Pat Healey, professor of human interaction and head of the Cognitive Science Group at QMUL, and Kleomenis Katevas, a doctoral candidate, had the idea to test an audience’s reaction to the robot by having him perform a set at the Barbican Center in London. Alongside him were human comedians, Tiernan Douieb and Andrew O’Neill, to act as controls to the experiment. Douieb even wrote the jokes that Robo Thespian would use on the crowd. . .
[W]hile he performed, Katevas and Healey set up cameras around the room to track the facial features and responses of people in the audience. They plan to use the collected data to tweek Robo Thespian’s software and make him a closer facsimile to human comedians.
via Geekosystem
August 19, 2013
