Year 2002 Archive of AI in the news articles
 -- July --
(a subtopic of AI in the news)


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JULY:

JULY 2002

July 31, 2002: Pearl the robot - a gem to the elderly. Mechanical maid helps with retirement home activities. Reuters / available from CNN.com. "Elderly people in a United States retirement home have been getting some extra help with their daily activities from an unlikely source -- a robot called Pearl. The mechanical maid uses ultrasound and laser rangefinders to whiz around the home in Oakmont, Pennsylvania, reminding residents of appointments and chatting with her elderly charges about the weather and the latest TV listings. ... Sebastian Thrun and scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania and Martha Pollack of the University of Michigan said their creation has been a success with patients, who enjoy interacting with it."
>>> Assistive Technologies, Robots
-> back to headlines

July 31, 2002: Virtual people help bridge digital divide. BBC. "Virtual people could soon be helping residents of Lewisham in London find out about the benefits and help they are due. Lewisham Council is leading a project to develop computerised avatars that can hold conversations with citizens about services, whether they qualify for benefits or get their views on local issues. ... Lewisham has developed a system based around avatars, computer-generated people, that talk to people instead of forcing them to use complicated web forms. 'In general people do not like interacting with machines, they would rather have a warm body,' she said, 'but an avatar is the next best thing."
>>> Customer Relations, Interfaces, Expert Systems, Applications, Natural Language
-> back to headlines

July 31, 2002: In Afghanistan, a new robosoldier goes to war - The 'war on terror' is a testing ground for new technology. By David Buchbinder. The Christian Science Monitor. "In fact, the Afghan theater has been a testing ground for a variety of futuristic technologies. Sitting in the broiling sun, US Army Col. Bruce Jette, the head of the robotics team, is both triumphant and apologetic: 'Today is the first time conventional forces have ever employed robots in a wartime environment.' ... Col. Jette's robotic comrade began proving his mettle after Sept. 11, when he probed the wreckage of the World Trade Center to test structural soundness. 'The same robot that helped with the recovery effort at the World Trade Center is now in Afghanistan trying to track down the people that did it,' says Tom Frost, senior technical manager at iRobot, the Somerville, Mass., firm that manufactures a line of machines they call PackBots, of which the nicknamed Fester is a prototype."
>>> Military, Hazards & Disasters, Robots, Applications, History, also see related article below
-> back to headlines

July 31, 2002: Robots strutted their stuff in World Trade Center search. By Allan Chambers. Edmonton Journal. "Like dogs before them, robots used at the World Trade Center last Sept. 11 have proved they belong on search and rescue teams, specialist Robin Murphy said Tuesday. In fact, robots went where the dogs couldn't go because the animals' paws were sliced by the rubble at ground zero, they sprained their ankles, and rain reduced their ability to smell, Murphy said. The dozen robots used at the trade centre didn't work perfectly, either. They screwed up in numerous ways, and so did their operators, Murphy told a packed session of scientists at an artificial intelligence conference at the Shaw Conference Centre. But in their first test in an urban disaster zone, they proved they can go where human and canine rescuers can't, and gather information to find victims. Their future role, she predicted, will be greater as robot technology improves."
>>> Hazards & Disasters, Robots, Applications
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July 30, 2002: A house that will take care of you - Scientists see us growing old in smart homes with robots to give us our pills. By Allan Chambers. Edmonton Journal. "You're old, frail, but independent and still living at home. The odds are that you're also a widow. Now you've fallen and you can't get up. Who'll come to your aid? It could be your house. That's the contention of scientists who laid out their vision Monday in Edmonton at the annual American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference. Smart technology could enable the elderly to stay home longer, taking some strain off the health-care system. Scientists described several experiments to create intelligent homes 'aware' of their occupants and able to help them go on living at home. ... Pearl, a nursebot being developed by researchers co-operating at several U.S. universities, will be a lot more effective than the 'glorified alarm clocks' now on the market, said Martha Pollack of the University of Michigan. Pearl will be able to follow an occupant through a home, reminding the person to take medicines and do other functions the robot has been programmed to expect."
>>> Smart Rooms, Assistive Technologies, Robots
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July 30, 2002: U.S. Tests Robots in Afghanistan. By Tanalee Smith. Associated Press / available from The Washington Post / also available from the Army Times. "Hermes the robot edged its way into the dark cave, its treads spinning over the dust and small rocks until a boulder appeared in its path. No problem. The tiny machine dropped its side arms, lifted onto and over the boulder, and rolled on, its two cameras sending images to an operator waiting outside. The war in Afghanistan is the first time robots are being used by the U.S. military as tools for combat. Proponents believe sending them into caves, buildings or other dark areas ahead of troops will help prevent U.S. casualties. ... The robots operate on a sensor system and by wireless desktop control. They are fitted with a Global Positioning System, and can see themselves and each other on a map, ensuring more efficient searches. They run on 2, 6-pound rechargeable batteries that run one hour each."
>>> Military, Hazards & Disasters, Robots, Applications, also see related article above

July 30, 2002: Digital'buddies' latest in elaborate marketing tool. By Christine Frey. Los Angeles Times / available from The Nando Times. "In a culture inundated with advertising, companies have discovered a new way to connect with consumers and make their messages stand out amid the din. They are using digital 'buddies' to spread word of their products on the Internet. The buddies are software applications also known as 'bots.' They're programmed to make friends and small talk, and they're eerily good at it. They take cues from a human acquaintance's questions and answers and search databases for conversational fodder. Bot-speak can be formulaic and stilted. It can also be witty, provocative and startlingly lifelike. Buddies are not mere motor-mouths. The more elaborate ones have quirks, preferences, yearnings - virtual personalities. Their presence on the Web represents a powerful new dimension in marketing. ... Computers first chatted in the mid-1960s, when MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum created a software program called Eliza. Designed to converse in the manner of a psychotherapist, Eliza asked people questions by rephrasing their previous statements. ... The technology has only grown more sophisticated since then."
>>> Marketing, Agents, Natural Language, History
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July 30, 3002: Anemone of the Smart People. By Michael Stroud. Wired News. "In a rock pool filled with greenish water, a sea creature unfurls its tentacles as daylight dawns. 'If you stick your hand in, it startles,' says MIT Media Lab researcher Josh Strickon. ... Is this good artificial intelligence or good programming? 'Is there a difference?' responds Scott Senften, chair of Siggraph's Emerging Technologies Exhibition. This year's exhibition was a meditation on human-machine interaction, as researchers from around the world demonstrated three kinds of projects: robots, machines that enhanced one or more of the five senses, and explorations of virtual reality."
>>> Artificial Life
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July 29, 2002: Robots ready to strut their stuff - The guy who lets the dogs out. By Allan Chambers. Edmonton Journal. "With robot parts everywhere and scientists bent like elves over computers and takeout stir-fry, the scene looked like the electronics section of Santa's workshop on a really bad day. It was really part of a preparation for robot competitions at a conference on artificial intelligence running through Thursday at the Shaw Conference Centre. ... The robot competitions are a sort of cross between a dream toy-store and leading-edge research lab. Scientists engage in friendly competition to build robots that incorporate state-of-the-art elements and rely on artificial, computer-programmed intelligence to operate. The robots used to be the fun and games part of the meeting. They still are, but in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, they've taken on a more serious aspect.
>>> Robots, Hazards & Disasters, Competitions
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July 28, 2002: Robots will succeed where man has failed. By Tim Cook. The Halifax Herald Limited. "In the ever-advancing world of computers that think like people, a team of researchers from the United States and Israel has developed an automated negotiator that they say can solve an international crisis. It will be demonstrated in Edmonton over the next few weeks as the University of Alberta hosts eight international conferences designed to explore the frontiers of artificial intelligence. ... There will be everything from a robot butler contest to a technical discussion on issues such as how robots can help the elderly. Representatives from the University of South Florida will detail how robots were used to explore the wreckage of the World Trade Center."
>>> Applications, Foreign Relations, Hazards & Disasters
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July 27, 2002: Windows, lose, draw - Alberta researchers develop a computer program that knows when you're bluffing. By Charlie Gillis. National Post. "This week, Mr. [Darse] Billings and a team of University of Alberta researchers are publicizing a poker-playing computer program that does what many a putative gambler cannot -- it successfully processes the mercurial and misleading information it receives in the heat of a game. The system represents a significant stride in artificial intelligence because it effectively guesses whether an opponent is bluffing, wavering or playing his hands arrow-straight. By doing so, it goes beyond programs developed for games such as chess and backgammon, which sift through finite sets of moves before choosing a course."
>>> Poker, Games & Puzzles
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July 26, 2002: Computer a celebrity for beating Kasparov - Knew all the moves, but couldn't learn. By Allan Chambers. Edmonton Journal. "The conference [on computers and games] is one of eight related meetings on computers and intelligent machines being held in the city this week and next, highlighted by the annual meeting of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, which begins Sunday and is expected to draw more than 1,600 scientists. ... Jonathan Schaeffer, a U of A computer scientist and one of the conference organizers, said the value of Deep Blue is immense. Scientists have tried since the 1940s to develop a computer capable of beating a human at chess, he said, and Deep Blue was the first success. 'Deep Blue was a major accomplishment,' he said. 'It was the single most important contribution to artificial intelligence to date. It was a milestone in computer history.'"
>>> Chess, Games & Puzzles, History
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July 26, 2002: Opterna aims to make fiber lines hacker-proof. By Jeremy Feiler. Philadelphia Business Journal. "Like the idea of foiling hackers before they strike? ... Opterna's FiberSentinel system uses artificial intelligence and optical-digital-signature recognition to monitor fiber connections. Doing so allows it to detect and deal with intrusions, said Michael Cohen, Opterna's vice president of global marketing."
>>> Networks
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July 26, 2002: Watch GRACE under pressure - Robot faces big test here. By Shane Holladay. Edmonton Sun. "Edmontonians roving around the Shaw Conference Centre Tuesday will have nothing to fear from a robot experiment wandering the area - GRACE will be cool under fire. 'And in any case, we have a little red button on the top we can hit if anything goes wrong' said Dr. Reid Simmons, an artificial intelligence researcher who helped build the robot.'"
>>> see related articles below ->
-> back to headlines

July 25, 2002: Women look to shape the future. By Emma Smith. BBC. "Women are using technology more than ever before. They do more online shopping than their male counterparts and are making up an increasing percentage of internet users around the world. But while the number of women who use computers is increasing, less and less are studying computer science at university. It seems that women are shying away from the very careers that would give them their best shot at gaining influence and making a difference in the 21st century. One of the most commonly cited reasons for not pursuing careers in technology is its image. Many women, particularly young women, think that technology careers are geeky, anti-social and even boring. The truth is somewhat different."
>>> AI is for everyone, Careers in AI
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July 25, 2002: Banks step up war on e-fraud. By Andy McCue. Vnunet. "AI technology to root out criminals and terrorists Barclays and the Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBoS) are to use artificial intelligence technology as part of an industry-wide crackdown on financial fraud and terrorist funding. ... The National Criminal Intelligence Service received 18,571 reports from banks of money laundering between January and May this year, double last year's total and expected to reach 60,000 by the end of the year."
>>> Law Enforcement, Banking, Fraud Detection & Prevention, Industry Statistics
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July 25, 2002: Can Grace the robot find her own way and win? By Byron Spice. Post-Gazette. "Grace -- an acronym for Graduate Robot Attending ConferencE -- has software in abundance. She has computer programs for standing in lines, for giving a PowerPoint presentation, for asking passersby for help, for navigating through a convention center and more than a dozen other skills. Her creators -- five academic, governmental and industrial research groups led by Carnegie Mellon University's Reid Simmons -- only hope her combination of software, sensors and the ability to wink will stand her in good stead on Tuesday. That's when she will compete in the Robot Challenge at the American Association of Artificial Intelligence annual meeting in Edmonton, Alberta. ... Only two of this year's entries -- Grace and a teleoperated robot built by iRobot Corp., a firm founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology roboticist Rodney Brooks -- will even attempt to tackle the entire challenge."
>>> Robots, Competitions, Vision, Speech, Natural Language, and also see the following article ->
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July 25, 2002: New Robot Has Basic Social Skills. By Keith Srakocic. Associated Press / available from Pasadena Star-News / also available from USA Today. "The robot's laser and sonar components are supposed to sense distances and steer GRACE around people. Its camera vision system and speech recognition software is supposed to recognize humans' hand gestures and speech. And its artificial intelligence 'brain' is supposed to gather all the information and tell the machine how to react. ... CMU computer scientist Reid Simmons, coordinating the GRACE project with help from the Naval Research Laboratory, Swarthmore College, Northwestern University and defense contractor Metrica Inc., gave GRACE a 50 percent chance of completing all her tasks. ... Simmons, who said the robot was made female because he believes women communicate better than men, solicited drama students to teach GRACE how to act like a human so it will make people feel comfortable. It's a tough task. 'Just think of what a robot would have to do just to answer a question from a person in terms of speech recognition'' said competition co-chair Holly Yanco. 'Not only that, but people ask questions in different ways.'"
>>> Robots, Competitions, Vision, Speech, Natural Language, and also see the previous article ->
-> back to headlines

July 25, 2002: Sports Fantasy Is Catching Up With Reality. By David Kushner. The New York Times (no-fee reg. req'd). " Sports video games are a best-selling genre in the $10.8 billion interactive entertainment business, representing 22 percent of video game sales over all, according to the NDP Group, a market research firm. ... Online play is the most important technological leap in the quest for authenticity and realism, the genre's bywords. The question is, how real can they get? ... With the bodies and movements in place, artificial intelligence is used to program the brains of the players. Programmers build a database of skills for each athlete, including a level of speed, agility and awareness. Players' positions impose their own attributes, too, like a quarterback's passing and running abilities."
>>> Video Games, Industry Statistics
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July 25, 2002: Artificial intelligence tackles breast cancer. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist. "Techniques borrowed from artificial intelligence could help doctors assess just how serious a particular case of breast cancer is and, therefore, how to treat it. ... When tested on 100 women, the new technique proved to be nearly 90 per cent accurate at predicting the extent of this spread and whether they would survive for five years. The approach, developed by a team led by Raouf Naguib at the University of Coventry and Gajanan Sherbet at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, builds on an existing analytical method called image cytometry. ... Naguib and Sherbet compared this technique to their own, which uses a neural network program and fuzzy logic, a decision-making tool commonly used by artificial intelligence researchers when dealing with imprecise data."
>>> Fuzzy Logic, Neural Networks, Medicine, Applications , also see the next article ->
-> back to headlines

July 24, 2002: Computer 'trained' to fight cancer. BBC. "Dr Sherbet, and his colleague Dr Raouf Naguib, 'trained' a computer to analyse images of cells captured from tissue samples for patterns of abnormality which could be used to predict the outcome of the disease. To train the system they used samples from 50 breast cancer sufferers and data about the outcome of the cases. Details from a further 50 cases were then fed into the computer, which was asked to predict which of the women would develop tumours in their lymph glands. It did so with 88% accuracy and achieved a similar figure when asked to predict which women would still be alive after five years."
>>> Machine Learning, also see the related articles above & below
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July 24, 2002: Computer Used to Predict Breast Cancer Outcome. Reuters. "Scientists have developed a computer system based on artificial intelligence that could help doctors to predict more accurately the outcome of patients with breast cancer. ... Breast cancer affects about a million women each year worldwide. If the disease is spotted and treated early survival rates are good, but the cancer can be deadly if it spreads beyond the breast to other parts of the body. Sherbet and his colleague Dr. Raouf Naguib believe they have developed the most sophisticated technique to determine which women have aggressive cancers and will need further treatment."
>>> Fuzzy Logic, Neural Networks, Medicine, Applications, also see the previous articles
-> back to headlines

July 24, 2002: Vendors showcase educational programs. By Jason Nix. The Brunswick News. "If Mehrl Martin has his way, 2002 might mark the first year Glynn County and other Georgia students' essays are graded by a computer system reminiscent of the movie '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Standing at his vendor's booth at the 2002 Georgia Association of Educational Leaders Summer Conference at the Jekyll Island Conference Center, he explains the ins and outs of IntelliMetric, an online computerized essay grading program he hopes will eliminate the handwritten red marks of teachers that students are used to seeing when their essay is returned. His company, Vantage Learning, developed the HAL-like artificial intelligence technology after $10 million in research and development. ... Vantage Learning has already sold the idea to College Board, the group responsible for the SAT. ... IntelliMetric uses artificial intelligence technology to combine the elements of a rubric developed by teachers as well as a sample of 300 papers graded by real teachers in order to grade student essays."
>>> Education, Natural Language, Applications
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July 23, 2002: Computer 'ChessBrain' learning right moves. By Steve Chawkins. Los Angeles Times / available from The Nando Times. "Carlos Justiniano has nine computers arrayed on a table in front of his four-poster bed. Sleeping just four hours a night, he pours himself into his fast-growing pet project - a globe-girdling network of computers that he hopes will one day play killer chess. He says it will be the largest chess computer network ever. But more than that, it will be a resource for universities, a playground for researchers in artificial intelligence. Like IBM's storied Deep Blue, it will take on the world's best chess players; unlike Deep Blue, Justiniano says, it will learn from its mistakes. ... While Deep Blue was a single, blazing-fast computer, ChessBrain is an example of 'distributed computing' - a system that draws power from a network of machines. It is being used in efforts as varied as solving math puzzles and scanning the universe for signs of life."
>>> Chess, Machine Learning, Multi-Agent Systems, Games & Puzzles
-> back to headlines

July 23, 2002: UR robot to strut its stuff. By Matthew Daneman. Democrat and Chronicle. " Mabel, built largely by UR students, leaves Tuesday for the American Association for Artificial Intelligence's annual conference starting Sunday in Edmonton, Alberta. More than half a dozen UR students will accompany Mabel. The conference will feature numerous robot displays and competitions from schools nationwide. ... The robot is loaded with voice recognition and facial recognition programs. It will look around for what it thinks are people, focuses its camera and microphone on what it believes are faces, and offers food. If the face moves around, the camera will follow."
>>> Robots
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July 23, 2002: AT&T Adds POPs to Global Network. atNewYork.com. "In addition, the private line service will be linked in with AT&T's optical network, whose features include artificial intelligence that help administrators restore service outages quickly and speed traffic re-routing and provisioning needs."
>>> Networks, Telecommunications
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July 23, 2002: When will robots outsmart humans? City to host 1,500 leading researchers - Conference on Artificial Intelligence. By Allan Chambers. Edmonton Journal. "The AAAI conference, which begins Sunday at the Shaw Conference Centre, will include presentations outlining the state of research on artificial intelligence. AI, according to the The Canadian Oxford Dictionary, is 'the field of study which deals with the capacity of a machine, especially a computer, to simulate or surpass intelligent human behaviour.' Researchers from the University of South Florida, for example, will show video footage and what they call a 'robot's eye' view from the World Trade Center bombing of last September. The university supplied one of the first robot teams used for search and rescue at the centre, and the scientists will present some of the lessons learned there."
>>> AI Overview, Conferences, ePress Kit, Hazards & Disasters, Games & Puzzles, Robots, Data Mining
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July 23, 2002: Outlook for security system industry remains bright. By Azura Abas. Business Times (Malaysia). "The business outlook of the security industry in Malaysia remains strong with more people beginning to understand and appreciate the need to install security systems in their homes and offices. Infotech Accord Sdn Bhd managing director Lee Che Chen said the sector faces a bright future and can thrive during good and bad times. ... On biometric-based security, Lee said Infotech Accord provides a Fingerprint Access Control System as well as a Facial Recognition Access Control System. 'These biometric security systems are offered to homeowners at affordable price tags between RM2,000 and RM3,000,' he said."
>>> Biometrics, Applications
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July 22, 2002: BSC breaking ground with 21st century technology. By Greg Jordan. Bluefield Daily Telegraph. "Instructors and students at the Bluefield State College engineering technology senior research project lab have spent months designing and building robots capable of navigating their own way through an obstacle course. One result was the 'Centurion' Autonomous Ground Robotic Vehicle. This robot, developed through the efforts of approximately 50 BSC engineering technology students, prompted the Central Measurement and Signature Intelligence Organization (MASINT) to award a $70,000 grant to the Applied Research & Technology Center at BSC. The grant will help the center develop an autonomous robot able to sense toxic vapors and generate sophisticated visual and logistical information. ... Robots in television shows, such as the television show 'Battle Bots,' on operated by remote control, but Centurion depends on its onboard sensors and computer for guidance.The robot will be controlled and guided through a Global Positioning System (GPS), sonar, and a vision system that uses diffuse visible sensors and a color video camera with image recognition, [Bruce] Mutter said."
>>> Military, Autonomous Vehicles, Hazards & Disasters, Vision, Image Understanding
-> back to headlines

July 22, 2002: Umpires Renew Attack on Monitoring. By Murray Chass. The New York Times (no-fee reg. req'd). "QuesTec, based in Deer Park, N.Y., has developed a system to track pitches by computer; the system is in place at about half a dozen major league parks. ... The union officers disputed the company's claim, writing that the umpires 'do not generally support' the system. The umpires and their technical consultants, the letter added, have 'serious concerns' about the use of the system under game conditions. 'Even if the QuesTec system were more accurate, there remain legitimate questions as to whether this device belongs in Major League Baseball,' the umpires said in the letter."
>>> Vision, Ethical & Social Implications
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July 22, 2002: Carnegie Mellon, Boeing building Army combat robot. Pittsburgh Business Times. "Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Consortium will build and test a prototype of a robotic, unmanned, ground combat vehicle for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA is working with the U.S. Army, under the Department of Defense's Future Combat Systems program, to develop new tools, weapons and unmanned vehicles enhanced with artificial intelligence. Those tools and weapons would give the Army more lethal and tactical capabilities, often without putting human troops in the line of fire."
>>> Military, Autonomous Vehicles, Hazards & Disasters
-> back to headlines

July 21, 2002: Signs of Fraud Go Beyond Signature - Credit Card Companies Use Artificial Intelligence to Thwart Thieves. By Margaret Webb Pressler. The Washington Post (Page H05). "As it turns out, however, credit card companies no longer rely on retail clerks to catch the crooks. ... 'We're at a level whereby we can understand with artificial intelligence . . . the potentially fraudulent transactions,' said Raf Sorrentino, vice president of risk management for First Data Corp., one of the country's biggest providers of credit card processing and payment services. Credit card fraud costs the industry about a billion dollars a year, or 7 cents out of every $100 dollars spent on plastic. But that is down significantly from its peak about a decade ago, Sorrentino says, in large part because of the powerful technology that can recognize unusual spending patterns."
>>> Fraud Detection & Prevention, Industry Statistics, Applications, Machine Learning
-> back to headlines

August issue [posted July 20. 2002]: Future Tech - Faking Intelligence. A sociable robot doesn't have to be smart - it just has to fool us into believing it is. By Eric Smalley. Discover (Vol. 23 No. 8). "Not long ago, computer scientists aspired to create silicon brains that could mimic the workings of the human mind. Doc Beardsley doesn't nearly meet those criteria, but his clever mix of animatronics, theater, speech recognition, and storytelling is remarkably effective at making visitors feel as if they are dealing with a conscious being. Long before anyone develops true artificial intelligence, pseudo-smart robots may be taking orders in restaurants, helping handicapped people perform daily chores, baby-sitting kids, and keeping us from boredom and loneliness. Todd Camill, a research engineer at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, says robots endowed with this sort of synthetic intelligence could soon make their public debut as animatronic characters in theme parks and museums. ... Compared with her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon, [Cynthia] Breazeal is focused less on near-term applications than on fundamentals of robotic behavior: how to make machines behave realistically in social situations and evoke normal human responses during activities such as leading a discussion or reading to a group of children.... A joint Carnegie Mellon-University of Pittsburgh team is developing Nursebot, a personable machine to aid the elderly. Someday the line between fake and genuine intelligence may begin to blur for real."
>>> Robots, Applications, Natural Language, Speech, Assitive Technologies, Entertainment
-> back to headlines

July 19, 2002: Is Anti-Virus Software Obsolete? By Erin Joyce. InternetNews. "That's why these and other anti-virus researchers talk about the need to add more anti-virus perimeters, which also happens to be the pitch from a new breed of outsourced security providers that help scan e-mail traffic before it enters the network. Take MessageLabs. Instead of deploying in-house reactive methods, it deploys 'digital watchtowers,' scanning engines with artificial intelligence that look at patterns and unusual characteristics within e-mails before they come into a customer's network, whether that's suspect files, codes, even porn-related spam. MessageLabs' SkyScan engine, notes Lindstrom, who has published studies of outsourced security providers, combines the scanning capabilities of three commercial a/v scanners (McAfee, F-Secure and V-Find) with proprietary statistical analytics (otherwise known in the trade as heuristics) and applies rule-based scanners to detect anomalies in network traffic."
>>> Networks
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July 19, 2002: Say hello to Kismet - and his maker. By Sean Fewster. The Advertiser. "Professor Brooks credits his success to a 'different view' of artificial intelligence. 'In the 1950s, the founders of A.I. were stuck on what makes someone intelligent, and they thought it was what made them superior to others,' he said. 'But they never thought about what a three-year-old can do - walk around a room and identify objects. 'What I'm concerned with is the things that people thought would be easy to do - moving around a room, sensing a room and interacting with the people in it. Once we've got that stuff, then creating higher-level intelligence is just an increment on top.'"
>>> Robots, AI Overview, Applications
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July 18, 2002: Nifty game to test your vocabulary. By Ahmad Faiz. The New Straits Times (Malaysia). "And like most other games, the best way for you to get better at Scrabble is by playing more. But you do not have people who would play with you at your convenience (and without gloating if they win). So, what do you do? Turn to the personal computer (PC), of course. Scrabble for the PC is not something new. There are many versions of it already. The earlier ones have very basic interfaces and very poor artificial intelligence (AI). Later versions are nicer to look at and have more challenging AI. ... As for the computer opponents, you can define their skill level as novice, intermediate, advanced, expert, champion and custom. The novice is a pushover who does not appear to know more than the usual three-letter word; the intermediate AI knows longer words but does not know how to strategise; the advanced AI knows a great many weird-sounding words and does strategise but makes mistakes in its strategies; the expert AI is near-flawless in its choice of words and strategy; and the champion AI tends to get all the good words (must have been configured to be downright lucky)."
>>> Scrabble, Games & Puzzles
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July 18, 2002: Robots Seen in Future of Citrus - The Citrus Department is paying for a study on the feasibility of robotic harvesting. By Kevin Bouffard. The Ledger. "The Florida Citrus Commission on Wednesday hired the University of Florida to conduct a $268,000 study on the feasibility of robotic harvesting in the state's citrus groves. ... The technology already exists to build a robotic harvester, [Galen] Brown said. The question remains whether that technology can harvest citrus productively and economically. ... Early robotic harvesters took several minutes to perform those tasks, he said. By the late 1990s, a European company had developed a robotic harvester that took about 3.5 seconds to recognize, pick and handle a single piece of fruit. That's still too slow to make a robotic harvester cheaper than manual labor, Brown said. But technology has advanced to the point it may be possible to build a machine that would pick one fruit per second."
>>> Agriculture, Robots, Vision, Autonomous Vehicles
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July 17, 2002: Thai humanoid being built. By Pongpen Sutharoj. The Nation. "Coming from a family who barely made ends meet, Djitt had to work hard to get where he is. . 'I never spent a baht of my family's money to pursue my studies,' he said. From Grade 1 to obtaining a doctoral degree in robotic science at Carnegie Melon University, Djitt relied on funding from scholarships. He now uses the knowledge he acquired from a decade's work to bring robots to life. Working with his team at the Centre of Operation for Field Robotic Development (Fibo) at King Mongkut's University of Technology Thon Buri, he is constructing his dream robot a 'humanoid' - which is designed to act like a human being. By putting artificial intelligence inside a robot, he hopes it will be able to talk and respond to people in a natural way. ... "They will be like us. People won't be able to tell them from humans. We will share the same society and who knows, one day, we may have an android population outnumbering humans, and they may demand their rights, like in the movies.'"
>>> Robots, Ethical & Social Implications, SciFi
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July 16, 2002: RoboForge released - Summitsoft releases a retail version of the robot-building simulation created by Liquid Edge.By Trey Walker. GameSpot PC. "The game, which was previously available for purchase through the Liquid Edge Web site, lets players design and build a custom robot from more than 300 components, program its artificial intelligence, and send it into test arenas to fight other robots."
>>> Video Games, Robots
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July 16, 2002: How new words come to be. By Sharon J. Huntington. The Christian Science Monitor. "Czech writer Karel Capek wrote a play in 1920 about mechanical creatures who work for humans. He called them robots, from the Czech word 'robota,' which means forced labor. The play was translated into English in 1923 and 'robot' entered our language to stay. ... When computers were first being developed, some programmers found their computer was not working right. They finally traced the problem to a bug (a moth, actually) that had landed on the circuitry. Now 'bug' has become a common term for a programming problem, even when they aren't talking about insects in the microchips."
>>> Namesakes (where you'll find our "bug" entry), Robots
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July 15, 2002: New 'smart' appliances for home gain U.S. foothold in Playa Vista. By Al Ridenour. Los Angeles Times / available from The Nando Times. "The integration of voice-command technology into domestic systems is not unique to GE. The Italian Turboair Group has created a stove hood with speech-recognition capabilities, and the British bathroom manufacturer Twyford has endowed a prototype toilet with a voice-activated flushing mechanism. There are also smart appliances that do the talking themselves. Sweden's Electrolux (maker of the robotic vacuum) is offering Indian consumers the 'Washy Talky,' a washing machine that prompts users with cues like "drop detergent, close lid and relax" in English or Hindi. And in Maryland, Home Automated Living provides software that not only recognizes and obeys voice commands, but also speaks back."
>>> Smart Rooms, Speech, Natural Language, Applications
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July 15, 2002: Artificial Intelligence. By Saptarshi Sarkar, Coordinator, Salt Lake School. Voices column in The Statesman (Magazine). "Today, Science is advancing at such a tremendous pace that what we dreamt of yesterday is now a reality. In the near future, we will achieve what the world of science is striving for nowadays, the ultimate creation of man, 'Artificial Intelligence'. Though we are marvelling at the advantages and splendours of such a highly modern invention, we are overlooking the drawback it holds for future generations. Still, it would be the greatest innovation ever in the sphere of science and technology. Creatures being artificially intelligent will be able to do anything without human command or control, They will execute or implement whatever they think to be correct. But, will those deeds be always useful or beneficial to us?"
>>> Ethical & Social Implications, Applications, AI: the movie, Robots
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July 15, 2002: Technologist of the year. By Ed Scannell. Inforworld. "Consistently hopping back and forth over the fence that separates deep technical research and the commercial marketplace for the past 30 years has made IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger the sort of practical visionary who can visualize and shape raw technology into purposeful products. ... Wladawsky-Berger traces this curiosity for all things technical back to his familiy. ... Throughout the 1970s, Wladawsky-Berger worked on a number of key projects in research, including IBM's first multiprocessing operating system for mainframes and projects involving early work on artificial intelligence."
>>> Careers in AI, Systems, Networks, Interviews & Oral Histories
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July 14, 2002: Robotics make driver optional. By Jason Strait. Associated Press / available from The Chicago Tribune (no-fee reg. req'd). "The technology was developed by University of Illinois agricultural engineers who have spent three years working with two of the country's largest farm equipment makers to create an automated tractor. 'What we needed, so to speak, is an artificial human. Basically we're mimicking a human -- eyes, brain and hands,' said Qin Zhang, who headed the university's research. ... In one test, researchers programmed the tractor to drive itself from garage to field, where it planted several acres of crops before returning to the garage on its own. ... Researchers stress the technology is intended to help farmers, not replace them."
>>> Agriculture, Autonomous Vehicles, Vision
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July 14, 2002: 14-Year-Old Already First In His Class - Fauquier Student Accepted To Thomas Jefferson. By Ian Shapira. The Washington Post. "Starting in September, the 14-year-old from southern Fauquier County will drive about two hours with his dad -- School Board Vice Chairman Gary A. Maloche (Cedar Run) -- to and from classes at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County. The Midland teenager is the first Fauquier student accepted to the Governor's Magnet School, one of the most exclusive and prestigious high schools in the Washington area. The rising sophomore registered Monday for what are considered basic classes at Thomas Jefferson -- chemistry, pre-calculus and computer science. He is already looking forward to his junior year when he can take elements of artificial intelligence or computer architecture."
>>> Student Resources
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July 14, 2002: To Err Is Human. By George Johnson. The New York Times [Deus Ex Machina, Week in Review, Section 4, pages 1, 7 (no-fee reg. req'd)]. "Ordered to climb higher by the electronic voice of the cockpit's automatic collision detector, the pilot of the children's plane obeyed the befuddled ground controller instead. The airliner dove head-on into a DHL cargo jet -- a tragedy that might have been averted if people put more faith in machines. ... The issue here is nothing so lofty as human versus artificial intelligence. What lay in the balance was a simple decision: up or down, 1 or 0. Believe the controller or believe the machine. Computers are routinely trusted to make a billion such binary calculations every second. It is what they do best. The Russian schoolchildren would probably be alive if the avoidance system had been equipped with the equivalent of robot arms capable of seizing control of the plane. Of removing the human from the loop. ... What happened in the cockpit was not really a matter of Us versus Them. The pilot, to the extent that he had time to think at all, was faced with weighing the reliability of the controller against that of the anonymous engineers who built the avoidance detector."
>>> Ethical & Social Implications, Reasoning, Expert Systems, SciFi
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July 14, 2002: Blinded by Science. By Patricia Leigh Brown. The New York Times [Week in Review, Section 4, page 3 (no-fee reg. req'd)]. "In his forthcoming book 'I'm Working on That: A Trek From Science Fiction to Science Fact,' William Shatner explores the reciprocity between Starship Enterprise fantasy and real-life scientific breakthroughs. 'What was suggested 30 years ago in 'Star Trek' is now old hat,' he said in a telephone interview. ... As a culture, we have become writers of our own fantasy saga in which pacemakers, cloning, the Internet, speech recognition software and the like are merely part of the scenery. And while much of what now seems humdrum was first envisioned in science fiction -- from mobile phones ('Star Trek') to fax machines (Philip K. Dick) -- it can sometimes seem as though the tables have been turned, with reality now providing inspiration to fantasy."
>>> The AI-Effect, SciFi, Speech, Natural Language, Applications, Artificial Life
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July 13, 2002: Local girls get scientific. By James Finlaw. The Herald News. "Building and programming a robot, constructing a boat from everyday objects, solving a murder, and disproving an old stereotype are each supremely daunting tasks. But for the girls participating in the annual 'Women In Technology Summer Camp' at Bristol Community College and the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, tackling such challenges are a joy. ... That spirit of learning and fun is exactly what Ted Boudria, the director of the Bristol Tech Prep Consortium, hoped the summer camp would instill in young women when his group launched the program. Begun eight years ago, the camp is designed to introduce young women to fields the nation's Department of Labor has identified as having a dearth of females -- technology and engineering. 'The federal government has indicated, through the Department of Labor, that less than 25 percent of the work force in engineering and related fields is composed of women,' said Boudria. ... [Kristy] Cabral said she also thoroughly enjoyed a program held at UMass Dartmouth on Tuesday, where the groups had to design and program a robot to walk and sing. 'Everything I've been doing so far is pretty cool,' she said."
>>> Equality in Computer Science. Summer Camps, Courses, Programs & more, Robots, Robot Kits, Resources for Educators
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July 13, 2002: Rescue comes on six long legs. The locally-made Autonomous Legged Vehicle can help search for survivors in inaccessible places. The Straits Times. "Known as the Autonomous Legged Vehicle, it is developed by the Defence Science and Technology Agency. The knee-high machine is able to navigate around obstacles because it is equipped with on-board ultrasonic sensors. ... When ready, the robots can be deployed by organisations such as the Singapore Armed Forces and the Singapore Civil Defence Force, to gather information at inaccessible accident sites such as hilly areas and seas, or to clear minefields."
>>> Hazards & Disasters
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July 13, 2002: US shows off robot plane. BBC. "The US Air Force has put on show a futuristic robot plane designed to survive the rigours of the battlefield. ... The X-45 is designed to be partially autonomous. Its pilot, who may fly several planes at once, would remain on the ground, out of harm's way. ... The Darpa, which develops future technologies for the Pentagon, has at least half-a-dozen other drones under development, some no larger than a cake tin."
>>> Autonomous Vehicles, Military
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July 12, 2002: High-tech Legos challenge class - High schoolers create robots at UNLV. By Natalie Patton. Las Vegas Review-Journal. "Rancho High School aerospace academy students snickered when they found out Lego building blocks would play a major role in a summer learning program at UNLV. ... The eight students, who today end a four-week NASA-supported summer learning program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, used Legos to build robotic vehicles that navigate mazes. The four vehicles were designed and programmed individually by pairs of students who used computer software to give the robots the artificial intelligence needed to turn corners and overcome the maze's obstacles, and light sensors for stopping. ... The Rancho Summer Internship Program provides a way for UNLV professors to connect with the high school engineering students and introduce them to the college environment, said Georg Mauer, the mechanical engineering professor overseeing the university program. Students earn a college credit and a stipend for their participation."
>>> Robots, Robot Kits, Competitions, Summer Camps, Courses, Programs & more
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July 12, 2002: Web services made easy. By Paul Festa. CNET News. "The W3C also promised a binding for SOAP 1.2 and continued cooperation with the W3C's efforts in what it calls the Semantic Web. Critics have called the Semantic Web -- an ambitious undertaking descended from the artificial intelligence world which aims to build a Web of documents that computers can 'understand' as well as read -- a distraction from the more practical and immediate demands of Web services. ... In other W3C news, the consortium published drafts in the following areas: ... Ontology Web Language: The Web Ontology Working Group updated its working draft of requirements for the Ontology Web Language 1.0. Web ontologies are sets of common terms that are useful to search services, software agents, and other applications relevant to the W3C's Semantic Web activity."
>>> Ontologies, Web-Searching Agents, Information Retrieval
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newspaper

July 11, 2002: Children's gears move at camp. By Jonathan Van Fleet. The Telegraph of Nashua. "Swamy and his wife, Naveena, who is the camp director, were delighted. After all, the camp was an idea of theirs that had come to life. The Swamys are passionate about technology - both have pursued high-tech careers - and want to pass on that passion to children. 'We want to take complex stuff and bring it to the kids in very simple ways,' Nanu Swamy said. The idea is to have campers, who are between the ages of 8 and 12, build things that will trigger their curiosity to figure out what makes their creations work. As they build, the campers will learn to use things such as diodes, resistors, transistors, semiconductor chips, gears, pulleys, axles and pneumatics, to name a few. ... 'There isn't anything like this for this age group in this region,' Naveena Swamy said. 'People are afraid to teach little kids these things. We feel the opposite.' ... While the camp is geared toward boys and girls, there clearly were more boys attending. The girls that were present certainly held their own."
>>> Summer Camps, Courses, Programs & more, Robots, Robot Kits, Resources for Educators
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July 11, 2002: CMU leads research team in developing a robot with social skills. By Judy Lin. The Associated Press / available from New Jersey Online / another version is available from The Straits Times: All Grace, but she's just a robot (7/16/02). "GRACE -- Graduate Robot Attending Conference -- is the prototype of a team of top computer scientists and researchers, led by Carnegie Mellon University, that's being developed with basic human social skills, from the ability to interpret human gestures to standing in line. The robot, a drum-shaped system with a digitally animated face that appears on a flat computer screen, is the only autonomous robot attempting to complete the mobile robot challenge at the American Association of Artificial Intelligence's national meeting later this month. The convention, complete with tuxedo-clad robots serving hors d'oeuvres, hosts such competitions to advance intelligent robotics research. The mobile robot challenge -- a cumbersome one by today's standards -- is to build a robot that can move safely and naturally among people. Elements of the challenge involve navigating through the AAAI convention in Edmonton, Alberta, having the robot register itself at the registration desk, find its way to a conference room to give a speech about itself and answer questions from people."
>>> Robots, Competitions
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reading news on laptop

July 11, 2002: His high-tech Highness - Barry Lam, boss of the world's biggest laptop maker, fancies his chances in storage and artificial intelligence. The Economist. "If you have not heard of him or of Quanta, that is because it suits him commercially to keep a low profile. ... Quanta, in other words, is a contract manufacturer -- a company that designs and makes gadgets but leaves the marketing (and increasingly only that) to companies with famous brands. ... Mr Lam's self-belief stretches into the future, too. He predicts that he will be the undisputed king of data-storage servers within five years. And further down the road? Wireless gadgets interest him, as does artificial intelligence."
>>> Applications
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July 11, 2002: A War of Robots, All Chattering on the Western Front. By Noah Shactman. The New York Times (no-fee reg. req'd). "Since the United States military campaign began in Afghanistan, the unmanned spy plane has gone from a bit player to a starring role in Pentagon planning. Rather than the handful of 'autonomous vehicles,' or A.V.'s, that snooped on Al Qaeda hideouts, commanders are envisioning wars involving vast robotic fleets on the ground, in the air and on the seas -- swarms of drones that will not just find their foes, but fight them, too. But such forces would need an entirely new kind of network in which to function, a wireless Internet in the sky that would let thousands of drones communicate quickly while zooming around a battle zone at speeds of up to 300 miles an hour. Such a network would have to be able to deal instantaneously with the unpredictable conditions of war and cope with big losses. ... An association of nearly 300 scientists and engineers spread across 45 project teams and coordinated by the Office of Naval Research is about a year and a half into a five-year, $11 million effort to determine what it will take to build such a system. The project is called Multimedia Intelligent Network of Unattended Mobile Agents, or Minuteman (not to be confused with the nuclear missiles)."
>>> Military, Autonomous Vehicles, Networks, Multi-Agent Systems, Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Telecommunications
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July 10, 2002: Think you can run Enron? Play the game. By David Becker. CNET News. "It might not have fully averted the WorldCom or Enron disasters, but Clark Aldrich figures his new software could have at least taught employees at those companies a few things about ethics and decision making. Aldrich is co-founder and vice president of SimuLearn, a software start-up focusing on corporate learning tools that look and run like computer games. The company's first product, 'Virtual Leader,' simulates a series of company meetings in which the player has to manage a complex network of interpersonal relationships in a work setting. ... Aldrich decided that an approach based on game conventions would be more engaging and productive. 'Virtual Leader' uses complex artificial intelligence routines to control the behavior of characters, drawing from a large roster of verbal responses and a library of almost 200 body gestures and facial responses."
>>> Education, Video Games, Ethical & Social Implications
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August issue (posted July 10, 2002): Stepford Child. By Sonia Zjawinski. Wired. "Even though she's just 5 years old, Cindy Smart speaks five languages. She's a good reader. She can tell time and do simple math, including multiplication and division. She's not a prodigy. She's just good programming. Cindy looks like an average doll - 18? inches of blond hair, baby-blue eyes, and a button nose. But loaded with a digital camera, microprocessor, and voice recognition software, Cindy is the first doll that can see, think, and do as she's told. That makes her both surprisingly precocious ... and a little creepy. When introduced by Toy Quest at conventions around the nation earlier this year, the doll spooked viewers as she read and counted out loud."
>>> Toys, Vision, Speech, Natural Language, Applications,
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July 10, 2002: FBI has eye on business databases. By Frank James. Chicago Tribune; distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services/ available from the Tallahassee Democrat / also available from the Billings Gazette. "While the FBI hasn't publicly specified how agents would use the data, experts say the bureau likely would employ a sophisticated technique called data mining to spot relationships in enormous amounts of data no human could possibly detect. The technique uses formulas, called algorithms, artificial intelligence and high-powered computers to tease out revealing patterns. Businesses have increasingly turned to data mining to reduce their sales costs through more precise targeting of consumers most likely to respond positively to marketing pitches or to predict what will keep current customers happy."
>>> Data Mining, Machine Learning, Marketing, Ethical & Social Implications
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July 9, 2002: A federal case - For U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, technology equals efficiency. By Julie Landry. Red Herring. "The federal government is one of the most ardent supporters of technology in the classroom. With its new No Child Left Behind education law, which takes effect this fall, the Department of Education is launching a five-year, $15 million study that will address whether technology is an effective teaching tool.... BAILEY: What we're seeing is that technology expands the learning opportunities for students. The ability for students to learn from other experts and participate in real research helps to make learning not only more interesting, but more real, in ways traditional textbooks cannot. The real opportunity and value proposition is when information systems are tied into instructional systems. Using artificial intelligence, these systems adapt the pace and complexity of instruction to meet the needs, abilities, and learning styles of each student. This creates the very real possibility of educating 52 million students in 52 million different ways. No more teaching to the middle of the class. No more one size fits all. No more leaving some of the children behind."
>>> Education
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July 9, 2002: Library announces new adult book list. Uinta County Herald . "The following books have recently become available for check-out at the Uinta County Library in Evanston. Some are also available in Lyman and/or Mountain View: ... Adult Non-Fiction ... Understanding Artificial Intelligence."
>>> AI Overview
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computer delivering newspaper

July 8, 2002: Replace your mouse with your eye. By Alfred Hermida BBC. "Scientists at Imperial College, London, are working on eye-tracking technology that analyses the way we look at things. The team are trying to gain an insight into visual knowledge - the way we see objects and translate that information into actions. ... Searching for something like a hand in a crowd requires as much mental effort as, for example, solving a crossword puzzle. ... 'We are trying to unravel how biological visual systems work and reverse-engineer better computer vision systems,' [Professor Guang-Zhong Yang] said."
>>> Vision, Interfaces, Cognitive Science, Applications, Crossword Puzzles
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July 8, 2002: Students program robots to hug line - Gizmos lead to education. By William Valente. Poughkeepsie Journal. "The task for the 29 students participating in the Summer Scholars program at Bard College was to build and program a robot that can follow a thick black line around a paper grid. Students attacked, dissected and found solutions to the challenge -- happy to spend two weeks of their summer vacation learning about computers and robotics. ... Teaching programming through robotics makes the topic more accessible to students as there is a physical demonstration of a programming language, Bard computer science professor Becky Thomas said."
>>> Resources for Educators, Robots
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July 8, 2002 issue: All You Need Is Love, $50 Billion, and Killer Software Code-Named Longhorn. By Brent Schlender. Fortune. "[Bill] Gates also takes an intense interest in Microsoft Research, the 600-person think tank he set up a decade ago to push the envelope of software technology, user-interface design, speech recognition, and computer graphics. Among his favorite projects is BestCom, an experimental program that turns a PC into an administrative assistant. It will screen calls and e-mails, set up and confirm meetings and telephone conferences just by entering them in the calendar, and prioritize and forward messages to the user's cellphone, PDA, or pager when he's out of the office. Bill calls it Outlook Plus and hopes it can be turned into a product for Longhorn."
>>> Interfaces, Speech, Natural Language, Agents, Applications
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laptop news

July 7, 2002: It's art, but artless - The future's looking good for Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise. What a shame the drama was lost along the way. By Jason Solomons. The Guardian Unlimited Observer. "Films about the future are never very funny. Steven Spielberg's Minority Report is, by turns, amazing, thrilling and puzzling, but it is also utterly devoid of humour. AI: Artificial Intelligence wasn't funny either, at least not intentionally. If these latest additions to the Spielbergian oeuvre illustrate anything, it is that computers can't tell jokes. ... Cruise is chief of a Washington DC police unit called Pre-Crime. He and his force swoop down from the heavens just as murders are about to be committed and arrest the perpetrators before they can carry out their criminal intentions. That way, nobody gets hurt and the murder rate is down to zero. ... The entire system - and this is set only 52 years from now - is based on the predictions of three young people asleep in a tank of murky water. These Pre-Cogs, as they are known, sporadically twitch into life and project their dreams and visions on to screens...."
>>> Now read this very interesting article from April 21, 2002: Robot cameras 'will predict crimes before they happen.' as well as, What a clever Dick, from June 23rd.
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July 7, 2002: Approximating Life. By Clive Thompson. The New York Times Magazine; pages 30 -33 (no-fee reg. req'd). "Each morning, he wakes before dawn and watches conversations stream by on his screen. Thousands of people flock to his Web site every day from all over the world to talk to his creation, a robot called Alice. It is the best artificial-intelligence program on the planet, a program so eerily human that some mistake it for a real person. As [Richard] Wallace listens in, they confess intimate details about their lives, their dreams; they talk to Wallace's computer about God, their jobs, Britney Spears. It is a strange kind of success: Wallace has created an artificial life form that gets along with people better than he does. ...Is she intelligent? If so, how? In 1950, the pioneering British mathematician Alan Turing grappled with this question in the journal Mind, where he first posed the 'Turing Test' -- the gold standard for artificial thought. 'Can machines think?' he asked -- and immediately noted that the question hinges, of course, on what 'thinking' is."
>>> Chatterbots, Natural Language, History, Turing Test, Philosophy, Namesakes (Zipf), Creativity
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July 6, 2002: Thrills in a mind-Cruisin' future. Francis Dass' review of Minority Report. New Straits Times. "John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is the head of an elite police unit called Pre-Crime in 2054. Pre-Crime does exactly what its name implies: its officers prevent murders by mining images of the future from three psychics and analysing the information to locate the would-be murderers and their 'victims' before the crime can take place. ... But that future, despite its wonderful bells and whistles, is one that any sane person would not want to live in. Sure there are wonderful magnet-propelled cars that are controlled by computers and eliminate the probability of accidents completely. ... Minority Report sees Spielberg painting a Big-Brother type of future that is insidiously foreboding. In the gifted director's vision, in 2054 an individual can no longer move freely without being eye-scanned and traced by anyone with computer access. Or, advertising dollars!"
>>> SciFi, Biometrics, Transportation, Ethical & Social Implications, Law Enforcement, and see this related article from April 21, 2002: Robot cameras 'will predict crimes before they happen.' By Andrew Johnson. Independent News.
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July 5, 2002: Portugal to Host 2004 World Robot-Soccer Tournament. Xinhua News Agency. "Portugal was awarded with the organization of the Robocup 2004 world tournament by Robocup Federation. The tournament will take place on June 27-July 3, 2004 in Lisbon, and will coincide with the European Cup also in Portugal."
>>> Robots, Competitions (from Student Resources)
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July 5, 2002: Producers use A.I. to change herd genetics. By Lana Johnson. Mobridge Tribune. "Cattle producers looking to improve the breeding quality of their herd have already completed, or are in the midst of, an A.I. program. No, it's not artificial intelligence. It's artificial insemination. 'It's the quickest, most inexpensive way to get dramatic changes in genetics in a herd in a single year,' said A.I. technician Susie Ellison, 42, of Isabel."
>>> This article proves the point that not all "AI" involves "AI" ! As for how AI (artificial intelligence) can help ranchers, see: Agriculture
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checking the news on computer

July 5, 2002: Unusual Heroes, Wired to Go. By Laurel Graeber. The New York Times (no-fee reg. req'd). "ABB is one superb basketball player. He's seven feet tall, makes 9 out of 10 of his shots and has his moves down to a science. But don't expect him to join a professional team any time soon -- unless, of course, the National Basketball Association starts accepting robots. The ABB Basketball Arm is one of the stars of 'Robotics,' a new exhibition at the New York Hall of Science."
>>> Robots, Exhibits & Collections (part of Student Resources)
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See our newest toon, inspired by the Fourth of July !!!

sketch of newspaper and computer

July 4, 2002: RoboNavigator to offer accurate parts assembly. The Japan Times. "Trading house Marubeni Corp. said Wednesday it has developed with two business allies a control system capable of recognizing the spatial location of industrial parts to be picked up and assembled by robot arms. The system features a single camera acting like an eye that can judge the spatial position of parts, enabling it to minutely adjust the movement of robot arms as they pick up and carry the parts, Marubeni said."
>>> Vision, Robots, Manufacturing
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July 4, 2002: Government Watchdog - Software That Sniffs. By Rebecca Fairley Raney. The New York Times (no-fee reg. req'd). "The software, called Minutes-N-Motion, applies artificial intelligence to the problem of finding needles in the haystacks of government documents. While standard document-searching software can pinpoint keywords, Mr. Craig's program makes connections to draw conclusions on issues like whether a public official may have acted on a matter presenting a conflict of interest. ... Although many universities and companies are building and selling systems that retrieve information from large data sets, such systems are rarely marketed as government watchdog tools. 'If they're looking for conflicts of interest, that's something I haven't seen,' said Tom Mitchell, president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.
>>> see the related article that follows
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July 2, 2002: Document Reading Made Easy - A new software might help journalists sort through reams of documents in minutes. By Rebecca Fairley Raney. Online Journalism Review. "While many reporters use keyword searches on documents or hunt for patterns in databases, [Murray] Craig's software can take documents such as city council minutes and identify potential conflicts of interest. Instead of matching keywords, artificial intelligence software incorporates rules within its programming to find results. ... Without question, many industries will make use of artificial intelligence as it advances and the price drops. Tom Mitchell, president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, said that technology that reads English is in its infancy. ... 'It's going to be a long time before we have programs that can read novels and reflect on their meaning,' Mitchell said. 'But we already have software that can read Web pages and pull out employee names and phone numbers.' ... [T]he appeal of artificial intelligence could grow in the news industry, where high turnover rates in newsrooms make 28-year-old reporters seem middle-aged. Over time, these types of automated shortcuts could seem economical to media corporations that employ fewer reporters as well as small-scale Internet publishers who scramble to give readers a good grasp of their communities."
>>> Politics, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval & Extraction
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July 3, 2002: Can a chip help computers see in 3D? By Stephen Shankland. ZDNet UK. "A Silicon Valley start-up believes it can improve computer vision by combining a custom-designed chip with the way humans see. Human brains judge how far away objects are by comparing the slightly different view each eye sees. Tyzx hopes to build this stereo vision process into video cameras. ...The technology could be a boon for surveillance systems, strengthening the ability to track people in banks, stores or airports. But stereo vision could have wider uses as well, helping focus a computer's attention and cutting down on the amount of data that needs to be crunched. For instance, a vacuuming robot trying to discern a table leg through pattern recognition could avoid getting caught up in examining the wallpaper in the background. Similarly, vehicles could use the technology to detect obstacles in their path while filtering out visual noise."
>>> Vision, Applications, Law Enforcement
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newspaper stand

July 2, 2002: Synaptics: nothing touchy-feely about it - Laptop touch pad maker shows its patience never wears thin. By Dean Takahashi. Red Herring Magazine. "[I]n 1994, Synaptics created the touch pad, the little sensor on laptop computers that detects the position and pressure of a person's finger on its surface. Powered by a neural network, the touch pad has proven to be the most accurate and quickest way to move the cursor around a laptop screen. It's now used on 55 percent of laptops. Meanwhile, 29 percent of laptops feature touch sticks -- a touch-sensitive padded stick to which laptop users apply pressure with their index finger to move the screen cursor. Pioneered by IBM, the touch stick is now manufactured by Synaptics. Finally, 10 percent of laptops come with both touch pads and touch sticks, and most of these dual touch stick/pads are supplied by Synaptics. It may not be the mother lode of artificial intelligence (although a touch pad packs more electronic smarts than were in the Apple II), but it's a product that people like -- and a market that Synaptics dominates. Last year Synaptics made 61 percent of all touch pads in new laptops, with volume reaching into the tens of millions."
>>> Interfaces, Neural Networks, Pattern Recognition, Machine Learning
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July 2, 2002: Video research at MIT puts words into mouths. Associated Press / available from CNN. "The MIT team has combined artificial intelligence and videography to make words and song -- even in foreign languages -- emerge from the lips of people who could never possibly have uttered them. ... Once the computer has learned how the person shapes their mouth around individual sound segments -- called 'phonemes' -- it can digitally morph the shape of the subject's mouth around any audio sequence the creator wants to put words in a subject's mouth within minutes. It's the 'teaching' of the computer that makes this method different from most existing facial animation technology. The recorded results? A woman made to sing in Japanese, and Marilyn Monroe lip-synching a song that didn't become famous until decades after her death. ... The MIT team is most excited to see this new technology used for language training, helping the deaf learn to speak or putting a more human face on computers, though it also has obvious applications for entertainment and film, such as realistic dubbing. Bob Steele, director of the ethics program at The Poynter Institute, a journalism research center, worries about the potential for abuse."
>>> Machine Learning, Ethical & Social Implications, Assistive Technologies, Interfaces
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July 1, 2002: From cuckoo clocks to cloud machines. By Graham Howe. Cape Times / available from Independent Online. "Welcome to the world's first cloud machine. ... The Cloud is one of the major drawcards of Expo.02, a Swiss showcase of arts and technology which will attract an estimated 10 million visitors from around Europe over the next four months. ... Challenging our conceptions of 'nature and artifice', the Swiss National Exhibition features a fictitious city called Biopolis which analyses your DNA, and Robotics, which 'provides amazing proof of the ever-dwindling dichotomy between man and robots', to quote the press blurb. There's even a walk-in electronic brain that demonstrates 'the scientific possibilities of imitating the functions of the human brain.' Artificial intelligence -and fake clouds and strawberries - can be interactive and entertaining."
>>> Exhibits, Ethical & Social Implications, Cognitive Science, Machine Learning, Robots
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July 1, 2002: At the crossroads of terror - Inside the clandestine operations center where the CIA tries to anticipate what al-Qaeda will do next. By Douglas Waller, with reporting by Christopher Preston. CNN. "The center is trying to do what it could not do before: pluck obscure bits of information from the flood of often irrelevant or insignificant data and connect the dots to foil a major new attack. CIA scientists are investigating exotic supercomputer programs and artificial intelligence that might help analysts link hundreds of thousands of names, places and bank accounts."
>>> Data Mining & Discovery
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July 1, 2002: Five players hold key to robotics success. By Christopher Davis. Pittsburgh Business Times. The success or failure of an initiative to make Pittsburgh the go-to source for defense robotics could hinge on the work of five local players, according to informed sources. While many civic and business leaders will play parts in a broad-based regional effort, these five people all have distinct roles, from generating essential public and private funding to serving as conduits to key industries. ... Their goal is to help the region tap into a large portion of the $34 billion expected to be spent on a new U.S. Department of Defense program, called Future Combat Systems, that focuses on developing unmanned vehicles and weapons enhanced with artificial intelligence. The Future Combat Systems program will develop tools and weapons to give the U.S. Army more lethal and tactical capabilities, often without putting human troops in the line of fire."
>>> Military, Robots
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computer reading newspaper

July 1, 2002: Computers reach one billion mark. BBC. "One billion personal computers have been sold across the world, according to hi-tech consultancy Gartner Dataquest. ... 'Today, humans have to work with computers on the computers' terms,' explained Intel's Chief Technology Officer, Pat Gelsinger. 'We want to make computers work with humans on their terms. That vision includes developing PCs that can recognize speech, gestures and video.'"
>>> Speech, Natural Language, Image Understanding, Interfaces, Industry Statistics, History
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July 1, 2002 issue [posted 6/28/01]: Tin Men - Japanese engineers are creating a race of obedient machines for the masses. By Charles S. Lee. Time Asia Magazine. (Vol. 159, No. 25). "Since 1986, Honda researchers have been trying to build a robot that could balance and walk naturally like a human. With ASIMO (short for Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility), mission accomplished. Now they are moving on to the next epochal challenge: creating a generation of humanoid machines that boast the kind of butlering skills of classic science fiction robots. 'Imagine a machine that's as versatile as a human but that works 24 hours a day and does all the household chores,' gushes Hirose. 'You can't really attach a price tag to what it offers.'"
>>> Robots, Applications
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July 1, 2002 issue [posted 6/23/02]: Where Lech Does Tech. By Desa Philadelphia. TIME. "Leading Poland to democracy brought Lech Walesa a Nobel Peace Prize and international acclaim, but he admits to a few regrets. One is that he was so busy throughout the 1980s and '90s that he 'did not have the time to follow developments in technology closely.' But he is catching up.The first corporate board Walesa, 58, has agreed to join is that of NuTech Solutions, a closely held company founded three years ago in Charlotte, N.C., by a pair of Polish immigrants. NuTech creates software that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to boost efficiency in its clients' manufacturing, distribution and customer service. NuTech software allows Ford to find profitable new ways to sell vehicles that are coming off leases. It helps Unilever target inefficiencies in its supply chain. And it is being used to detect check and credit-card fraud at Bank of America ... AMR Research, a technology research company based in Boston, estimates that 40% of all new manufacturing-related software already incorporates some form of AI. ... Walesa, who leads a foundation that promotes a free-market economy in Poland, says that although he is happy to be working with his countrymen, he joined NuTech primarily because he is passionate about the promise of its technologies, which he is studying avidly. 'The science and technology NuTech represents,' he says, 'are the future of all companies.'"
>>> Business & Manufacturing, Fraud Detection & Prevention, Industry Statistics, Machine Learning, Applications
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July 2002 issue [posted 6/18/02]: Nvidia - Meet Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, the man who plans to make the CPU obsolete. By Jeffrey M. O'Brien. Wired Magazine (10.07). "For a perfect example of the changing dynamic between the GPU [graphics processing units] and CPU [central processing unit], look at the Xbox. It uses a special version of Nvidia's nForce chipset, built around a tricked-out GeForce3 to handle graphics and sound. Microsoft paid Nvidia more than it did Intel for its 733-MHz Pentium III. For Huang, it's a proof of concept. 'The Xbox is how the computer will be built in the next 20 years. More semiconductor capacity will go to the user experience,' he says. 'The microprocessor will be dedicated to other things like artificial intelligence. That trend is helpful to us. It's a trend that's inevitable."
>>> Systems, Video Games
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