UC Berkeley Robotics

Been wanting to learn more about the interplay between Deep Learning and Robotics? UC Berkeley Professor Sergey Levine shares his thoughts and recent advances at the CMU Robotics Institute seminar series.

To naturally interact with humans robots will need to have grounded language understanding. Igor Mordatch (currently research scientist at OpenAI, formerly bair.berkeley.edu post-doc) latest work showcases the emergence of grounded compositional language in multi-agent populations! https://openai.com/blog/learning-to-communicate/

Great article on drive.ai's Deep Learning First approach to autonomous driving. drive.ai is led by Berkeley AI Research (bair.berkeley.edu) alumn Sameep Tandon!

Professor Ken Goldberg from the Berkeley AI Research lab (bair.berkeley.edu) shares his insights on challenges in robotic manipulation!

Roboticists at UC Berkeley have designed a small robot that can leap into the air and then spring off a wall, or perform multiple vertical jumps in a row, resulting in the highest robotic vertical jumping agility ever recorded. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvIk39rkkiU The work will be published Dec. 6 in the debut edition of the journal Science Robotics.

How might autonomous cars deal with ambiguous situations? E.g., when two cars arrive at a stop sign at the same time? New work by Dorsa Sadigh, Sanjit Seshia, Shankar Sastry, Anca Drgan from the Berkeley AI lab shows how autonomous cars can discover solutions to such situations!

Been wanting to learn more about Deep Reinforcement Learning, and how to get? Great opportunity tonight, with former Berkeley student John Schulman is presenting at the SF AI Meet up!

Announcing Berkeley's Center for Human Compatible AI, headed up by Prof. Stuart Russell! The goal of CHCAI is to develop the conceptual and technical wherewithal to reorient the general thrust of AI research towards provably beneficial systems. Artificial intelligence research is concerned with the design of machines capable of intelligent behavior, i.e., behavior likely to be successful in achieving objectives. The long-term outcome of AI research seems likely to include mac...hines that are more capable than humans across a wide range of objectives and environments. This raises a problem of control: given that the solutions developed by such systems are intrinsically unpredictable by humans, it may occur that some such solutions result in negative and perhaps irreversible outcomes for humans. CHCAI's goal is to ensure that this eventuality cannot arise, by refocusing AI away from the capability to achieve arbitrary objectives and towards the ability to generate provably beneficial behavior. Because the meaning of beneficial depends on properties of humans, this task inevitably includes elements from the social sciences in addition to AI. The Center for Human-Compatible AI is sponsored by the Open Philanthropy Project, the Future of Life Institute, the Leverhulme Trust, and CITRIS. Partner organizations include the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and the Center for Long-Term Security

Great short video on AI and our future by Prof. Max Welling from the University of Amsterdam!

The WAFR 2016 program has been posted. Great set of papers, and super-exciting line-up of invited speakers: John Canny, Erik Demaine, Danny Halperin, Lydia Kavraki! If you want to attend, make sure to register soon, as number of remaining slots is limited! http://wafr.org/program.html

Congratulations to Berkeley grad Sameep Tandon with the official launch of drive.ai, what an exciting vision!

AI has been advancing ever more rapidly, but ever wonder how advanced AIs and humans could co-exist? Berkeley AI Professor Stuart Russell is heading up a new Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, launching this week! The center is launched with a 5.5M grant from the Open Philanthropy Project, with additional grants for the center’s research from the Leverhulme Trust and the Future of Life Institute. Co-PIs include Anca Drgan, Tom Griffiths, Pieter Abbeel (Berkeley) and Michael Wellman and Satinder Singh (Michigan).