Towards addressing the Symbol Grounding Problem and motivated by early childhood language development, we leverage a robot which has been equipped with an approximate model of curiosity with particular focus on bottom-up building of unsupervised categories grounded in the physical world. That is, rather than starting with a top-down symbol (e.g., a word referring to an object) and providing meaning through the application of predetermined samples, the robot autonomously and gradually breaks up its exploration space into a series of increasingly specific unlabeled categories at which point an external expert may optionally provide a symbol association. We extend prior work by using a robot that can observe the visual world, introducing a higher dimensional sensory space, and using a more generalizable method of category building. Our experiments show that the robot learns categories based on actions and what it visually observes, and that those categories can be symbolically grounded into.https://info.arxiv.org/help/prep#comments

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into education has the potential to transform the way we learn and teach. In this paper, we examine the current state of AI in education and explore the potential benefits and challenges of incorporating this technology into the classroom. The approaches currently available for AI education often present students with experiences only focusing on discrete computer science concepts agnostic to a larger curriculum. However, teaching AI must not be siloed or interdisciplinary. Rather, AI instruction ought to be transdisciplinary, including connections to the broad curriculum and community in which students are learning. This paper delves into the AI program currently in development for Neom Community School and the larger Education, Research, and Innovation Sector in Neom, Saudi Arabia s new megacity under development. In this program, AI is both taught as a subject and to learn other subjects within the curriculum through the school systems International Baccalaureate (IB) approach, which deploys learning through Units of Inquiry. This approach to education connects subjects across a curriculum under one major guiding question at a time. The proposed method offers a meaningful approach to introducing AI to students throughout these Units of Inquiry, as it shifts AI from a subject that students like or not like to a subject that is taught throughout the curriculum.

In today's world, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is all around us. Whether you're using navigation apps such as Google Maps or talking to your nearby smart assistant, it is undeniable that the age of AI is impacting the lives of millions with this new technology. As Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, a Computer Scientist & AI expert, states "AI is going to change the world more than anything in the history of mankind. That's why it is important for our future generations to be learning about some fundamentals of AI. At Winchester Thurston Summer Camp, we did just that with Ready AI! Ready AI held a one week long summer camp session at Winchester Thurston from July 12th -- 16th reviewing the fundamentals of AI.

One challenge with introducing robots into novel environments is misalignment between supervisor expectations and reality, which can greatly affect a user's trust and continued use of the robot. We performed an experiment to test whether the presence of an explanation of expected robot behavior affected a supervisor's trust in an autonomous robot. We measured trust both subjectively through surveys and objectively through a dual-task experiment design to capture supervisors' neglect tolerance (i.e., their willingness to perform their own task while the robot is acting autonomously). Our objective results show that explanations can help counteract the novelty effect of seeing a new robot perform in an unknown environment. Participants who received an explanation of the robot's behavior were more likely to focus on their own task at the risk of neglecting their robot supervision task during the first trials of the robot's behavior compared to those who did not receive an explanation. However, this effect diminished after seeing multiple trials, and participants who received explanations were equally trusting of the robot's behavior as those who did not receive explanations. Interestingly, participants were not able to identify their own changes in trust through their survey responses, demonstrating that the dual-task design measured subtler changes in a supervisor's trust.

Wow, educational toys have changed a lot since I was a kid. I remember inserting floppy disks (!) into a computer in order to play classic games like "Number Munchers" and "The Oregon Trail". I learned very quickly that "Dog" was not a day of the week, and that it was very easy to die of wasting diseases in the western US in the 19th century. As the world becomes more and more digitally inclined, parents and teachers alike want toys that teach kids computer-and technology-related skills, both for their future employability and for being a citizen in a society built on 1's and 0's. One emerging trend is toys that teach kids how to write computer programming code. Coding is becoming essential knowledge because the world runs on computers, and computers themselves run on code. As a person with a degree in a STEM field, I had to learn how to code later in life, and it was a miserably long learning curve (even if it's one of my favorite things to do now).

Barely an hour ago, Recode broke the news that Anki, the consumer robotics company behind both Vector, Cozmo, and Overdrive, will be terminating several hundred employees and shutting down on Wednesday after it failed to secure a new round of financing at the end of last week. This is a significant blow to the consumer robotics industry: Anki, which came out of stealth during Apple's WWDC in 2013, had nearly US $100 million in revenue in 2017, and they seemed to have found a sweet spot with relatively sophisticated robotic toys that were still at least somewhat affordable. Despite having sold more than 1.5 million robots (hundreds of thousands of which were Cozmos) as of late last year, it wasn't enough "to support a hardware and software business and bridge to our long-term product roadmap," Anki said in a statement sent to press today. While the details of what happened at Anki are still developing, the company told Recode that "a significant financial deal at a late stage fell through with a strategic investor and we were not able to reach an agreement." This is despite additional reports that a variety of companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, and Comcast, were all potentially interested in acquiring Anki.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. At Amazon, we continually invest in new technologies to benefit customers. We've been hard at work developing a new, fully-electric delivery system – Amazon Scout – designed to safely get packages to customers using autonomous delivery devices.

When Ayanna met Cozmo the robot, both she and the robot lit up. "it was like she met a new best friend," her Boys and Girls Club teacher James Carter said. And when Cozmo said her name, "she was so excited she didn't know what to do with herself." Even better, it was Ayanna who had programmed Cozmo to say it. Ayanna is one of roughly 50 kids at the Boys and Girls Club of Western Pennsylvania who are using a new artificial intelligence kit created by ReadyAI.

If I was reviewing Anki's Vector as just another smart speaker or Alexa-enabled device, it would be hard to recommend. It takes too long to answer, has a limited set of skills (and Skills), and often won't respond to its wake word until the second or third attempt. But the thing is, even with all its flaws, Vector is just so darn likable. When it's not responding to your queries, Vector sleeps (and snores). He reacts to loud noises.

A new generation of robot toys with personalities powered by artificial intelligence could give kids more than just a holiday plaything, according to a University of Alberta researcher. Unlike previous electronic pets like the Furby and Tamagotchi that sparked holiday crazes in the late '90s, some of the robotic drones and droids on store shelves this season are packing genuine AI technology, said Anna Koop, director of applied machine learning at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute. "They're doing face recognition, they respond to voice commands with reasonable consistency, and they have sophisticated processors," she said. An object of particular curiosity for Koop is Cozmo and its more advanced cousin, Vector. Developed by Anki, a company founded by three graduates of Carnegie Mellon's robotics Ph.D. program, the little tank-like robots are so full of personality that even Koop has to take an educated guess at just how intelligent their artificial intelligence is.