My Soft­est Words project has been fea­tured in Design Ind­aba Mag­a­zine as part of a spe­cial report explor­ing Syn­thetic Biol­ogy and Design.

Some images of my Robot Empa­thy project crit. We were lucky enough to have use of the Per­rin lec­ture the­atre at the Cen­tre of the Cell for the day. After the crit we were treated to a tour of their James Bon­desque lair, which also dou­bles as an inter­ac­tive genet­ics learn­ing expe­ri­ence for kids.

J. Paul try­ing out my shape recog­ni­tion tool.

Stef­fen test­ing my face detec­tion hel­met on Jonas.

All images copy­right Dunne & Raby

Here are some of my pro­pos­als to enable humans to expe­ri­ence the world through a robot’s eyes.

I’m hop­ing to take some of these projects a stage fur­ther next year and talk to peo­ple who work with robots on a daily basis to learn about their experiences.

In response to a recent project enti­tled ‘Sci­ence & Soci­ety’, I set about inves­ti­gat­ing the world of machine learn­ing. Even­tu­ally my research led to to the area of Bayesian Sta­tis­tics. Bayesian Sta­tis­tics in the con­text of machines involves pre­dict­ing the like­li­hood of a hypoth­e­sis based on con­stantly chang­ing sen­sor data. This tech­nique is used widely in com­puter vision.

In tan­dem with this I became inter­ested int he area of Robotic Empa­thy. This is an area of robot­ics where researchers are exper­i­ment­ing with the effect of giv­ing robots the abil­ity or the appar­ent abil­ity to empathise with humans. Despite most of the cur­rent exam­ples being hor­ri­bly ‘robotic’ for want of a bet­ter word, humans seem to be able to sus­pend dis­be­lief for long enough to appre­ci­ate the con­cern of their robotic servants.

But why is this robotic empa­thy a one way process? Should we not too feel empa­thy for these machines too? Watch the video below and ask your­self what you feel?

I’m guess­ing the pri­mary emo­tion after hilar­ity was pity, rather than empa­thy. My the­ory is that if we could expe­ri­ence empa­thy for our machines our rela­tion­ships with them would become much richer. But in order to empathise we need to under­stand the per­spec­tive of the machine, we need to put our­selves in Asimo’s shoes.

To enable this I devel­oped a range of tools and activ­i­ties that would enable peo­ple to expe­ri­ence the world though the eyes of a robot. Images com­ing soon.

I made these two short videos as exper­i­ments in man­i­fest­ing com­puter vision and machine learn­ing by alter­na­tive means. In the first I moved the famil­iar face detec­tion rec­tan­gle from the screen and into the real world to see what its effect would be. As you might expect, it was dis­con­cert­ing walk­ing around with a bright green frame around my face.

In the sec­ond video I exper­i­mented with the oppo­site process, mov­ing some­thing that might ordi­nar­ily be phys­i­cal into the dig­i­tal space. Are com­put­ers that pre­dict our behav­iours con­trol­ling us like puppeteers?

I was at the LSE last night for a lec­ture by Ste­fan Halper titled, China’s 21st Cen­tury Market-Authoritarian Chal­lenge. Halper was a big-wig in four US Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tions over the past few decades until the early 90s. The bulk of his argu­ment focused on our need to re-evaluate China, not as a mil­i­tary or eco­nomic threat, but as an ide­alog­i­cal threat. China, while not a threat to West­ern democ­ra­cies on their home turf, is offer­ing an attrac­tive model to devel­op­ing nations for the eco­nomic and social advance­ment of their peo­ple, while enabling their rulers to retain a tight grip on power. I must admit that hav­ing recently vis­ited Shang­hai the effi­ciency with which the author­i­ties can imple­ment vast infra­struc­tural projects is awe-inspiring.

While some believe that the increased wealth of indi­vid­ual Chi­nese cit­i­zens will be an inex­orable force push­ing towards democ­racy, Halper sees the Market-Authoritarian model as a force directly against this. It has self-reenforcing prop­er­ties that make democ­racy less, not more likely as the econ­omy grows.

While China is inad­ver­tently export­ing this model through­out the devel­op­ing world, with hard cur­rency loans and resource agree­ments with devel­op­ing nations, at home there is a sur­pris­ing lack of ide­ol­ogy. Halper described it as like a donut: the hole is where com­mu­nist ide­ol­ogy used to be. In its place is a some­times jin­go­is­tic nation­al­ism, a pride in ris­ing China and a belief that per­sonal liv­ing stan­dards will con­tinue to improve.

That is a very amor­phous set of beliefs to built a soci­ety on and that is why, in order to main­tain the har­mo­nious soci­ety, the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment must con­tinue to stoke nation­al­ism, evoke pride and most of all pur­sue a high growth strat­egy. Halper termed it a growth trap.

The other inter­est­ing point raised is that the West needs to stick up for its inter­ests with more vigour. Halper believes that in Wash­ing­ton there is a need to con­sol­i­date all Chi­nese pol­icy into focused objec­tives and that the pri­mary objec­tive should be to encour­age a fairer val­u­a­tion for the yuan. He sees the cur­rent under val­ued cur­rency as effec­tively export­ing unem­ploy­ment and pre­vent­ing the west from climb­ing out of recession.

Halper’s new book is out now. Ama­zon

We had a very illu­mi­nat­ing talk from Richard Bar­brook at the depart­ment a few weeks ago. Barbrook’s inter­ests lie in the pol­i­tics behind our visions of the future, particularly from the 1960s onwards. He is dis­mis­sive of society’s fas­ci­na­tion with techno gad­gets. We have arrived at the future that was envis­aged by the McLuhanists of the atomic age and it’s time to move on, time to imag­ine new futures.

This is par­tic­u­lar­ily per­ti­nant to me in my dis­ser­ta­tion research and in my plans to dive into web sci­ence next year. Bar­brook painted a over-arching polic­i­tal vision behind the cre­ation on the inter­net. It was formed in a bat­tle between col­lec­tivism and cap­i­tal­ism . The inter­net is appar­ently the ulti­mate com­mu­nist cre­ation. No won­der it despises copyright.

My per­sonal strat­egy for Expo open­ing day was quan­tity not qual­ity. I avoided any­thing with a queue of more than 15 mins. The big flash West­ern Euro­pean pavil­ions had queues of over 3 hours that I just couldn’t face in the 29C heat. Thank­fully there were lots of inter­est­ing coun­tries with very short queues.

First up North Korea: I’m prob­a­bly never going to actu­ally visit the county so this pavil­ion was the next best think. Based on the exhi­bi­tion I’m guess­ing that North Korea is filled with bizarre multi-coloured neo-classical cherub foun­tains, fake flow­ers and buses of West­ern­ers tour­ing the sites. Por­traits of the Kims were notably absent.

Next door was Iran, while on first impres­sions Iran seemed to have the sim­i­lar bizarre styl­is­tic flair as North Korea, once you got past the strange horse tapes­tries and the giant plas­tic dome there were some inter­est­ing exhibits inside. Iran’s pride in sci­en­tific achieve­ment was centre-stage. Exhibits included the first Iran­ian Home Built Satel­lite, a Laser Harp and a Ura­nium enrich­ment plant (maybe not).

My per­sonal favourite in the whole expo has to be Turk­menistan. They had every­thing. Pic­tures of their supreme leader Gur­ban­guly Berdimuhame­dow every­where. (I thought with the death of Turk­men­basy in 2006 the coun­try had begun a period of lib­er­al­i­sa­tion but old Gur­ban­guly is a very hand­some man so there’s no harm in hav­ing a few pho­tos of him hang­ing about the place.)

The Turk­mens also had futur­is­tic cityscapes and mod­els of their lat­est hydro-electric projects. (Note to Cen­tral Asian Expo design­ers: Enough with the hydro-electric dam mod­els, once you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.)

Turk­menistan went one bet­ter and had an amaz­ing LED lit map show­ing all their power plants and sub­sta­tions. The entire trip to Shang­hai was worth it, just for this one map.

And of course who could for­get the golden horse stat­ues everywhere.

On a more seri­ous note, I really liked New Zealand’s Pavil­ion, there were some nice design details in the queu­ing area. It was good to see they had actu­ally con­sid­ered the queues as with some pavil­ions they were a design after­thought (UK take note). Even though the center-piece of the NZ exhi­bi­tion was a giant plas­tic tree there was some­thing taste­ful and con­sid­ered about the whole thing.

On the sec­ond day of the Expo I vis­ited som of the cor­po­rate stands on the other side of the Huangpu river. I par­tic­u­larly liked this sign at the entrance to the China Rail exhi­bi­tion. I knew Chi­nese trains were fast but…

Some of the Chi­nese exhibitors had unex­pect­edly inter­est­ing things to say, this Farm Ship from CSSC (a ship builder) was very DI. Vanke (the largest home builder in China) had a series of films with quite sophis­ti­cated views on sus­tain­abil­ity. China Tele­com on the other hand had an insipid video about com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­ogy make our dreams come true. The whole think was par­tic­u­larly insult­ing given that the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment seems so ter­ri­fied by inter­net free­dom, I’m not sure what the locals thought of it. The audi­ence were handed touch screen where they could “vote” for a wish for the future. I wished for Chi­nese democracy.

The scale of the China Pavil­ion was immense. The plat­form it stood on must have been about 20m high. Unfortunately none of our group actu­ally made it inside due to the con­fus­ing reser­va­tion sys­tem but here’s a link to some inte­rior shots from China Daily.

Just back from Shang­hai. One of the high­lights was a vist to the UK pavil­ion at the World Expo site a few days before the offi­cial open­ing. The Seed Cathe­dral by Heather­wick Stu­dio is sim­ply stun­ning, although I do have reser­va­tions about the con­cep­tual rel­e­vance to the sup­posed brief. The brav­ery and vision of the UK team in design­ing a holis­tic expe­ri­ence was notable in com­par­i­son to some of the other archi­tec­turally dar­ing pavil­ions whose inter­nal exhi­bi­tions some­times appeared to be an afterthought.