Microsoft selects UAE University to build friendly robots

Their project is entitled 'Facebots: Robots utilizing and publishing social information in FaceBook', and aims at making human-robot relationships much more interesting, natural, useful and longer-lasting.

The 'Facebots' will use FaceBook, a highly successful social networking web site with millions of users, so that they can become deeply embedded in the social network of the humans that they interact with.

In short, 'facebots' will not only know and recognize their human friends, but will also know who the friends of their friends are, remember when they met them and what they were discussing about, and even -- why not? - pass around information and gossip.

And there are few places in the world where maintaining multiple long term social relationships in various circles is so important (and enjoyable) as it is in the middle east - and thus Facebots seem to have chosen the right place to enter human society.

UAE University and Microsoft hosted a ceremony today in recognition of this achievement. The ceremony today attended by Dr. Abdullah Al-Khanbashi, Vice Chancellor of UAE University and Microsoft's Joe Wilson, Director of Academic Initiatives, as well as Cherbyl Fakhoury, GM of Microsoft Middle-East, and Dr. Rafic Makki, Dean of the College of IT.

'Microsoft has a long history of supporting scientific research. To be selected as one of eight recipients worldwide to receive this research award, is a significant achievement for the College of Information Technology faculty and students,' said Dr. Abdullah.

For his part, Joe Wilson described the very competitive nature of the award and complimented the College of Information Technology for its interesting proposal.

The research will be carried out in the Interactive Robots and Media Laboratory (IRML)
of the College of IT of UAEU - (http://www.hafeet.uaeu.ac.ae/irml/), a futuristic research lab where the latest robots of all kinds (be it small vehicles, arms, tour guide robots) and media of the future (virtual characters and worlds) are being developed, programmed, and befriended by students, researchers, faculty and visitors - and where aspects of the physical atoms of the participating beings are being constantly translated to bits through modern motion capture systems, sensor networks, and 3D scanners.

The founder and director of the lab is Dr. Nikolaos Mavridis, who had been awarded his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory.

Dr. Tamer Rabie, who is also affiliated with the lab, works with virtual animal-like characters and computer vision.