- Title: "Socially aware robot" captures WEF participants
- Date: 19th January 2017
- Summary: VARIOUS OF ABRAHAM PATEL, SOUTH AFRICAN MINISTER OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, TRYING OUT "SARA"
- Embargoed: 2nd February 2017 16:47
- Keywords: WEF Davos robot sara computer research USA
- Location: DAVOS, SWITZERLAND
- City: DAVOS, SWITZERLAND
- Country: Switzerland
- Topics: Information Technologies / Computer Sciences,Science
- Reuters ID: LVA0025ZQZL95
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: A robot which interacts with humans with the help of cameras and voice recognition was prominently displayed at the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Thursday (January 19).
Members of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute developed "SARA," a "Socially-Aware Robot Assistant " which interacts with participants at the Forum, an example of artificial intelligence one WEF participant predicted will spread across the world.
SARA "captures your facial expression, including smile, eye gaze and head nod and also, she can capture intonation and audio features," said Yoichi Matsuyama, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University who was in Davos to introduce the robot to WEF participants.
Among them was South Africa's Minister of Economic Development, Ebrahim Patel, who said "I was speaking to a robot and it could detect my sense of emotion: anger, smiling, frowning."
"What this really is about, the serious issue behind this is the application of artificial intelligence to so many social jobs that we had historically thought are intrinsically to be performed by human beings."
Patel said "we are going to see in future that these technologies will defuse across the world. The challenge for governments will be to think through the social policies that make this a good experience for human beings, to take human beings out of much of the drudgery and repetitiveness of work and release human beings to focus on creative things."
SARA was previously shown at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting of the New Champions in 2016 in Tianjin, China. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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