iPad -- a new tool to help treat autism?

Leo has plenty of toys, including this circular balance
beam, but nothing tops the iPad. (Photo by Kelly Nicolaisen)

iPad is probably the most popular high-tech toy on the market right now. But can it be more than just a toy and be useful in other ways, such as helping treat children with autism? The answer is a definite yes.

You might wonder why I am all of a sudden interested in the subject of treating children with autism. Actually, I have been a member of the TiLAR research group working on using assistive robotics technology to help treat children with autism. TiLAR stands for Therapist-in-the-Loop Assistive Robotics.

Recently, I came across an article named iHelp for Autism from SF Weekly. The article told multiple stories of how an iPad helped improve the behaviors of Leo, a 9-year-old artistic child, the son of Shannon Rosa. Shannon had won the iPad from a school raffle, and in the following months, she was pleasantly surprised again and again by how the iPad changed Leo's life and her own, to a better effect, that's of course.

It is important to note that the word autism could mean a spectrum of psychological conditions, that's why the more formal name Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is frequently used. Despite the wide spectrum, autistic children display common symptoms of deficiency in social interactions and communication and severely restricted interests and highly repetitive behavior.

So what are the benefits of using an iPad? Here I'll list some just off the top of my head:

• It looks slick and cool (remember it won't be like that forever).
• It's really a platform, so you can run all kinds of things on it like songs, movies, games, maps, etc.
• You can select things, move things, draw things with your fingers -- a multitouch interface -- and you have plenty of space to do it (unlike an iPhone). The interface is also relatively simple and intuitive, so it doesn't take a lot of time to learn or explore.
• It's relatively lightweight and is battery powered, so you can carry it with you everywhere you go.

Of course an iPad also has disadvantages:

• It's expensive.
• It's fragile (especially the screen).
• Battery life is not great.
• Apps have to be approved by Apple (but there's always iPad like devices running Android).

Now when we give an iPad to an autistic child, what could be good?

• Because an iPad is a fashionable item (at least for now), it would encourage the child to participate in more social activities while holding an iPad -- confirmed by a study.
• The intuitive and simple finger-controlled interface is attractive to autistic children because they can easily identify things and things are predictable. The finger touch interface is also great to encourage the autistic children to practice manipulate things with their fingers, improving motor skills that are normally problematic for autistic children.
• Because an iPad can run many games and apps, autistic children are more prone to play educational games on an iPad, so there's more opportunity to learn while feeling good about it.
• The portability of iPad allows the child to use it anywhere the child wants, and movie playing capability can let the child watch instructional demonstrations -- termed Video Modeling -- frequently and in various locations.
• An iPad can also act as a communication tool. For example, an autistic girl used an iPad to tell her mother where she'd like to go shopping.

So what could go wrong when we give iPad to an autistic child?

• One bad tantrum, there goes the screen, and it's expensive!
• If the child is over-reliant on the iPad as a communication tool, once the battery is dead, the child might go berserk.

As I mentioned earlier, autistic children tend to behave differently from social norms and have problems communicating with others. It seems that we ought to look at three different dimensions when we think about treatment. The first dimension is deviation from social norms. The child can behave more like social norms after treatment or deviate further away. The second dimension is the ability to communicate. A treatment might help the child to communicate better or make it worse. The third dimension is the ease for caregiver. A treatment can change the child's behavior so it's easier for the caregiver to take care of the child. It might also make the care-giving more demanding/challenging.

Ideally, we'd like the treatment to move the child positively on all three dimensions, but that might not always be true depending on the kind of treatment we provide and the kind of tool we use. Some people might also want to settle at different spots in this three-dimensional space. They'd accept a solution that improves the child's ability to communicate and makes the caregiver's life easier while the child's behavior might deviate further away from social norms. Therefore, one important question to ask is: Where in the 3D chart do you want the autistic child to be? For example, if an autistic child always uses the iPad to tell you what he wants, is that what you want? If the answer is no, then the iPad might actually have done harm instead of good.

Are there other creative ways of using an iPad to help support treating children with autism? The article mentioned that some researchers are actually using iPad to help collect physiological data of the autistic child on-the-go and maybe play a soothing sound/music if they get tense. I'll throw out some ideas of my own just for brainstorming purposes. If you can think of any, feel free to tell me in the comments section.

• Since we use a robot to assist the therapist in clinic sessions, the iPad can be used by the therapist before the session to program robot behaviors.
• We can put a virtual character in the iPad to encourage the child to imitate the character's moves. The virtual character can also encourage the child for certain behaviors such as turn taking with the therapist and the robot. The therapist can act as the sensor and use wireless devices to "inform" the virtual character if the child has performed the desired behavior.
• Maybe let the child use the iPad to choose what games to play with the robot and/or the therapist?
• The child can also use the iPad to tell the robot what to do (different sequences of moves). Later the child will be required to not only choose buttons on the iPad, but also speak out the request, for the robot to actually perform the moves. Either the robot will try to recognize the speech, or the therapist can be the sensor/processor and issue the approval command instead.
• The robot might also touch the iPad to do things. We just have to make sure the robot doesn't damage the delicate screen.
  

Picture of the Day:

TiLAR research group's robot Troy in the middle of a clinical
session with a therapist and a kid.

Chess Playing Robots at the AAAI-10

Many people are probably aware of the world-famous chess match between Garry Kasparov, a world champion, and Deep Blue, a super computer built by IBM, that took place in 1997. Deep blue won the match, but only with the help of humans because it couldn't really move the chess pieces without an arm. That is no longer the case, especially at the Small Scale Manipulation Competition held at the 24th AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) conference at Atlanta in July 2010, where four robots from different universities paired up against each other and moved all the chess pieces themselves. "Small Scale" here means robots that are smaller than the size of a human, and the goal was not to beat the opponent in a game of chess, but to manipulate chess pieces adeptly and accurately. Extra points can be earned by showing the ability to recognize the pieces on the fly. The competition was one of the many great treats at the conference. As a conference attendee, I was fortunate enough to observe the real duels with my own eyes.

Gambit -- University of Washington Intel Lab

"Gambit" is a robotic arm built by the University of Washington Intel Lab using funding from Intel, and interestingly, one of the two main builders of the robot is actually an old acquaintance I had met at the HRI conference earlier this year in Japan. Her name is Cynthia, and with this connection, I was able to dig out quite some information about how the robot works. Gambit is equipped with both a depth camera and a regular video camera. It uses SIFT features for recognizing pieces on the board and also uses dead reckoning to remember the positions of them. The robot is even smart enough to line up the opponent's pieces it had captured neatly by the side of the board. The gripper has tactile sensors built-in, but according to Cynthia, they aren't very useful, and she had to spend a good amount of time picking the right kind of material for the gripper so it can grab onto a chess piece firmly. One special trick the robot has is the ability to call for help whenever it gets stuck or couldn't reach certain positions. The cost of the robotic arm is relatively cheap (a few thousand dollars) and the university is actually promoting it as a research platform to other researchers.

Chiara -- Carnegie Mellon University Tekkostsu Lab

The strange scorpion look alike robot on the right is "Chiara", a robot built by the Carnegie Mellon University Tekkostsu Lab. It is also an open-source hardware/software platform promoted by the lab priced around several thousand dollars. Before making a move, Chiara would first walk to align itself at the right location, then raise itself high and use its gripper-stinger to pick up the right chess piece. The mobility of the robot seemed really cool, and I thought it was needed because otherwise the robot wouldn't be able to reach pieces at the other half of the board. Turned out, the mobility was only there because it was part of the platform. The robot is actually only able to play half of the board. But because the competition only focused on the first ten moves of each robot, they were able to get away with the limitation. This robot is a vision-only robot, meaning it doesn't use ranger sensors such as infrared, sonar, or laser. Due to the special pattern of the chess board, recognizing the board is not a very difficult task, and the robot performed relatively well during the competition.

Georgia Tech's robot is a massive, expensive looking arm. I would have guessed the price range of the robot to be somewhere around $100K. A Swissranger depth camera was held above the chess board (from a tripod by the side) separately from the robot in order to read the board and chess pieces positions. Ironically, in the first move of the game, the arm misbehaved and made a big swing to the side, almost knocking over the camera-holding tripod. That totally messed up the camera calibration, and the Georgia Tech team got heavily penalized by the judges because they had to reposition the camera and recalibrate everything in order for the robot to work correctly.

The robot built by University of Alabama is definitely the champion with respect to cost. The designer of the robot proudly told me that the entire robot cost less than $700. It uses an iRobot create robot platform as the mobile base. Then a hobby robotics arm kit is used for the arm (our lab has a robotic arm very similar to this that cost around $400). An android phone with a built-in video camera is held above the chess board in order to recognize the board and pieces. Then a Netbook running Ubuntu is used to control and process data from each of those three parts separately through a wireless network. This robot is also a mobile one. It moves around the table in order to align itself to the necessary positions. In the first game though, the members of the team got quite frustrated because it would take forever for the Netbook to download data, which was not the case during the testing in previous day. Turned out they were using the conference shared wi-fi network, which became quite congested at the time of the competition and slowed everything to a crawl. In the second day of the competition, they used their own wireless network, and the situation was improved dramatically.

Each robot played against all the other robots, and the total points were tallied to identify a winner. Eventually, Gambit from University of Washington won the championship with flying colors (or is it really flying arms). The video below was made by the winning team in celebration of their triumph. VERY INTERESTINGLY, part of me and my voice were captured in this video as well, proving that I was actually there!! So here's your challenge of the day: see if you can find me in the video! The video also showed a match between a kid (rumored to be a world-ranked player) and Gambit toward the end, but I don't know who actually won.

Gambit's journey to Championship

In each and every AAAI conference (at least for the last few years), there's always a robot competition and the competition is always great fun! I am so looking forward to next year's competition. Now I just have to write a good paper before the submission deadline and hope it gets accepted....

Picture of the Day:

Beautiful night landscape of Atlanta (taken from the 56th floor of the Peachtree Plaza Hotel in downtown)

Set Phasers on Stun -- Bad Designs Kill

Following my adviser's recommendation, I finally picked up the book Set Phasers on Stun by Steve Casey and read it with utter interest. The book is really light reading, but as I read on, my heart felt heavier and heavier.

The book contains 20 short, true stories of how design errors in various technologies led to terrible disasters, often resulting in the loss of many lives. Among them were the shut off handle on a command module capsule that caused the death of three Russian astronauts because it takes too long to turn, the control lever for autopilot vs. manual control caused a supertanker to hit a rock and leaking millions gallons of oil into the ocean because the captain slipped it into an unintended third control mode in panic, the Airbus A320 plane that crashed in an air show demo, killing many passengers, because the pilot was over-confident with the plane's autopilot, and a ferry ship that capsized because the captain didn't know the bow cargo doors were not closed when the ship set off. The key message the author tries to get across is that designers of technology MUST take into consideration human factors, especially possible human errors and capability limitations in tense and nervous situations. Learning from mistakes might be too costly because Bad Designs Kill.

The title of the book comes from the name of the first story in the collection. On March 23, 1986, Ray Cox, a patient in his 30s undergoing treatment to have a tumor removed from his back, was taking his ninth regular treatment with the Therac 25 machine. The Therac 25 is a highly sophisticated machine that's capable of using high-energy radiation to hit cancer cells to any point on or in a person's body with pinpoint accuracy. The machine can operate in two modes: the high-power "x-ray" mode and the lower-power "electron beam" mode. What Ray was to receive would be the lower-power "electron beam" mode. He would not feel a thing. When Mary Beth, the radiotherapy technician, started the procedure in the control room (a different room), she mistakenly typed "x", the command to use the "x-ray" mode. Noticing her mistake, she quickly moved the cursor back and used the "edit" function to change it to command "e", the command to use the "electron beam" mode. She had no idea that her quick sequence of keystrokes within 8 seconds was something the machine had never been run under before. The machine retracted the think metal plate used during "x-ray" mode but left the power setting on maximum. When Mary entered the command to initiate the treatment, Ray saw a blue flash and felt as if he was hit by a lighting bolt. Back in the control room, a message popped up on the monitor with the error message, "Malfunction 54, treatment not initiated." Feeling quite puzzled, Mary re-entered the command to initiate the treatment. Ray was rolling and screaming in pain when he was struck the second time, and he began to call out loud for help. Soon the third shock struck, and Ray jumped from the table and ran to the door. Nobody at the hospital knew what was going on, and only after the same incident happened again to another patient did they realize something was seriously wrong with the machine. Instead of receiving 200 rads of radiation, Ray was shot with 25000 rads. In the next few months, tissues hit by the beams died, leaving massive lesions in Ray's upper body. "Captain Kirk forgot to put the machine on stun," said Ray Cox, trying to keep his humor. Four months later, Ray Cox died.

At least three things went terribly wrong in this tragic incident:

1. The unexpected key sequence within the short time window should not have allowed the power setting to be left on maximum. The kind of operating mistake Mary made is typical human error and should have been expected and tested against.
2. The error message should have been clearer, at least warning the operator that something had been seriously wrong (whether it is serious or not) and that the beams have already been shot. This would have prevented Mary from firing the beams again and again.
3. A strict procedure should have been in place to make sure the patient undergoing treatment is been monitored real-time. This would also have spared Ray from the additional two shots (whether or not it might make a different of life and death in Ray's case).

Here's an article from People covering this story.

As a researcher in AI and robotics, it is likely that I'll be designing advanced and complex systems to be used in real applications. While enjoying the thrill and fun of designing cool toys, it is also very important to always keep in mind the responsibilities we hold. Especially in the case of people working with automation. We should always take into consideration the kind of errors human might make and design accordingly to handle such situations accordingly. As automation and robots emerge in many aspects of people's lives (I am talking about more direct interactions here, not the kind of secluded factory settings), we have to be utterly careful and make sure people don't get injured or killed.

UAV used in our field trial

I couldn't help but remember an incident happened during one of our UAV field trials. Our research group works on using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to support Wilderness Search and Rescue operations. Once we performed a field trial at Squaw Peak, Provo, Utah, a very mountainous area. The UAV is capable of maintaining a fixed height above ground, so to relieve some of the workload off the operator. The control software also overlays the area with a color map, warning the operator if the UAV is too close to the side of the mountain. When the UAV was flying along the side of the mountain, the operator noticed from the color warning that the UAV was too close to the side of the mountain, so he commanded the UAV to fly away from the mountain. Then the autonomy of maintaining fixed height above ground kicked in and the UAV quickly descended. The operator noticed that the UAV is still too close to the side of the mountain and kept "pushing" the UAV away from the mountain. Eventually the UAV lost control and crashed to the ground because it had been descending quickly continuously and failed to climb up fast enough when it ran into a small hill. Both capabilities were supposed to help the human better fly the UAV, but the combination in the specific situation actually directly led to human error and the plane crash (luckily the plane was not badly damaged).

Squaw Peak, Provo, Utah

So what should we do? There's obviously the need for extensive testing. The designer should also consider possible human errors and design accordingly to minimize the chances of human errors and deal with human errors when they do occur. Especially if the failure of the system might create catastrophic consequences, extensive safety checks must be built in. We'd rather for a machine to fail than for it to kill. Then, there's always the possibility of insurance polices as the last resort, as shown in today's Video of the Day.

Video of the Day:

For only $4 a month, you can achieve peace of mind in a world full of crime and robots, with Old Glory Insurance!

Smiling Proud Wanderer: Chapter 21 (5)

Read the first 20 chapters here!

Linghu Chong was lying in bed. He quickly turned around with his face toward the inside of the cell. Then he heard Mr. Black-White stopping outside of the prison door and spoke apologetically.

“Revered…revered mister Ren! I am truly very sorry for not having come sooner! In the past month, my eldest sworn-brother never set foot outside. Every day I anxiously awaited the opportunity to come and pay the revered mister my respect, but that opportunity only presented itself today. I hope the revered mister…the revered mister do not take any offense!”

Together with Mr. Black-White’s voice, a wonderful aroma of wine and roast chicken also came in through the square-shaped opening on the prison door. It had been many days since Linghu Chong last tasted any drop of wine. As soon the smell of the wine hit his nose, he could no longer hold his patience and quickly turned around.

“Give me the wine and chicken!” he demanded.

“Sure! Sure! So the revered mister has agreed to teach me the secret formulas of the divine art?” Mr. Black-White asked.

“Bring me three catties[1] of wine and a whole chicken each time, and I’ll teach you four segments of the secret formulas. Once I’ve had three thousand catties of wine and one thousand whole chickens, you can probably get all the formulas by then.”

“I am afraid this arrangement might be too slow and cause unnecessary problems. How about I bring six catties of wine and two whole chickens each time so the revered mister can teach me eight segments of the secret formulas?” Mr. Black-White bargained.

“You are certainly greedy!” Linghu Chong said with a grin. “Fine! Come on! Give those to me!”

Mr. Black-White handed over a wooden tray through the square-shaped opening, upon which were a large kettle of wine and a fat roast chicken.

Linghu Chong thought, “I am sure you won’t kill me with poison before I teach you the secret formulas.” So he picked up the wine kettle and quickly gulped down mouthful of wine. The wine was not in any way spectacular, but in his mind it tasted so nice that even Mr. Paint’s Turfan Grape-Wine of four cycles of distillation and ferments was no match for it. Without any stop for breath, he quickly poured half kettle of wine down his throat, and then tore a chicken leg off and shoved it into his mouth. Not very long after, he had already emptied the wine kettle and picked the chicken clean. Giving a satisfied pat to his belly, he declared approvingly.

“Excellent wine! Excellent wine!”

Mr. Black-White let out a big smile. “Now that the revered mister has enjoyed the tasty chicken and great wine, will the revered mister start the teaching please?”

Linghu Chong noticed that Mr. Black-White no longer mentioned anything with regard to the proposed Master-Apprentice relationship and ceremony. “He probably thought I was too busy drinking wine and eating chicken, and I’d completely forgotten about it,” Linghu Chong thought. So he didn’t mention it either.

“Okay. Here are the four segments. You’d better remember them well. ‘Inside the unique channels and eight passages, there exist inner energy streams. Gather them in your Dan-Tian. Join them in your Dan-Zhong[2].’ Do you understand?”

The original text on the steel plate actually read, “Inner energy streams inside Dan-Tian, disperse them into four limbs. Inner strengths inside Dan-Zhong, dissolve them into the eight passages.” Linghu Chong actually deliberately reversed the meaning in his teaching. When Mr. Black-White heard these, he found them to be just as plain as any ordinary inner energy cultivation methods out there, so he quickly replied.

“I got these four segments. Will the revered mister please teach me the next four segments?”

Linghu Chong thought to himself, “After I made the changes, those four segments sounded quite ordinary. Naturally he wanted something more unique. I must find four peculiar segments to give him a good scare!” So he said, “Since today is the first day, I might as well teach you four more. Remember these: ‘Split Yang-Wei Passage with shock. Shut down Yin-Qiao Passage with clog. Once all Eight Passages are broken, the Divine Art will succeed.

Mr. Black-White was stupefied.

“If…if…one’s unique channel and eight passages are broken, how could he stay alive? These…these four segments are really beyond my understanding!”

“Do you expect just any ordinary person to understand such powerful divine art easily? If so, what would be so unique about it? Of course there are many profound and subtle theories in the divine art so no ordinary person could have understood them,” Linghu Chong said with a snort.

As Mr. Black-White listened on, he became more and more suspicious. The manner of speaking and the phrases the “revered mister” used seemed to be quite different from the Ren-named person he knew. In the first two meetings, Linghu Chong had only spoken very few words and also muffled his voice. This time, since Linghu Chong was quite high in spirit after he drank a good deal of wine, he spoke a lot more. Mr. Black-White was a very scrupulous man and these unusual signs quickly brought suspicion to his mind – the “revered mister” must be making up formulas to make fun of him.

“You said, ‘Once all Eight Passages are broken, the Divine Art will succeed.’ Are the unique channel and eight passages of the revered mister all really broken?” he demanded.

“That’s of course,” Linghu Chong acknowledged.

From the tone of Mr. Black-White’s voice, he could sense suspicion developing and building, and he dared not to speak too much. So he quickly concluded.

“That’s all. Comprehend well and you’ll understand.”

After these words, he set the wine kettle back down on the wooden tray and then handed the tray back through the square-shaped opening. Mr. Black-White reached forward to receive the tray, but all of a sudden, Linghu Chong let out a cry and then fell forward. A loud clank echoed as his forehead banged against the iron door.

“Why!” Mr. Black-White uttered. People in his caliber with extraordinary Kung Fu skills always had very quick reflexes. In no time he had reached his hands forward through the square-shaped opening and grabbed hold of the wooden tray, making sure the wine kettle would not fall and smash on the ground. At that split second, Linghu Chong turned his left hand swiftly and grabbed onto Mr. Black-White’s right wrist.

“Black-White! Do you know who I am?” He grinned.

---

[1] Catty is a unit of weight used in Southeast Asia, especially a Chinese measure equal to 500 grams (approximately 1.1 pounds).

[2] Dan-Zhong is an acupoint in the middle of one’s chest by the Solar Plexus.

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

Video of the Day:

Enjoy these self-claimed Kung Fu Masters' performances. I hope you are not one of them. :)

Robot of the Day: Murata Girl, the Robo Unicyclist

Just recently we talked about the bicycle-riding robot Murata Boy in a previous blog post, but did you know that the Murata Boy now has a very cute cousin, the Murata Girl, who made her debut in 2008 and demonstrated her amazing unicycling skills at CEATEC JAPAN 2009.

Ever since the Murata Boy robot became a huge hit with his impressive bicycle-riding skills, fans had demanded his maker, the Japanese company Murata Manufacturing, to build him a companion. So the development began in 2007, but this time, the engineering team decided to make a female version, and to make it more challenging, the Murata Girl would only ride on one wheel, instead of two wheels like her cousin.

The Murata Girl uses the same kind of gyroscopic sensors and a spinning fly wheel at her chest to maintain balance. She is 50cm tall and weights 5kg. She can ride forward, reverse backward, remain idling, avoid obstacles, and even follow others. Then using Bluetooth technology, the Murata Girl can also take commands from a remote PC. The camera on her head also allows the remote operator to see from her perspective. The robot's project page shows more details about her capabilities and her internal mechanism.

Riding a unicycle is certainly more difficult than riding a bicycle (that's why most people know how to ride a bicycle, but not a unicycle). Murata Girl sometimes does fall down, but when she is in a good mood, she could cross a narrow bridge as narrow as 20mm (that's less than an inch) on her unicycle. Here's a video footage of her adorable performance.

The engineering team behind the Murata Girl is still working on improving her skills and capabilities. Wouldn't it be nice if they could teach her how to juggle while riding the unicycle? That would make her a true performer, and we'll be one step closer to a robot circus!

Video of the Day:

It's so sad to see Messi exiting the World Cup stage without scoring a single goal, despite the fact that he had the most shots (30 shots and 15 on goal) among all players including several shots hitting the poles or the crossbar. Argentina is crying (so is Germany)! Well, enjoy this beautiful song by André Rieu: Don't cry for me Argentina!

Paper Review: Visual Clutter Causes High-Magnitude Errors

We all know that when a visual display is too cluttered, it takes longer to retrieve the information we desire and even if we could locate the information eventually, the cluttered environment might also impact the quality of the information we retrieve. This paper by Stefano Baldassi and others from Firenze, Italy (published in 2004) investigated how such visual clutter affect the quality of perceptual decisions, and came to the conclusion that

... perceptual clutter leads not only to an increase in judgment errors, but also to an increase in perceived signal strength and decision confidence on erroneous trials.

In other words, the more visual clutters we have, the more mistakes the user tends to make, and he is also more stubborn about it. Hmm, interesting!!

The researchers performed an interesting experiment and focused on how visual clutter could affect people's perception of orientation. Each user is shown very briefly (100 ms) a picture of various number of icons like the one shown below where one of them is tiled slightly and the others are all vertical. The user is then asked to describe the direction and magnitude of the tilt by either selecting one of 12 tilted icons of various degrees (in sorted order) on the screen, or manually rotating a big icon using the mouse. The user also has to specify how confident he is by marking icons of various sizes, where the sizes of the icons represent levels of confidence.

Figure 1 in the paper illustrating the experiment sequence

Experimental results show that under conditions of visual clutter people tend to perceive stimuli to be more strongly tiled when they were wrong about the tilting directions. To make sure this was not caused by low-level sensory interactions between adjacent stimuli when close proximity occurs as the number of icons increase, a technique of "partial cueing" was used, and the results showed similar trends. Confidence ratings reported by users also show that average confidence is significantly higher as icon set size increases.

To illustrate the practicality of the findings, the authors presented a fun example:

For example, soccer referees are frequently required to decide rapidly whether a player is "offside" if the ball is passed to him when there are no defenders (besides the goalkeeper) between him and the goal. this study predicts that when there are several candidate defenders that could place the forward onside, the decision will not only be more error-prone, but the confidence with which referees call their (often erroneous) decisions will be higher.

Argentina's goal against Germany disallowed because of offside. There was plenty of audio clutter (the vuvuzelas), but I guess there was still not enough visual clutter here! Alas!

The user study the authors performed is really a pilot study with only ten users (including the authors). Too better validate the findings, a more extensive user study of more human subjects of various age, profession, etc. is probably necessary. I am also curious about whether adding more types of distractors (such as circle icons without line in the middle) would affect the results. Another one to try would be comparing same number of icons that are spaced very tightly versus sparsely (another dimension of clutter).

The paper ended with a quote from John Kerry in the first 2004 debate, which I found quite amusing, I'll also use it to end this post:

It's one thing to be certain, but you can be certain, and you can be wrong. Certainty sometimes can get you into trouble.

Videos of the Day:

Paul, the German psychic octopus, has become a world-wide superstar after it correctly predicted the outcomes of all six of Germany's games in the 2010 South Africa World Cup, including Germany's latest defeat in the semi-final against Spain. Since then, disgruntled German football fans have been sending death threats to the owner and the octopus suggesting a grilled octopus dinner.

With one more game to play for the German team fighting for the third place in the tournament against Uruguay tomorrow, the "Oracle Octopus" spoke again, predicting a German win, but one must wonder weather this has been influenced by the fear of ending up on a sushi menu. Tabarez, the Uruguay coach, however, vowed to beat Germany and the octopus at the same time! Well, may the better team win!

Robot of the Day: Murata Boy, the Robo Bicyclist

His name is Murata Boy, and it's hard to believe that he can ride a bicycle better than any person or any other robot. It is equally hard to believe that this robo-bicyclist robot has been out there for five years.

The Murata Boy robot only came to existence because the Japanese company Murata Manufacturing wanted to show off some of their various sensors technologies, hence the name. The robot made his first debut at CEATEC (Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies) Japan 2005 and people immediately fell in love with this little adept robot who can ride a bicycle like no robots before.

The Murata Boy is only 2-foot tall, which means he can only ride the tiny bicycle custom-built for him. The robot is equipped with four types of sensors: two gyro sensors used to detect angular velocity and inclination; an ultrasonic sensor to detect obstacles; and a shock sensor to detect rough surfaces (you can see more detailed specifications at the project web page here). With wireless network connection to a PC, the robot can follow remote commands such as forward, stop, and reverse. It can also follow pre-programmed paths. The robot can reach maximum speed of 30 inches per second and can even balance while at a complete stop. The robot's sensors work so well that the robot can even ride on a very thin balance beam as show in the video below (toward the end of the video).

Ever since its first debut in 2005, the robot has become very popular at technology exhibitions. And throughout the years, it also had to take on additional challenges with the help of the team of developers. The newly acquired skills include ones such as riding on an S-shaped beam and going uphill on a quite steep slope. Such tasks might sound easy, but requires precise sensor measurements and very accurate motor control. The end result, a very amazed crowd whenever the robot goes. (Change the video resolution to 480 for the two videos below for better viewing experience.)

Murata Boy riding and balancing on an S-Shaped beam

Murata Boy riding uphill

Although the robot is not capable of complex autonomous behaviors (not something Murata Manufacturing wants to show off), it certainly gives a good demonstration of what the sensors are capable of. Once we can develop advanced intelligence to combine with the wonderful engineering feats, who knows, maybe once day we'll see robots throwing morning newspapers at your doors. That is, of course, after the robot is equipped with dog-repelling (or evading) mechanisms. But anyhow, respect to the engineering team behind the Murata Boy!

The team of engineers at Murata Manufacturing who developed the Murata Boy robot

It's worth mentioning that some people opted to turn real bikes directly into robots. For example, the first video below shows the effect of some Japanese inventors working on a noodle-delivering unmanned bike. And the second video shows a Vietnamese attempt. Just imagine a fleet of unmanned bikes on the streets of Beijing, China, taking people to their work! What an amazing scene that would be! Here in the US, however, an unmanned bike is likely to end up an exercise equipment so the robotic bike will do the exercise so the lazy fat human won't have to do it. LOL!

Video of the Day:

Vuvuzela Concerto in B^b. If you click the video to open it in YouTube, you can also click the soccer button in the lower right corner to make it a real concerto!! And here's the music score that goes with it.

Smiling Proud Wanderer: Chapter 21 (4)

Read the first 20 chapters here!

Linghu Chong was dumbfounded. He had been concentrating so much on the energy cultivation and dispersion that he didn’t even realize that three days had passed and that it was the day he told Mr. Black-White to come back. He didn’t even notice Mr. Black-White’s arrival. Luckily his voice was so coarse now that Mr. Black-White didn’t find anything unusual. He quickly let out several hollow laughs as an acknowledgement.

“The revered mister seems to be in a pleasant mood today. Why not make it the day the revered mister receives a new apprentice?” Mr. Black-White suggested.

Linghu Chong thought to himself, “If I agree to take him in as an apprentice and teach him these energy cultivation techniques, as soon as he opens the door and comes in, he’ll notice that there’s only Feng Er-Zhong, but no revered mister Ren. For sure he’ll have a fall out immediately. Besides, even if it were the real revered mister Ren, once Mr. Black-White learns those techniques, he’ll most likely manage to murder revered mister Ren, like poisoning the food or something. Right! It would be so easy for Black-White to murder me with poison. Why would he want to let me escape after he learns the secret formulas? No wonder revered mister Ren wouldn’t ever agree to teach him the secret art in the last twelve years.”

“Once revered mister teaches me the magical art, the humble apprentice will show his respect by serving the revered mister great wine and tasty roast chicken,” not hearing a reply, Mr. Black-White immediately proposed.

Linghu Chong had been imprisoned for many days and was only given plain vegetables and tofu each day. As soon as he heard the words “great wine and tasty roast chicken,” his mouth drooled with greed. This was too tempting!

“Fine. Go get me some great wine and tasty chicken first. If they get me into a good mood, I might teach you something.”

“Sure! Sure! I’ll bring back some great wine and tasty chicken. But I am afraid it won’t be today. If opportunity allows, I’ll bring them in tomorrow,” Mr. Black-White replied hurriedly.

“Why not today?” Linghu Chong asked.

“To get in here, I have to pass through my eldest sworn-brother’s bedroom. Only when he is away, I could…could….” Mr. Black-White explained, to which Linghu Chong let out a snort without saying another word.

Afraid that Mr. Huang-Zhong might return to his bedroom, Mr. Black-White dared not to stay any longer. He quickly said his goodbye and then went away.

“How can I trick Black-White into the prison cell and whack him?” Linghu Chong thought to himself. “This man is so crafty; it would be impossible to swindle him. Moreover, without a way to break these iron shackles and chains around my wrists and ankles, even if I succeed in killing Black-White, I would still be stuck here.”

With that thought, his right hand naturally reached for his left wrist and then pulled. This was only a spontaneous move, and he certainly didn’t expect the iron shackle to break open, but to his great surprise, the iron shackle did actually open. He gave it a few more hard pulls and even managed to free his left wrist from the shackle.

This was definitely not something Linghu Chong could foresee, and his heart thumped quickly from the mixed feeling of shock and delight. He examined the iron shackle with his finger and then found a slit in the middle of the ring. If he had not dispersed the inner energy streams inside him, any hard movement would have made him faint. Even with the slit in the middle of the shackle ring, he would not have been able to pull it open. Since he had been working on dispersing inner energy streams for over two days, the energy streams the Peach Valley Six Fairies and Monk No-Commandment had forcefully injected into his body have been diffused into his Ren Channel, which in turn spontaneously originated strong inner force.

He felt the iron shackle on this right wrist. Sure enough, there was also a thin slit. He probably had felt the thin slit many times before, but never in his mind associated it with a crack in the shackle ring. He pulled hard with his left hand and freed his right hand from the shackle ring. Next he felt the two shackle rings around his ankles and also found thin slits in both. After some more hard pulling, he found himself breathless, covered in sweat, but completely free from all the shackles.

Once rid of the shackles, the iron chain no longer restrained him in anyway. He was truly puzzled: “Why is there a slit on each of the shackle ring? How could this kind of shackles have fettered anyone?”

The next day, when the deaf and mute old man delivered his food, Linghu Chong was able to actually look at the shackles closely. Next to each of the slits was a fine-grained saw pattern. Obviously someone had cut through the four shackles rings with a very thin steel wire saw. The slits shined under the dim light and there were no rust on the fractures. This meant that the cuts must have been made only recently.

“But why were these shackle rings closed again around my limbs?” Linghu Chong asked himself. “Someone must have tried to free me secretly. This underground dungeon is so well hidden; no one from the outside would be able to break in. Therefore, the secret rescuer must be someone inside the Plum Manor. Maybe he disliked the plot against me. That’s why he secretly cut open my shackles with a steel wire saw while I lay unconsciously in the prison cell. He probably didn’t want to openly declare himself an enemy of the Plum Manor, and he is still looking for an opportunity to help me escape.” At the thought, his spirit was greatly lifted.

“The entrance to the underground tunnel is concealed underneath Mr. Huang-Zhong’s bed in his bedroom. If it were Mr. Huang-Zhong who had wanted to rescue me, he could have done it anytime. He didn’t have to delay. Mr. Black-White obviously can’t be the one. Out of Mr. Bald-Brush and Mr. Paint, Mr. Paint is a confidant in the art of wine and had good fellowship with me. I bet it must be Mr. Paint.”

Then he remembered that Mr. Black-White would return the next day and thought about how he should cope with him. “I’ll just gloss things over with him. Why can’t I fool him with fake Kung Fu in exchange for some wine and meat?”

Then he thought, “Mr. Paint could come and rescue me any day now. I’ve gotta hurry and memorize all these formulas and techniques on the steel plate.”

He traced the carved characters and then recited each word carefully. When he studied these characters before, he didn’t pay very close attention, so memorizing everything with one hundred percent accuracy was no easy task. The handwritings on the steel plate were hasty and careless. With his limited education, he couldn’t recognize some of the poorly written characters. So he forced himself to memorize the strokes of the character and then randomly picked characters with similar strokes as substitutes. He knew that formulas for first-class martial arts are serious matters. Even one incorrect character could mean difference between life and death, success and failure. Any slight misunderstanding could very well lead to fire-deviation. Once he got out of the prison, who knows when he’ll be able to come back and reference the steel plate again? He must make sure he memorized everything with absolutely no errors.

So he read them again and again, losing count of how many times he had recited them, until he felt that he could even recite backward from the end to the beginning. Only by then, he felt at ease and allowed himself to fall asleep.

That night, in his dream, Linghu Chong actually saw Mr. Paint coming forth to open the prison cell door and let him out. The excitement woke him and then he realized it was only a fond dream. He didn’t let that depress him.

“He hasn’t come to rescue me today only because he doesn’t have the right opportunity. He’ll certainly come to my rescue before long,” he thought to himself.

He figured that although the formulas and techniques carved on the steel plate were very beneficial to him, they could be extremely harmful to others. If someone else gets locked up in this dark prison cell again in the future, that someone must have been a good person, and he wouldn’t let that person fall for Ren Woxing’s scheme. With that in mind, he traced the handwritings and recited the entire thing for another ten time or so, and then scraped off over a dozen characters in the passage from the steel plate using the iron shackles he freed himself from.

Mr. Black-White didn’t show up that day, but Linghu Chong didn’t care much about it. Instead, he continued cultivating his internal energy streams according to the formulas and methods on the steel plate. For the next several days, Mr. Black-White never came. Linghu Chong could tell that he had made great improvement in his training. Over sixty percent of the heterogeneous energy steams left inside him by the Peach Valley Six Fairies and Monk No-Commandment had been successfully dispersed out from his Dan-Tian and into his various Ren and Du Channels. He was sure that all of them could be dispersed out if he persevered.

Each day, he would recite the formulas scores of times and then scrape off a dozen or so characters from the steel plate. He noticed a gradual increase in his strength, and it became easier and easier to scrape the steel plate with the iron shackles. Another month went by in this manner. Although he lived deep underground, he could still sense a gradual decrease of the sweltering summer temperature.

“This must have been the work of divine providence. If I had been imprisoned here during winter, I would never have found the handwritings on the steel plate. Who knows? Perhaps before summer hits, Mr. Paint would have already had me rescued.”

At that moment, he suddenly heard the sound of Mr. Black-White’s footsteps from the outside tunnel.

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Video of the Day:

This is another great scene from the movie Fist of Legend by Jet Li. The moves he used here are typical Qin Na (grappling) techniques.

Paper Review: A Semi-Supervised Document Clustering Technique for Information Organization

This paper was written by Hanjoon Kim and Sanggoo Lee from Seoul National University presented at the ninth international conference on Information and knowledge management, 2000.

Traditional document clustering methods are unable to correctly discern structural details hidden within the document corpus because they inherently strongly depend on the document themselves and their similarity to each other. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a clustering method that incorporates relevance feedback into a traditional complete-linkage clustering algorithm in order to find more coherent clusters.

The main contribution of this paper is the method of combining complete-linkage hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) algorithm using the VSM model with user relevance feedback using the fuzzy information retrieval. The HAC with VSM allows the forming of pre-clusters using a “fixed-diameter”. Then documents in small clusters (less than η) form a “training document set”, which is used for user relevance feedback where user can answer “yes/no” questions to indicate relevance of documents returned using fuzzy information retrieval. This way, positive and negative bundles can be created and used to help reassign pre-clusters. Note that all these techniques mentioned above are not original ideas from the authors. The paper simply proposed a way to combine the strengths of these techniques in order to improve performance of the clustering.

Toward the end of the paper, the authors included two subsections that discuss the sensitivity of the degree of supervision parameter and the pre-cluster size parameter (“fixed-diameter”). This is a good attempt to justify the “magic numbers” used in the experiments. However, there is no discussion or analysis of the parameter η used in the supervising phase at all. Also, the paper describes that, “the threshold diameter value for pre-clusters is experimentally adjusted to provide good quality clustering.” This makes the reader wonder whether the experimental results presented are truthful and question how well the proposed method would work in real world applications.

Clustering techniques are used to group together things that have common themes. However, frequently, there are many different ways to group things based on different common themes and the distance function used decides what common theme will be used for the clustering. For example, a bunch of people can be grouped by one of many themes (e.g. age, gender, race, wealth, and hair style). Similarly, a document collection can also be clustered by themes such as style, topic, language, or subject. The paper simply stated the two alternative ways to define the diameter of a cluster but didn’t analyze how such selections might affect the results of the document clustering. The paper also did not clarify which definition of the diameter is used in the experiments.

The authors mentioned in several places that the proposed method helps in discerning structural details hidden within documents. However, throughout the paper, there is no discussion about how structural details are extracted from documents. Arguably the users might be able to identify structural details through user relevance feedback. However, this really has nothing to do with the proposed algorithm. The users might not even be looking at the structural detail of these documents at all.

A core part of the proposed method relies on human to provide domain-specific knowledge for the method to work, yet the paper is missing detailed description of how the experiment was designed to incorporate human knowledge. For example, we don’t know how many human analysts are involved. Could the human analysts have different opinions? If so, how is that handled? Are these human analysts really domain experts who possess domain-specific knowledge about the subject? The paper is also missing detailed description about how the queries are reformulated, which is an integral part of the user relevance feedback method.

In the supervising phrase, the user is asked to answer “yes/no” questions to mark documents as relevant to non-relevant to the query document. Firstly, relevance is a subjective question. It is possible that document marked as relevant by one user might end up being marked as non-relevant by another user. Secondly, a binary answer completely ignores the level of relevance (ranking). This results in that documents border lining non-relevance could still be marked as relevant and have the same weight as the most relevant document. This leads to inaccuracy and misrepresentation. A non-binary weighting probably would work better.

When building the test document set, the authors intentionally picked those that had a single topic, claiming that this would avoid the ambiguity of documents with multiple topics. Is this really for technical convenience so the experiment results would look better? Does this mean the proposed method would not work well at all for documents with multiple topics (which is probably more like the real world scenarios)?

The authors used F1-measure as the performance metric and used the complete-linkage clustering method as a baseline. The baseline selected is reasonable in order to show how much benefit can be achieved by adding the user relevance feedback component. However, using this baseline alone is not very convincing because we already know the complete-linkage clustering method doesn’t work well, and we also know that adding user relevance feedback will certainly help. It would be much more convincing if the paper compared the performance of the proposed method with another common document clustering technique such as K-Means and Bisecting K-Means. Using only the F1-measure as the performance metric is also weak. Including other quantitative metrics together with some qualitative analyses would certainly help.

In summary, this paper proposes a novice approach that combines the strengths of several IR techniques. However, it also has plenty of room for improvement.

Picture of the Day:

The biggest failure of the 2010 World Cup -- Domenech! We still wonder, "Why not Henry and why not Malouda?"

Robot of the Day: HINA, the Cutest Mini Robot Maid

This mini-robot has got to be the cutest robot I'd ever run across, and her name is HINA, made by Mujaki Clockwork (a secretive Ninja name of some sort, and here's the link to his blog in Japanese, which I can't understand). As soon as I laid my eyes on her, I couldn't help but think: "I so must get my daughter one of these!!"

HINA is not one of those cheap robot toys you can just buy at Wal-Mart, she is a real robot that has servos with many degrees of freedom and can run complex scripts. Besides being cute always, she can also be quite a little helper sometime and can even provide maid services such as making you a cup of morning coffee!

The above video is obviously staged, but it does shed some lights about what the robot is capable of. Hina is made using Kondo's KHR-2HV, a Japanese robotic kit that could cost $1,299.99 in the US, but customized by Mujaki to give her a very adorable look. She is 36 cm tall and weighs 1.1 kg. With a total of 21 DOFs (Degree of Freedoms) -- legs 6x2, arm 4x2, neck 1 -- she is capable of walking, lifting things up and moving them around. HINA is also equipped with 2 gyroscopes and acceleration sensor, which makes her a real robot, just not a very sensitive one. But with some further customization, it wouldn't be difficult to add a mini-webcam, some touch sensors, and two microphones to give her more capabilities to learn about the world around her. Laser and sonar would probably be out of the question for her tiny slim figure, which means you might need racks of server to process data collected from these sensor in order to produce some intelligent autonomous behaviors.

But still, isn't she the cutest robot in the planet?! And besides providing maid services, she can also entertain you with some cute break dancing moves! So what are you waiting for?





Watching World Cup games is another great way to put your 1.5 year old son to sleep (it might have something to do with the constant bee-like buzzing sounds from the vuvuzelas) .