Introducing Empathic Labs
Where machines empathize with humans
Hi, I’m Jacky Casas, PhD student in computer science in Fribourg/Switzerland. And I’m here today to introduce you Empathic Labs.
Empathic Labs is a network of researchers, companies and enthusiasts about interactions between humans and machines, and specifically the interactions that are empathic. It’s a network, or better, a community in the making. And I’m here today to explain what it is all about.
Let’s start from the beginning…
Machines and empathy
We can’t hide it anymore, machine are everywhere now, from smartphones to smart TVs, from electric scooters to semi-autonomous cars, from ATMs to medical appliances. In addition to this, AI, i.e. Artificial Intelligence, is at the heart of these machines most of the time.
We, humans, are used to interact with other humans. The way we do it is with emotions and empathy, it allows us to understand the other person and to communicate in an effective way. But we’re not used to communicate with machines when it goes further than giving simple orders.
Over time, these “machines” have adopted ways of communication similar to ours, such as speech or text, for example. These ways of communication are in principle specific to humans. What has been discovered is that people find it difficult to use these machines effectively and that they find them silly.
The explanation for all this is that these machines have difficulty understanding people’s emotions and above all reacting accordingly, they lack empathy. We can liken this to real understanding. And real understanding can’t happen without understanding emotions.
Thus, our vision
We realize that more and more machines/robots will be part of our lives in the future. We know that it is not easy to communicate with a machine, but we also know that machines are not very good at communicating humanly. We therefore believe that in order to facilitate communication while improving the acceptance of machines in our lives, a great focus must be placed on empathy.
We believe that this topic will be prominent in research in the years to come, and that companies that implement empathetic solutions will be one step ahead of the competition.
Introducing Empathic Labs
The idea of the lab came from these previous observations. So we had to set the framework, and here we are with a concept:
We are creating Empathic Labs, a community of researchers, entrepreneurs and enthusiasts who share our belief that the future lies in empathy.
We want to share our work, we want to spread the word, but we will not do it alone. We will also let people that share our vision be part of this adventure! This will create a network, a community, of people who are going to be part of that change.
Our mission is to tackle society problems by integrating empathic machines into daily use through a multidisciplinary approach with the help of our partners.
For this, we want to advance research in emotion recognition, natural language understanding/generation and artificial intelligence. We want to develop tools and algorithms that are able to detect and respond to human emotions. We want to create empathic systems. We want to connect experts, companies, entities and enthusiasts. And we want to promote empathic human-computer interactions.
Our tools for this are conversational agents (chatbots), virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), and much more. And we intend to share it with you in a multimodal way, so to speak. On the program: articles, videos, workshops, meetups and more. Stay tuned!
What’s to come?
Ok, so we’re just at the beginning. This first article presents the lab, other articles will soon come to present some of our projects. Subscribe :)
You can visit our website to know a bit more about us, it’s https://empathiclabs.ch. On the website, you can subscribe to our newsletter. If you want to connect of social networks because it’s more convenient for you, we’re also present on Twitter and Facebook.
If you can relate to this article in one way or another, it’s a sign that we need to talk. Our mailbox is open, guys@empathiclabs.ch, we look forward to talking to you soon.
Ah and by the way, we’re a bunch of PhD student from the HumanTech Institute in Fribourg: Jacky Casas, Karl Daher and Fouad Hannoun. Send us a poke. We’ll present some of our first partners on this adventure soon.
Cheers!
Jacky
