Keynote Lectures

"Towards Multimodal Affective Feedback : Interaction between Visual, Auditory and Haptic Modalities", Bipin Indurkhya, Professor at AGH University and Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland.

Affective computing has become a key research area in recent years. In this talk, a brief background of research on multimodal affective computing will be provided, and then the recent research on combining visual and auditory modalities with haptic modality will be presented. An affective haptic dataset has been constructed, and the emotional visual and auditory stimuli from the International Affective System (IAPS and IADS) were used. Participants were asked to rate the visual stimuli, auditory stimuli haptic stimuli, visual-haptic stimuli and auditory-haptic stimuli. Analysis of the results indicated that the presence of haptic stimulus affects the arousal of the visual stimulus, but does not affect the valence significantly. This interaction has been further explored in terms of the intensity, frequency, waveform and rhythm of the haptic stimuli. Finally, a set of guidelines on visual-haptic interaction that could be used to design multimodal affective feedback has been generated. Similar results were found on audio-haptic interaction.
 
"Cognitive-and-emotive robotics: Artificial brain, computing cognitive actions and emotional evaluations, since 1981", Stevo Bozinovski, Professor at South Carolina State University, Orangeburg, SC, USA and Elected Associate Professor at the University of Sts Cyril and Methodius, Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, Skopje, Macedonia.

This plenary keynote talk is related to the 35th anniversary of appearance of emotions in artificial neural networks. In 1981 a neural network was proposed named Crossbar Adaptive Array, which was the first artificial brain, in a sense that in addition to computing its behavior, it was able to compute emotional evaluations of encountered situations. And all the computations, cognitive and emotive, were done on the same memory structure. With its unique approach and architecture, this artificial brain was able to solve the delayed reinforcement learning problem for neural networks, which at that time was a very challenging problem. The talk will describe the 1981 event, as well as some of the current research related to that event.
 
"A Service-Oriented Web Architecture for Computational Creativity", Tony Veale, Professor at University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.

Creativity is a long cherished and widely studied aspect of human behavior that allows us to re-invent the familiar and to imagine the new. Computational creativity (CC) is a newly burgeoning area of creativity research that brings together academics and practitioners from diverse disciplines, genres and modalities, to explore the potential of computers to be autonomously creative, or to collaborate as co-creators with people. An architecture for creative Web services will be presented that will act as a force magnifier for CC, both for academic research, and for the effective deployment of real CC applications in industry. For researchers, this service-oriented architecture supports the pooling of technologies in a robust interoperable framework, in which CC models are conceived, developed and migrated from lab settings to an industrial strength platform. Industry developers, for their part, will be able to exploit novel results of CC research in a robust, low-risk form, without having to re-implement algorithms from a quickly moving field. The architecture will be illustrated with the first growing set of creative Web services that provide robust figurative language processing on demand.
 
"Socially Intelligent Robots, the need of next generation of Consumer Robots", Amit Kumar Pandey, Head Principal Scientist (Chief Scientist) and Scientific Coordinator – Collaborative Projects at Aldebaran Robotics, SoftBank Group, Paris, France.

The talk will reinforce that the humanoid robots have a range of potential societal applications, and that as a robotics industry, Aldebaran’s R&D and Innovation is around the centrality of wellbeing of people. The first part of the talk will illustrate some of the use cases Aldebaran is seeing for humanoid robot companion. The second part will highlight some of the research directions and results towards achieving such social humanoid robot companion. And last part will present the feedback from real users and conclude by pointing some ethical issues and the grand challenges ahead.