Course Details

Students of the “Socially Cognizant Robotics” course will learn basic principles and state-of-the-art developments of robotics so as to learn the expected trajectory of this technology and its impact on individuals and society. The course is designed for both STEM students as well as computationally-oriented cognitive and social science students.  The interdisciplinary curriculum has seven underlying disciplines spanning STEM fields to social and behavioral sciences. It includes traditionally technical disciplines, such as robot embodiment and control, and extends to areas which support human interaction, such as visual learning and language processing, to cognitive modeling, which enables more high level human-robot cooperation, and finally to areas such as behavioral research and public policy. The course will utilize open-source software libraries in robotics, computer vision,  and deep learning. Recent innovations at the intersection of deep reinforcement learning and human behavior modeling will be explored in the context of optimizing collaborative robot action.