University of Memphis researchers Stan Franklin and Uma Ramamurthy have released a new paper titled, Motivations, Values and Emotions: Three Sides of the Same Coin (PDF format). The paper talks about the interrelationships of the three concepts in autonomous agents, whether they are robots or humans. "Motivations prime actions, values serve to choose between motivations, emotions provide a common currency for values, and emotions implement motivations." As always, one needs to understand how the researchers use the terms. In this case, the authors seem to be using the words feelings and emotions in opposite roles from those I've seen defined in the past. They define feelings as raw sensory inputs such as heat, pain, or thirst and emotions are defined as feeling with cognitive content. Normally, I see feeling defined as the subjective or phenomenological aspect of emotion rather than the other way round. Of course, many people still use the two words interchangeably, so any distinction is helpful. Otherwise, the authors rely on the LIDA (Learning Intelligent Distributed Agent) model of cognition.

My friend, the robot | Newsmakers | CNET News.com

My friend, the robot | Newsmakers | CNET News.com: " I wanted to ask you a little bit more about this notion of robots and companionship. How much of that is people projecting things onto robots, and how much of that is robot designers building in cues that will allow people to do that?"

Babies Driving Their Own Robots

Babies Driving Their Own Robots: "ScienceDaily (Nov. 11, 2007) — Babies driving robots. It sounds like the theme of a cartoon series but it is actually the focus of important and innovative research being conducted at the University of Delaware that could have significant repercussions for the cognitive development of infants with special needs."

Google & Androids

Google today unveiled an early version of the software development kit for the Open Handset Alliance’s open-source Android mobile phone platform, one of the major projects among engineers at the company’s Cambridge, MA, research lab. At the same time, the company said it will spur innovation by giving away $10 million in cash prizes to the developers of the best Android applications, in amounts ranging from $25,000 to $275,000. Contestants must submit their programs between January 2 and March 3, 2008.