AI ALERT 8 September 2004

August 26, 2004: From factoids to facts. At last, a way of getting answers from the web. The Economist.
"Ask MSR is still a prototype, although Microsoft is trying to improve it and it may be launched commercially under the name AnswerBot. Dr [Eric] Brill, meanwhile, has moved to a more difficult task. One of his most recent papers, written jointly with Radu Soricut of the University of Southern California, is entitled 'Beyond the Factoid'. It describes his efforts to build a system capable of providing 50-word answers to questions such as "What are the rules for qualifying for the Academy Awards?" This is harder than finding a single-word answer, but Dr Brill thinks it should be possible using something called a 'noisy channel' model. Such models are already employed in spell-checking and speech-recognition systems. They work by modelling the transformation between what a user means (in spell-checking, the word he intended to type) and what he does (the garbled word actually typed). ... Rather than relying on a traditional 'artificial intelligence' approach of parsing sentences and trying to work out what a question actually means, this quick-and-dirty method draws instead on the collective, ever-growing intelligence of the web itself."
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August 26, 2004: Out of School - Doug Engelbart's Experience Shows That Even the Best Technology Can Be Ignored If It Is Difficult to Classify. Robert X. Cringely's "I, Cringely" column. PBS.
"I spent an afternoon recently with Doug Engelbart, talking about making computing history and troubleshooting Doug's DSL line. Doug, for those who haven't heard of him, conceived of and then went on to invent much of what we value today in computing from the standpoint of the user. Networks, graphical computing, hypertext, the mouse -- Doug's the guy behind all of those in one way or another. He is best known as the inventor of the mouse, but his work goes far beyond that. Doug did most of this at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) in Menlo Park, CA. And nearly all of those innovations first came to him during a momentary fugue state Doug entered while driving to work one day in 1950. ... 'It wasn't that my ideas were so radical by then, but that they didn't fit with either of the prevailing schools of research at the time,' Doug recalled. 'Back in the 1960s and 1970s the hot topics were Office Automation and Artificial Intelligence. Each of those areas was receiving huge amounts of research dollars and if you wanted money you had to be from one school or another. I wasn't. They were impressed by our demonstration, but couldn't see how it fit with their thinking. Office Automation was all about making secretaries more efficient but what we showed wasn't secretarial work. Artificial Intelligence was about teaching the computer to do the work for you, so while what we showed was very nice the people from that school felt that the computer should do those things automatically.'"
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August 29, 2004: Thought leadership. By Joseph Divanna. Moneyweb.
"I was in Johannesburg recently, and Moneyweb's Alec Hogg posed to me an interesting set of questions surrounding the origins and nature of thought leadership that caused me think about thinking. Alec wanted to know what is a thought leader and how does someone create thought leadership. Here is how I would answer him. 1) What is thought leadership? Thought leadership is the product of associative aggregation that formulates a new state or condition to a specific problem. Simply, the process of connecting an idea, concepts, or product to a business process or condition that may or may not be typically associated with one another to either create or enhance a value proposition or determine the relativity of one item to another. For example, collaborative technologies that facilitate the rapid exchange of data can be aggregated together to streamline the mortgage application process. Similarly, technologies like artificial intelligence and expressive systems can be combined to analyze a customer's financial status and previous history and eliminate the mortgage application process entirely leaving only the settlement process. ... 2) How do Thought Leaders create materials and where do you get the ideas? ... Conversely, ideas also spring from a variety of unrelated sources brought together over time when a new challenge presents the right conditions. For example: a military software application that rates the probability of incoming missiles on a battlefield could be adapted to rank the probability of daily stock market fluctuations based on an array of data points...."
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August 30, 2004: Coming soon - Robo-greeter. Automation has slashed factory jobs and is streamlining services and high-tech - but at what cost? By Gregory M. Lamb. The Christian Science Monitor. Note: This article is no longer available for free.
"In 19th-century England, craftsmen donned masks and rioted to force the destruction of textile machines that were stealing their jobs. The rebellion was crushed and the followers of Ludd - or Luddites - have come to be viewed as hapless rubes standing in the way of progress. But they had a point: Automation causes unemployment. The wave of automation now crashing onto the economy looks especially broad and powerful. Although its full impact is unclear, it could cause worker dislocation on a scale not seen since the Industrial Revolution, experts say. Eventually, technology creates more jobs than it takes away, they add. But in the short term, it's affecting more sectors of the labor market than in past eras of rapid technological change. ... Take industrial robots. Over the past 10 years, companies have spent some $100 billion installing them. Nearly 1 million are now on the job. The investment has proven spectacularly effective. The productivity of these machines has risen about 7 percent a year for the past decade. But the human cost has been immense. ... 'Smart systems,' computers that can do relatively routine tasks well, are beginning to gobble up jobs ranging from check-out clerks at Home Depot to airline ticket agents and hotel desk clerks - even to insurance underwriters and software customer support staff. ... So far, though, automation doesn't appear to have had a deep impact on job loss. For example, despite its airline kiosks and a tough travel economy, Continental says it has seen only a 4 percent decrease in ticket agents since 9/11. Kinetics is also running a pilot program at 55 McDonald's restaurants, where customers can order food at kiosks. Some restaurants have actually had to increase employment in the kitchen because of the faster customer turnover out front, says Jim Brown, a spokesman for Kinetics in Lake Mary, Fla. ... New technology becomes irresistible to businesses because it boosts productivity: That's bad for workers who lose jobs, but good for consumers who receive faster service and better products at lower prices. And it's perplexing for lawmakers."
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August 30, 2004: Always on watch - 4.2 million surveillance cameras monitor public places in Britain. By Jane Wardell. Associated Press / available from The Journal Gazette / also available from CNN.com (Big Brother watches Britain; 8/31/04).
"Big Brother is always watching in Britain. An estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit TV cameras observe people going about their everyday business, such as getting on a bus, lining up at the bank and driving around London. It's widely estimated that the average Briton is scrutinized by 300 cameras a day. The phenomenon is enabled by the arrival of digital video, cheap memory and sophisticated software. And Britain is acknowledged as the world leader of Orwellian surveillance -- perhaps because it has the experience of Irish terrorism, and is on guard for even worse today. ... Gas stations around the country are testing automatic number plate recognition to catch people who fill up but don't pay. ... Other video-cam networks use software that instructs the cameras to pick up unusual activity. 'They can identify something, like a bag in an airport, that shouldn't be part of the scene,' [Peter] Fry said."
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September 1, 2004: Domestic bliss through mechanical marvels? By Kevin Maney. USA Today.
"Never mind the humanoid Automated Domestic Assistants walking rich people's pets in the movie I, Robot, or the accordion-armed Robot B9 in TV classic Lost in Space warning of danger on lonely planets. The real force driving the development of personal robots -- and what will eventually create demand for them in the marketplace -- is aging baby boomers. That's the secret among robotics researchers and budding robot companies. As the horde of boomers become old, they increasingly will be unable to care for themselves or their homes. They'll face a social and medical system straining to help them. But they'll be comfortable with technology. ... In a way, robotics stands at a juncture similar to the earliest stabs at personal computing in the 1970s, when mammoth computers were familiar in business and government but unheard of in homes. Robots today help build cars on assembly lines and explore caves for the military. Eventually, they will scoot around our homes, as much a part of life as e-mail and Google. At a recent conference here of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, robots competed to rescue dummies in a disaster mock-up, while a robot named George greeted attendees as they arrived. Dozens of teenagers -- a next generation of roboticists -- showed off their robot creations in a contest. Presentations by scientists ran from the esoteric... to the practical topic du jour ("Intelligent Technology for Adaptive Aging," by the University of Michigan's Martha Pollack). ... Robots that are likely to serve the elderly seem to fall into three broad categories. Though the categories don't officially have names, you could call them homebots, carebots and joybots. A look at those categories speaks volumes about what's going on in robotics -- and what's still beyond technology's reach. ... 'Whether or not you have to love your robot is another question,' Brooks says. 'I don't need my ATM to be cute.' Here is a great point of departure between U.S. and Japanese robotics research. U.S. labs and companies generally approach robots as tools. The Japanese approach them as beings. That explains a lot about robot projects coming out of Japan."
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September 2, 2004: When E-Mail Points the Way Down the Rabbit Hole. Essay by Kirk Johnson. The New York Times (no fee reg. req'd.).
"I've been getting more and more spam lately that promises to get rid of other spam. ... The very basis of the spam wars is a search for better analysis of the way human beings think. ... 'It brings home the idea of technology living an independent existence - a parallel universe of computer programs living in a world of their own, having their own quarrels,' said Sherry Turkle, the director of the Center on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 'Spam is a great example of autonomous technology raising philosophical questions, and it's playing out in everybody's in-box day after day.' Science fiction writers have theorized for years, of course, about the moment when the gloriously ambivalent machines of human creation develop consciousness. Usually, as in movies like 'The Terminator' or '2001: A Space Odyssey,' it comes to no good. But in science fiction, the engines of artificial intelligence are almost invariably the products of Big Science, developed in fancy labs by idealistic dreamers with good intentions. There's usually a moral about best-laid plans. A machine consciousness that evolved from spam would be quite different, because the spam wars - and here's where it starts to get scary again - are shaped, to a great extent, by the tiny number of people who actually reply to spam solicitations. ... Some theorists, like Professor Turkle at M.I.T., say the first real flash points of spam and human identity might come when our ever more sophisticated anti-spam programs start to understand us a little too well. ... 'As spam becomes more and more sophisticated, most people think your filter will be developed by a smart agent observing you carefully, so the question becomes, what kinds of information do people want their software agent to know?' Professor Turkle said."
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September 4, 2004: Brain research? Pay it no mind. Mystery of consciousness still outwitting scientists. By Philip Marchand. The Toronto Star.
"Scientists who have been trying to understand the brain have recently tried to measure neural activity of Republicans and Democrats to see if political affiliations had anything to do with brain chemistry. The results were inconclusive. ... What really caught my eye about a New York Times Magazine article on the topic was the following statement: 'One of the most celebrated insights of the past 20 years of neuroscience is the discovery -- largely associated with the work of Antonio Damasio -- that the brain's emotional systems are critical to logical decision-making. People who suffer from damaged or impaired emotional systems can score well on logic tests but often display markedly irrational behaviour in everyday life.' I'm sure Damasio has done good work, rooting around the neocortex. But what does it say for neuroscience that one of its 'most celebrated insights' is something we've known for three or four millennia? ... The bravest of the neuroscientists are trying to tackle the toughest nut of all, the mystery of consciousness. ... A professor named Howard Gardner, for example, whose 1985 book The Mind's New Science helped to popularize the field of cognitive science, told Horgan that questions such as consciousness and free will were 'particularly resistant' to the scientific habit of trying to break down a subject into its most elemental parts, like neural pathways in the brain. ... The human brain is so complex it simply defies the same kind of analysis that scientists devote to subatomic particles or human immune systems. 'Like neuroscientists, researchers in evolutionary psychology and artificial intelligence are both bumping up against the Humpty Dumpty dilemma,' [John] Horgan writes. 'They can break the mind into pieces, but they have no idea how to put it back together again.'"
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September 4, 2004: Robots invade the table football pitch. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist Magazine (appears on page 18 with the title: Play table football against a robot).
"Fans of table football, or foosball, will no longer have to hang around at the pub waiting for a friend to turn up before they can play. A robotic foosball table will be able to give them just as good a game. ... To allow the control system to track the ball, the base of the table is made of translucent glass, tinted green. A camera underneath photographs the ball 50 times per second, and sends this data to a built-in computer that maps the ball's position. Intelligent software then works out the effect of one of the figures kicking the ball. ... [Bernhard Nebel's University of Freiburg] team is now working on being able to stop the ball and pass it -- a capability that will be essential if the robot is ever going to beat good players."
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September 6, 2004: Let's chat, shall we? Science news briefs. post-gazette.com.
"Mix scientific issues with a mug of beer -- or even a cup of joe -- and you've got something called Cafe Scientifique, a form of informal science discussion that's become popular in Europe. ... Phil Campbell, a senior research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Institute for Complex Engineered Systems, will give a short talk on medical robotics and tissue engineering, which will be followed by an hour of discussion with the audience. It is free and open to the public."
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September 6, 2004: Agents of Change - Autonomous agents are still in the labs but could eventually play a critical role in areas ranging from setting market prices to creating more resilient networks. By Patrick Thibodeau. Computerworld.
"Over the past year, NASA has been uploading software into the Earth Observing-1 satellite, turning it into a testbed for autonomous agents. The agents -- software programs that are able to learn and can function independently -- are used to manage experiments and operate the spacecraft. The effort is part of a technology initiative that researchers say will reshape IT over the course of many years. Autonomous agents have the potential to become an extraordinarily powerful technology, with the capacity to learn, experiment and act independent of human control. Agents could ultimately improve productivity, increase software reliability and change the operation of markets, particularly supply chains. ... Making markets, supply chains, telecommunications and other systems more efficient through the use of agents is a subject of intense interest. Some 800 researchers recently gathered at Columbia University for the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems, the leading conference on the technology. ... Negotiation was one of the key agent capabilities tested at the conference's Trading Agent Competition. ... IBM is building agent technology to support its autonomic computing systems, which have the intelligence to reconfigure themselves in response to changing conditions...."
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September 9, 2004: Self-sustaining killer robot creates a stink. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist News.
"It may eat flies and stink to high heaven, but if this robot works, it will be an important step towards making robots fully autonomous. To survive without human help, a robot needs to be able to generate its own energy. So Chris Melhuish and his team of robotics experts at the University of the West of England in Bristol are developing a robot that catches flies and digests them in a special reactor cell that generates electricity. So what is the downside? The robot will most likely have to attract the hapless flies by using a stinking lure concocted from human excrement. Called EcoBot II, the robot is part of a drive to make 'release and forget' robots that can be sent into dangerous or inhospitable areas to carry out remote industrial or military monitoring of, say, temperature or toxic gas concentrations."
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The Expansion Slot

Texas School to Offer Women's Gaming Scholarship. Reuters. August 26, 2004. "As part of a drive to attract more women into the male-dominated video game industry, a program for aspiring game developers at Southern Methodist University will offer a women-only scholarship, organizers said on Thursday. The 'Game Development Scholarship for Women' will help cover costs for women attending the Guildhall, an 18-month certificate program at SMU designed by noted game developers."
What awaits this year's GCSE generation? By Jenny Rees. The Western Mail / available from ic Wales. August 27, 2004. "Thousands of children in Wales picked up their GCSE [General Certificate of Secondary Education] results yesterday and started to make one of the biggest decisions of their lives - what do I do next? Here Jenny Rees takes a look at what life may be like when their children reach exam age. Ian Neild, of the BT research centre, looks at new and emerging technologies, and says that while the pace of change is rapid, in some cases very little has changed.... As the internet and technology becomes more sophisticated young people are unlikely to see the relevance of learning foreign languages. 'We use the language of the web, it's the Microsoft language,' said Mr Neild. And if we're ever stuck without a dictionary in our chosen language, 'there are all these lovely language translators on line,' he added. ... Teaching is set for possibly the biggest change, our crystal ball tells us. 'Teaching numbers will be in decline because no one will want to teach the children so there will be an increasing use of artificial intelligence to give personal teaching,' said Mr Neild. 'Just as you have typing tutors, these sorts of things will let you learn in different way.'"
An apple for the computer - Machines are so sophisticated they can be used to grade essays. But in some ways, artificial intelligence still lacks common sense. By Faye Flam. Philadelphia Inquirer. August 30, 2004. "First, computers learned to beat people at chess, then they started answering 411 calls. Now, computers endowed with artificial intelligence are going where only teachers ventured before: They're grading essays. At least three companies are marketing computerized essay graders, and thousands of schools across the country are using them as teaching tools and to score standardized tests. ... Jill Burstein, [E-rater's] lead scientist and a computational linguist, said the computer is 'trained' by feeding it thousands of essays that have already been scored and then asking the system to look for patterns that distinguish the good from the bad. ... [E]ssay-scoring programs will work for students who make a good-faith effort, said Harry Barfoot, vice president for marketing and sales at Vantage Learning. 'It can't score poetry and creative writing,' he said, but that was never promised. ... [Henry] Lieberman and other artificial intelligence researchers say computers could become dramatically smarter and more humanlike in the future. The brain is just a physical machine, albeit a complicated one we don't yet understand, they argue. 'People have this illusion that what we do is magic and it will never be automated,' said University of Pennsylvania computer science professor Lyle Ungar. When he first started studying artificial intelligence, he said, no one thought a computer could play chess well enough to beat the masters. Today, computers can beat everyone at chess, he said, and we're no longer impressed."
Sony Sends Its Robots to School - Humanoid devices will be used to encourage interest in science and technology. By Paul Kallender. IDG News Service & PC World. August 30, 2004. "Sony will lend one of its five Qrio public relations robots to schools in Japan, India, and Vietnam to stimulate children's curiosity in science and technology, the company says. In cooperation with the National Federation of UNESCO Associations in Japan (NFUAJ), Sony will initially send the 23-inch humanoid robot, accompanied by engineers, to a school in Sendai, Japan, on September 23 and a school in Gumma prefecture, Japan, in mid-December. Overseas, Qrio will go to a school in New Delhi, India at the beginning of October and to Hanoi, Vietnam, in January 2005. ... UNESCO and Sony have constructed two educational programs, under the name Qrio Science Program, to these ends. ... Equipped with seven microphones and a speaker, Qrio is able to identify voices, talk, sing, and understand about 20,000 words. It can also exhibit some limited emotional responses, according to Sony."
Engineer breaking ground in robotics. By Noriyuki Yoshida. Daily Yomiuri on-Line. September 1, 2004. "Toshitada Doi, 62, has become the representative director and president of Sony Intelligence Dynamics Laboratories Inc., which Sony Corp. established in July to develop an advanced form of artificial intelligence by fusing its achievements in robot technology. 'Our aim is to develop home information appliances--a computing system that can hold everyday conversations with humans,' he said. ... Doi, as an engineer, said his latest challenge was in a new field, what he calls intelligence dynamics. His challenge is create a robot that can mature and learn from its environment and experiences."
Marshfield woman studies technology's effect on humans. By Matt Conn. Marshfield News-Herald. September 1, 2004. "The refrigerator said you were out of milk. Your virtual pet needs more virtual water or it will die. ... 'We don't understand the psychological ramifications of that,' said Julie Hillan of Marshfield, creator of Frontiernumber4, an online publication that focuses on artificial intelligence. 'Technology is developing so rapidly, we can't keep up, even academically.' That takes a multidisciplinary approach, including social sciences, neuroscience and some would even argue biology, said Hillan, 34. ... Such frontiers are being explored through the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute, a nonprofit organization that describes its mission as creating powerful, ethically positive artificial general intelligence. Founder Ben Goertzel, a former computer science research associate professor at the University of New Mexico, examined the distinction of human and artificial development in a recent contribution to Frontiernumber4."
Finally, a Car That Talks Back. By John Gartner. Wired News. September 2, 2004. "Honda will soon become the first auto manufacturer to include, as standard equipment in some models, technology that enables drivers to converse with their cars about where to go and how to get there. Using voice-recognition and text-to-speech technology from IBM, the 2005 Acura RL, available in October, and Honda Odyssey, available in September, will produce maps and 'speak' turn-by-turn directions from the navigation system. Drivers will also be able to make phone calls or crank up the air conditioning, all while keeping their eyes on the road and their hands on the wheel. ... [Barbara] Britt said the system also takes into account regional differences in speech patterns...."
Programmed for stardom. By Sara Kincaid. Arizona Daily Sun. September 2, 2004. Note: This article is no longer available for free. "This Coconino High School senior writes computer programs that are out of this world. Stars, planets and, recently, asteroids are the topics of programs that Erik Kuefler creates for Lowell Observatory and a science program this summer in Socorro, N.M. ... Kuefler attended the Summer Science Program, Inc. at New Mexico Tech. The Summer Science Program is a nonprofit corporation with several higher education institutions involved with the program, such as New Mexico Tech, Stanford University and the University of California at Los Angeles. ... He plans to study computer science in college, although he has yet to decide where he'll go to college. Ideally, he'd like to specialize in artificial intelligence, he said."
Write smart software, forget the Net'. Press Trust of India / available from The Economic Times. September 2, 2004. "The internet is going to have only minor impact on future businesses. Expert systems - essentially new kind of intellectual software - is what is going to transform future businesses, says [Larry] Smith, who teaches Economics at University of Waterloo, in a new book 'Beyond the Internet: How Expert Systems will truly transform business.' Expert systems are sets of computer applications for businesses, systems now in development that will impose order on information chaos, screen for corruption in the data stream, force us to make correct decisions, diminish mistakes, reduce waste and decrease waste and decrease costs. 'While the internet merely helps us talk, expert systems will change the very nature of human work,' says Smith. ... 'Instead of mere downloading information, the decision support programmes or expert systems as they are called, deliver solutions. They do so by organising and verifying knowledge, and by using this embedded knowledge to reorganise work, increase efficiency, reduce waste and prevent errors,' says Smith."
Holonics -whole new era for machines. Process may be more reliable, lower-cost alternative for manufacturing. By Jim Mackinnon. Beacon Journal. September 3, 2004. "Jim Barlow thinks he has found a way to save manufacturing from disappearing in the United States. It's called holonics. That's a short word for a complex, evolving process using state-of-the-art technology and software to design, build and implement flexible manufacturing systems. In some circles it is also called intelligent automation. Barlow is among those who believe holonic manufacturing, which is still in its infancy, is the next generation of manufacturing technology and will revolutionize how America makes things. ... A lot of work developing holonic manufacturing is being done in Northeast Ohio, primarily at Rockwell Automation's advanced technology laboratory. Work is also being done in Europe and Asia. 'We've been doing work on this the last seven or eight years,'' said Kenwood Hall, vice president of architecture and systems technology at the Mayfield Heights lab. 'It's a form of distributed intelligence.'"
Looking for a job? Google might hire you. Newindpress.com. September 3, 2004. "Google, the world's largest search engine, is hiring. Great! What's even more exciting: It is hiring for the recently opened research and development centre in Bangalore, its latest full-fledged engineering facility outside Mountain View headquarters in California. ... The Bangalore office's charter is to innovate, implement and launch new Google technologies and products. 'Anything is fair game and the team here gets to decide its agenda.' The focus will be on fundamental areas of computer science, including information retrieval, distributed systems, machine learning, data mining, theoretical computer science, statistics and user interfaces."
Marist to teach video, computer game skills. By Sarah Bradshaw. PoughkeepsieJournal.com. September 4, 2004. "Starting this month, Marist College will offer a noncredit online program leading to a certificate in computer and video game development in just one year. The program is offered in conjunction with the Game Institute, which provides professional training in the field of video game production and development. ... The online forum allows people from all over the world to enroll. Sales of game software generated more than $6 billion last year, according to data from NPD Interactive Entertainment. ... 'What we are seeing is a new trend in education. Using game development training and technology to teach concepts in fields like computer science, mathematics and physics creates a multidisciplinary system, which engages students in a way that most other learning models cannot,' [Joseph] Meenaghan said. Students are required to take classes in game mathematics, artificial intelligence for games, and computer, graphics and network programming."
Fossil fuel hikes a boon for new energy firms. By Chris Pillow. ThePost.ie. September 5, 2004. "Recent developments, such as rising fuel prices, renewable energy policies and carbon taxes mean that sustainable energy is not just an environmental issue, but a preferable commercial option. A small number of Irish companies have begun to tap into this high-growth area in a bid to turn sustainable energy options into profitable businesses. ... Lightwave takes a different approach to energy use. Instead of changing the way heat and electricity is produced, it has developed new ways of conserving energy supplies. ... The central idea behind the company, which has its base on the campus of UCD, is to minimise energy demands in large office buildings using artificial intelligence. The objective is to save up to 35 per cent of energy costs for clients." Also see these related articles.
Security IT tops NSW tech showcase awards. By Fleur Doidge. CRN / available from iTNews Australia. September 7, 2004. "Two security-focused IT developers creamed the competition this year at the patrons' awards for the NSW Government's export-focused Australian Technology Showcase (ATS). ... Michael Egan, NSW Treasurer and Minister for State Development, said Argus had won for its success in growing export deals. ... Argus' patented iris recognition system had netted $600,000 in export sales in two years -- a considerable achievement for a new, innovative technology, he said. ... Second place went to another IT surveillance system developer, iOmniscient, based in Sydney's Chatswood. ... iOmniscient had patented a surveillance system using artificial intelligence to detect unmoving, suspicious objects -- such as bags and boxes that could contain bombs -- in crowded areas such as airports and train stations, [Warren Dick] said."
Artificial Intelligence Creeps into the Commercial Market Despite Initial Hurdles. PhysOrg.com. September 8, 2004. "When artificial intelligence (AI) was developed to emulate human intelligence, scientists hoped it would be a blockbuster technology. Instead, the inability of end users to deal with its complexity and expensiveness and their lack of understanding of its potential caused these expectations to dwindle. These factors slowed down the adoption rates of AI, but not the efforts of researchers. After a couple of decades, AI, now in the form of applications, is slowly making its way out of laboratories into the mainstream market."

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