Yiannis Aloimonos

The Language of Forces: A compositional theory for affordance and action

Object affordances are dependent on whether the object can participate in a number of actions. Actions on the other hand, for example anything we do with our hands, amount to the transfer of a force from our hands (and or body) to a tool and/or object. There is an alphabet and a language of pattern forces. The alphabet consists of primitive force patterns and the language consists of a grammar (i.e. a set of rules) for putting together the primitives into “words” and “sentences” which represent “components of the action” and the “whole action” respectively. In this talk I present a theory for learning the language of forces.

Biography

Yiannis Aloimonos is Professor of Computational Vision and Intelligence at the Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, and the Director of the Computer Vision Laboratory at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). He is also affiliated with the Institute for Systems Research and the Neural and Cognitive Science Program. He was born in Sparta, Greece and studied Mathematics in Athens and Computer Science at the University of Rochester, NY (PhD 1990). He is interested in Active Perception and the modeling of vision as an active, dynamic process for real time robotic systems. For the past five years he has been working on bridging signals and symbols, specifically on the relationship of vision to reasoning, action and language.