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June 23, 2006
Teaching robot dogs linguistic tricks
As quoted in an article on Slashdot:
According to this article at The Engineer Online, researchers led by the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology in Italy are developing robots that evolve their own language, bypassing the limits of imposing human rule-based communication. The technology, dubbed Embedded and Communicating Agents, has allowed researchers at Sony's Computer Science Laboratory in France to add a new level of intelligence to the AIBO dog. The robot dog has learnt to see a ball and tell another one where the ball is, if it's moving and what colour it is, and the other is capable of recognising it.
I attended a tutorial a few years back where Luc Steels, at Sony's Paris Computer Science Laboratory, discussed earlier versions of this work. The techniques actually seemed reasonable and well thought out, and the way that words compete for niches and evolve in a population of language users was consistent with my intuitive model of how this happens in human populations. It appears that the work has now advanced to where the language includes relational constructs (e.g., an object is moving in a direction).
It's too bad that Sony recently declared the AIBO to be an end-of-life product. I was looking forward to buying one at some point. (For folks interested in AIBO and business models for entertainment robotics, here is a pointer to a Harvard Business Review case about AIBO).
One of the respondents on Slashdot was particularly excited about these developments. His article on Slashdot is worth reading.
Posted by barney at June 23, 2006 2:49 PM
This entry was posted in the following categories: Human Language Technology
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