UCAmI 2024

Dr. Julie Robillard

Abstract: Social robots have demonstrated tremendous potential in supporting well-being across the lifespan and have exploded in popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic as a way to promote connectedness while limiting contact. In parallel, social robot complexity is on the rise and the integration of artificial intelligence in these systems offers promising new functionalities and application areas, including combining data from movement and audio sensors, with natural language processing to interpret dialogue, and generate increasingly personalized and socially adept responses. As these devices are becoming ubiquitous in our every day lives, it becomes critical to closely examine the balance of benefits and harms social robots bring to users. In this presentation, Dr. Robillard will provide an overview of social robots technology, from research prototypes to devices on the market, and will review their brain health-related applications for children, adults and older adults. She will showcase the latest evidence around the impact of social robot use in home and care settings, and discuss key ethical implications surrounding their use. Dr. Robillard will review some of the main challenges in social robot research and ubiquitous computing research more broadly, and will share insights about the development of devices that are aligned with end-user ethics and emotions.

Bio: Dr. Julie Robillard is a Scientist in Patient Experience at BC Children’s and Women’s Hospital and Health Centre, and Associate Professor of Neurology at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Robillard brings her multidisciplinary background in neuroscience and biomedical ethics to the study of issues at the intersection of patient experience, brain health and technology. Her current work focuses on the development of tools for the evaluation of the quality, ethics and experience of health intervention and health services, with a focus on brain health technology. She is also investigating the integration of artificial intelligence in technology for older adults with dementia and their caregivers as a means to ensure adherence to ethical norms.

Professor Sozo Inoue

Abstract: In this talk, the challenges of human activity recognition and its application to elderly care / hospital domains are discussed. We firstly review the demand in elderly care and hospital domains including the productivity of care workers. Then we introduce several approaches to forecast the future and utilize them for improving productivity. We use various sensor data, video data, and care / medical records and integrate them. We also introduce several techniques to improve machine learning in such a domain, including enhancing the algorithm using large language models. Finally, we introduce the deployment challenges cooperating with a startup company.

Bio: Sozo INOUE is a full professor in National Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan, and the Chief Technical Officer of AUTOCARE LLC. His research interests include human activity recognition with smart phones, and healthcare application of web/pervasive/ubiquitous systems. Currently he is working on applications of activity recognition and health forecasting for nursing care and medicine to hospitals and more than 50 nursing facilities using smartphones and IoT. Inoue has a Ph.D of Engineering from Kyushu University in 2003. After completion of his degree, he was appointed as an assistant professor in the Faculty of Information Science and Electrical Engineering at the Kyushu University, Japan. He then moved to the Research Department at the Kyushu University Library in 2006. Since 2009, he has been appointed as an associate professor in the Faculty of Engineering at Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan, and moved to Graduate School of Life Science and Systems Engineering at Kyushu Institute of Technology in 2018, and appointed as a full professor from 2020 and a head of Care XDX Center in Kyushu Institute of Technology from 2022. Meanwhile, he was a guest professor in Kyushu University, a visiting professor at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, in 2014, a special researcher at Institute of Systems, Information Technologies and Nanotechnologies (ISIT) during 2015-2016, and a guest professor at University of Los Andes in Colombia in 2019. He was a technical advisor of Team AIBOD Co. Ltd during 2017-2019, and a guest researcher at RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (AIP) during 2017-2019. He was a director during 2020-2021 and is a senior member of the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ), a member of the IEEE Computer Society, the ACM, the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE), the Japan Society for Fuzzy Theory and Intelligent Informatics, the Japan Association for Medical Informatics (JAMI), and the Database Society of Japan (DBSJ).