How can we recognize a person as a human being? This problem is called the Turing Test and was originally proposed by Alan Turing as Imitation Game. The original test was designed to test the intelligence of a machine by asking if a person could distinguish between a machine and a person when they talk to each other without knowing the interacting partner. To address this question, we conducted a Turing Test experiment in physical interaction, not verbal interaction. The participants showed that even in physical interactions, when limited to simple movements and perceptions, conversational turn-taking occurred when judging whether the interacting partner was a person or not.
We are collaborating with Sapporo Maruyama Zoo to build AI system that can take care of animals to reduce the load of zookeepers. One of our targets is to automatically create chimpanzees’ action histories for health management and maintenance of breeding environments. Our developing system combines the image recognition using deep learning, YOLO, and tracking, IOU Tracker, methods to realize tracking and identifying chimpanzees at the same time. We are also working on building a system to detect and clarify the relationships among individuals of social animals. This is the collaboration project with Sapporo Electronics & Industries Cultivation Foundation, Sapporo Maruyama Zoo, and ...
Sign language is a language used among hearing-impaired people. It is not common in our society and not many people can understand sign language. Developing a sign language translator is a big challenge for artificial intelligence. In sign language, not only hand shape and hand trajectory but also non-manual signals such as facial expression and nodding are important to understand meaning. Our developing sign language translator takes into account not only hand movements but the whole movements and postures of speakers. Our system consists of Bi-directional LSTMs to detect the meaning of the sign languages. This is the collaboration project with UNISYS, Sapporo Association of the Deaf, and Sapporo Electronics & Industries Cultivation Foundation.