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The Robot Professor
kaizokunami writes "From Wired News, we learn that a Japanese professor has created an android of himself that he uses to 'robot in' to classes. According to the article, 'It blinks and fidgets in its seat, moving its foot up and down restlessly, its shoulders rising gently as though it were breathing. These micromovements are so convincing that it's hard to believe this is a machine -- it seems more like a man wearing a rubber mask.'" More from the article: "'I want to check whether students, as well as my family, can feel my presence through Geminoid,' says Ishiguro, who seems perfectly at ease with his new twin. Geminoid already has a palpable gravitas that comes across when chatting to Ishiguro through the android, and one hesitates to even poke the machine's rubbery hands and cheeks."
Grad students are now obsolete.
Domo arigato, Professor Roboto!
I have been looking for an android with a palpable gravitas for a long time. I hope it is fully functional.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Robot Supermodels.
I wonder where this fits on the Uncanny Valley curve?
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But is this robot professor... fully functional? Alternitively, in other news half of slashdot realizes that they can make their very own girl robot...
Ow! My eyes! The goggles, they do nothing!
Pete/Petri "damn, my chainsaw is clogged with 1's and 0's again." --clyde
Do we give the professor a disk with a jpeg of an apple on it?
welcome our new android lecturer overlords?
Seriously, something like this must destroy students concentration.. It certainly seems to take away the human side of teaching.
Will program for karma.
...the shit's going to hit the fan when the guy dies and the robot decides to seek revenge on the guys that made fun of him in college, leaving the dimwitted clones of one of the revengee's children to seek out help from their grandfather's crack team of adventurers.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
There is something about the gaze of an intelligent person that can't be replicated. I'm wondering if this might have some subconscious effect on the students. I'm sure it would be alot harder to keep eye contact with a creation like this. And from there who knows what the complications would be.
Does anyone else think they would have a hard time learning from and listening to an object that didn't exude intelligence, even if in the background it was being controlled by a highly intelligent individual?
As a rule, I never trust dark brown ketchup.
FTA it looks like the actions and movements of the android have to be entirely controlled by humans using motion sensors. The android apparently is incapable of reading any kind of inputs (visual/aural) and processing and acting on them (the eyes/ears are for purely cosmetic reasons and nothing more, i believe). This is purely a controlled mechanical robot, not an intelligent auto-responsive robot - and though it's a neat proof of concept, I wonder what its real world applications could be?
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I bet this thing would do a better job than some of the professors that I've had. What's really funny, is that general ed. teachers may find themselves out of work as one of these teachs an entire class prerecorded material. The only negative is that it can't answer questions, but then again most teachers don't answer questions. They would just need to fill it with verbal outputs all saying, "find the answer yourself." If these were cheap enough, I could see them replacing some highschool teachers and some college either general ed or freshman level courses. I saw one post about super model versions next. Well, you know this is crafted after a teacher most wouldn't pick. They'd most likely pick a super model or atleast a very attractive person to use as the model for these things if they went into production.
I want to check whether students, as well as my family, can feel my presence through Geminoid.
Sounds like this guy is using The Force to suit his evil purposes.
In future degrees will be awarded on the basis of library fines.
KFG
And those grad students need to take better care of themselves - look at the acne on the guy in the last picture! He's giving even the most ardent mom's basement-dwelling
To be completely frank, I think this robot is a waste of effort. The thing is completely dependent on human input which means they might has well just have the actual guy sitting there in front of people. Even if they were recording a number of preset facial expressions it will never be truly convincing because it wont be able to call on the nuances of human emotion.
A robot doesn't look alive simply because its eyes wander around the room. If the intent is to guage human reaction to the thing I think they're going to find the response is exceedingly negative given how mishapen and disturbing the robot looks.
It's not like this is anything particularly unique either, it just happened that this guy used his own face as a model. Although, I suppose this guy's work isn't surprising given the amount of research and development Japanese put towards consumer products. I predict that will be the ultimate application we'll see for this work.
I'd be impressed if they were developing AI which mimicked human reactions. If the thing could learn by watching people and apply those observations for its own use in interactions.
"Aside from improving his android's lip synchronization and developing autonomous control of eye gaze, Ishiguro wants to start interacting with students through Geminoid."
Which makes this an avatar. He provides the essential interactive elements which would make it appealing to students (he seems to hope).
Psychologists may find something interesting here, being the way humans relate to this 'once removed' human presence.
When I was a kid in australia we had some friends who lived a long way away in the outback. Their kids attended school by Radio sometimes (perhaps all the time, I don't recall, this was over thirty years ago). A teacher who had a local presence might be an interesting extension of that basic idea. It's virtually the same thing as radio in this context, but more advanced.
What might be good is to use such a device to interact with people who are severely disabled. A system capable of translating the teachers actions into stimuli useful for the particuler student would have a lot of advantages. That way one teacher could interact with a class full of students with varying needs, where their own version of the Avatar translates to their needs.
Let me guess--the only clues that it's a robot are that it has a permanently painted on smirk, its eyes don't seem quite focused, there's a square access panel on its back (the door to which makes a visible outline even over a suit jacket in debates), it gets tired late at night when its battery runs down, it is overly touchy-feely with German diplomats and bald people, ... and, of course, it requires a human to operate it from an "undisclosed location".
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
blasphemy! I've always wanted a female invisible naked assassin robot to be a reality!
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
I think a lot of people are really missing the point of what this robot is supposed to do. There's a lot of comments about how the robot itself isn't autonomous and has no intelligence. That's not at all the role that the robot is supposed to fill.
The robot is supposed to simply project the presence of the professor remotely. Obviously we can do that to some degree with just a two way television hookup, but it's not like being in the room. You can't point at students and interact with them through a flat display. You can't change where the camera is pointing, and the students don't really know what the professor can see.
I think the biggest thing that this robot is missing is "gaze". If you ask me, the single distinguishing feature of presence is making eye contact. As someone pointed out, it doesn't look like there's actually any cameras in the eyes of this robot, so the actual professor can't see what the robot is "looking" at. If the robot could have gaze, reproduce facial expressions, and even replicate hand gestures, I think that would go a long way to having remote presence.
AccountKiller
Does it dream of electric sheep?
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
From the Artcle's picture section:
"A Geminoid operator wears motion-tracking lip markers. When the operator moves his mouth, Geminoid's lips make the same movement. A speaker inside the android lets the robotic double be heard."
And best said by one of the comments below the picture section:
"It's not even an android. It's all puppet and that all it is. If you have to have an operator in a back room running the thing, it doesn't even qualify as a robot, much less an "android"..... Oh, and Jim Hensen is dead, so his opinion doesn't matter. Mark Cannistraci"
No... no... no... you've got it all backwards. It's the robot that ends up going into the burning building to save the fireman/policeman/samaritan!