Or so the theory of the Uncanny Valley, first proposed by Japanese roboticist Masihiro Mori, goes.

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The idea of the uncanny valley was originally proposed by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist, in 1970.

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This summer Codon enlisted Craig Muir, the roboticist who industrialized gene-finding at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, to help build its factory in Cambridge.

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The self-taught roboticist has drawn inspiration from Honda's ASIMO robot and Drexel University's HUBO as well as sounding out opinion at his local hackerspace.

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This summer Codon enlisted Craig Muir, the roboticist who industrialized gene-finding at Millennium Pharmaceuticals (nasdaq: MLNM - news - people ), to help build its factory in Cambridge.

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"Something really interesting happens between some kids with autism and robots that doesn't happen between those children and other humans, " says Maja J Mataric, a roboticist at the University of Southern California.

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Davalos runs the competition with roboticist David Calkins.

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In a phrase first coined by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, get too human and they fall into the "Uncanny Valley", that point on a graph that plots acceptance against how human like a robot is where acceptance falls through the floor.

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