In this episode of Talking Robots we speak with Henry Markram who is the director of the Blue Brain Project, director of the Center for Neuroscience and Technology and co-director of EPFL's Brain Mind Institute in Switzerland. While most roboticists have been working on abstracting the brain, the Blue Brain project has been painting the whole picture of a rat neocortical column (NCC) from the bottom up; starting with the cells, neurons, and finally pulling the connections which generate the jungle of the mind. It seems that modeling our grey matter as a whole might result in emergent features such as consciousness or self representation and provide necessary tools for the study of brain disorders such as Alzheimer's or Autism. Finally, robots embedded with such in-silico replication of the brain might not only be more efficient in communicating, showing emotions and planning, they will also serve as essential testbeds to better understand what's happening in our head.

In this episode of Talking Robots we speak with Yoky Matsuoka who is the director of the Neurobotics Laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA. Boosted by her nomination as MacArthur Fellow she has been recognized as a leader in the emerging field of neurobotics. With her team, she's been focused on understanding how the central nervous system coordinates musculoskeletal action and how robotic technology can enhance the mobility of people with manipulation disabilities.

In this episode of Talking Robots we talk to Cynthia Breazeal who is an Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA, where she founded and directs the Personal Robots Group at the Media Lab. With her creaturoids, animoids, humanoids and robotized objects, Breazeal has been working to make robots and humans team up in a human-centric way, work together as peers, and learn from one another. Breazeal's work includes personal robots such as the very expressive Kismet, the Huggableâ„¢ robot teddy, Leonardo the social creature and the MDS (Mobile/ Dextourous/Social ) humanoid robot.

In this episode we interview Kerstin Dautenhahn who is Research Professor in the School of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences at University of Hertfordshire in the UK, where she is a coordinator of the Adaptive Systems Research Group. Autism is a developmental disorder affecting around 91 people in every 10,000, mainly causing difficulties in social interactions, communication and imagination. Using therapy robots in the AuRoRA project, Dautenhahn has been pushing autistic children to learn essential social skills such as turn taking, joint attention and imitation. Armed with a lot of patience and zeal, her team has been adapting their robots and therapy sessions to each individual child, whether it's about playing with wheeled robots or Dautenhahn's toddler-sized Kaspar humanoid. She also presents her new project on Interactive RObotic social MEdiators as Companions (IROMEC) which looks at how autistic children can learn to cooperate and interact with each other through the introduction of a robotic mediator.

In this episode we interview Frederic Kaplan. After ten years of research at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris, he is now researcher at the CRAFT at the EPFL in Lausanne Switzerland where he supervises a new team focusing on interactive furniture and robotic objects. From curious AIBO robots to interactive robot computers and furniture, he has been exploring technologies permitting to endow objects with a personal history so that they become different as we interact with them and to learn from one another, thus creating an ecosystem in perpetual evolution.

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