Education Policy, Business and Technology

BYU Researchers Aim to Stop Robots from Eating Tables with Wikipedia

Campus Technology: A team of researchers from Brigham Young University is using Wikipedia to make sure a future android won't try to tickle a refrigerator, drive a teapot or eat a table.

Eventually the team, led by Ph.D. candidate Nancy Fulda and computer science professor David Wingate, hopes to help build androids that can interact with the world reasonably well. The problem is that, while computers are fairly good at identifying objects, they are pretty terrible at understanding the context around them, including ideas such as what to do with them, how heavy they might be or where they're likely to be found.

"Consider the monitor on your desk: you can look at it, you can turn it on, you can even pick it up or throw it, but you cannot impeach it, transpose it, justify it or correct it," said Wingate in a prepared statement. "You can dethrone a king or worship him or obey him, but you cannot unlock him or calendar him or harvest him."

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