Author: Oliver Bendel

Posted on

Extended Deadline for RP2020

The organizers of the conference “RP2020: Culturally Sustainable Social Robotics” announced that the deadline for submission has been extended to May 1, 2020. The CfP raises questions like that: “How can we create cultural dynamics with or through social robots that will not impact our value landscape negatively? How can we develop social robotics applications that are culturally sustainable? If cultural sustainability is relative to a community, what can we expect in a global robot market? Could we design human-robot interactions in ways that will positively cultivate the values we, or people anywhere, care about?” (Website Robophilosophy Conference) In 2018 Hiroshi Ishiguro, Guy Standing, Catelijne Muller, Joanna Bryson, and Oliver Bendel had been keynote speakers of the Robophilosophy conference. In 2020, Catrin Misselhorn, Selma Sabanovic, and Shannon Vallor will be presenting. More information via conferences.au.dk/robo-philosophy/.

Posted on

Co-Robots as Care Robots

The paper “Co-Robots as Care Robots” by Oliver Bendel, Alina Gasser and Joel Siebenmann was accepted at the AAAI 2020 Spring Symposia. From the abstract: “Cooperation and collaboration robots, co-robots or cobots for short, are an integral part of factories. For example, they work closely with the fitters in the automotive sector, and everyone does what they do best. However, the novel robots are not only relevant in production and logistics, but also in the service sector, especially where proximity between them and the users is desired or unavoidable. For decades, individual solutions of a very different kind have been developed in care. Now experts are increasingly relying on co-robots and teaching them the special tasks that are involved in care or therapy. This article presents the advantages, but also the disadvantages of co-robots in care and support, and provides information with regard to human-robot interaction and communication. The article is based on a model that has already been tested in various nursing and retirement homes, namely Lio from F&P Robotics, and uses results from accompanying studies. The authors can show that co-robots are ideal for care and support in many ways. Of course, it is also important to consider a few points in order to guarantee functionality and acceptance.” The paper had been submitted to the symposium “Applied AI in Healthcare: Safety, Community, and the Environment”. Oliver Bendel will present the results at Stanford University between 23 and 25 March 2020.

Posted on

Care Robots with Sexual Assistance Functions

The paper “Care Robots with Sexual Assistance Functions” by Oliver Bendel was accepted at the AAAI 2020 Spring Symposia. From the abstract: “Residents in retirement and nursing homes have sexual needs just like other people. However, the semi-public situation makes it difficult for them to satisfy these existential concerns. In addition, they may not be able to meet a suitable partner or find it difficult to have a relationship for mental or physical reasons. People who live or are cared for at home can also be affected by this problem. Perhaps they can host someone more easily and discreetly than the residents of a health facility, but some elderly and disabled people may be restricted in some ways. This article examines the opportunities and risks that arise with regard to care robots with sexual assistance functions. First of all, it deals with sexual well-being. Then it presents robotic systems ranging from sex robots to care robots. Finally, the focus is on care robots, with the author exploring technical and design issues. A brief ethical discussion completes the article. The result is that care robots with sexual assistance functions could be an enrichment of the everyday life of people in need of care, but that we also have to consider some technical, design and moral aspects.” The paper had been submitted to the symposium “Applied AI in Healthcare: Safety, Community, and the Environment”. Oliver Bendel will present the paper at Stanford University between 23 and 25 March 2020.

Posted on

Towards a Human-like Chatbot

Google is currently working on Meena, a particular chatbot, which should be able to have arbitrary conversations and be used in many contexts. In their paper “Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot“, the developers present the 2.6 billion parameters end-to-end trained neural conversational model. They show that Meena “can conduct conversations that are more sensible and specific than existing state-of-the-art chatbots”. “Such improvements are reflected through a new human evaluation metric that we propose for open-domain chatbots, called Sensibleness and Specificity Average (SSA), which captures basic, but important attributes for human conversation. Remarkably, we demonstrate that perplexity, an automatic metric that is readily available to any neural conversational models, highly correlates with SSA.” (Google AI Blog) The company draws a comparison with OpenAI GPT-2, a model used in “Talk to Transformer” and Harmony, among others, which uses 1.5 billion parameters and is based on the text content of 8 million web pages.

Posted on

HTML, SSML, AIML – and MOML?

On behalf of Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel, a student at the School of Business FHNW, Alessandro Spadola, investigated in the context of machine ethics whether markup languages such as HTML, SSML and AIML can be used to transfer moral aspects to machines or websites and whether there is room for a new language that could be called Morality Markup Language (MOML). He presented his results in January 2020. From the management summary: “However, the idea that owners should be able to transmit their own personal morality has been explored by Bendel, who has proposed an open way of transferring morality to machines using a markup language. This research paper analyses whether a new markup language could be used to imbue machines with their owners’ sense of morality. This work begins with an analysis how a markup language is structured, describes the current well-known markup languages and analyses their differences. In doing so, it reveals that the main difference between the well-known markup languages lies in the different goals they pursue which at the same time forms the subject, which is marked up. This thesis then examines the possibility of transferring personal morality with the current languages available and discusses whether there is a need for a further language for this purpose. As is shown, morality can only be transmitted with increased effort and the knowledge of human perception because it is only possible to transmit them by interacting with the senses of the people. The answer to the question of whether there is room for another markup language is ‘yes’, since none of the languages analysed offer a simple way to transmit morality, and simplicity is a key factor in markup languages. Markup languages all have clear goals, but none have the goal of transferring and displaying morality. The language that could assume this task is ‘Morality Markup’, and the present work describes how such a language might look.” (Management Summary) The promising results are to be continued in the course of the year by another student in a bachelor thesis.

Posted on

Will Biorobots Clean Up the Seas?

In a paper published on 13 January 2020, researchers from the University of Vermont and Tufts University discuss computer-designed, novel organisms called Xenobots. Xenobots consist of skin and muscle cells. The skin cells stabilize the organisms, the muscle cells enable them to perform different activities. A nervous system is not present. An AI system calculates the optimal structure and ratio of the cells in relation to a specific function. The Xenobots are assembled according to the resulting construction plan. In fact, the cells appear to work together. The researchers see different areas of application. One could build Xenobots that move forward in the sea and have a pocket inside in which they collect microplastics. Once the biorobots are filled, they can go to a place where they die, whereby it is not clear whether they live at all, like classical organisms. In any case, all that would remain in this place would be the plastic particles and functionless cells. Both can easily be disposed of. However, Xenobots would also be swallowed by marine animals like fishs and turtles during their work and would be exposed to other dangers. In addition, normal robots are better suited for the removal of macroplastics.

Posted on

The Birth of the Morality Menu

The idea of a morality menu (MOME) was born in 2018 in the context of machine ethics. It should make it possible to transfer the morality of a person to a machine. On a display you can see different rules of behaviour and you can activate or deactivate them with sliders. Oliver Bendel developed two design studies, one for an animal-friendly vacuum cleaning robot (LADYBIRD), the other for a voicebot like Google Duplex. At the end of 2018, he announced a project at the School of Business FHNW. Three students – Ozan Firat, Levin Padayatty and Yusuf Or – implemented a morality menu for a chatbot called MOBO from June 2019 to January 2020. The user enters personal information and then activates or deactivates nine different rules of conduct. MOBO compliments or does not compliment, responds with or without prejudice, threatens or does not threaten the interlocutor. It responds to each user individually, says his or her name – and addresses him or her formally or informally, depending on the setting. A video of the MOBO-MOME is available here.

Posted on

The Old, New Neons

The company Neon picks up an old concept with its Neons, namely that of avatars. Twenty years ago, Oliver Bendel distinguished between two different types in the Lexikon der Wirtschaftsinformatik. With reference to the second, he wrote: “Avatars, on the other hand, can represent any figure with certain functions. Such avatars appear on the Internet – for example as customer advisors and newsreaders – or populate the adventure worlds of computer games as game partners and opponents. They often have an anthropomorphic appearance and independent behaviour or even real characters …” (Lexikon der Wirtschaftsinformatik, 2001, own translation) It is precisely this type that the company, which is part of the Samsung Group and was founded by Pranav Mistry, is now adapting, taking advantage of today’s possibilities. “These are virtual figures that are generated entirely on the computer and are supposed to react autonomously in real time; Mistry spoke of a latency of less than 20 milliseconds.” (Heise Online, 8 January 2019, own translation) The neons are supposed to show emotions (as do some social robots that are conquering the market) and thus facilitate and strengthen bonds. “The AI-driven character is neither a language assistant a la Bixby nor an interface to the Internet. Instead, it is a friend who can speak several languages, learn new skills and connect to other services, Mistry explained at CES.” (Heise Online, 8 January 2019, own translation)

Posted on

Another Animal-friendly Machine

Between June 2019 and January 2020 the project HAPPY HEDGEHOG (HHH) was implemented at the School of Business FHNW. Initiator and client was Oliver Bendel. In the context of machine ethics, the students Emanuel Graf, Kevin Bollier, Michel Beugger and Vay Lien Chang developed the prototype of a lawnmower robot that stops working as soon as it discovers a hedgehog. HHH has a thermal imaging camera. If it encounters a warm object, it further examines it using image recognition. At night a lamp mounted on top helps. After training with hundreds of photos, HHH can identify a hedgehog quite accurately. Firstly, another moral machine has been created in the laboratory, and secondly, the team provides a possible solution to a problem that frequently occurs in practice: commercial lawnmower robots often kill baby hedgehogs in the dark. HAPPY HEDGEHOG could help save them. The video on youtu.be/ijIQ8lBygME shows it without casing; a photo with casing can be found here. The robot is in the tradition of LADYBIRD, another animal-friendly machine.

Posted on

Opportunities and Risks of Facial Recognition

The book chapter “The BESTBOT Project” by Oliver Bendel, David Studer and Bradley Richards was published on 31 December 2019. It is part of the 2nd edition of the “Handbuch Maschinenethik”, edited by Oliver Bendel. From the abstract: “The young discipline of machine ethics both studies and creates moral (or immoral) machines. The BESTBOT is a chatbot that recognizes problems and conditions of the user with the help of text analysis and facial recognition and reacts morally to them. It can be seen as a moral machine with some immoral implications. The BESTBOT has two direct predecessor projects, the GOODBOT and the LIEBOT. Both had room for improvement and advancement; thus, the BESTBOT project used their findings as a basis for its development and realization. Text analysis and facial recognition in combination with emotion recognition have proven to be powerful tools for problem identification and are part of the new prototype. The BESTBOT enriches machine ethics as a discipline and can solve problems in practice. At the same time, with new solutions of this kind come new problems, especially with regard to privacy and informational autonomy, which information ethics must deal with.” (Abstract) The book chapter can be downloaded from link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-658-17484-2_32-1.