Universität Hamburg and the Universiti Putra Malaysia are members of the ULTRACEPT project consortium.
Professor Jianwei Zhang, the Director of the Institute TAMS (Technical Aspects of Multimodal Systems), Department of Informatics, Universität Hamburg (UHAM), Germany gave a talk entitled ‘Crossmodal Perception and Learning for Dexterous Service Robots’ on the 7th November, 2022 at the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology (FCSIT), Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM).
Prof Zhang met up with Assoc Prof Dr Shyamala Doraisamy, ULTRACEPT’s partner lead for UPM, for a short visit to UPM after attending IROS 2022 in Kyoto, Japan.
A brief introduction to ULTRACEPT was given by Dr Doraisamy at the beginning of the presentation, followed by a short welcome speech by Assoc. Prof. Dr Azreen Azman, Deputy Dean (Research and Innovation) of FCSIT. Faculty staff, postgraduate students, and members of the Digital Information Computation and Retrieval (DICR) research group that Dr. Shyamala leads at the faculty attended the talk.
Amongst the aims of the MSCA-RISE are knowledge creation and exchange, and skills development. This global partnership of researchers from academic institutions and the industry provided an opportunity for partners to network and share and exchange knowledge. Both Dr Doraisamy and Dr Azman completed secondments with ULTRACEPT partners Visomorphic Technology Ltd and the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom between 2018 to 2021 and continue to work closely with the consortium members.
At the end of this knowledge sharing session, a small token of appreciation was presented to Prof Zhang by Dr Azreen on behalf of the faculty.
The abstract and brief bio of Prof Zhang are as follows:
Abstract
Robot systems are needed to solve some real-world challenges by combining machine automation with realization of cognitive abilities in ICT systems. There has been substantial progress in deep neural networks and AI in terms of individual data-driven benchmarking, however, such existing data-driven systems are not yet crossmodal, they are not robust in a dynamic and changing world. My talk will first introduce concepts of cognitive systems that allow a robot to better understand multimodal scenarios by integration of knowledge and learning and then the necessary modules to enhance the robot intelligence level. Then I will explain how a robot can enhance its model as a result of learning from experiences; and how such cross-modal learning methods can be realized in intelligent robots, by demonstrating several novel robot systems with dexterous walking and manipulation skills in potential service applications. At the end, I will summarize the scientific challenges of cognitive systems in the framework of the NSFC/DFG Sino-German Collaborative Research Project TRR169 “Crossmodal Learning”.
Brief bio
Jianwei Zhang is a professor and Director of Technical Aspects of Multimodal Systems at the Department of Informatics, Universität Hamburg, Germany. He is a Fellow of National Academy of Engineering Sciences in Germany and the Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Hamburg Germany, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Tsinghua University. He received both his Bachelor of Engineering (1986, Computer Control, with distinction) and Master of Engineering (1989, AI) at the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and his PhD (1994, Robotics) at the Institute of Real-Time Computer Systems and Robotics, Department of Computer Science, University of Karlsruhe, Germany. Jianwei Zhang´s research interests include multimodal information processing, cognitive sensor fusion for robot perception, real-time learning algorithms, robot dynamics, modelling of sensory-motor control tasks, etc. In these areas, he has published over 500 journal and conference and received multiple best paper awards at several international conferences. Jianwei Zhang is the coordinator of the DFG/NSFC Transregional Collaborative Research Centre SFB/TRR169 “Crossmodal Learning: Adaptivity, Prediction and Interaction” and several EU robotics projects, including the RACE (Robustness by Autonomous Competence Enhancement) Project. He has received multiple best paper awards. He is the General Chair of IEEE MFI 2012, IEEE/RSJ IROS 2015, and the International Symposium of Human-Centered Robotics and Systems 2018, etc.