BEST IELTS Academic Reading Test 141 » Career Zone Moga

BEST IELTS Academic Reading Test 141

ACADEMIC READING TEST 141 – PASSAGE – 1

BEST IELTS Academic Reading Test 141

ACADEMIC READING TEST – 141

READING PASSAGE – 1

Robots with a sense of self

At Yale University, scientists have created a humanoid robot named Nico. When Nico sits in front of a mirror and raises an arm, he recognises the arm moving in the mirror as his own. It may not sound like much of a feat, but he has just become the first of his kind to recognise his own reflection in a mirror.

The ability to recognise your reflection is considered an important milestone in infant development and as a mark of self-awareness, sociability and intelligence in a non-human animal. Nico’s ability to perform the same feat could pave the way for more sophisticated robots that can recognise their own bodies even if they are damaged or reconfigured. The achievement is one of a cluster of recent instances in which robots have begun to approach the major milestones in cognitive development. If robots can be taught to move from one developmental stage to the next, as infants do, they may eventually be capable of learning more complicated tasks and therefore become more useful to humans. ‘It’s less about recreating a human than making a humancompatible being,’ says Matt Berlin, a robotics researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

To give Nico the ability to recognise himself, Kevin Gold and his supervisor Brian Scassellati equipped Nico with a video camera behind one of his eyes. They also gave him a jointed arm with an attached computer running some clever software. When Nico points his camera eye at the mirror, the software assigns sections of the image a probability of being ‘self’, ‘another’ or ‘neither’. At the same time, motion sensors in Nico’s arm tell the software when he is moving. Whenever a section of the image changes at the same time as his motion sensors detect movement in the arm, he assigns that section a high probability of being ‘self’. If a section of the image shifts and Nico detects no movement in his arm, he assigns that image section a high probability of being ‘another’, while static sections are likely to be ‘neither’. This allows him to recognise not only his own moving limbs, but those of other robots or people.

To test the self-recognition software, Gold programmed Nico to move his arm for four minutes while filming it with his camera, allowing him to learn when movement of his arm, detected by his arm sensors, corresponded to motion of the arm in the video. Nico was then positioned so that he could see both his own refl ection in a mirror and Gold standing beside it. Gold carried out a range of different tasks, including juggling balls, while Nico moved his arm around. Nico’s software was able to correctly classify the movements corresponding to his own reflection and those of Gold 95% of the time.

The same system should also make it possible for robots to recognise their own limbs even if they are damaged, or wearing different clothes by correlating movement detected by on-board cameras with those reported by sensors on their limbs, says Gold. This should help them carry out tasks such as manipulating objects or let them adapt the way they walk to a changing terrain, when conventional vision software can be fooled by changes in appearance or environment.

The same system should also make it possible for robots to recognise their own limbs even if they are damaged, or wearing different clothes by correlating movement detected by on-board cameras with those reported by sensors on their limbs, says Gold. This should help them carry out tasks such as manipulating objects or let them adapt the way they walk to a changing terrain, when conventional vision software can be fooled by changes in appearance or environment.

The ability to tell self from other should also allow robots to carry out more sophisticated tasks, says Olaf Sporns, a cognitive scientist and roboticist at Indiana University in Bloomington. For instance, researchers are investigating imitation as a way of helping robots learn how to carry out tasks. To successfully and safely imitate someone, though, robots will need to distinguish between their own limbs and those of another person, as Nico can. ‘The distinction between self and other is a fundamental problem for humanoid robotics,’ says Sporns.

Meanwhile, a furry robot called Leonardo, built at MIT recently, reached another developmental milestone, the ability to grasp that someone else might believe something you know to be untrue. You can test the capacity for ‘false belief’ in children by showing them a scene in which a child puts chocolate in a drawer and goes away. While he is out of sight, his mother moves the chocolate somewhere else. Young children are incapable of seeing the world through the other child’s eyes, and so predict that he will look for the chocolate in the place his mother has left it. Only when they reach four or five can they predict that the other child will mistakenly look for the chocolate in the drawer.

Leonardo, developed by Cynthia Breazeal together with Berlin and colleague Jesse Gray, uses face, image and voice recognition software running on an array of attached computers to build a ‘brain’ for himself – basically a list of objects around him in the room and events that he has witnessed. Whenever he spots a new face, he builds and stores another ‘brain’ which processes information in the same way as his own but sees the world from the new person’s point of view.

When faced with the false-belief test, Leonardo knows that the object has been moved and also that a person who left the room before this would not know this. It is more than just a cute trick, however. Gray found that the ability to model other people’s beliefs allows Leonardo to gain a better understanding of their goals.

As well as helping to build better robots, such research could ultimately enhance our understanding of cognitive development in infants. Developmental milestones such as self-recognition and modelling other people’s beliefs are believed to be associated with the development of other important capabilities, such as empathy and sociability. By performing feats associated with these milestones, such robots could help researchers understand what capabilities infants need to reach them, says Sporns. ‘It shows us that complex phenomena can sometimes be explained on the basis of simple mechanisms.’

Questions 1–4

Look at the following people (Questions 1–4) and the list of statements below.

Match each person with the correct statement, A–E.

Write the correct letter, A–E, in boxes 1–4 on your answer sheet.

1. Matt Berlin

2. Kevin Gold

3. Olaf Sporns

4. Jesse Gray

A. suggests that robots cannot yet discriminate between themselves and others

B. thinks that research using robots can help us understand the skills young children need to develop

C. wants robots to be able to respond to varying conditions

D. is working on a number of different versions of a robot

E. is not trying to make a human being but a machine to help humans

Questions 5–8

Label the diagrams below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

BEST IELTS Academic Reading Test 141

Questions 9–13

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

9. Nico has reached a significant developmental stage by identifying a as his own.

10. Nico classifies what he sees as being ‘ ’ if he detects no movement on the image or his sensors.

11. Researchers are developing robots that can recognise broken belonging to them.

12. Researchers investigate among youngsters using chocolate.

13. Robotic research can help us learn about children’s.

ANSWERS ARE BELOW

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ANSWERS

1. E

2. C

3. A

4. B

5. VIDEO CAMERA

6. MOTION SENSORS

7. ARM

8. JUGGLING (BALLS)

9. REFL ECTION / (ARM) MOVEMENT

10. NEITHER

11. LIMBS (NOT ARMS)

12. FALSE BELIEF

13. COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT