Recent advances in foundation models have created exciting new opportunities to develop embodied AI agents that can perceive, act, and learn from their environment. In this talk, I will introduce some recent work in my lab that studies language communication with embodied agents. I will highlight the important role of grounding – language grounding and communication grounding – in the context of learning and collaboration.
Joyce Chai is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. Her research interests range from natural language processing and embodied AI to human-AI collaboration. Her current work explores the intersection between language, perception, and action to enable situated communication with embodied agents. She is a recipient of the NSF Career Award, as well as multiple paper awards with her students (e.g., Best Long Paper Award at ACL 2010, Outstanding Paper Awards at EMNLP 2021, and ACL 2023). Her group won the Amazon Alexa Prize Simbot Challenge in 2023.