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November 1, 2007: Rise of the machines. The Economist. "[T]his weekend the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency is holding a contest for robot vehicles capable of operating on their own in busy cities (see article). What is intriguing about this competition is the sort of teams taking part. ... A similar sort of thing can be seen in the development of UAVs for civilian use. Indeed, so cheap and so easily available has the technology become that even hobbyists are making UAVs (see article). ... With luck there will be many more robotic devices to do not just dirty and dangerous jobs, but also tiresome but necessary ones, such as fetching and carrying for bedridden people. Robots can do some of these jobs better and more cheaply than humans can. But the technology's spread also brings worries. ..."
>>> Robots, Autonomous Vehicles, Military, Law Enforcement, Ethical & Social Implications, Transportation, Grand Challenges, Applications, Industry Statistics October 31, 2007: Cellphones team up to become smart CCTV swarm. By Tom Simonite. NewScientist.com news. "Software that turns groups of ordinary camera cellphones into a 'smart' surveillance network has been developed by Swiss researchers. The team says it will release the [Facet] software for programmers and users to experiment with. The software employs Bluetooth, a short-range wireless technology included in many modern phones, to automatically share information and let the phones collectively analyse events that they record. This provides a platform for a group of phones to act as smart network capable of, for example, spotting intruders or identifying wildlife. Other researchers are developing similar intelligent camera networks." October 28, 2007: Making Fast Food Even Faster. By Michael Fitzgerald. The New York Times. "Fast food is a slow sell for new technologies. It took four years, for instance, for HyperActive Technologies, which makes a system that uses artificial intelligence to predict customer order flow, to have a restaurant chain buy the product. And it took three years for Exit 41, a developer of call-center software, to make its first significant corporate sale. ... But not until January this year did it land a corporate customer, when Zaxby’s Franchising, a chain of 400 restaurants based in Athens, Ga., approved the system for use in all its franchises. ... R. Coulter, co-founder and chief scientist at HyperActive, based in Pittsburgh, says he decided to use his Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University on fast food rather than, say, space exploration because 'it’s the last $100 billion industry that still makes all its products by hand.'" October 26, 2007: Intel, scholars explore tech's future. By Daniel Lovering. The Associated Press / available from USATODAY.com. "On university campuses in three states, teams funded by Intel are exploring the future of computing -- and of the market for Intel's industry-driving microprocessors. Research teams at universities in Pennsylvania [Carnegie Mellon University], California [University of California at Berkeley] and Washington state [University of Washington in Seattle] have for six years been seeking ways to further integrate computers into daily life. ... Among the projects: a 'robotic bartender,' a small, wheeled table that carries cups to another device that grasps them and places them in a dishwasher using cameras and lasers as guides. 'The goal of this project is to free robots from the factory floor and bring them to your homes,' said Siddhartha Srinivasa, a [Carnegie Mellon University] scientist working on the project. ... Rahul Sukthankar, a researcher with Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel and an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon, said computers could sort through thousands of mammogram images to help doctors identify similar cases and decide whether to recommend biopsies. 'So really what you've done is enriched the doctor's decision-making potential at that moment by giving them access to all this data which otherwise would have taken a lot of effort to search through,' Sukthankar said." October 26, 2007: Video search makes phone a 'second pair of eyes'. By Will Knight. NewScientist.com news. "Soon, however, it may be easier to simply record a video clip of an item of interest and have your phone tell you about it instead. Researchers at Accenture Technology Labs in France have developed technology that makes this possible using any ordinary 3G cellphone equipped with a video camera. ... If a user records a video clip of, say, a foreign food item, the system can automatically identify ingredients that might cause an allergic reaction. Similarly, when shown a book, it can quickly perform an online price comparison, or find a review (see video...). Live video footage is fed from the handset to a central server, which rapidly matches on-screen objects to images previously entered into a database. The server then sends find relevant information and sends it back to user. The central server uses an algorithm called the Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) to match objects. ... Microsoft has a system called Lincoln, that lets users to take snapshots and send them off for identification. Another system developed by Evolution Robotics of Pasadena, California, called ViPR, also uses video footage to identify objects, and is already available in Japan."
>>> Image Understanding, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, Vision, Applications October 25, 2007: The E-Learning Adventure. By Nicole Girard. TechNewsWorld. "Improvements in the processing power of personal computers combined with Internet delivery applications provide a tremendous opportunity for novel approaches to preparedness training. The power of virtual learning environments lies in creating 3-D spaces that give users a sense of learning by doing. ... A simulation-based training game designed to equip players with the ability to deal with crises in a military situation was developed by research and development firm Stottler Henke. The system -- developed by the Navy to train tactical action officers (TAO) -- allows players to train within a battlefield simulation. As officers second in command to the captain, they are the individuals who run the ship in a crisis situation. 'In real life, the captain commands a cadre of about 15 people,' Jim Ong, group manager for Stottler Henke, told TechNewsWorld. Ong leads the development of artificial intelligence-based systems for training, performance support and decision support. ... Instead of pressing buttons on a dashboard, the player is talking to a person through the use of automated speech recognition and speech synthesis provided by a tool called 'Symbionic.' It's an intelligence agent toolkit used to monitor the students actions. It consists primarily of voice commands and questions and assesses whether or not the student is doing the right thing or not.... Stottler Henke specializes in turnkey applications and developing tools. Their main area of expertise is developing advanced training systems. Their core competition is artificial intelligence. 'We use [artificial] intelligence to make training more effective,' Ong said. 'A lot of simulations used by corporations tend to be pretty simple. Artificial entertainment games tend to have the intelligence of the characters that are in the game, the non-live characters.' The way to make the characters smarter is to enable the sim to automatically assess the students' performance, Ong said." October 25, 2007: Rating Facial Expressions - New software could help mental-health professionals assess patients and ensure that salespeople project a positive attitude. By Anna Davison. Technology Review. "Software that recognizes and rates smiles was demonstrated recently at an exhibition in Tokyo, where attendees competed to outsmile one another. The smile-checking technology is the latest addition to Omron Corporation's OKAO Vision software suite, which detects faces in images and can determine the person's gender and approximate age, or verify his or her identity from a database of faces. The smile software is Omron's first foray into facial-expression detection and analysis, a field that could revolutionize how humans interact with machines, and with each other. ... 'Clearly, it's an interesting thing,' says Joseph Atick of L-1 Identity Solutions, based in Stamford, CT, which supplies identification technology, primarily for security applications. 'If you can read people better, you can serve them better.' ... Sophisticated facial-expression analysis could help mental-health professionals evaluate their patients and monitor their progress." October 22, 2007: How Do You Say...Translation software is at last good enough to help companies do business in other languages. By Peter Loftus. The Wall Street Journal. "Thanks to the Internet, companies can leap over most geographical barriers to conduct business globally. But language barriers remain a tough hurdle. Increasingly, though, translation software is making it easier to do business in other languages. While computer translation isn't perfect -- human input is still needed to ensure complete accuracy -- the latest programs are faster and more accurate than earlier generations of translation tools. ... Ford Motor Co. uses translation software from Systran SA of France, along with some human input, to convert vehicle-assembly instructions written in English into four languages: Spanish, German, Portuguese and Dutch. It also uses software from Applications Technology Inc., of McLean, Va., for translations from English to Turkish. Nestor Rychtyckyj, a Ford technical specialist in artificial intelligence, says that while machine translation still isn't 100% accurate, it has improved over the years and is good enough to convey the substance of instructions to foreign workers. 'Machine translation just makes the process more efficient' than it would be using human translators alone, Mr. Rychtyckyj says. 'We're saving a lot of time and effort.'" October 22, 2007: 'Smart' video offers an alert to threats - Taking boredom factor out of security systems. By Hiawatha Bray. The Boston Globe. "In video surveillance systems, the weakest link is the often bored, distracted human who has to spend hours staring at a bank of video monitors, waiting for something suspicious to happen. Several Boston area companies say they have found a solution: surveillance systems smart enough to recognize threats, even when their human operators do not. 'It essentially replaces the need for people to watch video,' said Scott Schnell, chief executive of VideoIQ Inc., a Bedford firm that was spun off earlier this year from General Electric Co. ... Systems from VideoIQ and Intuvision Inc. of Woburn can automatically spot an intruder climbing a fence or a subway passenger leaving a suspicious parcel on the platform. ... [Simon] Harris said that worldwide sales of smart video surveillance systems will be less than $100 million this year, but rise to about $3 billion by 2010. ... One test video shows ducks and boats on the Hudson River. The system draws yellow boxes around the harmless ducks, but when a boat appears, the box turns bright red. ... Intuvision, a startup funded by grants from the US intelligence community, has attacked the problem using a technique called 'task-based attention.'"
>>> Law Enforcement, Image Understanding, Vision, Machine Learning, Applications, Industry Statistics October 21, 2007: Stanford team getting ready to take Junior out for a drive. By Matt Nauman. The Mercury News (SiliconValley.com). "Junior, a Volkswagen Passat station wagon, will compete this week as the Stanford Racing Team's entrant into the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. Driving it will be, uh, itself - it's a robotic vehicle. Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford computer professor, again heads the effort that resulted in a $2 million victory in a similar event in 2005. This time, however, instead of a run across the Southern California and Nevada desert, the autonomous vehicles from 36 teams must deal with other traffic, obey traffic laws, merge and park. Although the purpose of the event is to foster development of unmanned vehicles for the military, Thrun thinks robotic vehicles eventually can make highways safer and less congested, and even improve the environment. He talked to Mercury News Staff Writer Matt Nauman last week. Here is a transcript of their conversation. Q: What was the significance of winning the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, and how has all the fanfare affected you and the team? ... Q: Aren't robots better drivers than humans? ... Q: How significant are autonomous vehicles in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence? And how close are they to commercialization?A: Cars are a great opportunity for artificial-intelligence research to make advances. Many of the issues addressed by artificial intelligence are found in traffic, like scene research, understanding what's out there. Clearly that's something that happens in traffic. How close to commercialization? My guess is that in about six to eight years' time, we'll have technology that actually improves the performance and reliability of driving. I think the way the commercialization will go is that we'll have driver assistance systems that help people, but people are still in charge. They won't be completely autonomous for the near future. Q: How successful have robots been? ... Q: Will robot cars improve our lives and the world?"
>>> Autonomous Vehicles, Robots, Military, Transportation, Grand Challenges, Ethical & Social Implications, Applications, Interviews October 21, 2007: When the Military Needs It Yesterday. By G. Pascal Zachary. The New York Times. "The Pentagon has long indulged in highly polished technological systems that are the product of many years of bureaucratic wheel-spinning, grinding meetings and wish-list overkill. But those soul-deadening procedures have come under intense criticism for turning creative people away from innovation for national security. ... BBN built a two-way translator, a hand-held device that allows an American soldier to understand an Arabic speaker, sort of. It is not perfect, Mr. [Mark] Sherman acknowledges, but at 50 percent accuracy, the digital translator may indeed improve security and save lives because human translators in Iraq often spy for the other side or are targets for assassination by insurgents. In late 2006, Mr. Sherman had a chance meeting with some Army officers at Harvard. Because BBN had been researching language translation for decades, a team was able to produce a single hand-held translator in just 42 days. It is now being tested in Iraq. The idea of bringing inventions quickly to the battlefield has roots stretching to World War II and the Korean War." October 19, 2007: What I Meant to Say Was Semantic Web. John Markoff's post to Bits, The New York Times' Technology Blog. "One great way to start a fight in a crowded Silicon Valley cocktail party (and there are a lot of them these days) is to mention Web 3.0. There is no easy consensus about how to define what is meant by Web 3.0, but it is generally seen as a reference to the semantic Web. While it is not that much more precise a phrase, the semantic Web refers to technology to make using the Internet better by understanding the meaning of what people are doing, not just the way pages link to each other. ... So companies are bubbling up all over the place that claim to be building part of the semantic Web. Some are building voice recognition systems to use while browsing the Internet on a cell phone. Some want to challenge Google head on with a better search engine. ... In a demonstration I saw earlier this week Twine appeared to do a good job of what artificial intelligence researchers refer to as 'entity extraction,' that is categorizing things like people and places automatically."
>>> Interfaces, Representation, Web-Searching Agents, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Knowledge Management, Applications October 19, 2007: Newsmaker - Gates still finding his voice. By Ina Fried. CNET News.com. "Bill Gates has been saying for years that one day soon we will use handwriting, voice and touch to control our computers. He's still saying that. In an interview with CNET News.com, Gates talks about some of the ways that speech recognition has already made inroads and discusses some of the places it will eventually go. ... Q: When did you really first see the possibilities of voice? Was there a real early demo you saw years ago that sort of--you saw it and could really see the possibilities? Gates: Well, certainly the idea that computers should deal with voice has been around a long time. It's kind of a natural way to communicate. In the 1970s, DARPA was funding people, including people at Harvard, to do speech recognition. And so people kind of thought, hey, this should be easy to do. The dream of computers understanding voice goes way back. And the dream that the data network and the voice network would be one in the same goes way back as well. ... [Q:] What are some of the areas where you see voice going that people aren't necessarily thinking about today? Gates: To me, voice is in the broad realm of natural interface. ..."
>>> Speech, Natural Language Processing, Interfaces, Applications, Interviews October 18, 2007: Newsmaker - DARPA sees inspiration as trophy of robot race. By Stefanie Olsen. CNET News.com. "For Tony Tether, an upcoming race of robot cars isn't just about saving lives in the military. It's also designed to inspire a generation of technologists. As director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. government's military research and development arm, Tether pioneered a series of driverless challenges that have wowed the public and four-star generals alike. ... He was appointed director of DARPA in 2001. CNET News.com talked to Tether ahead of the Urban Challenge, the third in DARPA's series of robot races, which will award $2 million to the winner. The finals will take place November 3 in Victorville, Calif. Q: We're getting close to the Urban Challenge, and you've witnessed all of the others. So how do you suspect this one will vary from the others? ... What will be the hardest thing about the course, without giving anything away? ... So what do you think has been accomplished between the second and now? Tether: I think the thing that's really been accomplished is that these vehicles have learned to recognize not only fixed obstacles, but obstacles that are moving. ... Can you tell us how this challenge came about? [Tether:] The autonomous vehicle really came about for two reasons. One was that it's a serious mission for the military and that if we can reduce the number of people who are driving convoys in a place like Iraq or Afghanistan, we would definitely reduce the infrastructure to take care of those people. The second reason is that we are worried here at DARPA about the food stock: that the kids today in the United States don't seem to be going into engineering and science like they used to. ... What are the top three advances to come out of DARPA in the last five years would you say? ..." October 17, 2007: Next-Gen Robots Will Be Big For Holidays - High-Tech Robotics Come In Toy Packages. By Gregg Geller. WCBSTV.com. "Next generation robots will be a big hit this upcoming holiday season. Robots at this year's Digital Life Expo came in many shapes, sizes and prices, and with varying capabilities. What became clear was that no matter what you budget or desires for a new robotic toy, something is available for everyone." Videos of the robots can be accesed via links in the article. October 16, 2007: Software saves day. By Cameron England. The Advertiser (via AdelaideNow). "Adelaide firm SolveIT launched its new currency hedging program in time for the recent volatility in the Australian dollar, helping local wool company Michell ride out the turbulence. ... SolveIT chief executive Matthew Michalewicz said the company used 'fuzzy logic' in its software, which could adapt to changing conditions. 'It's based on artificial intelligence so you're looking for really smart algorithms to come up with recommendations, but the easiest way to describe it is that the system creates hedging rules,' Mr Michalewicz said." October 13, 2007: Reykjavík University Holds Artificial Intelligence Festival. Iceland Review Online. "Reykjavík University (RU) opens the 2007 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Festival in Reykjavík Theater today at 1 pm. Icelandic experts in AI will present their projects and research in this field, including AI world champion Dr. Yngvi Björnsson. Dr. Ari K. Jónsson, who used to work as a scientist at NASA, will also give a presentation at tomorrow’s festival, as well as Grímur Jónsson from Össur, who will talk about AI in artificial limbs, and a representative from Marel, who discusses AI in food processing."
>>> Applications, Assisitive Technologies, Games & Puzzles, Competitions & Events (@ Resources for Students) October 12, 2007: Surveillance system tracks faces on CCTV - Engineers at UK defence company say hi-tech system will help track suspected terrorists. By Bobbie Johnson. Guardian Unlimited. "Engineers at British defence company BAE Systems, which is working on the technology, claim it is even able to automatically follow a target even if they change their appearance by changing their clothes or hiding beneath a hat. 'Today the effectiveness of CCTV surveillance relies on a small, highly-trained team to identify and track suspicious individuals,' said Andrew Cooke, project manager at BAE Systems. 'Automating elements of the system -- and employing techniques to prevent suspects from throwing a team off their scent -- enables a single operative to track multiple targets with as much, or even greater, precision than before.' The Integrated Surveillance of Crowded Areas for Public Security (Iscaps) project is part of a joint initiative with around Europe to develop security systems for potential deployment around the continent." October 11, 2007: Researchers fine-tune F-35 pilot-aircraft speech system. By John Schutte. Air Force Materiel Command News. "When the first F-35 Lightning II rolls out in 2008, communications between pilot and aircraft will enter a new era thanks in part to testing and analysis conducted at the Air Force Research Laboratory's Human Effectiveness Directorate. The F-35 will be the first U. S. fighter aircraft with a speech recognition system able to 'hear' a pilot's spoken commands to manage various aircraft subsystems, such as communications and navigation. ... Currently pilots must press buttons, flip switches or glance at instruments for status information. The new system not only simplifies a pilot's workload but increases safety and efficiency, since pilots can remain focused on flying the aircraft and scrutinizing the combat environment. ... SRI International developed the DynaSpeak® speech recognition software as a highly accurate system for noisy environments, specifically for embedded devices like personal digital assistants, in-car navigation systems and avionics systems, Mr. Williamson said. It is speaker-independent, meaning a pilot can use it without first 'training' the system to his or her voice, which took up to an hour on previous experimental systems. SRI International is working with integrating contractor Adacel Systems, Inc., to tailor the system for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter's airborne environment." October 11, 2007: 'Dark Web' Project Takes On Cyber-Terrorism. By Steven Kotler. FOXNews.com. "'Since the events of 9/11, terrorist presence online has multiplied tenfold,' says Hsinchun Chen, director of the University of Arizona's Artificial Intelligence Lab. 'Around the year 2000, there were 70 to 80 core terrorist sites online; now there are at least 7000 to 8000.' Those sites are doing everything from spreading militant propaganda to offering insurgency advice to plotting the next wave of attacks, making the net, as Chen also points out: 'arguably the most powerful tool for spreading extremist violence around the world.' But thanks to Chen, that tide may be turning. He's the architect behind the newest weapon in the war on terror -- a giant, searchable database on extremists known as Dark Web. Using a bevy of advanced technologies, Dark Web is an attempt to uncover, cross-reference, catalogue and analyze all online terrorist-generated content. ... Dark Web is Chen's second foray into online crime-fighting. The first began in 1997, when he -- already an expert at tracking social change online (crime and terrorisms being extreme examples of social change) -- teamed up with the Tucson Police Department and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to help develop Coplink, a way for law enforcement forces around the country to link files and consolidate data. ... [Dark Web] utilizes existing technologies... as well as brand new technologies like sentiment analysis, which is capable of scanning documents for emotionally charged keywords such as 'that sucks.'... Civil-liberties concerns may continue to dog the technological front of the war on terror, but Dark Web is already producing results." October 5, 2007:The 'Numb3rs' Don't Lie [radio broadcast]. NPR's Talk of the Nation: Science Friday, with Ira Flatow. "Mathematics may seem like an unusual tool to catch criminals, but real math and actual events inspire the CBS crime drama Numb3rs. Guests [Gary Lorden & Keith Devlin] discuss the intersection of math-based crime solving and prime-time television. ... [17:15] Flatow: Mm-hmm. Let’s talk a bit about something that you write about in the book. You write that - it has to do with the war on terror. And we know that the government has all kinds of data mining that it’s doing. And you write that machine learning is, quote, 'perhaps the single most important tool within the law enforcement community’s data mining arsenal when it comes to profiling, enhanced catching or preventing criminals and terrorists.' Can you tell us what machine learning is? Dr. Devlin: Okay. That’s - actually, the center that I direct at Stanford is actually the world’s leader in doing that thing. It’s where you - it’s a branch of what was known as artificial - still is known as artificial intelligence. It means you have a computer program which you present lots of data, it could be data about - an obvious one is can you determine the profile of someone entering the country who’s likely to be a terrorist? ..." October 5, 2007: British patients counseled by a computer program. By Maria Cheng. The Associated Press / available from HeraldTribune.com. "Last year, 'Fearfighter' was one of two programs endorsed by Britain's health advisory watchdog for people with panic attacks, mild depression or phobias. People uncomfortable with getting advice from a computer can still choose to see therapists, but the option of logging on for help is now available -- and will be paid for by the government-run National Health Service. In Britain, patients registered with the NHS routinely wait up to six months to see a psychiatrist; nearly 90 percent of people with mild depression never actually see a therapist. The computer programs now mean that for some patients, getting psychiatric counseling is as easy as getting a password from their general practitioner to access the program online. ... 'The idea is that the repetitive parts of the therapy are done by a computer, which can then make decisions based on these answers,' said Dr. Isaac Marks, a professor emeritus at King's College Institute of Psychiatry in London, and co-developer of 'Fearfighter.' ... Many experiments in Britain, the United States and elsewhere showed that patients counseled by computers made just as much progress as those counseled by real live therapists. Using computers to treat patients was also much cheaper and could help cash-strapped health systems expand care. One study estimated that therapists using computer programs could double the number of their patients."
>>> Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Education, Cognitive Science, Medicine, Applications October 4, 2007: Robots may aid aging Japanese population. By Hiroko Tabuchi. The Associated Press / available from MiamiHerald.com. "If you grow old in Japan, expect to be served food by a robot, ride a voice-recognition wheelchair or even possibly hire a nurse in a robotic suit - all examples of cutting-edge technology to care for the country's rapidly graying population. ... At a home care and rehabilitation convention in Tokyo this week, buyers crowded round a demonstration of Secom Co.'s My Spoon feeding robot, which helps elderly or disabled people eat with a spoon- and fork-fitted swiveling arm. ... 'It's all about empowering people to help themselves,' [Shigehisa] Kobayashi said. The Tokyo-based company has already sold 300 of the robots, which come with a price tag of $3,500. 'We want to give the elderly control over their own lives,' he said. ... The intelligent wheelchair TAO Aicle from Fujitsu Ltd. and Aisin Seiki Co. uses a positioning system to automatically travel to a preset destination, and uses sensors to detect and stop at red lights, and to avoid obstacles. Another wheelchair designed by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology responds to oral commands like 'forward' and 'back,' 'right' and 'left.'" October 3, 2007: Don’t invent, evolve - The inventor’s trial-and-error approach can be automated by software that mimics natural selection. Economist.com. "Evolutionary design, as it is known, allows a computer to run through tens of millions of variations on an invention until it hits on the best solution to a problem. As its name suggests, evolutionary design borrows its ideas from biology. It takes a basic blueprint and mutates it in a bid to improve it without human input. As in biology, most mutations are worse than the original. But a few are better, and these are used to create the next generation. ... What has changed, in this as in so much else, is the availability and cheapness of computing power. According to John Koza of Stanford University, who is one of the pioneers of the field, evolutionary designs that would have taken many months to run on PCs are now feasible in days. The result is that the range of applications to which the principles of evolutionary design are being applied is growing fast. ... Perhaps the most cunning use of an evolutionary algorithm, though, is by Dr Koza himself. His team at Stanford developed a Wi-Fi antenna for a client...." October 3, 2007: 3-D avatar to help doctors visualize patient records and improve care. KurzweilAI.net. "IBM's Zurich Research Lab has developed an avatar to allow doctors to visualize patient medical records."
>>> Medicine, Machine Learning, Applications October 3, 2007: Scans reveal lost gravestone text. By Cristina Jimenez. BBC News. "Scientists at Carnegie Mellon university are making high resolution 3D scans of tombstones to reveal the carved patterns in the stone. A computer matches the patterns to a database of signature carvings which reveals the words. The technique could one day also be used by doctors to examine a patient's tongue for signs of illness. ... 'This technology is expected to reduce guessing work in field inspection,' said Dr Yang Cai, director of the Ambient Intelligence Lab at Carnegie Mellon Cylab. ... The new technique allows them to define patterns of 'typical' lines and curves and store them in a database. 'If the computer finds the data matches the patterns in the database, then it will highlight the area,' Dr Cai said." October 2, 2007: Natural Language Understanding and Conversational Dialogue - A Different Kind of Self-Service Speech Recognition. By Stefania Viscusi. TMCnet. "For more insight into natural language understanding in speech technologies, I took some time to ask Luis Valles, Chief Scientist at GyrusLogic, some questions on the topic. [Q] What is Natural Language Understanding? [A] Natural Language Understanding (NLU) or Conversational Dialogue is the capability for a user to say and/or ask anything, and the system understanding what the user meant, together with the system finding an appropriate response -- as with any other conversation between humans. [Q] How is this deployed with Speech Recognition? ... [Q] Can you tell me a little about the solution you have developed to provide Natural Language Understanding capabilities? [A] GyrusLogic’s Platica product is patented artificial intelligence (AI) technology built with computational linguistic models for customers, employees or any other stakeholder to enter into a fully-automated conversational dialog. ..." October 2, 2007: Ramadan chat with computer. Turkish Daily News. "Home appliance manufacturer, Tefal, has developed a smart computer software that will give out information and advice on its products, pushing aside the print out manual once and for all. Interestingly, it can also 'chat' with its owner about daily topics. 'BoTefal' is the brainchild of Tefal and Project House the latter having developed the software. ... BoTefal is used for Ramadan, answering questions about fasting times, and also giving out recipes." October 2, 2007: Robotic Therapy Tiles: Playing Your Way to Health. By Lakshmi Sandhana. Wired News. "Patients recovering from surgery or injuries may soon be able to physically play their way to a full recovery with intelligent robotic systems that generate specialized games to challenge the human body's abilities. Henrik Hautop Lund, a robotics and artificial-intelligence professor at the University of Southern Denmark is developing therapy tiles that guide patients through physical routines and help them heal. Each tile is a miniature robotic system employing neural networks. ... 'The modular robotic tiles are part of what we term "playware" -- intelligent hardware and software that produces play and playful experiences,' Lund said. 'The equipment creates a playful experience that motivates them to perform the actions needed for the recovery of their abilities.'" October 1, 2007: USC student's computer program enlisted in security efforts at LAX - Program developed by a USC student is intended to thwart terrorists by making the frequency of searches unpredictable. By Larry Gordon. Los Angeles Times. "The doctoral dissertation of a 26-year-old USC computer science student is having an unusual effect on security and transportation at Los Angeles International Airport. That's because the LAX police are giving a trial run to a new computer program that, they say, seeks to keep potential terrorists and criminals constantly uncertain about where, when and how often vehicles will be searched at airport entrances. The software is based on the thesis of Praveen Paruchuri, who earned his doctorate in May. ... Citing security concerns, Butts declined to discuss specifics of the program and its complicated algorithms other than to say it affects police deployment and the frequency of car searches in a way that 'makes it virtually impossible to predict where resources might be deployed.' It not only takes away the routine behavior that terrorists might study and take advantage of, it also designs schedules more likely to catch criminal behavior, [James] Butts said. ... LAX's adoption of Paruchuri's work is 'something that we, as researchers, dream of: creating research that is not only academically wonderful but something that is also very useful,' [Milind] Tambe said. Although engineers in artificial intelligence often are inspired by thinking about what robots will do on Mars in 50 years, Tambe said, 'This is not planet Mars. This is planet Earth, and we are being useful right here and right now.'" October 2007 [issue date]: A Robot Buying Spree - New orders received by North American-based robot companies rose 39% in the first half of 2007. By John Teresko. Industry Week. "Industry is buying. The evidence: New orders received by North American-based robot companies rose 39% in the first half of 2007, says the Robotic Industry Association (RIA). North American-based robot suppliers sold nearly 10,000 robots through June, valued at $563.2 million.
>>> Robots, Manufacturing, Industry Statistics, Applications 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: 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 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: 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 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, 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: 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 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: 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 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: 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 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 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: 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. The signing avatars and the award-winning technology for animating sign language from a special gesture notation were developed by the University of East Anglia and the database of signs was developed by RNID (Royal National Institute for Deaf People). ... SiSi has been developed in the UK by a research team at IBM Hursley, as part of IBM's premier global student intern programme, Extreme Blue. In the European part of the programme, 80 of the most talented students from across Europe were selected to work on 20 projects and given whatever equipment, support and assistance they required. Working for an intense 12 week period alongside IBM technical and industry leaders, they focused on innovative technology projects, such as SiSi, all of which had real business value. ... For a video demonstration of the SiSi technology, visit the following url: http://youtube.com/watch?v=RarMKnjqzZU" September 11, 2007: NCAR targets bumpy flights. By Chris Walsh. Rocky Mountain News. "The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder is looking to minimize such disruptions and delays and save airlines money through a new system that provides updated snapshots of turbulence across the country. The goal is to pinpoint areas of turbulence in clouds, allowing pilots to efficiently reroute flights to avoid rough patches. The system, currently being tested by United Airlines, uses the nation's network of Nexrad ground-based radars to gather information on precipitation and cloud density. It also measures wind gusts within clouds. A software program then filters out information that can distort the data - such as flying insects and birds - and creates a three-dimensional map of turbulence for a given area. 'What we're doing that's really new is applying artificial intelligence to get rid of data that contaminate the measurements,' said John Williams, a scientist with NCAR. 'The idea is to mimic how a human expert would look at the information. Our hope is that it will help reduce unnecessary delays and diversions and guarantee passenger safety and comfort.'"
>>> Transportation, Earth & Atmospheric Science, Expert Systems, Applications September 10, 2007: Scientists Use the "Dark Web" to Snag Extremists and Terrorists Online. Press release from the National Science Foundation (NSF). "Terrorists and extremists have set up shop on the Internet, using it to recruit new members, spread propaganda and plan attacks across the world. The size and scope of these dark corners of the Web are vast and disturbing. But in a non-descript building in Tucson, a team of computational scientists are using the cutting-edge technology and novel new approaches to track their moves online, providing an invaluable tool in the global war on terror. Funded by the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies, Hsinchun Chen and his Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona have created the Dark Web project, which aims to systematically collect and analyze all terrorist-generated content on the Web. ... Using advanced techniques such as Web spidering, link analysis, content analysis, authorship analysis, sentiment analysis and multimedia analysis, Chen and his team can find, catalogue and analyze extremist activities online. According to Chen, scenarios involving vast amounts of information and data points are ideal challenges for computational scientists, who use the power of advanced computers and applications to find patterns and connections where humans can not. One of the tools developed by Dark Web is a technique called Writeprint, which automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating 'anonymous' content online. ... Dark Web also uses complex tracking software called Web spiders to search discussion threads and other content to find the corners of the Internet where terrorist activities are taking place."
>>> Law Enforcement, Web-Searching Agents, Natural Language Processing, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Agents, Applications September 10, 2007: COPLINK data-sharing program aids crime-solving. By Katie McDevitt. EastValleyTribune.com. "Two years ago, a Phoenix homicide detective asked for help on a case. Someone had been killed, but police had few clues. 'Look for two brothers and a mother whose first name is all we know,' the homicide detective said. So planning and research Detective Ben Vermillion keyed the information into a special program that pools and searches police department databases. 'Within 15 minutes, I had the shooter for his homicide,' Vermillion said. 'They were listed in some departmental reports and ... (the program) links them together.' Vermillion says he couldn’t have done that so quickly without a tool called COPLINK. ... In Phoenix, detectives used COPLINK to catch the a.m. Rapist and in Washington, D.C., officials used the program in the hunt for the D.C. Sniper. ... The prototype of COPLINK was created by Hsinchun Chen, director of the University of Arizona’s Artificial Intelligence Lab and turned into a commercial product by Knowledge Computing Corp. of Tucson, which produces the software, said Bob Griffin, chief executive officer of the company." September 10, 2007: Artificial Intelligence under the spotlight at BA Festival. Posted by Joyce Lewis. University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science News. "Although Hollywood often likes to present us with a world full of self-aware and destructive robots in the style of I Robot, this is not the way the science of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is headed, says British Computer Society President and ECS Professor of Artificial Intelligence Nigel Shadbolt. Speaking at the BA Festival of Science in York tomorrow (Tuesday 11 September), Professor Shadbolt will outline how developments in the speed and power of computers, the emergence of the World Wide Web, and our deeper understanding of human and animal intelligence is producing a different but no less exciting future. 'AI has had a huge influence on the past and present of computer science -- it will be a large part of the future but not in the way you might think,' says Professor Shadbolt, an AI expert in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. ... He believes that we are now seeing the emergence of Assistive Intelligence which can be characterized as a different kind of AI. 'These results can be seen everywhere,' he says. 'Rather than being conscious brains in a box, as Hollywood would have it, they are in fact small pieces of adaptive and flexible software that help drive our cars, diagnose disease and provide opponents in computer games.'"
>>> Applications, Law Enforcement, Agents, Social Science, Ethical & Social Implications, Events (@ Resources for Students) September 10, 2007: Expanding Storage: Everything Must Stay! The cost of disk storage is so low that the easiest thing for companies to do is to just hold on to all their data. And that opens up radical new possibilities. By Gary Anthes. Computerworld. "'Since storage is almost free, you can kind of keep everything now,' says Kunle Olukotun, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University. And 'everything' is just what you need for an increasingly popular class of techniques called statistical machine learning, he says. As the name suggests, the idea is for a system to develop its own rules of logic by discovering patterns and relationships in data rather than having a programmer hard-code the rules in advance. 'There’s this notion of using large amounts of data to do things that previously were done by clever algorithms -- for example, language translation,' says Olukotun. Traditionally, automated language translation has been accomplished via bilingual dictionaries and databases of linguistic rules. Google Inc. uses that method for translating among English, Spanish, German and French. But it’s using machine learning in experimental translation engines for Arabic, Chinese and Russian. ... 'Where there are large stores of data, whether the company realizes it or not, there is a gold mine; there is free money,' says Kevin Scott, vice president of engineering at AdMob Inc. in San Mateo, Calif. 'Machine learning is going to be in wider and wider use as people begin to understand that it can fundamentally change the value proposition of your business.'" September 6, 2007: Intelligent software and web storage could create ‘memory companions.’ By Justin Richards. ComputerWeekly. "The challenge of using electronic tools to supplement human memory has been addressed by a BCS Thought Leadership debate on assistive memory technologies. ... The debate heard that assistive memory technologies will need to include intelligent software that can act as a 'companion' to the user, understanding their physical situation and offering up appropriate information from the user's data repositories. The challenge of building such companions is a variant of the challenge confronting artificial intelligence. How much adaptivity and intelligence do such companion systems need before they become useful? ... Another big issue is privacy. Storing large amounts of personal information online is a huge security risk. And, ethically, who has the right to view your 'memory' once it has been recorded?" September 6, 2007: Science fiction becoming science fact - Venu Govindaraju spearheads cutting-edge research at CUBS, CEDAR. By Kevin Fryling. UB Reporter. "In the future, UB faculty member Venu Govindaraju says, cameras will recognize passengers' faces at the airport, ... These are but a few applications of the cutting-edge research that Govindaraju spearheads as founding director of UB's Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors (CUBS) and associate director of the Center for Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR). ... About half of Govindaraju's research relates to the field of biometrics, which he describes as 'the science of identifying people.' His introduction to the subject, he notes, came from his thesis work on facial recognition -- a subject once considered more relevant to artificial intelligence than biometrics -- and since then he has been at the forefront of biometrics' transformation into a red-hot field in computer science due to rising interest in both personal and national security. ... Nowadays, Govindaraju says, CUBS looks at different aspects of biometrics. 'We look at facial recognition, voice recognition, fingerprint recognition' -- as well as iris recognition, gait recognition, odor detection and hand geometry -- 'and how to combine these different methods.' ... Govindaraju also points to his efforts to create algorithms that comprehend handwritten text in Arabic, English, Hindi and Sanskrit-he is fluent in the latter three languages -- as a further source of collaboration with UB colleagues. September 6, 2007: The trouble with computers - They may be powerful, but computers could still be easier to use. Might new forms of interface help? The Economist Technology Quarterly. "[M]aking computers simpler to use will require more than novel input devices. Smarter software is needed, too. For example, much effort is going into the development of 'context aware' systems that hide unnecessary clutter and present options that are most likely to be relevant, depending on what the user is doing. The trick, says Patrick Brezillon of University Paris VI, is to get computers to 'size up the temperament of users' and then give them what they want. This can be done by analysing the frequency of keystrokes, the number of typos, the length of work breaks, internet-search terms and background noise, among other things. ... The problem with all of this is that people may not want computers to make assumptions about their needs and preferences -- not least because those assumptions may be wrong. But proponents of context-aware computing say it is merely the next logical step from existing systems such as spam filters. ... Henry Holtzman, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says vehicles provide the most promising environment for context-aware interfaces. ... Many futurists and computer experts believe that the logical conclusion of all of these new input devices, sensors and smarter software to anticipate users' needs, will be for computing to blend into the background. In this 'ubiquitous computing' model, computers will no longer be things people use explicitly...."
>>> Interfaces, Systems, Smart Rooms & Houses, Applications September 5, 2007: AI - It's OK Again! Is AI on the rise again? By Michael Swaine. Dr. Dobbs. "Over the last half century, AI has had its ups and down. But for now, it's on the rise again. ... On the occasion of the 22nd annual AAAI conference this past July, we thought it appropriate to reflect on AI's 51-year history and check in with some experts about the state of AI in 2007. ... The connectionist approach is basically synthesis, or bottom-up, the symbolist approach is analysis, top-down. Both are doubtless necessary. '[S]ymbols-only AI is not enough, [but] subsymbolic perceptual processes are not enough either,' Winston says. ... In terms of real engineering and applied science accomplishments, '[t]he most active and productive strand of AI research today is the application of machine learning techniques to a wide variety of problems,' [Terry] Winograd says, 'from web search to finance to understanding the molecular basis of living systems.' ... Rodney Brooks sees great progress being made in practical systems involving language, vision, search, learning, and navigation, systems that are becoming part of our daily lives. Nils Nilsson took time out from writing a book on the history of AI to share some thoughts on its state today, citing practical results of AI work in adjacent fields like genomics, control engineering, data analysis, medicine and surgery, computer games, and animation. ... AI advances are not trumpeted as artificial intelligence so much these days, but are often seen as advances in some other field. 'AI has become more important as it has become less conspicuous,' Winston says. 'These days, it is hard to find a big system that does not work, in part, because of ideas developed or matured in the AI world.'" September 4, 2007: A high-tech helping hand for soldiers - A Lockheed Martin project could give them the tools to more easily provide reports directly from the battlefield. By Henry J. Holcomb. The Philadelphia Inquirer (philly.com). "For several years, Celeste L. Corrado has been thinking about, as she put it, 'soldiers coming back to base, tired and hungry after a long day on patrol,' to face the unpleasant but important task of filling out reports. Her team of scientists and engineers at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories in Cherry Hill has come up with a way to change that scenario. Last week, they turned over a working prototype of their electronic solution to the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, the architects of future warfare. ... Their working prototype is called WIRE, for Wearable Intelligent Reporting Environment. It takes mature speech-recognition technology - software that turns spoken words into documents - to the battlefield. Here's how it works. ... Instead of working with hours-old information, commanders will have fresh data for sophisticated computers and artificial intelligence - another technology being refined in the Cherry Hill labs." September 3, 2007: The Thinkers - He's taking unknown out of teaching algebra. By Mark Roth. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Last month, Los Angeles School Superintendent Roy Romer said that high school algebra 'triggers dropouts more than any single subject. I think it is a cumulative failure of our ability to teach math adequately in the public school system.' ... It is that kind of dismal performance that Steve Ritter is dedicated to overcoming. Dr. Ritter is the chief scientist at Carnegie Learning Inc., a Downtown company that markets one of the leading computer-based math teaching programs in the United States. The company's a spinoff from Carnegie Mellon University. ... The Cognitive Tutor's software lets students learn at their own pace, Dr. Ritter said, and can automatically change the mix of problems a student sees to help him work on the skills he is struggling with the most. And, in an unexpected benefit, the company has found that during the computer-learning sessions, teachers interact with 91 percent of their students -- far more than they would during a regular classroom session. ... [S]tudies have shown that the Cognitive Tutor program not only outperforms traditional algebra teaching, but also is especially effective in raising the scores of special education students."
>>> Education, Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Applications, Resources for Educators September 2007: The Hard Science of Making Videogames - Behind every realistic explosion, racecar and Jedi are programmers solving some of the toughest problems in physics, psychology and math. By Jacob Ward, Doug Cantor and Bjorn Carey. Popular Science.
>>> Video Games, Agents, Applications September / October 2007: Talk to the Phone - Speech-recognition software from Vlingo could make the mobile Web easier to use. By David Talbot. Technology Review Magazine. "Mobile phones can do lots of things: search the Web, download music, send e-mail. But the vast majority of the 233 million Americans who own them never use them for more than calls and short text messages. One reason is that other features often require users to enter sentences or long search terms, a tedious task. Speech-recognition interfaces could make such features easier to use. Vlingo, a startup in Cambridge, MA, is coming to market with a simple user interface that provides speech recognition across mobile-phone applications. ... 'Small platforms need speech, and search is a powerful way to find information,' says James Glass, head of the spoken-language systems group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ... Mazin Gilbert, executive director of natural-language processing at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, NJ, says others, including AT&T, are also developing speech interfaces for mobile phones...." THERE'S MORE ! SEE THE APPLICATIONS NEWS ARCHIVE |
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