[AI Seminar Series] Seminar by Prof. Jiachen Li, Friday May 16, 12-1pm, MRB Seminar Room

[Vassilis Tsotras]

Dear colleagues,
our regular AI Seminar will be this Friday May 16, 12:00-1:00pm at the 
MRB Seminar Room (1st floor).

**** Pizza and refreshments will be provided ****

To keep track of the number of attendees, please *register* at:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ai-seminar-series-tickets-1363799483969

The talk will be given by Prof. Jiachen Li, Department of Electrical and 
Computer Engineering, UCR

TITLE:
"Toward Trustworthy Embodied Agents: From Individuals to Teams"


ABSTRACT:
Modern intelligent embodied agents, such as service robots and 
autonomous vehicles, interact frequently with humans in dynamic, 
uncertain environments. They may also collaborate as a team through 
effective communication and coordination to enhance task success, 
safety, and efficiency. These bring a few significant challenges. First, 
building reliable agents that safely navigate multi-agent scenarios 
requires scalable and generalizable prediction of surrounding agents' 
behaviors and robust decision making under environmental uncertainty, 
especially in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. Second, effective 
cooperation between agents requires efficient communication and 
information fusion strategies and reliable task allocation and planning 
for complex long-horizon tasks. In this talk, I will introduce a series 
of our recent work that addresses these challenges to enable safe and 
trustworthy embodied agents and their application to autonomous driving 
and service robots. Specifically, I will first demonstrate principled 
uncertainty quantification techniques and how they enable generalizable 
prediction and planning in out-of-distribution scenarios. Then, I will 
talk about effective approaches to enable efficient multi-agent 
communication and cooperation in centralized and decentralized settings.


Bio:

Dr. Jiachen Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical 
and Computer Engineering (ECE) and a cooperating faculty member in the 
Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the University 
of California, Riverside. He leads the Trustworthy Autonomous Systems 
Laboratory (TASL) and is affiliated with the Riverside Artificial 
Intelligence Research Institute (RAISE), the Center for Robotics and 
Intelligent Systems (CRIS), and the Center for Environmental Research 
and Technology (CE-CERT). Before joining UCR, he was a postdoctoral 
scholar at Stanford University and earned his Ph.D. from the University 
of California, Berkeley. Dr. Li was recognized as an RSS Robotics 
Pioneer in 2022 and named an ASME Rising Star in 2023. He serves as an 
associate editor or reviewer for over thirty leading journals and 
conferences and has organized multiple workshops on robotics, machine 
learning, computer vision, and intelligent transportation systems at top 
conferences. His research interests span robotics, trustworthy AI & ML, 
reinforcement learning, control, optimization, and computer vision, with 
applications to intelligent autonomous systems (e.g., service robots, 
autonomous vehicles, manipulators, and cyber-physical systems), 
particularly in human-robot interaction and multi-agent systems.


------------------------------------
Sponsored by the RAISE at UCR Institute, the AI Seminar Series presents 
speakers working on cutting edge Foundational AI or apply AI in their 
research. The goal of these seminars is to inform the UCR community 
about current trends in AI research and promote collaborations between 
faculty in this emerging field.
These seminars are open to interested faculty and graduate students. 
Please forward this email to other colleagues or graduate students in 
your lab that may be interested. After the seminar a discussion will 
follow for questions, open problems, ideas for possible collaborations 
etc.

Sincerely,
Vassilis Tsotras
Professor, CSE Department
co-Director, RAISE at UCR Institute

Amit Roy-Chowdhury
Professor, ECE Department
co-Director, RAISE at UCR Institute
--