Anil Unnikrishnan, Technical Lead at Samsung NEON Talks About Artificial Humans

My mother tells me I gravitated towards a keyboard and monitor when I was around 4 years old and we visited somebody’s house. The first memory for me of a computer was when I was around 10 years old when I received my first computer. The first day the computer arrived, a tech support personnel came and assembled the PC for us and the first thing I made sure that was installed were videogames. Before he left he told me something. He told me the best way to open these games is through the command prompt. Else the game might hang. I didn’t quite understand what he meant by that. But made sure I use the command prompt to open these games. Wrote down all the commands in a book and left it next to the PC. That is probably where I was introduced to computer programming for the first time. 

As I continued to play and explore more games, I started paying more attention to them. It was not just fun to play, but I was always curious about how they were being made. For example, Super Mario. The game's fun part was defeating the enemies and getting to the princess. But there was also the aspect of how Mario jumped. When I pressed a button, how was Mario jumping? How did the turtle get squished when I jumped on it? How did the game know when the turtle touched Mario to defeat him? I wanted to learn that. That’s how I started to pursue my studies and then later on a career in computer science with a focus on computer graphics.

A NEON is an Artificial Human - a computationally created virtual being. The visual qualities of a NEON are indistinguishable from a live human and they react in real-time, providing human-like interactions, unlike anything seen before. The importance of this technology is that its real-time and people are able to interact with these artificial humans very easily. This project started off as a prototype some of us worked on while we were in another lab within Samsung. From there on, we realized there was so much more potential for the project and decided to setup our own division within Samsung and have been working on this project since 2019.

NEONs are more intuitive compared to existing AI Assistants. NEONs do not know about everything and anything. They have specific knowledge about certain domains and they can learn more information about that domain with time. NEONs can be powered by a multitude of technologies. You can think of a NEON at the airport, that can provide with you relevant information regarding your flight details and which terminal and how to get to it just by scanning your boarding pass. This information can be given out in your native language which makes it easier for people traveling aboard or to unfamiliar areas.

You can think of NEONs living on any screen. This can be smartphones, smart TVs or on kiosks like mentioned before. The power they bring is the human connection we lack with machines. There is a wide variety of applications we see for NEONs, from the service sector to the hospitality industry. There are places where the human interaction is of utmost importance and we believe NEONs are a great interface into machines.

When we look at 4 or 5 year-old children, they are very curious. They ask you all sorts of questions, a lot to which sometimes you don’t have the answer to. As we grow up, the curiosity element reduces sometimes. We learn about many many different things each day in the form of different subjects or life skills and it is very common to forget about being curious. Cause even without you asking, information keeps coming to you everyday.

We need to be aware of that and take an effort to keep being curious. It is important to keep asking “How?” And “Why?”. If you have a field of passion, it need not be computers or tech, it can be anything, We need to constantly ask How is that done? Why is that done that way?

Curiosity is a key element to finding your passion. The more you are curious and the more you would want to learn about something, it would be something that interests you. And it is okay if it changes along the way. But the field you are passionate about will constantly keep you curious.