AIL-Talks: Digital Emotions Event

with Univ. Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl
and Univ.Prof. Dr. Adam Miklosi

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.

Univ. Prof. Dr. Robert Trappl
Head of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence Vienna; Professor Emeritus of Medical Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence at the Center for Brain Research, Medical University of Vienna

Why do humans have emotions? What functions do they have in mental processes and in interactions with other humans? What is their anatomical and neurophysiological basis? Which different emotions do we know? Are their facial expressions different in different cultures, i.e. learned or are they universal? How can robots recognize emotions? Are there rules / diagrams which emotions robots should express as a result of different situations, in order to make a “human-like? impression? Do robots already have emotions and, if not, how are the chances that they will ever have them? We will try to answer some of these questions to have a material for a vivid discussion.

Univ.Prof. Dr. Adam Miklosi
Director of the Family Dog Project, Head of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University (Hungary)

What can robots learn from Dogs? In recent years, robotics started to chase a dream: It wants to produce a companion for humans. The main aim of social robotics is to build agents which can move into our homes, schools or hospitals, and which are regarded as ?real? companions. Some people imagine such robot as ?real? people while others think it should be something radically different.
But why leave out those people from this scientific endeavour who know the most about companionship, behaviour and social interaction: the ethologists?

Based on our experience in social robotics and ethology we came to the conclusion that the human-dog relationship offers a perfect model to study the possibilities and constrains of robot design. We consider the dog to be man?s first ?biorobot?. Thus we suggest that robots of the future should be by no means similar to man but represent a “new species?.

The detailed study of the human-dog relationship led us to make proposals for the behavioural capacities of companion robots that include complex social skills, like attachment, faithfulness, emotional responsiveness, social monitoring etc. It will be the question of the not-so-distant future how our insights can be implemented in real robotic agents. 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.