Sethu Vijayakumar wins Senior Research Fellowship

We have just received the welcome news that Sethu Vijayakumar, Director of the Institute for Perception, Action, and Behaviour, will be awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Research Fellowship, co-funded by Microsoft Research.

Congratulations to Sethu, and many thanks to Microsoft Research and the Royal Academy of Engineering for their generous support.

One of the central issues of 21st Century Informatics will be how to link, in theory and in practice, computational perception, representation, transformation and generation processes to external worlds. Motor control, translating purpose into action, is a key example. Humans and other biological systems are very adept at performing fast, complicated control tasks in spite of large sensorimotor delays while being fairly robust to noise and perturbations.

Sethu will use his Fellowship to develop the Statistical Machine Learning and Motor Control group, working on techniques that will allow robots to do the same.
He proposes to develop machine learning techniques to solve outstanding problems in autonomous systems in the areas of adaptive sensing and sensorimotor control, to integrate and test these techniques on an anthropomorphic robotic platform, and to develop controllers that can generate accurate and fast movements, while ensuring safety in a human-machine interaction scenario.

Distinguished Lecture: Alan Bundy

Cooperating Reasoning Processes: More than just the Sum of their Parts

4pm Wednesday
7 February 2007
Lecture Theatre 1
Appleton Tower
11 Crichton Street

The talk will be followed by a reception.

Using the achievements of my research group over the last 35+ years, I provide evidence to support the following hypothesis: By complementing each other, cooperating reasoning process can achieve much more than they could if they only acted individually.

Alan Bundy is the only researcher to have won both the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence and the IJCAI Distinguished Service Award. This talk is based on his acceptance speech for the Research Excellence Award, delivered at IJCAI 2007.