Syllabus

After successfully completing this course, you will be able to:

• Describe and critically evaluate approaches that researchers have used to enable robots to interact with humans using language.
• Identify open research questions in this area.
• Complete a research project addressing one or more of these research questions.

Course Requirements

This graduate seminar will consist of readings from the technical literature as well as a final project.  Grades will be determined by:

• 30% Attendance and participation
• 10% Paper presentations
• 60% Final project

Prerequisites

Familiarity with computational linguistics or robotics is helpful. Background in machine learning and artificial intelligence will also be useful. We do not expect students to have background in all of these areas; we expect that students with diverse backgrounds will teach and learn from each other in this multi-disciplinary research area.

Reading and Summaries

All students are expected to take part in class discussions on the blog and in person.  If you are unable to attend class, please let me know ahead of time.  Since this area is interdisciplinary, you should not expect to understand all technical material in all the papers. Asking for clarification is a great way to open discussion.

Final Project

Students are expected to complete a research project that advances the state-of-the-art in building robots that can interact with people using language.  Two-person teams are strongly encouraged for the projects, as this area is highly interdisciplinary and each team member can bring something unique to the collaboration.  Classes will be devoted to project updates three times per semester, and each team will meet with me periodically throughout the sememster to report on progress.  At the end of the sememster, a project report is due, formatted as a conference paper.  Final projects will be published on the course web site.

Special Needs
 
Please inform me if you have a disability or other condition that
might require some modification of any of these course procedures.
You may speak with me after class or during office hours.  For more
information, contact Students and Employee Accessibility Services at
401-863-9588 or SEAS@brown.ed