Next Talk:
27.11.23, 3 pm UK time

Professor Sarah Keren

will talk about 

Encouraging Automated Agents to Behave Nicely

Abstract


Autonomous AI agents are deployed in increasingly complex environments where they must account for the presence of other agents while trying to achieve their objectives.  Moreover, such agents may require assistance from other agents to efficiently accomplish their assigned task, or even be able to complete it.


The overarching objective of this work is to provide theoretical and computational foundations that will allow agents to learn and adopt cooperative and collaborative behaviors autonomously. As a first step for accomplishing this objective, we need to equip agents with the ability to produce ad-hoc assessments of their ability to be helpful to other agents and of the potential benefit of assistive actions that may be performed by other agents.


For this purpose, the Value of Assistance (VOA) will be presented, capturing the expected improvement in the performance of assistive actions. Computing VOA in different multi-agent and multi-robot settings will also be discussed. As an example, VOA estimation will be demonstrated for selecting which agent from a team of navigating robotic agents should receive localization information from a drone.

Estimation of VOA will also be demonstrated for grasping and integrated task and motion planning settings. 

 

About the Speakers

Sarah Keren is a senior lecturer (assistant professor) at The Taub Faculty of Computer Science at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. Before joining the Technion, Sarah was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received her PhD from the Technion.


Sarah’s research focuses on providing theoretical foundations for AI systems that are capable of effective collaboration with each other and with people. She has received several awards, including the ICAPS 2020 Best Dissertation Honorable Mention, the ICAPS 2014 Honorable Mention for Best Paper, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Postdoctoral Award for Women in Mathematical and Computing Sciences, and the Weizmann Institute of Science National Postdoctoral Award for Advancing Women in Science. 


Sarah Keren

Technion