17 Computer Vision News Maria Koskinopoulou for assembly or in medical robotics as well as other applications. Combining also computer vision. Why did you choose this field? Was it your specific ambition? Hmm, very interesting question. I did a master’s in neuroscience when in Greece, in Crete. From this master’s, I studied different topics related to computational neuroscience. At that point, there was an opportunity to participate in a national project funded by the Government of Greece about how to develop a computational model of how to teach robots the latent behaviors and how to coordinate their actions with humans. This project was particularly focused on manipulation tasks and how to teach a robot to act in an environment in a novel way. I started working on this project and started to feel like I liked this field of robotics, and I focused mostly on the manipulation part. Do you find it more difficult to teach robots or to teach humans? [she laughs] Very interesting question! I think it’s particularly difficult to teach humans because they interact in a different way. We’re not at such a level I think in our human-robot interactions. Robots can somehow have limited interaction towards a human, so you will not be asked very challenging questions, and you will not have this physical and seamless interaction and communication. I think you feel kind of safe that you have the primary role, and you can lead the communication and collaboration in your own way. However, with humans, this is not the case all the time! Maybe we should transform all our students into robots! Yes, this is the safest way! [Maria laughs] Also, for example, in learning from demonstration, like imitation learning that I was doing for my PhD, this is the topic that studies these kinds of relationships. They’re inspired by the way we’re teaching humans, especially children, how to learn and how to interact with their environment – how to learn to walk, how to learn to answer, and how to imitate our parents and relatives while we’re growing. These are the kinds of skills and abilities we’re trying to transfer to the robotic platforms.
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