robots that communicate with people.

But this story doesn't start with robotics at all,

it starts with animation.

When I first saw Pixar's "Luxo Jr.,"

I was amazed by how much emotion

they could put into something

as trivial as a desk lamp.

I mean, look at them -- at the end of this movie,

you actually feel something for two pieces of furniture.

(Laughter)

And I said, I have to learn how to do this.

So I made a really bad career decision.

And that's what my mom was like when I did it.

(Laughter)

I left a very cozy tech job in Israel

at a nice software company and I moved to New York

to study animation.

And there I lived

in a collapsing apartment building

I'm not using this phrase metaphorically,

the ceiling actually collapsed one day

in our living room.

Whenever they did those news stories

they would put the report in front of our building.

As kind of like a backdrop

Anyway, during the day I went to school and at night

I would sit and draw frame by frame

And I learned two surprising lessons --

one of them was that

when you want to arouse emotions,

it doesn't matter so much how something looks,

it's all in the motion -- it's in the timing

of how the thing moves.

And the second, was something

He actually did the weasel in Ice Age.

And he said:

"As an animator you are not

So, if you want to find the

don't think about it, go use your body to find it --

stand in front of a mirror, act it out

in front of a camera -- whatever you need.

And then put it back in your character.

A year later I found myself at MIT

in the robotic life group, it was one of the first groups

researching the relationships

And I still had this dream to make

an actual, physical Luxo Jr. lamp.

But I found that robots didn't move at all

in this engaging way that I was used to

for my animation studies.

Instead, they were all --

how should I put it, they were all kind of robotic.

(Laughter)

And I thought, what if I took whatever

and used that to design my robotic desk lamp.

So I went and designed frame by frame

to try to make this robot

as graceful and engaging as possible.

And here when you see the robot interacting with me

on a desktop.

And I'm actually redesigning the robot so,

unbeknownst to itself,

it's kind of digging its own grave by helping me.

(Laughter)

I wanted it to be less of a mechanical structure

giving me light,

and more of a helpful, kind of quiet apprentice

that's always there when you need

And when, for example, I'm looking for a battery

that I can't find,

in a subtle way, it will show me where the battery is.

So you can see my confusion here.

I'm not an actor.

And I want you to notice how the same

mechanical structure can at one point,

just by the way it moves seem gentle and caring --

and in the other case, seem

And it's the same structure,

Actor: "You want to know something?

He was already dead!

Just laying there, eyes glazed over!"

(Laughter)

But, moving in graceful ways is just one

called human-robot interaction.

I was at the time doing my Ph.D.,

I was working on human robot teamwork;

teams of humans and robots working together.

I was studying the engineering,

the psychology, the philosophy of teamwork.

And at the same time I found myself

in my own kind of teamwork situation

with a good friend of mine who is actually here.

And in that situation we can easily imagine robots

in the near future being there with us.

It was after a Passover seder.

We were folding up a lot of folding chairs,

and I was amazed at how quickly

Everybody did their own part.

We didn't have to divide our tasks.

We didn't have to communicate verbally about this.

It all just happened.

And I thought,

humans and robots don't look at all like this.

When humans and robots interact,

it's much more like a chess game.

The human does a thing,

the robot analyzes whatever the human did,

then the robot decides what to do next,

plans it and does it.

And then the human waits, until it's their turn again.

So, it's much more like a chess game

and that makes sense because chess is great

for mathematicians and computer scientists.

It's all about information analysis,

decision making and planning.

But I wanted my robot to be less of a chess player,

and more like a doer

that just clicks and works together.

So I made my second horrible career choice:

I decided to study acting for a semester.

I took off from a Ph.D. I went to acting classes.

I actually participated in a play,

I hope theres no video of that around still.

And I got every book I could find about acting,

including one from the 19th century

that I got from the library.

And I was really amazed because my

the previous name was in 1889. (Laughter)

And this book was kind of waiting for 100 years

to be rediscovered for robotics.

And this book shows actors

how to move every muscle in the body

to match every kind of emotion

But the real revelation was

when I learned about method acting.

It became very popular in the 20th century.

And method acting said, you don't have

Instead you have to use your body

You have to use your sense memory

to reconstruct the emotions and kind of

think with your body to find the right expression.

Improvise, play off yor scene partner.

And this came at the same time

in cognitive psychology called embodied cognition.

Which also talks about the same ideas --

We use our bodies to think,

we don't just think with our brains

but our bodies feed back into our brain

to generate the way that we behave.

And it was like a lightning bolt.

I went back to my office.

I wrote this paper -- which I never really published

called "Acting Lessons for Artificial Intelligence."

And I even took another month

to do what was then the first theater play

with a human and a robot acting together.

That's what you saw before with the actors.

And I thought:

How can we make an artificial intelligence model --

computer, computational model --

that will model some of these ideas of improvisation,

of taking risks, of taking chances,

even of making mistakes.

Maybe it can make for better robotic teammates.

So I worked for quite a long time on these models

and I implemented them on a number of robots.

Here you can see a very early example

with the robots trying to use this

to try to match my movements

sort of like a game.

Let's look at it.

You can see when I psych it out, it gets fooled.

And it's a little bit like what you might see actors do

when they try to mirror each other

to find the right synchrony between them.

And then, I did another experiment,

and I got people off the street

and try out this idea of embodied

So, I actually used two kinds

The robot is the same lamp that you saw,

and I put in it two brains.

For one half of the people,

I put in a brain that's kind of the traditional,

calculated robotic brain.

It waits for its turn, it analyzes everything, it plans.

Let's call it the calculated brain.

The other got more the stage actor, risk taker brain.

Let's call it the adventurous brain.

It sometimes acts without knowing

It sometimes makes mistakes and corrects them.

And I had them do this very tedious task

that took almost 20 minutes

and they had to work together.

Somehow simulating like a factory job

of repetitively doing the same thing.

And what I found was that people actually loved

the adventurous robot.

And they thought it was more intelligent,

more committed, a better member of the team,

contributed to the success of the team more.

They even called it 'he' and 'she,'

whereas people with the calculated brain called it 'it.'

And nobody ever called it 'he' or 'she'.

When they talked about it after the task

with the adventurous brain,

they said, "By the end, we were good

Whatever that means.

(Laughter) Sounds painful.

Whereas the people with the calculated brain

said it was just like a lazy apprentice.

It only did what it was supposed

Which is almost what people expect robots to do,

so I was surprised that people

of robots, than what anybody in robotics

And in a way, I thought, maybe it's time --

just like method acting changed the way

people thought about acting in the 19th century,

from going from the very calculated,

planned way of behaving,

to a more intuitive, risk-taking,

Maybe it's time for robots

to have the same kind of revolution.

A few years later,

I was at my next research job

and I was working in a group

dealing with robotic musicians.

And I thought, music, that's the perfect place

to look at teamwork, coordination,

timing, improvisation --

and we just got this robot playing marimba.

Marimba, for everybody who was like me,

it was this huge, wooden xylophone.

And, when I was looking at this,

I looked at other works in

yes, there are other works in

and they were also a little bit like a chess game.

The human would play,

the robot would analyze what was played,

would improvise their own part.

So, this is what musicians called

a call and response interaction,

and it also fits very well, robots

But I thought, if I use the same ideas I used

in the theater play and in the teamwork studies,

maybe I can make the robots jam together

like a band.

Everybody's riffing off each other,

And so, I tried to do the same

where the robot doesn't really know

what it's about to play.

It just sort of moves its body

and uses opportunities to play,

And does what </