On November 28, a new TSU course “My Friend is a Robot” begins on the world's leading educational online platform Coursera. This is the first course developed by Russian scientists,dedicated to the social evolution of robots, when they become more than just helpers. The participants will be able not only to understand why robots frighten us similarly to how humans do, but also invent their own social robot.
- Robots have already become a part of our lives, while gradually their functionality is expanding. They have new, more "human" tasks, and become not only our helpers but colleagues, and even leaders. Thus, for example, there are questions about how these robots should look and how we should respond to them, - said Nadezhda Zilberman, one of the authors of the course, assistant professor at the Department of Humanitarian Problems of Informatics.
TSU became the first university in Russia to study the social aspect of robotics - the structure and specificity of interaction between the robot and the human, predicting the consequences of introducing robots into society, and other aspects. Today, several social robots NAO, which scientists are teaching to interact with people and even dance, live in the Digital Humanities and Social Robotics Laboratory.
The Laboratory created this new online course with the participation of the Institute of Distance Education. It is designed for a wide audience. So it will be useful to engineers creating not only the robots but also different personal devices: social robotics are investigated, and aspects such as which interface is better perceived by users and what functions are important to them. In particular, students will be able to know the opinion of experts and developers who directly create social robotic platforms: Albert Efimov, head of Skolkovo Robotics Center, Pavel Khijniak, Chief Roboticist at Hoaloha Robotics (Seattle, USA), and others.
TSU is one of the six universities that are partners of Coursera in Russia. Now 16 free online courses of TSU are on the international platform.