MaP+S researchers to teach a workshop at SmartGeometry 2018

MaP+S faculty Panagiotis Michalatos, doctoral student Jose Luis García del Castillo and former researcher Nono Martínez Alonso were selected this year to teach a workshop at the SmartGeometry 2018 conference in University of Toronto.

The workshop is called Mind Ex Machina, and will explore the creative opportunities at the intersection of robotics and machine intelligence. As per the brief:

Robot programming interfaces are frequently developed to maximise performance, precision and efficiency in manufacturing environments, using procedural deterministic paradigms. While this is ideal for engineering tasks, it may become constraining in design contexts where flexibility, adaptability and a certain degree of indeterminacy are desired, in order to favour the exploratory nature of creative inquiry. This workshop will explore the possibilities of goal-oriented, non-deterministic real-time robot programming through Machine Intelligence (machine learning and artificial intelligence) in the context of collaborative design tasks. We argue that these new paradigms can be particularly fit for robot programming in creative contexts, and can help designers overcome the high entry barrier that robot programming typically features. Participants will be encouraged to explore this possibility through the conception and implementation of machine intelligence-aided interfaces for human-robot collaborative tasks.

More info on https://www.smartgeometry.org/mind-ex-machina