Martina Truschzinski

I combined this disciplines as every discipline describes emotions (as well as other aspects of human thinking and behavior) within their point of view based on different methodological approaches that have their own advantages and limits.

I am convinced that a combination of these approaches could bridge the gaps and overcome discipline related limitations to find the underlying principles of human thinking, which in turn could help to understand the causes and effects of cognitive and emotional issues on human behavior and well-being (such as depression, addiction or decision-making in general).

Affective Computing

Emotions are important components of human consciousness, which influences nearly all cognitive processes such as perception, learning, subjective ratings, attention and decision-making.

Since I had to prepare a talk to the topic "Computational Modeling of Emotion with Neuronal Networks" in my Artificial Intelligence Course I am fascinated to build an emotional computational model that could give robots and us (humans) the ability to understand human emotions. I think that human emotions making us both highly efficient, in developing new strategies and making our life better every day, and also highly vulnerably, because they have a huge impact on our well-being and our behavior. Therefore, I think a basis-understanding of human emotions should be implemented or at least acknowledged in each artificially intelligent algorithm that is interacting with humans.

Social robots

For an effective and intuitive execution of cooperative tasks the robot has to understand people’s specific knowledge, strengths and weaknesses.

If robots and humans are executing working tasks co-operatively in a peer-to-peer group, a socially interactive robot is required.  A socially interactive robot should have the ability to estimate and react according to the people’s intentions and needs as well as according to the dynamics of moving objects and changing situations. Such an understanding of human intention is intimately linked to an emotional understanding, because emotions are the judgment of our self and our relationship with the environment. Thus, in my opinion the first step towards an socially interactive robot is building a computational model, which could enable robots to understand and predict human emotions - which I have done in my PhD.

Human-Robotic-Interaction

A fruitful collaboration requires the ability to compensate disadvantages of one's by using the adventages of others.

I agree with the idea that robots are made for humans and should have a human-centred view in their behavior and architecture. Within my research I focused on empowering a robot to understand the emotional state of the human and its causes. As a consequence, the robot would be able to give an adequate response to the human. For me an adequate and easily understandable reaction is not only a human-understandable behavior but also an emotional response as this would indicate how good or bad a current situation for the robot or the interacting human is or would be.

Robo-Philosophy

Robots can make our life better, if we also adress the legal and ethical issues that this technological progress is entailing.

The growing area of robots could be a boon and a bane depending on how we create responsible creations of new forms of sociality in human-robot interactions. Their is a upcoming discussion about what robot can do and what robots should do. Especially in Europe, where the European Parliament published Civil Laws for Robotic, this topic will become more and more important in every area building robots and systems reacting in our human world. I think it is important to understand that researchers not only have the freedom to investigate and build everything that could be helpful and important for the future but also have a high responsibility that we make sure our contribution and developed systems actually helps and benefits (all) humans.