It Came From Hollywood
From: New Yorker - 12/01/2003 - Vol. 79, No. 37, P. 54
By: John Seabrook

Oscar-winning special-effects maestro Stan Winston, whose animatronic
creations have dazzled movie goers in such films as "Aliens," "Jurassic
Park," and the "Terminator" series, teamed up with MIT roboticist Cynthia
Breazeal to collaboratively develop an autonomous robot that can move on its
own, maintain eye line with the people it interacts with, and express
emotional states. The design and hardware component of the machine, dubbed
Leonardo, was contributed by Stan Winston Studio, while Breazeal supplied the
software that allows the robot to perceive its surroundings, recognize and
synthesize speech, and build fundamental cognitive skills. The project taps
into Winston's 35 years of working with and often pioneering breakthrough
automaton technology, and Breazeal's efforts in the field of artificial
intelligence, which have yielded sophisticated (for their time) robots such
as Cog and Kismet. Leonardo's appearance is supposed to accommodate both
technical and emotional considerations: His potbelly and oversized head
provide more room for his internal mechanisms, his large eyes facilitate more
light for the robot's cameras, and his ears relay sound to microphones;
Breazeal, meanwhile, mandated that Winston keep Leonardo from looking too
human so as to avoid what Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori calls "the
uncanny valley," the tenet that people find it harder and harder to relate to
robots that appear increasingly human-like. Some of the AI ideas Breazeal
wants to encapsulate in Leonardo are echoed in Donald Norman's forthcoming
book, "Emotional Design," in which he contends that emotions are just as
critical as cognition in intelligence. Leonardo's benefits for Winston
include the development of artificial creatures that can lock eyes with
actors, and his studio will own the patent on Leonardo itself. Breazeal
thinks this marriage of robotics and AI could help clear the way for sociable
robots, which would be companions and caretakers of growing ranks of elderly
persons.