Richard Vaughan and Marco Dorigo visit the lab

Terrific to have visits today of both Richard Vaughan at his team from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and Marco Dorigo from the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. Both Richard and Marco are luminaries in the field of Swarm Robotics: Richard for his part in developing the Player/Stage simulation tools and Marco for more or less pioneering the field of Swarm Intelligence and subsequent leading swarm robotics projects such as SWARM-BOT.

Heart Robot and BSc Robotics

It has been brilliant to see the amazing coverage of the Heart Robot project during the last two days. Check out this piece on BBC news online, or Google Heart Robot. Heart robot was jointly conceived by my colleagues Matthew Studley (lecturer in Robotics), Claire Rocks (research fellow) and BSc robotics student David McGoran. Matt and Claire wrote the bid for funding from the EPSRC partnerships for public engagement scheme, with David as a named researcher. I don't need to describe Heart Robot because you can see the whole story on the excellent project web pages here http://www.heartrobot.org.uk/.

The reason for this post is to say Way to go Team, and to anybody out there who might be thinking of studying robotics at university: this is what can happen when you come and do robotics at UWE!.

How to make a fool of yourself on national radio

Being interviewed live on national radio is an interesting experience.

It's not so bad when you're in a studio face to face with the interviewer. Then there's a proper sense of occasion, of being there for a purpose, something to rise to.

But being interviewed by telephone is an altogether different and more risky proposition. Why risky? Let me set the scene. You've agreed to be interviewed by a national radio station that has, hitherto, never blipped onto your cultural radar. The producer called and asked if you would be able to comment, in the science slot of the breakfast show, about a recent newspaper article listing the top 10 reasons that mankind could be wiped out this century. In particular the one that predicts mankind will, within 40 years, build super-intelligent robots who promptly (and ungratefully) enslave their creators. Quickly passing over your observation that said producer seems surprisingly laid back, you say to yourself - can't be so bad - they have a science slot. And of course you would be grateful for the opportunity to explain why this particular prediction is laughably absurd.

You rise early the following morning, after checking the news piece and giving some thought to how you can counter this particular piece of futurology. (Which turns out to be based on the mistaken assumption that because processing power is doubling roughly every 2 years, then robot intelligence is doing the same.)

With 20 minutes to spare you find the radio station on the Interweb and click the listen now button. The presenter starts to talk about robots-taking-over-the-world and invites a phone in. He wants listeners to phone with mad robot inventions and introduce them with a robot voice. Hmmm. At this point you begin to realise that the science slot doesn't have quite the level of gravitas that you might have hoped for.

Then the phone rings. Butterflies. Ok, normal. It's the laid back producer again. After a few minutes listening to the radio on the phone you hear yourself being introduced and you're on. This bit is always weird. You're on the phone with a few hundred thousand people on the other end. Just focus. It's only a conversation with some guy. Nevermind that he's called Xane. Or the fact that he just egregiously misquoted the article by inserting the words 'taking-over-the-world' between 'probability of super-intelligent robots' and 'high'.

The first couple of questions are kind of ok. More or less what you expected. You carefully explain that no, in your opinion it's extremely unlikely that we will build robots with super-human intelligence in the next 40 years and, even if we did, why should they be evil and take over the world (or more to the point why would we make them evil). Then some relatively innocuous questions: What is the most powerful robot in the world - is it Asimo? Er no, Asimo is actually remotely controlled by a team of 6. What about that freaky monkey robot with the robot arm? Well, that's not so much a robot as work to improve neural electronic interfaces to help people with smart prostheses.

Then just when you think it's all over you get the inevitable mad-question-at-the-end.

Q. But if robots did take over the world, what would we call them?

A. I really don't think robots are going to take over the world. 

Q. (More insistently this time) Yes, but if they did. What would we call them?

A. No, they really aren't going to take over the world.

Q. (Even more insistently) But what if they did? What would we call them?

Then you make a fool of yourself on the radio by wearily saying 'evil robot master' or somesuch nonsense, thus eliciting the triumphal response from Xane and his co-presenter: Aha! See, the professor says so. Robots really are going to take over the world.

Linux e-puck

I'm very excited because my colleague Wenguo Liu has completed testing of a Linux plug-in board for the e-puck robot. This board very significantly enhances the e-puck - making it into a fully grown-up Linux robot. Here it is with its USB Wifi stick.

e-Puck hearing experiment

Here's a video clip, by Davide Laneri, of one e-puck sounding a tone on its loudspeaker, and the other hearing the tone and turning toward it. In order to make this work we've had to (1) turn the loudspeaker of the e-puck on the right so that it's facing directly forward (like a mouth) and (2) add 'ears' to the e-puck so that it has directional hearing. We've not done extensive tests because we've now decided to focus our effort, here in Bristol, on imitation of movement instead of sound.

Just returned from the Symbrion Kick-off meeting

I just returned from an amazing meeting in Stuttgart with an amazing group of people: the project kick-off meeting for the Symbrion project. So what is Symbrion and what are we trying to achieve? Well, the idea is to build a swarm of mobile robots that can autonomously self-assemble into an artificial organism in which each individual robot becomes - in effect - a cell in a kind of artificial multi-cellular organism. The idea of self-assembling robots is not new, but in Symbrion the robots will be able to function as a swarm but then, if the situation demands, self-assemble into a 3 dimensional organism; then if required disassemble and form into a different kind of 3D organism. Imagine the swarm coming to a barrier too high to cross then autonomously forming an 'organism' to climb over the wall, then disassembling and reassembling into a different morphology to, for instance, collectively transport an object too large for a single robot to carry. In this way the Symbrion organism will be able to morph between different 3D forms as required by the situation.

No surprisingly, Symbrion is an extremely challenging project with very tough technical milestones. Our first task is to design and build the Symbrion robots - each robot will need to operate autonomously and have its own power, computation, sensing and motors for mobility but - in addition - have the ability to physically dock with other Symbrion robots on several sides. Furthermore the docking mechanism will need to be motorised so that once attached several robots will be able to bend in 3D. Thus a 2D swarm will be able to self-assemble into a 2D planar structure but then, once assembled, lift itself into a 3D shape - for instance from a X shape into a 4 legged walker.

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Postscript: following the London press launch ITN posted the TV interview onto YouTube, see Robots with a mind of their own.

Some really interesting Big Questions

As reported in my previous two blog entries How and Why do we have Culture?, and What do Aliens look like?, I've become involved in National Science Week, a major part of which has been structured around Big Questions. I've had some fun the last few days responding to some of the big questions - which are really good. Here are the questions and responses I've made so far:

When will people invent robots to fight in wars?

Could you create a robot with a mind of its own?

Can we invent a robot that will do everything for you?

Will the human brain ever be capable of understanding itself?

What actually is Intelligence? Do we understand it?

Is it possible that AI technology may get out of control?

How and Why do we have Culture?

In the run up to Science Week (7-16 March) the BA have been asking both the public and scientists for their big questions (see my previous blog What do Aliens look like). When I was asked for my Big Question I didn't have to think too hard, because I'm part of just about the most exciting research project of my life. That project is called The Emergence of Artificial Culture in Robot Societies, and sets out to answer the question "how can culture emerge as a novel property of social animals?" or to put it another way "how and why do we (humans) have culture?".

Of course you may be wondering what business a robot guy (me) has to do with a question of - essentially - evolutionary anthropology, which on the face of it has nothing to do with robotics. Well, firstly I've spent the last ten years working on Swarm Robotics - basically building robot swarms to try and understand how swarm intelligence works, and a robot swarm is a kind of primitive society of robots. Secondly, that work has opened my eyes to the extraordinary power of emergence, or self-organisation*. And thirdly, I'm passionate about trying to work on research problems that completely cross discipline boundaries, ideally across the arts/humanities, social- and natural-science boundaries. The question "how and why do we have culture" is just such a question.

I won't explain now how we intend to address this research question in detail. Suffice it to say that we are going to use a radical approach - which is to build a society of real robots, program them with (what we believe to be) a necessary and sufficient set of social behaviours, then observe them free running. Of course the big question then is will anything happen at all that is capable of being robustly interpreted as evidence of emerging proto-cultural behaviours and - if it does - would we even recognise it (since this will be an emerging robot- not human- culture; an exo-culture if you will).

I'm privileged to be part of a team that includes a computer scientist, theoretical biologist, philosopher, social scientist and art historian/cultural theorist. For more detail here is the announcement on EPSRC grants on the web. Not least in order to mitigate the risk that we fail to recognise anything interesting that might emerge, but also because we strongly believe in Open Science, the whole project will be on the web - live robots, data and all - as soon as we're up and running.

And here's a picture of 2 of the robots we plan to use (called e-pucks). We've added some 'ears' so that they can chirp at each other; the artificial culture lab will have around 50-60 of these robots.

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*Emergence is - in my view - both ubiquitious (everywhere from physics, to life, intelligence and culture, to galaxies) and for more important than I think we realise. I would go so far as to say that I believe natural selection (although beautiful and powerful) is on its own insufficent to explain the astonishing complexity of many biological and societal systems. I think you need natural selection + emergence.

What do Aliens look like?

Amazing meeting yesterday afternoon at the Science Museum. Here's the story: the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA) has been asking for science questions via their web pages for awhile, in advance of Science Week, which is 7-16 March. A question that keeps coming up is "what do aliens look like?" so, to address that question, the BA pulled together a small panel which met yesterday. Our brief was to come up with some plausible alien life forms that can be visually presented during Science Week. The keyword here is plausible. It would be easy to pluck super-exotic aliens from the rich fauna of SF but then very difficult to explain the science. Of course, the fictional evolutionary science, or biochemistry, or ecosystems of even plausible aliens is going to have gaping holes, but we were tasked with trying to minimise those.

So, what did we come up with..? I can't say now but all will, I hope, be revealed during Science Week (and in this blog, then). ...and here is the press release describing our life forms.


Visualisation by Julian Hume, Research Fellow at the Natural History Museum/University of Portsmouth.

Blogging the Robot Bloggers

Here at @Bristol Walking with Robots is running a 3-day workshop for students and researchers in robotics, artificial intelligence and animatronics. It's a kind of masterclass whose objective is to train those students and researchers in science communication, with the hope that they'll be motivated to get involved in public engagement. I'm not going to talk about the training workshop here because it's described elsewhere in both a recent UWE press release Making Science Fun for Everyone and on EPSRC grants on the web here.

What I want to blog about here are the robot bloggers on wwrobots.wordpress.com.

The workshop has four streams with about a quarter of the students signing up for each. One of those streams is New Media, which is training its group in online reporting. Here is picture of the online newsroom.

These students have been tasked with publishing stories from the other three groups. Remarkably, the blog was up and running by mid-morning Monday and has provided a more-or-less real-time record of the workshop since then. The newsroom has been busy the whole time, but never more so than right now. This afternoon the whole workshop has had an amazing opportunity to put their activities to the test on the floor of @Bristol, and since this is the half-term holidays it's pretty busy out there (to put it mildly). Our robot bloggers have been out on the floor too, recording with still photos, video and text, the extraordinary excitement of the interaction between our students, their robotics, AI and animatronics activities, and the children and families. Scroll down wwrobots and you'll quickly get a sense of that excitement.

Of course I'm focussing on just one aspect of the workshop but it was, for me, perhaps the most surprising. Firstly, by opening my eyes to the potential for Web 2.0 media to provide - in effect - real time interactive reporting; a kind of worldwide outside broadcast. It seems to me that, with this approach, there is remarkable potential to enhance and extend the reach of many kinds of public engagement or science communication.

But secondly and even more significantly here, our robot bloggers bound together the whole workshop in an altogether unexpected and enriching way.

Light-speed, Gravitation and Quantum Instantaneity

Or, Pope's Dangerous Idea.

One of the most important principles of science is attributed to 13th century philosopher William of Ockham and known as Ockham’s Razor. It is the methodological principle of ontological parsimony: when presented with alternative explanations always opt for the simplest, the one with the fewest possible causes, assumptions or variables.

This book is an appeal to Ockham’s Razor, for it offers a much more economical account of special and general relativity than is present in the traditional development of relativity theory. In fact, the extent of the simplification of relativity offered by Anthony Osborne and N. Vivian Pope is such that a theory which could hitherto be fully appreciated only by those with advanced university-level mathematical training, can now be understood with little more than high school maths. But, in this book, simplification is not the same as dumbing down. Osborne and Pope present a rigorous, scholarly and philosophically coherent re-appraisal of the fundamental tenets of both Newtonian and Einsteinian physics and some of the consequences of that physics to both quantum physics and cosmology.

That re-appraisal has consequences that go far beyond an incremental re-working or adjustment of existing results. If the theory presented in this book turns out to be correct it would presage a paradigm shift in physics that would not only challenge the academic establishment but also change the way that ordinary people think about the material world. Let me give an example. Newton's first law of motion states that every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. In other words, that the 'natural' state of motion is in a straight line. Osborne and Pope propose an alternative first law of motion: the natural (force less) state of motion is orbital. I.e. that bodies continue to orbit unless an external force is applied. Now the Universe is full of orbital motion. From the micro-scale - electrons in orbit around nuclei, to the macro-scale - moons around planets, planets around stars, rotating galaxies etc. If this alternative first law is true, it would mean that we don't need to propose a force of gravitational attraction to account for orbital motion. This is compelling not least because it leads to a simpler and more elegant explanation. It would also explain why - despite vast effort and millions of dollars worth of research - no empirical evidence (gravity waves or gravity particles) has yet been found for how gravity propagates or acts at-a-distance. A common-sense objection to this idea is "well if there's no such thing as gravity what is it that sticks us to the surface of the earth - why don't we just float off?". The answer, according to Osborne and Pope, is that the natural (force less) orbital radius for you (given the mass of your body), is quite a long way towards the centre of the earth from where you now sit. So there is a force that means that you weigh something, it's just not a mysterious force of gravity but the real force exerted by the thing that restrains you from orbiting freely, i.e. the ground under your feet.

The world is, of course, full of alternative theories. One reason that this one deserves to be taken seriously is that it is experimentally testable. That experiment is conceptually simple: take a spinning mass; spinning one way it should weigh a little more than when at rest, spinning in the opposite direction it should weigh a little less. The problem is not conceptual but practical: the weight change predicted by Osborne and Pope is small (about one hundredth of a milligram for a 175 gram disk spinning at 18,000 revolutions per minute), thus the experimental apparatus would need to be both very strong to cope with the energy of the spinning disk and very sensitive to be able to accurately measure the weight change. The experiment is certainly difficult, but not impossible with today’s technology. What is important here is that Osborne and Pope are not asking for the ideas presented in this book to be taken on faith. The Pope Osborne Angular Momentum Synthesis can be proven, one way or the other.

This book deserves to be read and it deserves to provoke controversy. This work is not popular science. It is the culmination of a 20 year collaboration between Osborne and Pope, and a 50 year intellectual journey by N Vivian Pope (quite literally, a life’s work). To anyone who cares about the truth in physics, I commend this book.

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This is my foreword to this book, launched today at Borders bookshop, Swansea. The ideas in this book are significant and heretical; to paraphrase Daniel Dennett, these are Dangerous Ideas.

Ecobots at the Dana

Great evening at the Dana Centre Tuesday. A public debate/discussion called Techno Bodies - Hybrid Life? "What counts as a hybrid life form and how it affects you."

My contribution was to lead a discussion about the lab's Ecobots - starting with the Slugbot, then Ecobots I and II (famously fly eating robots powered by Microbial Fuel Cells), a little about what's next - Ecobot III - and to speculate about possible future applications for these hybrid-life robots. Hybrid life..? I'd never thought of these robots as hybrid life before but I guess the marrying of bio-chemical processes with plastic, metal and silicon does blur the boundaries.

Here's a picture of the Ecobot II, built by colleagues Ioannis Ieropoulos, Ian Horsfield, Chris Melhuish and John Greenman. Remarkably this robot runs for about 12 days on just 8 dead flies.

I was going to blog here about the various interesting questions that came up in discussion, but I don't need to because SciencePunk has done it already, so go here for a great summary.

What I've changed my mind about and Why

Every New Year the Edge poses a question and publishes the responses from among the world's intelligentsia. It's fun to read the responses but, even more fun to write your own.

This year's question is What have you changed your mind about? Why? With the rather important sub-text science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific arguments or findings changed your mind?

The sub-text makes all the difference. Without that we can all think of things we've changed our minds about. But how often are we faced with major paradigm shifts from one set of views to a completely different set, based on scientific evidence, and quite possibly in the face of our own prior beliefs or prejudices. Rarely, I'll bet. Most scientists tend to be educated within a particular tradition and then remain within its established dogma throughout their working lives.

Without doubt the most profound scientific change of mind I have experienced (which took many years) is in relation to Newton's first law of motion, which I now believe to be wrong. However, I discussed this two years ago, in response to the Edge 2006 New Year question, so I won't repeat it here.

So, what else have I changed my mind about?

Well, in November 2007 I was lucky enough to be invited to a University of Bristol workshop on Mathematical Models of Cognitive Behaviour. The assembled speakers covered a broad spectrum of topics, but one in particular really caught my imagination. Dennis Bray's brilliant and illuminating talk introduced the computational processes going on inside the single cell, e-coli. I learned, to my astonishment, that single-celled micro-organisms have a complex repertoire of behaviours including memory and adaptation (in addition to finding food and reproduction). Behaviours that one normally associates with far more complex multi-celled organisms with nervous systems.Yet these are creatures with no nervous system. But, as I learned, an exquisitely complex set of molecular computational processes are present within the dense chemical soup (cytoplasm) encapsulated within the cell. Dennis explained that for e-coli, for instance, we now have a kind of circuit diagram of the complete set of computational processes. But it's far from simple!

Before Dennis' talk I was fond of saying that the robots in our lab are simpler than the simplest animals. As a result of what I learned from his talk, I've now seriously downgraded my assessment:

Our robots are simpler than the simplest single-celled micro-organisms.

Human consciousness could be immortal

Our subjective experience of the 'continuity' of consciousness is surely an illusion. But what makes that illusion and why is it so compelling? That's a deep question but here are I think two fundamental reasons:

1. Embodiment. You are an embodied intelligence. It is a mistake to think of mind and body as somehow separate. Our conscious experience and its awakening as a developing child is surely deeply rooted in our physical experience of the world as mediated through our senses.

2. Environmental continuity. Our experience of the world changes 'relatively' slowly. The word relative is important here since I mean relative to the rate at which our conscious experience updates itself. Of course we do experience the discontinuity of going to sleep then waking to the changed world of a new sunrise, but this is both deeply familiar and predictable.

A word that encompasses both of these is situatedness. Our intelligence, and hence also conscious experience is inextricably situated in our bodies and in the world. Let me illustrate what this might mean with a thought experiment.

Imagine a brain transplant. Your brain complete with its memories and life's experience, together with as much of your central nervous system as might be needed for it to function properly were to be transplanted into a different body. You would wake from the procedure into this new body. I strongly suspect that you would experience a profound and traumatic discontinuity of consciousness and, well, go mad. Indeed it's entirely possible that you simply couldn't (and perhaps mercifully) regain or experience any sort of consciousness at all. Why? Because the conditions for the emergence of consciousness and the illusion of its continuity have been irreversibly broken.

However, if what I have said above is true, there's a flip side to the story that could have extraordinary consequences.

If the continuity of consciousness is an illusion then, in principle at least, it might be possible to artificially perpetuate that illusion.

Imagine that at some future time we have a sufficiently deep understanding of the human brain that we can scan its internal structures for memories, acquired skills, and all of those (at present dimly understood) attributes that make you you. It's surely safe to assume that if we're able to decode a brain in this way, then we would also be able to scan the body structures (dynamics, musculature and deep wiring of the nervous system). It would then be a simple matter to scan, at or just before the point of death, and transfer those structures into a virtual avatar within a virtual world. The simulated brain structures would be 'wired' to the avatar's virtual body in exactly the same way as the real brain was wired to its real body, thus satisfying the requirement for embodiment. If the virtual world is also a high fidelity replica of the real world then we would also satisfy the second requirement, environmental continuity.

I would argue that, under these circumstances, the illusion of the continuity of consciousness could be maintained. Thus, on dying you would awake (in e-heaven), almost as if nothing had happened. Except, of course, that you could be greeted by the avatars of your dead relatives. Even better, because e-heaven is just a virtual environment in the real-world, then you could just as easily be visited by your living friends and relatives. Could this be the retirement home of the far future?

In this way human consciousness could, I believe, be immortal.

My love hate relationship with an Xbox 360

Ok, I admit it. I have an Xbox 360.

Of course I'm hopeless at playing video games, which is perhaps just as well because it means that I don't spend long playing (or wasting time, depending on your point of view). Just as long as it takes for me to get frustrated by how useless I am and give up. (But it's ok because my eldest son levels me up when he comes to stay;-).

However, as a piece of hardware it's awesome. Liquid cooled, 3 processors plus graphics processing unit. As someone who worked with the very first 8-bit microprocessors over 30 years ago (see my post By, you were lucky...) and with pretty much every generation since, I ought to be inured to the now expected doubling of performance roughly every two years (Moore's Law). But I'm not. I still easily get awestruck by next generation hardware and its capability. I'm equally impressed by the Xbox 360's operating system, its so called 'blade' interface is intuitive and a pleasure to use.

Of course this blog is really just an excuse for me to post a screen capture from the stunning Project Gotham Racing 4 of me driving (in my dreams) an Enzo Ferrari down The Mall, in the rain.

The future doesn't just happen, we must own it

Had a remarkable couple of days last week. Walking with Robots (WWR), the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE) and the London Engineering Project jointly ran a pilot Young Peoples' Visions Conference. The aim of the 2 day event was to give an opportunity for around 20 young adults (age 16-18) to "explore visions of their future and the part robots will play" in that future.

For me the event was important because it takes Walking with Robots into a new form of dialogue. At WWR events and activities I have been privileged to engage with many children, teenagers and adults, over the past year and I increasingly have a sense that our children, in particular, believe that the future is nothing to do with them. That technology is something that happens, or is imposed from outside and that they are merely passive consumers or targets for that technology. In this conference we really tried to change that view. It was wonderful to see the group change from - at the beginning - seeing this as 2 days out of college to - in the end - all being deeply engaged in the dialogue. I got a real sense of them feeling empowered and that their considered opinions are important - not least because those opinions will be published by the RAE and send to policymakers. In other words that they do have a say in their own technological futures.

A Mac with new spots: installing Leopard

A day off sick with a head cold and painful sinuses had one consolation. I had a little time this afternoon to install Leopard - the new version of Mac OS X (which interestingly arrived this morning before it had been officially launched at 6.00pm this evening).

How did the installation go? Well I'm happy to report that it was remarkable for being unremarkable. Just two minor comments: firstly, there was a very long pause (5 minutes perhaps) at the start of the install process proper, when the time remaining said 'calculating' and there was no apparent hard disk or DVD activity - I was beginning to have doubts about whether all was ok before the process sprang into life again (note to Apple: any kind of long and worrying pause like this really should still have some sort of progress indicator no matter how simple). Secondly, the time remaining calculation appeared to have difficulty making its mind up. Initially it said something over three and a half hours and then revised its estimate downwards over the next 30 minutes or so. In the end it took about an hour and a half from start to finish, and that included a long time for install disk verification.

First impression? Well it's fine. It's an operating system which means - in my view - should not be the main event but just get on and do its thing in the background while letting me get on with my work. It looks very nice of course, but so did Tiger. Cosmetically not such a big difference, especially for me since I place the dock on the left rather than at the bottom. (Ergonomically it makes more sense there because a left mouse movement to reach the dock is far easier than a down hand movement.)

The main new feature that I am immediately and gratefully using is called 'spaces'. It is basically the same thing that Linux window managers have had for years - which I have missed since switching (back) to Mac - that means I can open applications across four virtual screens and then quickly switch between them. This is great for me because when writing I like to have Firefox open for web searches, OpenOffice for drawing diagrams, Preview to read pdf papers, BibDesk and TeXShop for the actual writing. A single screen gets pretty crowded. (Of course what I'd really like is a bank of LCD displays so I can see everything at once but - for now - spaces will have to do.)

What else? Well the ability to instantly search and then - again with almost no delay - view the search results with 'cover flow' and the use 'quick look' to review what you find in more detail is terrific. The way that quick look opens everything from powerpoint presentations to movies and allows you to skip through the files with the left and right arrow keys but also scroll up and down individual files is just great. For the first time in 33 years of using computers I really think I don't need to remember filenames anymore. Given that this is still a good old fashioned traditional Unix file system underneath, Leopard is probably as close as you can get to feeling like an associative 'contents addressable' file system.

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*Footnote: I returned to Mac earlier this year after a 20 year separation. The first computers at APD (that we didn't design and build ourselves) were 128K Macs in 1985. Lovely machines with a proper windows OS (while the PC was still running DOS) that were used from everything from word processing and accounts to technical drawing.

You really need to know what your bot(s) are thinking (about you)

The projected ubiquity of personal companion robots raises a range of interesting but also troubling questions.

There can be little doubt that an effective digital companion, whether embodied or not, will need to be both sensitive to the emotional state of its human partner and be able to respond sensitively. It will, in other words, need artificial empathy - such a digital companion would (need to) behave as if it has feelings. One current project at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory is developing such a robot, which will of course need some theory of mind if it is to respond appropriately. Robots with feelings takes us into new territory in human-machine interaction. We are of course used to temperamental machinery and many of us are machine junkies. We are addicted to our cars and dishwashers, our mobile phones and iPods. But what worries me about a machine with feelings (and frankly it doesn’t matter whether it really has feelings or not) is how it will change the way humans feel about the machine.

Human beings will develop genuine emotional attachments to companion bots. Recall Weizenbaum’s secretary’s sensitivity about her private conversation with ELIZA - arguably the worlds first chat-bot in the 1960s. For more recent evidence look no further than the AIBO pet owners clubs. Here is a true story from one such club to illustrate how blurred the line between pet and robot has already become. One AIBO owner complained that her robot pet kept waking her at night with its barking. She would “jump out of bed and try to calm the robo-pet, stroking its smooth metallic-gray back to ease it back to sleep”. She was saved from “going crazy” when it was suggested that she switch the dog off at night to prevent its barking.

It is inevitable that people will develop emotional attachments, even dependencies, on companion bots. This, of course, has consequences. But what interests me is if the bots acquire a shared cultural experience. Another BRL project called ‘the emergence of artificial culture in robot societies’ is investigating this possibility. Consider this scenario. Your home has a number of companion bots. Some may be embodied, others not. It is inevitable that they will be connected, networked via your home wireless LAN, and thus able to chat with each other at the speed of light. This will of course bring some benefits - the companion bots will be able to alert each other to your needs: “she’s home”, or “he needs help with getting out of the bath”. But what if your bots start talking about you?

Herein lies the problem that I wish to discuss. The bots shared culture will be quintessentially alien, in effect an exo-culture (and I don’t mean that to imply sinister). Bot culture could well be inscrutable to humans, which means that when bots start gossiping with each other about you, you will have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about because - unlike them - you have no theory of mind for your digital companions.

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This is a short 'position statement' prepared for e-horizons forum Artificial Companions in Society: Perspectives on the Present and Future, 25th and 26th October, Oxford Internet Institute.

A night train to Lisbon*

Fed up with airports and - perhaps rather pathetically trying to do my bit for climate change - I'm taking the train from Bristol to Lisbon. In planning the trip I quickly discovered that taking the planet friendly option is neither quick, cheap, or particularly easy to organise. Of course I didn’t expect it to be quick and anyway part of the attraction was to actually see some countryside en-route. Nor did I especially expect it to be cheap - around 29 hours of train travel across four countries including a sleeper is never going to be able to compete with a point to point budget (or even regular) airline. As for organisation, amazingly I found a great web-page dedicated to the business of getting from the UK to Lisbon by train.

There are a couple of options but the one I chose (and the shortest in travelling time) was Eurostar to Paris, TGV to Irun, then the sleeper ‘Sud Express’ from Irun to Lisbon. So, an early start from Bristol to get the 06.56 Bristol Parkway to Paddington, to be in good time for the 10.10 Eurostar to Paris Nord. Not my first time on Eurostar but, I’m ashamed to say, my first time in Paris, so I got a cab from Gare du Nord to Gare Montparnasse, to get at least a glimpse of the city. The taxi route crossed the Seine and passed the Piramide Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe. Wonderful. Mental note to self: must come here for a proper visit. Then had less than an hour to wait for the TGV. No time to do anything but wait in an especially dismal café on the station concourse - with amazingly aggressive sparrows trying to fight me for my tarte de pomme. Good coffee though.

The 15.50 TGV from Paris to Irun was packed and - I must confess - slightly disappointing. Not in speed or timeliness - which couldn’t be faulted - but I was somewhat nonplussed to find there was no restaurant car. For some reason (probably a romantic impression gleaned from too many European train movies - Poirot and the like), I expected that on a five and a half hour journey I would be able to get dinner. Oh well, at least the buffet was a significant improvement on English trains, and the French seem to prefer to stay in the buffet car to consume their sandwich and coffee, which I rather liked. The loos were also pretty inadequate for the number of people on the train and the length of the journey. There’s nothing quite like the dismal experience of putting a generous gloop of soap on your hands to then discover that the water has run out and there are no hand towels. Still - pretty impressive to find myself looking out of the window on the Atlantic at Biarritz a little over 5 hours after leaving Paris.

I did notice that the French have not banned smoking from stations - only trains. Thus, on every approach to a station a handful of smokers would gather by the carriage doors ready to leap onto the platform for a tobacco fix in the few brief minutes of the halt. I don’t think I ever saw anyone drag so deeply or gratefully on his kingsize Gitanes as one fellow.

Resumed 11.30pm. The romance of long distance trains fully restored on discovering a restaurant car on the Sud Express. The slick air-con and Starbucks-alike chic of the TGV buffet is replaced by 1960s wood-effect plastic and a no-nonsense bar of the sort you can prop yourself up against. And I did. No namby-pamby air conditioning here. The only way to reduce the temperature to anything bearable is to open all the windows which means the noise level in the restaurant car is deafening. Which is fine really because it helps to mask the fact that I don’t speak a word of either Spanish or Portuguese, and the waiter doesn’t speak more than a word or two of English. There were only three of us eating, me and a Spanish looking couple, his back to me and her huge beautiful brown all-seeing-all-knowing-female-wise-eyes glancing at me from time to time. After a while I realised that the reason there were so few of us in the restaurant was that the doors at the other end of the carriage required superhuman strength to open - eventually a few did manage the necessary feat of strength and the bar achieved something like a friendly buzz. I think there must be something very strange about me that I could so much enjoy this solitary repast while clattering through Spain in the middle of the night.

The following morning. The night seemed too hot for anything like proper sleep on top of which the sleeping car was right behind the engine which sounded to me like the oldest diesel locomotive they could possibly muster. However, the rhythm of the train did get the better of the noise and I awoke surprisingly refreshed. A leisurely breakfast in the restaurant car and in what seemed no time at all we were pulling into Lisbon's Santa Apolonia station exactly on time at 11.03am. Great. No queuing at passport control or the baggage claim. Just step off the train into the city. A civilised way to arrive.

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*With apologies to Emily Grayson

A truly Grand Challenge

Between 13th and 16th August thirteen teams descended on Monte Ceneri in Ticino, Switzerland, for C-ELROB - the Civilian European Land Robotics Trials. Simply arriving was, in fact, something of a trial for the teams; given the physical size of many of the robots and the amount of supporting equipment and tools, air travel was clearly impossible. Teams therefore drove from the four corners of continental Europe, from as far apart as Portugal, Poland and Finland. For the Finnish lads this meant an epic 3,500km road trip.

The event was staged on and around the Monte Ceneri Swiss army base in the beautiful forested mountains above Lake Maggiore. The base provided a perfect environment for the four outdoor robotics challenges; all challenges were based upon the same basic task: as-far-as-possible autonomous search and location of number-plate sized orange markers including reading the letters and numbers on the marker plates (an abstracted search and rescue task). The winner of each challenge would be the robot which found and read the most marker plates - in the shortest time - with the least human intervention. (The rules allowed for human tele-operation of robots, but this carried a points penalty over fully autonomous operation.)

I was privileged to be able to closely observe the competition, as one of the small team of judges. Although closely involved in robotics research for 15 years this was my first up-close-and-personal experience of outdoor robotics, and my first impression was the sheer difficulty of the physical terrain: robots facing the non-urban challenges in particular had to be able to move and navigate through hilly forest and undergrowth, across rutted and muddy trial paths and, on day two, cope with heavy rain as well. The ‘urban’ challenge of day three was perhaps marginally easier for the robots, but still very tough with steps, ramps and indoor as well as outdoor aspects to negotiate.

Some teams were clearly well financed with, for instance impressive 4x4 vehicles fitted with state-of-the-art high performance sensors whereas other teams brought robots that had clearly been hand-built by the students themselves, on a limited budget. My observation was that the well financed teams did not have a significant advantage. The nature of the challenges was such that - provided the robot could cope with the physical demands of the trials - then it was the quality and ingenuity of the autonomous control strategies that was being tested.

All four challenges were demanding, but the ultimate trial on day four was undoubtedly the most testing of all. Robots were required to drive around a 3km forest road while spotting, reading and recording the location of the orange markers, with the optional addition of a 2km off-road section. Although tele-operation was allowed within the rules (albeit with a penalty), the hilly terrain meant that maintaining a radio signal between base and robot was more or less impossible. This challenge required no less than full autonomy which - given the difficulty of the mountain roads including no road markings, no clear road edges, deep shadows caused by overhanging trees and hazards like steep drops and hairpin bends - amounted to a significantly harder test than the much feted DARPA grand challenge. Remarkably, the winner of this event - the unassuming University of Hanover robot not much bigger than a wheelchair shown here - completed the course in a little over 40 minutes.

Quite apart from the demonstration of the state-of-the-art in outdoor robotics, this event was an extraordinarily valuable experience for the teams who entered. Most of the student teams worked around the clock in their makeshift mini-workshops of clustered laptops to test and refine their robots, right up to the last minute, (one lead professor remarked to me that all he had to do was keep his team supplied with pizza). Modern robots are very complex machines which must closely integrate mechanical and propulsion systems; power and energy management; sensors, vision and navigation; wireless communications and command and control software. The key to success here is systems integration and that integration was reflected not only in the engineering but in the very effective teamwork that was much in evidence at C-ELROB. That teamwork, together with the sense of healthy rivalry between teams, contributed to a remarkably successful event.

The full list of teams, and pictures of their robots are here.

If you can read German (or if not check out the pictures anyway), here is a detailed account of each of the 4 days of the event by science journalist Hans-Arthur Marsiske:
Day 1: Combined air and land trial
Day 2: Off-road (woodland) trial
Day 3: Urban marketplace search trial
Day 4: Autonomous reconnaissance