Angelo Cangelosi currently is Professor of Machine Learning and Robotics at the University of Manchester (UK). He also is Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute London, Visiting Professor (Jiangsu Talent) at Hohai University, at the Universities of Palermo and of Milano Cattolica, and Visiting Distinguished Fellow at AIST-AIRC Tokyo. His research interests are in developmental robotics, language grounding, human robot-interaction and trust, and robot companions for health and social care. Previously Angelo was Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognition, and founding director role, at the Centre for Robotics and Neural Systems at Plymouth University (UK). Cangelosi studied psychology and cognitive science at the Universities of Rome La Sapienza and at the University of Genoa, and was visiting scholar at the University of California San Diego and the University of Southampton. Cangelosi's main research expertise is on language grounding and embodiment in humanoid robots, developmental robotics, human-robot interaction, and on the application of neuromorphic systems for robot learning. He currently is Principal investigator for the ongoing projects “EnTRUST” (EPSRC, 2020-24, £1m), “THRIVE++” (US Air Force Office of Science and Research, 2018-2023, $1m) and the H2020 projects TRAINCREASE, eLADDA ETN and PERSEO ETN. He was the coordinator of the EU H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Industrial Doctorate “APRIL: Applications of Personal Robotics through Interaction and Learning” (2016-2019), and the recent H2020 projects MoveCare, STRoNA, and the Marie Curie networks SECURE and DCOMM. He was also coordinator of the FP7 projects ITALK and RobotDoc ITN, as well as UK projects BABEL and VALUE. Overall, he has secured over £32m of research grants as coordinator/PI. Cangelosi has produced more than 250 scientific publications, and has been general/bridging chair of numerous workshops and conferences including the IEEE ICDL-EpiRob Conferences (Frankfurt 2011, Osaka 2013, Lisbon 2017, Tokyo 2018, Beijing 2021). In 2012-13 he was Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Autonomous Mental Development. He has been Visiting Professor at Waseda University (Japan) and at Sassari and Messina Universities (Italy). Cangelosi is Editor of the journals Interaction Studies and IET Cognitive Computation and Systems, and in 2015 was Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Development. His book “Developmental Robotics: From Babies to Robots” (MIT Press) was published in January 2015, and recently translated in Chinese and Japanese. His latest book “Cognitive Robotics” (MIT Press), coedited with Minoru Asada, will be published in 2021.
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Growing theoretical and experimental research on action and language processing and on number learning and gestures clearly demonstrates the role of embodiment in cognition and language processing. In psychology and neuroscience, this evidence constitutes the basis of embodied cognition, also known as grounded cognition (Pezzulo et al. 2012). In robotics and AI, these studies have important implications for the design of linguistic capabilities in cognitive agents and robots for human-robot collaboration, and have led to the new interdisciplinary approach of Developmental Robotics, as part of the wider Cognitive Robotics field (Cangelosi & Schlesinger 2015; Cangelosi & Asada 2021). During the talk we will present examples of developmental robotics models and experimental results from iCub experiments on the embodiment biases in early word acquisition and grammar learning (Morse et al. 2015; Morse & Cangelosi 2017) and experiments on pointing gestures and finger counting for number learning (De La Cruz et al. 2014). We will then present a novel developmental robotics model, and experiments, on Theory of Mind and its use for autonomous trust behavior in robots (Vinanzi et al. 2019). The implications for the use of such embodied approaches for embodied cognition in AI and cognitive sciences, and for robot companion applications will also be discussed.
Cangelosi A, Asada M (Eds.) (2021, in press). Cognitive Robotics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cangelosi A, Schlesinger M (2015). Developmental Robotics: From Babies to Robots. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
De La Cruz V., Di Nuovo A., Cangelosi A., Di Nuovo S. (2014). Making fingers and words count in a cognitive robot. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 8, 13 10.3389/fnbeh.2014.00013
Morse A., Belpaeme T, Smith L, Cangelosi A. (2015). Posture affects how robots and infants map words to objects PLoS ONE, 10(3) 10.1371/journal.pone.0116012
Morse A, Cangelosi A (2017). Why are there developmental stages in language learning? A developmental robotics model of language development. Cognitive Science. 10.1111/cogs.12390
Pezzulo G., Barsalou L.W., Cangelosi A., Fischer M.H., McRae K., Spivey M. (2013). Computational grounded cognition: A new alliance between grounded cognition and computational modelling. Frontiers in Psychology, 6(612), 1-11. 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00612
Vinanzi, S., Patacchiola, M., Chella, A., & Cangelosi, A. (2019). Would a robot trust you? Developmental robotics model of trust and theory of mind. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 374(1771), 20180032. 10.1098/rstb.2018.0032
