I’m spend­ing the sum­mer at the techno-Utopian par­adise that is the Google­plex. I’m work­ing as a UX design intern on the heart and soul of the web. It’s all very  excit­ing and ever so secret, hence the absence of blog­ging for the past few weeks. As the sum­mer pro­gresses hope­fully I will be able to share some obser­va­tions on life in sil­i­con val­ley. Until then, peace out!

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?