Sans Sapiens Robonihilationwire News

Japanese Robot Disgusted with President Bush
Posted: 09 Jun 2007 09:33 AM CDT
According to a Reuters story (alt link), the creepy-looking Japanese humanoid robot, Kansei, generates appropriate facial expression when you talk to it. The facial expressions are based on the most common reaction that normal people have to a database of 500,000 English words. For example, hearing the word sushi makes the robot smile; hearing the words Bush or Iraq causes expressions of disgust and fear. The robot's face is equipped to generate 36 different facial expressions in many different combinations. The expressions are intended to improve human-robot interaction by mimicking normal human expressions that occur during conversations. Kansei was developed as part of a research project by Professor Takeno Jun'ichi at the Robot and Science Lab of Meiji University. For more you can read a 2005 Discovery Channel report on Kansei (PDF format). There's also a short YouTube video about Kansei. We reported on Kansei a couple of years ago when it had a smaller vocabulary