About "Matryoshka" by Francisco Escolano,founder and former director of the Robot Vision G

Francisco Escolano. ABOUT MATRYOSHKA:

"I enjoyed the première with my daughters. As a robotician, I wanted to show them the limitations of technology and the grandeur of logical thought. These where my presets before watching the film since I could barely imagine an accidental trip recognizing the key role of women in space.

The emergence of embedded computer systems governing complex ambients was prior to the first experiments devoted to endow robots with some ‘basic’ intelligence such as re-localizing themselves after being kidnapped (something called “the SLAM-Simultaneous Localization and Mapping” problem in the artificial intelligence jargon). Yes, robots can do few things by themselves (more and more everyday) and the way to these small achievements was paved by the computers having to interpret the Newton’s laws in the quite aggressive environment of the void space.

You can imagine my surprise when the expected failure in space really happens in the film. Beyond this, what captures my imagination is that the failure triggers an intense voyage to the deep of logical thought under extreme conditions. The human suffering onboard can be only alleviated by a strong basis on chess playing. I imagined myself programming my first chess-software in LISP language and my later contact with robots but I couldn’t by no means infer the impact of humans in my later career as a scientists. It is this human factor what dominates the film, with the main characters filling pages and pages of maths. Perfect tension in the language, impressive visual spectacle and realistic hypothesis. Ghost in the machine leads to human control and passion announces great sacrifices.

All these sensations compressed in only 22 minutes! During the Matryoshka movie I mentally assigned one minute to one of my years of expertise in making robots seeing and then helping the visually impaired with similar programs. My own path towards the humanisation of technology was displayed in a spectacular game of fantasy. The interplay between the main characters is very convincing in this cinematic joy. Congratulations to all the team from the bottom of my heart. "

FRANCISCO ESCOLANO Associate Professor, PhD Founder and former director of the Robot Vision Group (University of Alicante). Member of the Mobile Vision Research Lab. Chair of the TC2 scientific committee devoted by the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR) to Structural Pattern Recogntion.