Mon, Sept 11th: IN-PERSON “AI and Robotics," 6 PM MDT, In-Person, CU Boulder

The Rocky Mountain AI Interest Group (RMAIIG) will host an in-person meeting on Monday, August 8th at 6 PM MDT in Boulder on “AI and Robotics."

We will explore how generative AI and robotics are increasingly being integrated to create more efficient, versatile, and intelligent systems. The two fields are converging with applications covering areas such as Autonomous Operation, Machine Learning, Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Please join us in the ATLAS building (Room 100), located on CU Boulder’s campus on Tuesday, August 8th at 6 PM MDT. Capacity is about 150 attendees. 1125 18th St, Boulder, CO 80309. We are working on a possible Zoom option as well.

Our first speaker is Jacob Korniak who is a business development representative and University liaison for Furhat Robotics, working with research labs and commercial partners to bring the Furhat robot system to fruition. Jacob works at Furhat Robotics and Misty Robotics North American headquarters located here in Boulder , Colorado.

Furhat Robotics is a Conversational AI and Social Robotics company that is building the world's first social robotics and language model conversational system platform. Furhat is a back projected social robot, allowing it to change faces and appearance, that communicates with us humans as we do with each other - by speaking, listening, showing emotions. Furhat can currently speak 100 languages in over 300 dialects, and is used in research labs, universities, and commercial applications on 5 continents. With the new development of embedded language models, social robots like Furhat can be used and applied in ways never thought possible before.

We saw Furhat at our June RMAIIG meeting and we'll get more time for demos and interaction at this meeting!

Our second speaker, Harel Biggie, is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of Colorado Boulder, specializing in robotics. He works in the Autonomous Robotics and Perception group advised by Christoffer Heckman. Harel's research is centered on autonomy, perception, natural language integration, and field robotics.

Additionally, at CU Boulder, Harel served as a project engineer and led the perception team for CU’s entry into the DARPA Subterranean challenge. The SubT challenge was designed to accelerate the capabilities of autonomous robots in challenging underground search and rescue operations.

Harel helped to lead the team to an impressive third-place ranking among renowned universities from around the world. This talk will cover Harel's contributions to the DARPA SubT challenge and explore his recent work leveraging large language models, such as ChatGPT, for enhancing robot navigation through natural language commands. To illustrate these concepts in action, a live demonstration will be conducted using the Boston Dynamics Spot platform.

Also, we have a pizza sponsor, Carlos Garcia, yay! So plan on free pizza before the meeting.

Carlos Garcia is a private investor in Boulder. He is the founder of several companies including KIRA. (2022 revenue in excess of $200 million, operations in 6 countries, 2,000 employees.) Having sold his companies, he’s now dedicating himself to private investing and serving on boards of directors. He’s interested in meeting with entrepreneurs and investors in the AI Meetup Group.

Big thanks to Carlos for his sponsorship!

We also want to thank the following for generously arranging and providing an awesome meeting space for RMAIIG: Grace Wilson, John Bacus, Mark D. Gross, the University of Colorado and the Roser ATLAS Center at CU Boulder.