Title: User Modelling for Personalized Dressing Assistance by Humanoid Robots

Abstract: Assistive humanoid robots in home environments are steadily increasing in popularity. Due to significant variabilities in human behavior, as well as physical characteristics and individual preferences, personalizing assistance poses a challenging problem. Among various tasks in home environments, assistive dressing has great potential for strong societal impact, allowing elderly or disabled people to maintain aspects of their autonomy. However, it remains a challenging task for humanoid robots. In this talk, I will present three user modelling methods using different sensor information for humanoid robots to provide personalized dressing assistance to human users. We aim to address the important and challenging issue of user modelling: a robot learns to infer a user body model from multimodal streaming data, as well as user preferences, and adapts the assistance it provides to maximize its utility to the user.

Biography: Dr Yixing Gao is a Teaching Fellow in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. She was admitted to the Special Class for the Gifted Young at Xi’an Jiaotong University at the age of 15, followed by the joint undergraduate & graduate program in the Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering. After completing a BSc in Automation, she obtained a full PhD scholarship from China Scholarship Council to pursue a PhD degree in robotics at Imperial College London, under the supervision of Professor Yiannis Demiris. After her graduation, she continued her research as a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London. Her research interests are assistive humanoid robots, assistive dressing robots, human-robot interaction, user modelling and computer vision. She has published two papers (oral) as the first author in the prestigious IEEE/RSJ Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), along with other papers published on international journals and conferences. She has peer-reviewed journal and conference papers for Robotics and Autonomous Systems, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Autonomous Robots, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, Frontiers in Neurorobotics and IEEE RoboSoft. She was invited by Robots and Intelligent Systems Symposium of London PhD Network to give a presentation on assistive dressing by humanoid robots at Imperial College London.

Time: 9: 30-10: 30am, December 16

Venue: Room 403, Shui Wu Building

Organizer: School of Artificial Intelligence, Jilin University