Emotional AI in Cities: Cross Cultural Lessons from UK and Japan on Designing for an Regulation and Design (RAD) Lab
Outputs from this project
Andy McStay, and Lachlan Urquhart. 2019. ‘This time with feeling?’ Assessing EU data governance implications of out of home appraisal based emotional AI. First Monday. 24, 10 (Oct. 2019). DOI: https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i10.9457
Lachlan Urquhart and Andrew McStay, 2024, Regulating Emotional Artificial Intelligence in cars. in W Barfield, Y-H Weng & U Pagallo (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of the Law, Policy, and Regulation for Human-Robot Interaction. Cambridge Law Handbooks, Cambridge University Press
McStay, Andrew, and Lachlan Urquhart. 2022. “In Cars (Are We Really Safest of All?): Interior Sensing and Emotional Opacity.” International Review of Law, Computers & Technology 36 (3): 470–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600869.2021.2009181
Urquhart, Lachlan, and Diana Miranda. 2021. “Policing Faces: The Present and Future of Intelligent Facial Surveillance.” Information & Communications Technology Law 31 (2): 194–219. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600834.2021.1994220
Lachlan Urquhart, Diana Miranda and Lena Podoletz. 2022. Policing the smart home: The Internet of Things as ‘Invisible Witnesses’. Information Polity, 27(2), 233-246. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3233/IP-211541
Max L Wilson, Serena Midha, Horia A. Maior, Anna L Cox, Lewis L Chuang, and Lachlan D Urquhart. SIG: Moving from Brain-Computer Interfaces to Personal Cognitive Informatics. In Extended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 163, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3516402
Lachlan Urquhart, Alex Laffer and Diana Miranda, 2022. Working with affective computing: Exploring UK public perceptions of AI enabled workplace surveillance. in J Koskinen, KK Kimppa, O Heimo, J Naskali, S Ponkala & MM Rantanen (eds), Proceedings of the ETHICOMP 2022: Effectiveness of ICT ethics – How do we solve ethical problems in the field of ICT?. University of Turku, pp. 165-177. URL: https://sites.utu.fi/ethicomp2022/proceeding/
The Emotional AI in Cities project seeks to answer how UK and Japanese societies can best live with technologies that sense, profile, learn and interact with people’s feelings, emotions and moods.
Dr Lachlan Urquhart, Lecturer in Technology Law at Edinburgh Law School, joins a team of researchers on the project, ‘Emotional AI in Cities: Cross Cultural Lessons from UK and Japan on Designing for an Ethical Life,’ which is joint funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Japan Science & Technology Agency, as part of the UKRI-JST Joint Call on Artificial Intelligence and Society.
The three-year project began in January 2020 and will explore biometric and online technologies that sense, learn and interact with emotions, moods, attention and intentions, and examine the societal implications of these technologies in cities both in the UK and Japan. The research team aims to assess what it means to live ethically and well with Emotional AI in smart cities in cross-cultural commercial, security and media contexts.
As well as interviewing key stakeholders developing or deploying emotional AI in smart cities, the team will examine governance approaches (laws, norms, values) for collection and use of intimate data about emotions in public spaces to understand how these guide Emotional AI technological developments. Ultimately, it aims to feed all the research insights, including citizens’ views, back to the diverse stakeholders shaping usage of Emotional AI in cities.
The UK team is led by Bangor University with colleagues from Edinburgh Law School and the University of Northumbria, and the Japan team is led by Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University with colleagues from Meiji University and Chuo University.
Website: Emotional AI Lab
Project dates: January 2020 – December 2023
