Emotional AI in Cities: Cross Cultural Lessons from UK and Japan on Designing for An Ethical Life

This project is one of six funded through UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Fund for International Collaboration (FIC) in a joint UK-Japan initiative. The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), both part of UKRI, contributed £2.4m via FIC, while the Japanese Science and Technology Agency (JST) contributed ¥180m.

Dr Diana Miranda (Co-Investigator, Northumbria University) will be collaborating with different institutions in the UK (Bangor University and University of Edinburgh) and Japan (Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Meiji University and Chuo University). The UK team is led by Prof. Andrew McStay, with Prof. Vian Bakir, Dr. Lachlan Urquhart and Dr Diana Miranda as Co-Investigators. The Japan team is led by Prof. Peter Mantello, with Dr. Hiromi Tanaka, Prof. Nader Ghotbi, and Prof. Hiroshi Miyashita as Co-Investigators.

This project aims to explore how to live well with technologies that sense, profile, learn and interact with people’s feelings, emotions and moods. Funded by the UKRI-JST Joint Call on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Society, this project explores the impacts of emotion sensing technologies in cross-cultural (UK/Japan) commercial, security, and civic contexts. What are the societal, cultural, ethical implications of these technologies? How do citizens feel about the emergence of Emotional AI (EAI) in our cities? The project expects to influence EAI policy discourse and set up an online think tank to provide ethical advice to governments, industry, and other stakeholders.

Find out more on the project's website