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What's
Cognitive
Assistance?

Cognitive Assistance is a new research agenda to assist everyday life by fully utilizing the power of AI. AI is now starting to understand the surrounding world to make sense of the information for people who are unable to see. Additionally, those computers are starting to remember everything to fulfill the declining cognitive abilities of elderly people. The advancement of computing technologies now touches the level of cognition, starting to substitute and expand their abilities.

Carnegie Mellon University Cognitive Assistance Laboratory is established to lead the revolution, and become the center of ripple effects toward everybody in our society.

HEADS

Chieko Asakawa

Chieko Asakawa is an IBM Fellow working in the area of accessibility. Her initial contribution in the area started from braille digitalization and moved onto the Web accessibility. Today, Chieko is focusing on advancing cognitive assistant research to help the blind regain information by augmenting missing or weakened abilities in the real world by the power of AI. She is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and IBM Academy of Technology.

Kris Kitani

Kris M. Kitani is an assistant research professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his BS at the University of Southern California and his MS and PhD at the University of Tokyo. His research projects span the areas of computer vision, machine learning and human computer interaction. In particular, his research interests lie at the intersection of first-person vision, human activity modeling and inverse reinforcement learning.

TED
Talk

Our head, Chieko Asakawa gave a talk at TED Talk on October 2015.

She talks about how technology can help improve our quality of life and how we can navigate the world without using the sense of vision by showing our projects, especially NavCog.