Meet NEXI, MIT’s Media Lab’s Newest Creation

Wow, wow, wow. Cynthia Breazeal and the team at MIT’s Media Labs have done it again with NEXI, a mobile, dexterous, social robot that displays emotions.

Click on this link, and allow Nexi to tell you more about herself.

Via Suicide Bots.

The Debate Over Robot Rights

Dr. Caroline West, a senior lecturer in philosophy at Sydney University, says we should already be thinking about what will happen when humanoids develop the ability to reason and integrate into society. If humanoids become as intelligent and capable of feeling as humans, should they be given the same rights? The question cuts to the heart of what a “person” is.

“It could happen tomorrow, it could happen in 50 years, it could happen in 100 years,” says Professor Mary-Anne Williams, head of the innovation and research lab at Australia’s University of Technology. “People and animals are just chemical bags, chemical systems, so there’s no technical reason why we couldn’t have robots that truly have AI.”

Professor Williams believes a unique form of robotic emotion could even evolve one day. “You could argue some robots can mimic (emotions) already,” she says. “But because a robot will experience the world differently to us it will be quite an effort for the robot to imagine how we feel about something.”

“One of the things we’ll want robots to do is communicate. But in order to have a conversation you need the capability to build a mental model of the person you’re communicating with. And if you can model other people or other systems’ cognitive abilities then you can deceive.”

Humans generally anticipate how another person might feel about something by thinking about how it would affect them. People who don’t have the ability to empathize can become psychopaths.

“I think there is a danger of producing robots that are psychopathic,” Prof Williams says.

Of course, Isaac Asimov formulated the three laws to try and prevent robots from harming humans, but Professor Williams says this is easier said than done. Especially when there are robots already trained to kill on the battlefield in Iraq.

“You need a lot of cognitive capability to determine harm if you’re in a different kind of body. What will we do when we have to deal with entities … who have perceptions beyond our own and can reason as well as we can, or potentially better?”

Dr. Caroline West says, “If something is a person then it has serious rights, and what it takes to be a person is to be self-conscious and able to reason. If silicon-based creatures get to have those abilities then they would have the same moral standing as persons. Just as we think it’s not okay to enslave persons, so it would be wrong to enslave these robots if they really were self-conscious.”

Via TechNewsWorld.

Spotlight on Women in Robotics: Deborah N. Theobold

Deborah N. Theobald is Chairman and CEO Vecna Technologies, the company that developed the BEAR robot a versatile humanoid robot capable of lifting over 600lbs. BEAR is designed to locate, lift and rescue people in harm’s way,and carry them long distances if necessary. Whether on a battlefield, in a nuclear reactor core, near a toxic chemical spill, or inside a structurally-compromised building after an earthquake, the BEAR can rescue those in need without risking additional human life.

Theobald obtained her Aero/Astro degree from MIT and her Master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Maryland. Her education focused on human factors of space exploration with an emphasis on human-robot interaction, and she led a research team that explored haptic robot workstation design through the study of human posture in a simulated micro-gravity environment on NASA’s micro-gravity simulator, the KC-135.

Deborah Theobald is another great example of a woman making important strides in robotics. Holla for your girl!

From Vecna.com

Spotlight on Women in Robotics

Who knows– maybe it was Asimov’s famed character Dr. Susan Calvin that ignited a passion in robotics in a lot of young girls, but after learning about Rachel Wood’s achievements, I decided that it’s time to spotlight the strong role female scientists are taking in modern robotics research and development.

My ultimate roboscience idol is Cynthia Breazeal, director of the Robotic Life Group at MIT’s Media Lab. She’s the lead researcher on sociable machines, and her most famous work so far is the cute interactive robot Kismet that simulates emotion through facial expressions. Breazeal, along with Rodney Brooks, has been a very visible face in mass media and in encouraging an interest in science in documentaries and movies– in fact, you might have seen her the dvd extras for I, Robot.

Cynthia Breazeal and Rachel Wood prove that science isn’t just a man’s game, and that women are going to have an equal part in the shape of things to come.

Robot’s Brain Makes Mistakes Just Like A Baby

Instead of following standard neural network model, University of Sussex Center for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics research student Rachel Wood has designed a robot brain with a homeostatic network that exhibits the A-not-B error, a sign of intelligence found in babies between 7 and 12 months old.

The idea is that if AI can make the same developmental cognitive mistakes that we do as humans, it could be a critical step towards advanced AI– robots need to learn stability before they can achieve mental flexibility and adapt.

Meanwhile at University College London, researchers have created a program that sees the same optical illusions as humans.

The only question now is whether we want machines to emulate all of our flaws or try to improve upon them.

via New Scientist (subscription required to view full article)