LCSR Seminar Series

Odest Chadwicke "Chad" Jenkins, a professor of robotics and of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, will give a talk titled "Defining the Discipline of Robotics for Excellence and Equity in an AI-driven World" for the Laboratory for Computational Sensing \+ Robotics. Abstract: Start with a simple question: What is the best major for a student to become a roboticist? In my role leading the creation of the robotics undergraduate major at Michigan, we tackled this question through the curricular challenge of how to both: 1\) educate people to put ideas of the robotics discipline into practice and 2\) endow them with the intellectual lens for creating new ideas that extend the frontiers of the robotics discipline-where mobility and dexterity through humanoid robots are poised to have a transformative impact in our increasingly AI-driven world. In this talk, I will discuss my work to both advance the state of the art in semantic understanding for robotics and prepare students for possible futures where robotics and AI are abundant and ubiquitous. I will present the design, launch, and innovations for the Michigan robotics major for undergraduates, as robotics emerges into its own as a true academic discipline. I will describe highlights from research in semantic 3D perception for mobile manipulation robots \(including humanoids\) to understand the form and function \(or affordances\) for a diversity of objects in common environments. I will also share insights from my role as program chair of the AAAI-26 Conference \(and its roughly 30,000 submissions\) and how this role, and my experiences with Amazon AWS Machine Learning University, has reshaped my perspective on AI for teaching at the university level. Finally, I will discuss new efforts in my course this semester to formulate "mutation assessments" that gauge student understanding of agentically coded projects. Bio: Jenkins' research addresses problems in robot learning from demonstration and human-robot interaction, primarily focused on dexterous mobile manipulation and robot perception. He was the founding chair of the robotics major degree program launched in 2022 for undergraduates at the University of Michigan. Jenkins was recently program chair for the AAAI-26 Conference and inaugural editor-in-chief for the ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction. Jenkins earned his Bachelor of Science in computer science and mathematics at Alma College \(1996\), Master of Science in computer science at Georgia Tech \(1998\), and doctorate in computer science at the University of Southern California \(2003\). Jenkins is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and the Association for Computing Machinery.