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January 31, 2005: Computer system said to help stop drowning. By Ed Frauenheim. CNET News.com. "A man swimming in a pool near Paris almost drowned last week but was rescued with the help of a computer vision surveillance system, the maker of the system said. The Poseidon drowning-detection system also helped lifeguards save the life of a teenager in France who nearly drowned in 2000, and last year it helped lifeguards in Germany rescue an elderly man who nearly drowned after a heart attack, said Poseidon's maker, Vision IQ. ... Poseidon is a computer vision surveillance system designed to recognize texture, volume and movement within a pool." January 31, 2005: Computer class more than just data entry. By Gerard MacCrossan. Kerrville Daily Times. "'Students need to realize that there are many more uses for the computer other than word processing, spreadsheets, databases and PowerPoint,' [Dave] Pullias said. 'Each year, students coming into high school are more computer literate than those who preceded them.' Pullias simulates the workplace situation by assuming the role of a corporate production manager who communicates with a systems design firm --- his students --- through memos. ... In addition to learning about logic-based computer programming, the students have to place themselves in a real-world situation where they must meet deadlines to complete the project. .... Next year, Pullias said he plans to expand the computer class to incorporate artificial intelligence projects into the class, as well as the robotics the current seniors are working with." January 31, 2005: Westlaw Service Gains ‘Smart Tools.' Information Today Weekly News Digest. "Thomson West ... has added 'Smart Tools' to its Westlaw online research service. ... Smart Tools use artificial intelligence technology developed in-house by technologists, scientists, and attorneys solely focused on the legal industry." January 31, 2005: A.I. researchers struggle with human toll of automation. By John Scruggs. Memphis Business Journal. [Note: this article appeared in the 1/28/05 print edition.] "Artificial intelligence is becoming a reality as adaptive technologies revolutionize the way businesses operate. Industries ranging from transportation and distribution to healthcare and education are all target markets for adaptive technologies. As the limitless advantages and huge impact of artificial intelligence on the business world are slowly gaining acceptance, ethical questions arise concerning the impact such technologies could have on the labor market. ... Art Graesser, co-director of the Institute for Intelligent Systems and chairman of the department of psychology at the U of M, says that adaptive, intelligent systems will improve the labor market. 'The printing press didn't put scribes out of business,' says Graesser. 'This will allow workers to move from human repetitive tasks to more intelligent, engaging tasks.' He referenced the market for intelligent tutoring systems such as the AutoTutor software developed at the U of M. 'Teachers can now focus on developing content instead of the repetitive delivery of that content,' Graesser says. ... Artificial intelligence is driving much of the research at the FedEx Institute, but the acceptance and implementation of many new technologies is a slow process. "There's a chasm between the work that has been completed here and getting these systems into the market," [Eric] Mathews says." January 30, 2005: Teaching computers to read no simple task. By Michael Hill. Associated Press / available from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer / also available from SFGate.com (See Dick Compute: Teaching computers to read no ABC affair). "The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, or DARPA, granted a contract worth at least $400,000 last fall to two Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professors who are trying to build a machine that can learn by reading. ... A.I. is already ingrained in our lives, from programs used by banks in evaluating potential borrowers' credit ratings to software that suggests corrected spellings for unrecognized words to investigative programs that mine databases seeking non-obvious relationships. But reading is difficult for machines. ... 'Natural language is very ambiguous,' said Boris Katz of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory." January 30, 2005: Tool for Thought. Essay by Steven Johnson. The New York Times Sunday Book Review (registration req'd.). "Changing the way we think, of course, was the cardinal objective of many early computer visionaries: Vannevar Bush's seminal 1945 essay that envisioned the modern, hypertext-driven information machine was called 'As We May Think'; Howard Rheingold's wonderful account of computing's pioneers was called 'Tools for Thought.' Most of these gurus would be disappointed to find that, decades later, the most sophisticated form of artificial intelligence in our writing tools lies in our grammar checkers. But 2005 may be the year when tools for thought become a reality for people who manipulate words for a living, thanks to the release of nearly a dozen new programs all aiming to do for your personal information what Google has done for the Internet. These programs all work in slightly different ways, but they share two remarkable properties: the ability to interpret the meaning of text documents; and the ability to filter through thousands of documents in the time it takes to have a sip of coffee. ... They don't do cause-and-effect as well as they do ''x reminds me of y.''" January 29, 2005: Qrio dances into spotlight at Carnegie Mellon. By Michael Yeomans. Tribune-Review & PittsburghLIVE.com. "Qrio, a 2-year-old humanoid robot and corporate ambassador for Sony Electronics Inc., wowed a packed house at the [Carnegie Mellon University's] Campus Center with its fluidity of movement during preprogrammed dances. ... Knock it over, as its handler did intentionally, and Qrio braces its fall with its hands, and within 15 seconds, brings itself upright. ... Seema Patel, a graduate student at CMU's Entertainment Technology Center, was impressed with the face and sound recognition, sensor and movement technology on display in Qrio, but said an animatronic robot she and some of her fellow students are developing named Quasi aspires to improve the artificial intelligence of robots so they can have more meaningful interactions with people." January 29, 2005: Google's search for meaning. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist Magazine (Issue 2484; page 21). "Computers can learn the meaning of words simply by plugging into Google. The finding could bring forward the day that true artificial intelligence is developed. ... Paul Vitanyi and Rudi Cilibrasi of the National Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, realised that a Google search can be used to measure how closely two words relate to each other. ... From this a computer can infer meaning, says Vitanyi. 'This is automatic meaning extraction. It could well be the way to make a computer understand things and act semi-intelligently,' he says. ... The pair's results do not surprise Michael Witbrock of the Cyc project in Austin, Texas, a 20-year effort to create an encyclopaedic knowledge base for use by a future artificial intelligence. ... 'The web might make all the difference in whether we make an artificial intelligence or not,' says Witbrock." January 28, 2005: Other films planned for 2005. The Daily Herald & HeraldNet. "'Stealth': Military top guns try to bring down a renegade drone plane controlled by artificial intelligence. ... (July)." January 28, 2005: AI agents used to smooth wrinkles in housing project - A Chicago agency has turned to Agentis Software for help. By Heather Havenstein. Computerworld. "Agent technology -- distributed software components that can realign processes to meet goals without intervention -- is a practical application born from laboratory research into artificial intelligence. When business requirements change for the CHA [Chicago Housing Authority] during the project, the application can be modified incrementally to manage exception handling without expensive and time-consuming recoding efforts, said Barbara Banks, CHA's CIO. Banks said the agency was able to slash by 50% the budgeted cost of building and making changes to the application. ... 'The real power of agents is they can actually learn, and as they learn, they can self-modify the rules,' said Navi Radjou, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. 'It goes well beyond the rigid rules-based systems, which offer you a limited set of alternatives.'" January 28, 2005: Smart search lets art fans browse. BBC News. "ArtGarden, developed by BT's research unit, is being tested by the Tate as a new way of browsing its online collection of paintings. Rather than search by the name of an artist or painting, users are shown a selection of pictures. ... The technology uses a system dubbed smart serendipity, which is a combination of artificial intelligence and random selection." January 27, 2005: Battle bot: the future of war? Sharpshooting robots evoke 'Terminator.' The more pertinent question is how these automated soldiers will transform military conflict. By Gregory M. Lamb. The Christian Science Monitor. "This spring, the United States armed forces are expected to deploy 18 Talon robots to Iraq. The semi-autonomous machines will be capable of firing rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, and rockets with better accuracy than human soldiers. They're the latest step in a surge of battlefield 'bots' that are increasingly shouldering the military's most dangerous jobs. ... The evolution of war is at its midpoint, Mr. [John] Pike says. 'First you had human beings without machines. Then you had human beings with machines. And finally you have machines without human beings.' ... To advance research in the field, the US military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will hold its second 'grand challenge' this year, offering a $2 million prize to any robotic vehicle that can maneuver across 175 miles of desert terrain with no human aid. ... If such technological challenges are met, robot armies could someday become so powerful that the idea of war itself could become unthinkable. ... Or would war become easier?" January 27, 2005: A thinking man's runner - Coatesville's Ellis Wilson has some pretty brainy ambitions in the computer science field. By Ira Josephs. Philadelphia Inquirer. Ellis Wilson is fascinated by artificial intelligence, but there's nothing synthetic about his smarts. The Coatesville High senior distance runner plans to major in computer science, minor in psychology, and eventually add to the progress being made in the artificial intelligence arena." January 26, 2005: 'Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine.' Movie review by Michael Wilmington. Chicago Tribune. "The film shows us the war of nerves and checkmates between Kasparov and IBM and makes it as exciting as almost any recent sports drama around. But the ending, worthy of an Isaac Asimov science fiction story, is both ironic and, in its way profound; it raises numerous stimulating questions about man and the machine, artificial intelligence and the corporation (and the state) versus the individual." January 26 / February 2, 2005: Adaptive lights organize traffic. By Kimberly Patch. Technology Research News. "A researcher from the Free University of Brussels (VUB) in Belgium has devised a way to allow traffic lights to self-organize to improve traffic flow. The method, which taps the self-organizing principles of social insects, does away with central control. ... [T]he traffic lights cannot communicate directly with each other, but reacting to local traffic density allows them to coordinate indirectly. 'They communicate indirectly through their environment, as many social insects do,' said [Carlos] Gershenson. 'The environment of the traffic lights [is] the cars.'" January 26, 2005: Art with intelligence. The Guardian (Society Guardian / epublic / News: In Brief). "The Tate is working on a website allowing people who know little about art to browse a personal collection online. The ArtGarden system, developed by artificial intelligence experts at BT, collects information about users' personal tastes by showing a selection of works and offers views of pictures it thinks the user will like." January 26, 2005: Opera, the Forgotten Browser. By Michelle Delio. Wired News. "Voice Interaction, Opera's splashiest new feature, allows users to control the program by talking to their computers. Websites, e-mail and documents can also be read aloud by the browser. 'Voice Interaction is a progressive part of our vision that web browsing will soon move more into mobile phones and other small devices and browsing will need to be a hands-free experience,' said Michelle Valdivia, Opera marketing communications manager. 'This is very early, premature technology, but Opera wants to get ahead, get it out there and into practice to be future-ready.'" January 26, 2004: Cars that Think. PBS television broadcast of Scientific American Frontiers show. "The fully automatic car may be down the road a ways, but cars that do your thinking for you are just around the corner -- they watch out for hazards, they listen to you, they read your lips, they even know when you're distracted." January 25, 2005: Deloitte Identifies Top Trends in Technology for 2005. DMReview.com. "Deloitte's Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) industry group announced its predictions for the global technology industry in 2005, forecasting a number of advances in technology, along with some serious challenges. ... Eric Openshaw, a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP and Americas Group Leader, TMT industry group, commented, "In 2005 Internet use will continue to proliferate, with the web browser playing an increasingly important part in our lives. Nanotechnology will become increasingly mainstream.... Robots will move into our homes to help us with household chores and other mundane tasks.'" January 24, 2005: Softbots stride forward. By Siobhan McBride. Computerworld. "Can't make next week's videoconference with head office? No problem, your computer-generated avatar will stand in for you; having been created in your image it's a shrewd strategist in complete command of the points you wish to make - including your fallback position. While it sounds like it may be a long time coming, research into intelligent agents, software programs also known as 'softbots', is progressing so quickly scientists predict this scenario could be a reality within 10 years. ... Two researchers headed down this path are Professor Ryszard Kowalczyk, of Swinburne University's faculty of Information and Communication Technology, and Professor Jun Han, also of Swinburne University, who heads a contribution to an Australian-European Union consortium developing service-orientated computing systems of the future. ... The project plan is to develop agents to automate the interchange and composition of software and services via the Internet, including software components to coordinate business activities such as supply, distribution and sales." January 24, 2005: Cops pursue cybersystem that could help link robberies. By Frank Main, Crime Reporter. Chicago Sun-Times. "[A] DePaul University professor and the Chicago Police Department are exploring an artificial intelligence system that would scan the data warehouse to pick out crime patterns. They're limiting their study to robberies. ... The idea stems from a doctoral project by one of [Tom] Muscarello's students, Tim O'Shea, They tapped the expertise of Chicago's robbery investigators to tell the computer system what to look for when searching for a pattern of holdups. ... [L]ast year, Muscarello and another student, Kamal Dahbur, advanced the idea, setting up a 'Kohonen neural network' that finds patterns in crime data without any human intervention." January 24, 2005: Machine learns games 'like a human.' By Will Knight. New Scientist News. "A computer that learns to play a 'scissors, paper, stone' by observing and mimicking human players could lead to machines that automatically learn how to spot an intruder or perform vital maintenance work, say UK researchers. CogVis, developed by scientists at the University of Leeds in Yorkshire, UK, teaches itself how to play the children's game by searching for patterns in video and audio of human players and then building its own 'hypotheses' about the game's rules. In contrast to older artificial intelligence (AI) programs that mimic human behaviour using hard-coded rules, CogVis takes a more human approach, learning through observation and mimicry, the researchers say. ... 'A system that can observe events in an unknown scenario, learn and participate just as a child would is almost the Holy Grail of AI,' says Derek Magee from the University of Leeds." January 24, 2005: Redstone developing robot that may save soldiers' lives - Small, fast device with camera geared to troops reared on video games. By Shelby G. Spires. The Huntsville Times / abailable from al.com. "Redstone Arsenal's Robotics Systems Joint Project Office is developing a small wheeled robot that may be able to reduce that danger. Slightly smaller than a soda can, the robot has a transmitter and a camera on board, weighs less than 2 pounds and has a range of about 100 feet. ... The simple design makes the throwbot easy to use, Griffin said. "It's pretty simple in that a soldier can just throw it into a room or around a corner, and then drive it around to explore," [Col. Terry] Griffin said." January 22, 2005: Army prepares armed 'robo-soldier' for Iraq. By Michael P. Regan. Associated Press / available from Newsday.com. "The Army is preparing to send 18 of these remote-controlled robotic warriors to fight in Iraq beginning in March or April. Made by a small Massachusetts company, the SWORDS, short for Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems, will be the first armed robotic vehicles to see combat, years ahead of the larger Future Combat System vehicles currently under development by big defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics Corp. It's easy to humanize the SWORDS (a tendency robotics researchers say is only human) as it moves out of the flashy lobby of an office building and into the cold with nary a shiver. ... They may be able to offer cues to their operators when potential foes are near, but it's doubtful any of them will ever be allowed to make the decision to pull the trigger, according to Jim Lowrie, president of Perceptek Inc., a Littleton, Colo., firm that is developing robotics systems for the military. 'For the foreseeable future, there always will be a person in the loop who makes the decision on friend or foe. That's a hard problem to determine autonomously,' said Lowrie."
>>> Robots, Military, Applications, Ethical & Social Implications January 22, 2005: Digital technology changing face of security. By Jon Van. Chicago Tribune. "When a vehicle traveling through Boston's new underground highway system pulls over, digital surveillance cameras will automatically take pictures and check out the license plate. 'This is an intelligent system that can distinguish if it is a service vehicle, a police vehicle or some other vehicle that has stopped,' said Alan E. Calegari, president of security systems at Buffalo Grove-based Siemens Building Technologies Inc. ... Increasingly, the physical security of enterprises is becoming the domain of the information technology people, he said." January 21, 2005: Xegen takes Intellagents to market. By Kate Palmer. Reseller News Online. "Artificial intelligence developer Xegen is on the verge of going to market with its Intellagents software. The company, which began as a business incubation start-up at AUT Technology Park, is now ready to commercialise and take its AI software to the international market." January 20, 2005: Games people play - The co-operative and the selfish are equally successful at getting what they want. The Economist. "Many people, it is said, regard life as a game. Increasingly, both biologists and economists are tending to agree with them. Game theory, a branch of mathematics developed in the 1940s and 1950s by John von Neumann and John Nash, has proved a useful theoretical tool in the study of the behaviour of animals, both human and non-human. Sometimes these strategies involve co-operation, sometimes not. Sometimes the 'game' will result in everybody playing the same way. Sometimes they will need to behave differently from one another. But there has been a crucial difference in the approach taken by the two schools of researchers." January 20, 2005: Rock climbing robot. The Engineer. "A robot able to prevent landslides, whose development involved funding from both the European Commission and the European Space Agency (ESA), has been tested successfully in Italy. Roboclimber is a four tonne robot able to climb vertical slopes and drill deep holes into solid rock walls - typically the first step in the procedure to stabilise walls at risk of landslides." January 20, 2005: No Place to Hide - Freedom and Identity. Peter Jennings and the Fight Against Terrorism in the Digital Age. ABC News. "'Think about the time you call to buy a book or a sweater,' said journalist Robert O'Harrow, author of 'No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society.' As soon as your phone number pops up on the operator's computer screen, the networks of another data company, Acxiom, can append links to information from a wide range of databases that tell the operator not only your name, but also your estimated income and even the kind of car you drive, said O' Harrow, who collaborated with ABC News on the broadcast 'Peter Jennings Reporting: No Place to Hide.' From that information, and much more, marketers --- and now, perhaps, government investigators --- can study what people are likely to do, what kind of attitudes they have, what they buy at the grocery store. 'This is what the data analysts are doing 24 hours a day,' he said. 'And, in many cases, they're not even doing it, it's the computer intelligence software that's deriving these conclusions.'" January 20, 2005: Software would scan Arabic documents for information. By Carolyn Thompson. Associated Press / available from USA Today. "Computer scientists are at work on software to scan Arabic documents, even handwritten ones, for specific words or phrases, technology its developers say could aid in intelligence gathering." January 20, 2005: Sega takes leash off robot dog. By Matt Hines. CNET News. "Sony launched the market for robotic dogs in 1999 when it unleashed Aibo. But there's new competition from rival Sega Toys. On Wednesday, the Japanese electronics specialist took the wraps off its latest invention in Tokyo, a robotic canine known as idog that can be used to compose and play music. It also dances to the beat." January 19, 2005: Artificial intelligence alive and well in a robot named Maria. Auckland University Press Release available from Scoop. "While statistics students at The University of Auckland are taking a break from studies for summer, their new 'teacher' can't wait for the new semester to begin. Maria, an assistant teacher in Statistical Interference, is an unusual individual. ... Maria is a robot, or artificial intelligence entity, created over two years of intense work and study by Shahin Maghsoudi, a PhD student and member of the Artificial Intelligence Group in the Faculty of Science. As part of his Masters degree in Computer Science, Shahin embarked on a project to create virtual robots which could be used as teaching assistants, helpdesk operators and web-based marketing assistants." January 19, 2005: FBI stops using Carnivore wiretap software. By Ted Bridis. Associated Press / available from USA Today.com. "The FBI has effectively abandoned its custom-built Internet surveillance technology, once known as Carnivore, designed to read e-mails and other online communications among suspected criminals, terrorists and spies, according to bureau oversight reports submitted to Congress. Instead, the FBI said it has switched to unspecified commercial software...." January 18, 2005: How Siemens inventor built a better mouse house. By Howard Wolinsky. Chicago Sun-Times. "Siemens AG, the giant German infrastructure company, aims to use [Osman] Ahmed's technology -- protected by about a dozen patents -- to put sensors in carpeting, paint and elsewhere to make offices 'smarter' for human comfort and security. Siemens, which has 45,000 researchers on staff worldwide -- more than 10 percent of its workforce -- was so impressed that it named Ahmed its 2004 'inventor of the year.' While still working at Landis, he finished a doctorate in 1991 at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he researched the use of artificial intelligence to improve environmental controls in laboratories. He was moved into strategic planning for Landis. ... ''The big problem today is that our building systems are pretty dumb,' he said. 'We could do a better job with smarter controls.'" January 18, 2005: Fingerprinting Plays Key Role in Biometrics Boom. By Paul Korzeniowski. TechNewsWorld. "Fingerprinting is an authentication technique that has helped law enforcement officials identify potential criminals for decades, but recently it has started to gain wider usage. The technique is emerging as the most popular form of biometrics, and much of the budding interest is coming from government agencies looking to enhance physical security, such as access to buildings. Corporations are also making a move toward using fingerprinting technology to provide more reliable identification of employees, business partners and customers. In 2004, fingerprinting accounted for US$367 million of the $1.2 billion biometric companies generated in worldwide revenue, according to market research firm International Biometric Group." January 18, 2005: For Surgery, an Automated Helping Hand. By Marc Santora. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "'Meet Penelope,' Dr. [Michael R.] Treat said, motioning toward a robotic arm poised over a set of surgical tools. ...She is meant to replace the scrub nurse, the person in the operating room who hands the surgeon the tools of surgery. Responding to the ever-widening shortage of nurses in the country, and looking to deal with a problem that frustrated him as a working surgeon, Dr. Treat and his team of tech whizzes are working feverishly to get Penelope ready for her public debut. New York-Presbyterian Hospital has agreed to test Penelope in March in the operating room on a simple removal of a benign cyst. ... Some of Penelope's technology is off the shelf, like the voice recognition software. Dr. Treat said that this way, as others develop better software, they can update Penelope with relative ease. The major innovation is in Penelope's visual recognition, the ability to distinguish between surgical tools. Currently, Penelope can recognize 12 tools and will soon be able to recognize twice that many. That is harder then it might sound, because the tools often look very much alike." January 17, 2005: In the shadow of Google - Although Google dominates the market in Internet search, a number of companies are hoping that profi table niches remain. By Robert Weisman. The Boston Globe. "'There's a lot of business to be had in search in the next few years, and it's not all going to Google,' said Susan Aldrich, senior vice president at Patricia Seybold Group, a technology research and consulting firm in Boston. ... In the burgeoning search field, there's room for more than one business model. Google makes the bulk of its money through advertising, selling sponsored links alongside its search results, while companies in enterprise search license their technology to businesses. 'Some of the things that Google does so well, like page rankings, are irrelevant in the enterprise,' said Sue Feldman, vice president and search analyst at International Data Corp., a research firm in Framingham. ... Go to a clothing website powered by EasyAsk Inc.'s natural language technology, and you can get precise and meaningful results from a search for 'ladies footwear under $75,' a query that would yield no matches or a confusing jumble of listings from e-commerce sites using searches for key words. ... While [Bob Alperin, EasyAsk's president and chief executive] estimates the market for e-commerce search software at less than $100 million a year, Alperin thinks the market for enterprise search tools is closer to $1 billion annually, and growing. IDC estimates knowledge workers spend 15 to 30 percent of their office hours seeking information." January 17, 2005: Micromachine grows its own muscles. By Will Knight. New Scientist News. "A micromachine that walks using muscles that it grew for itself has been developed in a US laboratory. The remarkable device could eventually lead to muscle-based nerve stimulators that let paralysed patients breathe without a ventilator, or to nanobots that clear away plaque from inside the walls of a human coronary artery. ... And more fantastic ideas have been proposed by NASA, which has provided funding for the project. The US space agency hopes that swarms of muscle-powered microbots could one day repair damage to remote spacecraft automatically." January 17, 2005: Car, play me Eminem's latest hit. By John Borland. CNET News.com. "The company says it's developing voice-recognition software that will help drivers maneuver though hard drive-based car music systems that hold thousands or even tens of thousands of songs. ... .'Pushing buttons can be challenging when you're driving down the road at 80 miles an hour,' said Ross Blanchard, Gracenote's vice president of business development. 'The reason we thought we could do this now is that they've worked out the problems with voice recognition in the navigation and telematics market.'" January 17, 2005: Princess, Aibo spur Edinburgh Univ. ties with Japan. TokyoNow feature by Ko Hirano. Kyodo News. "[Timothy O'Shea, principal and vice chancellor of the University of Edinburgh], an artificial intelligence and computer science expert, said his 10-day official visit to Japan that ended Saturday made him realize how ''beneficial'' it is for his university to upgrade ties with Japan. For example, he was surprised to see a robot with eight ears when he visited a laboratory at Kyoto University, an experience prompting him to say that his university must expand the scope of joint research with Kyoto University." January 17, 2005: Together in electric dreams - A computer program is changing the face of the music business by allowing record labels to predict a hit at the click of a mouse. By Jo Tatchell. The Guardian. "The magic ingredient set to revolutionise the pop industry is, simply, a piece of software that can 'predict' the chance of a track being a hit or a miss. This computerised equivalent of the television programmer Juke Box Jury is known as Hit Song Science (HSS). It has been developed by a Spanish company, Polyphonic HMI, which used decades of experience developing artificial intelligence technology for the banking and telecoms industries to create a program that analysed the underlying mathematical patterns in music." January 15, 2004: McDonald makes it official. By Helen Colwell Adams. Sunday News & Lancaster Online.com. "Steve McDonald was speaking at a seminar in York about the digital transformation of the Lancaster County recorder of deeds office. ... Lancaster County’s recorder was the first in the state, and one of the first in the nation, to begin electronic recording of deeds and mortgages. It was the first in the state, and sixth in the nation, to record mortgage satisfactions digitally. It was the first in Pennsylvania to allow 'full and free' access to records at www.lancasterdeeds.com, and first in the state and one of five nationwide to use 'artificial intelligence software' to automatically capture data on documents. ... 'This is not your father’s recorder of deeds office,' he said." January 14, 2005: Hi-tech strategist. By Helen Knight. The Engineer. "Dstl's [Defence Science and Technology Laboratory] researchers aim to determine how best to harness various technologies to ensure that military commanders have the information at their disposal to make the best operational decisions. They are concentrating on a number of areas of growing importance to the MoD [Ministry of Defence], such as Network Enabled Capability (NEC), where they are investigating advances in sensors, information technology, artificial intelligence and neural networks. 'Whereas in the past we might have carried out research into something like an infrared detector, we're now working more at the systems level --- on how you might use an infrared sensor to gather information and present it to a commander or someone in the field,' said [Dr Frances] Saunders." January 14, 2005: Senior's robot tale to hit stores. By Jinah Roe. The Dartmouth Online. "Budding writer Vyshali Manivannan '05 will sign copies of her novel 'Invictus' Saturday at the Dartmouth Bookstore. ... The characters in 'Invictus' take the form of living robots that desire human identities, but Manivannan said she had not originally intended to write a work of science fiction. 'At the time I wrote it, I was merely interested in artificial intelligence,' Manivannan said." January 13, 2005: BT develops phone directory using AI. By John Tilak. Digital Media Europe News. "British telco BT’s researchers have developed an intelligent contacts directory for businesses using artificial intelligence software, called 'small world directories', or SWORD, which enables users to find the right person and makes use of company databases. It helps users find and contact the person they are looking for by learning about the user's own social networks and usage patterns." January 13, 2005: Robots see it all. e4engineering.com. "Researchers are developing new technologies that may give robots the visual-sensing edge they need to monitor dimly lit airports, pilot vehicles in extreme weather and direct unmanned combat vehicles. The researchers intend to create an imaging chip that defeats the harmful effects of arbitrary illumination, allowing robotic vision to leave the controlled lighting of a laboratory and enter the erratic lighting of the natural world. ... According to [Vladimir] Brajovic, limitations in standard imaging sensors have hindered many vision applications, such as security and surveillance, intelligent transportation systems, and defence systems." January 13, 2005: Frank Kelly Freas - Prolific and honoured science fiction illustrator. Obituary by Stephen Holland. The Guardian. "His first cover for Astounding Science Fiction, illustrating a story about the limits of artificial intelligence, was of a pleading, childlike robot, stripped of all mechanical clutter, holding out the dead body of a man in his palm; 25 years later, the image was used as the album cover for Queen's News Of The World (1977), with the band in the place of the body." January 13, 2005: Young science stars took different routes. By Jon Fortt and Luis Zaragoza. Mercury News (registration req'd.). "The three students hail from two very different Silicon Valley high schools. Each is brilliant. Each aspires to earn an advanced degree. Each is deeply involved in the community. They are among 18 students in California and 300 nationwide named semifinalists on Wednesday in the annual Intel Science Talent Search, known through most of its 64-year history as the Westinghouse search. ... Jong-Moon Kim, 17, attends Monta Vista High.... Jong-Moon saw TV images of the wildfires in Southern California that led to his entry on ways to use artificial intelligence not only to detect fires but predict their path. ... Jong-Moon began his essay on scientific attitude with this: 'The first thing I do when I get a problem is get excited.' His research in artificial intelligence could have applications in many situations, he says." January 12, 2005: Entertainment News. By Frazier Moore. The Record. "It's getting harder and harder to be lost in the crowd, but omnipresent video cameras tracking our daily lives are only part of the story. ... Meanwhile, artificial intelligence programs sift through our data trail to make judgments about us. Can government and the private sector be trusted to use these tools responsibly? That's the big question posed by ABC News' Peter Jennings in his special, 'No Place to Hide.' ... It airs 10 p.m. next Thursday." January 12/19/ 2005: Video organizes paper. By Kimberly Patch. Technology Research News. "With the notion of the paperless office fading into history, researchers from the University of Washington are working to more closely integrate the paper world -- still on the rise -- with the world of electronic data. The researchers' system uses a computer and overhead video camera to track physical documents on a desk and automatically link them to appropriate electronic documents. The researchers have constructed a pair of prototypes that track paper documents and sort photos. ... The researchers' system uses a combination of computer vision techniques to infer the structure of a stack of papers." January 12/19, 2005: Conversations control computers. By Eric Smalley. Technology Research News. "Because information from spoken conversations is fleeting, people tend to record schedules and assignments as they discuss them. Entering notes into a computer, however, can be tedious -- especially when the act interrupts a conversation. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology are aiming to decrease day-to-day data entry and to augment users' memories with a method that allows handheld computers to harvest keywords from conversations and make use of relevant information without interrupting the personal interactions. ... The researchers' system protects privacy by only using speech from the user's side of the conversation, said [Kent] Lyons." January 11, 2005: Face to face in the technology age. Column by Kate Heartfield. Ottawa Citizen (subscription req'd.). "The course is informally called TechnoRico, and formally called 'Building Better Humans? Legal and Ethical Issues at the Human-Machine Merger.' Mr. [Ian] Kerr, a law professor at the U of O, began teaching a special course in Puerto Rico in January 2000. This is the first year TechnoRico has taken place in Ottawa as well as Puerto Rico. Much of the discussion is about artificial intelligence and transhumanism (a philosophy that sees technology as a way to expand human capacity, often through its interaction with the human body). In other words, robots and cyborgs." January 11, 2005: Is it a cockroach? A robot? Artificial intelligence takes a new form when Stanford researchers mix robotics with biology. By Jessica Lin. The Stanford Daily Online Edition. "Stanford researchers in the Engineering Department are looking at other creatures to model in their artificial intelligence projects, specifically insects. ... This sprawl project is led by Engineering Prof. Mark Cutkosky. The Daily took an opportunity to chat with this innovative robotics researcher to find out more. ... The Daily: Why are you designing robots that imitate animals as opposed to humans? Mark Cutkosky: There are some things that animals can do much better than humans.... TD: Where did the idea of biomimetic robots originate --- and when did you get involved? MC: I think that robots have always, to some extent, been inspired by animals or humans. That’s part of what the historical dream behind having robots is all about. What is new is that we can start to build and control them more as nature does. The days of 'tin men' robots are over." January 11, 2005: A robot in every home? A prototype next-generation "leisure robot" went on show at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. By Jo Twist. BBC News. "Robosapien V2 is the successor to what was one of the top-selling toys last Christmas. ... The robot, out in September, is entertainment, but is 'serious robotics', said its makers. 'This is a real robot,' Art Janis from WowWee, Robosapien's creators told the BBC news website. ... 'Our competition costs thousands, but we want the common person to have a robot,' added Mr Janis." January 10, 2005: First Digital Tools for Arabic Handwriting Being Developed by Biometrics Researchers at UB. By Ellen Goldbaum. UB News. "While more students now may be taking courses in the Arabic language, the lack of digital tools to access Arabic documents on the Web puts these fields of study and those who pursue them at a distinct disadvantage. Computer scientists at the University at Buffalo's Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors (CUBS) are remedying that by developing the first optical character recognition (OCR) software for handwritten and machine-printed Arabic documents. ... 'The whole Internet is skewed toward people who speak English,' observed [Venu] Govindaraju. 'The fear is that if an OCR is not developed for a particular language, then all the classic texts in that language will disappear into oblivion. The automation of the interpretation of written Arabic will have major benefits for numerous applications.' ... '[I]n addition to the benefits for readers of Arabic, this project will help push the frontiers of computer vision, pattern recognition and artificial intelligence in general,' he said." January 10, 2005: Multitasking goes high-tech with OSU-born software- OSU professors and students create TaskTracer software that records computer activity. By Jennifer Moser. The Daily Barometer. "What do you do when the stress of multitasking on several projects at once is starting to drive you mad? For two Oregon State University computer science professors, the answer is simple: you train the computer to keep track of your projects for you. Assistant professor Jon Herlocker and professor Tom Dietterich are developing TaskTracer, a software program that manages all files and programs accessed while the user works on a specific project, maintaining the list for future reference. ... Dietterich's research interests are in machine learning, the process of using data to build software. The traditional way to build software, Dietterich explained, is to discuss the desired project, such as accounting software, with an expert in the field, such as an accountant, to determine the necessary steps. ... Rather than tell the computer all those details, 'it's easier to have the computer watch you and see these patterns of your behavior,' Dietterich said." January 10, 2005: Dean Kamen Kicks Off 2005 FIRST Robotics Competition. By Patrick Norton. ExtremeTech. "Dean Kamen's FIRST Robotics Competition for students and their mentors is back for 2005. The new game, field, rules and regulations were revealed at the Robotics Competition Kickoff, Saturday, January 8th.... The 2005 game, 'Triple Play' is a sort of massive three on three tic tac toe...." January 10, 2005: Digital lifesaver - Ex-dropout turns disaster into thriving retrieval firm. By Julie Poppen. Rocky Mountain News. "[Brady] Essman's story began with a crashed hard drive that resulted in critical sales information being lost. ... 'It came out of a personal disaster of my own,' Essman said, describing the company's origins. 'I just lost a hard drive and went through a data recovery nightmare. I paid an exorbitant fee for data recovery. My server was never truly given successfully back to me.' Thus the concept behind digitalmedix was born in 1999. ... [Jeremiah 'Bray'] Weaver developed an in-house operating system for digitalmedix that is always updated to find data patterns and fill in missing chunks of information based upon probability models. Each new generation of hard drives brings new challenges. ... Essman said Weaver is the only person anywhere who has programmed artificial intelligence in data recovery. Digitalmedix has spent more than $1 million on research and development in the past three years." January 10, 2004: Robot makers say World Cup will be theirs by 2050. By Julian Ryall. The Scotsman. See: Robots will give Beckham the boot, say designers (January 4, 2005). January 9, 2005: Lapeer East robotics team readies for first competition. By James L. Smith. The Flint Journal on MLive.com. "There's a new competitive team at Lapeer East High School whose members are training for their first regional meet. But instead of hitting the blocking sled or practicing jump shots, these competitors are brainstorming, designing and building. Lapeer East is forming its first robotics team, which is getting ready to compete in a regional meet March 10-12 at Eastern Michigan University. ... This year's game is 'Triple Place.' Two teams of three robots each must complete a 15-second pre-programmed autonomous mode, using a color-tracking sensor to find and obtain a series of objects. ... While the competitions are fun, they have a serious purpose and the rewards are not unlike those for star athletes. About 200 scholarships to 45 schools - worth about $5 million - are linked to the FIRST Robotics competitions, said Ed Bretzloff Sr., a DaimlerChrysler electrician who has been a mentor to the Goodrich [High School] team for four years." January 8 - 9, 2005 [broadcast dates]: New Developments in Human Longevity. John McLaughlin's "One on One." Guests: Terry Grossman, Ray Kurzweil and S. Jay Olshansky. Transcript made available by the Federal News Service. "Mr. McLaughlin: The key concept, the core concept, is the rate of progress. Kurzweil and Grossman see the rate of human progress in this century moving 10 times faster than ever before. At that rate, he thinks we will solve genetic riddles and biomedical processes to achieve huge advances in bioengineering to prolong life. Moreover, they see a convergence with a -- with progress in artificial intelligence and technology at the molecular level, nanotechnology, that will give biotechnicians the means to repair damage to organs, even the brain, and to fuse our organs with intelligent nanobots -- nanobots that are analogous to robots, but they're nanobots that are the product of nanotechnology, that are actually introduced into the human body. Mr. Kurzweil: That's the third bridge." January 8, 2005: Voicemail software recognises callers' emotions. By Celeste Biever. New Scientist Magazine. "A voicemail system that labels messages according to the caller's tone of voice could soon be helping people identify which messages are the most urgent. The software, called Emotive Alert, is designed by Zeynep Inanoglu and Ron Caneel of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ... Another British company, Edinburgh-based Affective Media, will soon be selling software for cars that detects drowsiness and frustration in a driver's voice as he or she asks the in-car navigation system for directions, and will attempt to wake the driver up or calm them down, as appropriate. It could also be used in computer games to detect boredom levels and spice up the action accordingly." January 7, 2005: How robotics can enhance and motivate maths learning across the curriculum. By Sue Johnston-Wilder and Tony Hirst. This is one of the articles in this week's 6-page subject focus: Maths. The Times Education Supplement (subscription req'd.). "Many students do better at maths if they understand how it is put to use in the world around them. As highlighted by the recent Smith report, the maths curriculum is failing to excite interest in and provide appropriate motivation for maths in many pupils, who are not sufficiently aware of the importance of mathematical skills for future career options and advancement. ... Those of us involved in work with young people using robotics have seen that robotics is an area of particular motivation for many of them." January 6, 2005: Solar robots. e4engineering.com. "A group of researchers is working to develop a network of distributed sensing devices and water-monitoring robots, including solar-powered autonomous underwater vehicles (SAUVs). ... The goal of ongoing experimentation by the researchers at Rensselaer's Darrin Fresh Water Institute (DFWI) on Lake George, NY is to develop SAUVs that will communicate and network together, thus allowing a coordinated effort of long-term monitoring, according to Art Sanderson, professor of electrical, computer, and systems engineering at Rensselaer. ... 'This research is a significant step toward obtaining real-time monitoring of water quality,' said Sandra Nierzwicki-Bauer...." January 6, 2005: With Japan aging, Toyota to staff factories with robots. Agence France Presse / available from Channel NewsAsia. "Toyota Motor will introduce robots which can work as well or better than humans at all 12 of its factories in Japan to cut costs and deal with a looming labor shortage as the country ages, according to a press report. The robots would be able to carry out multiple tasks simultaneously with their two arms, achieving efficiency unseen in human workers and matching the cheap wages of Chinese laborers, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said. ... Toyota has been increasingly turning to robot development and plans to welcome visitors to its pavillion at the World Expo in Japan in March with humanoid robots jamming in a brass ensemble and performing hip-hop." January 6, 2005: Computer Access Expanding - County Adding Centers, Bolstering Programs. By Jacqueline L. Salmon. Washington Post (registration req'd.). "County-run computer centers, which are designed to help Fairfax County residents with limited computer access bridge the 'digital divide,' are about to take on a new look this year. ... 'We're trying to reach out to different segments of the population,' said Pam Dudley, president of the Northern Virginia Technology Council Foundation, a key backer of the Computer Clubhouse program. At the centers, children ages 8 to 18 learn such skills as software design, computer simulations, electronic music, electronic publishing and Web page development. Some student teams have built robots and competed in local robot-design contests. Membership in the club is free, and the centers are open to all county residents." January 6, 2005: Search Looks at the Big Picture. By John Gartner. Wired News. "Searching the internet for images or videos often leads down a blind alley or worse -- to deceitful advertisers or unsuitable content. Researchers are developing visualization technologies that can 'see' inside images, reducing search engines' reliance on text-based image tags that are easily manipulated. ... The image-processing software looks for 'key patches' in an image to determine the relative positions of different shapes, such as tires and a car body, or a beach and ocean waves, to categorize the image's contents, [Christopher] Dance said. The software has learned hundreds of objects since development began in 2002, and 'can be used to categorize images and automatically create image tags,' Dance said. With the software, search engines could retrieve only images that contain people, which would help find those whose surnames are also nouns, such as Bush, Seal or Bonds, according to Dance. The software can look for images similar to those it has already scanned and 'knows,' he said." January 6, 2005: S Korean android learns faces, shakes hands. Asia Pulse & Yonhap / available from Asia Times Online. "A team of South Korean scientists unveiled a bipedal robot equipped with wireless networking capabilities Thursday, which they claim is the first such android ever developed. ... 'Through the wireless networking ability, NBH-1 can recognize people using facial recognition technology,' said Yoo [Beom-jae], a professor at the state-run Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST). It has enough in-built artificial intelligence to be able to recognize voices and motions as well, Yoo said." January 5, 2005: Schools grow as gaming industry comes of age. By Victor Godinez. The Dallas Morning News & Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services // available from MENAFN. "The industry that once relied on self-taught tinkerers is growing up, and SMU [Southern Methodist University] is among the universities rushing to prepare the next generation of gaming professionals. [Brian] Harris is a student in SMU's Guildhall, which offers an 18-month certificate program in the art and science of video game development. ... Game makers have been mostly home-schooled up to now, fiddling with code on their personal computers or designing add-on levels for existing games. But budgets for blockbuster titles are now $10 million to $20 million, and development teams of programmers, designers, artists, animators, musicians and artificial intelligence experts often number 100 or more. 'Because games are getting much more complex and teams are growing, it's becoming more of a structured discipline,' said Tim Willits, co-owner of id Software and lead designer at the company. ... Among the highest profile of the new video game courses is the Electronic Arts Interactive Entertainment Program in the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television. It's a three-year master of fine arts program created earlier this year when EA, the industry's largest publisher, invested $8 million to create a training ground for designers and developers." January 5, 2005: Put The Ghost In The Machine. By Pete Barlas. Investor's Business Daily (subscription req'd.). "[Norbert] Wiener, a professor of mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is best known for his theory that says machines and other automated devices should be designed to work in the same way as a human brain works. Wiener's theory, cybernetics, which he published in a book of the same name in 1948, forever altered the course of automation used in everyday devices from electric coffeepots to computers. Cybernetics is defined as the science of control and communication seen in animals and applied to machines. He coined the term 'cybernetics' from a Greek word that means 'steersman.' ... 'He had the ability to see over the fence --- he knew the social and economic effects of this new technology were going to be huge,' [Jim Siegelman] said." January 5, 2005: The Business of Fighting Terror. By Ryan Singel. Wired News. "Antiterrorism is an industry. Since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, the news has been filled with stories on proposed surveillance and data-mining programs, ranging from the Total Information Awareness system and the MATRIX to CAPPS II and journalist Steven Brill's drive for a private, biometric identification card. Antiterrorism books also form an industry -- albeit a smaller one -- but until Robert O'Harrow Jr., a reporter for The Washington Post, published No Place to Hide ($26, Free Press) this week, the true nature of an ever-growing national surveillance complex was largely unknown." January 4, 2005: Welcome to the next generation of robots - Will machines soon be taking over the world? Doubtful, but they could be doing your chores for you. By Chris Arnot. The Guardian. "Robot dogs don't chew the hearth rug and demand to be taken for a walk at inconvenient times. Computerised vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers carry out the tasks that some of us find a bore, others a strain. 'All very limited,' says Professor Aaron Sloman, from Birmingham University's School of Computer Science. 'They can do specific things but none can say why they do it.' Sloman and fellow researchers around Europe are primed to take the next step in the ongoing search for more intelligent robots, thanks to a grant of €6.25m (£4.3m) from the European Union. One of his colleagues in Birmingham, Dr Jeremy Wyatt, explains: 'We think experiments so far have had limited objectives. What has not been done is to put together, in a working robot, the things that humans can do - seeing, manipulating, hearing, learning and answering questions.' ... What about the suggestion, put forward by generations of science-fiction writers, that intelligent computers will one day take over and control our lives? 'There are people who worry where it will all end,' [Sloman] accepts. 'But I don't think that machines will ever be as nasty to human beings as humans have been to each other.'" January 4, 2005: Building a Smarter Search Engine. Startup profile by Heather Green. BusinessWeek Online. "While watching an academic presentation of video-search technology at Carnegie Mellon University six years ago, Valdes-Perez, then a full-time computer-science professor, became exasperated with screen after screen of seemingly nonsensical results. 'Wherever we looked, information seemed to be disorganized,' says Valdes-Perez. So, along with two other CMU researchers, he set out to come up with a smarter way to return search results. Armed with their research in using artificial intelligence to help organize scientific discovery, the three computer scientists founded a search startup four years ago. Called Vivisimo.... Now, Pittsburgh-based Vivisimo is trying to streamline search for consumers with a new service called Clusty. Since its launch three months ago, Clusty has generated buzz for its clean design and clever approach. Using artificial intelligence, Clusty groups search results into different categories." January 4, 2005: Robots will give Beckham the boot, say designers. By Julian Ryall. South China Morning Post (subscription req'd.) / also available from The Scotsman (Januay 10, 2005). "The footballers of tomorrow will have the midfield guile of Zinedine Zidane, the finishing ability of Andriy Shevchenko and the staying power of Roy Keane. ... An Osaka-based consortium of robotics experts has thrown down the gauntlet to future players of the beautiful game with the confident claim that their robots will be so skilful they will play mankind off the park within 50 years. 'By 2050, our aim is to beat the winners of football's World Cup and we are very confident that we will be able to do that,' said Shu Ishiguro, who heads the Robot Laboratory group. 'When we have accomplished that, we will have a society in which humans and artificial intelligence are completely in harmony.' Mr Ishiguro and his team are placing their faith in the offspring of their current star player, VisiON. ... He also dodged the question of a robot insurrection, akin to that depicted in the recent movie I, Robot. 'All these advanced technologies have an element of risk and we can warn of the dangerous aspects of robots in human society,' he shrugs. 'But cars, for example, successfully collaborate with humans and have been safely integrated into society. Everyone who saw the RoboCup could see the advantages of technology.'" January 3, 2005: Mills teacher computes way to advance women. By Jessica Guynn. Contra Costa Times. "Ellen Spertus wants women to get with the programming. Computer programming, that is. This Mills College computer science professor wants to develop opportunities for women and help them buck the odds in a male-dominated field. ... 'Computer science is magic,' Spertus said. 'Writing programs is like writing spells.' ... It was only when a female graduate student at MIT handed her a 1983 report called 'Barriers to Equality in Academia: Women in Computer Science at MIT' that Spertus began to recognize the obstacles women face. Curious, Spertus joined Systers, an online community for women in computer science founded by Silicon Valley pioneer Anita Borg. In a humanities course on women in computing, Spertus turned a 25-page term paper into a 100-plus-page treatise. The stories and statistics she uncovered dumbfounded her. 'Why are there so few women in computer science?' is still widely distributed and discussed in computer science departments. 'It helped other people see that this wasn't a level playing field,' Spertus said. 'It really changed my view.'" January 3, 2005: As robots learn to imitate. IST Results. "Can robots learn to communicate by studying and imitating humans’ gestures? That’s what MIRROR’s researchers aimed to find out by studying how infants and monkeys learn complex acts such as grasping and transferring it to robots. 'Our main motivation for the project was to advance the understanding of how humans recognise and imitate gestures,' says Professor Giulio Sandini, coordinator of the three-year IST-funded project, MIRROR. 'We did that by building an artificial system that can learn to communicate by means of body gestures.' ... Although the project is finished, all the members of the consortium now participate in a follow-up FP6 IST project called RobotCub...." January 3, 2005: Health site naturally wants you to be well. By Tricia Duryee. The Seattle Times. "What: Salugenecists.... What it does: A Web site that offers information to people on why they are sick. It pulls information from databases using artificial intelligence; the technology mimics how an expert with natural-medicine experience would think about an ill patient." January 2, 2005: How to Pick an Orange? The choice between back-breaking human labor and efficient fruit-harvesting machines is approaching fast, just as it did more than 40 years ago when the mechanical tomato harvester revolutionized California agriculture. So why is there no easy answer to the question? By Karen Brandon. Los Angeles Times Magazine. "Part robot, part tractor, the contraption is an unusual combination of one internal-combustion engine, four rubber tires, eight digital cameras, eight electronic arms and an excruciating number of computer algorithms that choreograph every movement. Its metal arms maneuver among the branches, where 'eyes' spot the fruit and suction-cup 'hands' grasp them even more gently than human hands, which is what they are designed to replace. ... For now, this machine exists exclusively in a virtual citrus orchard on a computer screen in an unassuming second-story office in Sorrento Valley, San Diego's corridor of high-technology entrepreneurship. It was conceived by two Massachusetts Institute of Technology-educated inventers, Bret Wallach and Tony Koselka, who founded Vision Robotics Corp., a 4-year-old company whose most recent success was the invention of a robot vacuum cleaner capable of cleaning the carpet by itself while dodging table legs and other obstacles. ... Many agricultural researchers say machines may offer the best hope for many types of American agriculture that now depend on an immigrant workforce, subsidies and tariffs. Many believe machines offer a better, cheaper and possibly more humane way to harvest the labor-intensive crops that are the hallmark of farming in California, a nearly $28-billion industry. ... California --- the state with the nation's largest and most complicated agricultural labor market --- has been down the road to mechanization before, when the tomato harvester revolutionized production of that crop more than 40 years ago. But now, as then, the questions raised by the technology are rife with political, social and economic implications. ... César Chávez, quoting fearful farmworkers in a 1978 article in the Nation, called such machines 'los monstruos,' the monsters. ... Clearly, machine harvesting was a better way to get tomatoes out of the field. Not everyone, however, agreed that ought to be the only goal." January 1, 2005: Ernestine, Meet Julie - Natural language speech recognition is markedly improving voice-activated self-service. By Karen Bannan. CFO Magazine. "If only Amtrak's Web designers were as attentive as the makers of the railroad's telephone self-service system. That system, which features the digitized voice of an operator named Julie, is a primer on good customer service. Rather than requiring Amtrak's 20 million or so yearly callers to punch in numbers, the system allows them to voice responses to questions like 'What city are you departing from?' And unlike many Web-based self-service setups, Amtrak's voice-activated operator does most of the legwork for the customer. Expect to bump into more Julies out there. A new technology, called natural language speech recognition, is markedly improving voice-activated self-service. Powered by artificial intelligence, these speech-recognition systems are altering consumer perceptions about phone self-service, as calls for help no longer elicit calls for help. That, in turn, is spurring renewed corporate interest in the concept of phone self-service. In 2004, sales of voice self-service systems topped $1.2 billion. 'We've seen voice systems move from emerging technology to applied technology over the last few years,' says Steve Cramoysan, principal analyst at Stamford, Connecticut-based research firm Gartner. 'It's still fairly immature. But it's proven and moving toward the mainstream.'" January 1, 2005: Robots that jockey for first place in the camel-racing stakes. By Michael Theodoulou. Times Online. "[C]amel-racing enthusiasts in Qatar are said to have been impressed by robo-jockey’s first trial run. The robotic jockey is now set to replace his flesh-and-blood equivalent after the Government announced this week that it was banning child jockeys. The sport, a favourite in the Gulf region, has faced widespread criticism from human rights organisations. ... Rich racing enthusiasts are likely to invest heavily in upgrading the robots to secure an advantage over their competitors." January 2005: Keeping Up the Fleet - Improving Maintenance of Military Gear requires Access to Information. By Joe Pappalardo. National Defense Magazine. "Wih a growing backlog of equipment repair and maintenance work, the U.S. military services and contractors are finding that, in order to expedite the job, they need computer systems that can share information across the supply chain. ... A number of programs have been established within the Air Force to facilitate the repair and servicing of equipment. An intelligent logistics monitoring system is at the heart of a program called expeditionary logistics for the 21st century, or eLog, which aims for a 20 percent increase in system availability by 2007. The software in eLog organizes spare-parts requests, helping to reduce the downtime of damaged equipment. The program’s artificial intelligence turns data into maintenance predictions by warning of impending mechanical component failures in motorized vehicles." January 2005: Arbitration - Playing catch-up. Although the UK has been slightly slow to take up the online dispute resolution cause, with investment in the right technology it could still become a world leader. By Jeremy Barnett. Legal IT. "London is a leading centre for the settlement of international disputes, dealing with approximately 4,000 cases each year. In about 90% of those cases, at least one party is based outside the UK. ... Despite the lack of experimentation by some, the use of online dispute resolution (ODR) is growing in these organisations and has been well documented over the years. ... While the CIArb and others use ODR as a mechanism to support the human resolution of disputes, other ODR services have been established to effectively resolve cases themselves. Such systems offer a high degree of sophistication in negotiation and settlement skills, often relying upon artificial intelligence. For example, SmartSettle.com uses mathematical algorithms to help find a resolution to disputes, creating what is frequently described as an 'automated negotiation tool'. This maximises the economic benefits to both parties by creating a low cost process. Squaretrade.com, attached to Ebay, is also using this technique and is approaching a million cases per annum." January 2005: Ethics for the Robot Age - Should bots carry weapons? Should they win patents? Questions we must answer as automation advances. View by Jordan Pollack. Wired Magazine (Issue 13.01). "While our hopes for and fears of robots may be overblown, there is plenty to worry about as automation progresses. The future will have many more robots, and they'll most certainly be much more advanced. This raises important ethical questions that we must begin to confront. 1. Should robots be humanoid? ... 2. Should humans become robots? ... 4. Should robots eat? ... 6. Should robots carry weapons? ... " January 2005: Digital Dullard - Billionaire Paul Allen's electronic science tutor fails to make the grade. By Steven Cherry. IEEE Spectrum Online. "Digital Aristotle began in 2003 as a contest, dubbed Project Halo. Three sets of high-powered researchers competed to create software that could do well on a high school advanced-placement exam in chemistry. They all succeeded. The winning program, written by a collaborative team from SRI International, in Menlo Park, Calif.; the University of Texas at Austin; and Boeing Phantom Works, in Seal Beach, Calif., scored a 3.00 on the exam out of a possible 5.00. That's better than the human student median grade of 2.82. ... Now, for a second stage of the contest, the same three teams are designing software tools that would allow Ph.D. graduate students to create collections of facts and inferences, so-called knowledge bases, much more cheaply. These tools would turn ordinary sentences of scientific knowledge -- a definition of electrical resistance, for example, or the fact that all mammals are vertebrates -- into what are called 'knowledge constructs': well-defined concepts and quasi-mathematical relationships among them. Once the constructs have been collected and stored, tried-and-true problem-solving methods and other AI technologies could be brought to bear on the task of answering questions on the chemistry test, for example. ... And if Allen is the wealthiest knowledge suitor to be smitten by the charms of AI, he's hardly the first. That honor might go to Aristotle himself, the human one. Some 2200 years ago, he dreamed of an 'instrument' that 'could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others.' At the dawn of the computer age, Alan Turing dreamed of a machine so humanlike that a panel of judges wouldn't be able to distinguish it from a real person. Since then, AI has had more flashes in the pan than a French restaurant. To be sure, AI has its successes. ... Part of AI's image problem stems from the fact that whenever a development moves from lab to market, it's no longer artificial intelligence; it's just software." January 2005: What We Can Learn from Robots. By Gregory T. Huang. Technology Review. "On a crisp october day last year, Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute kicked off its 25th-anniversary celebration.... On the third day, it was Mitsuo Kawato’s turn to speak. The lights went down, and the director of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, made his way to the stage to the beat of rock music. ... [T]here is a difference between him and other attendees. Kawato loves robots not because they are cool, but because he believes they can teach him how the human brain works. 'Only when we try to reproduce brain functions in artificial machines can we understand the information processing of the brain,' he says. It’s what he calls 'understanding the brain by creating the brain.' By programming a robot to reach out and grasp an object, for instance, Kawato hopes to learn the patterns in which electrical signals flow among neurons in the brain to control a human arm. ... 'This is very different from the usual justification for building humanoid robots --- that they are economically useful or will help take care of the elderly,' says Christopher Atkeson, a robotics expert at Carnegie Mellon. ... The evolution of robots into something more humanlike is probably inevitable. Experts agree there is nothing magical about how the brain works, nothing that is too inherently complex to figure out and copy. As Kawato is learning in his lab, the ultimate value in closing the gap between humans and machines might lie in what new generations of robots can teach us about ourselves." January 2005: Considerate Computing- Digital gadgets demand ever more of our attention with their rude and thoughtless interruptions. Engineers are now testing computers, phones and cars that sense when you're busy and spare you from distraction. By W. Wayt Gibbs. Scientific American (subscription req'd.). "'If we could just give our computers and phones some understanding of the limits of human attention and memory, it would make them seem a lot more thoughtful and courteous,' says Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research. Horvitz, [Roel] Vertegaal, [Ted] Selker and [Rosalind] Picard are among a small but growing number of researchers trying to teach computers, phones, cars and other gadgets to behave less like egocentric oafs and more like considerate colleagues. To do this, the machines need new skills of three kinds: sensing, reasoning and communicating. First a system must sense or infer where its owner is and what he or she is doing. Next it must weigh the value of the messages it wants to convey against the cost of the disruption. Then it has to choose the best mode and time to interject. Each of these pushes the limits of computer science and raises issues of privacy, complexity or reliability." January 2005: You, Robot - He says humans will download their minds into computers one day. With a new robotics firm, Hans Moravec begins the journey from warehouse drones to robo sapiens. By Chip Walter. Scientific American. "The 56-year-old Moravec should know. Born in Kautzen, Austria, and raised in Montreal, he has been pushing the envelope on robotics theory and experimentation for the past 35 years, first as the graduate student at Stanford University who created the 'Stanford Cart,' the first mobile robot capable of seeing and autonomously navigating the world around it (albeit very slowly), and later as a central force in Carnegie Mellon's vaunted Robotics Institute. His iconoclastic theories and inventive work in machine vision have both shocked his colleagues and jump-started research; Seegrid [Corporation] is just the next logical step. ... Industrial robots already flourish in tightly constrained environments such as assembly lines. Where they fail is in locations loaded with unpredictability. So Seegrid concentrated on creating vision systems that enable simple machines to move supplies around warehouses without any human direction. Not exactly the stuff of science fiction, Moravec agrees, and a long way from superintelligent robots, but he says you have to start somewhere. ... The same themes run through his view of the future of robotics. Evolution moves in tiny steps, Moravec notes, but accomplishes amazing things. Machine evolution will do the same as it incrementally nudges robots from their clumsy beginnings to the heights of human-level intelligence and mobility." January / February 2005: Man and the Machines - It's time to start thinking about how we might grant legal rights to computers. By Benjamin Soskis. Legal Affairs. "The story of the self-aware computer asserting its rights—and, in the dystopian version of the tale, its overwhelming power --- is a staple of science fiction books and movies. ... At some point in the not-too-distant future, we might actually face a sentient, intelligent machine who demands, or who many come to believe deserves, some form of legal protection. The plausibility of this occurrence is an extremely touchy subject in the artificial intelligence field, particularly since overoptimism and speculation about the future has often embarrassed the movement in the past. The legal community has been reluctant to look into the question as well. According to Christopher Stone, a University of Southern California law professor who briefly raised the issue in his well-known 1972 essay, 'Should Trees Have Standing?,' this is because, historically, rights have rarely been granted in abstraction. They have come only when society has been confronted with cases in need of adjudication. At the moment, there is no artifact of sufficient intelligence, consciousness, or moral agency to grant legislative or judicial urgency to the question of rights for artificial intelligence. But some A.I. researchers believe that moment might not be far off. And as their creations begin to display a growing number of human attributes and capabilities --- as computers write poems and serve as caretakers and receptionists --- these researchers have begun to explore the ethical and legal status of their creations. ... Even if you don't share [Raymond] Kurzweil's techno-optimism, however, there are good reasons to pay attention to the question of A.I. rights. With complex computer systems consisting of a combination of overlapping programs created by different coders, it is often difficult to know who should bear moral blame or legal liability for a computer action that produces an injury. Computers often play major roles in writing their own software. What if one created a virus and sent it around the world? Computers now help operate on us, and help handle our investments. Should we hold them as accountable as we do our surgeons and financial analysts when they screw up? ... The work of artificial intelligence often consists of the manufacture of human analogs. In addressing the nature of those creations, we can come closer to understanding our own nature and to appreciating what makes us unique. Even specifying why we should deny rights to intelligent machines --- thinking carefully about what separates the human from the nonhuman, those to whom we grant moral and legal personhood and those to which we do not --- will help us to understand, value, and preserve those qualities that we deem our exclusive patrimony."
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