Билет 16 вопрос 2 Emotional Robot Pets

ScienceDaily (Sep. 20, 2010) — Designers of robot pets are fighting a never-ending battle with consumers to provide entertaining and realistic gadgets that respond to human interaction in ever more nuanced ways, mimicking the behavior of real pet animals or even people. Researchers in Taiwan are now looking at a new design paradigm that could see the development of a robot vision module that might one-day recognize human facial expressions and respond appropriately.

Part of the problem is that robot design takes a long time, while the consumer life cycle of any given product is very short. Moreover, fixed prototypes and repetitive behavior in domestic robots for entertainment is no longer of interest to sophisticated users. Today, they expect their robot pets to be almost as good as the "robots" they see in 3D movies and games.

The researchers, Wei-Po Lee, Tsung-Hsien Yang and Bingchiang Jeng of National Sun Yat-sen University, have now turned to neural networks to help them break the cycle of repetitive behavior in robot toys and to endow them with almost emotional responses to interactions.

Building fully autonomous artificial creatures with intelligence akin to humans is a very long-term goal of robot design and computer science. On the way to such machines, home entertainment and utility devices such as "Tamagotchi" digital pets and domestic toy robots such as Aibo, the robotic dog and even the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, have been developed. At the same time, popular science fiction culture has raised consumer expectations.

There are three major issues to considered in robot design, the team explains. The first is to construct an appropriate control architecture by which the robot can behave coherently. The second is to develop natural ways for the robot to interact with a person. The third is to embed emotional responses and behavior into the robot's computer.

The researchers hope to address all three issues by adopting an approach to behavior-based architecture -- using a neural network -- that could allow the owner of a robot pet to reconfigure the device to "learn," or evolve new behavior and at the same time ensure that the robot pet functions properly in real time. Such a development has major implications for interactive devices, computers and functional robots of the future.

interaction – взаимодействие

facial – лицевой

sophisticated – утонченный, изысканный

endow – обеспечивать, снабжать

response – ответ, отклик

akin – близкий к

coherently – связанно

embed – встраивать, вставлять

Answer the questions:

1. What do designers of robot pets aim to achieve?

2. What problems do designers of robot pets meet?

3. Would you like to have an emotional robot pet? Why/Why not?

Билет 17 вопрос 2 Hardware, Software Advances Help Protect Operating Systems from Attack

ScienceDaily (Jan. 27, 2011) — The operating system (OS) is the backbone of your computer. If the OS is compromised, attackers can take over your computer -- or crash it. Now researchers at North Carolina State University have developed an efficient system that utilizes hardware and software to restore an OS if it is attacked.

At issue are security attacks in which an outside party successfully compromises one computer application (such as a Web browser) and then uses that application to gain access to the OS. For example, the compromised application could submit a "system call" to the OS, effectively asking the OS to perform a specific function. However, instead of a routine function, the attacker would use the system call to attempt to gain control of the OS.

"Our goal is to give the OS the ability to survive such attacks," says Dr. Yan Solihin, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the new system. "Our approach has three components: attack detection; security fault isolation; and recovery."

The concept is to take a snapshot of the OS at strategic points in time (such as system calls or interrupts), when it is functioning normally and then, if the OS is attacked, to erase everything that was done since the last "good" snapshot was taken -- effectively going back in time to before the OS attack. The mechanism also allows the OS to identify the source of the attack and isolate it, so that the OS will no longer be vulnerable to attacks from that application.

The idea of detecting attacks and re-setting a system to a safe state is a well-known technique for restoring a system's normal functions after a failure, but this is the first time researchers have developed a system that also incorporates the security fault isolation component. This critical component prevents the OS from succumbing to the same attack repeatedly.

The concept of taking snapshots of the OS and using it to replace the OS if it is compromised was previously viewed as impractical, since taking these snapshots and running such a system significantly slowed computer operating speeds. "But we've developed hardware support that allows the OS to incorporate these survivability components more efficiently, so that they take up less time and energy," Solihin says. The researchers say the survival system takes up less than 5 percent of the OS's operating overhead.

backbone - основа