Speaker: Angel Chang, Associate Professor, Simon Fraser University 

Date: Oct 2

Time: 2-3 p.m.

Location: KEC 1001

Zoom

Title - Towards agents that can interact with 3D environments

Abstract - In popular imagination, household robots that we can instruct to "bring me my red mug from the kitchen" are common.  For a robot to execute such an instruction, it needs to parse and interpret natural language, understand the 3D environment it is in (e.g. what objects exist and how they are described), navigate to locate the target object, and then interact appropriately with the target object. I will talk about some recent work that introduces 3D datasets of interactive objects, and recent work that investigates various tasks requiring 3D object localization and interaction.

Bio - Angel Xuan Chang is an Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair with Amii. Prior to this, she was a visiting research scientist at Facebook AI Research and a research scientist at Eloquent Labs working on dialogue. Dr. Chang’s research focuses on the intersection of natural language understanding, computer graphics, and AI.  Her research connects language to 3D representations of shapes and scenes and addresses grounding of language for embodied agents in indoor environments, as well as 3D content creation from language. Her group also works on using machine learning for biodiversity monitoring, specifically with DNA barcodes as part of the larger BIOSCAN project. Her work has been recognized by awards such as the SGP dataset award for ShapeNet and ScanNet.