– You look happy, that makes me happy!
Students at the Master in Media and Interaction Design, UiB, presented seven prototypes for human-robot interaction in health, teaching, navigation and recycling.
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– "You look happy, that makes me happy!" says the ICARE robot to master student, Ida Charlotte Solvig. The robot aims to be a friend and help improve mental health. It analyzes facial expressions and the voice of the user and initiates an encouraging conversation.
– It has a little trouble seeing the difference between surprised and happy, says master student Oda Steinland Haug. To create the robot, we trained a machine learning model and used about 50 images per emotion to get the accuracy at an acceptable level. It's really a very, very small number. You should use hundreds of thousands of images, says Steinland Skaug.
Students take "MIX301: Media Technology: Theory and Development" where the goal is to develop critical and creative knowledge of advanced media technology concepts and systems.
Student Kristin Mjelde shows the audience how the robot TRHINE can sort your garbage
Media technology and innovation
Media and interaction design is about designing and developing engaging solutions for new media.
The students develop prototypes and evaluate user experience of both media producers and users. This is a highly-industry relevant education.
– Innovation pedagogy is our central method. We expose students to great uncertainty in a conscious and planned way. Students are trained in being able to learn and create under pressure. This prepares the students for work life, says Professor Lars Nyre, Head of MIX301.
– When the students started they didn’t know much about robots. That brings uncertainty! Yet, this is an advantage as they are «blank», Fredrik Jensen, teacher on the MIX301 course. The students have bachelor degrees in different technology disciplines and fields.
– We worked together to increase our knowledge. We then tried to apply robot competences to companies. Asking questions such as: can you replace certain tasks in work flows with robots? Through these exercises they got a fundamental understanding and are able to develop prototypes, Jensen says.
Professor and leader of the program Media- and Interaction Design, Kristine Jørgensen, testing out one of the robots
