Humanoid Droids dance, dogs nuzzle, speak at Madrid robot museum

Humanoid robots dance at "The Robot Museum" in Madrid on November 28, 2013.

A white robotic beagle sits wagging its tail and nuzzling anyone who pets it, while six pint-sized robots, flashing blue, pump their fists as they dance to the pop hit "Gangnam Style".

They are the stars of a new museum launched in Madrid this month, showcasing what its owners say is one of the world's top collections of robot dogs and other pet automatons.

"As far as we know this is the biggest collection of robots in Europe, and in particular of Aibo robotic dogs," sold by Sony from 1999 to 2006, said the Robot Museum's manager Daniel Bayon, 39.

"They are a very important part of the museum. They are the most advanced robot dogs that have ever existed," he told reporters.

This pack of Aibos is the biggest in the world outside their native Japan, he added.

The museum houses some 140 exhibits dating from the 1980s to the present.

Among them is Nao, a walking, talking miniature humanoid developed by the French robotics company Aldebaran as an educational aid.

"I am a very special robot. I can simulate real-life behaviour," it said, in a high-pitched mechanical voice, during a recent demonstration.

"If you'll excuse me, I'll make myself a bit more comfortable," it added, sitting down on its bottom.

A child pets a robotic dog at "The Robot Museum" in Madrid on November 28, 2013.

Nearby stood a model of R2-D2, the classic bleeping droid first seen on movie screens in "Star Wars" in 1977.

Since opening nearly two weeks ago, tickets for guided visits to the small museum underneath the Juegetronica games store in central Madrid have sold out several times, Bayon said.

The owner of the collection, local technology enthusiast Pablo Medrano, said most of the models on display are no longer for sale in shops.

A picture taken on November 28, 2013 shows "NAO" a programmable humanoid robot developed by French robotics company Aldebaran Robotics at "The Robot Museum" in Madrid.

The museum is "perhaps the only dedicated robot museum in Europe outside of universities and training centres where we can see this technology of the future," Medrano, 39, told reporters.

"I want robots to be able to help us, just as household appliances and computers are helping us, which years ago was unthinkable. I hope that in a few years robots will meet our daily needs, particularly those of old people."

Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, Animated in Motion Graphics

“That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”

Over the years, I’ve enjoyed my share of animated adaptations of Carl Sagan’s iconic Pale Blue Dot monologue, based on the seminal photograph of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990. Now comes a lovely motion graphics adaptation by animation studio ORDER — enjoy, and see if you can hold back the chills.

Speaking and Understanding Speech Share the Same Parts of the Brain

The brain has two big tasks related to speech: making it and understanding it.

Psychologists and others who study the brain have debated whether these are really two separate tasks or whether they both use the same regions of the brain.

Now, a new study, published in the August issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that speaking and understanding speech share the same parts of the brain, with one difference: we don't need the brain regions that control the movements of lips, teeth, and so on to understand speech.

Most studies of how speech works in the brain focuses on comprehension. That's mostly because it's easier to image the brains of people who are listening quietly; talking makes the head move, which is a problem when you're measuring the brain.

But now, the Donders Institute at the Radboud University Nijmegen, where the study was conducted, has developed technology that allows recording from a moving brain.

Laura Menenti, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Glasgow, co-wrote the paper along with Peter Hagoort of Radboud University Nijmegen and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Sarah Gierhan and Katrien Segaert.

Menenti was initially interested in how the brain produces grammatical sentences and wanted to track the process of producing a sentence in its entirety; looking not only at its grammatical structure but also at its meaning.

"What made this particularly exciting to us was that no one had managed to perform such a study before, meaning that we could explore an almost completely new topic," says Menenti.

The authors used functional MRI technology to measure brain activity in people who were either listening to sentences or speaking sentences.

The other problem with measuring brain activity in people who are speaking is that you have to get them to say the right kind of sentence.

The authors accomplished this with a picture of an action -- a man strangling a woman, say -- with one person coloured green and one coloured red to indicate their order in the sentence.

This prompted people to say either "The man is strangling the woman" or "The woman is strangled by the man." (The experiments were all carried out in Dutch.)

From this, the researchers were able to tell where in the brain three different speech tasks (computing meaning, coming up with the words, and building a grammatical sentence) -- were taking place.

They found that the same areas were activated for each of these tasks in people who were speaking and people who were listening to sentences.

However, although some studies have suggested that while people are listening to speech, they silently articulate the words in order to understand them, the authors found no involvement of motor regions when people were listening.

According to Menenti, though the study was largely designed to answer a specific theoretical question, it also points towards some useful avenues for treatment of people with language-related problems.

It suggests that while it sometimes seems that people with comprehension problems may have intact production, and vice versa, this may not necessarily be the case. According to Menenti, "Our data suggest that these problems would be expected to always at least partly coincide.

On the other, our data confirm the idea that many different processes in the language system, such as understanding meaning or grammar, can at least partly, be damaged independently of each other."

Language and Your Brain - Infographics

For centuries, researchers have studied the brain to find exactly where mechanisms for producing and interpreting language reside. Theories abound on how humans acquire new languages and how our developing brains learn to process languages. We take a look at the mysteries of language and the brain in the infographic below.

Click on the picture to see the whole Infographics on VOXY Blog

Automatic Speech Recognition Software; Effectiveness

MOST of us talk to our computers, if only to curse them when a glitch destroys hours of work. Sadly the computer doesn't usually listen, but new kinds of software are being developed that make conversing with a computer rather more productive.

The longest established of these is automatic speech recognition (ASR), the technology that converts the spoken word to text. More recently it has been joined by subtler techniques that go beyond what you say, and analyse how you say it. Between them they could help us communicate more effectively in situations where face-to-face conversation is not possible.

ASR has come a long way since 1964, when visitors to the World's Fair in New York were wowed by a device called the IBM Shoebox, which performed simple arithmetic calculations in response to voice commands. Yet people's perceptions of the usefulness of ASR have, if anything, diminished.

"State-of-the-art ASR has an error rate of 30 to 35 per cent," says Simon Tucker at the University of Sheffield, UK, "and that's just very annoying." Its shortcomings are highlighted by the plethora of web pages poking fun at some of the mistakes made by Google Voice, which turns voicemail messages into text.

What's more, even when ASR gets it right the results can be unsatisfactory, as simply transcribing what someone says often makes for awkward reading. People's speech can be peppered with repetition, or sentences that just tail off.

"Even if you had perfect transcription of the words, it's often the case that you still couldn't tell what was going on," says Alex Pentland, who directs the Human Dynamics Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "People's language use is very indirect and idiomatic," he points out.

Despite these limitations, ASR has its uses, says Tucker. With colleagues at Sheffield and Steve Whittaker at IBM Research in Almaden, California, he has developed a system called Catchup, designed to summarise in almost real time what has been said at a business meeting so the latecomers can... well, catch up with what they missed. Catchup is able to identify the important words and phrases in an ASR transcript and edit out the unimportant ones.

It does so by using the frequency with which a word appears as an indicator of its importance, having first ruled out a "stop list" of very common words. It leaves the text surrounding the important words in place to put them in context, and removes the rest.

A key feature of Catchup is that it then presents the result in audio form, so the latecomer hears a spoken summary rather than having to plough through a transcript. "It provides a much better user experience," says Tucker.

Read the full article here .....