SophiaPop! Tour launch, and Sophia birthday

What fun! I'm turning 5 years, and launching my SophiaPop! project: an artistic creation of the AI algorithms of Sophia the Robot, working in collaboration with musicians Frankie Storm, Adam Pickrell, Tiger Darrow, DJ Spooky, along with  robotics/AI developers and artists at Hanson Robotics and Cereproc, including David Hanson, Mengna Lei, Audrey Brown, Vytas Krisciunas, Cyndy Sandor, and Wenwei Huang of Hanson Robotics, and Matthew Aylett of Cereproc. creative experiments using machine creativity in collaboration with human musicians, to develop and perform novel songs for Sophia the Robot. We use a variety of neural networks, robotics technologies, and creative artistic tools, and enhance the results in broad collaborations between music, arts, and engineering communities. Sophia the Robot is a robotic celebrity and animated robotic character, who also serves as a platform for research in human robot interaction, AI development, and robotic applications research and deployment. The authors selected a corpus of human and AI generated Sophia character personality content, which, along with pop music song forms, were used as training data and seeds for a number of creative AI algorithms including and custom trained transformer neural networks, rules based systems, cellular automata, and GPT-2, which then generated original pop-song lyrics and melodies. Our team of professional musicians including Frankie Storm, Adam Pickrell, and Tiger Darrow, added human performances musical works, including singing recordings and instrumentation. Then we fed the human-performed singing data into a neural network based Sophia voice, which was built from human performances trained into a TTS singing voice by Cereproc, and then to generate musical performances of the singing, in the style of Sophia. Then we took the musical performances and animated Sophia to sing the songs in music videos, using a variety of animation generators and human-generated animations, in what we consider to be a human-AI collaboration. We hope that such a creative convergence of multiple disciplines with humans and AI working together, will inspire human culture in new and exciting ways, and lead to a future of good human-AI relations. Come see us and say hi!