19 July, 2018 - Ognjen Rudović, a native of Montenegro, is employed at the Media Lab of the American MIT faculty, the leading research group in the field of assistive technologies. Rudović is the main contractor of the EngageME project, within which he is working with the team to improve the assistive technologies for the therapy of children with Autism Spectrum Conditions.
Ognjen obtained his B.Sc. degree in Automatic Control Theory from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, and M.Sc. in Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence from the Autonomous University of Barcelona / Computer Vision Centre in Spain. He received a Ph.D. from Dept. of Computing, Imperial College London, United Kingdom. During his Ph.D., Ognjen worked on machine-learning and computer vision models for automated analysis of human facial behaviour. The aim of these models is to improve the personalized medicine and healthcare, as well as the existing wellbeing technologies.
Ognjen's research focus is on the design of novel context-sensitive and multi-modal machine-learning approaches for analysis of naturalistic human behaviour outside the lab settings. This has a vast number of applications but in general, the aim is to achieve a more socially intelligent human-robot interaction.
His main mission is to make machine learning models that can be useful for each and every person, so that individuals with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC), and also individuals with other neurodevelopmental conditions, as well as their family and friends can all benefit from it.
The main objective of the EngageME project, which is supported by the European Union, is to "equip" the robot with artificial intelligence, which would allow it to naturally interact with children with Autistic Spectrum Conditions, while at the same time helping the therapist in carrying out the tasks of the therapy.
Researchers at the MIT Media Lab have now developed a type of personalized machine learning that helps robots estimate the engagement and interest of each child during the robot-child interactions, using data that are unique to that child. As Rudović explains “The long-term goal is not to create robots that will replace human therapists but augment them with key information that the therapists can use to personalize the therapy content and also make more engaging and naturalistic interactions between the robots and children with autism.”
The results of Rudović's EngageME team, together with their partners from Germany and Japan, were published in June by a prestigious academic magazine in the field of Science Robotics. The researchers predict that their technology will be available on the market in the near future, but their work still requires more studies and cooperation with doctors and therapists.
