We are pleased to inform that we have had a paper on ROILA accepted to the 7th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (IceTAL 2010). We hope to be actively involved in the conference scheduled to take place in Reykjavik, Iceland. We will upload the final version of the paper in due course.

We have now written out a short technical primer describing how users can have ROILA being recognized by machines and LEGO NXT robots. Find out more details about it in the speech recognition section. Please do try it out and contact us in the case of any problems.

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We were pleased to prepare an initial working demo of the ROILA language in use while interacting with a LEGO NXT Mindstorms robot. The interaction was based on simple turtle robot graphics and comprised of navigation commands only, such as go left, go right, run, walk slowly, etc. Speech recognition would take place on an external laptop with the recognition results being transmitted via bluetooth to the NXT. Since Sphinx is built and coded using Java it comfortably linked with the Lejos firmware of the NXT. Very soon we will provide detailed instructions on how to accomplish this along with some sample programs.

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It was an inspiring visit to the LEGO Mindstorms headquarters in Billund Denmark. We exchanged in a very positive and encouraging discussion with several members of the LEGO Mindstorms team.  We presented ROILA including its motivation, design objectives and our initial experimental results. We informed them that we were now ready for application case studies, LEGO being one and autistic children being another option (actually LEGO considered the autism line very interesting as well). In addition, we gave a successful demo that showed the language in use with a NXT robot and ‘turtle’ semantics. In summary, the LEGO Mindstorms team was very enthusiastic about the project and we had a lively debate. Best of all, LEGO Mindstorms promised to help us and that they would publicize the ROILA project on their website and we promised to provide them with material to do that.

On April 13th we were invited to participate in the one day LEGO Idea Conference 2010. We attended various inspiring workshops and lectures such as the lecture by Nicholas Negroponte on the one laptop per children initiative. Moreover, several speakers emphasized the importance of open ended play, creativity, learning by construction for children (and this could be an interesting element in our application case study, i.e. can children co-create the ROILA language?)

 

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Presented is the condensed version of the ROILA Vocabulary, primarily intended for beginning learners of the language. Read the rest of this entry »

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We are looking for potential participants for our upcoming evaluation of ROILA using LEGO NXT robots. Our user group is primarily children ranging from the ages of 12 and above up till roughly 15. They must be fluent in Dutch and/or English. Their involvement will comprise of two phases: a learning phase and the actual evaluation session. In the learning phase children would be expected to devote 20 hours to ROILA education and once they would be completely skilled they would bring the language in practice in an evaluation session with a LEGO robot somewhere in the summers, we hope to finalize a date soon. We aim to reward all our participants with a significant token of appreciation.

Feel free to contact us if you might know a school or anyone else that would be interested or even if you just want to try out ROILA.

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We will be at the Lego Idea Conference on April 13th, in Billund (DK). We will have a ROILA demonstration setup with us. Please contact Omar if you want to connect or receive an individual demonstration.

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We are pleased to announce that the website for the Robot Interaction Language (ROILA) has been officially opened. We offer a platform for the ROILA community which includes guides, forums and online courses. We hope that you find this web site useful.

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