Welcome 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, these articles have been collected from a variety of sources and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of AAAI and its membership, or even the greater AI community. Please remember that just because we referenced a news item and extracted a given excerpt, you should not infer that.... 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:

• Human after all? - Guardian Unlimited Online
• Machines' way with words - BBC News
• Robots Tackle Living Room and Battlefield - Associated Press
• I invented AI - New Scientist (letter to the Editor)
• 'Smart' homes not far away - CNN (plus two related articles)
• Low-tech valet parking gets high-tech treatment - USAToday
• Pentagon envisions electronic office assistant for busy human bosses - Knight Ridder Newspapers
• Man-Machines of Loving Grace - LA Weekly (interview)
• Tech-minded kids pass up canoes for computers - Associated Press (plus one related article)
• Play It Again, Vladimir (via Computer) - The New York Times
• Mt. Everest 2005 - Robert William Milne dies on Everest - EverestNews.com (plus three related articles)
• What Women Want - Equality remains an ideal in science and technology - Red Herring (plus three related articles)
• IBM Aims To Simulate A Brain - Forbes.com (plus two related articles and one collection of related images)
• Redefining the Power of the Gamer - The New York Times (plus one related article)
• Semifinalists Named in Desert Robot Race - Associated Press (plus one related article)
• A case of mistaken identity crisis - The Times Online
• Early Computing's Long, Strange Trip - American Scientist Online (book review)
• From the Deck of the AI News Clipper: Kate Murphy's "Trapped with Robots," with an accompanying In Memoriam by James Hendler. From the current issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems.

The Articles:

May 26, 2005: Human after all? Science fiction becomes reality as, for the first time in the UK, robots will be free to interact with the public at the London Aquarium. By Rob Sharp. Guardian Unlimited Online.
"A variety of robots - which look as if they would be more at home in a scene from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and include a 1.7 metre-tall fibreglass humanoid and a teddy bear - will meet and greet visitors to the building this summer. A team of four from the University of Essex is in the last stages of programming three robotic tour guides for the London Aquarium, situated in County Hall's basement. For the first time in the UK, robots will be left to interact with the general public by studying their faces, movements and voices. People will then be able to ask the mechanised helpers questions about exhibits using chest-high touch-sensitive screens and voice-recognition technology. ... The team behind the robots is understandably nervous about how their metal friends will be received. Cardy says: 'There's still a profound difference between the perception of robots in the UK and somewhere like Japan, where inanimate objects are often thought to have souls. Most people here see robots as a novelty.' Not everyone is happy with the rise of the robots. Richard Pughe, from Chingford, Essex, who regularly visits the aquarium with his daughter Isabel, says: 'I think it's terrible. Why can't people do the same job? It all started with the vending machine. I say bring back the dinner lady.'"
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May 28, 2005: Machines' way with words. By Stephen Evans. BBC News.
"It has happened to most of us. The phone call you make to your bank is answered by a talking machine. It asks questions, you answer and then it asks more questions. Voice recognition systems are becoming more prevalent... and scarily efficient. ... Banks, phone companies, railways and all kinds of alleged helplines, are spending a lot of money trying to find out what kinds of voices they should give the machines that speak to us, the public, on their behalf. Much of the research is conducted in a small room - Room 325 in McClatchy Hall at Stanford University in California. It is the site of the dryly entitled but fascinating Laboratory for Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media, which is the domain of a genial, enthusiastic professor called Clifford Nass who studies how people and machines get on, particularly when the machines talk to the people."
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May 30, 2005: Robots Tackle Living Room and Battlefield. By Mark Jewell. Associated Press / available from The Los Angeles Times / also available from HoustonChronicle.com (iRobot co-founder's perseverance pays off).
"Watching the original 'Star Wars' movie as a mathematically inclined 11-year-old, Helen Greiner dreamed of someday creating a robot like the heroic R2-D2. After enduring plenty of lean years chasing that elusive vision as a co-founder and chairman of iRobot Corp., Greiner can now boast a product that whirs and chirps much like the character she to this day calls her 'personal hero.' The Roomba vacuum cleaner may be incapable of fixing an X-wing fighter like Luke Skywalker's trusty droid, but 1.2 million of the disc-shaped robotic housekeepers have been sold in 25 countries in the last 2 1/2 years. For Greiner, the success of the Roomba and of IRobot's military machines validates the transformation of robots from the stuff of fantasy to practical tools. ... Greiner stresses the PackBot's defensive role, but technologies that IRobot and other defense contractors are developing are expected to lead to front-line robots -- including unarmed reconnaissance rovers that lead soldiers into buildings and help direct gunfire, and armed and autonomous robots that do the shooting themselves. ... Such prospects have raised ethical concerns, and run counter to a principle -- that robots should not harm humans -- outlined by classic science fiction author Isaac Asimov in his 1950 anthology, 'I, Robot' -- the namesake of Greiner's company."
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May 28, 2005: I invented AI. Philip Woodward Malvern's letter to the Editor. New Scientist (Issue 2501: page 27).
"The term 'Artificial Intelligence' was not coined by John McCarthy as stated in your brief history of AI (23 April, p 35), though the conference at Dartmouth College in 1956 (which I did not attend) was probably the occasion of its first public use. In the first semester of that year, I was a visiting lecturer at Harvard...."

• See the related article in the April 29th AI ALERT

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May 31, 2005: 'Smart' homes not far away. By Julie Clothier. CNN.
"Eneo Labs general manager Javier Zamora told CNN that the company was constantly developing its smart home technology, which would become increasingly common in the future. He said smart houses were able to predict the user's routine and adapt accordingly. 'For centuries we have been building homes using only concrete and bricks, and more and more we need to provide 'intelligence' for our homes because we want those spaces to adapt to the user's requirements,' he said. Zamora said smart houses had two main components: an 'information network,' which was like a human body's nervous system in that all devices inside the house would be connected to it; and a 'brain,' which co-ordinated what was inside the home and connected it to what went on outside. 'Somehow the house will learn from the user's daily routine. Basically, the brain is a computer that is in the wall of the home. It's listening and adapting to the routines we have,' Zamora said."

• Access all areas. The Engineer. May 31, 2005. "[N]ow a UK-based research project called MAPPED (Mobilisation and Accessibility Planning for People with Disabilities) is aiming to develop an integrated system to allow the disabled to find out more about access to buildings in their area. The researchers claim the project will also be the UK's first real example of ambient intelligence technology being put into practice. ... Data is collected and filed by the system for use by the disabled user, covering content including transport, tourism and leisure, work, business and education. The system can adapt itself according to the user's preferences, habits and the context in which it is being used, said Simon Edwards,senior research associate at the University of Newcastle. 'The system uses intelligent agents which are autonomous pieces of software that can learn from the user and present them with information they didn't even know they needed.' ... For some time, the concept of ambient intelligent technology has been a computer scientist's pipe dream, divorced from realistic applications and without the technology behind it to become a practical solution. But MAPPED will put the technology to practical use, and the University of Newcastle's [Phil] Blyth claimed the project is just the start of the use of ambient intelligence in the UK."
• Making SMART Homes Smarter. AZoBuild. June 2, 2005. "A University of Ulster researcher is at the cutting edge of innovative technology designed to make homes smarter. Dr Juan Carlos Augusto, a lecturer in the School of Computing and Mathematics says the research area could have major implications, particularly for elderly or vulnerable people living alone. Based at the University's Jordanstown campus, Dr Augusto specialises in the area of Artificial Intelligence and recently his research has focused on 'Ambient Intelligence' - which uses technology to increase the range of services that buildings can provide for their occupants. ... According to Dr Augusto, while there are many houses advertised as 'Smart Homes', it would be hard to say how many actually deserve the label - as this depends on where the line is drawn between something behaving intelligently or not. The market for Smart Homes technology is growing, particularly in Northern Europe, the USA and Japan. Some charitable trusts in the UK like the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust have basic Smart Homes functioning to provide independent living to elderly people."

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June 1, 2005: Low-tech valet parking gets high-tech treatment. By Chris Woodyard. USAToday.com.
"For Computerized Valet Parking Systems, the latest technology is the ability for the system to automatically read license plates. That came through a partnership with another firm, Active Recognition Technologies in Phoenix, about a year ago. Among other things, having the capability allows the system to know how many times a vehicle has come on the property previously. Casinos can use the license-plate-recognition technology not only to keep track of cars, but also to let casinos instantly know who is pulling up to the front door. ... The next goal is to make the system even more sophisticated. Instead of just recognizing license plates, the next generation could include the ability for the computer to automatically discern makes and colors of cars."
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June 1, 2005: Pentagon envisions electronic office assistant for busy human bosses. By Robert S. Boyd. Knight Ridder Newspapers / Knight Ridder Washington Bureau.
"With a strong push from the Pentagon, computer scientists are trying to create an artificial 'personal office assistant' that's smart enough to handle routine tasks for a human boss, military or civilian. The researchers aim to build an electronic system that understands human language, takes and remembers instructions, learns from its experiences and copes with unexpected situations. ... The office assistant program is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Pentagon unit that pioneered such once blue-sky developments as the Internet, stealth aircraft and microelectronic machines. DARPA Director Anthony Tether told the House Science Committee last month that his agency is moving into the field of 'cognitive computing,' meaning computer systems that 'perceive, reason and learn,' not just crunch numbers and manipulate data. The Pentagon project is called PAL, an acronym for 'personalized assistant that learns.' 'Cognitive systems that learn to adapt to their users could dramatically improve a wide range of military operations,' said Ronald Brachman, the director of DARPA's Information Processing Technology Office. 'They could learn and even improve on their own.'"
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June 3 - 9, 2005: Man-Machines of Loving Grace - Kraftwerk return! By Jay Babcock. LA Weekly.
"Next Tuesday, German electronic-music pioneers Kraftwerk will perform in Los Angeles for the first time since their now-legendary show at the Hollywood Palladium in 1996. ...We all know Kraftwerk songs -- odes to transportation like 'Autobahn' and 'Trans-Europe Express,' future/now manifestoes like 'Man/Machine' and 'The Robots' -- but it's in the live context, where the songs are joined to specially designed graphics, that Kraftwerk achieves a purity of all-encompassing vision that secular music rarely touches. It's all about rapture, and an interaction with -- or longing for -- a relationship with something other than human. On the telephone, Ralf Hutter -- co-founder of Kraftwerk with Florian Schneider, and now approaching 60 years of age -- is helpful and deliberate, like a professor pleased to have a visitor who's interested in his research on an obscure subject. L.A. WEEKLY: There's a bumper sticker that says 'Drum machines have no soul.' Do you think that is true? ... Would you consider the Kraftwerk concept to be basically optimistic about the relationship between man and machine? ... There’s an almost universal fascination with machines and computers, but at the same time, isn't there a cultural fear of the future, of machines taking over? A fear of cyborgs? ... What do you think about artificial intelligence? Do you think it's possible that a machine can become sentient? ... When you let machines play at concerts -- especially when there are actual robot versions of Kraftwerk onstage in place of the humans -- when you do that, and the audience applauds at the end of the song, what are the people applauding for?..."
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June 3, 2005: Tech-minded kids pass up canoes for computers. By Seth Sutel. Associated Press / available from TheJournalNews.com.
"With the summer camp season fast approaching, kids across the country will be stocking up on hiking shoes, bug spray and other necessities for adventures in the great outdoors. Thousands of others, however, will be enjoying adventures of the indoor variety: creating video games, building robots and designing Web pages. Computer camp, as it was known to an earlier generation, just isn't what it used to be. With the booming growth of video games, the Internet and digital media, technology-minded kids have an enormous variety of things to learn at technology camps, which are often taught on the campuses of major universities. ... Camp administrators say enrollment is up from last year.... And while the kids are on the computers for five to six hours a day, the instructors also take them outside for activities to break up the day."

• Teachers tinker with robots at workshop. By Jenny Lee Allen. HeraldTribune.com. May 28, 2005. "[Linda] Chambers joined about two dozen teachers from Manatee, Sarasota and Polk counties at a workshop at Lakewood Ranch High School on Friday to learn how to bring more robotics lessons into the classroom. ... Each summer, local school districts hold workshops to keep teachers up-to-date on technology. 'Technology changes so fast,' said Arnall Cox, a career and tech education curriculum specialist in Sarasota County. Last year, teachers from Manatee and Sarasota counties attended a 10-day workshop taught by a robotics expert from Brigham Young University. Gov. Jeb Bush's office heard about this year's workshop and offered to pay for three Manatee County teachers to attend a BattleBots IQ Teacher's Institute course this summer."

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June 5, 2005: Play It Again, Vladimir (via Computer). By Anne Midgette. The New York Times (registration req'd).
"This is the new world of computer music. In its infancy, way back in the 1960's, the goal was to use digital technology to create new sounds and new musical forms. Today scientists around the world are turning computers on human performance, seeking to quantify an element once thought to be intangible: the expressivity of a human artist. ... The reactions demonstrate a basic difficulty with mechanical reproduction of music: there is a subjective element involved in determining if it works. The final criterion for any such reproduction is the rather imprecise 'Turing test' of artificial intelligence: that is, whether it can make the listener think he or she is hearing a person rather than a machine. At the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a group of leading researchers known as the Machine Learning, Data Mining and Intelligent Music Processing Group are trying to pinpoint just what it is that fools the ear. Led by Gerhard Widmer, they are looking at everything from improving the way computers 'hear' music to isolating the elements of individual performance style, as well as creating graphs and animations to illustrate different pianists' interpretations of the same passage of music. In a 2003 paper, 'In Search of the Horowitz Factor,' Dr. Widmer and his team described giving the computer 13 recordings of Mozart piano sonatas, played into a Bösendorfer Disklavier by the pianist Roland Batik, to see if they could use the computer to determine rules that described the pianist's interpretive choices. ... [T]here's still the thorny matter of how to get data from an audio recording into the computer. It's a question not just of having the computer play back a CD, but of translating the music into a language the computer can understand. A computer, by itself, can't recognize the difference between a note of music and a cough."
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June 5, 2005: Mt. Everest 2005 - Robert William Milne dies on Everest. EverestNews.com.
"As per the report of Liaison Officer and the concerned trekking agency, the following one member ... died at the altitude of 8450 m. on the way to the summit of Mt. Everest on 5th June 2005. 1. Mr. Robert William Milne (49 yrs.), Software Engineer, Livingston, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. ... EverestNews.com spoke with Rob several time before he left for Everest. ... Rob was very interested in new technology that might save climbers lives."
UPDATE: "Rob's expedition leader Henry Todd has sent EverestNews.com the following message: 'Just below the Balcony he suddenly collapsed, and was found to have died instantly of a sudden heart attack. ...'"

• Everest resting place for climber. BBC News (June 6, 2005). "Mrs Milne said her US-born husband had died while fulfilling his lifetime dream. She said: ...'Robert died at the top, doing what he loved. That brings me some comfort.'... Professor Austin Tate told BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland programme that Dr Milne had a distinguished career as a scientist, working for a period as the Pentagon's chief scientist on artificial intelligence (AI). He said: 'Rob was very well known in all of the communities he played a part in. I'm part of the academic and scientific work he did on artificial intelligence but he was involved in so many other activities in Scotland - in business, the information technology sector, the mountaineering sector. He really was one of the strongest people engaged in AI applications throughout Europe. He'd formed a very successful business and had been doing this work for several years.'"
• Robert William Milne, artificial intelligence pioneer and mountaineer; born July 13, 1956, died June 5, 2005. By Polly Purvis. The Herald (June 7, 2005). "Rob Milne was one of the key figures promoting applications of artificial intelligence over the past 25 years and was instrumental in moving artificial intelligence (AI) from the computing research laboratory out into the world of industry. A member of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence and the British Computer Society, he was chairman of the European co-ordinating committee for artificial intelligence, the largest AI umbrella organisation in the world. He was a member of the national committee for the British Computer Society specialist group on artificial intelligence. He was also a director of ScotlandIS, the trade body for the software industry in Scotland. ... He led the development of Intelligent Applications' key product, Tiger, a knowledge-based gas turbine condition monitoring system since its inception and was responsible for its commercialisation, which is now on a global scale."
• Rob Milne: Single-minded AI scientist. Obituary by Alan Bundy and Austin Tate. The Independent. June 9, 2005. "Milne's life was characterised by setting very ambitious goals and single-mindedly pursuing them until he succeeded. His prominence in AI and software engineering and the achievements and accolades that followed are testament to his vision and tenacity. He led, inspired and befriended many of the people he met."
• Also see these related articles from the March 31st & April 29th AI ALERTs.

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June 6, 2005: What Women Want - Equality remains an ideal in science and technology. Experience and the numbers suggest it is still a dream. Red Herring.
"More than a few of our readers will ask why we’re focusing on the status of women in technology at this particular time. Marissa Mayer's story about looking for a job may help you better understand our reasons. Ms. Mayer, a computer science graduate of Stanford University, wanted what a lot of brand-new jobseekers want -- a welcoming environment and an intellectual challenge. But she saw something puzzling at many of the companies where she interviewed. ... It appears that the role of women in technology is far from settled. Technology, an equalizer in many ways, has yet to balance the numbers of men and women working. Five years into the 21st century, the percentage of women in the sciences is considerably less than their presence in the general work force. Even fewer women hold leadership roles at technology companies and science centers. ... The female presence is stronger when you step down from the executive suite to the lab and the computer center. In 2003, women accounted for 10.4 percent of all computer hardware engineers and 7.1 percent of electrical and electronics engineers in the United States. They fared better as computer and information systems managers, making up 30 percent of the work force in this category. The best news about new technology talent is at the undergraduate level, where U.S. women now outnumber men in earning engineering and science degrees. If you look at the nearly 27,000 engineering graduates in the same year, 21.4 percent are women. ... These numbers are rooted in the choices girls are encouraged to make as early as grade school, say many women who have survived -- and even thrived -- in high tech."

• New Group Aims To Get Women Into Top IT Research Posts. BCS e-Bulletin (Archive Issue 100). June 1, 2005). "A group aiming to get more women into top IT research posts in industry and universities has been launched with backing from the BCS and the likes of Microsoft, Intel, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The women@CL –- Women in the Computer Laboratory - initiative says 33% of women IT researchers aspire to research management jobs, compared with only 22% of men –- but they account for just one in 20 computing professors, one in eight researchers and one in four PhD students. ...'Women@CL has been formed to encourage, support, inform and celebrate women who are or plan to work in computing research or academic leadership in industry and academia. Computing research is an exciting, important and social activity, and transforms the world we live in. It's about creating the technology we use every day, like search engines or mobile phones, or figuring out the answers to big questions such as how to get computers to recognise emotions or what is going on in the human genome.' [says campaign director Ursula Martin, computer science professor at London University's Queen Mary College]."
• Grad shooting for stars. By Sally Mesarosh. The Gilbert Republic / azcentral.com. June 2, 2005. "A few decades ago, Steffanie Kuehn's career choice of electrical engineering might have been considered unusual. In today's workplace, stereotypes are no longer as likely to influence a student's career goals. Kuehn, 18, a recently graduated senior at Gilbert High School, will be pursuing a degree in electrical engineering at Brigham Young University with an eye toward a doctorate in astrophysics. 'I want to go into artificial intelligence,' said Kuehn, who scored a perfect 1600 on her SAT. 'I'm interested in helping build technology that goes into space, like probes that make decisions on their own.' ... Non-traditional career paths such as Kuehn's can offer both men and women broader opportunities and greater job satisfaction. The U.S. Department of Labor defines non-traditional careers as occupations where at least 75 percent of the workers are of one gender. For women, jobs traditionally held by men offer wages 50 to 75 percent higher than traditional female-dominated jobs. But Department of Labor statistics show that 15 percent of the 58 million women in the workforce are employed in non-traditional occupations such as auto mechanics, firefighting or engineering. Debbie Graham, career technician at Mountain Pointe High School in Ahwatukee Foothills, said she finds that high school students haven't been educated about non-traditional classes as much as they should be. 'When I walk into computer networking or programming classes, they're all male,' Graham said. ... Graham said the time for parents and teachers to begin pointing out non-traditional career options is before students enter high school. She said the state plans to build more information on non-traditional career options into the career curriculum."
• Shattering Myths That Women Can’t Be Leaders in Science. Spelman College release available from Newswise. June 8, 2005. "Spelman College students are defying the myth that women are not equipped to be leaders in the sciences. Countless hours of computer programming in between hitting the books have paid off for these students, who have earned the College a coveted spot in an international competition. From July 13-19, 2005, the all-female team will be in Osaka, Japan, for RoboCup 2005, where they will compete against 23 other academic institutions from around the world that have also programmed Sony AIBO robot dogs. The Coca-Cola Company is sponsoring the team to ensure they have the resources needed to successfully compete in this prestigious competition. ... Spelman President Beverly Daniel Tatum, Ph.D., and the Spelman community are proud of the SpelBots, the name for the Spelman team. 'The opportunity for six young Black women to lead a robotics team in international competition is so fantastic, and such a great testament to what is possible when the expectations are high,' said Dr. Tatum. 'It speaks to the continued importance of an institution like Spelman. We still need environments where those who have been historically left out are expected to succeed without the barriers often associated with gender or race, particularly in science and technology.'"

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• Mission to build a simulated brain begins. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist News. June 6, 2005. "An effort to create the first computer simulation of the entire human brain, right down to the molecular level, was launched on Monday. The 'Blue Brain' project, a collaboration between IBM and a Swiss university team, will involve building a custom-made supercomputer based on IBM's Blue Gene design. The hope is that the virtual brain will help shed light on some aspects of human cognition, such as perception, memory and perhaps even consciousness."
• Modelling the brain - Grey matter, blue matter. The Economist. June 9, 2005. "The first serious attempt to build a computer model of the brain has just begun. ... Henry Markram, the boss of the Brain Mind Institute, and the leader of the EPFL's side of the collaboration, stresses that Blue Brain's formal goal is not to build an artificial intelligence system, such as a neural network. Nor is it to create a conscious machine. The goal is merely to build a simulacrum of a biological brain. If the outputs produced by the simulation in response to particular inputs are identical to those in animal experiments, then that goal will have been achieved. On the other hand, he also says, 'I believe the intelligence that is going to emerge if we succeed in doing that is going to be far more than we can even imagine.' Watch this space."
• Images: Mapping the human brain. CNET News.com.

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June 7, 2005: Redefining the Power of the Gamer - The first Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment conference explored a future where games are driven as strongly by characters as combat. By Seth Schiesel. The New York Times (registration req'd.).
"Standing outside the apartment on Thursday, Walter could hear the barbs and retorts of a failed marriage's final throes. Walter's friends, Grace and Trip, had invited him over. ... This is the future of video games. In their modern riff on 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' Walter was the only human. Grace and Trip were virtual characters powered by advanced artificial intelligence techniques, which allowed them to change their emotional state in fairly complicated ways in response to the conversational English being typed in by the human player. It was one version of the future here this past week at the first Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment conference. It is a future where games are driven as strongly by characters as combat, where games are as much soap opera as shooting gallery and as much free-form construction set as destruction arena. The apartment drama, a 15-minute interactive story called 'Facade' that is scheduled to be released free next month (interactivestory.net), was one of the demonstrations offered to the roughly 120 game makers and academic computer experts who attended. 'As we try to create more immersive experiences, these artificial intelligence techniques are helping drive games forward and this is one of the areas that could really explode,' Bing Gordon, chief creative officer at Electronic Arts, the No. 1 video game company, said after his talk Wednesday night. 'We hope that the folks here start thinking about artificial intelligence as a feature, like graphics is a feature or sound is a feature.'"

• Video-game industry mulls over the future beyond shoot-'em-ups. By Gloria Goodale. The Christian Science Monitor. June 3, 2005. "Video games are no longer the geeky stepchild of popular entertainment. Last year, US sales of what is now called 'interactive entertainment' topped $7 billion, closing in on the $9 billion film industry. Throw in a host of other measurements, say those who study popular media, and what used to be the noisy baby in the backseat is now helping steer the entire culture, technologically and creatively. ... Perhaps most important, interactive entertainment is changing the way an entire generation sees itself in relation to the world, expanding popular storytelling beyond passive consumption to include involvement in the development and outcome of an experience. ... Peer Schneider, editorial director of IGN.com, a game website, points to the emerging world of educational and training software being used in venues such as hospitals ('Escape from ObeezCity,' a game to teach children about obesity) and the military ('America's Army'). All these tap the sophisticated interactive tools developed by the video-game industry."

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June 7, 2005: Semifinalists Named in Desert Robot Race. By Alicia Chang. Associated Press / available from Newsday.com.
"Let the battle of the machines begin again. Forty self-navigating robots were chosen Monday to compete in the Oct. 8 sequel to last year's first-ever robot race across the Mojave Desert. Only half of the semifinalists will qualify for a spot on the starting line, based on how they maneuver -- without human help -- through a series of obstacle courses. ... This year's semifinalists include most of last year's participants vying for a second chance. The teams, which come from 16 states and Canada, include individuals, universities, corporations and a high school. Nearly 200 teams applied for this year's race. The so-called Grand Challenge contest is sponsored by the research and development arm of the Pentagon known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to foster the development of unmanned vehicles that could be used in combat."

• Battlefield robots saving lives, proving their worth in Iraq. By Byron Spice. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. June 9, 2005. "One measure of how effective battlefield robots have become, says a top Pentagon robotics official, is that the enemy has begun to target them. ... The success with small ground robots, as well as with unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, has bolstered confidence as the armed forces move toward larger vehicles, such as Carnegie Mellon's 1-ton Gladiator recon robot, which will have longer range and, eventually, operate autonomously. ... Autonomous ground navigation is a technical 'tough nut,' [Cliff] Hudson said, which is why the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has targeted that technology with its Grand Challenge race. ... Many robotics firms are small businesses, Hudson said, so the Pentagon has begun a mentor-protege program, matching the small, young companies with large, experienced military contractors."

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June 8, 2005: A case of mistaken identity crisis - People afflicted with multiple personalities reveal that the idea of the self is a fiction. Comment by Matthew Syed. The Times Online.
"Pamela, the subject of a haunting documentary on Channel 4 tonight, developed a novel, if somewhat disquieting, mechanism to cope with her sadistic upbringing: she created new selves. ... What about the notion of the self as instigator of action? We naively suppose that we consciously decide to move, and then move. When Benjamin Libet conducted an experiment on voluntary action in 1985 he found that the brain activity began about half a second before the person was aware of deciding to act. The conscious decision came far too late to be the cause of the action, as though consciousness is a mere afterthought. Many reacted to this with astonishment. Why? Did they really suppose the body was animated by some ghostly mini me lurking behind the brain? A more plausible theory is that which is emerging from both biology and artificial intelligence. As Daniel Dennett, the philosopher, puts it: 'Complex systems can in fact function in what seems to be a thoroughly 'purposeful and integrated' way simply by having lots of subsystems doing their own thing without any central supervision.' The self, then, is not what it seems to be. There is no soul, no spirit, no supervisor. There is just a brain, a dull grey collection of neurons and neural pathways -- going about its business. The illusion of self is merely a by-product of the brain's organisational sophistication. Seen in this light, DID [Dissociative Identity Disorder] is neither a philosophical absurdity nor a medical fantasy but a vivid demonstration of the infinite adaptability of the human mind in the quest for survival."
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July / August 2005: Early Computing's Long, Strange Trip. Jaron Lanier's review of What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, by John Markoff. American Scientist Online.
"Does history matter? ... Let's focus the question more narrowly: Does the history of computers as we experience them -- the history of the user-interface design, for instance -- matter? I say yes. Like Shakespearean English, the computer is a tool that must be understood in depth to be deeply useful, and the richer the information about context, the richer the understanding. ... Markoff's book covers the years 1960 to 1975 and the area south of San Francisco around Stanford University that would later come to be known as Silicon Valley. ... The book also captures an important early conflict between two cultures of computing that seemed compatible on the surface but actually had opposing aims. On the one side was the human-centered design work of Engelbart, based initially at the Stanford Research Institute, and on the other was artificial intelligence culture, centered on the Stanford AI lab. Engelbart once told me a story that illustrates the conflict succinctly. He met Marvin Minsky -- one of the founders of the field of AI -- and Minsky told him how the AI lab would create intelligent machines. Engelbart replied, 'You're going to do all that for the machines? What are you going to do for the people?' This conflict between machine- and human-centered design continues to this day. What might all this mean to young engineering students? At the very least, this book will probably serve as a hedge against complacency."
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FROM THE DECK OF THE AI NEWS CLIPPER: Trapped with Robots: a wonderful article from the current issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems written by Kate Murphy (1987 - 2005), with an accompanying In Memoriam by James Hendler.

PLEASE NOTE: Though we have tried to provide you with links that will be active when you receive this ALERT, be advised that news articles have a tendency to quickly relocate or disappear. The good news, however, is that most articles have several incarnations such that an online search will usually lead to another source. For more information, please see our News FAQ.

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