Aarhus University Seal

Keynotes

Keynote 1, Friday August 22; Time: 17:45-19:15

Building 1412, AULA

Hiroshi Ishiguro

Android Philosophy

Androids, the very humanlike robots, are mirrors to reflect humanities. By building them, engineering researchers can establish methodologies to represent humanities on the androids and cognitive scientists and philosophers can use them as testbeds for their studies of humanities. Cognitive scientists focused on the basic function of human brains but not so much on complicated meta-level phenomena, such as heart, mind, and consciousness. However, these meta-level phenomena, which are often discussed in philosophy, can be investigated by studying human-android interactions. We call this new framework “android philosophy.” This talk introduces a series of androids developed in ATR Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories and Osaka University and discusses on the philosophical issues.


Hiroshi Ishiguro is professor of Department of Systems Innovation in the Graduate School of Engineering Science at Osaka University (2009-) and recently appointed the position of Distinguished Professor of Osaka University (2013-). He is also visiting Director (2014-) of Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute (ATR).  His research interests cover distributed sensor systems, interactive robotics, and android science. He has published more than 300 papers in major journals and conferences, such as Robotics Research and IEEE PAMI.He has developed  humanoids and android robots, called Robovie, Repliee, Geminoid (in the picture), Telenoid, and Elfoid. These robots have been reported many times by major media, such as Discovery channel, NHK, and BBC.  In 2007, Synectics Survey of Contemporary Genius 2007 selected him as one of the top 100 geniuses alive in the world today. Among his recent publications are:  H. Ishiguro and S. Nishio, "Building artificial humans to understand humans," Journal of Artificial Organs, 10(3), pp. 133-142, 2007;H. Ishiguro, "Scientific issues concerning androids," International Journal of Robotics Research, 26(1), pp. 105-117, 2007; H. Ishiguro, T. Minato, Y. Yoshikawa and M. Asada, "Humanoid platform for cognitive developmental robotics," International Journal of Humanoid Robotics, 8(3), pp. 391-418, 2011; H. Sumioka, A. Nakae, R. Kanai and H. Ishiguro. "Huggable communication medium decreases cortisol levels," Scientific Reports. 3034, pp. 1-6, 2013; M. Alimardani, S. Nishio and H. Ishiguro,  "Humanlike robot hands controlled by brain activity arouse illusion of ownership in operators," Scientific Reports, 3(2396), 2013.

Keynote 2, Saturday August 23, 10:45-12:15

Building 1441, Auditorium 1

Illah Nourbakhsh

Robots, Empowerment, and Equity

Robotics has introduced unexpected, new dynamics to fundamentally social aspects of human empowerment and human equity.  In this talk I review two fundamental principles that forge human hope: empowerment and equity.  I will then describe how robotics is influencing both dystopian and utopian futures of these constructions, and how technologists might influence the social downstream implications of our work.


Illah R. Nourbakhsh is Professor of Robotics, director of the Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) lab and head of the Robotics Masters Program in The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His current research projects explore community-based robotics, including educational and social robotics and ways to use robotic technology to empower individuals and communities, as described in this CREATE Lab white paper. The CREATE Lab's researchers lead diverse projects, from the application of GigaPan technology to scientific, citizen science and educational endeavours internationally to ChargeCar, a community-based effort to convert gasoline cars into locally customized electric vehicles; Hear Me, a project that uses technology to empower students to become leads in advocating for meaningful social change; Arts and Bots, a program for creative art and robotics fusion in middle school; Message from Me, a new system of communication between pre-K children and their parents to improve home-school consistency; and BodyTrack, an empowerment program that enables citizens to capture behavior, health factors and find ways to improve their well-being, to many other programs. The CREATE Lab's programs have already engaged more than 23,000 people globally, and the CREATE Satellite program is forging additional CREATE lab partners in new geographic zones. Illah's past research has included protein structure prediction under the GENOME project, software reuse, interleaving planning and execution and planning and scheduling algorithms, as well as mobile robot navigation. While on leave from Carnegie Mellon in 2004, he served as Robotics Group lead at NASA/Ames Research Center. He was a founder and chief scientist of Blue Pumpkin Software, Inc., which was acquired by Witness Systems, Inc. Illah earned his bachelor's, master's and PhD in computer science at Stanford University and has been a faculty member of Carnegie Mellon since 1997. In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences named him a Kavli Fellow. In 2013 he was inducted into the June Harless West Virginia Hall of Fame. He is co-author of the second edition MIT Press textbook, Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots. He is author of the newly published MIT Press book for general readership, Robot Futures.