ThoughtWorks Arts Residency, in conjunction with Scatter, is pleased to announce that Rashin Fahandej as been awarded our Volumetric Filmmaking Residency to expand her project A Father’s Lullaby.

A Father’s Lullaby is a multi-platform, community engaged interactive work that highlights the role of men in raising children and their absence due to the racial disparities in the criminal justice system with its direct impact on children, women and lower income communities.

ThoughtWorks Arts has published an open call for artists to investigate the monopolization and centralization of artificial intelligence by a small number of corporate giants and state actors.

A key theme in the open call is for an artist to explore how this control of AI could impact society, and the potential impacts of alternative and open approaches.

Over the summer ThoughtWorks Arts collaborated with dancer and roboticist Catie Cuan, exploring new modes of human-robot interaction.

ThoughtWorks developers created a 3D visualization toolkit, enabling Catie to rehearse her own bodily movements alongside those of industrial-scale robots.

I recently led a project team at ThoughtWorks to create and open source a new Facial Expression Recognition (FER) toolkit named EmoPy. The system produces accuracy rates comparable to the highest rates achievable in FER, and is now available for anyone to use for free.

This article explains how the EmoPy system is designed and how it can be used. It will examine the architectures and datasets selected, and illustrate why those choices were made.

Interactions between humans and robots are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. Questions naturally emerge about the how human-robot communications can be understood, now and in the future.

Where does communication flow, and where are there ‘gaps’? Further, what is not said in human-robot interactions? Movement and gesture are vital aspects of HRI, often making up shades of unspoken meaning.

Machine learning systems can be trained to recognize emotional expressions from images of human faces, with a high degree of accuracy in many cases.

However, implementation can be a complex and difficult task. The technology is at a relatively early stage. High quality datasets can be hard to find. And there are various pitfalls to avoid when designing new systems.

Artists working with emerging technologies frequently generate new insights on the future of culture, industry and society.

At ThoughtWorks we regularly engage with artists, collaborating on cutting edge technology projects, and enriching the perspectives we bring to our clients. Our recent explorations have taken us on journeys into cyborgism and transhumanism, bias in machine intelligence, movement in robotics, and more.