Talk on “Society 5.0: the future of AI and Robots” at the Italy-Japan Workshop 2019

Italy-Japan Workshop is an initiative, supported by the Embassy of Italy in Japan, and the Association of Italian Researchers in Japan, in which a specific theme related to robotics is discussed and analysed involving the government, universities, research centres, and industries of both countries. The idea is to brainstorm around important issues in modern Robotics using a Participatory Design approach, involving all stakeholders of both countries.

Italy-Japan Workshop has been organised since 2001 by Waseda University, one of the most important scientific partners for Italy, in collaboration with Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna. In this event, distinguished Italian and Japanese speakers share their experiences and their vision, while a selected number of Japanese and Italian companies are yearly invited to show and demonstrate their products.

The theme of this year, on the occasion of the re-launch of the collaboration between Sant’Anna and Waseda, is “Robots and the future”, and the technological innovation of the last decades will be explored, analyzing strategies and winning methods of methodological reform, for to identify the new technical, but also social, challenges that Robotics will face in the coming years.

It is important to underline the multidisciplinary, indeed transdisciplinary nature of this workshop. Unlike previous years, in fact, where a focus has been privileged at the level of robotic applications in specific fields, to increase and improve the ties of academic collaborations in the development of ad-hoc applications in various sectors, starting this year, in harmony with the times of technological innovation that sees robots increasingly present in everyday life, it was decided to explore the relationship between robot and man, starting from the basic mechanisms, often inspired by nature, of Leonardo Da Vinci’s works and of the great scientists and naturalists of his time.

This workshop marks the beginning of a new cycle in which issues related to man-robot symbiosis will be explored and explored, in view of a future society where robots will no longer be controlled by expert technicians and relegated to the industrial sector, but will live and be of concrete help in carrying out the modern man’s daily activities.