.@robotandfrank: Two thumbs up from me

Avid readers of this blog (all three of you) might recall that back in February I mentioned I was looking forward to watching Robot & Frank.

I finally managed to watch it today at the BFI London Film Festival, and cannot recommend it enough. It’s intelligent, funny, poignant and futuristic all at the same time. I wondered whether it would start dragging at any point but the narrative and editing held beautifully, the cast was amazing and the acting compelling. It’s also the first time I’ve seen a robot in an indie movie, and it was a great first for me in that respect.

Robots & Avatars (thanks @gboddington for the invite)

Last week I went to the press preview of Robots & Avatars, a selection of installations and projects examining how digital technologies can influence how human bodies might work a decade or so from now. It was put together by Body>Data>Space, an organisation that creates connections between performance, architecture, virtual worlds and new media and involved a range of collaborators and funders from across the globe, including MADE (Mobility for Digital Arts in Europe), RACIF (Robots and Avatars Collaborative and Intergenerational Futures), FACT (Foundation for Arts & Creative Technologies), the Knowledge Transfer Network and NESTA.

The commissions and exhibits were rather fascinating; my favourites were the following:

Visions of our communal dreams by Michael Takeo Magruder, Drew Baker, Erik Fleming and David Steele: Inside a beautiful golden painting frame is a digital screen that shows a virtual world that links to the physical, examining our relationships to our avatars in this digital age. Sort of like Second Life in a painting.

MeYouandUs by Alastair Elibeck and James Bailey: A camera next to a large screen records your movements as you walk by and plays them back with a slight delay, making you re-examine your movements and identity.

My Robot Companion by Anna Dumitriu, Alex May, Dr. Michael L.Walters and Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn: This reminded me of the robot companions I saw courtesy LIREC a couple of years ago. My Robot Companion is a robot whose face alone changes based on who is standing in front of it. The idea is to think about how we’d behave if we have robots as companions: what form would we want them to take? How would we interact with them?

It’s worth looking at all the projects on display – they do make you think about where technology can take us and if we’ll be equipped to consider both the practical and the larger philosophical questions that will face us at some point as a society.

The evening also featured a performance by digital artist Marco Donnaruma – a dance involving wearable technology that enabled him to produce sounds using his muscles. Yes, I did a double take when I saw that too. From his website:

During my performance muscle movements and blood flow produce subcutaneous mechanical oscillations, which are nothing but low frequency sound waves. Two microphone sensors capture the sonic matter created by my limbs and send it to a computer. This develops an understanding of my kinetic behaviour by *listening* to the friction of my flesh. Specific gesture, force levels and patterns are identified in real time by the computer; then, according to this information, it manipulates algorithmically the sound of my flesh and diffuses it through an octophonic system.

Robots and Avatars is a touring exhibition that is currently on show in London till 28th September at 12 Star Gallery, Europe House, 32 Smith Square – definitely worth a quick visit if you’re interested in technology and new media.

A big Thank You to Ghislaine Boddington, Creative Director at Body>Data>Space for the invitation.

Jumping robot thing, via @heyitsnoah

This is really quite cool.

The internet of things: coming ever closer

Last week I went to a talk at NESTA where Usman Haque and Matt Jones mentioned some interesting quotes in their presentations that I wanted to note down:

Personal data is the new oil of the Internet and the new currency of the digital world : Meglena Kuneva, European Commissioner for Consumer Protection (from this 2009 speech)

Lying about the future produces history: Umberto Eco

When you cut into the present, the future leaks out: William S. Burroughs

Be as smart as a puppy: IDEO via Matt Jones

Image from Usman Haque's recent presentation on IoT

Amidst all the talk of open data, Haque made an interesting point when he said that we’re not quite in the ‘internet of things’ yet, where machines are interconnected to each other. We’re still in the machine-to-machine phase (one-to-one) where data is in silos. Nike controls the Nike+ data, for example (see his presentation from earlier this year).  He mentioned the Natural Fuse project as an example of people controlling machines: the survival of plants in the project is dependent on the community.

Matt Jones showed us this funny video about Siri and mentioned the difference between smart devices and smart pliable devices.

As Usman Haque said, there is an increasingly blurred line between ‘digital’ and ‘physical’. Most digital things still need some physical input from humans anyway, so they aren’t truly digital in that sense of the word.

I was reminded of Matt Webb’s talk at the Royal Institution a while ago when someone at the NESTA talk (I forget who) mentioned that the real internet of things will be when we are able to buy easily operable devices at Argos that pull in useful digital data.

Today, the BERG folk released Little Printer and the BERG Cloud. As Russell Davies said, it took them 5 years to get from an initial prototype to this, so we shouldn’t underestimate the amount of effort involved. But the fact that there are projects like Little Printer and Twine happening at shorter intervals these days is a good sign. Maybe we will see them in Argos soon.

In the meantime, I’ve backed Twine and signed up for updates on the Little Printer. Take a look at the two here:

Hello Little Printer, available 2012 from BERG on Vimeo.

The Eyeborg documentary

Saw this a while ago on the Guardian blog. It’s amazing and spooky all at once. The makers of the video game Deus Ex commissioned a documentary on prosthetics and robotics. It features conversations with multiple folk who actually have an automated body part, as it were, Terminator-style. The best part? The eyeborg of course. Really makes me wonder about how amazing the future can be. We live in exciting times.

Bots High: the movie

I certainly look forward to the release (in October) of Bots High, a documentary that traces students at a high school in the US as they make combat robots for a national competition in Florida. Why didn’t I get to do this cool stuff in school?!

Via Automaton

The rise of the robot writers

Narrative Science is a startup that creates editorial content automatically from data. They say that their app ‘generates news stories, industry reports, headlines and more — at scale and without human authoring or editing’. Last week, they attracted $6 million in seed funding.

I’m sure they will never really replace journalistic content, but I’d love to see how they progress. News organisations today are under a lot of pressure to go digital and find better monetisation models – could this be one of them?

As this article says:

I suppose some people might get queasy about the idea of robot writers, but I think it makes perfect sense. There’s lots of content-making that machines can and should do much faster than humans, and at least as effectively.

Meanwhile, the push to produce more copy for less has been underway for a long time, even for publishers that don’t get labeled “content farms“–Reuters moved some of its financial-reporting resources to India years ago, and you never hear a peep about that.

Tweenbots on Kickstarter

It’s been almost a couple of years since Kacie Kinzer, then graduating from NYU’s ITP programme, created Tweenbots as a course project. I fell in love with the idea almost immediately, so I was understandably thrilled this week when I received an email saying that she has figured out how to produce a Tweenbot kit that will enable anyone (me!!) to create a Tweenbot of their own. I’ve backed the project on Kickstarter, and I think you should too, for both selfish and non-selfish reasons (I do think they’re a great example of anthropology’s technology-driven Renaissance*).

*credit for the phrase goes to Ken Banks.

Anthropomorphizing robots

More on robots using anthropomorphic qualities to endear themselves to us, by Russell Davies in Wired:

In fact, for all their potential as workers, nurses or bomb-disposal experts, I suspect robots will really come into their own when they start manipulating human emotions. They can be fast or strong, delicate or relentless, but the really killer app will come when we can strap a big pair of blinking eyes on them and get them making warbling noises. Robots don’t have to look like us for us to love them; they just have to look cute — like Johnny 5, R2D2 or Dewey. Robot scientists’ main skill might turn out not to be hacking batteries and algorithms, it might be hacking our attention.

Image of Johnny 5 by*USB* via Flickr, courtesy a Creative Commons license

Robots and that

This post is more just for me to note down some of my favourite robots of recent times than anything else. Some of you probably know them all – so pardon the self-indulgence.

As I mentioned earlier, I think robots are especially of relevance as we move into an era of increasing physical-digital connectivity (think internet of things, urban computing). Chris Heathcote mentioned some great examples, some of which (Nabaztag, for example) use robotic emotions and/or function as utilities and are also favourites of mine, during his talk on urban computing at Planningness in New York. If you haven’t looked at that yet, you should.

In no particular order:

1. Tweenbots: A project by Kacie Kinzer at NYU’s ITP last year, it sought to look at the question of how we as humans interact with the space and objects around us, especially if that object displays human qualities.

2. Voicebox: A robot-led data visualization project by the UK’s youth volunteering service vInspired, which curated the thoughts of young people on issues of the day, visualised it and then set the data free.

3. Availabot: An instant messaging buddy which flops over when your friends are offline, and stands up when they come online, built by BERG.

KinectBot is still premature, but it has the potential to be extremely interesting and useful: it was a weekend-hacking project by Philipp Robel of the MIT’s Robotics Lab and can respond to human gestures. I like that it was built by hacking the Xbox Kinect camera.

Bonus: A fun video of Robbie the robot, who’s trying to ‘make a life on the streets’ (HT Wired UK) – you can’t not smile!