Will a robot be your next best friend?

Theater professor Dr. Julienne Greer is trying to find the answer. She’s currently studying how human emotions can be applied to the rapidly growing field of robotics engineering. This groundbreaking work encompasses the application of theater techniques in the artificial intelligence. Her interdisciplinary research shows the arts can play a crucial role in STEM fields, translating to STEAM — science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics.

Greer’s refined experience in theater studies gives her a different perspective on innovations in more “technical” fields. She’s been working with engineers worldwide to share the outlook of acting methodologies and the possibilities of their application to robots. According to her UTA profile, Dr. Greer presented her paper, Building emotional authenticity between humans and robots at the International Conference for Social Robotics 2014 in Sydney, Australia. She’s a recipient of the 2015 College of Liberal Arts faculty award granting the purchase of “Pepper” the emotional robot (Softbank/Aldebaran) for use in her interdisciplinary course at UTA – Humans and Robots: The Future is Here Fall 2015.

“I’ve spent a lifetime trying to understand how human beings connect how they get through this thing called life,” she said in an interview. “I now get a chance to take that and apply it to non-humans that probably may someday be pretty gosh darn close to them.”

For this colloquium, she’ll be introducing students, faculty and staff to Nao the robot this Friday Dec. 2 at noon at the CAB library in College Hall.