Invited Talks
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Prof. Michael TrickAdventures in Sports Scheduling and Trends in Operations Research Major League Baseball is a multi-billion dollar per year industry that relies heavily on the quality of its schedule. Teams, fans, TV networks, and even political parties (in a way revealed in the talk) rely on the schedule for profits and enjoyment. Only recently have the computational tools of operations research been powerful enough to address the issue of finding "optimal" schedules. I'll discuss my experiences in scheduling college basketball, major league baseball, and other sports, and discuss major trends in optimization that lead to practical scheduling approaches, with some of these trends only appearing in the last two years. |
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Prof. Tony BelpaemeArtificial Cognition Through Interacting with Robots The holy grail of artificial intelligence is the creation of human-like machine intelligence. While AI progresses in leaps and bounds and is currently ubiquitous, for example through its application in information filtering on the internet, we still are far from attaining human-like intelligence. A likely reason for this a disregard in AI for what it is that makes humans intelligent and how our cognition develops as we mature. Central to this is social interaction, where cognition is shaped through interacting with intelligent others. The talk will introduce a number of cognitive robotics experiments, using humanoid robots, which show how social interaction is a likely candidate for the development of cognition and how artificial cognition can be achieved by leveraging on the human innate predisposition for social multi-modal interaction. |