/MISSION

RIIFT will bring together cutting edge robotics & AI researchers, artists, and commercial visionaries. Its mission is to engineer encounters with robots & autonomous systems, featuring technologies that are normally hidden at trade shows, conferences, and biennales, or that come from unexpected parts of the world. It will be a big tent event. Researchers developing soft robots and self assembling systems will appear alongside startling robotics performances. Major companies will show off commercial products in parallel with scrappy inventors coaxing miracles out of meagre resources. In short, RIIFT will showcase a cross-section of the dynamic robotics & AI communities from around the globe.

/WHY

People love robots. We dream of animating matter, of giving it purpose. Robots occupy a vast swath in our collective imaginations and fantasy worlds. But, in real life, they’re largely inaccessible, hidden away in factories and labs. RIIFT exists to coax the geniuses and inventors out of their labs, to persuade them to present their work to a large and passionate audience. As a multi-venue festival, RIIFT will be more like an old fashioned world's fair than a trade show. It will give people a chance to peek behind the curtain and discover the reality of robotics, to get a glimpse of the future in the making.

/TORONTO

Toronto is no stranger to splashy events, with its glittering music, arts, and film festivals (TIFF, Nuit Blanche, Luminato). It has developed the substantial capacity, infrastructure, and expertise to host what we hope will grow into a major annual festival. RIIFT will be noisy and public and exciting, focussing attention on dynamic developments in robotics & AI. Toronto is the perfect location. We have the facilities, talent, and support. Most importantly, we have the audience: big, technology savvy, engaged. We are hungry to participate in creating the future.

/CASE: KINSHASA TRAFFIC ROBOTS

Kinshasa's traffic robots are exactly what they sound like. Big, awesome, traffic directing robots in the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Created by a group of women engineers in the DRC, a place that few people associate with technology, they are scrappy, inventive, and radically new. They upend our assumptions about what robots can be, who makes them, and where they come from. They make it clear that the drive to animate matter is a global, and that astonishing creations will come from unexpected places. Wonderful creations are the result of people resourcefully confronting practical problems, and flexing powers of invention - whether those people have phds and work in billion dollar research labs, or are kids hacking their farm equipment. The robots are coming. From everyone, from everywhere.

We're working hard to have one at RIIFT.

/IMAGE CREDIT

Sam Grant took the excellent Kinshasa traffic robot photo on October 28, 2013. It is used with his kind permission..