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March 29, 2004 [issue date]: All
Eyes on Google. By Steven Levy. Newsweek / available from MSNBC. "Google
has made such eureka moments as common as sneezing. Who hasn't had such
a revelation on Google, whether the discovery was an old girlfriend's
whereabouts or a cutting-edge treatment for a rare disease? Amazing to
consider that less than a decade ago, search was a backwater, deemed not
very interesting and certainly not very profitable. ... 'Search is the
ultimate killer online app,' says Bob Davis, former CEO of Lycos. 'The
Internet without search is like a cruise missile without a guidance system.'
... 'Search is not a solved problem,' says Udi Manber, CEO of A9, a new
search company formed by Amazon.com that will focus on e-commerce. 'Ten
years from now, what we're doing now will look pretty primitive.' ...
Indeed, over the next few years search will evolve in a number of key
areas, and Google faces big competition in all of them. ... MULTIMEDIA.
Google has an Image Search function with almost a billion pictures. Microsoft
researchers in China are going full blast to create software that searches
through pictures -- possibly identifying faces and locations. Meanwhile,
a Washington, D.C., start-up called Streamsage has created breakthrough
technology that searches audio and video broadcasts by analyzing speech.
... ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. 'The ultimate goal is to have a computer
that has the kind of semantic knowledge that a reference librarian has,'
says Google's director of technology Craig Silverstein. But truly smart
search engines are probably decades away." March 18, 2004: Multi-agent
technology: removing the 'artificial' from AI. By Fran Howarth. IT-Director.com.
"I don't want to spoil the book for you if you haven't read it, but
Michael Crichton's 2002 novel 'Prey' is an example of science fiction
meeting the latest technology. In the novel, Crichton explores the use
of a combination of nanotechnology, biotechnology and computer technology
to create a swarm of self-sustaining, self-reproducing micro-robots that
are capable of learning from experience. These micro-robots have been
programmed to prey on humans - and, through self-learning capabilities,
they keep getting more and more dangerous. ... Agents are small software
programs that communicate with each other, acting behaviorally to interact
and respond, matching available resources to demand. ... In a multi-agent
system, each agent communicates with the network of agents, considering
options for matching its capabilities with demand, negotiating on such
constraints as quality, price and time, and then making decisions for
committing resources to match demand. As such, multi-agent systems have
applications in a wide range of business environments, such as supplying
sophisticated decision-support capabilities for supply chain demand and
logistics scheduling. ... The software agents become intelligent because
they can make use of the knowledge contained in ontology to use in the
process of negotiation and decision-making." March 9, 2004: Talking
Up a Good Game - Computer Simulation to Stimulate Soldiers to Speak in
Tongues. By Paul Eng. ABCNEWS.com. "Computer science professors
at the University of Southern California, with funding from DARPA, have
been working on a simulation program designed to help military personnel
perform a more prevalent -- and difficult -- task in the international
war on terrorism: communicating peacefully and correctly with foreigners
in their own native tongues. ... And the idea, says Lewis Johnson, director
of the Center for Advanced Research in Technology for Education (CARTE)
at USC, was that computer games, programmed with artificially intelligent
'agents' could help soldiers develop those much needed linguistic abilities.
... The result: The Tactical Language Training System. ... The program
is based on the graphics capabilities of Unreal Tournament, a consumer
computer game that has been popular with game players for its team-based
approach to virtual combat. But, Johnson and his team of researchers have
tweaked the game by adding a 'speech recognition' engine and their own
'intelligent agents,' software code that 'reacts' to how a user speaks
and what he says. ... The first part of the game, says Johnson, acts as
basically an 'intelligent tutoring' program.' ... But what makes the program
really 'intelligent' are the computer-generated and -controlled characters,
such as a virtual village leader and a virtual 'team member' that acts
as an in-game guide. These game characters are programmed to react in
ways that are unique to each individual user." March 2004: March 2004: Terror
Games - February 24, 2004: House
of the Future - Researchers are developing a system that may be able
to sense people's needs and adjust conditions accordingly. February 24, 2004: Skunk
works sniffs at smart sensors - Roger Lough is the recently appointed
Chief Defence Scientist, in charge of the publicly funded Defence Science
and Technology Organisation. He spoke to Selina Mitchell. Australian IT.
"What is the most exciting project you are working on at the
moment that you can talk about? The most exciting work, scientifically,
is some of the materials work being done in Melbourne on smart sensors
and self-healing structures. Not only is it good science, it has huge
ramifications for how we handle aerospace and maritime activities. There
is some exciting work going on in Adelaide, looking at how humans communicate
with machines. Again in Melbourne, there is some very exciting work on
artificial intelligence and how to use it in a distributed way. If you
have seen a flock of birds turn all at once, how can you do that in a
flock of UAVs, and how do you get that distributed intelligence process
working?" February 19, 2004: Navigating
Digital Home Networks. By Michel Marriott. The New York Times (no
fee reg. req'd.). "Consumers are discovering that all those gigabytes
of digital pictures and home movies - whether they are stored in personal
computers or burned onto CD's and DVD's - are enormously difficult to
sort and search through. Digital-camera owners are realizing that technology
has not rescued them from the shoebox overflowing with pictures, but simply
replaced the shoebox with a virtual one that is similarly overflowing,
or at least overwhelming. Strains of what Dr. [Steven] Drucker describes
as 'information overload' are also beginning to afflict consumers who
are literally buying into the promise of, say, toting 10,000 of their
favorite songs in a pocket-size audio player. ... 'We need software to
become your personal assistant,' Mr. [Jim] Gemmell said. 'You don't want
to have to worry about it.' ...Solutions may depend on the development
of more powerful processors and more sophisticated software that uses
a kind of artificial intelligence to tag, sort and retrieve media in more
intuitive, helpful ways. Some predict that voice- and face-recognition
breakthroughs will lead to systems that make media navigation as simple
as saying, 'I'd like to see all new pictures I've taken of the baby.'" February 15, 2004: Search
For Tomorrow - We Wanted Answers, And Google Really Clicked. What's
Next? By Joel Achenbach. Washington Post, Page D01 (no fee reg. req'd).
"The transition into the Google Era has not occurred without some
anguish. The stacks of a university library can be a rather lonely place
these days. Library circulation dropped about 20 percent at major universities
in the first five years after Internet search engines became popular.
... 'The field is called user modeling,' says Dan Gruhl of IBM. 'It's
all about computers watching interactions with people to try to understand
their interests and something about them.' Imagine a version of Google
that's got a bit of TiVo in it: It doesn't require you to pose a query.
It already knows! It's one step ahead of you. It has learned your habits
and thought processes and interests. It's your secretary, your colleague,
your counselor, your own graduate student doing research for which you'll
get all the credit. To put it in computer terminology, it is your intelligent
agent. No one knows how the intelligent agents of the future might
really work, and once you venture more than a few months out you're already
into some seriously fuzzy territory. But you might imagine that this intelligent
agent could gradually take on so many characteristics of your mind that
it becomes something of a digital doppelganger, your shadow self. ...
There are primitive intelligent agents already. Amazon.com makes book
recommendations based on your previous purchases and the judgments of
others who have liked the same books you've liked. But this form of collaborative
filtering is still fairly crude. Microsoft senior researcher Eric Horvitz
describes a variety of new and future technologies in which software is
more active, more of an entity, no longer just some inert codes waiting
for the user to issue a command. ... And lurking over the future of such
programs is the dilemma of privacy. ... What everyone wants is a reasonable,
discreet intelligent agent, like an English butler. ... [James] Hendler,
along with World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, is working on the
Semantic Web , a project to implant the background tags, the metadata,
on Web sites. The dream is to make it easier not only for humans, but
also machines, to search the Web." February 10, 2004: 'Rings'
takes special effects to another level. By Mike Snider, USA Today.
"Odds are The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won't need
special effects to pull off major Oscar wins Feb. 29. ... Just as George
Lucas and Industrial Light & Magic set a new standard with Star Wars,
so has the Rings fellowship. ... *Artificial intelligence. Before filming
began, Weta Digital's Stephen Regelous devised a computer program called
Massive that would give virtual life to digital characters. Each 'agent,'
whether it's a digitally created orc, Uruk-hai or Elven soldier, is embedded
with random characteristics and can act on its own -- defensively, aggressively
-- and react to the environment. The team created AI armies of more than
200,000 orcs, additional thousands of Gondorian and Rohan soldiers, and
the apparitional Army of the Dead." February 2004: Living
Machines - Technology and biology are converging fast. The result
will transform everything from engineering to art - and redefine life
as we know it. By Christopher Meyer, Jason Lohn, Karl Jacob, Dick Morley,
Shana Ting Lipton, Marco Dorigo, Avery Pennarun. Wired Magazine (Issue
12.02). "Copernicus demoted humanity by removing Earth from the center
of the universe. Darwin showed that, rather than being made in God's image,
people were merely products of nature's experimentation. Now, advances
in fields as disparate as computer science and genetics are dealing our
status another blow. Researchers are learning that markets and power grids
have much in common with plants and animals. ... It turns out that many
of life's properties - emergence, self-organization, reproduction, coevolution
- show up in systems generally regarded as nonliving." January 29, 2004: Smart
cellphone antennas boost coverage. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist
(from the January 31, 2004 print edition; page 21). "Smart cellphone
antennas that reduce the number of masts needed to get the new 3G broadband
mobile networks up and running - and minimise 'dead' spots in phone coverage
to boot - will be tested on a novel network during the Olympic Games in
Athens this summer. ... It is no good expecting people in a control centre
to decide where coverage needs expanding, as demand changes too often
for them to keep up. So the researchers [at Queen Mary, University of
London] have placed an autonomous software agent in charge of each antenna.
Software agents are programs that cooperate with each other in unpredictable
environments without human intervention. You might ask one to buy something
on the web when the price is right, for instance, by negotiating with
an agent on an e-commerce site. In Adamant, if a cell has too many users,
the software agent in charge of that cell simply negotiates with those
in charge of neighbouring antennas, asking which can help. If a neighbour
is not too busy, that antenna can 'reach out' to those with no coverage."
January 22, 2004: The
end of the travel brochure. By Jonathan Prynn. Evening Standard /
available from This is London. "The routine of booking and taking
holidays will be changed beyond all recognition in the next 20 years,
according to the study. ... Computerised 'artificial intelligence' agents
will put together individually tailored holidays, with details such as
preferred style of restaurants taken into account." January 9, 2004: Cash-strapped
forces will pay for 'World Cup' calibre robots. By Tom Blackwell.
National Post / available from Canada.com. "The Canadian military
may be hard pressed to put a well-equipped human force on the battlefield,
but it is ordering up six soccer-playing robots to compete in this year's
edition of the World Cup of artificial intelligence. ... The software
developed for the soccer tournament will be applied to a cutting-edge
Department of National Defence project that may one day replace soldiers
with robots, researchers said yesterday. ... RoboCup was started in 1997,
attracting teams of scientists from around the world to compete, and eventually
share their findings with colleagues, said Dr. Michael Bowling, a University
of Alberta professor who is helping organize a soccer event this year.
The events range from those involving small machines like the ones Defence
Research and Development is buying, to humanoid robots that have legs
and arms. The goal of RoboCup is to field a team by 2050 that could compete
against the human World Cup champions." January 9, 2004: At
war with technology - Keeping 200,000 digital actors motivated in
battle a tall order. By Jamie Portman. CanWest News Service / available
from The StarPhoenix and Canada.com. "Director Peter Jackson had
laid down his requirements for the Battle of Pelennor Fields -- the climactic
engagement in The Return Of The King in which the heroic defenders of
Middle-Earth face the overwhelming might of Sauron and his armies of Darkness.
... 'I want battles like nothing anyone has ever seen on screen,' Jackson
said. 'I want every soldier fighting for himself -- you have to come up
with something.' Special effects designer Richard Taylor says that this
order led to the writing of a 'massive' principal code for the battle
in order to give more than 200,000 digitized soldiers and some 6,000 horses
distinctiveness and individuality. ... 'It was the fact that you could
get a computer to think for itself, that you could get 200,000 agents
within the computer to think for themselves. So each of these computerized
soldiers is assessing the environment around them, drawing on a repertoire
of military moves that have been taught them through motion capture --
determining how they will combat the enemy, step over the terrain, deal
with obstacles in front of them through their own intelligence -- and
there's 200,000 of them doing that.'" January 2004: Attack
of the Stuntbots - Shoot them, stab them, throw them off the roof.
The next generation of Hollywood daredevils will never say die. By Oliver
Morton. Wired Magazine (Issue 12.01). "During the half century in
which J.R.R. Tolkien lived in Oxford, he must have walked or cycled down
George Street on innumerable occasions. ... A man who in the 1940s reacted
to electric street lighting with 'considered disgust' - scorning it as
'a typical product of the Robot Age' - would surely recoil from the traffic-saturated
plate-glass glory of 21st-century England. The author would likely reserve
his deepest disdain for a new business on George Street. NaturalMotion,
a startup founded by former Oxford researchers Torsten Reil and Colm Massey,
is ushering in a new age of digital animation. The company's sole app,
Endorphin, employs neural networks and artificial evolution to produce
self-animating software robots that walk and run and fly with startling
verisimilitude. ... Tolkien had a particular distaste for technology that
apes human attributes." January 8-14, 2004: Triumph
of the Robots - When Google tweaks its search rankings, whole economies
tremble in fear. By Dan Pulcrano. Metro. "The current generation
of information bots is likely the Model T Ford version of what lies ahead.
Robots will become our personal information gatekeepers, provide content-based
spam filtering, answer our mail and determine who gets through to us on
the phone. Eventually, robots will begin to route our physical movements,
providing Homeland Security border services, examining our biometrics
as we enter buildings, guiding our vehicles on the freeways and braking
at stop signs. ... Technology usually advances ahead of the social wisdom
to control it, and benefits arrive in tandem with risks, from Prometheus'
taming of the fire god to the exploitation of nuclear energy. Prometheus
was the inspiration for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, about the robot that
got away, just as some early robot science fiction drew from the legend
of the golem, a clay figurine that came to life in 1580, the creation
of Rabbi Judah Low bin Bezulel of Prague." December 29, 2003: 'Robot
Tarzan' helps forest work. By Jo Twist. BBC. "The hi-tech Tarzan
of the robot world, nicknamed Treebot, is the first of its kind to combine
networked sensors, a webcam, and a wireless net link. It is solar-powered
and moves up and down special cables to take samples and measurements
for vital analysis. Treebot has been developed by scientists at the US
Centre for Embedded Network Sensing in California. ... Eighteen months
in development, the main difference between Treebot and other fixed sensors
is its autonomous nature and its ability to communicate with other devices
and sensors." December 20, 2003: Invasion
of the Centibots. Army of Test Robots Drills for Military Duty. By
Elise Ackerman. Mercury News / available from Bayarea.com. "Charlie
Ortiz, who oversees the Centibots project at SRI's Artificial Intelligence
Center in Menlo Park, said the effort represents a step forward in getting
robots to work together autonomously and as a team. 'They represent a
major contribution in distributed robotics,' he said. Researchers have
built robots that vacuum rooms, explore shipwrecks, manufacture microchips,
imitate puppy dogs and fly around hunting for Osama bin Laden. But for
the most part, modern robots act alone. DARPA wanted machines that could
coordinate with each other to create a map of an area. The Centibots communicate
with a human commander who tells them where to search and reviews the
information they send back. However, the commander doesn't need to give
detailed instructions to each machine. 'They autonomously decide where
to go,' said Regis Vincent, a computer scientist who helped build the
Centibots. 'Nobody is controlling them.'" December 17, 2003: 'Lord'
Effects Rock - See how amazing special effects help make 'Return of
the King' an epic film. By Tracey Marx. TechTV. "Weta Digital's most
impressive piece of technology is simply called Massive. Director Peter
Jackson, who helped create Weta in 1993, demanded battles and armies beyond
the size of anyone's imagination. 'All tribute has to be given to a young
guy called Steven Regelous, who realized Peter's vision through a piece
of code writing,' says Richard Taylor, FX supervisor, Weta Workshop. Weta
Digital designed Massive, software that 'teaches' characters to fight
other characters using artificial intelligence. The software, a work-in-progress
for more than three years, gives characters a repertoire of military moves
pre-taught through motion capture. The AI would determine their ability
to win or lose a given battle." December 16, 2003: AI
think, therefore I am. Virtual agents feature - Computerised characters
that look, sound, move and seemingly think like real people are emerging
from the realms of science fiction into everyday life. Superguide by David
Braue. apcmag.com. "Making computers human is an idea as old as computers
themselves, and what was initially a wild science fiction fantasy is gradually
turning into fact. From the chilling 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL 9000
to robotic newsreader Ananova and Jar Jar Binks, virtual creatures have
become part of our collective culture. Much more than entertainment is
at stake, of course. The potential of computerised agents or entities
that are autonomous, self-directed, reactive and social -- just like humans
-- can be estimated only in the realm of the imagination. Already, such
agents have been built to present the weather on mobile phones, drive
trucks, monitor environments designed to support life on other planets
and perform many other sophisticated tasks. Computers are good at doing
what they're told, but in this field they're required to reach their own
conclusions. The complex computer code beneath their 'skins' is designed
to make them react to situations like real people do -- unpredictably.
Just how far we have come was evident in Melbourne earlier this year when
more than 450 researchers from 29 countries attended the second annual
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems conference. ... 'We have agents
embedded in trucks, excavators and individuals [robots] in order to mine
the right material at the right time,' says Hugh Durrant-Whyte, research
director at CEAS [Centre of Excellence in Autonomous Systems]. 'We do
not approach it at all from a human point of view -- robots are really
physical embodiments of agents. They won't discuss Plato with you, but
they can work 24 hours a day and have cooperation and negotiation strategies
[to interact with each other].'" December 2, 2003: Stottler
Henke To Develop Grid Software For DoE. By Paul Shread. Grid Computing
Planet. "Artificial intelligence firm Stottler Henke Associates has
been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy to develop 'smart job recovery'
software to improve the quality of service provided by computer clusters
and Grids. Stottler Henke has been awarded a $750,000 Small Business Innovation
Research contract from DoE to develop the Agent-Based High Availability
(ABHA) system. The goal of the system is to let computer clusters process
long-running batch jobs more reliably by detecting and diagnosing problems
so that ABHA can determine how best to restart those jobs and, if possible,
continue executing them." November 28, 2003: They
are our defence bulwarks - The Defence Technology Prize, the top award
for defence scientists, was given to two individuals and six project teams
yesterday. The Straits Times. "Learning from bees and ants, researchers
at DSO National Laboratories (DSO) are figuring out how they can send
a swarm of robots to the battlefield. November 24, 2003: AI
Boosting Smarts of Online Auctions. Artificial intelligence is making
online commerce more flexible and powerful. Future Watch column &
interview by Thomas Hoffman. Computerworld. "[Tuomas] Sandholm, who
runs the Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon
University in Pittsburgh and is an associate professor in the school's
computer science department, has patented a method for determining the
best rules to apply to decision-making processes. The approach, which
draws upon artificial intelligence and operations research techniques,
can be applied not only to business-to-business auctions but also in setting
rules for divorce settlements and evaluating public works projects. ...
[TH] How else can AI be applied to e-commerce? What are the current
hurdles, and can they be overcome? [TS] There are lots of different
things that can be applied here. Another stream of research we're doing
is automated mechanism design. Mechanism design is a subfield of game
theory. The game might be about designing the rules of an auction or that
of a divorce-settlement arbitration or a public forum over whether to
build a hockey rink or a bridge." November 10, 2003: Artificial
intelligence and the smarter search engine. Sidebar / Future Watch
Column by Linda Rosencrance. Computerworld. "Within three to five
years, we could see a very different, next-generation search engine --
one that could extract specific facts, draw inferences and organize those
facts based on a few key words, says Tom Mitchell, former president of
the American Association of Artificial Intelligence in Menlo Park, Calif.
... Mitchell says what people are now able to do in the laboratory is
develop computer software that can, when given a Web page or Web site,
examine that page or site and find names of people, dates and locations.
'It can't read text and understand it in the level of detail people can,
but already it can read text and can say, 'Oh, this is the name of a person'
with about 95% accuracy and, 'Oh, this is a location; this is a date,''
he says. ... '[W]ith the next-generation search engine, you're going to
be able to ask a specific question.' The user will be able to do that
because of technology that's under development that partially allows a
computer to read -- in a sense that it's able to extract specific facts
and draw inferences from those facts and then present them, according
to Mitchell." November 5, 2003: Autopilot
Telescopes Ease Gazing. By Michelle Delio. Wired News. "[Tim]
Naylor, head of the eScience Telescopes for Astronomical Research , or
eSTAR, team at the University of Exeter, doesn't have to run quite so
fast anymore. The team has developed intelligent autonomous software programs,
known as agents, which soon will be used to create a network of telescopes
that can respond automatically to astronomical events. The agents can
observe the sky, analyze and immediately follow up any significant sightings
with further observations, and communicate with and control telescopes,
all without the need for any human intervention. They also can send text
messages to astronomers' mobile phones, alerting them to astronomical
events. ... The eSTAR agent software
is open-source, and the team hopes that other astronomers will be able
to create their own agents to carry out their observational tasks." November 2003: Baffling
the Bots - Anti-spammers take on automatons posing as humans. By Lee
Bruno. Scientific American. "Bots are well known for helping to generate
millions of spam messages advertising printer cartridges, septic systems,
Viagra and Nigerian money scams. ... During the fall of 2000 [Henry] Baird
conducted a trial at the University of California at Berkeley. The resulting
paper dealt with a new image-degradation model named Pessimal Print. Concurrently,
Yahoo and [Manuel] Blum and his team at Carnegie Mellon were working on
a similar model, one version of which is called EZ-Gimpy. It is a kind
of reverse Turing test, which has come to be known as a CAPTCHA, or 'completely
automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart.' These
Turing tests for Internet bots are a cognitive puzzle that can be solved
by humans but not by computers. ... EZ-Gimpy has worked well, but next-generation
bots are getting wise to it. They are getting better at recognizing the
distorted words contained in the dictionary. But Baird, along with Monica
Chew of Berkeley, co-developed BaffleText, a new CAPTCHA scheme that goes
beyond the 850-word dictionary of EZ-Gimpy. ... BaffleText incorporates
nonsense words to overcome the problem of a small dictionary. Also, it
leverages Gestalt psychology, or a human's innate ability to infer the
whole picture of an image from only partial information (something machines
can't do)." October 15, 2003: Smart
software watches the skies - Intelligent agents may sound like something
out of The Matrix, but smart programs are helping astronomers find out
more about the Universe. BBC. "'What is so important here is that
we have developed an intelligent observing system,' said Dr Alasdair Allan
of the University of Exeter. 'It thinks and reacts for itself, deciding
whether something it has discovered is interesting enough to need more
observations. If more observations are needed, it just goes ahead and
gets them.' ... 'The Agents can detect and respond to the rapidly changing
universe faster than any human, and make decisions to observe an object
much faster than would otherwise be possible,' explained Dr Allan." October 9, 2003: Agents
of creation - Artificial "agents" can model complex systems. The Economist.
"They certainly cannot be faulted for a lack of ambition. The scientists
and engineers who gathered this week in Oxford for the first International
Workshop on Complex Agent-Based Dynamic Networks are seeking to explain
much of the world's behaviour through the use of 'agents'. In this context,
an agent is a program that acts in a self-interested manner in its dealings
with numerous other agents inside a computer. This arrangement can mimic
almost any interactive system: a stockmarket; a habitat; even a business
supply-chain. If the constituent parts can be understood, the reasoning
goes, some insight into the whole will follow. ... Neil Johnson, a physicist
from Oxford University, told the workshop of his latest research on the
so-called minority game. This is a stylised version of a classic problem:
a big crowd enters a bar where there are fewer seats than people (or agents).
Each individual decides independently whether to stay in the bar or leave.
The process is then repeated indefinitely. ... Not, you might think, that
useful. But he is already working with a group at NASA , America's aeronautics
and space agency, which uses like methods to deal with futuristic aeroplane
wings. Rather than having just one aileron to control their pitch, these
wings have hundreds of little ones. Each is, in effect, an agent. It must
decide, based on what it perceives the other ailerons are doing, whether
to stay up (ie, stay at the bar) or turn down (leave the bar). The mathematics
of the two processes are surprisingly similar." October 7, 2003: Meet
the PDA that can hold a conversation. By Helene Zampetakis. The Sydney
Morning Herald. "Amanda is the personal assistant of the future:
she is a good listener and quick at answering back. She reads email, checks
the news and weather, scans exchange rates and arranges appointments.
Ask her any question and she'll raise her eyebrows as she considers it
carefully, blink while she scans the internet for an answer, and deliver
her finding within seconds. ... Amanda's PDA [personal digital assistant],
developed by Dr Mohammed Waleed Kadous and Professor Claude Sammut, of
the University of NSW, is a prototype designed to blend mobile technology
with natural language to help humans interact more naturally with devices.
The natural language technology, known as inCA or 'internet conversation
agent', is also linked to tactile communication, so you can use a pen.
Eventually, it will be able to read emotions. ... Natural language technology
is much broader than speech recognition, which focuses on recognising
a specific range of words, because it seeks to convert words into meaning
by making contextual guesses much like the human brain." August 25, 2003: The
Ghost in Your Machine - Computers may soon monitor your work, notice
when fatigue sets in, and fix mistakes. BusinessWeek Online Reporter Olga
Kharif interviews Chris Forsythe. "At their most benign, smart computers
seem like executive secretaries for those of us who can't afford one --
offering tremendous advances in productivity. Yet some fear that the concept
suggests an ominous encroachment out of a sci-fi movie. Cognitive psychologist
Chris Forsythe, who leads the Sandia team, insists that the machines are
designed to augment -- not replace -- human activity. 'We don't want to
take the human out of the loop,' he says. The simplest versions of these
cognitive machines could hit production in as little as one to two years.
... Q: How would you characterize the current state of human-machine interaction?
... Q: What kinds of other applications do you expect to see? ... Q: Do
you anticipate a lot of privacy concerns over this? ... Q: How are cognitive
machines better than the search engines and functions we currently use?" August 11, 2003: CMU
professor wins award for program that aids decision-making process.
By Byron Spice. Post-Gazette. " A computer scientist at Carnegie
Mellon University, [Tuomas] Sandholm, 34, specializes in using artificial
intelligence to solve this sort of complex problem. It's not that a computer
can spit out the ultimate solution, but the programs he has developed
are adept at picking out the best rules to govern the decision-making
process. 'There are millions of different settings in the world where
a game is in place,' he explained, and the right set of rules will allow
all players to act in their own self-interest and nevertheless come up
with a solution that benefits all. His rule-setting programs could apply
to any number of such 'games' -- whether it's deciding whether to build
a bridge, divvying up assets in a divorce settlement, dispatching delivery
trucks from different terminals, electing a president, or auctioning goods
and services." August 5, 2003: Reasonable
Computers - The Next Steps in 'Artificial Intelligence.' By Paul Eng.
ABC News. "For years, DARPA has funded research into so-called artificial
intelligence systems -- computers that approach tasks using advanced software
and schemes that mimic how humans solve problems. But under a new, five-year
project called Perceptive Assistant that Learns, or PAL, researchers are
hoping to take 'cognitive systems' to a new level. The goal of the project
is to develop a computer system that would help decision-makers -- business
managers and battlefield commanders, for instance -- automatically manage
the flood of daily mundane chores and allow them to concentrate on more
important tasks. ... SRI International, a nonprofit research organization
in Menlo Park, Calif., is also tackling DARPA's PAL program with its own
project called Cognitive Agent that Learns and Observes, or CALO. Like
the CMU project, SRI's CALO program will pull together different bits
of 'expert software' and technology that have been researched and developed
in 20 universities and other research institutions, such as Boeing Phantom
Works in Seattle. ... 'Right now, [expert] systems are designed as isolated
engines, optimized for specific tasks and performances,' says [William]
Mark. 'We're turning that on its head. We're designing each piece of the
[CALO] system so that it's part of the whole.'" July 29, 2003: Students
seek the knowledge. By Steve Pain. ic Birmingham. "Students from
the University of Birmingham's school of engineering are checking out
a new mobile 'knowledge management' system developed by BT's research,
technology and IT operations business, BT Exact, it has emerged. The trial
allows students to access personalised information and to contact people
based on their personal profiles. The project was set up to help students
with their studies and is part of research at BT and Birmingham in mobile
technology to transform learning. ... At the heart of the trial is the
intelligent personal agent technology developed by BT Exact that can reliably
and accurately select information from a range of sources to match a particular
user’s profile of interests." July 23, 2003: Socially
Intelligent Software - Agents Go Mainstream. Researchers are working
on ways to add social intelligence to software, letting people interact
with computers in a less static way and allowing computers to respond
to users' emotions more effectively. By Gene J. Koprowski. TechNewsWorld.
"While the popular conception of an agent is a cartoon character who talks
with or interacts with a visitor to a Web site, today's technologies are
much more sophisticated than that. Venture investors are eying the agent
niche -- and its associated artificial intelligence and linguistics technologies
-- as a possible major market opportunity. 'By conducting dialogue with
customers, virtual agent technologies can more quickly identify customers'
problems and therefore provide appropriate solutions faster than traditional
search interfaces,' Timothy Hickernell, senior program director for Web
and collaboration strategies at Meta Group, told TechNewsWorld."
July 17, 2003: CMU
team to develop a software 'secretary.' By Byron Spice. Post-Gazette.
"Computer scientist Dan Siewiorek spent six hours this week compiling
an interim report on one of his research projects for a government agency.
It was a necessary chore, but in terms of what he thinks is productive
work, it also represented six hours down the hole. Siewiorek will never
get those six hours back, but he and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University
are getting $7 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
to begin developing the type of smart software that someday might compile
such a report automatically. They'll develop what might be called a 'personalized
cognitive assistant,' sort of a personal secretary in the form of computer
software. ... 'It's a very ambitious effort,' said Ron Brachman, director
of DARPA's Information Processing Technology Office, which has launched
the new effort, called Perceptive Assistant that Learns, or PAL. Designing
office software that has the ability to learn, to remember its user's
personal preferences, to reason and to understand everyday communications
between humans is so ambitious, he acknowledged, that it will be at least
a couple more years before researchers really know what they'll be able
to accomplish and when. ... Although it's a new program, PAL already has
received brickbats from New York Times columnist William Safire, who last
month suggested that some of the capabilities DARPA is talking about could
impinge on the user's privacy. Brachman countered that PAL isn't intended
to snoop on users, but to learn enough of their preferences and circumstances
so that it can be more helpful to them." July 15, 2003: Computer
Simulations: Modeling the Future. By Gene J. Koprowski. TechNewsWorld.
" Modeling and simulation have made momentous strides in recent years,
and the military, medical science and other professions are on the verge
of being able to use computing power to simulate reality for all kinds
of applications. 'We are within sight of being able to create a large-scale,
high-resolution battlefield environment detailed enough to let us experiment
and see how a given system might perform,' Robert Lucas, director of the
computational science division of the University of Southern California's
Information Sciences Institute , told TechNewsWorld. 'Advances in both
AI software and in networked computing have made virtual environments
of previously impossible realism possible.' ... Using artificial intelligence
designed at USC, each of the simulated vehicles in the model was given
autonomy, the ability to respond on its own to changes in its environment
and the ability to travel over wide geographic areas -- just like real-world
vehicles, be they cars, trucks, tanks or personnel carriers." July 8, 2003: Researchers
keep an eye on the future of security - The idea of checking physical
characteristics to authenticate a person's identity has a long and distinguished
history. By Karl Cushing. ComputerWeekly. "'One of the key problems
is that there is no single biometric device that is reliable and accurate
enough for all applications, and not everyone recognises that,' said Mike
Fairhurst, a professor in [Kent] university's department of electronics.
'People need to be more flexible in their approach.' Fairhurst's team
has developed an 'intelligent processing framework' that uses bespoke
software to centrally manage multiple forms of biometrics, choosing the
most appropriate for the job or combining different forms to increase
accuracy and reliability. One such project is Iambic (Intelligent Agent
for Multimodal Biometric Identification and Control), which is being run
in collaboration with technology developer Neusciences." July 4, 2003: Playing
with disaster could save lives for real. By Richard Wood. The New
Zealand Herald. "In a major disaster, it's one thing being able to
put out fires efficiently and deal with medical emergencies on the spot,
but you have to get your emergency vehicles there first. That's the dramatic
challenge for two University of Auckland PhD students and their home-grown
artificial intelligence systems. Cameron Skinner and Jonathan Teutenberg
left on Monday for Padua, Italy, to compete against 20 other teams in
the International RobocupRescue event. The competition, which begins tomorrow,
runs alongside RobocupSoccer, which aims to have an artificial soccer
team that can beat the world's best humans by 2050. The idea of RobocupRescue
is to automate the emergency response when a city is hit by something
like an earthquake. ... [Skinner] said the software agents had been built
in the Java programming language using entirely new algorithms and involved
about three months' programming time in total." June 22, 2003: Inspired
by Ants - A boyhood fascination led to Baldwin native's robotic breakthrough.
By Martin C. Evans. Newsday. "'The connection between the playful mind
and the serious mind is very strong,' [James McLurkin] said later. 'Sometimes
to understand a concept, you've got to put a girl in a box.' McLurkin's
own whimsical approach to science hit pay dirt earlier this year, when
he netted the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize. The prestigious annual
award goes to an MIT student whose work demonstrates remarkable inventiveness.
'The only difference between an engineer and an artist is mathematics,'
said McLurkin, who is working on a doctorate in computer science. 'I'm
a big believer that art and engineering ought to intersect.' McLurkin
won the prize for his work on artificial intelligence. He developed a
fleet of tiny, sensor-crammed, wheeled robots that zip about while communicating
among themselves by using infrared- light beams. The 'microbots' are capable
of working together on solving problems. Researchers look forward to the
day when teams of robots may be deployed to tackle tasks considered too
dangerous or too intricate for humans, such as searching collapsed buildings
for survivors or locating explosives in a minefield. Already, miniature
robots like the ones McLurkin designed have mastered such complex interactions
as playing soccer. They reposition themselves as other robot-players move,
cut to the goal and pass or shoot, depending on whether they are open.
McLurkin's impulse to probe the world of robotics was born on Long Island.
... But interest in the ants he observed on a Long Island soccer field
began pulling him into the research he pursues today. ... How, he wondered,
could such independent actors coordinate their behavior to adapt to complex
problems that often change in mid-task? And could this kind of adaptive
logic be programmed into robots?" June 21, 2003:The
semantic web - A touch of intelligence for the internet? By Ben Williamson
and Libby Miller. EducationGuardian.co.uk. "When discussing the semantic
web, it is important to get one thing clear from the start: this is not
a new version of the internet. Casual web users will probably not even
notice semantic web technologies running behind their browsers. But they
might notice a vast improvement in the relevance of the data returned
to them through search engines. ... Semantics is perhaps a misleading
term, Mr [Paul] Shabajee admits. 'We need a term that is somewhere in
between semantics and artificial intelligence.' Semantics is concerned
with meanings, which some argue exist only through human interpretation,
and AI is the pursuit of machine replication of biological behaviours.
Semantic web research seeks to produce machine-readable languages such
as RDF (Resource Description Framework) - a consistent, standardised way
of describing and querying internet resources, from text pages and graphics
to audio files and video clips - that allow web content to be indexed
and retrieved more intelligently." June 17, 2003: Phone
butler organises your life. BBC. "Imagine your very own mobile
butler, able to travel with you and organise every aspect of your life
from the meetings you have to the restaurants you eat in. Software, developed
by scientists at the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at
the University of Southampton, promises to do just this. The artificial
intelligence program works through mobile phones and is able to determine
users' preferences and use the web to plan business and social events."
June 14, 2003: Smart
cellphone would spend your money. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist
(page 17). "A consortium of the world's top consumer electronics
firms, mobile networks and broadcasters are funding the development of
cellphones that will spend money on your behalf. The consortium, called
Mobile VCE, includes Nokia, Sony, Vodafone and the BBC. It might sound
like a bankruptcy waiting to happen, but software engineer Nick Jennings
is supremely confident the phones will not mess up anybody's life. Jennings's
team at the University of Southampton in the UK are developing programs
known as software agents for the consortium. 'I see the artificial agent
as more like a butler-type character,' he says. The agents, which will
run on the new generation of 3G phones, will watch how you use your mobile
and learn to anticipate your next move. 'They start off monitoring what
you do and gradually look for ways to increase their role. Over time they
get to know your preferences,' says Jennings." June 10, 2003: Rogue
agents aren't a reload of Hollywood rubbish. By Adam Turner. The Age
/ also
available from The Sydney Morning Herald. "Self-replicating rogue
software agents set loose on the internet sound like figures from the
latest Matrix movie but they're really out there, sometimes with our lives
in their hands. Agents are autonomous applications endowed with advanced
reasoning capabilities and are often entrusted with mission-critical decision-making
tasks in dynamic environments such as air-traffic control and weather
forecasting. ... Agents are set 'goals', such as providing users with
aggregated data, and given the freedom to decide the best way to achieve
their goal, says Lin Padgham, associate professor of computer science
at RMIT. As such, the development of autonomous agents and multiagent
systems is closely tied to artificial intelligence research, she says.
... The ability of agents to learn from their mistakes is a leading-edge
research area and is yet to be widely used in commercial systems. Agents
do have the ability to breed though, 'spawning' new agents to complete
specific sub-tasks. ... Containing rogue agents is one of the issues to
be addressed at the Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems conference
(AAMAS'03) to be held in Melbourne next month." June 10, 2003: Enough
Already - Curbing Info Glut. Wired News. "'It was great to have
access to so much info but your brain can become data-fatigued very quickly,'
said retired Marine Communications Specialist Thomas Castro, who served
in the first Persian Gulf War. 'All of a sudden you're flooded with information,
and frantic that you'll miss the one bit that could save lives. It's a
truly horrible feeling.' But new open-source software developed by a team
of university researchers may help soldiers and emergency workers avoid
information overload and handle threats more efficiently. CAST, which
means Collaborative Agents for Simulating Teamwork, makes computers part
of a military unit or team, according to Pennsylvania State University
researcher John Yen, one of CAST's developers. Using software agents --
semi-autonomous, adaptive 'personal assistants' -- CAST can predict what
kind of data humans will need to handle a specific situation, then deliver
that information on a need-to-know basis." June 2, 2003: What
is game theory and what are some of its applications? Explained by
Saul I. Gass. Scientific American - Ask the Experts. "A game is said
to have perfect information if, throughout its play, all the rules, possible
choices, and past history of play by any player are known to all participants.
Games like tick-tack-toe, backgammon and chess are games with perfect
information and such games are solved by pure strategies. But whereas
you may be able to describe all such pure strategies for tick-tack-toe,
it is not possible to do so for chess, hence the latter's age-old intrigue.
Games without perfect information, such as matching pennies, stone-paper-scissors
or poker offer the players a challenge because there is no pure strategy
that ensures a win. ... Games such as heads-tails and stone-paper-scissors
are called two-person zero-sum games. Zero-sum means that any money Player
1 wins (or loses) is exactly the same amount of money that Player 2 loses
(or wins). That is, no money is created or lost by playing the game. ...
The power of game theory goes way beyond the analysis of such relatively
simple games, but complications do arise. We can have many-person competitive
situations in which the players can form coalitions and cooperate against
the other players; many-person games that are nonzero-sum; games with
an infinite number of strategies; and two-person nonzero sum games, to
name a few. Mathematical analysis of such games has led to a generalization
of von Neumann's optimal solution result for two-person zero-sum games
called an equilibrium solution." May 30, 2003: Wyoming
professors develop robots to sense terror toxins. University of Wyoming
News Service / available from the Billings Gazette. "Swarms of small
robots soon to be unleashed from University of Wyoming laboratories will
be programmed to detect and disable chemical targets in the war on terror.
David Thayer, a lecturer in the UW Department of Physics and Astronomy,
is working with UW Computer Science Department researchers to combine
his expertise in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with robotic chemical
plume tracing research. The research, Thayer said, was stimulated by the
need for new defense methods after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. It
incorporates what he called a 'swarm intelligence' network. Using technology
known as multimodal sensor arrays, the researchers are programming swarms
of as many as 100 autonomous mini-robots to detect chemical targets. ...
Programmed to sense a chemical, biological or even radiological plume,
the robots can zero in on the source of the contamination and eliminate
the spill without exposing people to the contaminants, Thayer said. ...
Although they essentially work as one unit, each robot is independent,
guided by artificial intelligence software." May 2, 2003: Robot
Dogs Score Goal for Science. By Noah Shachtman. Wired News. "Repeating
as champs is hard enough. Now imagine trying to do it after you've given
away your playbook, and you've let your competitors clone your best player.
That's the situation Carnegie Mellon University professor Manuela Veloso
faces, as CMPack, her squad of robotic dogs, tries to defend its title
as the world's best drone soccer team in their division. CMPack starts
defending its crown on Friday, when the RoboCup American Open, the hemisphere's
first regional robot soccer competition, gets underway. It's a tune-up
for the 6-year-old international RoboCup in July, which drew squads from
29 countries and nearly 120,000 visitors last year. ... 'CMU is like the
late-'90s Chicago Bulls, and Manuela Veloso is Michael Jordan,' [Tucker]
Balch said. Cornell has usually cleaned up in 'small-size' robot soccer
-- dueling groups of 18-centimeter-circumference coffee-can-shaped contraptions.
The competition also includes a 'simulated' class, with games that appear
only on computer screens. ... Based on what's he's learned on the playing
field, Ohio University professor David Chelberg wants to study the potential
of using robots to monitor Alzheimer's patients." April 2003: Cognitive Systems. ERCIM News. "The European Commission has identified Cognitive Systems as one of the priorities for the new generation of research projects to be developed from 2003 to 2008 (http://www.cordis.lu/ ist/workprogramme/fp6_workprogramme.htm ). The stated objective is to construct physically instantiated or embodied systems that can perceive, understand (the semantics of information conveyed through their perceptual input) and interact with their environment, and evolve in order to achieve human-like performance in activities requiring context-(situation and task) specific knowledge. ERCIM News has chosen to devote a special issue to this exciting research challenge in order to monitor what is under development in Europe (but not only in Europe), and what is the current status of research and development in this domain." - from the introduction
>>> AI Overview, Cognitive Science, Applications, Agents, Vision, Machine Learning, Robots, Education April 28, 2003: CMU
hosting first RoboCup American Open this week. Interest grows in making
robots work as teams. By Byron Spice. Post-Gazette. "Though the competition
can be fierce, robotic soccer is, more than anything else, a research
effort, [Manuela] Veloso emphasized. So when each year's competition is
over, each research group shares the computer code it developed for its
team with all of the other researchers. Though constructing a robot can
be a mechanical challenge, controlling a robot -- getting it to think
-- has proven to be the bigger challenge. That's especially so in the
four-legged competition, where everyone uses the same mass-produced Aibo
robot. The only thing differentiating the teams is the software. So sharing
software means the secrets that the CMU team used to win in Japan last
summer will be known by every competitor that shows up in Italy for RoboCup
this summer. Other teams can use CMU's software, if they choose. ... Such
sharing makes sense given the great challenge posed by robotic soccer
-- getting robots to work together at a task. This ability to coordinate
action will be key to the widespread use of mobile robots, whether for
constructing buildings, cleaning up hazardous waste sites or stocking
grocery shelves. ... Much of the research on multi-robot teams is now
focused on two issues: brittleness and collective perception." April 25, 2003: Military
robots to get swarm intelligence. By Will Knight. NewScientist. "A
battalion of 120 military robots is to be fitted with swarm intelligence
software to enable them to mimic the organised behaviour of insects. The
project, which received funding this week from the US Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is aimed at developing ways to perform
missions such as minesweeping and search and rescue with minimum intervention
from human operators. ... Swarm intelligence describes the way that complex
behaviours can arise from large numbers of individual agents each following
very simple rules. For example, ants use the approach to find the most
efficient route to a food source." Spring/March 2003: Smart
Tools - Companies in health care, finance, and retailing are using
artificial-intelligence systems to filter huge amounts of data and identify
suspicious transactions. By Otis Port, with Michael Arndt and John Carey.
Business Week's 2003 edition of The BusinessWeek50. "Some managers
still think that artificial intelligence--the decades-long effort to create
computer systems with human-like smarts--has been a big flop. But executives
at most companies on the BW50 list know better. Artificial intelligence
(AI) is often a crucial ingredient in their stellar performance. In fact,
AI is now a part of a swath of industries as broad as the BW50 itself.
AI software helps engineers create better jet engines. In factories, it
boosts productivity by monitoring equipment and signaling when preventive
maintenance is needed. The Pentagon uses AI to coordinate its immense
logistics operations. And in the pharmaceutical sector, it is used to
gain new insights into the tremendous amount of data on the human genome." March 27, 2003: Website
offers new view of music - A website that acts as your personal music
adviser has been set up by a student at the University of Southampton.
BBC. "Richard Jones began working on Audioscrobbler as part of his
third-year computer science project and has been surprised at how popular
it has become. Now, around 3,000 users regularly tune in to the website
to go to the forums and get in touch with people with similar music tastes.
At the heart of the website is a software program that monitors what you
listen to, recommends new artists and puts you in touch with other people
who listen to similar tunes. Using a technique known as collaborative
filtering, the software matches everything that is played on the computer,
whether from MP3 files, streaming media or CDs converted to some other
format. It can then match your profile up with other Audioscrobbler members,
as a means of introducing people to new music." March 19, 2003: On
the Backs of Ants - New networks mimic the behavior of insects and
bacteria. By Kimberly Patch. Technology Review. "Drawing heavily
on the chemistry of biology, researchers from Humboldt University in Germany
have devised a way for electronic agents to efficiently assemble a network
without relying on a central plan. The researchers modeled their idea
on the methods of insects and other life forms whose communications lack
central planning, but who manage to form networks when individuals secrete
and respond to chemical trails. The researchers found that what works
for ants and bacteria also works for autonomous pieces of computer code.
'The idea is inspired by chemotactic models of tracking trail formation
widely found in insects, bacteria, [and] slime molds,' said Frank Schweitzer,
an associate professor at Humboldt University and a research associate
at the Fraunhofer Institute for Autonomous Intelligence Systems in Germany.
The work could eventually be used for self-assembling circuits, groups
of coordinated robots and adaptive cancer treatments, according to Schweitzer."
March 17, 2003: The
wizards of Weta. By Alan Cane. Financial Times. "The Weta team,
a multi-national, multi-cultural peripatetic army of illustrators, animators,
modellers, compositors and programmers, is about to start work on the
final film in the [Rings] trilogy, Return of the King, set for release
at the end of the year. The filming is finished; it is Weta's responsibility
to create the special effects on time and on budget. ... The capabilities
of animation software are advancing by leaps and bounds. Only a year or
so ago, large crowds were digitally created by multiplying up smaller
ones. Anomalies could occur. In one famous crowd scene, the sharp-eyed
will spot a section of the audience clapping backwards. In The Two Towers,
however, all 12,000 of the screaming orcs and Uruk-hai soldiers which
took part in the battle of Helm's Deep were separately created using digital
technology and artificial intelligence. 'Each has his own fighting style,
his own walk, his own clothes and armour,' [Scott] Houston says. They
were created using software called 'Massive' developed by Weta and which
will shortly be available commercially." March 5, 2003: Web
companies searching for dollars. By Stefanie Olsen. CNET News. "Executives
of leading Web search companies see rosy days ahead for their technology.The
search box is becoming dominant in all areas of the Web for news, finance,
shopping, personals and jobs; and Yahoo is committed to making the most
of the opportunity, according to the company's vice president of search,
Tim Cadogan. ... The momentum behind online search activities has a significant
financial component. Overture's chief technology officer, Paul Ryan, in
his own keynote address on Tuesday, estimated that in the next couple
of years, sales from search engine marketing will hit about $6 billion--just
shy of the total worth of the online advertising market in 2002. ... But
Ryan gave only a brief sketch of how to improve search engine technology
with intelligence on the context of keyword queries and knowledge of a
Web surfer's intent while searching. (In contrast, just six months ago,
Google CTO Craig Silverstein compared the future of search to the sophisticated
artificial intelligence system in the 'Star Trek' television series.)
Yahoo's Cadogan also outlined areas that his company sees as key for innovation
in Web search, including understanding the intent behind queries. In the
future, he said, if a Yahoo visitor types the word 'Windows' in a search
field, Yahoo might deliver results that provide helpful choices among
products to buy or research links. He also said that improvements will
help match people looking for products and services with commercial interests."
February 26, 2003: MIT
engineer earns prize for robot 'swarm' research. Associated Press
/ available from the Concord Monitor. "Long before he was an MIT
engineer, James D. McLurkin's laboratory was his bedroom, bathroom and
backyard in his Long Island, New York home, where he concocted stink bombs,
tried to launch a flaming airplane into the sky, built a Lego monorail
train, and turned toy cars into remote control robots. Today, the 30-year-old
engineer has turned his youthful curiosity into cutting-edge engineering,
inventing the world's smallest self-contained robots and researching how
to build robot 'swarms' that could someday tackle dirty, dangerous, or
dull tasks that humans shun. His work in microrobotics, which could be
deployed as far away as Mars or as nearby as the living room, has earned
him a place among the world's leading robotics experts, as well as the
Lemelson-MIT Program's $30,000 student prize, which was to be announced
Wednesday at the Boston Museum of Science. 'I started geeking out an early
age. Robotics is when you combine Legos and video games to remote control
cars and electronics, and put those in the same bedroom. You get robotics
shortly thereafter,' he said." February 19, 2003: 18th
century theory is new force in computing. By Michael Kanellos. ZDNet.
"Thomas Bayes, one of the leading mathematical lights in computing
today, differs from most of his colleagues: He has argued that the existence
of God can be derived from equations. His most important paper was published
by someone else. And he's been dead for 241 years. February 14, 2003: Artificial
worlds used to unlock secrets of real human interaction. Cornell News.
"What do flocks of birds, traffic jams, fads, drinking games, forest
fires and residential segregation have in common? The answer could come
from a new computational research method called agent-based modeling.
Michael Macy, a sociologist at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., is using
this powerful new tool to look for elementary principles of self-organization
that might shed new light on long-standing puzzles about how humans interact.
... He credits Craig Reynolds, a pioneer of agent modeling and three-dimensional
computer animation, for the 1987 discovery that the complex choreography
of a flock requires that each bird (or 'boid,' as Reynolds called them)
follow just three simple rules: head toward the center of your neighbors,
match their speed and trajectory and avoid collisions. ... Traditionally,
sociologists have tried to understand social life as a structured system
of institutions and norms that shape individual behavior from the top
down, Macy notes. In contrast, agent modelers suspect that much of social
life emerges from the bottom up, more like improvisational jazz than a
symphony." January 27, 2003: Agents
of Change - Software agents tame supply chain complexity and optimize
performance. By Gary H. Anthes. Computerworld. "The idea is that
many systems that are enormously complex overall are in fact made up of
semiautonomous local 'agents' acting on a few simple rules. By modeling
and changing the agents' behavior, one can understand and optimize the
entire system. Agent-based modeling, while not yet commonplace, is catching
on, especially at companies with large, complex supply or transportation
networks. ... In P&G's computer simulations, software agents represent
the individual components of the supply system, such as trucks, drivers,
stores and so on. The behavior of each agent is programmed via rules that
mimic actual behavior, such as, 'Dispatch this truck only when it is full'
or 'Make more shampoo when inventory falls to x days' demand.'" January 20, 2003: IBM
aims to get smart about AI. By Michael Kanellos. CNET News. "n
the coming months, IBM will unveil technology that it believes will vastly
improve the way computers access and use data by unifying the different
schools of thought surrounding artificial intelligence. The Unstructured
Information Management Architecture (UIMA) is an XML-based data retrieval
architecture under development at IBM. ... Although it's been alternately
touted and debunked, the era of functional artificial intelligence may
be dawning. For one thing, the processing power and data-storage capabilities
required for thinking machines are now coming into existence. Researchers
also have refined more acutely the algorithms and concepts behind artificially
intelligent software. Additionally, the explosive growth of the Internet
has created a need for machines that can function relatively autonomously.
... Artificial intelligence in a sense will function like a filter. Sensors
will gather data from the outside world and send it to a computer, which
in turn will issue the appropriate actions, alerting its human owners
only when necessary. ... IBM's approach to artificial intelligence has
been decidedly agnostic. There are roughly two basic schools of thought
in artificial intelligence. Statistical learning advocates believe that
the best guide for thinking machines is memory. ... By contrast, rules-based
intelligence advocates, broken down into syntactical and grammatical schools
of thought, believe that machines work better when more aware of context."
January 15, 2003: Internet
'robots' to catch uni cheats. By Aban Contractor. The Sydney Morning
Herald. "A Sydney university has become the first in NSW to invest
in computer software using 'web crawling robots' to hunt through millions
of internet documents to catch students who cheat. University of Technology,
Sydney, (UTS) academic staff voted to buy a site licence allowing them
to use the plagiarism detection software in a bid to stem the growing
tide of students who cut-and-paste from the World Wide Web. ... Professor
[Shirley] Alexander said the software, developed at the University of
California, Berkeley, and costing $13,700 a year, used web-crawling robots
to check documents on a daily basis. 'These web crawling robots retrieve
millions of documents from the internet every day, focusing on sites like
online paper mills, academic resources, on-line encyclopedias and news
agencies,' she said yesterday." December 20, 2002: When
the web starts thinking for itself. By David Green. vnunet's Ebusinessadvisor.
"The so-called semantic web is an extension of the current web in
which data is given meaning through the use of a series of technologies.
... Ontologies provide a deeper level of meaning by providing equivalence
relations between terms (i.e. term A on my web page is expressing the
same concept as term B on your web page). An ontology is a file that formally
defines relations among terms, for example, a taxonomy and set of inference
rules. By providing such 'dictionaries of meaning' (in philosophy ontology
means 'nature of existence') ontologies can improve the accuracy of web
searches by allowing a search program to seek out pages that refer to
a specific concept rather than just a particular term as they do now.
While XML, RDF and ontologies provide the basic infrastructure of the
semantic web, it is intelligent agents that will realise its power. An
intelligent agent can best be described as a piece of adaptive computer
coding that is capable of reasoning and that learns from our behaviour
and preferences, thus delivering what is called 'proactive personalisation'.
There are many thousands of different agents (or bots as they are also
known), each performing specific, specialised tasks, for example search
bots, chatter bots and shopping bots). An important aspect of agents is
that they are sociable and can interact and communicate with humans and
other agents. ... When broken down into a series of explicit search statements
and appropriate content sources to search, a simple user information request
is revealed to be a complex task. Automating such tasks will result in
an ever-larger role for artificial intelligence technologies such as agents.
One key concern about the brave new world of bots is that, by increasing
their autonomy, their accountability will be lost. ... There is a need
to construct boundaries, such as user-determined privacy settings, to
safely contain such interactions." December 17, 2002: A
Massive undertaking. By Peter McMahon. EXN [Discovery Channel Canada].
" EXN producer Peter McMahon talked to Weta Digital's Stephen Regelous,
who created Massive, the artificial-intelligence-powered software that's
responsible for the vast swarms of battling orcs, humans and elves in
the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. Massive was originally developed
to allow large crowds of computer-generated movie characters to interact
as if they each had minds of their own. Now, Regulous says the software
could even be reverse-engineered to use simulated A.I. in controlling
large groups of real-life robots on missions where it's useful for them
to be able to think for themselves." December 13, 2002: Digital
Actors in Rings Can Think. By Courtney Macavinta. Wired News. "[Stephen]
Regelous created Massive, the special-effects program behind the colossal
battles in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Using Massive, the Oscar-winning
Weta Digital team pulled off anticipated scenes for the latest installment,
The Two Towers -- such as the battle at Helm's Deep -- by digitally generating
smart crowds to supplement the live action. The computer-generated characters,
called agents, have minds of their own. 'Every agent has its own choices
and a complete brain,' Regelous said. 'The most important thing about
making realistic crowds is making realistic individuals.' ... Agents aren't
robots, though. Each makes subtle responses to its surroundings with fuzzy
logic rather than yes-no, on-off decisions. ... For inspiration, Regelous
didn't watch war movies as you might expect. Instead he experimented with
artificial intelligence by growing digital plants, and studied how people
avoided each other on crowded streets." December 6, 2002: 'The
Two Towers' - The Movie You're Not Gonna Miss. Movie review by Kurt
Loder. MTV News. "It was the world premiere of 'The Lord of the Rings:
The Two Towers,' the second installment of director Peter Jackson's monumental
visualization of the J.R.R. Tolkien fantasy classic. ... This new generation
of computer technology, deployed with consummate artistry, is at the heart
of the film's extraordinary visceral impact. Never before have live action,
scale-modeling and digital animation been so seamlessly interwoven: Some
of 'The Two Towers' battle scenes clamor with an almost documentary realism.
... In the astonishing 20-minute sequence in which an army of 10,000 hideous
Uruk-hai warriors storm the bastion of Helm's Deep, each figure, seen
from above, appears to move in its own distinct ambit. This effect was
accomplished through the use of something called MASSIVE, a proprietary
software program developed by the New Zealand effects company WETA Digital.
As explained in the movie's copious production notes, MASSIVE is a venture
into the area of artificial-intelligence technology, allowing the creation
of vast numbers of digitized characters -- or 'agents' -- each of which
is able to draw randomly from a set of programmed responses in any given
situation. In short, they can effectively make their own decisions." November 27, 2002: A
Helping Hand To Find The Invisible Web. By Craig Liddell. "YourAmigo
is a search and retrieval company that has developed architecture that
can find information known as 'the invisible web'. Basically, information
that is not searchable by existing spider based search engines. 'The core
concepts were originally developed by a team in the Artificial Intelligence
(AI) Laboratory in the Department of Computing Science at Flinders University,'
Rahmon Coupe, YourAmigo CEO, explains. ... The core technology is fundamentally
different to traditional spider-based search engines, which follow links
between documents to discover and then index content. This is a problem
where documents are not linked, and where documents are created dynamically
on the fly, including from databases. YourAmigo's technology is based
on intelligent distributed Java agents, which are close to the information
sources. They are able to index all content, including unlinked documents
and dynamic pages. Encrypted information is pushed to a central search
index, which is optimised for compression and high-speed retrieval. The
agents can also keep up-to-date as documents change, are added or removed.
Traditional spider-based search engines are often out-of-date on the Internet
by a month or more and days on an intranet." November 4, 2002: CMU
work aims to change relationship between vehicle, driver. By Byron
Spice, Post-Gazette. "[T]his 'gesture interface,' being developed
and tested at CMU on a specially outfitted Pontiac minivan, is just one
example of how the relationship between car and driver could change. Not
only might cars respond to voice commands, or demand a fingerprint verification
before starting up, but the vehicle itself might keep an eye on the driver.
... One solution, suggested Asim Smailagic, director of CMU's Laboratory
for Interactive Computer Systems, is to design the car's computer systems
so that they are 'context aware.' That is, the computer system knows enough
about the driver and about the vehicle's surroundings that it anticipates
when the driver needs certain information, when the driver needs a reminder
and when the driver just needs to be left alone. ... Not visible is an
'intelligent agent,' software that tries to anticipate the driver's needs.
When the on-board GPS unit shows the vehicle approaching a dry cleaner,
for instance, the system may remind the driver to stop and pick up his
laundry." September 26, 2002: Galileo's
Ghost. This week's column by Annalee Newitz in Metroactive (SanFrancisco).
"Bush's special cybersecurity adviser, Richard Clarke, has prepared
a draft of the government's new cybersecurity proposal, which was released
a couple of weeks ago for comment. ... Along with several recommendations
that range from the sensible to the silly ... there are some deeply alarming
'national priorities' listed. One such priority is to keep close tabs
on scientific developments in 'intelligent agents' and nanotechnology.
Intelligent agents are programs that can carry out commands on their own
to a very limited extent -- that is, you tell them to do something, and
they go off and do it without any further input from you. They are mostly
being developed for useful and innocuous artificial intelligence projects
that do things like keep track of your schedule and find the bathroom
for you in a building. Likewise, nanotech has literally thousands of peacetime
uses in everything from materials engineering to medicine. Being singled
out for negative attention by the government will have an obvious chilling
effect on research in these potentially rich areas -- after all, who wants
to give a grant to a project that the president believes will endanger
our cybersecurity? ... When I look in the direction our culture seems
to be going, I think a lot about Galileo, imprisoned by the Catholic Church
in the early 17th century for refusing to categorically reject the idea
that the Earth revolves around the sun." September 18 - 25, 2002: Software
agents ask for help. By Kimberly Patch, Technology Research News.
"If you're good at something, people naturally ask your advice about
it. Researchers from the University of Porto in Portugal are tapping this
learning strategy by programming tiny bits of software, called agents,
to ask other agents for help as the group figures out how to control the
timing of traffic lights. ... The process showed that exchanging advice
can, indeed, speed the rate of learning. The method could eventually be
used to route traffic on the Internet, balance tasks among networked computers,
and help robots cooperate, said [Luis] Nunes. One general advantage of
the advice-exchanging approach is that agents using different strategies
can work together, said Nunes. 'One of the major differences between this
and other related work is that each agent is using different learning
approaches,' he said. This eliminates the common quandary of whether to
choose just one learning technique to deal with a problem, or taking the
time to test several techniques separately to find the one that performs
better, he said." September 6, 2002: Web
May Hold the Key to Achieving Artificial Intelligence. By Ariana Eunjung
Cha. The Washington Post. "SmarterChild, a computer program, is part
of a new species of 'chatterbots' that are renewing debate about the extent
to which computers can achieve intelligence. The electronic personalities
of this generation use the vast repository of information on the World
Wide Web as their memory bank, not just some rigid database. ... The company
that conceived SmarterChild, Active Buddy Inc., created the bot as a marketing
tool that would engage people in conversation and then tell them about
various products or services. Other companies have begun using these systems
to help with customer service or Web searching. Eventually, however, some
believe that technicians will be able to turn programs like SmarterChild
into more intelligent systems. That is, the network will naturally begin
to evolve into a sort of global brain, one made up of the constellation
of the roughly 1 billion computers comprising the Internet." September 6, 2002: Internet
pornography not a problem, say IT experts. By Tshering Gyeltshen.
Kuensel (Bhutan). "According to online survey reports, there are
over 230,000 pornographic websites on the internet with 200 - 300 new
sites being included each day. In addition to this, computer hackers often
hijack sites with respectable names and convert them to pornography sites
- as has been the case with Kuensel.com. ... Filtering systems, such as
BAIRSM, instantly recognizes and evaluates visual images as well as text.
The BAIRSM Filtering System is reportedly the only software program that
uses artificial intelligence to recognize and block pornography and other
material considered 'objectionable'." July 30, 2002: Digital'buddies'
latest in elaborate marketing tool. By Christine Frey. Los Angeles
Times / available from The Nando Times. "In a culture inundated with
advertising, companies have discovered a new way to connect with consumers
and make their messages stand out amid the din. They are using digital
'buddies' to spread word of their products on the Internet. The buddies
are software applications also known as 'bots.' They're programmed to
make friends and small talk, and they're eerily good at it. They take
cues from a human acquaintance's questions and answers and search databases
for conversational fodder. Bot-speak can be formulaic and stilted. It
can also be witty, provocative and startlingly lifelike. Buddies are not
mere motor-mouths. The more elaborate ones have quirks, preferences, yearnings
- virtual personalities. Their presence on the Web represents a powerful
new dimension in marketing. ... Computers first chatted in the mid-1960s,
when MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum created a software program called
Eliza. Designed to converse in the manner of a psychotherapist, Eliza
asked people questions by rephrasing their previous statements. ... The
technology has only grown more sophisticated since then." April 30, 2002: Silicon
super-agents. By Barbara Gengler. Australian IT. "Autonomous
software agents are rapidly moving from the development stage to providing
industrial-strength help in everyday environments. Gartner forecasts that
enterprise automation, which includes autonomous software agents and artificial
intelligence software, will account for almost 50 per cent of total IT
spending in 10 years. By 2010, it will be worth $US250 billion ($463 billion).
This new breed of technology uses small software programs built with artificial
intelligence to make independent decisions, such as automatically searching
for and purchasing products on the web." April 15, 2002: In
Search of Blessed Bots. By C. Brian Smith. Library Journal netConnect,
Spring 2002. "Call it the case of bots to the rescue. Despite their
cute name, they could soon be a powerful addition to the librarians' and
information professionals' toolkit. Eric Lease Morgan, head of the new
Digital Access and Information Architecture Department at Notre Dame University
Libraries and founder of Infomotions, Inc., defines a bot as 'a computer
application mimicking or embodying elements of human intellect.' Also
known as intelligent agents, bots are computer programs that act independently
and autonomously -- but on behalf -- of another. ... With bots, librarians
and information professionals are poised to step into the brave new world
of artificial intelligence (AI). Though still largely in the experimental
stages of use in libraries, bots promise time savings in our current work
and the help needed to expand our roles." April 2002: Seeing
Around Corners. By Jonathan Rauch. The Atlantic. "Schelling's
model implied that even the simplest of societies could produce outcomes
that were simultaneously orderly and unintended: outcomes that were in
no sense accidental, but also in no sense deliberate. ... Epstein and
Axtell then began applying their technique, which they called agent-based
modeling, to a variety of problems and questions, and as they did so they
quietly inverted a number of tenets of the more conventional varieties
of social modeling. In Sugarscape, and in the other artificial societies
that followed, Epstein and Axtell made their agents heterogeneous. ...
It is at least possible that with the development of artificial societies,
we have an inkling of an instrument that can peer into the black box of
unintended consequences. That is not to say that A-societies will ever
predict exact events and detailed outcomes in real societies; on the contrary,
a fundamental lesson of A-societies seems to be that the only way to forecast
the future is to live it. However, A-societies may at least suggest the
kinds of surprises that could pop up. We won't know when we will be blindsided,
but we may well learn which direction we are most likely to be hit from.
Moreover, A-societies may also eventually suggest where to look for the
sorts of small interventions that can have large, discontinuous consequences."
March 30, 2002: The
Push for News Returns. By Kendra Mayfield. Wired News. "The University
of Michigan is working on a similar service called NewsInEssence, which
also uses natural language techniques to find and summarize multiple news
articles on the Web. ... NewsInEssence's search agent, called NewsTroll,
searches for stories related to the same event. The agent then enters
keywords into search engines of news sites and produces summaries of a
subset of stories that it finds. ... But artificial intelligence systems
like NewsInEssence and Newsblaster are far from perfect. Summaries aren't
always as coherent as those written by human editors. Newsblaster often
assumes that all articles in a particular category are about the same
event. Sometimes the sentences have odd punctuation and do not flow smoothly.
... 'I personally don't think it will be able to substitute a human editor,'
[Regina] Barzilay agreed. 'But it will be able to provide more efficient
access to what humans have written.'" March 2002: Wild
Things -They fight. They flock. They have free will. Get ready for
game bots with a mind of their own. By Steven Johnson. Wired (10.03).
"It is the year 2002. After an explosion of R&D funded by software
giants and startups, more than a third of US households are populated
by sophisticated artificial intelligence bots - their decisionmaking guided
by complex neural nets and simulated emotions, their perceptual systems
honed to detect subtle changes in their environment. Every day millions
of Americans interact with these creatures, encountering advanced technology
from nuanced natural language routines to gesture recognition to machine
learning. Perhaps most impressive: As the AIs have grown smarter, they
have begun to communicate among themselves, sharing new ideas and collaborating
on group tasks. This is not some hopelessly optimistic sci-fi scenario
from 20 years ago. It is reality. Consumer-grade artificial intelligence
is alive and well in the world of games." March 15, 2002: Are
You Being Served? By Joe Nickell. Technology Review. "They aim
to build so-called 'service bots' -- software-hardware hybrid systems
that understand spoken or written English (or any other dialect or language
preferred by the customer), interpret vague or broad queries, possess
a thorough understanding of both the company's products and the customer's
past interactions, and speak or write answers in an intelligible, context-
and emotion-sensitive fashion. ... It may all sound pie-in-the-sky, but
numerous technology companies, as well as research centers at leading
academic institutions, are hammering away at the challenges of building
a better service bot. The first generation is already here. Ford Motor
Company employs a chatty online bot named Ernie, built by San Francisco-based
NativeMinds, who helps technicians at its network of dealerships diagnose
car problems and order parts. IBM's Lotus software division employs a
service bot from Support.com that can examine a user's software, diagnose
problems and fix them by uploading patches to the user's computer -- without
any necessary intervention by human tech support personnel." February 13, 2002: Cooperative
robots share the load. By Chhavi Sachdev. Technology Research News.
"Researchers at NASA have demonstrated that a pair of networked rovers
can work together to move large objects, drill holes and pitch tents in
tight coordination. And they can carry out the tasks in an unstructured
outdoor environment. ... The system's intelligence is evenly distributed
between a pair of robots. Information about the terrain, their payload,
positions and speeds is fused into a shared estimate, he said. Two robots
can carry an 8-foot long beam for 50 meters without faltering because
they are constantly aware of each other's state, said [Paul] Schenker.
The actions are fully autonomous, he said. 'Control is a true team decision
process, mediated by various negotiation-decision strategies.'" November 2, 2001: The
Sims Take on Al Qaeda. By Karen Kaplan. Los Angeles Times / also
available from The Salt Lake Tribune (11/4/01). "In the new war
against terrorism, with its infinite possibilities for unpredictable violence,
the military is attempting to understand jihad through the infinitely
patient and dogged computer. 'Interesting things happen,' said Michael
Zyda, who is leading the Navy's simulation project here, 'things you didn't
expect.' ... The new breed of virtual war game is attempting to push into
that unexplored terrain, drawing from a burgeoning field of artificial
intelligence known as 'agent technology.' The goal is to create a framework
flexible enough to probe the possibilities for attacks in any setting.
... The terrorist simulations are similar to the popular computer game
'The Sims,' in which players create their own digital worlds and populate
them with autonomous characters that roam about and grow, often with surprising
results." THERE'S MORE! SEE THE AGENT MENU |
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