Kevin Squire
About me
Greetings, and welcome to my home page! I am a professor of Computer Science here at the Naval
Postgraduate School. Previously, I was a PhD student in
Electrical Engineering at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
where I worked in the
Language Acquisition and Robotics Group
under the direction of Dr. Stephen Levinson.
For our work, we were attempting to build an intelligent robot capable of learning language. In addition to
developing much of the basic hardware and the core software framework for the robot,
my PhD research has focused on creating an associative semantic memory using a cascade
of hidden Markov models (HMMs).
My curriculum vitae.
Demonstration Video
In this demonstration, our robot Illy is wandering around in her pen. For some time now, we've
been teaching her the names of some objects, and in this video, I call to her, and tell her
to play with the cat. After she approaches the cat, I tell her the word for cat a few times
to help strengthen the association between that word and the object she sees in front of her.
After this she plays with the cat briefly, then looks around for her other toys.
During my PhD research, I initially did most of Illy's basic hardware modifications, and
designed a distributed computing framework and API to offload much of the sensor processing
and control decisions to other computers. Based on this harware and API, the demonstration
here highlights work by Danfeng Li (sound source localization), Ruei-Sung Lin (video feature
extraction), Matthew Kleffner (audio feature extraction), myself (audio, visual, and concept
recognition and learning), and Matt McClain (working memory and robot controller).
Robot demonstration video: divx4(3.6 MB),
mpeg1(18 MB)
wmv(3.8 MB).
Older videos of our group's research:
Illy finds a can... (12 MB)
Speech Imitation (4.6) MB)
Voice Control (31 MB)
Selected Publications
- K. Squire, and S.E. Levinson, Recursive Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Hidden Semi-Markov Models. Submitted to the 2005 IEEE Machine Learning for Signal Processing Workshop, Mystic, CN, September 28-30, 2005. (Updated: 5/18/05)
- K. Squire, and S.E. Levinson, HMM-Based Semantic Learning for a Mobile Robot. Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation: Special Issue on Autonomous Mental Development. (Updated: 1/28/05)
- S.E. Levinson, K. Squire, R.S. Lin, and M. McClain, Automatic Language Acquisition by an Autonomous Robot. AAAI Spring Symposium on Developmental Robotics, March 21-23, 2005.
- K. Squire, HMM-Based Semantic Learning for a Mobile robot. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004.
- K. Squire, S.E. Levinson, and P.G. Xavier, "A Robotic Framework for Semantic Concept Learning". Technical Report SAND2004-4518,
Sandia National Laboratories, 2004.
- S.E. Levinson, W. Zhu, D. Li, K. Squire, R.S. Lin, M. Kleffner, M. McClain, and J. Lee, "Automatic Language Acquisition by Autonomous Robot,"
in Proc. Int. Joint Conference on Neural Networks, 2003. (Invited paper)
- K. Nagao, Y. Shirai, and K. Squire, "Semantic Annotation and Transcoding: Making Web Content More Accessible." IEEE Multimedia,
8(2):69-81, 2001.
- S.E. Levinson, Q. Liu, K. Squire, C. Dodsworth, R.S. Lin, W. Zhu, and M. Kleffner, The Role of Sensorimotor Function,
Associative Memory and Reinforcement Learning in Automatic Acquisition of Spoken Language by an Autonomous Robot. In Proc.
Joint NSF/DARPA Workshop on Development and Learning, East Lansing, MI, April 5-7, 2000.
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Kevin Squire
Last modified: Wed Feb 21 08:39:30 PST 2007