The use of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in Live Creative Installations

This PhD project, in collaboration with the Nottingham Arts company Makers of Imaginary Worlds (MoIW), will investigate, develop, and implement (in a live environment with a real audience) adaptive robotic behaviours that can respond to changing audience states, such as excitement, boredom and attention using Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods, to enhance and enrich the audience experience.

Research into personalised robotic systems is highly significant to the world of today, where Internet of Things (IoT) devices are commonplace in our homes, and AI robotics are becoming increasingly present in not only industrial applications but also everyday consumer products. In order to enable the production of higher quality, more socially enriching, and trustworthy systems that can be accessed and accepted by all members of society, it is imperative that we achieve a greater understanding of the robotic control and decision mechanisms and the ethical and moral constructs that help define them.

One of the governing aims of this project is to develop computer sensing solutions to evaluate human behaviours and emotions and investigate how an AI robotic system might perceive, interact, and respond to audiences and how that could benefit the audience experience or degrade it. A key area of research that directly relates to human behavioural analysis is contextual awareness in robotic systems. Enabling a system to detect human behaviour or emotion and understand why the human is displaying those behaviours or emotions is a crucial aspect of improving the autonomy of social robotics and human-robot relationships.

We will collaborate with over 40 partners drawn from across FMCG and Food; Creative Industries; Health and Wellbeing; Smart Mobility; Finance; Enabling technologies; and Policy, Law and Society. These will benefit from engagement with our CDT through the following established mechanisms:

- Training multi-disciplinary leaders. Our partners will benefit from being able to recruit highly skilled individuals who are able to work across technologies, methods and sectors and in multi-disciplinary teams. We will deliver at least 65 skilled PhD graduates into the Digital Economy.

- Internships. Each Horizon student undertakes at least one industry internship or exchange at an external partner. These internships have a benefit to the student in developing their appreciation of the relevance of their PhD to the external societal and industrial context, and have a benefit to the external partner through engagement with our students and their multidisciplinary skill sets combined with an ability to help innovate new ideas and approaches with minimal long-term risk. Internships are a compulsory part of our programme, taking place in the summer of the first year. We will deliver at least 65 internships with partners.

- Industry-led challenge projects. Each student participates in an industry-led group project in their second year. Our partners benefit from being able to commission focused research projects to help them answer a challenge that they could not normally fund from their core resources. We will deliver at least 15 such projects (3 a year) throughout the lifetime of the CDT.

- Industry-relevant PhD projects. Each student delivers a PhD thesis project in collaboration with at least one external partner who benefits from being able to engage in longer-term and deeper research that they would not normally be able to undertake, especially for those who do not have their own dedicated R&D labs. We will deliver at least 65 such PhDs over the lifetime of this CDT renewal.

- Public engagement. All students receive training in public engagement and learn to communicate their findings through press releases, media coverage.

This proposal introduces two new impact channels in order to further the impact of our students' work and help widen our network of partners.

- The Horizon Impact Fund. Final year students can apply for support to undertake short impact projects. This benefits industry partners, public and third sector partners, academic partners and the wider public benefit from targeted activities that deepen the impact of individual students' PhD work. This will support activities such as developing plans for spin-outs and commercialization; establishing an IP position; preparing and documenting open-source software or datasets; and developing tourable public experiences.

- ORBIT as an impact partner for RRI. Students will embed findings and methods for Responsible Research Innovation into the national training programme that is delivered by ORBIT, the Observatory for Responsible Research and Innovation in ICT (www.orbit-rri.org). Through our direct partnership with ORBIT all Horizon CDT students will be encouraged to write up their experience of RRI as contributions to ORBIT so as to ensure that their PhD research will not only gain visibility but also inform future RRI training and education. PhD projects that are predominantly in the area of RRI are expected to contribute to new training modules, online tools or other ORBIT services.