The MeSA Lab successfully held the first open MeSA Workshop entitled “Ηuman-machine collective intelligence. From interactive robots to the collective intelligence”. The topic was analysed by Dr. Nikolaos Mavridis.

About the event
For some time now, the construction of robots that can communicate with humans using natural language and become comrades, is an interesting perspective of the science of robotics. Three examples of applications in this direction is the robot Ripley, the FaceBots and Ibn Sina. Each of these different embodiments exhibits propose a different aspect. The robot Ripley implements a desktop assistant with linguistic abilities, FaceBots remember previous encounters and friends and seek a long-term fellowship and the Ibn Sina is a historical character, an integral part of an interactive theater with many interactions. Outlook and development of technological and scientific field reveals the proposal of “Man-machine Cloud”. This proposal opens the way for a new generation of hybrid large scale human-machine systems, that overcomes many of the current limitations of artificial intelligence and exhibit many desired properties. These systems may exceed far beyond the limits of intelligence, and create a revolution both in the financial aspects and in artificial intelligence.

Our guest
Dr. Nikolaos Mavridis, PhD of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has taught, written and researched Intelligent Robots and Systems, having started from his youth. Today is As. Professor Research Polytechnic University of New York, and also extends the Laboratory Interactive Robots and Media (Interactive Robots and Media Lab-IRML) NCSR Demokritos. He is the founder of the laboratory IRML, which gained worldwide publicity with “Ibn Sina” (Avicenna), the first interactive humanoid robot capable of dialogue in Arabic and “FaceBots”. The Facebots are robots who have received awards from Microsoft, and use information from Facebook in order to develop long-term relationship with people. The project also includes the robot “Ripley”, a robot that learns natural language through examples and has features similar to those addressed by the token test, a psychological test three years old children. His publications has been cited more than 400 times, and he is the founder of IEEE UAE Robotics and Automation Society, and a member of the EU Cognitive Systems Experts Group. Furthermore, Nikoloas Mavridis is the vice president of Greek Artificial Intelligence Society and has served in several other similar positions in the past, is TEDx Curator and has been a speaker at two TEDx, the Emirates and Greece.

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