Rachid Alami is Senior Scientist at CNRS. He is currently the head of the Robotics and Articifial Intelligence Department at LAAS. He contributed and took important responsabilities in several national, european and international research and/or collaborative projects (IST FP6: COMETS, COGNIRON, URUS, PHRIENDS; IST FP7: CHRIS, SAPHARI, SPENCER). His main research contributions fall in the fields of Robot Architectures, Task and motion planning, multi-robot cooperation, and human-robot interaction.
Jedediah Allen is an assistant professor of Psychology at Bilkent University, Turkey. His background is in Developmental Psychology and Developmental Cognitive Science. Most broadly, his research interests are in the nature, learning, and development of knowledge within the specific domains of socio-cognitive and cognitive development in infancy and early childhood. Specific areas of interest include: imitation, folk psychology, infant research methodology, the nativist-empiricist debate, and the emergence of new knowledge.
Trine Skjødt Axelgaard is a BA student in Art&Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark.
Nello Barile teaches Media studies and Sociology of cultural processes at IULM University of Milan where he coordinated a Master programme in Creativity Management. He holds a PhD in communication sciences, resources management, and formative processes at the University of Rome “La Sapienza.” Among his publications are Brand New World: Il consumo delle marche come forma di rappresentazione del mondo (Milano 2009) and “From the Posthuman Consumer to the Ontobranding Dimension: Geolocalization, Augmented Reality and Emotional Ontology as a Radical Redefinition of What Is Real” in Intervalla: vol 1: Social Robots and Emotion: Transcending the Boundary Between Humans and ICTs, ed. Satomi Sugiyama & Jane Vincent; “A Knot to Untie: A Social History of Ties Between Fetishism, Communication and Power” in Habits of Being (vol. 2), ed. C. Giorcelli & P. Rabinowitz 2012. He is also a co-editor of The New Television Ecosystem (2012) with A. Abruzzese, J. Gebhardt, J. Vincent and L. Fortunati.
Manuel Bastioni is passionate about 3D graphics, open source, modeling of characters. In 2001 he founded MakeHuman project, an open source 3D computer graphics application for the prototyping of photo realistic humanoid. Currently he directs it and develops it as researcher and modeler. In 2004 he and his team received Suzanne international award for the best Blender Python script in 3D graphics. He collaborates with Italian universities, in particular University of Rome "La Sapienza", for thesis and publications on 3D human modelization.
Martin Mose Bentzen has a strong interest in the foundations of social robotics, in particular in the possibility of building ethical robots. He is engaged in constructing deontic reasoning systems suitable for Human-Robot communication, which are more in accordance with actual human reasoning patterns than current deontic logics. He is also interested in the ethical, political and social implications of building robots, including biological robots, and in the implications of introducing robots into various social domains. He participates rather eagerly in the public debate in Denmark about such issues.
Mark Bickhard has been at Lehigh University since 1990, where he is Henry R. Luce Professor of Cognitive Robotics and the Philosophy of Knowledge. He works within a process metaphysical framework, and has developed an action and interaction based model of representation that has extensive implications across multiple domains of psychology, including perception and language; brain studies; social ontologies and social persons; and others.
A list of publications is on his website.
Gunhild Borggreen is the co-founder of ROCA (Robot Culture and Aesthetics), a cross-disciplinary practice-based research network at University of Copenhagen (ikk.ku.dk/roca). Gunhild’s main research area covers gender, nationhood and performativity in Japanese contemporary art and visual culture, and her book Disrupted Images. Nation in Contemporary Japanese Visual Culture is forthcoming from Brill. Gunhild’s research on robots deal with robots in art and society in Japan, as well as robot visuality (what robots look like and how robots “see”), some of which is published in Transvisuality - Dimensioning the visual in a visual culture (forthcoming from Liverpool University Press). Gunhild is the editor of and contributor to Performing Archives - Archives of Performance (Museum Tusculanum Press 2013), and she publishes in international journals such as Performance Research and Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies.
Maria Brincker is an assistant professor of Philosophy at UMass Boston. Her research engages interdisciplinary issues typically on the border of philosophy and neuroscience. Recent and forthcoming publications include work on mirror neurons, affordances, aesthetic perception and sensorimotor issues in autism (the latter co-authored with Elizabeth Torres). In all of these projects she theorizes various sensorimotor and organism-context dynamics, and through these propose solutions that re-conceptualize basic constitutive structures of various cognitive processes. She received her PhD from the CUNY graduate center and then held an Art & Neuroscience fellowship at Columbia University before coming to UMass.
Antonio Carnevale is research fellow in philosophy within the European project “RoboLaw” (www.robolaw.eu) at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa. He obtained his PhD in Political Philosophy (2007) at University Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna with a dissertation on, “Needs, Rights, Obligations in the Ethic of Recognition”. He spent research periods at the Institut für Sozialforschung at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt am Main with Axel Honneth (2003), and he was visiting scholar on the Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago (2006). His areas of specialization: Hegel, modern and contemporary political philosophy, Frankfurt School, social justice, shame, human enhancement, robotics and disabilities, ethics and emerging technologies .
Raja Chatila, IEEE Fellow, is senior scientist at CNRS. He is director of the Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics (ISIR) at University Pierre and Marie Curie (Paris). He has led or contributed to several projects in robotics along his career on autonomous and cognitive robotics, and made several contributions on motion planning, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), cognitive and control architectures, human-robot interaction, learning, and to applications in the areas of service, field and space robotics. He is author of over 140 international publications on these topics. He coordinated the European FP6 FET Integrated Project "The cognitive Robot Companion" (COGNIRON) in 2004-2008. He is president of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society for the term 2014-2015.
Aurélie Clodic is a Research Engineer at LAAS-CNRS. She received a PhD in robotics in 2007 for which she elaborated and implemented ingredients for human-robot joint activity in several contexts (robot guide in a museum, robotic assistant in the framework of the COGNIRON project). Her research interest includes human-robot collaborative task achievement and robotics architecture design (focused on decision-making and supervision) dedicated to HRI
Fabio Dalla Libera is Specially Appointed Assistant Professor at Osaka University, Japan. He received his PhD (Robotics) from Padua University, Italy, in 2011. He was awarded a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 2011 and 2012 (Short term and Long term, respectively). Since April 2007, he has been collaborating with Prof. Ishiguro's Intelligent Robot Laboratory, Osaka University, Japan and with the JST ERATO Asada Project. His research interests include tactile sensing in human-robot interaction and the development of biologically inspired algorithms, with particular focus on the exploitation of stochastic resonance.
Main Research areas: Sociology of Knowledge and Culture, Social Robotics, Social Cloud and Social Network
Publications: Technical Assistant or Assistance by Means of Technology? The Performative Deployment of the Social Robot PARO in Dementia Care. In: International Journal of Social Robotics (with Michaela Pfadenhauer) (forthcoming); research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/23/49
Caton, S.; Dukat, C.; Grenz, T.; Haas, C.; Pfadenhauer, M.; Weinhardt, C. (2012): Foundations of Trust: Contextualising Trust in Social Clouds. 2nd International Conference on Social Computing and Its Applications (SCA 2012). (Xiangtan, Hunan, China)
Frank Esken has Interim Chair-Professorship for Philosophy of Mind at the University of Osnabrück, Institute of Cognitive Science. Since 2012 he has been a Research Fellow in the ESF Project “Understanding the Normative Dimensions of Human Conduct” (NormCon) at the University of Salzburg. He has previously held positions at Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK), University of Copenhagen, and Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris. Some relevant recent publications: Esken, F. (2009): “What does it mean to possess a subjective perspective? The relation between basic forms of consciousness and the establishing of a subjective perspective“, in: W. Mack & G. Reuter (ed.), Social Roots of Self-Consciousness. Psychological and Philosophical Contributions, pp. 80-102. Esken, F. (2012): “Early forms of metacognition in human children“, in: M.J. Beran et al. (ed.), Foundations of Metacognition, Oxford UP, 134-146. Brandl, J., Esken, F., Priewasser, B. (2014, in press): “Normative protest in young children: What it is and what it might be”, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
Carola Eschenbach studied computer science at the University of Hamburg. She worked in computational linguistics, linguistic semantics, spatial cognition, and formal ontology.
Charles M. Ess is Professor in Media Studies, Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religion, Drury University. Ess has received awards for excellence in teaching and scholarship; he has also held several guest professorships in Europe and Scandinavia - most recently as Guest Professor, Philosophy Department, University of Vienna (2013-2014). Ess has published extensively in Information and Computing Ethics (e.g., Digital Media Ethics, 2nd edition, Polity Press, 2013) and in Internet Studies (e.g., with William Dutton, The Rise of Internet Studies, new media and society 15 (5), 2013). Ess emphasizes cross-cultural approaches to media, communication, and ethics, focusing especially on virtue ethics and its illuminations of being human in an (analogue-)digital age.
Víctor Fernández Castro is Philosophy PhD student at University of Granada. His main research interest is the contribution of language to human cognitive abilities such as social cognition, regulation of behavior and attention or self-evaluation.
Michael Funk is a research assistant at the Institute for Philosophy and Technology at the Technical University Dresden, Germany. His current research includes intercultural and transdisciplinary philosophies of technologies and sciences, applied ethics, robotics and life sciences. Together with Prof. Bernhard Irrgang and in cooperation with the University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy he organized the international conference “Future of Robotics in Germany and Japan” (Dresden, November 2010). Latest publications:
Anne Gerdes is an Associate Professor at University of Southern Denmark, Department of Design and Communication, where she teaches courses on ICT-ethics and value based design. She is a member of the steering committee of the ETHICOMP conference and leader of the Danish Research Network on IT-ethics. Her research interests include ethical issues in relation to AI, cyborg technology, persuasive technology, privacy and national security.
Recent publications of relevance
Gerdes, A 2013, 'Ethical Issues in Human Robot Interaction'. H Nykänen, OP Riis & J Zeller (red), Theoretical and Applied Ethics. Aalborg Universitetsforlag, Aalborg, s. 125-143. Applied Philosophy, vol. 5
Gerdes, A & Øhrstrøm, P 2013, 'Preliminary Reflections on a Moral Turing Test'. T Ward Bynum, W Fleisman, A Gerdes, G Møldrup Nielsen & S Rogersen (eds.), ETHICOMP 2013 The possibilities of ethical ICT. Print & Sign University of Southern Denmark, s. 167-175
Matthew Gladden is a Research Affiliate at Georgetown University’s Center for Continuing and Professional Education and an MBA student in the Institute of Computer Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is interested in the potential of social robots to serve as colleagues, subordinates, and supervisors of human beings within organizations (especially businesses), as viewed from the perspective of management theory. As Associate Director of the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, he managed research and publication on topics including transhumanism and business ethics. He has also taught philosophical ethics at Purdue University and serves on the board of the International Society for Human and AI Resource Management.
Shubha Gokhale’s research focuses on the legal ramifications of emerging technologies. She teaches International Trade Law and Business Law at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea. She completed her Juris Doctorate at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, New York, and her Bachelors of Arts at Skidmore College, New York.
Pierluigi Graziani received his Ph.D from University of Rome La Sapienza and is currently a adjunct professor at University of Urbino. His works spans from mathematical logic, especially proof theory, to history and philosophy of mathematics. He has been editor of different volumes and published in different distinguished journals.
Raul Hakli is an Associate Professor at Aarhus University. He received his PhD in philosophy from University of Helsinki in 2010, where he taught philosophy and computer science since 2002. His main research publications are on collective epistemology, social ontology, and collective intentionality. In collaboration with Raimo Tuomela and Kaarlo Miller he explored varieties of “we-reasoning” in contexts of social ontology and with application to collective decision-making. A year ago he joined the PENSOR group and since then explores the applicability of core notions of social ontology and collective intentionality to social robotics.
Glenda Hannibal earned her BA in Philosophy from Aarhus University, where she is currently a MA student. Glenda has focused her studies on exploring the philosophical implications of ‘dynamic’ categorization of social robots. More generally, her interest is on how people perceive and relate to social robots in the areas of ontology, epistemology and philosophy of mind. Due to her strong interest in social robots Glenda has been an active member of the research group ‘Philosophical and Transdisciplinary Enquiries Into Social Robotics’ (PENSOR) since 2012.
Currently in the last phase of double PhD. Studies. Thesis title: Evolutionary modeling of language development.
Topics of interest: evolutionary computing, artificial life, machine learning, big data, pedagogy, participative and parallel democracy models, computational and developmental psycholinguistics, roboethics and robotheology.
Founder and first senator of biggest independent social network in Slovakia kyberia.sk (awarded Honorary Mention in Ars Electronica 2013 Digital Communities Prix). European citizen, PERL geek, cognitive libertarian and happy father.
Masashi Kasaki is a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Fellow at Kyoto University (Philosophy) and Guest Associate Professor at Osaka University (Engineering Science), Japan. He received his PhD (Philosophy) from the University of Calgary, Canada, in 2010. His research interests lie primarily in epistemology, philosophical methodology, and philosophy of psychology and its application to robotics. His most recent publications are: “The Traditional Conception of the A Priori”(co-authored with C. S. I. Jenkins), forthcoming in Synthese, and “Virtue Epistemology and Environmental Luck,” forthcoming in the Journal of Philosophical Research.
Agata Kłusak is a BA student in Art&Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark.
Julia Knifka is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy. She received her M.A. and B.A. in European Culture and History of Ideas from the KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), Germany. Awarded with a scholarship by the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung, she spent the academic year 2008/09 at Yale University, USA. The Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) funded her research stay at the University of Tokyo (Department of History and Philosophy of Science) in 2014. Her dissertation focuses on the problem of interaction in the field of Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI). Additional research interests include Philosophical Anthropology and Cultural Theories.
Tora Koyama is Specially Appointed Assistant Professor of the Graduate School of Human Sciences at Osaka University, Japan. He received his PhD (Philosophy) from Osaka University in 2004. His research interests are in philosophy, mainly metaphysics, philosophical methodology, and philosophical robotics. He has been conducting interdisciplinary study on robots and philosophy at the Center of Human-friendly Robotics Based on Cognitive Neuroscience, Osaka University.
Minao Kukita is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University, Japan. His main research areas are robot ethics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mathematics. A recent relevant publication is "Can robots understand values?: Artificial morality and ethical symbol grounding,’’ in Proceedings of 4th International Conference on Applied Ethics and Applied Philosophy in East Asia, Feb. 2014, pp. 65-76.
I am a second-year Max Weber postdoctoral research fellow at the European University Institute, and a teaching assistant for the undergraduate programme in Legal Informatics at the University of Bologna.
I am working on the legal status of nonhuman agents and on liability arising in connection with autonomous technologies: I am investigating the idea of rights that in time can be granted to artificial agents and I am also working on new schemes for liability that would enable us to deal with the problems such agents may give rise to. Those issues frame my interest in roboethics and computer ethics.
I am also interested in the philosophy of technology and in particular in the way philosophical ideas can help us deal with future challenges: I have accordingly been working to apply Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach to intelligent robots, and to combine Kant’s transcendental philosophy with Ray Kurzweil’s theory of mind.
Alex Levine has worked in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and the intersection of the two. He has published on the global reception of Darwinism (including the co-authored monographs From Man to Ape and Darwinistas) and on the epistemological consequences of adopting a process-metaphysical framework. He is currently at work on a book on the relationship between the extended mind thesis and the Marxian theory of alienation.
Holds a diploma degree in Computer Science from the University of Hamburg. Currently doctoral student at the University of Hamburg working on affordance-based models of social spaces for activity-placement planning as applied to social robotics.
Research Interests
Main Publications
Bertram F. Malle was born in Graz, Austria, and earned Master’s degrees in philosophy/linguistics (1987) and psychology (1989) at the University of Graz. After coming to the United States in 1990 he received his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1995 and joined the University of Oregon Psychology Department. Since 2008 he is Professor at the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. He received the Society of Experimental Social Psychology Outstanding Dissertation award in 1995, a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 1997, and he is past president of the Society of Philosophy and Psychology. Malle’s research, which has been funded by the NSF, Army, Templeton Foundation, and Office of Naval Research, focuses on social cognition, moral judgment, and more recently human-robot interaction. He has published over 80 articles and several books, including: Intentions and intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognition (with L. J. Moses and D. A. Baldwin, eds.), MIT Press, 2001; How the Mind Explains Behavior, MIT Press, 2004; and Other minds (with S. D. Hodges, eds.), Guilford Press, 2005.
Hironori Matsuzaki's main research activities lies in the areas of: Social Theory, Philosophical Anthropology, Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, Science and Technology Studies (especially Ethical, Legal and Societal Issues concerning Robotic Human Science and Social Robotics). He has special expertise in methods of qualitative social research. Since 2010 he is Research Associate in the research project “Development of Humanoid and Service Robots: An International Comparative Research Project – Europe and Japan”
Publications:
Constructing the robot’s position in time and space – the spatio-temporal preconditions of artificial social agency, STI Studies 10(1), 2014: 85-106. [with Gesa Lindemann]
When Robots Meet Society – Risk Issues and Legal Constraints in Japan, in: E. Hilgendorf & J.-P. Günther (eds.) Robotik und Gesetzgebung, Baden-Baden, 2013, 345-376.
Menschenwürde und Roboter, in: J.C. Joerden et al. (eds.) Menschenwürde und Medizin, Berlin, 2013, 919-931. [with Gregor Fitzi]
John Michael is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Department of Cognitive Science at the Central European University in Budapest. He is also an affiliated researcher at the Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University, and at the Center for Subjectivity Research, Copenhagen University. His background is in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and philosophy of science, and his main interests are in social cognition research. The aim of his current project is to develop a framework that specifies the psychological mechanisms with which agents identify and assess the level of their own and others’ interpersonal commitments. The project starts out by specifying three desiderata for a theoretical account of commitment: to identify the motivational factors that lead agents to honor commitments and which thereby make commitments credible, to pick out the psychological mechanisms and situational factors that lead agents to sense that implicit commitments are in place, and to illuminate the onto- and phylogenetic origins of commitment. In order to satisfy these three desiderata, the project conceptualizes a broad category of phenomena of which commitment in the strict sense is a special case, and introduce the term ‘minimal commitment’ to designate this broad category. By focusing on interpersonal commitments within the context of joint action, the project creates a new perspective for interpreting recent data from research in developmental psychology, behavioral economics, animal cognition, and social robotics. For more info, see: https://ceu.academia.edu/JohnMichael
John Carter McKnight is a postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University in the UK, and a former corporate finance attorney. His research is divided into two main areas, with substantial overlap:
Online communities, platforms, and producers: he studies the social and material technologies of online community formation and management, examining the interplay of community culture, technological platforms, user interface/experience design, and relations with professional content creators. His particular areas of interest include science and technology public communication and science fiction fandom.
Ethics and governance of emerging technologies: Much of his work examines the management and governance, formal and informal, internal and external, of innovation, with a particular interest in robotics, space exploration, and alternative financial tools such as cryptocurrencies.
Vincent C. Müller is Professor of Philosophy at Anatolia College/ACT, Thessaloniki, Greece. His research focuses on the nature and future of computational systems, particularly on the prospects and dangers of artificial intelligence. He is the coordinator of the European Network for Cognitive Systems, Robotics and Interaction with over 900 members, funded by the European Union through two FP7 projects with 3.9 mil. €, 2009-2014 (www.eucognition.org). He also organizes a conference series on the 'Theory and Philosophy of AI' (www.pt-ai.org).
Müller has published a number of articles in leading journals on the philosophy of computing, the philosophy of AI and cognitive science, the philosophy of language, applied ethics, and related areas. He has edited ten volumes on the theory of cognitive systems and artificial intelligence and is preparing a monograph on the fundamental problems of AI and. He was Stanley J. Seeger Fellow at Princeton University and is currently James Martin Research Fellow at the University of Oxford.
With a PhD from UC San Diego in philosophy of science, Ioan works in philosophy of physics and philosophy of artificial intelligence. He tackles topics such as unification and explanation in scientific theories. He recently published papers on genetic algorithms used in the process of scientific discovery and on explanatory pluralism in quantum gravity.
Morten Nielsen is a BA student in Art&Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark.
Vibeke Holm Nielsen is a BA student in Art&Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark.
Ezio Di Nucci is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Universität Duisburg-Essen. Among his recent books are Mindlessness (2013) and Ethics Without Intention (2014).
Marco Nørskov received his MSc in Mathematics and Philosophy in 2007 and PhD degree in Philosophy in 2011. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Research Programme for Philosophy and Intellectual Ideas at Aarhus University (Denmark) and cooperate researcher at the Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories (Japan). His research is focused on intercultural philosophy of technology with a special interest in HRI, Japanese philosophy and phenomenology.
Latest publication: Nørskov, M. (2014). Revisiting Ihde’s Fourfold “Technological Relationships”: Application and Modification. Philosophy & Technology, 1-19, doi:10.1007/s13347-014-0149-8.
Main Research areas: Sociology of Knowledge and Culture, Social Robotics, Mediatization, Ethnography
Publications: The New Sociology of Knowledge. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers 2013; Technical Assistant or Assistance by Means of Technology? The Performative Deployment of the Social Robot PARO in Dementia Care. In: International Journal of Social Robotics (with Christoph Dukat) (fortcoming); On the Sociality of Social Robots. A Sociology of Knowledge perspective. In: Science, Technology & Innovation Studies Vol 10, No 1 (2014), pp. 137-163; Ethnography of Scenes. Towards a Sociological Life-world Analysis of (Post-traditional) Community-building [31 paragraphs]. In: Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung, 6(3), Art. 43, 2005. Available at: http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/23/49
Rie Rasmussen is a BA student in Art&Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark.
My research concerns conceptual issues that arise at the intersection of philosophy, cognitive science, and social robotics research. For my Master’s thesis, I explored such issues as they emerge in empirical research into the so-called “uncanny valley” phenomenon. As a PhD candidate, I’m investigating what conceptual issues appear in empirical research concerning social robotics, empathy, and the emotions.
My main academic interest lays at the intersection of ethics, legal and social philosophy with the empirically informed study of the emotions and other philosophically relevant parts of psychology. Within this area, I work on well-being, autism, state punishment, desert, blameworthiness, personal identity, and the scope of moral consideration including the environment and robots.
In Defense of Shame (with J. Deonna and F. Teroni) OUP 2012
2009. Sentientism, wellebing, and environmentalism. Journal of Applied Philosophy Vol. 27 (1)
2012. Personal Identity Online. Philosophy & Technology, 25(3)
2009. Shame, Guilt, and Punishment. Law and Philosophy, 28(5),
2010. Guilt, Anger and Retribution. Legal Theory, 16(1)
Maria Grazia Rossi holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Sciences and she currently works at the University of Cagliari. Her research interests include philosophy of psychology, with a psychology of reasoning, moral psychology and theory of emotions. On these issues she published papers and books.
Alessandro Salice is a PostDoc Fellow at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. He is also an affiliated researcher at the Institute for Social Ontology and Philosophy of the Social Sciences, University of Vienna. His background is in phenomenology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language, and his main interests are in social ontology and collective intentionality research. The aim of his current project is to test the hypothesis that there are different forms of we-intentionality and that two of them play a particularly relevant role when it comes to group-forming processes. The first form of we-intentionality seems to be intrinsically goal-oriented and to presuppose the idea of coordination among individuals, whereas the second apparently requires the individuals sharing a social identity. The project aims at fleshing out these ideas by connecting it with insights developed within phenomenology, schizophrenia studies, group-identification theory, philosophy of mind and social robotics. For more info, see: http://cfs.ku.dk/staff/?id=460617&vis=medarbejder
Eleanor Sandry is a lecturer at the Department of Internet Studies/Centre for Culture and Technology, Curtin University, Australia. Her research is focused on exploring a diverse range of communication theory in developing an ethical and pragmatic recognition of, and respect for, otherness and difference in communication. She has just completed her book manuscript, Robots and Communication, for publication by Palgrave Macmillan in the Pivot series (late 2014/early 2015).
“Re-evaluating the form and communication of social robots”. International Journal of Social Robotics (2014). Manuscript under final editorial review. (This paper forms the basis for my presentation at Robophilosophy 2014).
“Dancing around the subject with robots: ethical communication as a ‘triple audiovisual reality’”. PLATFORM: Journal of Media and Communication 4, no. 1 (2012): 79-90.
Filippo Santoni de Sio is a philosopher; his main area of expertise is the theory of action and responsibility. He is a member of the Tu Delft-Oxford-based Enhancing Responsibility project on the ethics of cognitive enhancement; and member of the task force on robotics of the 3TU Centre for Ethics and Technology (Netherlands).
Johanna Seibt has her main research area in analytical philosophy, where she published widely on topics in the history and methodology of analytical metaphysics and ontology. She has worked on the theoretical foundations of a new approach to process ontology and is currently exploring applications of this framework for the interpretation of nature, sociality, and cognition. She is coordinator of the PENSOR (Philosophical Enquiries into Social Robotics) project, as well as coordinator of the new Danish research TRANSOR network (Transdisciplinary Studies of Social Robotics). Relevant publications: Theory and Applications of Ontology (in Philosophy and Computer Science, 2 Volumes), co-edited with R. Poli; A. Kamea, M. Healey (2010); “Embodying the Internet: Towards the Moral Self Via Communication Robots?” (co-authored with Marco Nørskov), Philosophy & Technology 25 (3), 285-307.
As an academic professional, Glenda Shaw-Garlock is a doctoral candidate in the School of Communication, at Simon Fraser University working under the guidance of Dr. Richard Smith. Her dissertation project relates to the affection experienced within human-technology interactions. Ms. Shaw-Garlock's research interests also include the cultural history of automatons and robotics in different cultures; the gendering of technological artifacts; the emergence of sociable and emotive technology in society; and critical perspectives on science, technology and culture.
Dr. Tom Simpson is a Senior Research Fellow at Wadham College, and the University Lecturer in Philosophy and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.
Tom’s research centres on the notion of trust, addressing both its theoretical dimensions and practical implications. Trust raises important theoretical questions. These include: What is trust? When is trust justified? Under what conditions do we know by trusting others? How should trust be restored when broken? Areas of practical application are numerous. During his doctorate he worked with Microsoft Research on trust on the Internet. He is currently engaged on a collaboration with Groningen looking at the restoration of trust in banking. He also works on the ethics of war and religious epistemology.
He joined the College from Cambridge, where he was a Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College. Between degrees he served as an officer with the Royal Marines Commandos, with tours in Northern Ireland; Baghdad, Iraq; and Helmand Province, Afghanistan.
To be supplied
Satomi Sugiyama (Ph.D. Rutgers University) is associate professor of Communication and Media Studies at Franklin University Switzerland. Her research interests include communication technology (particularly mobile technology), culture, and fashion processes. She has been conducting research on the way young people perceive and use the mobile device in various cultural contexts. Her work has appeared in several edited books as well as academic journals including New Media and Society. Sugiyama received MacArthur and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships at Colgate University while completing her Ph.D. at Rutgers University. In 2010, she has received the international exploratory workshop grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation in order to initiate a collaborative work exploring the notion of social robots and ICTs. The workshop outcome has been published in intervalla: platform for intellectual exchange (http://www.fc.edu/intervalla). The workshop also led to the COST workshop on social robotics, spearheaded by Leopoldina Fortunati (University of Udine) in 2013. In this endeavor, she has been exploring the idea of the mobile/smart phone as a “quasi-social robot.” She is currently co-editing a special issue “Social Robots: Form, Content, Critique” for the International Journal of Social Robotics (Springer) with Michaela Pfadenhauer and Charles Ess.
My main field of interest is the interconnections between the philosophy of mind/language, philosophy of science and technology, philosophy of psychology and ethics. During 2010-2013 I worked as part of the research project “A science of the soul? — Wittgenstein, Freud and Neuroscience in dialogue” financed by the Academy of Finland. Publications:
Philosophy and everyday language, In “Ethics-Society-Politics papers of the 35th International Wittgenstein Symposium”, eds. Martin G. Weiss and Hajo Greif. Kirchberg am Wechsel, 2012, Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society.
Man and his Invention, Forthcoming In: Njohja, No. 3, 2014, Pristina, Kosovo.
The moral roots of conceptual confusion in Artificial Intelligence research. Forthcoming in American Philosophical Association Newsletter “Philosophy & Computers” Vol. 14. No. 1
Ryuji Yamazaki received B.A. and M.A. degrees in Philosophy from Chuo University, Tokyo, and a Ph.D. in Knowledge Science from Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Ishikawa, in 1999, 2004, and 2010. His research interests are android science, dementia care, cross-generational communication, philosophy of technology and phenomenology. Publication: “Promoting Socialization of Schoolchildren Using a Teleoperated Android: An Interaction Study”, IJHR, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 1350007(1-25), 2013.
Yuichiro Yoshikawa is Associate Professor of the Department of Systems Innovation, Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University, Japan. He received his PhD (Engineering) from Osaka University in 2005. He has been working in interdisciplinary research fields using robots, e.g., the development of communication robots, analysis of human robot interaction, and cognitive developmental robotics.
Tom Ziemke is Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Skövde, Sweden. He received his PhD from the University of Sheffield, UK. His main research interest is embodied cognition, i.e., the role of the body in cognitive processes, in emotional mechanisms, in social interactions, and in interactions with different types of technology. He has more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and has edited two books on embodied cognition and social interaction. He is involved in a number of European research projects in the area of cognitive systems and robotics, is a member of the executive committee of the EUCog network and coordinator of a new FP7 integrated project called DREAM, which deals with the use of social robots in therapy for children with autism spectrum disorders.
