At present there is a clear distinction between robots and persons. In this article I explore the possibility that this distinction may not hold in perpetuity, as some robots attain personhood. I argue that personhood is an emergent property in both the development of individuals and the evolution of life, that personhood may not require a…

We performed an innovative STEM outreach project. High school students from the Colombian robotics' designed a prototype of a Lunar Loo named Tech Lunar Toilet (TLT) that was part of the international HeroX-NASA Challenge. These experiences were possible thanks to a wonderful network of collaboration. As a result of this program, the students that…

When a smart device talks, what should its voice sound like? Voice-enabled devices are becoming a ubiquitous presence in our everyday lives. Simultaneously, speech synthesis technology is rapidly improving, making it possible to generate increasingly varied and realistic computerized voices. Despite the flexibility and richness of expression that…

This special double issue of the International Journal of Training Research with the theme 'emerging labor markets of the future--reimagining skills development and training' contains 13 articles that provide a comprehensive overview of global and regional trends that impact on emerging jobs and labor markets of the future. With particular…

The authors designed and ran a crash course on emotional robotics involving students from both the Information Engineering School and the Design School of Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy. The course consisted of two intensive days of short introductory lessons and lab activity, done in interdisciplinary groups and supported by a well-equipped…

Summer outreach programs provide pre-college participants an introduction to college life and exposure to engineering in an effort to raise the level of interest and bring more students into engineering fields. The Junior Engineering, Mathematics, and Science (JEMS) program is a project-based summer workshop in which teams of high school students…

With the evolution of the surrounding world market, engineers have to propose innovations in products and processes. Industrial innovation frequently results from an improved understanding of basic physics. In this paper, an approach to accelerate inventive preliminary design is presented. This method combines the main advantages of CBR (Case…