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?

The last few days have been very monotonous and except for me nearly fainting on the porch nothing exciting has happened in my life, I am spending most of my days reading history, trying not to think that I will have to memorise all that nonsense and trying not to let my mind wander to greener pastures. Further I am getting this ominous sense of doom that the Apollo 13 astronauts must have felt when they must have seen all that oxygen being leaked out into the dark recesses of space (yes I have gone completely bonkers, finally). I am not really worried about marks or anything like that but no matter how hard I try my subconscious keeps on sending reminders that if I don’t start now I will be definitely messed up after 7th January. At times you just can’t reason with yourself, can you?

On Christmas I asked and received 2 books (my parents refused to buy more as it would keep me neatly engaged for a month until I had read and re-read them to my pleasure) from Arthur C. Clarke which I bought after spending 3 hours in the bookstore juggling around my “Final Selection” of books that are to be bought as a short term anti boredom measures these were:

• Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dwakins
• The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins
• 2061 by Sir Arthur
• The Hammer of God by Sir Arthur
• The Letters of R.P. Feynman by someone I can’t remember
• The Pleasure of Finding Things Out By the Big F
• Surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman by the Big F (I have it as an ebook, I want to read it during power cuts too, you know)
• What’s your Dangerous Idea? by some guy I can’t recall
• Atom by Lawrence Krauss (I like Krauss - he has a really good sense of humour)
• On the Shoulder of Giants by Stephen
• Prelude to the Foundation by Isaac Asimov (can’t get enough of these)
• Programming the Universe by another guy I can’t remember, hey I am not some book catalogue. (I liked the writing style)
• Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (I am always fascinated by this one but budget limitations prove to be quite a party spoiler)
• An Asimov gold collection

Out of these due to sheer desperation and much to my mother’s amusement I chose The Hammer of God and 2061. This neatly served as an active boredom deterrent for roughly 4 hours and after that, there were none.

Yesterday after getting over what I call Christmas shock, I tried to climb a tree in the morning and succeeded, only to find mom standing at the bottom with a bemused expression and saying “….. I know you are desperate not to give the pre-boards but honey this isn’t the way to do it, try doing something more effective….”. While coming back I felt an acute sense of fatigue and darkness started to eat away my field of vision, I felt like I was blind, it was a horrible and unique experience, I literally collapsed on the front porch and dad rushed out and put me on the sofa and the rest of it is a blur now. My parents conjectured that it was acute dehydration due to the fact that my water bottle’s water level hadn’t moved an inch for 2 days (I don’t like the taste of the water at home so I drink only mineral water until we get a R.O unit, I survived on appy fizz). Anyway the ordeal was over and I slept for the whole day, which made me feel extremely lethargic today, I guess that’s just about it. See the moral of the story is not to run around dehydrated and especially not to climb trees during this state.

I was going to dedicate this post to Bhutto but I thought otherwise and for the first time I blogged only on my life (I try not to divulge my life on the Internet, but then I thought who cares?).

Daisy Bell is a song very close to my heart, it was composed by Henry Dacre in 1892 as an ode to the beauty of a real life “daisy”, Frances Evelyn Maynard. However this is not the event that makes it special for me. It was the first song ever to be sung by electronic speech synthesis in bell labs by John Kelly in 1962 on an IBM 704 computer and guess who visited this facility? Aurthur C. Clarke, who then used this very song in 2001 a space odyssey during HAL’s most famous deactivation. Then again, the whole point is that it opened up a whole new frontier (speech synthesis) which soon became mainstream after this pioneering stunt took place.

There are several ways of doing speech synthesis one of them is known as concatenative synthesis. Which is stringing together recorded speech from a huge speech and then playing it with an associated file with it’s keyword or the phones, phrase etc. which are being said in the sentence, the down side of this is that it doesn’t sound continuous unless one uses algorithms to level out the volume difference , which might occur between two clips or there might be a slightly different speaking style in which the human speaks between two clips. Thus if the glitches are taken care of it is one of the most convincing forms but then again this system uses a huge database for generating speech , now the implications are that it takes up space and computing power to access it so it can be inefficient for small scale implementation but then again there is miniaturization.

One could also use Diphones which are nothing but transition between two sounds or phones so you use these to create speech in a very rambling sort of way. Personally I like this method as it will use up less space and it will be in my opinion extremely convincing when we make it work like it should work, however the problem is that it’s pretty hard to do that…

The rest of them are in my opinion needlessly complex like formant synthesis

Formant synthesis does not use human speech samples at runtime. Instead, the synthesized speech output is created using an acoustic model. Parameters such as fundamental frequency, voicing, and noise levels are varied over time to create a waveform of artificial speech. This method is sometimes called rules-based synthesis; however, many concatenative systems also have rules-based components.

This doesn’t produce convincing speech in any case, possibly due to the fact that our models are not that thorough or however it currently it does have a few advantages but then again it’s needlessly complicated. Now the thing is that there exists every type of system one can think of but the main argument here is to make them seamless and reliable. It may be like early computer graphics given enough time and computational power we may finally reach HAL…