Discuss “Social robots could help diagnose and treat autistic children”

For the past four years, Brian Scassellati has been researching the uses of humanoid robots that can interact with people by natural social cues. Scassellati spoke last Friday on ?Social Robots, Social Development and Social Disorders,? in which he demonstrated the uses of social robots when applied to autism diagnosis and therapy.

Scassellati, a computer science professor at Yale, developed a social robot named Kismet. Kismet has a physical body and is autonomous.

?The temporal correlations between motor activity and perceptual input discriminate [the robot] self from other time constants determined autonomously,? Scassellati said. In this way, Kismet can distinguish itself from other things. ?A lot of philosophers argue that a sense of self...