My GHC Memory

I remember the day perfectly.

It was summertime. I'd left the windows open, white translucent curtains flapping in the breeze. I sat at my wooden desk, on the first floor of a thick stone building, protected from the heat. My good 'ol grey Dell laptop kept me company as always. These were the days before Gmail, so when my little Outlook icon flashed a brief pop-up in my system tray, I clicked it giddily. I loved e-mail.

And that's when THE e-mail came slamming down. It was from GHC. And it said:
NO SCHOLARSHIP FOR YOU

What! I jumped out of my seat. I read it over again. Sorry, not enough scholarships to go around, bla bla bla... I skimmed it once. Twice. Scrolled, looking for a waitlist. Nope, nada, zilch. And I sat down, feeling like I'd been hit by a truck.

I thought about the time I spent on the application, mulling over "Why I want to go to GHC'', trying to think of reasons that are better than "because it's real good". I thought I'd expressed myself well enough. I thought I was deserving.

But apparently not. I felt inferior, rejected by the very organization that supports women in CS like me. If even GHC doesn't think I'm deserving, maybe it's because I'm really not! My supervisor had already been really harsh on me lately, already making myself feel like crap. And this on top of it? I started to have major doubts. I'll be honest, I shed a couple tears. Let's not go into detail about this.

Eventually I picked myself back up, and went back to my laptop, like I always do, and started making a plan for how to finance the trip on my own...

... fast forward to October. I'm in San Diego, having succeeded in an elaborate plan:

• I got a few hundred bucks funding from my department
• I'd scoured for hours and found a really cheap flight
• I found a roommate on the GHC blog so I could split the room cost
• I applied to be a "Hopper" volunteer and blogger so my conference fee would be waived

Little did I know that all of this legwork and involvement would actually make this GHC the BEST EVER. Plus, I blogged, so 5 years later both you and me can still read about it:

• The Deathly tired but Excited Arrival
• On Meeting "Me" Clones
• On Deciding What To Do With My Life
• On Anticipating $240 to Stand Around And Look Pretty
• On Getting $240 to Stand Around and Look Pretty and Stamp Stuff
• On Deciding between HCI and Robots (this is hilarious now that I'm working on Human-Robot Interaction)
• A Recap on the Best GHC EVAR

So yeah, what started out as being a frightful rejection letter turned out to be the best thing that happened to me. I've been to 5 GHCs all in all, including eventually getting the GHC scholarship, but this one in San Diego topped them all. So thanks, Grace Hopper Conference. You made the right choice.

On Robot Avatars

Last week I went to see Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro give a talk at my university. He's the guy that made a robot copy of himself:



As well as a copy of his daughter,


a news anchor:


And more recently just a beautiful woman who (because I know you want to know) is 1/4 non-Japanese.



In his talk he made a couple interesting points:

1. We can still tell the difference between the human and robot copy because of the small, unconscious movements humans make. They did an experiment where they revealed the robot from behind a curtain for around 3 seconds. If the robot sat perfectly still, pretty much everyone rated it as "robot". However, if they made the robot move her eyes to the side, much like an embarrassed woman getting stared at would, the majority rated "human".

2. When you're controlling the robot remotely ("telepresence", they call it), you really feel like you embody the robot. They tried putting a female operator behind the controls of Hiroshi Ishiguro's robot. She could see through his camera, similar to playing a first-person shooter. Then (the real) Dr. Ishiguro put his arm around his robot-clone. The operator squirmed and objected, as if he were really putting his arm around her!

3. His first few robots sit squarely at the bottom of the uncanny valley.


He was very honest and open about it. Actually Dr. Ishiguro was way cooler than the YouTube videos make him out to be :P

4. Read his book. *ahem* Haha, what a joker. But if you can't read Japanese, he recommends a movie called Surrogates (he has a cameo in it, but that's not why!). Indeed, I watched the movie and it truly paints a picture of the near future. What happens if humans get a chance to spend their days in a surrogate robot body? Can you imagine someone saying "Wow, you really look like your surrogate!" -- not the other way around. What if your main identity was not YOU? And how about surrogate "hacking": "I know this robot body looks Japanese, but it's really me in here, me, Angelica!"

And now for some perspective...

Robot telepresence is already being explored by -- of course -- the military, who use remote-controlled robots to disable landmines. On the civilian front, Willow Garage has a robo-telepresence project for the workplace, and MIT-lab have a small, crab-like telepresence robot that allow you to make gestures with its claws. At the Japan National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, HRP-4C both looks human (or like a famous virtual pop star with green hair), and can WALK. It's not quite at the telepresence stage yet though, as far as I know.



But I'd say there is still a big hurdle to wanting to "embody" one of these.

One big problem is navigating the thing. Who wants to use a joystick to move around? How much can you really see around you, even with multiple cameras? Maybe we could use an automatic buffer system so that the robot always stays 50 cm from the wall, but it seems more like attacking the symptom with a blunt hammer.

On the other hand, natural movements of the head and mouth can already be controlled using a simple video camera and image processing, as described in my video on the Kokoro Android from last year:




Or you could go directly to brain-machine interfaces:



Interface, interface, interface. In our lab we'll be starting to address some of these issues. It's kind of scary to think about where your research could lead the future though... when I got into robotics, I thought the idea of Artificial Intelligence was so far-fetched that I would never see it in my lifetime.

Now I see that it's not AI that'll be the next big thing in robotics. It's real people, real intelligence. Same implications?

The Batcave

Exciting! In this rather nondescript, warehouse-looking space, in the building across from our lab, Kenzo will soon be building and testing his new mobile robot. The robot itself will arrive in a few months, but in the meantime, we need to make this place a little more... how to say... comfortable.

Last week we started with the floor. Dust and grime, paint and mold...attack! It took 5 hours of scrubbing...

(click for video)

and making ample use of the Wet-Dry vac...

(click for video)

But I'd say you can tell the difference!



Still have a long way to go, including laying down a new layer of wax. But the place definitely has potential! Hanging plants, anyone?