Robots taught to deceive

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed algorithms that allow a robot to determine whether it should deceive a human or other intelligent machine and which techniques to use for the best deceptive strategy. The new work, published in the International Journal of Social Robotics, is believed to be the first detailed examination of robot deception.

Georgia Tech's Alan Wagner (right) says that robots capable of deception will likely be valuable for military and search and rescue operations. A search and rescue robot may need to deceive in order to calm or receive cooperation from a panicking victim. Robots on the battlefield with the power of deception will be able to successfully hide and mislead the enemy to keep themselves and valuable information safe.

Wagner and his co-researchers focused on the actions, beliefs and communications of a robot attempting to hide from another robot to develop programs that successfully produced deceptive behavior. Their first step was to teach the deceiving robot how to recognize a situation that warranted the use of deception. The researchers used interdependence theory and game theory to develop algorithms that tested the value of deception in a specific situation. A situation had to satisfy two key conditions to warrant deception -- there must be conflict between the deceiving robot and the seeker, and the deceiver must benefit from the deception.

Once a situation was deemed to warrant deception, the robot carried out a deceptive act by providing a false communication to benefit itself. The technique developed by the Georgia Tech researchers based a robot's deceptive action selection on its understanding of the individual robot it was attempting to deceive.

To test their algorithms, the researchers ran 20 hide-and-seek experiments with two autonomous robots. Colored markers were lined up along three potential pathways to locations where the robot could hide. The hider robot randomly selected a hiding location from the three location choices and moved toward that location, knocking down colored markers along the way. Once it reached a point past the markers, the robot changed course and hid in one of the other two locations. The presence or absence of standing markers indicated the hider's location to the seeker robot.

"The hider's set of false communications was defined by selecting a pattern of knocked over markers that indicated a false hiding position in an attempt to say, for example, that it was going to the right and then actually go to the left," explained Wagner.

The hider robots were able to deceive the seeker robots in 75 percent of the trials, with the failed experiments resulting from the hiding robot's inability to knock over the correct markers to produce the desired deceptive communication.

"The experimental results weren't perfect, but they demonstrated the learning and use of deception signals by real robots in a noisy environment," said Wagner. "The results were also a preliminary indication that the techniques and algorithms described in the paper could be used to successfully produce deceptive behavior in a robot."

The researchers are not unaware of the ethical issues that robotic deception creates. "We have been concerned from the very beginning with the ethical implications related to the creation of robots capable of deception and we understand that there are beneficial and deleterious aspects," explained co-researcher Ronald Arkin. "We strongly encourage discussion about the appropriateness of deceptive robots to determine what, if any, regulations or guidelines should constrain the development of these systems."

Demo's shifting focus: Businesses or consumers?

Instead of building fast with lots of servers, lots of customers, and hopes of revenue, many new start-ups--mindful of the recovering economy--are taking a downright old-fashioned approach: make money first, grow later.

Whether that will play out at the Demo conference, which begins in earnest Tuesday in Santa Clara, Calif., is debatable. But in recent months, the buzz-worthy start-ups have had a decidedly more traditional view than Web 2.0 heavyweights like Facebook and Twitter, founded just a few years ago with the principle that you build your audience, then you make your money.

There is, in fact, a shift every few years as start-ups change direction from the fast and loose (though potentially immense) consumer market, to that of businesses large and small. Whichever one is in vogue depends largely on who's doling out the money--be it investors or the end users. For a while, neither of these groups were willing to open up their wallets, forcing many start-ups to go back to the drawing board with their ideas.

Not too much needs to be said here about the merits of a good business-centric Web service; the Web offers the same kind of breakthroughs for a quick start, or cheaper overhead than traditional, in-house solutions. That's obviously an attractive angle for any Web start-up, especially with big contracts that bring the promise of long-term revenue or an exit to a bigger company.

On the flip side are the consumer services--the YouTubes, Facebooks, and the Twitters of the Web world. We know these names because they've reached the very top. Though just like in world of pro sports, there are an endless number of competitors ready to usurp, and that continue to do well, albeit on a slightly lower tier of popularity.

So which side of the fence does a company start out on? And can you change your mind once things get up and running?

In just the last couple of years there have been a number of companies that started out one way and eventually went another. Some might just call this survival, and in that way it's indicative of the environment they must survive in. One good example of that is storage service Box.net, which came onto the scene with a very flashy widget users could place on blogs or Web sites to share files with one another. This was back when companies would send you a press release about such things (note: some still do). Over the years the tool became more focused on its business users to the point where the newest product features almost always begin at the top before eventually trickling down down--its desktop file sync tool being one of the best examples of that.

It's the same story for Ning, which got its start around the same time as Box, though offered up a free DIY social network instead. The service was aimed mostly at users who wanted to create their own social networks with more control both over the look and feel and the feature set than could be found on larger social sites. Additional feature modules could be paid for, which brought extra features. The company went on like this for five years before killing off the free account levels, and requiring that users shell out for a paid plan by default.

Google launches Family Safety Center

Google has launched a new resource for parents to help them keep their kids safe while surfing the Internet, the company announced on Friday.

The Family Safety Center provides tips from child-safety experts on keeping kids away from adult content on the Web and on how to ensure kids aren't contacted and lured by an adult online. Google has also included a page detailing its own child-protection services on its many products, including SafeSearch and YouTube's Safety Mode.

The Partners page is also useful in that it includes links and brief information on the many organizations that provide "resources and advice on cyberbullying, child protection, and online education both for parents and children." Organizations like Family Online Safety Institute, NetSmartz411, and ConnectSafely are included in the listings.

"With kids growing up in an age where digital know-how is essential, it's increasingly important to ensure that they're developing healthy, safe and responsible online habits," Google wrote in a blog post. "And we're thinking every day about how we can help parents and teachers to do just that."