Date: 3rd January, 2013
Time: 1:00pm to 2:00pm
Topic of the talk: SOINN - An Artificial Brain for Intelligent Autonomous Agents.

Osamu Hasegawa is a Japanese researcher in the fields of computer science and robotics at Tokyo Institute of Technology. As the Principle Investigator (PI) of the Imaging Science and Engineering Laboratory, he is leading a research group to further develop an innovative learning mechanism, "SOINN" (Self - Organizing Incremental Neural Network). In addition to being a PI, he is an appointed Associate Professor in the Department of Computational Intelligence and Systems Science, a position that he has held since 2002.

Although Professor Hasegawa's research interest spans across several categories, SOINN will be presented during Techfest 2013. SOINN is an unsupervised online-learning method capable of incremental learning. By approximating the distribution of input data and the number of classes, a self-organized network is formed. SOINN offers the following advantages: network formation is not required to be predetermined beforehand, high robustness to noise, and reduced computational cost.

During his seminal talk at Techfest 2013, Professor Hasegawa will present his inspiration for creating SOINN as well as its future usage. He believes that in the near future, a SOINN device will accompany an individual from birth; this will allow the agent to share personal histories with its owner. In this occasion, a person's SOINN will know "everything" about its owner, lending assistance at any time and place throughout one's lifetime.

Besides having a personal SOINN, an individual can install this self-enhanced agent into human-made products - making use of learned preferences to make the system more efficient. If deemed non-confidential, an individual's SOINN could also autonomously communicate another SOINN to share information.

Lastly, Professor Hasegawa and his students will give a demonstration of HIRO, a humanoid robot controlled by SOINN, showing the link between algorithm (brain) and machine tasking.

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