Social Robot?

smashr writes "Researchers are currently putting the finishing touches on robots that will be attending the AAAI (American Association for Artificial Intelligence) conference this year as part of the AAAI robot challenge. In addition to robots wearing tuxedos and serving drinks, several robots designed to actually register themselves will be participating in the conference. One such robot is GRACE, being built by Carnegie Mellon University and the Naval Research Lab (among others). GRACE features a digital face and speech recognition to interact with people attending the conference. (She even runs Linux!) Her goal is to register for the conference, give a speech and answer questions. Stories at: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, CNN.com, and USA Today."

Comments

Re:Why a social robot?

[thrillbert]

Recognizing human emotional states and predicting their responses from facial expressions and actions is one of the things humans do best ...<snip>... rather than having them try to do things we're GOOD at.

Bwuahahahahahahahahaa!!!!!

Sorry.. but if we're so good at recognizing emotions and predicting responses from facial expressions, then why are there so many divorces? That alone is proof that we SUCK at recognizing each other's needs..

On that note, maybe I'll start work on AICounselor_v1.0Beta.tar.gz now.. I'm sure GRACE would enjoy that module.

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With all things being equal.. well, no, that's boring..

Re:Does GRACE connect to internet?

[shadowduck]

Actually, that is planned for the future. We currently have the ability to locate the AAAI badges that are given to all conference attendees and use OCR to extract the name of the person we're talking to (Swarthmore did that portion of the work). Next year, we'd like to try to schmooze with conference attendees about their current research by pulling down their current papers, c.v.'s, etc. off the web. In time, in time. :)