The new face of artificial intelligence is coming to TEDx Christchurch early next month.

BabyX is a "first step, a metaphor for a new type of technology," said Mark Sagar, director of the Laboratory for Animate Technologies at the University of Auckland.

"We're creating a system that creates it's own expressions and it's own emotion. It can think and react. It's live . . . it's experiencing the world just like we do," he said.

The "face" of BabyX is a human toddler on a computer screen and its brain a powerful computer. The TEDx audience will see Sagar interact with BabyX live on stage.

He won two technical Oscars for work on computer-generated faces while special projects supervisor at Peter Jackson's Weta Digital.

Another speaker, Mark Gee, still works at Weta - he's helping finish the third Hobbit film - although his TEDx talk will focus on astronomy photography. Gee was short-listed for the 2012 and 2014 Astronomy Photographer of the Year.

Gee was set to photograph the recent blood moon at the Carter Observatoryand said being in remote places at night to photograph the universe made him feel "small and insignificant".

Remoteness also features in the work of Dr Jenni Adams, a University of Canterbury associate professor of physics. Among her research interests is IceCube, a telescope constructed of a cubic kilometre of ice and 5160 optical modules buried 1450 to 2450 metres beneath the South Pole.

It detects neutrinos streaming through the Earth, some of which collide with ice particles. Neutrinos help explain processes that go on in the sun and are an important building block for the blueprint of nature.

Original post:

Computer baby TEDx magnet