The Truth About Kenji, the Robot Programmed to Love In early 2009, news broke that an experimental Toshiba robot that had been “programmed to love” was malfunctioning. The story, paired with the above image of a half-Frankenstein, half- Asimo automaton running amok with a captive damsel-in-distress, graced some of the internet’s most-read tech blogs and news sites. Gizmodo, IGN, the Next Web, and others all ran stories about Kenji, the robot-turned-stalker that refused to stop hugging a terrified female intern. It was a slightly chilling and totally titillating narrative, and it played directly into our science fiction-fed imaginations—the ones still avidly populated by increasingly sentient and sure-to-short-circuit robots. Yet the robo tall tale continues to quietly circulate around the web four years later, masquerading as blogged truth. Word that Kenji the love-struck robot was still lurking around online was delivered directly to my inbox. But amongst the usual suspects was an item about a machine built to love. Right.
Series | Google AdWords 101 | Actual CPC vs Max CPC “How much do I have to pay, what does it cost, my keywords are HOW much?” These are all common questions we get when speaking to new AdWords advertisers getting ready to set up accounts. They have yet to understand that CPC (cost per click) is only one of many metrics used to determine account performance. But, it’s a big one so let’s look at it more carefully. Max CPC Your Max CPC (cost per click) is the maximum you are willing to spend for a click for a keyword or group of keywords. Actual CPC Determining how much you will actually pay for a click, in advance, is not really possible. However, we show you the following slide and example to help you understand how Actual CPC is calculated on the back end and just give you a better understanding of it visually. In this example, we have Scott, Alison and Jon. Many people may think that because of this, Jon wins the coveted 1st position in an Ad Auction . Actual CPC is determined by… The “Proof is in the Pudding”
Humans Show Empathy for Robots | Human-Robot Interactions From R2-D2 in "Star Wars" to Furby, robots can generate surprisingly humanlike feelings. Watching a robot being abused or cuddled has a similar effect on people to seeing those things done to a human, new research shows. Humans are increasingly exposed to robots in their daily lives, but little is known about how these lifelike machines influence human emotions. Feeling bad for bots In two new studies, researchers sought to measure how people responded to robots on an emotional and neurological level. Scientists assessed people's levels of physiological excitation after watching the videos by recording their skin conductance, a measure of how well the skin conducts electricity. The volunteers reported feeling more negative emotions while watching the robot being abused. In the second study, researchers use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to visualize brain activity in the participants as they watched videos of humans and robots interacting. Human-robot interactions
Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed Our minds set up many traps for us. Unless we’re aware of them, these traps can seriously hinder our ability to think rationally, leading us to bad reasoning and making stupid decisions. Features of our minds that are meant to help us may, eventually, get us into trouble. Here are the first 5 of the most harmful of these traps and how to avoid each one of them. 1. “Is the population of Turkey greater than 35 million? Lesson: Your starting point can heavily bias your thinking: initial impressions, ideas, estimates or data “anchor” subsequent thoughts. This trap is particularly dangerous as it’s deliberately used in many occasions, such as by experienced salesmen, who will show you a higher-priced item first, “anchoring” that price in your mind, for example. What can you do about it? Always view a problem from different perspectives. 2. In one experiment a group of people were randomly given one of two gifts — half received a decorated mug, the other half a large Swiss chocolate bar. 3. 4.
Automaton Astro Teller has an unusual way of starting a new project: He tries to kill it. Teller is the head of X, formerly called Google X, the advanced technology lab of Alphabet. At X’s headquarters not far from the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., Teller leads a group of engineers, inventors, and designers devoted to futuristic “moonshot” projects like self-driving cars, delivery drones, and Internet-beaming balloons. To turn their wild ideas into reality, Teller and his team have developed a unique approach. It starts with trying to prove that whatever it is that you’re trying to do can’t be done—in other words, trying to kill your own idea. As Teller explains, “Instead of saying, ‘What’s most fun to do about this or what’s easiest to do first?’ The ideas that survive get additional rounds of scrutiny, and only a tiny fraction eventually becomes official projects; the proposals that are found to have an Achilles’ heel are discarded, and Xers quickly move on to their next idea.
Brain Scans Show Humans Feel for Robots Star Wars’ R2-D2 shows that a robot—even one that looks more like a trash can than a person—can make people laugh and cry. Now, in research to be presented at the International Communication Association conference in London, scientists have shown that when the human brain witnesses love for or violence against a robot, it reacts in much the same way as if the robot were human. Engineers worldwide are developing robots to act as companions for people—for instance, to help the elderly at home or patients in hospitals. However, after the novelty of using a robot fades, people often feel less interested in using them. To learn more, social psychologist Astrid Rosenthal-von der Pütten, at the University of Duisburg-Essen, in Germany, and her colleagues had 14 volunteers watch videos as they scanned their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In other videos, experimenters acted violently toward the targets—for instance, strangling them with a rope.
IBM’s Watson Tries to Learn…Everything Steven Cherry: Hi, this is Steven Cherry for IEEE Spectrum’ s “Techwise Conversations.” Computers aren’t just getting better, they’re getting smarter. Sixteen years ago, a software program beat the reigning chess champion . Two years ago, IBM’s Watson software beat the world’s two best players in the television game show “Jeopardy!” Since then, Watson has been put to work learning something a lot less trivial—medical diagnosis. But IBM is also looking to the long term. My guest today is Jim Hendler . Jim, welcome to the podcast. Jim Hendler: Thanks very much, Steve. Steven Cherry: I called this an open-ended three-year charter to make Watson smarter. Jim Hendler: That’s pretty much correct. Steven Cherry: So your students and colleagues will tackle a wide variety of problems, but there’s one that interests you personally, and that’s the thousands and thousands of open data sets around the world. Jim Hendler: Yeah, so there’s issues to do with standards, but the real issue is semantics.
Do Kids Care If Their Robot Friend Gets Stuffed Into a Closet? "Please don't put me in the closet," cries the robot. Last week, we wrote about a study that looked at whether humans attribute moral accountability and emotions to robots. This week, we've got a study from the same group, the Human Interaction With Nature and Technological Systems Lab (HINTS) at the University of Washington, that takes a look at what kind of relationships children are likely to form with social robot platforms, and it involves forcing their new robot friend into a dark, lonely closet. The 90 children in this study were separated into three groups by age: 9 year olds, 12 year olds, and 15 year olds, with an equal mix of boys and girls. The core of the study was a 15-minute, very carefully structured "interaction session" between Robovie, a child, and several adult researchers. The session involves a game of "I Spy," a guessing game where Robovie gives the child verbal clues to help them locate objects around the room. Geez. "What then are these robots? [ HINTS Lab ]
Meet Nao: The first robot able to develop emotions and form a bond with humans By Daily Mail Reporter Updated: 11:52 GMT, 13 August 2010 The first robot capable of developing emotions and forming bonds with humans has been unveiled by scientists. Nao has been designed to mimic the emotional skills of a one-year-old child and is capable of forming bonds with people who treat it kindly. The robot has been developed to use the same types of expressive and behavioural cues that babies use to learn to interact socially and emotionally with others. It is able to detect human emotions by studying body-language and facial expressions and becomes better at reading someone's mood over time as it grows to 'know' the person. It is also able to remember its interactions with different people and memorise their faces. Nao have been created through modelling the early attachment process that human and chimpanzee infants undergo when they are very young. 'This behaviour is modelled on what a young child does,' said Dr Cañamero.
Love Robot Holds Female Lab Intern Prisoner The robot Kenji at Toshiba's Akimu Robotic Research Institute was programmed by Dr. Akito Takahashi and his team to emulate certain human emotions, including love. However, Kenji began to display surprising behavior. The robot held a young female intern within its lab enclosure for a few hours, until she was freed by senior staff members. “Despite our initial enthusiasm, it has become clear that Kenji’s impulses and behavior are not entirely rational or genuine,” conceded Dr. USC: Restoring Memory, Repairing Damaged Brains -- LOS ANGELES, June 17, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire Biomedical engineers analyze—and duplicate—the neural mechanism of learning in rats LOS ANGELES , June 17, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Scientists have developed a way to turn memories on and off—literally with the flip of a switch. (Photo: ) Using an electronic system that duplicates the neural signals associated with memory, they managed to replicate the brain function in rats associated with long-term learned behavior, even when the rats had been drugged to forget. "Flip the switch on, and the rats remember. Berger is the lead author of an article that will be published in the Journal of Neural Engineering . In the experiment, the researchers had rats learn a task, pressing one lever rather than another to receive a reward. "No hippocampus," says Berger, "no long-term memory, but still short-term memory." "The rats still showed that they knew 'when you press left first, then press right next time, and vice-versa,'" Berger said.
杉万俊夫 Toshio Sugiman｜理論的研究｜Beyond the Mind-in-a-Body Paradigm Progress in Asian Social Psychology (Volume 2) T. Sugiman, M. karasawa, J. H. Liu, and C. Beyond the Mind-in-a-Body Paradigm Toshio Sugiman (Kyoto University, Japan) Introduction for Part V: Social Representations Moscovici, who originated a series of social representations research, referred to a notion of a thinking society in 1984. In the theory of social representations, everything that appears for you, like a cup in front of you, an image you feel in your mind, and so on, is a social representation. Some might have a doubt about social representations theory or the social construction paradigm and say, ‘Is it possible to have realities in which the moon in the sky suddenly falls down or in which a newborn baby runs a hundred meters in ten seconds, if realities are constructed arbitrarily by a society or a human collectivity as social representations theory or the social construction paradigm insists?’ But, social psychology as it stands cannot occupy such a position. References
Researchers Replace Passwords With Mind-Reading Passthoughts Remembering the passwords for all your sites can get frustrating. There are only so many punctuation, number substitutes and uppercase variations you can recall, and writing them down for all to find is hardly an option. Thanks to researchers at the UC Berkeley School of Information, you may not need to type those pesky passwords in the future. By measuring brainwaves with biosensor technology, researchers are able to replace passwords with "passthoughts" for computer authentication. Other biometric authentication systems use fingerprint or retina scans for security, but they're often expensive and require extensive equipment. In a series of tests, participants completed seven different mental tasks with the device, including imagining their finger moving up and down and choosing a personalized secret. The key to passthoughts, researchers found, is finding a mental task that users won’t mind repeating on a daily basis. Would you replace your passwords with passthoughts?
How to Build a Device that Improves Our Neural Abilities The abilities to learn, remember, evaluate, and decide are central to who we are and how we live. Damage to or dysfunction of the brain circuitry that supports these functions can be devastating, leading to Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, PTSD, or many other disorders. Current treatments, which are drug-based or behavioral, have limited efficacy in treating these problems. There is a pressing need for something more effective. One promising approach is to build an interactive device to help the brain learn, remember, evaluate, and decide. Their ability to improve performance is impressive. New and complex experiences engage large numbers of neurons scattered across multiple brain regions. I believe the answer to be an alternative approach based on enhancing flows of information through the brain. Once information has been stored in the hippocampus, a different flow of information is required to create a long-lasting memory. Loren M.