Anthony M Harrison

This year, the Intelligent Systems section of NCARAI was invited to participate in Navy’s FleetWeek in New York. Why? Because our work is awesome. What better reason is there? Actually, a large part of the reason was to show off Octavia. She is quite photogenic, after all.For six days we ran non-stop demos for the general public, VIPs, and the press. The final count was around sixty thousand people total, with peek flows of around two thousand people an hour. It was grueling for us and Octavia.We were actually able to collect quite a bit of useful data. For one, it was interesting to see the public’s reaction and interest. Working with the robots daily, we have a very muted perspective on them. We also got some good information on extended runtimes. We frankly never ran any of the robots that long without any breaks.Impressive over all.We’ve got a bunch of photos available. Plus, we got some really good radio and video converge from NPR’s Science Friday.But I’ll tell you, I’m glad to be back at work. PR is far too tiring for this researcher.

Harrison, A.M., & Trafton, J.G. (2010) Cognition for action: an architectural account for “grounded interaction.”  32nd Cognitive science society conference. (Paper | Model)

In March of this year, I transitioned from a post-doc at NRL’s NCARAI to a full-time employee. My duties remain largely unchanged. I’m still exploring architectural issues (from a psychological perspective) as they apply to embodied cognitive robotics. The only real change is that I’ve got a timesheet and benefits. Sweet, sweet benefits.

Harrison, A.M., Fransen, B.R., Bugajska, M.D, & Trafton, J.G., (2009) Robotic secrets revealed, episode 001. Twenty-first International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Pasadena CA. “Most Informative Video” winner.

Harrison, A.M. (2009) Acting outside the box: Lessons learned when embodiment is the only option. Presented at ACT-R workshop at the 31st annual conference of the cognitive science society. Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Trafton, J.G., Harrison, A.M., Fransen, B.R., & Bugajska, M. (2009) An embodied model of infant gaze-following. In A. Howes, D. Peebles, R. Cooper (Eds.), 9th International conference on cognitive modeling - ICCM2009, Manchester, UK.

Fransen, B.R., Herbst, E., Harrison, A.M., Adams, W., Trafton, J.G. (2009) Real-time face and object tracking. Proceedings from 2009 IEEE/RSJ international conference on intelligent robots and systems.

Our video won IJCAI’s 2009 Most Informative Shakey Award. I was hoping for a slightly nerdier trophy, but it’s still got some serious heft. Unfortunately, the pawn shop would only offer me $5.

“I’d like to thank the Academy..”

The pub release has cleared, and the video has now been posted. Click on the link to see how I, and the rest of the lab, work to integrate cognitive architectures, sensor systems and robots into a cohesive whole. Or, just gaze at the embed..

Harrison, A.M., & Trafton, J.G. (2009) Gaze-following and awareness of another’s perspective in chimpanzees. In A. Howes, D. Peebles, R. Cooper (Eds.), 9th International conference on cognitive modeling - ICCM2009, Manchester, UK.