Time: 2:00 - 3:00pm Venue: Maths 103
Machine Consciousness and Creativity Machine consciousness is a research field concerning computational models of consciousness. The seminar will present the current state of research of machine consciousness and it will discuss its relationships with creativity, with particular emphasis to musical creativity. The field of machine consciousness is tightly related with topics as information integration, embodiment, adaptation, emotions, which are all of interest in order to model musical creativity. On the one hand, facing the problem of consciousness could be a decisive move towards the design of effectively creative systems, on the other hand the study of computational models of creativity could be helpful in order to better understand consciousness. The first part of the seminar will review the main computational models of machine consciousness, while the second part will discuss consciousness with respect to musical creativity. The “jazz singing robot” project aimed at the Robotics Lab of the University of Palermo and CNR will be also presented.
Biography: Antonio Chella was born in Florence on March 4, 1961. He is a full professor in Robotics at the University of Palermo and an associate researcher at CNR (the Italian National Research Council). He published several papers on machine consciousness, cognitive systems, robotics and neural networks. He is a referee of international scientific journals and he has been a member of the program committee of several international conferences. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the “International Journal of Machine Consciousness” and an associate editor of “Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures” (BICA) journal. He is a co-founder and current member of the board of the BICA Society. He edited, together with Riccardo Manzotti, the book “Artificial Consciousness”, by Imprint Academic, UK, which is a main reference in the field. He is the head of the Robotics Laboratory of the University of Palermo and CNR. Detailed information on the scientific activity, including links to publications, can be found at Antonio Chella’s website: http://www.antoniochella.it/Antonio/Home.html