Machine Perception Lab Shows Robotic One Year Old

Jan. 9, 2013 — The world is getting a long-awaited first glimpse at a new humanoid robot in action mimicking the expressions of a one-year-old child. The robot will be used in studies on sensory-motor and social development – how babies “learn” to control their bodies and to interact with other people.

Different faces of Diego-san: video of robo-toddler shows him demonstrating different facial expressions, using 27 moving parts in the head alone.

Diego-san’s hardware was developed by leading robot manufacturers: the head by Hanson Robotics, and the body by Japan’s Kokoro Co. The project is led by University of California, San Diego full research scientist Javier Movellan.

Movellan directs the Institute for Neural Computation's Machine Perception Laboratory, based in the UCSD division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). The Diego-san project is also a joint collaboration with the Early Play and Development Laboratory of professor Dan Messinger at the University of Miami, and with professor Emo Todorov's Movement Control Laboratory at the University of Washington.

Movellan and his colleagues are developing the software that allows Diego-san to learn to control his body and to learn to interact with people.

"We've made good progress developing new algorithms for motor control, and they have been presented at robotics conferences, but generally on the motor-control side, we really appreciate the difficulties faced by the human brain when controlling the human body," said Movellan, reporting even more progress on the social-interaction side. "We developed machine-learning methods to analyze face-to-face interaction between mothers and infants, to extract the underlying social controller used by infants, and to port it to Diego-san. We then analyzed the resulting interaction between Diego-san and adults." Full details and results of that research are being submitted for publication in a top scientific journal.

While photos and videos of the robot have been presented at scientific conferences in robotics and in infant development, the general public is getting a first peak at Diego-san’s expressive face in action. On January 6, David Hanson (of Hanson Robotics) posted a new video on YouTube athttp://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=knRyDcnUc4U#!.

“This robotic baby boy was built with funding from the National Science Foundation and serves cognitive A.I. and human-robot interaction research,” wrote Hanson. “With high definition cameras in the eyes, Diego San sees people, gestures, expressions, and uses A.I. modeled on human babies, to learn from people, the way that a baby hypothetically would. The facial expressions are important to establish a relationship, and communicate intuitively to people.”

Diego-san is the next step in the development of “emotionally relevant” robotics, building on Hanson’s previous work with the Machine Perception Lab, such as the emotionally responsive Albert Einstein head (see video on Calit2 YouTube channel).

The video of the oversized android infant was picked up by the popular online technology magazine, Gizmag, with a Jan. 7 article titled “UCSD’s robot baby Diego-san appears on video for the first time,” written by Jason Falconer.

In his article, Falconer writes that Diego-san is “actually much larger than a standard one year old – mainly because miniaturizing the parts would have been too costly. It stands about 4 feet 3 inches (130cm) tall and weighs 66 pounds (30kg), and its body has a total of 44 pneumatic joints. Its head alone contains about 27 moving parts.”

The robot is a product of the “Developing Social Robots” project launched in 2008. As outlined in the proposal, the goal of the project was “to make progress on computational problems that elude the most sophisticated computers and Artificial Intelligence approaches, but that infants solve seamlessly during their first year of life.”

For that reason, the robot’s sensors and actuators were built to approximate the levels of complexity of human infants, including actuators to replicate dynamics similar to those of human muscles. The technology should allow Diego-san to learn and autonomously develop sensory-motor and communicative skills typical of one-year-old infants.

"Its main goal is to try and understand the development of sensory motor intelligence from a computational point of view," explained principal investigator Movellan in a 2010 Q&A with the Japan-based PlasticPals blog. "It brings together researchers in developmental psychology, machine learning, neuroscience, computer vision and robotics. Basically we are trying to understand the computational problems that a baby’s brain faces when learning to move its own body and use it to interact with the physical and social worlds."

The researchers are interested in studying Diego-san’s interaction with the physical world via reaching, grasping, etc., and with the social world through pointing, smiling and other gestures or facial expressions.

As outlined in the original proposal to the NSF, the project is “grounded in developmental research with human infants, using motion capture and computer vision technology to characterize the statistics of early physical and social interaction. An important goal is to foster the conceptual shifts needed to rigorously think, explore, and formalize intelligent architectures that learn and develop autonomously by interaction with the physical and social worlds.”

According to UCSD's Movellan, the expression recognition technology his team developed for Diego-san has spawned a startup called Machine Perception Technologies (MPT). The company is currently looking for undergraduate interns and postgraduate programmers. "We like UCSD students because they tend to have a strong background in machine learning."

The project may also open new avenues to the computational study of infant development and potentially offer new clues for the understanding of developmental disorders such as autism and Williams syndrome.

As noted in the Gizmag article, Diego-san won’t be the only child-like robot for long. This spring Swiss researchers will demonstrate their nearly 4-foot-tall Roboy robot toddler (with a face selected via a Facebook contest!).

Scientsts use a Shortcut to get Clues from Deep Ocean

By the A.M. Costa Rica staff January 10, 2012 Out of sight of land in the Pacific another group of scientists is trying to make sense of the undersea activities in that part of the world. This is the scientific complement of the "JOIDES Resolution" research vessel, and they are taking a shortcut. The "JOIDES Resolution" is a frequent visitor to Costa Rica's Pacific ports, and has participated in a series of scientific exploration off the coast. The main area of study is the activity beneath the sea floor that can cause horizontal movements of up to 8 centimeters (a bit less than 3.5 inches) a year as the earth pushes up magma. That research relates to the forces that forced up Costa Rica's mountains, energizes its volcanoes and continues to rattle the country periodically. Unlike a lot of scientific expeditions, this one is transparent with an educational dimension, so daily activity becomes discussion topics. This expedition, No. 345, is headed by Jonathan Snow of the University of Houston, Texas, and Kathy Gillis of the University of Victoria, Canada. The drilling ship "JOIDES Resolution" is now on station above what is known as Hess Deep Rift about 2 degrees above the equator. Previous expeditions sought to sample the rock deep under the sea floor by drilling to it. But the presence of the rift, sort of an undersea canyon, provides a shortcut, the expedition explained in a recent summary. The deep cut in the ocean floor allows the crew to avoid a lot of drilling. The rock surface at the bottom of the rift is estimated to be just about a million years old, a real youngster in geological terms. And this is what the scientific crew calls a tectonic window. The rift is not far from the intersection of the Pacific, Nazca and Cocos tectonic plates. The Cocos is the one that keeps pushing under and against the lighter Caribbean plate to bring earthquakes to Costa Rica.

Expedition, No. 345 photo  Scientist examine rock core from Hess Deep The summary of Expedition No. 345 describes its goal this way: "The objective of this project is to sample for the first time, primitive magmatic rocks of the lower crust in the oceanic Pacific. These samples will help scientists seek to understand the manufacturing process of the oceanic crust at a fast-spreading rift, but also to document the effect of cooling the young crust by seawater, and thus the importance of chemical exchanges between the crust and the ocean. They control the chemical evolution of the oceanic crust before recycling into the mantle via subduction zones, and play a fundamental role in geochemical cycles across the globe." As magma is pushed to the surface, it cools into basalt and an igneous rock called gabbro, said the summary. A previous expedition obtained samples of gabbro from a deep drilling also off the isthmus in the Pacific. A member of the expedition, Jean-Luc Berenguer, reported via the "JOIDES Resolution" Web site this week that the drilling team had brought up core samples of rock from the Hess Deep, which is about 5,000 meters (about 16,400 feet) down. In fact, the scientists have been demonstrating the force of the water by lowering polystyrene objects, which are compressed into a much smaller size in the deep ocean. This is mostly as demonstrations to schoolchildren who are viewing the work electronically.

Saturn’s shadow slices the rings

There is a whole lot of awesome in a picture of Saturn and its rings just released from the Cassini spacecraft. Check this out:

Mmmmm, ringalicious.

Cassini was about 2 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Saturn when it took this picture, so we’re seeing a decently wide-angle view. At the time, the spacecraft was below the plane of the rings, looking north (up, if you like). The Sun is off mostly to the left and up a bit.

The first cool thing is obviously the shadow of the planet itself cast on the rings. It cuts across like a black scythe! As I looked at the picture my eyes and brain kept trying to fill in the missing arc of rings, which was amplified by a slight afterimage as my eyes moved around. It’s a difficult illusion to ignore.

Second, I love how you can see all the different rings in the picture, including the thin, lumpy F-ringoutside the main band. The big gap is called the Cassini Division; it’s not really an empty space since there are many faint thin rings inside it. They’re just hard to see here. The Cassini Division is fairly easy to spot even through a small telescope, looking from Earth like someone took a knife to the rings and sliced them.

Third, you can see the tiny moons Janus (below the rings on the left) and Epimetheus (above the rings on the left) as well. I wonder how hard it is to get a picture like this without seeing any moons in it? Saturn has quite the fleet of them.

Fourth, look to the left, just where the inner arc of the rings cuts across Saturn. You can see the planet right through the rings! The rings aren’t solid; they’re composed of gazillions of particles of nearly pure water ice. There are spaces between the particles, so we can partially see through them, like looking through a screened window.

Fifth, and perhaps most cool of all: the part of Saturn we’re seeing here is the night side, entirely unlit by the Sun. The bottom (southern) part of Saturn is only noticeable by its absence! But what’s that glow in the north?

That, my friends, is ringshine! Although this part of Saturn is in nighttime, the Sun is still shining on the rings (wherever you don’t see Saturn’s shadow across them). The ring particles are very bright and shiny. They reflect the sunlight, which then illuminates the northern hemisphere of Saturn. The southern half is still dark because the ice particles tend to reflect light back up, like a mirror. Since the Sun is coming from the north, that’s the way the light gets reflected. I’ll note that most of the light gets reflected away from Saturn, to the upper right in this picture, but enough is reflected back to make the cloud tops glow softly.

This happens on Earth too, when sunlight reflects off the Earth and illuminates the dark part of the Moon. This is called Earthshine, also poetically called "the old Moon in the new Moon’s arms." It’s quite lovely.

And it’s science! Which is lovely, too.

"Wind Map" brings U.S. Wind Patterns to Life

The Huffington Post  |  By Craig Kanalley 

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A pair of Google employees have teamed up to provide a powerful animation of wind patterns in the United States in near real-time.

Wind appears like rivers or streams flowing across the country. The map really needs to be seen firsthand for the full experience (video preview above, click here for full/updated version). On the website, you can zoom in and out on the map, and you can look at previous days' wind patterns in a gallery.

The project was created by Google's Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg,according to Mashable, which adds that the duo is currently looking for international data sources for a global version.

According to LinkedIn, Viégas and Wattenberg are research scientists and co-leaders of Google's "Big Picture" data visualization group in Cambridge, Mass.

One goal of the wind map, which updates every hour, seems to be raising awareness and support for wind energy. The website hosting the map notes:

An invisible, ancient source of energy surrounds us—energy that powered the first explorations of the world, and that may be a key to the future.

The site includes links to the Wikipedia pages for wind and wind power for more information.

In related news, last week the Obama administration released new wind farm guidelines. On Wednesday, Major League Baseball's Cleveland Indians installed a wind turbine in their stadium.

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New Graphic Anti-smoking Ads

This image provided on Wednesday, March 14, 2012 by the Centers for Disease Control shows Shawn Wright who had a tracheotomy after being diagnosed with head and neck cancer. Tobacco taxes and smoking bans haven't budged the U.S. smoking rate in years. Now the government is trying to shock smokers into quitting with a graphic nationwide advertising campaign. (AP Photo/Centers for Disease Control)

ATLANTA — In a graphic new ad campaign announced Thursday, the government is trying to shock smokers into quitting with the sometimes-gruesome stories of people damaged by tobacco products.
The new effort confronts a hard truth: Despite increased tobacco taxes and bans in many public places, the adult smoking rate hasn't really budged since 2003.
"When we look back on just a few decades to the days of smoking on airplanes and elevators, it can be easy to focus on how far we've come," said Secretary of Health and Human Resources Kathleen Sebelius, at a news conference.
But smoking continues to take a devastating toll on the American public, and the new ads are meant to be "a wake-up call" to smokers who may not truly grasp the dangers that still exist, she added.
The billboards and print, radio and TV ads show people whose smoking resulted in heart surgery, a tracheotomy, lost limbs or paralysis. The $54 million campaign is the largest and starkest anti-smoking push by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its first national advertising effort.
The agency is hoping the spots, which begin Monday and will air for at least 12 weeks, will persuade as many as 50,000 Americans to stop smoking.
"This is incredibly important. It's not every day we release something that will save thousands of lives," CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden said in a telephone interview.
That bold prediction is based on earlier research that found aggressive anti-smoking campaigns using hard-hitting images sometimes led to decreases in smoking. After decades of decline, the adult smoking rate has stalled at about 20 percent in recent years.
Advocates say it's important to jolt a weary public that has been listening to government warnings about the dangers of smoking for nearly 50 years.
"There is an urgent need for this media campaign," Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said in a statement.
One of the print ads features Shawn Wright from Washington state who had a tracheotomy after being diagnosed with head and neck cancer four years ago. The ad shows the 50-year-old shaving, his razor moving down toward a red gaping hole at the base of his neck that he uses to speak and breathe.
An advertising firm, Arnold Worldwide, found Wright and about a dozen others who developed cancer or other health problems after smoking for the ads.
Federal health agencies have gradually embraced graphic anti-smoking imagery. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved nine images to be displayed on cigarette packages. Among them were a man exhaling cigarette smoke through a tracheotomy hole in his throat, and a diseased mouth with what appear to be cancerous lesions.
Last month, a federal judge blocked the requirement that tobacco companies put the images on their packages, saying it was unconstitutional.
Experts say some waves of anti-smoking ads have been hugely successful. Those that aired in the late 1960s helped drive a 10 percent decline in per capita cigarette consumption from 1967 to 1970. And the American Legacy Foundation's "Truth" ads from the early 2000s deserve substantial credit for a large drop in youth smoking at the time, they say.
The CDC ads are more graphic than spots that have aired nationally before.
The idea behind such ads is to create an image so striking that smokers and would-be smokers will think of it whenever they have an urge to buy a pack of cigarettes, said Glenn Leshner, a University of Missouri researcher who has studied the effectiveness of anti-smoking ads.
Leshner and his colleagues found that some ads are so disturbing that people reacted by turning away from the message rather than listening. So while spots can shock viewers into paying attention, they also have to encourage people that quitting is possible, he said.
The CDC campaign includes information on a national quit line and offers advice on how to kick the habit, CDC officials said.
Two of the largest tobacco companies issued statements, both acknowledging the health dangers of smoking but neither addressing the CDC ad campaign. "We agree smoking is addictive and causes serious disease and for those who want to avoid the health effects of smoking, the best thing to do is to quit," said the statement by Richmond, Va.-based Altria Group Inc., owner of Philip Morris USA – the nation's biggest tobacco company.

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CDC campaign: http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/campaign/tips/

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Sisters with Werewolf Syndrome

Meet the incredible Sangli sisters, three siblings whose lives have been blighted by one of the rarest conditions in the world - werewolf sydrome.

Savita, 23, Monisha, 18, and 16-year-old Savitri are just like any other young women except their bodies have been covered from head to foot in thick hair.

Werewolf syndrome - or hypertricosis universalis - affects just one in a BILLION people but in an incredible quirk of fate all THREE sisters have the condition.

Hyperthrichosis is a genetic mutation where cells, that normally switch off hair growth in unusual areas, like the eyelids and forehead, are left switched on.

It means the girls have had abnormal hair growth on their bodies and even their faces, affecting their eyebrows, nose and giving them appearance of having a beard.

Every day is a battle for the siblings who are now just beginning to bring the condition under control using a special hair removal cream.

Compared to these pictures taken just last year the sisters, from southern India, have changed remarkably, and two of the sisters have managed to remove much of the hair growth from their faces.

The sisters use hair remover cream every day, but to little avail

But every day is still a constant battle and not using the cream will see the hair quickly return, with the youngest sister Savitri still virtually covered.

The girl's mother Anita Sambhaji Raut has six daughters in total with only three having werewolf syndrome.

The condition was passed down by the girl's father who Anita was forced to marry aged 12 not knowing he had the condition as she had never seen him till their wedding day.

Anita and her daughters are now desperate to fund laser surgery that will help to finally remove the curse of excess hair and allow the girls to lead normal lives.

In their small village near Pune, central India, the girls have little prospects for marriage and the eldest Savita sometimes gets sent home from work when her hair begins to show.

Laser surgery would cost 350,000 Indian rupees or £4,500 per girl but the family are not wealthy enough to be able to afford it.

Now documentary filmmaker Sneh Gupta is planning make a film of the girls in a bid to help their dream of becoming almost hair free - with the eventual aim finding marriage.

The sisters are keen to marry - but want to achieve their dream of becoming hair-free, first

Mum Anita, 40, said her husband - who died in 2007 and whose portrait hangs in the family home - also suffered from werewolf syndrome. Anita was being looked after by her uncle and auntie as her parents had passed away and they told her if she didn't marry this man they would kill her off. She said: "It was only on the day of my marriage that I discovered what he was, (he) was hairy on his face, ears and body, that's when I found out." I was very young, I didn't know what kind of boy he was, he scared the hell out of me when he arrived at the altar. He's the groom, I am the bride, I had no idea what all that meant." I was only 12 when they forced me into marriage, and if you don't agree to marriage as a girl they will kill you off."

I asked my mother-in-law why my daughters were born like this and she told me because their father is like this, at the time (as a baby) my daughter had little hairs all over her face." When I used to take her (Savita) out as a child, they used to shout here comes the beast, the witch, that's what they said." They keep her at work now for 10 to 15 days, and then after that they ask her to leave as soon as the hair starts showing through, that's what they do." I tell people this is the type of girl she is, hair grows on her face, she has to apply medicine, we must be honest with everybody." In the village society a woman does not have much prospects if she is not married and mum Anita explained she was still trying to get her daughters a man. She said: " If a good proposal comes in, I'll get her married. If nothing comes in she'll have to work and survive. As long as I am living I have to keep trying." Eldest daughter Savita, who now using a cream to try and combat her hair growth, said: "When I used to go to school the boys and the girls would shout, 'hairy face', 'horrible looking', 'don't sit next to her', that's how they behaved. "Marriage is not an option for us, it's not likely to happen, who is going to marry us when hair keeps growing on our faces."