AI ALERT

29 April 2005

  
 

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The Headlines:

The Articles:

April 15, 2005: Automated mining still a dream. By Denis St. Pierre. Sudbury Star / available from CANOE.
"The use of artificial intelligence to create truly-automated machines remains decades away, an expert on the subject told a mining conference Monday. 'Why can't we make a machine that's a miner?' Marvin Minsky said in his address to the International Symposium on Mine Mechanization and Automation and Telemin 1 Conference at Laurentian University. 'We can make these big, powerful machines...but we cannot get the complete automation we'd like to get,' said Minsky. New approaches and greater resources are needed to develop computerized machines that can mimic the human capacity for common sense reasoning, he said. ... Increased automation will allow Inco to develop deeper ore bodies and possibly lower-grade ore that currently cannot be mined economically, [Peter] Jones said."
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April 15, 2005: IST project to grow first computer-based society. CORDIS News.
"The field of social simulation - which uses computer programmes to experiment on social systems - has grown steadily since its birth in the early 1990s. Due to computing constraints, however, research has until now focused on the development of simple social systems. But an international collaboration funded by the EU's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) is about to change that. The NEW TIES project (new and emergent world models through individual, evolutionary and social learning) aims to grow the worlds first full-blown society based on artificial computer-based individuals. The consortium includes leading researchers in artificial intelligence, language evolution, agent-based simulation and evolutionary computing, drawn from universities in the Netherlands, the UK and Hungary."
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April 18, 2005: Gordon Moore Looks Back -- And Forward. Intel co-founder coined computing's famous "Moore's Law" 40 years ago. James Niccolai, IDG News Service & PCWorld.com.
"Forty years after he coined the most famous law in computing, Gordon Moore still has a few words of advice for the industry. For software developers: Simplify! Your interfaces are getting worse. Nanotechnology? Don't believe the hype; silicon chips are here to stay. Artificial intelligence? Try again, folks! You're barking up the wrong tree. ... Asked about artificial intelligence, he said computers as they are built today will not come close to replicating the human mind because they were designed from the outset to handle information in a different way. Scientists need to figure out more clearly how the mind works, and then build a computer from scratch to mimic it. ... Still, they may mimic parts of human intelligence, such as the ability to recognize language and distinguish, for example, between when a person is saying 'two' or 'too.' 'I think when it recognizes language that well, then you can start to have an intelligent conversation with your computer and that will change the way you use computers dramatically,' he said."

  • Related article: Moore's Law original issue found. BBC News (April 22, 2005). "David Clark had kept copies of the magazine for years, despite pleas from his wife to throw them away. Now the couple are celebrating after collecting the $10,000 (£5,281) reward which was offered by chip maker Intel. ... 'We're delighted to at last have an original copy of the April 1965 edition of Electronics Magazine,' said an Intel spokesperson. ... Mr Clark, who admits he is 'a bit of a hoarder', collected the Electronics magazine issues, as well as others, after the Philips Central Library in the UK - now closed - started to clean them out. 'In the 70s, they started throwing out large quantities of these magazines,' he said. 'I was in my 20s at the time and thought you shouldn't throw them out because they are recording the golden age of electronics.'"

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April 18, 2005: Charlotte Mooers; helped users navigate early e-mail systems. By Nathan Hurst. The Boston Globe & Boston.com.
"Mrs. Mooers, a retired Cambridge science writer who was considered an expert on two of the earliest e-mail systems in the 1970s, died at the Courtyard Nursing Care Center in Medford on March 17 from complications of dementia. She was 80. ... Following her graduation in 1948 from Simmons College, Mrs. Mooers worked as a technical writer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and for her husband's firm, the now defunct Rockford Research in Cambridge, which performed some of the earliest studies on artificial intelligence and computer science. 'She was very involved with the Cambridge science community and AI [artificial intelligence] scene,' said her daughter Edith A. Mooers, of Melrose."
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April 19, 2005: Qatar to use robots as camel riders. By Tarek Al-Issawi. Associated Press / available from USA Today.
"With the reins in one hand and a whip in the other, the purple-jerseyed rider prodded a camel around the track Tuesday at a fast lope. But this boyish jockey attracted none of the ire heaped on camel owners whose beasts are piloted by underfed boys. The jockey was a robot. By 2007, rulers of this energy-rich emirate say all camel racers will be mechanical. ... Rights groups have called on Gulf states like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to ban children from the races. The countries have responded with laws that have thus far failed to fully uproot child jockeys from the sport. In Qatar, ruling sheiks have seized on robots as the best solution."

  • Also see this related cartoon (The universal language of sport. By Kurt Snibbe. ESPN.com. April 18, 2005) and these photos (Robots mount up for camel races. CNET News.com)

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April 20 / 27, 2005: Summarizer ranks sentences. By Kimberly Patch. Technology Research News.
"Because computers don't understand the meanings of words and sentences, automating the seemingly simple task of summarizing a news story using several sources is a major computer science challenge. Key to meeting the challenge is finding a way to identify the most important sentences from a set of documents on the same subject. Researchers from the University of Michigan have developed a multi-document summarization technique that compares sentences and has the effect of sentences voting for the most important among them. The method, dubbed LexRank, combines the content-sorting concepts of prestige and lexical similarity to find the most important sentences in a group of documents on the same subject. ... The researchers are planning to incorporate the method into their NewsInEssence Web site, which crawls the Web for news stories, clusters them into topical groups, and summarizes each group."
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April 20, 2005: Students rah, rah, rah their 'bot - Proud and of good cheer, young robot engineers gear up for world competition. By Katy Human. DenverPost.com.
"The group of nine, aged 10 to 14, unexpectedly won a state robot competition in January. Later this week, they will represent Colorado at an international contest of about 75 teams in Georgia. ... In middle-school robot competitions directed by FIRST - a science and technology education program established by Segway inventer Dean Kamen - it's not just robot performance that counts, said communications manager Marian Murphy. ... Also, teams had to write a research report, and that's where Reed's group really shined, team members boasted. 'We proposed this device that would help a person who is blind get across an intersection,' said Katrina Atkinson, 13. ... So the team wrote about building a small computer that would snap a picture of the 'Walk' or 'Don't walk' symbol, compare it with images stored in memory and indicate to its user whether it was safe to walk."
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April 20, 2005: 'Dormouse' Retells Silicon Valley History. Book review by Chris Nolan. eWeek.
"A new book chronicles the development of computer culture in political terms, showing that computer programmers were always aware of the world outside the office -- or the Valley. ... [John] Markoff's What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Computer Industry -- the title's from Jefferson Airplane's 'White Rabbit,' a paean to pills and other substances -- details the valley's early history, which involves computers, LSD, some marijuana and a lot of time in hot tubs and saunas, not to mention the occasional acts of civil disobedience and arrests for protesting against the Vietnam War. ... In this book they attend raucous parties, do a fair amount of LSD, smoke a goodly amount of marijuana and generally rabble-rouse, not just with machines but with household names from the era like Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead. 'If you were inside someplace like SAIL (the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab) it's a very social world,' says Markoff of one of the institutions that fostered these men and their work. 'It's a different kind of sociability.' ... All them share a few common understandings, primary among them that technology can -- and should -- make a difference in people's lives. Accompanying that belief is the conviction that technology will almost always change people's lives for the better."
  • Dropping Out and Booting Up. Perspective (opinion) article by John Markoff. The Mercury News (registration req'd.). April 24, 2005. "It often is said that the technologies that directly led to the personal computer were synthesized at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s. However, before PARC, many of the ideas and underlying technologies were pursued in laboratories located on opposite sides of Stanford University: one at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, now SRI International, and the other at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). During the '60s and early '70s, SAIL would contribute many of the best computer researchers and spin off almost as many companies as PARC. John McCarthy, who founded SAIL in the mid-1960s, was a pioneer in time-shared computing and invented the Lisp programming language."
  • Turn on, tune in, log on - The PC and the Internet sprang from pot-smoking, acid-dropping California dreamers. Book review by Ian Garrick . San Francisco Chronicle & SFGate.com. April 24, 2005. "John Markoff, a San Francisco technology writer for the New York Times, extends this visionary-centered narrative even deeper into the history of personal computing and the Internet. 'What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry' is an enthusiastic argument in favor of the idea that it was the uniquely Californian scene that brought forth the technologies we depend on so much today -- that the PC and the Internet sprang as much from a cultural environment of back-to-nature independence, personal freedom and psychedelic drugs as they did from engineering diagrams. ... Surprisingly, many of the basic technologies behind personal computing were products of artificial-intelligence research."
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April 23, 2005: Whatever happened to machines that think? By Justin Mullins. New Scientist (Issue 2496; pages 32 - 37).
"The first chatbot appeared in the 1960s. Back then, the very idea of chatting to a computer astounded people. Today, a conversation with a computer is viewed more on the level of talking to your pet pooch - cute, but ultimately meaningless. The problem with chatbots is a symptom of a deeper malaise in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). For years researchers have been promising to deliver technology that will make computers we can chat to like friends, robots that function as autonomous servants, and one day, for better or worse, even produce conscious machines. Yet we appear to be as far away as ever from any of these goals. But that could soon change. In the next few months, after being patiently nurtured for 22 years, an artificial brain called Cyc (pronounced 'psych') will be put online for the world to interact with. And it's only going to get cleverer. Opening Cyc up to the masses is expected to accelerate the rate at which it learns, giving it access to the combined knowledge of millions of people around the globe as it hoovers up new facts from web pages, webcams and data entered manually by anyone who wants to contribute. ... [Doug] Lenat's optimism about Cyc is mirrored by a reawakening of interest in AI the world over. In Japan, Europe and the US, big, well-funded AI projects with lofty goals and grand visions for the future are once again gaining popularity. The renewed confidence stems from a new breed of systems that can deal with uncertainty - something humans have little trouble with, but which has till now brought computer programs grinding to a halt. ... Where could the secret to intelligence lie? According to [Tom] Mitchell, the human brain is the place to look."

  • Also from this issue: Editorial - Time to think about artificial intelligence. New Scientist (Issue 2496; page 5. Subscription req'd.). April 23, 2005. "AI pervades our world and may soon start evolving faster than humans can track it - in whose hands should this awesome power reside? When it comes to emerging technologies, we know what we're afraid of, even though we may not know why. There is no shortage of public debate about genetically modified crops, nanotechnology and cloning. And policy makers have responded: many countries have laws that restrict the way these technologies can be used. So why the deafening silence about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence? Here is a technology that is already changing the world: AI is used in everything from guided missiles to air-traffic control. It is not yet 'intelligent' in the human sense, but that looks likely to change."

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April 24, 2005: Selling a software Holy Grail - The Sun last fall began tracking a Columbia startup, exploring the idea that launched the business. This installment focuses on the company's subsequent challenge: figuring out how to make money. Second in a series of occasional articles by Tricia Bishop. The Baltimore Sun.
"Sonum has developed an artificial intelligence that its staff believes could replace the mouse and keyboard of computers. The technology, they say, could drive computers in a way no one has yet been able to do -- by using normal speech. It has applications for the health care industry, operating systems suppliers, homeland defense and automated telephone interaction, they say. But convincing the marketplace, numbed by tech busts and unrealized promises, is a daunting project. For that, [Matt] Hitt knew changes would have to be made and a plan -- a solid, clear business plan -- put in place. ... The technology is based on work [W. Randolph 'Randy'] Ford completed while he was still in school. In the early 1980s, he had just finished work on his doctoral dissertation in artificial intelligence at the Johns Hopkins University: 'Natural Language Processing by Computer: A New Approach.' ... Would-be entrepreneurs, particularly those in the technology sector, have long made the mistake of falling under the spell of their own inventions. Believing creativity is enough to carry a company, too many executives neglect the design, discipline and strategies needed to transform ideas into bankable products. ... After shelving his work for two decades, Ford decided the time was right to resurrect the natural language processor in 2002. He incorporated a new company, first under the sanguine name Holy Grail Technologies. After a consultant complained about possible Monty Python associations, he settled on Sonum, Latin for sound. More important than the name choice was one decision that has made a world of difference: Ford didn't try to go it alone at the top. He brought on a businessman partner and co-founder: Hitt."

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April 25, 2005: AI's Next Brain Wave. New research in artificial intelligence could lay the groundwork for computer systems that learn from their users and the world around them. Part four in The Future Of Software series. By Aaron Ricadela. InformationWeek.
"Artificial intelligence, a field that has tantalized social scientists and high-tech researchers since the dawn of the computer industry, had lost its sex appeal by the start of the last decade. ... Now a new generation of researchers hopes to rekindle interest in AI. Faster and cheaper computer processing power, memory, and storage, and the rise of statistical techniques for analyzing speech, handwriting, and the structure of written texts, are helping spur new developments, as is the willingness of today's practitioners to trade perfection for practical solutions to everyday problems. ... Several industry trends also are helping move AI up on labs' agendas. The emerging field of wireless sensor networks, which have the potential to collect vast amounts of data about industrial operations, the ecosystem, or conditions in a building or home, could benefit from the use of AI techniques to interpret their data. ... InformationWeek took a look at four research labs working in artificial intelligence, at IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Xerox subsidiary Palo Alto Research Center. Instead of leading to another round of outsize expectations, this generation of research likely could lay the groundwork for a new breed of computer systems that learn from their users and the world around them."
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April 25, 2005: Thought control. By Doug Beazley. Edmonton Sun & CANOE.
"Canadian scientists are hard at work on mechanical limbs that are going to be a lot more like the real thing - maybe even better than the real thing. Further out, researchers forsee mind-machine 'interfaces' that could allow us to link up directly with computers. ... Most prostheses are passive machines, working on springs or electric motors and manipulated by the user like any tool. Victhom's bionic leg has both an electric motor and a built-in artificial intelligence computer. The AI gathers nerve data from sensors in the user's stump and from the natural leg, and moves the bionic leg by anticipating the user's intended movements. Instead of trying to interpret a signal from the brain, this leg does some of the user's thinking for him."

  • Companion article: Wired for the Furture. By Doug Beazley. Edmonton Sun & CANOE. April 25, 2005. "It could be the new 'ism' of the 21st century: cyborgism, discrimination against the machine-enhanced.In their wilder moments, transhumanists see humanity transcending biology by uploading consciousness into a computer and becoming both 'virtual' and immortal - the sort of idea that gives nervous fits to traditionalists. Political economist Francis Fukuyama, a member of the U.S. President's Council on Bioethics, recently damned transhumanism as the 'world's most dangerous idea.' ... Transhumanists counter by saying the new technologies can only benefit mankind if they're made available to everyone. But as computer science accelerates, [James] Hughes argues, people may have no choice but to augment their brains just to compete: we can't beat 'em, so we'll have to join 'em. 'If you consider the possibility of a self-aware machine intelligence able to modify itself, you could be looking at a Terminator-type scenario,' he said. 'We may be forced to augment ourselves just to cope with what's coming.'"

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April 27, 2005: Lecture sings praises of nanotech - The president of the Royal Academy of Engineering has added his voice to the debate about nanotechnology. In the fourth of his BBC Reith lectures Lord Broers debunks the myth that nanomachines could turn the planet into grey goo. BBC News.
"While some aspects of nanotech may need careful monitoring, other parts have been unfairly demonised, says Lord Broers. The idea of tiny machines self-replicating and breaking down biological material was first muted by Dr Eric Drexler, regarded by many as the father of nanotechnology. He has since refuted these claims. Lord Broers has added his voice to general scepticism that such machines could even be built let alone replicate. 'Our experience with chemistry and physics teaches us that we do not have any idea how to make an autonomous self-replicating machine at any scale,' he says."
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April 27, 2005: What's next jump in pet craze -- fleabots? Robotic pets, cloning, biological tinkering: We're a long way from Roy Rogers having Trigger stuffed. By Linton Weeks. The Washington Post / available from the Orlando Sentinel.
"Self-described robo-therapists and affiliated faculty members at Georgetown University, the Libins believe in the restorative value of animal companions. The catbot, they say, is easier for many people -- such as the elderly or allergy-prone -- to relate to than a real cat. Developed by Omron Corp. of Japan, the mecho-pets are not available in the United States, Libin says. They do not have to be fed or cleaned up. Variations of a teddy bear and a baby seal are being developed. ... Sherry Turkle, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and author of The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, says there is a huge future for robotic pets. She is convinced that people are responding to the new generation of robo-pets because people are basically lonely and vulnerable."
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April 29, 2005: "Everything is going well." Update from Sue (Harper) Todd to EverestNews.com.
"Everything is going well. It seems like a fairly average season up until now. ... It's very windy today, the weather has been in a pattern of sunny mornings, precipitation in the afternoons, so we're waiting for it to settle down a bit. Best Wishes, Sue ... Background: Henry Todd is returning to Mt Everest again in Spring 2005 to lead the Himalayan Guides 2005 Everest Expedition. ... Rob Milne is one of his climbers.... . Computer technology being developed at the University of Edinburgh will allow climber Rob Milne to respond rapidly to changing conditions and inform family and friends back home of his progress and any alterations to his plans. Dr Milne, a leading software engineer and entrepreneur, hopes to climb Everest in May and so join the elite group of mountaineers to have climbed the highest peak on each of the seven continents. ... The technology, developed at the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute in the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics, has been designed to provide computer support to people and teams performing a range of tasks – not just expedition teams operating in extreme conditions, but also key personnel involved in planning and rescue services responding rapidly to emergencies."

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May 2005: The Next Wave of Disruptive Technologies. Cover story by Jeff Moad. Managing Automation Magazine.
"Today, progressive manufacturers have an opportunity to change the course of their businesses by seizing emerging technologies, much like Henry Ford did when his company introduced the Model T in 1908. But which technologies have potentially game-changing power? This issue of Managing Automation answers that question by focusing on several emerging technologies and how manufacturers can use them to get ahead of the competition."

  • Related articles in the issue include:
    • Disruptive Technologies: Semantic Web. By Alan Alper. "'We're just now starting to see early success stories,' says Dr. James Hendler, a computer sciences professor at the University of Maryland (College Park, MD), the third co-author of the influential Scientific American article. He points to pilot projects at government agencies such as NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) where the Semantic Web's constructs are being tested. The real win, he says, will come when enterprises begin to use the technologies to enhance interoperability among company applications. So far, however, few are charging forward. 'It's like the guy with the first telephone; he's not happy until someone else has one,' Hendler says. 'We're just getting past that chicken and egg problem -- but at least we have a few chickens and a few eggs out there.'"
    • Disruptive Technologies: Automation Platforms. By Stephanie Neil. "A more attractive term for the technology is 'autonomous agents,' a type of software that incorporates information and artificial intelligence rules. These software agents are intended to be spread around various devices on a network where they can assess what's really going on outside of an operator's view and even negotiate how devices should interact based on the conditions they detect. Once they become low cost and ubiquitous, autonomous agents, in combination with secure industrial wireless mesh networks, new energy-reducing technologies and predictive diagnostic algorithms, will change the way manufacturers operate everything from the assembly line to recipe management. ... 'We have to make machines that learn and self-predict. I believe deeply that is the future of manufacturing,' [Jay] Lee says."

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