exploits

Scientists from Sony's computer science labs in France are participating with researchers from the European Commission's Emerging Technologies Initiative and the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology in Italy.

The project's name: EC Agents.
EC for Embedded and Communicating.

The goal: to teach robots linguistics and cognitive skills that they ultimately will be able to develop on their own over time, without the assistance of communications rules provided by humans.

The beginning: they first updated the software of a few Aibos, giving them the possibility to develop their own language. For example, giving the location of a ball in the room, identify if this ball is rolling and tell it to others, by barking. Those Aibos were put in a room with others objects that can transmit sounds when they're touched or when they're approached. Others objects are totally dumbs (cuddly toys, etc.)

The first observation is that Aibo barks much more in front of the noisy objects that in front of the dumb ones. And some patterns of barking received in response barkings of other Aibos. Good.


The conclusion: for the moment, boaf. These behaviors are analyzed but the researchers think that they are the premises of the Artificial Intelligence for the generated language, and they hope big development. The result is machines that evolve and develop by themselves without human intervention.

The application: Not a new version of Aibo since the production has been stopped in march 2006, but surely new Sony products, based on Artificial Intelligence. And also the Sweden's Viktoria Institute is using EC agents to let mobile devices, such as MP3 players and cell phones, "talk" to each other.

• What listen your guy to ?
• Placebo
• aïe
• yeah ...
• all right, here is Muse
• aïe
• yeah ...

Source: InformationWeek, 2 days ago and the official website.
For those who do not know:
AIBO is one of several types of robotic pets designed and manufactured by Sony; there have been several different models since their introduction in 1999. Able to walk, "see" its environment via camera, and recognize spoken commands, they are considered to be autonomous robots, since they are able to learn and mature based on external stimuli from their owner or environment, or from other AIBOs. Artist Hajime Sorayama created the initial designs for the AIBO.