Dear all,
On June 17, there will be a talk by Dr. Ulysses Bernardet at 3pm on “Artificial Social Agents beyond Symbol-based Interaction” at M-ITI, on -2 floor of Tecnopolo. You are all welcome to join.
More details below.
Abstract
Artificial social agents — human-looking robots and computer-generated virtual humans — will play an increasingly important role as stand-ins for biological humans in automated health care and education applications. I will argue for a bio-inspired approach to building artificial social agents that uses principles derived from biological systems to the construction of artefacts. Characteristic for this approach is that application and theory development are in a tight reciprocal connection: On the one hand, applications based on artificial social agents require the development of a specific control model to solve the given task. On the other hand, embodying a psychological or biological model in an agent is a heuristic for model testing. While the term artificial social agent covers the whole reality spectrum, using virtual, computer-generated humans as the development platform has the advantage that they present a technically simplified case and are closer to humans in terms of surface realism.
In my presentation will illustrate the topic and approach by elaborating on models we have built and studies we have conducted revolving around the topics of personality expression through non-verbal behaviour, social-spatial and reflexive behaviour. By focusing on the “middle” part that sits between attention and cognition, i.e. unconscious and autonomous processing, the presented work complements other approaches that focus mainly on the cognitive, symbol-manipulation level.
Bio
Dr. Ulysses Bernardet has a PhD in Psychology. He is currently a lecturer in Computer Science at Aston University, in Birmingham, Uk. His research interests lie on virtual human systems, biologically grounded interactive systems, cognition in human-machine interaction. He is an experienced psychological researcher leader with expertise in all facets of experimental and empirical research in high-profile universities. Skilled in collaboration with all members of the research team to develop novel and unique technological solutions in the domains of virtual and mixed reality, artificial humans, and neurorobotics. He has also technical proficiency in all major programming languages and frameworks.