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November 30, 2005: Interview with Dr. Timothy Tuttle, CEO of Video Search Company, Truveo. By Tracy Swedlow. Interactive TV Today [itvt] Bloggit. "Tuttle recently spoke to [itvt]'s Tracy Swedlow about why Truveo believes its technology's ability to crawl dynamic Web sites gives it a crucial advantage in the video search space, about the company's business model, about how its technology attempts to 'look' at Web sites in the same way that a person would, and more. ... Tuttle: ... You see, the big problem with video search--and everyone in the industry knows this--is that while search works great for Web pages, it's a much harder problem to find and index videos on the Web. The reason it's so hard is that it's very difficult for the typical crawling technologies to even see the video on the Web. If they go to a Web site and try to find the video, it's very hard for them to do that. ... [itvt]: How does your technology attempt to 'see' the visual characteristics of a Web page? Tuttle: What we try to look at is the rendered and instantiated version of a functioning Web application. Think of it as similar to looking at the screen buffer. We're looking at a screen shot, as it were, of the rendered page, in order to see if there's a section of that page that may have video playing. And also to look around it, to see if there's any other information that's displayed that relates to that video. ... [itvt]: Is Truveo interested in artificial intelligence technologies that would allow searches of visual content directly--i.e. searches of images themselves? Tuttle: We have a bunch of Ph.D's here who've spent a lot of time either working in research labs or universities on technologies for things like video metadata extraction. There are lots of techniques that are being researched right now. Frankly, people have been working on things like image analysis, object recognition, and scene detection for the past 15 years. I definitely think there is hope that those technologies might be useful in the future for doing automated analysis of images, and then--potentially--video. ... One of the techniques that a lot of the search companies are focused on right now--including us--is using technologies like voice recognition, in order to do a better job of extracting metadata from a video file. November 30, 2005: The right stuff - With a boost from NASA, Hellgate Elementary kids expand their knowledge. By Rob Chaney. Missoulian. "Getting kids to stay after school to do extra work sounds about as easy as putting a man on the moon, right? Thanks to a dedicated group of parents, teachers and NASA rocket scientists, it's a regular event at Hellgate Elementary School. At the only school district in Montana designated a NASA Explorer School, Hellgate Elementary students are skipping bus rides home to build robots, check moon positions and stretch the boundaries of their classroom education. ... After school Tuesday, a dozen fifth- and sixth-graders in the Hellgate Elementary Robotics Club were hard at their task of programming robot cars to accomplish a set of tasks far more complicated than programming a VCR. Using Lego Mindstorm kits, half of the the children set up obstacles and challenges on a big floor map. The other half crowded around computers, working out the software the robots must follow to complete their tasks." November 30, 2005: 'Robot women' of U of M reach out to girls, students of color. By Bob San. Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. "When Monica Anderson and fellow University of Minnesota students Kelly Cannon and Katie Panciera go shopping, they are reluctant to tell the salespeople what they major in. The three are studying for their doctoral degrees in the university's Computer Science and Engineering Department's Center for Distributed Robotics. In short, they study robots. 'We get that look when we tell them we study robots,' said Anderson. ... Anderson, Cannon and Panciera are studying and designing software for intelligent robots that can do surveillance work for humans. 'The idea is to keep people out of danger and save lives,' Anderson explained. 'They can be used to search for people in natural disasters, in collapsed buildings, and to search for bombs.' ... Anderson feels that women can offer different perspectives to the field of engineering and science research. ... Anderson, Cannon and Panciera are doing something extra to help more women and minorities into science and technology. Cannon ran a Minnesota Technology Day Camp for 15 middle school students this past summer. For five days, Cannon, Anderson, Panciera and other U of M students gave these students an insight into the world of robotics. ... 'Lots of girls think people studying computer science are antisocial, quiet and nerdy,' Cannon said. 'I want to show them that we are nice, normal people who do normal things.'"
>>> Equality & Diversity and Academic Departments and Summer Camps and Associations (@ Resources for Students), Hazards & Disasters, Robots, Applications November 30, 2005: Carleton students win scholarships for robotics research. Ottawa Citizen (subscription req'd.). "Two Carleton University graduate students have won $7,500 scholarships in a program that promotes research into robots and other forms of intelligent systems. ... 'We are committed to creating job opportunities for highly-skilled Canadians right here at home, and these funds will go a long way in helping to address Canada's 'brain drain' and skills shortage challenges,' [Precarn Inc.president Paul Johnston] said." November 30, 2005: A model evacuation. The Engineer Online. "[Judith] Holt and Keith Christensen, with Utah State University's Center for Persons with Disabilities, are researching how well accommodations for getting disabled people into buildings work when lots of people are trying to get out. ... 'The main problem with this study is that you can't practice with people,' says Christensen. “You can't put 10,000 people in a stadium, declare an emergency, and then watch what happens. Getting large groups out of a building fast can't be studied in real time with real people.' ... The research uses a method called 'agent-based modelling,' which creates thousands of individual computer people, or agents, each with their own tendencies and behaviours, such as how fast they move, whether they will follow a crowd or not, how they perceive exits, and their aversion to narrow hallways. Some of these agents are programmed with disabilities, and their exits are watched especially closely." November 29, 2005: LEGO team heads to competition. By Emily Quirk. Exeter News-Letter via Seacoast Online. "Stratham Memorial School's LEGO League teams are building future engineers. Although the school has three teams, it's the Wild Wacky Wolves all-girls team that will be traveling to Nashua on Saturday for the 2005 Granite State FIRST LEGO League Official Tournament. This is the first Stratham team to go to the state championship. The FIRST LEGO League, considered the 'little league' of U.S. FIRST Robotics, is for children ages 9 to 14. Youngsters build robots designed for their age group and gain hands-on experience in engineering and computer programming." November 29, 2005: 16 hands, 1 cyber glove. Eight Traverse City teens win an MIT grant for young inventors. By Susan Ager. Detroit Free Press. "Last month, the Traverse City teens got an $8,000 grant from one of America's top universities to develop a prototype of an invention the team is calling, for now, a 'mouse-glove.' ... The team is one of 18 in the nation awarded grants of up to $10,000 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this year. The Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams program is intended to excite, empower and encourage high school students in creative science. ... InvenTeam grants have, in the past four years, gone to teams proposing an eclectic mix of inventions, including a portable device to test the ripeness of watermelons. Last year, the only other Michigan team to win a grant, a group in in Saginaw, worked on a robot that stripes or re-stripes athletic fields. Whether these inventions are ever marketed is irrelevant."
>>> Applications, Resources for Students, Resources for Educators November 29, 2005: Science-and-religion pioneers still active - The Institute for Theological Encounter with Science and Technology addresses the religious implications of science. By Anne Reilly. Science & Theology News. "Advances in science and technology have resulted in a growing interest in their ethical and religious implications. The Institute for Theological Encounter with Science and Technology in St. Louis. has engaged the community in weighing science and its results since 1968. ... With an emphasis on the Christian perspective, the group discusses topics such as artificial intelligence, neuroscience, globalization and genetics. ... The institute publishes multiple science-and-religion resources, including a quarterly bulletin and books compiling information from their workshops. The most recent publication is Computers, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality." November 29, 2005: Pentagon's Urban Recon Takes Wing. By John Hudson. Wired News. "A leading defense contractor has successfully demonstrated a system that lets foot soldiers command unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, to see real-time overhead images on their handheld computers while fighting in urban battle zones. Individual war fighters can receive video-surveillance data on a target of interest by moving a cursor over the subject, as part of a Northrop Grumman system to automate reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition, or RSTA, within urban environments. ... For the demo, a soldier observed a distant garage with a van backing out of it, and selected this target on his handheld screen. HURT [Heterogeneous Urban RSTA ] autonomously selected the best UAV for the job based on location, and dispatched it to 'shadow' the van. It also re-tasked the remaining three aerial units to secure a wide-area perimeter. 'This is truly the system of systems,' said Jim Hart, a spokesman for Northrop Grumman." November 29, 2005: The cyber sleuth - DePaul computer scientist develops system to help Chicago Police Department solve serial crimes. By Patrice M. Jones. Chicago Tribune. "A veteran DePaul University computer scientist, [Tom] Muscarello has been working since the mid-1990s on perfecting an artificial intelligence system that is aimed at helping the Chicago Police Department blaze a bold new trail in the way it solves serial robberies, rapes and other violent crimes. And he just might have hit pay dirt. The computer system, called the Classification System for Serial Criminal Patterns (CSSCP), is expected to begin live trials at the Chicago Police Department as soon as early next year. ... 'We decided to try to build a system that is intelligent enough to do what the best detectives are already doing,' said Muscarello, who explored the techniques of six top Chicago detectives during the initial stages of the study." November 29, 2005: It's life, but not as we know it. By Beverley Head. The Sydney Morning Herald. "Ten years ago it took an hour to fly from Melbourne to Sydney. Now it's an hour and a half. 'That's not because the planes got slower, it's because of air-traffic control,' says Professor Peter Lindsay, director of the Australian Research Council's Centre for Complex Systems. He believes that if aircraft can be made to flock, similar to birds, it would drastically improve air-traffic management. Professor Lindsay, who holds the Boeing chair of systems engineering at the University of Queensland, is one of a growing number of computer scientists using the real world as muse and laboratory. They are forming multidisciplinary teams to look into how complex systems such as networks and traffic management are tackled in the real world. It is hoped that industry - which shows little interest in the science - will use the findings to make new computer systems that solve highly complex problems. 'We're looking at how birds flock through swarm analysis,' Professor Lindsay says. 'The artificial-life people have a good idea of how they do it. This will help develop a new model for air-traffic management.' ... A key aspect of these emerging complex IT systems is how much they borrow from nature. ... Complex IT systems are distinguished by their ability to evolve, to almost take on a life of their own. Just as genetic algorithms are modified with each incarnation an improvement over previous generations, neural networks adapt by learning from real-world examples - simple nanobots organise themselves, each following a simple set of rules that combine to generate a complex activity. ... 'Many areas of advanced computing are almost indistinguishable from biology,' says Professor David Green, a Monash University researcher and a chief investigator with the Centre for Complex Systems. 'Nature is so complex and has produced many ways of solving complex problems. We can learn from them,' says Professor Green. ... Professor of IT research at Monash University David Green and his colleague Tania Bransden have used swarm analysis techniques to predict social outcomes." November 29, 2005: Missile system ignites cancer detection. By Jennifer Foreshew. Australian IT / The Australian. "An Australian international authority on artificial intelligence is using missile guidance technology to create a device capable of cancer detection. ... Applying artificial intelligence to cancer scanning technology enabled body cells to be viewed with a higher degree of precision, helping to reduce the margin for error when studying fluctuations in body metabolism. 'This is all about early detection,' Dr Khoshnevisan said." November 28, 2005: News in A Flash - Army of robots hits campus. By Chloé Fedio & Jake Troughton. The Gateway. "A group of 30 school kids were on [the University of Alberta] campus this Saturday building robots with the help of engineering students. David Kastelan, an engineering student and member of the Autonomous Robotic Vehicle Project (ARVP), which put on the event, worked with other members of his group on the robot kits before the kids, aged ten to 15, took up the task. ... 'Robots can do cool things that humans can't; like, if they have to go clean up a nuclear accident, they can, but humans can't, 'cause they could get sick, like in Chernobyl,' [12 year old Stephan Soucy] said. Soucy, like all the kids at the event, submitted an essay to the Edmonton Journal about his interest in robots and was chosen to take part in the building process. 'Some day they might take over, who knows,' the seventh-grader warned. Still, he says he hopes to pursue a career in robotics." November 28, 2005: Artifical Intelligence Promises Major Advance in E&P Technology. By John A. Sullivan. Natural Gas Week (subscription req'd.). "In just a few years, an operator sitting at a console in Houston will be able to monitor oil and gas wells around the world, whether they are off the coast of Nigeria, in the middle of a jungle -- or even in the Arctic. It's not the stuff of science fiction, but a concept called the intelligent oilfield, now being developed by IBM through a partnership with the energy industry." November 28, 2005: Out of the ashes... Wessex Scene Online. "On 8th December 2002, Edinburgh University's School of Informatics and its Artificial Intelligence Library were partially destroyed by a fire, which started in a nightclub and ripped through Edinburgh’s Old Town. Like Southampton's School of ECS, Edinburgh was a world-leader for research and teaching and over forty-years' worth of work was lost in the blaze. £1.2 million worth of computer equipment, over 1000 PhD theses and Masters' dissertations and 30,000 reports were destroyed. ... In September this year, £42 million was pledged to the department to construct a new building which would house the School of Informatics, with work starting last month." November 27, 2005: Pardon Me, but the Art Is Mouthing Off. By Jori Finkel. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "It was late in the day, rain was streaking the windows of a converted warehouse in San Francisco and the robot was not behaving. Represented by a talking head on a flat-screen monitor, and equipped with voice-recognition software, the artificial intelligence computer -- known as DiNA -- was designed to chat with visitors about current affairs. She is supposed to be a political animal, or more precisely, machine. ... The next day, relaxing on a brown couch in her studio, Ms. [Lynn] Hershman Leeson talked about what it was like to be an artist forever bumping up against the limits of technology. 'I'm always trying to do something that doesn't exist yet,' she said. "Voice recognition for DiNA, for example - everyone said that we couldn't do it, that the technology wasn't far enough along. But I've learned over the years that you can never stop at the first no.' ... For more than 30 years, she has made artwork across many platforms - from painting, photography and performance art to video, laserdisc, DVD, Web-based work and interactive sculpture. She has also made two feature-length films: 'Conceiving Ada,' in 1997, and 'Teknolust,' in 2002. Like the rest of her work, they explore mind-bending questions about reality and identity. How can we tell in an age of digital and genetic sampling what is real? Can another mode of existence become more real or powerful than ours? Does a robot have its own personality? ... Both of her movies, which won awards on the film festival circuit, are feminist sci-fi adventures. 'Conceiving Ada' is a fantasy about bringing Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's brilliant daughter, back to life through computer programming - the language she helped to invent. 'Teknolust' tells the story of a geeky female biogeneticist who uses her own DNA to create three computer-bred clones...." November 27, 2005: Going to Boston. By Sam Nejame. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "Where to stay ... Following a $2 million renovation in 2004, the preciously named Hotel@MIT, 20 Sidney Street, Cambridge, (617) 577-0200, started aggressively courting the high-tech crowd. There are robots from M.I.T.'s Artificial Intelligence Lab in the lobby...." November 25, 2005: Bennettsville book fair promotes literacy. By Shireese M. Bell. Morning News Online. "[T]wo Bennettsville natives, CDF Founder Marian Wright Edelman ... and Karina Liles, a junior Spelman College student, a member of the Spelbots RoboCup Soccer Team, attended the [Children's Defense Fund's annual book fair]. ... Liles demonstrated Sony's ERS-7 AIBO Robot Dog. ... Liles said her professor Dr. Andrew Williams, who specializes in robotics and artificial intelligence, came up with the idea of forming a robotics team. She said the team started last year and had the opportunity to compete in the International RoBoCup 2005 Four-Legged Robot Soccer competition in Osaka, Japan, this past summer. The team was formed to provide hands-on robotics training and research for female computer science students and promote technology. Out of 24 teams, Spelman was the first and only historically black college and university and the only U.S. undergraduate school to qualify." November 25 - December 1, 2005: Pass the Paddles - Man's Best Friend. Nintendogs - machines, metaphysics, and you. By Joshuah Bearman. LA Weekly. "Computers were still huge assemblies of vacuum tubes and transistors when the German-Jewish émigré and computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum published a paper called 'ELIZA --- A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine,' in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 9. It was 1966, and Weizenbaum programmed ELIZA to simulate the 'active listening' psychoanalytical strategies of the Rogerian therapy in vogue at the time. ... ELIZA struck a deep chord: It was the first simulated intelligence, and already presented the possibility of people having an emotional relationship with a computer. That raised the issue, since taken up by computer scientists and philosophers and cyberpunk novelists and eager post-humanists: What do such relationships mean? ... Today, the saga further unfolds with the Nintendogs phenomenon. That's a form of computer intelligence running on that experimental platform, the Nintendo DS, a hand-held game system far less advanced than the theoretical HAL 9000 but still powerful enough to let you walk around with a bunch of simulated beings living in your pocket. Yes: virtual pets. ... Nintendogs go a long way toward satisfying a sort of canine Turing test: If they look and act enough like dogs, then at a simple cognitive level, they're a pretty good substitute. ... Nintendogs moves beyond the interpersonal, and instead facilitates bonding with the software itself." November 23, 2005: E-Europe awards. The Guardian. "The eEurope awards, organised by the European Institute of Public Administration, recognise innovaton in e-government and healthcare in the EU and Efta countries. We pick out some of the 52 finalists. ... Fighting fraud (Italy): Italian customs officers are fighting fraud with an artificial intelligence system called Falstaff: a fully automated logical system against forgery and fraud. (www.agenziadogane.it)" November 23, 2005: A cyborg explores what it means to be human - What does it mean to be a human? A cyborg and a professor weigh in on the discussion. By Seth Glick. Science & Theology News. "When 40-year-old Michael Chorost decided to get a cochlear implant, a device that uses a computer chip implanted in the brain to process auditory signals, he knew it would change the way he would perceive sound --- and the way he would perceive himself. A self-described science-fiction nerd, Chorost was intrigued by the fact that the surgery would designate him a 'cyborg,' a term used to describe a person whose physiological processes are aided by electrical devices. ... While Chorost approaches the definition of 'human' from a unique perspective, he said he's just one of many to weigh in on the issue. '"Human," for me, is an assignation that is purely value-free. That’s just a biological description. It's a descriptive term, while 'person' is a value-based term,' said Anne Foerst, a visiting professor of theology and computer science at St. Bonaventure University in New York and a former theological advisor to the robotics lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. 'Human' and 'cyborg,' Foerst said, belong in the same category because neither word implies the value of humanness. On the other hand, she said 'personhood' is not something that can be empirically proven. It must be assigned. She defines 'personhood' as the active or passive participation in the human construction of stories about one another. ... She said the main fear is one of comparison: Humans resist being compared to machines and animals because they need to feel they are superior."
>>> Philosophy, Ethical & Social Implications, Assisitve Technologies, Robots November 22, 2005: Video Games Are Their Major, So Don't Call Them Slackers. By Seth Schiesel. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "Three decades after bursting into pool halls and living rooms, video games are taking a place in academia. ... Traditionalists in both education and the video game industry pooh-pooh the trend, calling it a bald bid by colleges to cash in on a fad. But others believe that video games - which already rival movie tickets in sales - are poised to become one of the dominant media of the new century. ... According to the International Game Developers Association, fewer than a dozen North American universities offered game-related programs five years ago. Now, that figure is more than 100, with dozens more overseas. ... 'The skills and methods of video games are becoming a part of our life and culture in so many ways that it is impossible to ignore,' said Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator who is now president of the New School, which includes Parsons. Parsons has offered game courses to graduate students for five years and this fall began an undergraduate program in game design. 'But if you just look at the surface of people playing games, you are missing the point, which is that games are all about managing and manipulating information,' Mr. Kerrey said. 'A lot of students that come out of this program may not go to work for Electronic Arts. They may go to Wall Street. Because to me, there is no significant difference -- except for clothing preference -- between people who are making games and people who are manipulating huge database systems to try to figure out where the markets are headed. It's largely the same skill set, the critical thinking. Games are becoming a major part of our lives, and there is actually good news in that.' ... Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the game developers' association, said that no firm figures were available for overall employment in the industry. But at bellwether Electronic Arts, employment has almost doubled since 2000, to roughly 6,450. Over the same period, the number of employees in Electronic Arts's creative operations - the people who actually make games - has almost tripled, to 4,300. At universities that have embraced video games, the curriculum varies. ... " November 21, 2005: Neat package takes gamers to the next level. By Matthew Yi. San Francisco Chronicle & SFGate.com. "The differences in the new Xbox 360 from its predecessor are not only on the outside, but under the hood. The central processing unit, the brains of the system, is a chip package containing three cores, each running at 3.2 GHz. The graphics chip is a custom processor from ATI Technologies that runs at 500 MHz. The result is a powerful computing system that takes graphics another step toward cinematic realism and improves artificial intelligence, which can make taking out a bad guy hiding behind a barrier more difficult." November 21, 2005: Computer R&D rocks on - Recomputing the Future (first of three parts). By Rick Merritt. EE Times. "Think computers have become a commodity, like pork bellies, and computer science an old set of solved problems? Think again. The computer research agenda is as big as ever before, if not bigger. Experts see important breakthroughs and whole new fields of investigation just opening up. Advances will come in natural-language searches, machine learning, computer vision and speech-to-text, as well as new computing architectures to handle those hefty tasks. Beyond the decade mark, Edward D. Lazowska, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington, expects computers based on quantum physics. November 20, 2005: IT plan takes flight again. By Simon Bevilacqua. The Mercury / Sunday Tasmanian. "The CSIRO is promising Tasmania everything from unmanned aircraft to jobs and millions of dollars in investment. Australia's major science research organisation has bought into the embattled Intelligent Island program. ... The CSIRO was also interested in developing a unique unmanned aircraft for application in forestry and hydro power operations. The CSIRO already has Advanced Unmanned Air Vehicles like unmanned choppers which have artificial intelligence and vision systems technology that combine visible, ultra violet and infra red imaging. The vehicles also have advanced communications and navigation capabilities. 'In Europe forest and plantation management is becoming important and more highly regulated. Unmanned air vehicles monitor, manage and improve forestry productivity.' Mr [Gary] Doherty said the craft were essentially 'flying robots' and had many potential applications." November 19, 2005: Desert racers - drivers not included. By Gregory T. Huang. New Scientist (subscription req'd.; Issue 2526). "Five robotic cars have raced across 212 kilometres of treacherous desert tracks, all on their own - is it an artificial intelligence breakthrough? ... Some observers of the race have been quick to link the successes with general advances in AI research. 'It dramatically demonstrates a set of research advances in machine vision, probabilistic modelling, estimation and path planning that have evolved in laboratories and field experiments over the past decade,' says Ken Goldberg, a roboticist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the race. But others remain to be convinced that breakthroughs in AI made a real difference this time. 'The robotic road race community owes us a sound, clear and useful explanation of what, if anything, they have learned,' says Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in AI at MIT." November 18, 2005: Q&A - Bill Gates On Supercomputing, Software In Science, And More. By Aaron Ricadela. InformationWeek. "InformationWeek: ... How can Microsoft Research technology or the intellect of those people be applied to these broad problems in science, medicine, or engineering? Gates: ... Some of the people like [Eric] Horvitz and [David] Heckerman who came to Microsoft Research came--they're MDs, and they're machine learning experts. There's a technique, a Bayesian [statistical] technique, in which Heckerman or Horvitz are two of the leading people. When those guys came, we were always interested in applying machine learning to see what drugs work, and what lifestyles work, things like that. And they applied their things even to big data mining problems in business, where you say, 'OK, which are my most profitable customers, or what promotion techniques are working well?' They've taken some of their techniques against clickstreams to figure out how you should design the Web, or how searches work. ... InformationWeek: When we met back in September, we were talking about the shortage of computer science graduates in the United States, and that if that trend holds up, what it might mean for Microsoft years down the road. ... " November 18, 2005: Japan's rise of the robots. By Richard Taylor Editor. BBC News Click Online. "Is the future really the stuff of science fiction novels, with evil robots taking over the world, or even just putting everyone out of their jobs? A different vision is emerging in Japan, with an altogether more positive outlook. How many great-grandparents do you know who wile away the days with a toy robot? ... Unlike their fictional counterparts in the West, apparently hell-bent on destruction, robots in Japan are seen as forces for good, as borne out by their role in rescue work. And because the Shinto religion ascribes a spirit even to inanimate objects, they are seen less as machines and more as human-substitutes. ... 'Looking at the big picture of robot development, it's clear that this is a pivotal moment, a time of huge change,' said Masakazu Sato, robot researcher at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. 'Robots are starting to come into home environments, not just normal environments but also in terms of welfare, to assist older people in doing activities at home.'" November 18, 2005: Creator of autonomous vehicles visits. By Ryan Yacco. The Daily Targum. "As part of the Distinguished Lecture Series of the [Rutgers] Computer Science Department, [Sebastian] Thrun visited the Computing, Research and Education Building on Busch campus Tuesday, to discuss his recent work in the field of robotics and his visions for the future. Already a well-known figure within the field through his work at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, Thrun gained wider notoriety in October by winning the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. ... The winning vehicle incorporated seven Pentium processors, lasers, radar, cameras and a GPS into a drive-by-wire system that controlled throttle, steering, shifting gears and braking. Despite this impressive hardware setup, Thrun said, it was Stanley's internal programming that separated him from the crowd. 'We want to move away from vision-based control into more data based,' Thrun said. ... Building off of the success of Stanley, Thrun hopes to design a car capable of driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles in real traffic within two years time. 'This is a big thing,' Thrun said. 'This means that elderly people could be driving who otherwise couldn't drive anymore, and they would not become dependent and lose social relations.'" November 16, 2005: Gadget of the Week - WowWee Robosapien V2. A new and improved version of the popular robot buddy. By Wilson Rothman. TIME.com. "The original Robosapien, introduced last year, was an unexpectedly funny bionic buddy, and a runaway success: to date, 2.3 million units have been sold. The newer version comes at a higher price --- $250 instead of $100 --- but with jacked-up specs and capabilities. Twice as many motors control the limbs, digits, head and neck, and there are stereo microphones for sensing audio, while a camera detects motion and color. Mix a little of the original robot's sass with some nice new artificial intelligence, and you've got a robot that reacts to its environment or takes commands from the two-stick infrared remote." November 16, 2005: Virtual professors draw student attention - Study suggests they could be used to confront stereotypes, too. LiveScience / available from MSNBC.com. "There's a simple reason why computers have not taken over teachers' jobs: They're boring, unpersuasive, unattractive and soulless. That may soon change if Amy Baylor can perfect the virtual professors she's working on. 'Up until now, the personal computer's potential to be a valuable teaching and learning tool has been stymied by its 'soulless' nature,' says Baylor, a professor of instructional systems at Florida State University's Research of Innovative Technologies for Learning (RITL). 'We're using computers to simulate human beings in a controlled manner so we can investigate how they affect and persuade people.' ... The characters --- Baylor calls them pedagogical agents --- will ultimately be more than just 3-D animations and voices. Software will allow them to adapt to a student's skill level in a given subject and provide feedback, both cognitive and emotional." November 16, 2005: Visionary Kurzweil Touts Technologies Of Tomorrow. By Kevin McLaughlin. CRN. "Computer visionary Ray Kurzweil examined the effects of accelerating growth of technologies on the present and future of human technological innovation during a speech at the ninth annual CRN Industry Hall of Fame, held Tuesday in Santa Clara, Calif. ... As proof that these types of evolutions will take place, Kurzweil used the example of artificial intelligence that is embedded everywhere in today's society, from medical devices such as electrocardiogram machines and credit card fraud detection software. ... '2029 is where technology really gets interesting because we'll have had all of this exponential growth taking place over the next 25 years,' said Kurzweil." November 16, 2005: In Search of ... Smarter Information Analysis. By Stephen Swoyer. TDWI Business Intelligence News. "At this week's Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) annual meeting, members of the INFORMS data mining and artificial intelligence (AI) caucuses are expected to vote on a particularly tendentious proposition --- namely, to merge their two sections into one. ... The impetus? Smarter data mining and information analysis tools. And as business intelligence and data warehousing guru Mike Schiff points out, there's a lot of commonality between what folks like [Mary] Crissey call 'operations research' (OR) and AI. If nothing else, a lot of the insights that data mining and information analysis tools unearth can seem spooky --- even quasi-intelligent. 'Operations research is really just a superset of data mining. But it includes the statistical analysis piece, so the convergence of [OR and AI] would make sense. It definitely should be an exchange of information between the two, because basically they’re both used to solve problems,' says Schiff. ... Naturally, the convergence of data mining and AI technologies has some folks screaming Big Brother." November 16 - 22, 2005: Artificial and Biological Intelligence. View by Subhash Kak. Ubiquity (Volume 6, Issue 42). "The recent success of several teams in meeting the $2 million DARPA Grand Challenge 2005 ... raises the question if AI might be poised for another period of high support and increased expectations. The quest for AI is also the subtext to debates outside of the field of computer science. Physics, for example, is the discovery of formal structures in nature, and each of these formal systems could be interpreted as a natural machine. The claim of some physicists that the universe itself is a giant machine is taken to complement the belief that true machine intelligence and self-awareness should arise after machine complexity has crossed a critical threshold. But this leads to certain difficulties. Since machines only follow instructions, it is not credible that they should suddenly, on account of a greater number of connections between computing units, become endowed with self-awareness. On the other hand, if one accepts that machines will never become self-aware, one may ask why is the brain-machine conscious, whereas the silicon-computer is not? ... I have considered evidence that negates the view that the brain is an ordinary machine. I argue that even with self-organization and hitherto-unknown quantum characteristics one cannot explain the capacities associated with the brain. A summary of these arguments follows. ..."
>>> Philosophy, Cognitive Science, Nature of Intelligence, Artificial Life November 15, 2005: Sega's Ambitious Plans. The Tech Beat by Olga Kharif. BusinessWeek online. "[T]he company is coming out with a new psychological thriller game, 'Condemned: Criminal Origins,' for the Xbox 360. Based on the screenshots and what Jeffery tells me about the game, it should be really neat. Characters not operated by the player are equipped with artificial intelligence, so they may act differently every time you play a level. Say, you enter a room carrying a gun. The enemy character found within might then run out of the room screaming for help. If you had entered the room unarmed, that characted might have attacked you, instead. It's this kind of neat capabilities that Sega hopes will catapult it from its current position...."" November 15, 2005: Two Thumbs Up. By Leah Hoffmann. Forbes.com. "'Sentiment analysis,' as the field of research is known, is a hot topic among computer scientists these days. The goal is to create computer programs that can determine whether a document is positive or negative. ... Successful applications could help automate market and product research and dramatically alter the future of a simple Internet search. ... 'The variety of words that people use for subjective expressions is staggering,' says Janyce Wiebe, a professor of computer science at the University of Pittsburgh. Wiebe and her colleagues have already assembled a dictionary of some 8,000 indicator words and phrases. 'The dictionary tells you whether a word is positive or negative when it's taken out of context,' Wiebe explains. 'The challenge is to figure out whether it's positive or negative in each individual instance.' There are a number of different ways to accomplish this. ... Fast Search and Transfer ASA ... unveiled a customizable sentiment analysis program, Marketrac, last year. ... Other potential applications in the field of sentiment analysis include automated flame detectors for online bulletin boards, tracking systems for stock market reports and programs that monitor movie or product reviews." November 15, 2005: 'Thinking' Robot Breaks Barriers but not Eggs. Digital Chosunilbo (English Edition). "At one of the venues for the APEC forum currently underway in Busan, a bartending robot is poised to make its public debut, taking orders and serving the gathered leaders -- just like a human. It is only one of various walking humanoid helper robots that have been shown around Korea, but this is the first time that such a robot has been able to carry on conversations with customers and fetch the items they request. The Ministry of Science and Technology's Intelligent Robot taskforce has created the 'T-Rot,' which is scheduled to wait on world leaders in a Robot Café at the APEC summit venue. ... The most important function is the robot's capacity to recognize things by its sense of touch. Since helper robots live with humans all the time, security is crucial. For that reason, synthetic skin which detects the texture of things like human skin is essential." November 15, 2005: Robo-rodent gets 'touchy-feely.' IST Results. "Robots that 'feel' objects and their texture could soon become a reality thanks to the innovative and interdisciplinary research of the AMouse, or artificial mouse, project. But even more important, perhaps, are the lessons researchers learned about robot design and artificial intelligence. The project funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies initiative of the IST programme even developed new insights into biological brain function. Researchers from Italy, Germany and Switzerland developed a 'feeling' robot by developing a new sensor modelled on hypersensitive mouse whiskers. ... In one startling outcome an AMouse robot demonstrated what appeared to be emergent behaviour: it developed a homing instinct without any pre-programming of any kind." November 15, 2005: MP spreads word on IT. By Chris Sugrue. Howick and Pakuranga Times Online. "Sixty four million people have been killed in car-related incidents since the automobile’s invention --- one reason why driving may be left to artificial intelligence in the near future. The sobering statistic was among many MP Maurice Williamson presented to the Howick and Pakuranga Grey Power Association on Friday. ... Mr Williamson cites a Massachusetts Institute of Technology prediction that by 2050, 80 per cent of what people use in their everyday life has yet to be thought of." November 15, 2005: Unto us the Machine is born. By Kevin Kelly. The Sydney Morning Herald [originally published in Wired: We Are the Web; Issue 13.08 - August 2005]. "The web continues to evolve from an entity ruled by mass media and mass audiences to one ruled by messy media and messy participation. How far can this frenzy of creativity go? ... What matters is the network of social creation, the community of collaborative interaction that futurist Alvin Toffler called prosumption. ... The real transformation under way is more akin to what Sun Microsystem's John Gage had in mind in 1988 when he famously said: 'The network is the computer.' His phrase sums up the destiny of the web: as the operating system for a megacomputer that encompasses the internet, all its services, all peripheral chips and affiliated devices from scanners to satellites, and the billions of human minds entangled in this global network. This gargantuan Machine already exists in a primitive form. In the coming decade, it will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies, but our minds. ... This planet-sized computer is comparable in complexity to a human brain. Both the brain and the web have hundreds of billions of neurons, or webpages. ... Danny Hillis, a computer scientist who once claimed he wanted to make an AI 'that would be proud of me', has invented massively parallel supercomputers, in part to advance us in that direction. He now believes the first real AI will emerge not in a stand-alone supercomputer such as IBM's proposed 23-teraflop Blue Brain, but in the vast tangle of the global Machine. ... Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush outlined the web's core idea - hyperlinked pages - in 1945, but the first person to try to build on the concept was a freethinker named Ted Nelson, who in 1965 envisioned his own scheme, which he called 'Xanadu'." November 14, 2005: Airport security keeps eye on left luggage. By Anna Salleh. ABC Science Online. "A computer surveillance system that spots an abandoned suitcase at a crowded airport and sees what happened to the person who left it there is being developed. Its developers hope the system will one-day allow security staff to tell the difference between a suspicious abandoned suitcase whose owner has left the building and a suitcase whose owner is queuing for coffee two metres away. Computer vision expert, Associate Professor Massimo Piccardi of the University of Technology, Sydney and colleagues, were last week awarded an Australian Research Council grant to work with surveillance company iOmniscient, to improve the company's surveillance technology. ... 'We [will] just track them while they are walking and track the relationship with these objects that they carry,' he says. 'And we will raise an alarm only if the object is being left and the original carrier has left the area nearby.'" November 14, 2005: Technology for technology's sake. Comment by Jon Excell. The Engineer. "Ahead of his recent visit to the US Prince Charles trotted out the somewhat tired, but occasionally persuasive argument that technology, far from being our slave, has become our master. The Prince is not alone. Many claim that the unchecked development of technology for technology's sake is one of the most pernicious influences of our age. ... If every kernel of a technological idea was subjected to a 'do we or don't we need it?' test at its embryonic stage, many advances that have made our lives fuller, safer and healthier wouldn’t be with us today. ... [W]hile it’s highly unlikely that Toyota’s i-swing will ever be seen pootling down Oxford Street, perhaps some of the technology that the car maker’s unfettered dreamers thought up will. The gyroscopic balancing and steering mechanisms and the AI system that learns your driving habits offer real hope for disabled people yearning for the open road. ... The truth of the matter is that technology is neither the problem nor the solution, it cannot be blamed for what we do with it. It is the way we actively choose to apply it that matters. November 14, 2005: Home truths. The Engineer. "The real challenge for technologists, therefore, lies not in developing increasingly intelligent devices but in making their systems palatable and deploying them in such a way that your granny would instinctively take to them. ... [H]ow can this technology be made attractive to the average homeowner? It is a question that Roy Kalawsky, professor of human computer interaction at Loughborough University, has been studying as part of his work with the Centre for the Integrated Home Environment (CIHE). CIHE acts as an umbrella organisation that manages a portfolio of different projects based around smart homes and ubiquitous computing. Kalawsky believes that the biggest problem with home technology is that its merits are frequently obscured and let down by a confusing front end. With this in mind, Kalawsky is currently heading a project called the Smart User Interfaces trial. 'What we’re finding is that people don't want complex systems,' he said. 'No one wants to read a manual or have to work out how to operate a complicated remote control. They want something that is intuitive to use and they want to be able to personalise it; everyone wants a different way of controlling things.'" November 14, 2005: The Charlie Rose Show - A Discussion With Gordon Moore, Cofounder of Intel Corporation (television broadcast). "Rose: You read as I did all the concern about robotic and what, you know, Bill Joy wrote a famous piece in Wired magazine that got lots of attention, a nanotechnology and -- and robotics and - and all of that. Do you worry that technology has a place where it could - could threaten the existence of who we are? Moore: Yeah, I don't see that myself. To me, the technology is under our control and I don't think that's ever going to change. It's going to take something dramatically different than what we're doing for that to change in any case. You know, I think there are a lot of improvements we can look for. One thing that intrigued me, for example, if we ever get really good speech recognition in computers. Which I think is a matter of time, I don`t know if it's five years or 50 years, where you can talk to a computer and it will understand in context what you're saying. And if you mean t-o or t-double o for example. ... in a sentence. You get to the point where when it understands language that well, you should be able to have an intelligent conversation with your computer, should be able to ask it something in normal language and it should be able to find the answer. ... Moore: So I think, you know, that kind of level, which I would consider artificial intelligence is something that is likely to come down in the future. Not too far, maybe. Rose: Within 10 years? Moore: I have a tough time putting a time scale on it. I think 30 years ago people would have said 10 years. It's one of these ... things that keeps receding as you look at it. But I think the - you know, the - the basic capability is there, the processing power, hopefully the software will get developed to do it. It will come to pass eventually. But I still don`t see any direction in which the technology takes over, and ... Rose: We lose control. Moore: Yeah...." November 14, 2005: From building blocks to robots to winners - Richmond students turn Legos into a high-tech win. By Angela Mullins. Port Huron Times Herald. "Kathy Campau was introduced to Lego robotics four years ago. Not knowing what she was in for, Campau - a Richmond Middle School Spanish teacher with a flare for computers - signed up for a workshop on the subject at a technology seminar. She's been hooked ever since. ... Now, she is passing a love of the subject along to her students. The school's 22-member Lego robotics team started meeting in September. On Sunday, the group took home two trophies from a competition in Clinton Township in Macomb County. Popular at some schools locally and at many nationwide, Lego robotics is a team competition that challenges youth to build robots from Lego kits. Once the robots are assembled, the teams use computers to program them to do specific tasks. This year's theme was Ocean Odyssey...." November 14, 2005: Cellphones take on new snooping keys. By Mahalakshmi. Financial Express. "[I]f researchers from the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, are to believed, recent advances made in artificial intelligence (AI) technology will not make only present-day mobile devices more smarter, but personalised too. Their contention: Smartphones are providing value-added services through search engines. Perhaps, it is due to new trends in AI systems which are now becoming a hit among cellphone providers. ... 'In simple terms, mobile devices will tend to analyse one's behaviour as an user, and like a desktop search, get relevant answers approximately with five results,' says Vasudev Varma, assistant professor, IIIT." November 14, 2005: Think fast -- your games console is about to get a lot smarter. Media release available from Computerworld. "Soon the aliens and monsters will not only outgun you, they're likely to be outthinking you as well. That's the brave new world of artificial intelligence in gaming, a big topic for next week's Second Australiasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment in Sydney. The IE2005 conference, at the University of Technology, Sydney, is bringing together high-powered researchers from Australia and around the world to discuss how computing advances are about to revolutionise fun and games. 'Developments in computer gaming are just part of it,' said Conference Chair Dr Yusuf Pisan of UTS, whose own research is about developing characters that aren't simply the pawns of the player. 'Research in artificial intelligence and interactive entertainment is on the verge of producing whole new forms of entertainment, like interactive television and interactive stories. We're within in sight of creating interactive narratives with intelligent, AI-controlled characters. That means in not too long you could be able to buy a package that, for instance, lets you play one of the cast in your favourite soap.'" November 14, 2005: Supercomputers set processor pace. BBC News. "IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer has kept its position as the most powerful number cruncher in the world. Its hold on the top slot was revealed in the latest list of the Top 500 supercomputers on Earth. Blue Gene/L was top of the biannually produced list because in June 2005 it set a new world record performance of 280.6 trillion calculations per second." November 14, 2005: The universal translator. By Tim Radford. The Guardian. "Shall nation speak unto nation? Yes, but clumsily, and through human interpreters, at least for a while. Although US scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and their German counterparts at the University of Karlsruhe have just demonstrated a 'universal translator', it's a long way from being the equal of the same device in Star Trek - which enabled our human heroes to understand Klingons and their ilk. ... Neuroscientists are still trying to figure out why a human instantly understands the profound difference in meaning of sentences such as 'Time flies like an arrow' and 'Fruit flies like a banana' ... For years, computer scientists have tried to deliver 'chatterbots' - robots that respond to natural language. Their success, so far, has been limited. In 1968, Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick dreamed up HAL, the sinister silicon voice of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey." November 14, 2005: David's delight at £1m deals. Manchester Evening News. "The group said its latest American contract would improve efficiency and reduce the cost of processing claims at a major insurance company, by scheduling jobs for 450 staff. The Finnish contract, with the country's second-largest telecoms company Elisa Corporation, is to manage the schedules of 400 technicians who install the Internet in homes and businesses. ... ServicePower, which is quoted on the stock market, employs around 110 people and sells licences for its artificial intelligence software that enables clients to schedule jobs based on skills level, geographical location and customer availability...." November 14, 2005: The Google Story - An Excerpt from David A. Vise's Book. washingtonpost.com. "Chapter 26: Googling Your Genes ... Sergey Brin and Larry Page have ambitious long-term plans for Google's expansion into the fields of biology and genetics through the fusion of science, medicine, and technology. ... 'Too few people in computer science are aware of some of the informational challenges in biology and their implications for the world,' Brin says. ... 'The ultimate search engine,' says Page, 'would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.' The critical path inside the Googleplex includes experimentation with artificial intelligence techniques and new methods of language translation. Brin and Page are hopeful that these efforts will eventually make it possible for people to have access to better information and knowledge without the limitations and barriers imposed by differences in language, location, Internet access, and the availability of electrical power. ... Google is not averse to contributing to the scientific efforts of others. It teamed up with Stanford several years ago to provide computing power for a scientific project that focused on unfolding proteins. ... ... Google's data-mining techniques appear well-suited to the formidable challenges posed by analyzing the genetic sequence. It has begun work on this project...." November 14, 2005: Now that the first race for autonomously driven vehicles has been won, attention turns to applications - Future Challenges. By Byron Spice. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Stanley might have taken home the $2 million prize awarded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, but four other robotic vehicles also completed the course through the Nevada desert without human intervention or guidance, outstripping the expectations of many observers. 'It's not a victory for a specific institution,' said Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and leader of the Stanford Racing Team. 'It was a victory for the field.' Indeed, Dr. Thrun's telephone has been ringing regularly ever since, with proposals from defense contractors, entrepreneurs and others with ideas of how to employ autonomous navigation. But so has the phone of William 'Red' Whittaker, the Carnegie Mellon University roboticist whose Red Team had the second- and third-place finishers. 'The thing we've got going for us is the success of the Grand Challenge shifted a lot of the belief state,' Dr. Whittaker said last week. ... 'There were a lot of great finishes in the Grand Challenge and that shifted a lot of things from intention to action.' Some of that interest is from the military. ... But Dr. Whittaker, whose work 20 years ago using robots in the cleanup of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident was a milestone in establishing the concept of 'field robotics,' said the interest in autonomous vehicles is much broader than that, including environmental remediation, mining and agricultural machinery. ... Dr. Thrun, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist before joining Stanford in 2003, said he has rejected proposals to develop armed vehicles under computer control, but is pursuing the convoy work. ... 'My personal take is that the biggest impact you can have is reducing the 43,000 deaths each year of people on the highways,' he said." November 13, 2005: I, for one, welcome our robot overlords - A roboticist defends his work. By Raju Mudhar. The Toronto Star (registration req'd.). "We will be the architects of our own destruction. Actually, make that engineers, since our executioner will have a metal face. Either way, it's never too late to plan for our decimation at the hands of our own technological creations, which is why the new book How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on defending yourself against the oncoming rebellion is such a revelation. The author, Daniel H. Wilson, a 27-year-old roboticist and Ph.D. student from Carnegie Mellon --- one of the leading U.S. hubs of robot-related activities (and thus an obvious hot zone for future mechanized insurrection) --- is emarking on a book tour to expound on our cold, steely fate. ... His book covers a wide range of robotics research, such as robot logic and how sensors work. Thankfully, there are also helpful tips on practical matters such as how to treat a laser wound and even how to escape from the clutches of a renegade smart home." November 13, 2005: Are we, as science describes us, 'machines made of meat'? - The scientific rejection of dualism is hard to swallow as it diminshes people, is offensive, violates the tenets of every religion and conflicts with common sense. Editorial by Paul Bloom. Taipei Times. "The world's leading scholar on artificial intelligence once described people as machines made of meat. This nicely captures the consensus in the fields of psychology and neuroscience, which tell us that our mental lives are the products of our physical brains, and that these brains are shaped not by a divine creator, but by the blind process of natural selection. But, with the exception of a small minority of philosophers and scientists, nobody takes this view seriously. It is offensive. It violates the tenets of every religion, and it conflicts with common sense. We do not feel, after all, that we are just material bodies, mere flesh. Instead, we occupy our bodies. We own them. We are spontaneously drawn to the view defended by Rene Descartes: We are natural-born dualists, so we see bodies and souls as separate." November 10, 2005: From passive applications to sentient machines. IST Results. "We are close to the point where new types of automated routines and software applications could operate independently of direct human control to carry out prescribed tasks. Helping us arrive, researchers have designed a model that supports the development of applications constructed from mobile sentient objects. Firstly though, developers need to overcome the shortcomings of current architectures and middleware, which are still largely based on sequential programming models. The IST programme's CORTEX project aimed to overcome such obstacles, and to explore the fundamental theoretical and engineering issues involved in supporting the use of 'sentient objects'. 'On the one hand we have classical control systems that are programmed in a strictly sequential manner to respond to a precisely-defined sequence of events,' says project coordinator Paulo Veríssimo of the University of Lisbon. 'On the other, we have the outside world where environments interact and little can be predicted with certainty. If we are to construct highly interactive things like mobile robots, wearable devices that can react intelligently to their environment, augmented-reality systems, etc., we need to know how to programme these applications.' ... The CORTEX participants developed several prototype demonstrators to show off the project results including one that showed how robotic devices could dynamically subscribe and unsubscribe from information resources as either information providers or information users." November 10, 2005: Machinima Makes Filmmaking Virtual Reality. By Jake Coyle. The Associated Press / available from The Washington Post. "In 'Red vs. Blue,' one of the short films at this weekend's third annual Machinima Film Festival, two gun-totting, faceless patrolmen from the video game 'Halo' act more like Samuel Beckett characters than intergalactic warriors. ... Most machinima looks exactly like a video game. But the characters (as in 'Red vs. Blue') don't sound like video-game denizens and narratives develop that can have no relation to the game they're based on. Many of the more 'serious' machinima films deal with Hollywood's current favorite sci-fi topic: artificial intelligence. In the music video for Zero 7's 'In the Waiting Line,' a robot produced through 'Quake' programming is shown gardening in a space ship, apparently searching for meaning in its daily routine. In 'Bot,' a robot jumps away from sure death into the deep recesses of the game design - away from the action - where he finds robot cave drawings and a kind of spiritual awakening." November 10, 2005: Robot Lawyers Set for Trial Against Humans. By Lesley Stones. Business Day (Johannesburg). "Next year the Buys legal firm will find out just how popular or unpopular its lawyers actually are, when it introduces robotic rivals to its human staff. The company is developing three robots, Stacy, Dave and Nathan, to see if artificial intelligence can be as successful as the real thing. The robots will provide online legal opinions and advice to its customers early next year, says Reinhardt Buys. ... According to AI Expert Systems at the University of Texas, artificial intelligence (AI) technology will let computers autonomously reason with the law to draw legal conclusions. The head of that team, Selmer Bringsjort, says: 'Our intuition is that people won't mind in the least if their lawyers are empowered by artificial colleagues -- quite the contrary, if they are the beneficiaries of quicker turnaround time, lower legal fees and higher quality work.'" November 10, 2005: Present and correct - Ten years on, Richard Susskind is sticking to his guns over The Future of Law’s predictions. By Kieran Flatt. Legal Week. "[Richard Susskind's] early work, on expert systems, met with a mix of incredulity and hostility from some leading practitioners. Nonetheless, he persevered with his message and by the time he convinced a major publisher to print his first book, The Future of Law, in 1995, some of his disciples were already trying to implement his ideas in major law firms. Ten years on, The Future of Law still makes interesting reading. It describes a 20-year process of radical and irrevocable transformation in the legal sector. Susskind predicts that by 2015 legal services will be largely commoditised and for most commercial purposes clients will get the bulk of their legal advice online from expert systems, maintained and honed to near-perfect reliability by teams of lawyers. ... Susskind is sticking to his guns. 'The Future of Law was a 20-year prediction and we are only halfway through the cycle,' he says." November 10, 2005: Cars soon may 'talk' to roads, each other. By Chris Woodyard. USAToday.com. "The demonstration at Honda's test center outside Tokyo previews what is shaping up as the next phase of automotive safety: vehicles that talk to each other and the highway system itself. They silently send or receive warnings from other cars in close proximity. Or they pass information back and forth to sensors along the roadway that become part of a real-time database. They tell of their approach to an intersection, warn about hazards ahead or keep an inattentive driver from running a red light, all with the goal of preventing accidents. Around the world, major automakers from General Motors to BMW see the idea of a transportation system that can communicate as a major safety breakthrough. 'It does seem like it's straight out of a science-fiction movie,' says Robert Strassburger, vice president of vehicle safety for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. 'But it's happening already.' ... Intelligent transportation also offers a lucrative side benefit: the sharing of information that could ease traffic congestion, which wasted an estimated 2.3 billion gallons of gasoline in 2003, according to a Texas Transportation Institute estimate." November 10, 2005: Brain Work Gets New Digs at MIT. By Mark Baard. Wired News. "Hundreds of researchers will soon move into new offices at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT.... Robert Desimone, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT and a specialist in attention disorders, is the institute's director. Desimone said in an interview before the dedication that the institute would offer opportunities for 'unparalleled collaboration,' resulting in new drugs and other therapies for mental illness, and yield breakthroughs in the field of artificial intelligence. In fact, the institute's researchers are already making breakthrough discoveries, Desimone said. Last week, McGovern scientists announced they had deciphered a part of the process the brain uses to recognize visual objects. The discovery could help AI researchers build better computer vision systems that mimic biological functions. November 9, 2005: The Search for the Next 'Killer Technology'. By Anthony O'Donnell. FinanceTech. "Speaking at yesterday's ISO Tech session, 'The Next 'Killer Technology' In Insurance,' in Las Vegas, a panel of industry experts made the case for data analysis and distribution, integration, geographic information systems, next-generation visualization tools, sensing technology and artificial intelligence. ... 'Carriers are coming to recognizing that one of the true resources that the insurance industry has is its data,' said Jamie Bisker.... Pat Saporito, New York-based Information Builders' insurance industry practice manager, offered that, 'I think the next wave is in artificial intelligence, but in a more truly operational way, as used in underwriting and claims adjusting, for example.' Saporito argued that, among other uses, artificial intelligence could supplement the growing deficit of qualified underwriters in the insurance industry." November 9, 2005: Test for iRobot IPO will show whether Wall Street thinks the industry has arrived. By Robert Weisman. The Boston Globe. "IRobot Corp. has charmed homeowners with its Roomba vacuum cleaners that scour floors for dust. It's buoyed soldiers with its mobile PackBots that hunt for ammunition in caves. But today the Burlington company faces its toughest constituency yet: investors. ... IRobot's initial public offering will be a test of whether robotics, a field that long has drawn public fascination but Wall Street skepticism, is finally ready to emerge as a business sector worth investing in."
>>> Robots, Household Appliances, Military, Applications November 8, 2005: Improving breast-cancer diagnostic tools. FSU.com article available from Medical News Today. "Anke Meyer-Baese is an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Florida A&M University-FSU College of Engineering. Her work focuses on electrical and computer engineering, with a specialization in methods of artificial intelligence that can be applied to medical imaging. Meyer-Baese recently became the first College of Engineering faculty member to receive a National Institutes of Health Career Award, which comes with $695,000 in research funding. With the money, she will lead a five-year project to give doctors a new tool to better diagnose breast cancer. ... Despite the incredible potential of MRI technology, which cranks out at least 200 scans for a single patient, the sheer volume of images can be daunting for human eyes to evaluate. Meyer-Baese is developing computer software to mimic the way a radiologist analyzes all of that information -- and to do it better and faster." November 8, 2005: The perfect spot for a 'future' invasion - Filmakers pick South Brunswick warehouse to shoot science fiction movie. By Joseph Harvie. South brunswick Post and PacketOnline news. "Mr. [Mark] Cheng said 'Deployment Strategy' is set about 50 years in the future, a time when artificial intelligence is commonplace and is regulated by the government. In the film an elite SWAT team is sent to take a New Jersey scientist illegally making artificial intelligence. The inspiration for the plot came from Mr. Cheng's background as a software developer. He said that he took some of the ideas from his work in the computer field. He said there are three steps in development: conception, beta testing and then production. 'In beta testing phase, bugs can arrive and are fixed,' Mr. Cheng said. 'If software is not beta tested there could be detrimental problems. If AI is not beta tested it can be a cultural threat.'" November 8, 2005: Some Technologies Will Annoy. By Joanna Glasner. Wired News. "If you're waiting for the 'home of the future,' filled with talking appliances and complex networks that let all our devices communicate with each other, prepare to keep holding your breath. It's not that those things aren't technically possible. It's just that if we had them, they'd irritate us. In this week's column, professional futurists weigh in on which talked-about technologies are likely either to flop, under-deliver or take longer to reach critical mass than we might expect. Top on their list are things that sound better suited for a Jetsons set than a real-life home or workspace. Additionally, there are a lot of technologies that sound neat, but probably won't inspire us to open our wallets." November 8, 2005: Research money crunch in the U.S. By Marguerite Reardon. CNET News.com. "An outspoken group of information and communications technology innovators is worried that the United States is falling behind the rest of the world in technological innovation because fewer dollars are being allocated to long-term research. ... For much of the 20th century, major breakthroughs in technology came from large research laboratories like AT&T's Bell Laboratories, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) , and IBM's Watson Research Center. These research facilities operated much like national laboratories, making their discoveries and innovations available to anyone for modest license fees. ... In the early 1960s, the U.S. government started pouring money into information technology and communications research. It formed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to fund high-risk, high-reward research. ... Today, DARPA and the National Science Foundation fund a large portion of the academic IT research in this country, say research experts. ... 'Traditionally funding in computer sciences has come from the U.S. government,' [Leonard] Kleinrock said. 'And it's contributed to some remarkable advances, such as the Internet and artificial intelligence. They (the government) used to step back and with some direction let you go develop something new. But that's not the case today. And DARPA is no longer thinking long-range.'" November 7, 2005: U of A holds winning hand in video poker - Edmonton research in high demand for electronic games. By Shawn Ohler. The Edmonton Journal. "Poker pro Phil Laak had the great nickname (The Unabomber). He had the hot girlfriend (actress Jennifer Tilly) and the reputation at the table (crazy). But nothing could help him against the stranger from Edmonton. ... The stranger had a great nickname, too -- Vexbot, a computer powered by artificial intelligence and programmed by [Darse] Billings and the University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group, a world-leading team of Edmonton computer science professors and students. ... Vexbot had bluffed the poker pro out of a very large pot. ... 'It's a very challenging opponent against an average player. But it's not the program that's going to beat the world champion, and that's our standard.' [said U of A professor Jonathan Schaeffer]. The team is already working on A.I. that will immediately adapt to an opponent's tendencies." November 7, 2005: Computers outwitting ancient mind battles. asahi.com. "This autumn, the hottest topic in the world of shogi is that the association has forbidden professional players from playing matches with computers. ... 'In regard to the final moves before checkmate, computers have already surpassed human players,' says Takenobu Takizawa, a Waseda University professor and computer shogi expert. 'Except for holders of the highest ranks, humans are no match for computers anymore.' ... That humans are said to be superior to machines in the Japanese game of go as well as poker brings some relief." November 6, 2005: Driving force -- the robocar that won. How AI team from Stanford aced rugged desert race. By Tom Abate. San Francisco Chronicle & SFGate.com. "On Oct. 8, a robotic car run by Stanford researchers rode into history by winning a race of driverless vehicles. How a robocar nicknamed 'Stanley' crossed 132 miles of desert near Las Vegas, beating 22 rivals, is a tale that began in the summer of 2004, when Stanford artificial intelligence specialist Sebastian Thrun, now 38, and postdoctoral scholar Mike Montemerlo, 30, hatched a plan to beat the field, including the odds-on favorite, Carnegie Mellon University. ... In the early 1990s, [Thrun] was a graduate student at the University of Bonn. But he wanted to pursue a career in the United States. So he wrote to various American universities, offering to fly over and talk about his work. 'This is the type of thing you'd never do in Germany, but in America, it works,'' Thrun said. In Pittsburgh, he met [Tom] Mitchell and another Carnegie Mellon computer scientist, Alex Waibel. They found a way to bring Thrun over as a visiting scholar. ... How did Stanford's robocar know whether an object dead ahead was a harmless tumbleweed or a dangerous boulder? It couldn't really tell the difference, Thrun explained. Instead, the algorithms in Stanley's brain calculated probabilities. Say it was 95 percent certain an object was tumbleweed. It then balanced this with an analysis of the consequences of being wrong -- a 100 percent chance of being wiped out -- which made swerving its best option. 'The computer is calculating the odds of different outcomes, and it understands the consequences of these outcomes,' Thrun said. 'All of my research for the last 10 years has been on this one sentence'... There also looms the possibility that self-directing software could one day be mounted on offensive military robots -- a future envisioned in the 'Terminator' movies. That has some people worried. 'Certainly, it's a debate people should have,' said Ron Kurjanowicz, DARPA's race manager." November 5, 2005: Researchers Look to Create a Synthesis of Art and Science for the 21st Century. By John Markoff. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "As an actor and a founder of the politically active Electronic Disturbance Theater, Ricardo R. Dominguez is an unlikely faculty member at the nanoscience, wireless and supercomputing laboratory that opened its doors here on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, on Oct. 28. However, Mr. Dominguez and an eclectic group of computer musicians, computer game designers and nanotechnology artists are very much a part of the futuristic research 'collaboratory' being assembled by the astrophysicist Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, or Calit2, a $400 million research consortium assembled over the last five years. ... For Mr. Smarr - who as director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in the 1990's oversaw the development of Mosaic, the first World Wide Web browser - this synthesis of art and science is vital in light of the role he expects artists to play in designing the future. 'Part of the artist's insight is to be able to interpret the future earlier than anybody,' he said during an interview in the small hideaway conference room adjacent to his office. 'We regard the artist as fully equal with any scientist at Calit2.' ... Natalie Jeremijenko, who refers to herself as an 'artist experimenter,' is a former member of the engineering faculty at Yale interested in how society interacts with and uses toys. A current project is to create a pack of 'feral' robotic dogs with artificial intelligence capabilities and let them loose in a San Diego neighborhood. The robots could be assigned some socially useful function, like searching for or 'sniffing out' pollution. ... 'California and the U.S. cannot rest on our laurels,' Paul Jacobs said at the dedication of the Atkinson building on Oct. 28. 'We need this kind of investment in infrastructure to do the kind of visionary research that will keep us competitive.'" November 5, 2005: The robot that thinks like you... Scientists built a robot that thinks like we do and set it loose to explore the world. By Douglas Fox. New Scientist (subscription req'd.; Issue 2524). "The infant I am watching wander around its rather spartan playpen in the Neurosciences Institute (NSI) in La Jolla, California, is a more limited creature. It is a trashcan-shaped robot called Darwin VII, and it has just 20,000 brain cells. Despite this, it has managed to master the abilities of a 18-month-old baby – a pretty impressive feat for a machine. ... Darwin VII is the fourth in a series of robots that Jeff Krichmar and his colleagues at NSI have created in a quest to better understand how our own brains work. ... The idea of an artificial neural network that could perform computations was proposed as long ago as 1943, by Warren McCullough and Walter Pitts at the University of Illinois. ... [I]n the past few years, neuroscientists and AI researchers have started collaborating more closely, and their labours are beginning to bear fruit. Their conclusions challenge two decades of research into artificial neural networks." November 4, 2005: Amazon creates artificial artificial intelligence. By Kristen Millares Bolt. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "Amazon.com has launched a new program called Amazon Mechanical Turk, through which a computer can ask humans to perform tasks that it can’t do itself. The name Mechanical Turk dates back to 1769, when a Hungarian nobleman created a wooden robot-like mannequin that could play chess -- even defeating chess fanatic Benjamin Franklin in Paris. ... With Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon plans to supply 'artificial artificial intelligence' that connect programs needing the human touch with humans, such as the simple task of identifying objects in photographs (which humans can do better than computers). Examples of what humans can do for computers? Evaluate beauty, translate text and find specific objects in photos." November 3, 2005: Modern machines can change world. By L.E. Campenella. The Patriot Ledger at SouthofBoston.com. "The new robotics club at Blue Hills Regional Vocational Technical High School has its members thinking about what they would like to make a robot do. ... Because the robotics club is in its infancy, the group does not know what to expect when it participates in statewide competitions held at such sites as Boston University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Myers said his students will be cramming to catch up. Myers said refurbishing Hero-1 and a Hero-Jr., which he bought on eBay, will teach the budding engineers complicated .old school' circuitry and programming. That will add to the new high-speed, high-tech software programs available to teach, learn and apply artificial intelligence. ... As students program their mini-robots, thoughts turn from having robots do their chores to how to change the world." November 3, 2005: Ask Dave. By Michael Shaw. The Times Educational Supplement Online. "Drama teachers can rely on Dave to stay in character when they direct improvised scenes with pupils. That is because Dave is not a student but a form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) who joins in when pupils take part in drama sessions on computers - usually without them knowing he is not real. The creation of an automated pupil is a new development for the makers of EDrama, which has been used in schools for three years. ... The software, developed by Hi8us in Birmingham, has proven popular with some drama teachers because its anonymity encourages shy pupils to come forward and allows groups to improvise scenes around difficult topics. In partnership with Birmingham university, the program-makers have now developed the AI element which they hope to include in a published version of the program next year." November 3, 2005: What to watch this weekend. Robert Bianco's Critic's Corner. USAToday.com. "Fox's The Simpsons (Sunday, 8 p.m. ET/PT) takes on reality TV and Artificial Intelligence: AI, among other topics, in the 16th edition of its Treehouse of Horror trilogy."
>>> Science Fiction, AI: the movie, Robots, toons November 3, 2005: Daring encounter with asteroid. BBC News. "A Japanese spacecraft is about to make a close encounter with an asteroid in a mission to recover space dust. The Hayabusa probe is stationed over a giant asteroid some 300 million km from Earth. ... The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) probe carries the 10cm-tall Minerva robot that will bounce across the asteroid, collecting temperature readings and images. ... The landings will be controlled autonomously by the spacecraft's software." November 3, 2005: EA Tank Contest Seeks AI Talent. By Colin Campbell. Next Generation. "Electronic Arts has launched Tank Wars, a university competition to find the best new talent in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Tank Wars invites computer science students to demonstrate their skill by writing an A.I. program that pits one military tank against another in a battle for supremacy. ... John Buchanan, university research liaison at EA said, 'As we move into the next-generation, the task of rendering stunning graphics in games is slowly being handed over to specialized hardware. We have reached the point where we can easily produce highly realistic and incredibly impressive visuals with relative ease. In this competition, we have deliberately downgraded the graphics to emphasize the importance of A.I. Over the next five to 10 years, A.I. is going to differentiate great games from the rest. With this competition, we hope to find people with a passion for A.I. and understanding of the magic that makes a game truly fun to play.' The by-invitation-only competition is open to the following schools: ..." November 3, 2005: Students hope that third 'bot's the best. Robotics competition set for this weekend. By Harry Franklin. Ledger-Enquirer. "A week after placing fifth in the Alabama BEST robotics competition, 16 gifted students from South Girard School in Phenix City -- with the help of adult mentors -- redesigned and rebuilt a robot for a regional robotic competition at Auburn University on Friday and Saturday. The middle school students, seventh- and eighth-graders, will compete in the 2005 Boosting Engineering, Science and Technology Robotics Competition against 28 schools from eight states, all but two of which are high schools, said gifted teacher Angel Findlater." November 2, 2005: Google-eyed - UNT researcher gets noticed by search engine. By Aman Batheja. Star-Telegram. "Work by a researcher at the University of North Texas could someday out-Google Google when it comes to quickly searching for information online. So it's no surprise that the Internet search giant has given Rada Mihalcea a grant, valued at $107,112, to continue her research on information retrieval. ... Since 1997, Mihalcea has studied the field of natural-language processing, which looks at how language is used in information technology. Her research focuses on extracting information from texts online. Mihalcea said she's working on creating a program that could sift through large texts online and create key-word indexes and short summaries of the texts. ... Mihalcea's research group at UNT has already developed technology that can summarize short texts such as news articles." November 2, 2005: Camera, sensor network to watch our coast for terrorists. B.C.- developed system will also help deal with natural disasters. By Sarah Staples. CanWest News Service & The Vancouver Sun. "A multimillion-dollar networked fleet of cameras and sensors is being created to patrol Canada's coasts and infrastructure in a bid to ward off terrorism and improve the response to freak accidents and natural disasters, officials announced Tuesday. ... Software will analyze the information and create an overall assessment of the threat or emergency, which might consist of a visual element, such as a map, overlaid with relevant data. ... 'You're trying to create an intelligent system that doesn't just give you raw data, it puts only the important information up on the screen,' [Paul Johnston, president and CEO of Precarn] said." November 2, 2005: Robotic cars are fast taking 'autopilot' to new levels. By Ralph Vartabedian. Los Angeles Times. "The predictions of futurists have often fizzled on the subject of robots, which today can vacuum floors and play chess but not drive a car. But an exciting demonstration several weeks ago in the Nevada desert suggests that technologists are getting closer than anybody realized to a robotic car. Within about two years, the first car able to autonomously drive on freeways will be a reality, predicts Sebastian Thrun, Stanford University's guru of robotic cars and the winner of the Pentagon's Grand Challenge race in October. ... 'I am a big fan of putting the intelligence in the cars,' Thrun says. That statement marks a shift in thinking, coming after decades and billions of dollars in government spending on intelligent highways. The Bush administration has sharply increased such federal outlays, which have reached hundreds of millions of dollars a year. ... Thrun is unrestrained in his enthusiasm for the technology, saying the challenge of navigating the off-road course --- with vegetation, ruts and rocks --- was greater than keeping a car on a paved highway. Of course, an urban course would be full of moving obstacles, many operated by maniacs. ... The biggest challenges are not technical but societal, he says. Although robotic cars could save thousands of lives, they would not eliminate fatal accidents. The question is whether people would accept fatal robotic errors." November 1, 2005: The Charlie Rose Show - Ray Kurzweil talks about his new book called "The Singularity is Near" (television broadcast). "Rose: Let me come back to this book, to 'The Singularity Is Near.' What does singularity mean? Kurzweil: It's a metaphor of a future event, which I say will be the mid-2040s, 2045. At that point, the non-biological intelligence we`re creating, which we just talked about, will be a billion times more powerful than all of the biological intelligence we have in the human species. .... Kurzweil: 2045, the non-biological, the machine intelligence, the machine portion of human civilization's intelligence will be a billion times more powerful than the biological intelligence. That's a very profound change to human civilization. So singularity is a metaphor borrowed from physics, meaning an event horizon that's hard to see beyond, because it's so transformative. We can't really easily see inside a singularity in physics, a black hole. ... Rose: Will machines 2020, 2040, have human qualities of behavior in terms of emotional qualities? Or is that left to biological? Kurzweil: No, that is in fact the cutting edge of human intelligence. That is actually the most complicated and sophisticated thing we do, being funny or being jealous or being happy, expressing a loving sentiment. ... Rose: Bill Joy, who you know and I know, who has been on this show a number of times, said in 19 -- in 2000, in a famous piece he wrote, I think like in 'Wired' magazine, said, we are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakes. Is he right? Kurzweil: Well, I think his concerns are - are valid. And I share his concerns about the dangers. He's become identified with articulating the dangers. But I - I talk about them quite extensively in this book . ... Kurzweil: So, I think we both share actually the appreciation of the - the benefits and the dangers. And I think we have to be very mindful of these dangers. We have to be smart about them. ..." November 1, 2005: The Digital Access Architect. By Vanessa Neblett, Cassandra Shivers, Nils Thingvall and Bobby Tsui. Library Journal. "This July, the Digital Archive Architects at Orange County Library System (OCLS) in Orlando, FL, offered patrons two ways to access a program on how to plan a wedding using the Internet. Patrons flocked to the Wedding Virtual Gallery but shunned the trek to the library for similar material. The online option got 205 page views in one month; one person showed up for the face-to-face program. It's the job of the new Digital Access Architects (DAA) to address how to change the one-on-one model of providing information into a one-to-many dissemination of information in order to serve increasing and increasingly niched populations. ... Currently we are working to develop an easy reference tool using an artificial intelligence called a chatterbot. It allows patrons to ask questions in natural language rather than doing a keyword search or drilling down through categories to find answers to their questions. ... Trying to create a virtual librarian is no small task. Experimenting with several different solutions involves delving into artificial intelligence markup language (AIML), which is used to program the bot and interpret user questions." November 1, 2005: Mini-robots lend helping hand in UNMC surgery. By Mike Fritz. Daily Nebraskan. "[T]he University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Nebraska Medical Center are on the verge of applying for Federal Drug Administration approval of 3-inch tall mobile robotic devices that could drastically alter the way surgery is performed in the future. ... 'The idea of putting robots into humans for medical purposes has been around for a long time,' [Shane] Farritor said. 'But we will be the first to apply robots to laparoscopic surgery.' ... 'I believe robots will do for medicine,' [Dr. Dmitry] Oleynikov said, 'what computers did for office work.'"
>>>Robots, Medicine, Applications November 1, 2005: Artificial future for Buys. By Bhavna Singh. ITWeb. "IT law firm Buys Inc will introduce legal artificial intelligence robots, or Virtual In-house Lawyers, online from early next year. ... The three robots, named Stacy, Dave and Nathan, are being tested and developed. During his presentation, [Reinhardt] Buys said the 'robots' were intended to offer online legal counselling on demand at any time of day." November 1, 2005: The Strange Case of the Spoofer Captured by a Spoof. By Edward Wyatt. The New York Times. "'The Shroud of the Thwacker,' Mr. [Chris] Elliott's debut novel, published in October by Miramax Books, tells the tale of Jack the Jolly Thwacker, a serial killer terrorizing New York in the late 1800's. ... To his satirical 19th-century mix of gas-powered wooden cellphones and imagined New York landmarks like the original Ray's Pizzeria, Mr. Elliott adds a minor but intriguing character named Boilerplate, a robot said to be developed by the inventor Archibald Campion in the late 1800's. According to a deliciously detailed Internet site that tracks the robot's history (bigredhair.com), Boilerplate was designed to replace humans in combat; it took part in Roosevelt's campaign at San Juan Hill, joined the hunt for Pancho Villa, and fought in and, ultimately, disappeared during World War I. But in fact, Boilerplate never was. It is the creation of Paul Guinan, an illustrator and graphic novelist in Portland, Ore..... Mr. Elliott, it turns out, is not the first person to be caught in Boilerplate's net. The Boilerplate site's digitally altered period photographs have roped in a number of victims, including various students of robotics who have asked technical questions about Boilerplate's means of propulsion and other historical details." November 1, 2005: Volunteer call for the tech-savvy. BBC News. "An international charity that sends volunteers to developing countries to share their expertise is calling for computer-literate help. Usually those who can teach skills such as reading and writing are in demand by the Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO). ... But in a reflection of changing times, it is now actively searching out people with vital technology training skills. 'We are actually looking for teachers who have some experience of ICT (information communication technologies),' said VSO's Abigail Fulbrook. ... The call for tech-savvy teachers is very much a reflection of shifting priorities in countries which want to push their development." November 1, 2005: ACE - Building a World Between Arts and Sciences. By Genevieve Ernst. New University Newspaper. "Arts Computation Engineering is an interdisciplinary graduate program at UC Irvine that incorporates those three fields -- the arts, computer science and engineering. Student projects from the first graduating class included a robot controlled by a Madagascar cockroach by Garnet Hertz -- a commentary on artificial intelligence and robotics – and 'Infinicity,' Adrien Herbertz's application that allows for the algorithmic generation of an infinite three-dimensional digital space by gradual variation of objects that are loaded into a computerized world navigated by a user on a 'Dance Dance Revolution'-style foot pad with a large screen in front of them. 'Part of the idea is that there’s value to be gained from an interdisciplinary approach, to knowledge in a general sense,' said Robert Nideffer, co-director of ACE and an associate professor in studio art and informatics. '[ACE] trains students to think about a lot of issues not only central to the arts, but central to engineering and computer science to really allow people to be competent in these fields. The goal is to be working at a deep level in the media arts.'" November 1, 2005: A surveillance system that watches all while the bureaucracy sleeps. Technology Chatroom (opinion) by Stan Beer. The Sydney Morning Herald. "Dr [Paul] Boxer's brainchild, the Sentient AI Surveillance system is, as its name suggests, a system driven by artificial intelligence. Unlike other smart video surveillance systems, which are trained to recognise unusual behaviour, Dr Boxer's system does not need humans to input rules but learns by itself through observation. In practical terms, what this means is that the system may observe a check-point with a security boom and if, say, a motorcyclist decides to ignore the barrier and ride around it, the surveillance system will have learned through experience that this is unusual behaviour and automatically send an alert to an operator on a viewing screen. ... Sentient has engaged the services of a sales agency called Moss & Hooper, which specialises in helping small companies to sell their product into the marketplace. As a result, there are germs of interest springing up like small forest fires, which, incidentally, is one of the applications being touted. 'We've had interest in NSW for cameras to be installed to spot forest fires,' Dr Boxer says." November / December 2005: In the news [pdf]. IEEE Intelligent Systems 20(6): 6 - 10.
>>> Language & Structures, Ontologies, Representation, Assisitve Technologies, Robots, Applications, But is it AI? November 2005: Transforming America's Schools. By Jonathan Potts. Carnegie Mellon Today. "The technology that drives intelligent tutoring systems is grounded in research into artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, which seeks to understand the mechanisms that underlie human thought, including language processing, mathematical reasoning, learning and memory. As students perform problems using these tutoring systems, the program analyzes their strengths and weaknesses and on that basis provides individualized instruction. Intelligent tutoring systems do not replace teachers. Rather, they allow teachers to devote more one-on-one time to each student and to work with students of varying abilities simultaneously." November 2005: Robots in the Classroom - Move over, reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic. A new 'R' is ready to enter the classroom: robotics! Carnegie Mellon Today. "Researchers at the National Robotics Engineering Consortium (NREC) in Pittsburgh --- part of Carnegie Mellon's world-renowned Robotics Institute --- are teaching high school teachers about robotics. In turn, the teachers take the lessons back to the classroom for their own students. Teachers and students alike report great success when robotics lessons are incorporated into the curriculum. In traditional math and science courses, the addition of robotics makes the subject matter more interesting and gives teachers another way to present required lessons. In engineering and design classes meanwhile, robotics lessons introduce a new field where students can apply their talents." November 2005: Is It a Good Thing? Opinion from IEEE Spectrum Online. "Everywhere you turn these days, it looks as if we may soon be turning into the Jetsons. In the iconic American TV cartoon of the 1960s, robots prepared meals in seconds -- and cleanup was a snap. Forty years after Rosie the Robot first made dinner for her Space Age family on the go, the devices she inspired are coming into being. ... Will these shiny new machines make us more efficient and productive? While good-living mogul Martha Stewart might think so, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, the Janice and Julian Bers Professor of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, would probably disagree." November 2005: Robots of Arabia - The ideal camel jockey is the size and weight of a starving 4-year-old boy. Ancient tradition collides with new technology, atop a beast racing at 25 miles per hour in 112-degree heat. By Jim Lewis. Wired (Issue 13.11). "So it was that the emir, Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani, announced the replacement of all child jockeys with robots. The Qatar Scientific Club created a prototype but, as one of their members said, 'it was huge.' The search for a suitable robot was then assigned to the Qatar Industrial Development Bank. Requests for submissions went out to robotics corporations in the US, Europe, and Japan. Alexandre Colot remembers receiving a slightly cryptic email in late 2003. He was working at K-Team headquarters outside Lausanne, Switzerland, when the query came: 'Do you have robots that could be used in camel races to replace jockeys in Qatar?'... [T]hey were hired, they took a fact-finding trip down to Shahaniya, and they put together a team of 10 engineers, two zoologists, and a designer. 'There were three parts to the problem,' Colot says. 'The first part was environmental parameters - the heat of the desert, for example. The second part was the races themselves. There are a lot of shocks that the unit had to be able to take. The camels travel at about 25 miles per hour. The third part was the interaction with the animal.'" November 2005: E-mail Making You Crazy? How to cut through the info blitz and actually get some work done. Emerging Technology column by Steve Berlin Johnson. Discover Magazine. "The Institute of Psychiatry at King's college London sent the world of info junkies into a mild panic earlier this year by declaring that e-mail might do more damage to your brain than smoking pot. Of course, a closer examination of the study is less startling but still fascinating. ... Strategies for dealing with infomania -- a term coined by those researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry -- involve variations of pulling the plug. ... A better solution may lie in the design of interfaces. Data smog is prevalent because modern software has become increasingly adept at displaying multiple streams of information on a screen. Perhaps, instead of time away from the screen, what we really need are better screens: interfaces built for focus and contemplation and not a barrage of distractions. ... Computers can learn to detect different levels of concentration on their own. That's the premise behind BusyBody, a new software package under development at Microsoft. The software is designed to sense the 'cost of interruption' at any given point in a user's interaction with the machine. When you're surfing idly through the blogosphere, the cost of interruption is low. When you're cramming to finish a report, fielding 10 different instant messages from friends might be too costly." |
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