Do You Speak Human?

November 18, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Perhaps we shouldn’t be at all surprised that, since at least the 16th century, humans have been obsessed by the notion of automatons that mimic or mirror the anatomy of our bodies. Standing in front of Articulated Manikin – a miniature figure from late 16th-century Italy that shows the joints of the human body through rivets, screws and intricate iron parts – one isn’t transported into a post-Leonardo da Vinci-inspired future or the realm of science fiction, but into the past by as much as 300 years to the days of knights and medieval warfare, the clanking and the clashing of battleware, and the allure and couture of armour.

Yet the history of robotics goes back much further, with origins in the ancient world. In Greek mythology, Hephaestus created three-legged tables that were mobile, while Jason (of the Argonauts fame) sowed the teeth of a dragon into soldiers. In ancient Egypt, statues of divinities (made of stone and wood or metal) were animated. And in China, the subject of humanoid automatons was outlined in a series of Daoist texts known as Liezi, whereby a royal court is presented with an artificial man by a craftsman. By the 10th century BCE in the Western Zhou Dynasty, the artisan Yan Shi supposedly made a humanoid automaton that could sing and dance. Aristotle speculated in Politics (322 BCE) that automata could establish human equality by realising the abolition of slavery.

From the 16th century onwards, people started to apply mechanical ideas to human bodies, creating concepts such as artificial arms. During the Industrial Revolution, machines began to be used to replace human hands to perform repeated actions, which laid the foundation for robotics. With advances in science and technology, robots that imitate human actions have been developed over the centuries.

In addition to being used in industrial production, robots have played an important role in the realm of science fiction. The term “robot” was coined by Czech playwright Karel Capek in 1920. In Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis, the female robot Maria, whose look evokes the golden mask of the Pharaoh King Tutankhamun, dances in front of astonished workers. Maria became a blueprint for many of the cinematic and illustrated robots that followed. In 1957, an Italian humanoid robot named Cygan, driven by 13 electric motors and operated by radio control, became quite the talking point. It, too, could dance and perform.

In recent years, robots have become more and more human. They can walk on two legs, jump and do somersaults. They can express emotions with facial expressions and look around with eye cameras to capture their surroundings. And just like Kodomoroid, a Japanese newsreader robot and one of the most realistic androids ever created, modern androids can be used to study how people react to robots in order to improve their interaction with humans.

The latest development involves the incorporation of artificial intelligence into robots, thus allowing them to think, react and learn like humans. Witness RoboThespian, an acting robot that “gigs” at science centres, stars in films and plays, delivers stand-up comedy routines and officiates at wedding ceremonies.

Spanning five different periods, the Hong Kong Science Museum’s ongoing exhibition Robots: The 500-Year Quest to Make Machines Human uncovers how automata and society has been shaped by our understanding of the universe, the Industrial Revolution, 20th-century popular culture, and our dreams and visions of the future.

Featuring more than 100 examples, from the earliest automatons to robots from science fiction and modern-day research labs, you can see the latest humanoids in action as you explore how and why engineers are building robots that resemble us and interact in human-like ways. NASA’s Robonaut 2, for example, has been present on the International Space Station since 2011, complementing the work that’s being undertaken by human astronauts.

Given our increasing reliance on technology and our digital way of living, the future is either humanoid or robosapien. From robots evolving into humans, are humans simultaneously devolving or re-evolving, into robots? Only time will tell.

Red Destiny

May 20, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Space, and its navigation, connects to a specific timetable largely based on planetary movements. Thus, one doesn’t just fly to space so much as wait until space is ready to receive you. For example, flights to Mars can only happen once every 36 months, when the Red Planet comes closest to Earth during its revolutions, at a distance of 55 million kilometres. Although the coronavirus has stymied the best-laid plans for many a nation hoping to blast off for Mars in the July/August window of opportunity this year, China, first-in and last-out from the claws of COVID-19, has emerged ahead of the pack. In terms of ambition, Beijing’s project is light years ahead.

In April, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced that its upcoming robotic mission to the Red Planet is named Tianwen-1. The name, borrowed from an ancient Chinese verse by poet Qu Yuan of the Kingdom of Chu (475BCE–221BCE), means “quest for heavenly truth”. In the work, written in verse, Qu Yuan raised questions about the sky, the stars, natural phenomena, myths and even the real world.

The mission, scheduled to launch on a Long March 5 rocket from Wenchang in July and arrive on Mars in February 2021, is groundbreaking in its scope. Tianwen-1 will not only deploy an orbiter above Mars, but also deposit a lander and a rover on the Martian surface. The mission is designed to study the composition of the Martian atmosphere, as well as contribute to the ongoing search for past and present life. It will be the first mission in space history to complete orbiting, landing and roving on the Red Planet in one mission.

“The rover will have six wheels and four solar panels, carry 13 scientific instruments, weigh more than 200 kilograms and work for three months on the planet,” explains Sun Zezhou, the probe’s chief designer at the China Academy of Space Technology. Ye Peijian, one of the academy’s leading scientists, who’s known as the “father of the Chang’e probes”, says that while the launch should reach Mars by February 2021, the probe may not land on the Martian surface before July 2021.

In addition, 2020 heralds the 50th anniversary of China’s first entry into space, having launched its first satellite, Dongfanghong I, into space on April 24, 1970. Illustrating just how far the programme has come, in a recent cosmological first, CNSA landed the Chang’e-4 lander probe with a Yutu-2 rover on the moon in 2019, marking the first mission to touch down on the far side of the lunar surface. It’s an ongoing mission that’s providing unprecedented access to an unknown part of the universe. As of May 1, Yutu-2 had driven 447.68 metres on the far side and became the longest-working lunar rover on the moon.

The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) says this is a busy year, with the number of space launches (including the Mars probe and a new Chang’e-5 lunar probe) expected to exceed 40. China’s space launches over the past two years ranked first in the world – with 27 launches in 2019 alone, sending 68 satellites into space.

Fly, MetaFly, Fly

May 6, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Checkmates

April 15, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

There’s a new cult game in esports, an arena that’s been thriving, particularly given the onset of a global pandemic and the even more pressing need for global gamers to stay home. But it isn’t the shiniest new PC game that requires a bunch of complicated hardware – it’s chess. And esports has proved to be a huge boost for the age-old game, as more gamers stream online as they play tournaments and competitive rounds in front of virtual audiences.

In a way, it makes sense. One of the oldest board games still played today, modern chess is a combat strategy game rooted in medieval times. With castles, knights, kings, queens and bishops, it even has royal credentials, all on its geometric, grid-like board. While the game’s slow-paced strategies seem at odds with the fast-paced social-media culture on platforms like Twitch, chess is, surprisingly, one of the fastest-growing games on the platform.

Twitch is by far the largest esports streaming platform – and it’s a booming business. The market for competitive gaming and social online gaming hit US$1.1 billion last year, according to market research firm Newzoo. Chess.com, the largest digital chess website, counts 33 million members among its ranks.

Leading the charge are people like Alexandra Botez, the first female president of the Stanford University Chess Club, and one of Canada’s top-ranked players. A chess streamer with 67,000 followers on Twitch (as BotezLive), she plays live games and provides simultaneous commentary in a chatroom that usually has more than 1,000 members.

“My stream is live almost every day, but Saturdays are dedicated to helping get more girls involved in chess,” says Botez on her Instagram. “I’m excited to help create an environment that is friendly for female players. Anyone can watch. Also stay tuned for updates, as I’m planning on hosting a similar open-to-all event to help provide escapism for everyone doing the responsible thing and isolating at home.”

Meet Neon

March 4, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Welcome to a new kind of life… form. While Apple has been patenting glass laptops and dabbling with driverless cars, rival tech giant Samsung continues to push the envelope through its Star Labs future factory. Star Labs describes itself as a team of scientists, mathematicians, engineers and designers from all around the globe, with a mission of bringing science fiction to reality via the technology of tomorrow.

Most recently, this innovation has taken the form of Neon – what the electronics giant dubs the “first artificial human”. Neon is a computationally created virtual being that looks and behaves like a real human, with the ability to show emotions and intelligence.

A Life of Xen

February 19, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

What would naturalist Charles Darwin, author of 1859’s On the Origin of Species, make of today’s pioneering evolutionary development via the use of algorithms? Scientists at the University of Vermont (UVM) in Burlington and biologists from Tufts in Massachusetts have just “designed” creatures on a supercomputer, using algorithms that are then assembled into a new lifeform using real living cell tissue. 

The extraordinary living entities, called “xenobots”, are neither traditional robots nor any known species of animal. “They are novel living machines,” explains UVM robotics expert and computer scientist Joshua Bongard. 

The scientists repurposed living cells scraped from frog embryos (harvested from the embryos of the African frog species Xenopus laevis, hence the name “xenobots”) and assembled them into entirely new lifeforms. To do this, they took the frog skin cells (green) and heart muscle cells (red), then ran algorithms about what the biophysics of single frog-skin and cardiac cells can do. Assembled into body forms never seen in nature, the cells began to work together. 

The tiny millimetre-wide xenobots can move towards a target, pick up a payload (such as a medicine that needs to be carried to a specific place within a patient’s body) and heal themselves after being cut. It’s a whole new class of artefact: a living programmable organism. 

“We can imagine many useful applications of these living robots that other machines can’t do,” says co-leader Michael Levin, director of the Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology at Tufts. “Like searching out nasty compounds or radioactive contamination, gathering microscopic plastic in the oceans or travelling in arteries to scrape out plaque.”

It’s certainly not the first time that organisms have been manipulated by science for human benefit – that’s happened since the dawn of agriculture and genetic engineering is widespread. What distinguishes a xenobot is that research “designs completely biological machines from the ground up,” as the team writes in A Scalable Pipeline for Designing Reconfigurable Organisms. And they’re biodegradable, too. “When the xenobots have done their job, after seven days, they just become dead skin cells,” says Levin. 

So what else is possible? “You look at the cells we’ve been building our xenobots with, and, genomically, they’re frogs,” adds Levin. “It’s 100% frog DNA – but these are not frogs. Then you ask, well, what else are these cells capable of building?”

Mars: The New Earth

November 27, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Mars Habitat by Hassell with 3D-printed furniture by Nagami, with thanks to Oxygen Model Management

Mars has never been hotter as a subject (ironically, the cold planet would benefit from the same global warming that is killing Earth) and the global fixation of the world’s powers to get there first has become this century’s moon-landing equivalent. Yet, despite conditions on Mars being deeply hostile to humans, we still appear determined to go. 

“In the long run, the human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket – or on one planet,” wrote the late scientist Stephen Hawking. “If we’re to survive, I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth.” British stadium cosmologist Brian Cox agrees: “There will be Martians if we are to have a future. At some point, we will be the Martians, because we can’t stay here forever.” And then there’s Elon Musk. The serial entrepreneur with plans for humans to colonise Mars via his private SpaceX programme famously declared: “Being a multi-planet species beats the hell out of being a single-planet species.” 

Nasa, the European Space Agency, SpaceX and China are all in the race to “multi-planet” humanity. China will launch its Mars probe in 2020 and earlier this month tested a potential landing procedure in northern Hebei province. What differentiates the country’s ambition is its expectation to complete orbiting, landing and roving in one mission. “Though it has been preceded by other countries’ Mars missions, ours will produce better performance in terms of technological level and engineering capability,” says Ye Peijian, a leading space exploration researcher at Beijing’s China Academy of Space Technology. 

But any attempt to go as far as Mars requires a whole new approach to lifestyle. All of which makes London’s Design Museum exhibition Moving to Mars about as trending as it gets. Until February 23, 2020, the exhibition invites visitors to discover the role that design will play in humanity’s journey to the Red Planet. Every detail of this extraordinary venture must be designed – from the journey (around seven months) to considering what we will wear, eat and live in when we get there and beyond. 

“On the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, we are entering a new space age, with Mars once again capturing the popular imagination,” says the museum’s chief curator, Justin McGuirk. “As a museum interested in emergent futures, we are keen to explore how designing for space can help us design for Earth.”

There is something otherworldly and compelling about experiencing this show, given its topicality and futurism. Within 40 minutes of arriving, we had all but stepped on Mars, having witnessed a huge panoramic immersive installation On Mars Today, featuring high-resolution imagery from the surface of the planet that has never been shown in public before; we saw what farming will look like, a major challenge given the planet’s total lack of any discernible life, tiny amounts of water, limited carbon dioxide and constant spectre of radiation given the planet’s thin atmosphere. There’s also a full-scale prototype of the ExoMars rover, which will be launched into space next March. 

And there’s the journey. It ranges from food trays by Nasa to Galina Balashova’s designs for Russian space interiors from 1964 to 1980, and from Raymond Loewy’s design work for space stations to (exhibited for the first time) the NDX-1 spacesuit, designed specifically for the surface of Mars by the University of North Dakota. The challenges of dining are addressed in a newly commissioned spacecraft table by German industrial designer Konstantin Grcic, inspired by the constraints imposed by zero gravity. 

Hot Gear

October 16, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Bose Noise-Cancelling Headphones 700

Listen to the world around you on your own terms and personalise your environment with 11 levels of noise cancellation via these new streamlined, wireless Bose headphones, with a lightweight stainless-steel headband. Confidently take your calls with an unrivalled four-microphone system that isolates your voice while cancelling the noise around you, too. Hear and be heard like never before. 

Neo Geo Arcade Stick Pro

A throwback to the original Japanese cult gaming classic, the new Neo Geo controller comes with 20 pre-installed games including entries from the series King of Fighters, Samurai Shodown, Fatal Fury and much more. Connect the Neo Geo Mini or Neo Geo Mini Pad to the device and enjoy fierce gaming, and plug in another Neo Geo Pro for two-player action. Customise the ball-top fighting stick’s eight-button layout to fit individual strategies. Game on!

Fossil Collider Diana Smartwatch  

Blend digital with the notion of analogue and you’ve got Diana (a blend of “digital and analogue”) in Collider, a new hybrid wearable smartwatch by Fossil, which Google acquired for US$40 million. Diana combines physical watch features such as mechanical hands with digital elements including displays, along with a built-in heart rate monitor and an “e-ink display” (without a touchscreen) that sits behind the hands, showing weather and notifications from your apps. Expect Google to expand its iterations soon. 

Taobao Tips

October 3, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Seeing the Light

September 18, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

While the world is being overrun with talk of digitally driven AI future technology, scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have developed a concept for a smart piece of glass that recognises images without any external power or circuit. It does so by using light to distinguish and decipher images; the sophisticated technology that powers face recognition in contemporary smartphones could soon be getting an upgrade. 

The window to that future is a piece of glass. “We’re using optics to condense the normal setup of cameras, sensors and deep neural networks into a single piece of thin glass,” explains Zongfu Yu, the electrical and computer engineering professor who led the project. 

The ramifications are profound. For example, artificial intelligence currently gobbles up substantial computational resources (and battery life) every time you glance at your phone to unlock it with face ID. In the future, one piece of glass could recognise your face – without using any power. “This is completely different from the typical route to machine power,” says Yu. 

So how do they make the glass “smart”? Specifically, the engineers placed air bubbles of different sizes and shapes, as well as small pieces of light-absorbing materials such as graphene, at specific locations inside the sheet of glass. These particles bend light in specific ways to differentiate among images – artificial intelligence in action. 

The glass was dynamic enough to detect, in real-time, when a handwritten “3” was altered to become an “8”. “The fact we were able to get this complex behaviour with such a simple structure was really something,” says Yu. Designing the glass to recognise numbers was similar to a machine-learning training process, except that the engineers “trained” an analogue material instead of digital codes. “We’re accustomed to digital computing, but this has broadened our view,” he adds. “The wave dynamics of light propagation provide a new way to perform analogue artificial neural computing.” 

Which means? One big advantage is that the computation is completely passive and intrinsic to the glass material, meaning one piece of image-recognition glass could be used hundreds of thousands of times. “We could potentially use the glass as a biometric lock, tuned to recognise only one person’s face,” explains Yu. “Once built, it would last forever without needing power or the internet, meaning it could keep something safe for you even after thousands of years.” 

This glass isn’t just the smartest new material on the block – it’s the fastest, too. It works at the speed of light, because the glass distinguishes among different images by distorting light waves. 

“The true power of this technology lies in its ability to handle much more complex classification tasks instantly without any energy consumption,” says Ming Yuan, a collaborator on the research and a professor of statistics at Columbia University. “These tasks are key in creating artificial intelligence: to teach driverless cars to recognise a traffic signal and to enable voice control in consumer devices, among numerous other examples. Human vision is broad and general in its ability to discern all manner of objects, but smart glass could excel in specific applications – for example, one piece for number recognition, one piece for identifying letters, another for faces, and so on.”

Top Tech

September 4, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Rollable OLED TV R9, LG

If there’s one TV that everybody’s talking about, it’s LG’s rollable OLED TV – an impossibly thin flexible screen that magically appears and disappears into a svelte aluminium enclosure the company calls Zero View. Designed to appeal to decor-conscious homeowners who don’t want a big black screen dominating the room, tap a button on the remote and a hidden mechanism slowly unfurls to make the 65-inch screen disappear. It also features Alexa voice control and a 4.2-channel Dolby Atmos sound system. 

IQbuds Max, Nuheara

Smart hearing technology developer Nuheara has unveiled IQbuds Max, its most advanced and powerful hearing product to date. Building on all the features currently available with IQbuds Boost, Max has triple the hearing capability (utilising three microphones on each ear), five times the processing power and a hybrid active noise-cancellation system.

Spectacles 3, Snap Inc

Chic as you like, here comes creativity in three dimensions from the creators of Snapchat. Photos and videos wirelessly sync to your phone, where you can reimagine your favourite moments with a suite of 3D effects on Snapchat. Precision-crafted from a single sheet of lightweight stainless steel, these high-quality, high-fashion desirables are engineered for elegance, durability and comfort. 

Electrifying News

May 29, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Today, we might laugh when we watch the 1931 film Frankenstein and see the creature brought to life via a series of lightning strikes rendered via electric shocks – an act that was inspired by original Frankenstein novelist Mary Shelley’s sighting of a dead frog being reanimated via the administration of a small electric shock. 

But those creatures were conjured from the reality of death and non-existence. Now, however, scientists and doctors have made an astonishing discovery that could soon replace certain invasive and painful types of surgery, particularly of the cosmetic variety. The secret? Doctors can now reshape cartilage by using simple electricity. Granted, the subject on which experiments have been tested are thus far only a rabbit’s ears, but the knowledge used to transform the leporine is just as applicable to humans. 

The breakthrough, recently announced by the American Chemical Society, describes how cartilage, which shapes our noses and other parts of our anatomy, is made more pliant and malleable after undergoing exposure to an electrical current. By coupling this current with 3D-printed moulds, doctors have discovered how to soften and reshape cartilage without making a single incision – a development that not only makes the process less painful, but significantly shortens the recovery time for patients undergoing more typical interventions. 

The Society’s press release describes how lab technicians arrived at the Eureka moment entirely by accident. Ordinarily using laser beams to heat cartilage, which is both expensive and often kills the tissue itself, a scientist, for novelty value, tried the same with an electrical current. The process works not by heating the cartilage per se, but by destabilising the ions that move around within it, thus softening the tissue’s texture and allowing it to be reshaped and moulded like clay. 

The implications of this happy accident are far-reaching and exciting. The Society describes how, aside from cosmetic surgery to reshape noses and other facial features, doctors could reshape cartilage to alleviate the pain of those suffering from stiff joints and deviated septums. And why stop at that? Doctors suggest using the same modus operandi to repair corneas and even fix eyesight. 

Robotic Recruiter

May 15, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Meet your interviewer, Tengai

If you’ve ever wondered about your interview techniques in front of others, or the psychology at play between you and the HR or middle manager, then imagine the next-gen dynamic that’s already happening in Sweden: firms trialling an in-person interview robot. It makes HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey all seem a bit, well, turn of the century. 

Stockholm-based recruitment firm TNG, one of Sweden’s largest, is using a robot called Tengai to conduct interviews with potential job candidates, which consists of a head that sits or projects from a table, facing the interviewee at eye-level.

Tengai measures 41 centimetres high and weighs 3.5kg. It also has something of a human-like face, so it isn’t entirely manufactured but something closer to androidal. Its glowing face can tilt from side to side, and it blinks and smiles, thus mimicking not just our subtle facial expressions but also the way we speak. 

Tengai is the brainchild of Furhat Robotics, an artificial intelligence (AI) and social robotics company forged out of a research project that began at Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The creators of Tengai insist that rather than robbing an interview of genuine person-to-person interaction, the android offers interviews that can be free from unconscious biases often exhibited by human interaction. 

According to research conducted last year, TNG estimates that 73% of job applicants in Sweden believe they have been discriminated against while applying for a job, based on factors including their age, gender, ethnicity, handicap, sexual preference, appearance, weight or health. 

“It typically takes about seven seconds for someone to make a first impression, and about five to 15 minutes for a recruiter to make a decision,” says TNG’s chief innovation officer, Elin Öberg Mårtenzon. “We want to challenge that.” 

For now, you’ll have to be a Swedish speaker to interact and interview with Tengai. Recruiters and developers are diving into an English-language version that’s expected to hit companies and boardrooms by early 2020. Meet Tengai; it’s AI – and your new HR.

Some people feel that talking to a robot is creepy. So far, how have candidates reacted to Tengai? 

We’ve conducted some 80 interviews to date, and the vast majority of candidates describe Tengai as warm, friendly and easy-going. Most are surprised by how natural the meeting feels – despite talking to a robot. Perhaps it’s the unusual situation: sitting down with and engaging in an intelligent dialogue with a robot. You might even feel that the robot is a little too human, because it’s so adept at social codes. It can feel pretty surreal.

Are there only yes and no answers? How advanced is the communication?

There’s a lot of focus on providing and gathering information in recruitment, and this also applies to Tengai. It shares information in a dialogue form about the interview and how it will be conducted, and then gathers the answers. As it collects information, it understands what the candidate is saying, regardless of the number of words and sentences used. So yes, it can handle open questions and open-ended answers.

What happens when Tengai doesn’t obtain a satisfactory answer? Does it understand? 

If that happens, the robot informs the candidate, asks follow-up questions, and subsequently attempts to continue the conversation and the interview.

What is the greatest advantage with Tengai?

In addition to getting a more objective and structured process, we avoid the unconscious bias we all have. By doing this in the early-selection stage, we shift the subjectivity further along the process, where it is less damaging. Additionally, we’re able to invite more candidates to participate in the recruitment processes’ early stages, allowing for greater diversity by ensuring a better and broader selection of talent.

What we can risk losing is the detail and personalisation that can give a complete picture of a candidate’s suitability for a position. On the other hand, Tengai is designed to be used at the beginning of a selection process, where it’s advantageous to be objective and skill-focused to find the competencies needed for the job. In-depth assessment by an experienced recruiter, trained in unbiased recruitment, of a candidate’s experience, potential and motivation is conducted with the talent who progress further in the process.

An unbiased robot – is it possible? How do you ensure that the robot’s information-gathering is unbiased?

Tengai only records candidates’ speech, which it converts into text in real time. No other variables are involved, such as a person’s accent or the pitch of their voice, their looks or gender. Furthermore, we don’t let Tengai know anything about the candidates; the only thing we have access to are the candidates’ names and email addresses – and we don’t use this information for the purpose of identifying specific candidates. That way we keep biases out of the interview. But we do plenty more, too.

What do you teach the robot? Why is it needed? And what is the human recruiter’s role in this?

The robot has been developed for many years by the company Furhat Robotics. What we are doing is developing HR-tech application software, built together with Furhat on their existing OS. What we teach it is how to conduct situation- and skill-based interviews as close as possible to a human recruiter. This includes anything we do as a recruiter – like how we hum, nod our heads and ask follow-up questions. This project started in August 2018. We then established a question tree and all the social skills associated with it. In recent months, we’ve adjusted some of the dialogue in Swedish so it feels as natural as possible.

This is certainly a new way to recruit. How has it affected you as recruitment professionals?

We’ve really had to look at ourselves to understand how we conduct interviews – which movements, facial expressions, and words we use to confirm talent as humans and as candidates. We’ve gone to great lengths to analyse the questions that the robot should ask. It has been very important that the questions are as clear and as concrete as possible. Tengai struggles with ambiguity, so the less vagueness there is in a candidate’s answer, the better Tengai is to evaluate and validate the skill sets.

You have said that it would be good for all recruiters to partake in this work. Why?

All recruiters work old-school – and old-school skills need to be questioned in a world where the tech development gets faster by the day. It’s useful to evaluate yourself, the way you work on a daily basis and your interview techniques. Even if we tend to think that we do a great job for our clients and candidates, there are always things that can be better. You just need to dare to challenge yourself. We need lifelong learning, even in the recruitment industry. As we’ve taught Tengai social codes, we’ve become aware of how we behave in similar situations with people, both that we know and don’t know.

How does a series of questions asked by Tengai differ from one by a human?

There’s no capacity for extra words or narrative that isn’t directly linked to a question that Tengai has asked. All questions are asked in exactly the same way, in the same tone and typically in the same order. That way, it’s a more fair and objective interview. A hiring manager would deviate from this formula, adjusting to the candidates’ responses and thereby extracting more from them, which makes the process unfair. Additionally, as a human, they are also influenced and affected by unconscious bias about the candidates, and subject to their own preconceptions and subjective interpretations. With Tengai, this is avoided.

The Future Starts Here

September 12, 2018 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Tomás Saraceno’s Aerocene launches at White Sands Natural Park, 2015

On June 28, 2016, Facebook completed the first successful test flight of Aquila – a solar-powered drone that aims to beam internet technology to remote parts of the world and eventually break the record for the longest unmanned aircraft flight. Big as that milestone was, Facebook envisages a fleet of Aquilas flying together at 60,000 feet, communicating with each via lasers and staying aloft for months at a time – something that’s never done before. It’s all part of the digital behemoth’s mission to connect the world and help more of the four billion people who aren’t online to access the myriad
opportunities the internet provides. 

Indeed, the world of tomorrow is shaped by the designs and technologies emerging today. From smart appliances to satellites, the exhibition The Future Starts Here, at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum until November 4, brings together more than 100 objects (either newly released or in development) that point the way towards where society might be headed. Although some may seem straight out of the realm of science fiction, they’re all real, produced by research labs, universities, designers’ studios, governments and corporations.

The undeniable physical reality of these objects may give the impression that the future is already fixed. But new things contain unpredictable potentials and possibilities, often unanticipated even by their creators. It’s up to us – as individuals, as citizens and even as a species – to determine what happens next. While the objects here suggest a certain future, it is not yet determined. The future we get is up to us. And it starts here.

Guided by ethical and speculative questions, the exhibition examines the technological impact on notions of the self, the public, the planet and the afterlife – each evoking increasing scales of technological impact. How might these objects affect the way you live, learn and even love?

Humans can now design life itself. Our bodies, and even our internal biological systems, are becoming sites of design. Wearable technologies and personal trackers have become quotidian standards; we measure heart rates when we run and navigate cities by GPS when we drive. The distinction between human and technology blurs. Once a preserve of privacy, the home is now a broadcasting station from which we share our lives through social media. 

How will technology affect the places we gather collectively to make decisions? In a world where people crowdfund everything from bicycles to bridges, or leak government secrets and generate new currencies, does democracy still work? The top-down strategies of an increasingly small number of companies and governments, versus the bottom-up tactics of a rising mass of people – which will thrive?

And then there’s the even bigger picture. Should the planet be a design project? Human activity has altered our planet to the extent that some scientists have declared a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, or “age of humans”. Now that our behaviour has unintentionally designed the Earth, can we use technology to reverse the effects and clean, repair or give back to the planet? Some are looking for solutions in the stars – designing satellites that scope asteroids for mining new geological resources and devising ways for us to inhabit Mars. But if Mars is the answer, what is the question? Can we still save our planet, or is it time to leave?

Which leaves us with man’s irreconcilable dilemma: mortality. Who wants to live forever? Current advancements in biotechnology and artificial intelligence have the potential to redefine our conceptions of what life is. Reawakening after death or uploading one’s mind onto a computer are ideas that may sound like science fiction, but are taken quite seriously by some futurists today. Against these efforts to preserve the self, institutions such as the Long Now Foundation and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault are working to preserve humanity through books, seeds and material culture. But what do we want to save for the future – the individual or the collective?

Do You Douyin?

September 12, 2018 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Douyin's logo

Got a moment – or, perhaps, 15 seconds? In the age of fragmented time, short, funny videos can perfectly fill in the gaps when people have nothing better to do between two events. Enter Douyin, which is a massive hit in China right now; its daily plays have already exceeded one billion. The Vine-like app allows users to produce creative short videos that combine music with mouth shapes or body moves. They can dance, sing, cook or do whatever their hearts desire. 

Launched in September 2016, Douyin aims to connect people who want to share their lives, make new friends or just watch funny short videos. Emanating from the same company that brought us Toutiao (aka Headlines), Douyin is owned by Zhang Yiming, one of China’s top tech leaders; he chairs ByteDance. Similar to how Vine worked as a time-limited video platform, Douyin is a collection of brief 15-second music videos, mainly focused on young people, though it’s certainly suitable for all ages. 

On the platform, childish and eccentric behaviours are totally acceptable. In a high-pressure world, it’s no surprise that Douyin has become so successful – all you need to do is pick up your phone and open the app to relieve some stress and have a laugh. Users can tweak the shooting speed and apply editing techniques to their videos; another interesting item is that the app has a dubbing recording system in which every user can compete with another by using the same song as a base for their video. 

According to iResearch, a major Chinese researcher that provides the country’s internet economic results, in 2017 the market size for short videos was RMB 5.73 billion (US$890 million), while the whole market has the potential to reach RMB 35.68 billion (US$5.57 billion) in three years. The app pushes related videos and products based on users’ preferences and consequently, Douyin can be quite addictive – many people just want to enjoy a few minutes at first, but end up watching several hours’ worth of videos.

Douyin’s international version, called Tik Tok, is also popular overseas, especially in Japan, where it was in first place on the country’s Apple Store free app list for both April and May. After launching in Japan in August 2017, the app now commands huge popularity among young Japanese. According to research by Nikkei, 24 of 100 teenage girls in the hip Shibuya, Harajuku and Ikebukuro districts have downloaded Tik Tok. 

Game On

August 29, 2018 / by Michael Liu

Image above: Arcade Backpack by UCLA Games Lab

Major technological advancements after the millennium have seen increased access to broadband, social media, smartphones and newly available means of creation, and all of this has profoundly changed the way video games are designed, discussed and played. This shift has opened the door to new voices and ideas, allowing the medium to break beyond its perceived boundaries and aspire to new horizons. More accessible than ever, video games are at a tipping point, where their culture and meaning is being examined and reassessed, both by critics and designers. 

A new exhibition in London, Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt, explores the medium since the mid-2000s and delves into one of the most significant design fields of our time, exploring the work of groundbreaking designers, creative player communities and the critical conversations that define modern gaming.

Design

What does it take to make a game? Rarely seen design materials from the desks and hard drives of leading designers sit alongside specially commissioned multimedia installations to provide new perspectives and insights into the craftsmanship and inspiration behind a selection of groundbreaking contemporary video games. From the cinematic blockbusters of large AAA studios to the modest and often intimate work of independent designers, this section of the exhibition presents an eclectic and diverse range of voices and work across game design. All are united by their ambitions to break boundaries.

Play

Online player communities connected through servers and social platforms create, collaborate and spectate together. From the mind-blowing megastructures built in Minecraft to the vast array of fan art that embraces and extends beloved virtual worlds, their work sees them transcend the role of the designer to democratise design on a vast scale. A large-scale immersive installation in this section celebrates the dazzling imagination and creative chaos shown by gamers.

From the online to the offline, the playful exhibition finale looks to the rise of a new DIY arcade scene. Handmade arcade cabinets, as well as interactive installations of spectacle and performance, provide a punk-rock alternative to the traditional arcade space, which playfully reminds us of the social power of video games.