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Nothing Artificial About Their Intelligence

Though Richard Margolin and Tim Dockins were UT Arlington engineering students, they didn’t know each other nor know that they had a common interest until both secured summer jobs at Hanson Robotics in Dallas. Hanson is well known for creating the lifelike robotic heads of Albert Einstein and sci-fi author Philip K. Dick.

Dockins, a computer science and engineering senior, and Margolin, a mechanical engineering junior, discovered that their common interest was artificial intelligence. They both worked on robots that contained face and voice recognition and speech generation abilities, enabling the robots to identify people and respond to simple questions.

As a bonus, Hanson paid to have Dockins and Margolin attend an American Association of Artificial Intelligence convention in Chicago.

“There were representatives from student chapters at the convention and that got us to thinking,” said Margolin. “No organizations filled that niche at UT Arlington, and we knew there had to be a lot of students here interested in AI.”

“It’s a real interdisciplinary area,” Dockins added. “AI involves engineering, psychology, art, even philosophy. So we knew we had to try to get these people together.”

The two have organized two meetings, attracting more than the 10 members required to start a campus organization. They will make a formal application once they prepare a set of bylaws.

Once the chapter is established, they plan to begin a team project – a sock puppet operated by a robotic arm. The total system would have speech recognition and response capabilities and intended to serve as an interactive storyteller for youngsters. This may serve as a foundation for one of Margolin’s goals – a robotic Einstein that would teach science and math concepts to third and fourth graders conversationally in a science museum setting.

Margolin believes artificial intelligence is currently at a point comparable to where computers were 20 years ago. His interest in AI stems in part from his participation in biotechnology projects at the UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas while he was a high school student and his studies in neuroscience at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He also dabbled in carbon nanotube research at UT Dallas while in high school.

Both Dockins and Margolin see AI as a creative and expressive outlet and believe that a student chapter of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence here will have a substantial growth when more students become aware of its activities. “While working on Hanson’s newest creation – Zeno, an interactive, two-foot-tall boy robot – we discovered that it’s both fun and gratifying to develop a lifelike system that can respond intelligently to your questions,” said Dockins.

“Yeah,” added Margolin, “we said that even when you’re working alone, you had someone to talk to.”