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Social Interactions

 

    Social Interactions

  • Kismet, a Robot for Social Interaction
  • Imitating Head Nods

  • The Cog Shop
    MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
    545 Technology Square, #920
    Cambridge, MA 02139

    write to the Cog Documentation Project: cdp@ai.mit.edu
    Human infants are extremely dependent on their caregivers, relying upon them not only for basic necessities but also as a guide to their development. This reliance on social contact is so integrated into our species that it is hard to imagine a completely asocial human; developmental disorders that effect social development, such as autism and Asperger’s syndrome, are extremely debilitating and can have far-reaching consequences. Building social skills into an artificial intelligence provides not only a natural means of human-machine interaction but also a mechanism for bootstrapping more complex behavior. Our research program has investigated social interaction both as a means for bootstrapping and as an instance of developmental progression.

    Social interaction can be a means to facilitate learning. New skills may be socially transfered from caregiver to infant through mimicry or imitation, through direct tutelage, or by means of scaffolding, in which a more able adult manipulates the infant’s interactions with the environment to foster novel abilities. Commonly scaffolding involves reducing distractions, marking the task’s critical attributes, reducing the number of degrees of freedom in the target task, and enabling the infant to experience the end or outcome before she is cognitively or physically able of seeking and attaining it for herself. We are currently engaged in work studying bootstrapping new behaviors from social interactions.

    The social skills required to make use of scaffolding are complex. Infants acquire these social skills through a developmental progression. One of the earliest precursors is the ability to share attention with the caregiver. This ability can take many forms, from the recognition of a pointing gesture to maintaining eye contact . In our work, we have also examined social interaction from this developmental perspective, building systems that can recognize and respond to joint attention by finding faces and eyes and imitating head nods of the caregiver.



    Representatives of the press who are interested in acquiring further information about the Cog project should contact Elizabeth Thomson, thomson@mit.edu, from the MIT News Office,  http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/www/ .

     

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