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Emotional Bonding with Space Probes
bfwebster writes "Space.com has a story on the scientists and technicians working on the Mars rovers, Spirit and Oppotunity--and how they will react when the rovers finally break down, go silent, or otherwise die. Of course, humans becoming emotionally involved with hardware is high on the list of overused science fiction cliches (see I.14), and humans were naming (and anthropomorphizing) their cars long before they started doing it to their computers. Some argue that anthropomorphic design can ease end-user acceptance [PDF], with some interesting results among toys for children. On the other hand, when software manufacturers try to give our computers some 'personality', we tend to vehemently react against it--witness Microsoft's attempts with the much-loathed Bob and Clippy. And when our personal computers are aged or ailing or simply misbehaving, we usually are more than happy to put them out of our misery. So in the case of Spirit and Opportunity, the issue may be the large investment of time, money, and professional credibility in having two semi-autonomous rovers 100 million miles away function correctly. Best quote from the Space.com story: when Spirit, early into its mission, shut down for reasons then unknown, the Spirit mission manager happened to get a phone call from her husband. He asked her how her day had been, and she said, 'Well...I think I'm personally responsible for the loss of a $400 million national asset.' Doncha hate it when that happens?"
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Robotics designers are working with psychologists here at Vanderbilt University to improve human-machine interfaces by teaching robots to sense human emotions. Such "sensitive" robots would change the way they interact with humans based on an evaluation of a person's mood.
"We believe that many of our human-to-human communications are implicit -- that is, the more familiar we are with a person, the better we are at understanding them. We want to determine whether a robot can sense a person's mood and change the way it interacts with the human for more natural communications," said Vanderbilt assistant professor Nilanjan Sarkar.
"We don't want to give a robot emotions; we just want them to be sensitive to our emotions," added Craig Smith, Vanderbilt associate professor of psychology and human development.
Sarkar, an engineer, initiated the research project with Smith, a psychologist, with the insight that there is no universal method of detecting emotions in humans. This impressed Smith, who had independently noticed that years of research in psychology had failed to uncover the Rosetta stone of human emotions. The bottom line for both researchers was that people express the same emotions in different ways; thus, any "universal" method for detecting emotions with robots would be doomed.
"Psychologists have been trying to identify universal patterns of physiological response since the early 1900s, but without success. We believe that the lesson to be learned there is that there are no such universal patterns," said Smith.
Consequently, the team's research project has two parts: sensing the unique patterns of behavior that mark an individual person's emotions, and converting that information in real-time into actuator-style commands to the robot to facilitate communications between humans and machines.
"We have established the feasibility of the individual-specific approach that we are taking, and there is a good chance that we can succeed," said Smith.
Emotional data
The approach taken by the researchers was adopted from voice- and handwriting-recognition technologies: Information on baseline features is compiled for each person, and then the features that indicate each mental state are identified for that person. Armed with their personalized emotion-recognition system, the researchers hope to use diverse data steams from users to create a more intuitive interface.
In their prototype studies, sensors are worn by the person being monitored by the robot. For example, heart rate monitors would gauge the user's anxiety level, and the robotic responses would be adjusted accordingly. With the sensors in place on the subject, the researchers observe data streams for the subject in various situations, such as while the subject is playing a videogame.
By subjecting each person to the same anxiety-producing situations in the game, the researchers obtained electrocardiogram profiles for specific mental states.
One such experiment gathered information from the same user's sensors over a six-month period in order to validate the feasibility of the "personalized" approach.
So far, Sarkar's team has performed preliminary analysis of the profiles using conventional signal-processing algorithms and experimental methods like fuzzy logic and wavelet analysis. They have found patterns in the variations in the interval between heartbeats that could be "personalized."
Specifically, two frequency bands vary predictably with changes in stress. Sarkar's team is now conducting similar analyses using other available biosensors, including skin conductance (which changes when people sweat under stress) and facial muscles (such as furrowing the brow or clenching the jaw).
The team is also expanding the programming of its small robot to allow the robot to make better use of this information when communicating with people.
'I sense you are anxious'
In a current experiment the small robot explores its environ
Howto write a summary
Actually, there is a growing LiveJournal meme regarding spacer journals. Currently over two dozen of them. One of the communications satellites keeps a public friends filter of all of them available here:
HGS1's Spacers List
These journals are a blast to read. Check it out!
All I wanted was a rock to wind a piece of string around, and I ended up with the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota
There are many things that are anthropomorphized like this in addition to cars. Ships have been given names for hundreds of years, and in fact it was only relatively recently that a well-respected maritime publication (I think it was Lloyd's of London's insurance books) that ceased to call ships "she", opting instead for the more mundane "it". This move attracted a lot of negative reaction (including from myself) since it flies in the face of longstanding tradition.
... probably to ward off bad luck and just because ships really do seem to have a personality.)
...
Only in a few places have ships been called 'he'; those include the Soviet Union, and the German navy had one exception to the 'she rule', the cruiser Bismarck - due to its size and strength - and in many Star Trek novels, Klingon ships are referred to with male pronouns in part because the Klingons originally were meant to be a stand-in for the Soviet Union and in part because the writers believed that a warrior society wouldn't "demean" its ships by giving them feminine names.
Sailors, long a superstitious lot, will say that it's bad luck to change a ship's name, or to launch a ship with no name (German U-boats only had numbers, as did the White Star fleet of Babylon 5; I would bet that German crews unofficially named their ships, as did one White Star captain in the television series
In the Volkswagen enthusiast community, of which I am a part, it is quite common to see people name their cars. While many people follow the common convention and refer to their vehicle as 'she', there are a few cases where the Soviet practice is followed and a masculine name given. I have known people outside the VW community who name their cars, and some non-enthusiasts who do, but in general the naming seems to crop up more often among people who are passionate about the thing they name. Car enthusiasts tend to spend a lot more time with their vehicles, cleaning, repairing, and modifying them with their own hands instead of letting a faceless shop tech do it, so they bond more with the car and the car's personality - they're there, just ask any sailor - will have an influence on the owner.
We also anthropomorphize animals - we name our pets, don't we? And we talk to them as if they could understand (though I would swear that they can, sometimes) and treat them as part of our families. Mergings of humans and animals have been found in folklore for thousands of years (the ancient Egyptian pantheon perhaps being one of the most well-known examples) as have animals that could talk to people or be talked to by people. This is generally accepted and no one thinks much of it.
However, for some reason, more modern interpretations of this practice ("furries" for instance) are generally frowned upon; why I am not certain because past history seems to hint that it's not so unusual to imagine humans with animal qualities, or animals with human qualities. I would be interested in hearing speculation on why this is from some other readers.
So I don't really think it's all that odd that the MER spacecraft have been humanized. They even, to a point, seem to look a bit like us with a 'pair of eyes' and an arm holding out sensors, just like a human can extend its hand to touch something to examine it. After all, history shows that it's
Only human.
i am a soviet space shuttle
For those of you not familiar, The Librarian is a character in several Terry Pratchett novels.
The Librarian is librarian at Unseen University (for wizards). After a freak magical accident, among other things, the librarian was transformed into an oranguatan. The librarian decided that he liked being an ape better than being a human, and decided to stay that way. He likes bananas.
Now, personally, I'd perfer to see The Luggage as the next clippy. It would somehow be fitting....
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
are you sure????????????????
i think he meant the one from neil stephenson's "Snow Crash"... the librarian was a virtual reality AI assistant inside the metaverse
May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
Yeah, I guarantee you that I was talking about Neal Stephenson's Librarian, from Snow Crash.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Spirit
Opportunity
It isn't. It's Microsoft's fault for not modularizing the Office components, at least to a point where an Office Pro CD can be used to install the export components on a system installed with Office Standard and vice versa.
/renew and I received "You are trying to perform an operation on something that is not a socket". Anyway, in the process of trying to get the TCP/IP stack reinstalled I decided to run System File Checker. To my great suprise, sfc immediately asked me to insert the Windows XP Professional SP1 CD to continue. As I mentioned, this machine was installed with XP Home SP1, so of course putting in the original install media did nothing. I thought I might be able to get around the issue with an XP Pro CD I have here for one of my laptop, but its an XP Pro SP0 CD, so that didn't work either.
I ran into a similar (and yet even more unusual) battle this weekend with my wife's PC at home. Its running Windows XP Home, installed with the Windows XP Home SP1 CD. I installed a CD-RW drive so she could burn mix CDs to take with her in the car. After I installed the CD-RW drive, she later complained that "the Internet is down again". After doing some initial troubleshooting I discovered that the TCP/IP stack somehow ate itself-- I tried an ipconfig
This is the first (and only thus far) case I've ever seen where Windows has needed to copy files from a CD of software that I don't even own, especially when I legally purchased the XP Home SP1 CD in the first place.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
Article on the Talking Moose at Wired.
And (you can gasp in anticipation here if you like) there is an update for Mac OS X, called "Uli's Talking Moose" by Uli Kusterer. Unfortunately, the web site mentioned in the article does not seem to be fully functional, and redirects to a domain that does not resolve. I'm not sure what environment the Moose is currently inhabiting, but it's probably lurking somewhere.
http://macintosh.telcel.net.ve/preview/262242.html
*bow, bow* *snuggles the google bunny*