BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Centre for AI in Assistive Autonomy - ECPv6.16.2//NONSGML v1.0//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH X-WR-CALNAME:Centre for AI in Assistive Autonomy X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Centre for AI in Assistive Autonomy REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H X-Robots-Tag:noindex X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:Europe/London BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20240331T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20241027T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20250330T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20251026T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20260329T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20261025T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20270328T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20271031T010000 END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20260417T110000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20260417T120000 DTSTAMP:20260611T214654 CREATED:20260428T155105Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260428T155135Z UID:281664-1776423600-1776427200@assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk SUMMARY:Dialogue Games as Scaffolding for Building Open-ended Embodied AI for the Real World DESCRIPTION:Paper Summary\n \n\n \n Video\n \n\n \n Presentation Notes\n \n\n \n Presenter\n \n\n \n\n \n \n \n \n Welcome to the reading group presentation! \nHuman-Robot Interaction focuses on developing robots capable of collaboratively solving tasks with humans in robust and safe ways. This aims to foster more intuitive and effective collaborations\, enhancing the potential for robots to meet complex human needs and adapt to real-world environments. Future reliance on robots is crucial as they can handle repetitive and hazardous tasks\, improve efficiency\, and provide support in areas such as healthcare and disaster response. This not only enhances human safety and productivity but also frees humans to engage in more creative and strategic endeavours\, fostering innovation and improving quality of life. \nTo contribute to these aims\, Alessandro will present my research agenda in Embodied AI\, developed around the concept of embodied dialogue games. These activities enable AI agents to leverage multimodal signals and learn from interactions with the world and other agents. Key capabilities for these agents include embodied perceptual experience\, the ability to represent and learn from interleaved multimodal sequences\, and a training regime for learning through interaction. This talk will introduce future steps to advance research in Embodied AI and create a step-change in the way AI-powered robots are implemented so that they are able to develop a symbiotic relationship with humans to solve tasks in robust and safe ways. This will represent a potential path towards “Smart Machines” and get closer to the long-term vision outlined by the UK’s Robotics Growth Partnership.\n \n\n \n Coming soon!\n \n\n \n View the presentation material as: \n📄 Presentation\n \n\n \n Alessandro Suglia is a Lecturer in Embodied Natural Language Processing and a Fellow of the Generative AI Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh. He is co-lead of the “Generative AI for Robotics” theme at the National Robotarium\, and a member of ELLIS. He also won the “Italy Made Me Award 2024” from the London Italian Embassy for outstanding Italian early-career researchers in the UK. Alessandro’s research focuses on designing artificial agents that learn language by leveraging multimodal sensory information derived from interacting with the world and with other agents. During his PhD\, he was one of the main developers of Alana\, the Heriot-Watt conversational AI which ranked 3rd in the Amazon Alexa Prize challenge in 2018. In his role as Assistant Professor at HWU\, he led the HWU team “EMMA”\, the only non-American university team which was one of the finalists of the Amazon Simbot Challenge—the first Amazon competition to push the boundaries of Embodied Conversational AI. He was Head of Visual Dialogue at AlanaAI where he led a team of research engineers working on Multimodal Foundation Models for Embodied Visual Question Answering. Alongside several academic collaborations\, he has also completed research collaborations with industry including Amazon Alexa AI\, Meta AI\, and the European Space Agency— focused on developing innovative Multimodal Generative AI models for embodied and situated human-robot interaction tasks. URL:https://assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk/event/dialogue-games-as-scaffolding-for-building-open-ended-embodied-ai-for-the-real-world/ LOCATION:Bayes Centre (Bayes Theorem (G.03))\, 47 Potterrow\, Edinburgh\, EH8 9BT\, United Kingdom ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/reading-group-banners-alessandro.png ORGANIZER;CN="Centre for AI in Assistive Autonomy":MAILTO:info@assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20260317T110000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20260317T120000 DTSTAMP:20260611T214654 CREATED:20260322T081546Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260322T083814Z UID:281593-1773745200-1773748800@assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk SUMMARY:Explicit Inductive Biases for Efficient Modelling and Representation Learning | Reading Group DESCRIPTION:Paper Summary\n \n\n \n Video\n \n\n \n Presentation Notes\n \n\n \n Presenter\n \n\n \n\n \n \n \n \n Welcome to the reading group presentation! \nInductive biases are assumptions about the world that are encoded into models to help learn and generalise better. For computational modelling of perception (vision\, language\, etc.) inductive biases usually come from human perception and cognition-intending to drive human-like learning and learning from (relatively) less data than is now typical. This talk covers two recent lines of enquiry into building more powerful inductive biases into computational models. The first explores the use of explicit compositionality to leverage structural biases for representation learning in language\, and the second explores the use of discrete variables and autoencoding to help learn more efficient diffusion models. Together\, these are intended to facilitate exploration into a class of models that can induce compositional structure to learn better models of data.\n \n\n \n Coming soon!\n \n\n \n View the presentation material as: \n📄 Presentation\n \n\n \n Siddhartha is a Reader at School of Informatics. URL:https://assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk/event/explicit-inductive-biases-for-efficient-modelling-and-representation-learning-reading-group/ LOCATION:Informatics Forum (G.03)\, 10 Crichton Street\, Edinburgh\, Midlothian\, EH8 9AB\, United Kingdom ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/reading-group-banners-sid.png ORGANIZER;CN="Centre for AI in Assistive Autonomy":MAILTO:info@assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20260217T110000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20260217T120000 DTSTAMP:20260611T214654 CREATED:20260322T005203Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260322T084306Z UID:281589-1771326000-1771329600@assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk SUMMARY:Effective design of graphics in (robotics) research | Reading Group DESCRIPTION:Paper Summary\n \n\n \n Video\n \n\n \n Presentation Notes\n \n\n \n Presenter\n \n\n \n\n \n \n \n \n Welcome to the reading group presentation! \nIn this tutorial\, Matias will present a methodology to tackle a painful though necessary part of writing papers: making figures. He will present a workflow of five steps\, which streamlines this process and reduce the decisions we need to make when facing this challenge\, hopefully saving precious time while also improving the graphical quality of our manuscripts. The tutorial will cover basic concepts for each step and will provide concrete examples from robotics papers but that should also apply to other fields such as AI or computer vision. The slides and the companion code will be shared after the presentation.\n \n\n \n Coming soon!\n \n\n \n View the presentation material as: \n📄 Presentation\n \n\n \n Matias Mattamala is a Research Associate. URL:https://assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk/event/matias-mattamala-reading-group/ LOCATION:Informatics Forum (G.03)\, 10 Crichton Street\, Edinburgh\, Midlothian\, EH8 9AB\, United Kingdom ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/reading-group-banners-matias.png ORGANIZER;CN="Centre for AI in Assistive Autonomy":MAILTO:info@assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20251125T110000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20251125T120000 DTSTAMP:20260611T214654 CREATED:20251031T170021Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251105T135404Z UID:281484-1764068400-1764072000@assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk SUMMARY:AI co-pilot bronchoscope robot | Reading Group DESCRIPTION:Paper Summary\n \n \n Video\n \n \n Presentation Notes\n \n \n Presenter\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Welcome to the reading group presentation! \nSal introduces an AI-assisted bronchoscope robot that enables novice doctors to perform safe and expert-level lung examinations\, addressing global disparities in access to skilled bronchoscopic care. \nPlease find the\nrelevant paper here. \n \n \n To be added after the presentation!\n \n \n To be added after the presentation!\n \n \n Salvatore Esposito is a Research Fellow. URL:https://assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk/event/281484/ LOCATION:Informatics Forum (G.03)\, 10 Crichton Street\, Edinburgh\, Midlothian\, EH8 9AB\, United Kingdom ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/reading-group-banners-1.jpg ORGANIZER;CN="Centre for AI in Assistive Autonomy":MAILTO:info@assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20251111T110000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20251111T120000 DTSTAMP:20260611T214654 CREATED:20251031T162724Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260322T084940Z UID:281424-1762858800-1762862400@assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk SUMMARY:Modelling Assistive Interaction | Reading Group DESCRIPTION:Paper Summary\n \n\n \n Video\n \n\n \n Presentation Notes\n \n\n \n Presenter\n \n \n\n \n \n \n \n \nWelcome to the reading group presentation! \nWhat do we mean when we say we need to design assistive agents that help us in our daily activities? In this talk\, Rim will aim to answer this question by surveying several seminal works and recent advances in designing assistive agents\, stemming from decision-making and information theory. \nPlease find the\nJAIR paper\nand\narXiv paper\nhere.\n\n \n\n \n \nComing soon!\n\n \n\n \n \nView the presentation material as: \n📄 Presentation\n\n \n\n \n \nRimvydas Rubavicius is a Research Associate. URL:https://assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk/event/modelling-assistive-interaction-reading-group/ LOCATION:Informatics Forum (G.03)\, 10 Crichton Street\, Edinburgh\, Midlothian\, EH8 9AB\, United Kingdom ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/reading-group-banners.jpg ORGANIZER;CN="Centre for AI in Assistive Autonomy":MAILTO:info@assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20251028T110000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20251028T120000 DTSTAMP:20260611T214654 CREATED:20250818T112356Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251111T152545Z UID:281218-1761649200-1761652800@assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk SUMMARY:Integrated Task and Motion Planning | Reading Group DESCRIPTION:Paper Summary\n \n \n Video\n \n \n Presentation Notes\n \n \n Presenter\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Welcome to the reading group presentation! \nIn this talk\, Emanuele will discuss about a class of TAMP problems and survey algorithms for solving them\, characterizing the solution methods in terms of their strategies for solving the continuous-space subproblems and their techniques for integrating the discrete and continuous components of the search. \nPaper Link: Please find the relevant paper here. \n \n\n \n Coming soon!\n \n\n \n \nView the presentation material as: \n Presentation \n📄 Repo to run codes \n \n\n \n Emanuele De Pellegrin is a Research Associate. URL:https://assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk/event/integrated-task-and-motion-planning-reading-group/ LOCATION:Informatics Forum (MF2)\, 10 Crichton Street\, Edinburgh\, EH8 9AB\, United Kingdom ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/reading-group-banners.png ORGANIZER;CN="Centre for AI in Assistive Autonomy":MAILTO:info@assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20251014T110000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20251014T120000 DTSTAMP:20260611T214654 CREATED:20250806T140720Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251111T152748Z UID:280893-1760439600-1760443200@assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk SUMMARY:Bayesian Object Models for Robotic Interaction with Differentiable Probabilistic Programming | Reading Group DESCRIPTION:Paper Summary\n \n \n Video\n \n \n Presentation Notes\n \n \n Presenter\n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n Welcome to the reading group presentation! \nIn this talk\, Matias will explore a paper that introduces Bayesian Object Models (BOMs)\, a framework enabling robots to build rich\, uncertainty-aware models of unseen objects from limited interaction. These models capture both structural and dynamic object properties using a differentiable probabilistic program. By combining a tree structure sampler with a physics engine\, BOMs enable efficient gradient-based Bayesian inference\, outperforming recent neural and physics-based alternatives. \nPaper Link: Please find the relevant paper here. \n\n \n\n \n Coming soon!\n \n\n \n \nView the presentation material as: \n📄 Presentation \n \n\n \n Matias Mattamala is a Research Associate in Human-Robot Interaction. URL:https://assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk/event/bayesian-object-models-for-robotic-interaction-with-differentiable-probabilistic-programming/ LOCATION:Informatics Forum (G.03)\, 10 Crichton Street\, Edinburgh\, Midlothian\, EH8 9AB\, United Kingdom ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/reading-group-banners-1_page-0004-scaled.jpg ORGANIZER;CN="Centre for AI in Assistive Autonomy":MAILTO:info@assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20250930T110000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20250930T120000 DTSTAMP:20260611T214654 CREATED:20250806T135622Z LAST-MODIFIED:20250811T162652Z UID:280888-1759230000-1759233600@assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk SUMMARY:Physically Assistive Robots: A Systematic Review of Mobile and Manipulator Robots That Physically Assist People with Disabilities | Reading Group DESCRIPTION:Paper Summary\n \n \n Video\n \n \n Presentation Notes\n \n \n Presenter\n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n Welcome to the reading group presentation! \nIn this talk\, Joshua will discuss a paper that reviews recent progress in physically assistive robots developed to help individuals with disabilities perform everyday tasks such as moving\, eating\, and personal care. As these robots become safer\, more capable\, and affordable\, real-world deployment is increasing. The paper highlights major research trends in interaction methods\, autonomy\, and adaptability\, and outlines frameworks and future directions for the field. \nPaper Link: Please find the relevant paper here. \n\n \n \n To be added after the presentation!\n \n \n To be added after the presentation!\n \n \n Joshua Giles is a Research Associate in Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence for Assistive Technology. URL:https://assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk/event/physically-assistive-robots-a-systematic-review-of-mobile-and-manipulator-robots-that-physically-assist-people-with-disabilities/ LOCATION:Bayes Centre (Bayes Theorem (G.03))\, 47 Potterrow\, Edinburgh\, EH8 9BT\, United Kingdom ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/reading-group-banners-1_page-0003-scaled.jpg ORGANIZER;CN="Centre for AI in Assistive Autonomy":MAILTO:info@assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20250916T110000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20250916T120000 DTSTAMP:20260611T214654 CREATED:20250806T133113Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251111T152721Z UID:280881-1758020400-1758024000@assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk SUMMARY:Cognitive Science as a Source of Forward and Inverse Models of Human Decisions for Robotics and Control | Reading Group DESCRIPTION:Paper Summary\n \n \n Video\n \n \n Presentation Notes\n \n \n Presenter\n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n Welcome to the reading group presentation! \nIn this presentation\, Manisha will present a paper which explores how computational cognitive science helps us understand human decision-making using tools like probability theory\, reinforcement learning\, and statistical modeling. It reviews models that explain both how people make decisions (forward models) and how they reason about others’ decisions (inverse models). The authors highlight recent progress in integrating black-box learning with theory-driven approaches and reframe heuristics as rational strategies under cognitive constraints. The work bridges cognitive science with control and optimization perspectives. \nPaper Link: Please find the relevant paper here. \n\n \n\n \n Coming soon!\n \n\n \n \nView the presentation material as: \n📄 Presentation \n📄 Notebook for forward model \n📄 Notebook for reverse model \n\n \n\n \n Manisha Dubey is a Research Associate in Generative Modelling of Human Behaviour. URL:https://assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk/event/cognitive-science-as-a-source-of-forward-and-inverse-models-of-human-decisions-for-robotics-and-control/ LOCATION:Informatics Forum (MF2)\, 10 Crichton Street\, Edinburgh\, EH8 9AB\, United Kingdom ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/reading-group-banners-1_page-0002-scaled.jpg ORGANIZER;CN="Centre for AI in Assistive Autonomy":MAILTO:info@assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20250902T110000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20250902T120000 DTSTAMP:20260611T214654 CREATED:20250806T124320Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251111T152156Z UID:280347-1756810800-1756814400@assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk SUMMARY:π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control | Reading Group DESCRIPTION:Paper Summary\n \n \n Video\n \n \n Presentation Notes\n \n \n Presenter\n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n Welcome to the first reading group presentation! \nIn this presentation\, Yuhui will present a paper on building generalist robot policies using a vision-language foundation model. The authors propose a flow matching architecture built on top of a pre-trained vision-language model (VLM) to inherit Internet-scale semantic knowledge. Trained on a large\, varied dataset\, the model can follow language instructions\, perform tasks in a zero-shot setting\, and learn new skills via fine-tuning. \nPaper Link: Please find the relevant paper here. \n\n \n \n Coming soon!\n \n\n \n \nView the presentation with notes as: \n📄 Presentation \n📄 Presentation Notes \n \n\n \n Yuhui Wan is a Research Associate in Autonomy for Surgical Robots. URL:https://assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk/event/%cf%800-a-vision-language-action-flow-model-for-general-robot-control-reading-group/ LOCATION:Bayes Centre (Bayes Theorem (G.03))\, 47 Potterrow\, Edinburgh\, EH8 9BT\, United Kingdom ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/reading-group-banners-1_page-0001-scaled.jpg ORGANIZER;CN="Centre for AI in Assistive Autonomy":MAILTO:info@assistive-autonomy.ed.ac.uk END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR