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Abstract-Tega is a new expressive "squash and stretch", Androidbased social robot platform, designed to enable long-term interactions with children. I. A NEW SOCIAL ROBOT PLATFORMTega is the newest social robot platform designed and built by a diverse team of engineers, software developers, and artists at the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab. This robot, with its furry, brightly colored appearance, was developed specifically to enable long-term interactions with children.Tega comes from a line of Android-based robots that leverage smartphones to drive computation and display an animated face [1]- [3]. The phone runs software for behavior control, motor control, and sensor processing. The phone's abilities are augmented with an external high-definition camera mounted in the robot's forehead and a set of on-board speakers.Tega's motion was inspired by "squash and stretch" principles of animation [4], creating natural and organic motion while keeping the actuator count low. Tega has five degrees of freedom: head up/down, waist-tilt left/right, waist-lean forward/back, full-body up/down, and full-body left/right. These joints are combinatorial and allow the robot to express behaviors consistently, rapidly, and reliably.The robot can run autonomously or can be remote-operated by a person through a teleoperation interface. The robot can operate on battery power for up to six hours before needing to be recharged, which allows for easier testing in the field. To that end, Tega was the robot platform used in a recent two-month study on second language learning conducted in three public school classrooms [5], [6].A variety of facial expressions and body motions can be triggered on the robot, such as laughter, excitement, and frustration. Additional animations can be developed on a computer model of the robot and exported via a software pipeline to a set of motor commands that can be executed on the physical robot, thus enabling rapid development of new expressive behaviors. Speech can be played back from prerecorded audio tracks, generated on the fly with a text-to-speech system, or streamed to the robot via a real-time voice streaming and pitch-shifting interface.This video showcases the Tega robot's design and implementation. It is a first look at the robot's capabilities as a research platform. The video highlights the robot's motion, expressive capabilities, and its use in ongoing studies of child-robot interaction.

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A new approach to web application development is presented, in which an application is constructed by configuring and composing concepts drawn from a catalog developed by experts. A concept is a self-contained, reusable increment of functionality. Each concept includes both front-end and back-end functionality, and exports a collection of components-fullstack GUI elements, backed by application logic and database storage. To build an app, the developer imports concepts from the catalog, tunes them to fit the application's particular needs via configuration variables, and links concept components together to create pages. Components of different concepts may be executed independently, or bound together declaratively with dataflows and synchronization. The instantiation, configuration, linking and binding of components is all expressed in a simple template language that extends HTML. The approach has been implemented in a platform called Déjà Vu, which we outline and compare to conventional web application architectures. We describe a case study in which a collection of applications previously built as team projects for a web programming course were replicated in Déjà Vu. Preliminary results validate our hypothesis, suggesting that a variety of non-trivial applications can be built from a repository of generic concepts.