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, you are encouraged to access the entire article.

The Headlines:

• Mimicking fraudsters - The Guardian
• He, robot - The San-Diego Union-Tribune
• Game sequel takes leaps in AI technology - Mercury News
• Show me the money - Guardian Education Weekly (plus one related article)
• Coming to a Dashboard Near You - BW Online
• New start-up breed: Born in USA, made in India - Reuters & The Indian Express
• Software Tutors Offer Help and Customized Hints - The New York Times
• Computer browsers: Virtual tourists are helping the Swiss to plan their landscape - The Economist
• Alice chatbot wins for third time - BBC News
• Are poker 'bots' raking online pots? - MSNBC
• Robot Telescopes Comb the Skies - Wired News
• Chicago Moving to 'Smart' Surveillance Cameras - The New York Times
• Eavesdropping call centre computers cut talk time - New Scientist Magazine (plus one related article)
• The Expansion Slot - some more articles

The Articles:

September 9, 2004: Mimicking fraudsters - If your card use has been queried, it's probably because more banks are now using artificial intelligence software to try to detect fraud. By Ken Young. The Guardian.
"Credit card fraud losses in the UK fell for the first time in nearly a decade last year, by more than 5% to £402.4m, according to research by the Association of Payment Clearing Services (Apacs). The fall has put a spotlight on the increasing use of neural networks that have the ability to detect fraudulent behaviour by analysing transactions and alerting staff to suspicious activity. As commercial applications of research into artificial intelligence, these systems give the impression of mimicking human abilities for recognising unusual activity. Karina Purang, a financial analyst at Datamonitor in London, says the use of neural networks is growing: 'These systems are very important to banks trying to reduce fraud, and are becoming standard across the card industry to detect unusual spending patterns.' She says Barclays reported that after installing Fair Isaac's Falcon Fraud Manager system in 1997, fraud was reduced by 30% by 2003. The bank attributed this mainly to the new system. ... Nick Sandall, head of retail banking at Deloitte, says that banks also use other technologies. 'The artificial intelligence community is constantly bringing us new solutions. ...'"
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September 9, 2004: He, robot - 'Untouched by Hands' is an intriguing idea carried to fruition -- it's artistic, but is it art? By Robert L. Pincus. The San-Diego Union-Tribune & SignOnSanDiego.com.
"The images are by AARON. The signature on them reads Harold Cohen. That would be highly unusual in most circumstances, but these pictures are by a program rather than a person. AARON is Cohen's creation, a project that has preoccupied him for 30-plus years. The program never tires. It is running continuously during an exhibition at the Earl & Birdie Taylor Library in Pacific Beach -- 24 hours a day in fact -- creating new works and erasing works as soon as AARON determines they are done. ... The program, though a highly sophisticated example of artificial intelligence, hasn't expressed any desire to have its work preserved and exhibited. That is where Cohen enters the picture. ... Cohen has selected works he's determined to be particularly successful, compelling or, well, artistic. These make up the 36 picture exhibition titled 'Untouched by Hands: Recent Digital Prints by AARON, a Computer Program Written by Harold Cohen.' ... AARON is artistic, to be sure. It displays a finely calibrated sense of color and structure. ... It also carries with it the imprimatur of a creator who was himself accomplished painter, which clearly has something to do with AARON's skills. Cohen, who trained at London's Slade School, was a well-established artist in England before venturing into the world of computer science and artificial intelligence. ... But when artificial intelligence creates art, philosophical questions naturally arise. How much of art is technique and how much is rooted in soul or psyche? Metaphorical and symbolic thinking is at the core of much art ­ is it possible for a machine to possess such thought? Artificial intelligence can likely surpass what its creators had planned for it. This is the stuff of science fiction, of course, which often takes a dark view of the issue, from 'Frankenstein' to the recent movie version of 'I, Robot.'"
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September 13, 2004: Game sequel takes leaps in AI technology. By Dean Takahashi. Mercury News.
"What's remarkable about this computer game, being released worldwide Tuesday , is that the domestic drama is not scripted. The characters act the way they do because that is what naturally unfolds. It's a quality dubbed 'emergence,'' based on the history of the characters' relationships and their own artificial, or preprogrammed, intelligence. Electronic Arts, which is publishing the sequel to the bestselling 'The Sims,'' believes this leap forward in artificial intelligence is what will keep gamers by the millions entranced with their virtual Sims. That's why the 140-person team that developed the game over four years took great pains to make the Sims, as the virtual characters are called, act and feel smarter. ... For EA programmers, a character appears to possess intelligence if it behaves intelligently. Behavior is a collection of actions and each action is governed by a choice. And so the Sims face a web of inter-connected choices. If they make a friend, they have the option to hug the friend. If the friend accepts the hug, they have the option to kiss. Each choice leads to other choices. The Sims make choices and therefore they seem intelligent."
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September 14, 2004: Show me the money - new grants to shout about in the field of science communication. By Linda Nordling. Guardian Education Weekly.
"There is a lot of new funding up for grabs for the talkative researcher. Last week, the Office of Science and Technology announced it is offering up £1.2m for scientists eager to talk about their work. ... To get to the cash, you will have to show a genuine interest in what the public wants from science, and not just the other way around. The OST's Sciencewise scheme will focus on areas of science where there has been, or where there is expected to arise, friction between scientists and the public. Artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and the use of animals in research are some key issues. Climate change and security issues related to the internet are others."

• Education Briefs. The Hartford Courant & ctnow.com. September 21, 2004. "Ingrid Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of Hartford has received a $99,469 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop ways to teach college students about artificial intelligence. ... Russell is working on the project with Zdravko Markov of the computer science department at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain and Todd Neller of the computer science department at Gettsyburg College."

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September 14, 2004: Coming to a Dashboard Near You. By Alex Salkever. BW Online.
"More and more, though, auto makers are focusing on building control systems that don't require a driver to look away from the road to check the dashboard. These new systems will communicate with the driver either through sound or touch. Carmakers believe that this will alleviate existing visual overload and allow drivers to focus on the main task at hand. ...   That's why most auto makers are busily enhancing the voice-recognition systems they're building into their luxury models. In early September, Honda announced that it would include new IBM-powered voice recognition in three 2005 models. ... Voice recognition will supposedly allow drivers to ask the car normal questions and give it commands in conversational sentences. ... Carmakers sold about 2 million voice-recognition systems in the U.S. in 2003, according to Telematics Research Group, an auto technology consulting firm. That number is expected to surpass 11 million by 2010 as the cost of voice recognition declines to a fraction of its current $500 to $1,000 per car."
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September 15, 2004: New start-up breed: Born in USA, made in India. Reuters / available from The Indian Express & Express India.
" Multinationals have trimmed the fat for years by shifting low-value work to India. Now, slim Silicon Valley start-ups are leading a new outsourcing wave, moving cutting-edge product development to Bangalore and beyond. The start-ups have their top managers and sales teams in the United States, but design products in India, where high-tech engineers earn a third of their US counterparts.... The revival is funded by venture capitalists, who want more bang for their bucks now that making money on start-ups has become tougher amid sluggish demand for initial public share offerings. India-born entrepreneurs and venture capital (VC) firms are backing a clutch of companies.... New middlemen have sprung up to help the young firms, such as Pari Natarajan, chief executive of Zinnov -- short for 'zeal with innovation' -- a consulting firm that specialises in offshore outsourcing by US start-ups. ... [H]e noted the economic pull was strong, given that it generally costs just $2 million to develop a modest software product in India, against $5 million in the United States. 'The VCs can put that kind of money in three firms and hedge their bets,' he said. Nonetheless, developed countries were likely to keep their edge in high-end areas such as artificial intelligence, he added."
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September 16, 2004: Software Tutors Offer Help and Customized Hints. By Katie Hafner. The New York Times (no fee reg. req'd.).
"As she sat at a computer screen, she kept typing 2.8, an incorrect answer. Eventually a hint popped up: 'Think about the sign of your answer.' When Rochelle finally typed the correct sum, -1.8, the computer showed its appreciation by allowing her to move on to a new problem. She smiled at her small triumph. Since January, Middle School 301 in the Bronx, where Rochelle is an eighth grader, has been using a software program called Cognitive Tutor to help students learn math. The software, from Carnegie Learning, a six-year-old company that got its start at Carnegie Mellon University, is designed to give students individualized instruction when personal attention is scarce. Although such intelligent tutoring systems have their share of skeptics, students at schools that use them have not only improved their performance in math but now profess to enjoy a subject they once loathed. ... Broadly defined, an intelligent tutoring system is educational software containing an artificial intelligence component. The software tracks students' work, tailoring feedback and hints along the way. By collecting information on a particular student's performance, the software can make inferences about strengths and weaknesses, and can suggest additional work. When Rochelle, for instance, displayed a weakness when working with negative numbers, the program repeatedly asked her to solve similar problems. ... The artificial intelligence built into the Carnegie Learning program helps set it apart. Not only does the program present drills according to a student's weaknesses, but it watches the work step by step, detecting where the student stumbles, and chimes in when necessary."
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September 16, 2004: Computer browsers - Virtual tourists are helping the Swiss to plan their landscape. The Economist.
" Do cows improve the view? That is a question which interests the Swiss government, given that it subsidises farmers heavily to graze their cows in the mountains. One justification for the subsidy is that cows eat young trees, and fewer trees mean better vistas of the sort beloved by tourists. But just how much do cows improve the view and where do they provide most value for money? To help answer these questions, Kai Nagel and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, have developed computer models of the Alps and populated them with virtual tourists (or 'autonomous agents' in computer-speak) that can wander the electronic landscape. The agents are programmed to behave, as far as possible, like real tourists, and to record their impressions as they go."
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September 20, 2004: Alice chatbot wins for third time - People can chat with Alice on the web A computer chat program called Alice has won a prestigious prize for human-like conversation for the third time. BBC News.
"It was judged to be chattiest bot out of the four finalists in the Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence held in New York on Sunday. British hopeful, Jabberwacky, came second in the annual competition. The event is based on the Turing Test, which suggests computers could be seen as intelligent if their chat was indistinguishable from those of humans."
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September 20, 2004: Are poker 'bots' raking online pots? Some suspect computer programs have infiltrated Internet games. By Mike Brunker. MSNBC.
"Concern is growing in online chat rooms and news groups devoted to poker that sophisticated card-playing robots -- known as 'bots' in the nomenclature of the Web -- are being used on commercial gambling sites to fleece newcomers, the strategy-impaired and maybe even above-average players. ... But skeptics -- and there are many -- argue the complexities of the game and the changing strategies ensure that creation of a program that can 'read' opponents' cards using screen scanning techniques and respond in real time is years away at best. ... [Gautam] Rao and his fellow believers have a ready answer: A bot capable of playing against the best humans already exists. The University of Alberta's Computer Poker Research Group has developed an artificially intelligent automaton known as 'Vex Bot,'  capable of playing poker at the master level, though as yet it can only apply its gambling genius to two-player games. Vex Bot has been used by researchers to test the frontiers of artificial intelligence -- and as the basis for a commercial poker tutorial program, Poki's Poker Academy -- but some fear it may become a blueprint for programmers with more sinister motives."
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September 21, 2004: Robot Telescopes Comb the Skies.  By Lakshmi Sandhana. Wired News.
"British astronomers have just begun to operate RoboNet-1.0, a global network of the world's biggest robotic telescopes, controlled by intelligent software to effectively act as one giant eye that can be focused anywhere in the sky within a minute. It's a dream come true for the astronomers at Liverpool John Moores University who pioneered the development of a fully automated intelligent robotic network. They developed the network to allow astronomers to follow up unpredictable events or appearances of objects in the sky as rapidly as possible, something that isn't ordinarily possible with a single telescope at a fixed position. ... ESTAR, a joint project of Liverpool John Moores University and Exeter University, developed intelligent autonomous software programs, known as agents, that will function as the brains of the network. Acting as 'virtual astronomers,' the agents will collect and analyze data 24 hours a day, alerting their flesh-and-blood counterparts only when they catch sight of something noteworthy."
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September 21, 2004: Chicago Moving to 'Smart' Surveillance Cameras. By Stephen Kinzer. The New York Times (no fee reg. req'd.).
" A highly advanced system of video surveillance that Chicago officials plan to install by 2006 will make people here some of the most closely observed in the world. Mayor Richard M. Daley says it will also make them much safer. ... Police specialists here can already monitor live footage from about 2,000 surveillance cameras around the city, so the addition of 250 cameras under the mayor's new plan is not a great jump. The way these cameras will be used, however, is an extraordinary technological leap. Sophisticated new computer programs will immediately alert the police whenever anyone viewed by any of the cameras placed at buildings and other structures considered terrorist targets wanders aimlessly in circles, lingers outside a public building, pulls a car onto the shoulder of a highway, or leaves a package and walks away from it. Images of those people will be highlighted in color at the city's central monitoring station, allowing dispatchers to send police officers to the scene immediately. ... Many cities have installed large numbers of surveillance cameras along streets and near important buildings, but as the number of these cameras has grown, it has become impossible to monitor all of them. The software that will be central to Chicago's surveillance system is designed to direct specialists to screens that show anything unusual happening. ... 'With the aggressive way these types of surveillance equipment are being marketed and implemented,' Mr. [Edwin C.] Yohnka said, 'it really does raise questions about what kind of society do we ultimately want, and how intrusive we want law enforcement officials to be in all of our lives.' ... 'The value we gain in public safety far outweighs any perception by the community that this is Big Brother who's watching,' Mr. [Ron] Huberman said. 'The feedback we're getting is that people welcome this. It makes them feel safer.'"
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September 22, 2004: Eavesdropping call centre computers cut talk time. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist Magazine (September 25th issue; page 22).
"Phone a call centre and you are likely to spend ages on hold listening to canned music -- and then find the operator cannot find the information you need. But an artificial intelligence system that hunts down the required information is aiming to slash the time people waste this way. Using a mixture of speech recognition and search engine technology, the system, being developed by IBM, will trawl a call centre's databanks for the information a customer wants and present it to the operator before the caller has finished explaining what they want. By giving operators rapid access to the right information, calls will be dealt with faster. The system works by listening in to the conversation and identifying keywords spoken by the customer."

• Speech Code From I.B.M. to Become Open Source. By Steve Lohr. The New York Times. September 13, 2004. This article is no longer available for free."I.B.M. plans to announce today that it will contribute some of its speech-recognition software to two open-source software groups. The move is a tactical step by International Business Machines to accelerate the development of speech applications and to outmaneuver rivals, especially Microsoft , in a market that is expected to grow rapidly in the next few years with increased use in customer-service call centers, cars and elsewhere. To do this, I.B.M. is again using the strategy of placing some of its proprietary software in open-source projects, making it available for other programmers to improve. ... After decades of research and development, speech recognition is moving toward mainstream use. Advances in statistical modeling, pattern-matching algorithms and processing power have enabled speech recognition to interpret a far broader vocabulary of words and phrases than in the past, though glitches remain."

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The Expansion Slot

• Building a World (Robo)Cup football team in Vaasa - AI researchers trying to develop a team of autonomous footballing robots that could defeat the humans in 2050.By Timo Paukku. Helsingin Sanomat. September 7, 2004."Robofootball is increasing in popularity at a dizzying pace. The 2004 Robocup in Portugal had 346 teams taking part and 1,600 devices battling for the ball. There are numerous different categories, from four-legged Aibo dog robots to full-sized humanoids. In Fukuoka two years earlier, the robots were watched by a total of 135,000 spectators. Finland's best performance to date remains the 8th spot secured by the Samba team from Oulu University's Intelligent Systems Group, in the football simulation category in 1998. Nadir Ould Khessal presented the preliminary line-up and tactics of his robot footballers at a seminar arranged by the Finnish Artificial Intelligence Society and held at the beginning of the month in the Heureka Science Centre in Vantaa. ... Robocup is a testbed for practically all the world's laboratories working on AI issues. The visiting lecturer Khessal and his group at the Vaasa Polytechnic's Information Technology Department are therefore carrying forward the development of sensors, hardware and software for computer vision, and the autonomous interplay between machines."
• CPW studies ways to foil attack on water supplies. By Robert Behre. The Post and Courier & Charleston.net. (no fee reg. req'd.). September 11, 2004. "John Cook knows the next terrorist strike might not come by air. As assistant manager with Charleston's Commissioners of Public Works, Cook is privy to terrorist talk about undermining the nation's water supply. ... Working with Ed Roehl of the Greenville firm Advanced Data Mining, Cook has drawn up a $400,000 research project that aims to couple everyday sensor technology with advanced number-crunching models to create a reliable, affordable way to monitor water distribution lines. ... The hard part is making sense out of millions of measurements each day. 'No normal person can take all the data in from all these points and analyze it,' Cook says. 'That's where the artificial intelligence is important to make this work.' ... He and Roehl are developing software that can 'learn,' as humans provide it feedback about what caused an abnormal readout, such as a heavy rain."
• Online textbook service draws interest from Memphis investors. By Michael Sheffield. Memphis Business Journal / available from MSNBC. September 11, 2004. "College students will get one more learning resource with Cram101, a new company with a Memphis connection. Cram101 is an online service that uses artificial intelligence to read textbooks, summarize them and post highlights and key points of the material online. ... Cram was started by Scott Parfitt, a former Harvard professor who has been working with artificial intelligence since the 1990s. ... He says the goal is to provide students with a new method of studying. ... Daniel Brown, president of Preferred Advisors, the investment banking firm that coordinated the capital funding of Cram101, says when he first met Parfitt in 2003, he was skeptical that the artificial intelligence service could perform at the level Parfitt said it could, but was quickly won over. ... Despite obvious comparisons, Phillips says Cram is not an 'online Cliff Notes' program."
• Artificial intelligence helps prevent highway disasters. By Scott Foster. Ottawa Business Journal. September 13, 2004. "The idea first came to Takashi Gomi after hearing about a fatal landslide in Japan in 1994. A dam had broken near the mountainous border of Niigata and Nagano prefectures, creating a landslide that swept away highway construction workers and their heavy equipment. Days later, 14 bodies were recovered from the rubble. Mr. Gomi, president of Ottawa's Applied AI Systems, Inc., realized intelligent technology could have helped prevent the disaster. ... With more than $2 million in R&D funding, Applied AI has been working with the Japanese government to develop a solution. ... In 1997, the firm proposed installing an 'AI filter' in each of the cameras, so images could be captured automatically and viewed in real-time by a field officer. For example, a falling rock could be a precursor to a larger disaster, says Mr. Gomi. ... Other projects include an intelligent wheelchair that can move autonomously. ... Another project is a robotic assistant for farmers who pick fruit. The machine would move autonomously while the farmer collects the produce, easing the burden of carrying heavy fruit baskets."
• Vietnamese students win first prize at Robocon 2004 in Seoul. Viet Nam News. September 14, 2004. "Viet Nam's FXR boys won Saturday's final round at the Asia­Pacific Robot 2004 (Robocon), held in the Republic of Korea. ... This year's competition used the tale The Reunion of the Shepherd and the Weaver as its theme. The story goes that the gods become upset with the laziness of a Shepherd and his Weaver wife and separate them. Annually, the gods take pity on the pair and erect a bridge so they may meet. Each round, teams drove their robots (shepherds) across an area (the bridge) carrying red boxes (gifts for the Weaver). The team that could carry the most items within an allotted amount of time would win the round."
• Dune . Arrakis . desert planet. By Robert Folsom. The Kansas City Star. September 19, 2004. "In Fischer's first book in the Julia series [Julia and the Dream Maker], three grad students just want to make a little cash with an artificial-intelligence toy. After that, the future of science, all science, is not what it used to be."
• Museum home to a new Zone. Edinburgh Evening News. September 22, 2004. "The Royal Museum of Edinburgh will be the home of a new £1 million exhibition centre featuring 'iconic' science exhibits such as Dolly the sheep and a Ford Formula 1 car. ... Other icons include Freddie the Robot, which was built in Edinburgh in the 1970s and is considered one of the cornerstones of artificial intelligence."

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