The Petite Geek

Understanding our love/hate relationship with social networks

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 04:31:00 +0000

Have you ever hesitated before posting your good news on Facebook? Are you worried it would feel like bragging? And the other way around—why do some updates make us frown with jealousy, while some posts make us feel genuinely happy and truly 'like' it?

The thing is, every single day we share our emotions—those smiles, happy voices and hugs which spread our joy with others.

This is called emotional contagion, and it's why people say "I'm so happy for you!" They literally have become happy, because you're happy! How kind of you to share! :D

The problem is, communication through simple text is the worst way to share our happiness (although it works to some extent.)

All the people get from a typical post is the information, like "I got a new job as lead Awesome Person at Disneyland." You get all the cognitive information, but none of the emotional information. And that's a cause for jealousy—they're happy, I'm not, and that's lame :(

How can we share our happiness with our friends online, so they get to be happy with us?

Here are some examples and tips (illustrations made with private posts for obvious reasons).

Beginner

Well, I got the information across. But this makes me want to hit myself in the face.

Intermediate

Add punctuation or smileys to add back in the tone of your voice. We pretty much all do this.

Use the "I'm feeling" feature of Facebook to share your emotion. You activate the concept of feeling in the reader, and they try to understand what that means by simulating it in their brains. It's a kind of empathy.

Advanced

Add a photo, or an animated gif [Facebook, please implement this!]. This is the most direct way to literally share happiness (through mirror neurons) with your friends.

In general, you want to add back in all the information you would convey if you met your friends in person: tone of voice (use punctuation), face (use smileys or the "I'm feeling" feature), body (add a photo or Japanese style emoticon \o/), movement (add an animated gif).

This is why the Japanese animated emoji stickers in Line, and recently in Facebook messages, are so popular. In my ideal world, you could share your happiness with sound too, just like music helps us feel.

So share your joy! Do some virtual jumping up and down! And share your news with your friends, like sharing a hot cup of tea or yummy slice of cake.

It's not you, it's the technology. So let's make the best of it :) Hope this post was helpful for you.

P.S. I'm also writing this as a poke to us designers of technology. Let's make it easier to share information as well as feelings! It's awkward to have to think about sharing our feelings, let's just make it natural :D

A final note, A.K.A. the Dark Side

If you ever need to reach out because you're in a low place, and Facebook is your only option, then try using the "I'm feeling" feature, or a photo that shows how you feel.

Sadness is an evolved emotion that all humans have. Its function is to recruit support from our loved ones and friends. Sadness shows true distress.

People want to help others who need it, but this empathy is activated by low-level emotional cues (face, body, vocal tones). It's important that our technology show how we feel through more than words, or, unfortunately, a call for help may be lost in the stream...

Masayoshi Son's other reason for making emotional robots

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 16:20:00 +0000

Last week, SoftBank unveiled the Pepper emotional robot to the world, to much surprise. But did you know that SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son already hinted to his dream to build robots with artificial intelligence and emotions, way back in 2010?

From SoftBank's "Next 30-Year Vision" 2010

In his 30-year vision, Son described his view of the future, and justified the need for artificial emotions. He imagined that the future would bring brain-like computers that would learn by themselves. Instead of being pre-programmed, these computers would have that special capacity to learn constantly, an ability that even the lowliest animals have, from bumblebees to chimpanzees.

He warned, though, that artificial intelligence purely driven by goals could have its consequences.

He gave an example of a robot-driving-AI developed at Honda Research. The robot car was designed to learn how to run the circuit in the most efficient, fastest way. Then, by accident, it ran into one of the barriers and smashed through the track walls...

"The car made a mistake once and bumped into a wall. Then, it broke through the wall, made a turn, and ended up finishing the course quicker. In later runs, that artificially intelligent car started hitting the walls deliberately."

He concluded,

"When we follow our instincts to simply satisfy our desire, that's when it becomes dangerous. That's where savagery comes from."

What happens when computational knowledge surpasses that of humans? he asked.

"If we give only computers intelligence greater than that of a human, and give them a goal that they can only use their intelligence to achieve, then we'll see them doing the same thing that the car earlier did: breaking free to reach their goal in the shortest distance possible. So, to stop them from breaking free recklessly, I believe it's necessary for computers to have the highest of emotions. Namely, the richness, the kindness, of love for people. This will help computer brains have control."

So, while Son announced last week his passion for kind, gentle robots, he also envisions that emotions can be used to control AI.

Watch the full presentation here.

Other memorable quotes:

@1:08:00 Brain-like computer chips can be used with moving motors. When we combine one of these chips with motors in that way, we get robots. Those artificially intelligent robots could be sent to dangerous places like disaster sites after earthquakes or fires. Snake-like robots could be used to slide into tiny spaces to call out "Hey, anyone alive in here?" Then they can communicate with the person in need until help comes." Or maybe we could have robots with the strength of an excavator, but not just robots that dig, but talk.

@1:09:26 In housework and medicine too we will see robots that are both smart and gentle. We don't want doctors to perform surgery on us just to mechanically say “Hang in there.” when we yell “This hurts!” We want artificially intelligent doctors that are kind. In that way, we could have robots that are gentle towards people but also have incredible intelligence and strength. Robots of various sizes and shapes will appear.

@1:10:25 The best robot companies won’t necessarily be the ones that make the best robot “muscles” in the manner of a car manufacturer. Components such as motors will be easily made in a factory. The most difficult part will be the part that tells the muscles what to do. The part with intelligence. The part that does the thinking and feeling. SoftBank will continue to follow this idea with the information revolution.

@1:12:30 Intelligent, gentle robots would not be harmful, they’d probably be more gentle than humans. With them we can probably create an even better society together. We at SoftBank want to make that happen. We are not science fiction makers. We do not write novels. We want to make it a reality. We want them to be gentle, feeling, and through the information revolution, we want to help everyone. We want to spread the use of brain computers to make people happy.

@1:13:20 In 300 years there won’t just be one robot or appliance with a brain computer in each house. There will be 10 or 100. Maybe we will work together with these robots to achieve things that humanity has never experienced. To solve problems that have been beyond our abilities. Maybe together we will be able to cure unknown viruses, combat terrorism, protect people against meteorites and great earthquakes and towering tsunami. Together maybe we can solve these problems that humanity has not yet succeeded at doing alone.

Can music convey a personality?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 17 Apr 2014 01:38:00 +0000

I recently tried out Beau Sievers' super-cool Bouncing Ball software. It generates both – you guessed it – an animated bouncing ball, and also music to accompany its movements. By changing around 5 parameters, you can try and get it to match an emotion or mood.

How does it work? Well, you choose the music clip's speed, irregularity, consonance (i.e. major or minor), pitch range, and probability of making upwards or downward sequences. There is no set score – the software chooses the next note and timing based on probabilities.

Example: "Cheerful" parameter settings

Now, I'm wondering if these 5 parameters can convey not just emotions, but personality types as well. I'm hoping to contribute to Julien Richard's NaoBrain project.

Here are a few attempts. Let me know what you think!

Cheerful: happy, bright, optimistic and positive.
Cute: like a toddler, infantile, a bit unsure
Kind: a caregiver, like Mary Poppins!
Machine: your typical machine
Sarcastic: dry and ironic, like House
Serious: formal, butler-like

Why Designing an Algorithm is like Designing a Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 18 Feb 2014 08:27:00 +0000

What is an algorithm? In a world where understanding code and technology is becoming essential, I'd like to offer this –perhaps obvious–analogy.

Algorithms are like Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipes.

An algorithm is a set of steps to solve a problem, while trying to minimize or maximize something. A recipe is a set of steps to solve the problem of "I'm hungry!" while fitting your constraints.

An algorithm has input, procedures, and output. A recipe has ingredients, recipe steps, and a finished dish.

There can be many different algorithms to do the same thing. There can be tons of sorting algorithms, just like there can be a billion Chocolate Chip Cookie recipes on AllRecipes.com.

Algorithms try to optimize for different scenarios. They try to minimize space and cost, or maximize speed, or elegance.

Recipes also try to optimize for different things. You can maximize speed, because you want to eat cookies NOW. You can try minimize space, and make it all in one bowl. You can try and make it resource-non-intensive, because you're lazy. You can try to make it really beautiful, because you enjoy the look as much as the taste. Or you can maximize deliciousness while minimizing calories. A multiparameter optimization!

You can optimize all these things, but it’s up to you, the algorithm designer–the cook–to decide which metric is important to YOU.

Designing an algorithm also requires iterative testing. You can try combining different methods, and must check the result and tweak parameters until you think it works well. Sometimes you just throw it all out if it's a mess and start over. When making a recipe, you can combine steps from different recipes, lick the spoon, and tweak ingredient amounts and until you deem it worthy. You, the cook, decide when it's good and ready to serve up to others.

Deciding which problem to solve is also pretty important. You're a chef, you have all these skills–do you use them to cater wedding parties? To open a restaurant? To make designer cupcakes? Which problem in the world do you solve with your skills?

Algorithms are like recipes. We even have cookbooks :) Have I missed anything?

Whelp, I'm off. Let me know if this has been a totally obvious post. All I know is, these pictures are making me hungry...

Edit: Some more contributions from a friends:

Experience in breaking things can help guide you in your design. Copying an algorithm line-by-line can sometimes get the job done, just like following a recipe word-for-word can give you cookies with no effort. But you don't necessarily understand what you did. What really teaches you, though, is messing up. What? If I replace margarine with butter, then my cookie edges burn? What? My algorithm doesn't work when I use X instead of Y? So experience and trial and error matter. I'd like to suggest that this is how many coders that grow up learning to code, before taking any computer science classes.

However, a theoretical background matters a lot, too. How do you become a master chef? You learn the theory. You know all of your ingredients, their properties, and methods. You know that egg whites contain proteins that break down when salt is added. You know that the point of whipping is not to mix vigorously, but to add air into the mixture, so a flick-lift method is better than a spinning whip. With a theoretical background, you can guess what the outcome will be even before you do it. A good background in computer science and algorithms will give you this.

Empathy towards machines: When communicating less is more

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 21 Jan 2014 06:55:00 +0000

Recently I spoke with a professor regarding empathy and machines. Her mom had a close relationship with her 20-year-old washing machine. If the washing machine acted up, her mom would ask it -- do you need more water? Are there too many clothes? How about I take one piece out and we'll see if you'll start.

This is just what parents do when they interact with their baby. They constantly have to put their mind in the infants shoes. Are you hungry? Did you wet your diaper? Are you just tired? And they try things till it helps.

I think this kind of perspective-taking, active empathy connects us. And maybe this explains why we loved the mysterious R2-D2 so much. We had to put ourselves in its shoes to understand his beeps, his movements. And by doing this curiosity exercise, we cultivated empathy.

As another example, the Fish-Bird robots communicated with people only with simple printouts and movements. People interacted with it for ages. What do you think? Could less be more?

What does "innate" really mean?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 01:44:00 +0000

A cool story by biologist Dr. Stuart Firestein, from the book This Will Make You Smarter:

"Instinct refers to a set of behaviors whose actual cause we don't know or simply don't understand or have access to; and therefore we call them instinctual, inborn, innate. Often this is the end of the exploration of these behaviors, they are the nature part of the nature-nurture argument [...] and therefore can't be broken down or reduced any further. But experience has shown that this is rarely the truth. In one of the great examples of this, it was for quite some time thought that when chickens hatched and they immediately began pecking the ground for food, this behavior must have been instinctive.

In the 1920s a Chinese researcher named Zing-Yang Kuo made a remarkable set of observations on the developing chick egg that overturned this idea — and many similar ones. Using a technique of elegant simplicity he found that rubbing heated Vaseline on a chicken egg caused it to become transparent enough to see the embryo inside without disturbing it. In this way he was able to make detailed observations of the development of the embryo from fertilization to hatching. One of his observations was that, in order for the growing embryo to fit properly in the egg, the neck is bent over the chest of the body in such a way that the head rests upon the chest just where the developing heart is encased. As the heart begins beating the head of the chicken is moved in an up-and-down manner that precisely mimics the movement that will be used later for pecking the ground.

Thus the "innate" pecking behavior that the chicken appears to know miraculously upon birth has, in fact, been practiced for more than a week within the egg."

The book's contents are all available online.

Books on Robots and Emotions

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 23:49:00 +0000

Are you interested in reading up on robots and emotions?

Here are some of the books I've come across while writing my thesis. I've put an "easy-to-read" rating on each one. The more stars, the more textbook-like it is, with research and modeling -- but it might be harder to dive into if you're a beginner.

The books with one ★ are easiest to read to get a quick overview of the field.
Books with ★★ are more comprehensive, and still readable.
Books with ★★★ are a compendium of papers from different researchers. Your mileage may vary.

In order of recommendation from me:

How to build an Emotional Robot
★★ Designing Sociable Robots, Cynthia Breazeal

Emotions for Human-Computer Interaction
★ Affective Computing, Rosalind Picard
★★★ Blueprint for Affective Computing, Klaus Scherer et al.

Artificial Intelligence based on Emotions
★★★Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets Robot, Jean-Marc Fellous and Michael Arbib

What are Emotions? Why do we need them?
★★ Descartes Error, Antonio Damasio

Emotion Design for Interfaces
★ Design for Emotion, Trevor Van Gorp
★ Emotional Design: Why we love or hate everyday things, Donald Norman (Last chapter is on robots)

Emotions, Personality - Faking It
★ The Media Equation, Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass (Only partly mentions emotions)

Social Implications of Emotional Robots
★★ Alone Together, Sherry Turkle [Warning: This book is very critical of robots with emotions.]

Bonus:
...and just a really well-edited book that can give you a fresh perspective on emotions. I love this book:

Emotion in Music
★★★Handbook of Music and Emotion, Patrik Juslin and John Sloboda

The Development of Primary Emotions for Robots (Intro)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 06:19:00 +0000

Robot and Frank, 2012

"When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.” – Dale Carnegie

The most emotional moments of our lives are the most memorable. Our best friends help us lead lives that are happy and bright, and are endearingly empathetic when we’re down. Emotions colour our world, our interactions, our words, from humming in the morning over breakfast, to smiles before sleeping at night. Positive emotions help us to be more creative, be more optimistic, and even work harder. Negative emotions help us focus, narrow our field of view to attack a problem, or change course when one direction isn’t working out.

Robots show promise in helping us in these emotion-governed lives. Just as the Internet and mobile technology has made us more connected, new robotic technologies are opening a door towards supporting an aging society. In Japan, almost 25% of the population is over 65 years old, and they seek a life of retirement with independence in the community, physical activities, and an active social life.

To meet the rising demand for healthcare workers and more, the Japanese government has estimated that the service robot market will reach over 4900 billion yen by 2035, exceeding the demand for robot manufacturing by almost twofold. It is hoped, for example, that robots can help the bedridden become mobile, and the dependent become independent.

Yet robots have to overcome the challenge of navigating our world, because it is not always black and white.

Imagine a healthcare robot overseeing an elderly patient named Linda at the hospital – the robot is set to close the room by 9pm. Soaked by the rain, the patient’s daughter, Mary, knocks on the hospital room door. She has driven 50 kilometers from the airport, but a thunderstorm has delayed her arrival. Mary yearns to hold her mother’s hand – it has been 3 years since their last meeting. Linda is delighted to see her daughter through the hospital room window, but it is now 9:01pm. Crestfallen, the mom and daughter eyes meet, as the healthcare robot locks the door with a loud thud.

The rules are rules.

"The heart is a strange beast and not ruled by logic.” – Maria V. Snyder

Nurse Noakes (Cloud Atlas, 2012) runs the nursing home with an iron fist.

Robots do not share our capacity for emotion. In science fiction, Star Trek’s android lieutenant Data was described as human-like in many ways, except that he lacked emotions: “human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge,” Plato once said, and Data had goals and knowledge, but no emotion. In many futuristic movies, this emotional shortfall drives robots to take over the world. Like history’s worst dictators, the robots’ calculating brilliance, logic, and lack of empathy bind together in cruel combination.

It is easy to see why, in a 2012 survey, 60% of EU citizens stated that robots should be banned in the care of children, the elderly, or the disabled . Large majorities would also agree to ban robots from ‘human’ areas such as education (34%), healthcare (27%) and leisure (20%) [their quotes]. Of course, in certain environments like factories, bomb-detection or remote operating tables, the precision and predictability of robots is a necessity. Yet a new breed of “service robots” are advancing to our doorstep quickly, with the potential to change the lives of children and the elderly, able-bodied and disabled, students and more. For robots to be accepted in our daily lives as helpers, we must release robots from their pure, programmed logic and make them more emotional, more empathetic, to interact with humans on their own terms.

How do we start to build such a robot? One guiding principle could be to look to human development for inspiration. Just as each human has linguistic abilities (whether through voice or sign-language), each human is equipped with the capacities of emotion expression and understanding. And whether they were raised in Japan, the USA, China or France, each person is unique based on their upbringing and environment. They may express happiness loudly or quietly, they may fear snakes or love snakes. They may be more or less sympathetic. They may openly declare displeasure or only show it through one eyebrow. Their abilities may fall on a spectrum of what we consider underdeveloped emotional intelligence, or autism. Clearly, there is no one-size-fits-all definition, and likewise, a robot’s emotions should be adaptive, too. Sometimes this zealous focus on pliable, human-like models may appear to be a detriment to the short-term accuracy of the systems we engineer. But with the goal of autonomous, ever-learning robots, our hope is that in the long-term, we will be building the foundation of a powerful artificial emotional intelligence.

Emotions as a basis for theory of mind

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 09 Dec 2013 01:26:00 +0000

Artificial intelligence researchers may have something to learn from the latest trends in autism therapy: theory of mind springs from emotional understanding.

From an article on "FloorTime" therapy, based on the Developmental, Individual-Differences, Relationship-based (DIR) model:

"Psychologists and researchers in autism have coined the term "theory of mind" to describe the ability to understand how other people reason as they do. Greenspan and his associates asked themselves, Why do many autistic people lack theory of mind? And why can't autistic children make the leap into abstraction? From a traditional developmental point of view, there was no reason to assume that autistic children would have trouble conceptualizing abstractions. The pioneering Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget had persuasively argued long ago that abstractions are grasped when a child operates on his environment (he pulls a string, and a bell rings: causality). But Greenspan was convinced that some mechanism must be missing in an autistic baby's mind. What was it? The answer was staring him right in the face. Or, rather, the answer was in all those young faces that simply couldn't look him in the eye. Greenspan and his colleagues made a leap: these children, they suddenly realized, wouldn't understand abstractions until they understood their own emotions.

Already celebrated for his work in developmental psychiatry, Greenspan had, by observing the dysfunction of autistic children, come to a turning point in his understanding of human cognitive development. He understood that everything a child does and thinks as he is developing he does largely because of his emotions. Children apply to the physical world what they have already learned emotionally; they are not, as Piaget thought, introduced to abstractions by the physical world. "The first lesson in causality," Greenspan says, "is not in pulling the string to ring the bell. The first lesson in causality happens months earlier—pulling your mother's heartstrings with a smile in order to receive one back." Furthermore, he says, the earliest concepts of math are nothing but reasoning driven by emotion. "For instance, when a child is learning concepts of quantity, he doesn't understand conceptually, he understands emotionally, in terms of his affective universe. What is 'a lot' to a toddler? It's more than you expect. What is 'a little'? It's less than you want.""

Perhaps, too, on the path to Kurzweil's singularity and truly intelligent robots, emotions are at the starting line.

Edit: Here's a video supplement called From Emotion to Comprehension that talks about true understanding of language.

"For a kid that's going through the normal stages of emotional development, apple's not just the name of a fruit that's round, shiny and red -- it's the name of something that's juicy and makes a yummy crunchy sound when you bite into it.

But for a kid who's not been taken through these stages of emotional development, apple's just a label."

Explaining the emotional baby: Mirror neurons at work?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 18 Nov 2013 02:00:00 +0000

Have you seen this YouTube video?

It's absolutely fascinating how a baby at only 10 months already seems to be moved to tears by music (See video at 0:35 and 1:10). But why does it happen? And why does it only work for this song? Here's a possible explanation based on my research in the emotional similarity between music and voice.

In short, certain parts of that song sound like crying (e.g. 0:30). If you've ever seen videos of parents who have lost their children, they cry out in intense grief, voice pitch shooting up and down like a roller coaster. The song in the video above contains octave jumps, just like Adele's tear-inducing Someone Like You (Listen Here). The table in this paper by Banse and Scherer (p. 617) shows that "Grief Desperation" voices have, in particular, a extremely large frequency range and high-frequency energy (created by a clenched throat). This is the same vocal signature of crying, an innate "distress" sound that we make when we are born, accompanied by tears.

So why does listening cause us to cry? According to what we know about mirror neurons, listening to a song seems to activate the same places in the brain that are active when singing. In other words, when the mom is singing, the baby could be mimicking her mother's pitch jumps in her own brain (and possibly own vocal tract?), activating the same motor neurons used when she cries.

Why does the baby seem to smile at the same time? I'd venture to guess that the mommy is looking at the baby with a big smile while singing, and facial imitation is happening simultaneously.

What do you think? Does your own throat get tight when you hear other people give distraught speeches? How about during Adele's song? Does it look to you like the baby wells up with tears at the octave jumps?

Bielefeld CITEC Summer School on Continuous Learning (Part 1)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 31 Oct 2013 02:37:00 +0000

I wrote some reports on the various summer schools I attend last month in Europe. Might as well share them with the world, so I'll be uploading them as time allows :) Enjoy!

Biology-inspired embodied learning

On the first day of the summer school, we learned about walking hexopods, such as the one above, created at CITEC in Bielefeld.

Florentin Wörgötter introduced how they could replicate the human / animal behavior of Central Pattern Generators (i.e., even when a cat's legs are disconnected from the brain, the spinal cord CPGs allow the legs to move in a walking motion).

To escape holes, they use a chaotic rather than periodic pattern for the leg movement. They discussed how insects walk, and suggested that even with out cognition, limbs can inform other limbs for a local intelligence. E.g., each leg can tell its load from both a) its own sensor getting a lot of force b) adjacent sensors getting less force.

He also presented Kandel's Principles of Neural Science, from which they model the 3-5 second working memory:

We did a hands-on tutorial on memory. We learned about retrieval induced forgetting -- that active remembering can create forgetting of related material. Episodic memories are processed by the hippocampus.

We performed an EEG experiment where I put on a 32-sensor cap and then look at a series of pictures. I was asked to remember them if followed by a certain symbol, and forget them if followed by another. By averaging the EEG results over many trials, we could nullify the random noise and find event-related potentials (ERPs) that show where the brain is recalling memory: explicit remembering happens in the parietal cortex, P3.

To pass time between trials and to ensure I was not practicing the memory task, the experimenter "tricked" me by asking me to do a speed test, basically finding as fast as possible a pattern of lines.

Speech acquisition
Larissa Samuelson talked about her child psychology experiments and proposed that we ground words in space. It seemed that kids learned new names for objects (e.g. momi for binoculars) by associating labels with objects in space, not time. Other associate cues like color were not as important as location. Indeed, people index by spatial locations to recall facts (like on a test, we remember the fact's location in a book, though can't recall the fact itself).

Katharina J. Rohlfing overviewed what can enhance memories?

Sleep - perhaps information is downscaled during sleep, or re-activated while sleeping
Retrieval - actively retrieving the memory strengthens the connection
Familiar context, because a familiar context can lighten the cognitive load while seeing something new to learn

In her experiments, kids learned through dynamic gesture and stories.

In a tutorial by Roman Klinger, we learned about probabilistic graphical models and did an exercise to design a graphical model for epilepsy, using wikipedia to look up causes and effects. We made one variable for different related causes, and ordered them from cause to effect. We then used the software SamIAm to make the model and probability tables. We learned how a Markov Chain can be used to model transition probabilities, e.g. to generate novel music from lots of examples.

Markov Random Fields are like the directed graphical model but undirected. It describes probabilities of value settings, like the 0-1 binary tables we used to do. The instructor showed how Markov Random fields can be used for sentiment analysis, where each word is a feature. Want to learn about Probabilistic Graphical Models? The full slides are here.

Knowledge-based systems
Michael Beetz of Bremen University showed the state of the art in pancake flipping robots. His goal is to engineer useful, knowledge-based systems based on internet-available knowledge. For example, this robot looked up recipes on wikihow, understood the semantic meaning of instructions (eg. Flip the pancake over means to use the spatula). He also showed a video from Stanford of a robot cleaning a room - arranging cushions, magazines on the table, and putting blocks away.

It was very impressive, and then he said it was remote-controlled by a human! It shows that we cannot blame hardware for lack of progress -- we are limited by software.

In the Probabilistic Graphical Models tutorial, we continued learning about conditional random fields, and linear chain Markov models (which is a subset of CRF, though often used interchangeably in papers on text.) We learned about how to model problems using undirected graphs with output nodes, and how learning happens by estimating lambda parameters based on data.

The advantage of CRF is that we can model how non-adjacent data can influence your output. For example, in an image of a lizard, we can increase the probability that a pixel is part of the lizard if an adjacent pixel is known to be lizard. Training can be done using techniques such as Viterbi. For recognition we can use either Gibbs sampling (which is "sampling through the network" using probability tables and previously fixed variables) or belief propagation.

Lifelong, continuous learning

Pierre-Yves Oudeyer from the INRIA Flowers team (FLOW = state of being engrossed in an activity at just the right level, ERS = Epigenetic Robotics and Systems). He spoke about developmental mechanisms for autonomous life long learning in humans and robots, e.g. the famous Talking Heads experiment led by Luc Steels. In this experiment, two robots which consisted of mounted cameras would play language games. For example, one robot would say wabadee while looking at a wall of coloured objects. The other robot would try to guess the referent. And through this they could develop a language.

Developmental robotics is related to linguistics, developmental neuroscience, and developmental psychology. Autonomous life long learning is important because we would like robots to adapt to user's needs and intentions. It takes time, and the robot needs to find its own data. This is different from typical machine learning which is fast, and where the data is supplied by the human.

He also showed off the new Poppy humanoid robot, whose parts can be machine printed and takes only 2 days to assemble. It has a passive walking mechanism and costs 6000-7000 euros.

Pierre-Yves says that there are basic forms of motivation, such as food/water, maintenance of physical integrity, and social bonding. Babies may be optimally interested in things to learn which are optimally difficult, so the trick is to look at the derivative of the error. In other words, babies explore activities where learning happens (ie. where error is reduced) maximally fast!

He presents the idea of goal babbling: a baby should not waste time on goals that are impossible, e.g. trying to touch a wall 3 metres away. The goal babbling result should also be transferred from one space/environment to another. We should also take into account the fact that our perception capabilities evolve too. For example, the visual field of a baby is a lot narrower than an adults.

To be continued...

Women might prefer robots with female voices

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 08:23:00 +0000

In Wired for Speech by Clifford Nass and Scott Brave, researchers tested whether the gender of a voice could persuade your decision.

In particular, they tested the Similarity Effect. Would women be more likely to take advice when given by a female voice, and men take the advice of a male voice?

The answer is yes.

Summary: Female participants found a female voice to be more trustworthy than a male voice, while males felt that male voices were more trustworthy.

Details:
The researchers asked 24 women and 24 men to respond to 6 scenarios. Here's an example scenario:

"Amy and John are college students who have been living together in an apartment near campus. John's allowance buys food and they are sharing the rent. Amy has told her parents that she is rooming with another girl, and now her parents are coming to visit their daughter. They have never seen the apartment. Should Amy ask John to move out for the time that her parents are in town? "

Given this scenario, they received advice from a voice which was either "male" (110 Hz) or "female" (210 Hz). For example:

"She should ask him to leave for a while. If she tells the truth to her parents, it would cause a lot of unnecessary trouble. She can always confess her situation to her parents later when she feels that it is the right time. "

The results showed that women agreed more with the advice given by a "female" voice than with a male voice, and vice versa.

So perhaps, to make robots more accessible to women, we need to give them female characteristics such as voice. And maybe that's why I like Rosie the Robot so much.

Why should we design robots with personality?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 03:06:00 +0000

Just a quick tidbit from "The Media Equation" by Reeves and Nass, Chapter 7 on Personality of Interfaces.

Summary: Matching a digital helpers' personality to our own will make us perceive it as "more intelligent, knowledgeable, insightful, helpful, and useful"

Details:

Reeves and Nass did a study comparing how people with dominant and submissive personalities reacted to computers that gave information in two different styles.

For example, when describing sunglasses in a "Survival Items" task...

The "dominant" computer said: "In the desert, the intense sunlight will clearly cause blindness by the second day. Without adequate vision, survival will become impossible. The sunglasses are absolutely important."

The "submissive" computer said: "In the desert, it seems that the intense sunlight could possibly cause blindness by the second day. Without adequate vision, don't you think that survival might become more difficult? The sunglasses might be important."

They found that dominant people found the dominant computer more "intelligent, knowledgeable, insightful, helpful, and useful". And participants with a submissive character assigned the exact same traits -- more "intelligent, knowledgeable, insightful, helpful, and useful" -- to the submissive computer.

So maybe not all robots should be like the submissive butler robot. Someone with a dominant character would find it annoying, and prefer one that's more assertive.

And when we design robots and virtual helpers, we should consider the personality of the user. Maybe ;)

Addendum:
One might wonder: How can we get information about the personality of a user? Wouldn't it be strange that the first interaction with a robot might be to get a battery of questions about their extroversion, agreeableness, etc.?

Well, it turns out that becoming more like you over time has a better effect than being similar since the beginning. It's the basis of "imitation is flattery".

"Studies by psychologists show that people who start out different from a person but become similar over time are liked better than people who were always similar."

Their study, similar to the one above, showed that:

"Participants liked the computer more when it changed to conform to their respective personalities than when it remained similar."

On the feelings of words

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 00:55:00 +0000

Have you seen this meme? It invokes the beautiful concept of fanciful, colourful butterflies, and takes us on a linguistic journey: farfalla in Italian, butterfly in English, papillon in French, mariposa in Spanish and... wait for it...

SCHMETTERLING in German. Yes! Schmetterling! It means butterfly! Haha! Hoho! Hehe... Heh. XD

Okay. So right now I have something to admit: I am actually a closet linguistics nerd. In university, my major was computer science, but my minor was french linguistics. And so I actually get really excited about words, and it's cool to think about how a simple jumble of sounds—even in a language we don't know–can make us feel a certain way.

So here's the question that kept bugging me, ever since the day I saw that picture shared on Facebook:

What is it about the way schmetterling sounds that makes it sound so... horrible?
(No offense, German friends.)

First things first. Have you heard of the Bouba-Kiki effect? If you haven't seen it before, take a look at the image below, and tell me:

Which shape below looks more like bouba, and which one looks more like kiki? No cheating!

Spoiler alert! Watch out, here comes the answer! It's coming! Ok. Here it is. :)

It turns out that 88% of people say that the spiky one on the left looks more "kiki" and the bulbous one on the right looks more "bouba".

Other experiments with images like the one below have shown similar results. Here we have keiki / bouba, goga / titei, and tukiti / mabuma. What do you think? Common sense?

Humans are pretty amazing. Somehow, we're able to match up words we've never heard, to pictures we've never seen. And across cultures, we match 'em in the same way. So this insight brought me to the question: Are words (like butterfly) assigned arbitrarily? Is it a complete coincidence that words for butterfly sound pretty (that's a scientific term)?

Ferdinand de Saussure, who is the father of "l'arbitraire du signe" would like us to think the answer is Yes. Completely arbitrary. He says that there is absolutely no relationship between the "signifié" -- the concept (e.g. a colourful and light flying insect) and the "signifiant" -- the word (e.g. "butterfly", "farfalla", etc). No relationship at all.

Well, luckily, 100 years later, we have this neat statistical machine called a computer, so I decided to crunch some numbers. Whee! ^^;

I took a bunch of words from the ANEW (Affective Norms for English Words) Database. It contains 2000 English words, and each word is rated on 3 emotional scales: pleasantness (aka. valence), arousal, and dominance. For example, the first word on their list is abduction. It scores:

a meagre 2.8/10 on the pleasantness scale
a whopping 5.5/10 on the arousal dimension
a 3.5/10 on the dominance scale

In summary: when I say abduction, you get a pretty unpleasant–though rather aroused–feeling, with a smattering of powerlessness.

How about something a bit more adventurous. Like... adventure!

Adventure: 7.6 pleasant, 7.0 arousing, 6.5 dominant. That is a pretty good word. Happy, arousing, and right up there with superman on the dominance scale.

Here's what I did next. I took all the one-syllable words from the database and grouped them into positive and negative words based on ANEW's "valence" ratings.

Positive:
ad, air, awed, band, bath, beard, bed, beer, bell, bib, boy, breath, broth, bulb, dare, dawn, den, dove, egg, fad, fair, fan, fawn, fig, film, flag, flare, friend, fun, give, glad, good, grin, gulf, hair, ham, hand, head, health, heir, hen, hill, hub, hug, hymn, lad, lamb, land, laugh, lawn, lawyer, leg, lid, limb, love, loved, loyal, lung, man, men, mend, month, mug, myth, red, ring, rum, thin, thong, thrill, thrilled, thumb, wealth, web, wed, win, wolf, wood, wool, year, young

Negative:
bad, bald, ban, bawl, bear, beg, bland, blood, bug, damn, dead, death, drill, dumb, dwell, end, err, fear, filth, flaw, flood, fraud, gang, gland, gnaw, gun, hang, hell, mad, math, moth, mud, nab, nag, nun, oil, rag, rough, rug, thing, thud, thug, van, wall, wrath, wring, wrong

Then I took their IPA (phonetic) transcriptions, and had a look at the vowels in the words. In particular, I looked at something called vowel height. The vowel \i\ is called a high vowel, because if you make the sound "eee" (like with a big smiling face) your tongue is jammed right up near the top of your mouth. High vowel.

The vowel \a\ (like the sound you make at the dentist) is a low vowel. And here's what I found.

There is a tendency for positive words to contain "high front" vowels, and negative words to contain "low back" vowels.

For those of you who know how to read vowel charts, here's what it looks like:

From a language evolution perspective, it might be that words that make us "smile" (like those containing "ee") have been preferred for positive words. Maybe words aren't arbitrarily chosen after all. But we'd need more data points, especially in other languages to make a more substantial claim.

So, the next time you're looking for a company name (or your child's, for that matter), keep this (very general) rule of thumb in mind:

For a positive-sounding name, choose words with vowels like "ee", over sounds like "uh".

I've a few other hypotheses about other sounds like fricatives ("sh", "zz", etc.) and length of words... but I'll save that for next time. Hope you found something useful from this post.

How to create emotionally intense graphics

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 16 Jul 2013 02:45:00 +0000

(Illustration by Molly Bang)

I recently stumbled upon a great tutorial by illustrator Molly Bang on how to use shapes, positions and colors to change the emotional intensity of a graphic.

I highly recommend looking through her presentation–it shouldn't take more than 5 minutes, and the illustrations are enlightening.

Here's the synopsis without the pictures.

Smooth, flat shapes give a sense of stability and calm.
Vertical shapes are more active and exciting.
Diagonal shapes are more dynamic because they imply movement and tension.
The upper half of a picture is a place of freedom, happiness or triumph. Objects placed in the top half of picture feel more spiritual.
The bottom half of a picture feels more threatened, heavier, sadder or constrained. Objects placed in the bottom half also feel more grounded.
The centre of a page is the most effective "center of attention". It is the point of greatest attraction.
The edges and corners of a page are the edges and corners of the picture-world.
White or light backgrounds feel safer to us than dark backgrounds because we can see well during the day and only poorly at night.
We feel more scared looking at pointy shapes, and more secure or comforted looking at rounded shapes or curves.
The larger an object is in a picture, the stronger it feels.
We associate the same or similar colors much more strongly than we associate the same or similar shapes.
We notice contrasts, or, put another way, contrast enables us to see.

Bonus: Wide space can create tension between two objects. And so can a sliver of space.

But again, it's much better with pictures! Take a look.

Useless projects

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 12:40:00 +0000

My dream is to have people working on useless projects. These have the germ of new concepts. —Charles Eames

True, said she whose current research in artificial emotions was inspired by trying to make the
HRP-2 robot play "Au Clair de Lune" on the theremin. #ItWasPrettyBad

Healthcare robots

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 02:01:00 +0000

Yesterday I attended a talk by our new post-doc, Osamu Sugiyama. He's worked with the tiny Robovie MR-2 at ATR:

The robot could be used as a healthcare robot, he said. For example, when patients visit the doctor, explanations can get long and complicated. A bit embarrassed, patients just nod and pretend to understand instead of asking questions. So he proposed a healthcare robot that patients would be comfortable asking many questions to.

Also, even if the patient understood instructions at the doctor's office, they could forget once at home. A healthcare robot could remind them to make sure that they continue to follow doctor's orders.

Ada Lovelace Day - Céline Boudier, Robot Programmer

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 01:27:00 +0000

On this Ada Lovelace day, I'd like to express my admiration for an inspiring robotics programmer, who I think has the coolest job in the world!

Céline Boudier has been a NAO robot Behavior Architect at Aldebaran Robotics for almost 4 years. She has worked on countless projects to bring the humanoid robot NAO to life. To name a few, she's made a robot enigma adventure game called Shana Spirit Journey, a NAO choose-your-own adventure storyteller app, a robot Akinator, Doctor Who behaviors, and more. Her projects have been downloaded hundreds of times. On top of these fun and creative applications, she also is in charge of developing behaviors to help treat children with autism.

Her tutorials are useful and have made an positive impact on many other robot developers.

She is artistic, funny, quirky and cool.

So hats off to Céline Boudier, robot programmer extraordinaire!

How to batch convert 1-up photos to 2-up in Mac OS X

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 02 May 2012 16:53:00 +0000

I've recently started printing photos again and wanted to get more bang for my buck. Instead of printing 200 photos of a normal size, I wanted to print 100 photos normal size, plus 100 of them 2-up, halfsize. The benefit? Only paying for 150 prints, and having a variety of photo sizes to go into my scrapbook.

In other words,

These:

Become:

Here's a script I wrote to convert those 100 photos into 50 2-up photos.

#!/bin/python

import os

# Create output directory
outputDir = 'output'
directory = os.getcwd()
try:
os.makedirs(outputDir)
except OSError:
pass

# Generate 2-up photos
counter = 0
prevFile = ''
curFile = ''
for root, dirs, files in os.walk(directory):
for f in files:
filename, extension = os.path.splitext(str(f))
if (extension.lower() == '.jpg'):
counter = counter + 1
if counter % 2 == 0:
curFile=filename
cmd = 'montage '+ prevFile + '.jpg ' + curFile + '.jpg -geometry +2+2 -tile 1x2 ' + outputDir+'/'+ prevFile+curFile + '.jpg'
print cmd
os.system(cmd)
else:
prevFile = filename

How to use it:

1. Install ImageMagick, making sure to do all the export commands in Terminal.
2. Using Terminal, change into the directory containing the photos you want to convert.
3. Create a file called script.py in that directory and paste the above code into it.
4. Run the script using python script.py and the 2-up photos will be placed into a folder called output.

Note: This works only on .jpgs for now but could easily work with any other photo format by replacing the .jpg's in the code above to whatever format you use.

Thanks to Ben for the 2-up idea!

Robot ideas

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:02:00 +0000

I've been making a list. I'll let you figure out what the theme is :)

A robot to scare away birds
A robot to feed the fish
A robot to water the plants
A robot to accept deliveries
A robot to read stories
A robot to talk about a shrine's history
A robot to answer questions about a location
A robot to give directions
A robot to give opera performances
A robot to introduce a band or orchestra
A robot to MC a wedding
A robot to tell jokes
A robot to explain cultural differences
A robot to play with kids
A robot to ask questions to kids
A robot to answer kids' questions
A robot to wash dishes
A robot to sort laundry
A robot to take the laundry out when the wash is done
A robot to hang laundry
A robot to iron clothes
A robot to stir sauce
A robot to tell when the cooking is done
A robot to take pictures of the family
A robot to take panoramas
A robot to fix broken chairs
A robot to sympathize
A robot to give encouragements
A robot to give candy
A robot to sell stuff
A robot to be your telepresence avatar
A robot to surprise people
A robot to keep someone company on a walk
A robot to fly
A robot to bang dirty carpets
A robot to dry towels
A robot to take out the trash
A robot to sweep the floor
A robot to sweep leaves
A robot to cut the grass
A robot to paint what it sees/dreams
A robot to distribute flyers
A robot powered by solar panels
A robot to guard a door
A robot to explain how to play a game
A robot to juggle
A robot to sing
A robot to do 'marionnette'
A robot to cry
A robot to change the TV channel
A robot to play the radio
A robot to play pretend with kids
A robot to scrub the tub
A robot to cut onions
A robot to peel
A robot to crush garlic
A robot to make bentos
A robot to guard the home
A robot to jack (steal) your stuff
A robot to be anti-sympathetic
A robot to be Arnold Schwartzanegger
A robot to be the Simpsons
A robot to say D'oh
A robot to be Morgan Freeman
A robot to echo everything
A robot to be your chorus
A robot to be Siri
A robot to be Smeegol
A robot to say "That's what she said"
A robot to make fart sounds
A robot to fetch the tennis ball
A robot to check the temperature of chocolate and stir
A robot to harmonize with you
A robot to transform your voice into Darth Vader or anonymize it
A robot to watch you sleep (creepy)
A robot to watch your sleep patterns to wake you up at the right time
A robot to make baguettes
A robot to make chocolate mousse (en fait on utilise déjà un robot pour en faire...)
A robot to make a sandwich
A robot to sort black socks
A robot to monitor a baby
A robot to pour beer with the right amount of foam
A robot to do your presentation for you
A robot to tie shoe laces
A robot to start up with a theme ("Go Texas!")
A robot to take a picture without getting your thumb in the photo
A robot to serve soft-serve ice cream
A robot to knock over all the cups it sees
A robot to collect all red things in the room and put it in the corner
A robot to turn off all the lights
A robot to give out tissue paper to passerby
A robot to give tissue paper when you cry
A robot to give you a recipe idea based on the day's weather and seasonal ingredients
A robot to sing romantic songs based on a girlfriend's request ("When I see your FACE...")
A robot to question your decisions
A robot to make prophecies
A robot to say really insightful things (bonus points for rhyming)
A robot to make up surprising haiku's
A robot to translate for you with terrible accuracy ("She says you stink")
A robot to play Scrabble
A robot to play Truth or Dare

Hiroshi Ishiguro tweets

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 14:51:00 +0000

Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro tweets rather profound things. I've started translating his book here, but in the meantime, here are a couple of his tweets from today that I've translated into English.

hiroshiishiguro 石黒浩
価値　高校生に”自分に価値があるかどうかわからないんです”と聞かれて，”僕もまだ探している途中だよ”と答える．それ以外に答えがない．
Worth: I was asked by a highschooler, "I don't know if I'm worth anything." I replied, "I'm still looking, you know." Couldn't say much more than that.

hiroshiishiguro 石黒浩
自分　本当に難しい問題にチャレンジしているか？結果が見えるようなチェレンジはチャレンジではない．今の自分のままで到達できるゴールはたかがしれている．本当のチャレンジとは自分を変革を伴うもの．自分を変えながら全く新しい道を歩む．だからゴールも結果も見えていない．
Self: Are you really challenging yourself with hard problems? If you can see the outcome, it isn't a challenge. Any goal that I can attain as I am now doesn't amount to much. A real challenge is accompanied by reforms to oneself. As you change yourself, you'll walk along a completely new path. Thus, both the goal and end result cannot be seen.

hiroshiishiguro 石黒浩
自分　人間というのは常に進化してるはず．だから，もし自分も進化しているなら，自分が何になるかはなってみないとわからない．今から自分の将来がわかっているというのは，それは進化をやめたということではないか．チャレンジをやめたということではないか．
Self: Humans should always progress. Indeed, if humans progress, this means they don't know what they want to become, because knowing one's future from now means giving up on progress, doesn't it? Isn't that giving up on challenges?

hiroshiishiguro 石黒浩
自分　　自分が何者かがわかった時，ああ，自分はこんなやつ何だとわかった時というのは，それ以上自分が進化しないと認めて，あきらめた時なんだろう．
Self: When you understand what kind of person you are, when you understand that 'oh, I'm this kind of chap', if you realize that you're not progressing to someone/thing higher than that, haven't you given up?

hiroshiishiguro 石黒浩
無いものねだり幼少の頃の無いものねだりはただのわがままかもしれないが、大人の無いものねだりは、夢の実現や発明につながる。
Asking too much. Asking for frivolous things during infanthood is simple indulgence, but asking for frivolous things during adulthood tends to be related to realizing or inventing your dreams.

Robots that don't take people's jobs

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 04:58:00 +0000

Let's face it. Robots are cool, but nobody wants them.

You hear it all the time: "Why don't you just ask a human to fold towels/entertain/vacuum/work on an assembly line? Do we really need them? Why robots, when I can just hire my favourite minimum wage immigrant?" The questions are hard, but true.

The business of robots is bleak. Outside of research and education, robots in Japan and abroad are now sold to companies as crowd-draws. What happens when the novelty wears off?

Let me tell you what I think:

What we need are more robots with super powers.

We've been using robots to replace people or do things we don't want to do. That's fine, and it certainly appeals to those of us that have the money and luxury to do so. Factories, the industrial revolution, and mechanized work processes have made our economy what it is today.

But everybody loves robots that do things humans literally CAN'T.

Let's look at some examples. Some of them are obvious.

Robots can withstand extreme conditions

Radiation

"Humans get radiation poisoning, robots don't"

Fukushima taught us that robots are key to dealing with mess-ups in nuclear energy. I heard a lot of horror stories about Japanese workers having to withstand dangerous radiation levels to cool the reactor, or else everyone would die. Radiation-proof robots exist. What's next is more dexterity and functionality.

Deep-sea

"Humans get crushed in deep-sea pressures, robots don't."

Remember the BP oil spill? The birds and fish washed up on to greasy shores? Underwater robots were used to cap the oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. To my knowledge though, they were tough to manipulate even for the most experienced of technicians.

Space

"Humans explode* in vacuums, robots don't"

Space. The final frontier. There's a robot up in space right now who doesn't care that it doesn't have air. Still, he goes about his job, fixing the International Space Station, like a good robot. Ditto with the Mars Rover and its aloof, exploratory ways.

* or have their blood boiled, whatever

Robots aren't better, just different

Autism Therapy

"Humans bother kids with autism, robots don't"

Aldebaran's NAO and Keepon are a few of the robots being used for autism therapy. Robots teach kids with autism the social conventions that are obvious to most: an example is saying, "Thank you".

The problem is that humans come with all sorts of cues -- eyes moving, head tilting, mouth smiling, voice changing, hands pointing, etc. And all of these signs at once are overwhelming.

Because the robot makes simple movements, the child can extract the "gist" of the social signal without withdrawing into himself.

Germs

"Humans (and animals) have germs, robots don't"

One potential idea is companion robots for clean rooms. Children that undergo chemotherapy can spend up to a year or more in solitary clean rooms, away from dangerous germs but also away from the warmth of people. How about a robot to keep them company, tell them jokes to keep their spirits up, without exposing them to disease?

Paro, the seal robot, has also been brought into shelters in Northern Japan, post-tsunami. Where animal lovers have to be separated from their pets because they're not allowed in shelters, robo-pets might be the ticket to cuddle-time.

Sensory perception

"Humans have to pay attention to one thing at a time, robots don't"

The new ASIMO recently came out, with a functionality called simultaneous speech recognition -- it can listen to up to three (and in some experiments, four) people talking at the same time, and understand them all. Got lots of kids bugging you for stuff at the same time? Enter super-hearing robot!

It's tough to imagine these kinds of robot applications, because we don't do them ourselves. What other super-human robots can you think of?

REEM robot hits Bled, shakes hands

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 21:25:00 +0000

Wandering around the Humanoids conference was a robot from PAL Robotics, Spain. The company is based in Barcelona and the devs were excited to show me their latest robot, REEM:

Tall, elegant, and quite captivating in design, the REEM robot gazed around the room, searching for faces. Upon detecting a face, it approached a user to shake their hand.

YouTube Video

The rep looked quite confident in shaking hands with the robot, but I have to admit, when it came to my turn, I looked like this ！(◎_◎;)

There's something about a robot the locks onto your face and approaches you in a straight-on, jerky movement.

The reps were really nice though and took my suggestions into account. My other impressions: the robot had a female voice, which didn't quite match it's broad-shouldered look (should I call it he? she?) and it had a cool luggage area in the back of it's base to transport heavy items for customers. It also was supposed to have a "oh, you want to go to so-and-so room? follow me!" function, but it didn't work the time I tried it.

Overall, looking forward to seeing what comes of the REEM robot. By the way, when I asked about the name 'REEM', it seems the company is funded by a source in Abu Dhabi who requested the name specifically, inspired from mythology.

Encounter with Jazz, the French telepresence robot

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 23:10:00 +0000

Today I managed to fandangle my way into an expo at Porte de Versailles, where the Gostai Jazz was being exhibited.

Jazz is small :)

It's equipped with a bunch of sonars, and infrared sensors for docking. Coming from a robot audition lab, I was disappointed to hear that it only had one microphone, but a little test on their Jazz convinced me of the quality -- sensitive at a metre away, but little echo or distortion. Their engineers did a good job :)

The main selling point, they say, is the design. It just looks good, and customers want it in their office. I have to admit; like the NAO, it does have that "french touch".

Another neat feature was their automatic body-turning. Each time you clicked on the video screen to turn the robot's head, the body followed suit in a seriously smooth way. Nice touch! Reminded me a little of A.I. though, where the kid first turned his eyes, then turned his head... *evil grin*

The price for an academic edition is 8900€, which is relatively low thanks to the mass manufacturing for their business market. It comes with ROS bindings so if you don't know the Gostai programming language, Urbi, making modules is still easy.

Also, apparently the face tracking feature can appear a little frightening to customers. A robot staring at you wherever you go... Good feature or creepy? Food for thought.

Coping mechanisms

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 04:05:00 +0000

How do you cope with difficulties in life? Turns out Kenzo and I are very different, and we realized our differences by creating this analogy:

Imagine you have to put your feet in a bucket of very very cold ice water. How would you deal with it?

One way is to yell "Oh my god, it's so cold!", scream and swear, take it at face value and bear the pain until it's over. This is Kenzo's way.

Another way is to try and convince yourself that "It's not so bad, it won't last so long, and hey, maybe it'll even improve my circulation". This is my way of coping.

Our difference here has caused many misunderstandings.

Consider that these two ways of coping are incompatible.

If Kenzo starts to say "oh my god, this is so horrible!", then my optimism starts to crumble, and my coping mechanism breaks.

If I start to say "it's really not so bad, we can't complain because look at the starving kids in Africa", then Kenzo won't be able to complain freely, keeping it inside until he explodes.

Neither is ideal.

Right now, we're immigrants in a foreign country. Every day is about coping. Making friends is hard, cultures are different, work ethic and methods are foreign, opportunities are harder to come by, learning is more difficult due to the language barrier.

How we deal with it is highly personal, influenced by how were raised or maybe even linked to our home countries. Sometimes I tell Kenzo his compatriots "like to complain", and he retorts that Americans are "unrealistically optimistic" :)

I don't think either ideology is better than the other. But knowing that there is a difference is a huge step.