AI ALERT

8 February 2007

  
 

newspapersWelcome to the AI ALERT, a service from The American Association for Artificial Intelligence, showcasing an eclectic subset from the AI in the news collection in AI TOPICS, the AAAI sponsored pathfinder web site. As explained in our notices & disclaimers, the AI ALERT is intended to keep you informed of news articles published by third parties. The mere fact that a particular item is selected for inclusion does NOT imply that AAAI or AI TOPICS has verified the information (articles are offered "as is") or that there is endorsement of any kind. And because the excerpt may not reflect the overall tenor of the article, nor contain all of the relevant information, you are encouraged to access the entire article.

The Headlines:

The Articles:

January 25, 2007: Tax Takers Send in the Spiders. By Quinn Norton. Wired News.
"Websites around the world are getting a new computerized visitor among the Googlebots and Yahoo web spiders: The taxman. A five-nation tax enforcement cartel has been quietly cracking down on suspected internet tax cheats, using a sophisticated web crawling program to monitor transactions on auction sites, and track operators of online shops, poker and porn sites. The 'Xenon' program.... Xenon, explained Marten den Uyl of Sentient, is in some ways the opposite of something like Google's web crawler, which traverses a tree of links and grabs a copy of everything it sees. Xenon is smart about link selection and context, and uses a 'slow search paradigm,' he said. ... Once the web pages are screen-scraped, Xenon's Identity Information Extraction Module interfaces with national databases containing information like street and city names. ... As illuminating as Xenon is for the tax man, the data-mining effort poses dangers to citizen privacy, said Par Strom, a noted privacy advocate in the world of Swedish IT."
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January 29, 2007: Artificial intelligence: Making rapid strides - AI makes spam filters smarter, search engines more efficient and is even behind speech-to-text software. By J. Preethi. The Hindu Business Line.
"Phraselater - a pencil box shaped device that translates phrases in 15-20 languages and the vacuum-bot called Roomba that automatically finds its way back to its charging point. Examples that indicate that artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to make itself seen and heard. 'What people don't know is that AI has been around for years now,' said the AI expert, Dr Ron Brachman, V-P of Worldwide Research Operations, Yahoo! Research, speaking to Business Line recently. ... Commending the contribution of Indian researchers at Yahoo in the field of AI, he said, 'The talent here is extraordinary.' Work on various AI themes - speech to text, computer vision, Indic language processing and translation, multimodal communication (voice communication) and handwriting recognition is being conducted at various research labs across the country."
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January 29, 2007: Out of the shadows. The Engineer Online.
"Just a few years ago the idea of a robot combat aircraft was little more than a glint in the eye of the most forward thinking military scientist. While remotely operated drones used for reconnaissance have been around for some time the autonomous, unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) has remained in that shadowy area where military secrecy and the whispered rumours of science-fiction geeks make the truth hard to find. But now the veil of secrecy is beginning to slip and, in both the US and here in the UK, the use of robotic combat aircraft is fast becoming a reality of modern warfare. Under a £124m MoD contract announced late last year, UK engineers have begun work on the development of a prototype unmanned air vehicle (UAV) that could pave the way for a new generation of autonomous, stealthy aircraft and ultimately spell the end for human bomber pilots. Headed by BAE systems, the aim of the portentous-sounding Taranis project (named after the Celtic god of thunder), is to build and fly a technology demonstrator that will autonomously travel long distances deep into enemy territory and sneak past sophisticated air-defence systems. ... One of the biggest keys to Taranis' stealthiness will be its autonomous operation. While most production UAVs now in use are remotely operated Taranis, said [Chris] Clarkson, will operate with an unprecedented degree of autonomy. 'It needs to have intelligence in its mission systems to allow it to route round threats and take evasive action if it needs to do so, without having to have a human involved.'"
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January 30, 2007: A sense of security. The Engineer Online.
"An intelligent sensing system will use wireless technology, GPS and a suite of sensors for real-time monitoring of independent elderly people at home. The €1.85m (£1.2m) EU-funded Complete Ambient Assisted Living Experiment (CAALYX) project will develop and test a light, mobile device to monitor a number of vital signs and transmit the information to an intelligent data-logging system. ... Limerick University is to develop the fall detection accelerometers, which will also be able to predict falls. Most fall sensors use cameras that must first learn a person's 'normal' movements to be effective. These new sensors will be able to predict falls just before they happen and be adaptable enough for use anywhere so will give the wearer a greater degree of confidence even outside the home, said [Dr Maged] Boulos. ... The device will use algorithms that can pick up on any dangerous change in the person's vital signs or if one of the sensor feeds falls outside of acceptable parameters. If this occurs the system locates his or her position using GPS then triggers an alarm to alert the emergency services."
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February 2007: Dream Jobs 2007 - The scene of a recent crime, the rim of an active volcano, deep in the woods at the dead of night -- you never know where engineering will lead you. IEEE Spectrum Online.
"There’s no rule that dooms engineers to dwell in a Dilbertian cubicle hell. Quite the contrary. As the 10 technologists we found for this year’s 'Dream Jobs' report all prove, engineering occurs in some amazing places and offers incredible experiences. It’s just a matter of pursuing whatever interests you -- tenaciously. ... Sometimes, the trick is to combine two interests. Vasik Rajlich dreamed of becoming a chess grandmaster but realized he’d never make it. Instead, he’s using his talents as a programmer to write the world’s best chess software. Frédéric Kaplan’s passions are biology and engineering; now, as a researcher in artificial intelligence, he’s finding new and provocative ways to meld the two."

  • Vasik Rajlich: Game Boy. By Phillip E. Ross. IEEE Spectrum Online (February 2007). "[H]e set his sights on a new brass ring: writing the strongest chess-playing program in the world. 'I figured there were about 2000 people in the world stronger than me in chess,' he says, 'but not one chess player that was stronger than me in programming.' He took side jobs to pay the rent, and finally, in late 2005, his brainchild was ready. He called it Rybka, the Czech word for 'little fish,' and later that year entered it in a computer chess championship, held in Paderborn, Germany. It won, then quickly went on to establish an unprecedented superiority. Today the various computer ratings lists place it between 70 and 200 points above its nearest rival."
  • Frédéric Kaplan: A.I. Auteur. By Marlowe Hood. IEEE Spectrum Online (February 2007). "Working with industrial designers, Kaplan and his team are creating an entire menagerie of such nonintrusive, smart furniture. But their goal isn’t to be merely decorative. They also aim to toy with the way people interact with each other and with technology. ... What drew him to A.I. wasn’t figuring out how robots could mimic natural intelligence but rather how biology could learn from smart machines. ... In the freewheeling atmosphere at Sony, Kaplan helped design the “brain” of AIBO, the company’s eerily endearing canine robot, and he continued to develop it over nearly a decade. One of his biggest achievements was to program AIBO to get 'bored,' an experiment designed to test the limits of open-ended learning -- the holy grail of artificial intelligence."

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February 1, 2007: Bears lose to Colts in virtual Super Bowl. By Antone Gonsalves. InformationWeek.
"In the real world, the winner of Sunday's Super Bowl remains a dream of fans and bettors, but in the virtual world, the Indianapolis Colts have won. According to the Madden NFL '07 video game, the Colts beat the Chicago Bears by a score of 38 to 27. To come up with that score, along with a full set of game statistics, game-maker Electronic Arts placed the game on autopilot, and let it use its own artificial intelligence in matching the two teams."

  • Update: Crowning achievement - Manning, Colts storm back on Bears in Super Bowl XLI. The Associated Press / available from SI.com (February 4, 2007). "A wet and wild night of Super Bowl firsts brought Dungy, Manning and the Indianapolis Colts to the top of the NFL with a 29-17 victory over the Chicago Bears on Sunday night."
  • Also see:  A sporting chance of beating the bookies - Can a computer really predict sports results well enough to bamboozle the bookmakers? New Scientist decided there was only one way to find out. By Michael Reilly. New Scientist (Issue 2589: pages 36-39; subscription req'd).

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February 2, 2007: Coast Guard calls off search for missing sailor after four days. The Associated Press / available from Examiner.com.
"The Coast Guard called off its search Thursday evening for a renowned computer scientist [Jim Gray] lost at sea during solo sailing trip, ending a four-day hunt with no trace of him or his 40-foot yacht. ... Sergey Brin, co-founder and president of Internet search giant Google Inc., and engineers at online retailer Amazon.com sought high-tech ways to find the missing sailor. Gray's work over the past 30 years allowed databases to sort quantities of information once considered too vast to manage, leading to the creation of both online shopping and Web-based mapping programs. ... [E]ngineers at online retailer Amazon.com sought to ascertain whether the artificial intelligence software powering its Web site could be used to sift through aerial photographs of a wide swath of the Pacific."
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February 2, 2007: Rolf Pfeifer - New AI. Podcast from Talking Robots.
"In this episode of 'Talking Robots' we interview Rolf Pfeifer, about the last 50 years in artificial intelligence, the 'new AI', the central role of embodiment for intelligence, and his new popular science book. Rolf Pfeifer is professor of computer science at the Department of Informatics of the University of Zurich, and director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He has pioneered a new approach to artificial intelligence ('New AI'), which emphasizes the role of embodiment and argues that thought is not independent of the body, but tightly constrained, and at the same time enabled by it."
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February 4, 2007: A car that parks itself? Now that's truly modern art. By Stephen Bayley. The Observer | Guardian Unlimited Arts.
"Even an ordinary car is one of the most sophisticated systems you can buy. And dreams of automation - or artificial intelligence - have always been an element of the Modernist project. The playwright Karel Capek was inspired to create fictional 'robots' (from the Czech for 'slave') because he was 'disgusted by degradation and pain ... revolted by poverty'. Walter Gropius would have said much the same about his social architecture. Capek, and this is 1923, continued that he wanted an 'aristocracy nourished by millions of mechanical slaves'. So now there is the new Lexus LS460, the most automated car you can buy. This car parks itself or, at least, 'assists the driver by automatically controlling the steering when backing up'. These are modest (weasel) words, influenced by Health and Safety: in fact, it's a robot. ... Automation fascinated Enlightenment thinkers who swept idolatry away in a fit of proto-Modernism spring-cleaning. In the Musee d'Art et Histoire in Neuchatel, Switzerland, you can find one of the 18th-century automata of Pierre Jacquet-Droz. ... One of the last visits Mary Shelley made before she settled down to write Frankenstein was to Jacquet-Droz's studio. The experience of automation was enthralling, but the word came much later. Delmar S Harder first used the word in 1948, but it was John Diebold's 1952 book Automation that gave the word currency. Here, Diebold (who invented ATMs) established the useful metaphor of feedback. An intelligent system is one whose behaviour adaptively responds to changing inputs. ... Sixteen years ago Donald Michie, chief scientist of Glasgow's Turing Institute, said: 'If a machine gets very complicated, it becomes pointless to argue whether it's got a mind of its own. It so obviously does that you had better get on good terms with it and shut up about the metaphysics.' ... The robot Lexus is a fine result of the flawed Modernist project which trades dirt and danger for mechanical beauty and artificial intelligence. I do not know whether this car is optimistic or pessimistic. It reduces us, its creators, the descendants of Descartes, to near-passive humanoid blobs."
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February 4, 2007: A car that parks itself? Now that's truly modern art. By Stephen Bayley. The Observer | Guardian Unlimited Arts.
"Even an ordinary car is one of the most sophisticated systems you can buy. And dreams of automation - or artificial intelligence - have always been an element of the Modernist project. The playwright Karel Capek was inspired to create fictional 'robots' (from the Czech for 'slave') because he was 'disgusted by degradation and pain ... revolted by poverty'. Walter Gropius would have said much the same about his social architecture. Capek, and this is 1923, continued that he wanted an 'aristocracy nourished by millions of mechanical slaves'. So now there is the new Lexus LS460, the most automated car you can buy. This car parks itself or, at least, 'assists the driver by automatically controlling the steering when backing up'. These are modest (weasel) words, influenced by Health and Safety: in fact, it's a robot. ... Automation fascinated Enlightenment thinkers who swept idolatry away in a fit of proto-Modernism spring-cleaning. In the Musee d'Art et Histoire in Neuchatel, Switzerland, you can find one of the 18th-century automata of Pierre Jacquet-Droz. ... One of the last visits Mary Shelley made before she settled down to write Frankenstein was to Jacquet-Droz's studio. The experience of automation was enthralling, but the word came much later. Delmar S Harder first used the word in 1948, but it was John Diebold's 1952 book Automation that gave the word currency. Here, Diebold (who invented ATMs) established the useful metaphor of feedback. An intelligent system is one whose behaviour adaptively responds to changing inputs. ... Sixteen years ago Donald Michie, chief scientist of Glasgow's Turing Institute, said: 'If a machine gets very complicated, it becomes pointless to argue whether it's got a mind of its own. It so obviously does that you had better get on good terms with it and shut up about the metaphysics.' ... The robot Lexus is a fine result of the flawed Modernist project which trades dirt and danger for mechanical beauty and artificial intelligence. I do not know whether this car is optimistic or pessimistic. It reduces us, its creators, the descendants of Descartes, to near-passive humanoid blobs."
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February 5, 2007 [issue date]: Google's Moon Shot - The quest for the universal library. By Jeffrey Toobin. The New Yorker (posted January 29, 2007).
"Google’s is not the only book-scanning venture. Amazon has digitized hundreds of thousands of the books it sells, and allows users to search the texts; Carnegie Mellon is hosting a project called the Universal Library, which so far has scanned nearly a million and a half books; the Open Content Alliance, a consortium that includes Microsoft, Yahoo, and several major libraries, is also scanning thousands of books; and there are many smaller projects in various stages of development. Still, only Google has embarked on a project of a scale commensurate with its corporate philosophy: 'to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.' ... The story of how Brin and Google’s other co-founder, Larry Page, met as graduate students in computer science at Stanford in the mid-nineties, and devised a series of elegant software algorithms that allowed Web searchers to find relevant information quickly and efficiently, has become part of Silicon Valley lore. Less well known is that, at the time, Brin and Page were also working on Stanford’s Digital Library Technologies Project, an attempt, funded by the federal government, to organize different kinds of stored information, including books, articles, and journals, in digital form. 'There was an attitude in computer science that putting things on dead trees was obsolete and getting it all into a searchable, digital format was a quest that had to be accomplished someday,' Terry Winograd, a Stanford professor who was a mentor to Page and Brin, said. ... The chief engineer of Google’s system for scanning books in the library collections is Dan Clancy, who joined the company after eight years at NASA, where he supervised teams of Ph.D.s. working on problems related to artificial intelligence. ... Copying all those pages presents many difficulties, but writing software to make the books useful to searchers is even harder. 'The scanning technology is boring,' Clancy said. 'The real challenge is to get somebody something that they are actually interested in, inside a book.'"
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February 5, 2007: Jeff Hawkins hacks the human brain - The creator of the PalmPilot and the Treo isn't just making another gadget. He's attempting to fuse silicon and gray matter to produce the ultimate intelligent machine. By Erick Schonfeld. Business 2.0 Magazine / available from CNNMoney.com.
"Now [Jeff] Hawkins is finally ready to open up about what he's been chasing. And what he says makes clear that his quest may well lead to a tremendous technical advance with far-ranging implications. Hawkins believes that his latest startup, called Numenta, is on its way to creating the first truly intelligent computer - a thinking machine that, in essence, learns the same way the human brain does. ... Numenta is developing a new computer memory system that it says can remember the patterns of the world presented to it and use them, the way a human does, to make analogies and draw conclusions. ... 'I know this has to work because this is how the brain does it,' Hawkins says. ... Hawkins is actually interested only in the neocortex, the outer, pink part of the brain where he believes intelligence resides. 'Intelligence is about creating a model of the world and making predictions,' he says. ... The company is developing what Hawkins calls a 'hierarchical temporal memory' [HTM] system. ... Moreover, there are deep moral dilemmas inherent in Hawkins's vision of intelligent machines, starting with the primal fears behind plots for everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Terminator: Man makes machines smart, smart machines whale on man. ... Hawkins thinks such concerns are overblown."
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February 6, 2007: Who watches the watchers in surveillance society. Reuters / available from CNN.com.
"In some cities in Europe and the United States, a person can be videotaped by surveillance cameras hundreds of times a day, and it's safe to say that most of the time no one is actually watching. But the advent of 'intelligent video' -- software that raises the alarm if something on camera appears amiss -- means Big Brother will soon be able to keep a more constant watch, a prospect that is sure to heighten privacy concerns. Combining motion detection technology with the learning capabilities of video game software, these new systems can detect people loitering, walking in circles or leaving a package. New microphone technology can isolate the sound of a gunshot and direct the attached camera to swivel and zoom in on the source. Sensitivity may reach the point where microphones could pick out the word "explosives" spoken in a crowd. 'There's just not enough personnel to watch every single camera,' said Chicago emergency operations chief Andrew Velasquez. 'We are piloting analytic software right now ... where you can set that particular camera to watch for erratic behavior, or someone leaving a suitcase on the sidewalk.' ... The encroachment on privacy in what civil libertarians call a 'surveillance society' may be a price willingly paid by citizens who fear terrorism and crime. But ever-alert software capable of maintaining a continuous 'watch' on security cameras multiplies the risks of harassing innocent people, privacy experts say. ... Britain...has 4.2 million government security cameras, 2 million in London alone...."

  • Also see: Sowing the Seeds of Surveillance. By Jennifer Granick. Wired News (January 31, 2007). "Technology has an almost irresistible lure. When we build systems for surveillance, experience teaches that we will inevitably use them for purposes other than those for which they were originally designed. Last weekend, the Stanford Technology Law Review held a symposium on the Fourth Amendment, at which participants asked whether traditional conceptions of constitutional privacy are adequate when modern technology tracks personal information in entirely new ways. ... In 1964, Jacques Ellul developed the idea of technological determinism in his book, The Technological Society. Ellul argued that technique, or process, overtakes and dominates human values, and that the logic of technology is such that humans will continually choose to expand its scope, regardless of the effects. Ellul's bleak theory is that once a machine exists, humans will use it, even if that use is not part of the original justification for the machine. In her wonderful book Close to the Machine, author Ellen Ullman tells stories of technological determinism in action."

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February 7, 2007: Found in Translation - Meadan is offering Arabic-English machine translation to create a virtual town square during troubled times. By Shereen El Feki. Technology Review.
"September 11 affected millions of people in myriad ways. For Ed Bice, an American ex-architect, it sparked a desire to get ordinary Middle Easterners--and Westerners--talking together. Naturally, being based in the Bay Area, he turned to the Web for help. The result, six years later, is Meadan, which means 'town square' in Arabic. The basic idea is simple: it's a website that brings English and Arabic speakers together around daily postings of news articles, broadcasts, and events that are of common interest, and it gives users a platform to communicate through dialogues, blogs, and other exchanges. All the while, it allows users to pinpoint their location so that people can share views across continents. The hard part is creating a system that allows users to express their ideas in their native tongue. Enter IBM, which has committed $1.7 million to this not-for-profit project. The company has one of the most advanced systems for Arabic-English machine translation. It's 84 percent accurate and can transmute Arabic to English and back again at a blistering 500 words per second. This is no easy task, says Salim Roukos, a senior manager for multilingual natural-language processing technologies at IBM's Watson Research Center."
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February 8, 2007: Networking for a brighter future in IT - The British Computer Society is trying to get more people excited about a changing industry. By Wendy Grossman. Telegraph.co.uk.
"The 50-year-old British Computer Society is the leading professional body for those working in IT. About three years ago, the BCS began a push to expand its member base and also to broaden it. Until then, students who joined lost their membership after they'd completed their degrees because they didn't have the necessary experience to be full members. The change of policy has caused the average age of the membership to drop from 37 to 28. The reason for the push to increase numbers, says president Nigel Shadbolt, a professor specialising in artificial intelligence at Southampton University, is part of trying to make the organisation 'more impactful'. There are, he says, 1m to 1.5m people working in IT in the UK. 'We wanted to be representing a lot more of them.' The theme for his year as president is 'public engagement'. ... One frustration for Shadbolt in particular and the BCS in general is the dropping numbers of women entering computer science, a trend that has been studied by both the BCS and its American counterpart, the Association for Computing Machinery."

  • Also see: Robots draw girls to science - UVic course provides a sense of confidence in technical skills. By Carla Wilson. Times Colonist [canada.com] (February 8, 2007). "Girls plus robots equals fun and learning. Six teams of five girls will spend Feb. 17 at UVic assembling and programming robots for a hovercraft rescue mission across a simulated river. Teams choose the type of sensors on their robots needed to save several people, represented by marbles. Robots can be programmed to respond to light, touch and sound commands. The Lego Robotics Festival is aimed at introducing girls in Grades 6 to 12 to computer science and engineering, fields where they are under-represented at UVic and at schools throughout North America, says Anissa Agah St. Pierre, UVic co-ordinator for women in Engineering and Computer Science. ... Girls have more than a fun day at UVic. 'They get confidence in their technical skills,' she said. 'They will get familiar with programming concepts. They learn that math is both cool and important.' ... Women make up just about 17 per cent of computer science students and 11 per cent of engineering students at UVic and other institutions, she said. With about one-third of the faculty female, UVic's Department of Computer Science has the highest percentage of female faculty in Canada. There's a lack of visible role models for computer science but career possibilities are 'endless,' Agah St. Pierre said."

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The Expansion Slot

January 26, 2007: A Computer Program Wins Its First Scrabble Tournament. By Brock Read. The Chronicle (of Higher Education) Wired Campus Blog. "When Deep Blue first defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, the computer program's victory was hailed as a watershed moment for artificial intelligence, and rightfully so. But in November, another program reached a gaming milestone of its own, and no one seemed to notice. The Wired Campus intends to fix that. At a Scrabble tournament in Toronto, a piece of software called Quackle triumphed in a best-of-five series over David Boys, a computer programmer who won the world Scrabble championship in 1995. ... Mr. Boys seemed to have no trouble keeping a sense of perspective after the loss: 'It's still better to be a human than to be a computer,' he said."
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January 26, 2007: Computer Program Writes Its Own Fiction. By Jennifer Viegas. Discovery Channel News. "Could a computer one day be a fiction bestseller? While a computer-written bestseller may be unlikely, a technology expert has created a computer program that writes its own fiction stories with minimal user input. The program, called MEXICA, is the first to generate original stories based on computerized representations of emotions and tensions between characters. Rafael Pérez y Pérez [a computer scientist at the Autonomous Metropolitan University in México City], MEXICA’s creator, explains, 'The program keeps a record of the emotional links between characters while developing a story, and employs its knowledge about emotions to retrieve from memory possible logical actions to continue the story.' ... 'Programs like MEXICA are computer models that help us to conceive, and therefore to understand, how we write stories,' Pérez y Pérez said."
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January 30, 2007: Robotic Fish Cleared In Computer Glitch. By K.C. Jones InformationWeek. "The Association of American Medical Colleges' first computerized administration of medical school admissions tests experienced a glitch, but the error appears to be of human origin and not caused by robotic fish. ... No problems have been reported with the software provided by Prometric and or a new artificial intelligence scoring system from Vantage Learning. ... Computerization allowed all scores from the Saturday test to be tallied by 5 a.m. Monday, Jones said. It used to take 30 days to collect all of the exams at a single location and another 30 days to send students their scores." [Also see this related article in the previous AI ALERT.]
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January 30, 2007: The global war for talent. By Steve Schifferes. BBC News. "India's global leadership in the IT services industry, centred on Bangalore, is based on its rich human resources. The country's 400,000 graduates in science and engineering each year - more than any other country in the world - give India a competitive advantage. But with the global outsourcing industry still growing at breakneck speed, the Indian industry is worried about whether there will be enough skilled Indian software engineers in the future. ... India has few PhD programmes in computer sciences, which means that many go abroad to study in the US or Europe - and often stay on. But now, the Bangalore IT boom has persuaded many of them to return home. ... While they make up less than 10% of the IT workforce in the city, these B2B (Back to Bangalore) professionals often assume key roles in their organisations. ... The best and brightest computer students in India are now flocking to Bangalore's newest university, the International Institute for Information Technology (iiiT-B). ... Its highly ambitious young students are clear that they are competing in a global marketplace and their horizons are the world, not the Infosys campus across the road. Among them is Megha Saini, aged 22. A first-year student at iiiT-B, she has already won a place to study artificial intelligence next term at the University of Padua. She says there is only one lab in the world she wants to work in. 'I plan to work at IBM's artificial intelligence lab in Toronto. I have already collaborated on papers with some of its researchers,' she told the BBC."
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February 2, 2007: Finding religion with code. By Celeste Biever. New Scientist Technology Blog. "To help the public find similar cases of biblical inspiration, [Noah Vawter of the MIT Media Lab ] has created the 'Religious Speech Sensor' (RSSense), a piece of software that can be used to search speeches and statements using phrases from an electronic transcript of the bible and flags any suspected matches. ... In future, Vawter hopes to extend the system to 'handle additional texts, such as the Quran and the Tao Te Ching' and to automate the program, so that all political speeches could be 'sourced' for its religious content." [A link in the article will take you to the program's code.]
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February 3, 2007 [issue date]: The mind chip. By Douglas Fox. New Scientist (Issue 2589, pages 28-31; subscription req'd). "[W]hat it can do is organise raw optical stimuli into a useful representation of the thing it's 'looking' at, and identify the outlines of different objects in its field of view. Instead of mindlessly number-crunching like an ordinary computer, these chips are physically mimicking the electrical behaviour of the nerve cells found in a lemon-sized wedge of your brain called the primary visual cortex. ... Kwabena Boahen, now at Stanford University in California, and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadephia, from where he recently moved, have built this device to investigate how brains work, and it lets them experiment in ways that neuroscientists working with the real thing can only dream of. ... 'I want to figure out how the brain works in a very nuts-and-bolts way,' [Boahen] says. 'I want to figure it out such that I can build it.'"
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February 3, 2007 [issue date] : Bell Labs - Over and out. Opinion by Jeff Hecht. New Scientist (Issue 2589, page 18; subscription req'd). "'You don't know what you've got till it's gone,' sang Joni Mitchell a generation ago. That lyric should resonate with many physical scientists who over the past few weeks have been lamenting the fall of Bell Labs in New Jersey, formerly the world's premier industrial research laboratory. ... [photo caption:] Bell Labs' Claude Shannon, creator of modern information theory, developed a mechanical mouse that learned to navigate a changing maze."
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February 4, 2007: Robots, cars, batteries hold key to future growth. Korea.net News. "Korea is focusing on creating a growth engine in research & development itself and nurturing talented human resources by generating more jobs and increasing exports and the volume of highly value-added products. To this aim, the government plans to inject extended amounts of investment funds in the selected growth engine industries so that it can create production of value-added products amounting to 16.9 trillion won and generate 2.41 million jobs. The selected industries for the next growth engine are artificial intelligence (AI) robotics, environmental-friendly cars and next-generation lithium batteries. Among the selected areas, the AI robot industry receives most attention from experts who predict that the robot sector can create the next driving force of the Korean economy after the semiconductor sector. ... experts in culture and journalism. In a bid to create a widened market for the robot sector, the government is also considering creating a robot theme park where people can experience the future with robots, a robot stadium and new commercial applications for robots."
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February 5, 2007: Robo-doggy paddle. Posted by Tom to New Scientist Technology Blog. "Sony's Aibo robotic dog is no longer in production, but Aibos are still loved by enthusiasts across the world. Some of them are also robotics researchers. The video below shows one of the more inventive Aibo experiments I've heard of - French students took one for a swim."
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February 6, 2007: Q&A: Suranga Chandratillake - A cofounder of Blinkx explains why Internet video matters and how his company can contribute to its growth. By Jason Pontin. Technology Review. "Last week, at Demo07, an annual conference that showcases new technologies and startups, Suranga Chandratillake, a cofounder and co-CTO of Blinkx (pronounced 'blinks'), was voted 'Demo God' by the show's attendees. The crowd was impressed not only by Chandratillake's intelligence, but also by Blinkx's technology, which allows users to search more than seven million hours of Internet video to find exactly the clip they want. ... Chandratillake's technique employs speech recognition, neural networks, and machine learning to create transcripts of the world's videos; then, the words spoken in the videos can be searched. The method creates much more relevant video-search results. ... TR: If video now constitutes 60 percent of Internet traffic (with some estimates saying that figure will rise to 90 percent within the decade), how much of that content is now searchable using Blinkx? Could you compare that with your competitors in video search, please? SC: Blinkx is content and source agnostic, which means that we're working to index all video content, wherever it exists on the Web, which makes us the biggest video-search engine. ..."
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February 6, 2007: New Bionic Leg Shows Promise for Amputees (television broadcast). Fox 5 News | MyFoxAtlanta. "It uses artificial intelligence and the latest technology. For amputees, it may be the biggest breakthrough in decades. A new bionic leg is being called the future of prosthetics. Click video [link in the text] for more information."
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February 8, 2007: Man or Machine? Part 1: Human or Robot? - Experts ask are robots the next step in evolution? Find out how intelligent machines will change the world we live in. Transcript of a WCHS8 ABC Eyewitness News television broadcast. "Today, artificial intelligence flies airplanes, makes financial decisions and aids in medical diagnoses. ... BACKGROUND: Today, artificial intelligence helps airplanes fly, makes financial decisions, and helps diagnosis medical conditions. Tom Mitchell, president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, says this about AI: 'Ever since computers were invented, it has been natural to wonder whether they might be able to learn. Imagine computers learning from medical records to discover emerging trends in the spread and treatment of new diseases, houses learning from experience to optimize energy costs based on the particular usage patterns of their occupants, or personal software assistants learning the evolving interests of their users to highlight especially relevant stories from the online morning newspaper.' The AAAI describes artificial intelligence as 'the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines.' Experts say AI is going to be increasingly important in our lives and it won't be long before AI allows man to increase his levels of intelligence."
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February 8, 2007: Robot Asimo learns how to jaywalk. By Ben Schaub. New Scientist (Issue 2590: page 24; subscription req'd). "At Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, James Kuffner and his team have developed software that can plan a route through a constantly changing environment. It is used to control an Asimo robot on loan from its Japan-based manufacturer, Honda. ... This is 'the world's first demonstration of autonomous footstep planning for walking humanoids in dynamic environments', says Kuffner. ... Kuffner's software can analyse up to 7000 possible steps per second. It constantly updates its plan as new information is received from the camera...."
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February 8, 2007: For R2D2 or T-800 lovers, a new degree awaits - SEAS will be the second school in the country where students can earn master's in robotics. By Helen Yoon. The Daily Pennsylvanian. "From Rosie the Maid to the Terminator, general interest in robots is nothing new. Studying them, however, has been less common - until now. Come fall semester, the School of Engineering and Applied Science will begin offering a master's program in robotics - the study of building, instrumenting and programming robots. ... Penn is the second university in the country to implement this type of program - Carnegie Mellon University already has one in place. ... According to the GRASP Web site, students will graduate the program with a proficiency in artificial intelligence, computer vision, control systems, dynamics and machine learning. Upon completion of the program, the Web site says, graduate students will be qualified to go into industries that focus on robotics-related skills, like aerospace and defense."
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