AI and Robots: VEX Robotics Competition World Championship

Two days from today, and between April 22 and 24, the 2009-2010 VEX Robotics Competition World Championship will be held at Dallas Conventional Center where over 3000 contestants from 14 countries around the world will meet and fight their guts out (correction, fight their robots' guts out).

It is interesting that I only heard about this competition a few days ago from my wife because she is actually working on arranging hotel and travel for the Chinese team. Therefore, I looked it up and hence, today's blog post. :)

The main sponsor of the competition is a company called Vex Robotics Design System, who makes and sells robotics kits to hobbyists and young students. At the beginning of the season each year, the organizer would announce a new challenge, and students around the world can then form teams to compete in this world-wide competition using robots built from, of course, the VEX robotics kit. Contestants contained mostly middle school and high school students. However, even elementary school students can compete in this competition. These teams then compete against each other at the local and regional level until finalists are determined who then compete in the world championship. The competition is presently in its third season. The challenge for the 2008-2009 season is called Elevation Challenge, and the new one for the 2009-2010 season is called Clean Sweep Challenge.

The video below is from last year's world championship, also held at Dallas Conventional Center.

This year's challenge is the clean sweep challenge where two teams, each team using two robots, are divided into two courts, and the goal is to rack up as many points in a fixed time by pushing, shoveling, throwing, and dumping balls out of the team's own court and into the opponent's court. In the first 20 seconds of the game, the robots will play autonomously by running programs written by the contestants. For the remaining duration of the game, each robot is teleoperated using a remote control by contestants. Each team is free to design the robots anyway they like, and the only constraint is that the size of each robot can not exceed a certain limit (read the detailed description of the rules). The video below is the game animation describing the game in detail.

Since each team has to fight all the way from local to international, there are plenty of videos of games played at different cities and regions. The video below shows a game played by team number 8888 from La Salle High School in the semifinals (probably at the country level). You can probably see that during the first 20 seconds, the robots looked very dumb and didn't really do much. This is probably due to the difficulty for pre-college-level students to master and implement advanced AI algorithms and techniques. However, the students still have to put in a lot of effort designing and implementing these robots from an mechanical engineering perspective. Still though, it would be so nice if we see people designing fully autonomous robots (or robots with supervisory control) to compete in such interesting games.

I wish all the contestants the best luck in the upcoming world competition. I am sure they will all have a ton of fun and hopefully many of them will grow up into sincere robotists.

Video of the Day:

The street magician!

Full Moon Crescent Saber: Chapter 1 (3)

The creek was as clear as crystal.

Ding Peng walked along the creek, walking very quickly.

Of course he needed to hurry back. He still had many things to do. The morning sun had been rising high gradually. He suddenly felt very hungry, deadly hungry.

Today could very well be the most important day in his entire life. The moment that would decide his fate was right around the corner. But what was he doing? He was looking for an old man in bright red robe for a naked girl on an empty stomach like a fool.

If anyone else had told him of such a fool, he would never have believed.

The only thing real was that the girl was amazingly beautiful. Furthermore, she also possessed a very special temperament that made it impossible and unbearable for someone to reject her requests.

If there actually exists men capable of saying “no” to the face of this girl, such men must be very rare.

Fortunately, the creek was not very long.

There was indeed an old tree at the end of the creek, and indeed two men playing the game of Go there. One of them was indeed an old man in a bright red robe. Ding Peng heaved a secret sigh and then walked toward them in large strides. Reaching his hand forward, he tried to mess up the present game.

He was indeed an obedient man. But as he reached forward with his hand, his foot suddenly tripped. There was a hole on the ground, and he had stepped into the hole.

Fortunately the hole was not very big and he didn’t fall. Unfortunately, just when he drew his foot out of the hole, his other foot also tripped. Turned out there was a rope circle on the ground, and he happened to step into it. The rope circle immediately tightened.

Since his other foot was still in the air, as soon as the rope circle tightened, he lost his balance.

Even more unfortunately, the rope circle was tied to a tree branch. The tree branch had been bent to the ground. When the rope circle moved, the tree branch immediately shot upward and also swung him upward.

Most unfortunately, as he was swung upward, he happened to bump into another tree branch, and the branch happened to poke him right on an acupoint around his waist, which could easily immobilize a person even when poked lightly. Therefore, Ding Peng
found himself hanging upside down like a stupid fish hanging from a fishing pole.

The hold on the ground, the rope circle, and the tree branch – did someone deliberately set up the trap?

When the girl told him to come here, did she intend for him to fall prey of this trap? The two of them obviously didn’t hold any grudges against each other. Why would she do such a terrible thing to him?

The two men under the tree concentrated on their ongoing Go game without ever sparing a glance at him, as though they had no idea that someone came and was now hanging from the tree upside down.

The two must be true Go enthusiasts.

All Go enthusiasts hate interruptions when they are playing.

Maybe they only laid the trap to prevent others from disturbing them. They didn’t do it specifically for him.

Of course the girl would have no idea about such a trap.

At that thought, Ding Peng felt slightly better inside.

“Excuse me, misters! Will you let me down please?” he asked calmly.

But the two Go players didn’t hear him at all. Ding Peng repeated three times, but they ignored him completely as though they didn’t hear a word he said. Ding Peng began to lose his calm.

“Hey…,” he shouted.

He only had the chance to call out that one word. The word required him to open his mouth, but instantly, something flew over and blocked his mouth, something stinking, soft, sticky, and reeking. Ding Peng couldn’t tell if it was mud or something much worse than mud. The thing came from a tree branch on the opposite side. A little monkey wearing a red dress and riding on the branch was actually laughing at him with its mouth stretched wide. Things thrown by a monkey cannot be anything good! He’d be very lucky if it were only mud. Ding Peng nearly fainted from anger. After years of hardship and struggle, when he could almost feel the edge of success, then this happened.

Now support the translator Lanny by following my blog and leaving comments! :)

Picture of the Day:

Adeline does the Kung-Fu Panda at BYU CS Building!

Did you know that Jason Turner, a BYU alumnus currently working at DreamWorks Animation, personally built the computer model for "Po," the panda who stars in the movie?

Robot of the Day: Tetris-Bot, Lego Robot Playing Tetris

Remember the Rubik's Cube solving robots in a previous post? Well, as robots are gradually taking on our world, they are also taking on more and more of our games, and this time, it's Tetris -- one of the most popular video games in the world -- hmm, this really reminds me of those long, sleepless nights of a poor college student!

Pointing a web cam at a computer screen, hooking it to a Lego Mindstorms NXT robot, and setting the robot next to a keyboard, Branislov Kisacanin successfully created a Tetris-Bot that's capable of playing Tetris all by itself. Although Branislov claims that this was an educational project for his kids, chances are, he had a lot more fun than his kids.

The setup really had three pieces. The first piece is a camera capturing video of a computer screen running the game Tetris. A digital signal processing board then processes the video and determine how the falling piece should be moved. The DSP board then tells the NXT robot what to do using LED lights. Then the NXT robot uses its three fingers (hands) to punch three keys on a keyboard to move left, move right, or rotate. Although the robot is capable of punching 3 keystrokes per second, it moves at a much slower pace.

The creator Branislov must had a strong engineering background from his choice of using a DSP board for signal processing. If I were to create such a robot, I'd probably use a computer to perform the computer vision task. Recognizing the Tetris pieces and their orientation is not a very difficult task because of the color simplicity. Then the program just have to use a data structure to represent the state of the game and then choose moves that will maximize a certain utility (defined by the programmer). The video below demos the capability of the Tetris-Bot. The actual robot doesn't appear until 1:48, so skip forward if you want to hurry.

Tetris-Bot here plays like a novice player. My guess is that it will probably forever stuck on level 1 because of it's physical constraints. What would be really nice and fun is to implement some kind of learning algorithm so the robot actually learns what strategies to play from its own experiences and then does some advanced planning by thinking about what to do based on the pieces shown ahead of time. If the algorithm can adjust its parameters (such as threshold values on when to get rid of rows quickly vs. when to wait for a long stick), then the Tetris-Bot would look a lot smarter and more intelligent.

This is yet another example of what kind of robots you can build at your home at your free time using commercially available robotics kit. I know what I am getting for my kids' birthday -- I am very serious about my kids' education! Aren't you?

So if robots are doing our work and playing our games for us, what is left for humans to do? Well, I can think of at least three things:

• building better robots
• blog about robots, and
  
• work on my translation projects

Wait, aren't I doing these already? :) That is, of course, until we have robots that build better robots, robots that blog about robots, and robots that can translate better than I do ... and I am sure glad I won't live long enough to that day!

Video of the Day:

This is excellent engineering too: OK Go - This Too Shall Pass

Random Thoughts: Adventure in Japan -- Part 2

Adventure in Japan - Part 1

It has been a while since I returned from Osaka, Japan, but I thought I'd share a bit more of my experience in Japan for people who would like to visit Japan one day. Let me start off with some traveling tips.

• For a lot of people (61 countries and regions to be exact) including US citizens, visiting Japan for non-paid activities for 90 days or less does not require a visa. Just buy a plane ticket and go. It's that easy!
  
  
• There are several ways to get Japanese Yen. You can get it from your local bank before the trip. However, be aware that you have to pre-order, and it might take them up to 5 business days to get the money ready for you. They also charge a service fee ($10 for US Bank) for the exchange (from US Dollar to Yen or later from Yen to US Dollar after you return). This option works well if you exchange large quantities of money. A more convenient way to get Japanese Yen for a short term visitor is to get the Japanese money from ATMs at the Japanese airport. You will be charged about 3% for the exchange plus the ATM fee (probably $2). This option is better for small amount of exchange.
  
  
• Before visiting Japan, I was told that most places in Japan would take credit cards such as American Express of Visa. After visiting Japan, I learned the hard way that this is not true. Japanese businesses mostly don't take credit cards. Even McDonald's in downtown Osaka refused to take any credit cards.
  
  
• Power outlets in Japan are different from North America. North America has polarized outlets (one big one small). Japan has non-polarized outlets (both small). Also they don't have three holes, only two. If you have polarized plugs, then you need an adapter. The hotel might loan you one for free.
  
  
• Standard voltage in Japan is 100V. Make sure your devices can operate at 100V. If not, you need a transformer.
  

For the rest of the blog post, I'll focus on one single topic: Japanese Food.

The conference provided free lunch everyday in the form of a very traditional style of Japanese food: Bento Box. According to Wikipedia:

Bento (弁当) is a single-portion takeout or home-packed meal common in Japanese cuisine. A traditional bento consists of rice, fish or meat, and one or more pickled or cooked vegetables, usually in a box-shaped container.

The three pictures below show the three kinds of bento box lunches I was fortunate to try out. Each bento box contained a great variety of things, including rice, sea food, and lots of pickled things. Everything in a bento box is served cold, removing the need to heat up things using a microwave. I must confess that although the bento boxes looked very colorful and pretty, cold rice and too much pickled meat/vegetables just didn't quite agree with me. And I must mention that all the beautiful wooden boxes were properly recycled to save trees!

Because of the generosity of the HRI 2010 conference organizers (they covered most of the meals) and my very busy schedule, I only had the chance to visit one traditional Japanese restaurant during the trip. The picture below on the left shows the front of the small restaurant in downtown Osaka named Money House. The picture on the right shows the hall way inside, just wide enough for one person, a typical setup for traditional Japanese restaurants.

Since Japan is entirely made up of islands, it was not surprising to see lots of sea food dishes on the menu. Since a friend in our dinner group was an American who had lived in Japan for 8 years, he took charge of all the ordering, and we got to experience some interesting food. For example, deep fried squids (left), octopus balls (middle), and of course, raw fish (right). The first two actually tasted great despite the weirdness, however, I shied away from the raw fish, because I don't ever eat raw meat (e.g., a rare steak).

Some other dishes are very similar to Chinese dishes, such as dumplings, stir fried clams, and boiled green soy beans.

There were dishes that tasted very American too, such as the big Chicken Nugget shown below. Alcohol is also a big part of a Japanese culture (see all those bottles in the middle picture), and I wonder how many people in Japan drink and drive. The dinner was great! There is only one thing I'd like to complain though: why were all the dishes served in such small plates? See the stack of small plates in the last picture? We are a bunch of hungry grad students and I am not kidding when I say we can eat a lot!

For a group of 13 people, the dinner cost per person was 3000 yen (roughly about $35 USD), quite expensive in American standards, but it was well worth it. How often does one get the chance to eat a real authentic Japanese dinner? And by the way, they did not take credit cards. :)




The easiest way to put a baby to sleep is to give him classical music!

Paper Review: Using Maximum Entropy for Text Classification

This paper is written by Kamal Nigam, John Lafferty, and Andrew McCallum, all from Carnnegie Mellon University. It was presented at IJCAI-99 workshop on machine learning for information filtering.

This paper talks about the use of maximum entropy techniques for text classification and compares the performance to that of naïve Bayes.

Maximum entropy is a general technique for estimating probability distributions from data. The main principle in maximum entropy is that when nothing is known, the distribution should be as uniform as possible, that is, have maximal entropy. In text classification scenarios, maximum entropy estimates the conditional distribution of the class label given a document. The paper uses word counts as features.

Training data is used to set constraints on the conditional distribution. Maximum entropy first identifies a set of feature functions that will be useful for classification, then for each feature, measures its expected value over the training data and take this to be a constraint for the model distribution.

Improved Iterative Scaling (IIS) is a hillclimbing algorithm for calculating the parameters of a maximum entropy classifier given a set of constraints. It performs hillclimbing in parameter log likelihood space. At each step IIS finds an incrementally more likely set of parameters and converges to the globally optimal set of parameters.

Maximum entropy can suffer from overfitting and introducing a prior on the model can reduce overfitting and improve performance. To integrate a prior into maximum entropy, the paper proposes using maximum a posteriori estimation for the exponential model instead of maximum likelihood estimation. A Gaussian prior is used in all the experiments.

One good thing about maximum entropy is that it does not suffer from any independence assumptions.

The paper used three data sets to compare the performance of maximum entropy to naïve Bayes. The three data sets are WebKB, Industry Sector, and Newsgroups. In WebKB data set, the maximum entropy was able to reduce classification error by more than 40%. For the other two data sets, maximum entropy overfitted and performed worse than naïve Bayes.


Video of the Day:

Liu Qian performing magic tricks at the Chinese New Year Show. Can you figure out how he did the tricks?

Full Moon Crescent Saber: Chapter 1 (2)

The girl was young and tender.

Ding Peng felt as if he could no longer breathe, and his heart pounded three times faster than usual.

He had never come so close to a girl.

That was not to say that there were no young girls in his hometown, or that he had never seen any.

He always tried very hard to be abstinent and had used numerous methods to do so: shoving snow into his pants, soaking his head in the creek, pricking himself in the leg with a needle, running, mountain climbing, doing cartwheels….

Before obtaining his fame, he would not allow such things to distract him. He would not let anything waste his strength.

But now, all of a sudden, he saw a naked woman, a young, beautiful, naked woman.

With snow white skin, firm breasts, slender and sleek legs….

It took him all his strength to turn his head away, but the woman ran to him and held him in her arms, begging while gasping.

“Help me! You must save me!”

She was so close to him. Her breaths were warm and sweet. He could even hear her heartbeats.

His mouth was so dry that he couldn’t even utter a single word.

The girl had realized the change in his body, and her face reddened. Trying her best to cover herself up with her hands, she asked.

“You…eh…can…can you take off your clothes and lend it to me?”

Although the robe was the only clothes he had, he took it off without hesitation. The girl calmed down a bit after draping his robe over herself.

“Thanks!” she said earnestly.

Ding Peng finally calmed down a bit himself and could finally speak out.

“Is there someone chasing you?”

The girl nodded, and tears quickly welled up in her eyes.

“This place is out of the way and hard to find. Even if someone comes for you, you don’t have to be afraid,” said Ding Peng.

He is a man, born with the instinct to protect women, not to mention such a beautiful girl. He held her hands in his.

“As long as me and my sword are here, you don’t have to be afraid.”

“Thank you,” the girl said gently, feeling reassured.

She seemed to have said those words before. Then she looked downward and closed her mouth.

Ding Peng didn’t know what say.

He was going to ask, “Why are you running? Who’s after you? Why are they chasing you?”

But he forgot to ask, and she didn’t say.

Though she draped the robe over herself, such a short robe simply cannot cover up a fully-grown girl entirely.

A girl like her has too many inviting places on her body.

His heart was still thumbing, only too rapidly.

After a long while he finally noticed that her eyes were fixed on his packet of beef stew.

This meal could very well be his last meal, for he only had one copper penny left.

However, he said without a second thought, “These foods are clean. Why don’t you have some?”

“Thanks!” the girl said again.

“Help yourself!” replied Ding Peng.

The girl really helped herself promptly.

Ding Peng could never have imagined how such a beautiful girl could eat like a horse.

She must have been hungry for a long time and suffered deeply.

He could even picture in his mind the kind of tragedy the girl had endured.

A lonely girl, stripped of her clothes by a bunch of villains, locked down in a cellar, without any food. After quite some struggle, she finally managed to escape.

As he imagined the scenes in his mind, she had almost eaten up all his belongings.

She finished off all the beef and bean curds. She even ate all the steamed buns. All that was left were no more than a dozen peanuts.

Even she herself was somewhat embarrassed. “You can have these.” she pushed the peanuts over and said in an almost inaudible voice.

Ding Peng smiled.

He really wanted to cry, but somehow he couldn’t help but smile.

The girl also smiled, her face blushing, as red as a pretty flower in the sunshine.

A smile not only can make people happy, but also can shorten the distance between two persons.

They were both more relaxed by now, and the girl finally told her story.

Ding Peng’s imagination was actually not too far from what she told.

The girl had indeed been kidnapped by a bunch of villains. She had been stripped of her clothes and locked in a cellar. For several days, she didn’t eat anything. Those villains thought she was too hungry to move about, so they became careless, and she took the opportunity and escaped.

“I am so lucky to have run into you!” She found words so pale for her gratitude toward him.

“Where are they? I’ll go with you to find them!” Ding Peng asked as he rubbed the hilt of his sword.

“You cannot go!” the girl gasped.

“Why?” asked Ding Peng.

“There are some things I cannot say, but I promise I’ll tell you later,” the girl said with hesitation.

It seemed that the story was more profound than what had surfaced. If she couldn’t tell, he wouldn’t ask.

“I need to find a person, and then I’ll be alright,” the girl said again.

“Who are you looking for?”

“An elder of mine. He is over seventy years old, but still likes to wear bright red clothes. If you see him, you’ll definitely recognize him.”

“Would you find him for me?” the girl lifted her head and asked gently, her beautiful eyes filled with plea.

Ding Peng of course couldn’t go. He indeed couldn’t go, and he really shouldn’t go.

It was less than two hours from the fight that would decide his fate for his entire life.

He was still hungry, and he hadn’t practiced his sword moves. He must cultivate his mood and retain his strength so he could face Liu Ruosong. How could he just go and find an old man he had never met before for the sake of a stranger girl?

Yet he simply couldn’t let the word “no” out of his mouth. It was really no easy task to say “no” to a face of a beautiful girl. It would really require a great deal of courage and a lot of nerves. A man can only learn how to say “no” after going through many painful experiences.

“Where can I find this old gentleman?” Ding Peng sighed in his heart and finally asked.

“You will help me find him?” The girl’s eyes brightened.

Ding Peng had no choice but to nod. The girl jumped up and hugged him.

“You are such a nice guy! I’ll never forget you!”

Ding Peng knew that in the rest of his life, it would be very difficult to forget this girl as well.

“If you follow the creek and go up, you’ll see an old tree with very strange shapes at the end of the creek. He is always there playing the game of Go when the weather is good.”

Today’s weather was very good indeed.

“Once you see him, it is very important that you mess up his game board first. That’s the only way he would listen to you and then follow you over!”

Aren’t all board game enthusiasts like that? Even if the sky is falling, they’d still finish their present game first.

“I’ll wait here. Whether you find him or not, please hurry back.”

Now support the translator Lanny by following my blog and leaving comments! :)

Picture of the Day:

My daughter turned 5 recently, but I only have candles for one 6 and two 4s (I know, I am a cheapskate). How many different ways can you find to get 5 by adding math operators to these three numbers? Come on guys! You should at least be able to come up with the four obvious ones!! And there are a lot more. If you come up with one, write it down as a comment, so other people can focus on the unsolved ones...

Paper Review: Detecting Spam Web Pages through Content Analysis

This paper was written by Ntoulas (UCLA) and et al. (Microsoft Research) and 15th international conference on World Wide Web, 2006.

This paper is continuing work following two other papers on detecting spam web pages by the same group of authors. It focuses on content analysis as apposed to links. The authors propose 10 heuristics and investigate how well these heuristics correlate with spam web pages using a dataset of 17,168 pages. These heuristics/metrics are then combined as features in addition to 28 others to build a training dataset, so machine learning classifiers can be used to classify spam web pages. Out of the several classifiers experimented, C4.5 decision tree algorithm performed the best, so bagging and boosting are used to improve the performance and the results are reported in terms of accuracy and the precision recall matrix.

The main contributions of this reference paper include detailed analysis of the 10 proposed heuristics and the idea of using machine learning classifiers to combine them in the specific spam web page detection application. Taking advantage of the large web page collection (over 105 million) and a good-sized labeled dataset (17,168 pages), the paper is able to show some nice statistical properties of web documents (spam or non-spam) and good performances of existing classifying methods when using these properties as features of a training set.
Not being an export in the IR field, I cannot tell which of the proposed 10 heuristics are novel ideas with respect to spam web page detection. However, fraction of visible content and compression ratio seem to be very creative ideas and look very promising. Using each heuristic by itself does not produce good performance, so the paper combined them into a multi-dimensional feature space. Note here that this method has been used in many research domains with various applications.

One common question IR researchers tend to ask is: how good is your dataset? In section 2, the paper did a good job acknowledging the biases of the document collection and then further provided good justifications. This makes the paper more sincere and convincing. The paper also did a good job explaining things clearly. For instance, in section 4.8, the example provided made it very easy to distinguish “Fraction of page drawn from globally popular words” from “Fraction of globally popular words”. Another example is in section 4.6 when the paper explained how some pages inflated during compression. I specifically liked how the authors explained the concepts of bagging and boosting briefly in this paper. They could have simply directed the readers to the references, but the brief introduction dramatically improves the experience for those readers who have not worked with such concepts (or are rusty on them such as in my case).
Although well-written, the paper still has some drawbacks and limitations. Firstly, section 6, related work, should really have been placed right after introduction. That way, readers can get a better picture of how this problem has been tackled in the IR community and also easily see how this paper differs. Also, this section gives a good definition of “content spam”, and it makes much more sense to talk about possible solutions after we have a clear definition.

Secondly, in section 3, the paper talks about 80% of all pages (as a result of uniform random sampling) being manually classified? I strongly suspect that is what the authors meant to say. 80% of over 105 million pages will take A LONG TIME to classify, period! Apparently this collection is not the same DS dataset mentioned in section 4 because the DS dataset only contained pages in English. So what is this collection? It apparently is a larger labeled dataset than the DS dataset. From Figures 6, 8, 10, and 11, we see the line graph touching the x-axis due to possibly not enough data. Using this larger labeled dataset (of the English portion) might have produced better graphs. Another thing I’d like to mention here is that spam web page is a “subjective classification” (at least for me it is). Naturally I’d think the large data collection was labeled under a divide-and-conquer approach, so each document is only looked at by one evaluator. If this were true, then the subjectivity of the evaluators plays an important role on the label. A better approach would have been having multiple evaluators working on the same set of web pages and label following the majority vote to minimize each evaluator’s subjectivity.

Thirdly, when building the training set, the proposed 10 heuristics are combined with 28 other features before applying the classifier. I think it would be better to compare results of using only these 10 features, using only those original 28 features, and using all features combined. That way, we can better evaluate how well these additional 10 heuristics contributed to the improvement of the classifiers.

Additionally, in section 4.1, the paper says “there is a clear correlation between word count and prevalence of spam” according to Figure 4. I failed to see the correlation.

Lastly, the experiment results are only for English web pages. Since the analysis in section 3 (Figure 3) clearly indicate that French and German web pages contained bigger portions of spam web pages, it would be great to see how proposed solution works with those languages. I understand the difficulty of working with other languages, but it would really improve the paper even if only some very initial experiments were performed and results reported.

There are other minor problems with the paper as well. For example, for each heuristic, the paper reported the mode, median, and mean. I think it is also necessary to provide variance (or standard deviation) because it is an important descriptor of a distribution. I would also suggest using a much lighter color so that the line graph is more readable for the portions where it overlaps with the bar graph. Dr. Snell once said that we should always print out your paper in black and white to make sure it looks okay, and I am strong believer of that! Also in section 4.3, the authors meant to say the horizontal axis represents the average “word length” within a page instead of “number of words”.

I think it’s worth mentioning that the authors did an awesome job in the conclusions and future work section. Detecting web spam is really like an “arms race” between the spam filter designers and spammers. As new technologies are developed to filter spam, spammers will always work hard to come up with ways to break the filtering technology. This is an ongoing battle and degradation of the classification performance over time is simply unavoidable.

This is a well-written paper that showed excellent performance, and I certainly enjoyed reading it. I’d like to end this report with a quote directly from the paper which is so well said:

“Victory does not require perfection, just a rate of detection that alters the economic balance for a would-be spammer. It is our hope that continued research on this front can make effective spam more expensive than genuine content.”

I just learned recently that Superman's father is the Godfather!

Robot of the Day: Wakamaru, the Robot Actor and Salesman

On the second day of the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) 2010 conference, Dr. Ishiguro, one of the main organizers of this year's HRI conference, led us to a small traditional Japanese theater, and presented us a robotic play titled Hataraku Watashi (I, Worker), where I finally had the pleasure to meet the famous robot actor (and actress) in person. I have heard of them and their play from news media a long time ago.

The two robots stared in the theatrical production are the Wakamura robots made by Mitsubishi, named after the child name of a famous ancient Japanese general, although these yellow, 1 meter tall, and 30 kg robots were originally designed for companionship for elderly and disabled, selling at a hefty price of $14000 each.

The project was headed by Dr. Ishiguro at Osaka University, who sent his grad students to theater classes and also invited famous Japanese playwright, Oriza Hirata, to write a story. The result was a 20-minute piece named I, worker starring two Wakamura robots alongside two human actors. The robots played two depressed household servants who work for a young couple. Learning from the young couple's life experience, the robots grew tired of their mundane lifestyle and longed to break free and see the world.

Although the robots are not capable of facial expressions, their head and limb movements and the autonomous navigation capabilities successfully conveyed the depressing feeling to the audience. Most of the audience that day did not speak Japanese, but fortunately, Dillon, an American who works at ATR research institute in Osaka volunteered the translation on a big monitor, so we were able to follow the story. One interesting thing we noticed was that the robots apologized a lot, probably due to Japanese culture. The video below shows sections of the play in Japanese.

Since the robots were playing robots in the play, it is pretty hard to beat their performance with real human actors, but when asked about how they felt about the two robots in rehearsals and the real play, the human actor and actress actually almost thought of these robots as real human actors. So what if one day we have plays that comprise of robot actors only, when robots are becoming more sophisticated? What if one day we start to see robots sitting in the audience together with human? Don't think that would be interesting and entertaining by itself?

Other than acting, these Wakamaru robots are also acting as salesman in clothing stores now, and one found a job in a Uniqlo store in downtown New York. This robot is not only capable of conversations, it can also recommend promotions to customers, and best of all, it even asks customers to exercise with it, something that could be in great demand here in the US where obesity is a severe problem.

Video of the Day:

I also saw this at the HRI conference (yes, it's a chimpanzee, not a robot), and thought you'd all get a kick out of it!

Robot of the Day: Ishiguro and his "twin brother" Geminoid

Ever wished you could have a secret twin brother so he could go to classes for you while you sleep in or go out for a field trip? Well, maybe that dream could come true some day thanks to robotics and android technologies!

When Dr. Ishiguro decided to build an android robot for his research, he thought to himself, "why not build one that just looks like me?" And not long after, his new "twin brother", Genimoid, was born into this crazy human world!

Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro of the Osaka University is the general co-chair of this years HRI conference. He was also one of the panelist in the panel discussion in the HRI Young Pioneers Workshop I was attending, so I finally met him in person, exccept for a fraction of a second, I wondered if it was really him, or his "twin brother" that was sitting at the front row of the room. :)

Dr. Ishiguro's ultimate goal in researching android and human-robot interaction is to really learn and understand about human race itself. His grad students had built behaviors resembling his behaviors into the robot, but Dr. Ishiguro didn't think he had actually behaved like that. I guess sometimes we don't really know ourselves, and looking at oneself as from an external viewing angle might be a very strange and suprising experience.

Geminoid had limited capabilities. He could move his head, his hands, and twich his legs. He blinks and moves his lips when he talks. He could also show some limited facial expressions. There are 50+ motors inside him, though he was not built to walk around, so should we say, he was born paralyzed? But he could hear, see, and speak, and one of his applications is for tele-presense, so Dr. Ishiguro could speak at a remote location, and the robot will lip sync with him through controls over the Internet.

Dr. Ishiguro's advice on career were very simple: 1) Do really good work, and 2) Work on new things. "If you do that," he said, "then good things will just happen to you!"

Picture of the Day:

If you have not seen this movie, I would recommend it. See what consequences you might have to face when you can just duplicate yourself.

Random Thourghts: Adventure in Japan -- Part 1

Hello everyone! Today is March 1st, 2010 (again, I am still living in this parallel universe), and this is Lanny blogging live from Osaka, Japan! :)

For those of you who already know, I'll be spending the next five days here with my adviser, Dr. Mike Goodrich, attending the Human-Robot Interaction Conference. This is the fist time I visit Japan. Thought I'd share with you some of the fun adventures and "culture shocks" during my trip, so you'll be prepared when you decide to visit Japan someday in the future.

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Left home at exactly 4:00am on Sunday morning (February 28, 2010) and checked in at the City Plaza Osaka hotel downtown Osaka at approximately 8:00pm Monday evening (March 1, 2010). Does it really take this long? The truth is: yes, it does take a long time, but not this long. Osaka time is 14 hours ahead of Utah time (MST), so the trip "only" took 24 hours. What a long day!

The flight out of Salt Lake City to San Francisco was at 6:00am local time. Probably because our itinerary included international flights, we could not check in using the easy terminal, and had to stand in a long line to check in at the desk even though we only had carry on luggage. This only gave us 30 minutes to go through security check and rush to our gate, during which, I forgot to collect the little plastic bag containing my hand lotion and hair spray (probably because it didn't work well with the conveyor belt system and did not come out in time. Well, guess I'll just have dry hands and bad hair during the trip then! The good news was, we made the flight!!

The lay over at San Francisco was 4.5 hours. One waiting passenger at the International Terminal got so bored that he started exercising Tai-Chi, which successfully helped us kill about 20 minutes.

 

Tai-Chi in SFO International Terminal

The plane we flew in is a Boeing 777, big enough to have 2 seats on each side and 5 seats in the middle (where we sat at). The flight duration was 12 hours, and the distance between SF and Osaka is about 5800 miles.

 

Boeing 777 at SFO International Terminal

One thing nice about going to Japan from the US is that you don't need a visa. Going through the customs was quick and easy, but soon I had my first "culture shock" at the Osaka Airport restroom. While I was washing hands, a woman janitor just decided to walk in the men's restroom and began cleaning while others were still, you know, doing their business at the urinals. According to Mike, who lived in Japan before, this is a very common thing. Totally weird!

To get to the hotel downtown, we had to take a train first, and then transfer to a subway. We successfully bought our train tickets at at the station by showing the name of our destination in writing to the ticket agent. He gave us a warm reception and kept talking to us in Japanese as if we actually understood what he was saying. The ticket was a bit pricey: 1390 Yen, which is approximately $14 USD. Th exchange rate is 90 some Yen to 1 USD, so I simply calculate as if 1 USD is 100 Yen. The picture below shows a normal train at the station. We actually took a different one with a bullet-shape head.

 

Normal train at the underground train station.

 

Inside the Rapit Bullet Train

 

Looking out from the Rapit Bullet Train

The Rapit Bullet Train was quite empty, however, we did have to seat at our designated seats. Quite to my pleasant surprise, it had English anouncements for stations. Between stations, a train attendent lady would walk the entire six cabins to check tickets. The attendent lay was extremely polite -- she would bow every single time when she entered or left a cabin. Since she walked back and forth, I saw her bowing probably at least 10 times.

At a transfer station, we had to transfer from the train system to the city subway system. It took us a long time because we weren't sure what tickets to buy and which subway to get on -- there was no human agent to help us this time. Eventually we just boldly jumped on a subway and luckily, it was the right now. The subway fare is much cheaper: 230 Yen, which is about $2.5 USD. Another interesting thing I noticed was that the train and the subways would always play nice short melodies to indicate the arrival or leaving a station. Unlike the train, the subway didn't have English announcement, so we had to count number of stops.

When we exited the subway station in downtown, there was a slight shower. Immediately I saw a Starbucks Coffee shop, a 7-Eleven, and a McDonald (shown below, sorry, a bit blurry) around us. Man, it feels just like home! However, we didn't have any instructions to follow from the station to the hotel, and we didn't even know which direction we were going (really started to miss the nice grid street system in Utah). We had hoped to be able to just spot the hotel (since it is a big unique-looking building), but there are many big buildings downtown, and we failed. The shower also began to get worse.

 

McDonald at downtown Osaka

Desperate, we stopped a girl on the street and showed her a picture of the hotel without even attempt to talk to her. The girl then replied and gave us instructions with perfect English -- What a miracle! Turned out the hotel was only a few minutes walk from the subway station exit, we just didn't know which direction to go.

People in Japan drive on the left side of the street. I don't really know why. They weren't a British colony as far as I know. They also walk on the left side of the street. I kept forgetting about it and kept bump into people. How rude of me!

 

City Plaza Osaka hotel right at downtown Osaka

We were sure glad to finally found our hotel and checked in. It is a very nice hotel, and the twin-bed room was much more spacious than I had expected (given the fact that this is in Japan). Soon I found more differences between the American culture and the Japanese culture.

In Japanese bathrooms, shower and bath are two different things and therefore use different parts of the room. Toilet is actually in a different room on the other side, and man, what a FANCY toilet!! I won't go into more details about it, but you can see the picture below and judge yourself.

Japnese style bath room with seperate shower area

 

Fancy Toilet System

Well, that's enough for today. Look out for more updates directly from Osaka Japan in my blog soon!




You don't need to know Japanese to survive Osaka, and I am the living proof!