Episode
EP 42: When AI Meets Robotics: Building Machines That Care
- Podcast
- Data Science With Sam
- Published
- Jun 13, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2128
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://rss.com/podcasts/data-science-with-sam/3006406
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/data-science-with-sam-4345646/episodes/ep-42-when-ai-meets-robotics-building-machines-that-care/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/data-science-with-sam-4345646/ep-42-when-ai-meets-robotics-building-machines-that-care.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
In this episode, Sam sat down with guest Dr. Mohammad explore what it actually takes to build emotional intelligence into a physical machine - from the technical layers of facial expression recognition and voice intonation analysis to the user experience decisions that matter most when your users are vulnerable, lonely, and elderly. IN THIS EPISODE: ▪ How a postdoc in a psychology department became the career-defining moment that connected engineering with human wellbeing — and led to two decades of social robotics research ▪ Artificial emotional intelligence in practice: sensing facial expressions, eye gaze, head pose, voice intonation, and sentiment to generate empathetic and socially appropriate responses ▪ The LLM revolution: from 6–7 English students writing scripted dialogues for months (producing just 90 minutes of non-repetitive conversation) to open-ended, creative, domain-spanning conversation powered by large language models and real-time AI agents ▪ LLM risks in eldercare: hallucination, overconfidence, computational complexity, and cloud dependency — the challenges Mohammad continues to actively manage ▪ Why the hardest part of building Ryan wasn't the algorithm: engineering can always add resources, but making a machine feel respectful and socially appropriate to a cognitively impaired elderly resident is a problem compute alone cannot solve ▪ The real unlock for social robotics: not whether robots can walk and talk, but whether they can deliver measurable wellness benefits — with affordability, reliability, and clear value propositions as the actual barriers ▪ Ethics and trust from day one: IRB approval, guardian consent for residents with cognitive impairment, coercion quizzes, privacy controls. Trust is…