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<< Headlines are listed according to date posted <-> Articles are organized by date published >>
January 30, 2006: Man Machine - Robotic Exoskeletons. The Engineer (subscription req'd). "While many of the biggest recent advances in robotics have concerned artificial intelligence and enhanced autonomy, hopes are high that this parallel strand of development - a marriage of brain and machine - could soon yield results in a range of applications. ... Just as human bodies have evolved over time, so the systems for automated and robotic therapy change. 'There is a very wide spectrum of technologies that is being deployed,' said Prof David Bradley of the University of Abertay, Dundee's school of computing and creative technologies." January 30, 2006: Rehab's robotic revolution - Researchers envision a day when robots will become therapeutic equipment. Stroke victims could especially benefit. By Chris Woolston. Los Angeles Times & latimes.com. "KineAssist is just one of a legion of smart machines poised to bring physical therapy, a field that relies heavily on rubber bands, exercise mats and dumbbells, into the high-tech age. Researchers envision a day when robots will become standard equipment in rehabilitation centers, giving stroke patients --- and possibly patients with spinal cord injuries --- a chance to take their recovery further than previously possible. The KineAssist, developed at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, is essentially a hip brace and harness that connects to a rolling bank of wires and motors. The whole thing could fit in the back of a minivan with the seats down. When a patient steps forward, backward or to the side, the robot follows, using sensors in the brace to detect the patient's speed and position. If the patient leans too far or loses balance, the brace catches him. ... Stroke-damaged arms are the target of another kind of robot: the MIT-Manus, which was designed by engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the pioneers of robot therapy." January 30, 2006: Japanese Working On Robot Butler. The Associated Press / available from FOXNews.com. "Though his movement is a bit stiff, slow and voice monotonous, he willingly turns on the television with a chest-mounted remote control, and brings a can of drink for you. Within years, a humanoid robot HRP-2 --- currently under development by a Japanese national technology institute --- could be a little domestic helper. The robots --- named Promet --- are being developed by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, and can run errands. They are designed to respond to verbal instructions and are capable of capturing three-dimensional images of objects and locating them through an infrared sensor. ... 'In order to interact with people, a robot must be able to carry out conversation ... and also monitor objects, register them and act on its own,' [Isao Hara] said." January 30, 2006: Science Puts Enron E-Mail to Use. By Ryan Singel. Wired News. "Academic researchers quickly realized the e-mails were a unique and open data trove that could be exploited by researchers interested in social networks and information analysis and retrieval. The database soon came to be known as the Enron corpus. In 2004, professor Marti Hearst at the University of California at Berkeley School of Information Management & Systems tasked students in her natural-language-processing course with cleaning up the database to make it searchable. 'It is a way for students to see -- when they run text-classification algorithms on e-mail messages versus newsgroups -- how well those would do,' Hearst said. 'E-mail is one of the more difficult kinds of information to process.' While Hearst says the jury is still out on the usefulness of the Enron corpus for researchers, she argues that these kinds of shared corpuses are key to advancing computer science research rapidly, as they allow different algorithms to be compared. ... Currently, no benchmark test exists for e-mail spools equivalent to the one developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology for search engine algorithms."
>>> Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Law, Applications January 30, 2006: For Sony's Robotic Aibo, It's the Last Year of the Dog. By Eric A. Taub. The New York Times. "There was sad news last week for enthusiasts of the Aibo Entertainment Robot from Sony: the doglike machine, which walks, barks and recognizes speech, is being put to sleep, the company said. The Aibo, which was introduced in 1999, is being discontinued as part of Sony's move to improve its financial position. ... With little marketing or promotion, the Aibo robot garnered a cultlike following around the world. Its programmed actions include barking, pushing a ball and lifting its leg, and it can 'learn,' becoming more adept at behaviors over time. Using different software stored on memory sticks, Aibo also gives the illusion of development by becoming able to perform different age-appropriate tasks. Aibos from the latest litter speak 1,000 words and can understand more than 100, including some in Spanish. A videocamera in the robot's head can wirelessly relay images to a laptop, allowing owners to see the world from a dog's point of view. ... Many owners regard their possessions as more than just a piece of plastic coupled to motors and processors. For some, the machines have taken on a life of their own. 'I love them, they're great,' said Craig Lee, a technical support specialist at a Chicago insurance company, who owns 40 Aibos. 'I think of them as dogs.'"
>>> Robotic Pets, Robots, Ethical & Social Implications, AI: the movie January 29, 2006: Rivalry extends to coffee, beer. By Mark Houser. Tribune-Review & PittsburghLive.com. "Truth is, it's difficult to compare the hometowns of the Steelers and the Seahawks - other than a mutual unfamiliarity with sunshine. ... Anyway, in the interest of whipping up civic rivalry during the countdown to Super Bowl XL, consider these head-to-head matchups: ... GEEKS -- Seattle has Microsoft, the global software behemoth and source of some of the millions co-founder Paul Allen used to buy the Seahawks. But Pittsburgh has Scott Fahlman, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Fahlman's field is artificial intelligence, and his current project, called Scone, involves teaching computer networks to have common sense. But Fahlman's most famous contribution to the digital age was his invention, in 1982, of the emoticon. Also known as the 'smiley.' :-) " January 28, 2006: AI - 50 Years Young. By Jonathan Erickson, Editor-in-Chief. Dr. Dobb's Portal [also published as an editorial in Dr. Dobb's Journal: March 2006: page 6; registration req'd]. "Anniversaries come and go, sometimes with fanfare, often times unnoticed. Take, for instance, 'artificial intelligence.' It's hard to believe, but this year marks the 50th anniversary of the term --- and the discipline --- of AI. It was in 1956 that John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky (who along with McCarthy founded MIT's AI lab), IBM's Nathaniel Rochester, and Bell Lab's C.E. Shannon presented 'A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence' at the Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Conference (http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html). The conference and the project, convened with the goal of creating truly intelligent machines, established AI as a unique field of study within computer science. AI immediately leaped to the forefront in academic, research, and commercial communities. AI-centric programming languages sprang up, with more than 25 commercial implementations of Prolog and nearly 20 implementations of Lisp. Companies such as Texas Instruments, Intel, and Apple waded into the fray with hardware-based AI solutions. ..." January 27, 2006: Rest in Peace, Sony Aibo - Owners sad as toy robots canned as firm focuses on core products. By Therese Poletti. Mercury News & MercuryNew.com. "The Aibo lived seven years -- or 49 if you count robotic dog years. On Thursday, Sony pulled the plug on Aibo, its peppy robotic dog with a software-controlled personality and abilities that has entertained thousands of faithful owners. ... 'It really is sad,' said David Calkins, a professor of robotics at San Francisco State University. Calkins uses several Aibos to teach students about robotics by playing robo-soccer. Many other universities with robotics programs also use Aibos as a teaching tool. ... Another Aibo owner, Joe Barnhart, a software engineer in Santa Clara, has six of the robotic dogs, in part because he travels a lot and can't take care of a 'biological' pet. ... Sony said it plans to shift its research and development in artificial intelligence into future consumer electronics products, but offered no further details."
>>> Robotic Pets, Robots, Applications January 27, 2006: What happened to the Robot Age? Sony's decision to ditch its Aibo robotic dog, along with its entire robot development team, is a reminder that we are still a long way from the age of automated domestic servants. Architects of the Robot Age have been busy rethinking the future. BBC News Magazine. "It might seem as though the robot revolution we were promised 20 years ago has hit an almighty malfunction. On the outskirts of Hatfield, Hertfordshire, in a ground-floor flat in which two customised robots are the only full-time residents, a team of researchers have been grappling with just this issue. The University of Hertfordshire's human-robot interaction research group has, along with most other robot development programmes, gone back to basics. 'For a long time people thought the summit of human intelligence was our capacity for problem solving, IQ tests and the like. So in developing robots they designed them to do these complex tasks, like playing chess,' says Prof Kerstin Dautenhahn, the group's leader and professor of artificial intelligence. 'But now people are saying that its humans' ability to deal with complex social relationships that's made us intelligent. Primatologists suggest this is what has made us smarter.' ... These days, the watchword in robotics is 'multi-disciplinary' - bringing together people from sociology and psychology backgrounds, as well as the technical folk, to build a robot that could a true domestic goddess." January 26, 2006: Sony to quit manufacturing AIBO, QRIO. Kyodo News / available from Yahoo! Asia News. "Sony Corp. said Thursday it will cease manufacturing the popular robot dog AIBO by the end of March and stop developing a new version of the humanoid robot QRIO soon, as part of its efforts to improve profitability. Sony said it will continue with research and development of the artificial intelligence it has used in the process of developing the robots and will utilize the results for general electronics appliances."
>>> Robotic Pets, Robots, Hazards & Disasters, Applications January 26, 2006: Robot set loose to film your insides. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist (Issue 2536; page 26). "Next time you go under the knife, it may not be just the surgeon poking about inside you. A radio-controlled robot could be roaming round in there too, providing an extra eye for surgeons performing minimally invasive 'keyhole' procedures. The robot, developed by Dmitry Oleynikov and colleagues at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, can move around inside the stomach or abdomen to give surgeons a new perspective on the area being operated on. It is also equipped with a retractable needle, allowing it to perform biopsies." January 25, 2006: Programming Commander Data, Coding the Borg
- New Viterbi School Undergraduate Class in Artificial Intelligence Turns to Science Fiction for Problem Sets. University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering News. "Milind Tambe, an associate professor of computer science, will be using science fiction as problem sets in a class on artificial intelligence for undergraduate programmers [CS499] beginning in the fall, 2006 semester.
'Computer science is catching up with the ideas in these stories,' says Tambe. 'We are using science fiction as the spice for the main dish of teaching an important new area of our discipline.' While a number of universities use science fiction to introduce concepts in physics and other fields, Tambe believes his course is the first of its kind in computer science. ... The class will focus not on robots per se, but on their 'minds,' what are called in the field of artificial intelligence 'agents.' These are virtual robots, disembodied machine entities that can create strategies to achieve ends, and even negotiate with each other to cooperate while doing so. 'Science fiction provides three key benefits in this course,' said Tambe. 'First, it is a great motivator and it provides context, generating excitement about artificial intelligence topics in general, and agents and multiagent systems in particular. Second, science fiction also helps provide a perspective on how far we have come in our research, as well as current limitations, and future research challenges. Third, science fiction literature is a great vehicle for understanding the impact on society if agent-based computing truly succeeds.'" January 25, 2006: The Road Ahead - How 'intelligent agents' and mind-mappers are taking our information democracy to the next stage. By Bill Gates. Newsweek / available from MSNBC. "As management guru Tom Davenport once put it, 'Knowledge is information combined with experience, context, interpretation, and reflection.' It's the knowledge derived from information that gives you a competitive edge. ... Researchers at Microsoft and elsewhere are developing technology that can unobtrusively 'watch' you working, then make suggestions about related subjects or ideas. ... Computer scientists are also making progress against a long-held dream of 'intelligent agents' that anticipate your needs and provide just-in-time information that's relevant to the work you're doing. Experimental programs known as reasoning engines can test your ideas against common-sense logic, spotting flaws in hypotheses and acting as 'virtual subject experts' to help guide your thinking. These technologies promote consilience --- literally, the 'jumping together' of knowledge from different disciplines. They help people combine their own ideas with at least some existing knowledge far more efficiently than was previously possible. ... Today's search engines are good at locating tidbits of information in an ocean of data, and even at finding answers to simple questions. The next step is pattern-recognition engines and mental models to help people mine and assess the value of all that information, and technologies that infuse online data with meaning and context...." January 25, 2006: NIST fellowship open to undergrads. By Florence Olsen. FCW.com. "The Information Technology Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology is accepting applications from undergraduate students for its 2006 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program. ... The laboratory conducts research in many areas including computer forensics, software quality, statistical and mathematical modeling, data mining, machine learning, language and speech processing, virtual reality, information security, biometrics for computer access and security, and health care informatics." January 25, 2006: High Tech Bots Play Ancient Tune. Here and Now radio program hosted by Robin Young. WBUR. "Last week, Japanese scientists announced the creation of a robot that can do sign language. That brings the science of robotics another step away from the assembly line, and closer to human contact. But robotic music? Won't it sound like that cheesy 'Theme from the Entertainer' on your telephone hold button? No, says 'Ensemble Robot' director Christine Southworth. This week the ensemble is premiering 'Heavy Metal,' a new piece for Balinese gamelan, robots and strings. The piece debuts at 'Music and the Invasion of Technology,' part of the 'When Science Meets Art' series underway at the Boston Museum of Science here in Boston." Use the Listen button at the top of their page to access the broadcast. January 25, 2006: Imagining the Google Future - Top experts help us plot four scenarios that show where the company's geniuses may be leading it -- and, perhaps, all of us. By Chris Taylor. Business 2.0 / available from CNN Money.com. "What kind of company will Google become in the coming decades? ... We put the question to scientists, consultants.... They responded with well-argued, richly detailed, and sometimes scary visions of a Google future. On the following pages, we've compiled four very different scenarios for the company."
>>> The Future, Applications January 25, 2006: Robotics, For the Rest of Us. By Hector Hernandez. The Tech [published by the students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. "Recently, I attended a public talk by Professor Rodney Brooks, director of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The talk, titled 'Space Exploration and Robotics,' was part of a new lecture series sponsored and held at the MIT Museum with support from the Boston Globe. Part of the MIT Museum's plan to change its programming and image, the series is being broadcast as 'saloon-style, early-evening conversations with scientists and engineers who are making the news that really matters.' ... Surrounded by the metallic creatures which are part of his life, Brooks shared his vision for the development of space exploration. He painted a picture of autonomous robots preparing a landing site and habitat for humans to settle, and made sure to note both benefits and pitfalls of such exploration. ... At the conclusion of the evening, I was enthralled by the disposition and camaraderie of the audience. Here were people of all ages and walks of life sitting together having meaningful discussions about scientific advancements and potential effects on their lives. ... If there is a chance for us to ignite an interest in science and engineering in this country, we need more programs like this one started at the MIT Museum. We need more professors to take to the pulpit, or the soapbox, and with clear concise words explain to our audiences the science and engineering wonders we encounter every day." January 25, 2006: : The New Security - Cameras That Never Forget Your Face. By Noah Shactman. The New York Times & nytimes.com. "Digital spy cameras can instantly pick people out of crowds on the television show '24.' But real-world video surveillance was stuck in the VCR age, taking countless hours to sift through blurry black-and-white tapes. Stopping a problem in progress was nearly impossible, unless a guard just happened to be staring at the right video monitor. But surveillance companies, using networks of cheap Web-connected cameras and powerful new video-analysis software, are starting to turn the Hollywood model into reality. Faces and license plates can now be spotted, in almost real time, at ports, military bases and companies. Security perimeters can be changed or strengthened with a mouse click. Feeds from hundreds of cameras can be combined into a single desktop view. And videotape that used to take hours, even days, to scour is searched in minutes. Some experts question the effectiveness of such 'intelligent video' systems, which are sold by ObjectVideo, Verint and VistaScape as well, and worry about the privacy implications. ... To Mr. [Bruce] Schneier, the camera networks are part of a larger trend - along with Britain's plans to monitor every car on every major road, and the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program - toward 'wholesale surveillance, the kind of stuff Stalin only dreamed of,' he said. 'The question is, do we want that?'" January 25, 2006: A Growing Web of Watchers Builds a Surveillance Society. By David Shenk. The New York Times & nytimes.com. "If the American public seems a bit confused about the raging debate of security versus civil liberties - Bush/Cheney versus the A.C.L.U. - it may be because the debate itself has been outpaced by technology. In our post-9/11, protowireless world, democracies and free markets are increasingly saturated with prying eyes from governments, corporations and neighbors. For better and worse, free societies are fast entering the world of total surveillance. ... Allowing a computer to read your e-mail may not sound threatening, but with advanced pattern-recognition software, scanning many messages over time could produce a powerful consumer profile. As these machines get smarter and smarter, it may soon be far more worrisome to let a machine 'read' your information than to have a human reading it. ... These are today's tools. What about tomorrow's? The hallmarks of the new digital tool-building age are machines that are increasingly smart, small, cheap and communicative. We are, without question, headed into a world where - mostly by our choice - the minute details of our bodies, lives and homes will be routinely tracked and shared, with potential for more convenience and safety but also abuse." January 24, 2006: Partnership has legs - Yobotics envisions making robots walk. By Anna Guido. The Enquirer & Cincinnati.Com. "Someday, four-legged robots that look like dogs could help the U.S. Army scout out the enemy and carry supplies. With names like 'Pluto' and 'BigDog,' they could walk through the jungle and climb mountain areas where wheeled support could not navigate. But that day is not tomorrow. ... In August 2003, [Ben] Krupp and [Jerry] Pratt received funding for their 25-page proposal for research and development of a quadruped robot they call Pluto - short for Power Autonomous Legged Robot for Urban Terrain Operations. ... Pratt said the technologies that come out of their research and development also will have practical applications for the entertainment and medical industries. Thousands of toy robots will be available 20 years from now, he said. And in medicine, robots will be used in surgery and to help with physical rehabilitation, which is 'very labor intensive and requires two or three nurses for one patient.'" January 24, 2006: Pentagon Planning Document Leaves Iraq Out of Equation - A four-year blueprint for the military reflects a view that the war is an anomaly. There's talk of robots and drones, but no force buildup. By Mark Mazzetti. Los Angeles Times & latimes.com. "For more than two years, Army officials have been fending off questions about whether they have enough troops to complete their mission in Iraq and racing to get armor plates bolted onto Humvees and supply trucks to defend against homemade bombs. But in the Pentagon blueprint [known as the Quadrennial Defense Review], officials are once again talking about a futuristic force of robots, networked computers and drone aircraft. ... The Pentagon review will also endorse a large increase in the number of special operations troops, and more foreign language education and cultural-awareness training for all U.S. troops." January 24, 2006: Prof speaks "spooky." By Marquelle Matthews. The Pitt News & pittnews.com. "A University of Arizona professor spoke to students and faculty Thursday about the 'spooky stuff' involved with information science. Hsinchun Chen lectured students and faculty at the School of Information Sciences on research in medical and security informatics, the science of collecting information. The 'spooky stuff' Chen was referring to was his COPLINK project. COPLINK enables law enforcement agencies to organize and interpret information such as criminal records and the social network and structure of narcotic rings. 'Basically, it’s a Google for cops,' Chen said." January 23, 2006: Computer to User - You Figure It Out. Systems should leave something to the imagination. By Gary H. Anthes. Computerworld. "Researchers in the U.S. and the U.K. are developing computer systems that make deliberately ambiguous interpretations of human environments. What's more, the systems are often flat-out wrong. But the developers are delighted with their progress so far, saying that with computers, sometimes less is more. The work is a branch of 'affective computing,' which attempts to make computers recognize and respond to users' emotions. And then there's 'culturally embedded computing,' as Cornell University information science professor Phoebe Sengers calls it, which applies a twist to the concept. 'We are shifting from the idea that affective computing is about computers understanding emotions to thinking about how people can understand their own emotions better after interacting with computational devices,' says Sengers." January 23, 2006: Eliza Redux Robot Offers Psychoanalysis Over The Internet. By Adam Balkin. NY1 News. "Do computers worry you? How about a robot psychoanalyst trying to work you through your fear of technology. It's called Eliza Redux, a robosapien on Manhattan's Lower East Side configured to move and answer questions for anyone in the world with an Internet connection. 'You log on and you're in a waiting room, and you wait your turn because it can only see one patient at a time. Then you sign up for a session and if it's not occupied you get tossed right in,' says Andrianne Wortzel of NYC College of Technology.... The robot and website were created in part as a tribute to Joseph Weisenbaum, an MIT professor who in 1966 developed Eliza, the very first computer program that mimics human conversation." January 23, 2006: Talk to the car with new tech. By Stefanie Olsen, with Michael Kanellos contributing. CNET News.com. "[I]t may be a few years before mass-production vehicles synchronize electronic devices for voice control, but momentum is building for features that let people ask for driving directions or call a friend without using their hands. Last week, for example, Toyota partnered with a relatively unknown voice-search specialist, called VoiceBox, in Bellevue, Wash. In development for roughly three years, VoiceBox's technology differs from established voice tech on the market because it allows people to speak conversationally to operate car electronics, rather than having them memorize and deliberately sound out commands. ... [VoiceBox's founder, Bob Kennewick] recognized a fundamental problem with existing voice recognition, which required programmers to set up specific dictionaries for a given set of data, and then match speech to text. But users had to say the right words to make it work. Background noises could also muddle the translation. His vision was to develop technology that could recognize the context of speech, picking up the right cues in a conversation to answer like a human would. ... 'It looks for clues in what you're saying and what you've said before to infer what you want, just like a human would,' said Mike Kennewick, the founder's brother and current CEO of VoiceBox. ... Other big players in advanced search recognition, or voice recognition, include IBM, Microsoft and ScanSoft. Microsoft, for example, sells voice-recognition technology with its operating system for automobiles, but the system responds to commands rather than to contextual speech." January 23, 2006: Math Will Rock Your World. By Stephen Baker, with Bremen Leak. Business Week Magazine & BusinessWeek Online. "Neal Goldman is a math entrepreneur. He works on Wall Street, where numbers rule. But he's focusing his analytic tools on a different realm altogether: the world of words. Goldman's startup, Inform Technologies LLC, is a robotic librarian. Every day it combs through thousands of press articles and blog posts in English. It reads them and groups them with related pieces. Inform doesn't do this work alphabetically or by keywords. It uses algorithms to analyze each article by its language and context. It then sends customized news feeds to its users, who also exist in Inform's system as -- you guessed it -- math. How do you convert written words into math? Goldman says it takes a combination of algebra and geometry. Imagine an object floating in space that has an edge for every known scrap of information. It's called a polytope and it has near-infinite dimensions, almost impossible to conjure up in our earthbound minds. ... The world is moving into a new age of numbers. Partnerships between mathematicians and computer scientists are bulling into whole new domains of business and imposing the efficiencies of math. ... The clearest example of math's disruptive power is in advertising. There Google and other search companies built on math are turning an industry that grew on ideas, hunches, and personal relationships into a series of calculations. ... Math is also positioned to shake up investigations. Whether in law, journalism, or criminal detective work, sleuths have relied for centuries on the human brain to pick through strands of disparate evidence and to find patterns. ... One significant challenge to the math revolution is to build new businesses from data without sacrificing privacy. If customers, patients, and workers have reason to fear that the intimate details of their lives are floating around in databases, they'll likely work to lock up their information or move it off network. This could disrupt efforts to use math and data mining to fight disease and to battle terrorism. The goal now is to create systems that share group information while shielding the individual." January 22, 2006: Robotic pets offer health benefits, too. U.S. News and World Report article (see it in our December 2005 archive) available from Star-Telegram.com. "Sure, pets are cute and seem to improve human health. But there are some places where they can't live, such as nursing homes. So can a robot pet provoke the same reactions? Yes, according to a few preliminary studies -- but not to the same degree. 'I thought it was kind of silly when we started looking into it, ' says Alan Beck, director of the Center for the Human-Animal Bond at Purdue University's veterinary school. 'But there's something going on there.'" January 22, 2006: Hungary Joins Tech Competition - Budapest seeks U.S. investors and development deals. Red Herring. "Hungarian technology executives are working hard to strike up partnerships and increased investment from firms in the United States. They made a pitch Thursday at the Hungarian Consulate General in New York City, describing the technologies they are developing and the deals they are making. ... [Hungarian Technology Center's] Virginia office provides a kind of incubation facility where Hungarian companies can set up shop in the U.S. and try to reach the U.S. market. One such company is AITIA (Artificial Intelligence, Information Technology, Intelligent Agents) International, which has developed a wide range of technologies. One of those is a voice-enabled call center with Hungarian speech-recognition capabilities that several local government offices in Hungary are using, according to AITIA President Gabor Tatai. ... In addition, the company has developed an information kiosk where a female avatar provides directions to tourists in a Budapest plaza using artificial intelligence technology." January 20, 2006: Developing Robots as Social Companions. University of Hertfordshire News. "The University of Hertfordshire has taken the robot out of the laboratory and has it living in a house nearby as part of a study of human-robot interaction. The study, which will be broadcast on the BBC Three Counties' John Pilgrim Show, on Wednesday 25 January as part of a two-hour feature on the University, aims to research how humans can comfortably interact with robots. ... Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn, Professor in Artificial Intelligence at the School and who is leading the University’s contribution to the project commented: 'We aim to develop personalised robot companions. Some people will want a robot with a human head and arms, while others will be more comfortable with just a technical box.'" January 19, 2006: Searching questions - EU plans to fund a new search engine could succeed if the motivation is technological rather than political. Opinion by Victor Keegan. Guardian Unlimited Technology. "The EU is pondering whether to help fund a Franco-German initiative to build a search engine - costing up to €2bn over five years - to surpass Google. ... By any normal standards, this has got to be the baddest, maddest proposition since ... well, since a similar consortium decided to take on the dominance of the Boeing aircraft company many years ago. ... At the moment, it looks like a lost cause because Google dominates everything and appears unstoppable. ... But the technology of search, despite its mind-boggling efficiency (Google can scour the world's servers in a fraction of a second) is still in its infancy. Future search engines will make more use of artificial intelligence, speech recognition and other technologies to provide a better, more personalised service. There is a political element in all this since European governments are partly motivated by the desire not to hand over their national archives, with all the copyright problems, to a foreign company." January 18, 2006: Where now for agent-based computing? IST Results. "What is the future direction for agent-based systems, one of the most important software R&D areas in recent years? Drawing from a body of some 200 industry and academic organisations, a European project has released a strategic roadmap that hopes to guide evolution of the field over the next decade. AgentLink III, as its name suggests, was the third project in the series and author of the roadmap. ... In essence, an agent is an autonomous software system: a system that can decide for itself what it needs to do. Underpinning many aspects of broader information technology, some of the most compelling developments in IT – the semantic Web, ambient intelligence, the Grid, autonomic systems – require agent technologies or something similar for their realisation. ... Another example, [Michael Luck] says, is that of a shipping company that needed to improve its management of shipping routes for oil tankers. 'By modelling each tanker as an agent, the company was able to develop much better simulations of the operating environment, helping them to react more immediately to changing circumstances.' ... He warns, however, of dangers in the growing ubiquity of agent-based computing. Now that such applications are spreading throughout industry, he believes, we are at risk of losing focus as agent-based applications become embedded into ever-larger, and sometimes proprietary, systems.... 'As agent-based systems become "sucked up" into larger infrastructures, they will no longer be recognised as agent-based technologies. The risk is that we lose the ability to think laterally as ever-larger systems narrow the potential for development.'" January 18, 2006: Mass Spying Means Gross Errors. Commentary by Jennifer Granick. Wired News. "The United States government either currently has, or soon will have, new technology that makes mass surveillance possible. The next question for citizens and other policy makers is whether and when to use this capability. ... Privacy advocate Phil Zimmerman has pointed out that through CALEA [Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act] the FBI requested technological surveillance capabilities far beyond the capacity of the judicial system to approve warrants or the FBI to monitor. This suggests that law enforcement plans to automate or computerize the monitoring process -- probably by deploying voice-recognition technology to look for 'hits' that could be followed up on with human-monitored wiretaps. Proposals to install face-recognition technology at airports and public gatherings, to data-mine collections of government and commercial databases, and to profile airline passengers are feasible only with modern technology. ... Now that we have the power, should we use it? ... " January 17, 2006: Rewarding innovation - R. Bharat Rao developed a concept that is a fundamentally new way of analyzing data. By Gretchen Metz. DailyLocal.com. "Rao, a senior director of engineering research development in Siemens Medical Solutions’ computer-aided diagnosis and therapy group, constructed a data analysis prototype using his discretionary time at work. ... Rao’s pioneering data system went on the market about two years ago. To recognize the accomplishment, the Erlangen, Germany-based Siemens AG, parent company of Siemen’s Medical Solutions, named Rao to receive one of 12 2005 Inventor of the Year awards. ... Rao's automated data collection and analysis tool is known by the clever acronym, REMIND, the initials for Reliable Extraction and Meaningful Inference from Nonstructured Data. The technology enables caregivers to use disparate health care information to personalize patient care plans and enhance patient outcomes. Rao’s concept was not to change the data doctors collect to fit the technology, but to develop a technology using a sophisticated algorithm that would adapt to the data and analyze it. 'Much of the data in the health care system is not in a format that can be readily accessed or applied at the point of care,' Rao said. 'For example, key clinical information is stored as written text in patient records, discharge summaries, progress notes and radiology reports.' Without requiring any manual entry or change in workflow, REMIND integrates patient data with medical information and current treatment guidelines. Besides assisting doctors with computer-aided diagnoses, the technology will be able to review years of data to find patterns of treatment, as well as identify people eligible for clinical trials." January 17, 2006: U.K. cops look into face recognition tech. By Steve Ranger. CNET News.com. "The U.K.'s police force is investigating how to incorporate facial-recognition software into a new national mugshot database, so they can track down criminals faster. ... Geoff Whitaker, [the Police Information Technology Organization's] head of biometrics, said the organization is 'in the process of assessing the ability of current face recognition technology to meet the requirements of the police service for automated identification.'" January 17, 2006: Catchy class names attract more students. By Matt Krupnick. Contra Costa Times & ContraCostaTimes. com. "Faculty everywhere walk the thin line between catchy course names and plain old wackiness, with varying success. ... [Mills College] Computer science professor Ellen Spertus brings in students from several disciplines to her class, 'Robots, Persons and the Future.' 'Computer science is not a popular major right now, but everyone loves robots,' said Spertus, who started the class about four years ago. Students build Lego robots and read and write robot-themed fiction in the course. The name game worked on 25-year-old students Denali Nicholson, a computer science major who took the class last semester. 'It definitely caught my eye,' she said. 'I was definitely curious about how she was going to tie all this together.'" January 17, 2006: The computer really does say 'no.' Telegraph & telegraph.co.uk. "Aggrieved NHS patients will be able to complain online using computer software that, its makers claim, could settle 98 per cent of cases. Using the internet, patients will register grievances with a so-called 'robot agent' which will inform the relevant hospital or doctors' surgery and decide how to investigate it. In relatively minor cases, such as criticism of car parking facilities, the 'agent' may even be able to resolve the complaint online without any further human involvement. In more complicated cases, the 'agent' might have to hold meetings between the two sides.... The software [developed by a team at Kingston University, Surrey], known as MeDispute, is designed to speed up the time it takes to resolve complaints and also avoid costly courtroom battles. ... The system has been developed from technology created by a company in France, as part of a £1 million European Union project to find ways of improving industrial arbitration. The original programme has already been piloted at the European Court of Arbitration." January 16, 2006: Robotic hand translates speech into sign language. The Yomiuri Shimbun / available from The Daily Yomiuri & Daily Yomiuri Online. "An 80-centimeter robotic hand that can covert spoken words and simple phrases into sign language has been developed in a town in Fukuoka Prefecture. ... [Keita Matsuo and Hirotsugu Sakai] studied a book on sign language, and spent about two months creating the system, increasing the number of joints in the hand to 18 so that it could sign smoothly. They added that in the future, hundreds of thousands of words could be programmed into the voice recognition unit and the robotic hand could function as a receptionist." January 16, 2006: Police, Army Robots to Debut in 5 Years. By Kim Tae-gyu. The Korea Times & hankooki.com [Note: The article also appears under the headline > Police, Army Robots to Debut in 10 Years.] "By the 2010s, Korea is expecting to see robots assisting police and the military, patrolling the neighborhoods and going on recon missions on the battlefield. The Center for Intelligent Robots on Monday said the state-backed agency plans to check the feasibility of security robots by convening a 40-member planning committee late this week. ... 'The robots will be directed by a remote control system or move autonomously via their own artificial intelligence systems,' MIC project manager Oh Sang-rok said. `... Smart robots need three basic functions of sensing, processing and action. Thus far, robotics researchers have tried to cram the three into a single dummy, causing expenses to soar. Instead, the planned robots will be receiving most sensing and processing capabilities via a Web connection. Only the ability of movement will be located in the robot. ... On top of their use in national defense and social security, the MIC hopes to use the network robots for the private sector late this year. ... The three sorts of wheeled robots will be used for various applications: cleaning rooms, health-care programs, Internet connection, home monitoring or reading books to kids." January 16, 2006: Fujitec eases bottlenecks. By Anna Guido. The Enquirer & Cincinnati.Com. "A new elevator system developed by Fujitec America Inc. alleviates passenger bottlenecks in lobbies and in other high-traffic areas. The Destination Floor Guidance System - which was put into operation Friday in the Metropolitan Park West Tower in downtown Seattle - minimizes stops by grouping together passengers with common destinations. ... The Neuros Logic program that runs the system rationalizes and manages the elevator traffic patterns as they change throughout the day using technology such as artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic and genetic algorithms. ... Fujitec says only its system incorporates artificial intelligence to learn the building's traffic flow." January 16, 2006: A genuine milestone for artificial intelligence. By Richard Macey. The Sydney Morning Herald & smh.com.au. "Robots have a reason to party: this year is the 50th anniversary of artificial intelligence. In 1956 John McCarthy, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, convened a meeting of computer specialists at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. 'It was the dawn of the computing era,' said Claude Sammut, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of NSW and leader of its Artificial Intelligence Research Group." January 15, 2006: Watson presumes - Program developed at Northwestern computer lab emphasizes context. By John Van. Chicago Tribune & chicagotribune.com. "Many viewers were probably impressed when a character on Star Trek asked a computer for a cup of tea and it was produced immediately. Not Kristian Hammond. 'I wondered why he had to ask,' said Hammond, co-director of Northwestern University's intelligent information computer lab. 'A truly intelligent machine would anticipate that its operator wanted tea.' That's the kind of smarts that Hammond and his colleagues put in computers -- machines ready to answer questions you haven't yet formed. To Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, the lab's other co-director, too many scientists working with artificial intelligence have spent too much time on esoteric rather than practical pursuits. 'To be useful, anything you build has to be scalable," Birnbaum said, so that one solution can be applied to many problems. Taking years to build a machine that can do one nifty thing really well just won't cut it.' Northwestern's lab specializes in guiding computers through the mountains of information that reside on the Internet and in other databases, plucking out gems a person might use. The secret is context, letting the machine know its user's immediate interests. ... The goal is for your computers to know enough about you to anticipate your needs but keep that information private as they do your bidding, [Hammond] said." January 15, 2006: Science Fiction and Fantasy. A time-traveling earthman, a decaying city and an autocratic computer. Book reviews by Paul Di Filippo. The Washington Post & washingtonpost.com. "AI as Auteur: There have been at least two subsequent generations of cyberpunks since that school of science fiction broke big in 1984. But most newer writers in this vein have chosen to retrace the territory mapped in William Gibson's seminal first trilogy -- Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) -- rather than pioneer new horizons. One newcomer who does not make such a mistake is Justina Robson, with her debut novel, Silver Screen (Pyr; paperback, $15). Despite her hard-edged topic, Robson attempts and achieves many of the same humanistic effects that Gibson brings off in later novels such as Pattern Recognition. Robson examines one of the core conceits of cyberpunk writing: the nature of machine consciousness -- artificial intelligence, or AI -- and its implications for mankind. Our narrator, Anjuli O'Connell, is an artificial-intelligence shrink, in charge of nursemaiding 901, the most advanced machine mind of the mid-21st century...." January 14, 2006: And they call it robot love. Interview by Rachel Nowak. New Scientist (Issue 2534; subscription req'd). "How do people react when brought face-to-face with intelligent robots for the first time? It's a question that has fascinated Mari Velonaki for nearly a decade. But she is no anthropologist. She's not even a scientist in the conventional sense. Velonaki is an artist with a PhD, and a passion for electronics. She is also determined enough to have convinced the prestigious Australian Centre for Field Robotics in Sydney to give her a desk, lab space and expert assistance to help her understand what happens when humans interact with mechanical beings. Velonaki has collaborated with robotics scientists at the centre to create Fish-Bird, a live exhibition comprising a pair of moody, love-struck robots disguised as wheelchairs that can communicate through movement and written text. ... [Q:] From your experience, do artists, engineers and scientists have much in common? [A:] There is a lot in common. They are passionate and proud people who create things that didn't previously exist. ..." January 14, 2006: Covert Crawler Descends on Web. By Quinn Norton. Wired News. "Billy Hoffman, an engineer at Atlanta company SPI Dynamics unveiled a new, smarter web-crawling application that behaves like a person using a browser, rather than a computer program. ... The research adds a new wrinkle in the ongoing war between website operators and spambots. ... To select which links to click on, Hoffman has settled on a solution somewhere between a masterful AI and completely random selection. 'In some ways it's a very simplified Turing test -- you can assign the different threads a personality. This crawler, you're the slow reader, you read the entire page.' Another thread may spend less time on a page before it starts clicking on different links. 'Each individual crawler has its own browser habits,' he added." January 14, 2006: A return to the orangey world. By Jonathan Amos. BBC News. "[T]here is a significant challenge in operating such a vehicle so far from Earth. 'The round trip light-time is 2.6 hours; that's a lot worse than talking to the rovers on Mars,' explains team member Alberto Elfes. 'In addition to that, depending on the relative positions of Titan, Saturn and Earth, you may have situations where you have blackout periods of up to 16 days or so. Under those conditions, you need a vehicle that is substantially autonomous, that can take care of itself.' Elfes and colleagues have tested an artificial intelligence system on a small airship over a dry lake bed in El Mirage, California. The vehicle was able to navigate itself to designated waypoints, correcting its path to take account of the wind. Take this sophistication to another level and an aerobot sent to Titan could be left to get on with scientific observations, safe in the knowledge that the vehicle would not crash into the first hill." January 14, 2006: Oases Springing Up Here for Ancient Game of Go. By Blake Eskin. The New York Times & nytimes.com (registration req'd). "For [Feng Yun], the toughest part of playing go these days may be finding a worthy opponent. America, she explained, is 'the desert of this game.' There are oases: players meet at the New York Go Center in Midtown, at a Korean café in Fort Lee, N.J., a floating house game in Brooklyn. It also has a cult following in math departments (it made cameo appearances in the films 'Pi' and 'A Beautiful Mind') and among computer scientists interested in artificial intelligence. Go has simpler rules than chess but is so complex that no one has devised a computer program that can defeat a talented amateur, let alone Ms. Feng." January 14, 2006: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Robot. Astrobiology Magazine (based on an Electrolux release). "Will robots one day rule the world? For decades this notion has both fascinated and terrified humans, our hungry imagination fed by Hollywood blockbusters and sci-fi novels. Now a new generation of robots promises a breakthrough in the world of Artificial Intelligence as they become capable of cognitive thought processes. The 2005 Fourth British Computer Society's Annual Prize for Progress towards Machine Intelligence sponsored by Electrolux has been won by IFOMIND, a mobile robot system that demonstrates intelligence as it meets a new object in its world. Based on Khepera , a robot commercially available from K-Team, the machine intelligence system was designed and programmed by a team led by Professor David Bell from Queens University, Belfast. ... Runners up include Rollo Carpenter's entry -- a chatty personality, George.... Rollo explains, 'George learns from every word everyone says to him - to imitate people, as well as trying to be himself.' ... The award is sponsored by Electrolux, a leader in the field of home appliance machine intelligence, with appliances such as the Electrolux Trilobite 2.0 - a robotic vacuum cleaner. ... Sales of domestic appliance robots reached 39,000 units in 2003 and are forecast to hit 20 million by 2008." January 12, 2006: Caution - Merge ahead.
Kurzweil sees a far different future, where biology and technology unite, and religion's role is transformed
By Sandi Dolbee, Religion & Ethics Editor. The San Diego Union-Tribune and signonsandiego.com. "This computer scientist [Ray Kurzweil] , inventor and visionary foresees, in just a few decades, a society that is infinitely smarter and resilient, courtesy of 'nanobots,' robots about the size of blood cells that will do everything from reverse aging to vastly extend intelligence. Nanotechnology already is here, providing coatings on clothing for stain-resistant fibers and helping to deliver drugs to targeted tissues. For Kurzweil, who has been enamored with artificial intelligence for decades (and multiple books), the rest is just a matter of time. 'We will gain power over our fates,' he writes. 'Our mortality will be in our hands. We will be able to live as long as we want (a subtly different statement from saying we will live forever).' What does this have to do with religion? A lot, according to Kurzweil.... [I]n a telephone interview from his Boston-area home, his thoughts fly into warp speed in a burst of sentences and switching of topics that can best be described as Kurzweilian speak. ... Is religion destined to take a back seat to science among Singularitarians? 'Science, technology, particularly information technologies, will ultimately encompass all the things we care about. . . . I think it will necessitate a sort of revising our philosophies of life based on these new realities,' he says. Kurzweil believes this is already happening. 'Religion used to be a much stronger force and still is for many people, but we do have a rise in the secular culture that respects science and culture.'" January 12, 2006: Testimony of Professor Laurence Tribe, Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School, before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary on the Nomination of Samuel Alito to be an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.. "Disputes about frozen embryos, stem cell research, therapeutic and reproductive cloning, the use of human genetic material in non-human animals in order to perform research said to be vital in acquiring disease-preventing strategies, the uses of artificial intelligence, wide-ranging electronic surveillance to protect the public from terrorist attack, and any number of other subjects of controversy may present constitutional problems...." January 12, 2006: Clever car keeps an eye on stray pedestrians. By Will Knight. NewScientist.com news. "A prototype vehicle capable of spotting pedestrians who stray into the road has been built by Volkswagen and other companies. The Save-U system was developed by a consortium including Volkswagen, DaimlerChrysler, and several other technical companies. A prototype has already undergone successful testing in the UK. The pedestrian-recognition technology uses three different types of sensor to identify a person, or even a cyclist, in the road ahead. The system harnesses an array of radar sensors, as well as visual and infrared cameras. ... [Chris Wright from Middlesex University] notes that many manufacturers are working on ever more sophisticated technologies to make cars more autonomous. These include systems to automatically steer a vehicle and maintain a safe distance from the vehicle ahead, as well as impact avoidance features. ... 'In 10 or 20 years cars will be robots.' ... Wright says the biggest obstacle to greater automobile autonomy could be legal, as it will be difficult to show where responsibility lies should an accident occur." January 12, 2006: St Lawrence of Google. Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, has always wanted to change the world. He is well on his way. The Economist. "If Google is a religion, what is its God? It would have to be The Algorithm. Faith in the possibility of an omniscient and omnipotent algorithm appears to be what Messrs Page and Brin have in common. ... Google is already working on a massive and global computing grid. Eventually, says Mr [Paul] Saffo, 'they're trying to build the machine that will pass the Turing test' -- in other words, an artificial intelligence that can pass as a human in written conversations. Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina." January 12, 2006: The future trader: a machine? By Oh Boon Ping. The Business Times Singapore. "Imagine a virtual trading floor with thousands of machine traders wired to it and executing more than 10,000 transactions per second. Besides, these machines are also able to feel the pulse of the market, thanks to the artificial intelligence (AI) functions embedded in them. Indeed, this may well be the future of trading, thanks to financial engineering, says Low Buen Sin, director of the MSc (financial engineering) programme at the Nanyang Technological University. He explained: 'Currently, many financial institutions worldwide are already using algorithmic or rules-based trading to help them identify trading opportunities.' He added: 'AI has also caught on in many fields such as complex resource scheduling and resource allocation. So there's no reason why it can't be used in financial engineering.' ... Dr Low explained: 'Financial engineering is the use of various mathematical and statistical techniques to solve financial problems such as the valuation of derivative instruments, the trading and investment of securities, and risk management, and so on.'" January 12, 2006: Q&A with Anthony Carson. By Jim Stafford. The Oklahoman & News 9. "Today's Q&A is with the co-founder and chief scientist with Tulsa-based X-Cast Media, a startup company that is using artificial intelligence software to help people communicate with business Web sites. [Q:] What inspired you to create a business built around artificial intelligence software? [A:] To bridge the gap between man and machine ultimately is our overall goal. Because technology has become so complex, we need a technology interpreter. We are that bridge. [Q:] Does X-Cast Media truly use artificial intelligence to communicate between man and machine? ... [Q:] What is the advantage to businesses using the so-called avatars you have to communicate with users on a Web site? [A:] There are numerous advantages; the most important advantage is being able to communicate to a Web site in natural language...." January 12, 2006: Backstory - Don't swat that fly. It's a spacecraft! Tomorrow's space vehicles may look more like insects and ping-pong balls than traditional rocket ships. By Peter N. Spotts. The Christian Science Monitor & csmonito.com. "Picture this: Swarms of one-legged robots hopping across Mars like malformed chicks. They dart in and out of caves and crevices, grabbing soil samples and searching for signs of ancient microbes - and thus life.... Welcome to the space exploration of tomorrow. While NASA struggles to return humans to the moon, scientists and engineers in labs across the country are letting their imaginations run free in designing hardware for far more distant exploration of the solar system. ... The resulting research would come about as close to human exploration as you can get without putting actual bootprints on Mars or the moon. The robots and rovers would essentially set their own exploration agenda. They may not make missions cheaper, but they could squeeze more science out of each voyage. ... NASA's first Earth Observing satellite, for instance, is designed to watch active volcanoes, spot wildfires, and monitor the polar ice caps. As it recognizes terrestrial changes, it makes some of its own decisions about follow-up monitoring, says Steve Chien, who heads the artificial intelligence group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Future versions of this intelligent software could be built into a new generation of robots and orbiters." January 12, 2006: 'Grand challenges' spur grand results - Private groups are offering big cash prizes to anyone who can solve a range of daunting problems. By Gregory M. Lamb. The Christian Science Monitor & csmonitor.com. "In October 2004 SpaceShipOne roared into space (twice) - the first privately funded spacecraft ever to reach suborbit, nearly 70 miles above Earth. A year later, 'Stanley,' a Volkswagen Touareg modified by Stanford University students, rumbled across some 130 miles of desert without a human driver, navigating the rough terrain guided by computer programs and sensors. ... Using 'grand challenges' to stimulate scientific progress isn't new. In 1714 the British government offered the equivalent of about $12 million to answer a vexing question: How could His Majesty's ships calculate their longitude - how far they were east or west of home - to avoid shipwrecks and other disasters? ... The cluster of challenges may be the result of both bad and good news facing science today, says Gilbert Omenn, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, D.C. ... 'Prizes change the public perception about an issue,' says Peter Diamandis, founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation in Santa Monica, Calif. ... [A] successful grand challenge involves more than money, Omenn says. It needs to be clearly stated, socially worthy, and difficult but not impossible to achieve." January 11, 2006: Problem solving made simpler. IST Results. "[T]he IST-funded K-Wf Grid project addresses the need to develop a better infrastructure for future Grid services. The project aims in particular to develop a rule-based expert system which will underpin the use of a workflow approach to solving problems, rather than the present Grid system, which is based mostly on a series of independently-running batch processing jobs. The K-Wf Grid expert system is designed to help users construct workflow-based applications. Now halfway, the project is due to finish in February 2007, and the participants have already developed an experimental prototype of the system. 'A user may ask, "I want to produce a flood forecast for Slovakia for the period of the next two weeks",' says project coordinator Steffen Unger of Fraunhofer First in Berlin. 'This is the purpose of the K-Wf Grid system, to help users with such problems by giving advice and answers in normal language.' ... The project partners are developing an ontological approach to knowledge representation for the expert system to help with the construction of workflows." January 11, 2006: Is there a Santa Claus? Ho, ho, ho, robot! By Lee W. Bailey. The Ithaca Journal. "Our technology is very symbolic. Cars are fast, sexy, social position markers, and, rockets are powerful political expressions of collective soul-in-the-world. Our machines embody both clever engineering and mythic passions. Take robots, for example. There are plenty of important non-humanoid robots that perform valuable functions, such as the Mars explorers. But these do not try to look human. There are robots that try to look and act human, such as Honda's walking P2. Other androids are mythic robots in science fiction, such as Oz's Tin Woodman, Asimov's robots, Star Trek's Data, Star Wars' C3PO, the Terminator, animated dolls, the robots in films like Metropolis, A.I., and so forth. Some Santas are even robots. Not all of these are for kids. Many are highly symbolic, fervent fascinations of adults. They express hope for techno-utopias, fear of technological dystopias, and our complex, emotional interactions with machines, cute and sexual or powerful and destructive. ... These robot myths are not lies, but meaningful, symbolic, positive and negative, inspiring and critical stories for intelligent adults. ... I suggest that android robots are mythic, ritual re-enactments of the Pinocchio folktale about bringing puppets to life." January 11, 2006: Britain plans total electronic surveillance of roads - In trial runs, the high-tech system increased arrests per officer tenfold. By Mark Rice-Oxley. The Christian Science Monitor & csmonitor.com. "In March, Britain will enhance its reputation as the surveillance capital of the West with a global first: recording the movements of all cars on the road and storing the data for at least two years. It's a network of thousands of cameras harnessed to software that can read car license plates, check them against a central database, and alert police to suspected criminals or terrorists. ... Experts are already working on systems that can automatically recognize human faces and it may not be long before machines can pick out a 'suspicious' face in a crowd. Many on both left and right of the political spectrum find the growing use of surveillance disturbing. 'Frankly I don't want to see a society in which the Big Brother element comes to the fore,' says MP Garnier." January 11, 2006: Ahead, high-tech help for mine rescues. By Mark Clayton. The Christian Science Monitor & csmonitor.com. "Could new high-technology devices, some on the drawing board, others not yet approved for use in coal mines, have saved the 12 miners who died in the Sago coal mine last week? ... One area of technological gain has occurred with rescue robots that can enter mine environments without risking rescuers. The robot at Sago got bogged in mud, but future robotic technology will deal with mud, too. One new vehicle looks like a small all-terrain vehicle with four larger knobby tires." January 10, 2006: Smart Networks Vs. Smart Gadgets in 2006. By Tiernan Ray. Barron's Online. "Some expect artificial intelligence, or AI, to enjoy a resurgence as gadgets help users tell Google or Yahoo! which TV shows or movies they want. 'More and more, I want my computer to be my assistant, wherever I am,' says David Farber, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. 'You want an intelligent assistant that will go online, find out what TV shows are playing and offer to download them for you,' he says." January 10 - 17, 2006: Singularity - Ubiquity interviews Ray Kurzweil. Ubiquity (Volume 7, Issue 1). "Kurzweil: There are two key aspects to the concept of singularity -- the hardware and software sides of emulating human intelligence. We'll have sufficient hardware to recreate human intelligence pretty soon. We'll have it in a supercomputer by 2010. A thousand dollars of computation will equal the 10,000 trillion calculations per second that I estimate is necessary to emulate the human brain by 2020. The software side will take a little longer. In order to achieve the algorithms of human intelligence, we need to actually reverse-engineer the human brain, understand its principles of operation. And there again, not surprisingly, we see exponential growth where we are doubling the spatial resolution of brain scanning every year, and doubling the information that we're gathering about the brain every year. ... You may wonder: 'OK, what's the big deal with that? We already have human intelligence; in fact, we've got six billion human brains running around, so why do we need more?' One of the answers to that question is that it will be a very powerful combination to combine the subtle and supple powers of human pattern recognition with ways in which machines are already superior. Machines can think more quickly than we can. They're much better at logical thinking and much better at remembering things: a $1000 notebook computer can remember billions of things accurately whereas we're hard-pressed to remember a handful of phone numbers. And most importantly, machines can share their knowledge, their skills, and their insights at electronic speed, which is a million times faster than human language. My second point is that nonbiological intelligence, once it achieves human levels, will double in power every year, whereas human intelligence -- biological intelligence -- is fixed. ... Computers can't pass the Turing test today, but I'm predicting that they'll be able to do it in 2029. ... Ubiquity: Someone like H.G. Wells went from science and technology into world government and large social issues and such. Have you attempted to follow his example? Kurzweil: Well, I am involved with one important aspect, and that is to study the downside to these technologies. I'm not a utopian, and my view is not a utopian perspective. I've been articulating the dangers and downsizing of these technologies for a long time. Are you familiar with Bill Joy's 'Wired' cover story? ... " January 10, 2006: Digging for data that can change our world - Research tools able to swiftly analyse masses of data could soon bring about advances that scientists up to now can only dream of. By Julie Nightingale. Guardian Education Supplement. "Scientific research is being added to at an alarming rate: the Human Genome Project alone is generating enough documentation to 'sink battleships'. So it's not surprising that academics seeking data to support a new hypothesis are getting swamped with information overload. As data banks build up worldwide, and access gets easier through technology, it has become easier to overlook vital facts and figures that could bring about groundbreaking discoveries. The government's response has been to set up the National Centre for Text Mining, the world's first centre devoted to developing tools that can systematically analyse multiple research papers, abstracts and other documents, and then swiftly determine what they contain. Text mining uses artificial intelligence techniques to look in texts for entities (a quality or characteristic, such as a date or job title) and concepts (the relationship between two genes, for example). In many ways, it's more precise and sophisticated than a search engine: it not only tracks down information against specified criteria but can also draw out relationships between hitherto unlinked bits of research. ... Backstory: How text-mining began - Text mining has been carried out since the mid-80s when the US academic, Prof Don Swanson, realised that, by combining information sliced from seemingly unrelated medical articles, it was possible to deduce new hypotheses. And this suggested that the existing body of medical literature might be full of previously unnoticed links." January 10, 2006: Robot taught lesson of patience. BBC News. "Scientists at a Belfast university have developed a mobile robot system that can reason about change and adapt. The scientists, led by Professor David Bell from Queen's, have won the British Computer Society's prize for Progress Towards Machine Intelligence. The robot, named Ifomind, combines learning and reasoning to decide the best way to interact with objects. Professor Bell likened the reaction of the robot to how an animal may react to another it has not previously seen. ... 'A major challenge in artificial intelligence is the development of a system that can observe events in an unknown scenario, and then learn and participate as a child would.' ... Professor Max Bramer, Chairman of the British Computer Society's Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence (SGAI) said they wanted to use the award, sponsored by Electrolux, to showcase and reward achievement in the field. 'As a group we are committed to fostering achievement, capability and awareness of applied artificial intelligence,' he said. Sales of domestic appliance robots reached 39,000 units in 2003 and are forecast to hit 20 million by 2008." January 9, 2006: Robonauts. The next generation of space explorers will look -- and act -- more like people than probes. By Carolyn Y. Johnson. The Boston Globe & Boston.com. "In 1989, using an insect-like robot named Genghis, Rodney Brooks pitched a bold vision for exploring space: Send up an army of small, cheap machines to rove around on a distant planet and beam back data. The concept kicked off a new era in robotics, and eight years later, NASA sent the simple probe Sojourner rolling across the surface of Mars. But now Genghis sits in a box, and the sophisticated machines that populate Brooks's lab at MIT are becoming increasingly human-like: One has a sense of touch, another can find a familiar face in a crowd. Eventually a robotic torso named Domo -- now learning to wield a screwdriver -- will be able to master new skills by imitating people instead of undergoing software updates. The new designs are part of a broader shift toward a vision of robots that are partners, not simply remote-controlled probes. ... 'The thing we were tasked by NASA is: How can robots support manned missions on the moon and Mars before people get there, while they are up there, and after they've left?' said Brooks, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 'The danger is sticking with the mind-set that developed in the 1960s of "what robots do" and "what humans do."' It is now clear that both humans and robots have their advantages in space -- and the segregation between the two is fading as NASA pursues colonization of the moon and Mars. ... At the Johnson Space Center in Houston, researchers are developing Robonaut, an agile, tool-using robot-astronaut that can outlast any human on a space walk. SCOUT, a lunar rover being developed by NASA, will carry astronauts but will also have the potential to act on its own. Last month, NASA launched two competitions to encourage the private sector to create autonomous robots -- ones that can assemble structures with minimal human intervention and ones that can steer along a flight path and touch down to take surface samples." January 9, 2006: The Translator's Blues - Will I get replaced by a computer program? By Jesse Browner. Slate. "I work at a large international organization translating speeches from French, Spanish, and Russian. When a rumor began spreading in my office that our jobs were to be 'supplemented' by computer translation software, we mostly laughed it off. Anybody who's played around with translation software knows how bad the technology can be. Everyone in my office knows the hoary classic in which 'The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,' translated into Russian and back, comes out 'The vodka is good, but the steak is lousy.' ... Had MT evolved while I hadn't been paying attention? ... There are three fundamental types of machine translation in use today. Basic machine translation breaks each sentence down into component words, which are further analyzed for their base forms and grammatical and functional structures. ... Memory-based systems do not actually translate, but draw on a broad database of exact or similar matches from sentences or phrases that are already known. ... Statistical/cryptographic systems, such as Language Weaver, calculate the probabilities of correspondence by examining parallel texts. They then 'learn' these translation patterns and use them to translate similar constructs. ... Mike Collins of MIT, for one, has high hopes for 'machine learning,' which bypasses the need to hand-encode software by comparing broad databases of text previously translated by humans." January 7, 2006: New software cleans up illegible scrawl. New Scientist (Issue 2533; page 19). "If you get annoyed when people write circles or hearts above the letters i and j, instead of a dot, spare a thought for the developers of the handwriting recognition systems used in pen-based gadgets. Such habits can often leave their software floundering. Now Microsoft's Beijing research lab has developed an artificial intelligence tool to cope with slapdash handwriting." January 5, 2006: Bayes rules - A once-neglected statistical technique may help to explain how the mind works. The Economist. "Science, being a human activity, is not immune to fashion. For example, one of the first mathematicians to study the subject of probability theory was an English clergyman called Thomas Bayes, who was born in 1702 and died in 1761. His ideas about the prediction of future events from one or two examples were popular for a while, and have never been fundamentally challenged. But they were eventually overwhelmed by those of the 'frequentist' school, which developed the methods based on sampling from a large population that now dominate the field and are used to predict things as diverse as the outcomes of elections and preferences for chocolate bars. Recently, however, Bayes's ideas have made a comeback among computer scientists trying to design software with human-like intelligence. Bayesian reasoning now lies at the heart of leading internet search engines and automated 'help wizards'. That has prompted some psychologists to ask if the human brain itself might be a Bayesian-reasoning machine. They suggest that the Bayesian capacity to draw strong inferences from sparse data could be crucial to the way the mind perceives the world, plans actions, comprehends and learns language, reasons from correlation to causation, and even understands the goals and beliefs of other minds." January 5, 2006: Finding the Decisive Factor. Science Today feature by Dick Ahlstrom. The Irish Times (subscription req'd). "Those having difficulty choosing this year's summer holiday might consider talking to a research group at University College Cork where computers with artificial intelligence are making important decisions. The Cork Constraint Computation Centre (4C) develops computer software and the underlying science to help businesses and individuals make good decisions, explains 4C director Prof Gene Freuder. 'Our motto is "making hard decisions easier" and that is what we try to do,' he says. The idea is to solve complex decision-making problems using computers 'taught' to weigh up the pros and cons while including the constraints operating on any given decision. ... 'I come from an AI background so I use inference and other AI techniques. One of the active research areas is integrating AI and OR [operations research] techniques to solve problems.' ... 4C conducts extensive research but has also established links with companies here to work on real-world problems. Projects have included work on supply logistics with Cork University Hospital and on the optimisation of floor plans at Bausch & Lomb in Waterford." January 5, 2006: Will machines for the aged herald the age of machines? The Japanese vision of robots working alongside humans may be a cultural step too far for westerners. By Stuart Tanner. The Guardian. "At the recent international robotics exhibition in Japan, Joe Engelberger blasted the Japanese robotics industry for wasting time and money making humanlike robots. He saw 'nothing serious. Just stunts. There are dogs, dolls, faces that contort and are supposed to express emotion on a robot. They are just toys.' Engelberger is considered by many to be the father of robotics. His company, Unimation, installed the first robot in the General Motors car plant in 1961. Along with other robotics experts, he believed then that by the early 2000s, robots would have taken over many jobs. They haven't. Engelberger is critical of efforts by Japanese companies to create humanoid robots. He sees such efforts as a distraction from developing robots with a specific function. ... Engelberger also argues that the Japanese interest in humanoid robots is partly cultural. Takuya Fukuda, senior manager at Kawasaki Robots UK, agrees. He thinks the Japanese fascination with robots starts at a very young age: 'A lot of us grew up reading Atom Boy manga comics. Now we are the ones developing the robots.' ... So will robots step out of the factory floor and into the home to look after ageing parents - or our ageing selves? Dr Ken Young, chairman of the British Robotics Association, is not convinced. ... " January 5, 2006: Better robots could help save disaster victims. By Kurt Kleiner. NewScientist.com news. "In the wake of the tragic accident that killed 12 trapped miners in West Virginia, US, roboticists are saying that a new generation of search-and rescue-robots could help save lives in future disasters. ... Although they tried to use a robot to move ahead and test conditions, the robot, a commercial model usually used for bomb disposal, was not specifically designed for mine work and became bogged down after moving just 21 metres into the tunnel. 'They're slow [robots]. They won't cause an explosion, but they don't do much,' says Robin Murphy, director of the Center for Robot Assisted Search and Rescue at the University of South Florida, US. But new robots, designed to squirm through rubble, or crawl through boreholes, or clamber over obstacles on legs, could someday go into mines quickly ahead of rescuers. ... Howie Choset, a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, US, is working on a robot that can squirm snake-like through small spaces that might be left after a mine or building collapses." January 5, 2006: Geeks in Toyland. By Brendan I. Koerner. Wired News (to appear in the February 2006 issue of Wired Magazine). "The kit, due in stores in August, looks nothing like 2.0 and isn't backward compatible. Users still program the bots from their PCs, but everything else about the experience has been changed. The centerpiece of a Mindstorms kit is the RCX brick, which acts as the robot's brain. It receives input from sensors and sends instructions to motors, breathing life into plastic-block creatures. The new brain has a 32-bit processor -- a huge upgrade over the old 8-bit processor -- allowing NXT bots to perform more-complex tasks than their predecessors, like ambling with a near-human gait or reacting to voice commands. ... The programming language has been revamped, as have the sensors, motors, and I/O ports. As a result, Mindstorms NXT robots look and act far more realistic than their predecessors. ... Instead of cobbling together a 3.0 version, Lund decided to make a clean break with the past. Mindstorms' main flaw, he believed, was its complexity; many kids lost interest before completing their first robot." January 4, 2006: First Robot Park Opens in Puchon. By Cho Jin-seo. The Korea Times & hankooki.com. "After six months of preparation, Robo Park opened last week as Korea’s first and only year-round robot museum in Puchon (Bucheon), a town sandwiched between Seoul and Inchon. The park has some 30 kinds of household and industrial robots on display, and most of them are purchased from 17 companies located in the very same building as the museum. 'First, we built it as a showroom for robot manufacturers in the industrial complex,' said Byun Jong-hwan, director of Robo Park. 'But while we were working with the plan, we came to think that it would be able to serve the regional community as well, providing a good educational opportunity for young children.' The exhibition begins with a big sign of the famous 'three laws of robotics' by Russian-American pioneer Isaac Asimov, which starts with 'A robot may not injure a human being.' Then a guide robot named X-1 displays museum information on a TV screen on its belly, and robot-pet dog Genibo barks at visitors while playing simple tricks." January 2, 2006: Use of unmanned aircraft was big milestone for '05. By Kim Lanier. The Mobile Register & al.com. "The 2005 hurricane season saw more than unprecedented tropical activity. It also marked the first flight of an unmanned aircraft that could soon provide researchers and forecasters with regular observations from an area where meteorologists have had difficulty obtaining data. ... In September, the Aerosonde, a small, unmanned autonomous vehicle, became the first aircraft to provide near-surface observations when it flew into Tropical Storm Ophelia on Sept. 16, the morning after it had been downgraded from a Category 1 hurricane. ... Use of the Aerosonde is a joint venture between NOAA and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration with the Aerosonde Co. ... As computer forecast models improve, the high-resolution data collected by Aerosondes could eventually lead to improved model initialization, resulting in better routine weather forecasts as well as hurricane forecasts, [Joe] Cione said." January 2, 2006: Simulation Innovation - Engenuity Technologies creates visual software used for military training and testing and in the aerospace and automotive industries. Now it has tapped into artificial intelligence. By Hannah Hoag. The Gazette & canada.com. "On the screen, a man strolls down a busy city street. He's dressed in camouflage and carries a gun, but he's far from threatening. Every few steps he breaks into a dance move. When he does, the other pedestrians move out of his way and walk around him. There's a human controlling the soldier's dancing, but not the other characters' actions. They stick to the sidewalks and cross the streets only at corners. Cars stay on the road, avoid potholes and don't drive through buildings. The scene isn't scripted. The characters are reacting to the soldier's movements with the help of artificial intelligence. The demonstration is the product of Engenuity Technologies Inc., which makes visual simulation software used by the aerospace and automotive industries. ... 'Artificial intelligence is a piece of technology that is absolutely essential in the new simulation scene,' said Patrice Commune, Engenuity's director and chief executive." January 2, 2006: Over the holidays 50 years ago, two scientists hatched artificial intelligence. By Byron Spice. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette & post-gazette.com. [Also available from the Scripps Howard News Service: Fiftieth anniversary of invention of artificial intelligence (January 5, 2006).] "Fifty years ago, Herbert A. Simon and Allen Newell had a Christmas break story that would top them all. 'Over the Christmas holiday,' Dr. Simon famously blurted to one of his classes at Carnegie Institute of Technology, 'Al Newell and I invented a thinking machine.' It was another way of saying that they had invented artificial intelligence -- in fact, the only way of saying it in the winter of 1955-56 because no one had gotten around to inventing the term 'artificial intelligence.' ... It would be eight more months before their program, called Logic Theorist, would successfully run on a computer, the Rand Corp.'s JOHNNIAC. But they had helped invent artificial intelligence and their work 'inspired generations of researchers to work in that area,' said Randal E. Bryant, dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Tech's successor institution, Carnegie Mellon University. ... Though many of the specific methods used by the pair have been superseded, 'a huge fraction of what we do today ties back to Newell and Simon's work,' he added. Language translation by machine, speech recognition, robotics -- all embody or depend heavily on artificial intelligence. In his 1991 autobiography 'Models of My Life,' Dr. Simon noted he became involved in the work almost by happenstance, after first coming in contact with computers at the Rand think tank in California in the early '50s. ... The symbolic view of artificial intelligence -- that knowledge and information could be programmed into a computer -- was one of two camps that came to dominate AI research, Dr. Bryant said. The other approach, championed by John McCarthy of Stanford, was to express intelligence as formal logic. In the last decade or so, however, AI has achieved great success with a radically different approach, which uses statistical tools rather than human-like reasoning." January 1, 2006: Year of the Robot. By Brian Huse. Robotics Online. "Last year (2005) the news was full of stories about robots. On the industrial side, the robotics industry posted 30% growth through the first three quarters (the latest data available). In other, less traditional markets such as law enforcement, there were monthly reports of mobile robots used for bomb detection and disposal in the U.S. and across the world. Unmanned robotic vehicles have been used for assessing hurricane damage from Katrina; to watch borders; and go on missions to improve safety for our soldiers. On the surgical front, robots are assisting doctors in delicate surgery that yields more accuracy with less cutting and speedier recovery times. ... As we enter the New Year, we will certainly hear more about robotics. For many of us, our attitudes and notions about robotics will change in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. ... My own attitudes are changing, too. Only a few months ago, I was debating with [Robotic Industries Association's] Vice President of Marketing & PR, Jeff Burnstein, as to whether the Roomba deserves to be classified as a robot. ..." January 1, 2006: Singularly frightening future? Book review by James N. Gardner. The Oregonian & OregonLive.com. "Will super-intelligent computers someday inherit the Earth? This portentous question is a staple of science-fiction thrillers such as 'The Matrix' and 'The Terminator' movies as well as more thoughtful cinematic treatments such as Steven Spielberg's haunting film 'A.I.' It is also the topic of two best-selling nonfiction books by futurist Ray Kurzweil: 'The Age of Intelligent Machines' and 'The Age of Spiritual Machines.' With his new book, 'The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology,' Kurzweil links a projected ascendance of artificial intelligence to the future of the evolutionary process itself. The result is both frightening and enlightening." January 2006: Is This the Machine That Will Finally Find Life On Mars -
It may not look like much, but this humble 'bot may be our best shot at proving we're not alone in the universe. First, though, the scientists testing it in Chile's Atacama Desert have to figure out how to control the thing. By Joseph Hooper. Popular Science. "[H]ere is where a group of engineers from Carnegie Mellon University have come to test their creation, a six-and-a-half-foot-long, 440-pound robot built to detect life in seemingly lifeless environments. The robot features a cutting-edge system for identifying organic molecules, but it looks less than high-tech, more like a robotic patio table built with spare bicycle parts. And although its knobby wheels can soak up flat terrain at a brisk human walking clip, right now it's in trouble. 'Ah, that's the angle of refusal,' says Carnegie Mellon roboticist David Wettergreen. The robot --- named Zoë, the Greek word for 'life' --- had been making its way up a steep ridge, but suddenly its navigation software called for a complete stop. ... Zoë will find its way or collapse trying, and it can choose its own route. The engineers intervene only in emergencies." January 2006: Fiftieth Anniversary Issue. By Jocelyn Paine. AI Expert Newsletter. "In this issue of the Newsletter, I celebrate its 50th anniversary. I've taken eightynine people - mainly AI researchers - from the 1920s to the present day, and collected from the Web their memories of, views on, and predictions for, AI. There are also a few memorabilia, and assorted papers to demonstrate the diversity of approaches." January 2006: A Brief History of Decision Making - Humans have perpetually sought new tools and insights to help them make decisions. From entrails to artificial intelligence, what a long, strange trip it's been. By Leigh Buchanan and Andrew O'Connell. Harvard Business Review. "Future Nobel laureate Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, Harold Guetzkow, Richard M. Cyert, and James March were among the [Carnegie Institute of Technology] scholars who shared a fascination with organizational behavior and the workings of the human brain. The philosopher's stone that alchemized their ideas was electronic computing. By the mid-1950s, transistors had been around less than a decade, and IBM would not launch its groundbreaking 360 mainframe until 1965. But already scientists were envisioning how the new tools might improve human decision making. The collaborations of these and other Carnegie scientists, together with research by Marvin Minsky at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and John McCarthy of Stanford, produced early computer models of human cognition -- the embryo of artificial intelligence. AI was intended both to help researchers understand how the brain makes decisions and to augment the decision-making process for real people in real organizations." January 2006: The Hits of Tokyo Robot Week. By Aleksandar Lazinica. IEEE Spectrum. "The world's largest robotics show, the International Robot Exhibition, was held in the Tokyo Big Sight complex from 30 November through 3 December 2005. The event, which has taken place every other year since 1973, this year showcased robots from 152 companies and 40 organizations, featuring more than 800 booths, which displayed everything from manufacturing robots to humanoids. One recent trend at the show, known as IREX 2005, is the increasing number of robots designed for purposes other than manufacturing, including those built to perform medical, welfare, cleaning, and security jobs. For that reason, the biggest part of the exhibition was dedicated to robots specializing in service functions. ... The Actroid [from Kokoro Co. and Advanced Media] was the robot that left visitors breathless. Amazingly lifelike, this office robot has been designed as an android 'bearing a striking resemblance to a woman,' with a command of four languages. ... My second pick: The PARO, from the Intelligent Systems Research Institute of Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in collaboration with Microjennics Co. PARO is an eighth-generation mimetic mental-committed robot in the form of a baby harp seal. ... An autonomous robot, PARO can express feelings such as surprise and happiness, voluntarily, by blinking its eyes and moving its head and legs. ... They also have individual 'personalities,' which they develop through a process of interactive behavioral learning with their owners .... The robot was tested in nursing homes and hospitals for handicapped children in France, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the United States. After a few months of use, tests showed that having a PARO robot companion can bring about the same effects as interaction with a real animal." January 2006: Say Hello to Stanley - Stanford's souped-up Volkswagen blasted through the Mojave Desert, blew away the competition, and won Darpa's $2 million Grand Challenge. Buckle up, human - the driverless car of the future is gaining on you. By Joshua Davis. Wired (Issue 14.01). "The 128-mile race is a success. Four other vehicles, including both of CMU's entries, complete the course behind Stanley. The message is clear: Autonomous vehicles have arrived, and Stanley is their prophet. 'This is a watershed moment - much more so than Deep Blue versus Kasparov,' says Justin Rattner, Intel's R&D director. 'Deep Blue was just processing power. It didn't think. Stanley thinks. We've moved away from rule-based thinking in artificial intelligence. The new paradigm is based on probabilities. It's based on statistical analysis of patterns. It is a better reflection of how our minds work.' The breakthrough comes just as carmakers are embracing a host of self-driving technologies, many of them barely recognizable as robotic. ... But even as vehicles are being produced with sensors that perceive the world, they have, until now, lacked the intelligence to comprehensively interpret what they see. Thanks to [Sebastian] Thrun, that problem is being solved. Computers are nearly ready to take the wheel. But are humans ready to let them?"
>>> Autonomous Vehicles, Transportation, Machine Learning, Uncertainty / Probablility, Vision, Robots, Reasoning, Expert Systems, Applications, History, Chess, Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students) January 2006: The 50 Best Robots Ever. By Robert Capps. Wired (Issue 14.01). "They're exploring the deep sea and distant planets. They're saving lives in the operating room and on the battlefield. They're transforming factory floors and filmmaking. They're - oh c'mon, they're just plain cool! From Qrio to the Terminator, here are our absolute favorites (at least for now)." January 2006: Innovations from a Robot Rally - This year's Grand Challenge competition spurred advances in laser sensing, computer vision and autonomous navigation -- not to mention a thrilling race for the $2-million prize. By W. Wayt Gibbs. Scientific American. "The point of the Grand Challenge was not to produce a robot that the military could move directly to mass production, [DARPA director Anthony J. Tether] says. The aim was to energize the engineering community to tackle the many problems that must be solved before vehicles can pilot themselves safely at high speed over unfamiliar terrain. 'Our job is to take the technical excuse off the table, so people can no longer say it can't be done,' Tether explained at the qualifying event held 10 days before the October 8 race. Clearly, it can be done--and done in more than one way. This time five autonomous vehicles crossed the finish line, four of them navigating the 132-mile course in well under the 10 hours required to be eligible for the cash prize. More important than the race itself are the innovations that have been developed by Grand Challenge teams, including some whose robots failed to finish or even to qualify for the race. These inventions provide building blocks for a qualitatively new class of ground vehicles that can carry goods, plow fields, dig mines, haul dirt, explore distant worlds--and, yes, fight battles--with little or no human intervention. 'The potential here is enormous,' insists Sebastian Thrun, director of Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and also head of its robot racing team. 'Autonomous vehicles will be as important as the Internet.'" January 2006 [issue date]: Helen Greiner - Entrepreneur of the Year. By Patricia Greco. Good Housekeeping. "While studying computer science and mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Helen Greiner would often tell her mother about robots made for space exploration. 'That's great, honey,' her mom would say, 'but what I really want is a robot that can clean hard-to-reach places.' Greiner, 38, delivered on her mom's request. As cofounder and chairwoman of iRobot, she helped develop the Roomba...." |
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