Positive Technology Journal

Re-blogged from KurzweilAI.net 

Grand challenges proposed by the U.K. Computing Research Committee include a project to unify cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and robotics.

One sign of success would be a robot capable of functioning at the level of a 2- to 5-year-old child. Another milestone could be a robot capable of autonomously helping a disabled person around a house without explicit preprogramming about its environment.

Other challenge is intended to create more dependable computers and associated software systems, which oversee the bulk of the world's financial transactions, regulate life-saving instruments, and manage the delivery of products.

 

Via Mind Hacks

Memoirs of a Postgrad has an interesting analysis of cognitive robotics - the science of developing 'cognitive agents'

Link 

Via Usability News 

Deadine: 20 January 2007
Centre for interaction Design, Napier University, Edinburgh
Salary Level Research Associate (Grade IA)
£20,645 - £30,902 p.a. (dependent on experience)

Opportunities exist for talented individuals to join Napier University’s team, led by Professor David Benyon, to work on a €12 million EU funded project, COMPANIONS. This project concerns the development of persistent, intelligent agents that work with people to help carry out activities within digital space. Napier’s work focus is the interaction design of these companions.

An Interaction Designer is required to undertake field work, analysis, prototyping and evaluation of systems using a variety of media such as video and Flash animation. The Interaction Designer will be a creative individual who can contribute to the interface, functionality, affective characteristics and embodiment of the companions.

A Conceptual Modeller or software engineer is needed for the development of a meta-data schemata for the mark-up of behaviours, language processing and modality selection. This will result in a COMPANIONS mark-up language.

For either position, the successful applicant will require a higher degree (or significant industry experience) in human-centred computing or interaction design. She or he should have good writing, team working, creative and communication skills, and have experience with techniques appropriate to the position.

Part time or short term contract positions may also be available. In addition, two fully funded PhD studentships (worth approx. £12000 p.a.) may be associated with the project.

Informal inquiries should be directed to the COMPANIONS research fellow Dr Oli Mival, o.mival@napier.ac.uk. Full applications in the form of a CV and covering letter should be received by 20th January 2007, electronically to c.thomson@napier.ac.uk or by post to Cheryl Thomson, Faculty of Engineering, Computing and Creative Industries, Napier University, 10, Colinton road, Edinburgh EH14 1DJ.

Via Neurodudes

From the call for articles 

Editors:  Juan R. Rabuñal, Julián Dorado & Alejandro Pazos

Via Mind Hacks

Researchers at the University of Washington Neural Systems Lab have created a humanoid robot you can control with your thoughts via a EEG-based non-invasive brain-computer interface.

Link to Neural Systems Lab robot info page

Via KurzweilAI.net

Using Wikipedia, Technion researchers have developed a way to give computers knowledge of the world to help them "think smarter," making common sense and broad-based connections between topics just as the human mind does.

Link

Via KurzweilAI.net

Scientists have designed and built an immersive table tennis simulation that allows a human to compete against a computer..

Link

Via Suicide Bots

From the Evolved Virtual Creatures website

This video shows results from a research project involving simulated Darwinian evolutions of virtual block creatures. A population of several hundred creatures is created within a supercomputer, and each creature is tested for their ability to perform a given task, such the ability to swim in a simulated water environment. Those that are most successful survive, and their virtual genes containing coded instructions for their growth, are copied, combined, and mutated to make offspring for a new population. The new creatures are again tested, and some may be improvements on their parents. As this cycle of variation and selection continues, creatures with more and more successful behaviors can emerge.

The creatures shown are results from many independent simulations in which they were selected for swimming, walking, jumping, following, and competing for control of a green cube.

Download movie from the Internet Archive

swimming

Recent trends in robot-assisted therapy environments to improve real-life functional performance of affected limbs.

J Neuroengineering Rehabil. 2006 Dec 18;3(1):29

Authors: Johnson MJ

ABSTRACT: Upper and lower limb robotic tools for neuro-rehabilitation are effective in reducing motor impairment but they are limited in their ability to improve real world function. There is a need to improve functional outcomes after robot-assisted therapy. Improvements in the effectiveness of these environments may be achieved by incorporating into their design and control strategies important elements key to inducing motor learning and cerebral plasticity such as mass-practice, feedback, task-engagement, and complex problem solving. This special issue presents nine articles. The novel strategies covered in this issue encourage more natural movements through the use of virtual reality and real objects and faster motor learning through the use of error feedback to guide acquisition of natural movements that are salient to real activities. In addition, several articles describe novel systems and techniques that use of custom and commercial games combined with new low-cost robot systems and a humanoid robot to embody the supervisory presence of the therapy as possible solutions to exercise compliance in under-supervised environments such as the home.

Link

Via the Neurophilosopher

Josh Bongard, Victor Zykov and Hod Limpton of Cornell University’s Computational Synthesis Laboratory have designed and built the Black Starfish, a four-legged robot which “automatically synthesizes a predictive model of its own topology (where and how its body parts are connected) through limited yet self-directed interaction with its environment, and then uses this model to synthesize successful new locomotive behavior before and after damage.”

Re-blogged from Pink Tentacle

Oki Electric announced the development of iris recognition technology for camera-equipped mobile phones. Unlike Oki’s previous iris recognition technology that relies on infrared cameras for the iris scan, the new technology uses ordinary cellphone cameras. With plans to make the technology commercially available in March 2007, Oki hopes to boost the security of cellphone payment systems. According to Oki, any camera-equipped cellphone or PDA can perform iris recognition once the special software is installed. Identification accuracy is said to be high, with only 1 in 100,000 scans resulting in error, and the system can tell the difference between flesh-and-blood eyes and photographs.

Via Engadget

HAL (short for Hybrid Assistive Limb) is a robotic suite designed "to expand and improve physical capabilities of human being".

The system, a brainchild of Yoshiyuki Sankai, engineering professor at Tsukuba University, is getting ready for mass production, Engadget reports. The  robotic suite could be used in applications such as "walking assistance and rehabilitation, nursing, factory work and disaster relief."  

HAL is originally developed to help elderly or disabled people walk around with their own legs and HAL-3 achieved the primary goal in 2000.

In 2005, the latest model HAL-5 was given upper body limbs as well as weight saving and more compact POWER units, longer life battery and much smaller control unit and spectacularly designed outer shells.

HAL is a robot suit which can expand and improve physical capabilities of human being. By wearing HAL-5 and you can hold up to 40 kg load by arms and can increase the maximum weight of leg press from 100 kg to 180 kg.

 

Read more at Engadget

Re-blogged from KurzweilAI.net

"Embodied cognition" experiments involving real and simulated robots suggest that the relationship between physical movement and sensory input could be crucial to developing more intelligent machines...

Read the full article

Via Technovelgy 

NEC and NTT have jointly produced PaPeRo (short for Partner-type Personal Robot), the latest of a series of domestic robots. PaPeRo uses a camera in each eye to navigate and has image recognition capabilities to track and identify individual children. Further, it is equipped with a mobile phone that allows parents to control him at distance, as well as to talk to children directly or with text messages

Via New Scientist Tech

Tests involving real and simulated robots suggest the relationship between physical movement and sensory input could be crucial to create smarter machines...

Read the full story

Via Pink Tentacle

The CIRT consortium, composed by Tokyo University and a group of 7 companies (Toyota, Olympus, Sega, Toppan Printing, Fujitsu, Matsushita, and Mitsubishi), has started a project to develop robotic assistants for Japan’s aging population.

The robots envisioned by the project should support the elderly with housework and serve as personal transportation capable of replacing the automobile.

The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) will be the major sponsor of the research, whose total cost is expected to be about 1 billion yen (US$9 million) per year.

From the Neuro-IT mailing list 

The Department of Neural Information Processing at the University of Ulm invites applications for a post-doc (or PhD student) position to begin November 1 2006, or later.

The Institute for Neural Information Processing at the University of Ulm (Germany) has two full professors, 4 postdocs and about 12 students and researchers in different areas of neural network research. Ongoing work includes mobile autonomous robots, computer vision, neural modelling, and pattern recognition.

Successful applicants will be expected to conduct research involving:

- pattern recognition or sensor fusion with artificial neural networks, or
- information processing in networks of spiking neurons, or
-large associative memory systems with possible applications in autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, medicine, speech or vision, or modelling and recognition of emotions.

Post-doc candidates should have a recent PhD-degree for example in computer science, physics, mathematics or electrical engineering.

They will have some small teaching obligations, so some knowledge of German would be useful.

Applications for PhD-work are also possible. In this case the applicants should already have some experience in one of the fields mentioned above.

The appointment will be for at least 2 years. Salary will be BAT IIa (details depend on age and family status).

See for application details http://www.informatik.uni-ulm.de/neuro/