Artificial intelligence research firm OpenAI took inspiration from infants for its latest project, specifically the stunning ability for a newborn to mimic a person minutes after birth. The result is a robot that learns by example, and if you squint, you can see a future where helper robots mimic a person doing household chores once, and then repeats them forever.

The nonprofit of which Elon Musk is a founder and whose mission is discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence revealed Tuesday the system that uses two neural networks to train a robot how to mimic behavior performed in virtual reality. The example behavior was simple: stacking blocks a certain way.

The robot uses two brains to get this done, which work in sequential order. One brain (the vision network) uses information from a camera and transfers what it sees to the second brain (the imitation network) that controls the robotic block-stacking arm.

Our system can learn a behavior from a single demonstration delivered within a simulator, then reproduce that behavior in different setups in reality, OpenAI explains in a blog post. You might be thinking to yourself, why does the demonstration have to be delivered within a simulator? Wouldnt it be easier if a human stacked up actual blocks in real life, instead of doing it all in virtual reality? Itd be easier on the human, sure, but processing those images would be glacially slow.

Heres why: Traditional vision networks (most of them around today) are programmed to merely classify images and do nothing else. OpenAIs Jack Clark offers Inverse this example: Take 10,000 photos of dogs. Some photos have labels, perhaps by breed, while others do not. When all the images are fed through a vision network, it will determine how to sort any unlabeled photos under the right label.

But thats just classifying images, not taking action on them.

If we used real-world images wed need the robot to be storing a real-world image of every single action it took and appropriately labeling them, Clark explains. This is extremely slow.

Instead, researchers at OpenAI use simple virtual reality simulations of objects the A.I. already knows. And thats why this robot needs to learn from VR for its real-life block-stacking.

Belows an animation of block-stacking that a human does using a VR headset and controller, which the robot learns from before imitating it in the real world. Check it out:

The announcement from OpenAI builds on two recent developments from the research firm. The first was vision-based and announced in April: An A.I. trained in VR was used in a real-world robot to successfully identify and pick up a can of Spam from a small table of groceries and throw it in the garbage. It was, naturally, dubbed a Spam-Detecting A.I. That was a fairly simple task, though.

The researchers combined the vision-based learning you see above with so-called one-shot imitation learning, wherein robots should be able to learn from very few demonstrations of any given task. This one-shot learning ability means a human only has to perform a task in this case stacking blocks in a certain order one time for the robot to nail it.

Belows a video released by OpenAI about the project. So while speedy robot butlers may not be right around the corner, training robots in VR to do basic physical tasks is something thats happening right now.

Nick is deputy editor at Inverse. Email him at nick@inverse.com

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Robotic Imitation of Human Behavior Just Took a Big Step Forward ... - Inverse

May 22, 2017 Credit: CC0 Public Domain

How you dress, talk, eat and even what you allow yourself to feel - these often unspoken rules of a group are social norms, and many are internalized to such a degree that you probably don't even notice them. Following norms, however, can sometimes be costly for individuals if norms require sacrifice for the good of the group. How and why did humans evolve to follow such norms in the first place?

A new study from the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis explores this question, shedding light on the origins of human cooperation.

The results, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the ability of humans to internalize social norms is expected to evolve under a wide range of conditions, helping to forge a kind of cooperation that becomes instinctive.

The researchers used computer simulations to model both individual behavior in joint group actions and underlying genetic machinery controlling behavior. The researchers worked from the premise that adherence to norms is socially reinforced by the approval of, and rewards to, individuals who follow them and by punishment of norm violators. The researchers' goal was to see whether certain norms get internalized, meaning that acting according to a norm becomes an end in itself, rather than a tool to get something or to avoid social sanctions.

In the model, individuals make choices about participating in collective actions that require cooperation, and individuals who don't cooperate, or "free riders," can face consequences.

Specifically, the authors looked at two general kinds of collective actions requiring cooperation that our ancestors might have regularly faced. The first type of group action involves "us-vs.-nature" scenarios, where groups must defend against predators and hunt and breed cooperatively. The second type of group action is "us-vs.-them," which constitutes direct conflicts or other costly competition with other groups over territory, mating, access to trade routes, and the like.

The model found that norm internalization readily evolves in both scenarios.

The model also shows that encouraging peer punishment of free-riders is much more efficient in promulgating cooperation in collective actions than promoting participation itself.

The study predicts a significant genetic variation in the ability of humans to internalize norms. In particular, under some conditions populations are expected to have a relatively small frequency of "over-socialized" individuals who are willing to make extreme sacrifices for their groups. Examples in today's society might be suicide bombers and other displays of extreme self-sacrificial behavior for the good of the group. Likewise, there are also "under-socialized" individualspsychopathswho are completely immune to any social norms.

As social and physical environments vary greatly between different human groups, the model accounts for this variation and can predict how these differences will affect human social behavior and human decision-making in different regions.

In addition to answering theoretical questions about the origins of human cooperation, the study may have a variety of practical applications.

"Every day human beings make choices among multiple options in how to respond to various social situations. Those choices are affected by many interacting factors, including social norms and values. Understanding the effects of social norms could help us better understand human decision-making and better predict human actions in response to certain events or policies," said lead author Sergey Gavrilets, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and mathematics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and NIMBioS associate director for scientific activities.

Gavrilets also said the models could be helpful in social and economic policymaking.

"Changing social institutions is a common strategy for changing human behavior," he said. "Sometimes there are attempts to borrow or transfer institutions from one country or region to another. Often such strategies fail miserably, however. Our models can help explain why. Generalizing our models can lead to the development of better tools for predicting consequences of introducing certain social policies and institutions and in identifying the most efficient strategies for changing or optimizing group behaviors."

Explore further: Evolutionary computation scientists find social norms required for the transition to cooperative societies

More information: Sergey Gavrilets el al., "Collective action and the evolution of social norm internalization," PNAS (2017). http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1703857114

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(Medical Xpress) -- We all know that, for the most part, its wrong to kill other people, its inappropriate to wear jeans to bed, and we shouldnt ignore people when they are talking to us. We know these things ...

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The common lineage of great apes and humans split several hundred thousand years earlier than hitherto assumed, according to an international research team headed by Professor Madelaine Bhme from the Senckenberg Centre ...

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The tribal dynamic = internal altruism + external animosity.

The tribes that were better at this dynamic could be expected to prevail in conflict.

This is group selection. The results are biological. Innate. We are born with these traits.

IOW we are domesticated. Artificial. Selected over 100s of gens for our ability to ascribe to the tribal dynamic.

"Rude tribes and... civilized societies... have had continually to carry on an external self-defence and internal co-operation - external antagonism and internal friendship. Hence their members have acquired two different sets of sentiments and ideas, adjusted to these two kinds of activity... A life of constant external enmity generates a code in which aggression, conquest and revenge, are inculcated, while peaceful occupations are reprobated. Conversely a life of settled internal amity generates a code inculcating the virtues conducing to a harmonious co- operation (Spencer, 1892, i, 322).

"These two different sets of sentiments and ideas he called the 'code of amity' and the 'code of enmity'." http://rint.recht...rid2.htm

-Tribalism made us human.

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The right thing to do: Why do we follow unspoken group rules? - Phys.Org

Behavioral finance a body of work combining psychology, economics and other social sciences has upended the way we think about people and money. Where we once assumed that men and women are purely rational decision makers, we now realize that people are rational some of the time but also emotional, biased and often seemingly irrational when making money-related decisions. Omar Aguilar, Senior Vice President and Chief Investment Officer, Equities and Multi-Asset Strategies, at Charles Schwab Investment Management, analyzes global equity markets through a behavioral finance lens. In a recent discussion with Evan Cooper, Executive Editor of InvestmentNews Content Strategy Studio, he shared some thoughts on the rational and irrational elements in human investment behavior and ways advisers can help bridge the gap.

InvestmentNews: Let's begin with some basics. What are the core principles of behavioral finance?

Omar Aguilar: This whole field came into being because conventional economic theory with its math, models and equations could not explain what happens in real life. So it's appropriate that the first principle of behavioral finance is that we're human; we're not machines carrying out algorithms. Second, and closely related, is that because we're human, we have biases. We're wired that way, and our biases have enabled us to survive as a species, even if they sometimes lead to less-than-optimal solutions. Finally, there is a significant degree of dispersion in how people react to different events, partly due to our innate biases and partly due to social pressure and circumstance.

IN: What decisions do people make that reveal these biases?

OA: All of them. It's actually irrational to think that people will always make rational decisions. Again, traditional economic theory assumes market efficiency and that every individual is making rational investment decisions. If that's the case, and if people are making rational decisions constantly, then markets become efficient. If an individual doesn't make a rational decision, the market is supposed to correct it instantly and say, You were wrong. But the market doesn't know what an individual's objectives are, the costs associated with achieving those objectives, and hence the lack of information may be at odds with the theory of efficient markets. In other words, an individual's investment decision could be irrational, but right for the individual utility function. By the same token, you could make a decision that's perfectly rational and in your best economic interest, but it might keep you awake at night. So if it's a rational decision that maximizes your wealth but doesn't let you sleep, you'll probably be biased towards irrational decisions. For advisers, the challenge is trying to understand client biases, getting clients to understand them, and then encouraging actions that will be in a client's best interests.

IN: Many veteran advisers probably would say they don't need behavioral finance to know that their clients often make irrational decisions. How can a formal understanding of the area help advisers better serve clients?

OA: Making the connection between the client's investment objectives and emotional tendencies is what makes a long-term relationship succeed. At Charles Schwab Investment Management, we have a defined process that can help advisers do that. We help them understand a client's investment objectives in the pure economic sense, using financial planning tools to create a rational solution. That's the traditional part, which of course only solves part of the problem.

For the emotional side, we encourage advisers to get into deeper discussions with clients to understand their needs as well as the trade-offs clients and the adviser may have to make to reach the long-term goal. Getting there isn't based on just one decision, it's a journey. So advisers should understand if their recommended investment solutions will satisfy the emotional and human aspects of their clients. The best thing that can happen for an adviser is to make good recommendations that meet client needs, so that the client sticks with those recommendations in a plan that lasts a long time.

IN: What should advisers do to nudge clients in the right direction?

OA: There aren't any nudges or tricks. Advisers have to understand each one of the client's biases and incorporate them into their solutions. That is what's critical for a successful, long lasting relationship with their clients. As we describe it to our advisers and clients, there are two types of human biases: emotional and cognitive, and they are very different. Some people tend to have biases that are more emotional in nature, others more cognitive. As a result, even individuals who on paper look the same in terms of wealth, generation or education may react very differently to the same economic conditions or even communications.

For clients whose biases tend to be emotional in nature, we encourage financial advisers to create a clear and disciplined strategy for addressing uncertainties that may generate emotional reactions, for example changes in volatility or market corrections. Most importantly, we help advisers identify a communication strategy that focuses on their clients' emotional traits. Clients are not going to change very easily because emotional biases never change. Emotional biases can be mitigated and controlled, but they rarely change.

Cognitive biases are easier to deal with as they tend to be driven by evidence or are social in nature, for example feeling left out of a bull market. Advisers can provide clients with information explaining their biases and how they can actually use them to work in their favor. This gives clients a better sense of solid evidence that will help them achieve their long term goals.

IN: What about an adviser's own biases? How can those be countered?

OA: That's a question we get all the time, and I always offer the following analogy. Imagine you're on a plane and it suddenly hits turbulence. No matter who you are a passenger, the pilot or a crew member a reaction is expected because we are human. If you're the pilot or a flight attendant, the cognitive part of your brain kicks in almost immediately and calms you down. But if you don't travel that often or if you hate flying, it will take a while for the rational part of your human brain to override the emotional part. Both the trained and the untrained flyers have the same emotional reactions, it's just that trained professionals can switch mental gears more smoothly.

In the same way, financial advisers have the training and experience to help them overcome their own biases. But don't be mistaken; advisers have biases just like anyone else, and those biases don't go away. Advisers need to understand their own biases and how to manage them.

For example, if the market takes a dive, some advisers' gut reaction based on experience would be that everything will be okay like it was in the past, in other words this is just turbulence. They would immediately reach out to clients and reassure them. Other advisers will first do research around similar historical market scenarios and then call clients armed with data to show how markets recovered under similar circumstances. In the first case, advisers are relying on their own emotional and experience bias to stay calm. In the second case, advisers gather information so their cognitive brain can override their emotional brain.

IN: Should advisers admit their biases to clients?

OA: I think they should. Being upfront about it makes you more human. But advisers also should explain that they have the training and experience to help understand their own biases, as well as the tools and equipment to help clients handle different market conditions when emotions can be overwhelming.

IN: Are there certain patterns of client biases, based perhaps on age or gender?

OA: Absolutely. In addition to psychology and economics, society plays a role in triggering and reinforcing cognitive biases. We've done a lot of work on generational differences, and there are several biases based on those differences. For example, the generation that lived through the Great Depression was very risk averse even after they realized that things were getting better.

As kids, baby boomers had to fight to get a seat in school because there were too many of them and not enough schools or chairs. They were always elbowing each other to get attention, which shaped and reinforced their risk taking nature.

Millennials on the other hand grew up in the middle of several economic recessions and stock market collapses since the late nineties. Therefore, they tend to be more risk averse than other generations and less trustworthy of capital markets in general than other generations at their age. They also have more school loans than any previous generation. Their risk aversion is likely to carry through as they age.

IN: Does the rise of robo advice, where things are more or less on autopilot, mean that behavioral finance issues will become less important in the future?

OA: Robo advisers are great because they provide financial recommendations for people who may not otherwise have access. But we believe the human touch is necessary too and shouldn't be lost. The client-adviser relationship is just as important as the investment solution itself, whether the solution comes through traditional methods or a machine. The ability to merge investment solutions with an understanding of clients' social and behavioral preferences can help advisers deliver more optimal investment solutions and build stronger long-term relationships.

IN: Why is Charles Schwab Investment Management so interested in behavioral finance?

OA: Our mission is to create solutions for clients that are in their best interest. So, understanding what makes investors tick is very important, especially if you look at products and solutions through the eyes of clients, which is what we always try to do.

Understanding the client means not just trying to make a good asset-allocation decision. It also means trying to understand how an asset allocation is going to affect the life of a particular human being.

We also recognize that markets contain a lot of information that reflects inefficiencies created by human behavior. Sometimes people refer to this as soft data. We strive to understand behavioral aspects that may be moving markets so that we can reconcile that with the hard data and hence can provide appropriate guidance to advisers and clients about how to navigate market conditions.

IN: For advisers who want to know more about behavioral finance, what does Charles Schwab Investment Management offer?

OA: We have a behavioral finance program called Biagnostics to help advisers understand and address their clients' biases. It also helps them better understand behavioral science and the ways it can benefit their practices and their clients.

And since we look at markets and investing through a behavioral finance lens, we provide insights that differ from what clients might read or hear from the media. This unique perspective can be helpful to advisers when trying to explain market moves to their clients.

When you asked about why we are interested in behavioral finance, I think it all boils down to caring about people. There are a lot of things you can do today without human interaction including investing. But we also understand that investment decision-making is a function of recognizing that we're all human and that we must adapt to our own irrationality. Advisers play a key role in that process.

To learn more about Charles Schwab Investment Management's BiagnosticsTM behavioral finance program for advisers, visit csimfunds.com/biagnostics.

(0517-Z7F5)

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What behavioral finance can teach us about markets and ourselves - InvestmentNews

(MENAFN Editorial)

Human Behavior and Cognition Expert, Tony J. Selimi, Featured on FOX

Tony J. Selimi, Human Behavior and Cognition Expert, Speaker, Educator and Internationally Published Author, was recently seen on ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX network affiliates around the country as a guest on The Brian Tracy Show

London, England May 17, 2017 Tony J. Selimi, Human Behavior and Cognition Expert, was recently a featured guest on The Brian Tracy Show. The show was hosted by Best-Selling Author and one of the country's leading business minds, Brain Tracy, and features business leaders and experts from around the world. Tony J. Selimi was one of Brian Tracy's recent guests, discussing his five step method to maximize human awareness and awaken people's innate healing faculties, the TJS Evolutionary Method.

Selimi's expertise and specialization in helping people realize their full potential led to an invite to the set of The Brian Tracy Show to tell the revolutionary story on how he went from living homeless on the streets of London to becoming a thought leader. His work has changed the lives of his clients by helping them align their highest values to their daily lives, build iconic ethical businesses, co-loving relationships, achieve work-life balance, and find inner peace and attain ultimate health. His feature has been seen by viewers across the country, and has undoubtedly inspired many.

The Brian Tracy Show, filmed in San Diego, California, is produced by Emmy Award-winning Director and Producer, Nick Nanton, Esq. and Emmy Award winning Producer, JW Dicks, Esq., Co-Founders of America's PremierExperts and The Dicks and Nanton Celebrity Branding Agency. The episode featuring Selimi recently aired on NBC, CBS, ABC and FOX affiliates across the country.

Watch Selimi's appearance on The Brian Tracy Show here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyeYlGrASdw

About Tony J. Selimi:

Tony Jeton Selimi went from being a teenage victim of war feeling hopeless, impoverished, and abandoned on the streets of London, to graduating with honors from one of London's most prestigious engineering universities UCL. He build a very successful IT career before following his hearts calling to follow the entrepreneurial path that led him to become No.1 Amazon bestselling and award-winning author, key note speaker, co-creator of Living My Illusion Documentary Series and the founder of TJS Cognition, a service educational institution dedicated to unravelling, advancing, and elevating human potential.

He specializes in assisting businesses owners from all market sectors and people from all professions find solutions to their personal and business problems, accelerate their learning, and achieve excellence in all of the eight key areas of life: Spiritual, Mental, Emotional, Physical, Business, Money, Relationship and Love.

Like a transparent mirror, Tony is known for his ability to see through people' problems, unconscious behaviors, thought patterns, skewed perceptions, and dis-empowering beliefs that prevent them from creating and delivering astronomical visions and living the lifestyle they dream about. He helps them break free from shame, guilt, expectations, control, fears, trauma, addictions and other mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual blockages by upgrading their 'cognitive operating system and teaching them how to tap into the infinite wisdom of their interstellar existence.

As a business consultant he globally provides answers to questions and practical solutions to life's challenges in talks, workshops, one to one coaching, mastermind groups, retreats, articles, radio and TV interviews as well as through his books and online downloads of Audio Books and the TJS Evolutionary Meditation Solutions.

His clients are entrepreneurs, leaders, and people from all walks of life who seek his help to manifest their highest vision, to be more healthy, wealthy, wise, spiritual and influential. They range from Coaches, #Sports Personalities, Musicians, Celebrities, MPs, Dr's, Scientists, to CEO's and Managers of FTSE 100 companies such as Microsoft, SAP, Bank of America, E & Y, Gayacards, Vandercom and Deutsche Bank.

Tony appeared in various national magazines including Soul and Spirit, Global Women, Science to Sage, Hitched, Migrant Women, Accelerate Your Business, Changing Careers Magazine, Consciousness Magazine, Your Wellness, Time Out, Pink Paper, Gay Star News, Key Person Influence, and Soul Mate Relationship World Summit.

Some of his recent TV appearance include Digging Deep Show for SKY TV, Top Channel, Klan Kosova, AlsatM, Jeta KohaVision, RTM, MTV2, Kanal 21, and Shenja.

Tony's unique wisdom is sought regularly by various radio broadcasters to inspire their listeners including Hay House Radio, Voice of America, Radio Macedonia, Radio Kosova, Beyond 50, Knowledge for Men, Love and Freedom, Empty Closet, Donna Sebo Show, News for the Soul, Channel Radio, Untangled FM, Self-Discovery, and Spirit Radio.

He loves travelling, consulting, researching, teaching, speaking, and coaching clients globally. Tony loves using his creative flair and in partnership with the owners of Vandercom, a leading telecommunication and IT service Provider Company, he is co-creating inspiring films and documentaries that share his clients' real life breakthrough stories that are emotionally engaging, mind illuminating, and heart awakening to move people into action.

He is known for creating amazing transformation and leaving his clients feeling revitalized, energized, and with a sense of inner peace.

If you would like to learn more about Tony J. Selimi and his services, connect with him at: http://TonySelimi.com

###

Contact:

Christine Enberg

Dicks and Nanton Celebrity Branding Agency

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Human Behavior and Cognition Expert, Tony J. Selimi, Featured on FOX - MENAFN.COM

There are few people in the design world more familiar with field research, and the extensive travel that goes with it, than Jan Chipchase. On May 6th, Jan launched what has turned out to be a very successful Kickstarter campaign to publish his most recent book,The Field Study Handbook. There's still time to pre-order a copy of what looks to be a fascinating read, even if field research in the Hindu Kush is not on your immediate list of things to do.

Jan is a researcher, writer and photographer whose work focuses on the intersection of design, tech, human behavior and culture. Over the years, he's led research teams investigating both mainstream and emerging markets for Nokia and frog design. In 2014, he founded Studio D, a research, design and innovation consultancy, and later used his extensive travel experiences to create an ultra-light luggage brand, SDR Traveller.

I had a chance to catch up with Jan to talk about the book launch and other recent adventures and activities, as well as ask for some travel advice.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Core77: In addition to Studio D and SDR Traveller, I see also that you run as service called The Fixer List. What is that all about? It seems mysterious.

JC: Fixers are a staple of field research, at least with the way I run projects. Each project includes a local crew that is usually led by someone I call a "fixer". They come from very diverse backgrounds, often speak multiple languages, have a very good sense of their home locale and know how to hustle. Over the years, many of these connections have stayed in touch.

The Fixer List is the Studio D list of unusual talent that we can draw on to run projects around the world. We receive a lot of applicants.

You spend a large percentage of your time on the road, traveling extensively across the world. What are some notable recent field trips you've taken?

JC: Saudi Arabia was interesting and challenging. We were there gathering insights to understand the value proposition of a new brand offering. The new service, Jawwy, went live last year. The team had to achieve a high level of understanding of the local culture and how it maps to a mobile service, in only a month. Many foreigners would struggle to achieve this level of understanding in a lifetime. All credit to our local team of ten people for getting us that far.

Last year I took a tough, 7,000km overland expedition through Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan's GBAO region and China's western provinces. The trip was full of remote communities, dubious border crossings, permeable borders and lots of checkpoints. I learned a lot on that trip and wrote up my thoughts in a Medium post called 61 Glimpses of the Future.

Another interesting trip involved training a client's team on field research methods, including setting up a mountain retreat at the edge of the Tibetan Plateau to process the data. On every project we get to ask "Where is the best place to figure out x?" and "Where do we want to be today?"

Naturally, the Kickstarter includes expeditions as rewards, if you're up for A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.

In the Kickstarter video, you mention that the book is part of a mission to reframe the relationship between those that make things and those that consume them. Can you talk about this a bit?

JC: Increasingly, the impetus for creating new products will be based on the data analytics of mass consumption, feedback on marketing strategies, and optimized value engineering. The product creators are removed from their audience by several steps, and it is easy to lose touch with that actual audience. The ability to gather an over abundance of data only compounds the problem. As more data comes on stream, revealing what people are doing and how, there is a growing danger of people being treated as little more than lines in a database, stripped of personality and context, there solely to be mined and monetized.

Field research is defined by closeness and empathy. You get close to those you are studying, and in doing so, develop a deeper empathy for their lives and ways of living. You then take that empathy andin the best casesreflect it back on them through your work. In the right hands, it generates very rich, and very nuanced, data that is capable of answering why people do what they do. Understanding the motivations behind people's actions can lead to very different outcomes, if all you knew before was what people did and how.

I try (and usually fail) to not pack too much when I travel. As a seasoned traveller what are some of your suggestions and tips for packing?

JC: Everybody over packs. It's human nature! By packing less, you're actually more flexible and better able to alter your planned itinerary to react to interesting opportunities. My own preference is to use hand-held luggage (no wheels allowed!), make sure the bag can fit under an economy-class seat or a business class foot-well, and even with that small size, still leave room in your bag for things you might pick up along the way. I wrote about how the psychology of packing impacts the experience of the journey, and it still holds true.

Check out the book, and other rewards available for pre-order on the Kickstarter page forThe Field Study Handbook.

Article illustration, and book illustrations, by Lee Phillips (@leejohnphillips)

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How Understanding Human Behavior Can Open Up New Design Opportunities - Core77.com

When people work together on a project, they often come to think theyve figured out the problems in their own respective spheres. If trouble persists, its somebody elseengineering, say, or the marketing departmentwho is screwing up. That local focus means finding the best way forward for the overall project is often a struggle. But what if adding artificial intelligence to the conversation, in the form of a computer program called a bot, could actually make people in groups more productive?

This is the tantalizing implication of a study published Wednesday in Nature. Hirokazu Shirado and Nicholas Christakis, researchers at Yale Universitys Institute for Network Science, were wondering what would happen if they looked at artificial intelligence (AI) not in the usual wayas a potential replacement for peoplebut instead as a useful companion and helper, particularly for altering human social behavior in groups.

First the researchers asked paid volunteers arranged in online networks, each occupying one of 20 connected positions, or nodes, to solve a simple problem: Choose one of three colors (green, orange or purple) with the individual, or local, goal of having a different color from immediate neighbors, and the collective goal of ensuring that every node in the network was a different color from all of its neighbors. Subjects pay improved if they solved the problem quickly. Two thirds of the groups reached a solution in the allotted five minutes and the average time to a solution was just under four minutes. But a third of the groups were still stymied at the deadline.

The researchers then put a botbasically a computer program that can execute simple commandsin three of the 20 nodes in each network. When the bots were programmed to act like humans and focused logically on resolving conflicts with their immediate neighbors, they didnt make much difference. But when the researchers gave the bots just enough AI to behave in a slightly noisy fashion, randomly choosing a color regardless of neighboring choices, the groups they were in solved the problem 85 percent of the timeand in 1.7 minutes on average, 55.6 percent faster than humans alone.

Being just noisy enoughmaking random color choices about 10 percent of the timemade all the difference, the study suggests. When a bot got much noisier than that, the benefit soon vanished. A bots influence also varied depending on whether it was positioned at the center of a network with lots of neighbors or on the periphery.

So why would making what looks like the wrong choicein other words, a mistakeimprove a groups performance? The immediate result, predictably, was short-term conflict, with the bots neighbors in effect muttering, Why are you suddenly disagreeing with me? But that conflict served to nudge neighboring humans to change their behavior in ways that appear to have further facilitated a global solution, the co-authors wrote. The humans began to play the game differently.

Errors, it seems, do not entirely deserve their bad reputation. There are many, many natural processes where noise is paradoxically beneficial, Christakis says. The best example is mutation. If you had a species in which every individual was perfectly adapted to its environment, then when the environment changed, it would die. Instead, random mutations can help a species sidestep extinction.

Were beginning to find that errorand noisy individuals that we would previously assume add nothingactually improve collective decision-making, says Iain Couzin, who studies group behavior in humans and other species at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and was not involved in the new work. He praises the deliberately simplified model used in the Nature study for enabling the co-authors to study group decision-making in great detail, because they have control over the connectivity. The resulting ability to minutely track how humans and algorithms collectively make decisions, Couzin says, is really going to be the future of quantitative social science.

But how realistic is it to think human groups will want to collaborate with algorithms or botsespecially slightly noisy onesin making decisions? Shirado and Christakis informed some of their test groups that they would be partnering with bots. Perhaps surprisingly, it made no difference. The attitude was, I don't care that youre a bot if youre helping me do my job, Christakis says. Many people are already accustomed to talking with a computer when they call an airline or a bank, he adds, and the machine often does a pretty good job. Such collaborations are almost certain to become more common amid the increasing integration of the internet with physical devices, from automobiles to coffee makers.

Real-world, bot-assisted company meetings might not be too far behind. Business conferences already tout blended digital and in-person events, featuring what one conference planner describes as integrated online and offline catalysts that use virtual reality, augmented reality and artificial intelligence. Shirado and Christakis suggest slightly noisy bots are also likely to turn up in crowdsourcing applicationsfor instance, to speed up citizen science assessment of archaeological or astronomical images. They say such bots could also be useful in social mediato discourage racist remarks, for example.

But last year when Microsoft introduced a twitter bot with simple AI, other users quickly turned it into epithetspouting bigot. And the opposite concern is that mixing humans and machines to improve group decision-making could enable businessesor botsto manipulate people. Ive thought a lot about this, Christakis says. You can invent a gun to hunt for food or to kill people. You can develop nuclear energy to generate electric power or make the atomic bomb. All scientific advances have this Janus-like potential for evil or good.

The important thing is to understand the behavior involved, so we can use it to good ends and also be aware of the potential for manipulation, Couzin says. Hopefully this new research will encourage other researchers to pick up on this idea and apply it to their own scenarios. I dont think it can be just thrown out there and used willy-nilly.

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Pushy AI Bots Nudge Humans to Change Behavior - Scientific ... - Scientific American

OpenAI takes the robotic imitation of human behavior into a whole new level

OpenAI, anElon Musk-backed nonprofit artificial intelligence platform just announced a new milestone in training robots. They are working with a new algorithm known as one-shot imitation learning, which lets human being train a robot by demonstrating it first in virtual reality.

In the video below, a person is trying to teach a robotic arm how to stack a series of colored cube-shaped blocks by first performing it manually within a VR environment. The whole system is powered by two neural networks. The first one determines the objects spatial position to the robot by taking a camera image. However, the neural network was trained only with a host of simulated images, which means it knew how to cooperate with the real world before it ever actually met it. The second one emulates any task the demonstrator shows it by scanning through recorded actions and observing frames telling it what to do next.

Our robot has now learned to perform the task even though its movements have to be different than the ones in the demonstration, explains Josh Tobin, a member of OpenAIs technical staff. With a single demonstration of a task, we can replicate it in a number of different initial conditions. Teaching the robot how to build a different block arrangement requires only a single additional demonstration.

The model is currently a prototype, but this concept could help researchers in the long run. They could use this concept to teach the robots more complex tasks in future without using any physical elements at all. OpenAIs long term plan is to give the AI the ability to learn to adapt to unpredictable changes in the environment.

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OpenAI takes the robotic imitation of human behavior into a whole new level - The TechNews

Robots that occasionally act randomly can help groups of humans solve collective-action problems faster, new research has shown.

Playing a game with someone unpredictable can be annoying, particularly when you're on the same team. But in an online game designed to test group decision-making, adding computer-controlled players that sometimes behave randomly more than halved the time it took to solve the problem, according to the new study.

That shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, said study leader Nicholas Christakis, director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale University. Random mutations make evolution possible; random movements by animals in flocks and schools enhances group survival; and computer scientists often introduce noise a statistical term for random or meaningless information to improve search algorithms, he said. [Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]

But the discovery that these effects are mirrored in combined groups of humans and machines could have wide-ranging implications, Christakis told Live Science. To start, self-driving cars will soon share roads with human drivers, and more people may soon find themselves working alongside robots or with "smart" software.

In the study, published online today (May 17) in the journal Nature, the researchers describe how they recruited 4,000 human workers from Amazon's Mechanical Turk online crowdsourcing platform to play an online game.

Each participant was assigned at random to one of 20 locations, or "nodes," in an interconnected network. Players can select from three colors and the goal is for every node to have a different color from the neighbors they are connected to.

Players can see only their neighbors' colors, which means that while the problem may seem to have been solved from their perspective, the entire game may still be unsolved.

While highly simplified, this game mimics a number of real-world problems, such as climate change or coordinating between different departments of a company, Christakis said, where from a local perspective, a solution has been reached but globally it has not.

In some games, the researchers introduced software bots instead of human players that simply seek to minimize color conflicts with neighbors. Some of these bots were then programmed to be "noisy," with some having a 10 percent chance of making a random color choice and others a 30 percent chance.

The researchers also experimented with putting these bots in different areas of the network. Sometimes they were placed in central locations that have more connections to other players, and other times they were just placed at random or on the periphery where there are fewer links.

What the researchers found was that games in which bots exhibiting 10 percent noise were placed in the center of the network were typically solved 55.6 percent times faster than sessions involving just humans.

"[The bots] got the humans to change how they interacted with other humans," Christakis said. "They created these kinds of positive ripple effects to more distant parts of the network. So the bots in a way served a kind of teaching function." [The 6 Strangest Robots Ever Created]

There's a fine balance, though. The researchers found that the bots that had a 30 percent change of making a random color choice introduced too much noise and increased the number of conflicts in the group-decision-making process. Similarly, bots that exhibited no randomness actually reduced the randomness of human players, resulting in more of them becoming stuck in unresolvable conflicts, the scientists said.

Iain Couzin, director of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany and an expert in collective behavior, said the study's findings mimic what he has seen in animals, where uninformed individuals can actually improve collective decision-making.

He said it is a very important first step toward a scientific understanding of how similar processes impact human behavior, particularly in the context of interactions between humans and machines.

"Already we are making our decisions in the context of algorithms and that's only going to expand as technology advances," he told Live Science. "We have to be prepared for that and understand these types of processes. And we almost have a moral obligation to improve our collective decision-making in terms of climate change and other decisions we need to make at a collective level for humanity."

The new research also points to an alternative paradigm for the widespread introduction of artificial intelligence into society, Christakis said. "Dumb AI" (bots that follow simple rules compared to sophisticated AI) could act as a catalyst rather than a replacement for humans in various kinds of cooperative networks, ranging from the so-called sharing economy (which encompasses services like ride-sharing, home-lending and coworking) to citizen science.

"We're not trying to build AlphaGo or [IBM's] Watson to replace a person we are trying to build technology that helps supplement groups of people, and in a way, I think that might be a little less frightening," Christakis said. "The bots don't need to be very smart because they're interacting with smart humans. They don't need to be able to do stuff by themselves; they just need to help the humans help themselves," he added.

Original article on Live Science.

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How Robots Acting Randomly Can Help Speed Human Problem-Solving - Live Science

Turns out that humans aren't the only animals that contagiously yawn. iStockphoto hide caption

Turns out that humans aren't the only animals that contagiously yawn.

Bears do it; bats do it. So do guinea pigs, dogs and humans. They all yawn. It's a common animal behavior, but one that is something of a mystery.

There's still no consensus on the purpose of a yawn, says Robert Provine, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Provine has studied what he calls "yawn science" since the early 1980s, and he's published dozens of research articles on it. He says the simple yawn is not so simple.

"Yawning may have the dubious distinction of being the least understood common human behavior," Provine says.

There are many causes for yawning. Boredom, sleepiness, hunger, anxiety and stress all cause changes in brain chemistry, which can trigger a spontaneous yawn. But it's not clear what the yawn accomplishes. One possibility is the yawn perks you up by increasing heart rate, blood pressure and respiratory function.

"[Yawning] stirs up our physiology and it plays an important role in shifting from one state to another," Provine says.

When violinists get ready to go on stage to play a concerto, they often yawn, says Provine. So do Olympians right before a competition, or paratroopers getting ready to do their first jump. One study found that yawning has a similar impact on the brain as a dose of caffeine.

But not all yawn researchers agree with this theory.

"No specific arousing effect of yawning on the brain could be observed in at least five studies," says Adrian Guggisberg, a professor in the department of clinical neurosciences at the University of Geneva.

Guggisberg and fellow researchers reviewed several theories of yawning and concluded that the arousal theory lacks evidence. What they did find were several studies that show yawning is highly contagious among humans, suggesting that "yawns might have a social and communicative function," Guggisberg said in an e-mail.

Looking at yawns, hearing yawns, thinking about yawns or talking about yawns will likely trigger a contagious response. Contagious yawning may have evolved in early humans to boost social bonding, according to Provine. A good group yawn could serve to perk everyone up to be more vigilant about danger, he says.

Another piece of evidence backing up the social bonding theory of yawning is a 2011 study by Ivan Norsicia and Elisabetta Palagi that found people are more likely to copy a yawn if they know the person who is yawning. A stranger's yawn is less likely to trigger a contagious response. And while babies yawn spontaneously, children don't engage in contagious yawning until about age 4 around the same time they're becoming more socially connected.

Now, what about other animals? We know that all vertebrates, critters with backbones, yawn spontaneously. But very few yawn contagiously.

"Until the last few years, the feeling was that contagious yawning was unique to humans," Provine says.

But recently, two more species have been added to the list of contagious yawners: dogs and chimpanzees. When two groups of chimpanzees were shown videos of familiar and unfamiliar chimps yawning, the group watching the chimps they knew engaged in more contagious yawning. This study, by Matthew Campbell and Frans de Waal, supports the theory that yawning plays a role in the evolution of social bonding and empathy.

And dogs not only catch each others' yawns, they are susceptible to human yawning as well. In one study, 29 dogs watched a human yawning and 21 of them yawned as well suggesting that interspecies yawning could help in dog-human communication.

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Yawning May Promote Social Bonding Even Between Dogs And ... - NPR

EDWARDSVILLE - Southern Illinois University Edwardsvilles Paul Rose, PhD, has been named interim dean of the SIUE School of Education, Health and Human Behavior (SEHHB). The appointment is pending approval by the SIU Board of Trustees. Rose replaces Curt Lox, PhD, who resigned to assume duties as dean of the Brooks College of Health at the University of North Florida.

Rose, who will officially begin his duties Thursday, June 1, has served as assistant dean of the SEHHB since 2015 and chair of the Department of Psychology since 2009. He was a visiting assistant professor of psychology at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., before joining the SIUE faculty in 2005.

Rose has worked with the schools diversity committee to build student mentoring programs, and helped establish the Dr. Rudolf Dreikurs Visiting Scholar Fellowship with the support of an historic gift from the Dreikurs family.

Dr. Roses experience and leadership will allow the School of Education, Health and Human Behavior to continue its positive momentum, said Denise Cobb, PhD, SIUE provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs. It is clear that Paul is a trusted leader, good listener and extraordinarily capable administrator.

His thoughtful and confident style is an invaluable asset. I have had the pleasure of working with him in various capacities, and I am confident that he will be a collaborative and student-centered leader. I look forward to his contributions to our academic leadership team, and I am excited to see what the future holds for the School.

The School of Education, Health and Human Behavior has long valued innovation, Rose said. I look forward to leading and supporting our excellent faculty and staff through the significant changes that lie ahead.

Much of our strength comes from and will continue to come through partnerships. By highlighting the unique opportunities we offer our students, we will attract enthusiastic partners who help us build upon our strengths.

Prior to becoming a full-time administrator, Rose taught undergraduate and graduate courses in statistics, research methods and social psychology. His interdisciplinary research draws on social, personality, consumer and clinical psychology. He has published research on topics such as narcissism, self-esteem, romantic relationship dynamics, materialism and compulsive buying.

Rose serves on the editorial board of Psychology and Marketing and serves on the board of directors fundraising and public relations committee for the Living Independently Now Center of Swansea.

Rose earned a bachelors in psychology from Brigham Young University and achieved both masters and doctoral degrees in psychology from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

A search for a permanent dean will begin during the fall semester.

The SIUE School of Education, Health and Human Behavior prepares students in a wide range of fields including community and public health, exercise science, nutrition, instructional technology, psychology, speech-language pathology and audiology, educational administration, and teaching. Faculty members engage in leading-edge research, which enhances teaching and enriches the educational experience. The School supports the community through on-campus clinics, outreach to children and families, and a focused commitment to enhancing individual lives across the region.

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Rose named interim dean of the SIUE School of Education, Health and Human Behavior - RiverBender.com