How to engineer intelligence

"Do we actually want machines to interact with humans in an emotional way? Will it be possible for them to interact with us?". There are already research programmes that attempt to gauge the emotion in someone's voice or face but I'm more interested in a machine that could recognise the emotional significance of an event for a human." - —David Barber Those are just two of the questions posed by UCL academic David Barber as he prepares for his appearance at Cambridge Science Festival on March 20 (6pm). Barber, who is working on machine learning and applications of probability in information processing, will discuss biological inspirations for computing and how this can help humans to interact with machines in his talk  'How to engineer intelligence'. He will discuss the challenges of getting computers to process information in ways that enable interaction with humans to be more natural. This to an extent is already taking place with smartphones equipped with speech recognition software/ programming such as Siri. According to Barber, the world expects to be able to interact naturally with machines by expecting them to understand what we say and move naturally in our environment. He said: "There are already research programmes that attempt to gauge the emotion in someone's voice or face but I'm more interested in a machine that could recognise the emotional significance of an event for a human.