JUST before Christmas, Inkha got a job as a receptionist at King’s College London. She has all the prerequisites for the post: she can talk about the weather, give directions and look bored. But Inkha is a robotic head — her name stands for Interactive Neurotic King’s Head Assembly — that glowers from a glass box at the college’s Strand campus.
Her creator, Matthew Walker, a college alumnus and now an independent animatronics consultant, says her “mood” depends on the weather (she culls meteorological information from the Met Office website) and the time of day. Walker says: “If it’s a rainy Monday morning, she’s obnoxious. If you ask her for fashion tips, she’ll ask you if you got dressed in the dark.
“She has no intelligence, but certain behaviour makes her quite lifelike. People do get rather attached to her.” It helps that Inkha has a huge red pouting mouth and large, long-lashed eyes, the latter made for her by a specialist at Moorfields Eye Hospital.
But Inkha also deals with around a third of reception inquiries — mainly providing directions — and has cheered everyone up. “People come in looking glum and go away smiling,” Walker says. “And the other people on reception don’t feel threatened — they see her as an aid rather than as a replacement.”
Other robots, however, might induce more panic. A team of British scientists reported last week that they had developed a “robot scientist”. Sadly for visitors, it is no shiny humanoid in a white lab coat. The robot scientist comprises a computer connected to a piece of standard laboratory machinery used for handling liquids. But it is smart enough to outperform graduate students when it comes to devising and carrying out biology experiments.
Led by Professor Ross King, of Aberystwyth University, the researchers set the robot a scientific task done every day in laboratories the world over: functional genomics, or uncovering what certain genes do. The robot was preprogrammed with a level of existing biochemical knowledge, and algorithms that allowed it to learn from experience. It was also equipped with the ability to control a machine to do physical experiments, such as mixing chemicals.
The chosen target was yeast, one of the most studied organisms in genomics. The role of 30 per cent of its 6,000 genes remains unknown — the robot scientist’s role was to study a handful. By knocking out each gene in turn and seeing how the yeast grew in the presence of certain chemicals, the robot had to deduce the missing gene’s function. The robot was able to place liquids on plates and mix them, and include the results in its next bout of reasoning. This mix of preordained intelligence, practical know-how and the ability to gather and process new data allowed the robot scientist to come up with correct deductions on genes whose roles are already known.
“In initial trials, using nine graduate computer scientists and biologists, we found that there was no significant difference between the robot and the best human performance in terms of the number of iterations required to achieve a given level of accuracy,” the team reported in Nature last week. Other advantages, reported one observer wryly, are that the robot scientist “can also toil through the night without a murmur of complaint, and never pleads for more funding”.
King says: “This research is very exciting as we have given the robot — under our supervision — the ability to design the experiments and interpret the data for us.
“There is increasing need for automation in the biological sciences, and although the problems we set for the robot were relatively simple, we have shown that it could be used to help solve real-world problems.”
King is now turning his creation’s intelligence to yeast’s unstudied genes. Its real value, he says, lies in being a cost-effective way of freeing intelligent researchers from the drudgery of relatively simple experiments and allowing them to “make the high-level creative leaps at which they excel”. Drug design is another research area that could benefit from intelligent automation, he says.
Inkha and Asimo (Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility) are at the Dana Centre, near the Science Museum, on February 16. This evening event is free, but must be pre-booked. Call 020-7942 4040 or e-mail tickets@danacentre.org.uk. Asimo is at the Science Museum from February 16 to 22.
DANCING WITH EELS
INSPIRED by the sensuous moves of the actress Lucy Liu in the Charlie’s Angels films, a researcher in Japan has built a belly-dancing robot. Jimmy Or, from Waseda University in Tokyo, noticed the similarity between belly dancers and lampreys, eel-like creatures that swish through the water. “I decided to combine the fields and work on my idea secretly,” Or told the Nature website this week.
Or has come up with Waseda Belly Dancer No 1, a robot with a flexible spine. It is guided by a computer program that models a network of nerves in the lamprey. The network is the same web of reflexes that allows a headless bird to continue moving around for a short time. The same network is also thought to exist in people — when patients with spinal-cord injuries are placed on a treadmill the nerves prompt an automatic walking motion.
Observers say that giving robots spinal flexibility might help them to move less awkwardly. For example, Honda’s stair-climbing Asimo (Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility) robot, a white, helmeted creation most famous for its appearance in the Foster’s advert and the most advanced walking robot in the world, does not have the fluid movement of a human being. Or is hopeful that a humanoid that can bend, shimmy and slouch will go down well.
“A robot that can bow is important in Japanese society,” he says.
