Scaz probes humanity, robots
Bright yellow, with a cartoonish nose and pair of eyes and standing about 4 inches tall above its base, Keepon looks like a cross between a marshmallow Peep and a snowman. And Keepon has become a YouTube sensation — because this robot can dance.
Keepon can improvise to any song with a reasonable beat, said Brian “Scaz” Scassellati, a computer science professor who received tenure last week, exposing the robot’s inner workings while putting him through his paces. Partially built by former undergraduate Marek Michalowski ’02 GRD ’03 and imported from Japan, Keepon helps Scaz and his...
I appreciate the plug for my research, but I feel like I should clarify. Prof. Scassellati and I, in along with Prof. Steve Zucker and undergraduates David Golub and Eleanor Avrunin are studying how to enable robots to understand the structure of their bodies, including their senses in this model.
We haven't published any results disproving anything, yet, but we are fiddling around with a model of how infants learn the focal length of their eye (which is referred to in the article). What we're doing doesn't overtly disagree with psychology, but it will provide a proof of concept that could clarify matters, and my current analysis of the matter disagrees with what I first thought of when I heard of this theory. I'm not sure that a treatment of the matter has ever been so detailed as to really disprove it, and what we're doing is somewhat related. I guess a better way to phrase it would be that it changes the view, though I think I might have said "disprove" during our chat. I'd rather not further comment, since the result is both unfinished and unpublished.
In a broader context, what we've enabled Nico to do so far is to continue to see in 3D after his eyes move by modeling how they move while looking through them. We believe that infants start out with little or no concept of how their bodies work, and learn this through a process of self-exploration, which we are trying to simulate on Nico.
Anyway, thanks for the wonderful write-up on my advisor. I hope that my comment wasn't too nit-picky!