The Summer School on Social Human-Robot Interaction is now in full swing! Great talks so far, and some really good hands-on sessions. Last night was a workshop given by Aardman Animations on building models with plasticine - brilliant fun, and a nice insight on how to give the illusion of life to inanimate objects, which is of course a goal of social robotics research!
...see #hrisummerschool on Twitter...
And in other news, I've finally started to update my Research Details page, on which I outline in a little more detail the general research themes I am interested in. Please wander along and have a look!
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
Monday, April 22, 2013
Summer School on Social Human-Robot Interaction
On the off-chance that there's anyone reading this who may be interested, but who hasn't heard this elsewhere (...), then I'd like to mention a research-oriented summer school on Social Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) that will take place this coming August at Cambridge University, U.K. from the the 26th to 30th of August 2013.
Organised primary under the purview of the project I am employed by (ALIZ-E), and also involving the Accompany project, the aim of the school is to provide both theoretical background and practical skills to support researchers in the area of Social HRI. In stating 'social' the emphasis is moved away from industrial robots (or robots in manufacturing/automation contexts), for which interaction with humans in also necessary, and towards the use of robots in contexts where those characteristics of human-human interaction are more important (for example, companion robots, education support, caring in hospital/home, etc).
The application process has started already, with the deadline for submitting applications on the 30th April. With support from the IEEE and EuCognition, there will be a limited number of scholarships available for participants.
There's a list of topics being covered now available on the conference website, with the programme yet to be finalised. A little taster though:
Organised primary under the purview of the project I am employed by (ALIZ-E), and also involving the Accompany project, the aim of the school is to provide both theoretical background and practical skills to support researchers in the area of Social HRI. In stating 'social' the emphasis is moved away from industrial robots (or robots in manufacturing/automation contexts), for which interaction with humans in also necessary, and towards the use of robots in contexts where those characteristics of human-human interaction are more important (for example, companion robots, education support, caring in hospital/home, etc).
The application process has started already, with the deadline for submitting applications on the 30th April. With support from the IEEE and EuCognition, there will be a limited number of scholarships available for participants.
There's a list of topics being covered now available on the conference website, with the programme yet to be finalised. A little taster though:
The summer school will have a wide-ranging programme of lectures, discussions and hands-on ateliers on topics such as social signal processing, robotics and autism, child-robot interaction, multi-modal communication, natural language interaction, smart environments, robot assisted therapy, interaction design for robots, tools and technologies, and ethics. The school is participants who seek background and hands-on experience in the interdisciplinary science and technology supporting social human-robot interaction.I'll be doing a little something on Cognitive Architecture for Social HRI at the school, and so emphasising aspects of cognitive processing and organisation for robot control and behaviour relevant (or at least of interest) to social interaction. Which is of course a fascinating subject that you would be foolish to miss :-p
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Robotics and Legal Responsibility
With robotic devices increasingly prevalent in 'real life', and the prospect of ever more autonomous robots, there is a need for legislation to be updated to reflect the changing conditions. An article I read on Wired a few days ago reminded of an EU project that started last year: RoboLaw, which has the aim of exploring how emerging robotics technologies influence and are affected by the law (see also this, which I've just come across). This issue is brought into sharper focus in the case of something going wrong, where the question of responsibility arises. For instance, there's been a lot going around in recent months on the autonomous car efforts of Google and others. If there were to be a crash, who would take the blame? Would it be the manufacturer in the obvious absence of driver error, or perhaps those responsible for road/signalling maintenance? Indeed, would the technically possible autonomy be scaled back to maintain direct human oversight in order to mitigate the potential legal minefield? While there have been some legislative attempts to address this, there clearly is a way to go.
Individual researchers actually working on the supporting technologies have increasingly considered the implications, and potential implications, of their own field of research, typically focusing on the ethics involved in the (proposed) applications. Indeed, a couple of years ago now, I wrote something on the consequences of my ongoing work on memory in the context of human-robot interaction, though my effort was more directed at the possible legal implications of memory system technologies than ethics. The paper considered the implications of new computational means of providing the function of memory (specifically the use of sub-symbolic networks). It specifically proposed that as a consequence of the details of the technologies potentially used, current privacy legislation may not be suitable to account for new generations of autonomous social robots.
In my view, this is a small example of a wider need to consider the actual technologies in (proposed) use when considering legislative requirements - hence a need for the scientific/engineering community to engage with the legislative process (and therefore vice versa). However, in order for this to be effected, I feel that it would be beneficial to have common perspective or approach on the part of the researchers, which even if not unified is at least coherent. With one of the main deliverables of the project intended to be a white paper recommending regulatory guidelines to European legislators, this project has the potential to help provide this.
Individual researchers actually working on the supporting technologies have increasingly considered the implications, and potential implications, of their own field of research, typically focusing on the ethics involved in the (proposed) applications. Indeed, a couple of years ago now, I wrote something on the consequences of my ongoing work on memory in the context of human-robot interaction, though my effort was more directed at the possible legal implications of memory system technologies than ethics. The paper considered the implications of new computational means of providing the function of memory (specifically the use of sub-symbolic networks). It specifically proposed that as a consequence of the details of the technologies potentially used, current privacy legislation may not be suitable to account for new generations of autonomous social robots.
In my view, this is a small example of a wider need to consider the actual technologies in (proposed) use when considering legislative requirements - hence a need for the scientific/engineering community to engage with the legislative process (and therefore vice versa). However, in order for this to be effected, I feel that it would be beneficial to have common perspective or approach on the part of the researchers, which even if not unified is at least coherent. With one of the main deliverables of the project intended to be a white paper recommending regulatory guidelines to European legislators, this project has the potential to help provide this.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Review of "How to Build a Bionic Man"
This was a Channel 4 documentary on a week or two ago (I believe it's still viewable for those based in the U.K.) - I wasn't going to write a review of it at first. But then today, I noticed that there was a review of it on the IEEE Robotics and Automation blog.
My first opinions of the documentary were unrelentingly poor. As a programme as a whole, I thought it was awful (the mostly inane voice-over commentary didn't help) - the thread that supposedly holds this together is the goal "...to create the worlds first bionic man, that can get off the slab and walk among us" (approx 1:10 minutes in). In terms of robotics it was dire: misleading, decidedly not state of the art, and poorly executed (as is typical for programmes such as this, it both over and understates the current state-of-the-art in robotics). As for 'building a bionic man', it was rather pathetic, an excuse to get in the dodgy sci-fi to make it more 'popular', and ending up with sensationalist nonsense. I can well imagine a director throughout in the background shouting "ham it up for the camera!" rather a lot...
However, the positive I did draw out of it (and this is what the IEEE blog post reminded me of) was that as a commentary on synthetic body parts, there is much of interest. The overview of the technologies both available and under development for the replacement of a whole host of limbs (in the news again recently) and internal organs was genuinely interesting, and quite well done. I thought the synthetic heart was particularly striking for instance.
The role of Bertolt Meyer was to add the personal touch to the tech-talk. For this, apart from the seemingly over-egged reaction to seeing a copy of his face on the resulting machine and the bit where he is pretending to talk to a plastic skull (though for all I know these were genuine reactions...), he was an ideal foil, being the user (possibly not the right phrase here) of a prosthetic hand himself. The snippets of interviews with the developers of the respective protheses were informative and realistic (i.e. didn't seem to be creatively edited in a way that detracted from the real technological advances made by focusing on the trivial or controversial).
It's a shame that the programme seems so poorly executed (and it is the programme I have a problem with), as there's lots of really great stuff that's been put together that doesn't, in my view, get the credit and clarity it deserves. And I can't imagine that the guys at Shadow Robot are particularly enamored at being portrayed as the stereotypical mad scientist loons confined to a basement, as they do genuinely great work (their hand is really quite impressive, and being used in a number of research endeavors around the world).
Sorry for somewhat rant-ish nature of that - I was possibly a little harsh in places, but as may be apparent, I don't think much of this documentary. I think that it mixes concepts from robotics, artificial intelligence and prosthetics research in a way that actually detracts from each, and is done from the perspective of entertainment under the guise of being informative.
My first opinions of the documentary were unrelentingly poor. As a programme as a whole, I thought it was awful (the mostly inane voice-over commentary didn't help) - the thread that supposedly holds this together is the goal "...to create the worlds first bionic man, that can get off the slab and walk among us" (approx 1:10 minutes in). In terms of robotics it was dire: misleading, decidedly not state of the art, and poorly executed (as is typical for programmes such as this, it both over and understates the current state-of-the-art in robotics). As for 'building a bionic man', it was rather pathetic, an excuse to get in the dodgy sci-fi to make it more 'popular', and ending up with sensationalist nonsense. I can well imagine a director throughout in the background shouting "ham it up for the camera!" rather a lot...
However, the positive I did draw out of it (and this is what the IEEE blog post reminded me of) was that as a commentary on synthetic body parts, there is much of interest. The overview of the technologies both available and under development for the replacement of a whole host of limbs (in the news again recently) and internal organs was genuinely interesting, and quite well done. I thought the synthetic heart was particularly striking for instance.
The role of Bertolt Meyer was to add the personal touch to the tech-talk. For this, apart from the seemingly over-egged reaction to seeing a copy of his face on the resulting machine and the bit where he is pretending to talk to a plastic skull (though for all I know these were genuine reactions...), he was an ideal foil, being the user (possibly not the right phrase here) of a prosthetic hand himself. The snippets of interviews with the developers of the respective protheses were informative and realistic (i.e. didn't seem to be creatively edited in a way that detracted from the real technological advances made by focusing on the trivial or controversial).
It's a shame that the programme seems so poorly executed (and it is the programme I have a problem with), as there's lots of really great stuff that's been put together that doesn't, in my view, get the credit and clarity it deserves. And I can't imagine that the guys at Shadow Robot are particularly enamored at being portrayed as the stereotypical mad scientist loons confined to a basement, as they do genuinely great work (their hand is really quite impressive, and being used in a number of research endeavors around the world).
Sorry for somewhat rant-ish nature of that - I was possibly a little harsh in places, but as may be apparent, I don't think much of this documentary. I think that it mixes concepts from robotics, artificial intelligence and prosthetics research in a way that actually detracts from each, and is done from the perspective of entertainment under the guise of being informative.
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