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Monday, June 25, 2012

Surkin: if only every hotel were like Establishment in Syd. Apple TV, Bose sound system, wifi that actually works

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Sunday, June 17, 2012

Gynecologists view Cerazette(reg) - the estrogen ... - Health & Fitness

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Saturday, June 16, 2012

Baby robot learns first words from human teacher

AT FIRST it's just noise: a stream of incoherent sounds, burbling away. But, after a few minutes, a fully formed word suddenly emerges: red. Then another: box. In this way, a babbling robot has learned to speak its first real words, just by chatting with a human.

Seeing this developmental leap in a machine may lead to robots that speak in a more natural, human-like way, and help uncover how children first start to make sense of language. Between the ages of 6 and 14 months children move from babbling strings of syllables to uttering actual words. It is a necessary step en route to acquiring full language. Once a few "anchor" words have been established, they provide clues as to where words may start and finish and so it becomes easier for a child to learn to speak.

Inspired by this process, a team led by computer scientist Caroline Lyon at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, programmed their humanoid robot iCub ? called DeeChee ? with almost all the syllables that exist in English ? around 40,000 in total. This allowed it to babble rather like a baby, by arbitrarily stringing syllables together.

The researchers also enlisted 34 people to act as teachers, who were told to treat DeeChee as if it were a child. DeeChee took part in an 8-minute dialogue with each teacher but, between each session, its memory was saved, and then wiped and reset, so that with each teacher, the experiment started anew. At the outset of the dialogue, each of the syllables in DeeChee's lexicon had an identical score.

Lexicon score

All that started to change once the lesson began. Programmed to take turns listening and then speaking, DeeChee turned the teacher's speech into syllables, totting up the number of instances of each one. It then used this information to update the scores in its own lexicon, giving extra points to syllables the teacher had used.

When it next spoke, it would be more likely to repeat the syllables the teacher had uttered because these now had higher scores.

Lyon says this is reminiscent of human infants. "When they hear frequent sounds, they become sensitive to them," says Lyon. "They prefer what's familiar."

This learning by imitation was then reinforced, as teachers made encouraging comments when DeeChee spoke a recognisable word. DeeChee was programmed to detect these comments and give extra points to the syllables that preceded the teacher's approval. Inevitably some nonsense syllables would get extra points too. But as this process was repeated, only those syllables that made up words would keep showing up in strings that gained approval.

Though the robot was still uttering nonsense streams of syllables, towards the end of the 8 minutes, real words kept popping up more often than if DeeChee were still selecting syllables at random.

That words can emerge from babble using a statistical learning process not specific to language demonstrates that this stage of language acquisition does not require hard-wired grammar faculties, says Lyon.

Paul Vogt, a cognitive scientist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands is impressed: "It's a very interesting first step towards having robots that can help us study language acquisition."

Right now, DeeChee's speech is a far cry from full-blown language, but starting with babbling could be the best way to create robots that speak naturally. "If you want the robot to work with natural speech, then you might need to teach it from the very beginning," says Lyon.

Journal reference:PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0038236

Only the ones that matter

Not all words are created equal. When Caroline Lyon's team at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, taught a robot rudimentary speech, it favoured some types of words over others. Shapes and colours ? including red, green, heart, square, box ? appeared much more often than "the" or "and". Lyon says "and" or "the" are uttered very frequently but are sometimes squashed together with another word, making it hard to make them out. Salient words like "red" or "green" tend to be pronounced the same way no matter where in a sentence they appear. It's possible that this difference helps children learn, as these words have higher "information value" at a young age, suggests Lyon's team.

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Fitch downgrades Egypt over political uncertainties

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FDA urges markets to pull shellfish from SKorea

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Let Them Eat Cake? Yammer?s Price Tag May Be About $1.4 Billion

Benchmark Capital general partner Bill Gurley tipped an interesting price point for a potential Yammer deal. He asked on-stage whether it was $1.4 billion to the co-head of Goldman Sachs' global telecommunications, media and technology investment banking unit Anthony Noto tonight at the F.ounders conference in New York. Noto declined to comment.

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Foxconn employee jumps to death in southwest China

BEIJING (AP) ? A Foxconn Technology Group employee jumped to his death Wednesday from a company-rented apartment building in southwest China's Sichuan province, local police said.

At least a dozen Foxconn employees have jumped to their deaths or tried to do so since 2010, casting spotlight on the world's largest contract maker of electronics. The Taiwan-based company has been besieged with reports of poor working and living conditions for its workers at factories and dorms. The company installed nets in 2010 to prevent such deaths after the spate of suicides.

A public security bureau in Chengdu city announced the death Wednesday on the Sina Weibo microblogging site. The post identifies the employee only by the surname Xie and says the cause remains under investigation.

The official Xinhua News Agency said the man was 23.

In February, Foxconn ? which employs about 1 million workers at its massive plants in China ? said it had raised wages by up to 25 percent and that it was taking measures to limit workers' total work hours.

The plants that turn out iPhones, iPads, Xbox video game consoles, Dell and Hewlett-Packard computers, are run with military-like discipline.

Associated Press

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