Speaker

Jean Oh

Title

Creative Physical AI

Abstract

Do robots need creativity? I will share my stance that they do need creativity to solve general problems and support human values. Physical AI is a type of AI that enables robots to perceive and interact with a physical world. Trendy approaches in physical AI such as Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models directly map the observations to actions where robots make decisions dominantly based on sensed information. While sensing is crucial for understanding the current physical environments, this paradigm of physical AI is fundamentally limited to support general tasks where humans see around corners and solve problems creatively based on not only what they can observe now but also various predictions of the latent spatiotemporal and social contexts. I will illustrate the examples where robots without creativity can fail to fulfill even simple goals and how we can develop physical AI for creative problem solving. If equipped with creative physical AI, can such robots promote human creativity as in creating arts? Generative AI has brought us numerous types of convenience in the digital art world. To create artifacts in the real world, creative physical AI is needed, for instance, to preserve traditional craftsmanship such as wood carving or claymation, which faces declining participation due to its labor-intensive nature. More broadly, our innovations in creative physical AI aim to encourage people to participate in more creative activities such as educational and therapeutic art sessions. I would like to invite the audience to think about how we can use technologies to promote human creativity for the next generation.

Bio

Jean H. Oh is an Associate Research Professor and Director of roBot Intelligence Group (BIG) at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Jean’s research goal is to create robots that can co-exist and collaborate with humans in shared environments, continuously learning to improve themselves over time through training, exploration, and interaction. The philosophical goal of Jean’s research is to develop technologies to remind us of “what makes us human,” promoting humanity such as safety, creativity, and compassion. Jean is best known for her contributions to socially compliant navigation and interdisciplinary physical AI research between robotics and arts. Jean’s work has won numerous best paper awards at various robotics conferences such as IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) and ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), and featured in media worldwide including New York Times, CNET, Arirang TV, ABC, CBS, and KBS. Jean received a PhD from CMU, MS from Columbia University, and BS from Yonsei University. Jean is the founder of Lavoro AI where she brings her creative, safe, and compassionate Physical AI innovations to market.

Language

English (Offline)