According to the robotics community, it’s unlikely that any robot now on the market could hold your attention for more than 10 hours. (Actually, if you have a robot dog gathering dust on a closet shelf , you probably already know that.)
A new study, however, indicates that this threshold is poised to be broken—at least if the humans interacting with the machines are youngsters. Researchers found that a two-foot- (61-centimeter) tall metal man easily won over a classroom of tykes, aged 18 to 24 months, who intermittently spent time with it over a five-month period.
“Our results suggest that current robot technology is surprisingly close to achieving autonomous bonding and socialization with human toddlers for significant periods of time,” University of California, San Diego, researchers report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.
QRIO, a robot programmed with a slew of social functions, was placed in U.C. San Diego’s Early Childhood Education Center 45 times over the five-month observation period. For the first 27 sessions, the robot was allowed access to its full arsenal of programmed social behaviors. In addition, a controller could send commands to the humanoid, prompting it to wave, dance, sit, stand, etcetera (although there was a lag time between the prompt and when the robot made the movement).

photo credit: kaioshinThe tots began to increasingly interact with the robot and treat it more like a peer than an object during the first 11 sessions. The level of social activity increased dramatically when researchers added a new behavior to QRIO’s repertoire: If a child touched the humanoid on its head, it would make a giggling noise.
“The contingency coupled with the positive reaction of giggling made clear to the children that the robot was responsive to them and served often to initiate interaction episodes,” says study co-author Fumihide Tanaka, a researcher at U.C. San Diego’s Institute for Neural Computation and at Sony Intelligence Dynamics Laboratories, Inc.
For 15 sessions midway through the experiment, QRIO was programmed to repeatedly dance to the same song rather than interact with the kids. During these trials, the children became far less interested in the friendly automaton. For the final three sessions, however, QRIO could once again unleash its entire social arsenal.
Tanaka and his colleagues scored the quality of social interaction primarily based on where children touched the robot. A teddy bear and an inanimate toy robot named Robby accompanied QRIO during most of the observation period. The teddy bear was introduced first and prior to the introduction of the robots was very popular. But the stuffed animal was lost in the shuffle when QRIO and Robby came on the scene. Though the toddlers often manhandled Robby, they eventually began touching QRIO in a pattern similar to the way they touched one another—mostly on its arms and hands.
The only time they deviated from this behavior was when QRIO was programmed to giggle, at which point they frequently petted its face and head. Another indication that the little humans viewed robo-kid as a compeer was the way they reacted when QRIO ran out of juice and lay down as if to take a nap: Some of the children would try to wake and help it up, whereas others would cover it with a blanket.
“Our work suggests that touch integrated on the time-scale of a few minutes is a surprisingly effective index of social connectedness,” Tanaka says. “Something akin to this index may be used by the human brain to evaluate its own sense of social well-being.” He adds that social robots like QRIO could greatly enrich classrooms and assist teachers in early learning programs.

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By Nikhil Swaminathan
Courtesy Sciam

The thing observed in this article points out that we can use robots as information gathers we could gather world knowledge this way through the interactions with toddlers surely this will pay off over time? As the toddlers grow so will the program through its various manifestations and soon the component of world knowledge will increase. Now this is vital for the success of any program all humans come into this world with a brain their gene program decides that this is going to be different from a monkey and that it’s going to be along human lines in brain design space (which could be imagined as a huge room stretching off to infinity which is the sum representation of all the brains that can be made in the observable 3 dimensions, we are so similar that we occupy just a point in this infinite space, a frikkin’ point). Next, something wonderful happens, we are born and we interact, we cry, we laugh, we learn. This world knowledge form the basis of the instinctive “common sense” seen in humans we know water is wet because as a baby we touched it and the brain recorded the sensation and maybe our parents told us that you are getting wet, so that word was associated with that feeling.

We are basically bottom-up systems we learn and we interact and then learn some more. This positive feedback loop is something, I feel, we need to mimic in order to create machines that are somewhat intelligent. Let’s just throw the complex symbolic reasoning all the complex mathematics that are used to simulate creatures out of the window and let’s just create a child, a one day old child and let it learn. We could provide the foundation of this by putting in facilities like reasoning through bayesian systems, how the memory storage should be done, basically reverse engineer the brain, like kurzweil says, and put whatever is in it and let it loose. Then we wait and observe and let it interact to see what happens over time. Does the system grow? Is any knowledge gathered through sensory feedback used? So on and so forth, in this scenario we only maintain the basic mathematics, pattern recognition algorithms so and so forth but nothing else, will it work?

These days I get to hear about more incidents of rigging happening in school quizzes in Delhi. And it’s a really sad situation. Some of the best quizzes which were there (like the Agnel Talent Fest Quiz) are either no longer being held because of sponsorship issues, or their standards have declined drastically (like so many computer symposium quizzes - and I’m talking about ones like Dynamix). It seems that more of these quizzes are being leaked by the organizers to favor either the host school, or some friend they have in other schools. What these people don’t see is how it hurts their own reputation, the reputation of their quiz and their school.

Take for example the Tagore International School (Vasant Vihar) Commties Quiz 2008 held today. Prateek Vijayavargia was telling me how it was rigged to such an extent that his team’s correct answers were marked wrong (it was shown to them) and still the organizers refused to mend their error. All of this just to ensure that the host school made it to the final round. They manipulated to the extent of increasing the host school’s scores to make them qualify.

Events don’t earn respect by giving Lenovo laptops as prizes or Domino’s Pizza for lunch - they earn it by having a fair competition of all teams with high standards. At Code Wars 2007 for instance we went to great lengths to ensure that a tight lid was kept on all information. Even when our members were participating and I made the papers for some events, utmost care was taken to see that nothing leaked out. And these days we have events where the organizers are actually leaking out things to other schools too! This sort of malfeasance hurts everyone.

BTW, Prateek’s put up a few posts on some recent quizzes he’s gone to. You might want to check them out for some quiz papers.

PS (off topic) - ln (2π)…LMAO!!!

PPS - Prashanth wanted me to add here that he was not involved in Dynamix 2008, but he was involved in Dynamix 2007.

BarCamp Delhi 5 was held on 11th and 12th October 2008. My first BarCamp, and I can say that it was a truly exhilarating to be a part of this ‘unconference’.

By ‘unconference’, it means that the schedule of BarCamp is decided by the attendees on the day of the event itself. Everyone has an equal say in all matters related to organization (if they come forward, that is). Parallel presentations going on in multiple rooms - and anyone can give one.

The atmosphere’s really informal - you can ask questions in between a presentation (rather than waiting till the end, which is the usual case), walk out if you feel bored and want to attend something else. You can sit down and have a chat with anyone!

I’ve put up photos that I clicked at BarCamp Delhi 5 on Flickr, along with descriptive information about each. I thought that would make much more sense, than simply putting this stuff up here on my blog without ‘visual backup’. Initially my plan was to do live blogging from IIT Delhi (I expected that place to have Wi-Fi), but that wasn’t to be. (And I heard that was because of ‘possible national security issues of having unsecured WiFi networks’.)

Having organized events at the school on the ‘organized’ concept (and of, I guess, the same budget as BarCamp) it was interesting to see how with even such a seemingly ‘disorganized’ approach everything falls into place! Initial doubts that I had were rapidly dispelled as I got into the flow of BarCamp and enjoyed the sessions.

BarCamp is also a good place to socialize with like minded people. I never knew there were students as passionate about open source as Prateek Saxena and Pratul Kalia in Delhi! That, and the stories of the folks who came to BCD5 to talk about their startups. Most of them are people who are really passionate about technology and computers; yet, many of them ended up at nondescript colleges. Despite that fact they are pursuing their dreams of getting their creative ideas to achieve something big, and succeeding at it. Be it the CEO or the co-founder of venture or an employee at a big corporation, you can approach anyone and have free-ranging discussions with them on everything from colleges to company work cultures to open source philosophy.

Given the fact that so many (and varied) sessions were taking place I would suggest you to go through the Flickr link related to BCD5. If you want an even shorter story, a summary of the events follows.

Day 1

The allure of attending my first BarCamp did allow me to wake up before 9am. At 8am, in fact ( ). Prashanth Kanduri tagged along with me (I guess he was much more excited about going to IIT than BCD). Was apprehensive about being late, but when I reached there I was relieved to find that the sessions hadn’t started yet. (I did miss getting the BarCamp T-shirt though.) Registered, got my ID tag. There were sandwiches for the hungry hordes. The day started off with a presentation on the Making of BarCamp Delhi 5. After that, the (simultaneous) sessions started. That itself makes you call for ‘tough’ choices - on which sessions to attend. The first one I wanted to was one on ‘Lightning Quick Programming Using Python’. We were kept waiting by an IIT professor who was taking some extra class, so this session started late - and the rest of the schedule had to be adjusted for that. Once again, the concept of ‘unconference’ came to the rescue as the schedule isn’t something rigid. Followed by a session on ‘How to Survive When You Startup’ by Piyush Gupta, founder of RouteGuru and among the principal organizers of BCD5. Followed by a ‘Facebook Monetization’ case studies. The session would have been more interesting if the presenter had used examples of Facebook apps they themselves had created and monetized, but then they are into making them for clients. Nevertheless, some of the examples given were good ones on how Facebook can help you Get Big Fast. Lunch consisted of a vegetable thali, which (thankfully) was non-spicy (so I didn’t have to go hungry).

‘Round 2′ of Day 1 went on, the first session I attended in that being DCE alumnus Paras Chopra giving a talk on how he built a web application in six days (really impressive!). Aashish Solanki (of NetBramha Studios - I know, it’s a weird way of spelling ‘Brahma’, isn’t it?) gave a presentation on the importance of designing a corporate logo that reflects the values of a company. Then, Tarun Bhalla of simplyLearnt gave his views on the future of online education in India. This one was interesting as I myself have used a lot of online testing services, and getting to know what goes on behind the scenes. simplyLearnt, for instance, has definitely come up an innovative idea when it comes to online testing - that of directly using content from coaching institutes (their content providers) as Flash objects.

The last session of the day was Twilight Fairy talking about her experiences, which, IMO, was kinda lame (and I’m pretty certain that certain other members in the audience thought that too). The day wrapped up with a feedback session, a Twitter meetup that wasn’t to be (because there was no Wi-Fi), and BeerCamp.

Day 2

Reached early that day only to find that just a handful of people had come. So with this small group of people it was much easier to do introductions, which we did. The crowd didn’t grow much, so we decided to have a short interaction session in the morning which quickly turned into a discussion on blogging. At one point, the issue of corporate blogging came up and I mentioned iTasveer’s blog, which I admire (among corporate blogs) for its frankness. Imagine my surprise when I found that Animesh Jain, one of the core team members of iTasveer was sitting in the audience! Really, it’s a small world!

The schedule for day 2 was a bit less populated, so most of them were held in the Dogra Hall itself sequentially, rather than in parallel at multiple venues. The sessions started after the morning interaction, the first one being some marketing fluff by the Art of Living Foundation - again, really lame. Then came the star attraction amongst the presentations of the day - one by Fabian Rodriguez, a senior support guy with Canonical who gave a talk on the basics of Ubuntu. He was in India to deploy Ubuntu for a client across multiple systems (he’s here as a consultant), and was planning to go to see the Taj Mahal, but Pratul convinced him to come to BarCamp. For those who think that open source isn’t a path for making money, sample this - Fabian worked (till 2003) as an IT administrator for Windows-based setups; and after switching to work for Canonical, he earns three times more than what he did earlier. His job description consists mostly of consulting business organizations who want to deploy Ubuntu and oversee training of employees.

The presentation on Ubuntu had quite a few people interested, but I really don’t think it will translate into something concrete. My impression (formed over the years) is that most people’s response to Linux is a bit like AIDS: they’ve heard about it, given an opportunity (like a seminar) would want to know more about it, but at the end of the day they don’t want to have it. I spent some time explaining a lot of stuff about Ubuntu to Ritesh Goel of technolabs.in and Srajan too. Much like an impromptu parallel BCD5 session!

Prateek and Pratul were organizing a Hackathon after that, which they did. I saw that quite a few IIT guys had turned up there, thinking that it was about breaking into email accounts and stuff. So this is what IIT folks think hacking is. Consider the fact that it was a class 12 commerce student and an IP University college fresher who were conducting the event.

Lunch on day 2 was pizza from Domino’s. The organizers could afford that because far lesser number of people had turned up. Reasonably fresh pizzas. Food at BCD5 gets a thumbs up. Post-lunch sessions consisted of talks mostly about the experiences of different people who started up their own companies. The day’s events wrapped up early, but I stayed back for quite some time chatting with the other people there and helping a bit in packing up. I learned a lot. A lot. Definitely going for the next BarCamp.

Update: There are some more picture’s that you can view here on SlideShare, put up by the product manager of SlideShare (Amit Ranjan) himself!