Aims

• To give students an understanding of current theoretical, methodological and practical research issues around human interaction with robots and other computational intelligence.
• To teach students relevant knowledge and skills related to the design, implementation, evaluation and management of systems involving humans and intelligent machines.
  
• To raise students' awareness of ethical and related challenges and constraints around the coexistence and collaboration of humans and intelligent machines.
  
• To give students experience of researching advanced topics in computer science, summarising the current state of the art, undertaking a relevant study and presenting the results.

Learning outcomes

After successfully completing this unit students should be able to:

• demonstrate an understanding of current practice and developments in systems involving humans and intelligent machines
• show awareness of intelligent systems design issues
• critically evaluate examples of the design and deployment of intelligent systems
• recognise and challenge advances in the state of the art of intelligent systems
• design, conduct and critique original research to address questions and challenges in the design and use of systems involving humans and machine intelligence

Skills

• Problem solving
• Working with others
• Ability to reason analytically and scientifically about taught material
• Ability to research, summarise and cogently debate state of the art literature

Content

Course content will draw on a range of foundational and current issues in relevant areas. Examples of the topics include:

• what is machine intelligence?
• a systems approach to human-machine interaction
• what aspects of humans and non-human agents should be considered in designing intelligent systems?
  
• robots and diverse human needs, e.g. the young, the old, disabled people
  
• active learning
• ethics and safety of machine intelligence
  
• Centaur AI and cyborgs