From Perception and Learning to Understanding and Action

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) has long concerned itself with the notion of creating intelligent agents capable of observing the world and selecting actions to take based on those observations. The proposed research program will be pursued through exploring fundamental research problems linked to the combination of computer vision, embodied intelligence, natural language understanding, deep learning, reinforcement learning and robotics. The research program will make extensive use of simulation environments and human--agent interaction to explore deep learning, deep reinforcement learning, and question answering with embodied agents. Research will explore fundamental questions as well as realistic settings including: autonomous vehicles, robots that physically interact with the world and purely software based information agents. This research will examine three representative settings. (1) Autonomous vehicles: in this setting, many of the abstract concepts discussed above become more firmly grounded in a concrete task. Furthermore, key problems associated with many sub-disciplines of AI such as computer vision, automated reasoning, planning and the paradigm of reinforcement learning (RL) can become clearer when grounded in such an application. (2) Other settings such as those associated with the creation of more general-purpose robotics for industrial and home settings can also serve as grounding applications. In these settings an agent's understanding of how the world and objects within the world physically interact with the agent also becomes an important element of the problem. As one begins to envision the way in which people might interact with more general purpose and "embodied" intelligent agents, natural language emerges as a powerful way to facilitate human--robot interactions. Language can also serve as a mechanism for teaching agents new capabilities. Language can also be coupled with visual demonstrations to further enhance the learning of an embodied agent. (3) Intelligent assistants - such as those that interact with the user through a smartphone or smart speaker, could be thought of as software agents that exist in a world of information. The combination of physically embodied agents with information agents could propel the benefits of AI into the everyday world of Canadians. The large scale testing of autonomous cars is underway in North America and cars without safety drivers are now operating in the United States. The autonomous car oriented research proposed here explores subjects of critical importance to Canada and Canadians in terms of both public safety and economic prosperity. Further, more general-purpose robotics has the potential to transform manufacturing, distribution and delivery services and well as provide powerful assistance tools for the disabled.