Talk / Robotics
Creative robots inspiring creativity
Safinah Ali
Can children learn creativity by co-creating art with social robots?
Children lose their creativity when they enter school, often due to structured curricula. Creativity is a social behavior learned from and scaffolded by mentors and peers. When we design robotic learning companions, we often take into account children's cognitive learning gains. My work focuses on children's creativity gains. I use social robots and generative machine learning tools to create robots that generate art with children, while inspiring children to be more creative. I have worked with 120 children interacting with social robots to create poetry, prose, music and drawings. The social robot's creative expression as well as the social scaffolding they offer inspire children to be more creative. I ran comparative studies to demonstrate how artificial creativity enhances children's expressed creativity. I suggest design guidelines for artificial and social agents that can help boost children's creativity.
About the speaker
Safinah Ali
Safinah is a PhD student in the Personal Robots group. Her research focuses on making AI accessible to diverse communities and using Social Robots to foster positive learning behaviors in children. She studies the role of child-robot interaction in simulating curiosity, creativity and growth mindset in young children. She has developed Creative AI learning tools. She has also worked on robots for accessibility, particularly to assist children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. She likes to explore creative computational techniques and how they can be applied to social problems, especially in the developing world. She did her Bachelors in Design from IIT Guwahati and her Masters in HCI from Carnegie Mellon University.