English-Teaching Robots for Korea by 2018?

An article in today's issue of The Korea Times proclaims "Robots to Replace Native English Teachers."   Participants in a recent robotics forum speculated that, by about 2015 robots should be able to help English teachers in the classroom and that by 2018 they should be able to teach on their own, while communicating with students."  Robots are already available in English classes through a pilot project in Masan, aimed at testing the viability of robotic teachers.   Some participants in the robotics forum also saw English -teaching robots as a remedy for the lack of English teachers in small rural farming and fishing villages.
After reading this article, I remain very skeptical.  Nothing is mentioned about the current state of the art in machine translation and the considerable challenges of teaching English to native speakers of Korean.  The linguistic and pedagogical challenges of teaching English would seem to be too large to be overcome by developments in software and artificial intelligence in less than a decade.  In any event, we'll all see.

Korea's Growth Engines: Robotics

South Korea's robotics industry may be set to take off and could become an important growth engine for the nation's economy. On February 26, the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy announced that a law intended to encourage the development and distribution of intelligent robots had passed the National Assembly. In a 2006 article, the New York Times noted that If all goes according to plan, robots will be in every South Korean household between 2015 and 2020. That is the prediction, at least, of the Ministry of Information and Communication, which has grouped more than 30 companies, as well as 1,000 scientists from universities and research institutes, under its wing. Some want to move even faster. In December of last year the Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) announced that it concluded a contract with International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in order to promote the international standardization of network robot. To do so, they plan to organize a specialist group and jointly hold workshops. Although South Korea's current market share in the robotics industry worldwide is small, it appears to have great potential. As Korea.com noted, "Korea’s potential in the robot industry is among the best in the world, armed with highly developed associated industries, such as consumer electronics, automobiles and communication equipment. The country’s superior IT infrastructure and rapid acceptance of new technologies will help boost growth, too." More on this industry in future posts.

"I Am Robot"

I just finished watching the last fifteen minutes or so of a television program called "I Am Robot," on YTN. The program itself was produced by a science TV channel. The segment I watched featured a robot festival at a large exhibition hall somewhere in Korea. Students from several universities entered their robots in a variety of competitions, including relay races, basketball, dancing, music and so forth. Some of the robots could mimic human moves, if one of the students wore a specially designed electronic suit. Others were controlled from a small hand-held panel. A few things impressed me about this robot festival.

• One was the obvious enthusiasm of the college students for their projects.
• Another was how human-like some of the movements by the robots were. These were all humanoid robots, with two arms, two legs, and most of the major joints that a human being has.
• The audience for the robot competitions included quite a number of grade-school children and their enjoyment of the festival could be seen on their faces. Might this competition influence some of them to pursue a career in mechanical engineering and make a future contribution to robotics?

Korea is investing a great deal these days to develop the field of robotics. See, for example, the activities of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory (지능로봇 연구실) in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Korea University. http://robotics.korea.ac.kr/index.html?lang=eng Most of the other top universities have similar efforts underway, not to mention the work of government research institutes. Robots promise to play an interesting role in Korea's future information society as networks become ubiquitous.