Social robots, robots that can interact with humans and assist them in their daily lives, are gradually being introduced in numerous real-world settings. These robots could be particularly valuable for helping older adults to complete everyday tasks more autonomously, thus potentially enhancing their independence and well-being.

Researchers at University of Bari have been investigating the potential using social robots for ambient assisted living applications for numerous years. Their most recent paper, published in UMAP’22 Adjunct: Adjunct Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, specifically explores the value of allowing social robots who are assisting seniors to learn the relationships between a user’s routines and his/her mood.

“Social robots should support older adults with daily activity and, at the same time, they should contribute to emotional wellness by considering affective factors in everyday situations,” Berardina De Carolis, Stefano Ferilli and Nicola Macciarulo wrote in their paper. “The main goal of this research is to investigate whether it is possible to learn relations between the user’s affective state state and daily routines, made by activities, with the aid of a social robot, Pepper in this case.”

To efficiently navigate real-world environments, robots typically analyze images collected by imaging devices that are integrated within their body. To enhance the performance of robots, engineers have thus been trying to develop different types of highly performing cameras, sensors and artificial vision systems.

Many artificial vision systems developed so far draw inspiration from the eyes of humans, animals, insects and fish. These systems have different features and characteristics, depending on the environment in which they are designed to operate in.

Most existing sensors and cameras are designed to work either in on the ground (i.e., in terrestrial environments) or in water (i.e., in aquatic environments). Bio-inspired artificial vision systems that can operate in both terrestrial and aquatic environments, on the other hand, remain scarce.

Its process is faster than the human brain, and it is ready for deep learning.

AI Dungeon project first became available in December 2019 and attracted attention due to its advanced artificial intelligence — it generated coherent text adventures, where you could perform any action by typing it in the input window. Now AI Dungeon has appeared on Steam.

The gameplay looks like 1970s text quests: you’re told what’s going on, and you write what you’re going to do. But while the 1970s quests only accepted tightly constrained answers, AI Dungeon tries to adjust by all means what you type in. You only have to specify the type of input: action, word, or event.

AI Dungeon also allows you to generate a world, fill it with details of your choice, or dive into the worlds of other players. In addition, you can control the progress of an incident: force II to create a paragraph again or even rewrite it completely by hand. Occurrences allow you to go through with your friends.