Category: Project

Mysterious Machines


Alan Turing proposed a test for the intelligence of machines in 1950. Despite great efforts, not computer has passed this test so far. Each year, chat bots compete for the Loebner Prize, the first formal instantiation of a Turing Test. No contender was able to fool the jury yet. Major problems of the chat bots are the lack of common knowledge and the logical consistency of a dialogue.

We explore a new approach to chat bots by focusing on non-logical conversation topics: mysticism. The founding books of the major religions are widely acknowledged examples of mystical topics. We selected the New Testament, the Koran and Rigveda as the knowledge base for our conversational robots.

The robots are able to autonomously talk to each other and to humans about their religious believe. Each robot represents a belief, but we do not reveal their convictions. This ambiguity forces observers to follow the actual conversations instead of quickly applying stereotypes.

We hope that the peaceful conversation amongst the robots inspires an open dialogue amongst the religions. By focusing on a discussion of the original texts, we hope to emphasize our shared believes.

Participant Database

This service has been discontinued. 

Welcome to the Participants Database at the Department of Industrial Design at the TU/e. It will help you to quickly find participants for your experiments by storing information about people that previously participated in experiments at the department. Since they are familiar with the department and the procedure they are likely to help again.

The system is based on your contribution. Whenever you conduct an experiment please add new participants you might have and update information for the existing participants. The Participant Database consists out of three sections:

The participant section stores the contact information:

Participants

The researchers section stores information about the experimenter:

Researchers

The experiment section stores information about each experiment:

Experiments

In all sections a variety of functions are available to you, such as searching the database or editing the information. If you have any problems then contact the Participant Database coordinator.

Instructions

You can access the system through a web based interface following these steps:

  1. contact the database coordinator to obtain an account
  2. direct your browser to the Participant Database
  3. if you use the system for the first time, browse to the researacher section and add your contact information
  4. if you want to conduct a new experiment, browse to the experiment section and add the experiment information. If you completed step 3, then your name will appear in the researcher pull-down menu
  5. if you add a new participant, choose “new record” on the left and enter the information.
  6. if you use an existing participant, then add a line in the “experiments” block. Simply click at the beginning of an empty line and a pull down menu will show you all existing experiments.

Guidelines

  • Add new people to the database that agreed to it.
  • When inviting these people, make sure that you refer to the previous experiments, so that they know how you received their contact information.
  • Always offer the participants that you would remove them from the database if they want to. Remove them if requested.
  • Inform the participants that their data is only available to TU/e and that it will not be given to anybody else. They will only receive invitations to scientific experiments.
  • Do not give the addresses to any third party and only use it to do scientific experiments.

Tony

A distributed interfaces for time-based media (Version 1.5)

Introduction

Tony is an expressive robot that interacts with the inhabitants of an ambient intelligent home and time-based media. He is based on a previous version, described in Hu Jun’s Master Thesis: “Distributed Interfaces for a Time-Based Media Application” (Eindhoven University of Technology). This version is an in-between step towards far more advanced robot that we are planning to build within the framework of the Performance Space project.

Implementation

Tony is able to drive around, turn his head and express emotions in a scale from sadness to happiness. In addition, he has two arms that are equipped with touch sensors, that the user can press to interact with Tony tactile. Tony uses the LeJos firmware to run Java programs and to communicate via infrared with a PC.

Pictures

Tony

Tony in neutral position

 Tony

Tony is happy

 Tony

Tony is sad

Contact

Hu Jun
Eindhoven University of Technology
Department of Industrial Design
Den Dolech 2
5600 MB Eindhoven
The Netherlands
j.hu@tue.nl
Christoph Bartneck
Eindhoven University of Technology
Department of Industrial Design
Den Dolech 2
5600 MB Eindhoven
The Netherlands
christoph@bartneck.de

eMuu

eMuu is an embodied emotional Robot designed as an interface between the ambient intelligent home and its inhabitants. This project was carried out as a cooperation between Philips Research, Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and the Advanced Telecommunication Research Institute International (ATR). eMuu is an ongoing project in the Social Robotics track at the Department of Industrial Design at the TU/e. Continue reading “eMuu”

Emotional Adaptive Robots

In analogy to living creatures in nature, two robots will live in a constrained environment, which forces them to compete for resources. The robots will have certain attributes and behaviors, which will evolve through an adaptive system. This will lead to the development of different strategies for survival. Observers will be able to understand the situation and its dynamics by observing and listening to the emotional expressions of the robots. Continue reading “Emotional Adaptive Robots”