A few words first: To make it easier to find posts that interest you, I've added a search box to my blog (you probably have noticed it right above my post) that searches through all my blog posts but not anything outside of my blog. Just on the right side oft each post, you can also click on different blog labels to read my posts by category. At the end of each blog post, I've also included icons you can click to share the post with your friends using your favorite social network tools. Spread the good word if there's something you really enjoy! Okay, the real post starts below. ================================================================
Robot arm stabbing a human volunteer with a knife (Photo credit: IEEE Spectrum)
At the ICRA 2010 conference (IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation) that is currently ongoing in Anchorage, Alaska, some German researchers presented their latest research on the biomechanics of soft-tissue injury caused by a knife-wielding robot. The paper is titled "Soft-tissue Injury in Robotics." In other words, they wanted to find out what will happen if a robot holding a sharp knife erroneously stabs a person.And, no, I am not joking. The robot arm in the picture on the right is really holding a knife, and it really stabbed the guy's arm with it.
These researchers are from the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, part of DLR, the German aerospace agency, in Wessling, Germany, and they share the same dream with me --- that one day robots will be smart enough to take over kitchen duties and free us from the laborious duty of cooking. This task of course requires the robot to be able to handle a knife appropriately, so it can cut, chop, slide or dice during the course of preparing a meal. But what if it accidentally struck a human? With that question in mind, these researchers performed a series of experiment to investigate the severity of possible injuries and also designed a collision-detection to minimize the damage.
Various knives used in the experiments (Photo credit: IEEE Spectrum)
They mounted various sharp things, from knife to scissors to screwdriver (why does this somehow remind me of GTA San Andreas? Shudder!), to a DLR Lightweight Robot III, or LWRIII, a 7 degrees-of-freedom robot arm, and then tested the striking on a block of silicone, a pig's leg, and eventually, on the bare arm of a human volunteer. The collision-detection system turned out to be very successful, because the volunteer still has his arm.
The video below shows how the experiments were performed and how the robot arm performed differently with and without the collision-detection system (the real excitement is at the end of video). As a researching in Human-Robot Interaction myself, I couldn't help but imagine this poster in my head that reads, "Volunteer needed for a user study: Get Paid to be Stabbed by a Robot!"
But I am a little bit confused. Once turning on the collision-detection system, the robot will stop cutting/stabbing the human. The human is safe now, and so is that piece of steak! Three hours later, I'd be shouting in starved voice, "Where's my steak dinner?"
Note that the idea of a robot holding a knife would never be allowed in US universities. It would never get approval from the IRB (Institutional Review Board). See, we do things very differently here in the US, instead of knives, we give robots machine guns and missiles!! And there will be no danger to US citizens, because we send these robots to other countries! LOL!
MQ-9 Reaper Predator UAV
SWORD Robot
I think I am a bit off topic now, so let's get back to these German researchers. If I remember correctly, I actually saw a video from HRI 2007 made by the same guy demonstrating how he would let a powerful robot arm punch him in the head (Sorry I am having a hard time finding this video now). The robot arm would VERY QUICKLY slow down when it detects the collision, thus sparing the guy's life. Well, hats off to the guy!! Comparing to him, I am a coward, because I would never put myself under such conditions --- because I am a terrible programmer, and I have lots of bugs in my code. And my admiration for him went sky-high when I realized they also performed the following experiments. Ouch!!
Anyway, I think it will be a long time before we actually have knife-wielding robots that roam our homes. When I program my robots, I actually intentionally make it not touch things such as knives, gas stoves, and explosives. But I bet you this day will eventually come, and a lot of lawyers are going to get rich.
Drinking excessive amount of Mountain Dew and staying up till 4am can lead to severe stomach cramping and internal bleeding and many days of lost productivity.
If you've ever made purchases online, or signed up for any kind of account on the Internet (forums, subscriptions, etc.), or installed software applications on your computer, then you must have seen screens where you have to agree to some kind of terms and conditions, or EULA (standing for End User License Agreement). How many times, however, do you actually read through those pages after pages of dry, dull, impossible to understand legal languages, especially on a computer screen?
Well, if quickly clicking through things has grown into a habit for you, it's probably time to reconsider it now.
According to this article from Newslite and this article from geeks.com, GameStation, on UK online games retailer, added the "immortal soul clause" to its online purchase agreement basically saying the customers would grant them the right to claim their souls. More than 7,500 customers (88%) agreed to the clause without really reading the agreement details, and now GameStation legally owns thousands of souls. Here below are the exact wording of the sneaky clause:
By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul. Should We wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from gamesation.co.uk or one of its duly authorised minions. We reserve the right to serve such notice in 6 (six) foot high letters of fire, however we can accept no liability for any loss or damage caused by such an act.
If you a) do not believe you have an immortal soul, b) have already given it to another party, or c) do not wish to grant Us such a license, please click the link below to nullify this sub-clause and proceed with your transaction.
Luckily, 12% of the customers did notice a small tick box at the bottom of agreement allowing them to opt out of the clause, and earned themselves a £5 gift voucher by doing so. But really, how many of the 12% customers actually read the terms and services agreement? My guess would be very few.
Although this probably was part of an April Fool's Day joke (the vouchers were no joke), and GameStation has no intention to ever claim their rights on the souls (in fact, they emailed all customers nullifying the clause), this clearly shows the general public opinion on these agreements. Most people think that if most people don't read these things, they are no longer valid. However, the truth is that they will most likely be legally binding (not the soul clause, of course) unless challenged in a court of law. And do you ever want to get into a legal battle with large companies who employ an army of lawyers?
There are, actually, some people who take these agreements very "seriously!" Anne Loucks from obesso.com created a clever way to get herself out of legal troubles with EULAs. Using a piece of cardboard that reads "Kitty Agrees" with a protruding piece underneath, she would have her cat to step on the board, which pushes the spacebar underneath and agrees to an EULA for her. So worst comes to worst, it would be the cat losing its soul, and not Anne!
Putting aside the legality of these actions of both the businesses and users, clearly the system is not working very well. I know for regular business contracts or terms and agreements, critical elements are required by law to really stand out (bold, larger size, etc.). I am sure a better standard and approach will have to be created soon, because soon or later, somebody is getting sued over this.
Picture of the Day:
Brian Ghidinelli's creative reuse of his old equipments.
This paper is written by Steinback, Karpis, and Kumar, University of Minnesota, published at KDD workshop on text mining, 2000.
This paper presents the results of an experimental study of two main approaches to document clustering, agglomerative hierarchical clustering and K-means (standard K-means and bisecting K-means).
Example of Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering (HAC)
The two basic approaches to generating a hierarchical clustering are agglomerative and divisive. The paper evaluated agglomerative techniques in the comparison. It then described the agglomerative clustering algorithm, the K-means algorithm, and the bisecting K-means algorithm in details.
Visualization of the K-means algorithm
Three evaluation metrics are used in the experiments, and they include two external quality measure, entropy, F measure, and one internal quality measure, overall similarity. The paper described each measure in detail.
Eight data sets were used in the experiments: 5 from TREC, 2 from Reuters-21578, and 1 from WebACE. Performances of three agglomerative hierarchical techniques, Intra-Cluster Similarity Technique (IST), Centroid Similarity Technique (CST), and UPGMA were compared using F-measure and entropy. UPGMA is the best performing hierarchical technique overall, therefore, its performance is compared against standard K-means and bisecting K-means. The performances of bisecting K-means with refinement and hierarchical with refinement are also included in the comparison. In the experiments, the authors used many runs of the regular K-means algorithm and also used incremental updating of centroids.
Experimental results show that the bisecting K-means technique is better than the standard K-means approach and as good or better than the hierarchical approaches when using the three evaluation metrics mentioned. Also the time complexity of bisecting K-means is linear, which makes it very attractive.
The authors argued that the agglomerative hierarchical clustering didn’t do well because nearest neighbors of documents often belong to different classes. K-means and bisecting K-means algorithms do better because they rely on a more global approach. They also believe that bisecting K-means does better than standard K-means because it produces relatively uniformly sized clusters.
Video of the Day:
The Honest $10000 SPAM
Even though miracle happens, still, don't click on suspicious links or give out your bank information. The Nigerian connection at the end of the video is simply hilarious!!
Volume One: The City by the Sea
-- written by Maoni
Chapter 5: Staggering Pillow
Although Fan Xian had
the body of a four-year-old, inside he had the soul of a mature person. The
bloodshed and massacre on his first day in this world left deep imprints in his
mind. For that reason, he always felt a sense of unease in his heart, knowing
that his mysterious pedigree would one day bring serious trouble to him.
Trouble had
finally found him today.
Since his sneak
attack ended in vain, it was no good to repeat the old trick. While sobbing
pitifully with the intent to baffle the late night visitor, Fan Xian worked his
brain hard for a method of escape.
“If I cry for
help, the man would surely kill me in no time. But the visitor is not moving. He
must be really confused when I randomly called him ‘Daddy’,” he thought to
himself.
“Daddy, Daddy…,”
he immediately cried out, taking full advantage of his very young age.
“Stop pretending,
Young Master Fan,” the man said in an indifferent tone. “You are really smart.
Even at such a young age, you already know how to protect yourself. But you
probably also know very well that I am not the Count, his Excellency.”
After these words,
the man tightened his grip of the dagger and then approached forward toward the
four-year-old Fan Xian.
Fan Xian kept the
innocent look and teams streamed down his face, but he felt a strong throb in
his chest.
“Then who are you,
uncle?” he said with a sob.
“Your father sent
me to check on you. So don’t scream, okay?”
The late night
visitor’s two eyes both had small tints of brown and looked somewhat ugly. The
crinkles by the corners of his eyes clearly gave away his age. The tone of his
words directly reminded Fan Xian of a pervert grandpa who invites little girls
to go watch goldfish with him[1].
Fan Xian did not
reveal any of those thoughts and still put out a flawless act of a
four-year-old kid, showing a bit of fright, a bit of surprise, and a little annoyance.
“You are not
Daddy!”
Then as though he
had not seen the dagger in the man’s hand, he turned his tiny buttocks and
climbed up the big bed.
“I don’t even know
what Daddy looks like,” he muttered.
The man walked
toward the bedside with a sinister smile. All of a sudden, the little boy on
the bed turned his head around and gazed in the direction behind the man with
sheer joy. “Mommy!” he called out.
……
……
This was a very
clumsy attempt to trick someone. If it were done by any other person, the man
would not have fallen for it. He was, after all, a great master who owned an
entire laboratory in the Capital City.
However, since it
was done by a four-year-old boy, the man simply believed in him, and as soon as
he heard Fan Xian’s calling for Mommy, his eyes opened wide in shock, and he
jerked his head around and looked over his shoulder.
Naturally, behind
him were only the tightly-shut door and the dense shade of the night.
“Wham!” a brittle
cracking sound suddenly resonated in the bedroom. The late night visitor
collapsed to the floor, blood all over his head.
Holding the
remaining half of the porcelain “pillow” in his hands, Fan Xian looked at the
man lying on the floor, heart still fluttering with fear. He felt the weight of
the remaining “pillow” and then clenched his teeth. Raising his arms high, he swung
the porcelain headrest at the back of the man’s head with all his might.
This time the
sound was somewhat muffled because of the strength carried. Even if this late
night visitor were a first-class master in martial arts, this staggering “pillow”
blow would have kept him unconscious for a good while.
……
……
“Is everything
alright?” The servant girl’s voice arose from the outside.
“Everything is
fine, Sis! I broke a tea cup. You can clean it up tomorrow.”
“I better clean it
up today. You might step on the broken pieces and hurt your feet.”
“You can do it
tomorrow!”
When the servant
girl recognized the unusual bad temper in the voice of the always gentle and
lovely Young Master, she held her tongue and said nothing.
Fang Xian walked
by the closet and pulled out a quilt used in the winter. Holding tight onto the
quilt cover, he ripped hard and made himself some cloth strips. Twisting the
cloth strips together, he tied up the unconscious man on the floor firmly. Only
by then, he noticed that the clothes on his back had been soaked by cold sweat.
Fear quickly
welled up in his heart – both in his previous life and the present life, this
was the first time he ever tried to kill someone, even though he was still
unsure if he did kill the man or not.
“That was too
risky,” he thought, “if the man was indeed a Kung Fu master, my first strike
would for sure have gotten me killed.”
He reached
underneath the cloth mask of the man and felt. The man was still breathing. For
some unknown reason, Fan Xian suddenly felt a strong urge to kill the man. A cold
shudder awoke him. He suddenly realized that ever since his rebirth, he seemed
to have morphed into someone much more firm and resolute. He didn’t even
hesitate for a second when he ruthlessly attacked the man.
He didn’t realize
that deep inside the heart of the child named Fan Xian, he considered himself as
someone who had already died once. Therefore, the new life in this world was
especially precious to him, and he would not allow anyone to take it away from
him.
As the old saying goes,
“You never know what you have until you lose it.” The truth was just that
simple.
Fan Xian held the
dagger in his hand and pondered over and over. In the end he still couldn’t
make himself kill the unconscious man on the floor. Suddenly he thought of
someone and a smile crept up his face.
Silently pushing the door open, he ran to the back court and crawled out from a
hole in the wall used by dogs to get in and out. Soon he was standing outside
of the small grocery store on the street corner right across from the Count’s
Manor.
……
……
“Thump! Thump!” he gently knocked on the
door of the small grocery store. The sounds were very light and didn’t travel
far even in the quiet night of Port Danzhou. But Fan Xian knew that the man
inside would hear the knock with no problem. Even though the man always
pretended to not know him for the last four years, at the critical moment, this
man was the only person in this world Fan Xian could trust.
“Who is it?”
A flat, emotionless voice came from inside
the grocery store.
“He hasn’t changed at all,” Fan Xian
thought, “just like that year outside of the Capital City, following a
prescribed pattern in both his speaking and his acts.” He rolled his eyes and
then replied softly, “I am Fan Xian.”
As expected, the wooden door of the grocery
store opened quietly, and the blind youngster stood at the doorway like a
ghost, which actually caught Fan Xian by surprise.
Fan Xian stared at
the man who sent him to Port Danzhou and the face and the black cloth covering
his eyes, which didn’t seem to have changed even the slightest bit. He couldn’t
help wondering, “Doesn’t this man ever get old?”
[1]
“Inviting little girls to go watch goldfish” is a popular phrase used in China
to refer to pervert child molesters.
Now support the author Maoni by clicking this link, and support the translator Lanny by following my blog and leaving comments! :)
Video of the Day:
Got an iPhone? Got a blender? Ever wondered if your iPhone would blend in your blender? Well, find out from this video! The funny thing is that every Saturday, I play soccer right across the street from this company called Blendtec!
Not too long ago, we talked about Geminoid, Dr. Ishiguro's "twin brother" robot in a previous post. That robot was built in 2006. Four years later in April 2010, Dr. Ishiguro unveiled his latest creation: a female andriod named Geminoid-F (F stands for female), built after an unnamed female model in her 20s (photo credit Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP), according to this article at IEEE Spectrum.
The female robot is really the product of joint effort among Osaka University, ATR Laboratory, and Kokoro Co., a small Japanese firm specializing in building androids. Compared to the old male model, this new, more advanced model have the following improvements:
It can exhibit facial expressions much more naturally.
It only has 12 actuators (male model had 50)
Air servo valves and the control system are not embedded into the robot's body, and there is only a small external compressor (male model had a large external box for compressors and valves.)
The tele-operation system is using facial recognition software, so the operator doesn't have to wear any sensor at all.
Similar to it's male predecessor, Geminoid-F cannot walk and only have limited movements with its arms and legs. Most of the actuators are located around the neck and face. The main purpose of the robot is for tele-presence where an operator would be sitting in front of a camera and the robot would mimic the person's facial expression and lip/neck movements. One possible application of the robot is to support remote companionship. Dr. Ishiguro plans to test the robot in hospitals.
With a price tag of US $110,000 per copy, such a robot might not be very attractive to consumers even for people who seriously long for a twin brother or sister. However, the research team at least accomplished two things:
advanced the technology of natural expression for a robot, and
generated ample interest from the public to pay more attention to robotics technology
That leaves me with only one question: Who is he going to duplicate next time?
Picture of the Day:
Adeline will have a dance recital tomorrow. But she just lost a tooth the first time ever in her life! So here I present you:
