Category: Artificial Intelligence

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The ICSR 2025 Website is Now Online

The ICSR is one of the leading conferences for social robotics worldwide. The 17th edition will take place from 10 to 12 September 2025 in Naples, Italy. The conference website is now online: icsr2025.eu. “The conference theme, ‘Emotivation at the Core: Empowering Social Robots to Inspire and Connect,’ highlights the essential role of ‘Emotivation’ in social robotics. Emotivation captures the synergy between emotion and motivation, where emotions trigger and sustain motivation during interactions. In social robotics, this concept is key to building trust, fostering empathy, and supporting decision-making by enabling robots to respond sensitively to human emotions, inspiring engagement and action.” (Website ICSR) The most important conferences dates are: Full Paper Submission: March 28th, 2025; Full Paper Notification: May 9th, 2025; Camera-ready: June 30th, 2025; Paper Presentation Days at ICSR’25: September 11th and 12th, 2025. All dates are also listed on the website. Participants will meet for two days at the Parthenope University of Naples and for the third day at the Città della Scienza conference center. All buildings and rooms are also listed on the website. Be part of this excellent conference (Photo: ICSR)!

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22 Chatbots and Voice Assistants

Since 2013, Oliver Bendel has developed 22 chatbots and voice assistants together with his students or colleagues. They can be divided into three categories. The first are moral and immoral chatbots (i.e., forms of moral machines) and empathic voice assistants. The second are chatbots (some with voice output) for dead, endangered, or extinct languages and idioms. The third are pedagogical chatbots and chatbots that give recommendations and advice. Some of the projects lasted between four and six months. Most of the GPTs were created in just a few hours. Exceptions are Miss Tammy and Animal Whisperer, which took several months to build with the help of prompt engineering and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Articles and book chapters have been published on many of the projects. The names of the developers can be found in these. A few chatbots made it into the media, such as GOODBOT (for which the preparatory work began in 2012), LÜGENBOT aka LIEBOT, and @llegra.

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Cleop@tr@ Visits the Karnak Temple

Cleop@tr@ was invented by Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel in May 2024. It is a GPT that specializes in Egyptian. It is also familiar with the culture and history of ancient Egypt. Since 2012, the technology philosopher and information systems specialist has been building chatbots and voice assistants – partly with his students and partly on his own. These have been discussed by the media and found interesting by NASA. Under his supervision, Karim N’diaye developed the chatbot @ve for Latin, Dalil Jabou the voice-enhanced chatbot @llegra for Vallader, and Nicolas Lluis Araya the voice-enhanced chatbot kAIxo for Basque. For some time now, he has been testing the reach of GPTs for endangered languages such as Irish, Maori, and Basque. He is also investigating the potential for extinct languages such as Egyptian (Cleop@tr@) and Akkadian (H@mmur@pi). The GPTs do not readily communicate in hieroglyphics and cuneiform, but they can certainly represent and explain signs of visual languages. It is even possible to enter entire sentences and then ask how they can be improved or what they mean. In December 2024, Oliver Bendel tested his Cleop@tr@ in the Karnak Temple in Luxor. She was able to provide coherent explanations and translations for several inscriptions on columns and walls. However, further tests also revealed clear errors. Ultimately, Egyptologists will have to assess how reliable it is.

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Role Player Nina

Around the turn of the millennium, there were already numerous pedagogical agents, i.e., chatbots, voice assistants, and early social robots in learning environments. Names such as Virtual Learning Companions (VLCs) were also commonly used for the purely virtual versions. One of the companies that was ahead of its time was Extempo Systems, Inc. based in Redwood City, California. The company had evolved out of the Stanford Engineering School and designed and developed commercial agents for entertainment, business, and education: “Extempo makes e-learning products that help corporate em­ployees perfect their people skills. The company’s approach allows every learner to achieve mastery of the people skills they need for effective management, teamwork, sales, customer service, and other critical business functions. Extempo’s products give learners authentic practice in a variety of job-specific conversational role-plays, along with expert individualized coaching throughout the learning process.” (Extempo Systems) One example was the virtual Nina, with whom you could communicate and who you were supposed to motivate to behave in a certain way. It wasn’t just the functionality that was impressive at the time, but also the design of the characters.

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Award for ACI Paper

“The Animal Whisperer Project” by Oliver Bendel (FHNW School of Business) and Nick Zbinden (FHNW School of Business) won the Honourable Mention Short Paper Award at the 2024 ACI Conference. From the abstract: “Generative AI has become widespread since 2022. Technical advancements have resulted in multimodal large language models and other AI models that generate, analyze, and evaluate texts, images, and sounds. Such capabilities can be helpful in encounters between humans and animals. For example, apps with generative AI on a smartphone can be used to assess the body language and behavior of animals – e.g., during a walk or hike – and provide a recommendation for human behavior. It is often useful to take into account the animal’s environment and situation. The apps can help people to avert approaches and attacks, and thus also protect animals. In ‘The Animal Whisperer Project’, three apps were developed as prototypes based on the multimodal large language model GPT-4 from OpenAI from the beginning to mid-2024. Three specific GPTs resulted: the Cow Whisperer, the Horse Whisperer, and the Dog Whisperer. All three showed impressive capabilities after the first prompt engineering. These were improved by implementing information from expert interviews and adding labeled images of animals and other materials. AI-based apps for interpreting body language, behavior, and the overall situation can apparently be created today, without much effort, in a low-budget project. However, turning them into products would certainly raise questions, such as liability in the event of accidents.” The proceedings are available here.

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Awards at ACI ’24

The “Proceedings of the International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction 2024” were published at the end of November 2024, a few days before the conference in Glasgow. The following papers received awards: “Wireless Tension Sensors for Characterizing Dog Frailty in Veterinary Settings” by Colt Nichols (North Carolina State University), Yifan Wu (North Carolina State University), Alper Bozkurt, David Roberts (North Carolina State University) and Margaret Gruen (North Carolina State University): Best Paper Award; “Communication Functions in Speech Board Use by a Goffin’s Cockatoo: Implications for Research and Design” by Jennifer Cunha (Indiana University), Corinne Renguette (Perdue University), Lily Stella (Indiana University) and Clara Mancini (The Open University): Honourable Mention Award; “Surveying The Extent of Demographic Reporting of Animal Participants in ACI Research” by Lena Ashooh (Harvard University), Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas (University of Glasgow) and Rebecca Kleinberger (Northeastern University): Honourable Mention Award; “Shelling Out the Fun: Quantifying Otter Interactions with Instrumented Enrichment Objects” by Charles Ramey (Georgia Institute of Technology), Jason Jones (Georgia Aquarium), Kristen Hannigan (Georgia Aquarium), Elizabeth Sadtler (Georgia Aquarium), Jennifer Odell (Georgia Aquarium), Thad Starner (Georgia Institute of Technology) and Melody Jackson (Georgia Institute of Technology): Best Short Paper Award; “The Animal Whisperer Project” by Oliver Bendel (FHNW School of Business) and Nick Zbinden (FHNW School of Business): Honourable Mention Short Paper Award.

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Human Stuff from AI Characters

“Left to their own devices, an army of AI characters didn’t just survive – they thrived. They developed in-game jobs, shared memes, voted on tax reforms and even spread a religion.” (MIT Technology Review, 27 November 2024) This was reported by MIT Technology Review in an article on November 27. “The experiment played out on the open-world gaming platform Minecraft, where up to 1000 software agents at a time used large language models (LLMs) to interact with one another. Given just a nudge through text prompting, they developed a remarkable range of personality traits, preferences and specialist roles, with no further inputs from their human creators.” (MIT Technology Review, 27 November 2024) According to the magazine, the work by AI startup Altera is part of a broader field that seeks to use simulated agents to model how human groups would react to new economic policies or other interventions. The article entitled “These AI Minecraft characters did weirdly human stuff all on their own” can be accessed here.

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Grandma Daisy Tricks Phone Scammers

“Human-like AIs have brought plenty of justifiable concerns about their ability to replace human workers, but a company is turning the tech against one of humanity’s biggest scourges: phone scammers. The AI imitates the criminals’ most popular target, a senior citizen, who keeps the fraudsters on the phone as long as possible in conversations that go nowhere, à la Grandpa Simpson.” (Techspot, 14 November 2024) This is reported by Techspot in an article from November 14, 2024. In this case, an AI grandmother is sicced on the fraudsters. “The creation of O2, the UK’s largest mobile network operator, Daisy, or dAIsy, is an AI created to trick scammers into thinking they are talking to a real grandmother who likes to ramble. If and when the AI does hand over the demanded bank details, it reads out fake numbers and names.” (Techspot, 14 November 2024) Daisy works by listening to a caller and transcribing his or her voice to text. Responses are generated by a large language model (LLM), complete with character personality layer, and then fed back through a custom AI text-to-speech model to generate a voice response. All this happens in real time, as the magazine reports. As phone scammers use more and more AI in their calls, you will soon find AI systems trying to outsmart each other.

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The kAIxo Project

The interim presentation of the kAIxo project took place on 11 November 2024. Nicolas Lluis Araya is the project collaborator. Chatbots for dead, endangered, and extinct languages are being developed at the FHNW School of Business. One well-known example is @llegra, a chatbot for Vallader. Oliver Bendel recently tested the reach of GPTs for endangered languages such as Irish (Irish Gaelic), Maori, and Basque. According to ChatGPT, there is a relatively large amount of training material available for them. On 12 May 2024 – after Irish Girl and Maori Girl – a first version of Adelina, a chatbot for Basque, was created. It was later improved in a second version. As part of the “kAIxo” project (the Basque “kaixo” corresponds to the English “hello”), the chatbot or voice assistant kAIxo is being built to speak Basque. Its purpose is to keep users practising written or spoken language or to develop the desire to learn the endangered language. The chatbot is based on GPT-4o. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) plays a central role. A ChatSubs dataset is used, which contains dialogues in Spanish and three other official Spanish languages (Catalan, Basque, and Galician). Nicolas Lluis Araya presented a functioning prototype at the interim presentation. This is now to be expanded step by step.

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A New School of Computer Science

All four cantons supporting the FHNW approved the global budget of CHF 204.7 million in September and October 2024. This also clears the way for the new Hochschule für Informatik FHNW (assumed name FHNW School of Computer Science) with a main location in Brugg-Windisch and a secondary location north of the Jura (Basel-Landschaft and Basel-Stadt). It is due to be founded at the beginning of 2025 and will begin its studies in fall 2025. From this date, it will take over the existing computer science courses at the FHNW School of Engineering. During the 2025 – 2028 performance mandate period, the plan is to establish further education and training courses and develop research and development activities. The aim of the new university is to educate and train the IT specialists required by business and administration in Northwestern Switzerland. The degree programs and courses offered by the FHNW School of Business in business information technology, artificial intelligence, and robotics are not affected by this change.  The FHNW School of Computer Science will be the tenth university under the umbrella of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (Photo: Pati Grabowicz).