Robots are in the news, and if you believe what you hear they are about to take all our jobs, if not run the world and make humans their pets. But how far are these accurate assessments of robots and their current and likely future capabilities? Could we be holding a mirror up to ourselves and our own bad behaviour in making these assumptions about robots? What's real and what's hype; what can robots really do and why? What roles are they likely to play in our human world?
Ruth has been researching AI and robotics for nearly 30 years and is a member of the Edinburgh centre for Robotics, at Heriot-Watt University. Her early specialism was in AI planning systems. Since then she has taken part in projects developing long-lived robot companions and an empathic robot guide. Her current interest is in robot expressive behaviour and incorporating models of emotion into robot control.
She is working on a project to investigate whether an expressive robot can assist high-functioning adults with autism to improve their understanding of the social signals that regulate human interaction. Difficulties in this area are associated with the very high rate of unemployment of this group. She is happy that the world is currently interested in robots but less happy at some of the wild assertions about their capabilities: like most researchers in the area she does not accept that robots will take over the world.
Twitter - @ruthaylett
www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~ruth
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