Profile

Really hard to know what to say! Okay, ummm, oh yes! I have four nephews whom I absolutely adore 🙂 Currently got into the new TV series Westworld about a theme park populated with humanoids. It’s very dark and raises all sorts of social and ethical issues about the treatment of future robots. My favourite movie Directors are James Cameron (Terminator 2, Aliens 2; Avatar), and Chris Nolan (including Inception and Interstellar). I’m looking forward to seeing Dr. Strange at the BFI IMAX, Waterloo London – it has the biggest screen in the UK so special effects movies are worth experiencing there. What else? I love cakes and chocolate 🙂  Tomorrow there is a Chocolate exhibition at the Olympia, Kensington – I went to one in 2014 which was incredible, featured a fashion show with models wearing dresses made of chocolate, heaven 🙂  I guess this tells you I live in London, which is far from my place of work at Coventry University,  but it’s okay, I don’t have to attend every day, like many other staff, I am a location-independent worker (LIW), so can work/take meetings from the university’s London campus and work from home.

Develop research projects; design science experiments; write up and present results for journals and conferences.

Develop research proposals: I’m currently collaborating on two project proposals for EU Horizon2020 grant calls. One proposal is being led by a Professor at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, and is planned in the area of ‘science with and for society’, in the topic of ethics in technology. The other proposal is for a project on social robotics, including gesture and human language for human-robot collaboration.

Conduct original research: With a Linguist in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities in my university we are investigating the application of conversational collocation tools to transcripts of conversations I’ve gathered from a series of Turing test experiments.

Plan PhD programmes: I’ve prepared three areas of research that are for doctoral candidates. I’ve recruited one potential candidate, they work in industry as an R&D engineer so completing a doctorate for them is a personal goal. Supervising PhDs candidates is part of being a Research Fellow.

Disseminate research findings: This involves writing papers and submitting them to quality journals for peer review, or presenting results from experiments at international science conferences.

Teaching: This term I’m not delivering classes but in the past I have led/coordinated modules on AI degrees and created practical lab exercises for Tutorials.

Outreach: This kind of activity: persuading school pupils and college students to continue with science, technology and engineering in higher education, because the careers are varied, exciting and rewarding. I love the questions school pupils ask, they inspire me to become a better scientist 🙂

I don’t know what a ‘typical’ week or day would look like. For example, so far this week Oct 10-14 my activities have included:

Monday: Reviewed academic article for journal ‘Computers in Human Behavior’ – this is part of peer-review process in science. Took part in Skype meeting with co-organisers of 2017 Human-centred computing (HCC) conference in Kazan, Russia. I am organising two special tracks in this conference on a) gendered robots, b) human enhancement. Liaising with Cambridge University Press in relation to promotion of my co-authored book, Turing’s Imitation Game: Conversations with the Unknown. A brief Q/A about the book is here:

Turing’s Imitation Game – A Q&A with co-author Huma Shah

Tuesday: Continued promotion of the book. Organising flight to Moscow in November, this is to present an invited talk on artificial intelligence at Skolkovo Robotics.

Wednesday: Attended meetings on campus, including first term School of Computing. Electronics and Mathematics updates on teaching and research.

Thursday: Writing journal paper for submission to International Journal of Robotics Research – the paper emerges from an academic panel, on, gender, agents and artificial intelligence’ I chaired at a conference in Rome in February.  Organising a meet-up with scientists at Reading University to plan a Neuro Turing test experiment. Accepting meeting with external visitor in later in November.

Friday– today: Taken a Skype meeting with my Line Manager, Professor Kevin Warwick – first human cyborg: http://www.kevinwarwick.com/  and now I am writing this 🙂 Later I will continue with writing the robotics paper, the aim is to submit it for peer-review at the end of October.