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57 news posts in Robotics and AI

Robotics and AI

26 Oct 2016

Can a Brain-Computer Interface Convert Your Thoughts to Text?

By Srividya Sundaresan, Science Writer Recent research shows brain-to-text device capable of decoding speech from brain signals  Ever wonder what it would be like if a device could decode your thoughts into actual speech or written words? While this might enhance the capabilities of already existing speech interfaces with devices, it could be a potential game-changer for those with speech pathologies, and even more so for “locked-in” patients who lack any speech or motor function. “So instead of saying ‘Siri, what is the weather like today’ or ‘Ok Google, where can I go for lunch?’ I just imagine saying these things,” explains Christian Herff, author of a review recently published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. While reading one’s thoughts might still belong to the realms of science fiction, scientists are already decoding speech from signals generated in our brains when we speak or listen to speech. In their review, Herff and co-author, Dr. Tanja Schultz, compare the pros and cons of using various brain imaging techniques to capture neural signals from the brain and then decode them to text. The technologies include functional MRI and near infrared imaging that can detect neural signals based on metabolic activity of […]

Robotics and AI

25 Oct 2016

Changing the self through immersive Virtual Reality: an interview with Mel Slater

“I still find immersive Virtual Reality as thrilling now as when I first tried it 20 years ago,” writes Professor Mel Slater, Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Robotics and AI, on his personal blog. Slater, recipient of the IEEE VGTC’s 2005  Virtual Reality Career Award, is ICREA Professor and Head of the Event Lab at Barcelona University and part-time Professor of Virtual Environments at UCL. Here, we talk to him about his research, technical advances and challenges in the field, and how virtual reality can help raise awareness about sustainability and global change. VR as a research tool A major focus of research for Slater and his team is to use VR as a tool in psychology and neuroscience. Many interesting questions can’t be studied in real life, because they are dangerous or distressing to the participants. But in VR, you can safely simulate the situation, and gauge people’s response. For example, “We did a study where we look at (…) an important area in social psychology called the bystander problem: if you see two other people who start fighting, (…) do you run away, do you try to intervene? (…) This is very hard to study in physical reality, but in virtual reality you can.” In […]

Robotics and AI

07 Jun 2016

You are not as anonymous as you think online

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

Gestures improve communication – even with robots

  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

VIDEO: Penn State scientist uses sensors to tackle real-world problems

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

Everything that we see or seem: The secrets behind virtual reality

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

06 Jan 2015

Social Robotics: An Interview with Sebastian Loth

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 […]