MONDAY, MAY 16
			    WEAN HALL 4623
			       10:30pm

		     Towards a Cognitive Robotics
		     ---------------------------
			  Lynn Andrea Stein
			      MIT AI Lab


Traditional AI begins with the assumption that the world is parsed
into symbols, and addresses the problem of reasoning about these
symbols.  The premise underlying my work is that many of the
interesting aspects of intelligence arise {\it before\/} the world is
parsed into symbols.

In this talk, I will describe some of our recent work which
instantiates this approach on simple reactive robots.  The imagination
project involved the retrofitting of a robot already capable of
goal-directed navigation with map-reading abilities.  Although
traditional AI would suggest that this requires a separate
``reasoning'' component, I will describe an approach which reuses the
robot's existing navigational machinery to perform this qualitatively
different task.

While previous work has been limited by the state of available
robotics, this talk will conclude with a brief overview of a
significantly more sophisticated platform on which the research is
continuing.  Cog is a humanoid robot currently under development at
the MIT AI Lab; it is our hope that its richly multi-modal perceptual
an interactive abilities will allow a far more thorough investigation
of the problem of embodied cognition.