AI ALERT

27 July 2006

  
 

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

The Headlines:

The Articles:

Some of the many articles about AI@50, AAAI-06 & IAAI-06:

  • July 16, 2006: Dartmouth Marks AI Anniversary - Scientists gather to commemorate coining term ‘artificial intelligence’ 50 years ago. By E. Cubarrubia. Red Herring. "Long before 'AI' was the name of a maudlin Steven Spielberg flick saved only by Jude Law’s gigolo android, the term was a sparkle in the eyes of 10 researchers who met 50 years ago. Now Dartmouth is commemorating that occasion. ... Ms. [Neena] Buck said elements of artificial intelligence have been successfully introduced to the masses; for example, consider Google’s ubiquitous search engine. 'The founders of Google came from Stanford’s AI labs,' she said."

  • July 17, 2006: AI Reaches the Golden Years. By David Cohn. Wired News. "Artificial intelligence is 50 years old this summer, and while computers can beat the world's best chess players, we still can't get them to think like a 4-year-old. This week in Boston, some of the field's leading practitioners are gathering to examine this most ambitious of computer research fields, which at once has managed to exceed, and fall short of, our grandest expectations. 'Artificial intelligence has accomplished more than people realize,' said futurist Ray Kurzweil. 'It permeates our economic infrastructure. Every time you place a cell phone call, send an e-mail, AI programs are directing information.' ... AI technology is used by banks to police transactions for fraud, by cell phone companies for voice recognition, and by search engines to scour the web and organize data. Beyond business, programs like Artificial Intelligence in Medicine help doctors diagnose and treat patients, while vision-recognition programs scan beaches and pools and alert lifeguards to signs of drowning. ... Today, AI is still in its infancy, making it difficult to tell just what to expect in the future. 'It took more than 100 years between Mendel and deciphering the genetic code, and even that wasn't the end of genetics,' said Stanford's McCarthy. Keeping things in perspective, the conference this week isn't aimed at figuring out how to reach singularity but will present research papers from leaders in the field of AI on practical applications and breakthroughs. There will also be robot competitions and exhibitions, including a robot poker tournament that aspires to eventually produce a program capable of beating the world's best Texas Hold 'Em players."

  • July 18, 2006: Brainy Robots Start Stepping Into Daily Life. By John Markoff. The New York Times (registration req'd). "Robot cars drive themselves across the desert, electronic eyes perform lifeguard duty in swimming pools and virtual enemies with humanlike behavior battle video game players. These are some fruits of the research field known as artificial intelligence, where reality is finally catching up to the science-fiction hype. A half-century after the term was coined, both scientists and engineers say they are making rapid progress in simulating the human brain, and their work is finding its way into a new wave of real-world products. The advances can also be seen in the emergence of bold new projects intended to create more ambitious machines that can improve safety and security, entertain and inform, or just handle everyday tasks. ... Today some scientists are beginning to use the term cognitive computing, to distinguish their research from an earlier generation of artificial intelligence work. What sets the new researchers apart is a wealth of new biological data on how the human brain functions. 'There’s definitely been a palpable upswing in methods, competence and boldness,' said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who is president-elect of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. ... 'There is a new synthesis of four fields, including mathematics, neuroscience, computer science and psychology,' said Dharmendra S. Modha, an I.B.M. computer scientist. 'The implication of this is amazing. What you are seeing is that cognitive computing is at a cusp where it’s knocking on the door of potentially mainstream applications.'"

    • Also see the related popup timeline: From Fantasy to Fact. The New York Times (July 18, 2006).

      • Correction (July 21, 2006): "A chart with the continuation of a front-page article on Tuesday about advancements in the research field known as artificial intelligence misstated the year in which a robot at Kawasaki killed a Japanese mechanic because of a malfunction. It was 1981, not 1985."

  • July 18, 2006: AI conference returns to College after 50 yrs. By Alex Belser. The Dartmouth Online. "Fifty years after a group of about 10 young scientists first met to start the nascent field of artificial intelligence, some of them returned for a fiftieth anniversary conference this weekend entitled AI@50, the Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Conference: The Next Fifty Years. ... [T]he original Dartmouth conference brought together key people to identify the scope of possibilities for 'artificial intelligence,' a field that did not even have a set name before McCarthy coined it in the 1956 conference title. Even then, the field showed promise. Attendees Allen Newell and Herb Simon developed a system they called 'Logic Theorist' that reasoned one particular mathematical proof better than its designers, proving that computers could out-think humans. 'It felt like it was magic,' Ray Solomonoff, one of the original group who returned to Hanover this weekend, said. 'The idea that a machine could do things that before we thought only humans could do, that was sort of a breakthrough.' Since then, computers have tackled calculus, chess and even had some success at translating languages. There are robots that can vacuum without human assistance."

  • July 18, 2006: Google exec challenges Berners-Lee. Director of Search says Net pioneer's Semantic Web vision could be hamstrung by incompetent Web masters. By Candace Lombardi. CNET News.com. "On Tuesday, Berners-Lee, the father of the Web and the current director of the World Wide Web Consortium, gave the keynote on artificial intelligence and the Semantic Web at a conference sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). He said the next stage of the Web is about making data accessible for artificial intelligence to locate and analyze. A Semantic Web, a Web with linked data easily readable by machines, would make available more knowledge for reuse in serendipitous applications by people and organizations who are not the ones who originally created or published the information, Berners-Lee said. ... At the end of the keynote, however, things took a different turn. Google Director of Search and AAAI Fellow Peter Norvig was the first to the microphone during the Q&A session, and he took the opportunity to raise a few points. 'What I get a lot is: "Why are you against the Semantic Web?" I am not against the Semantic Web. But from Google's point of view, there are a few things you need to overcome, incompetence being the first,' Norvig said. Norvig clarified that it was not Berners-Lee or his group that he was referring to as incompetent, but the general user. ..."

  • July 19, 2006: Robots get smart (photo essay). CNet News.com. "An exhibition illustrating the application of artificial intelligence in robots was featured as part of the jointly held 2006 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 2006 Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence. The conference takes place this week in Boston."

  • July 19, 2006: AI Believers Tout Optimism for Technology. By Brian Bergstein. The Associated Press / available from FOXNews.com. "With artificial intelligence marking its 50th anniversary, it's tempting to recall how the technology has proven to be overhyped. But at the American Association for Artificial Intelligence annual meeting this week, AI evangelists were touting ways that a confluence of factors could put computer learning at the heart of a smoother-running world. ... Perhaps the biggest reason for today's optimism is the Web's emergence as an ever-richer storehouse of knowledge for AI programs to mine and reuse. During a break in the conference, Microsoft Corp. researcher Eric Horvitz, the AAAI president-elect, illustrated by tapping a handheld computer showing a map of Seattle highways. Combining real-time road sensor data with historical information about weather patterns, traffic flows at certain times of day and even pro sports schedules, the color-coded map was indicating how long drivers could expect to wait before gridlock hit each artery. The program can signal when drivers would be surprised, pleasantly or unpleasantly, by conditions on a certain road. That Microsoft program, known as JamBayes, is one of many aimed at turning computers into discreet assistants."

  • July 20, 2006: Newsmaker - Divining AI, and the future of consumer robotics. Sebastian Thrun led his Stanford team to victory in the DARPA robot-car race. How long will it be till we see such cars on the street? By Candace Lombardi. CNET News.com. "Last fall, Sebastian Thrun led the Stanford University Racing Team to victory in the DARPA Grand Challenge, sponsored by the U.S. Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. "Stanley," Stanford's robotic car, drove autonomously across 131.6 miles in the Mojave Desert. With its car averaging 19.1 miles per hour, the team took first place in the challenge, completing the course in six hours and 53 minutes--11 minutes faster than the second-place robot led by the team from Carnegie Mellon University. Recently, Thrun was named a Fellow by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. CNET News.com sat down with Thrun to talk about artificial intelligence and the future of consumer robotics. ... [Q:] Briefly, what technological advances in artificial intelligence are needed to make a home assistance robot a reality? ... [Q:] What are the next likely applications we will see in consumer robots? ... [Q:] You've said again and again that your goal is to produce self-driving cars. Aside from military use and safety reasons, why do you think this is so important? Why not just make cars that implement safety features to avoid crashing? ... [Q:] Do you think it's part of your job as a guiding force in robotics to choose to develop projects that could be beneficial to society instead of things that are of particular interest to you as an intellectual? ... [Q:] CNET News.com interviewed Stanford professor John McCarthy about the 50th anniversary of artificial intelligence. In that interview, he talked about formalizing common-sense knowledge and reasoning as the next goal. What do you think is the next big thing to accomplish in AI? ..."

  • July 20, 2006: The Wisdom of Robots. By David Cohn. Wired News. "You have to watch where you're walking at the artificial intelligence conference here this week -- you might trip over a roaming robot or bump into one flying around the room. Celebrating the 50th anniversary of AI, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence has gathered leaders in the field from around the world to present research and give students a chance to square off in robot competitions. The bot bakeoffs included a scavenger hunt and a poker tournament. ... The conference wasn't all fun and games; it was also a chance for AI's best minds to discuss the field's future. At one discussion, Tom Mitchell, chair of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, wagered a lobster dinner concerning the fate of AI in 10 years. 'By 2016, we will have an AI program that can read 80 percent of the factual content on the web,' Mitchell wagered. If that's achieved, it would dramatically change the face of AI, he said, creating a never-ending language-learning system fueled by the web. By extracting more and more knowledge from the web, it would read better every day, forever improving itself, he said. ... The predictive capabilities of AI also have experts at the conference foaming at the mouth with possibilities. By mining vast amounts of data about what happened in the past, AI can try to determine what's going to happen in the future. ... In his keynote address Tuesday about winning the Darpa Grand Challenge, Stanford roboticist Sebastian Thrun talked about what has been called the greatest achievement of robotics in the last decade."

  • July 24, 2006: Artificial Intelligence - Past, Present, and Future. By Susan Knapp. Vox of Dartmouth. "Fifty years ago this summer, a small group of scientists gathered for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, which was the birth of this field of research. To celebrate the anniversary, more than 100 researchers and scholars again met at Dartmouth for AI@50, a conference that not only honored the past and assessed present accomplishments, but also helped seed ideas for future artificial intelligence research. ... [Photo] Five of the attendees of the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence reunited at the July AI@50 conference. From left: Trenchard More, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Oliver Selfridge, and Ray Solomonoff. (Photo by Joseph Mehling '69)."

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July 18, 2006: New video systems aid cops, fight terror. By Jessica Taylor. United Press International.
"New surveillance technologies can revolutionize the war on terror and crimefighting techniques, a tech company executive told UPI. ... Previously, closed circuit television was used to recreate events in trials or to help law enforcement officers ascertain evidence, but such mechanisms could not be used for crime prevention unless a security guard was watching the cameras with the utmost attention and could then notify authorities. [Ian] Ehrenberg said human fallibility prevents such methods from being reliable. Where human error can fail, using technology as an alterative can act as a deterrent, he said. 'No city can afford to have police officers everywhere. It's just not economically possible,' Ehrenberg said. 'Criminals are sophisticated enough to know that when the officers are. When there are eyes in one spot, they'll go somewhere else. Technology is becoming the way around that.' By using 'artificial intelligence' technology, anything out of the ordinary can be instantly reported and the appropriate steps may be taken, Ehrenberg said. The systems store ordinary movements or objects so they do not falsely trigger the system, he said."

  • Also see:
    • Feds sharpen secret tools for data mining. By Matt Kelley. USA Today (July 20, 2006). "U.S. intelligence agencies have invested millions of dollars since 9/11 on computer programs that search through financial, communications, travel and other personal records of people in the USA and around the world for connections to terrorism, according to public records and security experts. The software is designed to find links between terrorism suspects and previously unknown people; track the international flow of money, operatives and materials; and search for clues in the worldwide communications over phone lines, wireless connections and Internet links. ... One surviving TIA program is a data-mining software development effort led by researchers at the University of Connecticut. The software, called Adaptive Safety Analysis and Monitoring (ASAM), was designed to uncover patterns of terrorist activity and suggest ways to intervene and stop terrorist plots. ASAM is meant to computerize the tedious work of examining reams of data to find links that may reveal terrorism, such as travel or communication patterns, says Peter Willett, one of the University of Connecticut researchers. 'I heard someone say that an intelligence analyst's job is like watching 100 channels of TV at a time, looking for the right information,' Willett says. 'If we can tell them what channel to tune to, we'd be doing our job.'"
    • Four Universities to Collaborate on New Homeland Security Research. U.S. Department of Homeland Security press release (July 25, 2006). "The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced today the selection of a team of four universities to conduct research on advanced methods for information analysis and to develop computational technologies that contribute to securing the homeland. ... The discrete sciences apply the methods of discrete, or finite, mathematics to computer science. Their focus is developing simpler, more efficient software algorithms and architectures for use in a broad range of computing applications. The University Affiliate Centers will be studying such topics as knowledge representation, natural language processing, text or information extraction, uncertainty quantification, and high-performance computing architectures. These will be applied by the Science and Technology Directorate to address problems in information analysis, decision support, risk analysis, critical infrastructure protection, bioinformatics, and computational biology."
    • Big Brother 101 - Could your social networks brand you an enemy of the state? By Noah Shachtman. Popular Science (August 2006 issue). "HOW: Using social-network analysis (the study of how people interact) and data-mining techniques (such as pattern-recognition algorithms) first used for artificial intelligence and consumer marketing. ... Does this stuff REALLY work? Data-mining techniques regularly help investigators identify credit-card-fraud and money-laundering patterns. And research in 2002 by social-network-analysis pioneer Valdis Krebs showed how the 9/11 plotters were all linked (some hijackers were separated by as many as 10 degrees, he found), but that was, alas, after the fact. Predictive data mining to preempt terrorist networks or activities hasn’t been publicly proven so far."

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July 20, 2006: A good robot has personality but not looks. By Celeste Biever. New Scientist (Issue 2561; subscription req'd).
"Robots are poised to enter our homes, schools and hospitals as cleaners, educational aides and medical assistants. So how can designers ensure we make the most of our robotic helpers? Two new studies suggest robots need to act more like humans, but not look too much like us, if we are to accept them into our lives."

  • Also see: Putting a face on android science by exploring an uncanny valley - Informatics researcher, IU scientists poised to present at international conference. Indiana University press release (July 20, 2006). "We might be more responsive to robots designed to look human rather than mechanical, but other factors may determine what causes us to accept or shun these virtual humans. 'Recent evidence indicates that androids are better able to elicit human norms of interaction than less humanlike robots or animated characters,' said Karl F. MacDorman, associate professor at the Indiana University School of Informatics. 'However, there's a heightened sensitivity to defects in near humanlike forms -- an uncanny valley in what is otherwise a positive relationship between human likeness and familiarity.' ... 'Android science has great potential to help cognitive neuroscientists, and social and cognitive scientists understand human beings as well as improving medical training,' MacDorman said. 'We might be using androids, but what we're really studying is ourselves -- what motivates us and how we interact with one another as humans.' MacDorman and Ishiguro are organizing a long symposium on July 26 at the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society in Vancouver, Canada. 'Toward Social Mechanisms of Android Science' brings together some of the world's experts in robotics and the behavioral sciences. Information about the session is at www.androidscience.com, as is a full text of MacDorman's paper on the robot video clips."
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July 21, 2006: AI Programs Grading Student Essays. By Bary Alyssa Johnson. PC Magazine.
"Professors at colleges and universities across the country are giving their students an opportunity for academic advancement via a variety of Web-based essay grading programs. SAGrader and MY Access! are among a handful of automated essay scoring programs that offer writing tips and feedback for students that want to improve their scholastic standing through a revision and re-writing process. ... Students can access the program online or through participating schools for a one-time fee of $19.00 per student per course. The fee offers unlimited access to SAGrader, enabling students to rework and revise their papers to the point of perfection. 'Students like the program because they like the immediate advice and ability to rewrite the paper,' [Ed] Brent said. 'It is also good for students who wait until the last minute to write their papers because they can get help late at night when their teacher is unavailable.' ... MY Access! analyzes student essay and offers feedback in five domains including focus and meaning, organization, content and development, language use and style, and mechanics and conventions. The program offers academic advice in multiple languages including English, Spanish, and Chinese. A Japanese version will be available in the near future. 'We combine Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology and natural language understanding concepts to train the engines to understand how to score accurately,' Barfoot said. 'Essay scoring itself is a small piece of the entire puzzle. It's all of the feedback and learning on top of that which is really the application itself.'"

  • Also see: Can a computer teach art? By Tim Whitmire. The Associated Press / available from The Austin American-Statesman (July 26, 2006). "I stared at the computer screen, aghast. I had just scored five out of a possible six points on Criterion, a computer program designed to evaluate and grade writing from college freshmen. ... Through personal accounts, students can submit drafts of papers to the Web-based program and get feedback on what needs work. Professors can let the program grade a student's writing, freeing the professor to focus on content in a paper, exam or essay. ... I looked around. A couple of those kids were still hanging around the computer lab. Surely they would see the madness of allowing a mass of silicon chips to judge one's writing, the most essential flowering of one's intellectual core. Ashley Anderson, 18, had gotten a 3 on her essay. How'd she feel about it? 'It was quick. I liked that,' she said. 'I think it said something about my concept.' ... When I spoke with Donna Hollenbach, a product manager at ETS, on the telephone, she explained that ETS developed Criterion as an aid to both students and faculty. 'We developed it for students because there is a growing need for students to improve their writing skills,' she said. 'We've got a huge and growing population of kids that need remediation in order to do college-level work.' She said Criterion uses 'natural language processing' -- which she described as an offshoot of artificial intelligence -- to analyze different linguistic features in a piece of writing. ETS has spent the last decade-plus refining the program, which merges analysis and constructive feedback. ETS uses real-life student essays that have been scored by humans to 'teach' Criterion what an essay should read like at grade levels from 4th through college -- and how to recognize, say, a 6th grade '2' or a sophomore year '5.'"

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July 25, 2006: AI set to exceed human brain power. CNN.com.
"Mention Artificial Intelligence and most people are immediately transported into a distant future inspired by popular science fiction. Humankind either co-exists in blissful peace with subservient robots and conscious computers or faces a battle for survival against ultra-smart psychotic machines set on its destruction. Yet Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already been with us for half a century. The phrase was first coined by Professor John McCarthy for a conference on the subject at Dartmouth College in 1956. And while the AI fantasies imagined by science fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov, author of 'I, Robot,' may not have materialized, AI is already in more common usage than many of us might imagine. Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the UK's Oxford University, said that AI-inspired systems were already integral to many everyday technologies such as internet search engines, bank software for processing transactions and in medical diagnosis. ... In the short-term, developments in AI are likely to lead to more mundane technological improvements, such as more intuitive search engines and more sophisticated pattern recognition software. Yet Bostrom is confident that technological advances coupled with a growing understanding of the workings of the human brain could enable machines to exceed human brain power within a couple of decades."

  • Also see: Man-Machine Merger Arriving Sooner Than You Think [radio broadcast; audio available]. NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday (July 23, 2006). "Imagine a world where the combination of faster computers, networks, and amplified human intelligence could bring about a change so radical that those who follow will no longer be human. Some futurists and science fiction writers envision that world coming to pass, not hundreds of years from now but in the next generation. And they call this event the Technological Singularity. From member station KUSP, Rick Kleffel tries to get a glimpse of an un-seeable future." Guests: Professor Vernor Vinge and science fiction writer, Cory Doctorow.

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July 25, 2006: The Mozart Code. By Kate Taylor. The New York Sun.
"By the time 'Enlightenment' is unveiled on Thursday evening at 10 p.m., in the colonnade outside Avery Fisher Hall, it will be able to run by itself in 35-minute sequences, 24 hours a day. ... In the most basic terms, 'Enlightenment' is an algorithm that allows 10 computers, working by trial and error, to reconstruct the composition of the 30-second coda to Mozart's Jupiter symphony, starting from scratch. Each of the 10 computers respresents one section of the orchestra. It's like waiting for monkeys to type Hamlet -- only they're specially trained monkeys that go back every time they make a mistake. ... The work represents the marriage of art and artificial intelligence; as such, it is a thoroughly contemporary work that reflects the various, unconventional ways in which artists today approach their chosen field. ... The three have been together since 2001, when the MIT Media Lab, where Mr. [Marc] Downie was working, asked Mr. [Paul] Kaiser and Mr. [Shelley] Eshkar to collaborate with him on a digital 'portrait' of the choreographer Merce Cunningham."
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July 31, 2006 [issue date]: Building a Better Limb - Veterans are inspiring a big push to create thought-controlled prosthetics By Nancy Shute. Building a Better Limb Veterans are inspiring a big push to create thought-controlled prosthetics By Nancy Shute. U.S.News & World Report.
"James Stuck thinks his newest right foot is 'pretty cool'; it can sense when he's headed downstairs or climbing up a slope and angle itself accordingly. A great choice for hiking. ... Until Iraq, companies had little incentive to develop high-performance prosthetics, since most of the country's approximately 1 million people missing a limb are older and often frail victims of diabetes or vascular disease. But Stuck and his comrades are young, athletic, and impatient--and have no intention of quietly retiring on disability. 'Our soldiers have really inspired the research community to apply the science to help,' says Lt. Col. Paul Pasquina, medical director of the amputee program at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. ... Stuck is doing his bit to advance prosthetic science. In late June, he became one of two patients at Walter Reed to test the new Proprio foot, a 2.5-pound, motor-powered appendage with sensors that detect terrain changes and 'artificial intelligence' that realizes the person is going upstairs, say, and bends the ankle accordingly. ... Last year, Ossur introduced the Rheo Knee, a prosthetic that uses artificial intelligence to remember and adapt to the user's tendencies."
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August 2006 [issue date]: The Expert Mind. By Philip E. Ross. Scientific American (pages 64 - 71).
"Skill at chess, however, can be measured, broken into components, subjected to laboratory experiments and readily observed in its natural environment, the tournament hall. It is for those reasons that chess has served as the greatest single test bed for theories of thinking -- the "Drosophila of cognitive science," as it has been called. ... In the 1960s Herbert A. Simon and William Chase, both at Carnegie Mellon University, tried to get a better understanding of expert memory by studying its limitations. ... Simon explained the masters' relative weakness in reconstructing artificial chess positions with a model based on meaningful patterns called chunks."

  • Also see: Researchers study 'shogi' players in bid to unravel brain's mysteries. By Shoji Tsue. Kyodo News & The Japan Times Online (July 26, 2006). "Researchers study 'shogi' players in bid to unravel brain's mysteries The Japan Shogi Association have opened the Shogi Super-Brain Research Society with cooperation from the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research to study how the brains of professional 'shogi' players work. ... A game between a professional player and shogi software will be held in the fall to analyze the player's brain with MRI equipment and a device to measure brain waves. The researchers will look at brain activity during the games as well as the differences between professional and amateur players. This research will not only help the field of brain science but also fields such as robot engineering, medicine and psychology. It could even be a big step in the development of artificial intelligence."

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The Expansion Slot

July 21, 2006: Innovation & wonder - A traveling exhibit spotlights quirky work by designers in Japan. By Nadine Kam. Star Bulletin. "[Natsuko Ono, a cultural adviser and researcher for the Consulate-General of Japan in Honolulu] is one of many hands busily working to stage 'Japanese Design Today 100,' an exhibition of everyday objects created between the 1950s and now, showcasing the quirky, innovative work of modern Japanese designers. The show opens Thursday at the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii.... Why create the robotic pet dog Aibo (Sony, 1999), also on view in the show, if not simply to separate fools, or the lonely, from their money? But consulate employees Katsutoshi Oikawa and Ayumi Sugahara strongly believe in Aibo's value to humankind, and have no problems adapting to innovations from their homeland. Where in America, science and new technologies are mistrusted for their capacity to curtail individual freedoms or be turned toward evil means, in Japan there's an optimistic belief in technology, scientists and designers as saviors, forces for beneficial change -- even though the nation was a victim of U.S. nuclear technology during World War II. Speaking through interpreter Julie Suenaga, Oikawa said: 'I always want something more, better than now. It's human nature to want to go forward. Aibo is necessary, not from a money-making perspective, but because its designers are trying to create robots that are more like human beings. Aibo is in-between, a test-pilot robot that has artificial intelligence. You can teach it. Look at Honda and ASIMO (the dancing, stair-climbing humanoid robot),' he said. 'You have to ask yourself, "Why would a car-maker be making a robot?" It's because they're thinking about the future. In the future, robots will be able to help disabled people,' Sugahara said. 'They won't replace human beings, but will be substitutes,' Oikawa said."
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July 22, 2006: Tech Chronicles - A daily dose of postings from The Chronicle's technology blog (sfgate.com/blogs/tech). By Al Saracevic. San Francisco Chroinicle (page C-2). "Tech fellows: The Computer History Museum in Mountain View announced this year's class of technology fellows, an annual group of seminal scientists that changed the world. ... Robert Kahn: For pioneering technical contributions to internetworking and leadership in the application of networks to scientific research. ... Marvin Minsky: For co-founding the field of artificial intelligence, building the first artificial neural network and early robotics systems, and developing the 'Society of Mind' theory of human and machine intelligence. Congrats to all the winners. The 2006 Fellow Awards dinner will be at the museum Oct. 17."
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July 24, 2006: Hackers use AI to uncover vulnerabilities - Latest danger identified as 'fuzzing. ' By Robert Jaques. vnunet.com. "Artificial intelligence (AI) software is now being widely used by hackers to find formerly undiscovered application vulnerabilities, security experts have warned. Researchers at Secure Computing said that cyber-criminals are exploiting the ability of AI tools to use a methodology referred to as 'fuzzing' to test applications for bugs."
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July 26, 2006: Computer camp draws students from coast to coast - High school students experience student life during Computing Insights program. By Michelle MacArthur. News@UofT. "Thirty high school students are being given a sneak peek of university life this month, complete with lectures, lab work and even a stay in residence. The students are on campus for computer science’s three-week Computing Insights summer program, which gives students entering their final year of high school the opportunity to explore the field of computer science. ... Computing Insights also helps debunk myths about the field, which is often misinterpreted as anti-social and uncreative, [Diane] Horton added. ... Computing Insights features daily lectures given by faculty and industry guests on topics as diverse as artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction and animation. ... In fact, the camp is so much fun that teachers want to come too; in response to demand from high school teachers, Computing Insights for Teachers was created five years ago"
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