AI ALERT

31 March 2005

  
 

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The Headlines:

The Articles:

March 11, 2005: Humanoids With Attitude - Japan Embraces New Generation of Robots. By Anthony Faiola, with Akiko Yamamoto. Washington Post (registration req'd.) / also available from The Detroit News (Japan embraces new generation of robots; March 12, 2005) and from The Sydney Morning Herald (We, robot: the future is here; March 14, 2005).
"'I almost feel like she's a real person,' said Kobayashi, an associate professor at the Tokyo University of Science and [Saya,the cyber-receptionist's] inventor. Having worked at the university for almost two years now, she's an old hand at her job. 'She has a temper . . . and she sometimes makes mistakes, especially when she has low energy,' the professor said. Saya's wrath is the latest sign of the rise of the robot. Analysts say Japan is leading the world in rolling out a new generation of consumer robots. Some scientists are calling the wave a technological force poised to change human lifestyles more radically than the advent of the computer or the cell phone. ... In the quest for artificial intelligence, the United States is perhaps just as advanced as Japan. But analysts stress that the focus in the United States has been largely on military applications. By contrast, the Japanese government, academic institutions and major corporations are investing billions of dollars on consumer robots aimed at altering everyday life, leading to an earlier dawn of what many here call the 'age of the robot.' But the robotic rush in Japan is also being driven by unique societal needs. ... It is perhaps no surprise that robots would find their first major foothold in Japan. ... 'In Western countries, humanoid robots are still not very accepted, but they are in Japan,' said Norihiro Hagita, director of the ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories in Keihanna Science City near Kyoto. 'One reason is religion. In Japanese [Shinto] religion, we believe that all things have gods within them. But in Western countries, most people believe in only one God. For us, however, a robot can have an energy all its own.'"
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March 11, 2005: Droid rage - Society's fascination with robots pops up in movies, TV and elsewhere. By James Hebert. The Union-Tribune & SignOnSanDiego.com.
"As a society, we may not know exactly what we think about robots. But if the recent wave of robot-related creative works is any indication, we've been thinking about them plenty. ... Fear and fascination about our creations and their consequences date back way before the time of Frankenstein. What's maybe different now is that science is so much closer to realizing the prospect of artificial intelligence. Just in recent weeks, NASA scientists working on Mars projects have unveiled robots that can rappel down cliffs, take pictures, slip through cracks and detect danger. Even in our daily lives, as TiVos choose shows for their owners and laptops and iPods act as auxiliary brains for people on the move, the lines between humans and their tech tools seem to be getting blurred. 'I think there's a real preoccupation now with the borders of the human,' says Priscilla Wald, an English professor at Duke University who studies pop-culture depictions of science. ... In films such as 'Bicentennial Man' and Steven Spielberg's 'A.I.,' the robots 'all want to become human,' Wald notes. 'I think that's our fantasy -- that there is something really special about being human, and everything wants to become human.' On the flip side, she argues, robots make us uncomfortable by suggesting 'how mechanistic we actually are. A lot of the work in artificial intelligence is making that really clear.'"
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March 11, 2005: Where do i begin? By Stephen Pincock. The Financial Times (subscription req'd.).
"Cyborgs are all around us. ... The dictionary definition of a cyborg is 'an integrated man-machine system'. They turn up in movies as flesh and metal characters such as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, Darth Vader from Star Wars or, for those of an older vintage, Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man. The term emerged in the 1960s, coined by researchers interested in how humans could adapt to space travel. ... Instead, I want to focus on a definition of cyborg that relates to our use of technology in a more general way. It is a definition that has sprung from a scientific view of the way our mind works and how its functions extend beyond our brains. ... The man I most wanted to contact was a philosopher of cognitive science, Andy Clark, professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, and a leading proponent of the idea of the extended mind. Two years ago, Clark published a book entitled Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence, which explored the way that human minds interact with technology - from the pencil to web-enabled mobile phones. ... Clark argues that there is little significant conceptual difference between a highly accessible computer outside our body, and one implanted into our body. ... He urges us to give up the idea that the only things that matter about our minds are what goes on inside 'the ancient fortress of skin and skull'. Instead, technologies such as the internet should be seen as integral parts of the systems that constitute human intelligence."
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March 11, 2005: Why Pay to be an Identity Thief? Experimental Software Makes It Free. By Steven Cherry. IEEE Spectrum Online.
"The U.S. database industry is under a legal microscope following the pilfering of information that could allow thieves to steal the identities of hundreds of thousands of people. ... But why should an identity thief bother with an expensive charade? Carnegie-Mellon University associate professor of computer science, Latanya Sweeney, has found an even simpler way than paying a company in the personal database industry, which critics say is underregulated. She's found a way to extract all the data she wants for free from the World Wide Web. For over a decade, Sweeney has been exploring the intersection of technology and privacy. Her latest work builds on earlier Web-searching tools that create software agents to extract names, address, birth dates, and Social Security numbers from résumés posted online -- everything you need to apply for a new credit card in someone else's name. Sweeney will report her findings at a symposium devoted to national security sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and held at Stanford Univeristy, in California, 21 - 23 March. ... Obviously, if people are posting their Social Security numbers to the Web, and if doing so leaves them highly vulnerable to identity theft, then they ought to stop. Sweeney's work addressed that issue. The Identity Angel project, which she launched earlier this year, looks for e-mail addresses in those résumés, and sends individuals automated notices that their identity information was found online. She says a follow-up study showed that more than 90 percent of the people subsequently removed the information from the Web."

  • Automated web-crawler harvests resume info. By Celeste Biever. NewScientist.com news service (March 22, 2005). "A new search engine focused on people can automatically identify online information on individuals and weave it into detailed summaries. Just like Google and Yahoo, ZoomInfo crawls and indexes the web. But instead of serving up the pages in response to a query, it attempts to identify and extract specific information on people. ... InfoZoom deploys algorithms that pick out verbs and proper nouns to home in on names, [Michel Décary] says. ... Privacy experts have criticised the technology for aggregating information about people without their consent. But Décary says that the information collected only relates to employment and education and is freely available online to a determined searcher anyway."

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March 12, 2005: Review of Electronic Brains by Mike Hally. Reviewed by Barry Fox. New Scientist (subscription req'd.).
"Alan Turing may have been the godfather of the computer, but his instruction manual for an early computer built at the University of Manchester, UK, was not a good legacy. According to Mike Hally, Turing's 'help file' was so complicated and full of errors that 'anyone without Turing's mathematical brain would struggle to follow it'. Just like some modern manuals, in fact. Hally has travelled the world recording interviews with people who knew first-hand how the first electronic computers were built in the 1940s and 1950s."
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March 12, 2005 [issue date]: AI am the law. The Economist Technology Quarterly (pages 34 - 46; posted online March 10, 2005).
"Given the choice, who would you rather trust to safeguard your future: a bloodsucking lawyer or a cold, calculating computer? Granted, it's not much of a choice, since neither lawyers nor computers are renowned for their compassion. But it is a choice that you may well encounter in the not-too-distant future, as software based on 'artificial intelligence' (AI) starts to dispense legal advice. Instead of paying a lawyer by the hour, you will have the option of consulting intelligent legal services via the web. While this might sound outlandish, experts believe that the advent of smart software capable of giving good, solid legal advice could revolutionise the legal profession. ... What makes both these programs so smart is that they do more than just follow legal rules. Both tasks involve looking back through past cases and drawing inferences from them about how the courts are likely to view a new case. To do this, the programs use a combination of two common AI techniques: expert systems and machine learning. ... [S]mart software has the potential to make legal advice more readily available, unnecessary court battles less frequent, and rulings more consistent."
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March 12, 2005 [issue date]: United we find. The Economist Technology Quarterly (pages 26 - 30; posted online March 10, 2005).
"Collaborative filtering software is changing the way people choose music, books and other things, by helping them find things they like, but did not know about. ... But while this might sound like a job for an internet search engine, keyword-based search engines (such as Google) have a fundamental constraint: they can only help you find something if you already have an idea of what it is. Two people's idea of 'good music' may differ substantially, but Google would return the same results to both of them. To find things you might like, but are not already familiar with, requires a different technology, known as 'collaborative filtering'. This increasingly pervasive technology looks for patterns in people's likes and dislikes, and uses those patterns to help people find things they did not know they were looking for. Computer scientists term this task, in a welcome respite from jargon, 'find good things'. Collaborative filtering also has the power to do the converse, 'keep bad things away', for instance by filtering unsolicited commercial e-mail messages, or spam. ... Dave Goldberg and his colleagues at Xerox PARC, who also coined the term 'collaborative filtering'.... Where the user of a search engine is on a solitary quest, the user of a collaborative-filtering system is part of a crowd."
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March 13, 2005: Q&A with CEO of SpikeSource. Kim Polese, chief executive of SpikeSource, spoke recently with staff writer Matt Marshall. The Mercury News (registration req'd.).
"Q: What would you say to high school girls and students? A: I'd say this stuff is fun, and that you can't have a more exciting career than in the technology industry. It's dynamic, it's changing all the time, you're exploring new ground, you're creating new inventions...I got turned on to technology because I was fortunate enough to live in Berkeley and go the Lawrence Hall of Science when I was a little girl, and started playing on computers, and just got hooked, because it was a mystery. There was a program called Eliza, one of the early artificial intelligence programs, which was a psychiatrist, with whom you could have a conversation online. At a certain point she would screw up and go into an infinite loop. I loved making her do that, and trying to figure out what's behind this. That was my first exposure to computers."

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March 14, 2005: History Is Going, Going, Gone - We risk losing the thrill of viewing and touching the actual papers handled by geniuses. By Steven Levy. Newsweek / available from MSNBC.
"Almost 30 years ago I came to possess a little piece of computer history. At the time, it seemed to me a fairly straightforward handwritten letter acknowledging my request to terminate an apartment lease, with instructions on how I could recover my security deposit. What I did not know then was that my landlord, a fellow with the unforgettable name of J. Presper Eckert, was a pioneer of the digital era, a co-inventor of one of the first operational electronic computers. The idea that this note might qualify as a historical artifact dawned on me a couple of weeks ago as I examined the 254 lots in the 'History of Cyberspace' collection auctioned at Christie's on Feb. 23."
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March 14, 2005: This net is child's play for elite high schoolers. By Carolyn Duffy Marsan. Network World.
"Meet the upperclassmen at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the nation's premier technical high school, which is affectionately known as TJ. The 30 students who hang out in TJ's Computer Systems Lab are likely to be the next generation of computer masterminds. ... 'In my opinion, it's the best public high school in the nation,' says Marilee Jones, admissions director at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which accepts as many as 20 TJ students each year. 'All their programs are strong . . . but they have such excellent, excellent teachers there in computer science.' TJ's four-year computer science program includes courses in artificial intelligence and supercomputer applications. ... What's special about TJ's computer science program is its hands-on approach."
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March 17, 2005: Getting Girls to Excel - GEMS conference provides ways to encourage girls to take math and science courses. By Mirza Kurspahi. Reston Connection - Connection Newspapers.
"The enrollment in computer science classes and programs in Fairfax County Public Schools between 1997 and 2003 was 76 percent boys, 24 percent girls. In 1984, women constituted 37 percent of those who received computer science degrees from universities and colleges, while today the percentage is down to 27. Dogwood Elementary School, in cooperation with Lockheed Martin, its corporate sponsor, and the American Association of University Women (AAUW) sponsored a conference for fifth- and sixth-grade girls to encourage them to take math and science classes. Girls Excelling in Math and Science (GEMS) started in 1991 through the AAUW. ... The conference, held on Saturday, March 12, hosted 27 hands-on workshops for the fifth- and sixth-grade girls. They were taught by professional women in fields of math and science, including employees of NASA and Lockheed Martin, among others. ... Elizabeth Vandenburg, the co-presenter of the workshop and the co-director of AAUW's Tech Savvy Girls Project, said it is important to show the girls the math and science jobs are not boring. 'You don't just sit behind computers the whole day -- you work on teams,' she said. ... Vandenburg's co-presenter, Laura Jones, urged the parents to change their daughters' outlook on computer scientists."
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March 20, 2005: 'Dark Hero of the Information Age' - The Original Computer Geek. By Clive Thompson. The New York Times Sunday Book Review (registration req'd.).
"To be a truly famous scientist, you need to have a hit single. Einstein had E = mc2. ... But there's another kind of scientist who never breaks through, usually because while his discovery is revolutionary it's also maddeningly hard to summarize in a simple sentence or two. He never produces a catchy hit single. He's more like a back-room influencer: his work inspires dozens of other innovators who absorb the idea, produce more easily comprehensible innovations and become more famous than their mentor could have dreamed. Find an influencer, and you'll find a deeply bitter man. Norbert Wiener -- the inventor of 'cybernetics' -- is precisely this type of scientist. Odds are that you are only dimly aware of cybernetics, if at all. ... Cybernetics is the science of feedback -- how information can help self-regulate a system. ... Wiener created the idea that scientists could measure information in a system and tweak it for optimal efficiency. The idea resonated in every field. The anthropologist Margaret Mead began studying cultural taboos as flows of self-regulating information inside a society. Wiener used his feedback theory to create an antiaircraft gun that tracked a plane in the air as if it were alive. ... Like Einstein, he issued dark social warnings about the misuse of science and technology, including his own. In his two most popular books -- 'Cybernetics' and 'The Human Use of Human Beings' -- Wiener warned that mass media were concentrated in too few hands, and were losing their power as a feedback device for society. Appalled by the atom bomb, he defiantly refused to accept any government money for research."
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March 20, 2005: Computers gain power, but it's not what you think - Performing complex tasks at lightning speed is the machine's greatest strength; thinking, intelligence still in our heads. By Jon Van. Chicago Tribune.
"[Donald] McLellan uses software called Watson, developed at Northwestern University and marketed by Chicago's Intellext Inc., which is part of a new wave of programs that provide computers with something akin to human intelligence. But these programs do not think for their users. Rather, after decades of trying to create machines that can think, researchers now just want to make computers that are less stupid. The results are impressive. ... Computers have long been likened to human brains, sparking fears and hopes that someday a collection of silicon and wires would think like a person. But even today's most powerful units are not smart enough to tie a shoelace or do anything most human 4-year-olds accomplish thoughtlessly. Even so, escalating computing power enables machines to recognize patterns and operate in ways that seem eerily intelligent. ... Northwestern professor Kristian Hammond, a co-founder of Intellext, was active in the artificial intelligence branch of computer science for years at Yale University and the University of Chicago before joining Northwestern. He no longer embraces the notion of intelligence commonly shared by artificial intelligence researchers. 'That model is that people have a clear, crisp idea of what they're thinking,' Hammond said. 'Our model is that there's never a clear idea; often it's just a collection of ideas in a context. You change the context and you change the intelligence.' A similar philosophy is at work at NICE Systems Inc., a Rutherford, N.J., firm that records call center conversations to monitor for quality. Its software can determine when a caller becomes emotional and can recognize specific words."
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March 20, 2005: Q&A with Mark Dean - director of IBM's Almaden Research Center spoke about his research, his work on the original IBM personal computer and promoting African-Americans' interest in science. By Therese Poletti. The Mercury News (registration req'd.).
"Q What kind of research is IBM Almaden working on right now that excites you? A We are starting down the path of thinking about things like recording my day. ... The key is not the recording of the information, but the key is being able to have a vast store of this, where I can go back and reference it, and use it for personal improvement on how I work, or just for reference. ... You want software that automatically tags and creates what we call meta data -- data that says what this data is -- so I can go back and find it. ... Q You are a rare African-American very high up in the engineering ranks in technology. Do you go out to try and get more blacks interested in science? A It's a big part of my time, spare and otherwise. IBM has a tremendous amount of effort in promoting and recruiting minorities in engineering and the sciences. We believe that the industry needs to mimic society. We need to mix, we need to match the mix that exists in society, or we won't be able to produce products that get to all of our constituency. We have a heavy push. I'm so serious that I'm looking for every minority Ph.D. graduate that is coming out of school, from computer science, electrical engineering, chemistry, physics, and maybe a few others. But I need to find every under-represented minority. We have blacks, Hispanics, American Indians. I want to hire every one of them. The good and the bad is that it's possible because there aren't that many. ..."
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March 23 / 30, 2005: Tool turns English to code. By Kimberly Patch, Technology Research News.
"Writing software has been relatively difficult since people began programming computers in the mid-1900s. Although programming a computer is eminently useful -- it gives you fine control of a powerful tool -- it requires learning a programming language. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are aiming to remove this requirement. They have taken a step toward that goal with a language-to-code visualizer dubbed Metafor. The visualizer uses natural language instructions to sketch the outlines of a program. It can be used as a programming learning tool and to provide rough drafts of programming projects, and could lead to more complete programming-by-natural-language methods. ... While the logic of the researchers' interpreter tackles only about 20 percent of the problem of full natural language programming, it achieves about 80 percent of the perceived rewards, said [Hugo] Liu."
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March 24, 2005: A New Company to Focus on Artificial Intelligence. By John Markoff. The New York Times (registration req'd.).
"Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky ... plan to announce the creation of Numenta, a technology development firm that will conduct research in an effort to extend Mr. Hawkins's theories. ... Artificial intelligence, which first attracted computer scientists in the 1960's, was commercialized in the 1970's and 1980's in products like software that mimicked the thought process of a human expert in a particular field. But the initial excitement about machines that could see, hear and reason gave way to disappointment in the mid-1980's, when artificial intelligence technology became widely viewed as a failure in the real world. In recent years, vision and listening systems have made steady progress, and Mr. Hawkins said that while he was uncomfortable with the term artificial intelligence, he believed that a renaissance in intelligent systems was possible. He said that he believed there would soon be a new wave of software based on new theoretical understanding of the brain's operations. 'Once you know how the brain works, you can describe it with math,' he said."
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March 26, 2005: Everest climber aims high with city software. By Fiona McGlynn. Edinburgh Evening News & Scotsman.com.
"A mountaineer is set to conquer Mount Everest with the help of pioneering software created in a Capital lab. Dr Rob Milne will be the first climber to use the life-saving technology in his attempt to tackle the world’s highest peak next month. Designed by Edinburgh University engineers, the IM-PACs (intelligent messaging, planning and collaboration) system will help Dr Milne to make critical choices during his trek. The system is designed to help climbers adversely affected by altitude sickness to make life or death decisions about their journey. ... Professor Austin Tate, the technical director of Edinburgh University’s Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute and a friend of Dr Milne’s, devised the IM-PAC. He said: 'Any attempt on Everest requires a lot of co-ordination and planning before, during and after the expedition. This makes such extreme expeditions good examples of the kind of thing we wish to support with IM-PACs and AI planning technology.'"
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March 30, 2005: Only the ethical need apply - In the heavily automated workplace of the future, a keen sense of right and wrong will become a highly valued job skill. By Susan Llewelyn Leach. The Christian Science Monitor.
"The 'great global brain drain' is how futurist Richard Samson describes it. As the century progresses, he predicts, more and more jobs will be sucked up by technology and sophisticated computers, forcing humans to hone skills machines can't duplicate - at least not yet. Qualities such as ethical judgment, compassion, intuition, responsibility, and creativity will be what stand out in an automated world. ... [W]hile artificial intelligence can perform numerous job functions, it brings no ethical considerations to bear on the tasks performed - a skill that Samson predicts will actually become more crucial as the world increases its reliance on technology. It's still a big leap from where we are today to a world in which white-collar, know-how jobs are largely being performed by computers. But Samson proposes that this will happen by century's end and points out that history offers interesting precedent."
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March 31, 2005: Talking tech with Bill Joy. By Dawn Kawamoto. CNET News.com.
"CNET News.com recently spoke to Joy about the use of technology in industrial societies and about venture capital prospects in the tech business. Q: Since your Wired piece in 2000, have you come to any firm conclusion about whether technology is going to wind up as a force for good or evil in the 21st century? Joy: It certainly seemed to have heightened an awareness of terrorism and also heightened the awareness of the possibility of the abuse of technology. Technology can also be a force for incredible good. We face a lot of problems that we'd like to address with technology, such as the threat of the flu endemic."
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March 31, 2005: The Evolution of Warfare - New robots take the battlefield in the miltary's bid to revolutionize the army despite fears from roboticists. By Michael Kan. The Michigan Daily.
"[T]he military’s newest recruit comes not from the ordinary military training camp but off the technological assembly line. Originally slated for deployment in Iraq this month, but postponed to an unspecified later date, the remote-controlled SWORDS, or Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection, is set to become the first armed mobile robot to see offensive ground combat. ... History Prof. Nicholas Steneck and faculty associate of the Office of Vice President of Research at the University who specializes in ethics in science, said the scientific issues like the usage of military robots needs to be brought to the attention of the public. 'The issue of a making war easier or more difficult to pursue is an important one that has been and needs to be debated,' he added."
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April 2005: La Vida Robot - How four underdogs from the mean streets of Phoenix took on the best from M.I.T. in the national underwater bot championship. By Joshua Davis. Wired (Issue 13.04).
"The robot competition (sponsored in part by the Office of Naval Research and NASA) required students to build a bot that could survey a sunken mock-up of a submarine - not easy stuff. The teachers [at Carl Hayden Community High School] had entered the club in the expert-level Explorer class instead of the beginner Ranger class. They figured their students would lose anyway, and there was more honor in losing to the college kids in the Explorer division than to the high schoolers in Ranger. Their real goal was to show the students that there were opportunities outside West Phoenix. The teachers wanted to give their kids hope. ... They hope to see all four kids go to college before they quit teaching, which means they're likely to keep working for a long time. Since the teenagers are undocumented, they don't qualify for federal loans. And though they've lived in Arizona for an average of 11 years, they would still have to pay out-of-state tuition, which can be as much as three times the in-state cost. They can't afford it."
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April 2, 2005 [issue date]: Software agents give out PR advice. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist (Issue 2493; page 24).
"Governments and big business like to indulge in media spin, and that means knowing what is being said about them. But finding out is becoming ever more difficult, with thousands of news outlets, websites and blogs to monitor. Now a British company is about to launch a software program that can automatically gauge the tone of any electronic document. It can tell whether a newspaper article is reporting a political party's policy in a positive or negative light, for instance, or whether an online review is praising a product or damning it. Welcome to the automation of PR. ... Previous attempts to automate this kind of analysis have used one of two techniques. In the first, called machine learning.... The alternative is the lexicon approach.... Corpora has come up with a program called Sentiment, which uses algorithms to tease out grammatical components, such as nouns, verbs and adjectives, and identify the subjects and objects of verbs."
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April 13, 2005 [broadcast date]: Robot Pals. Scientific American Frontiers television broadcast on PBS.
"To be really useful, robots need to behave as a cooperative partners rather than mindless machines. We'll meet three robots - including a future member of an astronaut team - that are trying to better understand us."
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