Robot head disguises itself as your friends

things, their analysis showed that cage stability improved if new young adult males were introduced now and again as they seemed to grow into “policing” roles. “You had to look at the data,” McCowan says. “It wasn’t something a human could see.” Terrence Deacon, an anthropologist and neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, explains that some pattern of repetition is a basic requirement when information is transmitted. In other words, if Herzing’s dolphins or McCowan’s macaques are exchanging information, if their behaviour is not just random, meaningless noise, then there must be some discoverable patterns. Information theory can find out what those pattern are, which parts of a whistle are important, helping behaviourists figure out what animals are communicating. The first results from Starner and Herzing’s work on dolphin communication-processing are due to be presented at the speech and signal processing conference in Florence, Italy, in May. Last summer’s work was cut short because the team lost the dolphin pod, but they did make some progress. Starner’s algorithms discovered eight different components in a sample of 73 whistles. It’s still preliminary, but they were able to match certain strings of those components with mother-calf interactions, for instance. The work has let them plan for the coming summer when they want to confirm twoway communication between humans and dolphins. Deacon is excited to see if such work can lead to a better understanding of animal cultures. He suspects much animal communication will turn out to be basic pointing or signposting rather than more complex language. But humans often communicate on a basic level too. “I don’t see a fundamental white line that distinguishes us from other animals,” he says. n 20 | NewScientist | 29 March 2014

Engineered Arts

Technology Computer vision software lets it perform tricks like recognising people, working out someone’s mood from their grimaces and smiles – and guessing their age. It also has some understanding of speech and comes with chatbot software based on Rosette, which in 2011 won the Loebner prize, awarded for a computer’s ability to hold simple

“When the robot joins the conversation as our colleague, and with his face, it is quite amazing” conversations. The idea is to build a system that people enjoy working closely with. “It’ll become a butler who knows you inside out,” says Jackson. Its transparent plastic face has contours for a nose, mouth and eyes, and is backlit with a digital projector. It can display a generic face like the one that sized me up, or create one based on a headshot of a friend or colleague to add telepresence to voice calls. “It’s as spooky as all hell,” says Jackson. “We’ve tried it with a couple of our telecommuting colleagues in meetings and when it suddenly turns –Who needs a webcam?– and joins in the conversation as our colleague Dan, and with his face, it is quite amazing. But you get used to it quickly.” I ran into SociBot-Mini at the Human-Robot Interaction conference in Bielefield, Germany, earlier this month. It isn’t the only one of its kind. At the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, Samer robots, already on sale. The company Al Moubayed is developing an bills it as a futuristic information animated head called Furhat to terminal that people could interact which 3D-printed faces can be with in a mall, airport or bank, say. attached. The idea is to take infrared And if the Kickstarter campaign is scans of someone’s friends and print successful, a cheaper, slimmed-down their faces, so that the appropriate version will follow for home use, as one can be used just before the a kind of personal assistant. person calls them. “Today’s computer interfaces It sounds like a palaver, but Al have moved on very little from the Moubayed says being able to animate typewriter,” says Jackson. “We have the 3D printed face of a real person social software and a social internet, lends extra authenticity to the but we don’t have social hardware.” telepresence experience. Skype is SociBot-Mini uses a depth-sensing interested in the project, and will camera – similar to Microsoft’s Kinect team up with the group developing system – to capture and recognise Furhat to bring animated delegates gestures. It can also capture facial to the Interspeech conference in expressions using a webcam. Singapore in September. n

Talk to the head

They’re just a bit creepy, but soon robots disguised as our friends will be putting a face to phone calls Paul Marks THE spooky robotic head was watching me. As I passed by, it followed me with its eyes and slowly craned in my direction. Then it spoke, its animated lips moving realistically as it promoted an imminent crowdfunding campaign. When I stood still, it looked me over: its sensors examined my face and counted up my wrinkles. Then, rather annoyingly, it correctly guessed my age. I was interacting with SociBot-Mini, a 60-centimetre-high robot built by Will Jackson and his colleagues at Engineered Arts in Penryn, UK. The model is one of their first generation of