On June 19 and 20 Professor Ruzena
Bajcsy led a two day workshop in Denmark looking at the future relationships
between machines and humans. This workshop was sponsored by CITRIS and
the University of Copenhagen. CITRIS faculty members included Shankar
Sastry and Claire Tomlin along with researchers from different universities in
Europe and the United States.
Various topics were tackled,
including robot controlled cars, face recognition, virtual communications,
unmanned airplanes and robotics in the home, just to name a few. A reoccurring
theme in each presentation was that machines need to know about the human and
what the human must know about the capabilities and limitations of the machine
in order to make the most of each other in a symbiotic way. It was
also agreed upon that while sensing, observing, and embedded systems
are relatively easy to build and operate, closing the gap between systems
and humans are not. Therefore, the agenda for a Cyberhuman is very pertinent,
difficult and wide open. Progress will most
likely be made by studying different scenarios and applications with the hope that general principles of modeling and control will emerge.
Please the agenda below for
more information on the presenters and the topics discussed.