For this talk we are joined by South West Creative Technology Network Automation Fellow, Tariq Rashid. As part of the Fellowship he is exploring artificial emotional intelligence, come and find out what he's discovered so far.

The next phase of AI development needs to make AI more emotionally intelligent. This is a vast field with rich areas of research yet to be done. One useful question in this field is "can we teach a machine to paint images with emotional content - a happy composition, or a melancholic image with a tinge of hope?". A more interesting question is "what does a machine learn in order to do that, what does it tell us about how our own emotional calculus". Generative adversarial networks, or GANs, are one of the hottest areas of AI research and generative art, and Tariq Rachid has been exploring whether they can be applied to this challenge. This beginner-friendly talk will introduce neural networks, GANs, and explore some of the challenges in training them, and share an update on his research.

About Tariq: My childhood enchantment of the artistic possibilities of technology and mathematics continues today in algorithmic art and data science. I feel the next era of automation must be more human – artificial emotional intelligence. I hope exploring machine learning for generating emotional art teaches us about our own emotional calculus.

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