IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems

October 4, 2013

Special session: The Uncanny Valley Revisited: A Tribute to Masahiro Mori

Nov. 6.  http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/art/uncanny-summit/

Masahiro Mori’s influential 1970 article, Bukimi no Tani Gensho, describes a phenomenon where the appeal of animated beings undergoes a steep non-linearity as they become increasingly similar to humans. Subsequently labeled the “Uncanny Valley” as a reference to Sigmund Freud’s 1916 essay on the Uncanny, the Uncanny Valley continues to have widespread influence in the fields of robotics, design, gaming, computer animation, art, and plastic surgery. For this special event, Emeritus Professor Mori will address an audience of international researchers in Robotics to comment on the thinking behind his article and how it has evolved over the past 40 years, followed by responses from a panel of roboticists and media theorists.

Plenary Talks

Nov. 4: Dynamic Robots: Mobility, Speed and Dexterity

Dr. Marc Raibert
Boston Dynamics, USA

Nov. 5: Robotics-Assisted Automatic Fabrication of Cellsheets
for Regenerative Medicine

Prof. Masayuki Yamato
Tokyo Women’s Medical University, Japa

Nov. 6: Surgical Robotics:From application specific robots to automated design and
3D-printing of patient-specific, disposable robots

Prof. Tim C. Lüth
Technische Universität München, Germany