Simply Superb! What kind of robots does an animator / jazz musician / roboticist make? Playful, reactive, curious ones. Guy Hoffman shows demo film of his family of unusual robots — including two musical bots that like to jam with humans. (Filmed at TEDxJaffa.) Professor Guy Hoffman, a lecturer and researcher at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications and co-director of the IDC Media Innovation Lab (miLAB) at the IDC Herzliya, gave a TEDx talk in October that has since become one of the 30 most viewed lectures in the TED Talks program, and, last week, was ranked by YouTube as one of the three most viewed videos in the world.
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IDC Herzliya said on Thursday that, last week, the official TED website chose the lecture as its “Talk of the Week”, and promoted it on the website’s homepage and in other official platforms. By Saturday, YouTube ranked the lecture as one of the three most viewed videos in the world. The video has been seen some 2 million times, and the lecture is among the 30 most viewed TED Talks in history (and is the only one of them that has been on air for less than a month).
Professor Hoffman’s lecture, based on his research, was called, “The Interaction between Artificial Intelligence, Robots, and Art” (“Theater, Animation, and Music”).
“Artificial intelligence of robots always looked at intelligence as a problem of information processing, ” IDC Herzliya said. “The robot processes information from the world, calculates the best possible decision and then executes it, like in a game of chess. Exactly the same way as psychology (and theater and music before that) understood that we use our body to influence our way of thinking, Dr. Hoffman believes that robots that use their bodies to think will be better partners to human beings. Even if it means they will be less accurate, people will prefer them.”
Professor Hoffman holds a Ph.D from MIT in the field of human-robot interaction, and a M.Sc. in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University, where he learned in the Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students at Tel-Aviv University. He also studied animation at Parsons School of Design in NY (Algemeiner News Service)
