Fictional human and real robot: sharing spaces with robots

Join us for the Being Human Festival between 17 and 25 November.

“In a future where intelligent androids are fully integrated with everyday life, how do we distinguish ourselves as human?”, asks Dr Lyuba Alboul Senior Research Fellow in the Materials and Engineering Research Institute at Sheffield Hallam University.

Some answers to this and other Robotics, AI and VR questions can be found at the ‘Fictional human and real robot: sharing spaces with robots’ event organised by researchers at MERI’s Centre for Automation and Robotics Research (CARR), Cultural Communication and Computing Research Institute (C3RI) and Sheffield Robotics.

The interactive displays will include a virtual future robotics museum, creation of customised human avatars, robots display, AI and Robotics discussion, a VR/AR experience and writing workshops. Visitors and guests will have the opportunity to interact with several robots. CARR’s newest AI member, Pepper, will also be present. Pepper is a human-sized, social, humanoid robot. Apart from Pepper, two other robots will be taking active part in the event – Robot Betty and Kermit/Green. Betty is a portable, social robot, and Kermit/Green is based on the InMoov open source 3D printed life-size robot by Gael Langevin.

Visitors can also participate in the writing of a short script that will later on be edited into a coherent narrative by Sue Bodnar, creative writing tutor/practitioner. Parts of those scripts will be used for the creation of a short movie that will be aired in Sheffield Hallam’s The Void on 23 November.

The ‘Fictional human and real robot: sharing spaces with robots’ events are supported by the African Community (black and minority ethic), Crisis, and Bank Street Arts. The events are free and open to the public.  For enquiries, please email us at: FictionalHuman@shu.ac.uk

For more information and details of all the events please download the brochure