IK2026: Bridging Realities - Brains, Language and Technology

 

Maggi and David are both at the IK2026 Interdisciplinary College by the Mohnesee in Germany this week. IK2026 explores the dynamic intersection of brains, language, and technology, where reality and fiction increasingly overlap and inform one another. This is being approached through three interconnected focus areas:

• Immersive Interfaces
• Language and Intelligent Agents
• Societies and Blurred Realities

Maggi is part of the 3-person leadership team for the event and David is delivering a 4 lecture course on virtual humans, the metaverse and the accidental digital immortal.

Chatbots and Conversational AI: Past, Present and Future

 

This White Paper grew a bit as a wrote it, but it is essentially an update to my Virtual Humans book, covering and bringing together things I've learnt and thought and talked about since then, and also reflecting that we're now in the era of LLMs. 

Click here to download a free copy!

Digital Human Twins and the Military Metaverse: Opportunities and Challenges (updated)

Following on from The Military Metaverse, Andy Fawkes and I have just had a paper published in Springer Nature's AI & Society on Digital Human Twins and the Military Metaverse: Opportunities and Challenges. 

Behind the Springer paywall but a preview is available. 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394534114_Digital_human_twins_and_the_military_metaverse_opportunities_and_challenges

[Update] I've done a short Medium post to explain more about the paper, and that also has a link to a free viewer for the whole paper.

David Interviewed on Dublin City FM

 

David was interviewed on Monday by Jillian Godsil for Dublin City FM. The talk is mainly around virtual humans and digital amortality, but also touches on some metaverse issues.

You can find a link to the radio programme, and a text version of the interview at: https://jilliangodsil.com/talking-to-virtual-barry-inside-the-digital-mind-of-david-burden/

Sensay Hackathon Launch

 

On Monday David was on the panel for the launch of Sensay's AI Chatbot Hackathon, talking about his work on virtual humans, and touching on some of the issues around digital amortality and embedding bots in the metaverse. The Hackathon details - building new bot applications with the Sensay API - are at https://dorahacks.io/hackathon/sensay-connect/detail.

One of David's (many) summer projects is to try and use the API in order to use Sensay to power chatbots within virtual worlds. Any progress will be reported here.