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Robot skin remembers what it has touched
Gilles Coulon/Tendance Floue
Technology “There’s something very exciting that’s happening now,” says Katherine Martin, head of US Dictionaries at Oxford University Press in New York. “A lot of things that would have been oral, and therefore never recorded, are being recorded as text, and are therefore searchable and findable.” Martin says her team is using similar algorithmic searches to stay on top of online language evolution. “We’re spidering the web, analysing 100 million words of English in use each month from a variety of sources. Then we can track the increases that happen month to month.” It’s not that online communication is accelerating language evolution, Martin says, but rather that it is making this evolution easier to see. “It was –It’s a lexical free-for-all online– always changing, but a lot of the cycles went without leaving a mark. There might have been some slang that took hold with kids in southern Illinois, and no one ever wrote it down.” The internet also provides a conduit for new language to BOOTYFUL, cyw, scrims. Whether Their goal is to peer into spread worldwide, performing you’ve already come across these special-interest online niches and a role that once only major TV terms or not, you might soon track novel language making its broadcasters could fulfil. A case be encountering them. They are way into the mainstream. “If we in point is the phrase “on fleek”, some of the fastest-proliferating see an innovation taking off on which means “looking good”. words in the UK, as sifted out by Reddit or Twitter, the question is Its earliest known utterance was software that charts the rise of [at] what point is it going to appear in June 2014 in a Vine video by a language online. in a newspaper?” says Rowe. woman called Peaches Monroee, “Bootyful”, an alternative The algorithms pick out who was referring to her own spelling of beautiful, has seen terms that are not just popular eyebrows. Within months, the a dramatic rise in usage among but surging in popularity, phrase had made it into a Nicki Twitter users in South Wales. so the results require some Minaj song. As for Monroee’s “Cyw”, coming your way, has video, it has now been watched “Within months, the phrase 38 million times. become popular in the north ‘on fleek’ had made it from of the UK. “Scrims”, referring This swirl of language creation one online video into the to practice sessions before and distribution online is a lyrics of a song” competitions, stems from challenge for linguists, says gaming forums. David Barnhart, a lexicographer The software that picked up interpretation. For example, from Massachusetts, whose on these words was developed in work to be presented next techniques Kershaw and Rowe by Daniel Kershaw and Matthew month at the Web Search and wrote into software. The internet Rowe at Lancaster University, UK. Data Mining conference in San means it’s no longer difficult They took established methods Francisco, the five fastest-rising to discover novel words, as it used by lexicographers to chart words in central London all was back in an earlier, printthe popularity of words, turned out to be Spanish dominated era. Now the problem translated them into algorithms, or Portuguese, unlikely to be is “how to sort out the useful then applied them to 22 million representative of the city’s from the ‘useless’ evidence”, words in Twitter and Reddit posts. evolving linguistic scene. Barnhart says. Hal Hodson n
Robot skin remembers what it has touched FISHING keys from the bottom of a bag or picking up soft fruit are pretty basic tasks for us humans. Now they’re getting a little easier for robots, too. For a robot to recognise and grasp different objects usually requires complex programming and processing power. But Xiaodong Chen at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and his colleagues have got around this by developing flexible, skininspired sensors that store pressure information about objects they come into contact with. The sensors work like our haptic memory, which can retain an impression of what a touch felt like after the stimulus has gone. Chen says the sensors could store information to help robots recognise their environment and moderate their grip to pick up different things. It would enable them to avoid damaging delicate objects like eggs and fruit, as well as freeing up the robot’s main processors for other tasks. Siegfried Bauer at the Johannes Kepler University Linz in Austria thinks the approach has potential. “It may be interesting when gripping complex-shaped objects to know the forces exerted on them,” he says. “Imagine gripping soft objects, such as strawberries: it is essential to know the contact forces of a robotic gripper.” Without this tactile memory, our future robot chefs are going to squash a lot of fruit. James Urquhart n
22 | NewScientist | 23 January 2016
KTSDESIGN/Science Photo Library/Corbis
Netting the lingo that will set the world alight
–Cracked it–
Technology “There’s something very exciting that’s happening now,” says Katherine Martin, head of US Dictionaries at Oxford University Press in New York. “A lot of things that would have been oral, and therefore never recorded, are being recorded as text, and are therefore searchable and findable.” Martin says her team is using similar algorithmic searches to stay on top of online language evolution. “We’re spidering the web, analysing 100 million words of English in use each month from a variety of sources. Then we can track the increases that happen month to month.” It’s not that online communication is accelerating language evolution, Martin says, but rather that it is making this evolution easier to see. “It was –It’s a lexical free-for-all online– always changing, but a lot of the cycles went without leaving a mark. There might have been some slang that took hold with kids in southern Illinois, and no one ever wrote it down.” The internet also provides a conduit for new language to BOOTYFUL, cyw, scrims. Whether Their goal is to peer into spread worldwide, performing you’ve already come across these special-interest online niches and a role that once only major TV terms or not, you might soon track novel language making its broadcasters could fulfil. A case be encountering them. They are way into the mainstream. “If we in point is the phrase “on fleek”, some of the fastest-proliferating see an innovation taking off on which means “looking good”. words in the UK, as sifted out by Reddit or Twitter, the question is Its earliest known utterance was software that charts the rise of [at] what point is it going to appear in June 2014 in a Vine video by a language online. in a newspaper?” says Rowe. woman called Peaches Monroee, “Bootyful”, an alternative The algorithms pick out who was referring to her own spelling of beautiful, has seen terms that are not just popular eyebrows. Within months, the a dramatic rise in usage among but surging in popularity, phrase had made it into a Nicki Twitter users in South Wales. so the results require some Minaj song. As for Monroee’s “Cyw”, coming your way, has video, it has now been watched “Within months, the phrase 38 million times. become popular in the north ‘on fleek’ had made it from of the UK. “Scrims”, referring This swirl of language creation one online video into the to practice sessions before and distribution online is a lyrics of a song” competitions, stems from challenge for linguists, says gaming forums. David Barnhart, a lexicographer The software that picked up interpretation. For example, from Massachusetts, whose on these words was developed in work to be presented next techniques Kershaw and Rowe by Daniel Kershaw and Matthew month at the Web Search and wrote into software. The internet Rowe at Lancaster University, UK. Data Mining conference in San means it’s no longer difficult They took established methods Francisco, the five fastest-rising to discover novel words, as it used by lexicographers to chart words in central London all was back in an earlier, printthe popularity of words, turned out to be Spanish dominated era. Now the problem translated them into algorithms, or Portuguese, unlikely to be is “how to sort out the useful then applied them to 22 million representative of the city’s from the ‘useless’ evidence”, words in Twitter and Reddit posts. evolving linguistic scene. Barnhart says. Hal Hodson n
Robot skin remembers what it has touched FISHING keys from the bottom of a bag or picking up soft fruit are pretty basic tasks for us humans. Now they’re getting a little easier for robots, too. For a robot to recognise and grasp different objects usually requires complex programming and processing power. But Xiaodong Chen at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and his colleagues have got around this by developing flexible, skininspired sensors that store pressure information about objects they come into contact with. The sensors work like our haptic memory, which can retain an impression of what a touch felt like after the stimulus has gone. Chen says the sensors could store information to help robots recognise their environment and moderate their grip to pick up different things. It would enable them to avoid damaging delicate objects like eggs and fruit, as well as freeing up the robot’s main processors for other tasks. Siegfried Bauer at the Johannes Kepler University Linz in Austria thinks the approach has potential. “It may be interesting when gripping complex-shaped objects to know the forces exerted on them,” he says. “Imagine gripping soft objects, such as strawberries: it is essential to know the contact forces of a robotic gripper.” Without this tactile memory, our future robot chefs are going to squash a lot of fruit. James Urquhart n
22 | NewScientist | 23 January 2016
KTSDESIGN/Science Photo Library/Corbis
Netting the lingo that will set the world alight
–Cracked it–