AIL-Talks: Digital Emotions
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.
6. März
19 Uhr
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.
13. März
19 Uhr
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.
Foto: Pinar Yoldas The Kitty AI. Artificial Intelligence for Governance (2016)