New Scientist Live

Date: 
Thu, 28/09/2017 - 00:00 to Sun, 01/10/2017 - 23:45
Location: 
ExCel London
Speaker: 
Professors Barbara Webb and Sethu Vijayakumar

New Scientist Live, a festival of ideas and discovery, is taking place at ExCeL London from 28th September until 1st October.

The event will have five main themes – Humans, Technology, Earth, Cosmos and Engineering.  There will be a wide range of speakers including two academics from the Centre.

Professor Sethu Vijayakumar will speak about “Shared autonomy: the future of interactive robotics”.  Professor Barbara Webb will discuss "How insects inspire robotics".

Pepper the Robot Presents Children's Television

Date: 
Thu, 10/08/2017 - 17:30

On Thursday 10th August at 5.30pm on the CBBC Channel, Pepper, one of our social robots, will help present an episode of Blue Peter! As part of our Year of Robotics celebrations, Dr Thusha Rajendran from SOS will also be on hand to guide viewers through some of our robotics and AI work including MiRo dog-bots and Alyx, our EMYS head. After the episode, viewers can head online to the CBBC website where they can enjoy more digital content plus Pepper will be answering questions posed by young viewers.

Artificial Intelligence Research SICSA AI Theme Meeting

Date: 
Wed, 30/08/2017 - 10:15
Location: 
The Cottrell Building, University of Stirling
University of Stirling

The next meeting of the SICSA AI Theme will take place on Wednesday, August 30, 2017 at the Cottrell Building Room B3, University of Stirling.

You can register for this event here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/artificial-intelligence-research-theme-meeting-tickets-36141047847

How do the many facets of learning in AI relate to each other?

Helen Hastie Promoted to Professor

Submitted by Colette Bush on Thu, 20/07/2017 - 15:45

Helen Hastie has recently been appointed Professor at Heriot-Watt University. Helen was promoted to full Professor in the Computer Science Department of the School of Mathmatics and Computer Sciences (MACS). Helen is currently on a Leverhume fellowship looking into explainable AI and trust for interactions with autonomous systems. Congratulations Helen!

Pitch Masterclasses (2015 & 2016 cohorts)

Date: 
Mon, 25/09/2017 - 09:00 to Wed, 27/09/2017 - 12:45
Location: 
Robotarium seminar room Heriot-Watt University

This half day training session will cover the following:

Understand what makes an effective pitch

- Get clear on the objective and the audience

- Students deliver pre-prepared pitches which are filmed

- Review the filmed pitches as a group and provide feedback

- Reflections and action plan

Throughout the masterclass the following learning areas will be addressed:

Verena Rieser Promoted to Professor

Submitted by Colette Bush on Thu, 06/07/2017 - 14:35

Congratulations to Verena Rieser who has recently been appointed Professor in the School of Mathematics and Computer Sciences (MACS). Verena was promoted to full Professor at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, where she leads the NLP research group on Spoken Dialogue Systems and Natural Language Generation. She received her PhD in 2008 from Saarland University and joined Heriot-Watt University in 2011 as Assistant Professor/ Lecturer. She currently serves as a faculty advisor for the Amazon Alexa Challenge and as an area chair for ACL 2017.

International Workshop on Robotics, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Submitted by Colette Bush on Thu, 06/07/2017 - 14:25

Researchers, end users and technology developers attended the International Workshop on Robotics (IWR 2017) which took place on 30th and 31st March at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), São Paulo, Brazil.

 

This workshop, with a theme of “Robotics and automation: uncovering recent developments and applications on energy, industry, environment, agriculture, health and social settings” was organised jointly by Dr Patricia Vargas from Edinburgh Centre for Robotics and Professor Ely Carneiro de Paiva, from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Unicamp. 

Heriot-Watt Robotics and Interaction Labs host an Open Day

Submitted by Anne Murphy on Wed, 28/06/2017 - 11:02

The Robotics and Interaction Labs at Heriot-Watt University hosted a joint Open Day on Wednesday 21st June. The Open Day included two keynote speakers: Dr Verena Rieser from the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at Heriot-Watt and Dr Mary-Ellen Foster, a Lecturer in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow.

Dr Rieser discussed "Data-driven methods for spoken dialogue systems" and Dr Foster presented on "Face-to-face conversation with socially intelligent robots".