Prof. Jeremy Wyatt, (University of Birmingham), world leader in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), will be hosted by the Faculty of Engineering in October 2017. Prof. Wyatt has an outstanding record of high impact academic research and is known internationally for making fundamental contributions to research in task planning and dexterous manipulation, and to other topics within the broad areas of Machine Learning and AI.

The University of Auckland has a strong connection with Prof. Wyatt through Dr. Mohan Sridharan, (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering). Prof. Wyatt and Dr. Sridharan have a track record of collaborating on research projects. Prof. Wyatt’s research expertise is highly relevant to the projects and research interests of staff at the University of Auckland, an example this includes the researchers in the multi-disciplinary Centre for Automation and Robotic Engineering Science (CARES).

The visit by Prof. Wyatt is an opportunity to form long-term research collaborations, which will help University of Auckland staff contribute to large, international research projects, to advance research outputs.

During the visit, Prof. Wyatt will offer a public lecture on robotics and AI, which will be organised at the University of Auckland and will be open to the general public. This public lecture will describe the state of the art developments in his areas of interest within robotics and AI, discuss the short-term and long-term societal impacts of these developments, and highlight the open problems in these areas.

Prof. Wyatt will also deliver a short series of lectures targeted to an academic audience of staff and students on robot planning and robot manipulation.

The topics of these lectures will include:

• Task planning in mobile robotics, with an emphasis on decision theoretic planning, and planning in incomplete domains;
• Decision theoretic models of humans and robots, looking at basic statistical models of decision making and information gathering, and relating them to understanding humans and engineering of robots; and
• Steps towards dexterous manipulation, including the application of decision theoretic models, work on machine learning of grasps, and challenges for robot manipulation.

There will be a number of opportunities for our researchers to engage with Prof. Wyatt to discuss projects of mutual interest.

Dates for the public and academic lectures shall be announced in early 2017.

We would to acknowledge the Ralph and Eve Seelye Charitable Trust, which has awarded funding to support Prof. Wyatt’s visit.

The Ralph and Eve Seelye Charitable Trust’s key purpose is to help the University to attract distinguished persons who are leaders in their field and to host internationally recognized experts for guest lectures and seminars.

For more information regarding Prof. Jeremy Wyatt’s visit, please contact Dr. Mohan Sridharan m.sridharan@auckland.ac.nz