UAE | General
Campus android to advance study of robotics
Ancient Arab scientist Ibn Sina will be brought back to life but as an Arabic-speaking android. The android is expected to open up new educational opportunities for UAE students.
- By Aftab Kazmi, Staff Reporter
- Published: 23:22 November 16, 2007
- The UAE University is working on an Arabic-speaking android that will be able to demonstrate different facial expressions.
- Image Credit: Supplied Picture
Al Ain: Ancient Arab scientist Ibn Sina will be brought back to life but as an Arabic-speaking android.
The android is expected to open up new educational opportunities for UAE students, academics said.
Dr Rafik A. Makki, Dean of the College of Information Technology at the UAE University, told Gulf News a team of experts, led by Dr Nikolaos Mavridis, has started work on the project. The college is building a new laboratory to create new electronic forms of media for the project.
"We have been acquiring new equipment for the lab from Europe that would reach here in the next two weeks," said the Dean.
Living together
He said a fully equipped Ibn Sina Centre would be set up in the college. "It would be a great place where robots, humans, and virtual agents would live together," Dr Makki said.
Dr Mavridis, an Assistant Professor at the college and head of the robot building team, said the android would support rich interactivity. "There is an immense need for advanced education and research in robotics that has a whole lot of dimensions.
"We are planning to introduce two more IT courses at the college ... to prepare students for different aspects of robotics," he said. "It is ideal for constructionist education and offers an ideal setting for cutting edge research."
The project includes work in areas like motor control, vision and speech, synergies affect, negotiated collaborative planning, language grounding, situation models embedded in virtual worlds, telepresence, human-robot interaction, virtual agents, interactive arts, and cognitive science and medical applications.
Network
The Ibn Sina robot would have an extensive network of sensors. It would be able to demonstrate different human postures, movements, facial expressions, eye movements, sounds, and objects tracked.
Dr Mavridis will handle the robot's interactivity and media, Tamer Rabie the vision and virtual reality, Driss Guerchi Arabic the speech synthesis and recognition, and Harmain Harmain will work on Arabic Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
A number of engineers and technicians will work on the project with a possibility of attracting PhD students from abroad, he said.
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