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If a robotic hitchhiker's guide to the United States were ever written, hitchBOT would probably have a thing or two to say about Philadelphia.

And yet it's remarkable to think that the child-like construction of hitchBOT and its simple quest to travel the world came to embody a far more complex notion of "the separation between matter and the special status of humankind."

That's how Prof. David Harris Smith, one of hitchBOT's co-creators, put it at a recent talk titled "The Death and Lives of hitchBOT, the Hitchhiking Robot.”

The talk comes a few months following the social robot's untimely demise in Philadelphia in early August, where it was vandalized only two weeks into its American journey. Previously, hitchBOT had successfully traveled across Canada, Germany and the Netherlands since the start of its travels in the summer of 2014.

Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and Multimedia at McMaster University, and is well noted for his efforts in a field likened as "cultural robotics," which he himself described as "the creative use of robots and AI to manifest a reflexive action, highlighting the construction of values, identities and beliefs."

The hitchBOT project was perhaps a culmination of these efforts, a cultural and social experiment developed in tandem by teams led by Prof. Smith and Prof. Frauke Zeller at McMaster and Ryerson University, respectively. With bright neon limbs made up of material that could have come from the dollar store, underneath the hood hitchBOT was a sophisticated piece of hardware that included a GPS-locator for the team to track and an LED screen to convey emotion.

Most importantly though, hitchBOT ran on a number of programs that included a conversational AI called Cleverscript, giving it the capacity to interact with human beings and create conversation in real time while literally hitchhiking across the country.

Prof. Smith's discussion went far beyond an account of hitchBOT's journey across the world though, as he tried to capture the spirit of what made hitchBOT so popular.

"People wanted to do things with it that were somehow culturally identifying," Smith commented.

Between the extensive social following hitchBOT had amassed and the outpouring of support it received following its demise — over half a million unique visitors were drawn to hitchBOT's website in August alone — hitchBOT represented an idea beyond its destination. What hitchBOT could represent was important for Smith and his team in developing the robot, and played a role in why they chose to specifically pursue a child-like whimsical appearance.

"That was central; we definitely wanted to make it out of junk, stuff you would have around your house. It's part of that desire to make it accessible, to make it approachable, an object that is actually able to manifest a humourous disposition."

This was essential, as hitchBOT was entirely dependent on human sympathy and assistance to get to its destinations.

With the increase in fame, hitchBOT also ended up receiving numerous offers of advertisements for products such as tires and soft drinks, but to Smith and his team, this was against the greater vision they had for hitchBOT.

"Somebody was going to give us 40,000 euros just to put a sticker on it. We turned that down because we didn't want to commercialize the thing; as soon as you brand it in that way, I think you lose your audience," he said.

The social robot’s whimsical impression made it all the more tragic for people invested in the robot's journey across the world. The idea that something so innocent and unimposing would find its end so violently and abruptly was something that captured the attention of media across the world, and support came in numerous forms from tweets, to hitchBOT cosplay and rallies.

However, despite the attention it received following its demise, Dr. Smith would still have preferred that hitchBOT simply could have continued its journey.

"Do I have any positive views of the fact that it was destroyed? No, not really. I would be more pleased if it was still out there, doing its thing," he explained.

"For us we'd rather people had a chance to experience it and know the adventure would continue in some way."

Dr. Smith is currently working on a number of projects that will continue to build on hitchBOT's legacy, including an opportunity to potentially put a social robot on the International Space Station. There have been many offers for hitchBOT's travels to continue, including in the United States, but it remains to be seen if hitchBOT will live again.

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"If you can walk and talk faster, you can go to McMaster."

On one hand, there's a level of juvenile appeal in comparing and bragging about the superiority of one's own school over another. But McMaster students can still take pride in their school after the most recent updates to world university rankings reaffirms McMaster's strong position in the global community.

With the release of the annual reports for the three most influential world university rankings, McMaster continues to demonstrate a consistency in both its ranking and its relation to Canadian contemporaries in post-secondary education.

Gord Arbeau, Director of Public and Community Relations, says that it indicates the prestigious standard McMaster is held to.

"If you look at [recent] rankings, if you look at them all together, the university has done quite well," Arbeau said. "It's a reflection of the university's ability to attract and retain, really, some of the best faculty members in the country, and to attract the very highest quality students."

In an early October update to the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, Canadian universities actually suffered in position, with the exception of the University of Toronto, which remained at its position of 20. While McMaster dipped from 92nd to 94th overall, the school remains as one of only four Canadian universities in the top 100 in the world, behind the University of Toronto, as well as the University of British Columbia and McGill University.

Meanwhile, earlier in September, the QS World University Rankings saw McMaster make a large leap to 113th, from 140th last year. Along with similar trends among other Canadian universities, QS noted the best indicator for improvement was academic reputation. McMaster also rose in standing in the latest update to the Shanghai Jiao Tong Academic Ranking of World Universities, moving from 92nd to 90th late this summer.

"I think with rankings, the important thing to remember is that they really are a snapshot in time, that each of the rankings use different methodologies and measure different things," Arbeau said.

"When you look at [recent rankings] individually, you might see the university might move up a spot or down a spot, but when you look at them collectively [...] you'll see that McMaster remains one of four Canadian universities firmly entrenched in the top 100 in the world. There are some 15,000, 16,000 universities around the world, and McMaster remains in the top 100."

Each of the three major ranking systems uses its own unique criteria when judging the placement of universities. For example, the THE looks at 13 performance indicators grouped into five areas, with an emphasis on teaching and research. The QS rankings uses the student to faculty ratio as a simple measure of teaching quality, with an added attempt to evaluate more subjective criteria through their focus on a survey of reputation.

In contrast to the THE and QS rankings, the ARWU system attempts to focus on more objective criteria, with a heavy emphasis on research. Criteria such as faculty that have won Nobel Prizes or other major awards, and the number of citations in prestigious journals are all weighed heavily.

Among the three rankings, McMaster specifically performs well in the evaluation of its science programs; this includes a global rank of 25 in THE's assessment of Clinical, Pre-clinical & Health programs.

In comments captured by a recent news release, Patrick Deane responded to the recent updates on world university rankings.

“When this ranking is considered with the others released over the past few weeks, it is clear McMaster is providing high quality teaching and learning, conducting groundbreaking research and attracting and retaining the best faculty and staff."

Starting this week, you'll have the chance to see professor of Health, Aging, and Society Jim Dunn roaming the streets of Hamilton, putting his Great Neighbourhoods Visualization Project into action.

Over the next few weeks, Dunn will be using a camera-car system, referred to as Mobile Urban Video Recording, in order to map the city of Hamilton, street by street, frame by frame. The project is aiming to identify the key visual features in neighbourhoods that indicate whether the physical environment is conducive to being a good family setting.

"When we wanted to characterize neighbourhoods [before], we had census data, which really doesn't tell you anything about the neighbourhood: it tells you about who lives in the neighbourhood. And we've had survey data, which is people's perceptions of the neighbourhood, and so people are interested in this because it's kind of the first objective data that's available on neighbourhoods," Dunn said.

Dunn's project, whose unique approach is only matched by one other academic researcher in North America, partially stems from an idea in criminology that the physical environment and the visual disorder information from the neighbourhood can affect the level of crime and behavior in an area.

Although his team at the CRUNCH laboratory in McMaster is focused on the physical environment of neighbourhoods, Dunn explained that the ability to create an archive of images each year will allow their work to extend beyond the goals of the project. Dunn commented that, in the past, "people in public health have taken some of that disorder information and then looked at its relationship to various kinds of health outcomes.

"In the future we might be able to do other projects where we recode it. So we might come up with new ideas."

In many ways, the project and car bear a close resemblance to the work done with Google Street View; in fact, for the technology, Dunn's team worked with Immersive Media, the co-developer of the Street View technology. However, the team's goal is to take a more consistent view of Hamilton neighbourhoods, both in the creation of a seamless street view and the year-after-year progression of Hamilton areas.

Of course, concerns are also warranted when considering the potential ramifications on privacy.

However, with precedent already set by Google Street View on roaming and capturing images of entire neighbourhoods, Dunn maintains that the project "meets or exceeds all of the privacy protections that Google has in place."

"When we collect our images, we're not posting them on the internet. We keep them all privately [on a] secure server," Dunn said. "The sensitivity really has to do with the fact that there's potentially identifiable images of people, [but] for the most part, we don't really have the camera resolution to get identifiable images."

Although the project can potentially be viewed as contentious, Dunn is open to discussion about issues of confidentiality and privacy.

"[Talking about] privacy and confidentiality issues is, in a way, good for us because it let's people know that, 'hey listen, we've thought about this, and we take it seriously, and here's what we're doing.'"