Meet & Greet with David Hanson

Description

David Hanson is in Oxford this Tuesday, and we're hosting a small, casual gathering with him at The Bear Inn. David is the founder of Hanson Robotics and the creator of Sophia, the world's best-known social humanoid. He has spent twenty years on embodied social AI while the rest of the field was pointed at industrial and logistics robots, and the industry has only just arrived where he's been working all along. After training as an artist and working at Disney Imagineering he set out to build machines people could actually relate to, at a time when the rest of the field was focused on industrial arms and logistics. He holds a PhD in interactive arts and engineering, and with his newly acquired master’s in applied neuroscience from King’s College London is shaping his current thinking on more biologically inspired architectures. This Tuesday David is specifically keen to spend the evening in conversation with students and researchers, what's coming in AI and robotics, what's overhyped, and what's genuinely worth working on. It's a relaxed pub gathering rather than a talk or a panel, so it's a real chance to speak with him properly rather than queue after a lecture. Tuesday 4 August, from 6pm , The Bear Inn, Alfred Street, Oxford. The Bear is one of the smaller pubs in Oxford, so numbers are strictly limited. If you'd like to come, do sign up before spaces are filled.