Bio
Steve Benford is Dunford Professor of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham’s Mixed Reality Laboratory, Director of the EPSRC-funded Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training and a UKRI Turing AI Fellow. He was previously an EPSRC Dream Fellow, a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge and a Visiting Professor at the BBC.
Steve’s research explores the design of interactive experiences that provoke human meaning making. His approach is to collaborate with artists to create, tour and study artworks from which he generalise new concepts, methods and tools. Technically, his research encompasses and interweaves AI, robots, and mixed reality.
His five year UK Turing AI Fellowship on 'Somabotics: Creatively Embodying Artificial Intelligence' will explore how people make meaning through art and embodied experience, partnering with award winning artists to create a series of robotic artworks, from robots that embrace and groom humans, to ones that dance and play with them. By investigating these systems using an artistic lens, Steve aims to create AI that embraces ambiguity, evokes interpretation and embraces improvision. The touring artworks supported through the programme will inspire the creative industries with new forms of cultural experience, while engaging the public to reflect on the future role of AI in society, especially on how it might become more inclusive.