HIT Featured Talks: David Kirsh
Department of Developmental Psychology - Padua
05.03.2015
Understanding Symbiotic Interaction
Time: 5 March 2015, 11.00 am
Venue: Aula Metelli (Dept. of General Psychology, via Venezia, 8)
Speaker: David Kirsh
Affiliation: Dept of Cognitive Science, UCSD, La Jolla, CA
Abstract:
A symbiot is a software agent, hardware element or virtual agent that a) acts or lurks in a given environment inhabited by one or more humans, b) delivers value to those humans, and c) benefits from providing that ‘help’. In nature famous examples of mutualistic symbiosis are bees pollinating flowering trees and plants: the bees get protein and fats from pollen and carbohydrates from nectar while the trees and plants are fertilized which is necessary for producing fruits and reproducing. Humans who collect bees and release them in underserviced areas could be part of this mutually beneficial chain if they are rewarded, as would any device that improves the effectiveness of pollination since bees miss so many flowers. With the emergence of apps distributed in millions of cell phones, and the growing use of crowd sensing, crowd sourcing, pocket drones and human augmentation, the social and cognitive dynamics of our world are starting to change. There are new possibilities for coordination, collaboration and managing complexity.
In this talk I will explore the basic principles of symbiotics using examples from evolution, contextual robotics, and devices that support disintermediation and distributed and augmented cognition.
Bio Blurb:
David Kirsh is Professor and past chair of the Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD. He was educated at Oxford University (D.Phil), did post doctoral research at MIT in the Artificial Intelligence Lab, and has held research or visiting professor positions at MIT and Stanford University. He has written extensively on situated cognition and especially on how the environment can be shaped to simplify and extend cognition, including how we intelligently use space, and how we use external representations as an interactive tool for thought. He runs the Interactive Cognition Lab at UCSD where the focus is on the way humans are closely coupled to the outside world, and how human environments have been adapted to enable us to cope with the complexity of everyday life. Some recent projects focus on ways humans use their bodies as things to think with, specifically in dance making and choreographic cognition. He is co-Director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, and he is on the board of directors for the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture.
