Can machines show empathy? Can an artificial intelligence be trained to react to our behaviour and emotions in a way that feels authentic?
About This Event
As an enhancement to the Girls and STEAM program Science World is hosting a series of online events throughout the year highlighting different STEAM industries and careers. While the terms "women" and "girls" are used in our event, Girls and STEAM invites participants and mentors who identify as women, girls, trans, gender queer, non-binary, two-spirit and gender questioning.
Each event features a 20-30 minute speaker panel, exploring the work that different STEAM mentors are doing followed by a networking opportunity where participants could ask more specific questions about some of the career options they might explore. All events will be online.
Our event on May 29 explores empathy in artificial creations, looking at some of the work that is being done to study empathy and the ways we as humans can consciously or unconsciously detect that it is there or not.
Panelists:
1. Olivia Norton from Sanctuary AI who is working on developing machine empathy. She and her team look at how empathy can be defined and ways to measure whether their synthetic human robots can display it in a way that is detectable to people.
2. Shazzy Gustafson-Angulo who uses the Unreal Engine in her work at Wildbrain entertainment and in the creation of her own web series Mitzy Makes It. She will be exploring the computer graphics/gaming/film world and what makes emotionally relatable virtual characters. There will be some discussion of Unreal Engine’s new Metahuman tool