Hilton Builds Connie Assistant with Watson

More hotel chains thinking about the usefulness of virtual assistants.   Notably includes Watson, and using conversation via a humanoid bot called Nao, and a Watson driven system called Wayblazer.   Must such bots be humanoid?  The model of a concierge is used.

In TNW: 
" ... Earlier this year, Hilton started a test with a concierge robot for its chain of hotels in the US. ...  The project is based on a partnership with IBM’s Watson program.

The robot – named Connie, after the hotel’s founder Conrad Hilton – is available to answer questions from customers. Connie knows everything about the hotel, neighborhood restaurants, tourist attractions, and so on. ... " 

See my list of assistants being investigated.

Teaching Robots Social Skills

Akin to common sense, a tough challenge.   Specifically using the normally intensely numerical approaches of machine learning is particularly interesting.  An application for more fuzzy logic?

IBM Wants Watson to Teach Robots Some Social Skills
Because language is only part of human communication, IBM is using machine learning to teach robots social skills like gestures, eye movements, and voice intonations.   .... "  

" ..... During a keynote speech at a conference held in San Jose, California, this week, Robert High, chief technology officer of Watson at IBM, demonstrated some of the techniques his team is working on using a small humanoid robot. The robot, a Nao model from the company Alderbaran, spoke with  ...  "

Plots for Cyclical Patterns

A method that is new to me, in Stephen Few's Perceptual Edge blog:  Cycle Plots.  " ... A cycle plot is a type of line graph that is useful for displaying cyclical patterns across time. Cycle plots were first created in 1978 by William Cleveland and his colleagues at Bell Labs. We published an article about them in 2008, written by Naomi Robbins, titled Introduction to Cycle Plots. Here is an example of a cycle plot that displays monthly patterns across five years ... "     Includes a link to an Excel template that I will try.

Robots for iPad

IEEE Spectrum has just published an publication App that surveys a number of robots and robotic applications.   This appears to be only available for the iPad systems at this time.    Whimsical at times, but some excellent examples, some of which I had not seen.  Would have liked more links to fundamental papers on the subject.  Costs $4.99    " ... Robots have long captured our imagination. Now a new iPad app will show how robots are becoming reality. Robots for iPad, a fun and engaging app featuring the world’s coolest robots, is now available in Apple’s App Store. Created by IEEE Spectrum, the award-winning technology magazine, the app lets users explore 126 robots from 19 countries, with 360-degree views, interactive animations, technical specs, and hundreds of photos, videos, and articles. 

Among the amazing robots included in the app are Honda’s famed humanoid Asimo, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, and Google’s self-driving car. There are also androids, drones, exoskeletons, quadrupeds, and snake robots. The app offers countless hours of exploration and entertainment to anyone interested in learning about robotics. Robot enthusiasts can review in-depth, technical data about each robot, while beginners can learn how robots work and how to get started in robotics.

Dancing humanoids, lifelike androids, and toy robots come alive on the iPad screen with the app’s interactive images. Created exclusively for the app, the interactives let users “play” with robots by spinning them 360 degrees or moving them through a variety of actions: Just by swiping the screen, a user can get the little humanoid Nao to perform tai chi or make the child robot iCub crawl back and forth. The interactives offer a unique, hands-on experience that’s possible only with the iPad. ... "

Neuroscience and Workplace Systems

An interesting example of what goes on in workplace contexts and how people interact with artificial systems like computers and avatars. What would this imply for virtual worlds?

Managing with the Brain in Mind
Neuroscience research is revealing the social nature of the high-performance workplace. by David Rock

Naomi Eisenberger, a leading social neuroscience researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), wanted to understand what goes on in the brain when people feel rejected by others. She designed an experiment in which volunteers played a computer game called Cyberball while having their brains scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. Cyberball hearkens back to the nastiness of the school playground. “People thought they were playing a ball-tossing game over the Internet with two other people,” Eisenberger explains. “They could see an avatar that represented themselves, and avatars [ostensibly] for two other people. Then, about halfway through this game of catch among the three of them, the subjects stopped receiving the ball and the two other supposed players threw the ball only to each other.” Even after they learned that no other human players were involved, the game players spoke of feeling angry, snubbed, or judged, as if the other avatars excluded them because they didn’t like something about them ... '