Hitchhiking is a means of transportation that is gained by asking individuals, usually strangers, for a ride in their car or other vehicle. The ride is usually, but not always, free.
Health informatics combines communications, information technology (IT), and health care to enhance patient care and is at the forefront of the medical technological revolution.. It can be viewed as a branch of engineering and applied science.
Cynthia Breazeal is an American robotics scientist and entrepreneur. She is a former chief scientist and chief experience officer of Jibo, a company she co-founded in 2012 that developed personal assistant robots. Currently, she is a professor of media arts and sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the director of the Personal Robots group at the MIT Media Lab. Her most recent work has focused on the theme of living everyday life in the presence of AI, and gradually gaining insight into the long-term impacts of social robots.
The School of Informatics is an academic unit of the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, responsible for research, teaching, outreach and commercialisation in informatics. It was created in 1998 from the former department of artificial intelligence, the Centre for Cognitive Science and the department of computer science, along with the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) and the Human Communication Research Centre.
Developmental robotics (DevRob), sometimes called epigenetic robotics, is a scientific field which aims at studying the developmental mechanisms, architectures and constraints that allow lifelong and open-ended learning of new skills and new knowledge in embodied machines. As in human children, learning is expected to be cumulative and of progressively increasing complexity, and to result from self-exploration of the world in combination with social interaction. The typical methodological approach consists in starting from theories of human and animal development elaborated in fields such as developmental psychology, neuroscience, developmental and evolutionary biology, and linguistics, then to formalize and implement them in robots, sometimes exploring extensions or variants of them. The experimentation of those models in robots allows researchers to confront them with reality, and as a consequence, developmental robotics also provides feedback and novel hypotheses on theories of human and animal development.
Brian J. Alters is a Canadian academic who is a professor in Chapman University's College of Educational Studies. He directs Chapman's Evolution Education Research Center, has taught science education at both Harvard and McGill Universities, and is regarded as a specialist in evolution education.
The Informatics Forum is a major building on the Central Area campus of the University of Edinburgh. Completed in 2008, it houses the research institutes of the university's School of Informatics.
Justine M. Cassell is an American professor and researcher interested in human-human conversation, human-computer interaction, and storytelling. Since August 2010, she has been on the faculty of the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and the Language Technologies Institute, with courtesy appointments in Psychology, and the Center for Neural Bases of Cognition. Cassell has served as the chair of the HCII, as associate vice-provost, and as Associate Dean of Technology Strategy and Impact for the School of Computer Science. She currently divides her time between Carnegie Mellon, where she now holds the Dean's Professorship in Language Technologies, and PRAIRIE, the Paris Institute on Interdisciplinary Research in AI, where she also holds the position of senior researcher at Inria Paris.
Informatics is the study of computational systems. According to the ACM Europe Council and Informatics Europe, informatics is synonymous with computer science and computing as a profession, in which the central notion is transformation of information. In some cases, the term "informatics" may also be used with different meanings, e.g. in the context of social computing, or in context of library science.
hitchBOT was a Canadian hitchhiking robot created by professors David Harris Smith of McMaster University and Frauke Zeller of Toronto Metropolitan University in 2013. It gained international attention for successfully hitchhiking across Canada, Germany and the Netherlands, but in 2015 its attempt to hitchhike across the United States ended when it was stripped, dismembered, and decapitated in Philadelphia.
Joanna Joy Bryson is professor at Hertie School in Berlin. She works on Artificial Intelligence, ethics and collaborative cognition. She has been a British citizen since 2007.
Angelo Dalli is a computer scientist specialising in artificial intelligence, a serial entrepreneur, and business angel investor.
Marina Denise Anne Jirotka is professor of human-centered computing at the University of Oxford, director of the Responsible Technology Institute, governing body fellow at St Cross College, board member of the Society for Computers and Law and a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute. She leads a team that works on responsible innovation, in a range of ICT fields including robotics, AI, machine learning, quantum computing, social media and the digital economy. She is known for her work with Alan Winfield on the 'Ethical Black Box'. A proposal that robots using AI should be fitted with a type of inflight recorder, similar to those used by aircraft, to track the decisions and actions of the AI when operating in an uncontrolled environment and to aid in post-accident investigations.
Julie Carpenter, born Julie Gwyn Wajdyk, is an American researcher whose work focuses on human behavior with emerging technologies, especially within vulnerable and marginalized populations. She is best known for her work in human attachment to robots and other forms of artificial intelligence.
Kerstin Dautenhahn is a German computer scientist specializing in social robotics and human–robot interaction. She is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Waterloo, where she holds the Canada 150 Research Chair in Intelligent Robotics and directs the Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Laboratory.
Ana Maria Severino de Almeida e Paiva is Secretary of State for Science in Portugal since April 5th, 2024. She was a full professor at the University of Lisbon. Her work is around artificial intelligence and robotics. She is an elected fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence.
Helen Hastie is the Head of the School of Informatics of the University of Edinburgh and a RAEng/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow. She specialises in Human-Robot Interaction and Multimodal interfaces. Hastie has undertaken projects such as AI personal assistants for remote robots, autonomous systems and spoken dialogue systems for sectors in defence and energy. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Vera Demberg is a German computational linguist and professor of computer science and computational linguistics at Saarland University.
Angelica Lim is an American-Canadian AI roboticist. She first started researching robots in 2008. Lim is currently an assistant professor in Computing Science at Simon Fraser University in Canada. She is also the head and founder of the Simon Fraser University Rosie Lab, which specializes in AI software development. Much of her work involves exploring the emotional capabilities of AI machines, and how AI interacts with music. Lim is the first to provide a scientifically published definition and implementation for robot feelings.
Cindy Esther Hmelo-Silver is a learning scientist and expert on problem-based learning, collaborative learning, the use of video for learning, and complex systems understanding. She is a Distinguished Professor of Learning Sciences, Barbara B. Jacobs Chair in Education and Technology, and the Associate Dean for Research and Development at Indiana University Bloomington. She is co-Principal Investigator and Education Research Lead of the EngageAI Institute, which conducts research on narrative-centered learning technologies and collaborative learning.
