My name is Katherine and I'm 8 years old.
And my question is
why are humans and robots similar?
My name is Bilge Mutlu.
I'm an associate professor of computer
science at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. I also direct the
Wisconsin human-computer interaction lab
where we develop technologies for human
use and build principles and methods to
design them better. Robots can be similar
to people but they aren't necessarily
similar to people, we make them so we can
make them to be similar, we can make them
not to be similar there are some
benefits that you get out of similarity.
We generally want to make our
environment similar to us, familiar to us.
We work better with things that are
familiar and things that are familiar
kind of jumpstart our sense making of
them, so it's easier to make sense of
things that work that are familiar to us.
Anything that we try to do try to
replicate human behavior we find that is
very complex. Things can be
broken down into more commonly used
elements, such as speech and eye contact
and my distance to the robot, and we can
work on those specific design elements,
that's the good news. The bad news is
that trying to replicate human behavior
in the exact census, it's a very very
challenging task, so what we try to do is
that we try to identify patterns that
humans display and try to replicate
those patterns, so it's not an exact
human behavior but it's human-like
behavior. Uncanny valley is when a
representation, it doesn't have to be a
robot, it could be characters in a movie,
it could be something else, when a
representation is designed to look
human-like and it's very close to human
life, but not quite right. It's very close
but it is just short of being human like
that it starts looking very
creepy. Our goal right now you know
in relation to uncanny valley is - how do we
provide the kinds of benefits that
robotics technology can provide without
sort of you know falling into the valley 
and you know eliciting these kinds of
negative feelings about robots. I
personally think that robots have
tremendous promise. We first saw
computers in the century, then we saw the
Internet,
I think robotics and robots is the
sort of the next big jump where you
bring in physicality into the equation a
computer can't bring you something if
you're in need a robot can. And just with
the embodiment itself, you get a lot of
additional benefits and engagement,
social presence. So there's all these kind of
really interesting very unique benefits
and functionalities that we can
bring into the world of technology into
the human world,
that there's just tremendous promise
that really excites me.
