PLENARY SPEAKER

Cognitive Machines Design: Advances and Challenges

Prof. Fakhri Karray
University of Waterloo, Canada

Abstract

Recent advances in the field of cognitive systems and computational intelligence have made it possible to impart robots/machines with new perceptual, control and context aware capabilities. The increased interest in this field is mainly driven by the need for designing machines (robots in this context) that are able to interact with humans naturally and socially as much as possible, hence the connotation of Social Machines (Robots). These new type of systems are useful in assistive tasks, say for entertainment purposes, and may be deployed in potentially hazardous and remote environments. This is mostly done by endowing a machine with autonomous knowledge acquisition capabilities and an automated reasoning mechanism allowing it to make high level decisions and respond adequately to previously unseen situations while being aware of its own existence and abilities (self-awareness) in achieving a particular goal. In this talk, the major milestones that led to the development of this emerging field are retraced, and the recent advances in developmental cognitive machines, multi-modal attention, perception, reflectivity and social interaction are outlined. The talk also tackles the recent research in the field of advanced metrics for Human-Machine Interaction and highlights the challenges encountered in developing cognitive systems that are truly human-like in terms of perception, adaptability and versatility.

Biography of the Plenary Speaker

Fakhri Karray is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Canada and the Associate Director of the Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Laboratory. He received the Ph.D. degree in Systems and Control from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. He has authored extensively in journals and conferences proceedings and holds fourteen US patents in various areas of intelligent systems. He is the co-author of a textbook on soft computing: Soft Computing and Intelligent Systems Design (Addison Wesley Publishing, 2004). Prof. Karray serves (or has served) as Associate Editor of: the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, the IEEE Transactions on Mechatronics, the IEEE Transactions on Systems Man and Cybernetics (part B), the IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, the International Journal of Robotics and Automation, the Journal of Intelligent Systems and Control, and the International Journal on Smart Sensing and Intelligent Systems. He has served as Chair/ co-Chair for more than 12 International Conferences and Technical Programs and most recently as the General Co-Chair of the IEEE Conference on Logistics and Automation, China, 2008 and the General Co-Chair of the International Conference on Autonomous and Intelligent Systems (for 2010 and 2011). He is the Waterloo Chapter Chair of the IEEE Control Systems Society and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.