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My job is to design, build and study
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robots that communicate with people.
-
But this story doesn't start with robotics at all,
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it starts with animation.
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When I first saw Pixar's Luxo Jr.,
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I was amazed by how much emotion
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they could put into something
-
as trivial as a desk lamp.
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I mean look at them -- at the end of this movie,
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you actually feel something for two pieces of furniture.
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(Laughter)
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And I said, I have to learn how to do this.
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So I made a really bad career decision. (Laughter)
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And that's what my mom was like when I did it.
-
(Laughter)
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I left a very quasi-tech job in Israel
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with an iSoftware company and I moved to New York
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to study animation.
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And there I lived
-
in a collapsing apartment building
in Harlem with roommates.
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I'm not using this phrase metaphorically,
-
the ceiling actually collapsed one day
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in our living room. (Laughter)
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Whenever they did those news stories
about building violations in New York,
-
they would put the report in front of our building.
(Laughter)
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As kind of like a backdrop
to show how bad things are.
-
Anyway, during the day I went to school and at night
-
I would sit and draw frame-by-frame
of pencil animation.
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And I learned two surprising lessons --
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one of them was that
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when you want to arouse emotions,
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it doesn't matter so much how something looks,
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it's all in the motion -- it's in the timing
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of how the thing moves.
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And the second, was something
one of our teachers told us.
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He actually did the weasel in Ice Age.
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And he said:
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"As an animator you are not a director, you're an actor."
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So, if you want to find the right motion for a character,
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don't think about it, go use your body to find it --
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stand in front of a mirror, act it out
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in front of a camera -- whatever you need.
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And then put it back in your character.
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A year later I found myself at MIT
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in the robotic life group, it was one of the first groups
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researching the relationships
between humans and robots.
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And I still had this dream to make
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an actual, physical Luxo Jr. lamp.
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But I found that robots didn't move at all
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in this engaging way that I was used to
-
for my animation studies.
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Instead, they were all --
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how should I put it, they were all kind of robotic.
-
(Laughter)
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And I thought what if I took whatever
I learned in animation school,
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and used that to design my robotic desk lamp.
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So I went and designed frame-by-frame
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to try to make this robot
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as graceful and engaging as possible.
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And here when you see the robot interacting with me
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on a desktop.
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And I'm actually really [unclear] the robot so,
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unbenounced to itself,
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it's kind of digging its own grave by helping me.
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(Laughter)
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I wanted it to be less of a mechanical structure
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giving me light,
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and more of a helpful, kind of quiet apprentice
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that's always there when you need
it and doesn't really interfere.
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And when, for example, I'm looking for a battery
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that I can't find,
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in a subtle way, it will show me where the battery is.
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So you can see my confusion here.
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I'm not an actor.
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And I want you to notice how the same
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mechanical structure can at one point,
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just by the way it moves seem gentle and caring --
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and the other case, seem violent and confrontational.
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And it's the same structure,
just the motion is different.
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Actor: "You want to know something?
Well, you want to know something?
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He was already dead!
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Just lay there, eyes glazed over!"
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(Laughter)
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But, moving in graceful ways is just one
building block of this whole structure
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called human-robot interaction.
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I was at the time doing my PHD,
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I was working on human robot teamwork;
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teams of humans and robots working together.
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I was studying the engineering,
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the psychology, the philosophy of teamwork.
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And at the same time I found myself
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in my own kind of teamwork situation
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with a good friend of mine who is actually here.
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And in that situation we can easily imagine robots
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in the near future being there with us.
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It was after Passover Seder.
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We were folding up a lot of folding chairs,
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and I was amazed at how quickly
we found our own rhythm.
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Everybody did their own part.
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We didn't have to divide our tasks.
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We didn't have to communicate verbally about this.
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It all just happened.
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And I thought,
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humans and robots don't look at all like this.
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When humans and robots interact,
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it's much more like a chess game.
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The human does a thing,
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the robot analyzes whatever the human did,
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then the robot decides what to do next,
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plans it and does it.
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And then the human waits, until its their turn again.
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So, it's much more like a chess game
-
and that makes sense because chess is great
-
for mathematicians and computer scientists.
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It's all about information analysis,
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decision making and planning.
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But I wanted my robots to be less of a chess player,
-
and more like -- you know -- like a doer
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that just clicks and works together.
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So I made my second horrible career choice:
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I decided to study acting for a semester.
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I took off from a PHD, I went to acting classes.
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I actually participated in a play,
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I hope theres no video of that around still. (Laughter)
-
And I got every book I could find about acting.
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Including one from the 19th century
-
that I got from the library.
-
And I was really amazed because
my name was the second on the list --
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the previous name was in 1889. (Laughter)
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And this book was kind of waiting for 100 years
-
to be rediscovered for robotics.
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And this book shows actors
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how to move every muscle in the body
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to match every kind of emotion
that they want to express.
-
But the real relevation was
-
when I learned about method acting.
-
It became very popular in the 20th century.
-
And method acting said, you don't have
to plan every muscle in your body.
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Instead you have to use your body
to find the right movement.
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You have to use your sense memory
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to reconstruct the emotions and kind of
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think with your body to find the right expression.
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Improvise, play off yor scene partner.
-
And this came at the same time
as I was reading about this trend
-
in cognitive psychology called embodied cognition.
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Which also talks about the same ideas --
-
We use our bodies to think,
-
we don't just think with our brains
and use our bodies to move.
-
but our bodies feed back into our brain
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to generate the way that we behave.
-
And it was like a lightning bolt.
-
I went back to my office.
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I wrote this paper -- which I never really published
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called "Acting Lessons for Artificial Intelligence."
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And I even took another month
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to do what was then the first theater play
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with a human and a robot acting together.
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That's what you say before with an actress.
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And I thought:
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How can we make an artificial intelligence model --
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computer, computational model --
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that will model some of these ideas of improvisation?
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Of taking risks of taking chances.
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Even of making mistakes.
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Maybe it can make for better robotic teammates.
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So I worked for quite a long time on these models
-
and I implemented them on a number of robots.
-
Here you can see a very early example
-
with the robots trying to use this
embodied artificial intelligence,
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to try to match my movements as closely as possible.
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It's sort of like a game.
-
Let's look at it.
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You can see when I psych it out, it gets fooled.
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And it's a little bit like what you might see actors do
-
when they try to mirror each other
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to find the right synchrony between them.
-
And then, I did another experiment,
-
and I got people off the street
to use the robotic desk lamp,
-
and try out this idea of embodied artificial intelligence.
-
So,
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I actually used two kinds of brains for the same robot.
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The robot is the same lamp that you saw,
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and I put in it two brains.
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For one half of the people,
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I put in a brain that's kind of the traditional,
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calculated robotic brain.
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It waits for its turn, it analyzes everything, it plans --
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let's call is the call it the calculated brain.
-
The other, got more the stage actor, risk taker brain.
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Let's call it the adventurous brain.
-
It sometimes acts without knowing
everything it has to know.
-
It sometimes makes mistakes and corrects them.
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And I had them do this very tedious task
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that took almost 20 minutes
-
and they had to work together.
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Somehow simulating like a factory job
-
of repetitively doing the same thing.
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And what I found was that people actually loved
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the adventurous robot.
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And they thought it was more intelligent,
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more committed, a better member of the team,
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contributed to the success of the team more.
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They even called it 'he' and 'she',
-
whereas people with the calculated brain called it 'it'.
-
And nobody ever called it 'he' or 'she'.
-
When they talked about it after the task
-
with adventurous brain, (laughter)
-
they said,"by the end we were good
friends and high-fived mentally."
-
Whatever that means.
-
(Laughter)
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Whereas the people with the calculated brain
-
said it was just like a lazy apprentice.
-
It only did what it was supposed
to do and nothing more.
-
Which is almost what people expect robots to do,
-
so I was surprised that people
had higher expectations
-
of robots, than what anybody in robotics
thought robots should be doing.
-
And in a way, I thought, maybe it's time --
-
just like method acting changed the way
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people thought about acting in the 19th century,
-
from going from the very calculated,
-
planned way of behaving,
-
to a more intuitive, risk-taking,
embodied way of behaving.
-
Maybe it's time for robots
-
to have the same kind of revolution.
-
A few years later,
-
I was at my next research job
at Georgia Tech in Atlanta,
-
and I was working in a group
-
dealing with robotic musicians.
-
And I thought -- music -- that's the perfect place
-
to look at teamwork, coordination,
-
timing, improvisation --
-
and we just got this robot playing marimba.
-
Marimba, for everybody [unclear] like me,
-
it was this huge, wooden xylophone.
-
And, when I was looking at this,
-
I looked at other works in
human-robot improvisation.
-
Yes, there are other works in
human-robot improvisation,
-
and they were also a little bit like a chess game.
-
The human would play,
-
the robot would analyze what was played --
-
would improvise their own part.
-
So, this is what musicians called
-
a call and response interaction,
-
and it also fits very well, robots
and artificial intelligence.
-
But I thought, if I use the same ideas I used in the
-
theater play and in the teamwork studies,
-
maybe I can make the robots jam together
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like a band.
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Everybody's riffing off each other,
nobody is stopping it for a moment.
-
And so, I tried to do the same
things, this time with music,
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where the robot doesn't really know
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what it's about to play.
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It just sort of moves its body
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and uses opportunities to play,
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And does what my chess teacher,
when I was 17, taught me.
-
She said, when you improvise,
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sometimes you don't know what you're doing
-
and you're still doing it.
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And so I tried to make a robot that doesn't actually
-
know what it's doing, but it's still doing it.
-
So let's look at a few seconds
from this performance.
-
Where the robot listens to the human musician
-
and improvises.
-
And then, look how the human musician also
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responds to what the robot is doing, and picking up
-
from its behavior.
-
And at some point can even be surprised
by what the robot came up with.
-
(Music is played by the musician and the robot)
-
(Applause)
-
Being a musician is not just about making notes,
-
otherwise nobody would every go see a live show.
-
Musicians also communicate with their bodies,
-
with other band members, with the audience,
-
they use their bodies to express the music.
-
And I thought, we already have
a robot musician on stage,
-
why not make it be a full-fledged musician.
-
And I started designing a socially expressive head
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for the robot.
-
The head does't actually touch the marimba,
-
it just expresses what the music is like.
-
These are some napkin sketches
from a bar in Atlanta,
-
that was dangerously located exactly halfway
-
between my lab and my home. (Laughter)
-
So I spent, I would say on average,
-
three to four hours a day there.
-
I think. (Laughter)
-
And I went back to my animation
tools and tried to figure out
-
not just what a robotic musician would look like,
-
but especially what a robotic
musician would move like.
-
To sort of show that it doesn't like
what the other person is playing --
-
and maybe show whatever beat it's feeling
-
at the moment. (Laughter)
-
So we ended up actually getting the money
to build this robot which was nice.
-
I'm going to show you now the
same kind of performance --
-
this time with a socially expressive head.
-
And notice one thing --
-
how the robot is really showing us
-
the beat it's picking up from the human.
-
When also giving the human a sense,
like the robot knows what it's doing.
-
And also how it changes the way it moves
-
as soon as it starts its own solo.
-
(Robot interacting with music played by musician)
-
And now look at the final chord of the piece again,
-
and this time the robot communicates with its body
-
when it's busy doing its own thing.
-
And when its ready
-
to coordinate the final chord with me.
-
(Musician and robot playing music together)
-
(Robot and musician play final chord in synchrony)
-
(Applause)
-
Thanks. I hope you see how much this,
-
how much this part of the body
that doesn't touch the instrument
-
actually helps with the musical performance.
-
We are in Atlanta, so obviously some rapper
-
will come into our lab at some point. (Laughter)
-
And we had this rapper come in
-
and do a little jam with the robot.
-
And here you can see the robot
-
basically responding to the beat and --
-
notice two things. One, how irresistible it is
-
to join the robot while it's moving its head.
-
and you kind of want to move
your own head when it does it.
-
And second, even though the rapper
is really focused on his iPhone,
-
as soon as the robot turns to him, he turns back.
-
So even though it's just in
the periphery of his vision --
-
it's just in the corner of his eye --
it's very powerful.
-
And the reason is that we can't ignore
-
physical things moving our environment.
-
We are wired for that.
-
So, if you have a problem with maybe your partners
-
looking at the iPhone too much
or their smartphone too much,
-
you might want to have a robot there
-
to get their attention. (Laughter)
-
(Rapping to music)
-
(Laughter)
-
(Applause)
-
Just to introduce the last robot
-
that we've worked on --
-
that came out of something kind
of surprising that we found --
-
at some point people didn't care anymore
about the robot being so intelligent,
-
and can improvise and listen,
-
and do all these embodied intelligence
things that I spent years on developing.
-
They really like that the robot
was enjoying the music.
-
And they didn't say that the
robot was moving to the music,
-
they said that the robot was enjoying the music.
-
And we thought, why don't we take this idea,
-
and I designed a new piece of furniture.
-
This time it wasn't a desk
lamp it was a speaker dock.
-
It was one of those things you
plug your smartphone in.
-
And I thought, what would happen
-
if your speaker dock didn't
just play the music for you,
-
but it would actually enjoy it to. (Laughter)
-
And so again, here are some animation tests
-
from an early stage. (Laughter)
-
And this is what the final product looked like.
-
(Music playing in synchrony
with the robot's movements)
-
So, a lot of bobbing head.
-
(Applause)
-
A lot of bobbing heads in the audience,
-
so we can still see robots influence people.
-
And it's not just fun and games.
-
I think one of the reasons I care so much
-
about robots that use their body to communicate
-
and use their body to move --
-
and I'm going to let you in on a little
secret we roboticists are hiding --
-
is that every one of you is
going to be living with a robot
-
at some point in their life. (Laughter)
-
Somewhere in your future there's
going to be a robot in your life.
-
And if not in yours, then in your children's life.
-
And I want these robots to be --
-
to be more fluent, more engaging, more graceful
-
than currently they seem to be.
-
And for that I think that maybe robots
-
need to be less like chess players
-
and more like stage actors and more like musicians.
-
Maybe they should be able to
take chances and improvise.
-
And maybe they should be able to
anticipate what you're about to do.
-
And maybe they need to be able to make mistakes
-
and correct them,
-
because in the end we are human.
-
And maybe as humans, robots
that are a little less than perfect
-
are just perfect for us.
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)
Amirpouya Ghaemian
Hi,
5:07 - 5:09
But the real relevation was ...
Is that a "revelation" ?
because I hear so ...
Krystian Aparta
The English transcript was updated on 12/7/2015.