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Charismatic robots can now do stand up comedy and respond to the audience

Ross Dawson, April 28, 2011 at 12:03 pm

Heather Knight, also known as Marilyn Monrobot, studies human machine symbiosis and charismatic robots. In addition to her doctoral studies at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute she runs a stack of interesting projects.

Here is a video of Heather speaking at TED, demonstrating her robot which does stand up comedy. The audience provided live feedback to the robot during its performance, which it used to develop its routine.

I have written a number of times before about emotional robots, for example in the context of aged care and robot pets. The concept of charismatic and culturally aware robots goes somewhat further. Hard to achieve, but absolutely possible.

(Hattip to @jhagel for the link to this excellent presentation by Heather at dorkbot Pittsburgh, which led me to her TED video.)

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Ross Dawson is globally recognized as a leading futurist, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, strategy advisor, and bestselling author. He is Founding Chairman of AHT Group, which consists of 3 companies: consulting, publishing, and ventures firm Advanced Human Technologies, future and strategy firm Future Exploration Network, and events company The Insight Exchange.

Ross is author most recently of Implementing Enterprise 2.0, the prescient Living Networks, which anticipated the social network revolution, and the Amazon.com bestseller Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships (click on the links for free chapter downloads). He is based in Sydney and San Francisco with his wife jewellery designer Victoria Buckley and two beautiful young daughters.