Where Innovation Lives!: Robot Reality
Siliconindia (05/02) Vol. 6, No. 5, P. 36; Williams, Mark

Deb Roy of MIT's Cognitive Machines Group is designing machines capable of
speech and comprehending natural spoken language. Such machines would
discover the meaning of words by interacting with their surrounding
environment. "If you want to create a robot that uses language as humans do,
I see no way but to endow it with the same sorts of sensory-motor grounding
and goal-pursuit processes that we ourselves possess," Roy argues. He says
that cognitive machines will require sensors and actuators to connect to the
physical world, as well as "drives, goals, desires and self-reflective
mechanisms." Roy and his team are working on a number of technologies,
including robots that can attribute meaning to visually grounded words and
understand fairly intricate grammar by show-and-tell; and a manipulator that
has been imbued with stereo color vision, proprioceptive sensors, senses of
gravity and touch, and the ability to play with verb definitions. Another
robot has been able to learn from observing how mothers address infants. "It
demonstrates the ability of the algorithms we've developed to segment speech,
and to link words to visual categories given the sort of data that an infant
would see and hear," Roy explains. He believes that the speech technologies
his group is working on could one day help people who are illiterate or
visually impaired access textual data.  

http://whitechapel.media.mit.edu/people/dkroy/
http://www.media.mit.edu/cogmac/
http://www.media.mit.edu/cogmac/newt.html