Carnegie Mellon welcomes the new robo-secretary to its campus

It was a truly surreal moment.

Anne Mundell had modeled the facial movements of a… It was a truly surreal moment.

Anne Mundell had modeled the facial movements of a computerized character for Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. Mundell looked into a computer screen and came face-to-face with the first outline of the character she had modeled.

“It was disastrous,” said Mundell, an associate professor of design in CMU’s drama department. “[The character] has to go through several computer iterations before she’s done. She was completely hideous.”

Today, the character Mundell modeled is much more attractive. She has big, blue eyes and short, blond hair and wears two gold earrings.

In CMU’s Newell-Simon Hall, she sits in a wooden booth of Mundell’s design and, from behind her screen, looks onto passers-by. She wears a red, white and blue scarf and a blue blazer at the bottom of her screen. She had been dubbed “Valerie,” and last month she was unveiled as the world’s first robotic receptionist.

Once Valerie’s sensors perceive a person walking up to her, she turns her hypnotic, blue gaze onto them. On a keyboard, people type questions to her, and in a flat, almost icy voice, she answers. She tells them about the weather, she gives them directions to points throughout CMU’s campus, and she tells them the phone numbers of people in the Robotics Institute and the locations of their offices.

She also tells stories about her personal life — her therapist, her singing career and her raging “motherboard.”

Mundell classifies her as “performance art.” Reid Simmons, a professor at the Robotics Institute, calls her a “social robot.”

“We wanted a permanent robot presence on campus,” Simmons said. “In general, when you come to visit [the Robotics Institute], the robots are parked away. We wanted one that anyone could come up to and interact with.”

Valerie is the product of a two-and-a-half-year collaboration between the Robotics Institute and CMU’s drama department. The Robotics Institute worked out the mechanics. The drama department created the character.

Under Mundell’s supervision, four graduate students concocted plotlines for Valerie’s life. The four writers each wrote a different storyline; one wrote about her job, one about her therapist, one about her singing aspirations, and one about her love life (She has dated a vacuum cleaner, a water cooler and a Chevy Impala).

The writers tried to imagine what problems a robot would face in a world ruled by humans. “She has an underdog quality,” Tara Meddaugh, one of the writers, said. “She is a robot trying to fit into the human world, but she can’t.”

Valerie was saddened when a “human child” ran away from her crying, but was cheered-up when she won a talent contest singing at Follies Night Club.

“I’ve never competed against humans before, only machines,” Valerie explains.

According to Meddaugh, “We all have a tendency towards black humor.”

Although Valerie is up and running, the writers’ work is not done. They will continue to add new chapters to the storylines so that anyone who returns to see her every week or so will hear new stories.

As a “social robot,” Valerie also presented unique challenges to the Robotics Institute.

“From a robotics standpoint, we had to go from scripted monologues to interactive capabilities,” Simmons said.

Valerie has sensors that are able to recognize a person approaching her. When a person types to her, she can hone in on certain words to realize that they are asking for directions or about the weather or if they are asking about her personal life — there is a plaque on her booth that lists workable conversation topics.

If a person types a new word to her, she says, “I don’t know [the word in question].” If a person approaches her and does not type, she exclaims, “If you don’t want to talk, I guess I will be getting back to work, now.”

But Valerie does not actually do any work.

“People have e-mailed us and said ‘How can you contribute to the unemployment?'” Simmons said. “People need to understand that she has not actually taken anyone’s job.” So if Valerie is not an actual receptionist, what is her purpose? Why does the world need a snippy, storytelling robot that gives directions at CMU?

Because, her creators say, people and robots need to learn to be friends.

“Social interaction is the key to how humans interact,” Simmons said. “By being able to capture that in a machine, we make man-machine interface more natural.”

Mundell added that Valerie’s creators are anxious to see if people will return to keep up with her story.

“Both areas [the drama department and the Robotics Institute] wanted something that was a machine that had learned to interact with us and not us learning to interact with it,” she said.