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Today's post is by Michael Larkin and William Day (both at the University of Aston). They are reporting on the Phenomenology of Health and Relationships conference, which was sponsored by project PERFECT and held at the University of Aston on 22-23 May 2019. We're both participants in the Phenomenology of Health and Relationships group at Aston University. In planning our inaugural  conference , the group initially considered a narrower focus on Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). There is a regular (more-or-less annual) IPA Conference, and we had agreed to host it. Eventually we settled on a broader theme (Creativity and Affect). IPA is one approach which many of us use in our work, but it is not the only one, and methods are not the sole focus of our meetings. When we meet as a group, we do discuss creative innovations in methodology, but we also read phenomenology, and explore studies which offer experiential insights on health and relationships. We hoped tha...

This cross-disciplinary symposium on the nature and implications of human and artificial autonomy was organised by Anastasia Christakou and held at the Henley Business School at the University of Reading on 8th May 2019. Josh Bongard (University of Vermont) opened the workshop presenting his research in robotics, where he and his team challenge the Cartesian assumption that body and brain are separate by simulating first, and creating then robots that have body plans adapting to changes in morphology. Bongard also addressed important questions about AI safety and AI ethics. Based on a recent publication on Machine Behaviour in Nature , he argued that we should treat machine behaviour in the same way as we treat animal behaviour, as something that evolves. Next Emma Borg (University of Reading) presented a paper on understanding agency in other people and in ourselves. She started comparing two accounts of how we explain and predict the agency of others, behaviour-reading and mind-re...