A TED talk by Cynthia Breazel about personal robots:
http://www.ted.com/talks/cynthia_breazeal_the_rise_of_personal_robots.html

The Geminoid project by the Danish Aalborg university:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snB24BHw1mw&feature=youtu.be
http://www.c.aau.dk/geminoid/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZlLNVmaPbM

We’re written a nice state of the art article:

http://www.chatbots.org/research/news/state_of_the_art_humanlike_conversational_ai/

Curious what you think!

Erwin Van Lun - Aug 5, 2011:

Curious what you think!

The videos are rather impressive if you ask me
Is there any way we can learn something about the technologies used?

Most of the time it are researchers from universities. They like to be involved in ‘serious’ discussions, and we’d like to help them.

What will definitely help if you upload a resembling photo and add a bio to your profile .

We’ll promote the research area amongst researchers shortly.

The state of the art in child care?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_Qc_nmSUGQ

Saw this on facebook and couldn’t resist sharing.

That’s pretty good, although ultimately I think it will be the better solution once they get the kinks ironed out.

Reminds me of an episode of the original “Twilight Zone,” one of the few that was actually positive. It was written by “Ray Bradbury” and was called “I Sing the Body Electric.” It was about two grieving children who had lost their mother, and their father hired a robot nanny to look after them…

http://asmith.id.au/photos/unattended-children.jpg

I never realized that they made Bradbury’s short story into a TZ episode. As he’s one of my all-time favorite authors, one would think that little tidbit of info would not have been missed. Indeed, that’s a wonderful story, and one I’ve read many times. I guess it’s a Hulu/Youtube search for me now.

The state of the art in education: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/science/16stanford.html

Any takers?

That sounds great! But where do I sign up? :(

Google to the rescue!

This seems to be the class sign-up sheet. Strange that they have it at its own domain, rather than within “stanford.edu”.

EDIT: The website of one of the instructors also links to the same page, so I guess it’s legit.

Thanks, CR. I’m now one of only 71,000+ people who have signed up. WOOT! I’m special!!!

[edit]Hopefully, I won’t be learning anything about green dresses, or how to ask for comeone’s credit card info. ALICE already taught me that stuff.

I signed up also.

I wonder if I should have Skynet-AI sign-up? He could always use a little extra AI.

It’s the real deal alright. First read about it a couple of weeks ago. Due to the overwhelming response, Stanford has decided to offer more of their popular courses online as well. Now you can take courses in database systems and machine learning. Sign up at the following places:

http://www.ai-class.com/ Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

http://www.db-class.com/ Introduction to Databases

http://www.ml-class.com/ Machine Learning

Thanks for the links, Andrew. I just signed up for the other two, as well. The database course will be especially helpful, I think, since that’s an area of my knowledge and experience that has some serious “holes” in it.

@Andrew: online training is an interesting topic! Actually we should have all information about online training, webinars etc online. Would you be willing to help?