The Study of Man. By Michael Polanyi. Price, $1.75. Pp. 102. University of Chicago Press, 5750 Ellis Ave., Chicago 37, 1959. One subtitle to Polanyi's challenging and fascinating book might be The Evolution and Natural History of Error , for Polanyi is at pains to expunge what he believes to be the false notion contained in the contemporary view of science which treats it as an object and basically impersonal discipline. According to Polanyi not only is this a radical and important error, but it is harmful to the objectives of science itself. Another subtitle could be Farewell to Detachment , for in place of cold objectivity he develops the idea that science is necessarily intensely personal. It is a human endeavor and human point of view which cannot be divorced from nor uprooted out of the human matrix from which it arises and in which it works. For a good while

Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy

人教版高中英语新课程教材中,语言运用（Using Language）是每个单元必不可少的部分,提供了围绕单元中心话题的听、说、读、写的综合性练习,是单元中心话题的延续和升华.如何设计Using Language部分的教学,使自己的教学模式既不落俗套,又能真正体现新课程标准所倡导的教学理念,正是广大一线英语教师一直努力探索的问题.

打磨Using Language,倡导新理念

Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. David McNeill. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 416 pp.

Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01684295/document

Human-aware robot navigation: A survey

As the field of HRI evolves, it is important to understand how users interact with robots over long periods. This paper reviews the current research on long-term interaction between users and social robots. We describe the main features of these robots and highlight the main findings of the existing long-term studies. We also present a set of directions for future research and discuss some open issues that should be addressed in this field.

Social Robots for Long-Term Interaction: A Survey

To explore possible robot tasks in daily life, we developed a guide robot for a shopping mall and conducted a field trial with it. The robot was designed to interact naturally with customers and to affectively provide shopping information. It was also designed to repeatedly interact with people to build a rapport; since a shopping mall is a place people repeatedly visit, it provides the chance to explicitly design a robot for multiple interactions. For this capability, we used RFID tags for person identification. The robot was semi-autonomous, partially controlled by a human operator, to cope with the difficulty of speech recognition in a real environment and to handle unexpected situations.A field trial was conducted at a shopping mall for 25 days to observe how the robot performed this task and how people interacted with it. The robot interacted with approximately 100 groups of customers each day. We invited customers to sign up for RFID tags and those who participated answered questionnaires. The results revealed that 63 out of 235 people in fact went shopping based on the information provided by the robot. The experimental results suggest promising potential for robots working in shopping malls.

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An affective guide robot in a shopping mall

This paper reports our development of a communication robot for use in a shopping mall to provide shopping information, offer route guidance, and build rapport. In the development, the major difficulties included sensing human behaviors, conversation in a noisy daily environment, and the needs of unexpected miscellaneous knowledge in the conversation. We chose a network-robot system approach, where a single robot's poor sensing capability and knowledge are supplemented by ubiquitous sensors and a human operator. The developed robot system detects a person with floor sensors to initiate interaction, identifies individuals with radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, gives shopping information while chatting, and provides route guidance with deictic gestures. The robot was partially teleoperated to avoid the difficulty of speech recognition as well as to furnish a new kind of knowledge that only humans can flexibly provide. The information supplied by a human operator was later used to increase the robot's autonomy. For 25 days in a shopping mall, we conducted a field trial and gathered 2642 interactions. A total of 235 participants signed up to use RFID tags and, later, provided questionnaire responses. The questionnaire results are promising in terms of the visitors' perceived acceptability as well as the encouragement of their shopping activities. The results of the teleoperation analysis revealed that the amount of teleoperation gradually decreased, which is also promising.

A Communication Robot in a Shopping Mall

This paper reports on a field trial with interactive humanoid robots at a science museum where visitors are supposed to study and develop an interest in science. In the trial, each visitor wore an RFID tag while looking around the museum's exhibits. Information obtained from the RFID tags was used to direct the robots' interaction with the visitors. The robots autonomously interacted with visitors via gestures and utterances resembling the free play of children [1]. In addition, they performed exhibit-guiding by moving around several exhibits and explaining the exhibits based on sensor information. The robots were highly evaluated by visitors during the two-month trial. Moreover, we conducted an experiment in the field trial to compare the detailed effects of exhibit-guiding and free-play interaction under three operating conditions. This revealed that the combination of the free-play interaction and exhibit-guiding positively affected visitors' experiences at the science museum.

/pdf/interactive-humanoid-robots-for-a-science-museum-29xr0oxpht.pdf

Interactive humanoid robots for a science museum

One objective of the Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories is to develop an intelligent communication robot that supports people in an open everyday environment by interacting with them. A humanoid robot can help achieve this objective because its physical structure lets it interact through human-like body movements such as shaking hands, greeting, and pointing. Both adults and children are more likely to understand such interactions than interactions with an electronic interface such as a touch panel or buttons. To behave intelligently during an interaction, a robot requires many types of information about its environment and the people with whom it interacts. However, in open everyday environments, simple recognition functions such as identifying an individual are difficult because the presence and movement of a large number of people as well as unfavorable illumination and background conditions affect the robot's sensing ability. We integrated humanoid robots and ubiquitous sensors in an autonomous system to assist visitors at an Osaka Science Museum exhibit

/pdf/interactive-humanoid-robots-for-a-science-museum-3dspttt81g.pdf

Interactive Humanoid Robots for a Science Museum

Safe navigation is a fundamental capability for robots that move among pedestrians. The traditional approach in robotics to attain such a capability has treated pedestrians as moving obstacles and provides algorithms that assure collision-free motion in the presence of such moving obstacles. In contrast, recent studies have focused on providing the robot not only collision-free motion but also a socially acceptable behavior by planning the robot’s path to maintain a “social distance” from pedestrians and respect their personal space. Such a social behavior is perceived as natural by the pedestrians and thus provides them a comfortable feeling, even if it may be considered a decorative element from a strictly safety oriented perspective. In this work we develop a system that realizes human-like collision avoidance in a mobile robot. In order to achieve this goal, we use a pedestrian model from human science literature, a version of the popular Social Force Model that was specifically designed to reproduce conditions similar to those found in shopping malls and other pedestrians facilities. Our findings show that the proposed system, which we tested in 2-h field trials in a real world environment, not only is perceived as comfortable by pedestrians but also yields safer navigation than traditional collision-free methods, since it better fits the behavior of the other pedestrians in the crowd.

Masahiro Shiomi

Papers

An affective guide robot in a shopping mall

A Communication Robot in a Shopping Mall

Interactive humanoid robots for a science museum

Interactive Humanoid Robots for a Science Museum

Towards a Socially Acceptable Collision Avoidance for a Mobile Robot Navigating Among Pedestrians Using a Pedestrian Model