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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."
Robots with social skills? Dear God, they've surpassed 80% of the population of /.!
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
This has been done before. Back in 1999, five robots had to make their way around the American Assocation for Artifical Intelligence annual meeting in Orlando.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
The Register had a good article on pronoun usage.
In English the masculine is used in gender-neutral cases where the gender cannot be specified before hand ("The officer should have his standard equipment present").
The feminine is used in cases of abstract personification ("The United States has her hands full") of a concept or an object (Freedom or automobiles).
Much like a car, to give it "personality" would move it from the first case to the second. Thus when you give a generic machine a specific voice, it is (usually) female).
But, as with all usage, it is up to the user. There is a strong push for gender neutral language in most things. The problem is that in cases that are purely up to personal taste, these rules apply.
So you can't tell someone to not make their robot feminine. But you can tell someone to make their manual not masculine.
And you seem to think their purpose was purely political (ie that there was a certain quota that needed to be maintained so they added a female robot to offset the male engineers). I really think it is much simplier than that.
What is music when you despise all sound?
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..
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. :)