ToRCHI October meeting October 25, 2007

Join us for the first ToRCHI meeting of the 2007/2008 season with Professor Mark Chignell.

DATE: Thursday Oct. 25, 2007
TIME: Registration and networking starts at 6:30pm; Presentation starts at 7:00pm
LOCATION: Bahen Centre Room 2135 (2nd floor)
MAP: www.osm.utoronto.ca/map/ (the building marked BA)
COST: Free for ToRCHI members* (General 1-year membership $20; Guests and students $10-; ACM members $15-)

Social Robots and Emotional Design: Future Directions for Human-Computer Interaction Research
In the past few years I have been collaborating with researchers in Japan at Keio University, Nokia Research Centre (Tokyo), and Oki Corporation on several research projects. One of the trends that I have observed during that time is growing interest in communication robots, which are robots that interact with people socially. In the past few years I have changed from being a skeptic concerning social robots to being someone who believes that it is inevitable that they will be used widely in the future. In this talk I will review current work in Japan on social robots, and will then describe recent research that Jamy Li and I have been conducting on human interpretation of robot gestures. I will then describe our research plans at the Interactive Media lab for comprehensive study of the problem of how emotions and cognitive effort can be measured and incorporated in emerging research on human-robot interaction.

Presenter
Mark Chignell is a Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto, where he has been on the faculty since 1990. Prior to that he was an Assistant Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California from 1984 to 1990. He has a Ph.D in Psychology (University of Canterbury, New Zealand, 1981), and an M.S. in Industrial and Systems Engineering (Ohio State, 1984). Mark is currently President of Vocalage Inc., director of the Interactive Media Lab, and a visiting scientist at both the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies and Keio University in Japan.

Official Website: http://www.torchi.org