Following the success of the first edition of Robo-Identity, the second edition provided an opportunity to expand the discussion about artificial identity. This year, focused on emotions that are expressed through speech and voice. Synthetic voice of robots can resemble and is becoming indistinguishable from expressive human voice. This can be an opportunity and a constraint in expressing emotional speech that can (falsely) convey a human-like identity that can mislead people, leading to ethical issues. How should we envision an agent’s artificial identity? In what ways should we have robots that maintain a machine-like stance, e.g., through robotic speech, or should emotional expressions that are increasingly human-like be seen as design opportunities? These are not mutually exclusive concerns. For this year’s edition, the special theme was “speech, emotion and artificial identity”.
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Who is a robot? There are a burgeoning number of "bodies", from standard humanoid robots, e.g., Nao, to more creative renditions e.g., asynchronized trio of robots as one or a more abstract Jibo. Yet thus far, who resides in artificial bodies and whether their identities can fluidly travel across different technologies remains as a fascinating, but under-explored research area. As a topic, identity has not been an explicit focus of research in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), and in neighboring fields of robo-philosophy, HCI, and design; whose identity is housed where and why deserves to be more thoroughly investigated. Hence, this half day workshop aimed to collaboratively discuss the problem of artificial identity or robo-identity that is brought forth by increasingly diverse interfaces and agents, in a multi-disciplinary manner.
More details can be found here.