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Archive for the ‘Communication and Linguistics’ Category

Cool, I just added you on Facebook . If you, like Jeopardy contestant Ken Jennings, are ready to welcome “our new computer overlords,” chances are you won’t have to wait long. Progress in the field of artificial intelligence has advanced by leaps and bounds over the past few years, churning out incredible machines like IBM’s Watson, which soundly defeated Jennings and fellow player Brad Rutter at America’s toughest trivia game. Now, scientists at Georgia Tech’s Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (RIM) say they are within a decade of creating personal robots capable of cleaning our homes, taking us on guided tours and caring for our grandparents in nursing facilities. However, computer scientists simply won’t be able to program every robot to do all the things we will want them to do. This means we’ll have to tell robots what do to and how to do it. How will we do that? Tip 1: Use English Scientists want our interaction with robots to be as intuitive as possible, so that means designing them to process our natural language. Usually, computers are programmed using math-based languages, but most people don’t want to earn a degree in computer science just to tell a machine to vacuum the floor. With this in mind, scientists are developing programming languages based on English syntax rather than mathematical symbols, which is no small feat. Math-based languages allow for only one means of expression, while natural languages like English can phrase a single thought in half a dozen ways. When programming in a natural language, scientists must factor in all, or most, possible phrasings of input commands—a tedious task, but one that won’t leave future citizens guessing for the exact phrasing that will get robots to take out the trash. Tip 2: Throw Away that Keyboard Though almost anyone can type a command into a computer, that kind of input method will prove impractical when granny needs her robot to help her out of the bathtub. Scientists know that personal robots will be expected to operate on voice commands for ease and efficiency of use. Some of this technology is already available through mediums like the iPhone’s Siri software, which allows users to make phone calls, send texts and search the Internet by voice. However, tomorrow’s robots will need to do more than just process simple voice commands; they will also need to learn the tasks their owners want them to do. This will require them to have electronic brains capable of being programmed with both visual and auditory information in the human-like process of “active learning.” RIM’s Maya Cakmak, Ph.D., is bringing this advanced technology to life by programming a robot named Simon to learn new tasks by asking questions. Her study on the subject, entitled “Designing Robot Learners that Ask Good Questions,” was recently presented at the 7th ACM/IEEE Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Cakmak’s work will someday allow ordinary people to program robots without ever touching a keypad or phrasing commands in seemingly bizarre ways. However, you may still have to demonstrate for your robot exactly how to line up your collectible action figures. Tip 3: Teach It to Ask the Right Questions Robots can’t ask just any kind of question if they are to learn and communicate effectively with their human masters. People don’t want to spend all day teaching their robots how to hang up a jacket, for instance. So, what kinds of questions should a robot ask to facilitate a smooth robot-human interaction? Surprisingly, humans have provided the answer. In an experiment, Cakmak asked a group of people to pretend to be robots bent on learning a new task. The questions participants asked in the course of their learning were sorted into three categories: label query, demonstration query and feature query. Cakmak found that 82 percent of the questions fell into the feature query category. When Cakmak asked the group to then rate which questions were “smartest,” 72 percent chose feature queries. Since humans seem to overwhelmingly prefer feature queries, this is the type of question learning robots will ask in the future. A feature query seeks to define the features a particular task. The example given in Cakmak’s study was, “Can I pour salt from any height?” Technically, anyone can pour salt from almost any height, but it may not be appropriate or desirable to do so, especially when the flavor of your mashed potatoes is at stake. This differs widely from a label query (“Can I pour salt like this?”), which simply yields a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response. Tip 4: Observe the Subtle Cues There’s more to communication than just verbalizing. Eye contact, hand gestures, tone of voice and body language are all part of the equation, and things that robots will have to master to truly integrate into our world. “Other human beings understand turn-taking,” says Aaron Bobick, chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing. “They understand that if I make some indication, they’ll turn and face someone when they want to engage with them, and they won’t when they don’t want to engage with them. In order for these robots to work with us effectively, they have to obey these same kinds of social conventions.” In the future, robots will be able to wave, beckon and communicate in other non-verbal ways. They’ll also be able to analyze their masters’ social and physical communication cues and respond to them appropriately. Researchers at Georgia Tech found that when they equipped their robot Simon with cameras, it could predict with 80 percent accuracy whether or not it had attracted a person’s attention with a simple mechanical gesture. Talking to a socially conscious robot means you won’t feel the urge to scream to make your wishes understood. Tip 5: Remember, It is Still a Robot Scientists are working hard to give robots more human-like qualities, such as smooth movements and somewhat random behavior. The purpose in doing these things is to make human-robot communication as natural and productive as possible. Someday, people may even be able to learn tasks by observing how robots perform them. No matter how human they seem, though, they’re still machines incapable of acting beyond their programming. This is especially important to remember if you ever find yourself in a hospital about to get a sponge bath from Georgia Tech’s “Cody.” No, the robot isn’t touching your arm to comfort you. It doesn’t have that capacity. You can climb down from the ceiling, now.

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5 Tips for Communicating with a Robot

A single photograph can communicate as much information as an entire volume of written text. Similarly, a single gesture can often communicate as much as an entire conversation. Furthermore, gestures tend to leave lasting impressions. Your mother’s last wave as the kindergarten bus pulled away on your first day of school, the thumbs up sign your father gave you from the back of the auditorium on graduation day or the upwardly thrust middle finger as your ex-partner peeled out of your driveway for the last time will remain with you forever. Chances are, all the different feelings you experienced when you saw those gestures will stick with you for just as long. As powerful as gestures are, however, their meanings are not always universal. Gestures often remain the same across cultures but carry dramatically different meanings and connotations. Your father’s thumbs up graduation day sign would have had a very different effect on your mood if you both had been natives of Greece. Use the following infographic from Pimsleur Approach to learn more about common American hand gestures and their meanings in different parts of the world. Related posts: Politicians’ Hand Gestures Reveal Their Good and Bad Thoughts Signers Identify Non-Verbal Cues More Quickly, Study Reveals The Role of Nonverbal Communication in Virtual Environments and Real Life Scenarios [Study]

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Don’t Export Your American Hand Gestures [Infographic]

How different are we? The issue of whether the differences between men and women are real or imaginary has been a matter of much debate. Now a new study conducted by the University of Turin in Italy and published in the journal PLoS ONE claims to have uncovered evidence that large differences in personality exist between men and women. Previous research has lent little credence to the popular school of thought that men and women are so different that they may as well live on different planets. However, lead author Marco Del Giudice claims to have developed a more accurate method to measure and analyze what he says are significant personality differences between men and women. Under Del Giudice, investigators took personality measurements from more than 5,000 men and 5,000 women. They measured 15 different traits, including warmth and sensitivity. Unlike previous studies, Del Giudice’s project compared comprehensive personality profiles that considered many different traits, rather than focusing upon differences in the incidence of individual traits between the sexes. When the data is looked at this way, very large differences between men and women are seen. Del Giudice admits that these individual differences, taken separately, do appear much less significant. He contends, however, that previous researchers not only neglected to correct for measurement errors, but that their practice of looking at one trait at a time obscured the big picture. As a result, according to Del Giudice, previous investigators failed to recognize the full extent of personality differences between men and women. Related posts: Beautiful people convey personality traits better during first impressions Study Finds Surprising Gender Differences Related to Sexual Harassment Evidence Says Women Are Better Multitaskers Than Men [Study]

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Significant Personality Differences Between Men And Women Found [Study]

Forked Fungus Beetles Maybe they are your younger brother’s gang. Maybe they are the guys you hung out with in high school before you had your growth spurt and went off to college. Regardless of how you know them, chances are you can name a group of guys who live their lives like perpetual middle-schoolers, hanging out with each other but rarely dating and never really establishing long-term romantic relationships. A new study by evolutionary biologists from the University of Virginia’s College of Arts & Sciences takes a closer look at these males who live on the fringes of the social world in order to determine how social interactions shape and are shaped by natural selection. Like many other insects, forked fungus beetles live in complex societies. While most of them live highly engaged social lives, a surprising minority have a lot in common with the former members of your old garage band. You know; the ones who are always trying to get you to ditch the wife and kids and come hang out like you used to back in the good old days. These beetles spend most of their time in small groups composed solely of males. The biologists, led by Vince Formica and Butch Broody, could not help noticing what your wife remarked on from day one: The males in these groups were less likely to have encounters with females that lead to mating and reproduction. Formica and Brodie are interested in what happens in beetle societies because social interactions are inextricably intertwined with natural selection, which is Darwin’s term for the natural process that occurs when members of a species possess characteristics that help them survive and pass those beneficial characteristics on to their offspring. The flip side of the evolutionary coin is that characteristics that tend to get members of a species killed at an early age or that make them less likely to mate often die along with the childless individuals who possess them. Formica and Brodie, both from the University of Virginia’s College of Arts & Sciences, conducted their research on the evolution of social behavior by studying the society-in-miniature that is the milieu of the forked fungus beetle. Specifically, their team wondered whether a beetle’s social role had any connection to its chances of producing offspring. The results of their investigation were published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology . Forked fungus beetles were chosen as subjects because in addition to their rich social life, they were readily available for the researchers to study in the wild and they can easily be captured, tagged and observed. Once the beetles were tagged for easy tracking, the researchers were able to observe and map their social activities. The research team noticed that the beetles with the most active social lives had large social circles and had a lot of sexual encounters, leading to a lot of reproduction on their part. The males with small social circles made up of just a few males rarely had social encounters with females and had little opportunity to pass their genes on to a new generation. According to Formica, learning how social networks operate is crucial to understanding the evolution of societies. “We’ve shown that the trait of sociability is under natural selection, but we don’t know yet if it’s heritable,” he said. “This is one of only a few studies that have shown that position in a social network is a trait that can experience natural selection and therefore has the potential to evolve. It is clear in this study that being central in a large social network is key to high reproductive success. If a trait – such as an individual’s position in a network – is related to reproductive success, you can say it is experiencing natural selection and has the potential to evolve.” Related posts: Social Network Analysis and the Dynamics of Web-Based Networking [Study]

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Want More Sex? Widen Your Social Network, Beetle Research Says

Television’s bad influence on viewers’ eating habits has long been a source of concern for health experts and parents. However, a new study by researchers in Italy shows that the more exposure to newspapers, television and the Internet people have, the healthier they eat. The study, conducted by researchers at the Fondazione di Ricerca e Cura “Giovanni Paolo II” in Campobasso, Italy, found that the more participants used television, newspapers and the Internet as a source of information, the more closely they adhered to a traditional Mediterranean diet. The Mediterranean diet is the eating pattern that was historically followed by inhabitants of the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Ocean. It has long been considered the ideal diet for humans. The current pattern of eating that is prevalent in Europe and North America is known as the Western diet. It is considered one of the least healthy diets and is known to lead to both short-term and long-term health problems. In recent decades, the Western diet has spread across many parts of the globe along with Western clothing, pastimes and entertainments, including television. Often, observers have placed part of the blame for the spread of unhealthy eating habits on television viewing. Some experts had assumed that the spread of other forms of mass media would have a similar effect. The new study, however, highlights the folly of lumping all use of television or other media together and assuming the consequences will all be negative. The results suggest that the effect of mass media, like most other things, often depends upon how and why it is used. The research, which is the first of its kind to look closely at the types of media accessed and to take into account how they are used, was published in the International Journal of Public Health . Previous studies analyzed only the impact television viewing had upon watchers’ health and generalized the results to include other types of media. The investigators studied 1,000 participants in the largest Moli-sani Project, a famous epidemiological study that involves 25,000 inhabitants of Molise, Italy. The goal of the Moli-sani Project is to determine the effect of environmental and genetic factors on the development of cardiovascular disease and tumors. As part of the larger study that included gathering information on individual dietary habits, participants were asked to answer questions regarding their use of mass media. The data was plugged into a specially created instrument designed to measure participants’ exposure to mass media information, and then the results were analyzed. According to researcher Americo Bonanni, “Results have shown that people most exposed to information delivered by any mass media source reported higher adherence to the Mediterranean-like eating patterns. “In particular, people…reported higher consumption of some key foods of the Mediterranean diet pyramid, such as fruits and fresh fish, and a lower consumption of less healthy food such as animal fats.” The researchers concluded that health experts should stop viewing mass media, including television, as the enemy and begin figuring out how to use it to get better information to the public more effectively. Related posts: For Teens, Early Sex and Media Exposure Not Linked Body Image and the Media [Videographic] UW-Madison’s joint mass communication degree ranked top in nation

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Exposure to Mass Media Improves Diet [Study]

You often hear about “the little people,” even when actual height is not discussed. Often times, it is people who converse with upcoming celebrities, telling them not to forget “the little people.” A research study from the authors of a new paper published in Psychological Science , a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, found that there is some psychological truth to these kinds of statements. Though non-celebrities are often normal heights, they may actually feel smaller then what they are when compared to a celebrity. The study suggests that people who feel powerful overestimate their size. Alternatively, people who feel weak, usually in a work setting, tend to feel physically smaller than what they actually are. One of the paper’s co-writers, Jack A. Goncalo of Cornell University, stated that there is physical experience that goes along with the study. He also went on to state that people who feel less powerful may actually see objects and other people larger than what they actually are. Alternatively, people who feel powerful may see things smaller than what they are. Of course, there is plenty of prior research that proves taller people generally make more money, are more likely to be promoted, and are viewed as more attractive, but this paper’s research proves the reverse to be true, that power makes people feel tall. One experiment had people come into the lab in pairs. Their height measurements were taken, and then they were given a leadership aptitude test. They were told that, based on their feedback, they would either be assigned to play the role of a manager or employee. The feedback the participants received was fake, and then they were assigned their roles. After they received their roles, they were asked to fill out a personal questionnaire, answering questions that involved their height, eye color, and other physical attributes. The participants who were given roles of manager, having complete power over crucial decision, stated that they were taller than the actual measurement. Alternatively, people who were given the role of employee answered that their height was either the same or less than the taken measurement. This could explain the psychology of people who wear high-heels to feel powerful or bosses who work in the top-floor office. Related posts: Breaking Rules of Social Behavior Makes You Appear Powerful Study shows why people read magazines featuring envy-inspiring models People Over 50 Prefer Negative Stories About Young People

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Powerful People Are Shorter Than They Think [Study]