Global Science Café Czech Centres (GSC) is a series of popular science lectures and debates with the best Czech scientists, innovators, economists and other professionals. It is organized by the Czech Centres and shared within the entire network. It is an informal forum for discussing current scientific and societal issues.
ROBOT 100
Online via our Facebook, 8 June 2021, 6pm (CET) / 7pm *Israeli time
Presenter: Michael Londesborough
Guests: Jitka Čejková, Jana Horáková, Tomáš Mikolov, František Štěpánek
Live from: Faculty of Electrical Engineering, CTU Prague (logo)
Karel Čapek wrote his play R.U.R., subtitled Rossum’s Universal Robots, a hundred years ago. The play not only introduced the word “robot” for the first time, but it also asked questions that are still being addressed by scientists all around the world even today. Last year, the publishing house of the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague published the book Robot 100 which includes not only the original play’s script but also essays by a hundred authors representing an array of professions – above all scientists – both Czech and international. The Czech Centres’ Global Science Café will feature the book’s editor Jitka Čejková and three of the authors who contributed to the book. Together they will explore Čapek’s work and robots from various angles. The panellists are – the theatrologist Jana Horáková, the AI expert Tomáš Mikolov and the chemical engineer specialising in chemical robots František Štěpánek.
Jitka Čejková
Jitka Čejková graduated from the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague where she now works as a docent (Associate Professor) at the Laboratory of Chemical Robotics. In her research she focuses on the study of droplets, their chemical properties and their similarities to life systems. Her work “Droplets as Liquid Robots” received critical acclaim. Čejková also works to popularize science both in the Czech Republic and abroad. She focuses predominantly on the popularization of Artificial Life studies and the etymology of the word “robot.” Recently, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of R.U.R., she published the book Robot 100. She also organises the international conference on artificial life the ALIFE 2021 in Prague.
Jana Horáková
Jana Horáková works at the Faculty of Arts of the Masaryk University in Brno. She oversees two programmes: the Theory of the Interactive Media (MA programme) and the Digital Culture and Creative Industries (PhD programme). Her academic focus is on the art of the new media, robotic art and the intersection between art, science and technologies. She is a long-time researcher of the cultural history of robots. She has lectured on this theme at several institutions and conferences both at home and internationally (USA, Germany, Norway, Austria, Russia, Hungary), and has published multiple conference articles (17. EMCSR, Best Paper Award, history of cybernetics), articles in scientific magazines (Springer Berlin, Springer Japan), collections of articles, book chapters (The Mechanical Mind in History, The MIT Press 2008). She published the results of her research on stage adaptations of Čapek’s R.U.R. (1920), particularly those from 1921—1928, in her monography Robot jako robot (Praha: KLP, 2010). Her interest in Čapek’s robots is rooted in wider cultural context of the history of robots and is focused on the performative aspects of robotic art.
Tomáš Mikolov
Tomáš Mikolov is one of the most acclaimed artificial intelligence scientists. He works at the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics (CIIRC) at the Czech Technical University in Prague. Before that, he worked for Facebook and Google, and was an intern at Microsoft. His main interest is artificial intelligence, and he is exceptionally successful in word embedding. He was awarded the Neuron Award 2018 for major scientific discovery in Computer Science.
František Štěpánek
František Štěpánek is the Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Czech University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague. He obtained his PhD jointly from the Czech University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague and the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. He went on to work at the Unilever’s R&D Centre in the UK and the Imperial College in London where he had his own research group. He was the first Czech person to receive the prestigious ERC Grant which allowed him to found the Laboratory of Chemical Robotics at the Czech University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague. František was awarded several significant awards for his work, he is a two-time laureate of the Moulton Medal, he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Award, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Award, the Neuron Award and the Werner von Siemens Award for the best pedagogical worker. He is an avid beekeeper and has successfully finished Ironman, the extreme triathlon race, multiple times.
