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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mtnlady who wrote (52322)	7/24/2002 8:35:41 PM
From: mmbw	Respond to of 54805

OT- Potential Gorilla? While your advice to drink heavily and recycle is logical, check out the following article. New Robot has Basic Social Stills by By JUDY LIN apnews.excite.com Some excerpts: PITTSBURGH (AP) - A 6-foot-tall robot that courteously steps aside for people, smiles during conversation and politely asks directions shouldn't be blamed for being too eager to please. After all, it's programmed to act that way. The robot, named GRACE (short for Graduate Robot Attending Conference), will wander a symposium on artificial intelligence that begins this weekend, where it will demonstrate basic human social skills. Simmons, who said the robot was made female because he believes women communicate better than men, solicited drama students to teach GRACE how to act like a human so it will make people feel comfortable. It's a tough task. "Just think of what a robot would have to do just to answer a question from a person in terms of speech recognition," said competition co-chair Holly Yanco. "Not only that, but people ask questions in different ways." GRACE will have relatives at the convention that will lack its autonomy. Massachusetts-based iRobot Corp.'s CoWorker, whose controllers supervise it over the Internet, will also participate in the mobile challenge. Using streaming video from on-board cameras, the user clicks in the picture to tell the machine where to go, said iRobot's Jim Allard. The GRACE team got together a year ago to integrate software and hardware that have been developed separately. While Simmons' work involved getting the robot to find the registration booth, wait in line and register, Alan Schultz of the Naval Research Laboratory has been working on speech recognition. TRACLab, a division of Metrica, developed the Biclops vision system, which enables the robot to recognize physical gestures. Wolfe said the system allows GRACE to understand whether a person is pointing to the left or right. The company hopes to market the system as a security system capable of identifying criminals by scanning faces. Team GRACE isn't consumed with completing the task this year. Members plan to refine the robot in future competitions. The team also hopes to teach the robot to schmooze,by recognizing a person and asking questions. Martha@wishihadarobottocleanthehouse.com PS Servo (The Sims) seems to have more skills than Grace. To bad it's a game.