Tedx Brussels

TEDxBrussels (on 22 November 2011 in Bozar, Brussels) is one of the many independently organised TED events, but for the Brussels chapter it’s already the 3rd edition. I’m part of the blogging team this year, and in this first post I’m having a look at the women in this year’s speaker list.

Entrepreneur, investor and business adviser Julie Meyer (@JulieMarieMeyer) is U.S. based, but most know her as one of the dragons on BBC’s Dragon’s Den. She is the founder and CEO of Ariadne Capital and the Managing Partner of Ariadne Capital Entrepreneurs Fund (ACE).

“Kaliya Hamlin is @IdentityWoman” sounds a little like a trailer for a female superhero tv series. But Kaliya is really a user-centric ID expert, who facilitates numerous internet ID workshops and unconferences. I’m playing with the idea to write a book about online identity and reputation, so I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how she’s managed to convince companies and organisations to innovate identity tools and systems that work for people on an internet scale.

Leila Chirayath Janah (@Leila_C) is mostly known as the CEO and founder ofSamasource, a social enterprise that gives digital work to impoverished people around the world. But in her Twitter bio she describes herself also as a bit of an “adventurette”. While attending Harvard, she did field work in Mozambique, Senegal and Rwanda and she’s a visiting scholar at Stanford, Yale, and the University of Calgary. Her main mission is to alleviate poverty by empowering the world’s poor as producers of goods and services in the global economy, because “the greatest natural resource in the world that has been overlooked is the brainpower at the bottom of the pyramid.” Check out her blog and official site for more.

Interesting idea: the X Prize Foundation, an organization dedicated to developing radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity through incentive prize competitions. Or, in other words, gamifying doing social good by rewarding the most groundbreaking ideas in a competition. TEDx speaker Eileen Bartholomew (@ebartholomew) has been a Senior Director, Life Sciences, Prize Development at the X Prize Foundation for over 2 years now. She describes her mission as “Relentlessly pursuing creativity and style in a world of necessary engagements.”

Julie Meyer, Kaliya Hamlin, Leila Chirayath Janah and Eileen Bartholomew will be at TEDx Brussels November 22

Clo Willaerts

Here at TEDx Brussels we like to think of ourselves as more than lifelike robots. We sent one of our correspondents to interview Henrik Schaerfe and his double, Geminoid DK to try and work out the difference.

What’s so amazing about robots and more specifically lifelike Androids?

The robot, and specifically the android, is the most iconic of all machines. It represents our curiosity and our dreams to produce something as strange and complicated as ourselves.

For a lot of people it’s looks weird having your alter ego android sitting next to you and smiling at the audience. Does it scare people ?

Yes, certainly, to some people, this is simply too much. But the vast majority of people who have actually met the geminoid quite easily comes to terms with him. First meetings are often driven by a combination of fear and fascination.

I saw the video of the Geminoid summit on YouTube. Experts are calling it a landmark in android science.  Can you tell me a bit about it?

The video was shot by Julie Rafn Abildgaard, who works with me at the Geminoid Lab at Aalborg U, and I think it nicely captures the strangeness and uniqueness of that special day. The video was shot at the end of a long day with experiments and we were all a bit tired and felt like having a bit of fun. We had also had a Japanese TV crew in the lab for several hours that day. We wanted to make the most of the fact that we had all three geminoids at our disposal. The technical setup for having three way conversations mediated by three androids was somewhat complicated, but it was really nice to see the DK with the other two androids.

Geminoid DK was born in 2011, his skillset is very human but also very basic. What kind of skills can we aspect in the next 12 months?

All of the movements and expressions of Geminoid DK are remote controlled by an operator with a computer. It’s means he hasn’t learn a lot so far. Can he learn ? All of the geminoids are designed as telepresence technologies and the remote control allows us investigate many aspects of communication between human and robot in great detail. This also means that the geminoids do not have any intelligence of their own. They cannot learn – but we can. And we do learn a lot with every experiment we make.

Most of the humanoid robots are built in Japan. Are the Japanese ahead of the rest of the world in this new industry and if so, why ?

There are research teams working with humanoids in many countries, including South Korea, Germany, UK, USA, and obviously Japan and Denmark. There is a long tradition in Japan for working with many kinds of robot, and I think that our Japanese colleagues are very skilled at utilizing previous research in humanoid robotics.  But it is also interesting to see how android science is interpreted differently in different cultures. In fact, one part of the geminoid-dk project has from the beginning been to see what happened when we took this technology to Western Europe. The reactions have been very good.

What can we learn from robots?

We learn a lot by studying human robot communication. In this case, we have a communication device with a body. One implication of this is that some of our communication models have to be re-thought. The physical presence of the robotic body changes the situation dramatically.

Why do you think people are so fascinated by humanoid robots?

It’s like looking at a reflection of yourself, and I think that for many people, the idea of having a machine that acts and looks like one of us is a kind of ultimate test of human ingenuity. The idea of making mechanical humans is very old. We find traces of that thought in ancient history from both Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Advances in computer science and robotics are bringing these dreams much closer to their realization. A thinking machine in the shape of a human being has been a source of inspiration to many scientists and artists for centuries. It serves as a measure and a constant reminder of what we are and where we might go. I bring that thought with me every time I walk into the geminoid lab and face the robot.

Interview by Henk de Hooge

Henrik Schaerfe and Geminoid DK will be at TEDx Brussels November 22

Joel Miller, a biomedical engineer at the University of Western Australia in Perth, has won the grand prize inScience‘s fourth annual “Dance Your Ph.D.” contest, a competition that recognizes the best dance interpretations of scientific doctoral work. Miller’s entry (seen above), which also notched the top score in the physics category, was based on his Ph.D. research using lasers to create titanium alloys strong and flexible enough for long-lasting hip replacements. Science also crowned winners in three other categories—chemistry, biology, and social sciences—for dances based on x-ray crystallography, fruit fly sex, and pigeon courtship.

Watch the video here. Microstructure-Property relationships in Ti2448 components produced by Selective Laser Melting: A Love Story

The rules of the contest were simple: Each dance had to be based on a scientist’s Ph.D. research, and that scientist had to be part of the dance. A record 55 dances were submitted to this year’s contest, covering everything from psychology to astrophysics. Last week, 16 finalists were chosen by six previous winners of the contest. The finalists were then scored by a panel of judges that included scientists from Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Boston University, as well as choreographers from Pilobolusand the entire dance cast of Shadowland.

As the grand-prize winner, Miller takes home $1000 and gets a free trip to Belgium to be crowned champion 22 November at TEDxBrussels, a gathering of scientists, artists, and business leaders. Miller’s entry was unusual in that, unlike all of the other entrants, he didn’t film his dance. “We didn’t have a video camera,” he says. So he and his friends shot a series of 2200 still photographs of the dance in action and then converted the photos into stop-motion animation. That allowed Miller to appear to fly over the ground wearing silvery spandex and a cape as he danced with women representing titanium’s alpha and beta crystalline forms.

The Ph.D. research of the three other winners, who will receive $500 each, made for equally compelling dances. Cedric Tan, a biologist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom who won the biology category, depicted the mating dance of the fruit fly, capturing the way that male flies stalk and sniff females. He also incorporated his research on how choosy females prefer to mate with flies that are brothers and how that relation reduces violence between the males.

by John Bohannon for Science Magazine.

Dance Your PhD and John Bohannon wil be at TEDx Brussels November 22

I’ve been thinking about elections lately. In addition to doing some research on why people vote (or don’t) I also returned to a novel I first read about four years ago – José Saramago’s dystopian novel Seeing. If you aren’t familiar with it, here’s how it opens – the government of an unnamed country is holding an election. In the morning, almost nobody shows up to vote, until the afternoon, when 83% of the electorate show up and vote a blank ballot. What is the meaning of the non-vote voters? They are participating by going to the polls, so is it a protest? Is it the culmination of a society’s dissatisfaction with a Parliament that has proven to be ineffective? These are the questions with which an increasingly neurotic and reactionary government wrestles through the rest of the book.

Given today’s ongoing global financial crisis and lack of confidence in governments’ ability to make decisions, the scenario Saramago writes seems less far-fetched than it did to me four years ago. Are we on a one-way road to a future in which citizens just go through the motions? Or even worse, give up on voting altogether? How can government re-energise the citizenry in a way that leads to a deep future of deeper civic involvement? A start would be making sure that issues that matter most to people are the issues getting the attention. U.S. president Bill Clinton is famous for being fixated on, and driven by, polling data. What do the people think about this or that issue, and then make a decision based on popular opinion/sentiment. But polling is built on the premise of asking people questions, and people and questions are messy in terms of in-built biases.  What we really want to know is citizens’ (and more broadly, citizenry’s) sentiment.

How important is sentiment? Ask the leaders of the North African and Middle East countries at the center of the Arab Spring. While protests in the streets are a last resort we can see how opinion was bubbling until the right moment. In the deep future, democracy can be guided not just by what people are saying in political letters to their elected officials, petitions and message boards, but what they say on social media platforms and via word of mouth that isn’t captured by polls and traditional media. It’s that undercurrent, or river of public sentiment, that drives emotion and action, something that former UN representative Paddy Ashdown knows all about from his experience managing post conflict politics in the Balkans.

The Arab Spring demonstrated not the power of the Internet and social media to incite revolution but its power as convener of people with shared sentiment towards their government. The amount of data captured and available via social media about individuals and groups is immensely valuable to governments seeking a clearer read about the sentiment of their electorate. This is no surprise to consumer marketers, who have used these tools already to create products and services and then engage consumers in marketing them on their behalf.

So the deep future will allow political parties, candidates and elected officials clearer, unfiltered information about what is playing well, what isn’t working and which issues are most important to citizens. Simply reading the river doesn’t constitute action though. That would be like casting a blank ballot.

Lord Ashdown will be at TEDx Brussels November 22

Jeff Chertack

Jeff Chertack is CEO of Ogilvy Belgium

Luc Steels is Professor C-3PO, he’s the human-robot language expert. His work at the VUB and Sony Computer Science Lab Paris is all about language and how to get robots to talk to each other and to talk to us, their human makers and users. Previous understandings of artificial intelligence have depended on a version of the old programmers maxim ‘garbage in, garbage out’ meaning if you program poorly you’ll get useless results. For robots you could say they’re limited by the sophistication of their creators and can only communicate using a form of language designed to imitate human speech. That’s why robots have vaguely human sounding voices, human type listening systems and movable limbs (for gestures and body language cues).

Steels reckons the way to get machines to communicate is to think about how language evolves. This means doing lab experiments and simulating how we build grammar rules and syntax from words and most importantly from context. We talk differently whether at work or at home, whether speaking to a ticket collector or to kids. Language also fundamentally changes over time, new words (such as crowdsourcing or tweet) appear and of course grammar changes too, many people have observed how writing is becoming more conversational for example. Trying to design robots that can adapt to the constantly shifting sands of personal communication is still a major challenge with some extremely complex problems to solve.

One of the hardest nuts to crack is that our own mental models of language, communication and speech depend strongly on whom we’re interacting with and how we learned them in the first place. Reproducing the circumstances of interpersonal communication is just too difficult to do with machines in a computer science lab – even with the social skills of geeks at full throttle!

The name of the game is self organisation. Our natural ability to learn language from our parents or teachers is a subconscious form of self organisation. Thank goodness it is, if we had to spend our time working out how to extract grammar rules from speaking, we’d be struck dumb within hours. Professor Steels has worked out a way however for robots to do the same thing, mostly by using the idea of putting machines in real world learning situations with one machine in dialogue with another. Both robots look at a board of symbols and over time one teaches the other what the symbols mean and eventually they come up with a language.

The significance of Luc Steels work for our deep future could be more natural, independent communication between machines and people. More useful robots then would be able to hold a conversation, be language agnostic, carry out more complex tasks and ultimately evolve to equal status with human intelligence. Open the pod bay doors Hal.

Luc Steels will be at TEDx Brussels November 22

John Fass
Art Director TEDx Brussels