How toys will shape future robots

At a recent car boot sale in the UK, Mark Tilden stumbled on something he often looks for at second-hand markets – one of his famous creations. Tilden, formerly a roboticist the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is a toy designer and he was now holding in his hands one of the humanoid bots he invented for children, “Robosapien”. Delighted with his find, he bought it for, “something like five quid”. The bot would give him the perfect opportunity to see exactly how it had been used.

“This toy had been played with to death. I was amazed,” he says. “It was filled with sand, it was filled with Plasticine, it had make-up still on it, rusted batteries – it had obviously been taken into the bath-tub – and that was fascinating because all of a sudden you realise that someone had loved this toy to the absolute extent.” Sure, it had been up for sale, but this bot had a good life.

What was it about this robot that had appealed so much to its owner? It’s a question that Tilden and other roboticists think is important – not just for toy design, but the future of robotics. For too long, robots have suffered from an image problem. They are often perceived as mechanical, cold and threatening in our culture and it’s difficult to reverse that impression. But this view of robots could be changed if they were designed to appeal to us with the same familiarity and, indeed, personality that our childhood toys once possessed.  

Robosapien burps, raps and dances - the secret of its success? (WowWee)

Children’s affection for Robosapien could be explained by the bot’s ability to display these characteristics, argues Tilden. His robot was never designed to seem super smart or unreasonably clever, but to have foibles and quirks that would entertain children and engage their imaginations. For instance, the toy’s 67 pre-programmed functions include belching, rapping and dancing. Seeing the Robosapien as a pal was far more important than seeing it as a hyperintelligent, futuristic machine.

Could other successful toys provide similar cues for robot designers? Perhaps – and it needn’t even be toy robots. Take Cabbage Patch Kids, for example. A highly successful line of dolls, Cabbage Patch Kids appealed to children’s emotional intuition through their insistence on being taken seriously as infants that required love and attention. They needed their nappies changing, as one advertisement explained, and came with documentation like birth certificates and adoption papers which positioned them within a mock bureaucratic world of parenting. As entertainment scholars have noted, it was the emotional responsibilities of owning a Cabbage Patch doll that made them persistent as toys – kids couldn’t put them down because they had a duty to look after them, a duty which they understood instinctively.

Cabbage Patch Kids: deeper than they look (Getty Images)

How do we get from here to robots? A few other toys will help to explain. In the 1990s, the electronic sophistication of toys was burgeoning and offered new opportunities to exploit children’s empathetic instincts. Tamagotchis were small egg-shaped mini computers with a square LCD screen displaying an animated pet.

The onus was on the child to look after this pet by feeding and playing with it. More than 76 million Tamagotchis have been sold worldwide since their arrival in 1996. The phrase “Tamagotchi effect” was coined to describe the strong emotional attachment to virtual agents exhibited by Tamagotchi owners.

Tamagotchis demanded care and attention from their owners (Joi Ito/Flickr/CC BY 2.0)

Newspaper reports at the time marvelled at how children expressed extreme outpourings of grief when their “cyberpet” finally succumbed to that great leveller of all, death. Tamagotchis required children to carry out a duty of care, like Cabbage Patch Kids, but the difference was that the consequences of bad parenting would actually be played out.

The Furby, launched in the 1990s, was designed to evoke similar emotions. Furry, talkative and exhaustingly needy, Furbies yearned for love and care. In this Radiolab podcast, Furby co-creator Caleb Chung explains that Furbies were designed to appeal to human beings’ innate sense of compassion by sounding scared when held upside down, or by quivering at loud noises.

Quaint, you might think, and something that only small children would do. But consider the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who gave funerals to combat robots when they were irreparably damaged. That machines provoke strong emotional connections with us is not the preserve of children.

Could robots be designed to evoke the same affection as toys? (Getty Images)

All of this is now directly informing the work of robot designers around the world. Aldebaran Robotics, headquartered in Paris, has learned a lot from the world of toys.

“When we saw that children were able to have a very strong connection with a Tamagotchi, a very simple device, we knew that it would be possible to create a much stronger connection with a robot that had a humanoid shape, an expressive voice and expressive gestures,” explains Aldebaran’s research director, Rodolphe Gelin. “Toys demonstrated to us that this was possible.”

The company’s most famous bot is Nao – a humanoid robot used in educational settings. Nao is intentionally the size of a teddy bear, says Gelin, so as not to be too large and “invasive”. Nao also has LEDs around its eyes and on the sides of its head that animate to provide further cues, such as blinking, which suggest it is alive. Even simple things, like making sure Nao didn’t have a lot of visible metallic parts, helped to naturalise it.

The Nao robot was designed to be the size of a teddy bear (Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images)

Aldebaran has also crammed the robot full of sensing capabilities which mean its behaviour can subtly adapt to the needs of human companions. Cameras and image analysis can distinguish your gender, or mood, for example, and 3D scanners read body language.

Studies that explore how children interact with robots have shown that this level of social intelligence is crucial for supporting long-term relationships with machines. Lola Canamero, a researcher in adaptive intelligent behaviour at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, agrees that children are generally very willing to initially suspend their disbelief when greeting a robot. However, that suspension of disbelief may not last very long unless the variety of interactions can continue to engage the child.

Children soon get bored if toys or robots fail to surprise them (Getty Images)

“If children see that the robot is actually responding to what they do and not just performing random actions, that keeps their interest for much longer and persuades them to continue interacting with the robot,” she says.

The results of all these efforts to improve the social capacities of robots speak for themselves. For instance, Gelin recalls visiting a nursing home in France to ask if the residents there, who had never seen Nao, would be interested in a robot companion. The elderly people scoffed at the idea. Gelin told them he of course understood – but before he left, he pulled Nao out of his bag. The mood in the room transformed. Suddenly the nursing home residents were fascinated and intrigued. “Can he sing? Can he talk to me?” they asked.

It’s this eagerness for companionship that Gelin says robot manufacturers must now appeal.

“What is most important for us is to have a robot which understands your emotion and which can itself express emotion,” explains Gelin. “What one generally imagines for a robot, that he will perform tasks, clean the house, bring you a beer – for us these things will come later. The first thing is to have robots which are accepted at home.”

After all, when we were children, we had a special connection to our toys. They had personalities, could follow us on adventures and proved to be the ultimate companions. Perhaps the most promising robots of the future, then, will just be toys all grown up.

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The secret to staying safe online

Why should I care about online security?
It’s tempting to assume that only big businesses or big celebrities have to worry about their online security. After all, personal information like our photographs aren’t as interesting to anonymous hackers as compromising pictures of Jennifer Lawrence and other Hollywood A-listers, are they?

But the truth is we all have photos and messages we would prefer to keep private, and information like credit card details we would like to keep safe. According to a report by security software-maker McAfee and the Washington think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, more than 40 million people in the US had their personal information stolen last year, as well as 54 million in Turkey, 20 million in Korea, 16 million in Germany and more than 20 million in China.

While it would be a mistake to think that the data we store online can ever be 100% safe, it would also be an error to assume that we can’t make our email accounts and the data – including photographs – that we store in the cloud a little bit more secure with very little inconvenience.

I’m pretty sure I don’t store anything in the cloud, thanks…
Many of the celebrities at the heart of the recent leaks may have thought the same. But as cloud services grow it’s becoming common for devices like smartphones to upload user data to remote servers by default. If you’re at all worried about some of your photos falling into the hands of malicious parties it’s probably not a bad idea to check your phone settings to see what data is being automatically backed up to the cloud, and disable automatic uploading.

Still, there’s no doubting that the cloud can be very useful – ask anyone who has lost all their photos and contact information because they lost or broke their phone. Fortunately there are other actions you can take to keep your data in the cloud safe. Probably most importantly, you’ll want to consider using a strong and secure password.

So what makes a good password?
For starters, some computer security experts say that password length is more important than complexity, which means that a 16-character memorable password like “ilovemysportscar” is more difficult to guess than an eight-character unmemorable password like “T9$ey!!q”. This is because there are far more total possible combinations of 16 characters than eight, meaning malicious software must take longer to hunt through all the possible options to find the correct password. One survey found that 22% of “strong” eight-character passwords that contained numbers and symbols could be cracked after 10 billion guesses – compared with only 12% of 16 character passwords.

(Thinkstock)

In his book How to Predict The Unpredictable, the author William Poundstone proposes other tips, such as including avoiding obvious number substitutions – most people substitute the letter “I” with a “1”, for example, which creates a false sense of security. Better would be to create a seemingly random string from the first letters of a phrase you have memorised. (As an illustration, the previous sentence in this paragraph could become: “bwbtcasrsftfloapyhm”).

Alternatively, you might choose a random string of letters and numbers, and use it to create a nonsense sentence. So, the (admittedly too short) password “RPM8t4Ka”, explains Poundstone, might become “Revolutions Per Minute, 8 track for Kathy”.

“I don’t know what it means,” he writes, “but I do know it’s fairly easy to remember.

OK, that’s my email password changed. Am I safe now?
Not completely. Even a 16-character password is useless if you inadvertently hand it over to a hacker. Unfortunately, that’s all too easily done. Use an unsecure wi-fi hotspot, for example, and an eavesdropper on the same hotspot can easily monitor your internet activity and read your passwords. If you’re not prompted to enter a password to access a wi-fi hotspot, there’s a good chance it isn’t secure. It’s probably best to restrict your online activity to basic browsing on these wi-fi hotspots, and perform more sensitive actions (checking email, uploading data to the cloud) on your home wi-fi or using your phone’s secure data network – look for the 3G or 4G symbol on your screen.

(Thinkstock)

You can actually go one step further for minimal extra fuss. Install a virtual private network (VPN) app on your phone, switch it on when you’re on a wi-fi hotspot and it will essentially make it more secure: the app scrambles all of the data from your online activity – including the passwords you use to check email – in a way that makes it unintelligible to eavesdroppers. VPNs aren’t free, though, so privacy comes with a price.

And that should protect me from data theft?
It’s a start – but you’ve still got work to do. We don’t know for sure how hackers compromised the online accounts of the celebrities at the centre of the recent leak. There’s some evidence that they exploited a vulnerability in Apple’s iCloud service to repeatedly guess the user password until they found the correct one. But there is another way to gain access to someone’s account, no matter how strong their password is. If you know the person’s username, you can ask the service provider to reset their password using the “forgot my password” function. To work this particular trick a hacker needs to know a little information about the person whose account they are trying to access – things like their date of birth, their mother’s maiden name, or the first school they attended – so they can guess the answers to the security questions that must be answered to reset the password.

Of course, celebrities will find it difficult to keep this kind of personal information secret, which makes them particularly vulnerable to this form of attack – Sarah Palin’s email account was hacked this way in 2011. But many of us are all too willing to publish online the personal information we rely on to protect our passwords – many of us display our full date of birth on a social network profile, for instance. Navigating the privacy settings on social networks to hide this data is often not easy, but in the interests of keeping your data secure, it’s probably worth taking the time to make sure this sensitive information is kept out of sight of potential fraudsters.

Some people even advocate using false information on social networks – like an incorrect date of birth or ‘un-birthday’ – to keep your identity elsewhere secure.

(Thinkstock)

OK, I’ve done all that. Am I finally safe?
Sadly, probably not. But you’ve certainly made life more difficult for hackers. And there’s one final trick you can use to add an extra layer of security. Many email and cloud services now offer two-factor authentication. With this service enabled, simply entering your correct password on a website won’t immediately offer you access to your account – instead it might trigger an automated call or text message to your mobile phone that requires you to punch in a PIN to complete the sign-in process. The idea is that confirming your identity twice is more secure than making you confirm it just once.

So I have to memorise, or do, yet another thing, then?
As with almost all of these security measures, two-factor authentication adds a little bit of inconvenience every time you want to access your account. Not everyone is prepared to trade convenience for security. But the bottom line is that we each have to make a personal decision about just how seriously we value our online privacy.

Is my personal information ever going to be more secure?
As The Economist noted earlier this year “Securing cyberspace is hard because the architecture of the internet was designed to promote connectivity, not security.” And this will get harder over the next few years and decades, as the “internet of things” begins to flourish – where billions of devices, from cars to household appliances to medical equipment, will be connected to the web.

“The tactic of pumping out new software as fast as possible and then issuing patches later to fix flaws in the code may be tolerable if all that is lost is data, but if it involves personal safety, consumers will be less tolerant,” noted The Economist. And if we want companies to be more proactive in keeping our information safe, then it’s all the more reason why we need to make sure we take enough precautionary steps ourselves.

To find out more about online security, check out at the World-Changing Ideas Summit in New York on 21 October. BBC Future will be covering the event in full – so watch this space.

Intel gains a new ally in China's chip wars - Beijing

(Reuters) - Intel's investment of up to $1.5 billion in two fast-growing Chinese mobile chipmakers has effectively aligned the U.S. giant with a third party - a Beijing government intent on producing a viable domestic challenger to the likes of Qualcomm and Samsung.
For more than a decade, China has targeted semiconductor design and manufacture as a major focus of its industrial policy. Activity has picked up markedly over the past year with a spate of cross-border mergers and cooperation deals.
"We've entered an inflection point where government policy has started to work - it's started to help the local semiconductor industry," said Nomura analyst Leping Huang.
The deal hashed out by Intel Corp Chief Executive Brian Krzanich over 24 hours in Beijing in early August extends Intel's beachhead in China, the biggest battleground in the smartphone industry, and boosts the company's years-long effort to catch up to leading mobile chipmaker Qualcomm Inc.
A key visit during the trip was to Yang Xueshan, the deputy chief of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), who gave his blessing for the deal.
The agreement, unveiled on Sept. 26, gives Intel a 20 percent stake in Spreadtrum Communications and RDA Microelectronics through shares in a Tsinghua University holding company, with the aim of jointly developing and marketing smartphone chips.
China is the world's largest consumer and manufacturer of smartphones yet relies heavily on imported chips - particularly the processors that power the latest devices - made by San Diego-based Qualcomm, South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co, or MediaTek Inc of Taiwan.
China's ramped-up activity also arrives on the heels of revelations about the U.S. surveillance programme PRISM, which has prompted Beijing to undertake a slew of actions to enhance the security of its information technology industry.
For Intel, the world's leading manufacturer of chips for personal computers, the Tsinghua deal offers an additional path into the world's biggest chip market after it was slow to recognize the mobile revolution and design new processors for smartphones and tablets.
Intel spokesman John Mandeville declined to comment.
NATIONAL TARGETS
The China Semiconductor Industry Association estimates that revenue from China's chip industry reached 251 billion yuan($40.98 billion) in 2013, while domestic demand for chips amounted to 917 billion yuan, representing more than half of global semiconductor consumption.
Deng Zhonghan, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and National People's Congress, said in March that China's $210 billion worth of annual chip imports exceeds the value of the country's entire yearly petroleum imports.
In June, the State Council offered the country's most comprehensive guidelines for the development of the semiconductor industry, outlining specific revenue targets for 2015 and 2020, with chip revenue set to grow at a better-than 20 percent annual clip, to reach 350 billion yuan by 2020.
An important part of Beijing's effort, analysts and industry insiders say, was consolidation of Spreadtrum and RDA, two companies formerly trading independently on Nasdaq.
The two companies were acquired a year ago for $1.7 billion and $900 million respectively by Tsinghua Unigroup, government-affiliated private equity group controlled by Tsinghua University in Beijing.
As part of its recent deal, which is expected to close early next year, Intel and Unigroup will form a new holding company that contains Spreadtrum and RDA.
Beijing wants the Unigroup companies to become competitive with Taiwan's MediaTek within five years and overtake Qualcomm within 10 years, according to a person familiar with Unigroup.
TRUE PARTNERS
Since taking over in 2013, Krzanich has aggressively positioned Intel to catch up with Qualcomm, the leading mobile chipset maker.
A central part of that strategy is China, where consumers are snapping up low-end smartphones made with low-cost chips from local suppliers like Spreadtrum and MediaTek.
Intel started investing in local operations 20 years ago, and presently operates factories across the country for manufacturing, assembling and testing microprocessors. Intel also has research and development operations in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.
In May, Intel said it reached an agreement with Fuzhou-based Rockchip to produce chips for tablets based on Intel's architecture.
"With China, what they want is for you to be a true partner," Krzanich told reporters in September. "We go in and we partner, we build factories, we build R&D and we help local companies."
Intel's deal with Tsinghua Unigroup comes three months after Qualcomm agreed to partner with Shanghai-based Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), China's largest foundry, to produce some of Qualcomm's smartphone chips.
As part of the agreement, Qualcomm will help SMIC implement its first high-end 28 nanometre manufacturing technology.
It also coincides with a year-long Chinese anti-monopoly investigation into Qualcomm. Critics say the probe unfairly targets foreign companies in order to help domestic companies, which Chinese authorities flatly deny.
Krzanich first discussed ways to collaborate with the Chinese firms during a visit to Tsinghua University in April, where he and Intel China head Yang Xu met Tsinghua Holding's Xu Jinhong, Unigroup's Zhou Weiguo, Spreadtrum founder Li Liyou, who is also a Tsinghua University alumnus.
He made a second trip to Beijing, the whirlwind visit in August, after which the deal fell into place.
"Tsinghua University is an important driving force for the development of national science and technology, and Tsinghua Holdings is a key part of that effort," Tsinghua Holdings Chief Executive Xu Jinhong told Reuters by email.
    Xu characterized the Intel investment as "a new model for cooperation between Chinese and U.S. companies in the chip industry."
Analysts say that Intel's deal will give the Santa Clara-based company a moderate boost by gaining a partner with strong relationships with local phone manufacturers.
The deal should also give Intel enough protection of its intellectual property through licensing arrangements and other conditions, said Scott Kennedy, director of the Research Centre for Chinese Politics and Business at Indiana University.
"There's potential benefits for everyone," Kennedy said.
(1 US dollar = 6.1250 Chinese yuan)
(Additional reporting by Michael Martina and Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Alex Richardson and Emily Kaiser)

Russian hackers target NATO, Ukraine and others - iSight

(Reuters) - Russian hackers exploited a bug in Microsoft Windows and other software to spy on computers used by NATO, the European Union, Ukraine and companies in the energy and telecommunications sectors, according to cyber intelligence firm iSight Partners.
ISight said it did not know what data had been found by the hackers, though it suspected they were seeking information on the Ukraine crisis, as well as diplomatic, energy and telecom issues, based on the targets and the contents of phishing emails used to infect computers with tainted files.
The five-year cyber espionage campaign is still going on, according to iSight, which dubbed the operation "Sandworm Team" because it found references to the "Dune" science fiction series in the software code used by the hackers.
The operation used a variety of ways to attack the targets over the years, iSight said, adding that the hackers began only in August to exploit a vulnerability found in most versions of Windows.
ISight said it told Microsoft Corp about the bug and held off on disclosing the problem so the software maker had time to fix it.

 

 

A Microsoft spokesman said the company plans to roll out an automatic update to affected versions of Windows on Tuesday.
There was no immediate comment from the Russian government, NATO, the EU or the Ukraine government.
Researchers with Dallas-based iSight said they believed the hackers are Russian because of language clues in the software code and because of their choice of targets.
"Your targets almost certainly have to do with your interests. We see strong ties to Russian origins here," said John Hulquist, head of iSight's cyber espionage practice. The firm plans to release a 16-page report on Sandworm Team to its clients on Tuesday.
While technical indicators do not indicate whether the hackers have ties to the Russian government, Hulquist said he believed they were supported by a nation state because they were engaging in espionage, not cyber crime.
For example, in December 2013, NATO was targeted with a malicious document on European diplomacy. Several regional governments in the Ukraine and an academic working on Russian issues in the United States were sent tainted emails that claimed to contain a list of pro-Russian extremist activities, according to iSight.
The firm said its researchers uncovered evidence that some Ukrainian government computer systems were infected, but they were unable to remotely confirm specific victims among those systems that had been targeted.
 Still, researchers believe a large percentage of those targeted systems were infected because the malicious software used was very sophisticated, using a previously unknown attack method that enabled it to get past virtually all known security protections, said Drew Robinson, a senior technical analyst with iSight Partners.
ISight said it had alerted some victims of Sandworm Team, but declined to elaborate.
The iSight research is the latest in a series of private sector security reports that link Moscow to some of the most sophisticated cyber espionage uncovered to date.
Russia's Kaspersky Lab in August released details on a campaign that attacked two spy agencies and hundreds of government and military targets across Europe and the Middle East.
(Reporting by Jim Finkle; Additional reporting by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Tiffany Wu)

Hundreds of alleged Dropbox passwords leaked

(Reuters) - Hundreds of alleged usernames and passwords for online document-sharing site Dropbox were published on Monday on Pastebin, an anonymous information-sharing website.
The anonymous user, who claims to have hacked close to 7 million accounts, is calling for Bitcoin donations to fund the operation.
"We will keep releasing more to the public as donations come in, show your support," the anonymous Pastebin user said on the site.

 

 

 

Dropbox, however, said it has not been hacked.
"These usernames and passwords were unfortunately stolen from other services and used in attempts to log in to Dropbox accounts. We'd previously detected these attacks and the vast majority of the passwords posted have been expired for some time now. All other remaining passwords have been expired as well," a Dropbox spokesman said in an email to Reuters.
Dropbox is a Silicon Valley startup that has proved a hit with consumers and boasts more than 200 million users six years after it was started. It has undergone tremendous growth amid the meteoric rise of cloud, which is expected to continue booming alongside mobile computing.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden last week advised those concerned about their privacy to "get rid of Dropbox" and cease using Facebook (FB.O) and Google (GOOGL.O).
(Reporting by Supriya Kurane in Bangalore; Editing by Gopakumar Warrier)

At 3 million sq ft in 5 years, Flipkart set for largest office deal

BANGALORE: India's biggest e-commerce company Flipkart has doubled its demand for office space to 3 million sq ft, barely two months after approaching top developers to lease 1.5 million sq ft. Embassy Office Parks, the equal joint venture between Blackstone and Embassy Group, is said to bag this lease deal which is pegged to be the largest office space transaction in India in at least a decade.

The deal, at Rs 52 per sq ft, is likely to be inked as early as this week. Flipkart plans to absorb the entire office space in two phases, but in a record four to five years. The e-commerce poster boy had short-listed Bangalore-based Bagmane Group and Embassy in a process advised by real estate consulting firm JLL.

Senior officials at Embassy Office Parks declined comment.

Flipkart, which is sitting on about $1.5 billion in cash, has already said that by the end of this financial year its employee strength would be increased to 25,000 from 12,000 at the beginning of the year. In real estate parlance, 3-million sq ft of office space could seat around 30,000 to 50,000 employees.

The breakneck growth of India's e-commerce market and Flipkart's aggression at the top would mean that hiring is likely to remain robust for the seven year-old-company co-founded by Sachin and Binny Bansal.

Rival Amazon has already leased out around 300,000 sq ft of office space at the World Trade Centre in Bangalore, a tenth of the office space requirement that Flipkart is projecting.

The office deal with Embassy Office Parks will see Flipkart being housed in the 106-acre Embassy TechVillage, which has around 500,000 sq ft of space that is yet to be leased of the 1.9 million sq ft developed, with the potential for to develop an additional 10 million sq ft of office space.

So far India's e-commerce leased about 600,000 sq ft space in the first of the ongoing calendar, said a report by consultancy firm CBRE South Asia, adding that office space deals by the well funded startups were rising.

Sectoral experts said that India's real estate sector will gain from e-commerce. CBRE South Asia deputy MD Ram Chandnani said e-commerce will stimulate demand for warehousing/logistics space for building back-end infrastructure, more than commercial office space.

Flipkart faces Rs 1,000 crore FEMA penalty: Report

MUMBAI: The Enforcement Directorate is looking to slap a show-cause notice on e-commerce major Flipkart over alleged FEMA violation, a report by ET Now said on Thursday evening.

The channel quoted sources as saying, "Our investigation is over and our Bangalore team has found evidence of FEMA violation against Flipkart." According to the report, the e-tailer may face a penalty of over Rs 1,000 crore.

A source who refused to be identified said Flipkart had violated FEMA provisions as WS Retail, the holding company, had investments from companies overseas.