Jan 28, 2014

Lift is partnering with the CineGlobe Film Festival at CERN and the Tribeca Film Institute for the upcoming “Story Matter” Hackathon, taking place March 15-19 2014 at CERN.

To get the word out about this exciting initiative the Blabdroids will invade the Lift Conference next week!

Created by artist and roboticist Alex Reben for his master’s thesis at MIT, the adorable Blabdroids will be filming interviews of participants and ask them personal questions, voiced by a 7-year-old boy. A video recap of Lift as seen by the robots will be available after the conference.

"Humanizing" Robots?

The blabdroid presence blends perfectly in an ongoing series of events and workshops Lift has been producing, exploring the relationship between robots and humans: After the Robolift Conference in 2011 and bringing the mind-controlled robot of José del R. Millán's laboratory at EPFL to Seoul in 2012 for the Swiss-Korean Innovation Night, last year Kate Darling (MIT Medialab / Harvard) and Hannes Gassert’s workshop “Harming and protecting robots – Can we, should we ?” stirred up a lot of discussions and was widely covered in several conferences and articles throughout 2013. It investigated the same phenomenon as the Blabdroids projects: how humans anthropomorphize robots and computers and thus engage emotionally engage with them.

**** Don’t miss the Blabdroids at Lift and sign-up for the “Story Matter” Hackathon at CERN, applications are open until Feb 17th! ****

And save the date for the CineGlobe Festival at CERNMarch 18 - 23 2014.