492: Social tech
As we interact more - and more often - with our digital technologies, those interactions tell us a lot about who we are. Can we analyze behaviour on social media for mental health insights? Researchers Munmun De Choudhury and Koustuv Saha discuss their latest study of the psychosocial effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, as gleaned from Twitter. Plus, robots already work on factory floors, in dangerous situations, and even cleaning our floors, but to truly interact with us humans, they're going to need to understand our world. Mark H. Lee, author of How to Grow a Robot, talks about building robots that "get" us, using... childhood development psychology! And: Better robots and AI require designing technology that doesn't actively harm humans. Can we get robots to learn things by letting them observe humans? Roboticist Odest Chadwicke Jenkins talks about training machines by (human) example, and how to avoid built-in racial bias in robotics and build more ethical AI.