The device named “Spark” flew high above the man on stage with his hands waving in the direction of the flying object. In a demonstration of DJI’s newest drone, the audience marveled at the Coke can-sized device’s most compelling feature: gesture controls. Instead of a traditional remote control, this flying selfie machine follows hand movements across the sky. Gestures are the most innate language of mammals, and including robots in our primal movements means we have reached a new milestone of co-existence.

Madeline Gannon of Carnegie Mellon University is the designer of Mimus, a new gesture controlled robot featured in an art installation at The Design Museum in London, England. Gannon explained: “In developing Mimus, we found a way to use the robot’s body language as a medium for cultivating empathy between museum-goers and a piece of industrial machinery. Body language is a primitive yet fluid means of communication that can broadcast an innate understanding of the behaviors, kinematics and limitations of an unfamiliar machine.” Gannon wrote about her experiences recently in the design magazine Dezeen: “In a town like Pittsburgh, where crossing paths with a driverless car is now an everyday occurrence, there is still no way for a pedestrian to read the intentions of the vehicle…it is critical that we design more effective ways of interacting and communicating with them.”

So far, the biggest commercially deployed advances in human-robot interactions have been conversational agents by Amazon, Google and Apple. While natural language processing has broken new ground in artificial intelligence, the social science of its acceptability in our lives might be its biggest accomplishment. Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori described the danger of making computer generated voices too indistinguishable from humans as the “uncanny valley.” Mori cautioned inventors from building robots that are too human sounding (and possibly looking) as the result elicits negative emotions best described as “creepy” and “disturbing.”

Recently, many toys have embraced conversational agents as a way of building greater bonds and increasing the longevity of play with kids. Barbie’s digital speech scientist, Brian Langner of ToyTalk, detailed his experiences with crossing into the “Uncanny Valley” as: “Jarring is the way I would put it. When the machine gets some of those things correct, people tend to expect that it will get everything correct.”

Kate Darling of MIT’s Media Lab, whose research centers on human-robot interactions, suggested that “if you get the balance right, people will like interacting with the robot, and will stop using it as a device and start using it as a social being.”

This logic inspired Israeli startup Intuition Robotics to create ElliQ—a bobbing head (eyeless) robot. The purpose of the animatronics is to break down barriers between its customer base of elderly patients and their phobias of technology. According to Intuition Robotics’ CEO, Dor Skuler, the range of motion coupled with a female voice helps create a bond between the device and its user. Don Norman, usability designer of ElliQ, said: “It looks like it has a face even though it doesn’t. That makes it feel approachable.”

Mayfield Robotics decided to add cute R2D2-like sounds to its newest robot, Kuri. Mayfield hired former Pixar designers Josh Morenstein and Nick Cronan of Branch Creative with the sole purpose of making Kuri more adorable. To accomplish this mission, Morenstein and Cronan gave Kuri eyes, but not a mouth as that would be, in their words “creepy.” Conan shares the challenges with designing the eyes: “Just by moving things a few millimeters, it went from looking like a dumb robot to a curious robot to a mean robot. It became a discussion of, how do we make something that’s always looking optimistic and open to listen to you?” Kuri has a remarkable similarity to Morenstein and Cronan’s former theatrical robot, EVA.

In the far extreme of making robots act and behave human, RealDoll has been promoting six thousand dollar sex robots. To many, RealDoll has crossed the “Uncanny Valley” of creepiness with sex dolls that look and talk like humans. In fact, there is a growing grassroots campaign to ban RealDoll’s products globally, as it endangers the very essence of human relationships. Florence Gildea writes on the organization’s blog: “The personalities and voices that doll owners project onto their dolls is pertinent for how sex robots may develop, given that sex doll companies like RealDoll are working on installing increasing AI capacities in their dolls and the expectation that owners will be able to customize their robots’ personalities.” The example given is how the doll expresses her “feelings” for her owner on Twitter:

Obviously a robot companion has no feelings, however it is a projection of the doll owners’. “To anthropomorphize their dolls to sustain the fantasy that they have feelings for the owner. The Twitter accounts seemingly manifest the dolls’ independent existence so that their dependence on their owners can seem to signify their emotional attachment, rather than it following inevitable from their status as objects. Immobility, then, can be misread as fidelity and devotion.” The implications of this behavior is that their female companion, albeit mechanical, enjoys “being dominated.” The fear that the Campaign Against Sex Robots expresses is the objectification of women (even robotic ones) reinforces problematic human sexual stereotypes.

Today, with technology at our fingertips, there is growing phenomena of preferring one-directional device relationships over complicated human encounters. MIT Social Sciences Professor Sherry Turkle writes in her essay, Close Engagements With Artificial Companionship, that “over-stressed, overworked, people claim exhaustion and overload. These days people will admit they’d rather leave a voice mail or send an email than talk face-to-face. And from there, they say: ‘I’d rather talk to the robot. Friends can be exhausting. The robot will always be there for me. And whenever I’m done, I can walk away.’”

In the coming years humans will communicate more with robots in their lives from experiences in the home to the office to their leisure time. The big question will be not the technical barriers, but the societal norms that will evolve to accept Earth’s newest species.

“What do we think a robot is?” asked robot designer Norm. “Some people think it should look like an animal or a person, and it should move around. Or it just has to be smart, sense the environment, and have motors and controllers.”

Norm’s answer, like beauty, could be in the eye of the beholder.

Robots raise all kinds of concerns. They could steal our jobs, as some experts think. And if artificial intelligence grows, it might even be tempted to enslave us, or to annihilate the whole of humanity. Robots are strange creatures, and not only for these frequently invoked reasons. We have good cause to be a little worried about these machines.

Imagine that you are visiting the Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, a museum in Paris dedicated to anthropology and ethnology. As you walk through the collection, your curiosity leads you to a certain piece. After a while, you begin to sense a familiar presence heading towards the same objet d’art that has caught your attention.

You move slowly, and as you turn your head a strange feeling seizes you because what you seem to distinguish, still blurry in your peripheral vision, is a not-quite-human figure. Anxiety takes over.

As your head turns, and your vision become sharper, this feeling gets stronger. You realise that this is a humanoid machine, a robot called Berenson. Named after the American art critic Bernard Berenson and designed by the roboticist Philippe Gaussier (Image and Signal processing Lab) and the anthropologist Denis Vidal (Institut de recherche sur le développement), Berenson is part of an experiment underway at the Quai Branly museum since 2012.

The strangeness of the encounter with Berenson leaves you suddenly frightened, and you step back, away from the machine.

The uncanny valley

This feeling has been explored in robotics since the 1970s, when Japanese researcher Professor Masahiro Mori proposed his “uncanny valley” theory. If a robot resembles us, he suggested, we are inclined to consider its presence in the same way as we would that of a human being.

But when the machine reveals its robot nature to us, we will feel discomfort. Enter what Mori dubbed “the uncanny valley”. The robot will then be regarded as something of a zombie.

Mori’s theory cannot be systematically verified. But the feelings we experience when we meet an autonomous machine are certainly tinged with both incomprehension and curiosity.

The experiment conducted with Berenson at the Quai Branly, for example, shows that the robot’s presence can elicit paradoxical behaviour in museum goers. It underlines the deep ambiguity that characterises the relationship one can have with a robot, particularly the many communication problems they pose for humans.

If we are wary of such machines, it is mainly because it is not clear to us whether they have intentions. And, if so, what they are and how to establish a basis for the minimal understanding that is essential in any interaction. Thus, it is common to see visitors of the Quai Branly adopting social behaviour with Berenson, such as talking to it, or facing it, to find out how it perceives its environment.

In one way or another, visitors mainly try to establish contact. It appears that there is something strategic in considering the robot, even temporarily, as a person. And these social behaviours are not only observed when humans interact with machines that resembles us: it seems we make anthropomorphic projections whenever humans and robots meet.

Social interactions

An interdisciplinary team has recently been set up to explore the many dimensions revealed during these interactions. In particular, they are looking at the moments when, in our minds, we are ready to endow robots with intentions and intelligence.

This is how the PsyPhINe project was born. Based on interactions between humans and a robotic lamp, this project seeks to better understand people’s tendency to anthropomorphise machines.

Trying to communicate with a robotic lamp, 2016

After they get accustomed to the strangeness of the situation, it is not uncommon to observe that people are socially engaging with the lamp. During a game in which people are invited to play with this robot, they can be seen reacting to its movements and sometimes speaking to it, commenting on what it is doing or on the situation itself.

Mistrust often characterises the first moments of our relations with machines. Beyond their appearance, most people don’t know exactly what robots are made of, what their functions are and what their intentions might be. The robot world seems way too far from ours.

But this feeling quickly disappears. Assuming they have not already run away from the machine, people usually seek to define and maintain a frame for communication. Typically, they rely on existing communication habits, such as those used when talking to pets, for example, or with any living being whose world is to some degree different from theirs.

Ultimately, it seems, we humans are as suspicious of our technologies as we are fascinated by the possibilities they open up.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Pepper, Jibo and Milo make up the first generation of social robots, leading what promises to be a cohort with diverse capabilities and future applications. But what are social robots and what should they be able to do? This article gives an overview of theories that can help us understand social robotics better.

I most like the definition which describes social robots as robots for which social interaction plays a key role. So social skills should be needed by the robot to enable them to perform a function. A survey of socially interactive robots defines some key characteristics that of this type of robot. A social robot should show emotions, have capabilities to converse on an advanced level, understand the mental models of their social partners, form social relationships, make use of natural communication cues, show personality and learn social capabilities.

Understanding Social Robots offers another interesting perspective of what a social robot is: Social robot = robot + social interface

In this definition, the robot has its own purpose outside of the social aspect. Examples of this can be care robots, cleaning robots in our homes, service desk robots at an airport or mall information desk or chef robots in a cafeteria. The social interface is simply a kind of familiar protocol which makes it easy for us to communicate effectively with the robot. Social cues can give us insight into the intention of a robot, for example shifting gaze towards a mop gives a clue that the robot is about to change activity, although they might not have eyes in the classical sense.

These indicators of social capability can be as useful as actual social ability and drivers in the robot. As studies show, children are able to project social capabilities onto simple inanimate objects like a calculator. A puppet becomes an animated social partner during play. In the same way, robots only have to have the appearance of sociability to be effective communicators. An Ethical Evaluation of Human–Robot Relationships confirms this idea. We have a need to belong, which causes us to form emotional connections to artificial beings and to search for meaning in these relationships.

How should social robots look?

Masahiro Mori defined the Uncanny Valley theory in 1970, in a paper on the subject. He describes the effects of robot appearance and robot movement on our affinity to the robot. In general, we seem to prefer robots to look more like humans and less like robots. There is a certain point at which robots look both human-like and robot-like, and it becomes confusing for us to categorise them. This is the Uncanny Valley – where robot appearance looks very human but also looks a bit ‘wrong’, which makes us uncomfortable. If robot appearance gets past that point, and looks more human, likeability goes up dramatically.

In Navigating a social world with robot partners: A quantitative cartography of the Uncanny Valley (2) we learn that there is a similar effect between robot appearance and trustworthiness of a robot. Robots that showed more positive emotions were also more likeable. So it seems like more human looking robots would lead to more trust and likeability.

Up to this point, we assume that social robots should be humanoid or robotic. But what other forms can robots take? The robot should at least have a face to give it an identity and make it an individual. Further, with a face, you can indicate attention and imitate the social partner to improve communication. Most non-verbal cues are relayed through the face and creates an expectation of how to engage with the robot.

The appearance of a robot can help set people’s expectations of what they should be capable of, and limit those expectations to some focused functions which can be more easily achieved. For example, a bartender robot can be expected to be able to have a good conversation and serve drinks, take payment, but probably it’s ok if it can only speak one language, as it only has to fit the context it’s in.

In Why Every Robot at CES Looks Alike, we learn that Jibo’s oversized, round head is designed to mimic the proportions of a young animal or human to make it more endearing. It has one eye to prevent it from triggering the Uncanny Valley effect by looking too robotic and human at the same time. Also, appearing too human-like creates the impression that the robot will respond like a human, while they are not yet capable.

Another interesting example is of Robin, a Nao robot being used to teach children with diabetes how to manage their illness (6). The explanation given to the children is that Robin is a toddler. The children use this role to explain any imperfections in Robin’s speech capabilities.

Different levels of social interaction for robots

A survey of socially interactive robots contains some useful concepts in defining levels of social behaviour in robots:

• Socially evocative: Do not show any social capabilities but rely on human tendency to project social capabilities.
• Social interface: Mimic social norms, without actually being driven by them.
• Socially receptive: Understand social input enough to learn by imitation but do not see social contact.
• Sociable: Have social drivers and seek social contact.
• Socially situated: Can function in a social environment and can distinguish between social and non-social entities.
• Socially embedded: Are aware of social norms and patterns.
• Socially intelligent: Show human levels of social understanding and awareness based on models of human cognition.

Clearly, social behaviour is nuanced and complex. But to come back to the previous points, social robots can still make themselves effective without reaching the highest levels of social accomplishment.

Effect of social robots on us

To close, de Graaf poses a thought-provoking question (4):

How will we share our world with these new social technologies and how will a future robot society change who we are, how we act and interact—not only with robots but also with each other?

It seems that we will first and foremost shape robots by our own human social patterns and needs. But we cannot help but be changed as individuals and a society when we finally add a more sophisticated layer of robotic social partners in the future.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy:

• A Pepper-warm reception at Decos
• Robots at your service: Empowering healthy aging at European Robotics Week, 2016
• Considering robot care, ethics & future tech at #ERW2016 European Robotics Week
• When robots become art: Interview with Yi-Wei Keng
• Hello Pepper: Getting started to program robots on Android
• Survey: Evaluate ethics of health related privacy with care robots

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

The concept One Being for Two Origins, from the teachings of Buddha, considers the unification of technology, nature, and human beings. It emerges from the theory of the three aspects: The values of the “Good”, the “Bad”, and “Muki” (Avyakata). The theory of One Being for Two Origins follows the theory of the three aspects and explains a mechanism for how values, such as the good and the bad, emerge in reality using the three aspects. The theory has a contradictory structure, hence it can be difficult for those with a scientific background to fully comprehend it. In this interview, Nagoya University’s Associate Professor Hiroko Kamide shares with us her insights on robot ethics, with a focus on One Being for Two Origins.

Date: December 5^th 2016

Interviewee: Prof. Hiroko Kamide, Designated Associate Professor, Nagoya University, Japan

Interviewer: Dr. Yueh-Hsuan Weng, Co-founder of ROBOLAW.ASIA and Fellow at CLAST AI & Law Research Committee (Beijing) and Tech and Law Center (Milan)

Q1 WENG: Thank you for agreeing to an interview with us. Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

KAMIDE: My background is social psychology. During my doctoral course, I studied close relationships and well-being. After receiving my PhD, I started researching human-robot interaction and collaborated with engineers to help realize so-called “human-friendly robots”. We established psychological methods to evaluate humanoids, and subsequently developed human-friendly behaviors for robots. I still collaborate with engineers to consider the adaptive way of introducing advanced technology, such as robots and self-driving cars, from an interdisciplinary approach.

 Q2 WENG: Currently you are also in charge of a special interest group on robots and philosophy at The Robotics of Japan (RSJ). Can you tell us something about your RSJ Special Interest Group on Philosophy in Robotics?

KAMIDE: In the RSJ group, we discuss the approach to  technology from an interdisciplinary standpoint. The members are from psychology, philosophy, law, sociology, and engineering. Psychological evaluation, like technological advancement, is important to realize robots that your average person can accept in their daily-life. This collaborative work between psychology and engineering is crucial to developing technologies that can satisfy a human’s needs and expectations. But sometimes we experience terrible events that we cannot control: nuclear accidents, wrongful use of robots, etc. Therefore we started to investigate what the appropriate approach is when implementing and dealing with the cutting-edge technology. It’s a the responsibility of researchers to convey information to ordinary users about how we should deal with technology in order to maintain harmony between technology, nature, and humans.

Q3 WENG: What is the theory One Being for Two Origins? Why is it important to the unification of humanity and nature?

KAMIDE: The theory of One Being for Two Origins has a contradictory structure, and it’s difficult for those with a scientific background to fully understand. At the first step, we begin with a theory of values—the theory of the three aspects—as an introduction to the theory of One Being for Two Origins. The theory of three aspects explains the mechanism of how values, such as good and bad, emerge from the three concepts of the good, the bad, and the “Muki”. Then the theory of One Being for Two Origins follows the theory of three aspects as the fundamental mechanism of order. Through the theory of One Being for Two Origins, we become able to recognize the truth and biases behind language, and as such can avoid conflicts between technology, nature and human-beings.

Q4 WENG: Your paper “One Being for Two Origins – A necessary awakening for the future of robotics” has been presented at the 2016 IEEE ARSO Workshop in Shanghai, China. The co-author is Professor Masahiro Mori, who is a world famous roboticist because of his “uncanny valley” theory. How come you decided to choose this topic? Does the concept One Being for Two Origins have any relationship with “uncanny valley”?

KAMIDE: His theory of uncanny valley has a very thoughtful and groundbreaking perspective, therefore many researchers in the world still refer to his theory. As for my impression, he developed a very clear sense of perspectives that leads us to understand the theory of uncanny valley. His method of observing the truth of the world is in line with the teachings of the Buddha.

Q5 WENG: Regarding regulation for robotics, you pointed out that there is widespread misunderstanding from regulators. What is the misunderstanding? What kind of legal crisis will materialize if they don’t change their way of thinking? How can your proposed theory help solve this legal crisis?

KAMIDE: As the theory of three aspects explains, the value of good and bad are just derived from Muki, that transcends such values and is a true quality of the technology. Useful technology is positive. On the other hand, it would be bad if technology harms people. Technology is fundamentally neither good nor bad. It’s the manner in which technology is applied and operated by humans that is either good or bad. It is humans themselves that attribute these aspects to the technology.

Regulations are attempts to eliminate the bad aspects of technology. However, it is not correct to assume that only the good remains when the bad is eliminated, because technologies themselves are the Muki. And if bad did not exist, good would not exist either, as one is parasitic on the other. To eliminate the bad is to interfere in the working of the Muki in producing these values. The same occurs robots.

Our mindset determines how we approaches the Muki. If we are not mentally prepared, Muki will transform into bad. If we are mentally prepared, we can treat the Muki as good. Bad can transform into good then, of course, good can also transform into bad. And the more good qualities a robot possesses, the stronger its bad qualities will be, following the transformation. Sharp scalpels save lives, but sharp daggers kill people. This is because the working of the Muki is powerful.

In all cases, the mindset of humans is crucial. So, the responsibility of us in robotics is to ensure that technology is not used in bad ways. We must both establish methods of using robots, and work to refine users’ mindsets.

Q6 WENG: Robotics is like a double-edged sword, it can either help or kill people. Robotic lethal weapons present a dilemma. Should they be banned or not? Do you have any comment on this?

KAMIDE: The problem is not in robotics but in ourselves—we who raise such dualistic questions. As I mentioned, the technology of robotics doesn’t have any values. Robotics is not double edged sword at all; our minds are double edged. People easily attribute these values to the physical entity but it is not true. We have to try and observe the fact that we see not what we see, but what we want to see.

Q7 WENG: Do you agree with using dualism as the meta-principle to teach robots right from wrong? If not, do you think it is possible to adopt your theory into creating ethical robots’?

KAMIDE: The “right” and “wrong” is always in the eye of the beholder, and there are no absolute standards. As long as humans accept that they are subject to subjective mechanisms of perceiving the world, it won’t be troublesome to develop ethical robots. But if humans see the “right” and “wrong” as existing independently, objective, it will be definitely problematic.

Q8 WENG: What are major challenges for implementing One Being for Two Origins into robot ethics?

KAMIDE: Clarifying the importance of applying wisdom, not just knowledge. In this theory, knowledge refers to the ability to divide the phenomena into detailed classifications in order to understand the difference between things. On the other hand, wisdom is necessary to discover the meaning in the different things. Knowledge is developed through education, usually, but wisdom is not taught explicitly. Therefore, we are accustomed to dualistic thinking based on knowledge, that divides the world into its constituent parts, but we have difficulty uniting the parts using wisdom, in a way of monism. This is one of reason that we often raise dualistic questions, and eventually develop conflicts.

Q9 WENG: Professor Shigeo Hirose gave an insight called “Morality Engineering” in his short review “A Dialog on Robots” Vol. 7, No. 4, JRSJ. Do you think that One Being for Two Origins might be helpful in implementing his proposal of “Morality Engineering”?

KAMIDE: His article is very interesting. Opinions from both sides who are optimistic or pessimistic to a robotized future society are quite realistic and thoughtful. Recently many philosophers have started to think about morality in robotics. His “Morality Engineering” suggests implementing “rational egoism”, and I agree with the importance of this approach. One Being for Two Origins is the methodology to transcendent and unify opposite aspects of the phenomena to see the truth. So it is helpful to consider how “rational egoism” truly functions in the interactions between humans and robots.

Click here to read Hiroko Kamide’s paper “One being for two origins — A necessary awakening for the future of robotics”.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also also enjoy:

• Considering robot care, ethics & future tech at #ERW2016 European Robotics Week
• On the ethics of research in robotics, with Raja Chatila
• A European perspective on robot law: Interview with Mady Delvaux-Stehres
• Open Roboethics initiative delivers statement to United Nations CCW

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Many of us from the Robohub team were at the landmark Uncanny Valley session at IROS this year – it turned out to be one of those wish-I’d-been-there events for anyone unlucky enough to have missed it.

Even people who were attending that day knew they would want to relive the experience: I was recording audio of the speakers for my notes, and several people sitting nearby slipped me their cards in hope that I would share the file with them later.

Lucky for all of us, Erico Guizzo captured the whole session on video and this is now available, along with some follow-up footage on IEEE Spectrum. Freshly posted today.

I do not normally shout, but if you did not see this session live, GO SEE IT NOW!!

In case you are unfamiliar with the concept, he also just posted this fun piece where the speakers try to explain the Uncanny Valley in less than one minute.

Robohub team members just returned from an exciting trip to Tokyo, where we attended the 2013 IROS conference and the concurrent iREX robot expo. With so many excellent projects, so many insightful lectures, and so many innovative robots — not to mention the many consecutive tracks! — it was hard for any one person to take it all in.

This month we asked our Robotics by Invitation experts to tell us about what stood out for them at this year’s event. Here’s what they have to say …

Andra Keay on “What were the highlights at IROS/iREX this year?”

For me, the highlight of IROS was the Uncanny Valley special session, although the sheer size of the IROS conference and the parallel iRex industrial and service robot expo also gave much food for thought. In particular, the new coworking robots from Kaweda and ABB look very interesting, but it’s clear that it still takes a long time for research to transition into robust applied robotics …

Read more →

Lynne Parker on “What were the highlights at IROS/iREX this year?”

I found the plenary speeches at IROS to be especially interesting.  Marc Raibert gave an entertaining talk on the robots being developed at Boston Dynamics. It’s encouraging to see that robots are becoming more and more robust, even for very challenging domains. Marc emphasized his company philosophy of pushing robots until they break, and then learning from those breakdowns to improve robot performance and reliability. Learning from failure is often overlooked in robotics, but is critically important for achieving usable systems.It’s also a good life lesson!

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Frank Tobe on “What were the highlights at IROS/iREX this year?”

Two images remain in my mind from IROS 2013 last week in Tokyo. The respect for Professor Emeritus Mori and his charting of the uncanny valley in relation to robotics, and the need for a Watson-type synthesis of all the robotics-related scientific papers produced every year. Let me explain …

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Have your own IROS highlights you’d like to share? Leave a comment below!

Let me explain.

Almost all of the presentations at IROS were abstract and technical except for the discussion about Prof. Mori’s Uncanny Valley theory. First of all, he was there and described how he came to observe the uncanny valley under different situations and circumstances. Secondly, all of the presenters and audience were respectful of Prof. Mori’s work, his theory, and him as a person. Third, and most interesting to me, each of the other speakers in this special lecture session described how the uncanny valley theory was relevant in different settings and disciplines. In art, philosophy, psychology — in the works of David Hanson and Hiroshi Ishiguro (both of whom were there) — as well as in medicine, prosthetics and in robotics in general. To me it was a reminder that robotics crosses sciences and connects with humans in many different forms, and this tribute presentation at IROS brought the personal relationships and the breadth of their reach to the forefront, and away from the abstract, theoretical and mechanical side of IROS.

In this video by IEEE/Spectrum, filmed outside the door of the room where the session was held, one can clearly see the multi-science and psychological/philosophical aspects of the theory:

Worse, 90% of scientists don’t even know whether their research is “new” or not.

Ever since I learned of the IBM Watson Jeopardy project my mind has been fascinated with possibilities for practical applications. IBM is on that trail as well and is using Watson to help with medical diagnoses and legal research and briefing. My idea is to get the NSF and IEEE (and other organizations) to commission a Watson project to synthesize robotics and AI-related science papers into a meaningful resource for all to use. At present, there are so many papers published that a researcher cannot possibly read them all. Consequently we don’t even know what we already know. But with Watson, we could know — and we could redirect research activities truly into the unknown without reinventing things over and over.

Read more answers →

The Uncanny Valley Revisited was a special tribute to Emeritus Professor Masahiro Mori, organized by co-chairs Ken Goldberg, UC Berkeley and Minoru Asada, Osaka U. Masahiro Mori’s 1970 article, Bukimi no Tani Gensho, described a phenomenon of unease that is felt as animated beings become more similar to real beings.

Labelled the ‘uncanny valley‘ in reference to Freud’s concept of the Uncanny (Unheimlich), Mori’s work first appeared in translation in 1978 and proceeded to be broadly adopted in the art world and cultural/social sciences. Astonishingly, Mori believes that robotics only noticed his concept in the mid 2000s, when papers citing the uncanny valley were presented at HRI conferences. Elizabeth Jocum from Aarlsberg U was one of several to speakers to point to the early and deep impact of Mori’s idea in other disciplines, including the arts.

It’s apt that the art world was first to appreciate the Uncanny Valley hypothesis, as Freud himself said that the uncanny is the only thing more strongly felt in art than in life. It’s also a dynamic rather than a static phenomenon, as other speakers attested. Marek Michalowski discussed the impact that animators have had on the field of human robot interaction. After all, animation has been a strong field for over 100 years and is primarily concerned with creating a compelling imitation of life. In the process, animators utilize much more than just the static superficial appearance of a character. Sound, perspective, staging, background, color and timing all enhance or destroy the illusion of life.

Freud’s original concept of the uncanny is also more closely aligned to general anthropomorphism, where the impact is less on the closeness of appearance to human and more on the human ability to ascribe emotion, agency and symbolism to logical, mechanical events or objects.

Mori intended for his theory to be a simple warning for robot designers to consider the possible affect of their constructions, and he calls for robots to be made less life-like or human-like, as he wishes for technology to have positive and not negative contributions to the world.

Robots are already out there in the world, and I think we are frequently unprepared for the range of anthropomorphism that even unlikely looking robots can attract. This is well described in the work of Nass and Reeves in The Media Equation and leads to the ‘new ontological status’ hypothesis put forward by Kahn Jr, Reichardt, Kanda and Ishiguro. Generally speaking, I find that roboticists oversimplify the uncanny valley hypothesis. Mori himself describes it as a clue rather than a theory, so it was refreshing to hear so many great speakers give it much needed dynamism and depth.

Read more answers →

Comrades, we live in a bleak and humourless world.  Here we are thirteen years into the twenty-first century, and we all carry around Star Trek style tri-corders, we have access to almost all human opinions via this awesome global computer network, we have thousands and thousands of channels we can flip through on television, we have something like 48,000 people signed up to go colonize Mars, and we even have robots roaming around up there, taking samples of that planet. But we still don’t have robots that can tell a good joke.

Even this new bartender robot, Makr Shakr was prime for a little humour, like, “A robot walks into a bar and asks for a screwdriver..”?

But seriously, folks, in my travels I have met with Honda’s Asimo, Adlebaran’s NAO, Toyota’s Partner Robot and many others, and each of these presumably world-class robots was, in the most critical sense of the word, robotic.  They were weirdly-shaped computers with an appendage.  If you give me a choice between a robot that can walk and one that rolls around on wheels, I’ll take the one that can talk. Simply put, talking is more important than walking. Design priorities in robotics should focus first on human interface and second on locomotion.

We live at a moment in which natural language interface is replacing the GUI just as the GUI replaced the command line.

Natural language interface developments are being led by Google and Apple, with some strong work being done by IBM.  Last week Google’s Chrome browser appeared with a little microphone just to the right of the input bar and Google Now has been out for a year or so.  Apple has had Siri, of course, and is now rumoured to be building a wrist watch that will have a natural language interface to it, probably building off the lessons learned from Siri.

Natural language interface makes sense anywhere there is big data or little screen.  It makes sense for robots for these same reasons. It provides access to more data and reduces the need for a screen. But most of all, building a natural language interface also gives the robot personality.  And this makes the robot more valuable to the human because it turns a robot into an emotion machine.

Giving a robot a personality includes two primary components.  First is psychology.

Last month, in The Uncanny Valet I wrote a bit about the design of psychology, specifically for android-style robots, which wasn’t so much an effort to write about human-shaped walking-talking robots (androids), as it was to point out that human interaction seeks human likeness. To emotionally bond with a robot it needs to be like us.  The more it is like us the more we can bond with it.  This is most important in the field of automated psychology.  This isn’t a new field.  If you don’t believe me dial an American 800 number.  Those horrid little automated voices that corporations use so widely these days are reproducing faster than feral rabbits (may we name them robbits?).  In fact, I would love statistics on how many voice answering machines are out there, but I would boldly bet on there being, on the market today, more software robots than hardware robots.  I can tell you that this number is increasing and the quality of software robots is improving.

Each month we see advancements in what amounts to software robots, or virtual knowledge workers.  Last week Infosys (a Bangalore-based provider of IT services) announced it is working with IPsoft (a New York-based provider of autonomic IT services) to build autonomous tools designed for help desks, operations, and other management needs. In an article about the the new partnership it is mentioned, “IPSoft has focused on autonomics for IT services, and Slaby estimates in his report that nearly all Level 1 support issues can be solved by IPsoft’s ‘virtual engineers’.”

We are past the primitive dawn of automated psychology.  It is becoming a branch of the robotics industry.

As graphic design for the GUI was to software design for the personal computer industry, personality design for natural language is to the software of the personal robotics industry.

At Geppetto Labs we build conversational systems.  This means that we take the natural language input from a user, pipe that through an analytics system that measures affect, syntactic and semantic values, and then feed the resulting data into an NLP system.  We author personalities via simple server-side tools that script what non-technical authors (generally film screen writers) have written into formatted rulesets. We also bend Chatscript and other tools for non-personality behaviour, like enhancing Amazon search by natural language understanding, using specific phrases or moments to trigger specific animations, etc. After that we stir in some scraping, automated ontology creation, and even tools to automate first person interviews and film scripts to craft a personality that can be managed. This is the foundation for natural language interface – at least how we do it.

And there’s an entire second level to natural language interfaces that has nothing to do with text.  In more advanced projects Geppetto Labs need to add animation that fires when the NL output does.  The simplest example I can think of is the word “Hi” being tied to a raising of the hand.  Hand gestures are easy, and clear, but gestures are only one part of the body language we build.  Body language might also be a facial expression, the position of the arms or the tilt of the head, but what it means is that we have to not only think about the psychology of the system, but how to tie that to the activation of non-verbal forms of communication as well. We have to walk the talk. That means we have to design body language into the personality.  It is linked with the psychology and frames the text.

Psychology needs to be graphically represented, just like a book needs a cover, and body language is the best means of achieving that.  Well, at least that’s where evolution has taken us.<

Body language coordinates the psychology of the personality with the visual presentation. Coordinating what is said and what is done is core to the personality.  This very coordination might be what we commonly call personality.  If you don’t believe, me consider this: watch television for a day and note what “Personalities” do; newscasters, politicians, actors, singers, and dancers.  They accompany their words with the most broad-stroke gestures and body language humans convey.

This is to say that body language may be more important to natural language interface than the words used.

Many famous studies claim that body language accounts for the majority of our communication (the most famous is probably Dr. Albert Mehabrian’s 7:38:55 rule).  Or, more precisely, that the words we use transmit the minority of what we communicate.  So how we move and what we visually communicate while we verbally blather on is pretty key to how others understand us.

Consider the eyes.  We blink more when we’re stressed out. It can indicate dopamine levels and both the pain or the creativity of the person we’re talking with.  The timing of a blink can indicate a punchline to a joke, a response to that joke, confusion at the punch line, or frustration at how it isn’t funny.  Pinched and held tight can mean something entirely different.  We don’t like to keep eye contact too long or it starts to feel threatening.  The person who listens should initiate eye contact – and if they don’t it might mean they just don’t care what you’re talking about.  But don’t break it too soon or the person listening will feel as if they’re not important. Don’t look at the ceiling when you talk (or you might come off as a snob) and don’t look at the floor, either (or you might come off as a bummer). If you’re talking with someone and they look up and to your right it generally means they’re remembering something, visually. If you’re talking with someone and they look up and to your left means they’re visually creating something.  Horizontal looking while talking indicates the person is most likely accessing auditory cues and, to your right is, again, remembering and to your left is, again, creating.  And if they look down maybe they’re depressed. Or maybe they’re just looking at the carpet. Or maybe they’re remembering how something feels.  That applies to most right-handed people around the world (according to John Bandler, Richard Grinder, and scads of other neurologists), but it indicates that there’s a lot happening when we speak with someone. A lot more than words.

But the eyes do this while other things are going on.  The eyebrows and cheeks are wiggling, the mouth opening and closing, the head is tilting and nodding, the shoulders are going up and down, the arms are waving around, the hands are flapping … and that’s all above the belt-line.

Please remember that human interaction seeks human likeness, so the body language of the robot needs to mirror the body language of the conversant. Think back on one of the early successful chat bots, ELIZA. This system was designed to simply mirror what a person said to it and repeat that back, like many psychologists. Several people evidently fell in love with the system.

The corollary of this is that a well-design natural language system will move like we do.

Today, we have a new graphical version of that, designed to note and reflect the body language of the conversant. Its name is Ellie.

A webcam and a game controller track eye directions, run some facial recognition software to chart expressions, and do the same with body positions. While the system is being trained in realtime in its early days, this training goes towards the video mapping input to the system’s output, just as any NLP system (such as Siri or Watson was designed, and exactly as we do our work at Geppetto Labs). It’s being trained on how to read people.

But there’s a missing part here, which I will guess the good Mr. Stan Rizzo is considering, which is generation of response movement in real time.

How the character moves, how the robot moves, is a key component. Just as natural language has the component parts of understanding and generation (NLU and NLG, respectively) body language has these same input and output cues. At Geppetto Labs we have several characters that we’ve been working on that have this running, and a process I’ll outline next month.

A robot walks into a bar and asks for a screwdriver, and the bartender says, “What is this, some kinda joke?” Personality, like a joke, synchronizes words and body language, linking them together and leaving us. “A Paro walks into a club” is about as bad as I get, and I promise I will not repeat the joke, but I bring it up as an icon of how to build personality: combine the mind and the body.

Natural language interface, when properly designed, is far more than just text.

Part One: Another robot dream girl

I’m talking with this woman on the phone, interviewing her for a job. She’s got a slight southern twang, maybe from Georgia, telling me about her past work, and as we talk I’m struck by how perfectly presentable, alert, and smooth she sounds. Her voice is soft, tonally fluid, and she articulates her words precisely, belying a geeky disposition. Seems she’ll be perfect for the rather tricky tech support position we’ve got.

“Did you enjoy the work?” I ask.

“Sure, I like talking with people. I mean, as long as they don’t get upset it’s sorta fun.”

“You were working at a bank, right?”

“Yeah,” she laughs, “There were four of us working the phones and please press seven if you’d like one of us to call you back.”

“Sorry?” I ask.

“There were four of us on the phones and please press seven if you’d like one of us to call you back.”

I realize this robot has a bug, thank her, and hang up. I won’t hire that one.

Of course I never spoke with the uncanny woman again because the above story is fiction; a conversational system like this one is something of a dream among today’s robotics designers. She might have had a bug in her bonnet, but at least she could hold a conversation and answer questions, for the most part.

A system like the above, a Natural Language Processing system, is the heart and mind of a robot.

By contrast, consider what we have today: those irritating, tyrannical little phone robots that have replaced perfectly good humans: “Please push one if you would like to make a deposit. Please push two if you would like to hear these options again.” These non-player phone-workers are so brainless, grindingly slow, and weirdly rude that I find myself repeatedly pushing keys like 0 and # just to get to a real human.

Of course, from the cold eye of the bank (or whatever corporate conglomerate that employs these “Customer Relations Management” systems) these virtual robots reduce costs by replacing a fickle, distracted, complaining, prone-to-error, temperamental, sleep-deprived and very expensive call-center human with a voice recording. It saves the company money, time, and tons of overhead on things like worker’s insurance, sick-leave, replacements and the high cost of managing people. People are hard to manage, right? Voice recordings are not. People sleep at night, right? Voice recordings do not. So virtual robots, and this particular feral species of virtual robot – the phone robot – is a means of disintermediating the person from the knowledge: it is a means of scooping the knowledge out of the head of person that was doing the job and serving it to you, the customer, couched in smooth tones with a dose of saccharin-sweet politeness.

But virtual phone robots in their present form are bad at solving problems, they don’t learn, they’re inattentive, and they can’t even understand me. I have few options on what I can do, and I get pushed into decision trees that I don’t want. I feel herded like a cow, and with that little phone-robot nipping at my telephonic heels to move me into the right slot for processing, I more often than not either hang up or return to the website.

The intention is that robotic knowledge workers can replace human knowledge workers. But robotic workers are not capable of the job: rather than collaborate, they dominate; rather than answer questions, they force responses.

Bad robot, bad!

Part Two: The problem is the rotten brains

According to research from Nuance corporation, there are three main ways to improve phone robots. The first is to allow access to a real human. Two-thirds of the customers interviewed wanted that. About half of them said the system’s logical call flow was most important. And about forty percent of them said that the speech recognition component was the most important. So access to a live human, logical flow, and recognizing what’s been said are the three main problems with phone robots today.

If two-thirds of the users of a system that is supposed to replace a human say that the system can be most improved by providing access to a human, then that system is mostly broken.

Phone robots may save money, but they suck. We expect them to act like humans because they have a human voice, but instead they act like robots. This just adds to our frustration by reminding us that we do not have what we really wanted in the first place: a real human to talk to. The sound of the language is right, the annunciation is right, but it is a facade that just highlights the problem.

These phone robots live along the upper edge of an uncanny valley (if you do not know what the uncanny valley is please stop reading this, right now, and go look it up in Wikipedia).

Masahiro Mori pointed out many uncanny valleys, but the most famous ones are related to appearance and movement. We have yet to discover the many other uncanny valleys out there, especially as robots – and androids in particular – become progressively more human. As the systems become more capable and more interactive (phone robots today are almost always just voice recordings with a button-activated decision tree), more questions will arise. This will be exacerbated as physical robots become more human-like.

Should a robot’s voice sound like a human’s? Whose? Should a robot smell just like a person? If so, which one? What about how frequently the robot blinks? What about the tone of voice or intonation in sentences? What about social abilities?

Name a human trait and it will become an uncanny valley. These uncanny valleys will, in the coming decades, be explored and mapped. Mori just hit the tip of an icy moon that will chill, mortify, and entertain us for decades to come. We’re going to find uncanny valleys all over the pocked, lunar landscape of robotics design, and the one that will be most important to address is psychology.

First we have cognitive psychology. Consider all the traits that we humans pack into language, such as logical flow, attention, learning, language, and emotion. These are classically cognitive traits, each of which the phone robots of today should pay attention to. (Of course I mean “The designers of these systems should pay attention to.”)

Second we have social psychology. Consider all the traits that we humans pack into interaction such as politeness, collaboration, competition, and understanding. These are classically social traits, which the phone robots of today, or more accurately, their designers, need to consider.

Let’s lump them all together and imprecisely call them psychology. This is the uncanny valley that most concerns me. How a robot holds a conversation, thinks, and speaks seems the most important, and urgent, of the valleys ahead.

Robot psychology is urgent because it’s happening today. You have spoken with a phone robot and chances are (76%, according to Nuance) that you were not satisfied with it. So there’s a problem here.

Robot psychology is also important because we mimic the way we are spoken to. If you don’t believe me ask yourself why you speak the language you do. Reading this article means you probably grew up in a place where people mostly spoke English. What about your accent? Again, the people around you influenced you to speak that accent. They also influenced you to use the phrases, slang, jargon, words, ideas, and therefor fundamental psychological scaffolding you use to support your notion of reality. We do as we are done unto. When you listen to someone, their mind enters yours.

If a robot treats me in a rude manner chances are good that I’ll mimic that. If I’m going to be working, playing, living, or talking on the phone with a robot, I hope it will be a healthy example of both cognitive and social psychology that I can interact with and not be polluted by. As these systems become more prevalent their influence on our own behavior will increase.

This dynamic and interaction is both important and urgent.

It is why we are becoming our robots, and why our robots are becoming us. As they speak like us we will speak like them, and vice-versa.

Please press the down key if you would like to continue reading.

Part Three: The solution is to design robot psychology

Once upon a time I had the odd luck to talk with the Geminoid F, the most realistic android on the planet (that was two years ago). It is the life work of Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro. This uncanny experience would not have been so unsettling if Dr. Ishiguro’s doppleganger hadn’t been wading around like a zombie in the muck of the uncanny valley, but there it was and I – like the rest of the bottom feeders – was there with it. To this day, wish I had not gone.

Dr. Ishiguro is a moribund and curious fellow, and his robot more so. The problem, as I detailed in my book, “We, Robot” was that the robot was so real that it set an expectation of being human.

Please consider this face, and the heart and mind behind it. You do not, really, want its mind to enter yours, do you?

Communication – and staying out of uncanny valleys – is all about reflection. It has to do with mutual empathy and mutual agreements of closeness. It is about familiarity.

In my last article I talked about the design of androids, wrote about the designers that made them, and noted that the function of an android is psychological closeness. Androids (uh, or rather their designers) want you to feel comfy. The core notion of an android’s design is to set you up to interact with a computer in a traditional human setting. It’s about an expectation of human familiarity and something that reflects back to you a human image of yourself.

We humans are built such that we like talking with other humans. We like what’s familiar, what is, etymologically, of our family. We like talking with a familiar face, and if the robot doesn’t look like us then we tend to freak out a bit. After all, our friends usually look like us, dress like we do, and come from the similar socio-economic background. I might not like to admit it, but that’s usually the case. And, just as we like talking with a familiar face, we like talking with a familiar psychology; the psychology of our family. Our friends think like us, act like us, and like the same things. Birds of a feather, it has been said, flock together.

This is because much of the best communication is a reflection and collaboration. We like reinforcement, familiarity, and a reflection of our presence in the world. We do not like talking with someone who herds us, we do not like being told to push buttons, and we do not like phone robots because they fly in the face of almost all human-based computer-human interaction (CHI) theories (such as the android). Phone robots are a good example of a bad psychology.

If you were still a child, would you rather grow up talking daily with Ronald McDonald, Shrek, or Kung-Fu Panda? C’mon, choose one. Now what if a million children were to be forced, by your decision, to do the same?

As designers of robots we are faced with the same type of problem. As kids grow up interfacing with robotic personalities, and virtual robots, they will be influenced by, adopt the behaviors of, and intellectually be guided by these personalities. It is our responsibility to offer something better than junk food for the psyche.

Siri is about the best form of phone robot we have on the public market today. From my interactions with her she’s a little vapid, slightly sardonic, sometimes helpful, but mostly apologetic. When she makes a joke, which is sadly rare, or when she directs us toward (or steers us away from) some product, she is affecting our psychology.

There are some two hundred and fifty million versions of Siri out there. Let’s conservatively call that two million active versions of Siri functioning today. And I have no clue how many of Siri’s phone robot ancestors are out there, but we can safely say that the psychology of these systems is affecting the psychology of millions of people.

Ahead of us, the design steps for implementing android psychology are not evident, but we can follow in the footsteps of other people and extrapolate from character-based properties already in the wilds and public media of today.

If we look at how famous branded characters like Ronald McDonald or Kung-Fu Panda have been developed, marketed and sold, we can make out the guideposts for cultural preference and gender. If we look at archetypes like Darth Vader or Voldemort we can see how to design the bad guys. Superman and Gandalf give us clues on the good guys. Homer Simpson, Indiana Jones, Buzz Lightyear, George Bush, and Jacques Chirac are all personalities that have left an indelible public impression that we can model and use in designing psychology.

Presentation is important, too. Of course the system has to speak your language, and therefor regional preferences will guide the design of these robots. Dialects and accents count today. We can already see how Siri has been implemented with various accents such as American vs British. Gender will also continue to be important (70% of the automated voice systems in Europe are female, and in North America, 30%). After presentation we have the personality, the archetypes, and what the character knows.

Authors are the people that know about this kind of design. People who write character portraits, who ‘get’ dialogue, and who are socially alert duplicators of human interaction; people who make movies, people who conduct interviews, and, unfortunately, people who make advertisements: these are the people who can design systems that avoid psychology’s uncanny valley.

If we look at avatars in social media, and if we consider the movie industry we can see some other guideposts for the future of the psychology of android design. The most important is interactivity and reflection of shared interests. This takes us back to Nuance’s research.

Access to a real human will become increasingly rare. Regardless of what consumers want, the whole idea of a phone robot is 24 / 7 availability at a decreased price, and this is some thing a human cannot do. Next on Nuance’s list was the logical flow of the call and the speech recognition ability. These two important interactive components will surely get better in parallel as understanding one helps to improve the other.

Most of it will happen via mobile. Consumers in the United States – which roughly maps to much of the rest of the industrialized world – prefer to resolve their customers service issues using the telephone (90%), face to face (75%), company website or email (67%), online chat (47%), text message (22%), social networking site (22%). So it seems that while these conversational systems will live mostly in the phone, there will be a place for them in other media as well. They will live in the wires and waves that surround us, always available, often improving.

This is how the system becomes, finally, conversational. The irritating little herd-dog phone robot will evolve into something closer to a Geminoid. One day you will think you’re talking with a human on the phone, and then you will find yourself in a new uncanny valley. It won’t happen for at least another five years, but we’ll stumble into it eventually. The psychology of that robot will be a thing that touches you and guides you in ways that corporations like Google (who have powerful NLP tools today) Facebook (who released an NLP search system yesterday), can only begin to hint at.

They will be able to speak to you, sell to you, buy from you, offer medical guidance, marital guidance, and talk with you about your depression, your homework, your spouse, and your boss. Semantic Analytics, Social Analytics, and NLP will accurately measure your responses and the system will reply with a warm candor. Young men will ask about sex, old women will ask about hysterectomies, and all the other most awkward, personal, relevant, and important questions of life will be whispered, spoken, laughed, and sobbed into these many kinds of virtual androids that will gradually collect, like little honey bees collecting pollen and taking it back to the nest, your very own fears, loves, desires, hates and general, if I may say, psychology. The phone robots of tomorrow will become tiny transporters of emotion and personality. You will leave a voice recording and it will be taken, before you have hung up the phone, to some hive-mind.

The question we may ask these little bees is, “Where have you taken my personality?”