Professor Cynthia Matuszek on Talking to Robots

CSEE Professor Cynthia Matuszek gave a talk at UMBC's 2023 GRIT-X event on the need for physical robotic assistants to be able to understand and use human languages. Watch her 11-minute talk on YouTube.

As robots become more common and begin to make their way into human environments, it becomes more important for them to interact comfortably with end users. One way to accomplish that is to build robotic systems that can use natural languages (human languages, such as English) to interact with and learn from people around them. In her presentation, she described the concept of grounded language, language that robots can use to understand the physical world around them, and discussed the promise, as well as some of the risks, of language-using robots.

Dr. Matuszek heads UMBC's Interactive Robotics and Language lab, which studies robotics and natural language processing, with the goal of developing robots that everyday people can talk to, telling them to do tasks or about the world around them. A goal is to build robots that can perform tasks in noisy, real-world environments instead of being pre-emptively programmed to handle a fixed set of predetermined tasks.

You can see all nine of the 2023 GRIT-X talks in this YouTube video.