Workshop : Affective artificial agents as models for affective science and psychology - April 9th

09.04.2018 12:50 – 17:00

The workshop “Affective artificial agents as models for affective science and psychology” organized by Prof. David Rudrauf and Prof. Patrik Vuilleumier will take place on Monday 9th April from 12:50 to 17 at Campus Biotech (University of Geneva). The event will exceptionally be hosted in room B1.06.

REGISTRATION IS FREE BUT MANDATORY because only people whose names have been announced in advance will be granted access to the room (DEADLINE APRIL 4TH): https://formulaire.unige.ch/cisa/survey/index.php/553678?lang=en

The workshop is part of the activities in the Swiss Doctoral School in Affective Sciences. The members of the doctoral school will get credits (0.2) in the category workshop for their participation in this event.

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SDS in Affective Sciences – WORKSHOP

Monday, April 9th 2018
12:50 – 17:00 pm
Campus Biotech – Room B1.06

“Affective artificial agents as models for affective science and psychology”

The workshop will focus on recent advances in social affective artificial agents. It will explore the possible integration of computational models of agents into the affective science and more generally scientific psychology, both as a support for theoretical developments and simulations and as predicitive models for empirical research.

12:50 – 13:00 - Introduction: Prof. David Rudrauf (University of Geneva)

13:00 – 14:00 - Keynote lecture: Prof. Ana Paiva (University of Porto)
"The role of emotions in the communication between humans and social robots"

14:00 – 14:15 - Coffee break

14:15 – 15:00 - Talk: Prof. Alexandre Alahi (EPFL)
“Affective computing for transportation”

15:00 – 15:45 - Talk: Prof. David Rudrauf (University of Geneva)
“The Projective Consciousness Model: Integrating perception, imagination, emotion and action in a global model of the embodied mind”

15:45 – 16:00 - Coffee break

16:00 – 16:45 - Open discussion
How can artificial agents be incorporated in research in the affective sciences? Options and challenges

16:45 – 17:00 - Synthesis and conclusions



PARTICIPANTS AND ABSTRACTS

1) Alexandre Massoud Alahi

Title: Affective Computing for Transportation

Abstract:
Humanity is at the dawn of a digital revolution where Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to reshape the future of transportation with self-driving cars, delivery robots, and intelligent machines more broadly. To this end, a fundamental challenge is to develop machines that can not only perform intelligent tasks, but do so while co-existing with humans in the open world. Machines need to learn unwritten common sense rules, ethics, and comply with social conventions. Delivery robots should respect personal space,
yield right-of-way, and ultimately “read” the behavior of others to effectively navigate crowded spaces.
While AI has made great progress in classifying images or playing games driven by well-defined set of rules, intelligent machines still lack common sense and the ability to make seamless, safe, moral and efficient decisions in crowded social scenes. To reach this ambitious goal, I propose empowering machines with a type of cognition I call socially-aware AI, i.e., systems equipped with perception and social intelligence. In other words, I aim to develop systems that have the capacity to i) understand human behavior and ii) effectively navigate and negotiate complex social interactions and environments. In this talk, I will present our latest works towards socially-aware transportation.

Bio:
Alexandre Alahi is currently an Assistant Professor at EPFL. He spent five years at Stanford University as a Post-doc and Research Scientist. He has worked on the theoretical challenges and practical applications of socially-aware Artificial Intelligence in the context of transportation, i.e., systems equipped with perception and social intelligence. He was awarded the Swiss NSF early and advanced researcher grants for his work on predicting human social behavior. He won the CVPR Open Source Award (2012) for his work on Retina-inspired image descriptors, and the ICDSC Challenge Prize (2009) for his sparsity-driven algorithm that has tracked more than 100 million pedestrians to date. His research has been covered internationally by BBC, abc, PBS, Euronews, Wall street journal, and other national news outlets around the world. Alexandre has also co-founded multiple startups such as Visiosafe, and won several startup competitions. He was elected as one of the Top 20 Swiss Venture leaders in 2010.

2) David Rudrauf

Title: The Projective Consciousness Model: integrating perception, imagination, emotion and action in a global model of the embodied mind

Abstract:

The Projective Consciousness Model (PCM) is an attempt to unify psychology computationally, with the broadest possible explanatory power about a multiplicity of phenomena and behaviors, from perception, imagination, appraisal, emotion, social cognition, motivation, and action. The PCM advances previous formulations of active inference by featuring an explicit psychological and cybernetic model, based on the Free Energy principle (Friston, 2010), of the form, structure and dynamics of conscious experience, in a manner that integrates counterfactual or multi-perspectival first-person perspectives with affective dynamics, for the global optimization of action outcomes. The PCM offers an explicit, formal, computable and integrative basis for testing hypotheses about normal and pathological psychological mechanisms quantitatively. The principles of the model will be explained, and will be illustrated with applications to agents' simulations of resilient navigation in the context of affective stressors, the generation of complex facial expressions as a function of affective states, social perspective taking in the context of modeling Autism Spectrum Disorders, and models of psychodynamical process related to fantasizing.

Bio:
David Rudrauf is a Psychologist and Neuroscientist and currently an Associate Professor at the University of Geneva, FAPSE, and a member of the Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences. He directs the Laboratory of Multimodal Modeling of Emotion and Feeling on the Campus Biotech in Geneva. After years of research in neuroscience, neuropsychology and multimodal neuroimaging in the US and in France, his current research focuses on mathematical psychology, and on the development of his computational model of embodied consciousness (Rudrauf et al, 2017, Journal of Theoretical Biology), which is based on a synthesis of psychology linking perception, imagination, emotion, motivation and action within a general algorithm of optimization and control, and on integrating the model with Virtual Reality and robotics in order to study the normal and pathological mechanisms of the mind.

Lieu

Bâtiment: Campus Biotech

Room B1.06

entrée libre

Fichiers joints

Workshop “Affective artificial agents”.pdf

221.7 Kb