Miscellaneous

[Airicist]

World's First Emotional Home Robot

Published on Jul 4, 2014

Artificial intelligence is still a work in progress, but if you're simply looking for robotic companionship, We may have a humanoid for you.

The Japanese mobile operator teamed up with Aldebaran Robotics to develop Pepper, the world's first personal robot that can read emotions.

Feeling blue? Pepper can detect sadness based on your expressions and voice tones. Using built-in sensors and pre-programmed algorithms, the robot will also react appropriately.

In the vein of its corporate philosophy of "happiness for everyone," SoftBank entered the cyborg business "with the aim of developing affectionate robots that make people smile," according to CEO Masayoshi Son.

But Pepper does more than tell a joke or two. The device comes equipped with a 10.1-inch touch display, as well as voice-recognition technology and emotion recognition, to enable human-to-humanoid communication. It can also handle gestures, like a wave of the arm, or nod of the head.

These advanced technologies make it easy for users to interact with Pepper just as they would family and friends. And, really, who needs human contact when they've got a robot that makes jokes, dances, and provides other forms of entertainment?

"For the past nine years, I've believed that the most important role of robots will be as kind and emotional companions to enhance our daily lives, to bring happiness, constantly surprise us, and make people grow," Aldebaran CEO Bruno Maisonnier said in a statement. "The emotional robot will create a new dimension in our lives and new ways of interacting with technology. It's just the beginning, but already a promising reality."

The friendly-looking cyborg will begin rolling into Japanese homes in February, for a base price of 198,000 yen ($1,931/1,152 pounds).

[Airicist]

Poor thing! Would you feel sorry for a simulated robot?

Published on Mar 27, 2015

This is an accompanying video on our HRI 2015 paper.

Poor Thing! Would You Feel Sorry for a Simulated Robot?
A comparison of empathy toward a physical and a simulated robot
dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2696454.2696471

Article "Would you feel sorry for a simulated robot? Study shows people empathize more with the real thing"

by Stela Seo, Denise Geiskkovitch, Masayuki Nakane, Corey King, Jim Young
March 27, 2015

[Airicist]

Human-Robot Emotional and Musical Interactions - video lecture by Prof. Massimiliano Zecca

Published on May 11, 2015

In his lecture titled ”Human-Robot Emotional and Musical Interactions", part of the IJARS’s Video Series, prof Massimiliano Zecca touches upon 3 main topics, emotional robotics, musical robotics and wearable bionistrumentation. Prof. Zecca centers his research on robotic systems and technologies that would make up for assisting those in need due to advanced age or illness. In this view, he’s mostly interested in robotic systems-human interactions on an emotional level and designing a mental model for the humanoid robot. This lead to the development of the WE-4RII robot. His second interest and research focus lies in musical robotics where the basic idea is to make the robot capable of interacting with other musicians on a same level, as if the robot was a band member, a music player part of the same musicians’ group. This is how the Waseda flutist robot N.4 refined VI was born, followed by the Waseda Saxophonist. Finally, the first two research focuses raised the question of how people perceived the interaction with these robots rather than concentrating solely on advancing the technology. This brought his attention to wearable sensors for humans where the data collected is directly fed to robots for interpretation.

Prof. Zecca explores issues such as how people feel about interacting with the robot on an emotional level, how the robots interact within groups, how can they “sense” what humans feel during the interaction. We invite you to watch his lecture for a more in-depth overview of the research presented.

"Human-robot emotional and musical interactions: Lecture by Massimiliano Zecca"

by International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems (IJARS)
May 15, 2015

[Airicist]

Hacking Emotional Intelligence (EQ) - Joe Dunn

Published on Jun 19, 2015

From Ignite Velocity San Jose 2015, a series of 5-minute presentations. Emotional Intelligence is a set of techniques for knowing yourself and relating to other people. It’s not that hard, despite often being described as a mysterious “secret sauce” for professional success. In this Ignite talk, we’ll introduce “Hacking EQ” – how to increase your EQ with a set of quick, simple techniques you can use any time and in any professional situation.

[Airicist]

A Simple Mind Trick Will Help You Think More Rationally

Published on Jul 22, 2015

Emotions can cloud our rational decision-making. By adopting the perspective of an outside advisor, psychologist Dan Ariely says we can inject some rationality into our cognitive processes. Ariely's new book is titled "Irrationally Yours: On Missing Socks, Pickup Lines, and Other Existential Puzzles".

Transcript - There’s one way to be rational, there are many ways to be irrational. We could be irrational by getting confused, not taking actions, being myopic, vindictive, emotional. You name it. There’s lots of ways to be wrong. And because of that there’s not one way to fix it.

But one interesting way to try and inject some rationality is to think from an outsider’s perspective. So here’s what happens. When you think about your own life you’re trapped within your own perspective. You’re trapped within your own emotions and feelings and so on. But if you give advice to somebody else all of a sudden you’re not trapped within that emotional combination mish-mash complexity and you can give advice that is more forward-looking and not so specific to the emotions.

So one idea is to basically ask people for advice. So if you're falling in love with some person, good advice is to go to your mother and say, “Mother, what do you think about the long term compatibility of that person?” You’re infatuated, right. When you’re infatuated you’re not able to see things three months down the road. You’re saying I’m infatuated. I’ll stay infatuated forever and this will never go away. Your mother being an outsider is not infatuated and she could probably look at things like long term compatibility and so on. But there’s other ways to do it which is not to be advisors to other people but to be advisors for ourselves. So for example in one experiment we asked people, we said look, you went to your doctor.

They gave you this diagnosis. You know that the thing that the doctor recommended is much more expensive and there are other things that would be much cheaper. Would you go for a second opinion? And people say no, my doctor recommended it. How could I not take their advice? How could I say can you please refer me for a second opinion? Then we asked another group. We said here is the situation. If this happened to your friend would you recommend that they go for a second opinion? People said absolutely. How could you not go for a second opinion? So one idea is to try and get ourselves from an outside perspective. You look at the situation and then you say to yourself if this was about somebody else, somebody I love and care about and then when this situation what would I advise them? And you would realize that often your advice will be different and often a more rational, useful perspective.

[Airicist]

Beyond Verbal talks at IFA'15 about emotional BIGDATA

Published on Oct 1, 2015

We are passionate creatures that beat to the rhythm of our sentiments, yet our machines are oblivious to these same emotions that power us humans and big data practically ignores this critical piece of information. But this is about to change. Enabling machines to understand our emotions is introducing a whole new dimension to big data. A big data of emotions change the way we look and analyze our world on a macro level but at the same time also change the very way we understand our own micro-selves.
The talk will show how emotions can be extracted, analyzed and quantified on a massive scale and what insights it can drive into our ability to understand our surroundings as-well-as our own personal wellbeing.