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SERVO 12.2013 9
Cheers!
The JAMES project
at Germany's Bielefeld
University (
www.uni-bielefeld.de) calls to
mind Mason Cooley's
semi-famous
observation, "An
academic dialect is
perfected when its
terms are hard to
understand and refer
only to one another."
JAMES (which stands
for Joint Action for
Multimodal Embodied
Systems) was created
by the school's Psycholinguistics Research Group to develop an artificial
embodied agent that supports socially appropriate, multi-party, multimodal
interaction. JAMES focuses on the qualitative aspects of task achievement in
social situations, and how such tasks can be improved through multimodal
communication, rather than the physical aspects of traditional robotics
tasks." What? Well, project literature further elucidates, "In particular, JAMES
plans to develop the core cognitive capabilities that enable a robot to
interact with humans in a socially appropriate manner, and demonstrate this
behavior in a bartending scenario."
Yeah, it's another tablet-headed, one-armed robotic bartender and a
clever scheme to get academic credit for drinking beer.
Bartender JAMES reads your body language and
knows when you want another drink.
Art for Art's Sake
Finally, this month's Big Whoop
Award goes to Austrian artist Alex
Kiessling ( www.alexkiessling.com)
who aspired to astonish the universe
by drawing three pictures at once last
September. While he worked on the
original in Vienna, a pair of industrial
robots — one in London's Trafalgar
Square and the other in Berlin's
Breitscheidplatz — drew the same
picture using satellite data transmission. Spectators in all three locations
could follow the redundant activities on giant screens. Sadly, a photo in
Britain's Daily Mail revealed a gathering of perhaps 30 people — half of
whom were looking at a nearby fountain instead. Oh, well. SV
A robot reproduces a drawing
from afar.
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