Word: kismet
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...Kismet is able to engage in the kind of purposeful human interactions that cousin Cog could not. Kismet calls people toward it. And when they get too close for its cameras to see them well, it protects its personal space and pulls away. When an object suddenly appears in front of it, Kismet quickly withdraws and flashes a look of bewilderment. Most winningly, the robot is able to engage in a babbling "conversation" with humans in its midst. When it "talks," it takes turns with its human interlocutor, a decent representation of a conversation between an adult and an infant...
Walk into room 922 of the artificial intelligence lab at M.I.T., and you may notice a winsome robot in the corner trying desperately to get your attention. When Kismet is lonely and spots a human, it cranes its head forward plaintively. It flaps its pink paper ears and vocalizes excitedly in a babylike patter. Kismet's handlers call this an "attention-getting display." You would have to have a heart of stone to ignore this cute little aluminum...thing...
From a physical standpoint, Kismet isn't much of a robot. It can't walk and grab things, as many robots today can. It doesn't even have arms, legs or a body. What sets Kismet apart is that it has been built with drives and equipped to engage in an array of interactions with people to satisfy those drives. In social terms, big-eyed, babbling Kismet may be the most human robot ever built. And it may be the closest we have yet come to building the kind of robots that populate science fiction and interact with humans...
...Kismet is the creation of Cynthia Breazeal, a postdoc in the Humanoid Robotics Group at M.I.T. Breazeal has studied for years under Rodney Brooks, perhaps the leading figure in the world of robotics. Breazeal got the idea for Kismet when she was working with Cog, another robot in Brooks' lab that was built to have the physical capacities of a human infant. Cog has a torso, a head and arms, and it can engage in simple tasks like turning a crank or playing with a slinky. Cog is physically gifted but completely lacking in social skills...
...much rather build something and interact with it than philosophize about it," she says. "Or philosophize about someone else doing it." But at the same time, she has used robotics to explore some subtle intellectual issues. At M.I.T., Breazeal has studied brains and cognitive science, and her work with Kismet raises complex issues about how humans think and learn...