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August 31, 2005: New center unites computer science university research. By Nathan Paulson. Iowa State Daily Online. "Greater interdisciplinary exchange is the purpose of the recently established Center for Computational Intelligence, Learning and Discovery. ... Approximately 20 faculty members are affiliated with the center already, led by Dr. Vasant Honavar, director of the center and professor of computer science. The center brings together computer scientists, statisticians and scientists to create algorithms and software for data-driven discovery and decision making. Iowa State's is among only a few centers of this kind, [James] Bloedel said.The center is designed to be interdisciplinary and combine computer science with different areas of university study such as agriculture or biology, Bloedel said." August 31, 2005: Computer alert for drowning girl. BBC News. "A 10-year-old girl has been saved from drowning by a computer system designed to raise the alarm when swimmers get into difficulties. ... The £65,000 system, called Poseidon, detected her on the pool floor and sounded the alarm. A lifeguard pulled her out and she recovered in hospital. It is thought to be the first such rescue in the UK. ... Gwynedd County Council leisure officer Brian Evans said: 'We feel as though the system has saved this little girl's life. The pool at the time was very busy. The lifeguards were at full stretch. We can say the extra pair of eyes identified her.' He said the computer identified the girl as being in distress within 10 seconds of her slipping under the water." August 31, 2005: Data mining hits pay dirt. By Don Mooradian. Nashville City Paper. "Welcome to the Information Age. Now what are we going to do with all that info, an amount so vast few humans can make sense of it? Two Nashville companies [Digital Reasoning Systems and Acxiom’s Diversified Industries Group] are leading the way in new fields that have names such as 'data mining,' 'text mining' and 'knowledge discovery.' These fields generally fall under the category of 'artificial intelligence.' Software has long been able to sort and organize information, but a new generation of software is going where no bytes have gone before. These programs are pinpointing customers for direct mail advertisers and fighting the war on terrorism. And some day soon they will help fight crime and cure disease." August 31, 2005: Robot Care for Graying Japan. Red Herring. "Mitsubishi Heavy Industries will begin taking orders for Wakamaru, its meter-tall, bright yellow humanoid robot designed to provide care and companionship for the elderly. The battery-powered robot has been programmed to recharge itself when its batteries run low. Wakamaru navigates the household based on infrared and video sensors, responding to voice commands as well as visual signals. The robot can be programmed to remind its owner when it's time to take medicine. With its built-in mobile phone, Wakamaru will call security or emergency services if it recognizes that its master is in distress. ... Wakamaru's relatively advanced artificial intelligence represents a significant improvement...."
>>> Assisitive Technologies, Robots, Vision, Smart Houses & Household Appliances, Speech, Applications, Science Fiction, Ethical & Social Implications August 30, 2005: How high-tech is coming to the rescue - Scientists bring gadgets to post-Katrina disaster scene. By Alan Boyle. MSNBC.com. "In Hurricane Katrina's wake, researchers are bringing cutting-edge technologies to the disaster area, just as they did after catastrophes ranging from the 9/11 terror attacks to last year's Asian tsunami. ... The researchers who operate under the aegis of the search-and-rescue institute emphasize that they're not trying to take the place of emergency-response workers. 'It's not us saving people. It's us getting the technology to the people who will use it to save people,' explained Robin Murphy, a professor at the University of South Florida who directs the Institute for Safety Security Rescue Technology. 'I always hate it when I hear people saying that we think we're rescuers. We're not. We're scientists. That's our role.' Murphy and her USF team are heading to New Orleans to link up with Louisiana State University's Fire Emergency Training Institute and put their tools to the test. The tool kit sounds like a laundry list for 21st-century tech: Pint-size robots that can move through crevices in a collapsed building to bring water, light and two-way communications to trapped survivors. Murphy's team tested such devices in the wreckage of New York's World Trade Center after the terror attacks.... " August 30, 2005: U of A bot takes on poker champ. By Max Maudie. edmontonsun.com. "There's no blood, sweat or tears, but Edmonton's poker champ-in-waiting is training like a madman, and his trainer hopes to one day see him wearing the crown. 'I want to see him (a champ) squirm,' said Jonathan Schaeffer, heading up the University of Alberta's Games Research Group. For 14 years, artificial intelligence (AI) researchers at the university have been working on various versions of computer programs that play problem-solving games, such as poker. 'This is the mecca of research into AI,' Schaeffer said." August 30, 2005: The Claim - Violent Video Games Make Young People Aggressive. By Anahad O'Connor. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "This month, the American Psychological Association called for a reduction of violence in all video games, saying the evidence from 20 years of research on the subject was clear. They based their conclusion largely on the work of Kevin M. Kieffer, a psychologist at St. Leo University near Tampa, Fla., who prepared an analysis of dozens of relevant studies. He found that, in general, children exposed to virtual bloodshed showed greater 'short-term' increases in hostility toward peers and authority figures than those exposed to more benign games. ... But a separate study, also published this month, concluded that violent video games have no 'long-term,' or permanent, effects on aggressive behavior. The study, by a researcher at the University of Illinois, was among the first of its kind to follow two groups of people for a month, some randomly assigned to play violent video games and some not. The Bottom Line: ...." August 29, 2005: Penn State IST researchers to enhance search engine. Penn State Live. "The National Science Foundation has awarded a $1.2-million grant to researchers in the Penn State School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) and the University of Kansas to enhance and improve the CiteSeer academic search engine which receives more than 1 million hits a day and is heavily indexed by Google and Yahoo!. Since its launch in 1997, CiteSeer has provided the public with access to more than 700,000 documents in computer and information sciences."
>>> Reference Shelf, Resources August 29, 2005: Nintendogs Teach Us New Tricks. By Clive Thompson. Wired News. "If we love Nintendogs, it's not merely because they're so adorable. It's that they're so needy. The puppies are -- like many virtual life forms, from Tamigotchis to The Sims -- a rather helpless breed. ... Sherry Turkle -- the digital-age pundit and author of Life on the Screen -- has been researching the relationship between robots and people. She's discovered that the most popular robots are, unexpectedly, the ones that demand we take care of them. ... The thing is, this precisely inverts the normal logic of artificial intelligence. Back in the '70s, everyone assumed we'd eventually have super-smart robots as servants -- guarding our homes, managing our schedules and bringing us a beer. That never happened. Nobody really wanted robots like that, because robots like that are kind of scary. Nobody wants a Terminator hanging around the kitchen. ... You could say the same thing about the artificial intelligence in our games. ... Maybe sci-fi doomsayers have got it all wrong. Artificial intelligence won't be dominating us with its superhuman cognition and bloodless logic. It'll be peeing itself and demanding to be taken for a walk." August 28, 2005: Roberts v. The Future. By Jeffrey Rosen. The New York Times Magazine. "At [John G. Roberts Jr.'s] confirmation hearings, a central focus will be the nominee's views about the scope of Congress's power to regulate the economy and the environment. ... As important as these issues are, during the next decade or two there may be other, less familiar legal debates over the scope of rights involving private property -- in particular, the ability of corporations and entrepreneurs, through the use of copyright and patent law, to control a broad spectrum of intellectual property, from digital entertainment to genetic sequences. ... Efforts to patent the building blocks of life may not only raise hard issues about scientific freedom. They may also ultimately force American society, and perhaps the Supreme Court, to debate the moral and constitutional issues raised by efforts to patent human life itself. To explore those issues, some of which seem more like science fiction than others, I phoned James Boyle, a professor at Duke Law School.... [T]he task of defining human life might be so politically explosive and embarrassing that Congress might ultimately prefer to punt the controversy to the Supreme Court. 'Congress might well say you can't patent human life, but the question is, What's that?' said Boyle, who imagines a future constitutional case being brought on behalf of 'a high-IQ genetically engineered dolphin' or, perhaps more plausibly, a computer program for artificial intelligence that seems to perform human functions. Either the dolphin or the machine might assert a right 'not just to be free of patent rights, but to be free of any ownership rights at all,' as Boyle put it. And there is precious little in the existing categories of constitutional discourse that would prepare the justices to identify the point at which an organism with a genetic sequence or artificial brain similar to a human deserves constitutional rights." August 28, 2005: Predicting how you're going to shop online. By Tania Hershman. Israel21c. "'What we are dealing with is a model for Customer Lifetime Value,' says Amit Fisher, a researcher at IBM's Haifa Laboratories. 'Normally customer value is calculated by looking at the purchases up til now and assuming that that is what they will carry on doing. It is very simplistic. But you can't assume that what happened in the past is what will happen in the future.' Fisher decided to take algorithms from the field of data mining, operations research and artificial intelligence and combine them with economics in order to take a more complex view of predicting how human beings are likely to behave in the 'long term' - a phrase which to a site like Amazon.com may mean ten years, but to another website could mean one year." August 27, 2005: Fraudsters favour brandy and one-way tickets. By Rebecca Knight. Financial Times (Subscription req'd.). "How do you tell a credit card fraudster from a genuine customer? Surprisingly enough, there are a few tell tale signs. ... Using neural technology - or artificial intelligence, and algorithms derived from data pooled from hundreds of retailers - Retail Decisions has created software that enables companies to make an 'instantaneous response' to help them determine whether a transaction is valid or not. August 27, 2005: Play and learn. By David Stonehouse. The Sydney Morning Herald. "[Steven] Johnson went on to write a book that dares to suggest that video games are actually good for your kids. Recently released in Australia, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter contends that not only is gaming beneficial but so is popular television. ... Jane Healy, an educational psychologist in Colorado, is much more wary. Healy isn't against video games but she is concerned about overuse and an increasing reliance on computers in schools. The author of Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds, she argues that children have to be supervised properly both at home and at school to make sure they are, indeed, learning and don't fall into dangerous territory. ... Video games, aka computer simulations, are widely used at Cherrybrook Technology High School, in northern Sydney. Students use simulations to learn about everything from how a plane flies to the intricacies of artificial intelligence. ... James Laird, head of IT at the school, says learning through the computer is a natural fit for students today. 'There is an ease of learning and degree of comfort that they get out of it. Given that this is a tool in the environment that they live with these days, it is not something they have to think about - they just do it,' he says. ... The students are expected to study the theories and details behind what is unfolding on the screen. In the chess game they are expected to study the strategies of chess and deduce whether the computer is relying on textbook moves in its matches against human players or acting on its own. 'They are having a look at artificial intelligence: is the computer really thinking or is the computer responding using predefined strategies?' Laird says." August 26, 2005: AI - the smart way to go. By Paul Hyman. HollywoodReporter.com. "Artificial intelligence -- or 'AI' -- is the Rodney Dangerfield of video game design. It gets no respect when it's working great, as when it contributed to 'Halo 2' and 'Half-Life 2' becoming the hugely successful games that they are. But when game characters start walking into walls, everyone knows to blame the AI. According to John Funge, high-quality graphics may be what attracts a player to a game, but it's the AI and the gameplay that holds their attention. ... In a chat with Hollywood Reporter columnist Paul Hyman, Funge talks about why designers ought to think about AI when turning their IP into games, and how AI has the potential to become the new driving force behind video game innovation. ... THR: When people talk about the next generation of console games, they always have a laundry list of what's going to make them better than today's games: more intense graphics, better sound and music, more realistic action. But you don't hear much about AI. Is that because no one expects AI to improve in next-gen games? Funge: No, that's not true at all. It's just that, for whatever reason, AI hasn't really captured the public's imagination to the same extent as graphics. Partly because it's a harder thing to appreciate. The graphics are very obvious to the player. Interestingly enough, that is changing. Nowadays, it's difficult to see the difference between this year's game graphics and last year's, so you're getting into an area of diminishing returns. Which is why I think AI will start to become more and more important as a way to differentiate games." August 26, 2005: Squirrel helps with mobile calls. By Luke Alexander. BBC News. "There are few things more intrusive than a mobile phone ringtone. ... MIT research student Stefan Marti may have the answer: ditch your mobile phone, and get a squirrel. Specifically, an animatronic desktop squirrel which deals with your calls for you. The squirrel answers phone calls, works out if you are busy or asleep, evaluates how important the incoming call is and takes messages. When it wants to alert its owner to a call, it waves and moves about rather than making a sound. And, it is ridiculously cute. ... The key principle behind the Autonomous Interactive Intermediary (AII), or 'cellular squirrel', is that machines should display what psychologists call social or emotional intelligence. In other words, a computer should be able to communicate information in a way which is responsive to the social situations around it." August 25, 2005: Asian Pop - Robot Nation: Why Japan, and not America, is likely to be the world's first cyborg society. By Jeff Yang. SF Gate. "The contrast between the two most popular consumer robots in the world, America's Roomba and Japan's Aibo, tells you everything you need to know about the two cultures' respective feelings about thinking machines. Roomba is utilitarian.... There's arguably a reason behind iRobot's refusal to anthropomorphize Roomba. Deep in its heart, America finds the idea of technology with personalities to be ... spooky. After all, the notion of objects with minds of their own runs counter to deeply ingrained Judeo-Christian values -- creating devices that can move and think without human intervention veers a little too close to playing God. And what if we do manage to create machines that are smarter, stronger or more capable than humans? ... Sony's Aibo, on the other hand, is a pet, a companion, a life partner. ... Japan's robot love goes farther than respect for function, and deeper than mere pragmatism can explain. Shinto, Japan's homegrown religion, is an animist faith. The Japanese embrace of robots is a logical extension of ancient beliefs that all things, living and nonliving, organic and inorganic, can possess a transcendent spirit. In Japanese tradition, humanity has never been reserved for humans. Is it any wonder that Japan is welcoming the cyborg future with open arms? ... Exploring human reactions to humanoid robots is the real underlying objective behind the Repliee project. The goal of the Intelligent Robotics team, led by Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, is to better understand human social behavior in order to refine, and ultimately perfect, the interface between people and thinking machines." August 25, 2005: Changing gear. The self-driving car comes closer -- but difficulties remain. The Economist. "It is an old chestnut -- a car that drives itself -- but General Motors, the world's largest car manufacturer, has become the latest company to claim to be building one. The car uses updated technology combined with several existing innovations and, according to the manufacturer, could be in production by 2008. ... This advanced version of automatic cruise control works alongside a system that corrects the car when it drifts out of its lane. Almost two million accidents a year worldwide are thought to be caused by drivers inadvertently changing lanes, frequently caused by drowsiness. ... [D]espite achieving what General Motors says is a very high level of reliability during the development stage. Several obstacles stand in the way. For example, self-steering cars are currently illegal in most European countries. ... European governments have set a target of halving road deaths by 2010. General Motors hopes that improved technology can help meet that goal." August 25, 2005: Students get taste of future. By Scott Paradis. The Daily Press. "A local school board is investing into a department that a decade ago would have been labeled science fiction. The study of robotics is getting $150,000 from the District School Board Ontario North East this fall. The money has been used to purchase Lego Mindstorms robotics equipment, which comes with Legos for building the robots and computer software to program them. The remaining money is earmarked for training staff. ... Robotics will make up one fifth of the science curriculum for Grades 6 to 8. The goal is to have student's build sturdy robots and make them perform tasks with computer programing. 'There's no human interference allowed,' [Gene] Kent added. ... Linda Knight, director of education for the school board, said the decision to invest in robotics was an easy one. She said she believes that in the future, robotics will be full of job opportunities." August 25, 2005: Pupils learn through Myst game. By Jo Twist. BBC News. "I have entered an alternate world and it is a far cry from the inner city. I have just met Tim Rylands, a teacher who uses the best-selling PC game series ever, Myst, in the classroom. Tim won this year's Becta (British Educational Communications and Technology Agency) award for the best use of technology in the class. ... The difference between using a mainstream popular computer game and an edutainment title is that there is no 'learning goal' at the end. Tim sets his own. To him, the rich, multimedia, immersive games, such as Myst, have huge potential for getting creative. ... 'Myst games are peaceful and mind expanding rather than mind-numbing.' They encourage children to problem solve, and think creatively and, according to him, the games have a 'solid social structure'." August 25, 2005: A Doll That Can Recognize Voices, Identify Objects and Show Emotion. By By Michel Marriott. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "Judy Shackelford, who has been in the toy industry for more than 40 years, has seen a lot of dolls. But none, she says, like her latest creation, a marvel of digital technologies, including speech-recognition and memory chips, radio frequency tags and scanners, and facial robotics. She and her team have christened it Amazing Amanda. ... 'The speech-recognition chip running in Amazing Amanda acts not only as speech recognition, but also allows her to talk,' said Todd Mozer, chief executive of Sensory, a speech-technology company in Santa Clara, Calif., that developed the chip used in the doll. He noted that the technology could interpret a range of languages and dialects." August 23, 2005: Photo in the News - Robot House Sitter Debuts in Japan. By Ted Chamberlain. National Geographic News. August 23, 2005: Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science. By Cornelia Dean. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "At a recent scientific conference at City College of New York, a student in the audience rose to ask the panelists an unexpected question: 'Can you be a good scientist and believe in God?' ... 'It should not be a taboo subject, but frankly it often is in scientific circles,' said Francis S. Collins, who directs the National Human Genome Research Institute and who speaks freely about his Christian faith. ... Some scientists say simply that science and religion are two separate realms, 'nonoverlapping magisteria,' as the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould put it in his book 'Rocks of Ages' (Ballantine, 1999). In Dr. Gould's view, science speaks with authority in the realm of 'what the universe is made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory)' and religion holds sway over 'questions of ultimate meaning and moral value.' When the American Association for the Advancement of Science devoted a session to this idea of separation at its annual meeting this year, scores of scientists crowded into a room to hear it. Some of them said they were unsatisfied with the idea, because they believe scientists' moral values must inevitably affect their work, others because so much of science has so many ethical implications in the real world." August 23, 2005: Saffron Technology eyes new business. By Anne Krishnan. The Herald-Sun. "Saffron Technology's software helps a military contractor resupply battlefields and the U.S. government detect aliases and investigate terrorism. Now the 6-year-old company is on the verge of introducing its tools to help commercial customers find meaning in large amounts of information. 'We're the tool that really helps discover the links in how people, places and things are related,' co-founder and CEO Manny Aparicio said. 'We're reading everything, so the analyst doesn't have to.' ... The third product, SaffronSage, can make predictions based on past experiences. It predicts gas surges for an oil and gas well customer and does real-time prognostics for military vehicles. 'It's the way the brain works -- you learn about the world and from past experience you reason through the problem,' Aparicio said. 'This isn't old artificial intelligence. From past experience, it predicts future events.'" August 23, 2005: A Techie, Absolutely, and More. By Steve Lohr. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "For students like Ms. [Jamika] Burge, expanding their expertise beyond computer programming is crucial to future job security as advances in the Internet and low-cost computers make it easier to shift some technology jobs to nations with well-educated engineers and lower wages, like India and China. 'If you have only technical knowledge, you are vulnerable,' said Thomas W. Malone, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of 'The Future of Work' (Harvard Business School Press, 2004). 'But if you can combine business or scientific knowledge with technical savvy, there are a lot of opportunities. And it's a lot harder to move that kind of work offshore.' ... On campuses today, the newest technologists have to become renaissance geeks. They have to understand computing, but they also typically need deep knowledge of some other field, from biology to business, Wall Street to Hollywood. ... Many are going into medicine, law, media and arts as well as other scientific fields. ... Even as computer science students are being encouraged to take more courses outside their major, students in other disciplines are finding more often that they need to use, design and sometimes write computer programs. ... 'There isn't the buzz and excitement about computer science that there should be,' [Bill Gates] said. 'We're on the threshold of extraordinary advances in computing that will affect not only the sciences but also how we work and our culture. We need to get the brightest people working on those opportunities.'" August 22, 2005: CMU's Brad Myers (an email conversation). By Eric Smalley. Technology Research News. "TRN: Tell me about the trends in human-computer interaction. What are the pluses and minuses of these technologies as they exist today? What do you see as the most urgent needs in these areas? Myers: An important area is dealing with information overload. I personally get about 900 spam emails a day, plus about 100 real emails that I have to deal with. There is also all the web pages and newsgroups with interesting information I would like to keep up with. How can computers help with this? ... TRN: What is the RADAR project, and how is it different from the various other attempts at building a digital assistant worthy of the term? Myers: Radar is a large five-year research project in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. The overall goal is to develop a software-based 'cognitive personal assistant' that will help busy military commanders and managers to work more effectively, with less time wasted on routine tasks. I think that Radar is interesting because it is one of the first projects to involve significant collaboration between AI researchers focusing on making the system learn about the user, and HCI researchers focusing on how to make intelligent assistance useful and usable for real people doing real tasks. ... Another area that I think is going to take off is intelligent interfaces, where the system actively tries to be helpful and learns from the user. ... Much of today's spam email filtering is using techniques pioneered in AI labs." August 22, 2005: Stanford, Volkswagen team up to enter driverless-vehicle race. By Matt Nauman. The Seattle Times. "The federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency sponsors the event with a $2 million prize for a driverless vehicle that can travel up to 175 miles in the desert in 10 hours. ... Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford professor and artificial-intelligence expert heading the effort, sees autonomous driving as 'the beginning of a scientific revolution.' The goal is to reduce the more than 40,000 American deaths from car crashes each year." August 22, 2005: Appleton native dreams of running the show at Mission Control. Kathy Walsh Nufer's weekly education column. The Post-Crescent. "Ever since her days at Appleton’s Einstein Middle School, Kara Kranzusch has set her heart on a dream as big as the sky and as irresistible as the distant heavens. ... [I]t wasn't until seventh grade when she attended Space Academy in Huntsville, Ala., through the Appleton Area School District that she caught a major case of NASA fever. ... Every summer through high school, the 2001 Appleton North graduate went to an aerospace or engineering camp to prepare for her career. While in college, NASA accepted her for three co-op tours at Johnson. During the first, her group helped develop an artificial neural network, a type of artificial intelligence that will be incorporated into the science laboratory bound for Mars in 2009." August 22, 2005: University on trail of detective training. The Northern Echo and This is Wearside. "The first students have been enrolled on the University of Sunderland's BSc in forensic computing - dubbed CSI Sunderland. It teaches students the latest technologies being used to help catch criminals. Undergraduates will be taught how to use criminology, forensic psychology, chemistry, pharmacology and computing to help solve crimes. ... Students will use case studies and be challenged to use modern techniques, such as artificial intelligence, to analyse forensic scene-of-crime data. ... The degree is being run by Dr Giles Oatley, senior lecturer at the university's artificial intelligence lab, the Centre for Adaptive Systems. He said: 'The Home Office is emphasising the use of technology-based solutions in crime fighting. Forensic data analysis, artificial intelligence and high-quality programming abilities are the skills that criminal investigations of the future will demand, and this degree course will provide students with the skills necessary for a very interesting and enriching career.'" August 22, 2005: The New World of AI. Red Herring magazine preview. "Artificial intelligence (AI) may not have lived up to the visions of Sci-Fi geeks, but it has gone underground into a lot of day-to-day systems. Many people think of AI as a high-flying 1980s tech concept that crashed and burned back in the early 1990s after a good deal of hype. The fact is, AI technology has become pervasive in much of the software we use today."
>>> AI Overview, Applications, The AI Effect, History, Machine Learning, Cognitive Science, Vision, Natural Language Processing, Expert Systems, Interfaces, Representation August 21, 2005: Medicine & Machines - Robot makes history as surgical technology evolves. By David Cho. Palm Beach Daily News & Cox News Service. "Penelope is a robot, a machine that recently made medical history by becoming the first to act as an independent surgical aide during an operation. During a June procedure at New York-Presbyterian Hospital to remove a benign tumor from a patient's forearm, Penelope responded to voice commands from a surgeon, handing over clamps, forceps and other instruments with her magnetized mechanical arm. Watching with digital cameras, the robot retrieved the instruments when the surgeon placed them down. Inside her computer brain, artificial intelligence software kept track of the implements to ensure none were misplaced and made predictions about what tool the surgeon would ask for next. 'Penelope is just the first step,' said Dr. Michael Treat, a surgeon, physicist and lifelong robotics fan who founded the company that developed Penelope. ... The robot, named for the resourceful wife of Odysseus in Homer's epic poems, weighs about 60 pounds and has a lightweight arm made of carbon fiber mounted on a stainless steel frame." August 20, 2005: How bots can earn more than you - Software robots can already outperform people on the stock markets, and that is just the beginning. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist article preview (Issue 2513; subscription req'd.). "One morning this month, David Pardoe earned himself $4.7 million without lifting a finger. All the hard work was done by a robot. True, it was a robot without a body - a software robot, in fact - but almost a century after the word 'robot' was coined, the vision of automaton slaves is at last becoming reality. Software robots - also known as bots or software agents - can earn hard cash in the real world. They can even outperform people in some tasks, so it makes sense to let them do all the hard work." August 19, 2005: Kids get aggressive after video games. Psychological association calls for less violence in games. By Jennifer Wild. news @ nature.com. "The American Psychological Association (APA) has adopted a resolution to reduce violence in children's interactive media. This follows an in-depth review confirming that violent video games can make kids aggressive in the short-term, they say. The long-term effects are still unknown. Some researchers say that playing 'shoot 'em up' video games is directly linked to kids' aggressive behaviour in the real world. Others say the games are a healthy outlet. Many say the research is so mixed that the jury is still out." August 19, 2005: More Women in Science. By Jo Handelsman, Nancy Cantor, Molly Carnes, Denice Denton, Eve Fine, Barbara Grosz, Virginia Hinshaw, Cora Marrett, Sue Rosser, Donna Shalala, and Jennifer Sheridan. Science (Volume 309, Number 5738, pages 1190-1191; subscription req'd).
>>> Equality & Diversity and Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students) August 19, 2005: Supercomputer's key to the brain. The quest to simulate the mammalian brain on the world's most powerful supercomputer is neuroscience's most ambitious project yet. David Reid went to Lausanne in Switzerland to find out how the line is being blurred between man and machine. By David Reid. BBC News Click Online programme (video available via article sidebar). "Man has long wanted to discover the secrets of the brain, and has done so with varying degrees of success. Recently advancements in this area of science have been limited by the power of computers. But at Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, the Blue Brain Project aims to change this by simulating the structures and functions of the brain. The project's head, Professor Henry Markram, says that in the past there was no software environment capable of simulating the brain. ... 'We are not trying to build an intelligent device or robot or anything like that,' explains Professor Markram. 'We are trying to understand the brain, and one pathway is to take our available knowledge of the brain and put it to a test inside a model.' ... Mix brain research with one of the world's most powerful computers and people start wondering about artificial intelligence and whether a computer will ever be conscious or have, as they often appear to, a mind of its own. Markus Baertschi says that the computing power is not really up to it at the moment." August 19, 2005: Daisy has all the digital answers to life on Earth. By Alok Jha. The Guardian. "Scientists have unveiled plans to create a digital library of all life on Earth. They say that the Digital Automated Identification System (Daisy), which harnesses the latest advances in artificial intelligence and computer vision, will have an enormous impact on research into biodiversity and evolution. Daisy will also give Britain's army of amateur naturalists unprecedented access to the world's taxonomic expertise: send Daisy a camera-phone picture of a plant or animal and, within seconds, you will get detailed information about what you are looking at. ... Using pattern-recognition software, Daisy would try to match the picture with images in its archives. 'The portal would route the answer back as a web page that had the confidence level of the identification and the institution that made the identification,' said Prof [Norman] MacLeod. ... 'New developments in artificial intelligence and computer algorithms have taken neural nets to where they act more like human intelligence,' he said." August 18, 2005: Girls get own class in computer science. By Nikole Hannah-Jones. The News & Observer. "Even the high school for the state's science and math elite can't find enough girls willing to become computer geeks. So it's deleting boys from one of its techie classes. The school is 49 percent female, but since 2002, just 33 girls have taken the introductory computer science course at the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics, compared with 154 boys. That bothered NCSSM President Gerald Boarman. 'As I went around to talk to the girls ... I said, 'You are bright; you are excellent math students. Why don't you get into these classes?' 'It was because of the boys.' So, starting in October, the school will offer a computer science class for girls only. ... While women have made strides in most sciences, they are losing ground in computer science, even as jobs in that field show the fastest growth." August 18, 2005: The human touch - Robots need skin like ours to provide sensory data essential for even basic tasks. By Laura Spinney. The Guardian. "It was a nice idea: robots that vacuum the living room, lower the baby into the bath - having first tested the water - and carry granny upstairs to bed. Today's robots are more likely to scald the baby and vacuum granny. But the domestic revolution came a step closer this week when Japanese researchers reported the development of an artificial skin that senses both pressure and temperature, and stretches like human skin. ... 'Skin-like sensitivity, or the capability to recognise tactile information, will be an essential feature of future generations of robots,' [Takao] Someya says. ... [Fumiya] Iida says Someya' s skin could make a big difference. ... With that level of sensory discrimination, he says, a robot could detect more variation in the objects it encounters, and perhaps begin to learn about relationships between objects, their functions and meaning. That knowledge would in turn affect how it interacts with its environment. ... 'The skin is crucial for the development of a consciousness of the boundary between the robot or the organism and its environment,' says Riccardo Manzotti...." August 18, 2005: Knowing When to Fold 'Em - Q &A with Palisades' Poker Champ Chris Ferguson. Interviewed by Nancy Myers. Palisadian Post. "NM: Growing up, did you play other sports or games? CF: I played a lot of basketball and baseball at Paul Revere and PaliHi. I also loved Othello; it's a board game with black and white chips on a grid. My brother and I created a computer program for playing Othello. We actually programmed the computer to play and then it showed us how to play the game better. So we taught the computer more, it showed us more, and so on. NM: Is that when you began your interest in computers? CF: Actually, I learned to play poker online in 1989. I went into a chat room and played poker for pretend money. It was a lot of fun. In fact, I spent a lot of my college time here. I graduated from UCLA with a degree in math/computer science, then earned a Ph.D. in computer science with an emphasis on artificial intelligence. Now, I own a computer software business called Tiltware, which makes software for poker. The outcome is FullTiltPoker.com, a poker-playing Web site." August 18, 2005: Computer characters mugged in virtual crime spree. By Will Knight. NewScientist.com news. "A man has been arrested in Japan on suspicion carrying out a virtual mugging spree by using software 'bots' to beat up and rob characters in the online computer game Lineage II. The stolen virtual possessions were then exchanged for real cash. The Chinese exchange student was arrested by police in Kagawa prefecture, southern Japan, the Mainichi Daily News reports. ... By performing tasks within a game repetitively or very quickly, bots can easily outplay human-controlled characters, giving unscrupulous players an unfair advantage. Many games firms employ countermeasures to detect this bot activity." August 17, 2005: 'Able Danger' and Coordinating Pre-Sept. 11 Intelligence. Talk of the Nation radio program hosted by Neal Conan. NPR (audio available). "Conan: We turn now to Harry 'Skip' Brandon, former deputy assistant director in charge of counterterrorism and national security at the FBI. He's with us from his offices at Smith Brandon International, a defense and security consulting firm here in Washington ... Conan: Let me ask you also about the technique that was used; and, again, Colonel [Anthony] Shaffer was circumspect. He said Able Danger apparently did a lot of stuff. But one of the things they did was so-called open-source data mining. Brandon: Yeah. Conan: Tell us about that. Brandon: Well, that's simply a technique for going at information that is out there that essentially is publicly available, or at least available to -- on the Internet and various other resources, and just pulling bits and pieces together and putting them together and seeing if you can get a complete picture. This can be done rather--I won't say crudely, but rather laboriously by using analysts just to go through information, or there are computer programs available that try to make the links for you. It's basically using artificial intelligence to gather bits of information and put it together. It's very efficient. Conan: Google on steroids. Is that... Brandon: Yeah, that's a great phrase, but to a degree, it is. But the programs that are used--and we don't know what was used, but I could only guess that might have been used by professionals -- would be probably much more sophisticated than that." August 17, 2005: Lending an ear to new technology. By Barry Ellsworth. Belleville Intelligencer. "[Hearing loss] is the third most prevalent chronic disease among older adults, according to statistics from the Canadian Association of Speech-Language Pathologists and Audiologists. The association said that 20 per cent of people aged 65 have hearing loss, 40 per cent of those aged 75 and 80 per cent of those who live in nursing homes. ... A new $3,000 hearing aid has artificial intelligence and a brace of microphones that open and close, zeroing in on where you look and screening out other sounds, said a representative for Tim Davidson Hearing Services of Belleville. 'They have done some advancement to try to decrease that background noise,' [Alana] DeVille said." August 17, 2005: Diving Deep Into The Web - Pair's search engine scours 'hidden' sites. By Michael Bazeley. The Mercury News (registration req'd.). "You think the Web is big? In truth, it's far bigger than it appears. The Web is made up of hundreds of billions of Web documents -- far more than the 8 billion to 20 billion claimed by Google or Yahoo. But most of these Web pages are largely unreachable by most search engines because they are stored in databases that cannot be accessed by Web crawlers. Now a San Mateo start-up called Glenbrook Networks -- says it has devised a way to tunnel far into the 'deep web. and extract this previously inaccessible information. ... Komissarchik and her father, Edward Komissarchik, say they have figured out how to analyze the forms on Web pages and understand the type of information the sites are looking for. Then, Glenbrook's Web crawlers use artificial intelligence to walk themselves through sometimes complex Web forms, answering questions, such as the location of their desired job, in the same way a human would." August 16, 2005: Language translation software being developed. By Alexander Villafania. INQ7.net. "The Philippine Council for Advanced Science and Technology Research and Development-Department of Science and Technology (PCASTRD-DOST) recently tapped the De La Salle University College of Computer Science (DLSU-CCS) to develop a machine translator that converts English words to Filipino and vice versa. The software will be used to translate volumes of scientific works present in the DOST's archives, many of which are being integrated into the E-Library project of the Commission on Information and Communications Technology. ... [Ethel Ong] also said that the machine translator, composed of several different software, would have an integrated artificial intelligence (AI) that 'learns' new changes in the Filipino language." August 16, 2005: Brains, cancer and computers. By Daniel Winterstein. The Register. "The race is on to apply machine learning to biology. The starting gun was fired in 2002 when research company Correlogic stunned the medical world with the announcement of a vastly improved test for detecting ovarian cancer. The new test was simple - a few drops of blood are all that's required - yet reliable. What made it truly remarkable was that the test was discovered by machine. This formed a key theme at this month's International Joint Conference in AI (IJCAI) at Edinburgh. The computer program BLAST, which searches genetics databases looking for similar gene sequences, is now ubiquitous in genetics research. ... This is the new mechanised biology, created by a combination of developments. Modern biology - especially genetics, molecular biology and medicine -- throws up vast amounts of data. These are now available in various vast international databases. Put this together with advances in statistical artificial intelligence (AI), and the conditions are ripe for the creation of a new subject. Known as bio-informatics (the word has become ubiquitous in AI project proposals), it is the application of computers to biology. ... Medicine attracts the most attention. There is interest from practically every area of AI. One striking project is the robot Penelope.... Computers are also being used to unlock that warped and weird construct, the human brain." August 16, 2005: BT reveals insight into the future - BT's Technology Timeline predicts what the next 50 years hold. BT news release. "BT's futurology department has launched its latest Technology Timeline, which predicts the technological advances that will impact our future. The timeline encompasses all areas of life influenced by technology developments, including Artificial Intelligence; Health and Medical; Business and Education; Demographics; Energy; Robotics; Space; Telecommunications; Transport & Travel." August 15, 2005: Women in technology - Success stories are there. By Bob Mook. Denver Business Journal (from the August 12, 2005 print edition). "Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steven Jobs are familiar names to those inside and outside the tech industry, but less is known about these women who've also made significant contributions to technology: Donna Dubinsky - Title: Founder and CEO of Numenta Inc., Menlo Park, Calif. ... Monika Henzinger - Title: Director of research for Google Inc., Mountain View, Calif. ... Helen Greiner - Title: Co-founder and president of iRobot Corp., Burlington, Mass." August 15, 2005: Musings from a Mouse. By Anita Chabria. Technology Review. "For years, cognitive scientists have described the human brain as operating like a computer when it comes to language, meaning it interprets letters and sounds in a binary, one-step-at-a-time fashion. It's either a Labrador or a laptop. But a recent study, led by Cornell psycholinguist and associate professor Michael Spivey, suggests that the mind may be comprehending language in a more fluid way. 'Our results have shown that the various parts of the brain that participate in language processing are passing their continuous, partially activated results onto each next stage, not waiting till it's done to share information,' says Spivey. 'It’s a lot more like a distributed neural network.' ... Whereas computers still perform calculations in a linear order, the human brain can make a continuous series of computations at the same time, passing information back and forth in a non-linear, self-organizing manner. ... [B]esides hinting at new understandings of human cognition and new kinds of computer-assisted research and design, Spivey's study might have implications for a field somewhere in the middle: artificial intelligence. As Spivey points out, biological neural networks might be a better model for creating AI applications, such as language-recognition systems, than binary-based computers. 'If you want to invent a mind, you probably don’t want to be using a computer format,' Spivey says. " August 15, 2005: Thin skin will help robots 'feel'. BBC News. "Japanese researchers have developed a flexible artificial skin that could give robots a humanlike sense of touch. The team manufactured a type of 'skin' capable of sensing pressure and another capable of sensing temperature. These are supple enough to wrap around robot fingers and relatively cheap to make, the researchers have claimed. The University of Tokyo team describe their work in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ... The University of Tokyo scientists say their breakthrough has the potential to improve how robots will function in the real world."
>>> Systems, Robots; also see this additional related article August 15, 2005: Academia's quest for the ultimate search tool. By Stefanie Olsen. CNET News.com. "The University of California at Berkeley is creating an interdisciplinary center for advanced search technologies and is in talks with search giants including Google to join the project, CNET News.com has learned. ... The principal areas of focus: privacy, fraud, multimedia search and personalization. ... The success of the $5 billion-a-year search-advertising business is fueling Internet research and development in many ways. ... The search problems of today are different from those of five years ago. ... Jaime Carbonell, director of CMU's Language Technologies Institute, said his research team is perfecting a technology for personalized search that would solve some of the privacy concerns surrounding the wide-scale collection of sensitive data, such as names and query histories. ... CMU is also working under a government grant on a longer-term project called Javelin, focused on question-and-answer search technology. ... The universities of Texas and Pennsylvania are also exploring different approaches to the same problem. Stanford continues in its role as a breeding ground for search projects. ... Stanford associate professor Andrew Ng, among others, is working on artificial-intelligence techniques for extracting knowledge from text in a search index. ... Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and many other universities are working to solve problems presented by the library of tomorrow, which will be largely digitized. Sifting through and organizing billions of digital documents will require new search technology." August 15, 2005: Long Live AI. Opinion by Ray Kurzweil. Forbes.com. "Many people think the so-called AI winter in the 1980s, when many AI companies folded, was the end of the story. But boom-bust cycles are sometimes harbingers of true revolutions (recall the railroad frenzy of the 19th century), and we see the same phenomenon in AI. Artificial intelligence permeates our economy. It's what I define as 'narrow' AI: machine intelligence that equals or exceeds human intelligence for specific tasks. ... AI programs diagnose heart disease, fly and land airplanes, guide autonomous weapons, make automated investment decisions for a trillion dollars' worth of funds and guide industrial processes. ... So what are the prospects for 'strong' AI, which I describe as machine intelligence with the full range of human intelligence? ... To understand the principles of human intelligence we need to reverse-engineer the human brain. ... The killer app of strong AI, combined with nanotechnology, will be blood-cell-size robots called nanobots. We'll have billions of them traveling in our bloodstream...." August 14, 2005: All aboard for a journey to the wild side. Web site reviews by Robbie Hudson. Sunday Times & Times Online. "The English mathematician Alan Turing is credited as the father of computer science, and it was he who famously proposed using two-way conversation with a computer to test artificial intelligence. At Simon Laven’s site [www.simonlaven.com], you can find dozens of online 'chatterbots' ...." August 14, 2005: Robots prove mettle as surgical aides - Humans freed up for harder tasks. By David Ho. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution / ajc.com. "Gliding into the operating room for the first time to assist a surgeon, Penelope wasn't nervous. Unlike other novice medical assistants, 'she' felt nothing. That's because Penelope is a robot, a machine that recently made medical history as the first to act as an independent surgical aide during an operation. During a procedure in June at New York-Presbyterian Hospital to remove a benign tumor from a patient's forearm, Penelope responded to voice commands from a surgeon, handing over clamps, forceps and other instruments with its magnetized mechanical arm. Watching with digital cameras, the robot retrieved the instruments when the surgeon put them down. Inside its computer brain, artificial intelligence software kept track of the instruments to ensure none was misplaced and predicted what tool the surgeon would ask for next. ... Will Penelope put nurses out of a job? ... [Dr. Michael] Treat said that is the goal of Penelope: to take over repetitive tasks and free up people for work that requires a human touch, such as interacting with patients and families." August 14, 2005: When everyone is immortal, death becomes fascinating. Book review by John Coffren. baltimoresun.com. "If you were virtually immortal, what would you do with your greatest surplus - time? Science-fiction master Joe Haldeman suggests that you might choose to do nothing more unusual than take a long cruise and watch the History Channel. That is the 23rd-century equivalent of what his immortals do in Old Twentieth. ... The cruise goes great until people start dying, a rare occurrence for future humans who take little pills that stop the aging process. Jacob Brewer, an immortal engineer, goes in search of what is causing the deaths. An investigation leads him to an artificial intelligence living inside the system's software with an agenda all its own." August 13, 2005 : Spotting the bots with brains. New Scientist (Issue 2512, page 27). "How do you tell just how smart your robot is? Simple: give it a universal IQ test. ... Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter at the Swiss Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Manno-Lugano have drafted an alternative test that will allow the intelligence of vision systems, robots, natural language processing programs or trading agents to be compared and contrasted despite their broad and disparate functions. Although there is no consensus on what exactly human intelligence is, most views appear to cluster around the idea that it hinges on a general ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments, says Legg. The same can be applied to an AI system...."
>>> Nature of Intelligence, AI Overview, Cognitive Science, Turing Test August 12, 2005: Having fun while building robots, kids learn computer skills. By Beth Slovic. Bozeman Daily Chronicle. "For four days this week, [Mike Coon, a technology teacher at Gallatin Gateway School] oversaw the school's Technology Camp, where 14 kids from the third through the seventh grades built robots and designed computer programs to make the robots flip, spin and circle a track. The camp was one in a series of summer programs at the school, which also hosted several sports camps this summer. Unlike the others, Technology Camp was designed to give the school's students a jumpstart on problem-solving skills they will need to tackle advanced computer projects, Coon said. ... After almost three straight hours of programing and building Thursday morning, the children took a break to eat lunch around noon. It was their first break of the day. 'It's a testament to how much they like this,' Coon said." August 12, 2005: In Defense of Common Sense. Op-Ed by John Horgan. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "As anyone remotely interested in science knows by now, 100 years ago Einstein wrote six papers that laid the groundwork for quantum mechanics and relativity, arguably the two most successful theories in history. ... In the midst of all this hoopla, I feel compelled to deplore one aspect of Einstein's legacy: the widespread belief that science and common sense are incompatible. In the pre-Einstein era, T. H. Huxley, a k a 'Darwin's bulldog,' could define science as 'nothing but trained and organized common sense.' But quantum mechanics and relativity shattered our common-sense notions about how the world works. ... Ironically, while many scientists disparage common sense, artificial-intelligence researchers have discovered just how subtle and powerful an attribute it is." August 12, 2005: Kids battle robot in goldfish-catching contest. By Will Knight. NewScientist.com news. "Catching goldfish might seem like child's play but, for a net-wielding robot, it is an extremely challenging task. The goldfish-grabbing bot, known as 'Poipoi', was developed by researchers at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), in central Japan. It has been entered into an annual goldfish catching competition for children, which takes place in nearby Yamatokoriyama, on 20 August. ... The bot is essentially mechanical arm connected to a computer and an overhead camera. The camera keeps track of goldfish in a pool below the arm, allowing the computer to predict where and when the arm should swoop down to snatch up as many fish as possible. 'In this project, we are studying dynamic image analysis with lots of moving objects,' [Masatugu Kidode] told New Scientist, noting that the same principle used to rapidly track large numbers of moving fish can also be applied to moving cars and even people in crowds." August 12, 2005: CCTV video mixes maps and images. By Jo Twist. BBC News. "Smart software is taking CCTV into the domain of 3D gaming by combining graphics, map data, and different camera views in one composite image. The system automatically tracks and stitches 3D images with CCTV video, maps and other real-time information. It automatically alerts operators to intruders, unusual behaviour, left objects or anything it is told to spot. The UK's former defence research agency, QinetiQ, plans to bring the US system, called Praetorian, to the UK. It is currently in operation at airports in the US and other high security environments there. ... 'It is not looking at a database of people. It looking for anomalies in behaviour, for example, people loitering in places you would not expect them to be,' said Dr [Simon] Stringer." August 11, 2005: Getting an online degree.
By Marilyn Bowden. Bankrate.com. "The online market in higher education is undergoing electrifying growth. Last year, more than 2 million Americans took college-level courses online. Though the cost is about the same as for an education on campus, the advantages for students are obvious. Onliners are freed from geographical constraints, residency requirements and rigid schedules. They can pursue undergraduate or graduate degrees while holding full-time jobs, traveling or serving in the military. But industry watchers warn that consumers looking for credible credits on the Internet need to be cautious. In many fields, headhunters for top-tier companies are only beginning to take online degrees seriously. And educators, while enthusiastic about the potential of e-education, warn that the quality of e-degrees currently on the market fluctuates dramatically. ... Both [Murray] Turoff and [Caroline] Howard recommend checking with professional organizations to find out what online courses meet their requirements. ... Turoff says professional bodies such as the Association of Computing Machinery publish generally accepted standards for various degree programs, as well as documents explaining the differences between them." August 11, 2005: Saudi Robo-Kids Tackle Robocup. By Aisha Kay. News from Saudi Aramco's Media Center. "Six young Saudi students represented the Kingdom in an international robotics competition in July under the tutelage of a Saudi Aramco engineer. Saeed A. Saeed, of the EXPEC Computer Center and founder of the Talents Center, set off for Japan with the students on July 11. The students, aged 11 to 14, participated in Robocup 2005, held July 13-19, at the Intex Convention Center in Osaka. They had hoped to win the Robocup for their team and the Talents Center as representatives of Saudi Arabia. This trip was sponsored by Saudi Aramco and the Arab Establishment for Projects. ... The goal of the Robocup organizers is to develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that will be able to win a soccer competition against a human world champion soccer team by the year 2050." August 11, 2005: Software firm to assist Air Force. By Richard Sine. The News Journal & delawareonline.com. "The folks at Newark-based software firm Quantum Leap Innovations recently heard of a Department of Homeland Security intelligence analyst who had accumulated 115,000 unopened e-mails after just nine months on the job. ... With a $500,000 contract from the Air Force, Quantum Leap is building software that helps provide 'the right information to the right people at the right time,' said Elad, a University of Delaware computer science graduate who cofounded Quantum Leap in 1999. Today's analysts get information from spies, satellites, electronic sensors, cameras, documents, the Internet and other sources, said Donald Steiner, chief technology officer for Quantum Leap. Steiner is developing an intelligent software 'agent' that can continuously search for data and choose which is most important for the analyst to see first." August 11, 2005: Computer History Museum Debuts New Exhibit, "Mastering The Game: A History of Computer Chess. Press release available from Yahoo! Finance via market Wire. "According to John Toole, the Museum's executive director and CEO, this marks the first new exhibit since the institution relocated to its home at 1401 N. Shoreline Boulevard in Mountain View, Calif., two years ago. 'The topic of chess is a fascinating way for visitors of diverse backgrounds to learn about computing history. Chess resonates with the general public as a difficult problem to solve for people and machines alike. From this launching point, visitors can explore some important software concepts -- abstract and traditionally challenging topics to explain,' said Toole. ... This 1,000 square foot exhibit will follow a five-decade-long chronological plan, from the theoretical foundations developed by such computing pioneers as Alan Turing and Claude Shannon, to the development of PC chess software and the drama of IBM's chess-playing supercomputer, Deep Blue. In addition, the institution has created an online version of 'Mastering the Game: A History of Computer Chess.' ... In addition to the public open house from 1-5 p.m., September 10, the Computer History Museum will host a special presentation in conjunction with the opening.... Entitled 'Computer History Museum Presents: The History of Computer Chess: An AI Perspective,' the 7 p.m., September 8 event will feature Murray Campbell, Deep Blue project member, International Business Machines (IBM); Edward Feigenbaum, a Stanford artificial intelligence researcher; David Levy, International Computer Games Association, and John McCarthy, professor, Stanford University." August 10, 2005: I See What You're Signing - Gesture interfaces are putting the hearing in touch with the deaf. By Willie D. Jones. IEEE Spectrum's Web Only News. "Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, have come up with a gesture-recognition technology that will allow deaf people to communicate more easily with hearing people. In cooperation with engineers at The George Washington University and cognitive scientists at the University of Rochester, the Georgia Tech team is developing a system that acts as a one-way American Sign Language-to-English phrase book. ... The system, called TeleSign, consists of a miniature video camera and wrist-mounted accelerometers to pick up a person's signs and software-based machine learning techniques to interpret them. ... TeleSign was inspired by VoxTec International's Phrasalator system now used by U.S. troops around the world. The user speaks an English phrase into the Phraselator and the device attempts to match it to a phrase in the target language." August 10, 2005: Research robot readies for desert duty. By Stefanie Olsen. CNET News.com. "A 3-year NASA project to test a 'search-for-life' robot will soon come to an end, but not before one last trip to the Chilean desert. 'Zoe,' a solar-powered rover that resembles a go-cart, is a prototype of an artificially intelligent astro-biologist, or a robot that can explore and study life in harsh climates. It's been developed and tested by Carnegie Mellon University and NASA's Ames Research Center, which expects to use the underlying technology in future Mars missions." August 10, 2005: Games to be tested in classrooms. BBC News. "The use of computer games in education is going to be tested out in four secondary schools in the UK. The project aims to find ways in which school teachers can include video games in their teaching. It will also be trying to help game developers learn about potential educational uses for their products. ... Futurelab, which is leading the research, hopes that the study will contribute to a move 'away from the bland edutainment games that are currently on offer towards genuinely compelling games that support learning.'" August 10 - 16, 2005: What the Dormouse Said: An interview with John Markoff. Ubiquity (Volume 6, Issue 29). "UBIQUITY: Congratulations on 'What the Dormouse Said' --- it's a fascinating book. Tell us about it. MARKOFF: Well, I guess I'd call it a revisionist history. It about things that happened around Stanford University between roughly 1960 and 1975, and is a kind of pre-history of personal computing and the personal computer industry. What I was trying to do was to get at some of the culture through which the technology was developed. UBIQUITY: Why the cultural emphasis? MARKOFF: Because technology never happens in a vacuum. The book was an effort to try to pin down how personal computing first emerged around the Stanford campus at two laboratories in the 1960's: one was run by John McCarthy, and was called the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; and the other was run by Doug Engelbart and known as the Augmentation Research Center or the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center. ..." August 9, 2005: Guessing game gives machines clearer vision. By Will Knight. NewScientist.com news. "A guessing game that lets players idle away a few minutes online could also teach computers how to recognise the world around them. The game, called Peekaboom, was devised by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. It harnesses the brain power of online players to train a set of powerful vision recognition algorithms. This could eventually enable computers to recognise images in a similar way to humans - by focusing on the most relevant features." August 9, 2005: AI company gets veteran at the helm. By Joe Napsha. Tribune-Review & PittsburghLive.com. "A local technology company that sells computer systems to help fast-food restaurants serve customers more quickly and with less waste has added a veteran industry executive veteran to help it grow. HyperActive Technologies Inc. -- which developed an artificial intelligence system called 'HyperActive Bob' to help McDonald's and other chains figure out how many burgers to cook and when -- said Monday it named Joseph J. Porfeli as the chief executive. ... The system uses a camera to monitor traffic into a restaurant parking lot. The software system distinguishes between cars and vans, adults and children, then analyzes the data and instructs cooks via touch screen monitor on the quantity and type of food to cook."
>>> Business, Vision, Applications August 8, 2005: Health Care System Turns to IT for Patient Care Plans - Treatment based on data about similar patients. By Heather Havenstein. Computerworld. "NewYork-Presbyterian Healthcare System is rolling out an IT system that generates suggested care plans for physicians based on data about previous patient outcomes and then sends alerts if treatments don't appear to be working. The Patient Health Monitor project, which the health care system began two months ago at its flagship NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, currently uses artificial intelligence (AI) software to create treatment plans for patients in cardiac intensive-care units. ... 'This idea of a decision-support system is one of the outcomes we'd like to see from the introduction of electronic medical records ... moving to an era of personalized medicine,' [Eric] Brown said. 'It is taking your particular situation and plugging it into the database -- not searching for all people who have had a heart attack, but all patients who have had a heart attack who look like you.'"
>>> Medicine, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Applications August 8, 2005: SpelBots score with technology, education - Spelman College women reach goals with 4-legged robots. By Marsha Walton. CNN. "For six young women from Spelman College in Georgia, a competition to teach robotic dogs how to play soccer has also taught them a lot about their own abilities to break down stereotypes. The undergraduates and their digital dogs recently scored a lot of firsts in the RoboCup 2005 competition in Osaka, Japan. The competitors became the first all-female team, and the first from a historically black college to compete in this global robotics challenge. The meteoric rise of the 'SpelBots' (short for Spelman Robotics) put to rest the notion that girls don't 'do' science. ... And the competition is providing a learning experience that could have an impact on research and career possibilities for these young women. 'We can apply a lot of things to the dogs,' said Brandy Kinlaw from North Carolina. 'They are doing research now with prosthetic arms and legs, and by working with the dogs we understand how the joints move,' she said. 'I can see myself in the future, using robotics and artificial intelligence to hopefully come up with something innovative in the medical field,' said Ebony O'Neal from Barnesville, Georgia." August 8, 2005: Companies Using Tech Analysis on Themselves. By Brian Bergstein. The Associated Press / available from the Casper Star-Tribune also available from The Seattle Times (More companies turning to data-mining software). "The automated analysis of 'unstructured' data is becoming remarkably agile at giving companies detailed answers to the age-old business question of 'How are we doing?' ... Eastman Kodak Co. uses unstructured-data analysis to spot connections in its own and its competitors' patent filings. Government agents use it to hunt for insider trading or linkages between terrorist groups. Mayo Clinic researchers use it to scan physicians' notes for evidence about the efficacy of treatments. The breakthrough has been in getting computers to understand the content of the documents they scan. ... In hopes of broadening the potential of this kind of software, several companies planned to announce an agreement Monday on a technological standard that will let multiple computing engines for sorting unstructured data work together. The programming codes that govern the framework, spearheaded by International Business Machines Corp. in conjunction with academic researchers and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, will be open source and freely available."
>>> Data Mining, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Business, Information Retrieval, Knowledge Management, Law Enforcement, Applications, Software August 8, 2005: The State Of Surveillance (cover story) - Artificial noses that sniff explosives, cameras that I.D. you by your ears, chips that analyze the halo of heat you emit. More scrutiny lies ahead. By Catherine Yang, with Kerry Capell and Otis Port. BusinessWeek Online. "Tomorrow's surveillance technology may be considerably more effective. But each uptick in protection will typically come at the cost of more intrusion into the privacy of ordinary people. For now, the public seems to find that trade-off acceptable, so scientists around the world have intensified efforts to perfect the art of surveillance, hoping to catch villains before they strike. ... Despite the many failings of biometrics, the federal government is encouraging scientists to fashion them into covert surveillance tools. Face recognition -- the most obvious way to track people because it's how humans do it -- is still dogged by problems matching images that may be distorted by a smile or ill-placed shadow. ... Another hope is that certain characteristic movements may be recognizable at a distance. Taking a page from Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research body credited with inventing the Internet, funds work on software that could identify individuals by their strides. ... Ever since September 11, the U.S. government has been striving through the power of software to extend its investigatory net over an elusive enemy lurking among the populace. The idea is to rifle through multiple databases using algorithms that categorize and rank documents -- ranging from airline manifests, car rental records, and hotel guest lists to credit, court, and housing records compiled and sold by private companies such as ChoicePoint. In this way, machines might recognize relationships among human beings that humans themselves can miss. This is just one of many measures that trigger a Big Brother alert."
>>> Law Enforcement, Biometrics (@ Image Understanding), Vision, Artificial Noses, Patrern Recognition, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Ethical & Social Implications, Applications August 7, 2005: Is pop culture good for your brain? By Peter Ellingsen. The Age. "[N]ow we are being told that the latest media technology, like video games and reality TV, are not just entertaining, but a way to boost the brain. Interestingly, the charge is being led by a new book that argues trash TV and the likes of Space Invaders lifts IQ. In Everything Bad is Good for You, American writer Steven Johnson insists that what is making us smarter is what we thought was making us stupid: popular culture. The culture he is talking about is electronic.... Johnson says brains are set up to respond to the kind of problem-solving hurdles posed by games and work for children because they tap into the brain's natural 'reward circuitry'. This happens through what he calls the 'dopamine system', the mechanism that distributes feel-good chemicals. Thus, spending hours driving through virtual streets playing Grand Theft Auto is not aimless, but a structured narrative in which desire is engaged to solve problems. ... When Johnson says 'In the games world, reward is everywhere', he is talking about behaviour that engages with computer-generated responses, not human ones. It is no accident that the test for artificial intelligence is the capacity of a computer to convince a person that it is human. No machine has so far succeeded in managing this deception because what is human goes way beyond decision-making." August 7, 2005: Linux Robot - Could Be A Hero, Could Be A Toaster. Researchers are developing robots that run on Linux to do search-and-rescue in environments unsafe for people. By Mary Hayes. InformationWeek. "At LinuxWorld in San Francisco this week, scientists from SRI International's Artificial Intelligence Center demonstrated Linux-based robots that can search for objects and people in environments unsafe for rescue workers, such as the site of a chemical spill or an earthquake-damaged building. The research project is sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Linux was chosen for the robots, called Centibots, because they require a small, reliable operating system that has drivers for a variety of devices, can be automatically installed, and have a journaling file system, says Regis Vincent, a scientist with the nonprofit research institute." August 6, 2005: Automatons for the people. By Stephen Pincock. Financial Times (FT Weekend Magazine: page 13: subscription req'd.). " was introduced to an interesting website called Sodarace (www.sodarace.net) a few weeks ago, and have to confess that I've quickly become a bit of an addict. Explaining the site isn't an easy task. At the most obvious level, you could say it's a place where humans and artificial intelligences compete to build and race robots in a virtual world, but in truth it is much more than that. ... The idea was to use the website as a kind of outreach programme to help to get young people more interested in science, so they created a series of online forums that allowed constructors and AI researchers to talk about how the project should evolve and to give each other hints on building new machines." August 6, 2005: Computers learn a new language. New Scientist (Issue 2511; page 2). "ADIOS (automatic distillation of structure) program, developed by researchers at Cornell University in New York and Tel Aviv University in Israel, infers the building blocks of a language using statistical and algebraic processes. The software learns the grammar of a new language by searching text for patterns." August 6, 2005: Newsmaker - Raj Reddy. By Jill King Greenwood. Tribune-Review & PittburghLive.com. "Reddy was awarded the 2005 Honda Prize from the Honda Foundation. The prize includes an honorary certificate, a medal and $89,000 for his contributions to 'eco-technology,'' a concept that technology needs to create harmony with the environment while pursuing efficiency and profit. Reddy is being honored for his achievements in computer science and robotics, particularly as a world leader in the study of human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence and speech and visual recognition by machines." August 4, 2005: Chasing the dream. The Economist. "Is it a new medium on a par with film and music, a valuable educational tool, a form of harmless fun or a digital menace that turns children into violent zombies? Video gaming is all these things, depending on whom you ask. ... Amid all the arguments about the minutiae of rating systems, the unlocking of hidden content, and the stealing of children's innocence, however, three important factors are generally overlooked: that attitudes to gaming are marked by a generational divide; that there is no convincing evidence that games make people violent; and that games have great potential in education." August 4, 2005: Best and brightest robots showcased - Innovations used for practical needs, research. By Elizabeth Withey. The Edmonton Journal. "The WAM (Whole-Arm Manipulator) Arm is one of many robotic innovations showcased at the 2005 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, better known as IROS. The largest robotics conference in the world, it is being held in Edmonton for the first time since it began in 1988. ... The Canadian company [Applied AI Systems] is ... developing an intelligent wheelchair that will move on its own, collision-free. The wheelchair uses landmark navigation to recognize its environment, allowing a wheelchair user to speak commands like 'take me to the kitchen' instead of a steering device." August 4, 2005: Futuristic Fashion Forward. By Suzie Ridgeway. Designtechnica. "Let’s face it, most of us have similar notions of how the future of travel or home life might look - flying cars, compartmentalized Jetson-inspired high-rises, and artificial intelligence robots doing our mundane, everyday tasks. But have you ever stopped to think about what futuristic clothing might look like, aside from the Star Trek skin-tight space suits and bizarre headdresses showcased in Star Wars? Inspired partly by the futuristic creations from Bravo Network’s clothing designer reality show, 'Project Runway', two MIT graduate students, Christine Liu and Nick Knouf, along with the MIT Media Lab and MIT Council of the Arts, recently produced 'Seamless: Computational Couture', an out-of-this-world fashion show held at the MIT Media Lab." August 4, 2005: Robot catcher grabs high speed projectiles. By Will Knight. NewScientist.com news. "If robots are to inherit the Earth, then they should at least be able to catch. So say the researchers behind a bot that can match the most skilled human baseball player faced with a hurtling ball. The robotic catcher, developed by scientists at the University of Tokyo, Japan, can comfortably grab a ball careering through the air at 300 kilometres per hour, or 83 metres per second, its creators say. ... 'The need for a robotic hand that works in the real world is growing,' [Akio] Namiki told New Scientist. 'Such a system should be able to adapt to changes in its environment and we think that the concept of high-speed movement with real time visual feedback will become an important issue in robotic research.'" August 4, 2005: Getting Schooled on Game Design. Random Access column by Robert MacMillan. washingtonpost.com. "Being a columnist is a bit like sitting over the dunking booth. Sooner or later, someone will nail you. That's what happened Wednesday after I described Michigan State University's videogame design curriculum as 'most unusual.' I should have visited the rest of the nation's college and university Web sites because, as it turns out, nearly everybody is doing something similar." August 4, 2005: Girls build robots at RoboCamp. By Crystal Barbour. The NT Daily. "Girls from all over Denton and Collin Counties [Texas] signed up for the camp. The campers spend their days attending seminars on engineering-related careers and the inner workings of computer science. They also get hands-on robotic experience by learning how to build and program their own miniature robots. ... David Keathly, computer science and engineering undergraduate adviser, and Robert Akl of the computer science and engineering faculty created RoboCamp after serving as judges for a regional high school robotics competition. Keathly and Akl received a two-year grant from Higher Education Coordinating Board to host a girl's robotics camp at the NT Denton and Dallas campuses. ... 'I want them to see that computer science isn't just a bunch of geeks in front of a computer,' [Keathly] said." August 3, 2005: The Cyborg Astrobiologist. By Tony Hoffman. News from PC Magazine. "When astronauts someday explore Mars, they may wear artificial-intelligence devices to help them spot unusual geological features and maybe even signs of life. The Cyborg Astrobiologist, developed by Patrick McGuire and colleagues at Madrid's Center for Astrobiology, combines a Tek Gear SV-6 headset with a monocular display, a wearable ViA computer, and a tripod-mounted camera." August 3, 2005: World's artificial intelligence experts gather for conference. Edinburgh Evening News. "Edinburgh is playing host to [IJCAI] the world's largest and most prestigious conference on artificial intelligence. Thousands of experts from around the world are convening in the Capital in what is a major coup for Scotland. The distinguished turnout for the event at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre highlights the country's growing reputation in this field of scientific research." August 2, 2005: Teaching Common Sense to Computers - An exhibit developed by members of USC's Information Sciences Institute sets out to prove that a computer can think on its own -- given the proper piece of information. By Eric Mankin. University of Southern California press release. "People are helping computers become independent thinkers through a traveling exhibit that gives the machines something distinctly human: common sense. The exhibit, part of the 'Robots and Us' show on display through August at the California Science Center, is the brainchild of scientists at USC’s Information Sciences Institute. ... Yolanda Gil, also of ISI, said that researchers in the field of artificial intelligence have learned over the past 50 years that 'any intelligent system needs to be able to learn new things all the time. You cannot predict in advance all the things they need to know in order to perform a task, nor can you count on ... engineers or programmers to be able to describe all the things they know about the objects being used in an application,' Gil said. The problem is the so-called 'knowledge acquisition' bottleneck that makes intelligent systems 'brittle' because they cannot reason even slightly beyond the knowledge they start with, she said. 'Having a system that [continuously] learns new things about the world … from volunteers [who] have a lot of time on their hands … is a very promising approach to address brittleness,' she said." August 2, 2005: 'Robo-doc' to treat seriously ill. BBC News. "An intelligent computer system which can imitate doctors' decisions about treatment for intensive care patients is being developed by scientists. ... Team leader [University of Sheffield] Professor Mahdi Mahfouf said the system's ability to learn, adapt and make informed decisions was unique. Intelligent decisions 'This new system not only monitors and treats critical patients, but it can also learn from the experiences of medical staff, who can override the machine at any time,' he said. If overridden, the system assimilates the doctor's input and uses the new information to make decisions about similar cases in the future." August 2, 2005: Lucas - Future in Asia, vid games. By Sheigh Crabtree. The HollywoodReporter.com. "Think George Lucas is going to take it easy now that he's completed his final 'Star Wars' trilogy? Think again. ... 'I put all of my resources into pushing the evolution in an industry that is notoriously backwards and I enjoy pushing that envelope,' Lucas told the thousands of Siggraph attendees who squeezed into a hall at the Los Angeles Convention Center for Lucas' hourlong Q&A session. ... Lucas said the next breakthrough in gaming is artificial intelligence and voice recognition. 'I want to get to a point where you can talk to the game and it will talk back, Lucas said. 'I'm really pushing for advances in artificial intelligence and intelligent voice recognition technology. I think that will change games from first person shooters narratives to intelligent and challenging first-person shooter type dramas.'" August 2, 2005: CMU professor wins Honda Prize. Tribune-Review & PittsburghLIVE.com. "Raj Reddy, the Mozah Bint Nasser University professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, has won the 2005 Honda Prize. ... Reddy received the award for his contributions to eco-technology ... [and] was recognized for his leadership in the study of human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence and speech and visual recognition by machines." August 1, 2005: PC Precisely Predicts Felony. By David Cohn. Wired News. "Police are always trying to get inside criminals' minds to predict their next move. In Yonkers, New York, last week a police computer turned this guessing game into a science by correctly forecasting the time and place of a robbery -- and dispatched officers to nab the perpetrators. Lt. James McLaughlin of the Yonkers Police Department technical support unit used a PC to analyze crime statistics and predict the time and location of a robbery before it occurred." August 1, 2005: A Prediction - Data Integration Will Improve Safety. Dupre Transport's analytic architecture reduces the risks associated with trucking. What's next? Predictive modeling By David Stodder. Intelligent Enterprise Magazine. "For more sophisticated predictive modeling and analysis, [Sam] Wilkes turned to new partner Valen Technologies, which offers Risk Manager, a predictive insurance underwriting software system. While increasingly rules-based, most insurance underwriting functions are still largely dependent on human judgment. Valen instead applies artificial intelligence in the form of computational learning technology to evaluate risk facto rs and come up with an underwriting risk assessment that strategic business managers use to set economically oriented objectives. FleetRisk let Valen's algorithms loose on the TRAC data warehouse to discover patterns that showed a driver's likelihood of having an accident. The process used seven years' worth of driver and accident information. FleetRisk used the first six years of data to develop a 'blind test' for the predictive software to see if it would offer results close to the actual data for the seventh year. 'And in fact, it did,' says [Reggie] Dupre." August 1, 2005: Rating System Will Evaluate Free Software. By Steve Lohr. The New York Times (registration req'd.). Carnegie Mellon University, Intel and SpikeSource, a company that supports and tests corporate open-source projects, have devised a rating system intended to reduce confusion and guesswork in evaluating such software. The initiative, Business Readiness Ratings, is to be announced today at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Ore. The rating system, the sponsors say, will employ an open-source model with scores determined by those who use certain programs and contribute their judgments. The idea can be seen as a software version of the Zagat survey of restaurants - rankings determined by customers." August 1, 2005: Surveillance to detect abnormal behaviour on public transport. PM radio program on Radio National & ABC Local Radio; reported by David Weber. "(Professor Svetha Venkatesh, from Curtin's Institute for Multi-Sensor Processing and Content Analysis.) SVETHA VENKATESH: The research institute has been working for some time now on trying to detect patterns in data. The data can be anything, you know it could be camera data or sensor data. And essentially what we're going to be doing with DTI is looking specifically at camera data and trying to see whether we can solve some of the problems with respect to detecting events that happen in a bus that people might be interested in. ... DAVID WEBER: Abnormal behaviours will differ from country to country, from culture to culture I suppose? SVETHA VENKATESH: That's right and that's why we use machine learning so that it can learn from the data that is presented, as opposed to a human defining it."
>>> Law Enforcement, Vision, Machine Learning, Assistive Technologies, Ethical & Social Implications, Applications August 1, 2005: CMU online game will be used to help teach computers to see. By Byron Spice. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "The ESP Game is no ordinary online game, but a clever way of using the Web to painlessly harness the brainpower of computer users. And von Ahn, who will soon complete his doctorate in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, is ready with yet another game, this one called Peekaboom. While the ESP Game was designed to generate descriptive labels for photographs and other images, Peekaboom is intended to help teach computers to see. Computer vision is still at a primitive stage, in part because it takes so much time to teach computers how to identify objects -- a process that involves highlighting objects or features in images for the computer. 'There aren't many humans who are willing to sit down and teach a computer to see,' said Manuel Blum, a theoretical computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. But as von Ahn has demonstrated with the ESP Game, there are plenty of people who will do so if they think it's fun. ... In the early days of machine vision research, it was assumed that computers could learn to identify an object, such as a car, or a spoon, or a face, if it was given the rough geometry of the object, said Alexei Efros, a computer vision researcher at Carnegie Mellon. But that wasn't a successful approach. A better approach to teaching a computer how to identify an object, such as a car, is to show it lots of images of cars, of various makes and colors, taken from a variety of angles and distances and under a variety of lighting conditions, he said." August 2005: We Are the Web. By Kevin Kelly. Wired (Issue 13.08). "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'." August 2005: The Dream of a Lifetime.
By Bill Joy. Technology Review. "You've likely heard stories about the birth of the PC: of Xerox PARC as the Mecca of computing; of its creation of the Alto, Ethernet, and the laser printer; of the Homebrew Computer Club, the MITS Altair, Bill Gates and the theft of his Micro-soft Basic; of Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, the founding of Apple, and the Jobs visit to PARC that inspired the Macintosh. But what you may not know about is the really early history. The stories of Doug Engelbart and John McCarthy, of the Augmentation Research Center, and of the early days of the Stanford University AI Lab (SAIL) are not well known. Yes, you may have heard that Engelbart invented the mouse, and that SAIL and Stanford led to companies like Sun and Cisco. But there are better stories, great and old ones from the early days of computing, about the events that led to personal computing as we know it.
In his wonderful new book What the Dormouse Said..., John Markoff tells these stories. ... Dormouse tells the important story of what the Bay Area did for computing. But as I read the book, I found myself thinking about other early history, stories not centered on the West Coast. While the PC was born in California, its conception required important contributions from other parts of the country ... the great universities and research labs on the East Coast, in England, and even in the upper Midwest, where I grew up. ... Historically, the most cutting-edge research in computing was sponsored for national defense, with a very long-term view." August 2005: Photo Essay - Lookin' for Love. IEEE Spectrum Online. "The Sims 2 Nightlife, shown on the screen, is an expansion pack for The Sims 2, the fastest-selling PC game of all time. Think of The Sims 2 as a virtual dollhouse populated by semiautonomous artificial people, called Sims.... The game's artificial intelligence code uses these traits along with memories the Sims have of previous events to calculate what they will do next." |
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