October 20th 2021
10-15.30 CEST
Online
Programme: https://cutt.ly/mE5sO8C
We welcome everyone to our first ‘Whole Action Conference’ on 20 October at 10.00 – 15.30 CET, showcasing the insights of our eight Working Groups.
New technologies like virtual and augmented reality are set to grow significantly worldwide in the coming years, and will have major effects on how we talk, translate, interact, and communicate. Instantaneous translation, real-time visual overlays, visual augmentation of facial movements, and extensive interaction with highly intelligent virtual characters will radically change our use of language.
Our Working Groups consider different aspects of this huge challenge, including language variation and change, language ideologies, pragmatics, language contact, translation, language rights, linguistic endangerment and vitality, among others.
The conference will be free and online, with an invited plenary speech and parallel sessions encouraging dialogue and shared learning among everyone. It will also include a ‘rapid networking’ session to enable introductions among people.
Please see our detailed program here: https://cutt.ly/mE5sO8C
Please save the date and register before 19 October 23.50 CET here: https://link.webropol.com/s/lithme-wac2021
Meeting link for the event will be shared with registered participants.
PLENARY SPEAKER: Kristiina Jokinen, Senior Researcher at Artificial Intelligence Research Center, Japan; and University of Helsinki, Finland, ‘Interactions with Social Robots – challenges and opportunities for digital companions’
My own work has focused on situated robot agents which can sense their environment, walk and gesture, besides talk. Such social robots aim to communicate with human users in a natural manner, and offer solutions to many societal problems such as lack of human care-takers or help in communication between different people, in everyday situations and in difficult environments like disaster areas or in COVID-19. However, development and design of social robots also faces many challenges which deal with technological issues as well as social and human issues related to trust, ethics, accessibility, cooperation, etc.
In recent years, many different AI agents have appeared providing potentially useful applications for a variety of everyday tasks. Such agents range from talking heads on one’s phone to situated robots in a shopping center, and their role varies from a simple information provider to an autonomous robot companion.
In this talk, I will discuss reseach and development on ethical and trustworthy social robots which support human well-being and cooperation. In particular, I will focus on dialogue modelling that enables flexible and long-term interaction between users and social robots. I will draw examples from my work in the DigiSami project and the ongoing EU-Japan project e-VITA.
