Robotics and AI
29 Sep 2016
The nursing assistant for your next trip to the hospital might be a robot. This is the implication of research recently published by Dr. Elena De Momi and colleagues in the open access journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI (Artificial Intelligence).
Robotics and AI
18 Aug 2016
Every year 1,900 new upper-limb amputations occur in Europe, maintaining a population of such disabled persons hovering around 90,000. What can assistive robotics, rehabilitation science and engineering do for these people?
Robotics and AI
16 Aug 2016
Researchers from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia put their humanoid robot iCub to the test using manipulation and interaction as sources of knowledge and new experience, as well as, providing a means to explore and control the environment. Read more.
Robotics and AI
07 Jun 2016
Our online browsing behavior leaves a unique digital personality signature which can identify us by Tania FitzGeorge-Balfour, Frontiersin.org Hiding online is harder than you’d think, a new study published on Frontiers in ICT has revealed. Your browsing behavior can indicate your personality and provide a unique digital signature which can identify you, sometimes after just 30-minutes of browsing. “Our research suggests a person’s personality traits can be deduced by their general internet usage. This differs from other studies that have only looked at the use of social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter,” said Dr Ikusan R. Adeyemi, a research scholar at the Universiti Teknologi, Malaysia, and lead author of this new study. He continued; “This opens up opportunities for new research into understanding online behavior.” Research linking personality traits to computer usage has typically focused on social media. For example, extrovert people tend to use these platforms to enlarge their boundary of friends and influence, while introvert individuals spend more time on social media to compensate for a probable lack of physical interaction. However, a person’s general online browsing behavior can also reflect their choice, preference and reflexes, which is largely controlled by their unique psychological characteristics. This latest study recruited volunteers […]
Robotics and AI
05 Apr 2016
By Abigail Pattenden, science writer In the world of robot communication, it seems actions speak louder than words. Scientists in the UK have discovered that by getting robot avatars to “talk with their hands,” we understand them as well as we do our fellow human beings. Avatars have been in existence since the 1980s and today are used by millions of people across the globe. They are big business too: from artificial intelligence to social media and psychotherapy to high-end video games, they are used to sell things, to solve problems, to teach us and to entertain us. As avatars become more sophisticated, and their use in society grows, research is focusing on how to improve communication with them. Getting your message across with your avatar is more important than ever, and learning how to improve this communication is a big deal. Scientists Paul Bremner and Ute Leonards took on this challenge in a recent study published in Frontiers in Psychology. They built their study around the hypothesis that if avatars were to use “iconic” hand gestures together with speech, we would understand them more easily. Iconic gestures have a distinct meaning, like opening a door or a book, […]
Robotics and AI
11 Feb 2016
by Kirstin Sonne Artificial Intelligence (AI) is undoubtedly one of the buzzwords of our times and has become the subject of innumerable movies, TV series, novels and conspiracy theories. But despite the high-flying and fantastical predictions which appear ubiquitous in our popular culture, artificial intelligence is still surprisingly limited in many ways. Although computers are able to make calculations at a scale and speed that is unimaginable to humans, one of the areas in which we maintain a clear advantage over machines is in contextualizing information. “They can’t situate themselves in an environment,” explained Professor Shashi Phoha. Searching for new ways for computers to put information in context Currently Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of the Information Sciences & Technology Division at the Applied Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University, Phoha is a leading figure in sensor networks and machine perception and intelligence. Her research focuses on improving the distributed automation of multiple interacting devices and achieving real-time data driven sensor fusion and self-organization algorithms for secure wireless sensor networks. Her achievements in the computational sciences have secured her senior positions in academia, government and industry, and she has over 200 research publications to her name. In […]
Robotics and AI
30 Oct 2015
Frontiers Science Hero: Mel Slater from Frontiers on Vimeo. Prof. Mel Slater has always been intrigued by the science that lies behind virtual reality. “I think one of the things that fascinated me about it was the question why people, when they go into a virtual reality even though what they see may not look real, they nevertheless have a strong illusion that what is happening is real and also a strong illusion that they are in the virtual place,” he said. Mel Slater is an ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona, and became Professor of Virtual Environments at University College London in 1997. Slater started working in the area of virtual reality during the early 1990s with the aim of understanding our mindset when it comes to a virtual world. “I set out to try to understand why this illusion happens and what factors we as engineers can introduce into our applications to promote those feelings and realistic responses to virtual reality,” he said. The power of virtual reality Throughout his career, Slater has made several important discoveries. “I was one of the first people in this field who worked in this area of understanding the impact […]
Robotics and AI
29 Jun 2015
The market, direct applications, the will for seeking knowledge, understanding risks through research, involving the public, and opening up the field are the main elements that influence robotics research in 2015.
Robotics and AI
11 Jun 2015
There is some debate about Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) between those who believe that it would enable our digital technology to address concrete societal problems, and those who want to limit it based on ignorance and fear.
Robotics and AI
06 Jan 2015
Frontiers presents an exclusive interview with Sebastian Loth, part of the Psycholinguistics research group at Bielefeld University, Germany. Sebastian is a member of the EU-funded JAMES project (Joint Action for Multimodal Embodied Social Systems), formed to further research into social robotics and human-robot interactions. How did you first get interested in social robotics? Social robotics investigates the predictability of social behavior, asking which signals are most informative for understanding behavior. I started with a degree in Linguistics and Informatics and then moved on to a PhD in Psychology with a focus on visual word recognition. From there it was clear that social robotics and psycholinguistics are related on an abstract level. For example, in visual word recognition you might be interested in the predictability of letters. In social robotics, “letters” are events, behaviors, signals and so on. However, the question of how predictable certain events are and how they relate to other events is similar. This is interesting, because the ability to anticipate and rely on expectations is fundamental to the human condition. Exceeding or falling short of expectations is what defines a success versus a failure. This makes it very intriguing to understand how expectations are formed and how […]
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