Date: 24.07.2023

Time: 15:00 CEST (Central European Summer Time)

Title of the Talk: Markov Decision Process for Emotional Behavior of Socially Assistive Robot

Speaker: Dr. Ali Nasir (Assistant Professor, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia)

Profiles: LinkedIn, Google Scholar

Event Link: Zoom

Abstract: This talk presents a Markov decision process-based model for a socially assistive robot. Problem addressed by the model is one to one correspondence of a robot with a human where robot has to convince the human about completing certain tasks. In this regard, emotions of the human and those of the robot are incorporated in the model. Furthermore, emotion transition probabilities and probabilities of robot being able to successfully convince the human are also incorporated. The resulting model however involves large state space. Computational complexity involved in calculation of optimal decision policy from the proposed model is discussed and a computational complexity reduction technique is presented that uses decomposition of the tasks to be performed into sub groups. An online learning framework is also proposed to account for un-modeled parameters in the problem. Behavior of decision-making optimal policy obtained from the proposed model has been demonstrated with the help of a simulation-based case study.

Biography of the Speaker: Dr. Ali Nasir obtained his PhD along with M.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor in USA. He received his B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from University of Engineering and Technology, Taxila. He is the recipient of Fulbright scholarship for MS leading to PhD. He is currently working on distributed control of multi-agent systems and human intent prediction. His research interests also include Approximate Dynamic programming, fault tolerant control, and nonlinear control and estimation.