Servo - December 2013

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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