Model Emotion: Engineering Experiments in Human-Robot Affect

16 December, 18:00 CEST
Online event

Agency for Science, Innovation and Technology (MITA) invites you to attend a talk by Dr. Daniel White (University of Cambridge). The talk takes place online on the 16th of December 18 CEST. Dr. White is a senior research associate in the Department of Social Anthropology and the Centre for the Future of Intelligence, both at the University of Cambridge. He researches the emotional dimensions of human-machine interactions in Japan and his various projects and publications can be found here.

AI Forward Forum initiative was started by Judita Rudokaitė and Julija Vaitonytė who are doctoral researchers at Tilburg University Department of Cognitive Science & AI (the Netherlands). This initiative seeks to form a community of people across various domains of research, industry and arts, and, more generally, invite everyone for a discussion on AI. At the core of this discussion are fundamental questions regarding what intelligence even means, and what would be required to build it in machines. What are the ideas, conceptually and technologically, that would enable moving closer towards general-purpose AI systems that could operate beyond the narrow areas as is the case now?

More information about this initiative can be found here.

Abstract: Robotics engineers in Japan have long sought to equip machines with emotion. Over the last two decades, however, this endeavor has shifted from practices of modeling human emotion in robots to experimenting with collaboratively produced human-robot affect. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork among roboticists and robot fans in Japan, this talk draws on examples of furry companion robots, android bodhisattvas, and funerary rituals for robot pets to explore the changing experience of emotions within increasingly machine-inclusive multispecies societies. 

To attend this event, please register here.

The recordings of previous talks hosted at AI Forward Forum are available online.