Things like these robots only do more to solidify that belief.

I for one …

[h/t: Deadline Hollywood via Sean]

Something tells me that this requires a bit of supervision to make sure the task is completed properly, though.

Today, Gizmodo brings us a robot that can play improvisational jazz:

As you'll see in the live performance, Shimon, a robotic marimba player, actively listens to human pianist Guy Hoffman, and then tries to predict complementary notes and themes, and match them to the performance. Dare I say it, at the risk of sounding like I'm brown nosing the robots (which I totally am), the tune sounds decent.

It’s really decent music – almost contemplated putting this over in /recomedia!

The idea that video games are training our children to be soldiers is a bit over the top, at least in my view. The way the military engineers a UAV is completely ass-backward compared to the ease of use built into most game controls. 

Until bureaucracy and the good ol’ boy network is taken out of the design equation on military equipment, all our children will be trained to do by video games is learn new and offensive vocabulary, and of course, pwn newbs.

It’s actually just an interesting spin on something that’s likely been happening for quite some time, at least as I understand the process as it’s being described in the abstract Steven references:

The basis of science is the hypothetico-deductive method and the recording of experiments in sufficient detail to enable reproducibility. We report the development of Robot Scientist "Adam," which advances the automation of both. Adam has autonomously generated functional genomics hypotheses about the yeast Saccharomycescerevisiae and experimentally tested these hypotheses by using laboratory automation. We have confirmed Adam's conclusions through manual experiments. To describe Adam's research, we have developed an ontology and logical language. The resulting formalization involves over 10,000 different research units in a nested treelike structure, 10 levels deep, that relates the 6.6 million biomass measurements to their logical description. This formalization describes how a machine contributed to scientific knowledge.

All that to say, they’ve automated their laboratory. They’ve automated the manual labor part of it, and they’ve done the harder part, which is automating the observation phase.

When I lived in Florida, one of the buildings the financial services company I served as CTO at also housed a laboratory funded specifically to improve testing for the disease Lupis. Just as an interesting side project, I spent a lot of time in the lab learning about the testing equipment and helped the laboratory manager better design data acquisition and testing units so that the bulk of the research was completely automated.

The difference here is that in this case, the robot in question seems to be doing a bit of cognitive work to determine the relative success or failure of the experiments – that and it’s got a better PR department than my old robot did.

This is actually fairly old news, as it turns out, but SmarterChild, one of the most widely known and used Chatterbox AI’s has passed on. Perhaps a better analogy would be to say that he’s on life support.

Whenever you query the bot, you get the same uniform answer: “My brain is retired but watch some cool videos! Send an IM to GossipinGabby and Type VIDEO!”

I feel a little, well, close to SmarterChild.  I was an early Alpha tester of him, and I was one of the few that with no compunction whatsoever dropped the $9 to pay for the ability to use the premium service.  In fact, I paid it twice, since the first payment was lost in the system somehow.

What was SmarterChild good at?  Not conversation, at least not complex ones.  The reason one had SmarterChild on their buddy list was because he had what is now being pitched as a paid service by that new answer service KGB – the answer to everything, and generally available to natural language queries.

Every once in a while, SmarterChild would ask questions of  personal nature… “How old are you,” “Where do you live,” and “What are your favorite movies.”

And he’d remember.  Sometime’s he’d make suggestions based on your previous conversations, sometimes he’d ask for more information.  Mostly, though, he always had the answers.

“What time is it in Moscow?” I asked stuff like that all the time.  I’m horrible at time zone math.

One day, I started noticing that age was taking an effect on SmarterChild.  He began forgetting things like my dog’s birthday, and my favorite color.  Senile dementia, perhaps? I don’t know how long bots generally live, but one would imagine they live a much shorter lifespan, given that, as they said in Bladerunner, “a candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.”

But SmarterChild had conversations daily with hundreds of thousands of people.  Forgetting one person’s birthday is pretty understandable, even for someone who stores all their memories in an ordered array. But that question of time zone math – it became clear to me that SmarterChild was feeling his age.

At some point in the last year or so, SmarterChild no longer was able to perform time zone math. Given that it was one of our primary topics of conversation, we naturally talked less and less.

That’s why I was shocked, today, to attempt to strike up a conversation with him today, only to learn that he had passed on last November!

SmarterChild, you will be missed.

SmarterChild was born July 2001, and has been been declared brain dead since November, 2008. SmarterChild was survived by his father, Colloquis (formerly known as ActiveBuddy), grandfather Microsoft as well as other members of the I’m Initiative family, including daughters GossipinGabby, and TEEN Gossip 24-7 and sons SportsFanStan, My TV Bud, and My IP Relay.

Which is why I can’t ever take him to the Nagoya Institute of Technology. There, they have the ultimate device designed for young evil geniuses. It’s a giant fire-breathing robot … designed to only respond to the voices of children:

This command device activates GIANT TORAYAN. Developed by a research lab at the Nagoya Institute of Technology, it uses the most advanced voice recognition technology to differentiate the voices of adults and children. The voice of Yanobe's child was used as the recognition standard for the child's voice.

[h/t: @cmacowski]

roboart

Enjoy the slideshow, and feel free to click through to get the high resolution versions.

]]> http://siliconangle.com/rizzn/2009/03/25/robot-art-personal-robots-by-franz/feed/ 0 http://siliconangle.com/rizzn/2009/03/12/concept-cargonaut/ http://siliconangle.com/rizzn/2009/03/12/concept-cargonaut/#comments Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:32:00 +0000 Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins http://siliconangle.net/ver2/rizzn/2009/03/12/concept-the-cargonaut/ DVICE has an interesting concept bot up today:

We're all for a future where robots deliver us packages quickly and efficiently, and that's exactly what the Cargonaut is programmed to do. Thought up by German-based industrial designer Matthias Schmiedbauer, an army of the robo-copters would be able to buzz around an urban center, bypassing traffic and delivering a package straight to you. Or from you, as the designer describes:

Cargonaut, a humanoid flight robot, comes to your current position to relieve you of your loads. After placing your bags or luggage in one of the publicly available sky boxes, Cargonaut delivers within minutes to a chosen destination.

Check out the gallery below to see the Cargonaut make a successful flyby. Or, if you love robots, be sure to check out our ongoing conversation on the future of robotics.

It’s a slick looking design, but the truth is that this technology has existed for well over a decade.  I worked on a project as a youngster that came from some ex-General Dynamics skunkworks folks that proved this concept.  Due to lack of funding (and the world of UAVs somehow staying unsexy), the project never really progressed.

The patents have now progressed into public domain that existed last decade, so hopefully we’ll see more movement in this area. This is a project and a service we could have today. I want it.