Robotics Department Seminar Series (https://robotics.umich.edu/events/robotics-seminar-series/)
Speaker: Joyce Y. Chai, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan
Title: "Language and Robots: Space, Time, and Common Ground"
Date: Tuesday, October 27, 2026
Time: 4:00 - 5:00pm ET
Location: FRB 2300 + Zoom
Zoom Link: https://myumi.ch/Mp1x3
Meeting ID: 961 2563 2448
Passcode: 639024

Abstract: Language plays a fundamental role in embodied AI, serving not only as a means of communication between humans and robots, but also as a powerful tool for representing knowledge, reasoning about the world, and guiding actions. While space and time have always been central to robotics, language introduces new opportunities and challenges in how robots represent, reason about, and interact with the physical world. In this talk, I will revisit some of the enduring challenges at the intersection of language and robotics through three interconnected dimensions: space, time, and common ground. For space, I will discuss grounding language in the 3D world, including reasoning across different spatial perspectives. For time, I will explore how language supports learning about actions, causal relationships, and past experiences to enable long-horizon planning. For common ground, I will examine how language enables humans and robots to establish, maintain, and repair shared understanding of their environment, goals, and intentions. Drawing on past and recent work, I will take stock of where we stand and reflect on the challenges and opportunities.

Speaker Bio: Joyce Chai is a Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. Her research interests span from natural language processing and embodied AI to human-AI collaboration. She is fascinated by how experience with the physical world and social interaction shape language learning and language use; and is excited about situated language processing that is sensorimotor-grounded, pragmatically-rich, and cognitively-motivated. Her recent work explores the intersection of language, vision, and action to enable situated communication with embodied agents. She is a recipient of the NSF Career Award, and multiple awards with her students (e.g., Best Long Paper Award at ACL 2010, Outstanding Paper Awards at EMNLP 2021 and ACL 2023, and First Place in the Amazon Alexa AI Simbot Challenge 2023). She is a Fellow of ACL.