*** please note non-standard day for seminar***

  AI Seminar
  -------------------------------
  Monday, March 7th, 2005
  4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
  175 ATL (Large Conference Room)

  "Can Robots Learn Language the Way Children Do?"
  Prof. Stephen E. Levinson
  Dept of Electrical and Computer Science
  The Beckman Institute
  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Speech recognition machines are in use in more and more devices and
services.  Airlines, banks, and telephone companies provide information to
customers via spoken queries.  You can buy hand-held devices, appliances,
and PCs that are operated by spoken commands.  And, for around $100, you
can buy a program for your laptop that will transcribe speech into text.
Unfortunately, automatic speech recognition systems are quite error prone,
nor do they understand the meanings of spoken messages in any significant
way.  I argue that to do so, speech recognition machines would have to
possess the same kinds of cognitive abilities that humans display.
Engineers have been trying to build machines with human-like abilities to
think and use language for nearly 60 years without much success.  Are all
such efforts doomed to failure?  Maybe not.

I suggest that if we take a radically different approach, we might
succeed.  If, instead of trying to program machines to behave
intelligently, we design them to learn by experiencing the real world in
the same way a child does, we might solve the speech recognition problem
in the process.  This is the ambitious goal of the research now being
conducted in my laboratory.  To date, we have constructed three robots
that have attained some rudimentary visual navigation and object
manipulation abilities which they can perform under spoken command.