Goren Gordon: "Biological and artificial curiosity: models, behaviors and robots"

Curiosity is one of the major human drives. Can we model curiosity in biological agents? Can we implement them in artificial systems? What happens when a curious child meets a curious robot? In this talk I present recent work on the study of curiosity. First, studies of curiosity-driven behaviors in humans and rodents are presented, where we show that biological agents attempt to manage their novelty in a structured manner. A model that captures this structure is presented, wherein emergent exploration behaviors are balanced with novelty-based withdrawal-like actions. The model, which has only a few free parameters, reproduce, explain and predict many observed behaviors in mice and rats. A similar model is implemented in curious robots that learn about their own body and people interacting with them, resulting in emergent behaviors that have similar characteristics to infants’ behaviors. Finally, results from a recent study show that children’s curiosity can increase after interacting with a curious social robot. Future work on the development of autonomous curious robots, as well as studies of infants’, children’s and adults’ curiosity-driven behavior concludes the talk.

Date and Time: 
Thursday, December 18, 2014 - 13:30 to 14:30
Speaker: 
Goren Gordon
Location: 
IDC, C.110
Speaker Bio: 

Goren Gordon has B.M.Sc, M.Sc. in physics and M.B.A. from Tel-Aviv University in Israel. His first Ph.D. was in quantum physics and his second Ph.D in computational neuroscience, both from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Goren has more than 40 publications, in several disciplines; his quantum protocols and optimal decoherence control papers are highly cited and his curiosity-based neuroscience and robotics research has received several "best paper awards" in international conferences. He is currently a Fulbright post-doctorate fellow in Cynthia Breazeal’s Personal Robots Group, Media Lab, MIT where he is studying models of curiosity in children and robots and their interactions. His research interests are machine learning, neuroscience of curiosity, developmental robotics as well as science education for children and the general public