Dr Fabio Ramos is helping to produce a new breed of intelligent robots (Photo: Ted Sealey)
By Pristine Ong 14 October 2013 - Intelligent machines are a favourite subject for science fiction writers, who have mined into the rich potential for mayhem when robots with brains rebel against their human masters. In real life, robots are often assigned mundane tasks that are too boring or dangerous for human hands. But Fabio Ramos is helping to produce a new breed of intelligent robots with applications more ambitious than vacuuming the floor or dealing with unexploded bombs. A Brazilian graduate from the University of Sao Paulo, Dr Ramos is now a Senior Lecturer and an Australian Research Council fellow at the School of Information Technologies and Australian Centre for Field Robotics. Based in the area of robotics and artificial intelligence, he writes programs that effectively train machines how to learn for themselves. "We devise methods that allow machines to learn on their own, based on their interaction with the environment," he explains. "They are motivated by little rewards that we write into the program.
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