VOA常速英语:New Robot Teaches Autistic Adults to Navigate Office Politics

For many autistic adults entering the workforce, it’s not the work that is challenging but the people they work with.People on the autism spectrum often have trouble recognizing their co-workers’ emotions, making it hard to create working relationships.
许多自闭症成年人开始走向社会工作，并不是工作本身多具有挑战性，而是与他们共事的人。自闭症患者往往难以识别同事的情绪，从而难以与他们建立工作关系。

That’s where Alex comes in. Adults with autism tell us that they have real problems of getting employment and keeping employment and the main issue is not that they can’t do the work, it’s the workplace politics especially being able to understand what people really meanrather than simply what they say and part of that is understanding emotional expression so that’s why robots like Alex are going to help them.
那就是Alex出现的目的。成人自闭症患者告诉我们，他们难以就业和难以持续就业，问题不在于他们做不了这份工作，而是职场政策，尤其是要弄清楚人们真正想表达的意思而不仅仅是字面上的理解，所以他们需要机器人Alex的帮助。

Researchers at Heriot-Watt University gave Alex human emotions in their most basic universal form.Autistic adults then work with the robot on various tasks and learn to recognize common emotions.
赫瑞瓦特大学的研究人员给了亚历克斯最基础和最普遍的人类的情感形式。然后自闭症成年人与机器人一起完成各种任务，以学会识别普通的情感。

What you’re trying to do is alter the environment through training through helping rather than changing the person which frankly hasn’t worked and 50 odd years of triedso the main focus is on using this as a therapeutic intervention if you like but it’s more environmental change.
你要做的是通过帮助训练来调整环境，而不是改变人，坦率地讲，50多年的尝试都没有成功，所以要点在于，把这种治疗手法当作一种干预治疗，如果您了解的话，但这其实更像是一种环境的改变。

The emotions are easily recognizable to most people. There’s joy, sadness, anger, fear and surprise.The researchers took this a step further by programming the robot to not only show emotion but to respond to the users behavior.
情绪很容易被大多数人识别。有欢乐，悲伤，愤怒，恐惧和惊奇。研究人员通过编程使机器人不仅表现出情绪，而且能对用户的行为做出反应。

As well as training the robot to understand human beings, we’re actually creating a robot that can they respond in a human-like way and that’s what’s going to be the effective part of this skills training for adults with autism so they’re not just providing a sort of input,they’re actually experiencing the whole kind of behavior timeline, the input, the process and then the output.
训练机器人理解人类的同时，我们正在创造举止更像人类的机器人，这是成为这个自闭症成人技能训练的有效部分，所以他们不只是输入，他们实际上经历了一个完整的，可以说是行为时间，输入，处理，然后输出。

Right now Alex is just a prototype.In its final form, it will be full bodied and autonomous like Casper, a similar robot that works with autistic children.
现在亚历克斯只是一个原型。在其最后的形式，它将像与它类似的机器人Casper一样具有完整的身体和自主性，来同孤独症儿童一起学习。

Bronwyn Benito, VOA News.
美国之音新闻，Bronwyn Benito报道。