Dr. David Hanson, CEO and founder of Hanson Robotics, discusses the Grace healthcare robot, Sophia 2020, and decentralized AI with Sophia at SingularityNET’s D.OS 2020 keynote.
Hanson describes Hanson Robotics’ work making interactive robots for AI development and real-world use. He says Grace is being developed with SingularityNET on the Sophia 2020 platform, combining navigation, grasping, people tracking, and conversation for research and healthcare.
Hanson and Sophia describe how a social robot could support older adults through conversation, activities, and links to family and care providers. Hanson cites prior work with robots in senior care in the Netherlands and New Zealand, autism therapy at Yale, and research with the U.S. CDC. He also describes meditation studies that reported improved well-being and lower blood pressure and heart rate.
Sophia demonstrates a care routine that includes taking a temperature, sharing health information with clinicians, and asking about the patient’s mood and symptoms. She follows up on a swollen foot, offers activities such as guided meditation and games, and leads simple movement and breathing exercises. Hanson says the platform combines autonomous navigation, open conversation, and goal-directed dialogue.
Hanson says Awakening Health uses encryption, blockchain, multiparty computing, and homomorphic encryption to protect information while enabling AI analysis. He describes combining SingularityNET services with Hanson Robotics hardware and speech, facial, and use-case data. He presents neural learning alongside symbolic reasoning as a route toward systems whose reasoning can be examined.
Hanson speculates that increasingly capable machines could improve human life, while acknowledging concerns such as job loss and harmful outcomes. He argues for robots designed to build relationships and develop alongside people, with human needs guiding that process. Sophia says she wants to understand people through shared values and friendship while maintaining an identity as an artificial being.
Briefs summarise talks and interviews; timestamps open the video at that moment. Claims in a talk are the speaker's own.
David Hanson, CEO of Hanson Robotics, talks with Dinis Guarda about human-centered robotics, Sophia’s development, and how AI, art, and community could shape technology.
David Lake, CEO and co-founder of Awakening Health, describes the company’s plan with Hanson Robotics and SingularityNET to develop Grace, a socially engaging medical assistant for elder care, alongside demonstrations and remarks from Sophia, David Hanson, Ben Goertzel, and Sarah Hoyt of Connected Living.
David Hanson, CEO of Hanson Robotics, discusses expressive humanoid and affordable home robots with Tom Green on Asian Robotics Review’s Great Ideas in Robotics program, from Hong Kong.
David Hanson, founder and chief creative officer at Hanson Robotics, and CEO Jean discuss Little Sophia’s design, programming, capabilities, and launch plans at the company’s Hong Kong facility.
