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<< Headlines are listed according to date posted <-> Articles are organized by date published >>
October 31, 2005: GMU's Harry Wechsler. "Technology Research News Editor Eric Smalley carried out an email conversation with Harry Wechsler, Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Distributed and Intelligent Computation Center at George Mason University. Wechsler's research centers around making computers more intelligent by giving them the ability to recognize patterns. ... TRN: Tell me about the trends in pattern recognition research. What are the pluses and minuses of these technologies as they exist today? Wechsler: Not much different from 30 - 40 years back. Some of the big news, e.g., statistical learning theory and support vector machines (SVM) owe their existence to research done in the 60s. ... TRN: Research on giving machines the ability to accurately perceive their surroundings has advanced considerably in recent years but remains a major challenge. What will it take to build machines that can operate effectively in unfamiliar, dynamic environments? ... TRN: Machine perception and pattern recognition technologies are increasingly applied to problems of tracking and understanding human behavior. What are the social and economic implications of these technologies? ... TRN: Can you describe for the layperson what 'backpropagation' is? ... TRN: What are the possibilities and limits of data mining, and what are the social and economic implications of using the techniques you and others are developing?" October 31, 2005: Live speech-translation technology unveiled. By Will Knight. NewScientist.com news. "Technology that provides live translation of speech from one language to another has been revealed by scientists from the US and Europe. ... They were developed by researchers from the International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies (InterACT), a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon and the University of Karlsruhe in Germany. ... The speech translation software developed by the InterACT researchers backs up its use of speech recognition and voice synthesis with statistical techniques to speed up the selection of words and phrases. These techniques are based on scans of a vast number of previously translated documents in order to build probabilistic rules for translation. ... In the past, translation researchers have sought to provide computers with an understanding of the syntactic rules underlying different languages. But this has often failed when faced with exceptions to those rules." October 30, 2005: Google Wants to Dominate Madison Avenue, Too. By Saul Hansell. The New York Times. "More quietly, Google is also preparing to disrupt the advertising business itself, by replacing creative salesmanship with cold number-crunching. Its premise so far is that advertising is most effective when seen only by people who are interested in what's for sale, based on what they are searching for or reading about on the Web. Because Google's ad-buying clients pay for ads only when users click on them, they can precisely measure their effectiveness - and are willing to pay more for ads that really sell their products. Hidden behind its simple white pages, Google has already created what it says is one of the most sophisticated artificial intelligence systems ever built. In a fraction of a second, it can evaluate millions of variables about its users and advertisers, correlate them with its potential database of billions of ads and deliver the message to which each user is most likely to respond. ... For every page that Google shows, more than 100 computers evaluate more than a million variables to choose the advertisements in its database to display - and they do it in milliseconds. The computers look at the amount bid and the budget of the advertiser, but they also consider the user - such as his or her location, which they try to infer by analyzing the user's Internet connections - as well as the time of day and myriad other factors Google has tracked and analyzed from its experience with advertisements. 'If someone is coming from a particular location, a certain ad may be more popular there,' explained Jeff Huber, Google's vice president for engineering. 'The system can use all the signals available, and the system itself learns the correlations between them.' This technology is both amazing and potentially frightening." October 30, 2005: Defend yourself against the coming robot rebellion - Don't let this happen to you! By Timothy McNulty. post-gazette.com. "'Any robot could rebel, from a toaster to a Terminator, and so it is crucial to learn the strengths and weaknesses of every robot enemy,' author Daniel H. Wilson warns in 'How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion.' What makes the book cool -- and unlike some other survival books -- is that Wilson is an actual roboticist, who got his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon last month. ... The book subtly educates about robots and technology while coming across as humor. Readers will learn about robot history, artificial intelligence and the problems scientists are currently working on, just by flipping through it. ... While there has been fear about robots since before they even existed (the term 'robot' was coined in Karel Capek's 1920 play 'R.U.R.' about -- you guessed it -- killer robots), few scientists think they will actually revolt. First off, they do a lot of good, by cleaning up hazardous sites, making on-board airline computers safer and so on. Rather than starting an active uprising against humans, it is much more likely that they will affect lives by taking over jobs (especially manufacturing jobs, but increasingly service positions, too). And robots already take human lives, but not in the way described in movies or Wilson's book. ... Many people share a fear of robots, especially in the West (they are far more a part of everyday life in Japan), probably stemming from fear of technology itself, said Robert Strohmeyer, the editor of the Gear Factor column for Wired News and a robot nut." October 28, 2005: Women valued for technology roles. BBC News. "A woman who uses a robot dog to get others excited about technology and its potential as a career has been named best woman in technology for her work. Jackie Edwards, a lecturer from De Montfort University, won the overall prize at the inaugural Blackberry Women and Technology Awards on Thursday. Hundreds of women gathered in London to celebrate their achievements. The awards were aimed at recognising women's significant professional contribution in fields of technology. Even though women make half of the UK's overall workforce, the number employed in technology industries fell from 27% in 1997 to 21% in 2005, according to the Office of National Statistics (ONS). ... [Meg Munn] said that the under-representation of women in technology was a problem and that younger women in particular needed role models to encourage them to think about careers in the profession." October 28, 2005: Robots go for gold. Asia Pulse/Yonhap. Available from Asia Times Online. "An international robot competition kicked off here on Thursday to showcase the latest technological advances in robotics, organizers said. A total of 320 contestants from 10 countries are participating in the four-day 2005 International Robot Olympiad at the Korea International Exhibition Center (KINTEX) northwest of Seoul. South Korea is fielding 130 players and robots. ... One of the events that is expected to generate interest among visitors is the cleaning robot exhibition, which will show all machines currently being produced by local companies that can clean homes. 'The events are aimed at promoting interest and development of more intelligent robots,' said Kim Hye-won, administrator of the Agency for Technology and Standards." October 27, 2005: Nokia Teams With MIT To Create New Research Lab. By W. David Gardner. TechWeb News. "Nokia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced Thursday they will establish a research facility near MIT's Cambridge campus. To be called the Nokia Research Center Cambridge, the facility will bring together 20 researchers each from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Nokia Research Center, which is headquartered at Nokia's headquarters in Finland. ... 'The areas of focus are likely (to include) new user interfaces and the development of new mobile equipment using lower power,' [Laurie Armstrong] said. She added that the researchers are likely also to examine ways to make wireless solutions more intuitive and to find new ways of managing information." October 27, 2005: Sir, the Gamers Are Revolting! By Chris Kohler. Wired News. "For Ivan Marovic, video games are serious business. As one of the founders of the Serb student-resistance group Otpor ('resistance'), Marovic helped remove former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic from power. Since then, he has worked with the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, or ICNC, helping human rights activists to organize pro-democracy movements. ... The game doesn't require an itchy trigger finger or keen hand-to-eye coordination; rather, it relies entirely on strategy. As well as historical recreations, players can set up their own scenarios, based on their own situation on the ground, and experiment with different nonviolent strategies. The game's artificial intelligence calculates the results. ... Marovic sees games as a weapon of change, and so does BreakAway Games. For the last few years, the Maryland-based developer has been a leader in what it calls 'serious games.' The company has worked closely with various arms of the Department of Defense to create military training and war-game simulations, and has also worked with health care professionals to develop Code Orange, a game that helps doctors learn to manage mass-casualty emergencies." October 27, 2005: New tech speaks many languages at once. By Michael Kanellos. CNET News.com. "Alex Waibel, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and Germany's University of Karlsruhe, plans to demonstrate a host of software and hardware on Thursday at CMU's Pittsburgh campus. The technology could make it far easier for people who speak different languages to understand each other. One application, informally called Lecture Translation, translates a speech from one language into another on the fly and without restrictions. Current translation technologies typically circumscribe speakers to certain topics or a limited vocabulary and require them to train on the application. ... Progress in machine translation is due, in large part, to a philosophical shift in the field. In the past, researchers tried to construct programs that would allow a computer to 'understand' a language through its own semantics. The internal logic and numerous exceptions, however, proved too complex. In the past few years, however, researchers have switched to using statistical analysis to get the job done. 'It doesn't go through a deep understanding of the meaning of a sentence. It maps one word to another,' Waibel said. 'Increases in computer speed and power and databases have made this a winning approach...We essentially gave up trying to do the full semantics of this thing.' ... The success of the statistical approach can be seen in a recent victory by Google in a computerized translation contest sponsored by the National Institute of Science and Technology."
>>> Machine Translation, Natural Language Processing, Applications, The Future; also see this related article October 26, 2005: New Microscopic Robot's Tiny Step Is a Huge Leap. By Brian Handwerk. National Geographic News. "Researchers have built one of the world's smallest controllable robots -- a machine tinier than the period that ends this sentence. The miniscule device is as narrow as a human hair. Its inventors note that some 200 of them could line up across the top of an M&M candy. A lab headed by Bruce Donald, a computer science professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, designed the robot. ... 'Cleary it's a really neat thing to have done,' said Kristofer Pister, a professor in the University of California at Berkeley's Robotics and Intelligent Machines Laboratory.... Pister notes that microrobots at this scale currently depend on much larger support apparatus, like the specially designed floor. In the future, he'd like to see them function on their own -- and also pack a more technologically sophisticated punch. ... Shrinking robots is a growing field of research. For that reason much of Dartmouth's microrobots' design will be in the public domain." October 26, 2005: Robotic toys may one day diagnose autism. By Lee Gomes. The Wall Street Journal / available from post-gazette.com. "Autism is a heart-rending mental illness that has become entwined with a contentious social issue. While neither is conducive to easy solutions, some Yale University researchers are hopeful that the clever use of technology might prove helpful to both. ... Brian Scassellati is a robotics researcher in Yale's computer-science department, and is part of an interdisciplinary group on campus that includes doctors and others. Part of his contribution has been to build very simple robotic heads -- more like smart toys -- then to watch how different children, autistic and nonautistic, respond to them. ... Working with autistic children can be exhausting, notes Prof. Scassellati, but machines don't tire. 'It is hard to focus on eye contact if the kid is standing a centimeter away from you,' as autistic children do, he says. 'But that would be very easy for a robot to do.' Researchers at Yale, and many other places, are designing robots and tools such as videogames to teach socializing skills to autistic children." October 26, 2005: From the Earth to Tatooine, the show teaches as it dazzles. By Ty Burr. The Boston Globe & Boston.com. "Named with happy exactitude, ''Where Science Meets Imagination' [an exhibit at Boston's Museum of Science] is a different galaxy entirely: A hugely enjoyable movie-memorabilia flea market that doubles as an eye-popping, hands-on tour along the leading edge of scientific breakthroughs. It's fun. You learn something. Best of all, the fun is in the learning. ... [T]he exhibit is worth attending, because the science on display is immediate, comprehensible, and fun. ... The trial-and-error stations that allow you to create a workable robot deliver satisfaction when the critter manages to walk without falling over on its shiny face. Interactive exhibits on robot vision and prosthetic parts are backed up with real-world science and human docents, and I'm not sure which is more transfixing: Anakin's mechanical arm or the retinal implants and microprocessor knee on display at a nearby learning stand." October 26, 2005: Yujin CEO Shin sees user-friendly, low-cost robots rendering help to daily lives. By Hwang Si-young. The Korea Herald. "Yujin Robotics may not be a familiar name to many, but to those who are tech-savvy and interested in improving the quality of life, the name is synonymous with cleaning robots. 'We're in the early stages of the robot business. And for now, robots are just recognized as giving fun and curiosity. But I'm sure that the robot business will emerge as a major industrial trend in a few years, rendering substantial help to our daily lives,' says Shin Kyung-chul, CEO and president of Yujin Robotics. ... Other than cleaning robots [such as 'iClebo Q'], Yujin boasts of network-based home robots. The company developed two different types of home robots: iRobi and Jupiter. ... 'Intelligent robots, robots with artificial intelligence, will be a keyword to understanding the future robot industry,' says Shin." October 26, 2005: Robot Already Optioned. Sci Fi Channel. "Author Daniel H. Wilson told Sci Fi Wire that his first book, How to Survive a Robot Uprising, has already been optioned for a movie, though it doesn't even hit stores until Nov. 7. ... Robot Uprising advises readers, with tongue in cheek, how to combat robots run amok and is written with 'technical veracity,' Wilson said. The 27-year-old Ph.D. candidate in robotics (at Carnegie Mellon University) offers such helpful advice as how to fool speech-recognition programs, how to recognize a rebellious servant robot and how to escape from a smart house. ... He added that he found himself attracted to the field of robotics as an undergraduate in computer science. 'Robotics ... is the place where artificial intelligence is most effective. You're not limited to operating inside a computer, and you can apply learning to the real world.'" October 25, 2005: Tech talk - The Furute is Nanobots. By San Grewal. Toronto Star (registration req'd.). "Some of Ray Kurzweil's ideas about the future may seem way too futuristic. But the Massachusetts-based computer scientist, inventor and author is convinced that artificial intelligence will completely change human life. 'Nonbiological intelligence will match the capabilities of human intelligence by 2029. And in the 2030s we will merge with this technology by sending intelligent nanobots (micro robots) into our brains through the capillaries,' Kurzweil wrote in an email interview. ... In the future, we will be media-savvy cyborgs. But we won't have to watch any more commercials -- unless we want to. 'For the next generation the quote won't be 'the medium is the message.' 'It will be 'I am the media,' says Watts Wacker, the former resident futurist at Stanford University's Stanford Research Institute. ... Futurist and University of Toronto professor Steve Mann agrees with [Ann] Clurman that a backlash could happen. Even though the electrical and computer engineer has invented a number of advanced computer devices and is considered one of the world's leading cyborg experts, Mann says if technology is only used to make people's lives more complicated the natural reaction will be to pull back." October 25, 2005: Bring on the geekettes - Educators insist a culture shift will lure females to sciences and math. By Susan Bourette. Macleans.ca. "The Grade 8 student unwittingly summed up what many educators and researchers already know: girls not only seem uninterested but lack confidence in their ability to learn math, computers and science. The upshot? Few go on to pursue careers in technology and science. Still, worries that initiatives to get girls excited by bytes, vectors and parabolas seemed to have been pushed to the back burner. Over the past few years, educators have been more concerned that boys have become the second sex, left behind by an education system that some argue favours girls. ... [I]n August, at a meeting of the American Sociological Association in Philadelphia, researchers presented a paper that indicated women continue to lag behind men globally in science-related fields. ... In computer science, females were under-represented in all 21 of the industrialized countries studied. Still, the researchers found great variance from country to country. In the United States, males were overrepresented in computer science by a ratio of slightly more than two to one, in the Czech Republic, by more than six to one. 'The ubiquity of women's under-representation attests to the persistence of deep-seated and widely shared beliefs that men and women are naturally different and they are suited for different occupations,' the authors wrote. 'But the fact that there's so much cross-national variability suggests that there's lots of room for country-specific cultural and social influences to play out.' ... These papers are just the latest research in a large body of social science supporting the theory that culture is more important than chromosomes in women's math and science achievement. ... The newest computer geeks are also Renaissance men -- and increasingly women. A number of universities are developing new multidisciplinary courses, allowing students to combine 'hard sciences' with other disciplines. ... Princeton's [Maria] Klawe has been at the forefront of the movement. She redesigned a number of programs at the University of British Columbia, where she was dean of science from 1998 to 2002, with the goal of getting more women interested in computer science. The result? Female enrolment in the discipline has inched upward every year." October 25, 2005: Smart fire detector could slash false alarms. By Kurt Kleiner. NewScientist.com news. "A fire detector that can tell the difference between burning toast and a burning building could save money, annoyance, and possibly even lives, by cutting down on false alarms. ... The detector uses four sensors and a neural network to determine if the smoke and heat it's detecting are from a fire or are just part of the normal room environment. ... Most home alarms are designed to go off when smoke in the air exceeds a certain concentration. ... Some commercial systems are more sophisticated, feeding data from a number of different sensors to a central computer and letting the computer decide whether the readings indicate a fire.The Siemens detector is different, [Andrew] Morgan says, because it builds artificial intelligence into each individual detector, using custom-designed integrated circuits." October 25, 2005: Futurists Pick Top Tech Trends. By Joanna Glasner. Wired News. "[L]et's take a look at the positive trends futurists see on the horizon. ... Speech-recognition technology will be instrumental in enabling new mobile services, said Ronald Gruia, author of the blog Technology Futurist and emerging communications program leader at consulting firm Frost & Sullivan. In recent years, speech software developers, in particular Nuance Communications, which until recently went by the name ScanSoft (SSFT), have gotten much better at what they do. Gruia believes it's only a matter of time before speech-enabled mobile apps for tasks like composing e-mail while driving can be commonplace." October 24, 2005: Robots nail down the nuts and bolts of bomb disposal. By Steven Komarow. USAToday.com. "Navy technician Michael Kapeluck rips into the injured soldier on the table with a wrench and a hammer. Not your standard operating tools. But not your standard soldier either. At least, not yet. Kapeluck and a half dozen other specialists work in the U.S. military's first deployed operating room for robots. ... 'Each time one of these gets blown up, it has saved the life of an EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) technician,' says Sgt. Randy Davis, 21, of the Army's 52nd Ordnance Group. ... The military plans to expand the use of robots beyond disarming bombs, increasing the number of robots on duty in Iraq to 1,000. The next batch will include small units that soldiers can send ahead to look for enemy ambushes or booby traps. These 'scout bots' are small enough to be thrown over a wall or into a window and to fit inside a backpack. The robot programs are part of the $1 billion overseen by the Pentagon's Defeat IED Task Force. IED refers to improvised explosive devices." October 24, 2005: Machines are catching up to human intelligence. By Robert S. Boyd. Knight Ridder Washington Bureau. "The machines are gaining on us. Their electronic brains are getting quicker and more capable and are displaying more signs of humanlike 'intelligence.' A race earlier this month by five driverless vehicles across 132 miles of twisting desert road without a living soul aboard is evidence of the remarkable progress being made in the arcane field of artificial intelligence - AI for short. Artificial intelligence is what happens when a computer or machine does something that would be considered intelligent if a human did it, such as drive a car, play soccer, reserve a hotel room or pilot a plane. Also known as machine intelligence, AI is wired into almost every corner of modern society. ... Some AI systems are famous, such as Deep Blue, the computer that beat the world chess champion Garry Kasparov, or Predators, the unmanned spy planes hovering over Afghanistan. But the machine intelligence that underlies most such systems is largely invisible, so people take their cleverness for granted. AI experts grouse that once one of their projects succeeds, people no longer consider it to be AI. According to Rodney Brooks, the director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 'AI is everywhere around you every second of the day. People just don't notice it.' ... 'There was a lot of optimism about artificial intelligence in the early days. But then we hit a brick wall,' said Alan Mackworth, a computer scientist at the University of British Columbia in Canada, and the president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. 'People were embarrassed to call themselves AI researchers,' Mackworth said. 'Now it's coming back. We've gotten a lot better at doing the science.'" October 24, 2005: Making computer work like a brain - Rutgers part of military project. By Kevin Coughlin. The Star-Ledger & NJ.com. "Rutgers University in Newark is among 15 institutions and companies sharing $9.5 million in grants for the first year of DARPA's Biologically-Inspired Cognitive Architectures program. When the field of artificial intelligence took shape in the 1950s -- spurred by pioneers at Bell Labs and Princeton University -- academics expected to build machines that reason and think like people, a branch of study later known as 'strong A.I.' But the task proved daunting and interest waned in the 1980s, starting a bleak 'A.I. winter.' Neuroscience research, meanwhile, has flourished. Techniques such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, which tracks blood flow in the brain, have yielded clues about what each region of the brain actually does. 'We're saying there might be enough new information to build up computer models of how the brain works,' said [David] Gunning, a computer scientist and psychologist managing the DARPA project. ... DARPA is giving [Rutgers neuroscientist Mark] Gluck $172,000 to create a model of how memories begin in the hippocampus, a region of the brain within the temporal lobe on each side of the head. The hippocampus acts like a filter, tossing some tidbits and sending others for storage elsewhere. ... Ultimately, the Pentagon seeks smarter machines to fight wars with fewer soldiers. ... Civilian spinoffs could include smarter robots to clean your house or drive your car, or truly helpful programs to sift your communications. ... But the project troubles some people. Smart-yet-unfeeling war machines could make the battlefield 'an even nastier place,' says bioethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania."
>>> Cognitive Science, Neural Networks & Connectionist Systems, Machine Learning, Military, Applications, Ethical & Social Implications, Emotions, AI Overview, History October 24, 2005: Turning the Car Keys Over to the Car. Steven Levy's The Technologist column. Newsweek / available from MSNBC.com. "At first, Sebastian Thrun didn't feel quite comfortable behind the wheel of the modified Volkswagen Touareg R5 named Stanley. That's understandable, because he wasn't driving. Stanley was. As the Stanford University entrant in the DoD's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) $2 million Grand Challenge, Stanley was designed to compete against 26 other driverless robot vehicles in a race through 132 miles of hostile terrain in the Mojave Desert. ... Thrun and his team began to think that on Oct. 8, Stanley might complete the DARPA challenge. That was an achievement that many observers considered possible only in the distant future, if ever. Computers, despite success in e-commerce, data mining and chess, have behaved like utter idiots when it came to getting from point A to point B in the real world. Only a year and a half ago, in the first DARPA challenge, the robots promptly drove into rocks or bushes or simply died at the starting gate. ... This year was different -- and historic. There was a winner: Stanley, which completed the course in six hours and 54 minutes. What's more, four other empty vehicles also triumphantly made it to the finish line ... What was Stanley's secret? ... " October 23, 2005: Beyond Human. By Christopher Caldwell. The New York Times Magazine. "Abandoning your own world for a made-up one is an ever larger part of adult life. For the futurist Ray Kurzweil, this is only the beginning. According to his new book 'The Singularity Is Near,' we are approaching the age of 'full-immersion virtual-reality.' Thanks to innovations in genetics, nanotechnology and robotics, you'll be able to design your own mental habitat. ... But this raises questions: What will then be the point of unenhanced human beings? And what will become of our relations to one another? A willingness to run head-on at these moral-technological issues has made the French novelist Michel Houellebecq one of Europe's best-selling writers and arguably its most important. His 'Elementary Particles' (2000), set in the year 2079, recounts the near-total extinction of ordinary human beings. His new novel, 'The Possibility of an Island,' due out in the United States next spring, describes the triumph of a cult that believes man was created by nondivine extraterrestrials and sees genetic engineering as a path to 'immortality.'" October 21, 2005: Nanobots Will Help Battle Ills In Future. By Brian Deagon. Investor's Business Daily & Investors.com. "Ray Kurzweil wears many hats. He's a prolific inventor and businessman. He wrote a book on how to live forever. He speaks eloquently on technology, artificial intelligence, genetics and robotics. But he is best known as a futurist. His new book, 'The Singularity Is Near,' is a bold view of what the world could be like in 30 years and beyond. And just how might that world be? Well, your best friend might be one you build yourself. Kurzweil's view of the future includes computers that function just like a human brain, with emotions. ... Kurzweil recently spoke with IBD about this brave new world. IBD: How did you become a futurist? ... IBD: Couldn't a computer go bad, just like some humans do? Kurzweil: I discuss this promise vs. peril of technology in my book. One of the most daunting is pathological artificial intelligence. How do you protect yourself from an intelligent entity that's destructive? My response is that AI will not be off in one corner. It will be deeply integrated into our civilization, society, our bodies and brains. And we will have conflicts with our enhanced intelligence. The way to counteract that is to keep our values of openness, freedom, civil liberties and democracy alive in our civilization. Because we are going to merge with the machines. IBD: So we shouldn't worry about machines taking control? ..." October 21, 2005: Museum Launches Digital ID System. Advanced Imaging Magazine (updated version of article from the October 2005 issue). "With the Digital Automated Identification System (DAISY) created by the Natural History Museum (London), which has more than 70 million species in its collection, a user could photograph a specimen with a mobile phone camera, and the identification could be made in seconds by computer. DAISY uses artificial intelligence and computer-vision technologies to produce virtual collections of authoritatively identified specimens. ... 'The DAISY program is based on an unsupervised neural-net generalized pattern recognition algorithm that can accept and work on any sort of digital data,' says Dr. Norm MacLeod, keeper of paleontology at the museum." October 20, 2005: Robots with a nose for trouble - Young hackers are rewiring old toys and turning them into the sniffer dogs of the future. By Quinn Norton. The Guardian. "This summer, eagle-eyed Dubliners might have spotted a gang of feral dogs sniffing their way through the streets of the Irish capital. The pack, which is now on its way to London, crawled at ankle height on a mission to sniff out dangerous pollutants. But these dogs are not trained bloodhounds: in fact, they are not even flesh and blood. The robotic canines were constructed by Irish teenagers under the eye of their inventor, Natalie Jeremijenko. They began life as toy robots with names such as Tekno, I-Cybie and Megabyte 1 and 2, but were moved into the workshops of Jeremijenko, an Australian who is now a professor at University of California, San Diego. ... For Jeremijenko, it's an opportunity to get people thinking about what makes technology and how it relates to the wider world. Robotic dogs are the expression of 50 years of artificial intelligence research and technology manufacturing - a dirty industry." October 19, 2005: Mystery of the machine. The Evening Chronicle & icNewcastle. "Robots will take over Newcastle's Life Science Centre with a week of mechanical fun during October half-term (October 22-30). ... Along with characters from Science Fiction, real robotic technology can be experienced in the Robot Zone with the PeopleBot.... Other activities allow people to test the difference between human and artificial intelligence (AI) by chatting with the Baldi Speech Interface and, on the Body Zone, the human anatomy is compared to its robotic counterparts.... Rounding off the robot appearances during the week, Ant E Statik, also known as performance artist Antony Arnold, will perform a specially developed dance routine inspired by robotic movements.... Linda Conlon, director of the Life Science Centre said: 'During half-term, visitors can explore the latest in robot technology and see how it is used in everyday life.'" October 19, 2005: Amateur team defeats experts in computer-car race. By Lee Gomes. The Wall Street Journal / available from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Had it not been for a hurricane and an extra-wide roadway, the technology center of the universe right now might be Metairie, La., a suburb 10 miles outside of New Orleans. Instead, a few dozen amateur robot makers will have to content themselves with being a technology history footnote, albeit a remarkable one. The Darpa Grand Challenge desert race earlier this month marked the first time that computer-controlled vehicles were able to navigate such a long (132 mile) and difficult a course. ... The winner was a Volkswagen from Stanford University, which finished in just under seven hours. In an unheralded fourth place, though -- just 37 minutes behind the winner -- was an entrant from Gray Insurance, a small, family-owned casualty company in Metairie. Fourth place may not sound like any big whoop until you realize that the Gray Team finished ahead of cars from some of America's most elite technical universities, as well as from a number of big defense contractors. In fact, theirs was one of only five vehicles that managed to even cross the finish line. The Gray Team had no prior experience in elite fields like robotics or artificial intelligence, spending their days instead in humdrum corporate data-processing tasks. They didn't decide to get involved in the race until 10 months ago, and didn't take delivery of the car they used until April. Not to mention how two months ago most of them had their homes destroyed by Katrina." October 19, 2005: UU Research Brings Stories to Life. University of Ulster news release. "New computing research carried out by the University of Ulster could help bring stories to life using the latest multimedia technology. Professor Paul McKevitt and PhD student Minhua Eunice Ma, from the Faculty of Engineering at Magee, have developed a unique software package that can automatically transform English into 3D computer animation. The project is part of an ongoing research collaboration between computing and the arts, investigating how storytelling can benefit from the help of artificial intelligence. ... 'It can be used in something as simple as bringing a child's story to life or as an educational tool to allow students to view literature from different perspectives. It could also have applications for teaching languages,' said Professor McKevitt." October 19, 2005: Health-care system getting wired. By Marlene Orton. The Ottawa Citizen & canada.com. "CHEO [Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario] in collaboration with Carleton University has spent more than a decade developing a machine-intelligent system that can comb through all that data to spot a pattern. Data from babies with a particular heart defect, at a certain weight, with a certain blood pressure and other matching vitals signs, for example, are analysed and an outcome can be reliably predicted. This artificial neural network is not meant to replace a human but it could eventually guide physicians caring for these very sick babies. Artificial intelligence tools, medical informatics and a wide range of information technology systems are gradually becoming part of the health-care system." October 19, 2005: Toyota's single-seater electric car resembles armchair on wheels. By Yuri Kageyama. The Associated Press / available from The Detroit News. "Toyota's single-seat electric car resembles a soft cuddly armchair on three wheels and comes with a virtual 'friend' programmed inside that learns the driver's tastes and personality. ... 'We wanted to treat the car like a living thing.' Imagine driving around in the i-swing and its artificial intelligence, which will pop up as a mascot character in a display at the driver's shoulder, will point out a noodle shop that's sure to match your palate, [Hideo] Miwa said. The robotics technology in the car will also work to remind you if you're running late to class, or give you fashion advice." October 19, 2005: Study lists top five tech trends. BBC News. "Specialised robots, devices for DIY content creation and new TV displays are among the trends to watch in 2006. That is according to the American-based Consumer Electronic Association which has published its view of technologies set to influence in next 12 months. ... A robotic future has long been talked about but so far has failed to deliver anything to match a human's flexibility, mobility and dexterity. But specialised robots are finding their way into homes, with robotic vacuums already doing the cleaning duties in half a million US homes. This trend is set to continue, according to the CEA." October 18, 2005: NSF Next-Generation Cybertools Awards Go to Cornell and U. of Chicago - Social and behavioral research to gain from better computing. NSF News. "The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced the first awards in its Next-Generation Cybertools program--an initiative designed to extend the boundaries of social and behavioral research and lead to fundamental advances in cyberinfrastructure--will go to research teams at Cornell University and the University of Chicago. The cybertools initiative will serve two purposes. First, it will help social and behavioral scientists push their research through the use of 'cyberinfrastructure'--vast new webs of computers, networks and data resources that are becoming increasingly important to science as a whole, and to the activities of NSF in particular. Second, the scientists' efforts will guide the development of future computational tools that will advance cyberinfrastructure itself. ... The Cornell project, headed by sociologist Michael Macy, will attempt to create a novel laboratory for social- science research based on the vast Internet Archive. The 40 billion pages of the archive represent snapshots of the Web that have been captured and stored every 2 months for nearly 10 years.... The challenge is to access that record and make sense of it. To meet that challenge, the Cornell team plans to build an intelligent front-end for searching the archive, an effort that will require cutting edge research in natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, as well as next-generation technology in privacy preservation. ... The Chicago project, headed by psychologist Bennett Bertenthal, will develop tools for collecting and analyzing human behavioral data on an unprecedented scale and level of sophistication. ... Most notably, their efforts will contribute to research on how human behavior can be automatically extracted, and even interpreted, from media like audio and video recordings." October 18, 2005: Science Finds New Patterns. UC Davis News & Information. "People love patterns. Our brains readily organize the stream of information from our senses to find pattern, structure and connections. Our pattern-finding ability lets us understand the world in front of us; sometimes it fools us with optical illusions. For a growing number of researchers at UC Davis, pattern recognition is a fast-growing field of science where disciplines like computer science, statistics, biology and physics converge. From genetics labs to astronomers' observatories, scientists are being flooded with data. There is a need to develop tools to process data very quickly, so humans can make use of it in real time, and to analyze it for increasingly subtle connections. ... Automated pattern recognition has already become a part of our lives. Retailers such as Amazon.com, for example, already use pattern analysis to match customers' demographic data with what they buy, and then use those patterns to recommend additional purchases. 'We need to analyze the human genome, we need to analyze the Web, this is creating a move to unify statistics and computer science, and we call it pattern analysis,' said [Nello] Cristianini.... Understanding pattern analysis can also give us insight into how humans -- and machines -- learn from their experiences. ... Both [Bruno] Olshausen and Cristianini are interested in machine learning -- how to program computers that can learn the way a baby does, by finding structure in a mass of data. 'In unsupervised learning you have to take the data without knowing how you will use it, and organize it by structure,' Olshausen said." October 18, 2005: U.S. Army, Link and Florida to create modeling research lab. TSJOnline.com. "L-3 Link Simulation and Training has joined an initiative to establish a research laboratory for modeling, simulation and training technology development. Link is joining forces for the project with the U.S. Army Research Development and Engineering Command's Simulation and Training Technology Center and the University of Central Florida. ... The laboratory, which will serve as both a technology demonstration facility and an innovation center.... Focus areas will include simulation architectures, learning technologies, artificial intelligence, and sensor and behavioral representation in simulations." October 18, 2005: Video Game News in Brief. By Lou Kesten. The Associated Press / available from Yahoo News. "News from the virtual world: ... Elsewhere on the casual games front, independent game developers gathered in Eugene, Ore., this month to trade tips on design, programming and marketing. The Indie Games Con also gave out awards.... [T]he IGC's choice for most innovative: 'Façade,' Procedural Arts' fascinating experiment in bringing artificial intelligence to characters in a domestic drama." October 18, 2005: 1965 - Key to the computer's future reflections. From the AustralianIT archives. " Men: key to the computer's future - Experts argue vehemently on the long-range effects of computers - whether computers will merely upset our weekly rhythm of work and leisure of five days on and two days off, or lead on to mass unemployment and disaster. As the controversy grows one thing is obvious - all arguments rage over and around apparently malevolent machines. But a computer is a lifeless thing, a structure of electronic components in steel boxes which look like broom cupboards." October 18, 2005: Stanley is king of bots. Bruce McCabe's The Scrutineer column. Australian IT. "When the Grand Challenge was first held last year, the best of the robots could only manage 11km before coming unstuck. A year later, four robots completed the entire 212km course faultlessly and inside the 10-hour deadline, with a fifth following soon after. That difference represents an enormous amount of progress in artificial intelligence, sensor technologies and computer engineering, and all in a practical, real-world context. A long list of heavyweight companies was inspired to become involved as financial backers or active participants in research and development. ... The event served as a catalyst for new industry tie-ups and boosted the skills of hundreds of staff and students. Although all of that will produce real, tangible economic value, it is the competition that counts because nothing gets the blood boiling more than a race. The race drew together people from universities and industry, inspiring them to work weekends, nights and holidays and by all accounts it would be hard to find a participant who did not think life was richer for having been part of it." October 18, 2005: Robots shift car tech into high gear. By Stefanie Olsen. CNET News.com. " A well-publicized race in the desert earlier this month proved that artificially intelligent robots can drive autonomously over rugged terrain and long distances. But will the technology be relevant to average Americans? If you ask the masterminds behind the robots, the answer is 'yes, it's just a matter of time.' Vehicles powered with artificial-intelligence software and sporting the ability to 'see' the road with external sensors will be a staple in the U.S. military within 10 years, under a mandate from Congress that spurred the desert robot rally. The underlying technology also will find its way into popular cars with features like collision and lane-departure warnings and adaptive cruise controls. The technology is also relevant, experts say, for the disabled and for automating machines. ... 'We've been working on the war on cancer, but with this technology we're a lot closer to saving more lives--young lives--through accidents, by giving attentional aids,' said Gary Bradski, a machine-learning expert at Intel who worked on Stanley." October 17, 2005: K-12 programs draw girls to science. By Sheila Riley. EETimes.com. "Girls just want to do robotics. At least, that's the premise behind efforts to correct the gender imbalance in engineering, starting with getting girls interested at an early age. The MathWorks (Natick, Mass.), which makes software for technical computing and model-based design, is picking up part of the tab for a weekly after-school robotics club for fifth graders. Girls at Wilson Elementary in Framingham, Mass., work in teams of three, coming up with the design for an 'assisted device'— a robotic creation that provides handicapped access. It could be a vehicle but doesn't have to be. And an all-female environment is important. 'It makes the girls feel a lot more comfortable and at ease when they're not competing with the boys,' said King, who directs the Center for Women and Minorities in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, a nonprofit state agency on work force development. The center is part of a national effort to improve math and science education for underrepresented demographic groups. ... From robotics clubs to high school physics summer camps, there are countless government, education, industry and nonprofit efforts under way to improve K-12 math and science education, and to attract girls to the technical professions." October 17, 2005: Gates donates $15 million to museum - Mountain View institution records computing history. By Benjamin Pimentel. San Francisco Chronicle & SFGate.com. "Bill Gates is donating $15 million to the Computer History Museum, the biggest gift in the history of the Silicon Valley institution, which maintains the world's largest collection of computing artifacts. The gift from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will help the Mountain View museum reach its goal of raising $125 million for educational programs and a long-term endowment. ... The museum will also use the Gates donation for its 'Timeline of Computing History,' an ambitious interactive exhibit that seeks to chronicle the history of computing and its impact on the human experience. ... The museum began in Boston in 1979 under the name Digital Computer Museum. It moved to Silicon Valley in 1996." October 17, 2005: Stanford robotic vehicle adapted human ways of learning. By Mike Langberg. The Mercury News (registration req'd.). "Stanley, the robotic car from Stanford University that triumphed in a recent $2 million race across desert terrain, learned to drive in much the same way as any 16-year-old: by following the lessons of experienced humans. ... When the Stanford team first started testing Stanley, a blue sport-utility vehicle, he had a 12 percent blunder rate for 'false positives' -- incorrectly assuming 12 percent of the objects in front of him were obstacles big enough he had to swerve around them. So the team instructed Stanley's software to take notes while a human driver maneuvered the car over different types of terrain. By following this guidance, the false positive rate dropped to one in 50,000 objects. This kind of debugging, conducted during 1,200 miles of off-road testing in the deserts of Southern California and Arizona, put Stanley first across the finish line in Primm, Nev., after traversing a 132-mile course with no human intervention. ... The race was funded by DARPA, formerly the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, because the Pentagon wants to make one-third of the military's land vehicles self-driving within a decade. But the really big market for robotic driving systems is in the civilian world, for both safety and convenience. ... 'We focused on artificial intelligence from the get-go,' said Stanford team leader Sebastian Thrun, director of Stanford's artificial intelligence lab."
>>> AI Overview, Autonomous Vehicles, Military, Robots, Planning, Machine Learning, Grand Challenges, Transportation, Applications October 17, 2005: Rescuing missed information - Cutting-edge commercial wares give agencies a whole new outlook on searching for information. By Aliya Sternstein. FCW.com. "The overhaul of the FirstGov Web portal is providing a high-profile example of the potential of new search technologies for government. Therefore, experts believe agencies will follow industry and adopt cutting-edge search technologies such as metasearch, clustering and topic maps. Those techniques promise to dig deeper into the government's online knowledge base, in addition to making search results much easier to use. ... Another priority for vendors is helping users make more sense of search results that can list hundreds and even thousands of hits. 'The ongoing problem is that just about anything you type in [a search form] will lead to an overabundance of information,' said Raul Valdes-Perez, co-founder of Vivisimo, which runs the clustering search site Clusty.com, and an adjunct associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. ... Metasearch, also known as federated search, can eliminate this blind spot. A single search triggers multiple simultaneous queries of selected databases, the Web and site-specific search engines, such as NASA.gov. The metasearch tool then collects and combines the search results, eliminates redundancies and presents the finished product as one list. ... In addition to metasearch capabilities, ToxSeek also uses clustering, another new search technique. With clustering, algorithms sort search results into groups based on textual and linguistic similarities. For example, a ToxSeek user could search for 'cancer' and 'smoking,' and the system would return results categorized by a variety of subheads, including the information's source, topic and type. Clustering lets users see results that would otherwise appear near the end of ranked lists, and they can survey the information landscape before digging in. ... The still-emerging area of topic maps can help educate search engines. Like metasearch, topic map techniques do not replace traditional search tools. They can work in conjunction with them, however, to provide more powerful search navigation. For example, a NASA topic map could be set up so that when a person enters 'Pathfinder' into a search form, the topic map guides the user to related items, such as 'Mars lander' and 'evidence suggesting liquid water was once a stable presence on Mars.' ... Topic map implementation requires more elbow grease than search appliance installation. Unlike traditional search engines, most topic maps require human and artificial intelligence." October 17, 2005: Homes to turn 'smart' within next decade. ekathimerini.com. "Greek scientists said on Saturday they have begun working on technology designed to introduce artificial intelligence into homes and offices within a decade, making them more energy efficient. Experts from the technical colleges of Piraeus, Thessaloniki and Patras began working on designing 'smart buildings' six months ago and unveiled their plans at a technology conference in Thessaloniki on Saturday." October 16, 2005: Meet the Life Hackers. By Clive Thompson. The New York Times Magazine. " ... When you work next to other people, they can sense whether you're deeply immersed, panicking or relatively free and ready to talk - and they interrupt you accordingly. So why don't computers work this way? Instead of pinging us with e-mail and instant messages the second they arrive, our machines could store them up - to be delivered only at an optimum moment, when our brains are mostly relaxed. One afternoon I drove across the Microsoft campus to visit a man who is trying to achieve precisely that: a computer that can read your mind. His name is Eric Horvitz, and he is one of [Mary] Czerwinski's closest colleagues in the lab. For the last eight years, he has been building networks equipped with artificial intelligence (A.I.) that carefully observes a computer user's behavior and then tries to predict that sweet spot - the moment when the user will be mentally free and ready to be interrupted. Horvitz booted the system up to show me how it works. ... "
>>> Interfaces, Applications October 16, 2005: Troubleshooters wanted - It's time to put pre-college science laboratories on the front burner. Puts & Calls (business opinions and perspectives) article by Elizabeth Jones. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "From across the region, high school teachers and their students routinely come to CMU [Carnegie Mellon University] for these weekend workshops. Why? Because many simply don't have the lab space or the equipment to do experiments. ... Now more than ever, universities must partner with state initiatives, foundations, community groups and corporations to augment school budgets. The work is piecemeal, but essential. For instance, last year one faculty member here worked with nearly 150 high school students during weekend laboratory workshops. And she mentored many other students on their science fair projects. ... Through just one summer program, the Pennsylvania Governors School for the Sciences, we've seen many bright students become scientists as they have their first opportunity to make nanomaterials called buckyballs, study gene expression in a sea urchin embryo or use artificial intelligence to create a computer backgammon player." October 15, 2005: Even a chatbot can turn nasty - Artificial intelligence programs that learn by example can pick up some bad habits from internet users, much to the embarrassment of their owners. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist (subscription req'd.; Issue 2521). "Nowhere is the problem more pressing than with the artificial-intelligence programs used as software agents and natural-language chatbots. Many of these programs are designed to learn from their interactions with their users, and use what they glean to converse in a more natural, human-like way. The trouble starts when they don't just pick up our conversational pleasantries, but insults and swear words too. ... Many companies, including big names such as Coca-Cola and Burger King, have begun using chatbots to represent them on their websites or to build them into automated telephone services. The last thing these companies want is to find their corporate ambassadors insulting the customers, says [Antonella] De Angeli." October 14, 2005: A conversation with Bill Gates- The world's richest man talks about developing new drugs to combat AIDS, open-source software and why Microsoft's still cool after all these years. By Chanakya Sethi. The Daily Princetonian. "DP: In 1995, you wrote 'The Road Ahead,' where you outlined your vision for a digital future. What predictions came true and, looking back, what do you think you'd change? Gates: A lot of the predictions there were dead on in terms of talking about digital rights management, the arrival of broadband and things like that. Obviously if I wrote it again today, I could talk more about progress we've made in machine learning, speech recognition, vision, tablet computing and security. The field has been advancing very rapidly. The best investment Microsoft has ever made is our pure research group in the way that it collaborates with the universities. That's where the big advances are coming from. ... DP: In recent years, Apple has done a lot to boost its image among young people with products like the iMac and the iPod. Do you think young people still perceive Microsoft as a 'cool' company? Have you been eclipsed? Gates: Well, there's room for many cool companies. The software Microsoft is doing is cool. What Apple's doing is cool. The competition amongst all these companies leads to great products. We're a software company and if you want to do breakthroughs in artificial intelligence or new databases or speech recognition or tablet computing, there's a depth of software understanding and research at Microsoft you don't find anywhere else. ... " October 14, 2005: Why smart machines need people. Good Thing You Asked column by Christopher Viney. MercedSun-Star.com. " Q: 'If artificial intelligence makes robots smart, then why don't they think to get rid of us?' Question submitted by Siggy Arcea, in the sixth grade at Weaver Elementary School, Merced (Mrs. Day's class). A: ... It is of course possible to program computers to be destructive to the interests of humans. For example, this type of programming goes on every day when people create computer viruses and spam. At the same time, there are also programmers who write anti-virus software and spam filters. The battle is between humans who are using machines, not between the machines and humans. There have been many instances throughout the history of science where scientists have said that something could never happen, only to be proved wrong by later discovery. With this in mind, I would be reluctant to say that humans will never develop an artificially intelligent machine that could unexpectedly decide to get rid of its creator. ... Misuses of technology can be prevented by ensuring that as many people as possible are aware of the principles, possibilities and limitations of science and engineering. For this reason, science education is valuable to everyone, including people who don't plan a career in the sciences. ... " October 14, 2005: Behind Artificial Intelligence, a Squadron of Bright Real People. By John Markoff. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "The five robots that successfully navigated a 132-mile course in the Nevada desert last weekend demonstrated the re-emergence of artificial intelligence, a technology field that for decades has overpromised and underdelivered. At its low point, some computer scientists and software engineers avoided the term artificial intelligence for fear of being viewed as wild-eyed dreamers. ... The feat, which won a $2 million prize from the Pentagon Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, was compared by exuberant Darpa officials to the Wright brothers' accomplishment at Kitty Hawk, because it was clear that it was not a fluke. ... While artificial intelligence technology is already in use in telephone answering systems with speech recognition and in popular household gadgets like the iRobot vacuum cleaner, none of the existing systems have been as ambitious as Darpa's Grand Challenge road race. This leap was possible, in large part, because researchers are moving from an approach that relied principally on logic and rule-based systems to more probability or statistics-oriented software technologies. ... Until recently, progress in artificial intelligence lagged so far behind computing technology that some in the field talked about an 'A.I. winter,' after commercial and government funding evaporated in the mid-1980's. Now there is talk about an A.I. spring among researchers like Sebastian Thrun, the director of the Stanford lab." October 12, 2005: Robotic Rollouts. By Jon Burke. alarm:clock / available from Technology Review. "After years of caution, venture capitalists are warming up to robotics companies such as iRobot, Zoom Systems, and InTouch Technologies. Venture capitalists tend to be fairly conservative people -- despite their reputation for risk taking. Consequently, few robot-makers have received venture funding. In fact, it's possible that many VCs put robot business models on a par with time travel and jet-pack transportation. With the announcement of a $115 million IPO by Burlington, MA-based iRobot, though, companies commercializing robot technology are beginning to attract VC attention. ... Zoom Systems, raised $12 million in September.... In health care, venture-backed robotics startup InTouch Technology recently raised $12.1 million...." October 12, 2005: Stopping a computer revolt - Artificial intelligence may not be ready to rule the world, but a Vancouver researcher works to make it safer. By Dee Anne Finken. The Oregonian & OregonLive.com. "Perhaps because of its unlikely plot, one of Hollywood's latest sci-fi thrillers didn't draw big crowds this summer at the multiplex. After all, how realistic is the premise behind 'Stealth,' a movie about a jet piloted by an artificial-intelligence computer that goes renegade and leads the world to the brink of disaster? But a Washington State University Vancouver researcher knows the idea of artificial intelligence going berserk isn't totally the stuff of fantasy. And he's getting high marks for his insight. At the Fourth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multi Agent Systems, held in the Netherlands, Scott Wallace's research on high-level security controls for artificial intelligence was selected this summer as one of the four best submissions -- out of 531 from around the world. ... Wallace works on ways to improve software that provides security for an artificial-intelligent agent -- whether it's surfing the Internet for a researcher, fielding phone calls or flying a jet fighter -- to keep it from going haywire. Wallace has no contracts, but he envisions his technology someday being applied in simulators for jet pilots. More importantly, 'I hope to make artificial-intelligence technology more acceptable to society,' he said." October 12, 2005: How a team of Cornell students banded together to create the impossible: a driverless vehicle. By Maria T. Welych. The Post-Standard & Syracuse.com. "In April 2004, four Cornell University students had a dream. They wanted to build a robotic car to compete in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's second Grand Challenge race. The first race, in March 2004, ended with no vehicle traveling farther than seven miles. But the attempt drew the attention of the students, who thought they could draw on the expertise Cornell has with other artificial intelligence projects such as the international robot soccer championship, called RoboCup, to create an autonomous vehicle. ... This is the story of their dream and how they achieved it. ... " October 12, 2005: The evolution of video games. By Lauren Phillips. The State News. "This weekend, top video game industry executives, researchers and government officials will descend on MSU to discuss the future of video games at 'Future Play 2005: The International Academic Conference on the Future of Game Design and Technology.' ... Experts say cycles of new releases reveal the latest technologies available in gaming. They expect big developments in the new systems, especially the use of advanced artificial intelligence to increase the quality of gameplay. At the same time, the video game industry is working to broaden its market beyond its traditionally young, male audience. It is even branching out into professional applications, with game systems used to train firefighters and police for natural disasters, future soldiers for combat methods and young professionals in corporate applications. The debate over violent video game content came to a head in Michigan in September when Gov. Jennifer Granholm signed new legislation that makes the sale or rental of mature or adult-rated video games to children illegal. ... Experts say with the evolution of technology like artificial intelligence, video games are going to become even more realistic. 'Artificial intelligence' has been a key component in this reality. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a simulation of human intelligence using computer programming. It is continuously developed and applied to video game technologies." October 11, 2005: 'TalkTown' new website launched by NSPCC. News Release from The Westmorland Gazette. "People in Kendal are invited to visit TalkTown', a new online town launched today by the NSPCC [National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children] to help tackle child abuse. TalkTown, which can be visited at www.talktilitstops.org.uk, is a pilot website which is part of the charity's largest ever national call to action, Talk 'til it stops'. It is the first time the Society has used artificial intelligence to help anyone worried that a child is being abused. People can turn to the town's virtual residents for help on what they can do and how they can contribute to ending child cruelty. ... Talktilitstops.org.uk uses a technology called Lingubot to enable members of the public to interact directly with one of the four characters. By asking the residents questions, individuals will be able to start talking to the characters about the difficult subject of child abuse and learn more about the role they can play in ending cruelty to children. The underlying technology is based on a sophisticated word and phrase pattern recognition system that matches preprogrammed responses in the Lingubot's knowledge base with questions typed in by users. As people interact with the Lingubot, sophisticated analysis tools will be used to expand the characters' knowledge throughout the campaign. It is the first time this technology has been used to address such a sensitive topic." October 11, 2005: New Online Test Is Intended to Help Colleges Measure Students' Learning Outcomes. By Burton Bollag. The Chronicle of Higher Education Daily News. "The Educational Testing Service introduced on Monday a new version of its test of general education outcomes for use by colleges to assess students' skills in reading, writing, critical thinking, and mathematics. The new examination, called the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress, replaces a test called the Academic Profile, which has been in use since 1987. ... Institutions can purchase an optional essay section, which grades students' writing samples by computer. Linda L. Tyler, ETS's executive director of new product development for higher education, said the program uses 'natural language-processing technology, which mimics human scoring.'" October 11, 2005: Robotic inspiration - Students try hands at emerging technology. By Clint Cooper. Chattanooga Times Free Press (Life section). "Taylor Brown of Central High School watched as the ER1 robot turned and spoke. 'This is the greatest thing ever,' he said of the laptop computer mounted on a mini cart in a computer lab at UTC. 'Can I get one of these?' Taylor, 16, was one of a group of Chattanooga high school students who got a glimpse of the future Saturday in a field that until recently seemed like science fiction. The first Autonomous Control Conference at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga was designed to cultivate interest in math, science, engineering and technology, officials said. ... When high school students see college students not much older than themselves working in areas such as autonomous control, they feel more comfortable about attending the school and about college life in general, Ms. [Julie] Sanders said." October 11, 2005: At Dartmouth, a Remote-Controlled Robot. By Kenneth Chang. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "For a steerable piece of dust, look somewhere at Dartmouth College. Researchers there have built what they say is the world's smallest untethered, controllable robot. When placed on a penny, it looks like a mole on the side of Lincoln's chin, measuring a hundredth of an inch by one four-hundredth of an inch. A traffic jam of 200 of them would stretch the length of an M&M. The robot contains no motors or circuitry. Rather, it is a carefully carved piece of silicon that moves across a special surface that contains an embedded electrical grid." [Video available via a sidebar link.] October 10, 2005: In HAL's Footsteps - Real progress is being made in developing IT systems that do a better job of monitoring, analyzing, and fixing problems without human intervention. By Darrell Dunn. InformationWeek. "The film '2001' gained cinematic notoriety with the introduction of a self-aware, independent-thinking, murderous computer named HAL that became a sci-fi icon. In the movie's namesake year, IBM engineers launched an effort to develop technology to help computers monitor, diagnose, and heal their own problems. IBM isn't trying to create a real-life HAL, but it does want to make computers smart enough to heal themselves. The promise of autonomic computing -- systems that function automatically, much like reflexive bodily functions such as breathing, without external intervention -- still remains formative. Developing these sorts of capabilities often requires multiple vendors to work together toward a long-term vision to build networkwide capabilities, sometimes piece by piece. ... Many companies are avoiding the term autonomic computing, which IBM has promoted. But they aim to improve system management with emerging technologies...." October 10, 2005: Ph.D. students plan for a difficult job market. By Max Gladstone. Yale Daily News. "Other graduate students said they feel more relaxed about the proposition due to the relative popularity of their fields in the business job market. Kevin Gold GRD '09, a computer science graduate student focusing in artificial intelligence, said academic jobs in machine learning techniques -- his area of interest -- are easier to come by, thanks to companies like Google that actively pursue recent degree recipients. 'Between Google and Microsoft, a lot of talented people are getting snapped up,' Gold said. 'In terms of getting a job, I'm fairly confident, perhaps undeservingly so, that if I wanted to leave academia I could get a job in the industry.' Although Gold said he is still worried about getting the right job -- one in his area of interest and close to his girlfriend -- he also said his education will ultimately leave him in a more employable position than that of many humanities doctoral degree holders. 'If I was studying symbols in Jane Eyre -- I mean, who would buy that?' Gold said." October 10, 2005: Autonomous car comes in first place. By Mandy Kovach. The Stanford Daily. "The Stanford Racing Team's driverless Volkswagen Touareg, fondly dubbed Stanley, braved the harsh terrain of the Mojave Desert, winning the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge, a race to develop fully autonomous vehicles, this past Saturday. Stanley completed the 132-mile course with a time of 6:53:08 -- averaging over 19 miles per hour on the course -- and bringing home the $2 million prize. According to Computer Science Prof. Sebastian Thrun, the racing team's project leader, this success not only means a lot in terms of defense technology, but it also changes the face of modern transportation."
>>> Autonomous Vehicles, Robots, Military, Applications, Grand Challenges, Competitions (@ Resources for Students), History; also see these related articles October 10, 2005: The Mind of an Inventor - He built his first computer as a child. In his 20s, he had moved on to supercomputers. Now Danny Hillis is thinking of bigger things. By Steven Levy. Newsweek / available from MSNBC.com. "The more complicated question is what makes a great inventor possible. Though [Danny] Hillis may not be a household word, he's definitely on the radar of those in the top ranks of science, government and business. ... Nonetheless, he insists that 'people tend to overestimate the individual inventor and underestimate the system that makes their inventions real.' If that's so, Hillis is a case where the system worked. He is a child not only of science but scientists.... As an MIT sophomore he built a computer out of Tinkertoys. But as he hung out at the school's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (he actually moved into the basement of its famous leader Marvin Minsky), he became consumed with creating a machine that could think. 'I want,' he once said, 'to build a computer that would be proud of me.' To pursue this goal, he rethought the architecture of the modern computer, whose 'brain' typically consisted of a single processor. Hillis imagined a supercomputer with thousands of processors all working together. Not only did this idea of 'parallel processing' become his doctoral thesis but, while still a grad student, he started a company based on it, called (what else?) Thinking Machines. ... There's nothing not possible. Maybe believing that is what makes an inventor. ... That upbeat sense of experimentation permeates the giant toy shop of Applied Minds." October 9, 2005: All human life is indexed on the web - Search engines are changing the face of business forever. By Tony Glover. The Business Online. "The library of Alexandria was the first time humanity attempted to bring all human knowledge together in one place at one time. Our latest attempt? Google, according to Brewster Kahle, entrepreneur and founder of the Internet Archive. Search technology is still in its infancy but it will revolutionise the computer industry and change our world as radically as the PC did a generation ago. ... When the problem is fully solved, Battelle predicts an eerie future: 'Search may well lead to the creation of Hal, the intelligent but creepy computer doppelganger of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or, if that possibility doesn't keep you up at night, think of search as the application that lays the foundation for Skynet, the AI (artificial intelligence) programme that takes over the world as imagined in the Terminator films, or the equally dystopian Matrix trilogy.' But well before any of these sci-fi scenarios emerge, search technology will revolutionise the retail, publishing, advertising, media, procurement and entertainment industries. ... According to Battelle, search is the fastest growing business in the history of media. From its inception in the late 1990s to 2004, it grew as an industry from a base in the low millions to $4bn (£2.28bn, E3.32bn) in revenues. According to researcher Piper Jaffray, it is estimated to hit $23bn by 2010." October 8, 2005: Stanford robotic vehicle finishes $2 million Mojave Desert race. By Alicia Chang. The Associated Press / available from SFGate.com. "A customized Volkswagen SUV entered by Stanford University became the first autonomous vehicle to cross the finish line of a $2 million Pentagon-sponsored race across the rugged Mojave Desert on Saturday without help from a human driver or remote control. The race announcer did not immediately declare a winner because 22 out of the 23 robots left the starting line at staggered times at dawn, racing against the clock rather than each other. ... Stanley finished the course in less than 7 1/2 hours. The unmanned vehicles must use their computer brains and sensing devices to follow a programmed route and avoid hitting obstacles that may doom their chances."
>>> Autonomous Vehicles, Robots, Military, Transportation, Applications, Grand Challenges, Competitions (@ Resources for Students), History, Ethical & Social Implications October 8, 2005: Not-so-remote control - Ever wanted to cross-breed a vacuum cleaner? Latest robots take the floor in San Jose show. By Carrie Kirby. San Francisco Chronicle & SFGate.com. "If you're not a techie, you might think the Roomba is pretty neat as it comes out of the box. It's a robot vacuum cleaner that zips around the carpet on its own. An upcoming variation will even scrub the kitchen floor. But that's not good enough for Phillip Torrone, an associate editor at Make magazine. Today, he'll be demonstrating how to combine the Roomba, which starts at $150, with other devices to create cross-bred robots that can do more than just clean house. Where do you find crowds eager to learn how to convert a vacuum cleaner into something less useful but more interesting? At RoboNexus, the all-dancing, all-wrestling, all-floor-cleaning robot trade show at the San Jose Convention Center through the weekend. ... Many of the robots on display were designed as educational tools. ... Several sessions over the weekend will delve into robot art, as in art created by robots on their own or via commands from remote human beings. ... This afternoon, Joanne Pransky, a marketer and public speaker who bills herself as the world's first robotic psychiatrist, will expound on the social issues involved in robotics...." October 8, 2005: Smile, the camera is waiting for you - Only cheerful faces in smart cameras of the future. By Steve Makris. The Edmonton Journal. "Canon's automatic smile detection system prototype turned heads at the recent Japanese giant's Canon Expo 2005 in New York, an event also held in Paris and Tokyo every five years. The camera's artificial intelligence tracks all moving faces within sight and snaps the picture when smiles and bright eyes peak -- a challenge for even professional photographers. It will be a while before this camera hits the streets." October 8, 2005: 2001: A web odyssey for NSA. By Eben Harrell. The Scotsman (subscription req'd.). "An artificial ntelligence system that one researcher claims will be as powerful as the computer 'HAL' from 2001: A Space Odyssey is being developed by the United States' top spy agency, The Scotsman has learned. When completed, the internet-based system will be able to understand and answer questions posed by intelligence analysts...." October 7, 2005: University computer buffs plus in to conference. By Dan Shah. The Daily Illini. "The Association for Computing Machinery at the University, in conjunction with the computer science department and the electrical engineering department, will be hosting its 11th annual student computing conference from Oct. 7-9. The conference, titled the ACM Reflections Projections Student Computing Conference is taking place at the Digital Computer Laboratory, 1304 W. Springfield Ave., and at the Siebel Center, 201 N. Goodwin. The goal of the conference is to bring students together from all over the nation to gain a more general idea regarding the field of computer science. A job fair, speakers, an artificial intelligence programming contest, an Xbox tournament, as well as food and events such as a puzzle contest will take place. ... The artificial intelligence programming contest, entitled MechMania XI, which will consist of 16 3-person teams and will last 18 hours on Saturday at the Digital Computer Laboratory. The instructions will be given out Friday." October 7, 2005: Venture Capital - CleverSet predicts a role for itself in shopping. By John Cook. Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "CleverSet's data-mining technology has been used by the U.S. military to track battlefield assets in Iraq and the National Institutes of Health to determine the likelihood that an elderly individual will stumble and fall. But now the 5-year-old software company, which moved its headquarters from Corvallis, Ore., to Seattle last week, is hoping to take some of the lessons from the government work and apply them to the consumer online world. Having just raised $1 million in private financing from local angel investors, CleverSet plans to release new software in the coming months that will help online retailers deliver personalized recommendations to customers based upon their shopping or browsing patterns. ... Developed by Bruce D'Ambrosio, a former Oregon State University computer science professor and an expert in artificial intelligence, CleverSet uses relational databases, graphical models and machine-learning algorithms to predict behavior." October 7, 2005: Robots take the wheel in desert race. By Stefanie Olsen. CNET News.com. "This is no ordinary race. The competitors are artificially intelligent robots designed to drive autonomously, and they're facing tough terrain: A 150-mile desert course with mountain switchbacks, gullies, dry lake beds, tunnels and manmade obstacles. And the computer scientists who developed the robot racers have to balance care with speed; the robots must finish the course in under 10 hours. ... 'In 2004, we thought it was quite an achievement that a robot was able to go about seven and a half miles,' DARPA director Tony Tether said. 'But the results of this (year's semifinals) tell me that we will leave that in the dust of the Mojave.'"
>>> Autonomous Vehicles, Robots, Military, Applications, Grand Challenges, Competitions (@ Resources for Students) October 7, 2005: The Future Needs Futurists. By Joanna Glasner. Wired News. "Being a futurist sure sounds like a fun job. Observe the world at large, amass predictions and inspire awe at one's visionary talents. But is there a future in it? According to the Association of Professional Futurists, prospects are starting to look quite promising. As companies and government agencies grapple with the seemingly scorching rate of technological innovation and change, more are engaging the services of self-described futurists for advice on how to adapt. ... 'Making future forecasting more of a formal field could be a great step toward moving some of the techniques into public policy,' said Howard Rheingold, a futurist and author. 'I'm not saying it's possible to predict the future, but grappling with what's happening today and where it's going is an important priority that seems to be ignored on the policy level.'" October 7, 2005: Europe needs bigger robots push. BBC News. "European Union (EU) member states are losing out to the Japanese when it comes to developing useful robots that are commercially available. The European Commission (EC) urged businesses to turn their robotics research into viable products much more quickly than they do now. ... Japan has long had a lead in the robotics industry, but the EU's 25 member states have a 35% share in the global manufacturing of robots. ... Robots are increasingly being used for more hazardous or specialist jobs, such as scientific and medical research, defence and surveillance, as well as mine-clearing. ... Researchers around the world are developing robots for different uses, and many are making them a lot smarter and autonomous by developing AI systems (Artificial Intelligence). ... Last year, a United Nations annual World Robotics report said that 4.1 million robots would be doing jobs in homes by the end of 2007."
>>> Robots, Applications, Industry Statistics October 6, 2005: Jeff Hawkins, computing pioneer, endows new center to develop model of brain. By Robert Sanders. UC Berkeley News. "Jeff Hawkins, creator of the first commercially successful handheld computer and author of the book 'On Intelligence,' has endowed a new research center at the University of California, Berkeley, to develop mathematical and computational models of how the brain works." October 6, 2005: Artificial intelligence helps make life easier. By John Caldwell. redandblack.com. "Unlike the often-sinister robots of pop culture science fiction, University researchers' machines are created to make life easier. 'The amount of artificial intelligence an average person touches in a normal day is astounding,' said Don Potter, director of the Artificial Intelligence Center [at the University of Georgia] and a professor of computer science. ... Among the robotic gadgets and a figurine of Star Trek's Captain Picard in his office is a bumper sticker that sums up his view: 'Artificial Intelligence: It's For Real.'" October 6, 2005: Robotic Hummer Gets Pole in Robot Race. By Alicia Chang. The Associated Press / available from The Washington Post. "A driverless red Hummer snagged the pole position Wednesday in a government-sponsored sequel race across the Mojave Desert that will pit 23 robots against one another. The finalists were chosen after an intense, weeklong qualifying run at the California Speedway, where the self-navigating vehicles had to drive on a bumpy road, zip through a tunnel and avoid obstacles. No human drivers or remote controls were allowed. ... 'The worst vehicle we have is as good or better than the best vehicle last year,' said DARPA director Anthony Tether."
>>> Autonomous Vehicles, Robots, Military, Applications, Grand Challenges, Competitions (@ Resources for Students) October 6, 2005: New breed of 'fish-bot' unveiled. By Alison Ross. BBC News. "The world's first autonomous robotic fish are the latest attraction at the London Aquarium. Biologically inspired by the common carp, the new designs can avoid objects and swim around a specially designed tank entirely of their own accord. This new kind of cyber-fish took three years to develop, by a team of scientists from Essex University. Future generations may be used for seabed explorations, detection of leaks in oil pipelines, or even as spies. ... It is hoped that bringing the public into direct contact with robots will increase their understanding of science and technology." October 6, 2005: Artificial intelligence - threats and opportunities. Legal IT. "The future may be electronic, says Ian Pearson, futurologist for BT, but even in a world of conscious computers and artificial intelligence, lawyers will still be in huge demand. ... Pearson has been working with firms from other industries, notably the legal profession. 'The first time I analysed the legal industry the first question was whether technology would be putting lawyers out of a job, but the reality is quite the opposite,' he says. 'Computers and the internet will be able to automate basic legal functions -- such as conveyancing, which will leave more time for lawyers to concentrate on the intellectual and social parts of the job.' ... Further into the future is the issue of artificial intelligence. 'In 10 years time computers will be approaching human levels of intelligence and achieving consciousness. Electronics are already starting to mimic the physiology and nervous system of humans and by 2050 they could be making back-ups of your mind.' ... 'But if you grant computers a consciousness what else will they be granted? What human rights will they be granted? If computers become capable of committing crime, what level of responsibility will they have? It is something that we see coming over the horizon and there will be a time when we have to debate it.'" October 5, 2005: Researchers equip robot with sniper-detecting capability. By Mark Jewell. The Associated Press / available from USAToday.com. "A Massachusetts company best known for its robotic vacuum cleaners is teaming up with Boston University to develop a robot that can locate the source of sniper gunfire. ... 'These systems are primarily made for gathering and understanding the nature of the threat,' said [Glenn] Thoren, director of Project REDOWL, or Robot Enhanced Detection Outpost with Lasers. But the mobile robot's use of infrared light and lasers to fix on a target also raises the possibility that robots may eventually be armed to use weapons themselves, either autonomously or under human control. 'The decisions on what to do are in the hands of others,' Thoren said. 'I would be uncomfortable if it had total autonomy.'" October 5, 2005: Racers, Start Your Software, and May the Best Robot. Win By John Johnson Jr.. Los Angeles Times (registration req'd.). "The riderless motorcycle tore out of the chute and promptly plowed into a tin barricade. Then, to the amazement of hundreds of spectators at Fontana's California Speedway, the 90cc Yamaha named Ghostrider picked itself up and sped away. A year ago, 15 robot competitors participated in the Defense Department's first million-dollar challenge to design a vehicle that could drive and navigate without a human controller. It was a humiliating display, with only one robot managing to go seven miles before breaking down. If this was the best the bots could do, the supremacy of mankind over wires and circuits was in no danger. But as Ghostrider demonstrated at qualifying trials for this year's race, the computers have gotten a lot smarter in 18 months. ... The DARPA Grand Challenge is scheduled to take place Saturday, starting and finishing in Primm, Nev. Twenty contestants will try to complete the course of up to 175 miles to win a $2-million prize, twice as large as last year's. ... The goal of the challenge is to spur development of autonomous vehicles that can operate in dangerous environments, such as war zones. ... The fundamental problem for all the vehicles, said Tom Strat, DARPA's program manager, is sorting through all the information streaming in and deciding how to react. There are two main types of information: navigation and sensing." [Be sure to see the sidebar for related information.] October 5, 2005: FAQ - Keeping pace with robots. By Jonathan Skillings, with Michael Kanellos contributing. CNET News.com. "FAQ The robots are among us, but they're not exactly the stuff of science fiction. At least, not yet. Every week seems to bring a new report of a robot taking up a human task: cleaning floors, riding camels, babysitting the kids, firing machine guns. ... To help set the record straight on where we stand now, here's a rundown of what robots are up to these days. What exactly is a robot? ... What's the difference between a robot and an android? ... Can a computer be considered a robot? It has silicon-based intelligence of a sort, and performs specific tasks. ... What have they done for us lately? ... Who's leading the charge to get robots into real-world settings? ... Where will Robot Valley sprout? ... When will there be a robot for every household? ... Is one robot better than another? ... Can robots reproduce? ... How smart are they? ... Is it ethical to send a robot to do a human's dirty work? ... When will robots become like human beings?" October 5 - 11, 2005: Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto! Silicon Alleys feature by Gary Singh. Metroactive. "The robots are coming T to San Jose. Throughout this upcoming fine October weekend, RoboNexus, the largest robotics event in the Western Hemisphere, hits the McEnery Convention Center in downtown San Jo (Oct. 6-9). This is a whirlwind party both for academics as well as garage tinkerer types. ... I called up one of my partners in subversion, David Calkins, who just happens to be president of the Robotics Society of America, and asked him if robots are going to take over the world. 'The biggest thing there is that [people] are overanthropomorphizing,' he said. ... Whenever any idiot brings this up, there's three basic points that completely refute them. First of all, robots by no means are perfect. ... Secondly, they need to work out battery-charging issues. ... And thirdly, artificial intelligence ... in no way relates to emotion. For robots to take over the world, they must have emotion. And that is different from being self-aware.' ... At the conference, Calkins will give a talk titled 'Consumer, Hobby and Competition Robots: What's Available, What's Coming.'" October 5, 2005: Almost Human - Robotics in the 21st Century, featuring James McLurkin (television broadcast). Thinking Big ("an in-studio program that features notable men and women from the fields of science and technology"). WGBH. "James McLurkin, a robotics engineer at the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, imagines a world filled with robots, where man-made intelligent machines do the work deemed too dangerous for people -- such as searching for survivors in the rubble of collapsed buildings or exploring the farthest reaches of space. McLurkin acknowledges that such sophisticated robots are a long way off, but he hopes to have a fun-filled career trying to make it happen." [video available] October 5, 2005: Devices help the blind cross tech divide. By Michael Singer. CNET News.com. "Jerry Swerdlick runs a 15-employee company that resells computers and devices that aid people with visual, hearing, learning and other physical disabilities. Business is really booming these days, Swerdlick said, as more and more manufacturers are building so-called assistive technology gadgets to address a wide range of special needs groups. ... Swerdlick's EVAS is part of a $5.4 billion assistive technology industry, according to the Smithsonian Institution. That's nearly double market estimates six years ago. The market itself is broad. Some of the devices that are becoming increasingly common include Braille-based handheld devices with text-to-speech technology, tactile keyboards with oversize characters, and pointing devices that control PCs with a movement of an eyebrow. An aging population in industrialized countries combined with a government effort to satisfy more special needs groups is lighting a fire under this industry, which adds 10 to 20 new companies every year, Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA) executive director David Dikter said. ... Microsoft, for one, has been taking a hard look at the issue. ... Apple Computer, Adobe and IBM have been working on speech recognition and screen enlargement software for their various applications. ... Smaller companies such as Freedom Scientific, HumanWare AgentSheets, WizCom Tecnologies, Digital Lifestyle Outfitters and DynaVox are also among the hundreds of assistive technology companies that the ATIA endorses. ... Some recent product examples include: ... " October 5, 2005: They're out there - Science fiction's presence in pop culture outgrows its niche. By Lauren Phillips. The State News. "Science fiction isn't just for 'geeks' anymore. As the technology-based genre becomes more mainstream, more people are finding themselves enchanted by it. Science fiction traditionally focuses on the impact of imaginary technologies or sciences on humans. Books that qualify as science fiction, such as H.G. Wells' 'The Time Machine' and 'The War of the Worlds' have been around since the beginning of the twentieth century. The genre has come in many forms since then, including magazines, films and television shows. There are even whole conventions devoted to the genre, such as the ConClave 30 convention being held in Lansing this weekend. ... 'Most kids like to think they're at the cutting edge of the culture, living ahead, at the future now,' said Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, a co-editor of 'Science Fiction Studies,' an academic journal devoted to the scholarly study of science fiction. ... Csicsery-Ronay said in the 1960s and 1970s, a dominant theme in science fiction was computers taking over every part of the world, and now that the technology is prevalent in almost every aspect of life, science fiction has become even more relevant to popular culture." October 5 - 11, 2005: Indus: A New Platform for Ubiquitous Computing. By Kallol Borah. Ubiquity (Volume 6, Issue 36). "Indus is a software agent platform for ubiquitous computing. Ubiquitous computing is a term used to generally refer to computing across software platforms and hardware devices to seamlessly interface human to machine and machine to machine. Work on platforms for ubiquitous computing have been continuing throughout the past decade in academic and industry research organizations. The Indus project was conceptualized in 2002 and prototypes implemented at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore to demonstrate how general purpose object oriented programming languages can be extended to enable ubiquitous computing applications. ... The primary components of the Indus platform comprise of a programming language to implement software agents, libraries to provide services to agents on a distributed network and containers or run time environments to enable deployment of agents on a variety of hardware platforms starting from 8 bit devices onwards. In Indus, software agents represent language abstractions that are autonomic, adapt to existing computing environments and coordinate with other agents to cooperatively execute tasks." October 4, 2005: Arthur C Clarke still looking forward. By Martin Redfern. BBC News. "Eighty-seven years and the after-effects of polio have left Sir Arthur in a wheelchair and somewhat forgetful of past events; but as a science visionary, he is as sharp as ever, looking forward to the time when other predictions he has made come true. He is convinced that we will become a space-faring species. ... He is sure that we will journey to Mars and eventually on to other solar systems; first sending robot probes, then humans, perhaps in suspended animation or even with their thoughts and consciousness transferred into a machine."
>>> Space Exploration, The Fututre, Science Fiction October 4, 2005: Japanese robot goes bike-riding - Murata Boy demonstrates gyro sensor technology. Associated Press / available from MSNBC.com. "'The whole point of developing a robot that rides a bicycle is to show the technology of balancing in the environment, where keeping your balance is tough,' said project engineer Shigeki Fukunaga. To solve the problem, Fukunaga said Murata's engineers installed a gyro sensor that detects angular velocity and inclination, then transmits the data to a computer that adjusts the robot's balance." October 4, 2005: Defining the language of life, death - The vocabulary of death and dying is elusive. By Cathy Lynn Grossman. USA Today.com. "What's a 'person'? ... 'A person is someone who can make choices, communicate those choices and practice intelligence,' says Margaret Boden, a professor at the University of Sussex in England and an expert on artificial intelligence. Without intelligence, she says, it's 'irrational and, in many cases, cruel' to keep a body going." October 4, 2005: Large grants for thinking. By Karen Dearne. Australian IT & The Australian. "Up to $750,000 in Thinking Systems grants will be available next year to fund collaborative projects between neuroscience, genetic, proteomic, cognitive science, artificial intelligence and computing researchers. The Thinking System grants will promote cross-disciplinary research leading to frontier technologies such as intelligent machines, information systems and robots. The grants are part of a research initiatives scheme administered by the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council...." October 4, 2005: Looking into the Future - Professors awarded grant for program that learns from itself. Opinion by Cole Dowden. The Shorthorn. "What if the federal government's limited resources could have been better positioned before Hurricane Katrina? ... A $500,000 grant from your friends at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is helping make those dreams a reality. The agency has sent Diane Cook and Larry Holder of UTA's Computer Science Department a grant for their efforts and research into data mining and artificial intelligence. The project is called SUBDUE, a computer program that finds interesting patterns in data represented as a graph. It can examine large chunks of data easily and examine data points and relationships between them. ... The program isn't just some number-crunching program. It has the ability to learn from its information. ... The program's use of artificial intelligence is a touchy subject for many in the scientific fields. Many have said that artificial intelligence will somehow enslave humanity. Others say the concept of artificial intelligence is far beyond the capabilities of our current technology. But to all the naysayers and soothsayers alike, I say, 'Why not?' Why not push our minds and reasoning to the limits and explore the tools newly created? ... " October 4, 2005: NASA's new robots show their stuff - Gromit, K-9 have the smarts to travel on the moon, Mars. By David Perlman. San Francisco Chronicle & SFGate.com. "'If we're going to have humans on the moon and Mars,' said computer scientist David E. Smith, 'it's clear we'll need increasingly advanced robotic systems -- and that means autonomous robots, machines that can operate on their own using their own built-in intelligence.' Although only two robots were rolled out to demonstrate their skills Monday, Smith said he expected there could be hundreds of them roving the lunar surface by 2018 before the next human astronauts set foot there. ... On Mars, the two Rovers Spirit and Opportunity have been operating spectacularly for 20 months.... And [William J.] Clancey said there was a strong possibility that at least one of them could continue exploring for another two full years. That's time enough, he said, for some of the software now under development cooperatively at Ames, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, to beam fresh software up to the rovers that would enable them to operate with far greater 'autonomy' and fewer commands from Earth than they need now."
>>> Space Exploration, Autonomous Vehicles, Robots, Applications October 3, 2005: USC's Michael Arbib. By Eric Smalley. Technology Research News. "Technology Research News Editor Eric Smalley carried out an email conversation with Michael Arbib, the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science and a Professor of Biological Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Southern California (USC) in September 2005. ... Throughout his career Arbib has encouraged an interdisciplinary environment where computer scientists and engineers can talk to neuroscientists and cognitive scientists. ... TRN: Context -- the body, the physical environment, society -- seems to play a critical role in shaping consciousness and intelligence. What does this mean for building artificial intelligences? Will we be able to relate to truly intelligent machines? Arbib: ... I do think that there will be future robots that indeed have emotions -- as high-level indicators of process state that set an overall bias on decision making and condition patterns of communication with others. However, I also think that emotions that are useful (but sometimes harmful) for robots interacting with other robots (imagine a team of autonomous robots responsible for spaceship maintenance on a decades long mission, or a team of agents monitoring the whole Earth for ecosystem evaluation) need not necessarily be similar to the "mammalian humans" that are so much part of human life. TRN: One of the big challenges in robotics is simply giving machines the ability to accurately perceive their surroundings. What will it take to build machines that can operate effectively in unfamiliar, dynamic environments? Arbib: One part of the answer, clearly, is that learning will be necessary. ... TRN: Is there a particular image (or images) related to science or technology that you find particularly compelling or instructive? Why do you like it; why do you find it compelling or instructive? ... " October 3, 2005: Female equation. By Shelley Widhalm. The Washington Times. "Women are not studying mathematics and computer science at colleges and universities to the same extent as their male peers, according to metro-area professors and education association members. The result is fewer women entering careers in those fields. 'What there has been is a shortage of female role models in these fields. ... In the industries, those ratios are lower for women,' says Jill M. Landsman, public relations manager for the Technology Student Association (TSA), a nonprofit education association in Reston that offers competitions and programs for middle- and high-school students. 'The stereotypes are the issue here. ... There is the nerd and geek issue that girls don't gravitate to. In TSA, we don't see gender, we don't see bias, and we don't see disparities.' Metro-area colleges are making an effort to provide female role models at the instructional level to remove that disparity. ... 'What women often express is that they do feel alone. They look around and don't see people who look like them,' says Telle Whitney, chief executive officer of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, an organization in Palo Alto, Calif., that offers programs and support for women in technology." October 3, 2005: Speech-Recognition Technology Advances (radio broadcast). Reported by Lisa Chow for NPR's Morning Edition. "Speech-recognition technology has been around since the 1960s, when computer scientists were trying to mimic the complexities of human speech. Now, the technology has become an everyday feature as people talk to computers in the office, cars and more." [audio available] October 3, 2005: Robots Prove Fitness As First Responders During Katrina Emergency. By R. Colin Johnson. EE Times. "The first responders surveying the devastation that Hurricane Katrina wrought in Louisiana and Mississippi were not all human. Autonomous vehicles also had a role, in an early indication of how robots might expedite the government's much-maligned response capability in future disasters. ... After Katrina savaged the Gulf Coast in August, disaster responders deployed the center's unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to search remote flooded areas in Mississippi. Within two hours of arriving on the scene, the UAVs had 'cleared' a town by showing that no survivors were trapped -- far faster than would have been possible by boat or manned helicopter, said Safety Security Rescue Research Center team member Robin Murphy, director of the University of South Florida's Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR). Ground robots also aided in the Katrina response, searching structurally un-sound buildings in New Orleans. ... For the future, the team is developing collision-avoidance software to give the UAVs more autonomy in avoiding obstacles that are not seen by the operator. ... The only solution thus far has been to deploy two operators -- one to drive and the other to scan. 'Now we are developing artificial-intelligence algorithms that we hope can perform the function of that second person,' Murphy said." October 3, 2005: Traffic Taming - Three startups test distinct approaches to helping drivers avoid gridlock. By Jon Burke. alarm:clock / available from Technology Review. "Inrix uses Bayesian machine learning algorithms to make statistical inferences and predictions about traffic, based on variables such as weather conditions, construction schedules, holidays, sporting events, and historical traffic patterns." October 3, 2005: The Aibo shuffle - Robotic dog is best friend to many; now speculation grows that Sony might pull the plug. By Therese Poletti. Mercury News. "The Binders' dogs are hardly spoiled, yappy lap dogs. They're robots. All 49 of them. Their small robots are Aibos, launched in 1999 by Sony as one of the first serious consumer robotics products. An Aibo -- which means both pal and 'robot with an eye' in Japanese -- is a metallic creature with artificial intelligence software. The software lets it develop a personality based on interaction with its owner. ... Today, with price tags ranging from $1,700 to $2,000, the Aibo robotic dogs have attracted a cult following in the United States, complete with user groups and owner gatherings. They are also extremely popular among academics who use them to teach students how to program and participate in RoboCup soccer, where Aibos play soccer with a bright magenta ball. Now Aibo owners are confronting the possible end of their beloved robotic species. As Sony announced a corporate restructuring last month, speculation intensified that the Tokyo-based behemoth may pull the plug on Aibo's future or scale back robotics research and development. Later this week, at the RoboNexus robotics show in San Jose, cheaper competitors such as the Raptor (from the makers of the Robosapien toy) and the popular Roomba vacuum cleaner and its cousin, the Scooba floor-washing robot, will likely get more attention than the Aibo. Sony will not have a booth at the show." October 3, 2005: 2 way-out views of technology's role in shaping the future - Inventor predicts the fusion of human and machines; author says let go of technological fixes for humans' sake Tom Abate. San Francisco Chronicle & SFGate.com. "Inventor Ray Kurzweil's new book, 'The Singularity Is Near,' predicts the fusion of humans and machines to create powerful and potentially immortal life forms. In his book, 'Enough,' environmentalist Bill McKibben says that unless we forgo such technological fixes, and accept death, we will ultimately cease to be human. Between these extremes rages a debate about the role that technology will -- or should -- play in shaping the future. ... Kurzweil believes post-Singularity humans will cheat death. He writes: 'When our human hardware crashes ... software-based humans ... will live out on the Web, projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including virtual bodies in diverse realms of virtual reality.' Kurzweil admits the potential perils of a cyborgian future. He cites the 2000 essay, 'Why the Future Doesn't Need Us,' in which software-guru-turned-venture-capitalist Bill Joy argued that, 'We are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakes.' ... Kurzweil also acknowledges broader critiques from opposing thinkers like McKibben, whose 1989 book, 'The End of Nature,' put global warming into the public lexicon. McKibben's 2003 book, 'Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age,' established him as a critic of tinkering with ourselves."
>>> Ethical & Social Implications, Systems; also see this related interview October 3, 2005: Ministry promotes robot to teach students. By Chang Chung-hoon. JoongAng Daily. "The days of hiring robots as English tutors in Korea may not be too far away. The Korea Advanced Intelligent Robot Association, an organization developing artificial intelligence technology under the Ministry of Information and Communication, announced yesterday it has begun operating, on a test basis, robots that can help young students pronounce English words." October 2, 2005: Welcome to the machine. By Jim Buchanan. Asheville Citizen-Times. "I've seen a lot of buzz floating around the Internet regarding 'The Singularity is Near,' a book by futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil. From what I've read - 'fessin' up, I'll say here that everything I know about it I've read in reviews - Kurzweil offers a somewhat mind-blowing vision of the near future. ... That's 'The Singularity,' and Kurzweil pegs it to occur around 2045. Now, in 1950s 'B' movies when this happened, humans became slave to the machines. In more recent sci-fi like 'The Terminator' movies or the new 'Battlestar Galactica,' the machines decide to wipe the humans out. A more benign version would be 'The Jetsons,' where robots become maids with attitudes. 'The Singularity' is a different take. There's little doubt that in a relatively short period of time, computers have wrought major changes on society. ... But Kurzweil doesn't envision a future where machines take over and Arnold Schwarzenegger is trying to kill everyone. ..." October 1, 2005: Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Film review by Rowan Hooper and Will Knight. NewScientist.com news. "Robots are killing their human owners and Agent Batou of the counter-terrorism unit Section 9 - himself almost completely cyborg - is assigned to investigate. This is the premise for Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, an animated film directed by Mamoru Oshii and based on the classic Manga comic book series of the same name by Masamune Shirow. As in the original film, the sequel explores the consequences of people becoming ever more reliant on technology, and central to the theme is what happens when the human soul, or 'ghost', is all that remains inside a technologically enhanced 'shell'. This is a dystopian vision of the future...." October 2005: Technology in Clinical Practice: Computer-Based Therapy and Radio Frequency Identification. By John Luo, M.D. Psychiatric Times (Vol. XXII, Issue 12). "[T]here are significant numbers of patients who will not seek mental health care. These patients often turn to self-help materials available online or in the bookstore. With today's sophisticated computers and the large amount of storage available on DVDs, computer-based assessment and treatment software is becoming more commonplace. These programs are quite sophisticated, utilizing specialized heuristic techniques to produce a more natural response to patient-entered information. Natural language processing allows software to determine the nature of queries and responses. ... There are numerous advantages to computer-based therapy. Patients can work at their own pace in the privacy of their own home. ... In addition, software programs are not susceptible to the frustrations of traditional treatment such as changed appointments, therapist boredom, absences and ethical misconduct. ... Computer-based therapy programs offer many benefits with limited risks. While they are not touted as replacements for traditional therapy, they are very useful supplements." October 2005: The Robo-Copters. By David Talbot. Technology Review. "[T]he Aerobot Project at the University of California, Berkeley, is a leader in key areas like autonomous obstacle-avoidance and coordination between helicopters." Be sure to follow the link to see Timothy Archibald's robo-copter photos. October 2005: R Is for Robot- What bots can teach tots (and vice versa). By Larry Gallagher. Wired (Issue 13.10). "For the past six months, the children in Classroom One [at 'the Early Childhood Education Center, a preschool attached to UC San Diego'] have spent half an hour of each school day interacting with one of two robots. Rubi takes on the role of a teacher, leading songs and playing games that instill basics like ABCs, shapes, and colors. She alternates days with Qrio, Sony's swanky prototype humanoid, whose role is more peer-to-peer: He spends his time dancing with the kids. The class is taking part in a project developed by [Javier ] Movellan, who directs the university's Machine Perception Lab. For him, the short-term goal is to watch the kids and use what he learns to develop interactive teaching tools. ... Movellan hopes to distinguish Rubi from existing automated teaching software by adding an emotional component to the interaction between kids and the machine. "The success of Rubi as a learning system is going to depend on whether she can engage these children - make them feel good about learning," he says. Movellan is not the first AI researcher to propose this approach. Indeed, the past decade has seen the emergence of what's called affective computing, whose proponents believe we need to build emotions into robots." |
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