Vanessa  Lam (Dang-Lam)

Glitchi is a robot, who is an intelligent being, originally from a galaxy 27 million light-years from earth called Sunflower Galaxy. He resided on the planet called HelianthusX, where all the entities (highly intelligent beings) on the planet expressed only one emotion, happiness. Negative emotions such as sadness and anger have not existed on the planet for the past millennium. Therefore, there are no problems on the planet HelianthusX, like we have here on earth such as poverty, war, crime, pollution, and climate issues. It is a world where all of the beings were programmed/created in a way that they would maintain “perfect” social structures. This was all true except for Glitchi, who was quite different from the rest. He expressed an array of human-like emotions which was out of the perfect societal norm of the planet, since human emotions are known to be quite unpredictable sometimes, no one understood him, and are afraid of him. He himself did not really understand these different emotions or how to manage them. As a result, Glitchi, a robot from a different planet, comes to planet Earth to find out why he is so different from the others on his planet. He learns that expressing different emotions is normal on Earth by listening to the stories of humans. Therefore, the goal is to make Glitchi communicate with the user, listen to the user and respond to the user in regard to their (the users) responses that relate to the analyzed sentiment values. Glitchi will also express its emotions through its facial expression, in other words, it would "imitate" what the user feels.

​

Glitchi is composed of neopixel lights, multiple servo motors, a microphone, a speaker and a screen. Glitchi express three different emotions, happy (lights turn green and the servo motors move fast), sad (lights turn blue and the servo motors move slowly) and angry (lights turn red and the servo motors move very fast). Glitchi is also connected to a laptop to run the MAX8/MSP program, which gives him access to his Twitter account, where he learns his speech.