Posts

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Social Robots in Olten

The elective module “Social Robots” by Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel took place from November 4 to 6, 2024 at the Olten Campus. Tamara Siegmann (with the online presentation of the paper “Social and Collaborative Robots in Prison”) was invited as a guest speaker. She made it clear to those present that every member of the university can make a contribution to research. On site were Pepper and NAO from the FHNW Robo Labs as well as Unitree Go2, Alpha Mini, Cozmo, Furby, and Booboo (aka Boo Boo) from Oliver Bendel’s privately funded Social Robots Lab. Unitree Go2 – also called Bao (Chinese for “treasure, darling”) by the lecturer – and Booboo were particularly well received. At the end of the elective module, the students designed social robots – also with the help of generative AI – that they found useful, meaningful or simply attractive. The elective modules have been offered since 2021 and are very popular.

Posted on

The Uncanny Social Robot

The uncanny valley effect is a famous hypothesis. Whether it can be influenced by context is still unclear. In an online experiment, Katharina Kühne and her co-authors Oliver Bendel, Yuefang Zue, and Martin Fischer found a negative linear relationship between a robot’s human likeness and its likeability and trustworthiness, and a positive linear relationship between a robot’s human likeness and its uncaniness. “Social context priming improved overall likability and trust of robots but did not modulate the Uncanny Valley effect.” (Abstract) Katharina Kühne outlined these conclusions in her presentation “Social, but Still Uncanny” – the title of the paper – at the International Conference on Social Robotics 2024 in Odense, Denmark. Like Yuefang Zue and Martin Fischer, she is a researcher at the University of Potsdam. Oliver Bendel teaches and researches at the FHNW School of Business. Together with Tamara Siegmann, he presented a second paper at the ICSR.

Posted on

Robots in Prison

On October 22, 2024, Tamara Siegmann and Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel (School of Business FHNW) presented their project “Robots in Prison” at the ICSR in Odense (Denmark). They investigated whether collaborative and social robots can and should be used in prisons. One result was that modern industrial robots such as cobots and classic service robots such as transportation and cleaning robots hardly create any added value. Instead, they take work away from inmates. In contrast, social robots are conceivable and useful. They bring something to imprisonment that is common in freedom. And – an important point for resocialization – they can combat the loneliness of inmates. The International Conference on Social Robotics is the most important conference for social robotics alongside Robophilosophy. The paper “Social and Collaborative Robots in Prison” will be published in a proceedings volume by Springer at the end of the year.

Posted on

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).

Posted on

Back to the Future

Elon Musk presented the prototypes of his new Cybercab and his new Robovan in October 2024. In this context, he once again said: “The future should look like the future.” (TechCrunch, 10 October 2024) This is an astonishing statement, because if you know a little about the history of robot and vehicle construction, you know that Elon Musk is orientating himself on ideas that were popular 20 to 80 years ago. Brass, copper, silver, gold, and large, matt or polished surfaces – reminiscent of Elektro (1939) and his animal companion Sparko (1940) as well as futuristic vehicles such as Gil Spear’s Chrysler two-seater (1941). Science fiction and fantasy are also likely to play a role in the design of Tesla and co – think of steampunk and cyberpunk in general, and think of movies like “Metropolis” (1927) and “I, Robot” (2004). Elon Musk generally likes to mix ideas from fiction in his developments, for example the large language model called Grok, which takes its name from “Stranger in a Strange Land” and is intended to fulfil claims formulated in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. TechCrunch also points out the backward-looking nature of the Robovan: “The Robovan has a retro-futuristic look – somewhere between a bus from The Jetsons and a toaster from the 1950s. It features silver metallic sides with black details, and strips of light run-ning parallel to the ground along its sides, with doors that slide out from the middle.” (TechCrunch, 10 October 2024) Robots and robotic vehicles could look very different in the 2020s (Photo: Eirik Newth; cropped by Robophilosophy).

Posted on

Robotics in Retail

September 25, 2024 was the first day of the AI & Robotics4Retail Conference 2024 in Bonn. It was part of the “ECR Day 2024”, which took place at the World Conference Center. Numerous practical presentations provide an insight into the most important AI and robotics topics in retail at the moment and provide important ideas for projects in your own company, according to the website. The keynote speech was given by Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel on the topic of “Service robots from a technical, economic and ethical perspective”. From the description: “Service robots have become widespread as cleaning, transportation, and security robots. As vacuum and mopping robots, they can be found in households, airports and hotels. As transport robots, they move around factories and warehouses, move between the buffet and kitchen in restaurants or bring orders to customers in cities. In the form of social robots, they advise and serve us in shopping malls or entertain our children while we shop. Universal robots, human-like machines that help in production and logistics in the morning, dig up the garden in the afternoon and play tennis with us in the evening, are just around the corner. They are connected to multimodal language models that enable or improve their control and perception. The talk presents use cases of this kind, classifies them from a technical, economic and ethical perspective, and takes a look into the future.” Further information about www.robotics-konferenz.de.

Posted on

The Animal Whisperer at ACI 2024

The paper “The Animal Whisperer Project” by Oliver Bendel and Nick Zbinden will be presented at ACI 2024, which takes place in Glasgow this December. It is a conference that brings together the small community of experts in animal-computer interaction and animal-machine interaction. This includes Oliver Bendel, who has been researching in this field since 2012, with a background in animal ethics from the 1980s and 1990s. He initiated the Animal Whisperer project. The developer was Nick Zbinden, who graduated from the FHNW School of Business. From March 2024, three apps were created on the basis of GPT-4: the Cow Whisperer, the Horse Whisperer, and the Dog Whisperer. They can be used to analyze the body language, behaviour, and environment of cows, horses, and dogs. The aim is to avert danger to humans and animals. For example, a hiker can receive a recommendation on his or her smartphone not to cross a pasture if a mother cow and her calves are present. All he or she has to do is call up the application and take photos of the surroundings. The three apps are available as prototypes since August 2024. With the help of prompt engineering and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), they have been given extensive knowledge and skills. Above all, self-created and labeled photos were used. In the majority of cases, the apps correctly describe the animals’ body language and behavior. Their recommendations for human behavior are also adequate (Image: DALL-E 3).

Posted on

Can and Should We Use Robots in Prisons?

Tamara Siegmann and Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel carried out the “Robots in Prison” project in June and July 2024. The student, who is studying business administration at the FHNW School of Business, came up with the idea after taking an elective module on social robots with Oliver Bendel. In his paper “Love Dolls and Sex Robots in Unproven and Unexplored Fields of Application”, the philosopher of technology had already made a connection between robots and prisons, but had not systematically investigated this. They did this together with the help of expert interviews with the intercantonal commissioner for digitalization, several prison directors and employees as well as inmates. The result was the paper “Social and Collaborative Robots in Prison”, which was submitted to the ICSR 2024. The International Conference on Social Robotics is the most important conference for social robotics alongside Robophilosophy. The paper was accepted in September 2024 after a revision of the methods section, which was made more transparent and extensive and linked to a directory on GitHub. This year’s conference will take place in Odense (Denmark) from October 23 to 26. Last year it was held in Doha (Qatar) and the year before last in Florence (Italy).