AIL-Talk: Digital Emotions II Eva Hudlicka and Helmut Leder Event

Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) currently are experiencing a powerful renaissance of scientific and public attention. We believe that the advance of these technologies will have an enormous impact on our ways of living, working, learning, communicating, travelling, caressing, curing, and even dying.
However, there still remain two big issues to be solved in order to allow for a fruitful human-machine-interaction: In order to become trustworthy to humans, how can machines develop emotional behavior, and how do they have to look like?
In the lectures series four international experts from AI, robotics, and biology discuss the state of the art in their respective research fields.

Idea, concept & moderation: Katharina Gsöllpointner

Dr. Katharina Gsöllpointner is a media and art theoretician with a habilitiation in media studies. Her focus is on the crossover of media aesthetics, digital technologies, and the cybernetics of art, and she has a passion for inter?, trans? and crossdisciplinarity. Beside working as a university lecturer and researcher at the Department Digital Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, since 2017 she also is a staff member of the Department Cross-Disciplinary Strategies where she teaches Artistic Strategies from a cross-disciplinary perspective.

Prof. Dr. Eva Hudlicka

Principal Scientist at Psychometrix Associates & Visiting Faculty at the College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Psychotherapist in private practice at therapy21st
Social robots and virtual affective agents are increasingly becoming components of our digital landscape. This talk will discuss how computational models of emotions can enhance their affective realism, and how this impacts the associated human-agent relationships. The talk will address the nature of these relationships, their roles in human-agent interactions, as well as the emerging ethical considerations.

Univ.Prof. Dr. Mag. Helmut Leder

Professor of Cognitive Psychology and Head of Department of Basic Psychological Research and Research Methods at the University of Vienna, Head of the Research Focus ?Perceptual Aesthetics?, Department of Psychology/University of Vienna

Psychology of the Arts: Move me? astonish me? Emotions in Aesthetic Exeriences:
150 years after its foundation as a psychological discipline, Empirical Aesthetics has arrived at a state in which descriptive models open new, exciting pathways for empirical, experimental, and neuro-scientific progress towards a Psychology of the Arts. Our theoretical model (Leder et al., 2004) has guided a large number of empirical studies, e.g. regarding style processing (Leder & Nadal, 2014; Leder, Bär & Topolinski, 2012), the cognitive classification changes due to expertise (Belke et al., 2010), effects of context and museum environments (e.g. Brieber et al.,2015), and art-related emotion (Leder et al., 2013). Ten years after the model was proposed, based on our own and others? developments, we have now provided an even more comprehensive model theory (Pelowski, Markey, Forster, Gerger, & Leder, 2017) – comprising states of being strongly moved, negative emotions and even transformative states.