Amy, Hortense and I have written about our project Beyond the Black Box for Human Robot Interaction (HRI) 2024 in Boulder, Co.

Beyond the Black Box: Human Robot Interaction through Human Robot Performances

Amy Eguchi, Hortense Gerardo, and Robert Twomey. 2024. Beyond the Black Box: Human Robot Interaction through Human Robot Performances. In Companion of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human- Robot Interaction (HRI ’24 Companion), March 11–14, 2024, Boulder, CO, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3610978.3640577

Hortense Gerardo, Amy Eguchi, and I will lead a Robot Cabaret experience at the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) International Workshop on January 29th.

Together with Ash Eliza Smith, I’m playtesting a new interspecies theater piece at Worlds in Play! Join us this January 3-7 at ASU Media and Immersive eXperience (MIX) Center in Mesa, Arizona and step into the artist’s studio as they experiment with adventurous participatory projects at various stages of development, including immersive theatre, XR, Alternate Reality Games, Table Top Role Playing Games, social practice, food experiences, collaborations with AI, parties, and larps.

I’m pleased to be presenting at the Ag4Space symposium we are hosting this Thursday/Friday in the East Campus Union at UNL. This is part of our Grand Challenge project SPACE2 (Space, Policy, Agriculture, Climate, and Extreme Environment). 

I’ll be speaking on the role of speculative design and experimental arts practices in developing space science: “Ag4Space: Speculative Design, Demos + Installations – A Primer”.

I’m delighted to have my project “A Machine for Living In” featured by Thuto Durkac-Somo in his article “System Settings” for the Canadian Center for Architecture. It weaves together design, domesticity, and our evolving relationships to smart homes and networked architecture. Check it out!

I presented a paper “The Future of Real-Time AI: Liveness, Co-Creation, and Participatory Play”—written with Ash Eliza Smith—for SLSA 2023 at ASU. This was part of a tremendous panel on “Contacting, Playing, and Designing with Aliens”, with a lively discussion.

I had a blast participating in the Atlas of Imagination workshop at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination October 20 and 21. It was thrilling to spend two days with the experts Cassandra Vieten and Erik Viirre gathered—some familiar faces and many new ones—to flesh out a rich, multi-disciplinary perspective on imagination. Developing both metrics for assessing imagination, and maps (it’s an atlas) for situating efforts in the field of imagination. I am honored to have been part of the conversation, and look forward to continuing development at the next gathering.

I was honored to speak on an AI panel with these luminaries (Yusu Wang, David Danks, Pelin Thorogood, and Greg Horowitt) for San Diego Innovation Day, September 14 2023. This was an excellent event. I also got to experience my second Craig Venter talk of the past month.