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EVENT DETAILS |
The Machine Learning New York City (ML-NYC) Speaker Series & Happy Hour is a monthly event for machine learning practitioners, researchers, & students to meet & watch talks from leading researchers in the field. Each event will feature a New York City-based speaker presenting their work, followed by a reception. The ML-NYC Speaker Series is open to anyone interested in machine learning research, & we encourage everyone to attend, whether you are just getting started in research or an expert in the field.
We are excited to welcome Lerrel Pinto as our next speaker on Wednesday, March 20. The talk will begin at 4pm at the Flatiron Institute, followed by a reception. You must register on Eventbrite to attend the talk & reception.
Title: On Building General-Purpose Home Robots
Abstract: The concept of a "generalist machine" in homes - a domestic assistant that can adapt & learn from our needs, all while remaining cost-effective - has long been a goal in robotics that has been steadily pursued for decades. In this talk, I will present our recent efforts towards building such capable home robots. First, I will discuss how large, pretrained vision-language models can induce strong priors for mobile manipulation tasks like pick-and-drop. But pretrained models can only take us so far. To scale beyond basic picking, we will need systems & algorithms to rapidly learn new skills. This requires creating new tools to collect data, improving representations of the visual world, & enabling trial-and-error learning during deployment. While much of the work presented focuses on two-fingered hands, I will briefly introduce learning approaches for multi-fingered hands which support more dexterous behaviors & rich touch sensing combined with vision. Finally, I will outline unsolved problems that were not obvious initially, which, when solved, will bring us closer to general-purpose home robots.
Bio: Lerrel Pinto is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at NYU. His research focuses on machine learning for robots. He received a Ph.D. degree from CMU after which he did a Postdoc at UC Berkeley. His research on robot learning has received the best paper awards at ICRA 2016 & RSS 2023, & finalist at IROS 2019, & CoRL 2022. Lerrel has received the Packard Fellowship & was named a TR35 innovator under 35 for 2023. Several of his works have been featured in popular media such as The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, MIT Tech Review, Wired, & BuzzFeed among others. His recent work can be found on www.lerrelpinto.com.
Organizers: The ML-NYC Speaker Series is organized by professors David Blei, Joan Bruna, & Lawrence Saul, Flatiron Fellows Neha Wadia & Brett Larsen, & PhD students Claudia Shi & Noah Amsel. Please email nycmachinelearning@gmail.com if you have any questions. You can also follow us on Twitter @MLNYCSeries, join our mailing list, or check out our website.
Protocols:
- By entering the building each person implicitly attests that they do not have symptoms consistent with COVID & they are not knowingly COVID positive.
- Enter with a government issued ID (you will need to show your ID, not the QR code from Eventbrite) when arriving at the building.
- There is NO food or drink allowed in the auditorium.
- Please do not arrive earlier than 30 minutes before the event.
The Flatiron Institute is located at 162 Fifth Ave. The entrance is on 21st street between 5 & 6 Ave & the IDA auditorium is located on the 2nd floor.
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