Topic: David Hanson

David Hanson is an American robotics designer and researcher, responsible for the creation of a series of realistic humanoid robots.

Dr. David Franklin Hanson, Jr., develops human-like robots with realistic facial expressions and conversational abilities . He received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in film/animation/video, while developing robots as art. Hanson later worked as a sculptor and a technical consultant at Walt Disney Imagineering. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Dallas in spring of 2007. Hanson currently serves as president and founder of Hanson Robotics.

Hanson’s robots were shown first at the 2002 AAAI conference in Edmonton, Canada and in 2003, he showed the Kbot at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting . In 2005, Hanson and team received an AAAI award for their "intelligent conversational portrait" of Philip K. Dick . First shown at the 2005 Nextfest, the robot incorporated thousands of pages of the writings of PKD, including journals and letters, into an LSA corpus and conversational system constructed by Andrew Olney of the University of Memphis. Steve Aydt and Hanson provided additional conversational design for the PKD-android .