Biography

Jochen Steil received the diploma in mathematics and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bielefeld, Germany, in 1993 and 1999, respectively and the venia legendi in Neuroinformatics in 2006. From 2007-2016, J. Steil has been directing the Institute for Cognition and Robotics (CoR-Lab) at Bielefeld University and has been member of the scientific board of the Cognitive Interaction Technology Excellence Center (CITEC). Research stays included one year at the St. Petersburg Electrotechnical University, Russia, time with the Honda Research Institute Europe (Offenbach) as senior scientist and a temporary appointment in 2014 at Oxford Brookes University as full professor of computer science, where he remains a visiting professor to date. J. Steil coordinated of several large scale projects in robotics including FP7 AMARSi and H2020 CogIMon (Cognitive Compliant Motion in Interaction) and the Human-Machine Interaction project within the German ministriy of science’s leading edge cluster in Intelligent Technical Systems. Since 2016, J. Steil has been full professor of Robotics and Process Control at the Technische Universität Braunschweig. He has published more than 180 papers in the research areas of robotics, robot learning, human-machine interaction, neural networks, and applications in flexible production and human-friendly interactive robotics.

Abstract

 Goal Babbling to model and explain human exploratory learning

While Goal Babbling is established as an efficient method for earning direct inverse models in robotics and has been motivated by early infant development,  little is still known about human learning dynamics for entirely novel tasks. The talk discusses possible predictions and explanations that Goal Babbling can deliver towards understanding such human exploratory learning. To this aim, it focuses on our work in modelling synergy formation, in Goal Babbling for modelling the so-called U-shaped motor development (ICDL Baby Bot challenge from 2015), and finally in testing predictions from Goal Babbling in a novel human motor learning task.