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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Atlanta, GA | Posted: August 25, 2009
Georgia Tech Media Relations
Laura Diamond
laura.diamond@comm.gatech.edu
404-894-6016
Jason Maderer
maderer@gatech.edu
404-660-2926
Summary Sentence:
Andrea Thomaz named top innovator for work with robotics
Full Summary:
Andrea Thomaz, an assistant professor in interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been recognized by Technology Review magazine as one of the world's top innovators under the age of 35.
Andrea ThomazAndrea Thomaz, an assistant professor in interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been recognized by Technology Review magazine as one of the world's top innovators under the age of 35.
Thomaz, who joined the Georgia Tech faculty in 2007, focuses her research on social interactions between robots and humans.
"It's quite hard to enumerate, much less engineer ahead of time, all the tasks and skills people will need robots to do," said Thomaz. "We're working on developing robots that can learn new skills from everyday people so that the robots can adapt their behavior to the task at hand."
It's called Socially Guided Machine Learning, and Thomaz is working on bridging the gap between state-of-the-art learning systems and the kind of teaching an everyday person is able to give the robot.
For example, her robots - Junior and Simon - give visual cues, such as gestures and facial expression, to indicate whether they understand what a human is telling them. Thomaz also develops machine learning methods to help robots learn physical tasks more quickly, particularly from teachers who are not necessarily programmers.
Thomaz was selected from more than 300 nominees by a panel of expert judges and the editorial staff of Technology Review, MIT's magazine on science and technology. She will be featured along with the other 34 finalists in the magazine's September/October issue, and will be recognized at MIT's Emerging Technologies Conference in September.
