advances in emotion simulation and new forms of the Turing Test.

FYI:  be sure to watch the video, best emotion animation I have yet seen; except for the recent movie “Beowolf” which was completely CG by the way.  However live actors had their expressions mapped to the CG characters, and any adjustments were made manually in post production.   It is not clear to me in the example below if the actorbot was simulating emotions, vs a playback.  I’d like to hear comments from you Avatar developers.   What is the state of the art for emotion simulation?

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Tests that show machines closing in

on human abilities

New Scientist Tech Jan. 22, 2009

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New ways are being developed to

test how well machines can match

aspects of human intelligence,

including animated human faces,

androids, a jazz improvization

program, and military robots....

http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=10010&m=33305

This is what Rollo Carpenter is doing with Jabberwacky; visitors are constantly correcting jabberwacky’s responses and providing new knowledge.  I wonder if he has read about the error correcting methods employed by Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk”.  Could these methods be applied to AIML chatbots?  Especially to expand large domains.

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Crowd-Sourcing the World

Technology Review Jan. 21, 2009

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Nathan Eagle, a research fellow at

the Santa Fe Institute, is launching

a project similar to Amazon's

Mechanical Turk but that distributes

tasks (such as the translation of

documents into other languages and

transcription of audio recordings)

via cell phones. The goal of his

"txteagle" project is to leverage an

underused work force in some of...

http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=10007&m=33305