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Virtual Human is a Reality

13 July 2010 Last updated at 15:14 ET

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'Virtual human' Milo comes out to play at TED in Oxford

By Jonathan FildesTechnology reporter, BBC News, Oxford

Milo made his world debut in 2009 at the E3 Expo in Los Angeles

Microsoft has shown off its "virtual human" that reacts to a person's emotions, body movements and voice.

Milo, as he is known, is designed for use with the firm's hands-free Xbox 360 motion controller called Kinect.

The technology is the brainchild of veteran UK games designer Peter Molyneux.

"I want to introduce a new revolution in storytelling," he told the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) Global conference in Oxford.

"Films, TV, even hallowed books, are just rubbish because they don't involve me," he said. "It's a sea of blandness."

Mr Molyneux said that he wanted to create a character "that seemed alive, that would look me in the eyes, and feel real".

Hidden technology

Milo was first shown off in a demo at the E3 expo in 2009, but has not been seen since.

"There was a huge row online about that with people saying 'this can't be real'," Mr Molyneux said.

The live demonstration used Microsoft's soon-to-be released Kinect controller, which uses a series of sensors, cameras and microphones to interpret a player's intentions.

The demo was conducted by an assistant, who showed Milo exploring a garden, learning to skim stones and finally confiding in him after being told off by his parents.

"We're changing the mind of Milo constantly," he said.

"No two people's Milos can be the same - you are actually sculpting a human being. Some of the things you are doing will change the course of his life."

Mr Molyneux said Milo had been built using artificial intelligence developed by his firm Lionhead studios, along with technology that was "hidden in the dusty vaults of Microsoft".

He said the system exploited psychological techniques to make a person feel that Milo was real.

In addition, software allowed "complete control" over subtle facial elements such as blushing and even the diameter of Milo's nostrils, which he said could denote stress.

"Most of it is just a trick - but it is a trick that actually works," he said.

During the demonstration, the player egged Milo on to squash a snail in the garden.

Mr Molyneux said that commands such as these were interpreted by Milo using voice-recognition software along with a database that attempted to interpret the players intonation and meaning.

These seemingly inconsequential events could also impact on Milo's later life and development in the game, he said.

The demonstration showed the initial stages of the game, where players learn to interact with Milo.

"After three-quarters of a hour, he recognises you," said Mr Molyneux.

"I can promise you that if you are sitting in front of this screen, that is a truly wonderful moment."

He said that the later stages of the game, which were not shown, allowed a player to explore the landscape with Milo more freely.

"There are lots of adventures - some of which are quite dark," he said.

At the moment, the technology is still in development and Microsoft has no plans to release it, he said.

However, he hinted that the game was designed to be used for millions of people and therefore could one day become a commercial product.

"His mind is based in the cloud," he told the audience. "As millions of people use it, Milo will get smarter."

'Good news'

Mr Molyneux showed off the technology at TED Global (Technology, Entertainment and Design), the European version of an established US event.

The invitation-only conferences explore "ideas worth spreading" and have featured talks by the former UK prime minister Gordon Brown and Nobel laureates as well as lesser-known technologists and designers.

This theme of this year's event is, "and now the good news".

"Good news has become a near-extinct species," said Bruno Giussani, European director of TED at the opening of the conference.

"But if you dig deeper, there is new technology, new science, new art, new ways of collaborating that offer a more hopeful view of the future."

Invited speakers at this year's TED include a voting system designer, a women's rights activist, a green chef and a physicist who runs a lab that aims to allow anyone to make almost anything.

Each is given 18 minutes in front of the audience.

This year's conference runs from 13 to 16 July in Oxford, UK.

Community Service instead of Military Service

An army of volunteers
The end of conscription may have uncharitable effects
Jul 15th 2010 | BERLIN

SIX days a week a small fleet of compact cars sets off from the Diakonie-Zentrum in Mariendorf in southern Berlin to deliver cheap hot meals to pensioners in the district. More often than not they are driven by “Zivis”, young men who have refused military service and so are obliged to spend nine months in “community service” instead. Some 90,000 a year man hospitals, sports clubs and kindergartens across Germany (a lucky few monitor eagles in the forest). Anything involving driving is popular. Alexander Fläschner, a meals-on-wheels man, is happy “to see a bit of Berlin by car” before he begins his studies in the city.

The government’s decision to shorten basic military service from nine months to six and the possibility it might be eliminated altogether is causing worry at the Mariendorf centre and at thousands of similar outfits. Since community service is an alternative to conscription, it will be cut back to the same degree. Ending it altogether would have “huge consequences” for “social welfare as a whole”, says Jens Kreuter, the federal official in charge of the service.

Zivis are not supposed to replace regular workers, nor do they often have the skills. They provide useful, and for some people vital, extra services. Often they are the ones who read to folk at old-age homes. For some people who cannot feed themselves the choice may be between a Zivi and a feeding tube. They are thought to bring fresh ideas to the organisations they serve and to take away a more rounded view of the world. Mr Fläschner says he feels “enriched” by his contact with the aged.

Some 12,000 help out at Diakonie, a vast charity linked to the Protestant church (of which the Mariendorf meal service is a part). The shortening of service to six months will make it hard for Zivis to perform some functions. It will be “hardly possible” to train them to provide accident assistance to the Diakonie’s rescue service, says Kerstin Griese, the group’s head of social policy. In Mariendorf three of the seven drivers are Zivis; they cost less and work longer hours than the others. If community service is eliminated, says Heidi Adams, the manager, the cost of the meals will have to go up.

Charities hope that Zivis will opt to stay for the extra three months, or longer (it looks as if a third will do so). Ms Griese wants the government to provide extra funds for a voluntary “social year” if community service is eliminated. She thinks Germany has something to learn from the United States, where volunteerism among the young is “almost an obligation”. If lawmakers remove the compulsion to serve, perhaps a sense of duty will take its place.

The Man Who Was Thursday

GLOBAL: Millions wasted on shipping food aid

Photo: Chuck Simmins/Flickr

Aid has many hidden costs

JOHANNESBURG, 13 July 2010 (IRIN) - US taxpayers spend about US$140 million every year on non-emergency food aid in Africa, and roughly the same amount to ship food aid to global destinations on US vessels; money that could have been used to feed more people says a new study by researchers at Cornell University in the US.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has accounted for more than half of the world's food aid every year for decades, but has been "the last and slowest donor to reform its food aid policies", noted Christopher Barrett, a leading food aid expert, and his colleagues, Elizabeth Bageant and Erin Lentz.

Their study, Food Aid and Agricultural Cargo Preference, has come up with the numbers to back a long-standing call for reforms, and goes a step further in showing that the policy designed to "nurture" or subsidise the US shipping industry "under the guise of humanitarian assistance" is not doing either effectively.

Most donors have moved towards cash transfers or vouchers to buy food, instead of providing food as aid, but the paper points out that most countries only had agribusiness and some NGO interests to contend with while reforming their food aid policy.

Reforms in the US have faced much tougher opposition from "a uniquely effective lobby", referred to as the "iron triangle", comprising agribusiness, the shipping sector and some NGOs.

Barrett and Daniel Maxwell, an associate professor at Tufts University, Boston, in the US, who wrote at length about the "iron triangle" in their 2005 book, Food Aid After Fifty Years: Recasting Its Role, estimated that it cost more than two dollars of US taxpayers' money to deliver one dollar's worth of food procured as in-kind aid.

If our objective is to generate US jobs, why do so through a humanitarian food aid programme, rather than focusing on generating jobs directly

Little known shipping subsidy 

Little has been written about the costs and effects of a policy called the Agricultural Cargo Preference (ACP), which affects the shipping sector of the "iron triangle", and USAID, the world's largest food aid programme.

The ACP requires that 75 percent of US food aid be shipped on privately owned, US registered vessels, even if they do not offer the most competitive rates. Some of these costs are reimbursed by the Department of Transportation's Maritime Administration, but ultimately the US taxpayer foots the entire bill. 
The Cornell researchers used data available for every USAID food aid shipment in 2006, when ACP cost US taxpayers $140 million, "The amount paid above the regular cost of ocean freight on the competitive market," said Barrett.

ACP was calculated by taking into account the costs of transporting the food aid on competing foreign vessels plying the same waters, after deducting the ACP costs borne by US Department of Agriculture food aid programmes, and reimbursements.

The un-reimbursed cost of ACP to food aid agencies was almost the same as what USAID spent on non-emergency food aid to Africa, which benefited 1.2 million people and was "widely deemed important to preventing food emergencies". USAID declined to comment on the findings of the study, saying the research "spoke for itself".

About 20 years ago the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent investigative arm of Congress, looked at the costs of shipping food aid in US-flag vessels rather than using cheaper foreign ships, and estimated that it cost $150 million each year. Another report in 1994 put the cost as high as $200 million a year.

Failing shipping as well 

The ACP was put in place to achieve four objectives: ensure that US vessels remained seaworthy and prepared should a war break out; maintain skilled jobs for American seafarers; maintain the financial viability of US ships; protect US ocean commerce from foreign domination.

Barrett, Bageant and Lentz found that "contrary to its national security and 'buy American' objectives", ACP used vessels which were not useful to the military, and most of the vessels used were ultimately owned by foreign corporations.

They recommended that the US administration revisit the ACP, and suggested separating security objectives from humanitarian ones, with direct support for the Maritime Security Program.

But shipping industry says 

The US shipping industry, which produced its own study - Impacts on the US Economy of Shipping International Food Aid - around the same time as the Cornell researchers, argues that eliminating the ACP would shrink the US-flag merchant fleet by 15 percent to 30 percent, with the loss of between 16,500 and 33,000 jobs.

Barrett said the shipping industry's study had used "very crude multipliers not developed for this application, and seem to use the total ocean freight costs, not the marginal cost of cargo preference, thereby assuming that every maritime job would disappear. That's a highly questionable assumption that they then inflate, using highly questionable multipliers".

The Cornell study's calculations showed that US taxpayers were paying a subsidy of almost $100,000 every year per mariner on an ACP vessel shipping food aid. "That's a pretty handsome subsidy," he commented.

"One would hope there would be some economic multiplier. The question is whether that's the best use of those funds, if our objective is to generate US jobs; and if the objective is to generate US jobs, why do so through a humanitarian food aid programme, rather than focusing on generating jobs directly?"

West Africa - in Search of More Aid As 10 Million Face Hunger

Lagos — Over 10 million people are at risk of hunger in the Sahel before the September harvests, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO). In Niger, about half of the 13.4 million inhabitants are facing hunger. Up to two million Chadians and hundreds of thousands of Mauritanians and Malians also need assistance.
There have been early interventions and prepositioning, but more should have been done earlier, say aid workers and the response needs to be urgently scaled up.
In late 2009, the Famine Early Warning System Network highlighted signs of the crisis: a drop in cereal production, poor pastoral conditions and a dangerous combination of poverty and high food prices.
"There are always delays in supply pipelines. This means that decisions taken today will have an impact on the ground in late July or August. Food distributions should have started in April or May," said the Swiss operation director of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Bruno Jochum.
Support remains crucial, he added, since during the months of August and September, people are typically left with no food while they wait for the next harvest.
Only 57 percent of the US$190 million emergency appeal by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) for Niger is funded. In Chad, the World Food Programme (WFP) still lacks $23 million of the $65 million required for the food crisis.
The head of the European Commission Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO) for West Africa, Cyprien Fabre, noted, however, that the donor response is timelier than in 2005, when the food crisis caught many unprepared. This time, he said, early warning and response mechanisms were in place in most affected countries and funds were rapidly allocated.
"Operations are well under way in Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali. In Chad, more actors are needed to respond properly. Funding will be available, if necessary."
Chad
The situation in the Sahelian belt of Chad is especially worrying. "Chad is somehow like Niger in 2005," explained the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) regional adviser for nutrition, Félicité Tchibindat. "The number of organizations on the ground is limited, so is the political will. On the bright side, humanitarian agencies and donors are now starting to respond."
Such mobilization will help, but the imminent start of the rainy season will make the tricky task of bringing assistance to remote villages in a landlocked country even more challenging. WFP indicates that it can take as long as 3-5 months for food to arrive in Chad. In parts of the country, roads will be officially closed as of the end of June because of the rains.
"Even if there are cargos and cargos of stocks, if they cannot be delivered, people will not get food. Without prepositioned food, it will become very difficult. Agencies may have to look into air deliveries," said OCHA's public information, advocacy and donor relations officer for West Africa, Yvon A. Edoumou.
"Very vulnerable"
If there are normal harvests in the autumn, the population is expected to recover at the end of the year. A normal to wet rainy season is forecast by the Permanent Inter-State Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS).
Precipitation is crucial in a region where most agriculture is rain-fed. "If the rains fail, it will be a catastrophe in the whole region. People's assets are significantly depleted. They have borrowed money to eat and are now waiting for the rains," said ECHO's Fabre.
The Sahel countries are among the poorest in the world. A third of the population of Chad and Niger is chronically undernourished. Each year, 300,000 under-five children die of malnutrition, according to UNICEF.
"The population is already very vulnerable," said OCHA's Edoumou. "When you live from one day to the next, any shock provokes a crisis. If the rains are poor, if the cattle are affected by a mysterious disease, people are in difficulty."
Source: Humanitarian news and analysis (A project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs)

Copyright © 2010 Daily Champion. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).

Boston University Professor Finds Genes Predicting Living to 100

By Victoria Gill

Science reporter, BBC NewsThe test is based on the largest study of centenarians in the world

US scientists have developed a way of predicting how likely a person is to live beyond the age of 100.

The breakthrough, described in the journal Science, is based on 150 genetic "signposts" found in exceptionally long-lived people.

The Boston team created a mathematical model, which takes information from these signposts to work out a person's chance of reaching 100.

It is based on the largest study of centenarians in the world.

This is a rare trait - only one in 6,000 people in industrialised countries reaches such a ripe old age. And 90% them are still disability free by the age of 93.

The researchers now think they have cracked the genetic secret of this longevity.

The team originally embarked on their study in 1995. Since then, they have scanned the genomes of 1,000 centenarians.

They identified genetic markers that are "most different" between centenarians and randomly selected individuals.

The research was led by Paola Sebastiani, a professor of biostatistics at Boston University, and Thomas Perls, associate professor of medicine, also at Boston University.

"We tested our model in an independent set of centenarians and achieved an accuracy of 77%," explained Professor Sebastiani.

"So out of 100 centenarians we could correctly predict the outcome of 77."

She said that the "23% error rate" indicated that, although "genetics is fundamental in exceptional longevity it's not the only thing".

"So there may be other factors like environment or other lifestyles that may help people live longer and healthier lives."

Enriched lives

Professor Perls explained that a previous study had looked at longevity in a group of people belonging to the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

"Those individuals have probably among the highest average life expectancy that we know of in the US of 88 years," he said.

Continue reading the main story

What makes these people live a very long life is not a lack of genetic predisposition to diseases, but rather an enrichment of longevity.

Paola SebastianiBoston University

"They get there by virtue of the fact that they have a religion that asks them to be vegetarian, they regularly exercise, they don't drink alcohol, they tend to manage their stress well through religion and time with family and they don't smoke.

"To live the additional 10-15 years beyond the age of 88, our paper is indicating that genetics are playing an increasingly important role."

The scientists said that, when it came to genes associated with a predisposition to age-related diseases, centenarians and non-centenarians did not really differ.

"This is very surprising," said Professor Sebastiani. "It suggests that what makes these people live a very long life is not a lack of genetic predisposition to diseases, but rather an enrichment of longevity."

Lifespan website

Professor Perls said it was feasible that a simple test could be developed to screen people's chances of being so long-lived.

"I think that that's a possibility down the road," he said. "It brings up this whole field of personal medicine and being able to use genetic information in the future to help guide therapy."

But he added that there should be "a great deal of caution in thinking about what people might actually do with the information".

"Will that stop companies from going ahead and [developing some kind of chip-based test]? Probably not," he said,

"But we think it's really important to understand what people end up doing with this information, including thinking about social entitlements - that merits a lot more discussion."

Professor Sebastiani added: "We have a long list of things to do here.... to understand the real biology behind what we have found."

Continue reading the main story

Exceptional longevity is not this vacuous entity that no one can figure out

Thomas PerlsBoston University

One of the co-authors of the Science paper is already building a free-to use website where people will be able to use the mathematical model.

On that site, which could be up and running within a week, people who know their genetic code could work out their predisposition to exceptional longevity.

"The site would provide some description of how to interpret the results in the right context," Professor Sebastiani explained.

Dr Jeffrey Barrett, a geneticist from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, cautioned that "subtle biases could make the test seem more accurate than it really is".

"Some of the genetic variants in this study are claimed to have much, much stronger effects on longevity than we've seen in similar studies of diabetes, heart disease and cancer," he told BBC News.

"Evaluation of the test by an independent laboratory will be the ultimate test of its accuracy."

Professor Perls summed up the findings as "a very optimistic message".

"Exceptional longevity is not this vacuous entity that no one can figure out," he said.

"I think we've made quite some inroads here in terms of demonstrating a pretty important genetic component to this wonderful trait, and this really opens the door to future research."