R3A designed this Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science Artificial Intelligence (AI) Makerspace
Story by Chandi Chapman • Originally published 2/21/2023 11:23 PM
Working from home during the pandemic has changed the way people live their daily lives.
But let’s take remote working a step further. What if you had a digital twin to help with your job?
Pittsburgh’s Action News 4 spoke with a Carnegie Mellon University professor who says the artificial intelligence could be happening in the near future.
Jodi Forlizzi is a Herbert A. Simon professor of human computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. She says artificial intelligence, or AI, is not an idea for the future, it’s currently happening.
“Now as services are coming back online we have the presence of AI driven products and services and huge changes in the workers work,” she said.
Forlizzi says having a virtual doppelganger is not far fetched.
“There’s a lot of emerging research on agents and what’s called digital twins,” she said. “And actually some of our work looks at how people perceive these agents, whether they see them as having human capabilities or do they retain the identity of a person.”
Industries that depend on human interaction like the hospitality industry are now using more robots.
“We interviewed workers about using algorithmic managers for housekeeping,” Forlizzi said. “We interviewed bartenders and cocktail waitresses that made the free drinks and casinos, and they were replaced by these robotic bartenders.”
Even healthcare could see a change in the way patients are treated.
Instead of getting questions answered by a doctor, Forlizzi says medical data and records can be loaded into an avatar.
“You want to interact with a health care professional, but it’s very hard to get an appointment so you can have a virtual appointment or you can have an appointment with an avatar which is fed by a database, an AI that has questions and answers about a condition.”
Forlizzi says research shows human interaction is not the same as a computer.
She says artificial intelligence is a work in progress and CMU students are dedicated to studying AI.