Short Bio

Shahriar Hassan is a PhD researcher at the University of Extremadura as part of the SWEET Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network (MSCA DN). His research focuses on socially aware robotics using cognitive architectures and inner simulators to model and predict human and environmental interactions, with collaborations with industry partners including PAL Robotics (Spain) and NAVER LABS Europe (France). He previously completed his MSc in Marine and Maritime Intelligent Robotics (MIR), an Erasmus Mundus joint master’s program, studying at Université de Toulon (France) and Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon (Portugal), and conducting his MSc thesis at KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden). He received his BSc in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Islamic University of Technology (IUT), Bangladesh.

Topic

Social awareness involves understanding the environment and its inhabitants using the robot’s internal models. This research aims to unveil the potential of inner simulators embedded in a robotics cognitive architecture as the key facilitators of social awareness. This endeavour will explore the links between Bayesian and Active Inference and differentiable internal simulators within an advanced distributed cognitive architecture. Using this conceptual framework and the CORTEX architecture, the project will pursue the hypothesis that social awareness is a form of prediction-updating dynamics implicit in the architecture that continually aligns the robot with its environment. As a consequence of this self-maintaining loop, the robot will generate epistemic actions to gather information about the perceived objects and people, and transform discriminative bottom-up percepts into predictive stable beliefs in its internal model. Models of humans will be extended into simple intentional engines and added to the inner simulator to predict a small range of human actions in specific contexts. These new capabilities of the CORTEX architecture will constitute a firm step towards socially aware robots.

Host Institution:Universidad de Extremadura – Badajoz, Spain

PhD Enrollment: Universidad de Extremadura

PI: Prof. Pablo Bustos Garcia de Castro