Personal Robotics and the Next Revolution in Computer Science

David S. Touretzky
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon

Location: Churchill Tower room 207
Date: Friday, October 30th
Time: 10:00 – 10:50am

Abstract:

New computing technologies can take decades to blossom.  When they do, our profession and our lives are transformed.  The development of affordable graphics hardware sparked a technological revolution via the GUI, led to an explosion of new applications, and greatly enriched the intellectual content of computer science.  A similar story can be told about networking, which was even more arcane than computer graphics 35 years ago.  As Bill Gates observed in his 2007 Scientific American article, the rapidly growing hobbyist robotics field very much resembles homebrew computing in the 1970s, the dawn of the personal computer revolution.  So how will the coming robotics revolution affect computer science?  What will our field be like when "perceiving" and "manipulating" are as common in computing as "drawing" and "messaging" are today?  My talk will include a demonstration of the Chiara robot, a new platform designed for robotics education and research.

Speaker bio:

David S. Touretzky is a Research Professor in the Computer Science Department and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University.  His principal research areas are cognitive robotics and computational neuroscience.  Dr. Touretzky earned his BA in Computer Science from Rutgers University in 1978, and his PhD from Carnegie Mellon in 1984.  In 2006 he was named a Distinguished Scientist by the Association for Computing Machinery.

Sponsored by a Peter Canisius Distinguished Professorship:  Robotics Across the Curriculum (Debra Burhans, R. Mark Meyer, H. David Sheets)

For information feel free to contact Debra Burhans, burhansd@canisius.edu