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<< HEADLINES are listed in order of date posted here <-> ARTICLES are organized by date published >>
September 30, 2007: Computer turns prosaic dunces into lyrical poets - Software claims to hone anyone's written English. By David Smith. The Observer | Guardian Unlimited. " A computer software program claims that it can automatically turn garbled writing into clear and simple prose. WhiteSmoke, an American-Israeli company, says the new version of its 'text enrichment' software not only checks spelling and grammar but comes up with the word you are looking for when trying to finesse a legal form, a piece of creative writing or even a love letter. The concept reopens the question of whether computers can truly ever simulate human culture. ... Online writing tools already exist but attempts by computers to imitate language have often been clumsy and jarring. WhiteSmoke argues its system is different because it uses artificial intelligence to draw upon millions of examples of well-written English, then applies them to new contexts. ... Does it work? Two prose styles put to the test. ..." September 29, 2007: Digital critters shed light on human sleep. By Michael Reilly. New Scientist (Issue 2623: page 28; subscription req'd). "Digital 'organisms' that learn to sleep when energy is scarce and harvest it when it's abundant could help explain why sleep evolved in animals. The lifelike programs might also make gadgets more energy efficient. To simulate early life forms, Benjamin Beckman and colleagues at Michigan State University in East Lansing created 3600 self-replicating digital organisms each with its own refillable energy store and a 'genome' made of computer code to govern when the organism replenishes its store. Every time one of the organisms replicates, a portion of its energy store gets used up. To keep stores topped up, the organism executes a simple logic operation that uses up some energy, but results in it getting more back. ... Together with colleague Philip McKinley, Beckman is adapting the organisms to enable them to regulate energy consumption in wireless sensor networks."
>>> Artificial Life, Applications September 29, 2007: Robot makers - The future is now. By David Ho. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Decades later, [Colin] Angle says the age of household robots has truly arrived, and the Jetsons it's not.'In the '60s, it showed people what robots might have to offer, but it's a limited and impractical vision,' Angle said at the Digital Life technology show in New York this week. 'Say goodbye to the Jetsons, goodbye to Hollywood robots, and say hello to (perhaps a little boring) but fantastically useful robots.' Robots stole the show this year with models such as the Wi-Fi-controlled Spykee 'spy robot' from Meccano of France and toylike devices from Wowwee Robotics. ... Angle and robot experts say a hurdle for the young industry is getting people to accept robots as real-world tools, not science fiction. 'Having an actual physical moving robot, that's still pretty unusual for most people. But what people are not necessarily realizing is how that technology is creeping in in different places,' said Joel Burdick, a mechanical engineering professor and a robotics specialist at the California Institute of Technology. ... Burdick said people may not fill their homes with clearly identifiable robots, but everyday devices will gradually get smarter. As the novelty wears off, people will eventually stop using the term 'robot' to refer to these labor-saving devices, [Ayanna] Howard said."
>>> Robots, Science Fiction, Robotic Pets & Toys, Household Appliances, Applications September 28, 2007: Artificial Comedy -- A five giggle-byte program Julia Taylor's computer has detected a joke. By Shirley Smith. The Associated Press / available from The Modesto Bee. "Doctoral student Julia Taylor and Professor Larry Mazlack of the University of Cincinnati's Applied Artificial Intelligence Laboratory are giving computers a sense of humor."
>>> Natural Language Processing, Humor, Applications September 28, 2007: The Element of Surprise - To help combat the terrorism threat, officials at Los Angeles International Airport are introducing a bold new idea into their arsenal: random placement of security checkpoints. Can game theory help keep us safe? By Andrew Murr. Newsweek Web Exclusive available from MSNBC.com. "Security officials at Los Angeles International Airport now have a new weapon in their fight against terrorism: complete, baffling randomness. Anxious to thwart future terror attacks in the early stages while plotters are casing the airport, LAX security patrols have begun using a new software program called ARMOR, NEWSWEEK has learned, to make the placement of security checkpoints completely unpredictable. ... Randomness isn't easy. Even when they want to be unpredictable, people follow patterns. ... The ARMOR software is the real-world product of an idea that began as an academic question in game theory. USC doctoral student Praveen Paruchuri sought to find a way for one 'agent' (or robot or company) to react to an adversary who has perfect information about the agent's decisions. Using artificial intelligence and game theory, Paruchuri wrote a new, fast set of algorithms to randomize the actions of the first agent. ... Soon ARMOR will begin jumbling the placement of the bomb-sniffing canine patrols too, says Butts. Other potential uses are too secret to talk about. [James] Butts says that the new random placement 'makes travelers safer' and even gives them 'a greater feeling of police presence' by making the cops appear more numerous."
>>> Law Enforcement, Agents, Game Theory (@ Multi-Agent Systems), Applications; also see this related article September 28, 2007: Robots take on social tasks. By Mark Jewell. The Associated Press / available from globeandmail.com. "Dominated by home-cleaning gadgets, the consumer robotics market is expanding with the arrival of 'bots that can spy inside your home when you're away or arrange virtual meetings of family or friends. Robotics experts say gadgets introduced Thursday could usher more socially oriented robots into the U.S. market, though they bear little physical resemblance to humans or pets as robots embraced by consumers in Japan and South Korea do." September 28, 2007: Artificial brain falls for optical illusions - AI software that misjudges colour in the same way as humans suggests that robots must inherit our flaws if they are to have our strengths. By David Robson. NewScientist.com news. "A computer program that emulates the human brain falls for the same optical illusions humans do. It suggests the illusions are a by-product of the way babies learn to filter their complex surroundings. ... For some time, scientists have believed one class of optical illusions result from the way the brain tries to disentangle the colour of an object and the way it is lit. ... Until now there has been no way of knowing whether this theory is correct. Beau Lotto and David Corney at University College London, UK, think they have finally done it. They created a program that learns to predict the lightness of an image based on its past experiences -- just like a baby. And just like a human, it falls prey to optical illusions. ... Most creators of machine vision try to copy human vision because it is so well suited to a variety of environments. The new findings suggest that if we want to exploit its advantages, we also have to suffer its failings." September 27, 2007: Research adds new perspective to high-tech gender gap. By Jessica Mintz. The Associated Press / available from Nashuatelegraph.com / also available from TIME (Study Targets Gender Gap in Software; September 24, 2007) and CBS2.com (Study: Men, Women Use Software Differently; September 24, 2007). "For more than a decade, academics and technology executives have been frowning at the widening gender gap in computer science. Everyone has a theory, but no one has managed to attract many more women. Now, some computer science researchers say one solution may lie in the design of software itself – even programs regular people use every day. Laura Beckwith, a new computer science Ph.D. from Oregon State University, and her adviser, Margaret Burnett, specialize in studying the way people use computers to solve everyday problems – like adding formulas to spreadsheets, animation to Web sites and styles to word processing documents. ... Research like Beckwith's may help ensure that when the industry starts adding new features for those everyday computer users, differences between men and women aren't left out of the equation. What's more, making complex everyday software more accessible to women could help get more of them interested in computer science, Beckwith and Burnett believe. As it is, the percentage of bachelor's degrees in computer science awarded to women fell from 37 percent in 1985 to just 22 percent in 2005, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, even as women made gains in other science and math-based fields. Most gender-gap theories today have more to do with computer science's image as a haven for solitary male geeks. ... Julie Jacko, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and president of the Association for Computing Machinery's group on human-computer interaction, said research like Beckwith's could end up changing how young women feel about computers. 'We know from our colleagues in psychology and sociology that there are gender differences that can be very important to take into account in human-computer interaction and software design,' Jacko said. 'Projects like this can help us have a better impact, even at younger ages, where I believe interventions need to happen.'"
>>> Cognitive Science, Careers in AI -and- Diversity & Equality (@ Resources for Students), Computer Science; also see this related NewsToon September 27, 2007: Robot Diet Coach Keeps You in Line. Good Morning America | ABC News. "Across campus in the MIT Media Lab, Cory Kidd has been busy building his own robot, Autom. 'Autom is a weight-loss coach. So what she does is talk to you about how much you're eating and exercising. And the reason for that is we know that people who are trying to lose weight or keep off weight that they've lost who keep track of those two things are more likely to be successful,' said Cory Kidd, robot inventor. Autom helps people stick to their diets by verbally asking dieters to input data about what they ate on a touch screen. The robots then provide encouragement and advice. Automs are making test runs now in Boston-area homes. ... And the Autom already has a host of fans, singing its praises. Amna Carreiro lost 9 pounds in eight weeks."
>>> Robots, Assisitive Technologies, Applications September 26, 2007: Uni future is with the robots. By Tom Weatherill. Gazette. "Pioneers of artificial intelligence and advanced robotics are to launch a new department at Essex University. With the rapid advances in technology, the university is gearing itself to deal with the challenges ahead by creating the department. Computer Science and Electronic Systems Engineering have pooled their skills to form the new department of Computing and Electronic Systems with Dr Sam Steel at the helm." September 26, 2007: The Future of Computing, According to Intel - Massively multicore processors will enable smarter computers that can infer our activities. By Kate Greene. Technology Review. "Andrew Chien, the director of Intel Research, is looking beyond eight-core chips and into the range of terascale computing, in which machines with tens or hundreds of cores perform trillions of operations every second. Chien is working with computer scientists at Intel and at universities around the world to find the best uses for these future machines. ... Technology Review: What are the major projects at Intel Research? Andrew Chien: One of the things that we're very focused on is this idea of inference and understanding the world. The big idea is all about this question of whether inference and sensors are really the missing piece to make ubiquitous computing come to fruition. We can build small devices that fit into our pocket, but the things we're falling short on are inference, making the devices work together well, and making them interact with us in natural ways. ... TR: Why would anyone want their gadgets to infer their behavior? Walk me through an example. AC: One of the initial steps is to build systems that understand what we're doing and understand the importance of different activities in our lives. ... TR: The idea that you have sensors that record your activities raises quite a few privacy concerns. How is Intel addressing that? AC: One of the things Intel is driving hard is [figuring out] how to build platforms with integrity. ... TR: Why is inference possible now? AC: One thing is that computing systems are now able to tap into all the data that's available on the Internet and learn from it. ..." September 26, 2007: University Mourns Death of Prof. Michalski. The Mason Gazette. "Ryszard Michalski, PRC Professor of Computational Sciences and Health Informatics , died from cancer on Sept. 20, Provost Peter Stearns announced Tuesday. He joined the Mason faculty in 1988. ... Michalski was a pioneer and cofounder of the field of machine learning. To recognize his efforts to foster collaboration between Polish and American scientists, the president of Poland honored him with the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland in July. ... He cofounded the Journal of Machine Learning and helped organize the first international machine learning conferences." September 26, 2007: Intelligent playgrounds. By Michelle Jana Chan. CNN.com. "Pick me! Pick me! The weakest children may no longer be left out of playground games. New technology may help to put kids on a more level playing field, which may in turn motivate them to learn and encourage competitiveness. Using modern artificial intelligence and robotics, new playground games can recognize a child's behavior and respond accordingly -- in real-time -- to make the game harder or easier. The industry calls it augmented cognition, or 'aug cog', a technology that is also being developed by the armed services to reduce mental overload in the battlefield. ... The team at the University of Southern Denmark developed the technology by first studying children in a playground. They categorized the behavior of children, comparing those who played in a disruptive manner with those who played in a continuous way. When they brought a new set of children to the playground, the neural network they had programmed had learnt to recognize different children's abilities. It could even distinguish when a child was tiring. Every thirty seconds, the neural network re-categorized the child and changed its response if necessary. ... Denise Nicholson, Professor of Modeling and Simulation at the University of Central Florida, is also researching aug cog in the gaming industry, as well as in education and even advertising. 'We want to understand more about people's reactions and find ways to measure that.' Nicholson is currently looking at a system, which will aid speech therapy." September 25, 2007: MacArthur Foundation Gives Out ‘Genius Awards.’ By Felicia R. Lee. The New York Times. "24 recipients of this year’s $500,000 'genius awards,' to be announced today by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. ... 'Every class has its own tempo to it; they’re all wonderful,' Jonathan F. Fanton, the foundation’s president, said in an interview. 'There are some interesting clusters you might note. There are a lot of people creating technology for the future. Another cluster deals with people working on the frontiers of medicine, and yet another cluster comes from other countries.' Most of this year’s fellows are known primarily in their own fields, like Yoky Matsuoka, 36, a robotics researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, who creates prosthetic devices and develops rehabilitation strategies for disabled people."
>>> Neuroscience, Robots, Cognitive Science, Machine Learning, Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students) September 25, 2007: Gujarat girl to present paper on Indian fonts in US. Rediff.com. "Sandhya Sitaraman (20), studying national language processing at an institute in Surat, is the only representative from India invited to present a paper at the forum, which is specially for undergraduate women pursuing careers in computer sciences. ... Sitaraman is gearing up to overcome this handicap and will present a paper on 'Artificial Intelligence Recognition for Indian languages' at the conference at Carnegie Mellon University. ... Clearing the air about artificial intelligence, Sitaraman said 'Many people have the misconception that AI is all about cyborgs and inserting chips into human beings which is not true. A lot of AI today is just about fields like human computer interaction and natural language processing to make communication smoother to help solve complex problems easily.'" September 25, 2007: Robot dogs race to be soldier's best friend. By Will Knight. NewScientist.com news. "LittleDog was created for the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) by US robotics company Boston Dynamics. And now DARPA has selected six university research teams, including ones at MIT and Stanford, to compete to develop the best algorithms for controlling the robot puppy. The agency hopes this will help identify the best adaptive strategy for moving over irregular surfaces. ... The six teams have each been given a LittleDog and a section of near-identical artificial terrain for the robot to cross. The video (top, right) shows one the robots -- CMU's LittleDog -- in action. Videos of other LittleDogs can be found here, here and here. [All 4 videos can be accessed via links in article] ... Max Lungarella, a robotics researcher at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, says the project provides a great opportunity for comparing different approaches. 'What is really interesting about the whole project is the idea of a common research platform,' he told New Scientist. 'A lot of research in robotics is done on platforms built ad-hoc.'." September 25, 2007: Caltech's spin on DARPA's robot race. By Stefanie Olsen. CNET News.com. "Even in a collision between robot cars, size might make all the difference. That's the thinking of Team Caltech, a robotics group at the California Institute of Technology that is fine-tuning a large self-driving van, an 8,000-pound Ford E-350 reinforced with armor plating, for next month's semifinals of the Urban Grand Challenge. The government research arm known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency invited 35 teams to compete in its race of driverless vehicles, with a $2 million first place price. According to one of the road rules, if a team's robot hits another vehicle--which seems highly possible for a newbie machine driver--then that team is automatically disqualified from the competition. But if a car is the victim of a collision, that car's team has 30 minutes to fix the robot and continue in the race. If the damage is too great, it's out. ... Of course, physical hardware is just one consideration in a competition that's ultimately about testing artificial intelligence software on the road."
>>> Autonomous Vehicles, Robots, Grand Challenges, Competitions (@ Resources for Students) September 24, 2007: Computer elbowing out TV - News at Seven scours sources to present information that's tailored to viewer's interests. By Brad Spirrison. Chicago Sun-Times. "Last week, as hundreds of local broadcast and interactive marketing executives assembled to study the economic effects of media intersection, researchers from Northwestern's Intelligent Information Laboratory were literally making news. InfoLab co-director Kristian Hammond and two graduate students will soon introduce new features to News at Seven, an online service that uses avatars to read and present customized newscasts online. ... Visitors to www.newsatseven.com are asked to state their areas of interest -- whether they be the Cubs, Hillary vs. Obama or CTA funding. Those areas are then used to generate customized newscasts. The Web site aggregates news copy, video and commentary from all over the Internet around chosen topics. An animated newsreader then reads automatically edited reports (there is no human intervention in the process) with accompanying imagery similar to what you would see in a television newscast." September 24, 2007: Happy Birthday, Sputnik! (Thanks for the Internet). By Gary Anthes. Computerworld. "Quick, what's the most influential piece of hardware from the early days of computing? The IBM 360 mainframe? The DEC PDP-1 minicomputer? Maybe earlier computers such as Binac, ENIAC or Univac? Or, going way back to the 1800s, is it the Babbage Difference Engine? More likely, it was a 183-pound aluminum sphere called Sputnik, Russian for 'traveling companion.' Fifty years ago, on Oct. 4, 1957, radio-transmitted beeps from the first man-made object to orbit the Earth stunned and frightened the U.S., and the country's reaction to the 'October surprise' changed computing forever. ... [T]he public demanded that something be done. The most immediate 'something' was the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a freewheeling Pentagon office created by President Eisenhower on Feb. 7, 1958. Its mission was to "'prevent technological surprises'.... [J.C.R.] Licklider [the first director of IT research at ARPA] had studied psychology as an undergraduate, and in 1962, he brought to ARPA a passionate belief that computers could be far more user-friendly than the unconnected, batch-processing behemoths of the day. Two years earlier, he had published an influential paper, 'Man-Computer Symbiosis,' in which he laid out his vision for computers that could interact with users in real time. It was a radical idea, one utterly rejected by most academic and industrial researchers at the time. (See sidebar, Advanced Computing Visions from 1960.) ... [A]round 2000, Kleinrock and other top-shelf technology researchers say, the agency, now called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), began to focus more on pragmatic, military objectives. A new administration was in power in Washington, and then 9/11 changed priorities everywhere. Observers say DARPA shifted much of its funding from long-range to shorter-term research, from universities to military contractors, and from unclassified work to secret programs. Of government funding for IT, [Leonard] Kleinrock says, 'our researchers are now being channeled into small science, small and incremental goals, short-term focus and small funding levels.' The result, critics say, is that DARPA is much less likely today to spawn the kinds of revolutionary advances in IT that came from Licklider and his successors. DARPA officials declined to be interviewed for this story. But Jan Walker, a spokesperson for DARPA Director Anthony Tether, said, 'Dr. Tether ... does not agree. DARPA has not pulled back from long-term, high-risk, high-payoff research in IT or turned more to short-term projects.' (See sidebar, DARPA's Response.) ... 'In the early years, ARPA was willing to fund things like artificial intelligence -- take five years and see what happens,' he says. 'Nobody cared whether you delivered something in six months. It was, "Go and put forth your best effort and see if you can budge the field." Now that's changed. It's more driven by, "What did you do for us this year?"' ... Meanwhile, funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for computer science and engineering -- most of it for universities -- has increased from $478 million in 2001 to $709 million this year, up 48%. But the NSF tends to fund smaller, more-focused efforts. And because contract awards are based on peer review, bidders on NSF jobs are inhibited from taking the kinds of chances that Licklider would have favored."
>>> AI Overview, History, Applications; also see this related article and 11 down in our AI Crossword Puzzle (or go straight to the annotated solution) September 24, 2007: Public, private sectors work together to steer students toward careers in science. By Jennifer L. Berghom. The Brownsville Herald - Online Edition. "Aileen Palacios cheered on the battery-powered robot she helped make as it rolled through a maze Monday morning. A GEAR-UP family and community liaison at PSJA North High School, Palacios and a colleague were the first to complete their robot during a workshop at the University of Texas-Pan American as part of the sixth annual Hispanic Engineering, Science and Technology (HESTEC) Week festivities. 'Girls rule,' Palacios said. ... The weeklong event is a joint project between the university and U.S. Rep. Rubén Hinojosa, D-Mercedes, to encourage Hispanic youths to pursue careers in science and technology. ... Amy Uribe, a GEAR UP coordinator for PSJA North High School, said her ninth-grade students have worked with robots in the past and want to start a robotics club. 'They want something that’s challenging beyond the classroom,' Uribe said." September 24, 2005: AI is A-OK in new games. By Mike Snider. USATODAY.com. "Our video-game enemies are smart -- and getting smarter. The artificial intelligence that guides in-game characters today leads to far more natural actions and realistic friends and foes than in the past. 'As graphics improvements top out, artificial intelligence will (drive) game innovation,' says University of California-Santa Cruz professor Michael Mateas. A look at AI evolution: ...." September 24, 2007: DARPA leads new AI research - Defense agency wants to create computers that can learn from subject-matter experts. By Brian Robinson. FCW.com. "Computer scientists have long sought to develop computers that can match the subject expertise that humans acquire during a career or a lifetime. Despite intensive work with expert systems and other forms of artificial intelligence, researchers have discovered that building a computer that can learn like a person is more difficult that they expected. Now, with a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program called Bootstrapped Learning, the agency wants to generate renewed interest in achieving that objective. SRI International recently won a $10 million contract to lead the first 15-month development phase of the program. ... The objective of the SRI-led first phase of DARPA’s Bootstrapped Learning program is to develop a learning system called Phased Learning through Analyzing, Teaching and Observation (PLATO). The result will be a domain-independent electronic student that can learn from human instructors, understand the implications of that instruction in a particular context and be able to refine that learning over time, as necessary. ... The second phase of the Bootstrapped Learning program, for which contracts have not been awarded, will be to develop a simulated person that can teach the electronic student." September 24, 2007: New service eavesdrops on Internet calls. The Associated Press / available from MSNBC.com. "A startup has come up with a new way to make money from phone calls connected via the Internet: having software listen to the calls, then displaying ads on the callers' computer screens based on what's being talked about. ... [Ariel] Maislos stressed that the calls are not stored in any way, nor does Puddingmedia keep a record of which keywords were picked up from a particular call." September 23, 2007: King Algorithm - An Oracle for Our Time, Part Man, Part Machine. By George Johnson. The New York Times. "Last week, when executives at MySpace told of new algorithms that will mine the information on users’ personal pages and summon targeted ads, the news hardly caused a stir. The idea of automating what used to be called judgment has gone from radical to commonplace. What is spreading through the Web is not exactly artificial intelligence. For all the research that has gone into cognitive and computer science, the brain’s most formidable algorithms -- those used to recognize images or sounds or understand language -- have eluded simulation. The alternative has been to incorporate people, with their special skills, as components of the Net. ... In the 1950s William Ross Ashby, a British psychiatrist and cyberneticist, anticipated something like this merger when he wrote about intelligence amplification -- human thinking leveraged by machines. But it is both kinds of intelligence, biological and electronic, that are being amplified. Unlike the grinning cyborgs envisioned by science fiction, the splicing is not between hardware and wetware but between software running on two different platforms. ... In his 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence,' Alan Turing foresaw a day when it would be hard to tell the difference between the responses of a computer and a human being. What he may not have envisioned is how thoroughly the boundary would blur." September 22, 2007: Apple Co-Founder Looks to Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. By Michael Vizard. eWeek.com. "Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak says one of the primary emerging technologies that is capturing his imagination these days is area of robotics and how artificial intelligence will be applied on those types of systems. Wozniak said he hopes that someday the robotics field will take a page from the personal computer era by creating robots that are easily programmable by users to perform specific tasks rather than solely focusing on creating system that are preprogrammed to perform specific functions. 'People want things that are useful as opposed to things that do a lot of little things that we call artificial intelligence,' said Wozniak." September 21, 2007: 3rd generation of intelligent robots to be put on market. Chinanews.cn. "With improvement being made, home robots will have more functions and they will be safer. They can understand human language better and they can know whether its master is happy or sad. They can thus communicate with human beings, said a person in charge at Siasun Robot and Automation Company." September 21, 2007: 'Self-aware' space rovers would be speedy explorers. By Michael Reilly. NewScientist.com news. "Robots armed with an innate sense of self and an insatiable curiosity could be the next big thing in interplanetary exploration, covering an alien terrain much faster than today's turtle-paced rovers. ... Josh Bongard of the University of Vermont, US, has designed a simulated rover that shows how to work much faster. This rover 'imagines' itself and its immediate surroundings, and heads off to explore the areas that stimulate its curiosity. The approach lets it navigate uncharted territory much more quickly without putting itself in undue danger. To simplify the challenge, Bongard created a rover that does not use sophisticated camera vision, but instead relies on just two tilt sensors to gain information about its world." September 21, 2007: Smile - you're on camera! Face recognition is only the beginning. Web only Tech.view column. Economist.com. "Now face-recognition technology is getting even smarter. Next week, Sony is due to launch a digital camera that can be set so it won’t release the shutter until people in the picture are smiling. ... If the face-recognition problem can be truly solved (ie, if an identity can be attached to a person in an image, irrespective of lighting, orientation, occlusion, pose, expression or adornment), then we will be well on the way to licking one of the greatest challenges in artificial intelligence -- computerised vision. The pay off for cancer screening, road safety, security, computer interfaces, video compression and, of course, digital cameras could be immense." September 21, 2007: CMU rolls out prototype for robotic moon rover. By David Templeton. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Carnegie Mellon's Robotic Institute and School of Computer Science displayed their four-wheeled rover yesterday ... Scarab will be required to navigate in the perpetual darkness of craters at the moon's southern pole, where ground temperatures will dip to minus 385 degrees with no source of energy on hand. 'It's a place where humans can't work effectively, but where Scarab will thrive,' said William 'Red' Whittaker, Carnegie Mellon's Fredkin Research Professor and principal investigator in the project funded by NASA. By year's end, Carnegie Mellon roboticists hope to complete software to allow Scarab to travel more than a kilometer and then perform drilling procedures automatically, among other functions, said David Wettergreen, an associate professor at the university's Robotics Institute. A key feature will be its ability to lower itself to the ground for drilling operations, or to rise 21 inches off the ground to climb over rocks and rough lunar terrain. ... NASA has yet to announce a mission involving Scarab...."
>>> Space Exploration, Autonomous Vehicles, Robots, Applications September 20, 2007: Student studies 'symbiotic media.' By Will Prescott. The Daily [University of Oklahoma]. "Jesse Harlin, a fine arts graduate student, wants to be an artist. To reach his goal, he spends almost every waking hour studying computer programming, robotics and circuit design. He does all this for an idea -- symbiotic media -- he cannot fully explain. 'You have to realize the first jazz musicians didn’t sit down and go, "We are going to call this jazz, and it will have these chord changes, and it will do this,"' Harlin said. 'I didn’t create the term ‘symbiotic media.’ I just know what I personally want to do.' Harlin combines his musical background with an increasing proficiency in robotics and computer science to create new, interactive art forms. ... Interactivity and reliance on digital technology are the defining features of symbiotic media, a concept being propagated by Adam Brown, media arts professor." September 20, 2007: The Careers Adviser. By Caroline Haydon. Independent Online. "Q. I have a degree in mathematical physics and a Masters in artificial intelligence. I had a successful career as a computer programmer. But five years ago I developed RSI and was unable to use the computer. I took what I thought was to be temporary employment at a crammer. I am still there. I feel I have fallen off the ladder. A. ... You need to distinguish between finding a job you can get from your current position, and working your way into a career you will enjoy in the long term. ... One starting point might be to look at the potential careers in the IT industry that don't involve as much keyboard work, such as marketing, advisory or consulting roles. See the British Computer Society website (www.bcs.org) for profiles. Lateral thinking might get you to combine IT and education and come up with a marketing role in an educational software company. These are just starting-point ideas." September 20, 2007: Robots turn off senior citizens in aging Japan. By Emi Foulk. Reuters / available from canada.com. "Ifbot, the resident robot at a Japanese nursing home, can converse, sing, express emotions and give trivia quizzes to seniors to help with their mental agility. Yet the pale-green gizmo has spent much of the past two years languishing in a corner alone. " ... High-tech gadgets and futuristic robots which Japan had hoped might lend a hand when the population turns gray haven't caught on with the elderly, who according to forecasts will make up around 40 percent of the population by the middle of the century. "Most (elderly) people are not interested in robots. They see robots as overly-complicated and unpractical."
>>> Assisitive Technologies, Medicine, Robots, Applications, Ethical & Social Implications September 19, 2007: We need to find an IT celebrity. Editor's note by Peter Whitehead. Financial Times | FT.com. "If IT wants to attract bright youngsters, one thing it might do is find a celebrity champion - real or fictional - to give an idea of what working in IT really involves and where it can lead. Unfortunately, some role models, such as the IT experts in the absurd but compelling thriller series 24, tend to be oddball characters. Being at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, robotics, mobility, and so on, ought to be an exciting prospect for any student. But the overall message reaching them is muddled and unappealing." September 19, 2007: Stanford University Engineers Builds New Robot Car - Doesn't Need A Driver To Cruise Around. abc7news.com. " Stanford students are developing a concept car for a contest sponsored by the Pentagon. From a distance, it looks like a normal Volkswagen Passat with a roof rack. But this car, with it's eight laser sensors, a highly accurate GPS system, and two on board computers uses artificial intelligence to drive itself. 'That even means through moving traffic and even obeying California traffic laws,' said David Orenstein from Stanford University Engineering. Meet Junior, Stanford University's entry into this years urban challenge. The Pentagon is sponsoring the contest in the desert. ... Junior and it's creators at the Stanford racing Team hope to be one of the 20 finalists at the Urban Challenge Qualifiers to be held in Victorville next month."
>>> Autonomous Vehicles, Robots, Transportation, Grand Challenges, Competitions (@ Resources for Students) September 19, 2007: OKC named robotics competition site. By Brian Sargent. NewsOK.com. "Oklahoma City was announced as a regional site for the 2008 FIRST Robotics competition during a ceremony today at Southeast High School. Click Here The FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) competition challenges high school students to design and build a robot. They compete in high-intensity events that measure the effectiveness of robots."
>>> Competitions (@ Resources for Students), Robots September 19, 2007: The Singular Question Of Human vs. Machine Has a Spiritual Side. By Lee Gomes. The Wall Street Journal Online (subscription req'd). "A few Saturdays ago, I spent the day in an auditorium full of fellow citizens concerned with 'singularity.' The word refers to the day when the intelligence of computers will exceed our own. ... It turns out, there is a schism between the AGI [Artificial General Intelligence] and the AI worlds. The AGI faction thinks AI researchers have sold out, abandoning their early dreams of 'general' intelligence to concentrate on more attainable (and more lucrative) projects. They're right. The machines today that recognize speech or play chess are one-trick wonders. Of course, AI researchers defend that approach by saying their early dreams of general intelligence were naive." September 19, 2007: Intelligent, Chatty Machines - A startup hopes to help toys, cell phones, robots, and personal computers have meaningful conversations with people. By Kate Greene. Technology Review. "A new company called Cognitive Code has built software that it believes will let everyday gadgets talk with humans. At the Techcrunch40 conference in San Francisco on Monday, the startup unveiled a developer's studio with a set of algorithms that convert strings of words into concepts and formulate a wordy response. ... The problem that the company is tackling is called natural-language processing, and it's been the subject of intense research at world-renowned research labs for decades. Some computer programs are already able to parse basic information from inputs that don't match exact commands. Well-known examples are chatbots such as Alice and Jabberwacky, programs that simulate a conversation via text input. Spring claims that Cognitive Code's product, SILVIA (which stands for symbolically isolated, linguistically variable intelligence algorithm), is more advanced than chatbots for a couple of reasons. ... The system works like this: during a conversation, words are turned into conceptual data, Spring explains. SILVIA takes these concepts and mixes them with other conceptual data that's stored in short-term memory (information from the current discussion) or long-term memory (information that has been established through prior training sessions). Then SILVIA transforms the resulting concepts back into human language."
>>> Natural Language Processing, Chatbots (@ Natural Language Processing), Interfaces, Applications, The AI Effect September 19, 2007: CMU professor gives his last lesson on life. By Mark Roth. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Randy Pausch set the tone early on yesterday at his farewell lecture at Carnegie Mellon University. 'If I don't seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you,' said Dr. Pausch, a 46-year-old computer science professor who has incurable pancreatic cancer. It's not that he's in denial about the fact that he only has months to live, he told the 400 listeners packed into McConomy Auditorium on the campus, and the hundreds more listening to a live Web cast. It's more that 'I am in phenomenally good health right now; it's the greatest cognitive dissonance you will ever see -- the fact is, I'm in better shape than most of you,' he said. ... What he was there to discuss was how to fulfill your childhood dreams, and the lessons he had learned on his life's journey. ... In his 10 years at Carnegie Mellon, Dr. Pausch helped found the Entertainment Technology Center, which one video game executive yesterday called the premier institution in the world for training students in video game and other interactive technology. He also established an annual virtual reality contest that has become a campuswide sensation, and helped start the Alice program, an animation-based curriculum for teaching high school and college students how to have fun while learning computer programming."
>>> Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students), Drama, Video Games, Education, Resources for Educators September 18, 2007: Open-Source Aibo Wants To Come Out And Play. Wired Gadget Lab blog by Rob Beschizza. "AIBO was euthanazed a couple of summers ago, with makers Sony only begrudgingly permitting third-party development amid the abandoned viscera of its cutest-ever product. Give thanks, then, to 'The New Robot,' an open-source copydog powered by dual 500 Mhz AMD Geode processors." September 18, 2007: Brain connections cause rethink over human memory. New Scientist (Issue 2621: page 23; subscription req'd). "It was originally assumed that the number of memories was proportional to the number of neurons in a network. Given that even 1 cubic centimetre of the brain's cortex contains about 50 million neurons, it seemed that the brain could indeed store masses of information. However, this model relied on the notion that each neuron is connected to every other neuron, whereas a neuron is actually connected to between 5000 and 10,000 others. Neuroscientists then proposed that the number of memories was proportional to the number of connections per neuron. Now Yasser Roudi and Peter Latham at University College London have found a problem with this model too. ..."
>>> Neuroscience, Neural Networks & Connectionist Systems, Cognitive Science September 17, 2007: Colorado tax site eases e-mail burden. By Trudy Walsh. Government Computer News (Vol. 26 No. 24). "It began so quietly, so reasonably. Ro Silva started working on the Web site for Colorado’s Department of Revenue in 1995. A year later, she began answering e-mail from taxpayers through the site. It was a lot, but it was manageable. Within three years, Silva was answering 13,000 e-mail questions each tax season through the site at TaxColorado.com. ... Silva knew the department needed to find a better way to handle the e-mail deluge. In the summer of 2000, Silva got an invitation to see a demonstration of RightNow, a software product from RightNow Technologies that automates e-mail replies to common questions."
>>> Customer Service, Applications September 17, 2007: Mechanical mole could seek out disaster survivors. By Kurt Kleiner. NewScientist.com news. "A digging robot inspired by the mole is being built by UK researchers, who hope it could one day 'swim' through rubble at disaster sites to help find survivors. Roboticists are already experimenting with robots that roll, walk or even slither to locate or help survivors. But Robin Scott and Robert Richardson at the University of Manchester, UK, think a robot that digs would be most useful in an emergency."
>>> Hazards & Disasters, Robots, Applications September 17, 2007: No ‘Drop and give me 20’ - Next IT brings recruit-friendly avatar to Army. By Doug Beizer. Washington Technology. "Dressed in fatigues and wearing a black beret, Sgt. Star’s stern look doesn’t reveal the real man. Unlike drill sergeants in the movies, Sgt. Star is patient and tries to answer every question. That’s because he is a computer-generated avatar powered by artificial intelligence on the Army’s recruiting Web site, GoArmy.com. ... Army officials worked with Next IT Corp., of Spokane, Wash., to develop Sgt. Star using the company’s ActiveAgent application, said Patrick Ream, Next IT’s vice president of marketing. ActiveAgent is an interactive, conversational device that enables online users to communicate with it using natural language. It is a proprietary application based on artificial intelligence. ... 'If you look at the statistics coming out of the Army, they say that it is over 92 percent accurate,' he said. 'That is pretty phenomenal when you consider that when someone asks a question, there are thousands of different ways that that single question can be asked.' ActiveAgent looks at phrasing, word usage, intent and other factors, and boils them down to a single concept. ... Before Sgt. Star, the average session time on GoArmy.com was four minutes. Now it is up to 16 minutes and trending toward 17 minutes. Those numbers are important to recruiters." September 17, 2007: Search startup ready to challenge Google. By Michael Liedtke. Associated Press / available from MiamiHerald.com. "After nearly two years of hushed development, Powerset is finally providing a peek at a 'natural-language' technology that is supposed to make it easier to communicate with search engines. Powerset's algorithms are programmed to understand search requests submitted in plain English, a change from the 'keyword' system used by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and the owners of the other leading engines. ... This isn't the first time a search engine has tried to understand simple English, but Powerset has drawn more attention because its natural-language technology is being licensed from the Palo Alto Research Center. Better known as PARC, the Xerox Corp. subsidiary is renowned for hatching breakthroughs - like the computer mouse and the graphical interface for personal computers - that were later commercialized by other companies. PARC's top natural-language specialist, Ronald Kaplan, is now Powerset's chief technology and scientific officer."
>>> Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Applications September 17, 2007: BI and Analytics - A Power Couple: The marriage of BI and text analytics promises to give deeper meaning to BI data. By Jennifer McAdams. Computerworld. "The marriage of business intelligence and text analytics is starting to have a profound impact on companies in several industries, including health care, insurance and finance, which are just waking up to the benefits of tying structured BI data to unstructured text. Text analytics tools use linguistics, rules-based natural-language processing, specialized algorithms and other methods to impose order on unstructured text scattered throughout the enterprise. More IT executives are using text analytics software to mine disparate document- management applications, e-mail and phone systems, or even blogs and Web sites. The goal is to breathe new life into static BI reports. By extracting facts, concepts and data relationships buried in text, text analytics software transforms this unstructured information into modeled data that can then be tied to BI databases. Hence, text analytics promises to enhance the context and meaning of BI data, which is often presented as canned reports scraped from data warehouses or major applications, such as ERP and customer relationship management (CRM) databases." September 17, 2007: Robots That Sense Before They Touch - Intel researchers are using electric-field sensors to build pre-touch technology into robots to help them size up objects and people they encounter. By Kate Greene. Technology Review. "Currently, robotic arms and hands routinely grab and hold objects on factory floors, where the uncertainty has been engineered away, [Josh] Smith says. By adding pre-touch to a robot, it can sense the shape and size of unfamiliar objects at close range and react accordingly. Smith hopes that by improving this close-range interaction, robots will be more useful in homes, able to bring an elderly person a glass of water, for example, or pick up objects on a floor before the Roomba vacuums. ... Much of Smith's EF [electric-field] sensing research now involves developing algorithms that can make sense of the data, as EF signals tend to be complex, especially when an object or robot is in motion. ... EF sensing isn't the only form of sensing that robots use. Often, a machine will use a video camera to detect objects at a long range. And robotic cars, such as those built for the Urban and Grand Challenges, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, use laser range finders that shine an infrared beam onto objects and use the reflected light to build maps of their environment."
>>> Robots, Vision, Applications September 16, 2007: A future of artificial intelligence. By Thomas H. Thompson, guest columnist. WCFcourier.com. "We are associated on a daily basis with artificial intelligence. ... But there are a group of futurists who believe that artificial intelligence will develop a shocking and, for most of us, an unimaginable potency. I will attempt to summarize their arguments. Gordon Moore.... Ray Kurzweil.... Is all this science fiction or science fact? It's neither. Arthur Clarke, the author whose work was adapted for the film '2001: A Space Odyssey,' was no scientist. And Hal, that nasty super-computer, was fictional. But Kurzweil and his colleagues are serious scholars and their predictions deserve serious attention. Even if this technological imperative does not arrive on time and proves not to be as potent as its adherents imagine, it is evident that high technology will impact the future of humans alive today in profound ways."
>>> Ethical & Social Implications, The Future, Science Fiction, Robots, Applications; also see these related articles September 15, 2007: Big Brother is watching us all. By Humphrey Hawksley. BBC News.
>>> Law Enforcement, Military, Autonomous Vehicles, Biometrics (@ Image Understanding), Machine Translation, Ethical & Social Implications, Applications September 14, 2007: Using Math to Track Terrorists [radio broadcast]. NPR's Science Friday with guest host Joe Palca and guests Hsinchun Chen, director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and Bernard Brooks, professor of mathematics at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York. "Are there new weapons in the war on terror? Here's a suggestion. If you want to find a terrorist cell, consider asking a mathematician. Researchers in math, computer science, and criminology met this week to talk about ways in which mathematical techniques can be brought to bear on the problem of counterterrorism. In this segment, guests join Joe Palca for a look at how mathematicians and computer scientists can help track terrorist activity, find connections between seemingly unrelated pieces of data, and help hunt for a needle in a haystack." September 14, 2007: Threat detector. The Engineer Online. "Cranfield University researchers have been chosen as part of a team for the MOD’s first 'Grand Challenge' -- a national competition to design an autonomous robot that can identify, monitor and report military threats in urban areas. ... The team has just 12 months to carry out an ambitious task to produce their system, which will be comprised of two unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV)." September 13, 2007: The death of expertise. Review of "Super Crunchers" by Ian Ayres. The Economist. "Every time a world-class chess player loses to a computer, humans die a little. In this book Ian Ayres, a professor of law and management at Yale University, explains how in many less high-profile endeavours, human intuition and flair are more easily beaten. The sheer quantity of data and the computer power now available make it possible for automated processes to surpass human experts in fields as diverse as rating wines, writing film dialogue and choosing titles for books. ... Mr Ayres predicts that automated decision-making will soon see other professional jobs going the same way as that of the bank-loan officer...." September 13, 2007: Business by numbers. The Economist. "Algorithms sound scary, of interest only to dome-headed mathematicians. In fact they have become the instruction manuals for a host of routine consumer transactions. ... Algorithms can take many forms. At its core, an algorithm is a step-by-step method for doing a job. These can be prosaic -- a recipe is an algorithm for preparing a meal -- or they can be anything but: the decision-tree posters that hang on hospital walls and which help doctors work out what is wrong with a patient from his symptoms are called medical algorithms. ... [C]omputers have made algorithms far more valuable to companies. 'A computer program is a written encoding of an algorithm,' explains Andrew Herbert, who runs Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Britain. The speed and processing power of computers mean that algorithms can execute tasks with blinding speed using vast amounts of data. ... UPS uses algorithms to help deliver the millions of packages that pass through its transportation network every day in the most efficient way possible. ... Solving this 'travelling-salesman problem' means a lot to UPS. ... UPS reckons that VOLCANO has saved the company tens of millions of dollars since its introduction in 2000. Logistics firms are far from the only ones working on 'optimisation' algorithms. Telecoms operators use algorithms to establish the quickest connections for phone calls through their networks or to retrieve web pages speedily from the internet. ... Just as optimisation algorithms come in handy when people are swamped by vast numbers of permutations, so statistical algorithms help firms to grapple with complex datasets. Dunnhumby, a data-analysis firm, uses algorithms to crunch data on customer behaviour for a number of clients."
>>> Traveling Salesperson Problem, Data Mining & Discovery, Fraud Detection & Prevention, Business, Marketing, Telecommunications, Networks, Machine Learning, Applications September 13, 2007: Sebastian Thrun - Probabilistic Robotics and the DARPA Challenges. Audio podcast from Talking Robots. "In this episode we interview Sebastian Thrun who is the director of the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) in California. He tells us how he won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge along with the Stanford Racing Team and Stanley the robot car. 7 hours is all Stanley needed to find its way through 215km of California's Mohave Desert thanks to its secret ingredient: probabilistic robotics. Sebastian Thrun is widely acknowledged as a pioneer in the area of probabilistic robotics, which is concerned with perception and control in the face of uncertainty. It's all about computing the odds based on what you know and what you learn along the way." September 13, 2007: Online worlds to be AI incubators. By Mark Ward. BBC News. "Online worlds such as Second Life will soon become training grounds for artificial intelligences. Researchers at US firm Novamente have created software that learns by controlling avatars in virtual worlds. Initially the AIs will be embodied in pets that will get smarter by interacting with the avatars controlled by their human owners. ... 'The virtual world provides the body,' said Dr Ben Goertzel, founder and head of Novamente. He said the company had developed a 'Cognition Engine' that acted as the thinking part of the artificial intelligences it wanted to create. ... 'Robots have a lot of disadvantages, we have not solved all the problems of getting them to move around and see the world,' he said. 'It's a lot more practical to control virtual robots in simulated worlds than real robots.'"
>>> Machine Learning, Agents, Video Games, Robots, Applications September 13, 2007: Google puts $30 million behind lunar robot. By Stefanie Olsen. CNET News.com. "Google on Thursday announced it has sponsored the Google Lunar X Prize, a robotic race to the moon with a purse of $30 million. The contest invites private teams from around the world to build a robotic rover capable of roaming the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and then sending video, images and data back to Earth, among other feats. The idea behind the challenge is to urge private industry to develop new robotic and virtual-presence technology to reduce the cost of space exploration. ... The contest comes at a time when NASA is working on new spacecraft and technology to take man back to the moon within the next 12 years. At a recent artificial-intelligence conference, Peter Norvig, the former head of computation at NASA's Ames facility who is now Google's director of research, suggested that the space agency is taking the more expensive approach in trying to send astronauts to the moon and that it should focus on robotics."
>>> Robots, Space Exploration, Autonomous Vehicles, Grand Challenges, Applications September 13, 2007: IBM Research Demonstrates Innovative 'Speech to Sign Language' Translation System. IBM press release via Market Wire. "IBM (NYSE: IBM) has developed an ingenious system called SiSi (Say It Sign It) that automatically converts the spoken word into British Sign Language (BSL) which is then signed by an animated digital character or avatar. SiSi brings together a number of computer technologies. A speech recognition module converts the spoken word into text, which SiSi then interprets into gestures, that are used to animate an avatar which signs in BSL. ... This project is an example of IBM's collaboration with non-commercial organisations on worthy social and business projects. T | ||||||