Scottish University in bid to make robots "concerse" with human A NEW generation of software that will allow computers and robots to "converse" with humans for the first time is being developed by scientists at a Scottish university. And the computing experts behind the development at Aberdeen University say they hope the new systems will build trust between machines and humans and increase efficiency - both operationally and financially - across a range of industry sectors. The research is being funded by a £1.1million grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. And it is hoped the new technology could be used in the aerospace, aviation, defence and energy industries for a wide range of tasks from unmanned space missions, deep sea research and the decommissioning of nuclear power plants. Dr Wamberto Vasconcelos, from the university's School of Natural and Computing Sciences, said: "Autonomous systems - such as robots - are an integral part of modern industry, used to carry out tasks without continuous human guidance. Useful Employed across a variety of sectors, these systems can quickly process huge amounts of information when deciding how to act. However, in doing so, they can make mistakes which are not obvious to them or to a human. Evidence shows there may be mistrust when there are no provisions to help a human to understand why an autonomous system has decided to perform a specific task, at a particular time, and in a certain way. He explained: "What we are creating is a new generation of autonomous systems, which are able to carry out a two-way communication with humans. The ability to converse with such systems will provide us with a novel tool to quickly understand, and if necessary correct, the actions of an automated system, increasing our confidence in, and the usefulness of, such systems. The new systems being developed use technology called Natural Language Generation (NLG) whereby complex information and data are translated into simple text summaries.