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Scassellati will highlight recent advances in building supportive robots for teaching development skills to children.
Socially assistive robotics is a new field of robotics that focuses on developing robots capable of assisting users through social interaction.
Robots have long been used to provide assistance to individual users through physical interaction, typically by supporting direct physical rehabilitation or by providing a service such as retrieving items or cleaning floors.
Just as a good coach or teacher can provide motivation, guidance, and support without making physical contact with a student, socially assistive robots attempt to provide the appropriate emotional, cognitive and social cues to encourage development, learning or therapy for an individual.
In this talk, Scassellati will review some of the reasons why physical robots rather than virtual agents are essential to this effort, highlight some of the major research issues within this area and describe recent results building supportive robots for teaching social skills to children with autism spectrum disorder, early language learning for bilingual children, math skills tutoring for third-graders and for teaching nutrition to first graders.
Scassellati is Professor of Computer Science, Cognitive Science and Mechanical Engineering at Yale University and Director of the NSF Expedition on Socially Assistive Robotics. His research focuses on models of human social behavior, especially the development of early social skills in infants and children.
His other interests include humanoid robots, human-robot interaction, artificial intelligence, machine perception and social learning.
Light refreshments will be served at 6:30 p.m. The event is free to Museum members, and is $15 non-members. Reservations are required by calling 203-413-6757.
The Bruce Museum is at 1 Museum Drive in Greenwich.
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