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#436202 Trump CTO Addresses AI, Facial ...
Michael Kratsios, the Chief Technology Officer of the United States, took the stage at Stanford University last week to field questions from Stanford’s Eileen Donahoe and attendees at the 2019 Fall Conference of the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI).
Kratsios, the fourth to hold the U.S. CTO position since its creation by President Barack Obama in 2009, was confirmed in August as President Donald Trump’s first CTO. Before joining the Trump administration, he was chief of staff at investment firm Thiel Capital and chief financial officer of hedge fund Clarium Capital. Donahoe is Executive Director of Stanford’s Global Digital Policy Incubator and served as the first U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council during the Obama Administration.
The conversation jumped around, hitting on both accomplishments and controversies. Kratsios touted the administration’s success in fixing policy around the use of drones, its memorandum on STEM education, and an increase in funding for basic research in AI—though the magnitude of that increase wasn’t specified. He pointed out that the Trump administration’s AI policy has been a continuation of the policies of the Obama administration, and will continue to build on that foundation. As proof of this, he pointed to Trump’s signing of the American AI Initiative earlier this year. That executive order, Kratsios said, was intended to bring various government agencies together to coordinate their AI efforts and to push the idea that AI is a tool for the American worker. The AI Initiative, he noted, also took into consideration that AI will cause job displacement, and asked private companies to pledge to retrain workers.
The administration, he said, is also looking to remove barriers to AI innovation. In service of that goal, the government will, in the next month or so, release a regulatory guidance memo instructing government agencies about “how they should think about AI technologies,” said Kratsios.
U.S. vs China in AI
A few of the exchanges between Kratsios and Donahoe hit on current hot topics, starting with the tension between the U.S. and China.
Donahoe:
“You talk a lot about unique U.S. ecosystem. In which aspect of AI is the U.S. dominant, and where is China challenging us in dominance?
Kratsios:
“They are challenging us on machine vision. They have more data to work with, given that they have surveillance data.”
Donahoe:
“To what extent would you say the quantity of data collected and available will be a determining factor in AI dominance?”
Kratsios:
“It makes a big difference in the short term. But we do research on how we get over these data humps. There is a future where you don’t need as much data, a lot of federal grants are going to [research in] how you can train models using less data.”
Donahoe turned the conversation to a different tension—that between innovation and values.
Donahoe:
“A lot of conversation yesterday was about the tension between innovation and values, and how do you hold those things together and lead in both realms.”
Kratsios:
“We recognized that the U.S. hadn’t signed on to principles around developing AI. In May, we signed [the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Principles on Artificial Intelligence], coming together with other Western democracies to say that these are values that we hold dear.
[Meanwhile,] we have adversaries around the world using AI to surveil people, to suppress human rights. That is why American leadership is so critical: We want to come out with the next great product. And we want our values to underpin the use cases.”
A member of the audience pushed further:
“Maintaining U.S. leadership in AI might have costs in terms of individuals and society. What costs should individuals and society bear to maintain leadership?”
Kratsios:
“I don’t view the world that way. Our companies big and small do not hesitate to talk about the values that underpin their technology. [That is] markedly different from the way our adversaries think. The alternatives are so dire [that we] need to push efforts to bake the values that we hold dear into this technology.”
Facial recognition
And then the conversation turned to the use of AI for facial recognition, an application which (at least for police and other government agencies) was recently banned in San Francisco.
Donahoe:
“Some private sector companies have called for government regulation of facial recognition, and there already are some instances of local governments regulating it. Do you expect federal regulation of facial recognition anytime soon? If not, what ought the parameters be?”
Kratsios:
“A patchwork of regulation of technology is not beneficial for the country. We want to avoid that. Facial recognition has important roles—for example, finding lost or displaced children. There are use cases, but they need to be underpinned by values.”
A member of the audience followed up on that topic, referring to some data presented earlier at the HAI conference on bias in AI:
“Frequently the example of finding missing children is given as the example of why we should not restrict use of facial recognition. But we saw Joy Buolamwini’s presentation on bias in data. I would like to hear your thoughts about how government thinks we should use facial recognition, knowing about this bias.”
Kratsios:
“Fairness, accountability, and robustness are things we want to bake into any technology—not just facial recognition—as we build rules governing use cases.”
Immigration and innovation
A member of the audience brought up the issue of immigration:
“One major pillar of innovation is immigration, does your office advocate for it?”
Kratsios:
“Our office pushes for best and brightest people from around the world to come to work here and study here. There are a few efforts we have made to move towards a more merit-based immigration system, without congressional action. [For example, in] the H1-B visa system, you go through two lotteries. We switched the order of them in order to get more people with advanced degrees through.”
The government’s tech infrastructure
Donahoe brought the conversation around to the tech infrastructure of the government itself:
“We talk about the shiny object, AI, but the 80 percent is the unsexy stuff, at federal and state levels. We don’t have a modern digital infrastructure to enable all the services—like a research cloud. How do we create this digital infrastructure?”
Kratsios:
“I couldn’t agree more; the least partisan issue in Washington is about modernizing IT infrastructure. We spend like $85 billion a year on IT at the federal level, we can certainly do a better job of using those dollars.” Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#436190 What Is the Uncanny Valley?
Have you ever encountered a lifelike humanoid robot or a realistic computer-generated face that seem a bit off or unsettling, though you can’t quite explain why?
Take for instance AVA, one of the “digital humans” created by New Zealand tech startup Soul Machines as an on-screen avatar for Autodesk. Watching a lifelike digital being such as AVA can be both fascinating and disconcerting. AVA expresses empathy through her demeanor and movements: slightly raised brows, a tilt of the head, a nod.
By meticulously rendering every lash and line in its avatars, Soul Machines aimed to create a digital human that is virtually undistinguishable from a real one. But to many, rather than looking natural, AVA actually looks creepy. There’s something about it being almost human but not quite that can make people uneasy.
Like AVA, many other ultra-realistic avatars, androids, and animated characters appear stuck in a disturbing in-between world: They are so lifelike and yet they are not “right.” This void of strangeness is known as the uncanny valley.
Uncanny Valley: Definition and History
The uncanny valley is a concept first introduced in the 1970s by Masahiro Mori, then a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The term describes Mori’s observation that as robots appear more humanlike, they become more appealing—but only up to a certain point. Upon reaching the uncanny valley, our affinity descends into a feeling of strangeness, a sense of unease, and a tendency to be scared or freaked out.
Image: Masahiro Mori
The uncanny valley as depicted in Masahiro Mori’s original graph: As a robot’s human likeness [horizontal axis] increases, our affinity towards the robot [vertical axis] increases too, but only up to a certain point. For some lifelike robots, our response to them plunges, and they appear repulsive or creepy. That’s the uncanny valley.
In his seminal essay for Japanese journal Energy, Mori wrote:
I have noticed that, in climbing toward the goal of making robots appear human, our affinity for them increases until we come to a valley, which I call the uncanny valley.
Later in the essay, Mori describes the uncanny valley by using an example—the first prosthetic hands:
One might say that the prosthetic hand has achieved a degree of resemblance to the human form, perhaps on a par with false teeth. However, when we realize the hand, which at first site looked real, is in fact artificial, we experience an eerie sensation. For example, we could be startled during a handshake by its limp boneless grip together with its texture and coldness. When this happens, we lose our sense of affinity, and the hand becomes uncanny.
In an interview with IEEE Spectrum, Mori explained how he came up with the idea for the uncanny valley:
“Since I was a child, I have never liked looking at wax figures. They looked somewhat creepy to me. At that time, electronic prosthetic hands were being developed, and they triggered in me the same kind of sensation. These experiences had made me start thinking about robots in general, which led me to write that essay. The uncanny valley was my intuition. It was one of my ideas.”
Uncanny Valley Examples
To better illustrate how the uncanny valley works, here are some examples of the phenomenon. Prepare to be freaked out.
1. Telenoid
Photo: Hiroshi Ishiguro/Osaka University/ATR
Taking the top spot in the “creepiest” rankings of IEEE Spectrum’s Robots Guide, Telenoid is a robotic communication device designed by Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro. Its bald head, lifeless face, and lack of limbs make it seem more alien than human.
2. Diego-san
Photo: Andrew Oh/Javier Movellan/Calit2
Engineers and roboticists at the University of California San Diego’s Machine Perception Lab developed this robot baby to help parents better communicate with their infants. At 1.2 meters (4 feet) tall and weighing 30 kilograms (66 pounds), Diego-san is a big baby—bigger than an average 1-year-old child.
“Even though the facial expression is sophisticated and intuitive in this infant robot, I still perceive a false smile when I’m expecting the baby to appear happy,” says Angela Tinwell, a senior lecturer at the University of Bolton in the U.K. and author of The Uncanny Valley in Games and Animation. “This, along with a lack of detail in the eyes and forehead, can make the baby appear vacant and creepy, so I would want to avoid those ‘dead eyes’ rather than interacting with Diego-san.”
3. Geminoid HI
Photo: Osaka University/ATR/Kokoro
Another one of Ishiguro’s creations, Geminoid HI is his android replica. He even took hair from his own scalp to put onto his robot twin. Ishiguro says he created Geminoid HI to better understand what it means to be human.
4. Sophia
Photo: Mikhail Tereshchenko/TASS/Getty Images
Designed by David Hanson of Hanson Robotics, Sophia is one of the most famous humanoid robots. Like Soul Machines’ AVA, Sophia displays a range of emotional expressions and is equipped with natural language processing capabilities.
5. Anthropomorphized felines
The uncanny valley doesn’t only happen with robots that adopt a human form. The 2019 live-action versions of the animated film The Lion King and the musical Cats brought the uncanny valley to the forefront of pop culture. To some fans, the photorealistic computer animations of talking lions and singing cats that mimic human movements were just creepy.
Are you feeling that eerie sensation yet?
Uncanny Valley: Science or Pseudoscience?
Despite our continued fascination with the uncanny valley, its validity as a scientific concept is highly debated. The uncanny valley wasn’t actually proposed as a scientific concept, yet has often been criticized in that light.
Mori himself said in his IEEE Spectrum interview that he didn’t explore the concept from a rigorous scientific perspective but as more of a guideline for robot designers:
Pointing out the existence of the uncanny valley was more of a piece of advice from me to people who design robots rather than a scientific statement.
Karl MacDorman, an associate professor of human-computer interaction at Indiana University who has long studied the uncanny valley, interprets the classic graph not as expressing Mori’s theory but as a heuristic for learning the concept and organizing observations.
“I believe his theory is instead expressed by his examples, which show that a mismatch in the human likeness of appearance and touch or appearance and motion can elicit a feeling of eeriness,” MacDorman says. “In my own experiments, I have consistently reproduced this effect within and across sense modalities. For example, a mismatch in the human realism of the features of a face heightens eeriness; a robot with a human voice or a human with a robotic voice is eerie.”
How to Avoid the Uncanny Valley
Unless you intend to create creepy characters or evoke a feeling of unease, you can follow certain design principles to avoid the uncanny valley. “The effect can be reduced by not creating robots or computer-animated characters that combine features on different sides of a boundary—for example, human and nonhuman, living and nonliving, or real and artificial,” MacDorman says.
To make a robot or avatar more realistic and move it beyond the valley, Tinwell says to ensure that a character’s facial expressions match its emotive tones of speech, and that its body movements are responsive and reflect its hypothetical emotional state. Special attention must also be paid to facial elements such as the forehead, eyes, and mouth, which depict the complexities of emotion and thought. “The mouth must be modeled and animated correctly so the character doesn’t appear aggressive or portray a ‘false smile’ when they should be genuinely happy,” she says.
For Christoph Bartneck, an associate professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, the goal is not to avoid the uncanny valley, but to avoid bad character animations or behaviors, stressing the importance of matching the appearance of a robot with its ability. “We’re trained to spot even the slightest divergence from ‘normal’ human movements or behavior,” he says. “Hence, we often fail in creating highly realistic, humanlike characters.”
But he warns that the uncanny valley appears to be more of an uncanny cliff. “We find the likability to increase and then crash once robots become humanlike,” he says. “But we have never observed them ever coming out of the valley. You fall off and that’s it.” Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots