Facial Expression Recognition. Who Wants This?

I came across another interesting article on Science Daily concerning new software prototype that can read your face and identify your expression as one of six basic emotions. The article lists a couple of possible applications for this kind of software -- none of them anything I would ever want my computer monitor doing without some pretty explicit case-by-case authorization.

The basic idea is that after it decides what look is on your face, it can communicate with some kind of online avatar that will reproduce the basic expression for the benefit of whoever you happen to be corresponding with. So maybe your World of Warcraft avatar is mimicking your expressions in near real-time, or maybe you're doing business online and your computer is spying on your reaction to the offer you just got.

I mean... I guess it's cool. But it's kind of nosy. Facial expressions might give a more complete picture of a person's feelings than their words, but words are chosen, while facial expressions are largely involuntary. If you wanted to video chat, there's already software to do it. Do we need virtual faces?

In terms of web immersion, it seems a little bit too intense -- we're already creating weird enough social phenomena in MMORPGs as it is-- but giving people the tools to put up a false front that synchs up to their faces? How deep do we want to get into this stuff?

And in terms of e-commerce, I'm just not sure what's going to come of that. A new form of market research that tracks people's facial expressions when they look at a new product or ad? I can't see a scenario where that could possibly work out to the buyer's advantage, but I see plenty where it could be abused by the seller. We've already got spyware programs doing their best to track our browsing habits -- expression tracking just seems like one more step in the wrong direction -- unnecessary and invasive.

Now, there really are ways this could be used that would be cool and important, so I'm not saying I wish it didn't exist. I'd really like to see some applications where a program attempted to respond "intelligently" to your expressions by offering you different options depending on your reaction -- still, you'd really need a verbal override, because people just aren't in full and constant command of their faces the way they are with their voices and their fingertips.

Check out a video of someone testing out the program. Notice that it looks sort of fun to manipulate, but consistently misses the authentic half-smile and eyerolling that keep creeping up between unrealistic stage-expressions. I don't think this is going to clarify people's emotions over the net very well, though people might enjoy using it to express them.

Meanwhile, if we're going to be using something like this to show people our expressions and clarify our responses and intentions-- then instead of categorizing expressions and repackaging them as a basic catchall emotion like "fear" or "joy", wouldn't it make more sense to use those sophisticated tracking abilities to just rebuild the same face you made?* Human expressions are too complicated to be sliced up into six types.

*Given the somewhat vague wording of the article, it's possible the program in question does this, but my overwhelming feeling from the description of the way it works is that it focuses on identifying rather than rebuilding the expressions it captures.

I Just Assumed All Children Naturally Want to Go to Space...

Space tourism is close. Very close. I had known for a while that it was going to be possible soon for those who have the money to ride a special jet that kind of skims out past the atmosphere and technically makes it out there. It was exciting, but kind of not exciting, if you know what I mean.

But now we're talking space elevators. Moon hotels. Slowly rotating low-gravity swimming pools where you can pop out of the water like a flying fish (I want to know who came up with that one. It's cute.) This kind of stuff is projected for 2025.

The most interesting part of all of this is the idea of a space hotel. If you were rich, you could stay in one of these for a few nights for about 4 million dollars. But if you're not? Well, we can't exactly leave these high-paying tourists all alone in their moon rooms to fend for themselves.

So are we going to have people living and working full-time in service positions in space? The majority of jobs needed for the daily operations of a hotel aren't the most rewarding or enjoyable in the world, so I've got to wonder. Your job sucks, but you're living on the moon. Is that a plus or a minus? How long does it take to get sick of something like that?

And also, how does the pay situation work out? You can't really spend your money from the moon, unless Amazon is going to start delivering there. I can only assume your basic needs will be provided for by your employer, but what about entertainment? Communication with friends and family back home? Will the moon get cable? How do you live on the moon?

(Spacefuture.com actually predicts 2 month rotations for moon staff-- so it could be that you're just expected to go without this stuff until your shift is up.)

Apparently, though, this is something that students from the University of Delaware are interested in doing. According to Science Daily's article on space tourism, the University of Delaware is a Land, Sea, Urban, and Space Grant university. So their students majoring in tourism and hospitality are being encouraged to pursue job opportunities in space.

Now, that's ambitious.

(Image credit: Shimizu Corporation, Tokyo, Japan)

It's Time to Take Your Medicine.... (Robots part 2)

I saw Honda's ASIMO robot today at the Robotopia Rising exhibit at the Kennedy Center, and I have to say that the presentation was not really all it could have been. ASIMO has a handful of showcase-abilities, all of them made most significant by the fact that ASIMO is life-sized, about as big as a twelve year old human.

So keeping that in mind, the biggest challenge in ASIMO's design has obviously been balance. ASIMO can't just casually throw its weight around. Walking, running, climbing stairs, kicking a ball, and "dancing..." these are all things ASIMO can do... but slowly. And carefully.

So, ASIMO was presented in a 15 minute show that was clearly aimed at kids. Which means they had a lady using her best kindergarten teacher voice to try to get everybody really, really excited about whatever ASIMO was about to do. This is kind of a subtle robot, though. For example, when it runs, it doesn't really look like it's running. It's more of a half-comical sneaking motion.

When you build something up like it's going to be awesome, knowing full well that it isn't all that visually impressive, that makes the event itself kind of a disappointment. It was like that all throughout the show, especially when it came time for ASIMO to dance.

Now, ASIMO can't actually move its lower body very well, so what it did was slowly and randomly move its arms around until the music stopped. It was really kind of sad. And then, as the show moved into the possible practical applications of ASIMO as an aide to the elderly, the show took on the "forced" and "creepy" aspects that are almost inevitable to any discussion of using the clumsy, slow, and awkward robots we have right now with vulnerable people in need of reliable help.

What would have made the ASIMO presentation really engaging, in my opinion, was more talk about the challenges of getting it to do the things it can do, and the ways its developers failed along the way, as a means of explaining how they learned from their failures to make it work. That way, the audience would better appreciate why ASIMO isn't quite ready to shake its booty yet.

So, discussion question. Is there a difference between making a science exhibit accessible and inviting to kids, and targeting it at them? Grownups made ASIMO, shouldn't there be a layer to its presentation intended for them as well? Or is the only purpose of an exhibit like this one to get the young ones excited about technology and learning?

Lucky for me, inventor/artist-troupe Maywa Denki were also performing at the Kennedy Center, providing fun and song with their "Original Instruments" consisting of guitars that play themselves, singing "robots" powered by bellows, a kind of electric castanet-set mounted on a pair of wings, and a number of other percussion instruments based off of a basic "knocker" device that goes "bonk" and "clunk" at different pitches. The group invents and creates their own instruments (among other things), then presents them as "products" as part of their performance art motif, which hearkens back to the small electric stores of a bygone era.

Not only are the instruments innovative and funny, but some of their songs were pretty catchy, too.

Others, just weird. But even still, somehow wonderful.

I Heart Robots

On Saturday I'm hoping to go see some robots with my friend Chris, and so I wanted to get into the robot spirit. Since today is Valentine's day, I thought I would introduce you to 5 robots that I love.



This is QRIO. Right now he and his other QRIO friends are just dancing (it's all preprogrammed--not very robotic at all), but apparently he can do much much more. He can throw things, identify objects and faces, move his little fingers, protect his face from danger, right himself when he's about to fall down, and stack blocks. Intended as a little robot entertainer, the QRIO project was tragically dumped by Sony over a year ago, but rumor has it that Toyota might be picking it back up.





This is ACM-R5, an amphibious snake robot created by the Hirose Fukushima Robotics Labs in Japan. Watching it move is just amazing. The different segments are all semi-autonomous, and have a system of communicating with one another that lets them count how far down they are from the head so that they can be replaced without needing reprogramming.





This is the Toyota Partner Robot, one of the robots at the Robotopia Rising show. It plays the freaking trumpet. Having spent 4 or so years of fruitlessly trying to learn the oboe, I'm blown away by this. I wonder how it would stack up on a chair test?





This is the Cornell Healing Robot, a robot that can teach itself to walk as well as develop new ways of walking to adapt to injuries. I once bought a little cockroach robot for ten dollars that responded to any and all stimuli with "turn 45 degrees to the right," and I remember being frustrated with how stupid my robot was as I watched it wiggle in endless circles next to a simple obstacle.

This robot has no preconceived notion of how its parts are put together, and so it tries out randomly generated models of what it might look like until it gets the results it expects. According to Chronicle Online, the robot never really settles on one model for forever and always. Instead it allows all the models it tried recently to continuously compete for the role of which one best describes the robot's past experiences. Sound suspiciously like the way we think?





This is Domo. Designed to help the elderly with chores, Domo is another adapting robot. It uses a couple of different strategies to figure out the size and shape of objects so it can put them on shelves, and it also responds to human commands. Probably the best thing about Domo is the pseudo-sentient naive eye contact it makes with its human master before carrying out a task.

I've seen a video of Domo trying to make a drink, too, but considering the robot identifies the bottle by shaking it upside down, never unscrews the cap, and doesn't actually make a drink, I'm not really sure if that's a one of its more reliable features. Domo isn't really intended to ever hit the market, but the research that went into creating it should contribute to making better helper robots for our glorious, creepy robot-assisted future.

One Step Closer to Manufacturing Microbes

I remember reading a little clip in The Daily Press about five years ago that claimed scientists were closing in on the ability to create synthetic life, and thinking, "Oh, crap."

It looks like Craig Venter is almost there, after synthesizing the complete genome of a bacteria that usually lives in humans, Mycoplasma genitalium. According to New Scientist's Short Sharp Science Blog, Venter plans to implant the genome into a natural Mycoplasma cell and see if it functions. If it does, the synthetic genomes can be reprogrammed to carry out specific, useful functions, and we'll have custom microbes to do things like digest waste and clean up the air.

Now, since this process requires using the machinery of a normal living cell and refitting it with a new code to use in reproducing itself, it's not necessarily artificial life in the form you might imagine. Instead, it actually sounds a lot like the way a virus hijacks a healthy cell and repurposes it for the sake of churning out more viruses. Only in this case, it's making more copies of the hybrid cell.

Back when I originally read about the viability of this sort of project (and said, "Oh, crap,") it was because the news made me a bit anxious about the integrity of the whole "life" idea. A genome doesn't really have any sort of will or awareness of its surroundings as far as we know, but in theory, a complete organism does. So, what's the difference between a living thing and a collection of nonliving, self-replicating parts?

Well, I don't know, so I'm not going to try to tackle it here. But if you're like me and went into a panic spiral, wondering:

Is that it? Did he figure out the secret behind everything? Will we be building artificial people next?

You can still rest easy (unless you were all excited about artificial people; then I'm sorry to disappoint.) Recent discoveries suggest that the genes expressed in DNA alone aren't enough to explain complex organisms like us. In fact, a lot of the regulatory work in complex organisms is actually being done by RNA.

To control which genes are switched on at a given time, and how those genes are expressed, various kinds of RNA are constantly on the move. Before finding this out, most scientists assumed RNA was not particularly important to the workings of a cell.

It will probably be a while before scientists attempt to tackle the challenge of creating RNA in all its different forms. Until then, we can look forward to the potential benefits of having microorganisms designed to help us deal with our problems.

Cell Phones Aren't Killing Us After All

I'm generally the type to throw caution to the wind when it comes to the supposed quiet killers of modern life, (I drink diet coke, if that's any indication) but I can sometimes kind of appreciate the vague dread of new technology for aesthetic reasons. It's not that I particularly want my phone to incite my brain cells into rebellion, but I'm a fan of Don Delillo. I like to look at microwaves and power lines sometimes and wonder if they're having some effect on the world we can't see.

Well, there's good news, if kind of a letdown to technophobes and conspiracy theorists. Evidence is mounting that the radiation from cell phones just isn't dangerous to humans. Not even over the long term. The latest study covers up to ten years of use, and examines the effects of different kinds of phones on different areas of the brain.

If you can believe it, our phones aren't killing off the bees, either.

In part, the kind of paranoia that bee-killing theories and cancer fears speak to is practical. It's not smart to stand back and let the world fill up with dangerous technologies, especially we get to the point where we use them every day and can't get rid of them. Staying on top of what's dangerous and what's not is a part of living responsibly.

A little bit of paranoia can take our mind off our problems, too. Who really cares about what went wrong at work today if our cell phones are giving us cancer, processed food is starving us, and we're about to run out of bees?

Still, it can be easy to get the wrong idea about the latest hidden menace, even if most people just sweep the stories aside and get on with their lives. A scrap of shocking news can hit the net and spread like wildfire, but clarifications and corrections sometimes get lost.

Now, while I want to scare you and make you think, I don't want to mislead you.

For the purposes of this blog, unreliable stories that I find worth mentioning as food for thought will be clearly identified as such, and corrections and updates will also figure prominently if they're needed.

Because while it's fun to think about our cell phone towers killing off massive amounts of bees, at the end of the day it's important to understand it was actually the bee rapture.