David Hanson Keynote Speaker

As the founder and CEO of Hanson Robotics, Dr. David Hanson and his company aim to create robots as socially adept as any human being. A former Walt Disney Imagineer, this entrepreneur and roboticist has been called “genius” by both PC Magazine and WIRED, and earned awards from NASA, NSF and Cooper Hewitt Design.

Hanson lives in Hong Kong with wife Amanda, son Zeno, and many robotic children. Dr. David Hanson creates humanlike robots with intelligence, feelings, and expressions, yielding many of the most startling robots in recent years including: the robot Sophia, the walking Albert Hubo, and the android portrait of Philip K Dick. These Hanson robots can see you and talk with you using A.I., and express themselves with a full range of natural facial expressions, and can walk on android bodies such as KAIST Hubo.

Dr. David Hanson’s Ph.D. dissertation,”Humanizing Robots” describes his early work to bring robots to life with scientific, artistic and technological research, and considers the philosophical and ethical implications of creating such artificial lifeforms. By seeking to emulate human bio-systems, from cognition to social expression to locomotion, Hanson hopes to yield machines that are creatively brilliant, truly conscious, and that can deeply care about us. Hanson proposes that only by building such humanlike machines, can we realize safe, benevolent, superintelligent AI.

Dr. David Hanson’s work is a story of the quest to realize robots with true spark of life, awareness, consciousness, and unleash a better future for humanity, our technological children, and al