Robot is Helping Autistic Children with their Social Skills

"This is nice, it tickles me," Kaspar the social robot tells four-year-old Finn as they play together at an autism school north of London.

Kaspar, developed by the University of Hertfordshire, also sings song, imitates eating, plays the tambourine and combs his hair during their sessions aimed at helping Finn with his social interaction and communication.

Finn is one of around 170 autistic children that Kaspar has helped in a handful of schools and hospitals over the last 10 years.

But with approximately 700,000 people in Britain on the autism spectrum, according to the National Autistic Society who will mark ‘World Autism Day’ on Sunday, the university wants Kaspar to help more people.

"Our vision is that every child in a school or a home or in a hospital could get a Kaspar if they wanted to," Kerstin Dautenhahn, professor of artificial
intelligence at the University of Hertfordshire, told Reuters.



Achieving that goal will largely depend on the results of a two-year clinical trial with the Hertfordshire Community NHS Trust, which, if successful, could see Kaspar working in hospitals nationwide.

TRACKS, an independent charity and specialist early years center for children with autism in Stevenage, have seen positive results from working with Kaspar, who sports a blue cap and plaid shirt for play sessions.

"We were trying to teach a little boy how to eat with his peers. He usually struggled with it because of his anxiety issues," said deputy principal Alice Lynch.

"We started doing it with Kaspar and he really, really enjoyed feeding Kaspar, making him eat when he was hungry, things like that. Now he's started to integrate into the classroom and eat alongside his peers. So things like that, are just a massive progression."



Many children with autism find it hard to decipher basic human communication and emotion so Kaspar's designers avoided making him too lifelike and instead opted for simplified, easy to process features.

Autism support groups have been impressed.

"Many autistic people are drawn to technology, particularly the predictability it provides, which means it can be a very useful means of engaging children, and adults too," Carol Povey, director of the National Autistic Society's Centre for Autism, told Reuters.

"This robot is one of a number of emerging technologies which have the potential to make a huge difference to people on the autism spectrum."

Source: Fox News, Health

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Robot Eavesdrops on Men and Women to See how much They Talk

Who would you get to observe differences in how men, women and children interact? A robot in a fur-lined hat, of course.

Experiments using a robotic head, called Furhat, aimed to uncover inequalities in people’s participation when working on a shared activity, and see if a robot could help redress the balance. They revealed that when a woman is paired in conversation with another woman, she speaks more than if paired with a man. And two men paired together speak less than two women.

But this only holds for adults. “Surprisingly, we didn’t find this same pattern for boys and girls. Gender didn’t make much difference to how much children speak,” says Gabriel Skantze at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, who is also one of the robot’s creators.

Furhat interacted with 540 visitors at the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology over nine days. Two people at a time would sit at an interactive table with a touchscreen opposite the robot. They were asked to play a game that involved sorting a set of virtual picture cards, such as arranging images of historical inventions in chronological order.
The people worked with the robot to try to solve the task. During this time, the robot’s sensors tracked how long each person spoke for.

“This turned out to be a really nice opportunity to study the differences between men and women, and adults and children,” says Skantze.



Pairs of women spoke for 45 per cent of the time on average, compared with just 26 per cent for pairs of men. When women were paired with men, the speaking time was 28 per cent, with each gender sharing the time about equally. For children, there was no significant difference between gender pairings.

Making conversation
In cases of adults paired with children, the former dominated the conversation. The largest imbalance occurred when a male adult was paired with a female child, with the men speaking more than twice as much as the girls.

When it was the robot’s turn to say something, its behaviour was randomly selected from four options, such as addressing a question to the dominant or non-dominant speaker. This hints at how a robot could influence the conversation.

“When Furhat directly addressed the less dominant speaker, they were more likely to speak,” he says. “We want to use this idea to make interactions with the robot more equal.”
The research was presented at the Conference on Huma-Robot Interaction in Vienna, Austria, last week.



Most studies of this type are performed in a lab, so it’s interesting to see the outcomes in a more natural setting, says Sarah Strhkorb at Yale University. However, the results may be affected by the fact that interacting with a robot is still an unusual situation for most people. The findings could also differ for different cultures.

But having a robot that can successfully influence conversations could have useful applications, such as in educational settings, says Strohkorb. “It’s really exciting to see robots used to help change behaviour for the better.”
Source: Timothy Revell / Journal reference: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction

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Living Robot with 'Human Brain'

Close to the creation of Super-Computer with AI

COMPUTER scientists attempting to electronically replicate the human brain are close to creating a 'living PC'.

Engineers at the University of Massachusetts are developing microprocessors which mimic biological synapses - the nerve cells which pass messages across the human body.

The science fiction-style project is being undertaken by Joshua Yang and Qiangfei Xia, professors of electrical and computer engineering at the US college.

Their work focuses heavily on ‘memristors’ - a computer component which could change science forever, switching the focus from electronics to ‘ionics’.

Ionics, unlike electronics, is not dependent on a power source. It essentially has a memory, so even if it loses power it can remember what it was doing before and continue the action.



“The computers will send messages in the same manner of the human brain”
This means computers of the near-future will be able to shut on and off like a lightbulb, not losing any data or files in the process.

Different researchers and developers, including Mr. Yang and Mr. Xia, are now racing to be the first to harness this technology and use it to create a new generation of computers.

Professor Jennifer Rupp said: “I think there is a race going on. There is a strong driving force, but at the same time it's very important that there are players like HP, because they want to get to the market, show everyone that this is real.”

Mr. Yang and Mr. Xia explained the process in more detail in their report, explaining the process behind neuromorphic computing - computers which mimic humans.

Computers will soon have memories and be able to operate without power
They said: “Memristors have become a leading candidate to enable neuromorphic computing by reproducing the functions in biological synapses and neurons in a neural network system, while providing advantages in energy and size”.

“This work opens a new avenue of neuromorphic computing hardware based on ‘memristors’”.



“Specifically, we developed a diffusive-type ‘memristor’ where diffusion of atoms offers a similar dynamics and the needed time-scales as its bio-counterpart, leading to a more faithful emulation of actual synapses i.e. a true synaptic emulator”.

“The results here provide an encouraging pathway toward synaptic emulation using diffusive ‘memristors’ for neuromorphic computing."
Source: Joey Millar

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