Unlocking Your Inner Robot | Chung Hyuk Park | TEDxPearlStreet

[Music] let me introduce a few friends [Music] hello my name is minnie what's your name it looks like we're in a maze i wonder what exciting things are gonna happen around the maze let's start walking and discover together are you ready runway mini were born in 2014 a small mobile robot with a face and a humanoid that can laugh and cry invite us to play express happiness fear anger excitement and our favorite frustration their minds are products of assistive robotics and telemedical robotic intelligence research created to help people with disabilities there are particularly good friends with children with autism spectrum disorder or asd in ways that humans have managed rumor and meaning and their human relative op2 have pioneered unparalleled social emotional interactions with children with autism to assist in their development and track their progresses i don't know what to do one day opito was shouting in front of a child 12 year old boy in part of a controlled experiment in our lab at the george washington university his parents were sitting with me a few feet away he's frustrated the boy answered that's frustration the boy's parents were shocked they have not known their son knew the word frustration let alone that he'll be able to identify the behavior that defined the feeling it was revelation robot could open a new channel of communication for the boy that boy lives with autism one precious member of the world's largest minority group people with disabilities one billion men women and children largely misunderstood misrepresented and underserved the very same humans who are characteristically compassionate collaborative and charitable i learned that first hand by working with them and building many but it was years before i unlocked this truth a journey that started in south korea to live in a modern high-tech society we are expected to master a vast amount of knowledge in order to keep ourselves from merciless world failure competitions it's a tragedy idealized around the globe strive to get a good education to get a job to be wealthy and become famous i was in there too and while fighting my way through those challenges i sensed myself becoming less human and more robotic ironically enough i wanted to study robotics so i can make robots that work for humans ease our lives and enrich humanity i realize now i was also trying to improve my own life by giving meaning beyond my physical reach i had secured a job in the big iit industry in korea but i wasn't satisfied i was not seeing my contribution change the society in the ways i thought was possible so quite uncharacteristically korean of me i quit koreans and critters any koreans out there might know what i'm talking about you don't dishonor your parents but i quit to honor my father his parents my grandparents were killed in the korean war leaving my father and his four siblings to raise themselves as a youngest in the family my father went to seoul alone to study the an emerging field of economic geography and became a professor to share his findings with curious minds as a scholar he devoted his whole life to the development plans of korea his example was one of moral courage and his was the example i want you to follow so i left for america to pursue a phd program at georgia tech where i could combine my technical expertise and my desire to affect individual lives i joined our probability project accessible robotic programming for students with disability what i did is not knowing what i know now about people with disabilities back then i was one of the misguided majority who misunderstood 1 billion men but i did know humanized intelligence and assist technology systems or robots in my case that connect with people with special needs and augment with perception and functionality for two years i told robotic programming for teenagers with visual impairments while they told me patience and perseverance i learned more than they did and i quickly discovered that there's no one-size-fits-all engineering solution for the individuals with disabilities what they needed were practical and personalized solutions based on their expressed preferences my first experiment to test this was a telepresence robotic system interactive robotic technology non-visual descriptions designed to enable remote navigation like a simulator for the blind or hectic skype for the blind i invited the visually impaired community and teens adults and even some seniors came from hours away to test my system not only they were excited to use my robots they were effusive with their insightful suggestions one participant was so moved by her experience that she wrote an essay in one national center for women in information technology nc wit award my ideas were getting attention and i was getting confidence the students whose potential i was unleashing with our robots while unlocking the robot in me when i left the center i poured all of my energy into programming romo mini and op2 with my students and researchers with same hearts and designed our robots to empower children with autism why autism because there are one in every 54 children in the u.s who have autism because there's no cure because geography and finances have become excuses for inequitable services because fewer than 20 of adults with autism are employed and because diagnosed children are getting only 30 minutes of one-on-one special care per day or even per week these children need more deserve more and robots can fill in the gaps but to all the extent all the diagnosis and thoughtful interventions have proven to curb symptoms of autism in children and give them a chance to outgrow it our robots can contribute to both lending their hands to human caregivers and to the children's families giving them fresh hope and here's how they do it robots like romo and mini can stay in the same place space with the children as such children do not feel judged or intimidated by the robot but they treat them as their equal or playmate roommate many in turn have the time to observe and analyze the child's activities model the behaviors the child needs improving and report the effectiveness of the intervention back to clinicians and parents this means that romo and many are working double time when in the play space their observation becomes data quantifiable and actionable data about children's activities from their movement power speed range of motion facial expressions eye gaze vocal responses and physical interactions this information is on-boarded as computational intelligence prompting our robots to understand and empathize with the children and select appropriate actions to regulate and guide to child emotional changes reduce sensory overloads and ultimately increase the effectiveness of the intervention as primates our robots can invite the child into joyful social environment with more natural place settings so robots do not dominate the space while providing social problems and emotional stimuli and over time our robots can accumulate knowledge from the interaction with each child being more ready and eager to learn from the child and grow together and they have in the experiment after experiment we watch children with autism speak their minds instead of ignoring human instructions each child watched meaning to some muscles and card with him when minnie was lost a treasure a child with sensory issues who hated getting his hands dirty tuck his hands into a ball of sand to find the treasure for meaning one child was so tech savvy and smart he challenged many to speak you know meaning doesn't have a mouth to follow his wild moves and to become smart the next time they met our seven years of study were providing overwhelming proofs that kids with autism spectrum disorder were responding as well as typically developing children during interactive sessions with our robots and not just by reacting to the robot but by self-initiating interactions we were learning something new from each study each day children and their parents inspired us and humbled us each child a testament to the fruits of perseverance resilience and collaboration i do open these smiles when people challenged my motivations and questioned why do you use color when the visual impaired can't see light what is the financial or economic benefits of its research for real autism can your research attract big industry attention and perhaps the most hurtful why are you doing this research if you don't have autistic children of your own the question stung but they were understandable of course if you are from a society or cultural background where people's disability are kept hidden it'll be impossible to understand the need of these studies of course a parent who sacrificed the career and relationship to care for the child would question how a man like me could truly understand and feel how much it hurts to be misunderstood i couldn't pretend to feel that their reality but i could see their potential it was through finding potential in others they finally unlocked my own our recent progress with machine learning algorithms demonstrates that robotic interventions could be used as a preliminary evaluation for at risk detection of autism and results from our deemed learning and artificial intelligence are enabling our robots to learn dance moves so they can teach the steps to children for more enriching social and educational experiences our robots are evolving quickly to learn the context of social interactions and human gestures to better understand the child and to be better prepared for developing child who could very quickly outgrow and outsmart a robot we have made tremendous progress i have to the billion people who had misunderstood told me how to listen how to trust to believe not just in them but in my own ability as their fellow human to empower them with our robotic system and over the companions that could change their lives but the journey is far from over there's more to learn romul mini and opt have just begun to bridge the gaps in our understanding of one another but one humanoid alone can't alter the perception of the precious minority but children can just like one child after another has changed me mini here doesn't see labels or doesn't say them he plays through them and so must we thank you very much you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 2,358

Rating: 4.594203 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Technology, AI, Children, Disability, Engineering, Robots

Id: HGFoEf9yGtA

Length: 13min 26sec (806 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2020