Debate

16:00 - 17:00 PT, 15th July 2021

Debate Statement

People would prefer pre-trained robots that will be improved...

...using programmable higher-level interfaces (e.g., touchscreens/high-level programming interfaces, natural language task descriptions/statements of expectation) - represented by Cynthia Matuszek and Guy Hoffman

vs.

... via explicit learning, (e.g. IRL, LfD, reinforcement learning with human reward shaping) - represented by Dorsa Sadigh and Chelsea Finn

Debate Structure

The debate is 2 vs 2 with a total time of 60 mins. It is inspired from the "Debates on the Future of Robotics Research". Following is the order of events in the debate.

1) An initial audience poll asking whether the audience members “agree” or “disagree” with the proposed resolution. Open all day before the debate and while the introductions happen.

2) Introductions (5 min = 4 debaters x ~1 min each)

3) Opening arguments (20 min = 4 debaters x 5 min each)

4) Moderated discussion between debaters with audience questions (15 min)

5) Closing remarks (10 min = 4 debaters x 2.5 min each)

6) The final audience poll starts now.

7) Audience Q&A to the panel (~10 min)

8) Final polls released after 10 mins.

Debate Panelists

Cynthia Matuszek

Cynthia Matuszek is an Assistant Professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore County where she founded the Interactive Robotics and Language lab. She obtained her PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her work focuses on the problem of grounded language acquisition: extracting semantically meaningful representations of human language by mapping those representations to the noisy, unpredictable physical world in which robots operate. She works to combine robotics, natural language processing, and machine learning to build systems that non-specialists can instruct, control, and interact with intuitively and naturally. Her work has been covered by major news outlets including the Washington Post, CNN, the Independent, etc.

Dorsa Sadigh

Dorsa Sadigh is an assistant professor in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Her research interests lie in the intersection of robotics, learning, and control theory. Specifically, she is interested in developing algorithms for safe and adaptive human-robot interaction. Dorsa has received her doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) from UC Berkeley in 2017, and has received her bachelor’s degree in EECS from UC Berkeley in 2012. She is awarded the NSF CAREER award, the AFOSR Young Investigator Program Award, the IEEE TCCPS early career award, the Google Faculty Award, and the Amazon Faculty Research Award.

Chelsea Finn

Chelsea Finn is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. She leads the IRIS lab at Stanford where she studies intelligence through robotic interaction at scale. She is interested in the capability of robots and other agents to develop broadly intelligent behavior through learning and interaction. She completed her Ph.D. in computer science at UC Berkeley and her B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. She has won the MIT TR35 award, ACM doctoral Dissertation award, the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship award and the Intel Rising Star Faculty Award.

Guy Hoffman

Dr. Guy Hoffman is Assistant Professor and the Mills Family Faculty Fellow in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. Prior to that he was Assistant Professor at IDC Herzliya and co-director of the IDC Media Innovation Lab.

Hoffman holds a Ph.D from MIT in the field of human-robot interaction. He heads the Human-Robot Collaboration and Companionship (HRC2) group, studying the algorithms, interaction schema, and designs enabling close interactions between people and personal robots in the workplace and at home.

Among others, Hoffman developed the world’s first human-robot joint theater performance, and the first real-time improvising human-robot Jazz duet. His research papers won several top academic awards, including Best Paper awards at HRI and robotics conferences in 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2013, and 2015. In both 2010 and 2012, he was selected as one of Israel’s most promising researchers under forty. His TEDx talk is one of the most viewed online talks on robotics, watched more than 2.9 million times. Hoffman received his M.Sc. in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University as part of the Adi Lautman interdisciplinary excellence scholarship program

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