Artificial Playmates for Autistic Children

By Elsa Youngsteadt
ScienceNOW Daily News
15 February 2008

BOSTON--Children with autism spectrum disorder are unable to sustain play, make-believe games, and fluid social interaction--at least with real people. But psychologist and linguist Justine Cassell of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, says that interaction with virtual peers releases hidden social skills in these children.

A virtual child is a cartoonish-looking, gender-neutral 8-year-old that appears on a TV or projection screen. When it interacts with a real child, half of the action takes place in the real world, and half in the virtual world. Thanks to sensors on the toys, the children can pass dolls back and forth between worlds, and the virtual child "watches" the real child as he or she plays. The virtual child can also speak in a recorded child's voice and even uses lifelike expressions and gestures.

At a press briefing yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (ScienceNOW's publisher), Cassell said that she and her colleagues originally developed virtual children 10 years ago, in part to study how literacy and conversation skills develop in normal children. But "every time I presented the work," she said, a parent of an autistic child would come to her and ask, 'Please, can I get a copy of this software for my child?' "

Indeed, the group's newest research, presented at a session this morning, demonstrates that interaction with virtual playmates may unlock social aptitude in autistic children. During unsupervised play with typical children, autistic children don't fill in pauses in conversation, nor do they ask or answer questions in a natural flow. But with a virtual playmate, autistic children begin to do all these things after as little as 20 minutes. In another experiment, the autistic children were given the opportunity to "become" the virtual child. When they hid behind a curtain and manipulated the digital child by means of a control panel, their virtual stand-ins interacted with typical children in socially sensitive ways.

Cassell says autistic children may be more at ease with virtual playmates because the virtual children are more predictable, which could make them seem less threatening. Preliminary brain scans show that typical people have to think harder to relate to a virtual human than to a real one, and Cassell speculates that the reverse may be true in autistic children. But will the autistic children's newfound social savvy translate to subsequent interactions with real children? "That's the million-dollar question," Cassell told Science.

Theoretical linguist Cynthia Zocca, a graduate student at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, who attended Cassell's presentation, enjoyed seeing the role of linguistics in creating virtual children capable of conversation. She says it's nice to see how the work is helping children in the real world.

Related sites

Cassell's Web site, with more on the research

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development on autism

Bidding Near End in FCC Spectrum Auction?

Bidding stalled on Tuesday in the closely watched auction of a piece of wireless airwaves that the U.S. government is selling, according to data released by the Federal Communications Commission. There were no new offers for the nationwide "C" block slice of wireless spectrum to top previous high bids totaling $4.74 billion. Tuesday's pause prompted speculation that bidding for the C block spectrum may have run its course, and that the most likely possible winner could be either Verizon Wireless or Internet search leader Google. Bidders' identities are kept secret until the entire auction ends, under FCC rules. The end won't come until bidding has stopped on all five blocks of spectrum up for sale in the auction, which will probably take at least another week or two. The $4.74 billion in bids for eight regional pieces of the C block on Monday surpassed a $4.71 billion offer made last Thursday for a nationwide package of the spectrum. Stifel Nicolaus analyst Rebecca Arbogast said there were several possible scenarios as to which companies had bid on the C block airwaves. The most likely of those, she said, is that Verizon Wireless pushed the C block bids up to $4.74 billion on Monday in order to top an earlier bid by Google. It was also possible that the earlier, $4.71 billion offer was made by Verizon Wireless, and that another competitor is aiming to force Verizon to up its bid, Arbogast said. Bidding on the C block had temporarily stalled on Friday after Thursday's $4.71 billion offer. That bid exceeded a $4.64 billion minimum price set by the FCC and triggered a condition sought by Google that would require the winner to make the spectrum accessible to any device or software application. Analysts have said Google may drop out of the bidding after hitting the minimum price, content to let Verizon acquire the C block spectrum as long as the open-access conditions are guaranteed. The C block is one of five groups of 700-megahertz spectrum being offered. The top bids on Tuesday totaled almost $18.94 billion for all five blocks, raising more money than any previous FCC auction. The 700-megahertz signals are valuable because they can go long distances and penetrate thick walls. The airwaves are being returned by television broadcasters as they move to digital from analog signals in early 2009. Other potential bidders in the auction that began January 24 range from entrenched carriers AT%26T and Verizon Wireless, to possible new competitors like Google, EchoStar Communications and Cablevision Systems. Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group.

Cisco Sees Slowdown

Cisco told investors on Wednesday exactly what they didn't want to hear: that growth slowed dramatically in January and may not rebound for several months. The assessment from CEO John Chambers on the company's conference call sent Cisco's shares skidding by 7% in after-hours trading to a new 52-week low. Cisco's sales for the quarter that ended in January rose 16.5% to $9.83 billion, just ahead of Wall Street estimates, while pro forma earnings of 38 cents a share, or $2.4 billion, met the Thomson Financial consensus estimate. But Chambers said sales growth slowed to less than 10% last month, and while he said that may be an "aberration," he said it was prudent to assume that the "extremely challenging" environment "may continue for the next several months," so the company lowered its sales growth forecast to 10%. Wall Street analysts were looking for 15% growth in the current quarter. "We are seeing our U.S. and European customers being increasingly cautious," said Chambers, but he added that the company remains well positioned to meet its long-term growth target of 12-17%. The news followed other weak recent economic indicators %26#151; including an unexpected slump in the service sector last month that sent U.S. stocks plunging on Tuesday. Stocks lost ground again on Wednesday, as a Federal Reserve official's warning about inflation added to slowdown fears. JDS Uniphase was a bright spot, soaring 26% after beating estimates and raising guidance, and Multi-Fineline was up 37% on its results. Micron fell 10.8% on inventory concerns. FormFactor, CNET, Riverbed, Travelzoo, CommVault, Double-Take and Radisys fell on their results. The Nasdaq lost 30 to 2278, the S%26P fell 10 to 1326, and the Dow lost 65 to 12,200. Volume declined to 3.98 billion shares on the NYSE, and 2.47 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led by a 20-12 margin on the NYSE, and 19-10 on the Nasdaq. Downside volume was 69% on the NYSE, and 74% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 15-80 on the NYSE, and 41-129 on the Nasdaq.

Dell Support Offerings Get Customizable

The "Simplifying IT" beat goes on with Dell, as it announces another element in that initiative -- a less-complex array of support programs. The new Dell ProSupport program reduces its 10 previous service offerings down to two customizable packages. The packages -- ProSupport for IT and ProSupport for End-Users -- are for business/corporate customers. (Consumers will still have to stick with the India call centers for support.) While consolidating the number of support programs it offers, Dell offers some flexibility, allowing customers to configure their support program for their exact needs. "The standard model of break/fix for my computers no longer is working," Tim Mixon, senior marketing manager for Dell Global Services, told InternetNews.com. "We have people out there with varying levels of expertise and we need to take care of people based on how they use the technology." Ideally, this means immediate response in just a few hours or longer-term forensic support for nagging issues, depending on the options a customer selects. For example, imagine an IT professional, working in a mission-critical environment, knows a blown switch is causing a server to lag. In this case, a Dell customer who's purchased the "fast-track dispatch" option could get a switch sent out, pronto -- dispensing with the troubleshooting steps because problem is known. Support also now extends to commonly used applications, a first for the company. As a result, Dell offers a support option for customers likely to need help figuring out how to (for instance) add a pivot table in Excel. The new service options also include proactive support. In that case, if a customer finds that it repeatedly faces the same problems -- like crashing systems -- Dell support can dig into their environment to determine the underlying problem, Mixon said. The new contracts will not replace existing Dell service contracts, Mixon said. "The one thing we won't do is touch existing contracts, as most people have signaled they don't want to do that," he said. "Going forward, they can combine ProSupport. If they want to add new features like fast-track dispatch, they can add it." ProSupport is the latest idea to come from IdeaStorm, the Web site Dell set up to solicit customer feedback. "We got a lot of good ideas from IdeaStorm," Mixon said. In addition to revamping its support plans, Dell also said it is making its support more consistent globally. The company said it began finding that many customers had been receiving varying levels of assistance, depending on their location. The company said it's now working to ensure it offers customers a more consistent level of support across the globe.

Regulators Would Watch Any Google-Yahoo Tie-up

Google might be able to stymie Microsoft's bid to buy Yahoo by forging a deal to run Yahoo's Web search operations or buy a minority stake -- but even that risks the ire of antitrust regulators. Microsoft on Friday offered to pay $44.6 billion for Yahoo, an ailing Web star that has been under pressure from Wall Street to either cut jobs or make more money on advertising. To fend off Microsoft's overture, a Yahoo source said on Sunday the search company would consider a business alliance with Google. Google, which has 58.4 percent of the U.S. Web search market, would probably be prevented by U.S. antitrust enforcers from buying Yahoo, which holds 22.9 percent of the search market, according to ComScore, antitrust experts said. "The probability that (a Google-Yahoo deal) would pass antitrust muster is a lot lower than the Yahoo-Microsoft deal would pass muster," said Luke Froeb, a former director of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Economics. Aaron Edlin, who teaches law and economics at the University of California in Berkeley, said Google could help Yahoo stay out of Microsoft's grip with a carefully targeted buy like "an investment in stock, 10 or 20 percent, a noncontrolling interest." Google and Microsoft are bitter rivals. Microsoft staunchly opposed Google's offer to buy advertising company DoubleClick for $3.1 billion last year, but U.S. antitrust regulators approved the deal in December. One alternative that Yahoo and Google appear ready to consider is to revive an old arrangement where Yahoo relied on Google to power Web searches on its site. Yahoo was Google's highest profile customer from 1999 to early 2004. Regulators would still have the option to stop such a partnership, though it could prove lucrative to Yahoo. Google has a three-year, $900 million deal to run searches for MySpace, the world's largest social network site. "Google and Yahoo have a longer history of working together than Yahoo and Microsoft," said Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst with Oppenheimer %26 Company in San Francisco. "Yahoo has to make a decision about how much upside they make from working with Google as a partner versus selling out to Microsoft." While any deal between Yahoo and Google would reflect a hard-nosed business decision, many cultural ties join the two Silicon Valley Internet giants. Aggarwal says one big appeal of Google's search advertising system is that it generates 45 percent more revenue per search than Yahoo's own search system and at least that percentage relative to Microsoft searches. David Lisi, a lawyer with Howry, said that even licensing searches from Google could draw regulatory concern -- though not necessarily an outright rejection. "Technology having moved on ... now they're competitors," he said. "It's the kind of thing that regulators would take a look at. I can't tell you what they'd decide." Lisi said that Yahoo might consider breaking itself up but called that possibility "very remote." He added, "I think Yahoo is looking for the third alternative. Nobody wants to get into a bidding war with Microsoft but Yahoo will offer licensing," he said, adding that Google may try to convince a media or other company to partner with Yahoo. In this hypothetical situation, Lisi said that Google might say, "'We will sweeten the pot and be a strategic partner with Yahoo.' That might be enough."

Apple Offers iPhone, iPod Touch With More Memory

Apple on Tuesday introduced models of its iPhone and iPod touch devices with double the memory available in previous versions. The products come on the heels of Apple's launch last month of a service that lets iPhone and iPod users rent and download movies to watch on their devices. "There are a lot of users out there for whom there is never enough memory," said Greg Joswiak, Apple's head of global marketing for iPod and iPhone. "We've given people more and more content that they can put on their iPhones," Joswiak said. Apple, which said in January that it had sold more than 4 million iPhones since sales began last June, will now offer an iPhone with 16 gigabytes of flash memory, the kind that stores data on microchips instead of a spinning disk drive. The iPod touch, a wireless touch-screen device that plays music and videos, adds a 32-gigabyte model. Both of the new devices will sell for $499, Apple said. Apple will continue to sell its iPhone with 8 gigabytes of memory for $399. A 16-gigabyte version of the iPod touch remains at $399 and an 8-gigabyte model, at $299. The updated models come amid a slump in Apple's stock, due to fears that a U.S. recession could make consumers less likely to buy its iPods, Mac computers or other products. Asked whether Apple expected the new models to boost sales, Joswiak said: "We always put our products out there and hope the market likes them. The higher-capacity models have always done well." Apple shares were up 30 cents at $131.95 in morning Nasdaq trade. The stock has fallen more than 33 percent so far this year.

Ballmer Fills in 'Software-Plus-Services' Plan

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer this week detailed perhaps the most complete high-level view of the company's emerging software-plus-services strategy that it has presented so far. Ballmer's talk came in a "Strategic Update" presentation given on Monday to Wall Street analysts, which reiterated in part how the company's bid to acquire Yahoo fits into its overall business. The annual meeting is a regular event planned long before the company's record-setting offer for Yahoo last Friday. As a result, Ballmer spent most of his time describing Microsoft's longer-term efforts -- including how its products fit into its emerging "software-plus-services" push, and how the company intends to monetize each product category. More than two years ago, Microsoft began espousing its own version of the industry's burgeoning software-as-a-service business model (SaaS) (define). Unlike some competitors, Microsoft's software-plus-services plan does not -- at least not immediately -- transition the company to a strictly Web-based business model. Instead, it has chosen a route that uses the Web to offer some services that are available to users through a simple browser interface %26#150; like competitors' offerings. At the same time, it is also offering services "in the cloud" that enhance the power of rich clients such as PCs running Windows and Office. "When we talk about the transformation of our business to a world of software-plus-services, we're talking about everything we do transforming over the next several years to a world of software-plus-services," Ballmer told analysts. "Each and every one of these businesses, on top of a consistent cloud platform, transitions to have additional revenue and profit opportunities, based upon this transformation to the cloud," he added. Several pieces of the software-plus-services puzzle have already begun to emerge. For instance, in the area of Windows, the company is well underway rolling out its Windows Live Services products, which are free to users and funded by advertising. For corporate desktop users, however, advertising is not appropriate, so the company will monetize its offerings in that category as part of its Microsoft-hosted Online Services for Business, providing functions on a subscription basis. Introduced last fall, Microsoft's Online Services for Business are available to large enterprises with 5,000 or more seats. The offering features hosted versions of Exchange e-mail, SharePoint document management and Office Communications. In terms of core server capabilities such as virtualization, security and management, high-performance computing, and Web serving, Ballmer said those functions will be offered "in the cloud" %26#150; that is, as part of the company's growing online infrastructure. Those, too, will be offered on a subscription basis. "One of the toughest things for most companies %26#133; is actually to do the deployment of their servers, their datacenters, the propagation of applications to those servers," Ballmer said. "As we productize the cloud platform that I talked about, that becomes a subscription-based service that we can offer small companies, startups, larger companies, and you'll hear more about this opportunity and this investment over the course of the next 12 months." The plan resonated with at least one industry-watcher. "That is more detail than they've given %26#91;previously%26#93;, but it makes sense," Matt Rosoff, lead analyst for consumer products and corporate news at researcher Directions on Microsoft told InternetNews.com in an e-mail. "I don't think larger businesses would be willing to accept advertising in hosted applications, and a lot of them are already on multiyear license agreements with Microsoft, so moving to a subscription basis wouldn't be too jarring," Rosoff said. For small and medium-sized businesses and consumers, Microsoft is introducing products such as Office Live Workspace, which is free but ad-supported. It's also offering Office Live Small Business, which is free for a basic version, but more feature-packed editions are subscription-based. Also targeting small and medium-sized businesses are Microsoft's plans for offering its own hosted versions of its Dynamics-branded business management products -- notably, Dynamics CRM Live, an upcoming version of CRM 4.0 hosted by the Redmond, Wash. software colossus itself. Normally, CRM 4.0, which just shipped, is available for customers to self-host or for partners who will provide the hosting. CRM Live is currently in beta test and is scheduled for general availability during the first half of 2008. It will be available on a subscription basis. Meanwhile, Microsoft's Live consumer-oriented offerings will tend to remain advertising-funded. These include Live Search, which competes with Google and Yahoo's search engines. Of course, Microsoft's MSN portal and its aQuantive acquisition also support the company's ad-driven offerings. Though Ballmer didn't mention Yahoo's products specifically, Yahoo's search engine and advertising technologies would likely fall under this category. Its other services, such as Yahoo Mail and the Flickr photo sharing service, also would appear to fit in the same bin as Microsoft's Live consumer services. The presentation also positioned the company's popular Xbox Live subscription-based online gaming service as a software-plus-service product, alongside subscription offerings for Microsoft's Zune music player and its Mediaroom IPTV set-top box technologies. It also includes advertising on Windows Live Mobile-based devices. Additionally, the company gains revenues, and plans to gain more, via transactions on its Xbox Live, Zune and Mediaroom offerings. "I want to make sure that you understand that in every one of these cases, we are investing in some software-plus-services-based opportunity to extend our value," Ballmer said. So what about the proposed Yahoo takeover? "What we're trying to do is take some momentum that we have and ask, 'How do we really increase that momentum even further? What else can we do?'" he added.