Seventh International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction
10-12 November, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom - ONLINE

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Special Guest Session: In Dialogue with Farm Animals

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• Christian Nawroth - Farm Animal Cognition: Human-Directed Behaviour in Goats
  Dr. Christian Nawroth is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN) in Dummerstorf, Germany. His research focuses on how farm animals perceive and interact with their physical and social environment and how this knowledge can ultimately be used to improve management conditions and human-animal interactions.
   

• Ellen van Weeghel - Animal Capacities in Design (ACiD), an approach to incorporate animal capacities in the design process and to promote animal agency in the final design
  Ellen van Weeghel has a master's degree in Biology and works as a researcher system innovation in livestock production at Wageningen Livestock Research. And works at the same time on her Ph.D.‘ design for animal welfare’ at Wageningen University. Her mission is to contribute to a good life of production animals and strives for sustainable development of animal production as a whole. Ellen does this by developing design tools and methods that incorporate the animal as a stakeholder and contributor in the design process of more sustainable livestock systems. Currently, she focuses on the design of opportunities for production animals to experience positive emotions.
   

• Mark Hansen - Computer vision and deep learning for on-farm welfare assessments of dairy cows and pigs

  Dr. Mark Hansen is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Machine Vision at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, a joint venture between UWE Bristol and Bristol University. He spent 10 years in the industry as a software engineer before returning to academia in 2008 and gaining his Ph.D. entitled "3D Face Recognition using Photometric Stereo". Currently, his main research interests lie in designing image acquisition systems, image processing, machine learning, and bringing state-of-the-art developments into the field via robust commercial prototypes. His work spans many fields from security to medicine, but in recent years his focus has shifted to agri-tech where recent projects have included "Herdvision", a 3D vision system for welfare monitoring of dairy cows; "Grassvision", which detects broadleaf weeds in pasture and most recently, a deep learning face recognition system for pigs that have been extended to stress detection via facial expressions.

 

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Closing Keynote

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• Irene Pepperberg - Interspecies Communication, Parrot Cognition, and ACI: A Brief History, the Present, and a Possible Future
  Irene M. Pepperberg, SB (MIT), MA (Harvard), Ph.D. (Harvard), is the president of The Alex Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to avian intelligence and conservation. She has most recently been a Research Associate and Lecturer at Harvard, where she studied the cognitive and communicative abilities of Grey parrots, including developmental issues. She has published over 100 scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals and as book chapters; is the author of The Alex Studies and Alex & Me; the latter won the 2009 Christopher Award. She has been a visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern University, tenured Associate Professor at the University of Arizona, visiting Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab, and adjunct Associate Professor at Brandeis University; she was a senior lecturer at MIT in 2018 in animal cognition. She has received John Simon Guggenheim, Harry Frank Guggenheim, Selby, and Radcliffe Fellowships is a Fellow of AAAS, APA, APS, Animal Behavior Society, Psychonomic Society, American Ornithologists’ Union, and Midwest and Eastern Psychological Associations. She won the 2005 Frank A. Beach Comparative Psychology Award, Division 6, APA; the 2013 Christopher Clavius, S.J. Award, Sigma Xi, from Saint Josephs University; the 2019 Marquand Award for Excellence in Advising and Support at Harvard; and the Comparative Cognition Society Research Award for 2020. She serves on the editorial board of several journals, was an associate editor of the Journal of Comparative Psychology, a board member of the Eastern Psychological Association, and served as a member-at-large for both Divisions 3 and 6 of APA.