KCIST Colloquium: Robots, Religion, and Pandora’s box

  • Venue:Am Fasanengarten 5, Bldg. 50.34, Room -118, 76131 Karlsruhe
  • Date:18 March 2024, 10:30
  • Author:Gabriele Trovato is Associate Professor in Shibaura Institute of Technology and Visiting Researcher in Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan.
    As founder and head of LAB 22, Gabriele Trovato is also Principal Investigator in the EU-Japan Horizon 2020 project e-ViTA.
    He received his M.S. degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Pisa, Italy, and Ph.D. degree in Biorobotics in Waseda University. Within the relations between the two countries, Gabriele Trovato has been in the organising committee of Italy-Japan Workshops since 2011, and has been appointed "Ambassador of Livorno in the world" by the Municipality of Livorno, Italy.
    He has been Visiting Researcher in Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), University of Sao Paulo (Brazil), PUCP (Peru) and Imperial College London (UK) among others.
    Gabriele Trovato has worked in the video game industry, being involved in the development of the world-wide notorious game series "Sid Meier's Civilization" and having created popular innovative mods for the game.
    His main research interests are interdisciplinary and include Human-Robot Interaction, with focus on culture and religion related aspects, artificial emotions in humanoids, robot aesthetics, and procedural content generation.
    Gabriele Trovato's latest creations, such as SanTO robots, are a combination of engineering, AI, art and humanities, and raised interest among the worldwide press, including the Wall Street Journal and the BBC.
  • Abstract:

    Robotics and religion may often be perceived as distinct, or even oppositional, areas of human studies. However, such a strict view fails to correspond to the actual past and present realities of robotics. In this presentation, the concept of theomorphism in robotics will be introduced, along with descriptions and results from a few robots of this type - SanTO, DarumaTO, and CelesTE. The implications of this research figuratively open Pandora's box, as ethical issues and controversies arise.