Pawan Sinha
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Why putting googly eyes on robots makes them inherently less threatening
At the start of 2019, supermarket chain Giant Food Stores announced it would begin operating customer-assisting robots -- collectively dubbed Marty -- in 172 East Coast locations. These autonomous machines may navigate their respective store using a laser-based detection system, but they're also outfitted with a pair of oversize googly eyes. This is to, "[make] it a bit more fun," Giant President Nick Bertram told Adweek in January, and "celebrate the fact that there's a robot."
The fight against childhood blindness could lead to eagle-eyed robots
Imparting vision upon machines has been a massive, multi-decade undertaking by the scientific community. And while the acuity of today's state-of-the-art computer systems can match or exceed a human's high-resolution optical anatomy, training these machines to understand what they're looking at is still a labor intensive task. But thanks to the work of Dr. Pawan Sinha, Professor of Vision and Computational Neuroscience at MIT, and his Project Prakash (Sanskrit for "Light"), we may have stumbled upon a faster and far more efficient method of machine learning. Also, thousands of congenitally blind children in India have had their vision restored, so there's that.
