SCS DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES
4:00 PM - Wean Hall 7500
3:45 PM Distinguished Donuts - Outside the Hall
The Teruko Yata Memorial Lecture in Robotics
Henrik I. Christensen
Director
Centre for Autonomous Systems (CVAP/NADA)
and Chaired Professor
Department of Computer Science and Numerical Analysis
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Autonomous HomesOver the next two decades the western world is going to experience a
significant aging in its population. This change in demographics is
going to change our everyday life in a number of ways both in terms of
economies, housing, work effort and health care. The change in
demographics will in many ways change our daily life. As part of this it
is natural to consider how technology for example may enter into our
houses in a new ways. To investigate this a design study has been
carried out jointly between engineers and industrial designers. It is
here possible to consider a number of new facilities that can assist
elderly and handicapped (the early adopters) but also be of use to the
average citizen. These technologies will first of all have to have user
interfaces that make them available to the non-experts. This is going to
be a major challenge for advanced systems. In addition the systems will
have to be operational out-of-the box, which calls for a large degree of
flexibility beyond pure pre-programming. The various facilities entering
into a home will in addition have to include facilities for various
kinds of co-existence, if not co-operation. As an example it is unlikely
that we will want have to acquire the quirks of 10 different user
interfaces to be able to use the new facilities. One could imagine a
centralized approached to design of such systems. However, simple
calculations clearly demonstrate that such an approach is not
economically viable. For the design of such systems we need to consider
them from a SYSTEMS point of view. At the same time the construction of
the vision of the autonomous home requires careful consideration of how
diverse disciplines such as HCI, Control engineering, Communication,
Software engineering can be integrated into systems. No one of these
disciplines can be disregarded and progress in component disciplines is
not enough to provide the required systems. In this talk the overall
problem will be outlined and a number of example applications in the
house of the future is presented. Finally a number of research
challenges to be addressed to deliver on the vision is presented.Speaker Bio: Henrik I. Christensen is a chaired professor of computer science at KTH and the director of the Centre for Autonomous Systems. He received M.Sc
EE and PhD degrees from Aalborg University, Denmark 1987 and 1989,
respectively. His research is primarily on holistic approaches to vision
and robotics with a strong interest in biologically plausible methods.
He has published more than 160 contributions on vision, robotics,
artificial intelligence and control. He serves/d on the editorial board
of a number of prominent journals including, IEEE PAMI, IJRR, AI-Magazine,
MVA, IJPRAI, and RAS. He is also the founding chairman of the European
Robotics Network (EURON) and serves as an IEEE RAS distinguished lecturer.
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