Emotional Intelligence

Diese Rubrik zeigt einen Ausschnitt unseres neuen Magazins engine, mit dem speziell Ingenieure ihre Englisch-Kenntnisse erweitern. Das Thema: Roboter und Bildschirmmännchen zeigen Gefühle. Werden daraus gewonnene Erkenntnisse richtig umgesetzt, erleichtern sie uns den Umgang mit Maschinen.

Hello there, I'm Mexi. Like a curious rabbit, the little fellow with the tinny voice perks up his ears and beams. He stares at the unfamiliar guest for a while, but then his attention seems to wane, and he gazes at the floor apathetically, then sets his sights on two colored balls that lie in front of him on a table -- until that gets too boring for him as well. ¿Mexi has needs just like a person," says 43-year-old Dr. Bernd Kleinjohann, Deputy Director of C-LAB in Paderborn, Germany, a research institute run jointly by Siemens and the University of Paderborn. ¿Once a need has been satisfied, he loses interest -- like an infant."
Kleinjohann is one of the fathers -- or rather creators -- of Mexi, the Machine with Emotionally Extended Intelligence. Mexi is not a living thing, but rather a somewhat bizarre concoction made of plexiglas, microchips, motors, cameras and small lights. Nevertheless, with its protruding eyes and its lips of red cord, the robot looks somehow human, almost endearing. You automatically smile back and catch yourself wanting to talk to this artificial head. And indeed, Mexi can already speak short sentences and express emotions. For instance, he raises his voice when he's happy, and lowers it when he's in a bad mood.

Role Models
Does Mexi have feelings? ¿No, he just appears to," says Kleinjohann, shaking his head as he opens the Emotion Engine on a PC, from which Mexi can be programmed. Three slide controls appear on the screen. They represent the alternating desires Mexi tries to satisfy: communication (looking at people), play (watching colored balls) and greeting the Linux mascot -- a penguin doll. With the help of another control, Mexi can display a wider range of emotions. He can show fear, for example, by cringing when someone waves a hand in front of his camera eyes or comes too close for comfort.
Mexi has two famous role models: Cog and Kismet, both of which were built at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) just outside of Boston. Robot pioneer Professor Rodney Brooks proceeded from the hypothesis that a robot can acquire attributes similar to those of a human being only if it is allowed to explore its surroundings in the same way a small child does. Cog is now able to distinguish the faces of his handlers from strangers' faces, and he can tell whether or not a person is looking directly at him. Like Mexi, Kismet, the successor to Cog, has feelings. If no one pays attention to him, he looks sad. ¿Kismet was designed to emotionally blackmail people," says his creator, Cynthia Breazeal.

The Need for Emotions
Neglected by cognitive researchers until recently, emotions now seem to be essential to the success of artificial intelligence, a field that has disappointed many since its promising birth in the 1960s and ´70s. The Affective Computing research group at MIT is proceeding from the assumption that emotions are important for the ability of intelligent machines to make flexible and rational decisions.
The researchers draw this inference in part from studies conducted by Antonio Damasio, a neurologist at the University of Iowa. In the course of his research, Damasio discovered that emotionally disturbed patients make their decisions much as computers do -- inflexibly and according to simple if-then patterns.
All of this is speculation for Bernd Kleinjohann. He's not particularly concerned whether Mexi's emotions are genuine or pretend. What's important, he believes, are the feelings that the artificial head triggers in people. ,,People project their emotions onto technical devices they interact with," he observes. Although robots or artificial characters on a screen ¿ so called avatars -- do not have real feelings themselves, they trigger emotional reactions in people. And this can be used, for example, to design better user interfaces. This new discipline is called robotic user interfaces, and the objective behind it is not to build robots and avatars that resemble people, but to develop synthetic creations that can bridge the gap between human needs and the information present in the computer world. Kleinjohann imagines future information kiosks or cash machines that enter into spoken dialog with users through a device that might be similar to Mexi.
Christoph Bartneck of the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands imagines robot interfaces above all in the entertainment and educational sectors. He believes that robots could also take over the job of controlling an electronic home.
In Japan, where the subject of humanoid robots is viewed with far fewer inhibitions than almost anywhere else, domestic helpers of this kind are already highly popular. One example is the R100 from NEC, which looks like a miniature version of R2D2 from Star Wars. This monitor-based creation can read e-mails out loud for its owner and control the television and video recorder. But Kleinjohann believes that a physical implementation such as Mexi is more credible and therefore superior to a computer-screen avatar: ,,The PC with a screen isn't the terminal of the future¿
Quelle: engine/Siemens AG

artificial künstlich
goal Ziel
curious neugierig
fellow Kerl
tinny blechern
perk up, to die Ohren spitzen
beam, to strahlen
wane, to schwinden
gaze, to starren
jointly gemeinsam
concoction Gemisch
protrude, to hervorstehen
cord Kordel
endearing liebenswert
cringe, to zurückschrecken, zusammenzücken
proceed from, to herrühren
acquire, to sich aneignen
attribute Eigenschaft
distinguish, to unterscheiden
handlers Bediener
successor Nachfolger
blackmail, to erpressen
neglect, to vernachlässigen
assumption Annahme
conduct, to durchführen
genuine echt
trigger, to auslösen
gap Kluft, Lücke
inhibition Hemmungen
implementation Ausführung
credible glaubwürdig

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