UNews - Francesco Rea

Mitacs award winner takes studies overseas to Italy

trevor.kenney — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 22:35:20 +0000

Have you ever wanted to combine your studies with your interest in traveling overseas? Austin Kothig is a computer science student who had the wonderful opportunity to do just that, by completing a semester abroad in Italy during Fall 2018.

Computer science student Austin Kothig, left, was able to work on the iCub robot at the Italian Institute of Technology.

Kothig was awarded the Mitacs Globalink Research Award through collaboration between ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge neuroscience professor, Dr. Matthew Tata, and Dr. Francesco Rea from the Department of Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Science at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa, Italy.

Kothig’s U of L story actually began five years ago when, as a member of Lethbridge’s high school International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) team that won first place at the iGEM 2013 High School Jamboree, he was awarded a scholarship to the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ. Having grown up in Lethbridge, he was happy to stay home for his post-secondary education. During the Spring 2017 semester, Kothig took Tata’s 3000 level interdisciplinary studies course, Introduction to Robotics. Inspired, he jumped at the opportunity to take an independent study in the Tata lab that involved working with the iCub robot, a complex humanoid robot. Through this project, Kothig met Rea and together with Tata and two other students, the group developed new algorithms for the iCub. The work required very specific procedures to create new behaviours and skills, and focused on various applications involving the implementation and improvement of cognitive models of the human attention system.

Through the Mitacs Globalink Research Award, Kothig was able to travel to Italy and continue working on developing biologically inspired software for the iCub as part of a four-month co-op work term. More specifically, he was working on a computational model for localizing human speech. The goal was to give the robot better context of what is happening in the auditory world. The project took inspiration from how human brains can effortlessly decode complex mixed signals. This context is then represented as the probability that there is a speaker at all angles around the robot.

“This project is significant because audio is a difficult computational challenge. The iCub platform is unique because between the two microphones on the head is a computer with a cooling fan. This ends up causing a lot of noise in the auditory world,” explains Kothig.

Kothig established numerous collaborative relationships while overseas.

“In a lot of the demos with the iCub, the person giving instructions to the robot (i.e. pick up the toy octopus) is speaking to a monoaural microphone in their hand. This is done to ensure that the speech recognition they are using has ‘clean’ input. A long-term goal would be to take what we have developed and use the probabilities of where human speech is coming from as the target locations for where the robot should be attenuating to, ignoring all other positions.”

It wasn’t all work for Kothig in Italy. Over the course of his semester, he made several new friends among the PhD students at IIT, especially enjoying the “lab dinners” they would enjoy at the many different restaurants and pizzerias in Genoa. His journey with robotics has inspired him to pursue a master’s program doing research on AI and robotics.

“Getting involved in research in your undergrad is an excellent experience. It can help foster skills and knowledge beyond lectures. Showing interest in academic research is a great way to build connections, not only internally but also externally,” says Kothig. “Don’t be afraid to look for opportunities outside of your department. A key strategy in software engineering is to make your team diverse and interdisciplinary; having vastly different academic perspectives on a project often results in better solutions.”

Kothig goes on to say, “Find out from your supervisors if they have had any previous collaborations, partnerships, or colleagues that are with institutes outside of Canada. Preexisting connections are a fantastic way to jumpstart your application.”

The Mitacs Globalink Research Award provides $6,000 for senior undergraduate and graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows in Canada to conduct 12 to 24-week research projects at universities overseas.

For more information about the Mitacs Globalink Research Award, click here.

Coding the iCub – making connections with cognitive robotics

trevor.kenney — Mon, 05 Feb 2018 23:12:51 +0000

An international partnership between ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge neuroscience professor Dr. Matthew Tata and Dr. Francesco Rea (Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa) has given three undergraduate students the unique opportunity to work on an independent study focused on cognitive robotics.

Tata started working with Rea during a sabbatical year in 2013-2014 when he lived in Genoa, Italy and worked full time at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT).

Each of the students had an opportunity to work on different features of the iCub's interactivity.

“It was a perfect example of how a sabbatical study leave should work. I spent a year working with Dr. Rea learning everything I could about robotics, which was completely absent from the curriculum and research environment at the U of L. I brought robotics back with me and set up a lab and an introductory course, and maintained the collaboration with Dr. Rea so that students and researchers at the U of L can tap the expertise of IIT,” says Tata. “Our collaboration with colleagues at IIT aims to translate our discoveries about human cognitive neuroscience into technologies for robot perception and attention. This will make robots better at understanding and responding to human instructions.”

Rea received a BSc in Software Engineering from the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Bergamo, Italy and went on to do an MSc in Robotics and Automation at Salford ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ, England. He then received a PhD from the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Genoa in 2013 where he developed machine vision and attention algorithms for human-robot interaction. Since 2013, he has been a researcher at IIT where he takes a brain-inspired approach to develop advanced cognitive robotics for the iCub humanoid robot.

“My research is focused on human-robot interaction and also cognitive robotics. These two disciplines work together, and we strongly believe that if we want to interact with robots, we need to share the same neuroscientific models of interaction,” says Rea. “We know that the U of L is a very important university where research in the field is well-known across the world. We are convinced that by studying those models here, we can more easily port them on a complex humanoid robot such as the iCub.”

The iCub is the humanoid robot developed at IIT as part of the EU project RobotCub and subsequently adopted by more than 20 laboratories worldwide. It has 53 motors that move the head, arms and hands, waist and legs. It can see and hear, and it has the sense of proprioception (body configuration) and movement (using accelerometers and gyroscopes).

“The humanoid robot, iCub, is complex – and there is a very specific reason. We want to create the perfect platform for the study of humans, so we need a little bit of complexity that is justified by the fact that we really want to reproduce some human behaviours,” says Rea. “It is complex, but there is a huge community of iCub users that collaborate together. By doing so, we can easily build on each other’s work and quickly provide very new innovative achievements, which relaxes the complexity of the platform a bit and is definitely one of the advantages of working with the iCub.”

Rea was in Tata’s lab working with computer science undergraduate students Lukas Grasse, Austin Kothig and Alex Hochheiden on the iCub robot. The students have been focused on various applications involving the implementation and improvement of cognitive models of the human attention system. He is working on introducing the students to developing new algorithms on a complex humanoid robot, which requires very specific procedures to create new behaviours and skills. “The idea is to achieve cognitive robotics and apply neuroscientific plausible models to robots.

The goal is to improve and validate those models – at the same time trying to give the robot skills that are human-like, skills that will eventually allow the robot to interact with humans in a natural fashion,” says Rea.

The students found their work with Drs. Tata and Rea to be very rewarding, and gained a lot from working with the iCub. Alex Hochheiden has been getting up to speed working with the robot for the first time.

“Other team members have been working with it for a semester or more, so I'm just trying to learn what they know and how I can contribute,” he says. “In addition to that, I've been looking at how we can optimize our code, helping troubleshoot issues and thinking about how to apply some software engineering best practices.”

Lukas Grasse has been working on the iCub’s understanding of speech in the environment and its response to when someone addresses it with “Hello iCub” or in Italian “Ciao iCub”. Like the others, he was first introduced to robotics through an Introduction to Robotics course offered by Tata, and has pursued the interest ever since.

“I really liked the class and have been doing independent studies in Dr. Tata’s lab since then. Cognitive robotics is an awesome field because it requires knowledge from many different areas, and you get to work with people that have different backgrounds and experience,” he says. “The field of cognitive robotics is just getting started. Working with Dr. Tata and Dr. Rea has made me realize how important it is for people to be able to interact with robots naturally using speech, touch, etc. I think this is true for technology in general, and I plan to keep working on solutions that enable these natural interactions.”

Austin Kothig also has plans to continue working with robotics.

“I've been spending a lot of time working in the lab with Dr. Tata and Dr. Rea, and have definitely learned a lot about how the global iCub community develops software for the robot,” he says. “Prior to doing my summer independent study I thought that I would be happy with a Bachelor in Computer Science. Since then I have been inspired to continue on to apply for a master's program doing research on AI and robotics.”

It is important to consider the impact of cognitive robotics in a world where humans have been building machines to help us do work for thousands of years.

“Now, with the advances of computer science, engineering and cognitive science we can build machines that are interactive and smart. They can make decisions. This is the most important technology of the 21st century and it will be highly disruptive,” says Tata. “There are many important technical and societal implications that we need to carefully consider and understand, so Canada needs to have highly-trained scientists working on the state-of-the-art in the field. That means working at the interface between neuroscience and robotics.”

Connect with Dr. Matthew Tata to learn more, or visit his lab website: tatalab.ca

UNews - Francesco Rea

Mitacs award winner takes studies overseas to Italy

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