In the lecture given by Emilia Barakova and Roos van Berkel about the importance of expressive movement in social robotics and, consequently, in human-robot interactions, two notions caught my attention from the beginning: anthropomorphic and humane robots. In an extremely interesting distinction between them, the two scholars tried to understand how a robot can or…

There is a lot of argument these days when it comes to robots. This topic has become especially actively discussed in recent years, as AI and robotics are no longer in distant future. FESTO with a myriad of insect and animal robots that move just like their prototypes, Boston Dynamics’ with their series of robots…

One of the main challenges in coordinating robot behavior, as shown by Roos van Berkel and Emilia Barakova in their lecture, centers around the ability to let robots respond to movement and emotion; essential to human behavior. They demonstrated a variety of approaches, ranging from gaze matching to Laban Movement Analysis, and it quickly became…

Melvin Waver’s talk, Using Neural Networks to Study Conceptual Shifts in Text and Image, provided some critical insight on the potential of neural networks in conducting academic research in the field of Humanities. The proliferation of available data and the rapid developments in the processing possibilities, in conjunction with the increasing digitization of archives, has…

In Melvin Wevers’ lecture Using Neural Networks to Study Conceptual Shifts in Text and Image, he explained why humanities researchers should collaborate with computer scientists. He did this by showing a neural network that can analyze and categorize images in advertisements. This network could then recognize certain patterns, which eventually could lead to new insights…

In his talk Using Neural Networks to Study Conceptual Shifts in Text and Image, Melvin Wevers exposed a type of research that, relying on large corpora of data for advertisements, employed computational devices in order to be able to proceed with his analysis. The amount and accessibility of data nowadays, as it has been addressed…

The underlying idea of pedagogy is that parents, teachers and other adults bear responsibility for the upbringing, education and conduct of children. These responsibilities range from the mental life of the child to behavioural manners to legal liability. Ideas of the responsibility in education are not only limited to human-human relations but are equally applicable…

Reflecting on the fascinating research presented by Melvin Wevers on neural networks and the ongoing technical innovations within the field of computer recognition and identification software. Through a complex explanation of the mathematical and algorithmic techniques going into these research, Wevers showed us how computers are not just research tools, they are, as if they…

For as long as humanity existed, people have been occupied with the essence of things around them. Philosophers, mathematicians, astronomers tried to understand the world since the ancient times, looking up at the sky, at nature, at art to find the answers to the most fundamental questions. Later many other scientists studied the air, the…

Frank Kessler’s lecture brought forward several questions about the role of the media in daily life and its potential to transform the way we perceive and describe our daily experiences. For example, I started reflecting on the ways that cinema has reconfigured the senses and shaped our experience of the world, and how it has…