| - COGNITIVE SCIENCE - General Index by Topic to AI in the news |
AI Topics Home | ||
October 14, 2007: Studying how a broker's brain works. swissinfo. "To help maintain its competitive edge, the Swiss banking industry is investing heavily in financial engineering. Its latest recruit is economist Peter Bossaerts. swissinfo talked to Bossaerts, a leading expert in neuroeconomics – the study of how we make financial choices - about his recent appointment as professor at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. ... swissinfo: So what exactly is neuroeconomics? Peter Bossaerts: It's a mixture of decisional theory - mathematical theories applied in risk-based decision-making - and neuroscience. ... Neurofinance, therefore, tries to understand how choices are made in a risky world. It looks closely at the workings of the brain while taking into account human emotions. ... swissinfo: What is the aim of your work? P.B.: Firstly, to make progress on how people make choices when dealing with risk. ... Neuroeconomics should also help improve decisional theory, which doesn't work in the real world where rules are vague and probabilities are unknown. The aim is to build up artificial intelligence based on a theory where decision-making is repeated." October 3, 2007: Robot brain makes the same mistakes as humans. By Michael Reilly & David Robson. New Scientist (Issue 2624: pages 30-31; subscription req'd). "When your software crashes, you probably restart your PC and hope it doesn't happen again, or you get the bug fixed. But not Rachel Wood. When a program she was testing screwed up a task that a 2-year-old would find easy, she was elated. The reason for this seemingly perverse reaction is that Wood's program didn't contain a bug, but had committed a famous cognitive goof identified by the psychology pioneer Jean Piaget. ... Wood's robot has a brain far simpler than a baby's. But unravelling the events that led to this human-like behaviour - something that is easier to do in a computer program than a real brain - could help improve our understanding of artificial intelligence. ... It's not the only machine that has exhibited an exclusively human flaw. Last week researchers at University College London announced that they had created a computer program that falls for the same optical illusions as a humans (see 'Shared illusions' [sidebar]). It also highlights an idea we may need to get used to: as robots develop human-like strengths, the trade-off could be that they also inherit our weaknesses. ... Wood used a form of neural program called a homeostatic network, which gives the programmer control over how the neural network evolves." October 1, 2007: It's All in Your Head. By Lisa A. Ennis. Library Journal. "The dynamic and rapidly expanding field of neuroscience traditionally has involved the study of the nervous system from a biological/medical standpoint. But in recent years the science has become multidisciplinary, attracting researchers from computer science, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and even the humanities. ... For public and college libraries, developing a well-rounded, balanced, and broadly accessible collection of books, periodicals, DVDs, and web sites on this highly technical and academic subject can be challenging. The following bibliography provides a general listing of recent titles, mostly nonmedical, that demonstrate neuroscience's breadth. ... Bennett, Maxwell & others. Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language. Columbia Univ. 2007. 232p. ISBN 978-0-231-14044-7. $25.50. To illustrate the philosophical issues surrounding cognitive neuroscience, this volume presents the conflicting views of three established philosophers and a prominent neuroscientist. While not light reading, it is a good introduction to this dynamic subfield. ... Bloom, Floyd E., M.D. Best of the Brain from Scientific American: Mind, Matter, and Tomorrow's Brain. Dana, dist. by Univ. of Chicago. 2007. 243p. illus. index. ISBN 978-1-932594-22-5. $25. This collection of essays drawn from Scientific American and Scientific American Mind offers an excellent, readable overview of the latest brain research since 1999. ... Minsky, Marvin. The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind. S. & S. 2006. 400p. illus. ISBN 978-0-7432-7663-4. $26; pap. Nov. 2007. ISBN 978-0-7432-7664-1. $16. Artificial intelligence pioneer Minsky examines the human imagination and common sense in this provocative book that challenges current thinking about the way humans think." [Please see the article for the complete bibliography.] October 2007 [issue date]: Searching for God in the Brain - Researchers are unearthing the roots of religious feeling in the neural commotion that accompanies the spiritual epiphanies of nuns, Buddhists and other people of faith. By David Biello. Scientific American Mind. "The spiritual quest may be as old as humankind itself, but now there is a new place to look: inside our heads. Using fMRI and other tools of modern neuroscience, researchers are attempting to pin down what happens in the brain when people experience mystical awakenings during prayer and meditation or during spontaneous utterances inspired by religious fervor. Such efforts to reveal the neural correlates of the divine -- a new discipline with the warring titles 'neurotheology' and 'spiritual neuroscience' -- not only might reconcile religion and science but also might help point to ways of eliciting pleasurable otherworldly feelings in people who do not have them or who cannot summon them at will. ... The brain mediates every human experience from breathing to contemplating the existence of God. And whereas activity in neural networks is what gives rise to these experiences, neuroimaging cannot yet pinpoint such activity at the level of individual neurons. Instead it provides far cruder anatomical information, highlighting the broad swaths of brain tissue that appear to be unusually dynamic or dormant. But using such vague structural clues to explain human feelings and behaviors may be a fool’s errand." September 28, 2007: Artificial brain falls for optical illusions - AI software that misjudges colour in the same way as humans suggests that robots must inherit our flaws if they are to have our strengths. By David Robson. NewScientist.com news. "A computer program that emulates the human brain falls for the same optical illusions humans do. It suggests the illusions are a by-product of the way babies learn to filter their complex surroundings. ... For some time, scientists have believed one class of optical illusions result from the way the brain tries to disentangle the colour of an object and the way it is lit. ... Until now there has been no way of knowing whether this theory is correct. Beau Lotto and David Corney at University College London, UK, think they have finally done it. They created a program that learns to predict the lightness of an image based on its past experiences -- just like a baby. And just like a human, it falls prey to optical illusions. ... Most creators of machine vision try to copy human vision because it is so well suited to a variety of environments. The new findings suggest that if we want to exploit its advantages, we also have to suffer its failings." September 27, 2007: Research adds new perspective to high-tech gender gap. By Jessica Mintz. The Associated Press / available from Nashuatelegraph.com / also available from TIME (Study Targets Gender Gap in Software; September 24, 2007) and CBS2.com (Study: Men, Women Use Software Differently; September 24, 2007). "For more than a decade, academics and technology executives have been frowning at the widening gender gap in computer science. Everyone has a theory, but no one has managed to attract many more women. Now, some computer science researchers say one solution may lie in the design of software itself – even programs regular people use every day. Laura Beckwith, a new computer science Ph.D. from Oregon State University, and her adviser, Margaret Burnett, specialize in studying the way people use computers to solve everyday problems – like adding formulas to spreadsheets, animation to Web sites and styles to word processing documents. ... Research like Beckwith's may help ensure that when the industry starts adding new features for those everyday computer users, differences between men and women aren't left out of the equation. What's more, making complex everyday software more accessible to women could help get more of them interested in computer science, Beckwith and Burnett believe. As it is, the percentage of bachelor's degrees in computer science awarded to women fell from 37 percent in 1985 to just 22 percent in 2005, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, even as women made gains in other science and math-based fields. Most gender-gap theories today have more to do with computer science's image as a haven for solitary male geeks. ... Julie Jacko, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and president of the Association for Computing Machinery's group on human-computer interaction, said research like Beckwith's could end up changing how young women feel about computers. 'We know from our colleagues in psychology and sociology that there are gender differences that can be very important to take into account in human-computer interaction and software design,' Jacko said. 'Projects like this can help us have a better impact, even at younger ages, where I believe interventions need to happen.'"
>>> Cognitive Science, Careers in AI -and- Diversity & Equality (@ Resources for Students), Computer Science; also see this related NewsToon September 25, 2007: MacArthur Foundation Gives Out ‘Genius Awards.’ By Felicia R. Lee. The New York Times. "24 recipients of this year’s $500,000 'genius awards,' to be announced today by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. ... 'Every class has its own tempo to it; they’re all wonderful,' Jonathan F. Fanton, the foundation’s president, said in an interview. 'There are some interesting clusters you might note. There are a lot of people creating technology for the future. Another cluster deals with people working on the frontiers of medicine, and yet another cluster comes from other countries.' Most of this year’s fellows are known primarily in their own fields, like Yoky Matsuoka, 36, a robotics researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, who creates prosthetic devices and develops rehabilitation strategies for disabled people."
>>> Neuroscience, Robots, Cognitive Science, Machine Learning, Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students) September 18, 2007: Brain connections cause rethink over human memory. New Scientist (Issue 2621: page 23; subscription req'd). "It was originally assumed that the number of memories was proportional to the number of neurons in a network. Given that even 1 cubic centimetre of the brain's cortex contains about 50 million neurons, it seemed that the brain could indeed store masses of information. However, this model relied on the notion that each neuron is connected to every other neuron, whereas a neuron is actually connected to between 5000 and 10,000 others. Neuroscientists then proposed that the number of memories was proportional to the number of connections per neuron. Now Yasser Roudi and Peter Latham at University College London have found a problem with this model too. ..."
>>> Neuroscience, Neural Networks & Connectionist Systems, Cognitive Science September 12, 2007: The Edifice of Pinkerism. Book review by Seth Lerer. The New York Sun. "Not since the 18th century has there been so much argument about the mind. In that era, philosophers such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant argued about the relationships between thought and speech, and between sensation and knowledge, in terms that we still mull over today. Are human beings born with innate ideas, or are we just blank slates, filled up by experience as we grow up? Is language something that uniquely makes us human? Do words really represent things in the world or are they markers of ideas inside our brains? Is there a language of thought itself, or do different languages embrace and shape the world in different ways? Such questions have been asked afresh in recent years, not only by philosophers and linguists, but also by cognitive scientists and evolutionary biologists seeking the origins of human sensibility. Among the most prolific and most public of the current generation of inquirers into human understanding is the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. In a veritable bookshelf of recently published volumes, he has argued for what might be called a soft innatism: a theory of mind that holds that certain concepts or ways of thinking are hardwired into our brains at birth. ... This argument, what we might call Pinkerism, sets up a fundamental relationship between language and mind. Its implications have been seen across a gamut of human experiences: from understanding social relationships to developing artificial intelligence. Indeed, some adherents might claim that Mr. Pinker's work gives us not just a template for humanity, but a program for computer architecture. In short, this is a blueprint for the brain, whether it be organic or virtual." 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.'" August 29, 2007: Barney Pell - Pathways to artificial intelligence [podcast interview / 18:34]. Between the Lines blog posting by Dan Farber. ZDNet.com. "Barney Pell has a passion for artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP). His latest foray into those related fields is Powerset, a search engine that he hopes will challenge Google. He will be speaking, along with other experts in the AI field, at the Singularity Summit 2007, held at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco September 8-9. In this podcast interview, I talked with Pell about his views on AI and how the development of machines smarter than humans will play out in coming decades. ... Pell said that AI entities will get smarter but also humans, via intelligence augmentation, will gain new capabilities." August 27, 2007: Machines Like Us interviews - Steve Grand. By Norm Nason. Machines Like Us. "An honorary research fellow at Cardiff University's School of Psychology and NESTA Dreamtime fellow, Steve Grand, OBE, has carved himself a reputation at the cutting edge of artificial life. He is Director of Cyberlife Research Ltd. and was formerly Technical Director of Creature Labs, where he was responsible for the architecture and programming of the artificial life game, Creatures. Currently Grand is developing artificial life applications as well as an intelligent living machine that embodies a set of hypotheses about the neurological mechanisms present in various species of animal. ... SG: ... I think one of the most important aspects of my work is the way I think about computation. Since the development of the computer we've all been conditioned to think of computation as a digital, serial, stepwise process in which varying sets of instructions are used to control data. So many of our metaphors for understanding the world are now set within this paradigm. But living things, brains, social systems, and for that matter most things in the universe compute almost instantaneously, in a massively parallel, analogue way. What's more, it's the 'data' that drive the 'code', in the sense that the laws of physics (the 'instructions') are fixed and universal, and all the richness we see around us is due to the changing relationships between objects. It seems to me that my job as a creator of simulations should involve taking the serial, top-down, digital computer and turning it as quickly as possible into a simulation of a parallel, analogue, bottom-up, data-driven system. From that point on I should simply arrange virtual objects in space and alter their parameters -- the way the real world works. Basically I start out as a programmer and then switch as early as possible to being a biologist. I think this is important, but most people in AI, A-life and computer science find the digital paradigm a hard habit to shake. Once you do shake free of the world of IF/THEN statements, you find that there are many forms of computation in the world beside algorithms. ... As for Artificial Intelligence, it would help enormously if we admitted to ourselves that we don't have a clue how to do it. For a start it would be useful if we made a stronger distinction between 'hard' and 'soft' AI. ... The answer lies, not in computer science but in neuroscience, since the brain is the only example of a fully-working intelligent machine that we have. But we don't know how that works either. I predict that the solutions to the problems of AI will come from computational neuroscience, but we need some changes to the prevailing paradigm before that is likely to happen. ..." August 27, 2007: EU project builds artificial brain for robots. CORDIS News. "Scientists in Spain have achieved a giant leap for robotkind by building the first artificial cerebellum to help them interact with humans. The cerebellum is the portion of the brain that controls motor functions. ... The researchers hope that their work will also result in clues on how to treat cognitive diseases such as Parkinson's The four-year project, dubbed Sensopac (SENSOrimotor structuring of perception and action for emerging cognition) is funded by the EU under its Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) and brings together physicists, neuroscientists and electronic engineers from leading universities in Europe. ... One possible use for the robots would be as home-helpers for disabled people."
>>> Cognitive Science, Machine Learning, Robots, Assistive Technologies, Applications August 21, 2007: Sleights of Mind. By George Johnson. The New York Times. "It was Sunday night on the Las Vegas Strip, where earlier this summer the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness was holding its annual meeting at the Imperial Palace Hotel. ... After two days of presentations by scientists and philosophers speculating on how the mind construes, and misconstrues, reality, we were hearing from the pros: James (The Amazing) Randi, Johnny Thompson (The Great Tomsoni), Mac King and Teller -- magicians who had intuitively mastered some of the lessons being learned in the laboratory about the limits of cognition and attention. ... Sounding more like a professor than a comedian and magician, Teller described how a good conjuror exploits the human compulsion to find patterns, and to impose them when they aren’t really there. ... One evening out on the Strip, I spotted Daniel Dennett, the Tufts University philosopher.... Retreating to a bar at the Imperial Palace, we talked about a different mystery he had been pondering: the role words play inside the brain. Learn a bit of wine speak -- 'ripe black plums with an accent of earthy leather' -- and you are suddenly equipped with anchors to pin down your fleeting gustatory impressions. Words, he suggested, are 'like sheepdogs herding ideas.' ... With a grab bag of devices accumulated over the eons, the brain pulls off the ultimate conjuring act: the subjective sense of I. 'Stage magicians know that a collection of cheap tricks will often suffice to produce "magic,"' Dr. Dennett has written, 'and so does Mother Nature, the ultimate gadgeteer.'" August 16, 2007: Cognitive Science Initiative encapsulates expertise. By R. Colin Johnson. EE Times. "Armed with cognitive models of human behavior, Sandia National Laboratories is aiming to enhance soldiers' performance with knowledge augmentation, while simultaneously diminishing our enemies' effectiveness by second-guessing their next move. ... 'Using patterns instead of rules, we have achieved the goal of the Grand Challenge--building a software framework that we can populate automatically from text and spatio-temporal behavior,' said [John] Wagner. As a result of its success, the Cognitive Science and Technology Program has been upgraded to a strategic initiative, thereby making it a permanent part of Sandia's national security development efforts. ... By switching from outmoded rule-based expert systems, Sandia chose to instead use pattern-based artificial intelligence that employs semantic networks to store knowledge and statistics, thereby predicting actions. They also wanted their models to feel like humans feel, which meant including simulations of fatigue and other emotions from real situations. Now the researchers believe they have the tools to build cognitive models of people perceived as potential threats, in order to predict their behavior in response to current events. ... Sandia also plans to add a natural language interface to the system so that users can interact with experts--ask their advice using natural language." August 9, 2007: Three books about what it means to be human -- and maybe post-human. By Bill O'Driscoll. Pittsburgh City Paper. "Three new books address our provisional status as a distinct species. Thumbs, Toes and Tears is Chip Walter's engaging, nimbly written tour through the evolution of the body parts and bodily functions that make us human. ... Walter's tale, however, leads to a ghost: the ghost of evolution yet to come. Quoting the writings of such thinkers as visionary Carnegie Mellon robotics scientist Hans Moravec, Walter (himself a CMU adjunct professor as well as a journalist), prophesies our transformation into a new species he dubs 'Cyber sapien -- a creature part digital and part biological.' ... Moravec also cameos in Almost Human, Lee Gutkind's book [Almost Human - Making Robots Think] about CMU's famed Robotics Institute and the struggle to create an autonomous robot -- one that can function without human assistance. ... Meanwhile, Eliezer J. Sternberg weighs in on consciousness with a companionable little volume titled Are You a Machine? A key question for this Brandeis University student of neuroscience and philosophy is whether consciousness can emerge from physical structures. Are our minds merely patterns, replicable in labs? Daniel Dennett (who says yes) and John Searle (who says no) are among the philosophers Sternberg surveys, all while leavening with puckish humor his considerations of famous thought-experiments about the nature of consciousness, and of writings from Descartes to double-helix co-modeler Frances Crick. The artificial-intelligence guru whom Sternberg cites is not CMU's Moravec, but like-minded Ray Kurzweil." August 8, 2007: Cognitive Science and Technology Program becomes Sandia initiative. Press release from Sandia. "Imagine a world where a machine creates a 'virtual you' by modeling how you think and your expertise on a subject. Or one where your car’s computer appreciates your driving skills and compensates for your limitations. That’s the world Sandia National Laboratories has entered full throttle through its Cognitive Science and Technology Program (CS&T). A revolution is at hand, says Chris Forsythe, member of the Labs’ cognition research team. It’s not one of just better guns and weapons for national security. Instead, 'it’s a revolution of the mind -- of how people think and how machines can help people work better.' ... The term 'cognitive systems' has been used worldwide to identify a variety of programs, initiatives, and technologies. However, so many varied uses have led to ambiguity of meaning. Sandia has established its own definition of cognitive systems: 'Cognitive systems consist of technologies that utilize as an essential component one or more computational models of human cognitive processes or the knowledge of specific experts, users, or other individuals.'"
>>> Cognitive Science, Agents, Interfaces, Systems, Education, Military, Law Enforcement, Transportation, Ethical & Social Implications, Applications August 7, 2007: Rebuilding minds. By Ilana Teitelbaum. Jerusalem Post (updated version of article originally published August 1st). "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein might have been unprecedented in its time, but since then popular culture has been clogged with a fascination for the concept of artificial intelligence, from the eerily humanoid robots of The Twilight Zone to films like AI and Robocop. People can't seem to get enough of the idea that advanced technology may one day create sentient life, but at the same time seem to dread the consequences of an apparent transgression against the laws of nature. It may therefore come as a surprise to find that advances in the field of nano biotechnology are now taking place that have nothing to do with creating monsters. ... With the use of chemical stimulation, [Professor Eshel] Ben-Jacob and [Itay] Baruchi discovered that they could trigger a man-made network of neurons to imprint patterns - the same process by which the brain creates memories. ... It's the connection between the computer and the neural network, which would communicate with one another, that creates a new kind of machine. Ben-Jacob elaborates: 'The network won't replace the computer but it will do the softer cognitive functions of decision-making, interaction with the environment, and sound recognition.' ... Ben-Jacob predicts that brain repair will be an important consequence for the treatment of neurological disorders like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. ... The science fiction aspect of the discovery rears its head when Ben-Jacob describes other potential advances, such as 'cybrids' (cyborg-hybrids) that can learn to carry out specific tasks." August 6, 2007: Special Report - The Cutting Edge of Defense IT. Government Computer News (Volume 26, Number 20). "Technology has always been essential to military strength, but breakthroughs developed within the military often are not limited to weapons. This special report introduces some of the Pentagon’s most advanced information technology projects, in the context of their relation to commercial products and battlefield necessities." [Audio is available for each article.]
>>> Military, Autonomous Vehicles, Robots, Transportation, Cognitive Science, Grand Challenges, Applications August 2, 2007: Is Language Innate or Learned? By Brittany Sauser. Technology Review Editors Blog. "An international team of researchers has created a computer program that makes them believe the answer is the latter. Japanese, Canadian, and Stanford University researchers have designed a novel computer program that, through listening to samples of speech, was able to identify different categories of sounds without any human guidance. These findings shed light on how human infants learn language. ... The group of researchers developed the program's software by incorporating features of machine learning into a neural network model." August 2, 2007: Can our brains understand themselves? They're tough nuts to crack even for the brainiest of scientists. By Jeanna Bryner. LiveScience via MSNBC.com. "Our brains can fathom the beginning of time and the end of the universe, but is any brain capable of understanding itself? ... Neurologists and cognitive scientists nowadays are probing how the mind gives rise to thoughts, actions, emotions and ultimately consciousness. ... 'Whether the human brain can understand itself is one of the oldest philosophical questions,' said Anders Garm of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.... Scientists have made some progress in taking an objective, direct 'look' at the human brain. In recent years, brain-imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have allowed scientists to observe the brain in action and determine how groups of neurons function." July 30, 2007: More Than Meets the Eye. The Leonard Lopate Show. WNYC, New York Public Radio. "Robots with artificial intelligence have been a science fiction staple for decades, but now some researchers might be close to making them a reality. New York Times contributing writer Robin Marantz Henig and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Rodney Brooks describe new machines that can make eye contact, read social cues, and even help out around the house. Are they too good to be true? Read Henig's article, 'The Real Transformers.' Weigh in: What would you like a robot to do?"
>>> See the referenced article below; AI Overview, Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Robots, Machine Leaning, Nature of Intelligence, Emotion, Applications, Interviews July 29, 2007: The Real Transformers - Researchers are programming robots to learn in humanlike ways and show humanlike traits. Could this be the beginning of robot consciousness -- and of a better understanding of ourselves? By Robin Marantz Henig. The New York Times Sunday Magazine (cover story). "I was introduced to my first sociable robot on a sunny afternoon in June. The robot, developed by graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was named Mertz. ... At the moment, no single robot can do very much. The competencies have been cobbled together: one robot is able to grab a soup can when you tell it to put it on a shelf; another will look you in the eye and make babbling noises in keeping with the inflection of your voice. One robot might be able to learn some new words; another can take the perspective of a human collaborator; still another can recognize itself in a mirror. Taken together, each small accomplishment brings the field closer to a time when a robot with true intelligence -- and with perhaps other human qualities, too, like emotions and autonomy -- is at least a theoretical possibility. If that possibility comes to pass, what then? Will these new robots be capable of what we recognize as learning? Of what we recognize as consciousness? Will it know that it is a robot and that you are not? ... [Cynthia] Breazeal realized how complicated it was to try to figure out what, or even whether, Kismet was feeling. 'Robots are not human, but humans aren’t the only things that have emotions,' she said. 'The question for robots is not, Will they ever have human emotions? Dogs don't have human emotions, either, but we all agree they have genuine emotions. The question is, What are the emotions that are genuine for the robot?' ... Robot consciousness is a tricky thing, according to Daniel Dennett, a Tufts philosopher and author of 'Consciousness Explained,' who was part of a team of experts that Rodney Brooks assembled in the early 1990s to consult on the Cog project. In a 1994 article in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Dennett posed questions about whether it would ever be possible to build a conscious robot. His conclusion: 'Unlikely,' at least as long as we are talking about a robot that is 'conscious in just the way we human beings are.' But Dennett was willing to credit Cog with one piece of consciousness: the ability to be aware of its own internal states. ... Robot consciousness, it would seem, is related to two areas: robot learning (the ability to think, to reason, to create, to generalize, to improvise) and robot emotion (the ability to feel). Robot learning has already occurred, with baby steps, in robots like Cog and Leonardo, able to learn new skills that go beyond their initial capabilities. But what of emotion? ... Some believe that emotion is at least theoretically possible for robots too. Rodney Brooks goes so far as to say that robot emotions may already have occurred -- that Cog and Kismet not only displayed emotions but, in one way of looking at it, actually experienced them. 'We're all machines,' he told me when we talked in his office at M.I.T. 'Robots are made of different sorts of components than we are -- we are made of biomaterials; they are silicon and steel -- but in principle, even human emotions are mechanistic.' A robot's level of a feeling like sadness could be set as a number in computer code, he said. But isn't a human’s level of sadness basically a number, too, just a number of the amounts of various neurochemicals circulating in the brain? Why should a robot's numbers be any less authentic than a human's? ... 'I want to understand what it is that makes living things living,' Rodney Brooks told me. At their core, robots are not so very different from living things. 'It's all mechanistic,' Brooks said."
>>> AI Overview, Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Robots, Machine Leaning, Nature of Intelligence, Emotion, Applications July 26, 2007: An Emotional Cat Robot. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. Technology Review. "Scientists in the Netherlands are endowing a robotic cat with a set of logical rules for emotions. They believe that by introducing emotional variables to the decision-making process, they should be able to create more-natural human and computer interactions. 'We don't really believe that computers can have emotions, but we see that emotions have a certain function in human practical reasoning,' says Mehdi Dastani, an artificial-intelligence researcher at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. By bestowing intelligent agents with similar emotions, researchers hope that robots can then emulate this humanlike reasoning, he says. ... In addition to improving interactions, this emotional logic should also help intelligent agents carrying out noninteractive tasks.... 'It's a heuristic that can help make rational decision-making processes more realistic and much more computable,' says Dastani. ... Other robots have been designed to mimic human expressions. But Dastani's focus on how emotions might affect decision makes it different from many of the other projects on emotional, or affective, computing, such as MIT's Kismet robot, developed by Cynthia Breazeal. With Kismet, like other affective robots, the focus is on how to get the robot to express emotions and elicit them from people." July 23, 2007: Bare-Bones Program Learns English and Japanese Vowels - Computer model learns vowel sounds infant-style: on the fly By JR Minkel. Scientific American Science News. "A new computer model has learned to recognize vowel categories from multiple English and Japanese speakers without 'knowing' the number of vowels it is looking for or having a complete list of sounds to analyze, according to a new report. Instead, it gradually lumps vowels into distinct groups by considering them one at a time, reminiscent of how an infant might attend to sounds. The designers of the model say it is an early step toward improved voice recognition software and a better understanding of how the infant mind comes to recognize that the voices it detects are speaking one language and not another. 'We see this work as representing a movement towards thinking about language learning as an experience-dependent process,' says James McClelland, professor of psychology at Stanford University and co-author of the report appearing online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA." July 9, 2007: Using a Robot to Teach Human Social Skills. By Emmet Cole. Wired. "Children with autism are often described as robotic: They are emotionless. They engage in obsessive, repetitive behavior and have trouble communicating and socializing. Now, a humanoid robot designed to teach autistic children social skills has begun testing in British schools. ... Developed as part of the pan-European IROMEC (Interactive Robotic Social Mediators as Companions ) project, KASPAR [Kinesics and Synchronisation in Personal Assistant Robotics] has two 'eyes' fitted with video cameras and a mouth that can open and smile. ... The researchers hope that the end result is a human-like robot that can act as a 'social mediator' for autistic children, a steppingstone to improved social interaction with other children and adults. 'KASPAR provides autistic children with reliability and predictability. Since there are no surprises, they feel safe and secure,' [Dr. Ben] Robins said, adding that the purpose is not to replace human interaction and contact but to enhance it. ... Using robots to interact with children is nothing new, although there's been a lot of new research lately into this kind of work. The Robota dolls, a series of mini humanoid bots developed as part of the AURORA project, have been in use as educational toys since 1997. The Social Robotics Lab at Yale is collaborating with a robotics team from the university’s department of computer science to develop Nico, a humanoid robot designed to detect vulnerabilities for autism in the first year of life." July 4, 2007: Rat-brained robot thinks like the real thing. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist.com news. "A robot controlled by a simulated rat brain has proved itself to be a remarkable mimic of rodent behaviour in series of classic animal experiments. The robot's biologically-inspired control software uses a functional model of 'place cells'. These are neurons in an area of the brain called the hippocampus that help real rats to map their environment. They fire when an animal is in a familiar location. Alfredo Weitzenfeld, a roboticist at the ITAM technical institute in Mexico City, carried out the work by reprogramming an AIBO robot dog, made by Japanese firm Sony, with the rat-inspired control software. When placed inside a maze, the robot learnt to navigate towards a 'reward' in a remarkably similar way to real rodents, using landmarks to explore. ... Weitzenfeld is also working closely with neuroscientists who are experimenting with real rats. 'Our goal is to extend our current models by testing new hypotheses in robots,' he says, 'and by performing corresponding new experiments with real rats that may lead to further understandings in rat spatial memory and learning.'" July 2, 2007: Robot works on navigating like a human. By Reuben Schwarz. The Dominion Post | Stuff.co.nz. "Scientists in Auckland have built a robot that learns to find its way home like animals and humans do. The researchers, headed by Albert Yeap, director of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research at Auckland University of Technology, hope to shed light on how animals find their way around, paving the way for robots better suited to the real world." July 2007: Swarm Behavior - A single ant or bee isn't smart, but their colonies are. The study of swarm intelligence is providing insights that can help humans manage complex systems, from truck routing to military robots. By Peter Miller. National Geographic Magazine. "'Ants aren't smart,' [Deborah M.] Gordon says. 'Ant colonies are.' A colony can solve problems unthinkable for individual ants, such as finding the shortest path to the best food source, allocating workers to different tasks, or defending a territory from neighbors. As individuals, ants might be tiny dummies, but as colonies they respond quickly and effectively to their environment. They do it with something called swarm intelligence. ... . It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing. ... In Houston, for example, a company named American Air Liquide has been using an ant-based strategy to manage a complex business problem. ... Working with the Bios Group (now NuTech Solutions), a firm that specialized in artificial intelligence, Air Liquide developed a computer model based on algorithms inspired by the foraging behavior of Argentine ants (Linepithema humile), a species that deposits chemical substances called pheromones. ... By demonstrating the power of self-organizing models to mimic swarm behavior, [Craig] Reynolds was also blazing the trail for robotics engineers. A team of robots that could coordinate its actions like a flock of birds could offer significant advantages over a solitary robot. ... Marco Dorigo's group in Brussels is leading a European effort to create a 'swarmanoid,' a group of cooperating robots with complementary abilities ... Military agencies such as DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) have funded a number of robotics programs using collaborative flocks of helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, schools of torpedo-shaped underwater gliders, and herds of unmanned ground vehicles. But at the time, [Centibots] was the largest swarm of robots ever tested." July/August 2007: Artificial Societies and Virtual Violence - How modeling societies in silico can help us understand human inequality, revolution, and genocide. By Mark Williams. Technology Review. "In the early 1990s, [Joshua] Epstein and [Robert] Axtell had created a simulation called Sugarscape, a square grid representing a two-dimensional landscape inhabited by autonomous subprograms -- agents --that were driven from square to square by crude artificial metabolisms that demanded a resource, designated 'sugar.' When hundreds of these agents were programmed so that their ranges of vision and metabolic rates varied, even in simple ways, surprising patterns emerged. ... Essentially, Epstein and Axtell found, Sugarscape functioned as a model of a hunter-gatherer society, reproducing a common feature of human societies: skewed wealth distribution. ... [N]ature is full of peculiarly consistent statistical relationships, which reoccur across dissimilar realms and which statisticians call 'power laws.' The most common power law is the Pareto distribution, named for the 19th-century Italian economist - Vilfredo Pareto. In the late 1890s, Pareto argued that in any given society, 20 percent of the people will hold 80 percent of the wealth. ... That the behavior of Sugarscape's automata yielded power law-type distributions indicated to Epstein and Axtell that they were on to something." July/August 2007: Artificial Intelligence Is Lost in the Woods - A conscious mind will never be built out of software, argues a Yale University professor. By David Gelernter. Technology Review. "AI offers to figure out how thought works and to make that knowledge available to software designers. It even offers to deepen our understanding of the mind itself. Questions about software and the mind are central to cognitive science and philosophy. Few problems are more far-reaching or have more implications for our fundamental view of ourselves. The current debate centers on what I'll call a 'simulated conscious mind' versus a 'simulated unconscious intelligence.' We hope to learn whether computers make it possible to achieve one, both, or neither. ... To say that building a useful conscious mind is highly unlikely is not to say that AI has nothing worth doing. Consciousness has been a 'mystery' (as Turing called it) for thousands of years, but the mind holds other mysteries, too. Creativity is one of the most important; it's a brick wall that psychology and philosophy have been banging their heads against for a long time." June 20, 2007: Five Ideas That Will Reinvent Modern Computing. By Cade Metz and Jamie Bsales. PC Magazine. "Here, we profile a particularly clever project from each one, showcasing five ideas that reinvent everything from pointing devices to artificial intelligence. Some could bear fruit in a matter of months. Others might need years. But all will pique your interest. ... The Man-Made Brain - It could be the most ambitious computer science project of all time. At IBM's Almaden Research Center, just south of South Francisco, Dharmendra Modha and his team are chasing the holy grail of artificial intelligence. They aren't looking for ways of mimicking the human brain, they're looking to build one -- neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse." June 8, 2007: Chimps Pass On Culture Like Humans Do. By Charles Q. Choi. LiveScience. "Chimpanzees readily learn and share techniques on how to fiddle with gadgets, new research shows, the best evidence yet that our closest living relatives pass on customs and culture just as humans do. ... This work is 'particularly useful to robotic development and artificial intelligence,' [Antoine Spiteri at the University of St. Andrews] added. 'Understanding how the mechanisms of imitation and social learning can help us develop artificial beings that can behave and evolve in the way that we do and ultimately it may help us create other brains.'"
>>> Cognitive Science, Robots June 2007: The Traveler's Dilemma - When playing this simple game, people consistently reject the rational choice. In fact, by acting illogically, they end up reaping a larger reward--an outcome that demands a new kind of formal reasoning. By Kaushik Basu. Scientific American. "Despite their names, Prisoner's Dilemma and the two-choice version of Traveler's Dilemma present players with no real dilemma. Each participant sees an unequivocal correct choice, to wit, 2 (or, in the terms of the prisoner story line, incriminate the other person). That choice is called the dominant choice because it is the best thing to do no matter what the other player does. ... In contrast, the full version of TD has no dominant choice. ... When studying a payoff matrix, game theorists rely most often on the Nash equilibrium, named after John F. Nash, Jr., of Princeton University. ... The game and our intuitive prediction of its outcome also contradict economists' ideas. ... How People Actually Behave - Over the past decade researchers have conducted many experiments with TD, yielding several insights. >>> Reasoning, Games & Puzzles, Cognitive Science, Multi-Agent Systems, Induction May 28, 2007 [issue date]: Remember This? A project to record everything we do in life. By Alec Wilkinson. The New Yorker. "October arrived in 1998, and Gordon Bell went paperless, after hearing from a professor at Carnegie Mellon who was engaged in a project to scan a million books and post them online. The professor, a friend of Bell’s named Raj Reddy, had called to ask if he could scan and post Bell’s books, including one on how to start a high-tech business. Bell said, 'Of course.' ... The first epiphany of three in the making of Bell’s archive occurred when Bell realized that if Reddy was scanning books into a computer, Bell could scan all the papers in his file cabinets and in the boxes crowding his garage, in California, and then throw them away. ... Then he had his second epiphany. He recalled a piece, published in The Atlantic in July, 1945, by Vannevar Bush, called 'As We May Think.' ... Bell’s principal collaborator, for the past five years, has been Jim Gemmell, a senior researcher whose office is at the Microsoft facility in Redmond, Washington. The project is called MyLifeBits, and its purpose is to find uses for the material that Bell is storing and that he and Gemmell believe everyone will eventually store on their computers. (By 2010, a typical life, they feel sure, will fit on a cell phone.) ... One of the models Bell is interested in is proposed by the work of a principal researcher at Microsoft named Eric Horvitz. Horvitz is engaged in what he calls 'complementary computing, where the computer understands human limitations and fills in the gaps,' he told me in his office, in Redmond. Horvitz, who is the president-elect of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence -- 'triple-A. I.,' he says -- would like to see computers provide 'a fabric that would extend us in areas where we’re weak. If you look at twentieth-century cognitive psychology, what it showed was that people have vast abilities coupled with characterizable limitations and bottlenecks. ... To create a computation that understands those grooves and nooks and crannies, and using it in places where a computer can do well in a complementary way to extend people, is what I’m trying to do.' Horvitz is working on a project called Lifebrowser, which uses time lines as a means of locating images and information.... 'It comes to understand your mind, how you organize your memories, by what you choose. It learns to become like you, to help you be a better you. Computers are going to become tools we work with and trust, rather than merely appliances.' At night, he said, he sometimes hears his computer working. 'I hear the fan, and I think, My system is consolidating new memories,' he said. 'It’s like a human being dreaming.'" May 22, 2007: If I only had a brain - Androids, it seems, have appearance in the bag. But is their intelligence only skin-deep? By Peter Spinks. The Sydney Morning Herald. "Androids - robots that resemble humans - are increasingly popular exhibits at robotics conferences and trade shows worldwide. Unlike humanoids, which have two arms and two legs but look more like machines than people, androids are appealing because they seem so much like us. Enticed by research suggesting that people relate better to robots the more they resemble humans, roboticists are developing androids that one day might assist in aged care and eventually supersede servile robotic home helps, such as automated floor-crawling vacuum cleaners. 'The appearance of androids is important and we cannot ignore its effect in communication,' says Professor [Hiroshi] Ishiguro, a pioneer in android science, which combines cutting-edge research in robotics with slow but sure advances in cognitive psychology. 'My purpose is to understand humans by building androids . . . The practical use of androids is a kind of by-product.' Until recently, roboticists had not taken them seriously, regarding androids largely as electronic puppets. ... The inability of androids to communicate intelligently with humans is their biggest bugbear. They may speak in limited ways on specific topics, but cannot converse widely and certainly not on abstract subjects such as philosophy. In short, they're a long way from passing the legendary Turing test, described in 1950 by British mathematician Alan Turing. ... Despite androids' limited communication skills, their physical make-up and prowess - from skin to limbs, muscles to motion - are progressing in leaps and bounds. ... How might tomorrow's androids function? In years to come, roboticists expect that advanced systems - incorporating neural networks, genetic algorithms and fuzzy logic - will run on an assortment of very small, very fast processors, each performing a specific task in parallel and communicating simultaneously over lightning-fast networks. ... A promising area of research, already under way at some labs, involves equipping robots with mood-detection software and giving them rudimentary forms of social and emotional intelligence. This might help them match a person's emotional state. ... Q&A Indulging in some crystal-gazing, Peter Spinks asked Paul Davies what a hypothetical cutting-edge android - let's call it 'Jim' - might be capable of doing in 2045. Jim would be a sophisticated NASA machine to assist astronauts on missions to Mars. ... " May 20, 2007: This Week on Philosophy Talk - Artificial Intelligence (radio broadcast: audio available online). With Ken Taylor and John Perry of Stanford University. KALW, 91.7 FM, San Francisco. "At least some versions of artificial intelligence are attempts not merely to model human intelligence, but to make computers and robots that exhibit it: that have thoughts, use language, and even have free will. Does this make sense? What would it show us about human thinking and consciousness? Join John and Ken [and guest, Marvin Minsky] as they uncover the philosophical issues raised by artificial intelligence." May 19, 2007 [issue date]: Self-aware robot turns mirror on humankind. By Celeste Biever. New Scientist (Issue 2604: pages 30-31; subscription req'd). "Nico gazes into the mirror in front of him. Looking back is his reflected self, wearing a grey Yale University sweatshirt and a baseball cap cocked at a jaunty angle. When Nico raises an arm, he recognises the arm moving in the mirror as his own. It may not sound like much of a feat, but Nico is a humanoid robot. He has just become the first of his kind to recognise his own reflection in a mirror. The ability to recognise your reflection is considered an important milestone in infant development, and as a mark of self-awareness, sociability and intelligence in a non-human animal. Nico's ability to perform the same feat could pave the way for more sophisticated robots that can recognise their own bodies even if they are damaged or reconfigured. ... To endow Nico with the ability to recognise himself, Kevin Gold and his supervisor Brian Scassellati at Yale equipped Nico with a video camera behind one of his eyes, a jointed arm and an attached computer running some clever software. ... Meanwhile, a furry robot called Leonardo, built at MIT, recently reached another developmental milestone, the ability to grasp that someone else might believe something you know to be untrue. ... As well as helping to build better robots, such research could ultimately enhance our understanding of cognitive development in infants."
>>> Robots, AI Overview, Cognitive Science, Philosophy April 29, 2007: Hearts & Minds - Since Plato, scholars have drawn a clear distinction between thinking and feeling. Now science suggests that our emotions are what make thought possible. By Jonah Lehrer. The Boston Globe (boston.com). "Just over 50 years ago, a group of brash young scholars at an MIT symposium introduced a series of ideas that would forever alter the way we think about how we think. In three groundbreaking papers, including one on grammar by a 27-year-old linguist named Noam Chomsky, the scholars ignited what is now known as the cognitive revolution, which was built on the radical notion that it is possible to study, with scientific precision, the actual processes of thought. The movement eventually freed psychology from the grip of behaviorism, a scientific movement popular in America that studied behavior as a proxy for understanding the mind. ... 'Because we subscribed to this false ideal of rational, logical thought, we diminished the importance of everything else,' said Marvin Minsky, a professor at MIT and pioneer of artificial intelligence. 'Seeing our emotions as distinct from thinking was really quite disastrous.' ... From its inception, the cognitive revolution was guided by a metaphor: the mind is like a computer. We are a set of software programs running on 3 pounds of neural hardware. And cognitive psychologists were interested in the software. The computer metaphor helped stimulate some crucial scientific breakthroughs. It led to the birth of artificial intelligence and helped make our inner life a subject suitable for science. For the first time, cognitive psychologists were able to simulate aspects of human thought. At the seminal MIT symposium, held on Sept. 11, 1956, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell announced that they had invented a 'thinking machine' -- basically a room full of vacuum tubes -- capable of solving difficult logical problems. (In one instance, the machine even improved on the work of Bertrand Russell.) ... But the computer metaphor was misleading, at least in one crucial respect. Computers don't have feelings. Feelings didn't fit into the preferred language of thought. Because our emotions weren't reducible to bits of information or logical structures, cognitive psychologists diminished their importance. ... This new science of emotion has brought a new conception of what it means to think, and, in some sense, a rediscovery of the unconscious." April 25, 2007: Best of the Brain - The five biggest neuroscience developments of the year. By William Saletan. Slate Magazine Special Issue - Brains!: A special issue on neuroscience and neuroculture. "[F]ive major trends and breakthroughs stand out. Here they are, with links to related news items and columns. ... 5. The progress of artificial intelligence." April 23, 2007 [issue date]: Know Thyself --- Man, Rat or Bot. By Sharon Begley. Newsweek / abailable from MSNBC.com. "Whether it is an eerily human bot in a virtual-reality game, an animal looking at you with soulful eyes or a patient in a vegetative state, the question nags and nags and won't go away: is there a thinking, self-aware, conscious mind in there? ... It's called metacognition --- the ability to think about your thoughts, to engage in self-reflection, to introspect. ... After decades in which metacognition was written off by many researchers in artificial intelligence, it is getting serious attention, says Michael Cox of BBN Technologies. There are now computer systems that can reason about what went wrong in a calculation and consider whether to continue on their current path to a solution or switch to a new strategy --- both of which, if a person did them, we would call introspection and self-awareness. Next month an AI conference in Hawaii will feature a dozen studies on introspective machines." April 11, 2007: Research Center Explores How Humans Process Information. Northwestern University NewsCenter. "Human beings have developed specialized abilities to process information about the world around them in a number of ways. One of our most important mental abilities is spatial intelligence -- the ability to perceive accurately and to recreate or transform aspects of the world. The Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC) [link], Northwestern's new interdisciplinary center, brings together researchers from four leading universities in a collaborative effort to understand and solve scientific puzzles of spatial learning and to enhance the mental skills people need to compete in today's technological workforce. Northwestern University scholars have joined with colleagues from Temple University, the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania to form SILC. ... Ken Forbus, computer science and education, studies spatial processes by building intelligent artificial intelligence (AI) systems that can represent and reason about spatial relations. Forbus and his team are developing a unique research platform called CogSketch [link] -- a program that will be able to interpret sketches in a humanlike way. CogSketch will allow students to sketch on a screen and receive feedback on their work. Once installed on hand-held computers, CogSketch could be used in classrooms to promote spatial learning or by engineers working out conceptual design issues." April 4, 2007: Computer vision - Easy on the eyes. A computer can now recognise classes of things as accurately as a person can. The Economist. "One theory goes that the human brain recognises strategic positions in a general way, and that this helps to reduce the problem to a manageable size. Thomas Serre and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have built a computer processing system that tries to work in this general way. ... A neuroscientist trying to understand how people recognise objects would thus start with this simplest of systems. That is the purpose of Dr Serre's computer. His project is nothing less than an attempt to reverse-engineer the relevant part of the brain. ... Dr Serre considered his computer's processing units analogous to nerve cells, and he organised them into areas, just as they are in real brains. Then he let the machine learn in much the same way that babies do. ... A system like this has obvious applications (it may, for instance, soon be put to use searching for child-pornography sites on the internet). But it also brings more subtle benefits. Based as it is on how brains work, it may give insights into what happens when they go wrong." April 2007: The Power of Babble - MIT researcher Deb Roy is videotaping every waking minute of his infant son's first 3 years of life. His ultimate goal: teach a robot to talk. By Jonathan Keats. Wired (Issue 15.04). "[Deb] Roy, 38, directs the Media Lab's Cognitive Machines Group, known for teaching remedial English to a robot named Ripley. By recording the early stages of his boy's life, Roy is seeking to supplement his steel-and-silicon investigations: His three-year-long study will document practically every utterance his young son makes, from the first gurglings of infancy through the ad hoc eloquence of toddlerdom, in an unprecedented effort to chart -- uninterrupted -- the entire course of early language acquisition. The goal of the Human Speechome Project, as he boldly calls his program, is to amass a huge and intricate database on a fundamental human phenomenon. Roy believes the Speechome Project will, in turn, unlock the secrets of teaching robots to understand and manipulate language." April 2007: Strange Ways - A weaving together of minds, machines, and mathematics. Book review by Stephen Cass. IEEE Spectrum Online. "[Douglas R.] Hofstadter has returned to one of the themes of his 1979 opus, believing it to have been somewhat overshadowed by the rest of the book. What is this overlooked gem? That we owe our self-awareness to the existence of 'strange loops.' In I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter develops the implications of this idea.... He further argues that any system capable of representing a sufficiently rich suite of symbols could develop self-awareness: it doesn’t matter if the microlevel of the strange loop is composed of neurons or transistors. When this idea was expressed in Gödel, Escher, Bach, most people latched onto it for its strong support of the possibility of true artificial intelligence."
>>> Philosophy, Cognitive Science April 2007: Learn Like A Human - Why Can't A Computer Be More Like A Brain? By Jeff Hawkins. IEEE Spectrum Online. "In some ways, the task has been wrongly posed right from the start. In 1950, Alan Turing, the computer pioneer behind the British code-breaking effort in World War II, proposed to reframe the problem of defining artificial intelligence as a challenge that has since been dubbed the Turing Test. Put simply, it asked whether a computer, hidden from view, could conduct a conversation in such a way that it would be indistinguishable from a human. So far, the answer has been a resounding no. Turing's behavioral framing of the problem has led researchers away from the most promising avenue of study: the human brain. It is clear to many people that the brain must work in ways that are very different from digital computers. To build intelligent machines, then, why not understand how the brain works, and then ask how we can replicate it? My colleagues and I have been pursuing that approach for several years." March 22, 2007: If you're happy, the robot knows it. By Celeste Biever. New Scientist (Issue 2596: pages 30-31). "Meet RoCo, the world's first expressive computer (.mov video). Inhabiting a back room in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, the robotic computer has a monitor for a head and a simple LCD screen for a face. It expresses itself using its double-jointed neck, which is equipped with actuators that shift the monitor up and down, tilt it forward and back and swivel it from side to side, rather like Pixar's animated lamp. An attached camera can detect when its user moves, allowing RoCo to adjust its posture accordingly. Unveiled at a human-robot interaction conference in Washington DC on 11 March, RoCo's creators hope that by responding to a user's changes in posture, people might be more likely to build up a 'rapport' with the computer that will make sitting at a desk all day a little more enjoyable. ... The team is among a growing number of researchers who are investigating how far a robot's physical presence can influence people."
>>> Robots, Cognitive Science, Interfaces, Applications, Music, Ethical & Social Implications March 21, 2007: Pentagon Preps Mind Fields. By Noah Shachtman. Wired News. "The U.S. military is working on computers than can scan your mind and adapt to what you're thinking. Since 2000, Darpa, the Pentagon's blue-sky research arm, has spearheaded a far-flung, nearly $70 million effort to build prototype cockpits, missile control stations and infantry trainers that can sense what's occupying their operators' attention, and adjust how they present information, accordingly. Similar technologies are being employed to help intelligence analysts find targets easier by tapping their unconscious reactions. It's all part of a broader Darpa effort to radically boost the performance of American troops. 'Computers today, you have to learn how they work,' says Navy Commander Dylan Schmorrow, who served as Darpa's first program manager for this Augmented Cognition project. He now works for the Office of Naval Research. 'We want the computer to learn you, adapt to you.'" March 15, 2007: A quiet death for bold project to map the mind - Military scraps research at Rutgers and other schools to engineer a brain. By Kevin Coughlin. The Star-Ledger (nj.com). "The Star-Ledger has learned the Pentagon quietly has killed a project to 'reverse-engineer' the human brain, a goal one participant compared to inventing the atomic bomb or landing men on the moon. ... The program was called BICA, short for Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures. It was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the agency that spawned the Internet. About $9.5 million was earmarked to chart a game plan, the brain project's first phase. But the next stage -- a five-year, $50 million to $100 million push to design and test brainlike software -- never got launched. ... The brain effort linked experts from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, robotics and artificial intelligence. They wanted to replicate how different parts of the brain interact -- sometimes pulling together, sometimes not -- to solve problems. ... One ongoing project is PAL, short for Personalized Assistant that Learns. Computers are adapting to users' quirks, to customize information in busy command centers. ... 'We really hoped this would be an important project and would lead to some real breakthroughs,' said University of Michigan computer scientist John Laird, who had wanted to explore how emotions shape decision-making." March 6, 2007: Jeff Hawkins and the Brain - The creator of the PalmPilot and the Treo is at it again. But his latest startup, Numenta, isn't just making another gadget. It's attempting to fuse silicon and gray matter to produce the ultimate intelligent machine. By Erick Schonfeld. Business 2.0 Magazine (February 1, 2007 issue) / now available from CNNMoney.com. "Hawkins believes that his latest startup, called Numenta, is on its way to creating the first truly intelligent computer - a thinking machine that, in essence, learns the same way the human brain does. ... Numenta, Hawkins stresses, has nothing to do with the field known as artificial intelligence. What he has in mind is far more supple and elegant. Rather than being inspired by biology, AI uses brute computing power and logic to make computers seem intelligent through their behavior. When IBM's (Charts) Deep Blue finally beat chess grand master Gary Kasparov a decade ago, it wasn't because it was smarter than he was. It was just faster. Even today, computers don't have intuition. ... Numenta's approach is radically different. Computers running Numenta software will not be programmed like regular computers. Rather, algorithms that Numenta has come up with allow machines to learn from observation, just as a child learns by observing the world around her. ... The key difference between an HTM and a regular computer is that you don't program an HTM ["hierarchical temporal memory" system]. It learns by itself through observation. This could fundamentally change the relationship between the programmer and the computer. 'The programmer's job is no longer to tell it what to do,' [Bill] Atkinson notes. 'An HTM can deliver more intelligence than the programmer has because it can learn things the programmer does not understand.' ... For Hawkins, the ultimate applications will be those that allow us to acquire new knowledge in areas of science such as quantum mechanics and biology. 'What is exciting to me,' he says, 'is the prospect of building intelligent machines that sit comfortably in the realms of science where we have difficulty thinking. It will be like having a dedicated Einstein working around the clock on these problems.' ... Moreover, there are deep moral dilemmas inherent in Hawkins's vision of intelligent machines, starting with the primal fears behind plots for everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Terminator:...."
>>> Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, AI Overview, Applications, Science Fiction, Ethical & Social Implications March 5, 2007: Intelligently Promoting AI - Numenta eyes computers that think just like humans -- if others don’t beat it to the punch. By Eydie Cubarrubia. Red Herring. "Artificial intelligence startup Numenta said Monday it would license for free its computer memory system, giving scientists, developers, and engineers the chance to create applications that work like the human brain. The Menlo Park, California-based company claims its technology is different from traditional AI software because it’s based on the human neocortex, which means can store and analyze data to make predictions or conclusions in the same manner as the human brain. ... Several other companies have developed projects or products based on brain-based computing." March 2007: The Thinking Machine - Jeff Hawkins created the Palm Pilot and the Treo. Now he says he’s got the ultimate invention: software that mimics the human brain. By Evan Ratliff. Wired (Issue 15.03). "It’s this fascination with the human mind that drove Hawkins, in the flush of his success with Palm, to create the nonprofit Redwood Neuroscience Institute and hire top neuroscientists to pursue a grand unifying theory of cognition. It drove him to write On Intelligence, the 2004 book outlining his theory of how the brain works. And it has driven him to what has been his intended destination all along: Numenta. Here, with longtime business partner Donna Dubinsky and 12 engineers, Hawkins has created an artificial intelligence program that he believes is the first software truly based on the principles of the human brain. Like your brain, the software is born knowing nothing. And like your brain, it learns from what it senses, builds a model of the world, and then makes predictions based on that model. The result, Hawkins says, is a thinking machine that will solve problems that humans find trivial but that have long confounded our computers -- including, say, sight and robot locomotion. ... Numenta is close to issuing a 'research release' of its platform.... It was while he was in his PhD program that Hawkins stumbled upon the central premise of On Intelligence: that prediction is the fundamental component of intelligence. ... Hawkins argues that [neural] networks have traditionally lacked 'neuro-realism'.... HTMs [hierarchical temporal memory] attempt to mimic the way the brain learns -- for instance, by recognizing that the common elements of a car occur together -- neural networks use static input, which prevents prediction." February 25, 2007: Author, author! Computer takes a bow. By Katie Haegele. Philadelphia Inquirer (philly.com). "[I]t could be that there are certain underpinnings to the act of story creation itself. Computer systems that generate stories might give us a better understanding of the nature of creativity. MEXICA, created by Rafael Pérez y Pérez at the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City, is a new artificial- intelligence-based model that generates original stories about the ancient inhabitants of that city, known as the Mexicas. Given basic details, MEXICA produces very short stories about knights, kings, princesses, love and violence. Computerized storytellers similar to this one have been in existence since the 1970s. ... 'We human beings always have employed tools to help us to conceptualize new ideas,' said Pérez y Pérez, who has composed music and written his own short fiction. 'For example, think of how an architect employs blueprints and scale models to build a tower. Those are external tools that help the creative people to see and better understand their own ideas. Computers are the same: They are tools that help us visualize complex systems. ... [I]f we can build a system that generates adequate short stories, that means that we have understood better how the creative process works.'" February 20, 2007: Grand challenges free researchers to explore what can be imagined. By John Jernery. The Daily Yomiuri Online. "By design, grand challenges are dreamed up to push the envelope, to break through barriers, and to ignore limits. ... In the previous 'Report from Silicon Valley,' we began looking at some of the grand challenges currently under way in Britain under the auspices of the U.K. Computing Research Committee (www.ukcrc.org.uk). ... We continue here with some of the other grand challenges that the British are exploring. The Architecture of Brain & Mind: Cognitive science, artificial intelligence (AI), and robotics, while related, have traditionally followed distinct trajectories. Cognitive science is primarily concerned with understanding the human mind, while artificial intelligence would be happy to create any type of intelligent system, humanlike or not. Robotics brings programmed action, intelligent or otherwise, into the realm of the physical. In the true spirit of a grand challenge, the Architecture of Brain & Mind project aims to bring these three disciplines together in a single demonstrable system. ... Learning for Life: Computer tutoring, e-learning, and distance learning are fast becoming a common ingredient in education-and not just for children. Learning today is a lifetime endeavor and the Learning for Life grand challenge seeks to discover what that means in the coming age of ubiquitous, possibly intelligent mac | |||