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

[Vassilis Tsotras]

Reminder about our regular AI Seminar tomorrow Friday at noon in MRB.
Please sign with the link below if you plan to attend.

best,
V. Tsotras

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On 2025-05-12 20:40, Vassilis Tsotras wrote:
> 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
> --