robot-alert!

Robots are learning lessons on "robotiquette" - how to behave socially - so they can mix better with humans.

By playing games, like pass-the-parcel, a University of Hertfordshire team is finding out how future robot companions should react in social situations.

The study's findings will eventually help humans develop a code of social behaviour in human-robot interaction. The work is part of the European Cogniron robotics project, and was on show at London's Science Museum.

Back to the future

"We are assuming a situation in which a useful human companion robot already exists," said Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn, project leader at Hertfordshire.

"Our mission is to look at how such a robot should be programmed to respect personal spaces of humans." The research also focuses on human perception of robots, including how they should look, and how a robot can learn new skills by imitating a human demonstrator.

"Without such studies, you will build robots which might not respect the fact that humans are individuals, have preferences and come from different cultural backgrounds," Professor Dautenhahn told BBC News Online. "And I want robots to treat humans as human beings, and not like other robots," she added.

Pass-the-parcel

In most situations, a companion robot will eventually have to deal not only with one person, but also with groups of people. To find out how they would react, the Hertfordshire Cogniron team taught one robot to play pass-the-parcel with children.

Showing off its skills at the Science Museum, the unnamed robot had to select, approach, and ask different children to pick up a parcel with a gift, moving it arm as a pointer and its camera as an eye. It even used speech to give instructions and play music.

However, according to researchers, it will still take many years to build a robot which would make full use of the "robotiquette" for human interaction. "If you think of a robot as a companion for the human being, you can think of 20 years into the future," concluded Professor Dautenhahn.

"It might take even longer because it is very, very hard to develop such a robot."

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George W. Bush's official site is now off limits to foreigners... if you go there by clicking the link below and you're located outside the US, you will get an 'access denied' message.

Is this a gesture of paranoia, saying something like "We know that every country outside the US is vehemently against a second George W Bush presidency, according to last week's polls, therefore we are blocking their access to our site in order to fend off possible cyber-attacks and heckling"?

No... according to the campaign it is a cost-saving measure... they don't want to pump out bandwidth to people who aren't voting in the election. This will presumably save them around £3,000... With the unimportant side effect of making them look like xenophobics of course... link

Trivia: When is something you dig up out of the ground 'treasure'? According to the guy on the radio, the definition is: more than 300 years old, and contains gold or silver.

This gives fear of the future a new meaning.

Tim Radford, science editor
Wednesday October 27, 2004
The Guardian

US scientists have taught a monkey to feed itself using a robotic arm and the power of thought. The experiment, revealed last night at a meeting of neuroscientists in San Diego, offers hope to people with spinal cord injuries.

A team from the University of Pittsburgh restrained the arms of a monkey and wired a neural prosthesis - a robot arm with a mobile shoulder, elbow and griping device - into its brain. The arm intercepted signals from electrodes attached to probes in the nerve cells of the motor cortex, the brain region that controls movement.

An algorithm devised at Pittsburgh interpreted the activity in the monkey's brain as the animal tried to move its own arm, and transmitted the signals to the robotic arm.

Four years ago a team from Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, used electrode brain implants to link a monkey to the internet and make it move a lever 600 miles away in Massachusetts.

In 1999, doctors in Tubingen in Germany, said they had helped two people with advanced motor neurone disease compose sentences on a computer just by thinking about moving their fingers.

But complex movements remained a challenge because of the number of brain cells involved. The Pittsburgh team tried to work out how the brain "knows" what it wants a hand to do. They developed an algorithm which acted like a polling system, taking a continuous tally of signals from sampled cells.

The team relied on the monkey to learn how to move the arm by trial and error. They placed food at various locations and the pinioned animal "thought" the movements that triggered the arm.

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They've finally come up with a 21st-century version of X-Ray Specs, those glasses they used to advertise in the backs of comics which supposedly let you see bones and stuff (and through people's clothes incidentally). It was invented, 'accidentally' mind you, in Japan.

A developer in Tokyo has created an add-on for Vodafone handsets that's meant to be used as a night filter to let people take pictures with their phones in the dark.

Unfortunately, the night vision camera has an unexpected side effect, according to Japanese developer Yamada Denshi. In the right circumstances, it allows users to see a lot more than they bargained for.

As well as taking snaps in the dark, the Yamada Denshi infrared filter apparently sees through people's clothes.

The problem arises because the filter uses the distribution of heat to create its pictures. When attached to a high-end camera, the filter can see though certain kinds of clothing and is reportedly particularly effective on dark bikinis.

The handset most often used with the filter--the V602-SH--is only available in Japan.

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This is a robot from Broklyn. His name is robot.

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Happy birthday, Hendreds school style.

Happy birthday to you
Squashed bananas in stew
You look like a monkey]
And you live in the zoo.

If anyone's wondering what Clarence's HiAce van looks like I think this is a good example.

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I've done a drawing for an upcoming ATTAC International calendar, commemorating the Haymarket martyrs. They were hanged for campaigning for an eight-hour workday - seems kind of ironic working freelancers' hours. Click here.