Tag Archives: Artificial intelligence

#439070 Are Digital Humans the Next Step in ...

In the fictional worlds of film and TV, artificial intelligence has been depicted as so advanced that it is indistinguishable from humans. But what if we’re actually getting closer to a world where AI is capable of thinking and feeling?

Tech company UneeQ is embarking on that journey with its “digital humans.” These avatars act as visual interfaces for customer service chatbots, virtual assistants, and other applications. UneeQ’s digital humans appear lifelike not only in terms of language and tone of voice, but also because of facial movements: raised eyebrows, a tilt of the head, a smile, even a wink. They transform a transaction into an interaction: creepy yet astonishing, human, but not quite.

What lies beneath UneeQ’s digital humans? Their 3D faces are modeled on actual human features. Speech recognition enables the avatar to understand what a person is saying, and natural language processing is used to craft a response. Before the avatar utters a word, specific emotions and facial expressions are encoded within the response.

UneeQ may be part of a larger trend towards humanizing computing. ObEN’s digital avatars serve as virtual identities for celebrities, influencers, gaming characters, and other entities in the media and entertainment industry. Meanwhile, Soul Machines is taking a more biological approach, with a “digital brain” that simulates aspects of the human brain to modulate the emotions “felt” and “expressed” by its “digital people.” Amelia is employing a similar methodology in building its “digital employees.” It emulates parts of the brain involved with memory to respond to queries and, with each interaction, learns to deliver more engaging and personalized experiences.

Shiwali Mohan, an AI systems scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center, is skeptical of these digital beings. “They’re humanlike in their looks and the way they sound, but that in itself is not being human,” she says. “Being human is also how you think, how you approach problems, and how you break them down; and that takes a lot of algorithmic design. Designing for human-level intelligence is a different endeavor than designing graphics that behave like humans. If you think about the problems we’re trying to design these avatars for, we might not need something that looks like a human—it may not even be the right solution path.”

And even if these avatars appear near-human, they still evoke an uncanny valley feeling. “If something looks like a human, we have high expectations of them, but they might behave differently in ways that humans just instinctively know how other humans react. These differences give rise to the uncanny valley feeling,” says Mohan.

Yet the demand is there, with Amelia seeing high adoption of its digital employees across the financial, health care, and retail sectors. “We find that banks and insurance companies, which are so risk-averse, are leading the adoption of such disruptive technologies because they understand that the risk of non-adoption is much greater than the risk of early adoption,” says Chetan Dube, Amelia’s CEO. “Unless they innovate their business models and make them much more efficient digitally, they might be left behind.” Dube adds that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated adoption of digital employees in health care and retail as well.

Amelia, Soul Machines, and UneeQ are taking their digital beings a step further, enabling organizations to create avatars themselves using low-code or no-code platforms: Digital Employee Builder for Amelia, Creator for UneeQ, and Digital DNA Studio for Soul Machines. Unreal Engine, a game engine developed by Epic Games, is doing the same with MetaHuman Creator, a tool that allows anyone to create photorealistic digital humans. “The biggest motivation for Digital Employee Builder is to democratize AI,” Dube says.

Mohan is cautious about this approach. “AI has problems with bias creeping in from data sets and into the way it speaks. The AI community is still trying to figure out how to measure and counter that bias,” she says. “[Companies] have to have an AI expert on board that can recommend the right things to build for.”

Despite being wary of the technology, Mohan supports the purpose behind these virtual beings and is optimistic about where they’re headed. “We do need these tools that support humans in different kinds of things. I think the vision is the pro, and I’m behind that vision,” she says. “As we develop more sophisticated AI technology, we would then have to implement novel ways of interacting with that technology. Hopefully, all of that is designed to support humans in their goals.” Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#439066 Video Friday: Festo’s BionicSwift

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!):

RoboSoft 2021 – April 12-16, 2021 – [Online Conference]
ICRA 2021 – May 30-5, 2021 – Xi'an, China
DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USA
WeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – Coral Gables, FL, USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

Festo's Bionic Learning Network for 2021 presents a flock of BionicSwifts.

To execute the flight maneuvers as true to life as possible, the wings are modeled on the plumage of birds. The individual lamellae are made of an ultralight, flexible but very robust foam and lie on top of each other like shingles. Connected to a carbon quill, they are attached to the actual hand and arm wings as in the natural model.

During the wing upstroke, the individual lamellae fan out so that air can flow through the wing. This means that the birds need less force to pull the wing up. During the downstroke, the lamellae close up so that the birds can generate more power to fly. Due to this close-to-nature replica of the wings, the BionicSwifts have a better flight profile than previous wing-beating drives.

[ Festo ]

While we've seen a wide variety of COVID-motivated disinfecting robots, they're usually using either ultraviolet light or a chemical fog. This isn't the way that humans clean—we wipe stuff down, which gets rid of surface dirt and disinfects at the same time. Fraunhofer has been working on a mobile manipulator that can clean in the same ways that we do.

It's quite the technical challenge, but it has the potential to be both more efficient and more effective.

[ Fraunhofer ]

In recent years, robots have gained artificial vision, touch, and even smell. “Researchers have been giving robots human-like perception,” says MIT Associate Professor Fadel Adib. In a new paper, Adib’s team is pushing the technology a step further. “We’re trying to give robots superhuman perception,” he says. The researchers have developed a robot that uses radio waves, which can pass through walls, to sense occluded objects. The robot, called RF-Grasp, combines this powerful sensing with more traditional computer vision to locate and grasp items that might otherwise be blocked from view.

[ MIT ]

Ingenuity is now scheduled to fly on April 11.

[ JPL ]

The legendary Zenta is back after a two year YouTube hiatus with “a kind of freaky furry hexapod bunny creature.”

[ Zenta ]

It is with great pride and excitement that the South Australia Police announce a new expansion to their kennel by introducing three new Police Dog (PD) recruits. These dogs have been purposely targeted to bring a whole new range of dog operational capabilities known as the ‘small area urban search and guided evacuation’ dogs. Police have been working closely with specialist vets and dog trainers to ascertain if the lightweight dogs could be transported safely by drones and released into hard-to-access areas where at the moment the larger PDs just simply cannot get in due to their size.

[ SA Police ]

SoftBank may not have Spot cheerleading robots for their baseball team anymore, but they've more than made up for it with a full century of Peppers. And one dude doing the robot.

[ SoftBank ]

MAB Robotics is a Polish company developing walking robots for inspection, and here's a prototype they've been working on.

[ MAB Robotics ]

Thanks Jakub!

DoraNose: Smell your way to a better tomorrow.

[ Dorabot ]

Our robots need to learn how to cope with their new neighbors, and we have just the solution for this, the egg detector! Using cutting-edge AI, it provides incredible precision in detecting a vast variety of eggs. We have deployed this new feature on Boston Dynamics Spot, one of our fleet's robots. It can now detect eggs with its cameras and avoid them on his autonomous missions.

[ Energy Robotics ]

When dropping a squishy robot from an airplane 1,000 feet up, make sure that you land as close to people's cars as you can.

Now do it from orbit!

[ Squishy Robotics ]

An autonomous robot that is able to physically guide humans through narrow and cluttered spaces could be a big boon to the visually-impaired. Most prior robotic guiding systems are based on wheeled platforms with large bases with actuated rigid guiding canes. The large bases and the actuated arms limit these prior approaches from operating in narrow and cluttered environments. We propose a method that introduces a quadrupedal robot with a leash to enable the robot-guiding-human system to change its intrinsic dimension (by letting the leash go slack) in order to fit into narrow spaces.

[ Hybrid Robotics ]

How to prove that your drone is waterproof.

[ UNL ]

Well this ought to be pretty good once it gets out of simulation.

[ Hybrid Robotics ]

MIDAS is Aurora’s AI-enabled, multi-rotor sUAV outfitted with optical sensors and a customized payload that can defeat multiple small UAVs per flight with low-collateral effects.

[ Aurora ]

The robots​ of the DFKI have the advantage of being able to reach extreme environments: they can be used for decontamination purposes in high-risk areas or inspect and maintain underwater​ structures, for which they are tested in the North Sea near Heligoland​.

[ DFKI ]

After years of trying, 60 Minutes cameras finally get a peek inside the workshop at Boston Dynamics, where robots move in ways once only thought possible in movies. Anderson Cooper reports.

[ 60 Minutes ]

In 2007, Noel Sharky stated that “we are sleepwalking into a brave new world where robots decide who, where and when to kill.” Since then thousands of AI and robotics researchers have joined his calls to regulate “killer robots.” But sometime this year, Turkey will deploy fully autonomous home-built kamikaze drones on its border with Syria. What are the ethical choices we need to consider? Will we end up in an episode of Black Mirror? Or is the UN listening to calls and starting the process of regulating this space? Prof. Toby Walsh will discuss this important issue, consider where we are at and where we need to go.

[ ICRA 2020 ]

In the second session of HAI's spring conference, artists and technologists discussed how technology can enhance creativity, reimagine meaning, and support racial and social justice. The conference, called “Intelligence Augmentation: AI Empowering People to Solve Global Challenges,” took place on 25 March 2021.

[ Stanford HAI ]

This spring 2021 GRASP SFI comes from Monroe Kennedy III at Stanford University, on “Considerations for Human-Robot Collaboration.”

The field of robotics has evolved over the past few decades. We’ve seen robots progress from the automation of repetitive tasks in manufacturing to the autonomy of mobilizing in unstructured environments to the cooperation of swarm robots that are centralized or decentralized. These abilities have required advances in robotic hardware, modeling, and artificial intelligence. The next frontier is robots collaborating in complex tasks with human teammates, in environments traditionally configured for humans. While solutions to this challenge must utilize all the advances of robotics, the human element adds a unique aspect that must be addressed. Collaborating with a human teammate means that the robot must have a contextual understanding of the task as well as all participant’s roles. We will discuss what constitutes an effective teammate and how we can capture this behavior in a robotic collaborator.

[ UPenn ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437512 Advancements in Android Tech

From science-fiction, to science fact in 30 years. Through rapid improvements in science and technology, A.I. Humanoid robots are now real.

Posted in Human Robots

#439023 In ‘Klara and the Sun,’ We Glimpse ...

In a store in the center of an unnamed city, humanoid robots are displayed alongside housewares and magazines. They watch the fast-moving world outside the window, anxiously awaiting the arrival of customers who might buy them and take them home. Among them is Klara, a particularly astute robot who loves the sun and wants to learn as much as possible about humans and the world they live in.

So begins Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel Klara and the Sun, published earlier this month. The book, told from Klara’s perspective, portrays an eerie future society in which intelligent machines and other advanced technologies have been integrated into daily life, but not everyone is happy about it.

Technological unemployment, the progress of artificial intelligence, inequality, the safety and ethics of gene editing, increasing loneliness and isolation—all of which we’re grappling with today—show up in Ishiguro’s world. It’s like he hit a fast-forward button, mirroring back to us how things might play out if we don’t approach these technologies with caution and foresight.

The wealthy genetically edit or “lift” their children to set them up for success, while the poor have to make do with the regular old brains and bodies bequeathed them by evolution. Lifted and unlifted kids generally don’t mix, and this is just one of many sinister delineations between a new breed of haves and have-nots.

There’s anger about robots’ steady infiltration into everyday life, and questions about how similar their rights should be to those of humans. “First they take the jobs. Then they take the seats at the theater?” one woman fumes.

References to “changes” and “substitutions” allude to an economy where automation has eliminated millions of jobs. While “post-employed” people squat in abandoned buildings and fringe communities arm themselves in preparation for conflict, those whose livelihoods haven’t been destroyed can afford to have live-in housekeepers and buy Artificial Friends (or AFs) for their lonely children.

“The old traditional model that we still live with now—where most of us can get some kind of paid work in exchange for our services or the goods we make—has broken down,” Ishiguro said in a podcast discussion of the novel. “We’re not talking just about the difference between rich and poor getting bigger. We’re talking about a gap appearing between people who participate in society in an obvious way and people who do not.”

He has a point; as much as techno-optimists claim that the economic changes brought by automation and AI will give us all more free time, let us work less, and devote time to our passion projects, how would that actually play out? What would millions of “post-employed” people receiving basic income actually do with their time and energy?

In the novel, we don’t get much of a glimpse of this side of the equation, but we do see how the wealthy live. After a long wait, just as the store manager seems ready to give up on selling her, Klara is chosen by a 14-year-old girl named Josie, the daughter of a woman who wears “high-rank clothes” and lives in a large, sunny home outside the city. Cheerful and kind, Josie suffers from an unspecified illness that periodically flares up and leaves her confined to her bed for days at a time.

Her life seems somewhat bleak, the need for an AF clear. In this future world, the children of the wealthy no longer go to school together, instead studying alone at home on their digital devices. “Interaction meetings” are set up for them to learn to socialize, their parents carefully eavesdropping from the next room and trying not to intervene when there’s conflict or hurt feelings.

Klara does her best to be a friend, aide, and confidante to Josie while continuing to learn about the world around her and decode the mysteries of human behavior. We surmise that she was programmed with a basic ability to understand emotions, which evolves along with her other types of intelligence. “I believe I have many feelings. The more I observe, the more feelings become available to me,” she explains to one character.

Ishiguro does an excellent job of representing Klara’s mind: a blend of pre-determined programming, observation, and continuous learning. Her narration has qualities both robotic and human; we can tell when something has been programmed in—she “Gives Privacy” to the humans around her when that’s appropriate, for example—and when she’s figured something out for herself.

But the author maintains some mystery around Klara’s inner emotional life. “Does she actually understand human emotions, or is she just observing human emotions and simulating them within herself?” he said. “I suppose the question comes back to, what are our emotions as human beings? What do they amount to?”

Klara is particularly attuned to human loneliness, since she essentially was made to help prevent it. It is, in her view, peoples’ biggest fear, and something they’ll go to great lengths to avoid, yet can never fully escape. “Perhaps all humans are lonely,” she says.

Warding off loneliness through technology isn’t a futuristic idea, it’s something we’ve been doing for a long time, with the technologies at hand growing more and more sophisticated. Products like AFs already exist. There’s XiaoIce, a chatbot that uses “sentiment analysis” to keep its 660 million users engaged, and Azuma Hikari, a character-based AI designed to “bring comfort” to users whose lives lack emotional connection with other humans.

The mere existence of these tools would be sinister if it wasn’t for their widespread adoption; when millions of people use AIs to fill a void in their lives, it raises deeper questions about our ability to connect with each other and whether technology is building it up or tearing it down.

This isn’t the only big question the novel tackles. An overarching theme is one we’ve been increasingly contemplating as computers start to acquire more complex capabilities, like the beginnings of creativity or emotional awareness: What is it that truly makes us human?

“Do you believe in the human heart?” one character asks. “I don’t mean simply the organ, obviously. I’m speaking in the poetic sense. The human heart. Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual?”

The alternative, at least in the story, is that people don’t have a unique essence, but rather we’re all a blend of traits and personalities that can be reduced to strings of code. Our understanding of the brain is still elementary, but at some level, doesn’t all human experience boil down to the firing of billions of neurons between our ears? Will we one day—in a future beyond that painted by Ishiguro, but certainly foreshadowed by it—be able to “decode” our humanity to the point that there’s nothing mysterious left about it? “A human heart is bound to be complex,” Klara says. “But it must be limited.”

Whether or not you agree, Klara and the Sun is worth the read. It’s both a marvelous, engaging story about what it means to love and be human, and a prescient warning to approach technological change with caution and nuance. We’re already living in a world where AI keeps us company, influences our behavior, and is wreaking various forms of havoc. Ishiguro’s novel is a snapshot of one of our possible futures, told through the eyes of a robot who keeps you rooting for her to the end.

Image Credit: Marion Wellmann from Pixabay Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#439000 Can AI Stop People From Believing Fake ...

Machine learning algorithms provide a way to detect misinformation based on writing style and how articles are shared.

On topics as varied as climate change and the safety of vaccines, you will find a wave of misinformation all over social media. Trust in conventional news sources may seem lower than ever, but researchers are working on ways to give people more insight on whether they can believe what they read. Researchers have been testing artificial intelligence (AI) tools that could help filter legitimate news. But how trustworthy is AI when it comes to stopping the spread of misinformation?

Researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and the University of Tennessee collaborated to study the role of AI in helping people identify whether the news they’re reading is legitimate or not.

The research paper, “Tailoring Heuristics and Timing AI Interventions for Supporting News Veracity Assessments,” was published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports. It discussed how crowdsourcing marketplace Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) can be used to identify misinformation for fresh news and specific heuristics, which are rules of thumb used to process information and consider its veracity. In other words, heuristics are essentially “shortcuts for decisions,” explained Dorit Nevo, an associate professor at RPI’s Lally School of Management and a lead author for the paper.

The study found that AI would be successful in flagging false stories only if the reader did not already have an opinion on the topic, Nevo said. When study subjects were set in their beliefs, confirmation bias kept them from reassessing their views.

Nevo said the first part of the project focused on whether subjects could detect misinformation around climate change and vaccines like the one designed to prevent chicken pox. Then, beginning in April 2020, her team studied how people responded to news related to COVID-19.

“With COVID-19, there was a significant difference,” Nevo said. They found that about 72 percent of respondents could identify misinformation about the coronavirus without heuristic clues, and roughly 93 percent were able to be convinced by the researcher’s heuristics that the content was fake.

Examples of heuristic clues include text with too many capital letters or the use of strong language, Nevo said.

There were two types of heuristics mentioned in the team’s paper: objective heuristics and source heuristics. They put a statement at the top of each article the subjects read; it instructed them to read the article and indicate whether they believed its central thesis.

“We either put a statement that says the AI finds this article reliable and accurate based on the objective heuristics, or we said the AI finds the source reliable,” Nevo said. “So that's the source heuristic.”

In her research on heuristics, Nevo found that people’s thinking takes one of two paths: The first path is to read the article, think about it and decide if they believe it; the second is to consider the source and what others think about the news, and decide whether to believe it before reading it.

Image: Dorit Nevo/RPI/IEEE Spectrum

Researchers at RPI researched the role of heuristics and AI in detecting whether people thought news was credible

Another research paper, “Timing Matters When Correcting Fake News,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by researchers at Harvard University, differed from the RPI researchers in its findings. While Nevo and her collaborators found that it’s easier to convince people that a story is fake news before reading it, the Harvard researchers, led by Nadia M. Brashier, a psychologist and neuroscientist, discovered that a fact-check can convince people of misinformation even after reading headlines. When study subjects read true or false labels after reading a headline, that resulted in a 25.3 percent reduction in “subsequent misclassification,” when compared to headlines with no tag, Brashier and her team found.

In the end, fighting misinformation will require both computing and human efforts such as policy changes, says Benjamin D. Horne, an assistant professor of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee and one of Nevo’s co-authors. He says the RPI-Tennessee work was inspired by AI tools he designed previously. Horne was previously a research assistant at RPI, where he developed machine learning (ML) algorithms that can detect partial truths as well as decontextualized truths and out-of-date information.

“Our algorithms are trained on source-level behavior, both when using the textual content of an article and the network of other news sources that it draws news from,” Horne said. “We have found that these two types of features together are quite good at distinguishing between sources labeled as reliable or unreliable by external news source ratings.”

The machine learning algorithms analyze the writing style and the content-sharing behavior of news outlets, Horne said. Researchers trained a supervised ML algorithm called Random Forest, a classification algorithm that uses decision trees.

AI for Detecting Fake News

So, what’s the potential for AI to be successful in detecting misinformation?

“The tools we have developed, and other tools developed in this area, have fairly high accuracy in lab settings,” says Horne. “For example, our most recent technical work showed around 83% accuracy in predicting when the source of a news article is reliable or unreliable.”

Despite the effectiveness of algorithms, old-fashioned fact-checking by journalists will still be required to combat fake news. AI could filter the information for fact-checkers to verify, according to Horne.

“AI tools are great at dealing with high quantities of information at fast speeds but lack the nuanced analysis that a journalist or fact-checker can provide,” Horne said. “I see a future where the two work together.” Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots