Keynotes Sessions

Speaker: Dr. Jeffrey Tan Too Chuan

Learning AI (Artificial Intelligence) for beginners can be quite intimidated especially when one lacks of any computer science background. However, AI is flourishing various industries outside of its own technical domain, making AI literacy soon to be a requirement in many workplaces. The situation becomes more embarrassing when current AI education is mainly focusing on generating AI experts for the theoretical development or complex applications of AI, rather than making AI can be learned by young schoolchildren.

The RoboCup@Home Education initiative was started with a simple intention to facilitate technically complex service robot development by novice teams and even schoolchildren. The service robot development involves many practical AI applications solving real-world problems in various domains including human-robot interaction, navigation and mapping in dynamic environments, computer vision, object recognition and manipulation, and robot intelligence. Under the education initiative, a novel AI learning approach was formulated after several cycles of the organization of workshop based service robot challenge with team-centered competition design. Not only a learning framework was created, the workshop contents had generated teaching materials, and the competition design had provided yardstick for learning assessment.

Even without computer science background, this AI learning approach by service robot development is currently being further developed into a more formal education system, together with compatible hardware, software and courseware, with the aim to provide practical basic AI education for non-technical beginners and young schoolchildren.