Yale's Scassellati gets Microsoft 'breakthrough research award' fo...(as well. Few technologies currently...),Health

Few technologies currently exist to support this kind of robot recognition, said Avi Silberschatz, professor and chair of computer science at Yale. From a computer science perspective, this work is a way to give robots social feedback. A robot or computer that can recognize human social behaviors will have the ability to alter its own behavior, he added.

Prosody is language-independent which is exactly what we in robotics want, said Scassellati. We know that adults and dogs and infants all do this, although we dont know how the process works. But we can mathematically describe the process and program computers to do it. Partnering with Microsoft now allows us to build practical tools that anyone can use.

The Microsoft HRI initiative focuses attention on the general shift from robots as tools to social robots. It considers human-robot interaction similar to many other computing devices deployed in the modern human environment, including PCs, Smartphones and the World Wide Web. Robotic vacuum cleaners have even become a common new tool.

We are excited to partner with Yale University so robot developers will be better able to build robots that interact with humans in real-world environments, said Sailesh Chutani, senior director, Microsoft Research. Professor Scassellatis research aligns with Microsoft Researchs commitment to innovative research that has the potential to solve some of todays most challenging societal concerns.

This initiative is the latest in a series of robotics-related investments that Microsoft is making, including the Institute for Personal Robots in Education and Microsoft Robotics Studio. The Robotics Studio is a software development kit the company has made available since 2006, at no cost for academic and non-commercial use. Scassellatis project will use and extend this technology.

The A. Richard Newton Breakthrough
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