MAGGIE JOHNSON: The way that Google
started was an academic venture.
JEFF DEAN: How do you find interesting problems
in the world?
ALFRED SPECTOR: Google depends on academia.
So many of the good ideas that we've brought forward
to the world come from academia.
JEFF DEAN: One of the real reasons to engage with academia
is to get a really fresh perspective.
MAGGIE JOHNSON: We empower academics
to work on real problems.
And in the other direction, academics
bring ideas and new approaches that
are put into practice much more quickly
than in an academic environment.
JEFF DEAN: You know, oh, that's interesting,
that's interesting, that's interesting.
All of a sudden, you've knitted together
something that is really, really, tremendously powerful.
MAGGIE JOHNSON: We need their help because of the problem
we're trying to solve internally.
ALFRED SPECTOR: Academia can look far out into the future,
it can take greater risks, and look for really interesting
solutions that industry sometimes cannot.
KEN GOLDBERG: My name's Ken Goldberg.
I'm a professor at UC Berkeley in the College of Engineering
and School of Information.
And I run a robotics lab there where we do research
in areas like surgical robotics.
And what I'm really excited about right
now is cloud robotics.
MATEI CIOCARLIE: And I am Matei Ciocarlie.
I'm a research scientist here at Google.
I am part of the robotics effort hoping
to advance the state of robotic mobile manipulation
and allow robots to do things that they're not
able to do today.
KEN GOLDBERG: Well, I've been interested in this field
for a long time, since I was a kid.
I think every kid gets interested in robots.
We sometimes talk about them as the gateway drug
for STEM- science, technology, engineering and math.
And it's because that are robots are
very compelling at all levels.
I think kids are captivated by them.
But really, adults and anyone is interested in the idea
of making something that can become alive.
Cloud robotics has a long history.
The way I think about it is it goes back to early work
when the internet emerged in the early '90s,
and a number of groups started putting together robots
with the internet.
And the idea was that we could use the resource of the world
wide web as a standard to allow people to come in from anywhere
in the world and operate industrial robots.
MATEI CIOCARLIE: It truly is a symbiotic relationship, right?
At Google, one of the things we deeply care about
is understanding the world.
KEN GOLDBERG: Well, the one thing
that's really emerged in the last couple of years
is a way of thinking about the cloud as an active resource.
When the building that my office is in
was constructed only 10 years ago,
there's an enormous basement that
was dedicated for computing facilities.
It's empty now, because we don't do that.
We don't actually have computing in the building.
Everything is done on the cloud.
We need vast computation.
We use cloud clusters on demand.
And that makes a lot more sense.
Because it can be centralized, it can be shared,
they could be upgraded and maintained.
MATEI CIOCARLIE: Sharing is a really important part of it,
right?
Imagine if we had to advance science
but we couldn't leverage anything
that any other person has done in the past.
We couldn't teach each other verbally
or through the written text.
And in a sense, that's what robots are without sharing.
And the cloud can enable robots to share knowledge,
to share things that they've understood about the world.
KEN GOLDBERG: We were saying about it's interesting
that sharing has become this very whole new-- it reaches
new levels where people share every detail of their life.
What they had for breakfast, where they were.
And in a sense though, there is this idea
that robots can start doing something similar.
They can say, hey, I just learned
how to pick up this pair of eyeglasses in a new way,
and instantly share that with every other robot.
So if another robot comes and sees that pair of eyeglasses,
they know exactly what to do.
And I think that idea of accumulating information
is really what's been happening with the web at one level,
but can now enter an entirely new level.
Working closely with James and his colleagues,
we were able to actually get access to the computing engine
and we were able to take images and do experiments
that we reported in a conference paper last year.
And we're very excited now about taking this to the next level.
We have a number of ideas about how
image libraries-- or actually libraries of 3D objects,
of solids and mechanics, could actually
be used to enhance grasping using ideas
that Matei has pioneered where we
can do, for example, very complex computation
about grasp strategies.
But these can be pre computed in the cloud
and then stored so that they can be indexed online
very rapidly when a new object is encountered.
The field has really changed dramatically
in the last couple of years, and particularly last year
with the announcement by Google that it
was getting into this field in a big way
and acquiring a number of major companies.
This has been a big boost for researchers.
I think bringing a critical mass of people like Matei, James,
and many of my former students together here
is really creating this critical mass
where lots of interesting things are happening.
Getting this agenda together where they are bringing skills
from many different areas to focus on problems of robotics
is very exciting.
I think that also because Google is really
at the forefront of the cloud, you
have all the skills in robotics, traditional robotics
or advanced robotics I should say,
and then you're combining them with all the skills
of the cloud.
And the potential here is enormous.
One of [? the good ?] questions is
what are these robots going to look like.
And my own feeling, because I work also
in factories and factory robots, I'm
not convinced that robots are necessarily
going to be humanoids.
MATEI CIOCARLIE: Exactly.
KEN GOLDBERG: I think that they're not
going to look-- this comes back to Sigmund Freud, actually, who
wrote about the uncanny.
And the ideas about the uncanny valley
indicate that if a robot looks too much like a human,
it actually leads to a sense of discomfort for many people.
MATEI CIOCARLIE: Right.
KEN GOLDBERG: And so I don't think
we necessarily need to go there.
I think we want a robot to look like a machine.
It'll do something that will go around and clean up our house,
for example.
Keep our floors clean, or maybe someday keep us company.
But I don't think it needs to look like a human to do that.
MATEI CIOCARLIE: To me, trying to copy the human [? for the ?]
robot, you get what you had hundreds of years ago
when people were trying to build flying machines by copying
the birds.
And you had devices that flapped wings and look
more or less biological and fell off cliffs.
Right?
Whereas when we finally understood
the principle of lift, that's when flight took off.
Right?
So a robot doesn't necessarily have to copy the human.
If you try to copy the human, we'll copy the wrong things.
A robot needs to have a function and get a job done for us.
And if it doesn't look human when doing that, that's fine.
KEN GOLDBERG: Right.
So we might not even recognize-- right now
when we look-- what robots may evolve to are things
that we may not even be able to imagine right now.
I mean, they may not look like what
we think they're going to look like.
So it's a pleasure to come down to Google where all this is
happening, really at the center of all the action.
And for a lot more details on all these topics
we talked about, see my Talk.