CS Colloquium
Reid Simmons, Carnegie Mellon University
Light refreshments will be available.
Host: Tesca Fitzgerald
Title: AI Agents for Personalized Assistance
As the population ages, the need grows for AI agents to assist people to remain independent for longer. Older adults are typically set in their ways, so AI agents should adapt to their ways of doing things, rather than the other way around. To that end, we are exploring various approaches to learning to personalize assistive agents, including the use of bandit algorithms, foundational models, neuro-symbolic architectures, and theory of mind. This talk will present our approaches and results in several assistive areas, including meal preparation and exercise coaching, as well as work in learning policies from humans. Much of the research is being supported by AI-CARING, an NSF-sponsored Institute devoted to developing AI technologies to help older adults with cognitive and physical decline remain in their homes.
Dr. Reid Simmons is a Research Professor in the Robotics Institute and Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his PhD from MIT in Artificial Intelligence, and since coming to CMU in 1988, his research has focused on developing self-reliant robots that can autonomously operate over extended periods of time in unknown, unstructured environments, and on human-robot social interaction, especially non-verbal communication through affect, proxemics, motion, and gesture. He is co-PI and Research Director for the NSF-sponsored AI-CARING Institute. Dr. Simmons is an author of over 250 publications on AI, Robotics, and Human-Robot Interaction and has graduated 25 PhD students. He previously served as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation, where he oversaw the National Robotics Initiative and initiated the Smart and Autonomous Systems program. In 2018, Dr. Simmons helped found the first-in-the-nation standalone undergraduate major in Artificial Intelligence and currently serves as its program director. He is a Fulbright Scholar, a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a Senior Member of IEEE, and was an ONR Summer Faculty Fellow in 2022.