Robots are learning etiquette

Should robots be familiar with etiquette, which basically was designed by humans for humans? If they want to live amongst us, they should!

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) — a branch of the U.S. Department of Defense dedicated to the development of new military technologies, start teaching robots etiquette. By knowing social norms, robots could more flawlessly interact with humans.

Learning social norms is based on developing a machine-learning algorithm to learn by drawing on human data. The aim is to get to the point, where AI system “intuitively” knows how to behave in the certain situation. As we, humans, do.

A list of social end ethical norms is long and humans are socializing from childhood. The other problem is also the fact, that social norms can differ between different societies or cultures. For humans, learning new norms is also more easy, because they already have a complex network of norms, we are familiar with.

As for now, the DARPA project has succeeded in providing a framework for machine learning. In next stage DARPA needs to collect data and create a system which gives robots capacity to “learn, represent, activate and apply the large number of norms people expect others to obey”, say Reza Ghanadan, DARPA program manager.

Source: LiveScience.com