Students, meet your new teacher, Mr. Robot
The Autism News | English
By Benedict Carey And John Markoff | NDTV
Los Angeles: The boy, a dark-haired 6-year-old, is playing with a new companion.
The two hit it off quickly — unusual for the 6-year-old, who has autism — and the boy is imitating his playmate’s every move, now nodding his head, now raising his arms.
“Like Simon Says,” says the autistic boy’s mother, seated next to him on the floor.
Yet soon he begins to withdraw; in a video of the session, he covers his ears and slumps against the wall.
But the companion, a three-foot-tall robot being tested at the University of Southern California, maintains eye contact and performs another move, raising one arm up high.
Up goes the boy’s arm — and now he is smiling at the machine.
In a handful of laboratories around the world, computer scientists are developing robots like this one: highly programmed machines that can engage people and teach them simple skills, including household tasks, vocabulary or, as in the case of the boy, playing, elementary imitation and taking turns.
So far, the teaching has been very basic, delivered mostly in experimental settings, and the robots are still works in progress, a hackers’ gallery of moving parts that, like mechanical savants, each do some things well at the expense of others.
Yet the most advanced models are fully autonomous, guided by artificial intelligence software like motion tracking and speech recognition, which can make them just engaging enough to rival humans at some teaching tasks.
Researchers say the pace of innovation is such that these machines should begin to learn as they teach, becoming the sort of infinitely patient, highly informed instructors that would be effective in subjects like foreign language or in repetitive therapies used to treat developmental problems like autism.
Several countries have been testing teaching machines in classrooms. South Korea, known for its enthusiasm for technology, is “hiring” hundreds of robots as teacher aides and classroom playmates and is experimenting with robots that would teach English.
Already, these advances have stirred dystopian visions, along with the sort of ethical debate usually confined to science fiction. “I worry that if kids grow up being taught by robots and viewing technology as the instructor,” said Mitchel Resnick, head of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “they will see it as the master.”
Most computer scientists reply that they have neither the intention, nor the ability, to replace human teachers. The great hope for robots, said Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, “is that with the right kind of technology at a critical period in a child’s development, they could supplement learning in the classroom.”
Lessons From RUBI
“Kenka,” says a childlike voice. “Ken-ka.”
Standing on a polka-dot carpet at a preschool on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, a robot named RUBI is teaching Finnish to a 3-year-old boy.
RUBI looks like a desktop computer come to life: its screen-torso, mounted on a pair of shoes, sprouts mechanical arms and a lunchbox-size head, fitted with video cameras, a microphone and voice capability. RUBI wears a bandanna around its neck and a fixed happy-face smile, below a pair of large, plastic eyes.
It picks up a white sneaker and says kenka, the Finnish word for shoe, before returning it to the floor. “Feel it; I’m a kenka.”
In a video of this exchange, the boy picks up the sneaker, says “kenka, kenka” — and holds up the shoe for the robot to see.
In person they are not remotely humanlike, most of today’s social robots. Some speak well, others not at all. Some move on two legs, others on wheels. Many look like escapees from the Island of Misfit Toys.
They make for very curious company. The University of Southern California robot used with autistic children tracks a person throughout a room, approaching indirectly and pulling up just short of personal space, like a cautious child hoping to join a playground game.
The machine’s only words are exclamations (“Uh huh” for those drawing near; “Awww” for those moving away). Still, it’s hard to shake the sense that some living thing is close by. That sensation, however vague, is enough to facilitate a real exchange of information, researchers say.
In the San Diego classroom where RUBI has taught Finnish, researchers are finding that the robot enables preschool children to score significantly better on tests, compared with less interactive learning, as from tapes.
Preliminary results suggest that these students “do about as well as learning from a human teacher,” said Javier Movellan, director of the Machine Perception Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego. “Social interaction is apparently a very important component of learning at this age.”
Like any new kid in class, RUBI took some time to find a niche. Children swarmed the robot when it first joined the classroom: instant popularity. But by the end of the day, a couple of boys had yanked off its arms.
“The problem with autonomous machines is that people are so unpredictable, especially children,” said Corinna E. Lathan, chief executive of AnthroTronix, a Maryland company that makes a remotely controlled robot, CosmoBot, to assist in therapy with developmentally delayed children. “It’s impossible to anticipate everything that can happen.”
The RUBI team hit upon a solution one part mechanical and two parts psychological. The engineers programmed RUBI to cry when its arms were pulled. Its young playmates quickly backed off at the sound.
If the sobbing continued, the children usually shifted gears and came forward — to deliver a hug.
Re-armed and newly sensitive, RUBI was ready to test as a teacher. In a paper published last year, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Joensuu in Finland found that the robot significantly improved the vocabulary of nine toddlers.
After testing the youngsters’ knowledge of 20 words and introducing them to the robot, the researchers left RUBI to operate on its own. The robot showed images on its screen and instructed children to associate them with words.
After 12 weeks, the children’s knowledge of the 10 words taught by RUBI increased significantly, while their knowledge of 10 control words did not. “The effect was relatively large, a reduction in errors of more than 25 percent,” the authors concluded.
Researchers in social robotics — a branch of computer science devoted to enhancing communication between humans and machines — at Honda Labs in Mountain View, Calif., have found a similar result with their robot, a three-foot character called Asimo, which looks like a miniature astronaut. In one 20-minute session the machine taught grade-school students how to set a table — improving their accuracy by about 25 percent, a recent study found.
At the University of Southern California, researchers have had their robot, Bandit, interact with children with autism. In a pilot study, four children with the diagnosis spent about 30 minutes with this robot when it was programmed to be socially engaging and another half-hour when it behaved randomly, more like a toy. The results are still preliminary, said David Feil-Seifer, who ran the study, but suggest that the children spoke more often and spent more time in direct interaction when the robot was responsive, compared with when it acted randomly.
Making the Connection
Making the Connection
In a lab at the University of Washington, Morphy, a pint-size robot, catches the eye of an infant girl and turns to look at a toy.
No luck; the girl does not follow its gaze, as she would a human’s.
In a video the researchers made of the experiment, the girl next sees the robot “waving” to an adult. Now she’s interested; the sight of the machine interacting registers it as a social being in the young brain. She begins to track what the robot is looking at, to the right, the left, down. The machine has elicited what scientists call gaze-following, an essential first step of social exchange.
“Before they have language, infants pay attention to what I call informational hotspots,” where their mother or father is looking, said Andrew N. Meltzoff, a psychologist who is co-director of university’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. This, he said, is how learning begins.
This basic finding, to be published later this year, is one of dozens from a field called affective computing that is helping scientists discover exactly which features of a robot make it most convincingly “real” as a social partner, a helper, a teacher.
“It turns out that making a robot more closely resemble a human doesn’t get you better social interactions,” said Terrence J. Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at University of California, San Diego. The more humanlike machines look, the more creepy they can seem.
The machine’s behavior is what matters, Dr. Sejnowski said. And very subtle elements can make a big difference.
The timing of a robot’s responses is one. The San Diego researchers found that if RUBI reacted to a child’s expression or comment too fast, it threw off the interaction; the same happened if the response was too slow. But if the robot reacted within about a second and a half, child and machine were smoothly in sync.
Physical rhythm is crucial. In recent experiments at a day care center in Japan, researchers have shown that having a robot simply bob or shake at the same rhythm a child is rocking or moving can quickly engage even very fearful children with autism.
“The child begins to notice something in that synchronous behavior and open up,” said Marek Michalowski of Carnegie Mellon University, who collaborated on the studies. Once that happens, he said, “you can piggyback social behaviors onto the interaction, like eye contact, joint attention, turn taking, things these kids have trouble with.”
One way to begin this process is to have a child mimic the physical movements of a robot and vice versa. In a continuing study financed by the National Institutes of Health, scientists at the University of Connecticut are conducting therapy sessions for children with autism using a French robot called Nao, a two-foot humanoid that looks like an elegant Transformer toy. The robot, remotely controlled by a therapist, demonstrates martial arts kicks and chops and urges the child to follow suit; then it encourages the child to lead.
“I just love robots, and I know this is therapy, but I don’t know — I think it’s just fun,” said Sam, an 8-year-old from New Haven with Asperger’s syndrome, who recently engaged in the therapy.
This simple mimicry seems to build a kind of trust, and increase sociability, said Anjana Bhat, an assistant professor in the department of education who is directing the experiment. “Social interactions are so dependent on whether someone is in sync with you,” Dr. Bhat said. “You walk fast, they walk fast; you go slowly, they go slowly — and soon you are interacting, and maybe you are learning.”
Personality matters, too, on both sides. In their studies with Asimo, the Honda robot, researchers have found that when the robot teacher is “cooperative” (“I am going to put the water glass here; do you think you can help me by placing the water glass on the same place on your side?”), children 4 to 6 did much better than when Asimo lectured them, or allowed them to direct themselves (“place the cup and saucer anywhere you like”). The teaching approach made less difference with students ages 7 to 10.
“The fact is that children’s reactions to a robot may vary widely, by age and by individual,” said Sandra Okita, a Columbia University researcher and co-author of the study.
If robots are to be truly effective guides, in short, they will have to do what any good teacher does: learn from students when a lesson is taking hold and when it is falling flat.
Learning From Humans
“Do you have any questions, Simon?”
On a recent Monday afternoon, Crystal Chao, a graduate student in robotics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, was teaching a five-foot robot named Simon to put away toys. She had given some instructions — the flower goes in the red bin, the block in the blue bin — and Simon had correctly put away several of these objects. But now the robot was stumped, its doughboy head tipped forward, its fawn eyes blinking at a green toy water sprinkler.
Dr. Chao repeated her query, perhaps the most fundamental in all of education: Do you have any questions?
“Let me see,” said Simon, in a childlike machine voice, reaching to pick up the sprinkler. “Can you tell me where this goes?”
“In the green bin,” came the answer.
Simon nodded, dropping it in that bin.
“Makes sense,” the robot said.
In addition to tracking motion and recognizing language, Simon accumulates knowledge through experience.
Just as humans can learn from machines, machines can learn from humans, said Andrea Thomaz, an assistant professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech who directs the project. For instance, she said, scientists could equip a machine to understand the nonverbal cues that signal “I’m confused” or “I have a question” — giving it some ability to monitor how its lesson is being received.
To ask, as Dr. Chao did: Do you have any questions?
This ability to monitor and learn from experience is the next great frontier for social robotics — and it probably depends, in large part, on unraveling the secrets of how the human brain accumulates information during infancy.
In San Diego, researchers are trying to develop a human-looking robot with sensors that approximate the complexity of a year-old infant’s abilities to feel, see and hear. Babies learn, seemingly effortlessly, by experimenting, by mimicking, by moving their limbs. Could a machine with sufficient artificial intelligence do the same? And what kind of learning systems would be sufficient?
The research group has bought a $70,000 robot, built by a Japanese company, that is controlled by a pneumatic pressure system that will act as its senses, in effect helping it map out the environment by “feeling” in addition to “seeing” with embedded cameras. And that is the easy part.
The much steeper challenge is to program the machine to explore, as infants do, and build on moment-to-moment experience. Ideally its knowledge will be cumulative, not only recalling the layout of a room or a house, but using that stored knowledge to make educated guesses about a new room.
The researchers are shooting for nothing less than capturing the foundation of human learning — or, at least, its artificial intelligence equivalent. If robots can learn to learn, on their own and without instruction, they can in principle make the kind of teachers that are responsive to the needs of a class, even an individual child.
Parents and educators would certainly have questions about robots’ effectiveness as teachers, as well as ethical concerns about potential harm they might do. But if social robots take off in the way other computing technologies have, parents may have more pointed ones: Does this robot really “get” my child? Is its teaching style right for my son’s needs, my daughter’s talents?
That is, the very questions they would ask about any teacher.
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5 year-old hit-and-run victim released from hospital
The Autism News | English
By KARE 11
ST. PAUL– It would not be a stretch to call the recovery ‘miraculous’.
Five-year-old Godswill Udoh is home after spending four days in the hospital recovering from a hit and run in St. Paul’s Frogtown neighborhood.
It happened Thursday night just before 6:30 p.m. at the intersection of Marion and Thomas Avenues.
“The impact knocked the child onto the hood of the car. The child struck the windshield went over the car and landed in the street behind it,” says Sgt. Pete Crum with the St. Paul Police Department.
Godswill spent the weekend at Gillette Children’s Hospital, recovering from bumps, bruises, and trauma to his head.
His parents say Godswill has autism, and somehow managed to climb out the window of their ground floor apartment and into the busy intersection.
Police describe the vehicle as an older model car, possibly a Honda Civic. It was red or maroon in color with gray trim around the bottom. The car had a small spoiler and large exhaust pipe. There was damage to the passenger side headlight.
If you know anything about this hit and run, call St. Paul Police.
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Idaho parents sue over 8-year-old’s school arrest
The Autism News | English
By Rebecca Boone | The Alva Review-Courriel/Newsgram
BOISE, Idaho — The parents of an 8-year-old autistic girl who was arrested at her northern Idaho elementary school are suing the school district and the sheriff’s department in federal court, contending the agencies violated the Americans With Disabilities Act.
Spring Towry and Charles Towry, along with their daughter, Evelyn, filed the lawsuit Friday in Idaho’s U.S. District Court against the Lake Pend Oreille School District and the Bonner County Sheriff’s Department.
The family claims the district discriminated against Evelyn because of her disability, and that the school failed to make reasonable modifications so she could access to school services and facilities. They are asking for unspecified monetary damages.
“The school district denies any wrongdoing in this case and feels that in accordance with various precedents set forth in state and federal law, the school will ultimately be vindicated,” said Brian Julian, the attorney for the school district. The attorney representing the Bonner County sheriff’s department did not immediately return a call seeking comment Monday.
The case arose Jan. 9, 2009, when the Kootenai Elementary School third-grader was arrested, handcuffed and taken to the county’s juvenile lockup on suspicion of battery. School staffers said Evelyn had spit on and inappropriately touched two instructors. The child was later released to her parents, and the prosecutor’s office dropped the charge against her.
After the incident, Charles Towry said his daughter has Asperger’s Syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism. He said that on the day of the altercation, she was wearing a hooded sweatshirt her mother had decorated with sewn-on ears to look like an animated cow character from the movie “Barnyard.” She wasn’t allowed into a school party because of the sweatshirt, although the lawsuit didn’t explain why.
Evelyn was placed in a separate classroom instead, Towry said, and when she tried to leave, staffers restrained her. Towry said that caused the girl to panic and react violently.
According to the lawsuit, Evelyn’s teacher, Louise Zumuda, and her principal, Betsy Walker, called police and asked to have her arrested and charged “because they felt they were not getting their point across” to the child and her parents after creating a plan to address behavioral issues. The Towrys say two deputies arrested, handcuffed and patted down Evelyn, refusing Spring Towry’s request that they release the child to her.
That caused the family severe emotional distress, the Towrys contend.
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Holding your breath and testing the limits of autism
The Autism News | English
By Susan Senator | The Sydney Morning Herald
A bike ride led to new understanding between mother and son.
On holiday in Cape Cod last weekend, I decided to ride my bike into the next town. As I gathered my helmet, phone and water bottle, I saw my adult son, Nat, was watching me. I knew he would come along for the ride if I asked him, but I hesitated.
Nat has fairly severe autism. Like so many of his skills, his cycling ability is erratic. He knows how to brake, but he does not know how to shift gears. He obeys traffic signals but is foggy about the more subtle, human signals. Or he seems foggy – I have never been able to test this definitively. But then, how do you test something that could endanger him or others? Hang back and see if he stops and looks both ways at a small side street with no stop light?
What about the other bikers, families and dogs along the way, all of whom he would have to navigate carefully? How do you catch someone before he hurts himself if you’re also on a bike?
The answer is: You don’t. I know because I’ve tried.
When Nat learnt how to ride, at age seven, he was merely going back and forth on our street, bookended by my husband, Ned, and my father. When they finally decided to step aside and see how Nat did, he took off – all the way around the block. There was some shouting and then screaming for him to stop and come back, but he kept going.
There was no time to get my bike, so I took off after him on foot. I ran fast, following him in time to watch him go around the first corner just right and stay on the footpath. But soon he pedalled out of sight, turning the second corner. I realised then, as I felt that leaden, incapacitating fear that our bodies seem to reserve for our children, that my son was, for the next moments, on his own, and that I had no idea what he would do.
In all his seven years, Nat had never once been on his own – in any way. We just did not know how to find out if he would be OK. A normally developing child can give signals of what he can and cannot do, of what he wonders about and what confuses him.
Nat could not do those things. I knew all this and yet as I rushed back to our home, where I hoped he would end up, I felt a flicker of something other than fear. A rebellious voice in me challenged: Why wouldn’t he be OK? He knows how to ride and where to go. And when I reached our driveway, Ned voiced the very same point; he reminded me that even though this was terrifying, there was no reason to think that Nat would not continue around the third corner and come back on his own. He called it a ”calculated risk”. I knew what he meant. I had just never thought to apply the concept to Nat.
I waited and watched for Nat, hoping Ned was right. A few seconds later, Nat rounded the corner and pedalled towards us, with perfect biker’s form, steering, braking and stopping right where he should.
He was grinning with excitement and delight. He knew, even without the words to express it, that he had accomplished something.
I felt I had accomplished something too, in this moment of letting go. It was the first time I understood that Nat could grow and develop away from me, and on his terms. It is a lesson I have had to learn again and again because each time there is risk involved.
So I took Nat with me the other day on my holiday bike ride – reluctantly, of course, because my old fears cling to me like a sweaty T-shirt. But he wanted to go with me, so how could I say no? Once we started riding, the spectre of little mischievous Nat evaporated, replaced by the reality of solid, stolid grown-up Nat. Nat who pedals slowly and steadily; who still doesn’t talk much and certainly doesn’t allow you to know his thoughts. Nat who doesn’t walk his bike or stand on the pedals but just presses harder. This is the man he has grown into, dogged and competent, still limited in many ways by his autism – but more so by how we all underestimate him. Especially me.
I thought about that while riding behind him. But mostly I just breathed, a little more tense than I probably needed to be, watching out for him from a few metres back, while he chugged along, his yellow shirt lifting in the breeze like a sail.
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Evolution determines infant brain growth
The Autism News | English
Research suggest that certain regions of the brain might develop more quickly in young infants for evolutionary reasons.
By Cosmos
WASHINGTON: The parts of the human brain that grow the most during infancy and childhood are nearly identical to the brain regions that have changed the most when humans are compared to primates, a recent study has shown.
Researchers made the discovery as they conducted a study to try to better understand abnormal brain development in premature babies and assess the long-term effects of premature birth on brain development.
The number of babies born before term in the United States has risen steadily to reach 12% of all births, said Terrie Inder from Washington University in St Louis and lead author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Disorders due to brain structure
Babies born prematurely face a greater risk of having learning disabilities, attention deficits, behavioral problems and cognitive impairments, according to the researchers.
“This study and the data that we’re gathering now could provide us with very powerful tools for understanding what goes wrong structurally in a wide range of childhood disorders,” Inder said.
The researchers hope to gain insight into the after-effects of premature birth and even conditions such as autism, attention-deficit disorder or reading disabilities, they said.
Uneven growth points to evolution
The researchers used a technique called surface reconstruction to compare regions and structures in different brains.
In analysing the brain scans of 12 full-term babies and comparing them to the scans of 12 healthy young adults, the researchers found that the cerebral cortex – the wrinkled area on the surface of the brain responsible for higher mental functions – grew unevenly.
A quarter to a third of the cortex expanded around twice as much as other cortical areas during normal development.
The findings reveal “evolution’s imprint on the human brain” because the rapidly developing parts of the brain are also those that differ most when the human brain is compared to primates’.
Gaining the upper hand
High-growth regions have been linked to advanced mental functions such as language and reasoning and traits that make humans uniquely human.
Previous studies have shown that many of the brain’s high-growth regions “are expanded in humans as a result of recent evolutionary changes that made the human brain much larger than that of any other primate,” said David Van Essen, one of the study’s authors.
Brain growth dictated by early needs
Van Essen, who developed the surface reconstruction technique used to scan the brain regions, speculated that the full physical growth of the rapid-growth regions may be delayed somewhat to allow them to be shaped by early life experiences.
Inder hypothesised that certain regions of the brain might develop more quickly in young infants for evolutionary reasons.
For instance, the part of the brain responsible for vision, which is necessary to allow a baby to bond with his mother during nursing, develops early, while brain functions less important early in life come later.
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Mother Sentenced To Four Years For Starving Daughter To Death
The Autism News | English
By Scott Theisen | KSAX-TV
A Sandstone woman will go to prison for starving her disabled daughter to death.
Ludusky Sue Hotchkiss was sentenced to four years in prison for manslaughter. She pleaded guilty in a plea deal with prosecutors in May. Two lesser charges were dismissed.
Prosecutors say her 10-year-old daughter, Lakesha Victor, was just 31 pounds when she died of malnutrition, dehydration and pneumonia in 2006.
The girl had cerebral palsy, autism, a seizure disorder and ate through a feeding tube.
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