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The Royal Scottish Society of Arts
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2nd Meeting of the 190th Session (2010-2011)

Talking with Robots

Professor Jon Oberlander
School of Informatics
University of Edinburgh

In the Augustine United Church
41 George IV Bridge
Edinburgh, EH1 1EL
On Monday 8th November 2010, at 7pm

How can we get robots to talk like you and me? Informatics is the science of information - the study, in theory and practice, of natural and artificial systems that store, process and communicate information. Robots are artificial systems that have to be engineered to - amongst many other things - communicate information with nearby humans. Studying the ways in which humans already communicate is essential, if we're to get robots to talk anything like us. The talk focusses on human-robot dialogue, and explores some recent progress in this area at the University of Edinburgh.

Jon Oberlander holds a personal Chair in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Until recently, he was Director of the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance, the £29M SFC initiative bringing together leading researchers in 10 institutions across Scotland. Within Edinburgh, he is a member of the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation, which houses one of the world's leading groups in computational linguistics; he is also Director of Inspace, a new 300m² instrumented living lab for public engagement, with a special focus on human-environment interaction. He works at the intersection of computational linguistics and cognitive science.

Location of meeting

Members of the Public are welcome to attend

Jane Ridder-Patrick, Secretary
secretary@rssa.org.uk
Telephone: 0131 556 2161

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