Applied Examples of Analog Biomorphic Design (ICRA 2014)

[su_youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKli3zIDFoM”]

This session was part of a large IEEE academic robotics conference) in Hong Kong; organized by Ben Goertzel, David Hanson, Mark Tilden and Gino Yu. It was great fun with a huge amount of discussion and give-and-take.

There is a good bit yet be done before we have generally intelligent humanoid robots, but the folks in the room were doing real work of various sorts aimed at this goal, and the sense of conceptual cross-pollination was exciting.

Five of the talks (Mark Tilden, David Hanson, Dan Popa, Mark Sagar and Ben Goertzel) were captured on video, along with the Q&A and discussion following their talks. The camerawork is pretty erratic as it was done informally by a few researchers in the audience, but the sound quality is OK, and it’s great to have this exciting session thus documented.

It’s hard to say who won the robo-cuteness prize: Tilden’s menagerie of RoboSapiens, Hanson’s telerobotically controlled mini-Einstein head (mimicking incomparable programmer/postmodern-comedian Ean Scheussler), or Sagar’s eerily realistic computer-graphical Baby X.

The academic papers corresponding to the talks (including a few talks not captured on video, but not including Tilden’s talk) are in the proceedings PDF, http://www.agi-society.org/wp-content…, which is linked from the session’s webpage http://www.agi-society.org/icra-2014-…

— Video/audio recording done by Ruiting Lian, Mandeep Bhatia, and Ben Goertzel; and for various long sequences of time, Ruiting’s unattended camera. Valiant efforts at video editing by George Papadakis.