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News Release
- April 22, 2010
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Mouth-less Keepon Robot Gets a Smile
As Winner of Carnegie Mellon’s Smiley Award
PITTSBURGH—Marek Michalowski, a Ph.D. student in robotics, and Keepon,
an ingratiating robot that looks like a tiny yellow snowman, are the
winners of this year’s Smiley Award, presented annually to a Carnegie
Mellon University student for innovation in technology-assisted
person-to-person communication.
The $500 award, presented by the
Computer Science Department and sponsored by Yahoo!, is named in honor
of the ubiquitous Smiley emoticon, :-), created at Carnegie Mellon in
1982. FaceFlip, a hilarious technological twist on the Web sensation
called Chatroulette, will receive an honorable mention for creator
Maxwell Hawkins, a freshman in computer science.
Both projects
and all of the nominees will be recognized during a celebration at 4:30
p.m., Thursday, April 29 in the Rashid Auditorium of the Gates and
Hillman centers.
Keepon, a
spongy robot about the size, shape and color of two yellow tennis balls,
was created by a Japanese scientist, Hideki Kozima, to study how small
children develop social behavior. It also is used as a tool in therapy
for children who have developmental disorders such as autism.
Michalowski has worked with Kozima for several years, expanding Keepon's
use by studying how rhythmic movements affect interpersonal
communication. With two cameras as eyes and a microphone for a nose (but
no mouth), Keepon can bob along to a musical beat or respond to a
person's movements. Keepon is perhaps most famous for a couple of
popular YouTube videos in which it dances to songs by the band Spoon.
“Keepon
is undeniably cute, but that wasn’t a deciding factor for the judges,”
said Scott Fahlman, a research professor of computer science and
language technologies and the inventor of the Smiley emoticon. “When we
saw the video of its interactions with autistic kids and how it got them
to come out of their shells, we realized the potential of this thing
and why Marek deserved recognition for his work.”
Michalowski,
who completed the defense of his Ph.D. thesis in December, said winning
the Smiley Award is a huge honor. “Although the robot was originally
designed to facilitate interaction with children with autism, it's been
exciting to see how rhythm has made Keepon resonate so powerfully with
people around the world,” he said. “And Keepon's minimal form certainly
shares the simplicity of the emoticons we use to add emotional context
to our everyday communications.”
Hawkins created FaceFlip as a class project this
spring. Its starting point is Chatroulette, a website that pairs random
strangers for webcam-based conversations. At any point in a
conversation, either participant can opt out and be randomly paired with
another partner. Usually, the Chatroulette site displays video images
of both participants; when a Chatroulette user happens upon a partner
using FaceFlip, however, that user instead sees his or her own image
sent back with the face — and only the face — flipped upside down.
“Everybody
thought it was hilarious,” Fahlman said. “It’s very clever. And we were
blown away when we learned that that this was conceived and implemented
by a freshman.”
The Smiley Award was
established in 2007 during the 25th anniversary celebration of Fahlman’s
invention of the Smiley emoticon. The feat took all of 10 minutes,
Fahlman recalled, but it addressed a need in the early days of computing
to let readers of online bulletin boards know when a writer was joking.
It is a need that persists in this age of emails, Facebook posts and
tweets. Fahlman said he hopes the prize will encourage development of
more student projects that enhance person-to-person communication via
computer, as the Smiley did back in 1982.
Contact:
Byron Spice
412.268.9068
bspice@cs.cmu.edu
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About Carnegie Mellon: Carnegie Mellon is a private research university with a
distinctive mix of programs in engineering, computer science, robotics, business,
public policy, fine arts and the humanities. More than 10,000 undergraduate and
graduate students receive an education characterized by its focus on creating
and implementing solutions for real problems, interdisciplinary collaboration,
and innovation. A small student-to-faculty ratio provides an opportunity for
close interaction between students and professors. While technology is pervasive
on its 144-acre Pittsburgh campus, Carnegie Mellon is also distinctive among
leading research universities for the world-renowned programs in its College of
Fine Arts. A global university, Carnegie Mellon has campuses in Silicon Valley, Calif.,
and Qatar, and programs in Asia, Australia and Europe.
For more, see www.cmu.edu.
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