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<< Headlines are listed according to date posted <-> Articles are organized by date published >>
MARCH 2005
March 31, 2005: The Evolution of Warfare - New robots take the battlefield in the miltary's bid to revolutionize the army despite fears from roboticists. By Michael Kan. The Michigan Daily. "[T]he military’s newest recruit comes not from the ordinary military training camp but off the technological assembly line. Originally slated for deployment in Iraq this month, but postponed to an unspecified later date, the remote-controlled SWORDS, or Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection, is set to become the first armed mobile robot to see offensive ground combat. The U.S. Army hopes that with the availability of an infantry robot to support ground forces and engage in the high-risk combat tasks, the military will yield fewer human casualties. 'Our soldiers are saying this device will keep (them) alive,' said Bob Quinn, spokesman for Foster-Miller, the technology company that designed SWORDS. Despite their potential of saving American lives, Rackham student and roboticist Steven Collins balks when he considers the long-term consequences of such technology. If robot soldiers like SWORDS do succeed in reducing the military’s casualty rate and increasingly take the stead of human troops in the future, Collins fears warfare will unfold into an even deadlier affair: without the cost of human lives weighed in America’s decision to engage in armed conflict, unnecessary wars become all too easy for the U.S. to wage. “There’s a lot of good uses for robots,” Collins said. 'Sticking a gun on them for battle may be one of them. But I don’t think we are ready for it. Psychologically we are not. … The potential for abuse is overwhelming.' In the last decade, robots have seen an increase in use by the military as U.S. forces have actively deployed non-combat robots to the battlefield like unmanned aerial vehicles outfitted for air reconnaissance to mine detecting seeker bots. ... History Prof. Nicholas Steneck and faculty associate of the Office of Vice President of Research at the University who specializes in ethics in science, said the scientific issues like the usage of military robots needs to be brought to the attention of the public. 'The issue of a making war easier or more difficult to pursue is an important one that has been and needs to be debated,' he added." March 31, 2005: Talking tech with Bill Joy. By Dawn Kawamoto. CNET News.com. "CNET News.com recently spoke to Joy about the use of technology in industrial societies and about venture capital prospects in the tech business. Q: Since your Wired piece in 2000, have you come to any firm conclusion about whether technology is going to wind up as a force for good or evil in the 21st century? Joy: It certainly seemed to have heightened an awareness of terrorism and also heightened the awareness of the possibility of the abuse of technology. Technology can also be a force for incredible good. We face a lot of problems that we'd like to address with technology, such as the threat of the flu endemic." March 30, 2005: Microsoft develops cybercrime-fighting tools. By Munir Kotadia. ZDNet Australia. "Microsoft is developing analytical tools to help international law enforcement agencies track and fight cybercrime. ... 'We are looking at making our internal tools available to law enforcement agencies,' [Greg] Stone said. 'I'm not talking about commercial shrink-wrapped products that we would put out onto the market. I am talking about very specialised bits of technology, like artificial intelligence and data mining, that would be safe in the hands of extremely competent individuals'. Stone said the tools were originally employed to help Microsoft programmers analyse code as their software was being developed. They are now being transformed into specialist tools to assist in the law enforcement effort." March 30, 2005: Building a robot -- and teamwork - After-school program challenges students to create machines that work. By Charlie Breitrose. MetroWest Daily News. "Sifting through a pile of tiny screws and nuts, gears and wheels, a group of boys at Westborough's Mill Pond School painstakingly work on what will become a working robot. The students get a helping hand from Ed Harrow, the after-school program's director and a former high-tech worker. The after-school program is considered an enrichment activity to give the students a challenge they wouldn't get in class. The fourth-graders in the program all want to know more about robots. ... While he wants them to learn how to assemble the robots, Harrow said one of the goals is actually just getting them to work in teams. He got the idea for trying to build good working relationships after seeing what can happen when people can't work together during his time in the high-tech industry. ... Not all of Harrow's classes are the same. In some towns, he uses the Lego robotics system, where students will build their machine out of Lego pieces, and can program them. ... Robotics fits in perfectly with the interests of students, Sholler said. 'I think it's definitely a hot topic now. I think it is interesting for the kids, who are really intrigued by things like robotics,' [Kim Sholler, director of Community Education] said. 'A lot of kids are tech savvy, so creating something and be able to program it intrigues them.' " March 30, 2005: Only the ethical need apply - In the heavily automated workplace of the future, a keen sense of right and wrong will become a highly valued job skill. By Susan Llewelyn Leach. The Christian Science Monitor. "The 'great global brain drain' is how futurist Richard Samson describes it. As the century progresses, he predicts, more and more jobs will be sucked up by technology and sophisticated computers, forcing humans to hone skills machines can't duplicate - at least not yet. Qualities such as ethical judgment, compassion, intuition, responsibility, and creativity will be what stand out in an automated world. ... [W]hile artificial intelligence can perform numerous job functions, it brings no ethical considerations to bear on the tasks performed - a skill that Samson predicts will actually become more crucial as the world increases its reliance on technology. It's still a big leap from where we are today to a world in which white-collar, know-how jobs are largely being performed by computers. But Samson proposes that this will happen by century's end and points out that history offers interesting precedent." March 29, 2005: Shape-Shifting Robot Nanotech Swarms on Mars. By Bill Steigerwald. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. "[T]he robot pyramid traveled across the floor of a lab at NASA Goddard. Robots of this type will eventually be miniaturized and joined together to form 'autonomous nanotechnology swarms' (ANTS) that alter their shape to flow over rocky terrain or to create useful structures like communications antennae and solar sails." Movies and related information can be accessed via a link at the end of the article.
>>> Space Exploration, Robots, Autonomous Vehicles, Multi-Agent Systems, Applications, Artificial Life, Systems March 29, 2005: How universities' intelligent web project unlocks the information that really counts. By John Kavanagh. ComputerWeekly.com. "Imagine clicking on a low point on an oil production graph to launch a web search that threw up only strictly relevant information, including news stories about the Iraq war and reports on everything from international economy to effects on wildlife. This is a far cry from searching for 'oil' and getting hits ranging from car engines to massage services, and it is a reality among researchers developing what is known as the semantic web. The prospects were described by a leading researcher in this area, Nigel Shadbolt, a professor in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University, when he presented the BCS and the Royal Signals Institution annual lecture. Intelligent web searches would not just look for key words but would also understand what a page is about and its relevance to the user, he said." March 28, 2005: Gene Finding with Hidden Markov Models- The application of phylogeny to HMMs is improving gene annotation. By Karen Heyman. The Scientist (Volume 19, Issue 6). "HMMs are special instances of graphical models, which were originally developed by computer scientists studying machine learning and speech recognition. In technical parlance, says [Sean] Eddy, HMMs 'describe a probability distribution over an infinite number of sequences.' To the uninitiated, they resemble a cross between a flow chart and a doodle. In order to understand conceptually how HMMs work, consider their origin in speech recognition, says [David] Haussler. In that field, a computer is asked, given a speech wave, what are the phonemes (sounds) that it encodes. The wave is the measured signal; the phonemes are the 'hidden' signals that give the HMM its name. 'There is a probabilistic relationship between phonemes,' Haussler explains. 'After a 'th' sound can easily come an 'r' or an 'ah' or several other types of sounds, but not, for example, a 'k' sound. A hidden Markov model for speech incorporates all possible phonemes, and for each phoneme the probability that it's followed by any other phoneme.' Haussler says the HMM also 'models the stochastic relationship between each phoneme and the speech wave one might measure for it. In this way it can be used to infer the sequence of phonemes that best fits a given segment of recorded speech.' Translating that to molecular biology, he explains, the measured signal is the sequence of nucleotides, while the hidden signal is their function. 'Biology is trying to speak a language to us, and the HMM model is helping us to distinguish the phonemes of that language.'" March 28, 2005: A Word to the unwise -- program's grammar check isn't so smart. By Todd Bishop. Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "Microsoft says it has been making continuous improvements in the grammar-checking tool, and the company notes that the issue is more complex than it might seem. Experts in natural-language processing say the broader issue reflects a deep technological challenge beyond the current capabilities of computer science. 'It is tremendously difficult,' said Karen Jensen, a retired Microsoft researcher who led the company's Natural Language Processing research group as it developed the underlying technology for the grammar checker, which debuted in 1997. 'It gives you all kinds of respect for a human being's native ability to learn and understand in natural language.' ... In fact, there is room for Microsoft to make incremental improvements in Word's grammar checker, said Christopher Manning, assistant professor of linguistics and computer science at Stanford University. For example, he said, the Word grammar checker could benefit from greater use of advanced probabilistic and statistical methods to analyze sentences and flag problems." March 28, 2005: Pentagon Invests in Unmanned 'Trauma Pod.' By Paul Elias. Associated Press / available from The Washington Post. "The Pentagon is awarding $12 million in grants on Monday to develop an unmanned 'trauma pod' designed to use robots to perform full scalpel-and-stitch surgeries on wounded soldiers in battlefield conditions. ... SRI researchers caution that the project remains at least a decade away from appearing on any battlefields. Surgeons will need to manipulate the robot in real time, using technology that prevents any delays between their commands and the robot's actions."
>>> Robots, Medicine, Systems, Applications March 26, 2005: Everest climber aims high with city software. By Fiona McGlynn. Edinburgh Evening News & Scotsman.com. "A mountaineer is set to conquer Mount Everest with the help of pioneering software created in a Capital lab. Dr Rob Milne will be the first climber to use the life-saving technology in his attempt to tackle the world’s highest peak next month. Designed by Edinburgh University engineers, the IM-PACs (intelligent messaging, planning and collaboration) system will help Dr Milne to make critical choices during his trek. The system is designed to help climbers adversely affected by altitude sickness to make life or death decisions about their journey. ... Professor Austin Tate, the technical director of Edinburgh University’s Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute and a friend of Dr Milne’s, devised the IM-PAC. He said: 'Any attempt on Everest requires a lot of co-ordination and planning before, during and after the expedition. This makes such extreme expeditions good examples of the kind of thing we wish to support with IM-PACs and AI planning technology.'" March 26, 2005: Introducing the glooper computer - How do you turn a blob of jelly into a thinking, feeling liquid brain? New Scientist investigates the development of chemical-based processors. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist (Issue 2492; subscription req'd.). "Most of us find a shot of caffeine or a brisk walk does the trick. But when Andrew Adamatzky feels his brain needs a little extra stimulation, he gets a robot to dabble its metal fingers in it. Adamatzky is a computer scientist at the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK, and his prototype brain is a dish of chemicals sitting on a lab bench. Its 'thoughts' are waves of ions that form spontaneously and diffuse through the mix." March 25, 2005: Robots ready to rumble. By Richard Shim. CNET News.com. "Learning and sharing knowledge are the goals of the second annual robot competition called RoboGames, formerly Robolympics. That might sound hokey, but it's something that doesn't happen enough -- to the detriment of robotics, said David Calkins, president of the Robotics Society of America and organizer of the event. 'The participants never really talk to each other, and they have so much to learn from one another,' said Calkins, also a professor of robotics and computer engineering at San Francisco State University. "'At something like this, people can cross-pollinate in different disciplines, since they're all in the same place at the same time, when so many new things are going on.' At RoboGames, 650 participants compete in a number of categories, from combat to sumo. ... People from 15 countries have come here to take part, and the competition is growing--the number of entrants is up 20 percent." March 25, 2005: New Support-Center Tool Detects Emotion In Voice Of Disgruntled Callers - Software automatically alerts supervisors when customers voice frustration about company's goods and services. By Eric Chabrow. InformationWeek. "Keeping customers happy is crucial for most businesses, and knowing when they're disgruntled is important to the Madison, Wis., health insurer. Last year, WPS [Wisconsin Physician Services Insurance Corp.] began using new software that provides this insight. The software is called Perform and was created by call-center software provider Nice Systems Ltd., an Israeli company, which began widely marketing the product this month. ... What's next for emotion detection software? Artificial intelligence. Instead of users defining keywords and emotions, the software itself will figure things out, such as by analyzing voice pitch levels, a key determinant in emotion detection. By analyzing pitch, as well as tone, tempo, and inflection, the software in the not-too-distant future could be used to detect fraud. It already can differentiate between real anger and someone mimicking anger." March 25, 2005: Robo-pessimism - Hubble's last frontier. By Ryan McElveen, Science Columnist. The Cavalier Daily [the independent daily newspaper at the University of Virginia]. "We are entering an age of introspection that requires all scientists to ponder, 'Am I tomorrow's scrap metal? Will I be replaced by my creations? Is my university degree in quantum theory pointless?' The technological philosophy of Karl Marx deserves some reconsideration, as it relates directly to the conflict America is currently facing regarding robo-pessimism. Marx warned that Capitalists would increasingly invest more in new technologies and less in labor. The human race is on the verge of toppling into the chasm of human-humanoid separation, and the ridge on which we stand today may provide the last vista of human dominance. ... If we lose rationality in adapting artificial intelligence to complete human tasks, we may be digging our own graves." March 25, 2005: Sci-fi Hall of Fame inductees will be honored in Seattle. By Mark Rahner. The Seattle Times. "In the shadow of the Space Needle, four more legends are joining the ranks of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame." March 24 - April 1, 2005: Joseph Konstan on Human-Computer Interaction, Recommender Systems, Collaboration, and Social Good. Ubiquity (Volume 6, Issue 10). "UBIQUITY: How does your work fit you into the general field of human/computer interaction? KONSTAN: My work as a researcher spans several different parts of human/computer interaction. The biggest project I have been working on, and one that I have been working on now for nine years, is the GroupLens project which is about recommender systems-systems that do real-time personalization. It is very much like you see on Amazon.com when you are recommended books or movies that they think you might like. I joined that project a decade ago, and it had already been going for a couple of years. We've been exploring both the technology for how you create those recommendations and, what I think is more important, the understanding of what designs and what properties lead users to find them useful. So a chunk of this work is understanding, given what a computer can do, what is better to present to a person to be helpful to them. ... UBIQUITY: Talk about some of the other applications beyond movies and products for sale. KONSTAN: One of the ones we have been looking at is in the area of digital libraries. I've got a student who's working with a couple of other people that built a prototype of a research paper recommender. You can tell it which papers you've already read and it will recommend papers that you should read next? He's actually now working with data from the ACM digital library to see what types of recommenders we can build that would help you discover that an article just published is something you should know about. ... UBIQUITY: I assume that you see this as a growing field -- or is there a natural limit on how much work will be done in this? KONSTAN: I think that the field broadens so that it can grow. ... The people who are working in this area come from very different backgrounds. Some come from human/computer interaction, some come from artificial intelligence and machine learning, some of them are coming out of business schools and marketing and economics and psychology, not to mention other parts of computer science, data mining and different areas. As you bring all those different people together its not just that they're solving this problem better but they're solving related problems and broader problems. ... UBIQUITY: ...Computer scientists don't always try to change people's social behavior. KONSTAN: My takeaway message for the computer scientists here is there are some very interesting opportunities to collaborate with people solving big problems in the world, whether you're interested in AIDS and medical problems, or the kind of work that Negroponte was talking about with the hundred dollar computers for the developing world, or dozens of other things. There are a lot of opportunities there where you can make a difference." March 24, 2005: Hi-tech support helps Mt. Everest climber. Press release from British Information Services / available from Eureka Alert / also available from EverestNews.com (3/05). "Dr Milne, a leading software engineer and entrepreneur, hopes to climb Everest in May and so join the elite group of mountaineers to have climbed the highest peak on each of the seven continents. Dr Milne ... will be the first mountaineer to use the IM-PACs (intelligent messaging, planning and collaboration) system. The technology, developed at the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute in the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, has been designed to provide computer support to people and teams performing a range of tasks -- not just expedition teams operating in extreme conditions, but also key personnel involved in planning and rescue services responding rapidly to emergencies. IM-PACs' foundations in artificial intelligence planning technologies supply a framework that encourages a methodological approach to any task and allows users to transmit and respond to information in ways that can adapt to the circumstances the expedition team finds itself in. ... Professor Austin Tate, Technical Director of AIAI, said: 'Any attempt on Everest requires a lot of coordination and planning before, during and after the expedition. This makes such 'extreme' expeditions good examples of the kind of thing we wish to support with IM-PACs and AI planning technology. ... '" March 24, 2005: UCSC adds new track for computer science majors - Game design. By Jondi Gumz. Santa Cruz Sentinel. "If you thought computer games were just a hobby, think again. Next fall, UC Santa Cruz will offer a track in game design for computer science majors, preparing graduates for jobs in a $7-billion industry. 'By the end of their four years, they will create a computer game,' said Ira Pohl, UCSC’s chairman of computer science. ... Senior Jeremy Hayes is part of a team creating a role-playing game involving the crew of a rocket ship. Designing such a game requires knowledge of 'distributed systems' so more than one person can play, Pohl said, adding that artificial intelligence comes into the picture when characters learn how to deal with new situations." March 24, 2005: If it only had a brain. By Dean Takahashi. Mercury News. "For the past several years, [Jeff] Hawkins has funded the Redwood Neuroscience Institute in Menlo Park, where 10 researchers are studying the brain. Hawkins notes that the brain takes about 100 steps to recognize something, like a face or a painting. 'With a computer, it takes hundreds of millions of steps, and even then it can't do the job at all,' he says. Artificial intelligence researchers long have known this, but they have yet to match the elegance of the brain's 30 billion cells in efforts to create 'neural networks' and other kinds of intelligent machines. Hawkins studied those efforts and concluded that they failed because they didn't start with a good understanding of how the brain works. So Hawkins wrote 'On Intelligence,' a book published last October that advances his theory on how the brain works. ... 'I started wondering if it would be possible to create intelligent machines with a brain-like memory system,' Hawkins says. 'And the answer is yes, you can.'" March 24, 2005: A New Company to Focus on Artificial Intelligence. By John Markoff. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky ... plan to announce the creation of Numenta, a technology development firm that will conduct research in an effort to extend Mr. Hawkins's theories. ... Artificial intelligence, which first attracted computer scientists in the 1960's, was commercialized in the 1970's and 1980's in products like software that mimicked the thought process of a human expert in a particular field. But the initial excitement about machines that could see, hear and reason gave way to disappointment in the mid-1980's, when artificial intelligence technology became widely viewed as a failure in the real world. In recent years, vision and listening systems have made steady progress, and Mr. Hawkins said that while he was uncomfortable with the term artificial intelligence, he believed that a renaissance in intelligent systems was possible. He said that he believed there would soon be a new wave of software based on new theoretical understanding of the brain's operations. 'Once you know how the brain works, you can describe it with math,' he said." March 23, 2005: Profs study robotic soldiers of the future - Engineering School takes part in military research on behavioral tendencies of robots. By Ko Im. dailypennsylvanian.com. "As military technology continues to improve, more and more robots are being used for surveillance and search and rescue missions. This summer, computer scientists, biologists and engineers from Penn and other schools around the country will collaborate to study a relatively new technology known as biology-inspired swarming behavior in robots. Under the Defense Department's Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative program, the University's General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception Laboratory will receive $5 million from the federal government over the next five years. With Vijay Kumar, director of the GRASP Lab, as principal investigator, the Scalable Swarms of Autonomous Robots and Sensors project will study group coordination of small vehicles. ... 'We're not trying to mimic biology, but understand whether its principals can be formalized and manipulated,' [George] Pappas said." March 23, 2005: Robots Take Center Stage at World's Fair. By Audrey McAvoy. Associated Press / available from NYNewsday.com. "The prevalence of robots at the fair reflects how sincerely developers believe they will soon make inroads into daily lives. 'Until now, robots were used at factories, in assembly lines to make cars or semiconductors,' said Tetsuya Yamamoto, who as a manager at the government-funded NEDO research institute is responsible for bringing many of the robots to the exposition. 'In the future, they will be used in homes, offices, hospitals and amusement parks.' Japan is home to half of the world's 800,000 industrial robots. ... Not all of the expo's robots are humanoid. The SuiPPi ground sweeper robots from Matsushita Electric Works Ltd. look like steel boxes mounted on circular brooms, but they are intelligent enough to detect and avoid obstacles while they clean. ... NEDO, which stands for New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, estimates Japan's market for service oriented robots like these will mushroom from to $17 billion in five years from nothing now, Yamamoto said." March 23 / 30, 2005: Common sense boosts speech software. By Eric Smalley. Technology Research News. "Speech recognition software matches strings of phonemes -- the sounds that make up words -- to words in a vocabulary database. The software finds close matches and presents the best one. The software does not understand word meaning, however. This makes it difficult to distinguish among words that sound the same or similar. The Open Mind Common Sense Project database contains more than 700,000 facts that MIT Media Lab researchers have been collecting from the public since the fall of 2000. These are based on common sense like the knowledge that a dog is a type of pet rather than the knowledge that a dog is a type of mammal. The researchers used the phrase database to reorder the close matches returned by speech recognition software." March 23 / 30, 2005: Tool turns English to code. By Kimberly Patch, Technology Research News. "Writing software has been relatively difficult since people began programming computers in the mid-1900s. Although programming a computer is eminently useful -- it gives you fine control of a powerful tool -- it requires learning a programming language. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are aiming to remove this requirement. They have taken a step toward that goal with a language-to-code visualizer dubbed Metafor. The visualizer uses natural language instructions to sketch the outlines of a program. It can be used as a programming learning tool and to provide rough drafts of programming projects, and could lead to more complete programming-by-natural-language methods. ... While the logic of the researchers' interpreter tackles only about 20 percent of the problem of full natural language programming, it achieves about 80 percent of the perceived rewards, said [Hugo] Liu." March 23, 2005: New BITS for Old - Researchers working on next generation quantum computers. Editorial. The Times of India. "[S]ince the early 1980s, cybernetic scientists have been toying with the next logical step of building a new generation of machines called quantum computers. ... Earlier this month, a major glitch concerning the reliability of such computers was finally overcome, according to the journal Nature. This means that within most of our lifetimes we might witness the advent of computers whose processing power could be a staggering billion times faster than today's fastest supercomputers. ... Ultimately, if quantum computers are able to model every known process, they should be capable of simulating conscious rational thought also. They may hold the key to achieving true artificial intelligence." March 22, 2005: IBM computing algorithm thinks like an animal. By Michael Kanellos. CNET News.com. "IBM has devised a way to let computers think like vertebrates. Charles Peck and James Kozloski of IBM's Biometaphorical Computing team say they have created a mathematical model that mimics the behavior of neocortal minicolumns, thin strands of tissue that aggregate impulses from neurons. Further research could one day lead to robots that can 'see' like humans and/or make appropriate decisions when bombarded with sensory information. ... Over the past two years, researchers have increasingly looked toward nature as a model to emulate." March 22, 2005: Automated web-crawler harvests resume info. By Celeste Biever. NewScientist.com news service. "A new search engine focused on people can automatically identify online information on individuals and weave it into detailed summaries. Just like Google and Yahoo, ZoomInfo crawls and indexes the web. But instead of serving up the pages in response to a query, it attempts to identify and extract specific information on people. ... InfoZoom deploys algorithms that pick out verbs and proper nouns to home in on names, [Michel Décary] says. ... Privacy experts have criticised the technology for aggregating information about people without their consent. But Décary says that the information collected only relates to employment and education and is freely available online to a determined searcher anyway." March 22, 2005: Steamboy Rages Against Machines. By Jason Silverman. Wired News. "London in 1866 might seem a strange time and place for a Katsuhiro Otomo film. In 1988, this legend of manga and anime set a new standard for futuristic cinema with his Akira, a post-apocalyptic tale set in Tokyo in 2019. If Akira refined our notions of science fiction, Otomo's new film, Steamboy, expands them. Jumping back 140 years, Steamboy is a kind of sci-fi creation myth, imagining the moment when humans first came face to face with machinery's fearsome power. On one level, Otomo's film is the story of a boy in Victorian England who wants to be an inventor. But the central concern of Steamboy is the uses and misuses of science." March 21, 2005: Hawkins start-up takes brainy challenge. By Michael Kanellos. CNET News.com. "Jeff Hawkins is trying to monetize the brain. Hawkins, who created the Palm handheld, is forming a company that will specialize in systems able to recognize patterns, make predictions about familiar phenomena and in general function like human gray matter. An early software application he has helped create can recognize drawings, a challenge that has bedeviled scientists to date. ... Pattern recognition is based, in part, on probabilistic techniques, which have gained popularity in recent years among search engine specialists. Although probability was largely scoffed at 15 years ago, it is now widely considered the most promising solution for artificial intelligence." March 21, 2005: Robots
set to take over Wilkes. By Joe DeAngelis. The Beacon (registration
req'd.). "Although still in its infant stages, the robotics club
commenced at Wilkes University with its first meeting on Tuesday, March
8. ... The club aims to teach students how to build, operate, maintain
and program autonomous robots, which are robots that can be operated without
human interference. 'Our club primarily will focus on mobile robots that
are autonomous,' said Matt Zukoski, an assistant professor of mathematics
and computer science and a co-advisor for the club. ... 'There's a growing
interest across the country in robotics, partly due to the war in Iraq,'
said Zukoski. Because of this, along with an increasing demand for robots
in manufacturing industries, there will be more careers available in robotics.
... Both Zukoski and Abu-Nabaa plan for the club to participate in national
competitions such as RoboCup.... Since it involves a lot of disciplines,
the club is open to all majors." March 21, 2005: Artificial
intelligence - Solving problems for the real world. By Billy Defrain.
Daily Nebraskan (Editor's note: This is the second part in an occasional
series in which the fantastic realms of science fiction are compared to
those of real world science fact.). "For a typical American, the
mention of artificial intelligence may conjure up nasty images of a robot
wielding a plasma rifle atop a pyramid of human skulls. Mention artificial
intelligence to Berthe Choueiry, though, and she thinks of problems. Choueiry,
an associate professor of computer science and engineering, conducts artificial
intelligence research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. And out of
the wide field of artificial intelligence, her research focuses on constraint
processing. This involves developing techniques to solve decision problems
and applying them to real world uses, Choueiry said. ... She works to
generate 'solutions that hopefully apply to real world problems like resource
allocation, airline times and natural language processing,' Choueiry said. ... Constraint propagation, which is Choueiry's speciality,
is just one method of reasoning for artificial intelligence. Constraint-based
reasoning is a deductive process in which the program looks at a group
of data by considering which responses are not acceptable. These unacceptable
responses are constraints.... Choueiry said one of the most difficult
aspects of constraint processing is the concept of combinatorial explosion."
March 21, 2005: Prepare
yourself for rise of the machines. By Kevin Hurley. The Scotsman."The
coming of a robot age, with mechanical helpers at our beck and call, moved
a step closer yesterday with news of a revolutionary British invention
that could soon change our lives. ... [E]ngineers are working on a device
capable of churning out a host of household items and gadgets, including
kitchenware, cameras and even small musical instruments. The invention,
named the 'self-replicating rapid prototyper' or 'RepRap', will one day
even reproduce itself by fabricating its own component parts. Scientists
behind the invention believe this capability will mean the machine will
cost a few hundred pounds or less within years. Dr Adrian Bowyer, who
is leading the project at the University of Bath's Centre for Biomimetrics,
hopes initially to use the computer controlled machines, which mass-produce
components for industry, such as vehicle parts, to make parts for the
RepRap. ... The RepRap invention will effectively be a form of Universal
Constructor - the theoretical self-replicating machine first proposed
by mathematician John von Neumann in the 1950s. Bath University engineers
have already built a simple demonstration robot." March 21, 2005: Are
We Ready for Robots? By Gregory Scoblete. Tech Central Station. "[A]s
robots make their way from the obscurity of the lab to the light of human
society, our minds, conditioned by years of sci-fi dystopias, sense danger.
We instinctively ask: are we on a collision course with our own creations?
... Much of the debate on the intersection of technology and politics
at the highest levels of government has focused on the impact of biotechnology.
There is, for instance, the President's Council on Bioethics that is formulating
policy guidelines in areas such as stem cell research, cloning and life
extension technology. Biotechnology naturally garners the most attention
because the science visibly intrudes onto some fundamental ethical terrain
regarding human life, its purpose and its protection. But research and
development into robots is prodding some of the same boundaries. ... As
advances in robot design continue, we'll be confronted with the same conundrum
we face in biotechnology: not how far can we go but how far should we
go? In this case, how much intelligence, creativity and most importantly,
independence, should we endow robots with? ... Where are the moral 'red
lines' -- if any -- that should not be crossed? ... The more troubling
aspects, for religious conservatives, are the ramifications of artificial
intelligence, which dovetails with robotics. ... If in their quest for
more advanced robots, scientists succeed in untangling some of the mysteries
of consciousness -- if they deduce that intelligence, creativity, and
emotion are simply a matter of chemicals and electricity and not a 'divine
spark' -- how will that influence our understanding of the uniqueness
and supremacy of human consciousness? ... I don't know the answers to
these questions. I do know that they need asking now, in the infancy of
robotics. ..." March 20, 2005: Q&A
with Mark Dean - director of IBM's Almaden Research Center spoke about
his research, his work on the original IBM personal computer and promoting
African-Americans' interest in science. By Therese Poletti. The Mercury
News. "Q What kind of research is IBM Almaden working
on right now that excites you? A We are starting down
the path of thinking about things like recording my day. ... The key is
not the recording of the information, but the key is being able to have
a vast store of this, where I can go back and reference it, and use it
for personal improvement on how I work, or just for reference. ... You
want software that automatically tags and creates what we call meta data
-- data that says what this data is -- so I can go back and find it. ...
Q You are a rare African-American very high up in the
engineering ranks in technology. Do you go out to try and get more blacks
interested in science? A It's a big part of my time,
spare and otherwise. IBM has a tremendous amount of effort in promoting
and recruiting minorities in engineering and the sciences. We believe
that the industry needs to mimic society. We need to mix, we need to match
the mix that exists in society, or we won't be able to produce products
that get to all of our constituency. We have a heavy push. I'm so serious
that I'm looking for every minority Ph.D. graduate that is coming out
of school, from computer science, electrical engineering, chemistry, physics,
and maybe a few others. But I need to find every under-represented minority.
We have blacks, Hispanics, American Indians. I want to hire every one
of them. The good and the bad is that it's possible because there aren't
that many. ..." March 20, 2005: Computers
gain power, but it's not what you think - Performing complex tasks
at lightning speed is the machine's greatest strength; thinking, intelligence
still in our heads. By Jon Van. Chicago Tribune. "[Donald] McLellan
uses software called Watson, developed at Northwestern University and
marketed by Chicago's Intellext Inc., which is part of a new wave of programs
that provide computers with something akin to human intelligence. But
these programs do not think for their users. Rather, after decades of
trying to create machines that can think, researchers now just want to
make computers that are less stupid. The results are impressive. ... Computers
have long been likened to human brains, sparking fears and hopes that
someday a collection of silicon and wires would think like a person. But
even today's most powerful units are not smart enough to tie a shoelace
or do anything most human 4-year-olds accomplish thoughtlessly. Even so,
escalating computing power enables machines to recognize patterns and
operate in ways that seem eerily intelligent. ... Northwestern professor
Kristian Hammond, a co-founder of Intellext, was active in the artificial
intelligence branch of computer science for years at Yale University and
the University of Chicago before joining Northwestern. He no longer embraces
the notion of intelligence commonly shared by artificial intelligence
researchers. 'That model is that people have a clear, crisp idea of what
they're thinking,' Hammond said. 'Our model is that there's never a clear
idea; often it's just a collection of ideas in a context. You change the
context and you change the intelligence.' A similar philosophy is at work
at NICE Systems Inc., a Rutherford, N.J., firm that records call center
conversations to monitor for quality. Its software can determine when
a caller becomes emotional and can recognize specific words." March
20, 2005: 'Dark
Hero of the Information Age' - The Original Computer Geek. By Clive
Thompson. The New York Times Sunday Book Review (registration req'd.).
"To be a truly famous scientist, you need to have a hit single. Einstein
had E = mc2. ... But there's another kind of scientist who never breaks
through, usually because while his discovery is revolutionary it's also
maddeningly hard to summarize in a simple sentence or two. He never produces
a catchy hit single. He's more like a back-room influencer: his work inspires
dozens of other innovators who absorb the idea, produce more easily comprehensible
innovations and become more famous than their mentor could have dreamed.
Find an influencer, and you'll find a deeply bitter man. Norbert Wiener
-- the inventor of 'cybernetics' -- is precisely this type of scientist.
Odds are that you are only dimly aware of cybernetics, if at all. ...
Cybernetics is the science of feedback -- how information can help self-regulate
a system. ... Wiener created the idea that scientists could measure information
in a system and tweak it for optimal efficiency. The idea resonated in
every field. The anthropologist Margaret Mead began studying cultural
taboos as flows of self-regulating information inside a society. Wiener
used his feedback theory to create an antiaircraft gun that tracked a
plane in the air as if it were alive. ... Like Einstein, he issued dark
social warnings about the misuse of science and technology, including
his own. In his two most popular books -- 'Cybernetics' and 'The Human
Use of Human Beings' -- Wiener warned that mass media were concentrated
in too few hands, and were losing their power as a feedback device for
society. Appalled by the atom bomb, he defiantly refused to accept any
government money for research." March 18, 2005: Robots
By Land, Sea, Air. Based on MIT release. Astrobiology Magazine. "There's
still a long way to go before today's robots evolve into practical, everyday
technologies, but even now, autonomous robotic vehicles are exploring
uncharted or hazardous places, assisting troops in combat and performing
household tasks. ... 'In 20 years, we've gone from robots that can hardly
maneuver around objects to ones that can navigate in unstructured environments,'
said Brooks, director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory (CSAIL). He also pointed to the many applications for labor-saving
robots, from autonomous lawnmowers to mobile 'assistants' for the elderly.
... Professor Chryssostomos Chryssostomidis, director of the MIT Autonomous
Underwater Vehicles Laboratory (AUV Lab), envisions 'robots filling the
vast void of oceans, roaming around, observing, communicating, and reporting
back.' ... Eric Feron and his research group in the Laboratory for Information
and Decision Systems are working on several projects that may lead to
more airborne robots. Those projects include intelligent aircraft, communication
among multiple air vehicles, and automated takeoff and landing." March 17, 2005: Getting Girls to Excel - GEMS conference provides ways to encourage girls to take math and science courses. By Mirza Kurspahi. Reston Connection - Connection Newspapers. " The enrollment in computer science classes and programs in Fairfax County Public Schools between 1997 and 2003 was 76 percent boys, 24 percent girls. In 1984, women constituted 37 percent of those who received computer science degrees from universities and colleges, while today the percentage is down to 27. Dogwood Elementary School, in cooperation with Lockheed Martin, its corporate sponsor, and the American Association of University Women (AAUW) sponsored a conference for fifth- and sixth-grade girls to encourage them to take math and science classes. Girls Excelling in Math and Science (GEMS) started in 1991 through the AAUW. ... The conference, held on Saturday, March 12, hosted 27 hands-on workshops for the fifth- and sixth-grade girls. They were taught by professional women in fields of math and science, including employees of NASA and Lockheed Martin, among others. ... Elizabeth Vandenburg, the co-presenter of the workshop and the co-director of AAUW's Tech Savvy Girls Project, said it is important to show the girls the math and science jobs are not boring. 'You don't just sit behind computers the whole day -- you work on teams,' she said. ... Vandenburg's co-presenter, Laura Jones, urged the parents to change their daughters' outlook on computer scientists." March 17, 2005: Complex
instincts. The Engineer Online. "Robots already play a vital
role in defence and security, space exploration and on the production
line. They are also becoming increasingly important for entertainment
applications and as human companions. But their usefulness doesn't end
there. According to Dr. Tony Prescott of the Department of Psychology
at Sheffield University, robots can also play an important role in the
search for answers to one of the most fundamental mysteries of life: The
workings of the vertebrate brain. 'Robots are a kind of physical model,'
explains Dr. Prescott. 'We are simulating and building robots as a tool
to gain a better understanding of what the brain is doing and how it is
operating.' ... By working to develop a robust control system for these
multitasking robots, Dr. Prescott and his Sheffield-based colleagues -
neuroscientist Professor Peter Redgrave, computational modellers Dr. Kevin
Gurney and Dr Mark Humphries - make up one of the few groups internationally
whose activities straddle neurobiological research, computational modelling
and robot modelling. ... The group are also drawing inspiration for their
work from the pioneering studies of artificial neural networks carried
out in 1969 by Warren McCulloch at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
a neuroscientist who was also interested in reverse engineering the brain
to understand how it operates. ... [T]he Group's work with robots is providing
useful insights for applications such as computer games and the development
of intelligent agents...." March 16, 2005: Robotic
rover detects life in the driest desert. By David L Chandler. NewScientist.com
news service. "Researchers have proven that a robotic rover can be
used to detect living organisms, even in a desert with barely any to find.
The team led by Nathalie Cabrol of NASA's Ames Research Center is planning
an even more ambitious, more automated attempt later in 2005. The ultimate
goal is to develop a system that can be used to hunt for signs of life
on Mars." March 16, 2005: New
face of mining. By Kristy Dorsey. The Herald. "ITI Life Sciences
is backing the launch of a £5.3m research and development programme that
will spend the next three years creating a software system that specialises
in digging out relevant information from the large and growing body of
scientific data available from journals, online systems, databases and
so forth. This process, known as text mining, is expected to lead to quicker
and less expensive discovery and development of new drugs. ... Cognia,
which specialises in the curation of biomedical data, will work along
with the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics to create a new
software platform capable of extracting specific data relevant to a particular
project. It will do this using natural language processing techniques
developed within the university. The market for text mining in life sciences
is currently worth between £5m and £10m annually, but is expected to grow
to more than £200m by 2014." March 16, 2005: Researchers
Able to Predict Death Penalty Outcomes. Newswise. "Following
a Supreme Court decision prohibiting the execution of minors which could
have ramifications for the future of the death penalty, researchers at
Loyola University New Orleans have found further evidence questioning
the fairness of the capital punishment process. The researchers have developed,
trained and tested an artificial neural network that is more than 90 percent
accurate at predicting whether a convicted capital offender will be executed
or not." March 16, 2005: Hitachi
unveils 'fastest robot'- Hitachi's Emiew, the fastest humanoid robot.
BBC News. "Hitachi said the 1.3m (4.2ft) Emiew was the world's quickest-moving
robot yet at 6km/h (3.7 miles per hour). ... Explaining why Hitachi's
Emiew used wheels instead of feet, Toshihiko Horiuchi, from Hitachi's
Mechanical Engineering Research Laboratory, said: 'We aimed to create
a robot that could live and co-exist with people. We want to make the
robots useful for people ... If the robots moved slower than people, users
would be frustrated.' ... Hitachi said Pal and Chum, which have a vocabulary
of about 100 words, could be 'trained' for practical office and factory
use in as little as five to six years. ... By 2007, it is predicted that
there will be almost 2.5 million 'entertainment and leisure' robots in
homes, compared to about 137,000 currently, according to the United Nations
(UN)." March 15, 2005: Sentient
machines will raise human questions. Opinion by Tyson Durst. The Gateway
(Volume XCIV, Issue 39). "To make this assumption and rule out the
possibility that sentient machines will ever be created would be foolish
and narrow-minded; so many of the technologies that we take for granted
were once thought impossible. The race to build machines that possess
consciousness is already underway -- one could argue that it's been underway
since people first imagined artificial life. But today's scientists are
looking at the data and theories that are available, re-examining the
logic and flaws of this information and thinking about how we, as humans,
think. For example, take the famous Turing test, proposed by Alan Turing
in 1950. ... Scientists who are serious about research and development
of true artificial intelligence, though, are very much interested in the
internal processes going on in a computer. An example would be the simple
action of walking.... For now, though, the days of computers that attain
consciousness are still far off, although far from impossible. Before
we will be able to finally build machines that think as we do, we will
first have to figure out just how we think. ... A new field of science
will likely be born -- 'artificial neuroscience' -- that will deal with
the application of human consciousness within the construct of a computer,
a 'ghost in the shell,' if you will." March 15, 2005: CMU
Robot finds life 'all by itself' - Practice run by device may lead
to Mars trip. By Byron Spice. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "A Carnegie
Mellon University rover called Zoe is the first robot to remotely detect
life, finding fluorescent signals from both visible lichens and microscopic
bacteria in Chile's barren Atacama Desert. The NASA-sponsored field test
last fall thus demonstrated that scientists can use robots to identify
life in harsh regions, a critical technology as automated exploration
on Mars shifts from a search for water to a search for life. 'The rover
found 'em all by itself,' said Alan Waggoner, director of CMU's Molecular
Biosensor and Imaging Center, which developed the robot's life-detection
instrument." March 14, 2005: This
net is child's play for elite high schoolers. By Carolyn Duffy Marsan.
Network World. "Meet the upperclassmen at Thomas Jefferson High School
for Science and Technology, the nation's premier technical high school,
which is affectionately known as TJ. The 30 students who hang out in TJ's
Computer Systems Lab are likely to be the next generation of computer
masterminds. ... 'In my opinion, it's the best public high school in the
nation,' says Marilee Jones, admissions director at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT), which accepts as many as 20 TJ students
each year. 'All their programs are strong . . . but they have such excellent,
excellent teachers there in computer science.' TJ's four-year computer
science program includes courses in artificial intelligence and supercomputer
applications. ... What's special about TJ's computer science program is
its hands-on approach." March 14, 2005: Sign
Language. By Tod Newcombe. Government Technology. "At Pennsylvania
State University, researchers are working on something similar, combining
GIS [Geographic Information Systems], natural language technology, cognitive
engineering and the relatively new field of gestural science to create
their version of the computer used by Cruise in Minority Report. The difference
is the technology will help governments better manage crises such as hurricanes,
terrorist attacks, disease outbreaks and forest fires. ... The solution
is called Dialogue Assisted Visual Environment for GeoInformation (DAVE_G).
'DAVE_G can recognize gestures in conjunction with dialog and interpret
the meaning,' [Michael] McNeese explained. ... The computer can interpret
the combination of voice and gesture commands, zoom in the area and act
on the next series of queries." March 14, 2005: Robotic
Bid to Answer Question. Aberdeen Evening Express & this is north
scotland. "A Top expert is taking his pet robot to Aberdeen to answer
the question that has long troubled science-fiction enthusiasts. ... Tom
[Sgouros] and Judy [the robot] use music, games and other interaction
to explore the concept of artificial intelligence. ... Professor Susan
Craw, Head of the School of Computing said, 'Tom Sgouros's witty play,
co-starring the charming robot Judy, is an imagination-stretcher that
delights while it exercises your mind. ... The show cleverly explores
deep and quirky philosophical questions of consciousness in relation to
Artificial Intelligence. The show will suit everyone.'" March 14, 2005: History
Is Going, Going, Gone - We risk losing the thrill of viewing and touching
the actual papers handled by geniuses. By Steven Levy. Newsweek / available
from MSNBC. "Almost 30 years ago I came to possess a little piece
of computer history. At the time, it seemed to me a fairly straightforward
handwritten letter acknowledging my request to terminate an apartment
lease, with instructions on how I could recover my security deposit. What
I did not know then was that my landlord, a fellow with the unforgettable
name of J. Presper Eckert, was a pioneer of the digital era, a co-inventor
of one of the first operational electronic computers. The idea that this
note might qualify as a historical artifact dawned on me a couple of weeks
ago as I examined the 254 lots in the 'History of Cyberspace' collection
auctioned at Christie's on Feb. 23." PR Sampler - some recent releases:
March 13, 2005: Q&A with CEO of SpikeSource. Kim Polese, chief executive of SpikeSource, spoke recently with staff writer Matt Marshall. The Mercury News. "Q: What would you say to high school girls and students? A: I'd say this stuff is fun, and that you can't have a more exciting career than in the technology industry. It's dynamic, it's changing all the time, you're exploring new ground, you're creating new inventions...I got turned on to technology because I was fortunate enough to live in Berkeley and go the Lawrence Hall of Science when I was a little girl, and started playing on computers, and just got hooked, because it was a mystery. There was a program called Eliza, one of the early artificial intelligence programs, which was a psychiatrist, with whom you could have a conversation online. At a certain point she would screw up and go into an infinite loop. I loved making her do that, and trying to figure out what's behind this. That was my first exposure to computers."
>>> Careers
in AI (@ Resources for Students), Chatbots (@ Natural Language Processing), Interviews March 12, 2005 [issue date]: United we find. The Economist Technology Quarterly (pages 26 - 30; posted online March 10, 2005). "Collaborative filtering software is changing the way people choose music, books and other things, by helping them find things they like, but did not know about. ... But while this might sound like a job for an internet search engine, keyword-based search engines (such as Google) have a fundamental constraint: they can only help you find something if you already have an idea of what it is. Two people's idea of 'good music' may differ substantially, but Google would return the same results to both of them. To find things you might like, but are not already familiar with, requires a different technology, known as 'collaborative filtering'. This increasingly pervasive technology looks for patterns in people's likes and dislikes, and uses those patterns to help people find things they did not know they were looking for. Computer scientists term this task, in a welcome respite from jargon, 'find good things'. Collaborative filtering also has the power to do the converse, 'keep bad things away', for instance by filtering unsolicited commercial e-mail messages, or spam. ... Dave Goldberg and his colleagues at Xerox PARC, who also coined the term 'collaborative filtering'.... Where the user of a search engine is on a solitary quest, the user of a collaborative-filtering system is part of a crowd." March 12, 2005 [issue date]: Humanoids on the march. The Economist Technology Quarterly (pages 3 - 4; posted online March 10, 2005). "First came Asimo, Honda's childlike robot, which was introduced to the world in 2000. Sony responded with QRIO (pronounced curio) in 2003. Now a competition has broken out between Japan's industrial firms to see which of them can produce the most advanced humanoid robot -- and South Korean firms are getting involved, too. … Despite their sudden proliferation, however, humanoids are still a mechanical minority. Most of the world's robots are faceless, footless and mute. They are bolted to the floors of factories, stamping out car parts or welding pieces of metal, machines making more machines. According to the United Nations, business orders for industrial robots jumped 18% in the first half of 2004. They may soon be outnumbered by domestic robots, such as self-navigating vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers and window washers, which are selling fast. But neither industrial nor domestic robots are humanoid. ... [W]hile the humanoid form may not be perfect, there are some good reasons to emulate it. " March 12, 2005 [issue date]: AI am the law. The Economist Technology Quarterly (pages 34 - 46; posted online March 10, 2005). "Given the choice, who would you rather trust to safeguard your future: a bloodsucking lawyer or a cold, calculating computer? Granted, it's not much of a choice, since neither lawyers nor computers are renowned for their compassion. But it is a choice that you may well encounter in the not-too-distant future, as software based on 'artificial intelligence' (AI) starts to dispense legal advice. Instead of paying a lawyer by the hour, you will have the option of consulting intelligent legal services via the web. While this might sound outlandish, experts believe that the advent of smart software capable of giving good, solid legal advice could revolutionise the legal profession. ... What makes both these programs so smart is that they do more than just follow legal rules. Both tasks involve looking back through past cases and drawing inferences from them about how the courts are likely to view a new case. To do this, the programs use a combination of two common AI techniques: expert systems and machine learning. ... [S]mart software has the potential to make legal advice more readily available, unnecessary court battles less frequent, and rulings more consistent." March 12, 2005: Review
of Electronic
Brains by Mike Hally. Reviewed by Barry Fox. New Scientist Magazine
(subscription req'd.). "Alan Turing may have been the godfather of
the computer, but his instruction manual for an early computer built at
the University of Manchester, UK, was not a good legacy. According to
Mike Hally, Turing's 'help file' was so complicated and full of errors
that 'anyone without Turing's mathematical brain would struggle to follow
it'. Just like some modern manuals, in fact. Hally has travelled the world
recording interviews with people who knew first-hand how the first electronic
computers were built in the 1940s and 1950s." March 11, 2005: Why
Pay to be an Identity Thief? Experimental Software Makes It Free.
By Steven Cherry. IEEE Spectrum Online. "The U.S. database industry
is under a legal microscope following the pilfering of information that
could allow thieves to steal the identities of hundreds of thousands of
people. ... But why should an identity thief bother with an expensive
charade? Carnegie-Mellon University associate professor of computer science,
Latanya Sweeney, has found an even simpler way than paying a company in
the personal database industry, which critics say is underregulated. She's
found a way to extract all the data she wants for free from the World
Wide Web. For over a decade, Sweeney has been exploring the intersection
of technology and privacy. Her latest work builds on earlier Web-searching
tools that create software agents to extract names, address, birth dates,
and Social Security numbers from résumés posted online --
everything you need to apply for a new credit card in someone else's name.
Sweeney will report her findings at a symposium devoted to national security
sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and
held at Stanford Univeristy, in California, 21 - 23 March. ... Obviously,
if people are posting their Social Security numbers to the Web, and if
doing so leaves them highly vulnerable to identity theft, then they ought
to stop. Sweeney's work addressed that issue. The Identity Angel project,
which she launched earlier this year, looks for e-mail addresses in those
résumés, and sends individuals automated notices that their
identity information was found online. She says a follow-up study showed
that more than 90 percent of the people subsequently removed the information
from the Web." March 11, 2005: Where
do i begin? By Stephen Pincock. The Financial Times. "Cyborgs
are all around us. ... The dictionary definition of a cyborg is 'an integrated
man-machine system'. They turn up in movies as flesh and metal characters
such as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, Darth Vader from Star
Wars or, for those of an older vintage, Steve Austin, the Six Million
Dollar Man. The term emerged in the 1960s, coined by researchers interested
in how humans could adapt to space travel. ... Instead, I want to focus
on a definition of cyborg that relates to our use of technology in a more
general way. It is a definition that has sprung from a scientific view
of the way our mind works and how its functions extend beyond our brains.
... The man I most wanted to contact was a philosopher of cognitive science,
Andy Clark, professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh,
and a leading proponent of the idea of the extended mind. Two years ago,
Clark published a book entitled Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies
and the Future of Human Intelligence, which explored the way that human
minds interact with technology - from the pencil to web-enabled mobile
phones. ... Clark argues that there is little significant conceptual difference
between a highly accessible computer outside our body, and one implanted
into our body. ... He urges us to give up the idea that the only things
that matter about our minds are what goes on inside 'the ancient fortress
of skin and skull'. Instead, technologies such as the internet should
be seen as integral parts of the systems that constitute human intelligence." March 11, 2005: Droid
rage - Society's fascination with robots pops up in movies, TV and
elsewhere. By James Hebert. The Union-Tribune & SignOnSanDiego.com.
"As a society, we may not know exactly what we think about robots.
But if the recent wave of robot-related creative works is any indication,
we've been thinking about them plenty. ... Fear and fascination about
our creations and their consequences date back way before the time of
Frankenstein. What's maybe different now is that science is so much closer
to realizing the prospect of artificial intelligence. Just in recent weeks,
NASA scientists working on Mars projects have unveiled robots that can
rappel down cliffs, take pictures, slip through cracks and detect danger.
Even in our daily lives, as TiVos choose shows for their owners and laptops
and iPods act as auxiliary brains for people on the move, the lines between
humans and their tech tools seem to be getting blurred. 'I think there's
a real preoccupation now with the borders of the human,' says Priscilla
Wald, an English professor at Duke University who studies pop-culture
depictions of science. ... In films such as 'Bicentennial Man' and Steven
Spielberg's 'A.I.,' the robots 'all want to become human,' Wald notes.
'I think that's our fantasy -- that there is something really special
about being human, and everything wants to become human.' On the flip
side, she argues, robots make us uncomfortable by suggesting 'how mechanistic
we actually are. A lot of the work in artificial intelligence is making
that really clear.'" March 11, 2005: Humanoids
With Attitude - Japan Embraces New Generation of Robots. By Anthony
Faiola, with Akiko Yamamoto. Washington Post (registration req'd.) / also
available from The Detroit News (Japan
embraces new generation of robots; March 12, 2005) and from The Sydney
Morning Herald (We,
robot: the future is here; March 14, 2005). "'I almost feel like
she's a real person,' said Kobayashi, an associate professor at the Tokyo
University of Science and [Saya,the cyber-receptionist's] inventor. Having
worked at the university for almost two years now, she's an old hand at
her job. 'She has a temper . . . and she sometimes makes mistakes, especially
when she has low energy,' the professor said. Saya's wrath is the latest
sign of the rise of the robot. Analysts say Japan is leading the world
in rolling out a new generation of consumer robots. Some scientists are
calling the wave a technological force poised to change human lifestyles
more radically than the advent of the computer or the cell phone. ...
In the quest for artificial intelligence, the United States is perhaps
just as advanced as Japan. But analysts stress that the focus in the United
States has been largely on military applications. By contrast, the Japanese
government, academic institutions and major corporations are investing
billions of dollars on consumer robots aimed at altering everyday life,
leading to an earlier dawn of what many here call the 'age of the robot.'
But the robotic rush in Japan is also being driven by unique societal
needs. ... It is perhaps no surprise that robots would find their first
major foothold in Japan. ... 'In Western countries, humanoid robots are
still not very accepted, but they are in Japan,' said Norihiro Hagita,
director of the ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories
in Keihanna Science City near Kyoto. 'One reason is religion. In Japanese
[Shinto] religion, we believe that all things have gods within them. But
in Western countries, most people believe in only one God. For us, however,
a robot can have an energy all its own.'" | |||