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Four [02 Jun 2003|08:16am] [ mood | hungry ] Pentagon seeks to sort and store lifetime experience 29.05.2003 3.30pm - By JIM WOLF WASHINGTON - The Pentagon is shopping for ways to capture everything a person sees, says and hears as part of a project it says is meant to help create smarter robots. The projected system called Lifelog would suck in all of a subject's experience -- from phone numbers dialed and emails viewed to every breath taken, step made and place gone. The idea is to index the material, and make patterns easily retrievable in an effort to make machines think more like people, learning from experience. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the Pentagon's cradle for revolutionary technologies, is sponsoring a competition to bring out proposals for setting up such a system. The resulting knowhow could give US war fighters more effective computers capable of building on a user's past and interpreting his or her commands, said Jan Walker, a DARPA spokeswoman. She said the new project had nothing to do with DARPA's Terrorism Awareness Information programme, a research initiative into creating a giant surveillance system aimed at thwarting terrorism which has been criticised by civil rights groups. The LifeLog goal is to create a searchable database of human lives -- initially those of the developers -- to promote artificial intelligence, the agency said. The technology will advance a new class of systems able to reason in a number of ways, learn from experience and "respond in a robust manner to surprises," DARPA's Information Processing Technology Office said. To do so, it must index the mumbo jumbo of daily life and make it possible "to infer the user's routines, habits and relationships with other people, organisations, places and objects, and to exploit these patterns to ease its task," the announcement said. Perhaps eager to avoid any comparisons with George Orwell's all-seeing "Big Brother" in the classic novel 1984, DARPA said respondents must address "human subject approval, data privacy and security, copyright and legal considerations that would affect the LifeLog development process." Steven Aftergood, who tracks government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, said he was not prepared to reject the LifeLog initiative or call it illegitimate. "But, you know, it's one more programme that demands vigilant oversight," he said in a telephone interview. "The more personal experience that can be captured by digital means, the more vulnerable that experience is to unwanted surveillance." - REUTERS post comment

Five [02 Jun 2003|12:49pm] [ mood | okay ] Study: Human traits make robots likable By Winston Chai Special to CNET News.com May 30, 2003, 10:02 AM PT Imitation is not just the best form of flattery--it's also good interface design. A study shows that talking computers that copy a user's unique vocal inflections seem easier to use. The researchers think that a key component of machine likability is the ability to mirror the "music"--the rhythm and pitch--of a user's speech. This finding stemmed from an experiment conducted by Japanese researcher Noriko Suzuki's team at ATR Media Information Science Laboratories in Kyoto, reported scientific journal New Scientist. According to the report, the researchers looked at how social bonds develop between people. When we sense that a person is making an effort to copy the way that we speak, we tend to like that person more, they believed. The group asked volunteers to work with an animated computer character that had the linguistic capabilities of a 1-year-old child, the report said. The participants were told to make toy animals out of blocks on the computer screen and to say the names of these animals to the character. The report said the character would in return hum sounds that mimicked the volunteers' speech in rhythm, intonation, loudness and pitch. The users were then asked to rate the character on attributes such as cooperation, learning ability, task achievement, comfort, friendliness and sympathy. Results showed that the animated character scored highest on all counts when it mimicked 80 percent of a volunteer's voice--proving that the advice "It's not just what you say, but how you say it" also counts for machines, according to the report. "The user felt some kind of friendly emotion from the computer, even though it was just copying the stresses and intonation of their own voices," Suzuki said. The research team said the character did not imitate the volunteers' voices fully, but created the impression that it had free will and thus was more human and more loveable. Suzuki said in the report that this revelation can help forge closer bonds between people and machines. "Sometimes people are afraid of robots," he said. "But if robot voice patterns are improved, people may warm up to them." That opinion is shared by Timothy Bickmore, an expert on human-computer interaction at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bickmore said in the report that such mimicry can indeed help build rapport between humans and computerized characters or robots. He added that this finding could be applied in areas such as entertainment, computer gaming and toys. The history of personal computing is filled with attempts to make daunting interfaces more likable through the use of human-like avatars or characters such as Microsoft's Office helpmate Clippy or its Bob software. CNETAsia's Winston Chai reported from Singapore. - CNET News.com post comment

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