14 Human – Machine – Robotics

Technologies are mirrors, reflecting physical, cognitive and social characteristics of humans and human society. Thus, they have to satisfy, among others, both aesthetic needs and affective needs. Two approaches stand out here: creating machines which can feel, think, and act in the real world, based on  Affective Developmental Robotics and the design of interactive systems that are aesthetically pleasing in the way they  feel , beyond just beautiful visuals. In the seminar, we will explicate and discuss the theory and practice of those two aspects in detail, and try to find an intersection.

Recommended literature:

Buxton, William A. S., The three mirrors of interaction: a holistic approach to user interfaces

Link: http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/OTP/papers/bill.buxton/3mirrors.html

Purgathofer, P.: Is informatics a design discipline?

Link: http://igw.tuwien.ac.at/designlehren/purgathofer%20-%20is%20informatics%20a%20design%20discipline.pdf

Minoru Asada, Koh Hosoda, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Hiroshi Ishiguro, Toshio Inui, Yuichiro Yoshikawa, Masaki Ogino, and Chisato Yoshida. Cognitive developmental robotics: a survey. IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, Vol.1, No.1, pp.12–34, 2009.

Link: http://www.er.ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp/Paper/paper-eg.html

Minoru Asada. Affective Developmental Robotics: How can we design the development of artificial empathy?. HRI 2014 Workshop on HRI: a bridge between Robotics and Neuroscience, 2014 (to appear)

Deacon, Terrence W., The Symbolic Species: The co-evolution of language and the brain, New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998