This is a picture of the iCub humanoid robot. It will “be able
to understand what is being said to it and even anticipate the end of a
sentence."
Today I read an article called “'Simplified' Brain
lets the iCub Robot learn language”. It talks about an artificial brain being
developed and incorporated in an “iCub humanoid robot.” It explains what this
robot can do with this artificial brain in it. Peter Ford Dominey, a “CNRS
Director of Research at Inserm Unit 846" invented an artificial brain with his
team. This brain comes with awesome qualities. “The artificial brain system
enables the robot to learn, and subsequently understand, new sentences
containing a new grammatical structure.”
Dominey
and his team couldn’t make this brain off the top of their heads, they needed
research to back them up. According to the article, the speed at which language
processing is performed in the human brain is one of the most fascinating
aspects of it. An example would be, a person talking to you and you listening
to what they are saying and predicting, in your head, what you or they will say
next based on the context of what is being discussed. The artificial brain uses
an "artificial neuronal network”. This is similar to what the human brain uses. “Thanks
to so-called recurrent construction (with connections that create locally
recurring loops) this artificial brain system can understand new sentences
having a new grammatical structure. It is capable of linking two sentences and
can even predict the end of a sentence before it is provided.”
In
the middle of reading this article I thought, why is this invention/development
so important? Apparently it is very important. It can provide research into
certain diseases. This invention “could contribute possible linguistic malfunctions
in Parkinson’s disease”. In the future it could provide robots the possibility
to learn a language.
Currently engineers aren't able to program all
of the knowledge a robot would need but, it may be possible for robots to get
this knowledge through “a learning process—in the same way as children.” How
fun would this be being in class with a robot?
After
reading this article I felt that they should have a robot like this in every
school. This article opened my eyes to the potential
of how much help an iCub could be in classes where all different types of
learning takes place. In a lab perhaps, the robot could be the one who holds
potentially harmful materials.
Check this article out!
