Seven years after the researchers unveiled their first-generation android, Affetto, they've now found a system to make it more expressive. Photo / Osaka University
Seven years after the researchers unveiled their first-generation android, Affetto, they've now found a system to make it more expressive. Photo / Osaka University
Japan's affection for robots is no secret. But is the feeling mutual in the country's amazing androids?
We may now be a step closer to giving androids greater facial expressions to communicate with.
While robots have featured in advances in healthcare, industrial and other settings in Japan, capturing humanistic expression in a robotic face remains an elusive challenge.
Although their system properties have been generally addressed, androids' facial expressions have not been examined in detail.
This is owing to factors such as the huge range and asymmetry of natural human facial movements, the restrictions of materials used in android skin, and of course the intricate engineering and mathematics driving robots' movements.
A trio of researchers at Osaka University has now found a method for identifying and quantitatively evaluating facial movements on their android robot child head.
Named Affetto, the android's first-generation model was reported in a 2011 study.
Seven years after the researchers unveiled the first Affetto, they've now found a system to make it more expressive.
Their findings offer a path for androids to express greater ranges of emotion - and ultimately have deeper interaction with humans.
"Surface deformations are a key issue in controlling android faces," study co-author Minoru Asada explained.
"Movements of their soft facial skin create instability, and this is a big hardware problem we grapple with. We sought a better way to measure and control it."
The researchers investigated 116 different facial points on Affetto to measure its three-dimensional movement and facial points were underpinned by so-called "deformation units".
Each unit comprises a set of mechanisms that create a distinctive facial contortion, such as lowering or raising part of a lip or eyelid.
Measurements from these were then subjected to a mathematical model to quantify their surface motion patterns.
While the researchers encountered challenges in balancing the applied force and in adjusting the synthetic skin, they were able to employ their system to adjust the deformation units for precise control of Affetto's facial surface motions.
"Android robot faces have persisted in being a black box problem: they have been implemented but have only been judged in vague and general terms," study co-author Hisashi Ishihara said.
"Our precise findings will let us effectively control android facial movements to introduce more nuanced expressions, such as smiling and frowning."
Why personality matters in love
For men, having a greater range of personality traits plays a big role in having more sex and producing more children. Photo / 123RF
What's the secret to having more sex and producing more children?
Well, for men at least, it might come down to having a greater range of personality traits - especially those deemed extroverted, emotionally stable, agreeable or conscientious.
Queensland University of Technology behavioural economist Dr Stephen Whyte and colleagues collected their data from the online Australian Sex Survey of 2016, in which participants were asked a range of socio-demographic questions, as well as given a mini-marker BIG 5 personality test.
"Throughout history, competitive advantages have helped men and women achieve increased success in their occupation, sport, artistic endeavours, their ability to acquire and secure resources and, ultimately, their survival," Whyte said.
"However, little is known about the advantages, or disadvantages, personality traits provide in relation to sexual activity and offspring success.
"Science doesn't really have a firm understanding around how personality traits influence human mating and reproductive behaviour, and particularly whether certain personality types are favoured by either males or females.
"Only those who identified as heterosexual were included in our analysis which gave us a sample of close to 3000 males and 1500 females."
The team discovered key personality differences between the sexes in both sexual frequency and offspring success.
Compared to females, males reported a larger number of personality factors that influenced such outcomes, which explained a greater proportion of the variation in sexual activity.
"For both men and women, extraversion equated to greater sexual frequency," Whyte said.
"The results showed certain trait combinations appear to result in higher sexual frequency and more offspring for select males.
"The combinations producing higher sexual frequency for select males being high extraversion and high agreeableness, high extraversion and high conscientiousness, and high agreeableness with high conscientiousness."
New research shows how young women interact with images online can affect how they feel about their own bodies. Photo / 123RF
It's no secret that social media can blur the lines on what's real and what's fantasy, but new research shows how young women interact with images online can affect how they feel about their own bodies.
The study focused on young women, aged 18 to 27, who liked or commented on photos of people they deemed to be more attractive than themselves.
"The results showed that these young adult women felt more dissatisfied with their bodies," said study leader Associate Professor Jennifer Mills, of the University of York in Canada.
"They felt worse about their own appearance after looking at social media pages of someone that they perceived to be more attractive than them," she said.
"Even if they felt bad about themselves before they came into the study, on average, they still felt worse after completing the task."
The research included 118 female undergraduate students from diverse ethnic backgrounds.
Participants reported their age, ethnicity, whether English was their first language, and years of post-secondary education in an online questionnaire six weeks before the experiment.
Each participant was given a consent form and questionnaire where they had to indicate using a specific scale how satisfied or dissatisfied they were with their appearance or body image.
Participants were then randomly assigned into one of two experimental conditions.
One group of participants were asked to log into Facebook and Instagram for a period of five or more minutes and find one peer that was the same age who they felt was more attractive than themselves.
After looking at the photos, each participant was asked to leave a comment of their choice.
In the control group, participants were asked to do the same task except this time comment on a post of a family member whom they did not think was more attractive than themselves.
The data showed that participants' views of their own appearance were not affected when interacting with their family members.
"I think in a lot of cases, young women who post to social media are hoping to get positive reinforcement for what they're posting and the way in which women use social media is more appearance-based than it is for men," Mills said.
Particularly in this age group - 18 to mid-20s - appearance was very important, and women cared a great deal about how they were perceived by other people.
They were also most likely to use social media.
"When we compare ourselves to other people, that has the potential to affect the valuation of ourselves," Mills said.
"We really need to educate young people on how social media use could be making them feel about themselves and how this could even be linked to stringent dieting, eating disorders or excessive exercise.
