TED Talk: User-Friendly Robots

erco

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blLWpdGtYRQ&feature=watch-vrec

Interesting thoughts on empathy and emotion, but for the time being I'll stick with sharp jagged claws and flamethrowers.

mindrobots

You can always express empathy through your thoughtful application of sharp jagged teeth and thrown flames!! And nothing says "I don't like you" better than a sharp pinch and a wall of flames!!

Martin_H

She has a point about inadvertently appearing threatening. But the problem I see is liability, as any general purpose robot large enough to be useful, automatically poses a danger to humans in its vicinity. Industrial robots often have physical barriers to prevent accidents, but a domestic robot can't use that strategy. Willow Garage has a safety video for its PR2 robot that will make you never want to go near it.

I'm also skeptical about her demo with the bipedal robot at the end. I suspect that it was scripted and not actually translating.

I found the robot she was using. It's for sale, but only to researchers:

http://www.robotshop.com/aldebaran-robotics-nao-h25-humanoid-robot-academic-5.html

The CPU is a 1.6 gHz Atom, so at best it could run the Dragon speech software, but I doubt it could translate to Japanese.

NWCCTV

Martin_H wrote: »

http://www.robotshop.com/aldebaran-robotics-nao-h25-humanoid-robot-academic-5.html

The CPU is a 1.6 gHz Atom, so at best it could run the Dragon speech software, but I doubt it could translate to Japanese.

It says there is a second CPU located in the Torso and can interpret 8 languages. For the money I could hire an interpreter and a maid and get more done!!!!

erco

Hey, what do you want for $16,000?

Only $15,000 each in a five-pack.

Personally, I'm sick of seeing Nao on the cover of ROBOT magazine every other month. Gimme something I can use. Or afford.

Martin_H

NWCCTV wrote: »

It says there is a second CPU located in the Torso and can interpret 8 languages. For the money I could hire an interpreter and a maid and get more done!!!!

Hmm, I read that it could text to speech in eight languages, which isn't translation. Even with awesome voice recognition you need to translate text from one language to another. That's a hard problem. Since it has wifi built in, it might be calling for help from another computer.

erco

Machine translation is the term for computer translating from one language to another, and that is a very complicated process for a standalone computer. I''ve been using various versions of Globalink's Power Translator for many years. Systran is better and pricier. But Google translate or Babelfish is far better now, so best to keep it all web-enabled.

GordonMcComb

Though not an industrial robot per se (in the sense it doesn't assemble and weld cars), the new Baxter robot by Rod Brook's Rethink (http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/) is made to be used alongside humans. Baxter is not physically strong, but it turns out only a small segment of "industrial" robots need a lot of power. Its sensors and algorithms monitor the presence of weakling humans, and compensate accordingly.

erco

Jumping back to machine translation: one promising app I saw 3 years ago at CES incorporated digital imaging, OCR, and machine translation. According to its promise, you could take a picture of a scene (for instance, a busy downtown Tokyo street with stores & signs in Japanese), and it would overlay the english translation of each sign on top of the image.

That "universal image translator" could be quite handy, although no substitute for learning a bit of the language yourself. I've travelled a lot, and just knowing "please", "thank you", and "can you help me" can work miracles abroad. Most people are eager to help wayward Americans who show any bit of politeness and courtesy. Yes, even in Paris!

Matt Gilliland

erco - you mean like this?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2OfQdYrHRs

erco

Just like that! Back when I saw it, they promised umpteen different languages all in one.

Humanoido

It definitely raises an interesting question, i.e. by what process can a machine become empathic, if it can develop such abilities? Generally empathic humans have a command of great awareness, sometimes going beyond the conscious level, even thought to have abilities and results related to genetics and inheritance. When will machines reach the "fortune teller, future predicting" level?

Humanoido

Maybe you get what you pay for. I saw several humanoid NAOs in Shanghai China, all functioning randomly together. They appeared very "human" lifelike in motion and doing things that seemed very advanced. Numerous times they surprised spectators with their capabilities.

GordonMcComb

Humanoido wrote: »

Generally empathic humans have a command of great awareness ...

Empaths are still considered paranormal, and the stuff of Star Trek. Humans and some animals can have empathy, and it can be simulated in artificial intelligence. It's not true empathy because the machine does not have the same experience as the object it's being empathetic toward, but it can appear to onlookers that it is understanding your emotional state. It might learn to observe those states and predict things such as mild annoyance turning into red-faced anger, but as it lacks the primitive -- yet highly complex -- brain functions that create these emotions, it can only simulate a reaction.

On the other hand, machines at present are simply incapable of sympathy, which involves caring and numerous other highly evolved emotional states.

-- Gordon

MacTuxLin

As Gordon said, I don't see this "empathy" incorporated into machines any time soon as it is mathematically impossible. Even with the most advance machine learning algorithm, one cannot pin-point the area in which to identify to the robot to perform a certain reaction when "empathy" is encountered. Let's say a ML engineer were to look at this problem, he/she would categorize this as supervised learning. Maybe using a neural-network model since there are so many possible input parameters with logistic regression. If you run that through hundred thousands or even millions of training sets, you might not even capture a decent global optimal, lest local optimal. Even if you do, the algorithm might (very likely) to perform poorly with cross-validation & test sets....

Humanoido

Empathic Computing by Yang Cai, Carnegie Mellon University

MacTuxLin

I admire the works of such scientist & many others, particularly those I saw in Japan, as they help advance the well-being of us humans. It is a normal practise for ML scientists/engineers to generalize/place a problem thereby confine it to within a controlled environment in order for certain mathematical algorithm(s) to identify & solve. In this case (study), with its specific training sets, it was able attain 90% for correctly matching the Xcv & Xtest to its trained theta. However, will it perform well if that same algorithm is placed, say, in a totally different environment? IMHO, I think not. If this machine/robot was tasked to dish out $100 to anyone it "thinks" he/she matches y=1 or any value it perceives as true, will the really needy people get the cash? I'm not saying this study is not correct, obviously it served well in its given tasks & solves this very focused (healthcare) problem but it is definitely not able to attain the same kinds of empathy as say humans (or animal) do. Like I said, not at the moment, but maybe in the future....

GordonMcComb

Humanoido wrote: »

Empathic Computing by Yang Cai, Carnegie Mellon University

In current usage, particularly among New Age adherents, empathic is like telepathic; both are studies in the paranormal. Empathetic is the correct term to use to avoid confusing AI with some other sixth sense not clearly defined.

-- Gordon