| - COGNITIVE SCIENCE - General Index by Topic to AI in the news |
AI Topics Home | ||
|
September 26, 2004: Crick's
other goal - Unlocking riddle of the mind. Scientists continuing
study of consciousness. By Bruce Lieberman.
San Diego Union-Tribune & SignOnSanDiego.com. "Francis Crick focused on looking for an area of the brain that might be critical to human consciousness. As a young scientist in 1940s England, Francis Crick decided to devote his life to unraveling two mysteries: the foundation for all living things and how the brain gives rise to the mind. ... Tomorrow, when the Salk Institute in La Jolla hosts a public memorial for Crick, who died July 28 at 88, that unfinished business will most certainly be talked about. How billions of brain cells interpret sensations, draw on memory and association to make sense of them, and create conscious thoughts about the world is unknown. 'It's inconceivable to us, but somehow it happens,' said Terry Sejnowski, a computational neurobiologist at the Salk Institute who studies how computers can be used to understand the brain. 'Consciousness is elusive,' he said. 'It's hard to pin down.' ... Illuminating how the brain creates consciousness would profoundly change the way humans view themselves, scientists say. ... Engineers could build machines that truly think, bringing artificial intelligence out of science fiction and into the real world. ... [C]onsciousness is really about how all the parts come together to create the thinking mind. 'Being reductionist is a good way to start, but at some point you have to . . . put together the pieces and see how they work together,' Sejnowski said. He calls the effort to assemble the big picture of consciousness 'the Humpty Dumpty project.'" September 21, 2004: A
little stroke of genius. A one-day symposium explores the link
between neuroscience and music. By Arminta Wallace.The Irish Times
(subscription req'd.). "Another speaker at the symposium will
be Prof Paul Robertson, a musician who has acquired a considerable
amount of expertise on the medical front. For many years as leader
of the Medici String Quartet, he developed an interest in neuropsychiatry
and presented a series called Music and the Mind for Channel 4.
'It was a fantastic opportunity to talk to people who were doing
fascinating work - the most fascinating aspect of which was that
none of them knew about each other,' he says. 'So, for example,
there are people doing work with brain-damaged children using music
therapy but there's very little contact between them and the people
doing brain mapping. And there's virtually no connection between
either of those groups and the people doing artificial intelligence
in computing. But it doesn't take a mastermind to see that a huge
cross-fertilisation is possible in those areas.'" September 16, 2004: Children
create new sign language. By Julianna Kettlewell. BBC News.
" A new sign language created over the last 30 years by deaf
children in Nicaragua has given experts a unique insight into how
languages evolve. The language follows many basic rules common to
all tongues, even though the children were not taught them. It indicates
some language traits are not passed on by culture, but instead arise
due to the innate way human beings process language, experts claim.
The US-led research is detailed in the latest issue of Science magazine.
... [C]hildren instinctively break information down into small chunks
so they can have the flexibility to string them back together, to
form sentences with a range of meanings. Interestingly, adults lose
this talent, which also suggests there is an innate element to the
language learning process." September 8 / 15, 2004:
Automatic
icons organize files. By Kimberly Patch. Technology Research
News. "Researchers from the University of Southern California,
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and ESC Entertainment
are aiming to improve the lost-in-cyberspace problem with a tool
designed to tap people's facility with pictures. The system, dubbed
VisualID, automatically generates detailed icons for specific files.
It assigns similar icons to related files by mutating the original
icon in a series. The degree of mutation depends on the degree of
similarity of the file names, which gives the user an approximate
visual sense of saliency, according to J.P. Lewis, a researcher
at the University of Southern California. ... Beyond file management,
the icons system could be used for systems like air-traffic control,
said Lewis. ... The system 'exploits the fact that appearance is
efficiently learned, searched and remembered, probably more so than
file names,' said Lewis. 'Psychological research has shown that
searching for a picture among other pictures is faster than searching
for a word among other words.' The bottom line is that interfaces
need scenery, said Lewis." September 4, 2004: Brain
research? Pay it no mind. Mystery of consciousness still outwitting
scientists. By Philip Marchand. The Toronto Star. "Scientists
who have been trying to understand the brain have recently tried
to measure neural activity of Republicans and Democrats to see if
political affiliations had anything to do with brain chemistry.
The results were inconclusive. ... What really caught my eye about
a New York Times Magazine article on the topic was the following
statement: 'One of the most celebrated insights of the past 20 years
of neuroscience is the discovery -- largely associated with the
work of Antonio Damasio -- that the brain's emotional systems are
critical to logical decision-making. People who suffer from damaged
or impaired emotional systems can score well on logic tests but
often display markedly irrational behaviour in everyday life.' I'm
sure Damasio has done good work, rooting around the neocortex. But
what does it say for neuroscience that one of its 'most celebrated
insights' is something we've known for three or four millennia?
... The bravest of the neuroscientists are trying to tackle the
toughest nut of all, the mystery of consciousness. ... A professor
named Howard Gardner, for example, whose 1985 book The Mind's New
Science helped to popularize the field of cognitive science, told
Horgan that questions such as consciousness and free will were 'particularly
resistant' to the scientific habit of trying to break down a subject
into its most elemental parts, like neural pathways in the brain.
... The human brain is so complex it simply defies the same kind
of analysis that scientists devote to subatomic particles or human
immune systems. 'Like neuroscientists, researchers in evolutionary
psychology and artificial intelligence are both bumping up against
the Humpty Dumpty dilemma,' [John] Horgan writes. 'They can break
the mind into pieces, but they have no idea how to put it back together
again.'" August 26, 2004: Science
at the Edge, edited by John Brockman. Book review by Paul Nettleton.
The Guardian. "A stellar cast of thinkers tackles the really
big questions facing scientists in a book developed from pieces
that first appeared on the web forum Edge (www.edge.org). Betraying
that they were written for the screen, a leading role is given to
the computer and the potential for machine intelligence. Brockman,
whose big black hat gives away his day job is as literary agent
to scientists-turned-bestselling authors, argues in his introduction
that his contributors have broken down the barrier of CP Snow's
two cultures and found - echoes of Tony Blair - a third way. A number
of chapters also echo the writers' latest books." August 3, 2004: Mapping
the Physical And Mental Universes. Editorial by Narayani Ganesh.
The Times of India. "If the manual of life is encoded in our
DNA, where do we look to find the blueprint of consciousness? This
was a subject that fascinated Francis Crick, who, along with James
Watson, discovered the double-helix structure of DNA 50 years ago.
... This is the information age, thanks to the giant leaps we've
made in computer chip technology. David Chalmers, of the department
of philosophy, University of Arizona, raises a complex futuristic
question: If the precise interactions between our neurons could
be duplicated with silicon chips, would it give rise to the same
conscious experience? Can consciousness arise in a complex, synthetic
system? In other words, can consciousness some day be achieved in
machines?" July 14, 2004: Computer
brains. e4engineering.com. "A team of computer scientists
and mathematicians at Palo Alto, CA-based Artificial Development
are developing software to simulate the human brain's cortex and
peripheral systems. As a first step along the way, the company recently
disclosed that it has completed the development a realistic representation
of the workflow of a functioning human cortex. Dubbed the CCortex-based
Autonomous Cognitive Model ('ACM'), the software may have immediate
applications for data mining, network security, search engine technologies
and natural language processing." July 4, 2004: Programming
doesn't begin to define computer science. By Jim Morris ["professor
of computer science and dean of Carnegie Mellon University's West
Coast campus']. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "The tech meltdown
affecting computer jobs as well as stock prices, and the stories
about off-shoring of programming jobs, have caused a decline in
computer science enrollments at colleges and universities across
the country. This wouldn't happen if people understood the real
goals of computer science. ... The current approaches to computer
science education fail to teach the science of computing. As a result,
they fail to inspire the very best and brightest young minds to
enter the field. Computer science is faced with scientific challenges
that rival any in history, yet are relevant to practical problems
of today. Computer science involves questions that have the potential
to change how we view the world. For example: What is the nature
of intelligence, and can we reproduce it in a machine? ... Or, how
can one predict the performance of a complex system? ... Or, what
is the nature of human cognition.... Or, does the natural world
'compute'? ... Computer science education is not just training for
the computer industry. A computer science program is a great preparation
for many careers: business, law, medicine, biology -- any field
touched by computing. ... How does computing fit into the world?
The computer is becoming the interface between people and their
world. Computer scientists must know enough history and social science
to chart and predict the impact of computers on the intersecting
worlds of work, entertainment and society. To do this, they must
understand the modern world and its roots. To participate in today's
debates about privacy, one must understand both computers and society." June 14, 2004: Computing needs a Grand Challenge. By Lucy Sherriff. The Register. "Sir Tony Hoare - British computing pioneer and senior scientist at Microsoft Research - believes the computer industry needs a "grand challenge" to inspire it. In the same way that the lunar challenge in the 1960s sparked a decade of collaborative innovation and development in engineering and space technology, or the human genome project united biologists around the globe, so too must computer scientists pull together on such a scale to take their industry to its next major milestone. ... One of the grand challenges, then, is to re-write the basic foundations of the science, to find a theory of computation that is 'more realistic than the Turing model, and can take into account the discoveries of biology, and the promise of the quantum computer'.... 'An ultimate joint challenge for the biological and the computational sciences is the understanding of the mechanisms of the human brain, and its relationship with the human mind,' he says. '... This challenge is one that has inspired Computer Science since its very origins, when Alan Turing himself first proposed the Turing Test as a still unmet challenge for artificial intelligence.'"
>>> AI
Overview, Systems, Cognitive
Science, Artificial Life, Turing
Test, Alan Turing (@ Namesakes)
June 14, 2004 [issue date]: Innovators
/ Artificial Intelligence: Forging the Future - Rise
of the Machines - These visionaries are making robots that can
perform music, rescue disaster victims and even explore other planets
on their own. By Dan Cray, Carolina A. Miranda, Wilson Rothman, Toko
Sekiguchi. Time Magazine. "The Bionic Engineer - Driving
School On Mars. Television critics will tell you that The Bionic
Woman was just another cheesy '70s sci-fi series, but for Ayanna Howard
it was a springboard to a career. When she was 12 years old, she became
so captivated by the show's cyborg premise that she started reading
books that reaffirmed the concept of integrating machines with humans.
A thousand reruns and an electrical-engineering Ph.D. later, she's
creating robots that think like humans for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
... Three years ago, hoping to encourage others to follow in her footsteps,
Howard launched a math-and-science mentoring program for at-risk junior
high school girls. ... Howard hopes the program will help steer more
young women into robotics, a field she says that within a decade will
produce robots that mimic human thought processes. ... The Swarm
Keeper - Metal Insects On Wheels. When James McLurkin was a high
school junior on Long Island, N.Y., he built his first robot: a toy
car that he rigged with a keypad, an LED display and a squirt gun.
... Now a graduate student in computer science at M.I.T., the young
scientist is on the forefront of developing 'swarmbots'--packs of
dozens of small robots that communicate with one another and work
in harmony to complete an assignment. They have no centralized command
system and can cover vast terrain; if one is destroyed, others fill
in. ... Rescuer By Remote - Need Help? Send In The Robot.
Within 24 hours of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Robin
Murphy was on the scene with a team of robots to help sort through
the debris. It was the first real-world test of the Center for Robot-Assisted
Search and Rescue in Tampa, Fla., the only unit of its kind on the
planet. ... The Mimic Maker - The Android Who Learned To Dance.
Mitsuo Kawato is fascinated with the brain -- so he helped build one.
The biophysics engineer and computer researcher led a team at the
Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto,
Japan, that spent five years constructing a humanoid equipped with
artificial intelligence. Completed in 2001, the 6-ft. 2-in., 175-lb.
robot was named Dynamic Brain, or DB for short. Says Kawato: 'We built
an artificial brain hoping that it'll help us understand the real
one.' ... So far, the robot has acquired about 30 skills, including
juggling, air hockey, yo-yoing, folk dancing and playing the drum." June 10, 2004: Christopher
Longuet-Higgins - Cognitive scientist with a flair for chemistry.
Obituary by Chris Darwin.The Guardian. "Christopher Longuet-Higgins,
who has died aged 80, was not only a brilliant scientist in two distinct
areas - theoretical chemistry and cognitive science - but also a gifted
amateur musician, keen to advance the scientific understanding of
the art. ... In 1967, as a result of a growing interest in the brain
and the new field of artificial intelligence, Christopher made a dramatic
change in direction and moved to Edinburgh to co-found the department
of machine intelligence and perception, together with Richard Gregory
and Donald Michie. It was Christopher who, in 1973, was the first
to name this field more broadly as 'cognitive science'. ... As time
went on, tensions arose between the founding members of the department
at Edinburgh - partly a reflection of intellectual differences regarding
the future direction of artificial intelligence - which resulted in
a contentious review of the field by Christopher's old Wykehamist
colleague Sir James Lighthill. At the instigation of Stuart Sutherland,
Christopher made the decision to move to the experimental psychology
department at Sussex University. There, he continued his work in cognitive
science and made major contributions in vision, language production
and music perception." June 10, 2004: Brain
learns like a robot - Scan shows how we form opinions. By Tanguy
Chouard. Nature Science Update. "Researchers may have pinpointed
the brain regions that help us work out good from bad. And their results
suggest that humans and robots are more alike than we may care to
admit, as both use similar strategies to make value judgements. ...
The team also plotted brain activity on a graph to give a mathematical
description of processes that underlie the formation of value judgements.
The patterns they saw resembled those made by robots as they learn
from experience. 'The results were astounding,' says study co-author
Peter Dayan. 'There was an almost perfect match between the brain
signals and the numerical functions used in machine learning,' he
says. This suggests that our brains are following the laws of artificial
intelligence." June 7, 2004: Brain-mimicking
circuits to run navy robot. By Charles Choi. United Press International.
"Researchers in New York City are teaming with the U.S. Navy
and scientists in Russia to build electronic circuits that mimic the
brain, producing an agile controller that can maneuver robot vehicles
with speed and precision. The devices are based on a circuit in the
cerebellum, the part of the brain that helps organize the body's motions.
Specifically, the new technology imitates the olivocerebellar circuit,
which controls balance and limb movement. ... 'Controls in robotics
are for the most part algorithmic,' [Rodolfo Llinas] explained. 'It's
basically software, and the software instructions are written in a
particular order -- you follow a particular set of steps.' In addition,
the computations are contained in a system that is distinct from the
one it controls. 'The nervous system, on the other hand, is not algorithmic,'
Llinas said. The same cells that gather the sensory data from the
muscles also have a key role in operating the muscles as well, so
both sensory and motor systems are wedded together, 'unlike what happens
in digital computers.' So the researchers are developing analog circuits....
The new controller, like the olivocerebellar circuit, is made up of
clusters that interact electronically with one another." June 7 - 14, 2004 [issue date]: The
Ultimate Remote Control - One day, our brains might be able to
beam our very thoughts wirelessly to the machines around us By Carl
Zimmer. Newsweek (International Edition) / available from MSNBC. "Where
computers use zeros and ones, neurons encode our thoughts in all-or-nothing
electrical impulses. And if computers and brains speak the same language,
it should be possible for the two to speak to each other. ... Imagine
a quadriplegic person able to operate a robotic arm mounted on a wheelchair
with merely a thought. Imagine a digital stream flowing from a microphone
into a deaf person's auditory cortex, where it could become the perception
of sound. These dreams have an official name: brain-machine interfaces.
... At the Center for Neuroengineering at Duke University, monkeys
with electrodes surgically implanted in their brains move robotic
arms with their minds alone." June 4, 2004: Programs
of the Mind. Review by Gary Marcus. Science Magazine (subscription
required). "Eric Baum's What Is Thought? [MIT Press, Cambridge,
MA, 2004], consciously patterned after [Erwin] Schrödinger's book
[What Is Life?], represents a computer scientist's look at the mind.
Baum is an unrepentant physicalist. He announces from the outset that
he believes that the mind can be understood as a computer program.
Much as Schrödinger aimed to ground the understanding of life in well-understood
principles of physics, Baum aims to ground the understanding of thought
in well-understood principles of computation. In a book that is admirable
as much for its candor as its ambition, Baum lays out much of what
is special about the mind by taking readers on a guided tour of the
successes and failures in the two fields closest to his own research:
artificial intelligence and neural networks. ... Advocates of what
the philosopher John Haugeland famously characterized as GOFAI (good
old-fashioned artificial intelligence) create hand-crafted intricate
models that are often powerful yet too brittle to be used in the real
world. ... At the opposite extreme are researchers working within
the field of neural networks, most of whom eschew built-in structure
almost entirely and rely instead on statistical techniques that extract
regularities from the world on the basis of massive experience." May 26, 2004: Small
world networks key to memory. By Philip Cohen. New Scientist News
(also appears in the May 22nd issue of New Scientist Magazine: Memories
are made of small worlds, page 12). "If you recall this sentence
a few seconds from now, you can thank a simple network of neurons
for the experience. That is the conclusions of researchers who have
built a computer model that can reproduce an important aspect of short-term
memory. The key, they say, is that the neurons form a 'small world'
network. Small-world networks are surprisingly common. Human social
networks, for example, famously connect any two people on Earth -
or any actor to Kevin Bacon - in six steps or less. ... 'The philosophical
conclusion is that connectivity matters,' says [Northwestern University]
team member Sara Solla. 'Our model uses only a simple caricature of
neurons, yet this network shows this working memory-like behaviour.'
... They found that when 10 to 20 per cent of the neurons participated
in short cuts, the network formed self-sustaining loops of activity." May 20, 2004: A
Design Epiphany - Keep It Simple. By Jessie Scanlon. The New York
Times (no fee reg. req'd.). "Dr. [John] Maeda says the solution
is not better design or better technology but a better partnership
between the two. Hence the Simplicity Design Workshop, which could
leverage the lab's understanding of emerging technologies and the
real-world experience of the designers into a series of concrete,
well tested principles. ... In January Mr. [Bill] Moggridge of Ideo
met with a Media Lab group led by Cynthia Breazeal, an assistant professor
of media arts and sciences, to try to define simplicity. It was easy
to embrace the concept, with its connotations of beauty and elegance
and its promise of a better way, but what did it mean in practical
terms? ... 'We started with the big picture: what does simplicity
mean in the context of our work?' said Dr. Breazeal, a pioneer of
social robotics whose current project is building a learning companion
robot called RoCo. 'But the real value is to see how Bill approaches
the problem of design.'... A third arm of research focuses on making
computers smarter. One method, a new branch of artificial intelligence,
aims to give computers common sense in the form of a vast database
of mundane truths about the world (the sky is blue, coffee wakes you
up). A second approach, affective computing, gathers information about
the state of the user through a range of sensors, enabling the computer
to adapt by, say, holding delivery of all but high-priority e-mail
when it detects stress." May 5, 2004:
United States Senate Committee on Appropriations, Defense Subcommittee
Hearing with Public Witnesses - Testimony of Christopher Sager,
American Psychological Association. "Although I am sure you are
aware of the large number of psychologists providing clinical services
to our military members here and abroad, you may be less familiar with
the extraordinary range of research conducted by psychological scientists
within the Department of Defense. ... Office of Naval Research (ONR)
The Cognitive and Neural Sciences Division (CNS) of ONR supports research
to increase the understanding of complex cognitive skills in humans;
aid in the development and improvement of machine vision; improve human
factors engineering in new technologies; and advance the design of robotics
systems. An example of CNS-supported research is the division's long-term
investment in artificial intelligence research. This research has led
to many useful products, including software that enables the use of
'embedded training.' Many of the Navy's operational tasks, such as recognizing
and responding to threats, require complex interactions with sophisticated,
computer-based systems. Embedded training allows shipboard personnel
to develop and refine critical skills by practicing simulated exercises
on their own workstations. Once developed, embedded training software
can be loaded onto specified computer systems and delivered wherever
and however it is needed." May 5, 2004: Robot
Sex - Sure, they're only machines. But the more they interact with
us humans, the more important their apparent gender becomes. The Net
Effect column by Simson Garfinkel. Technology Review. "Is your
Roomba a boy or a girl? ... 'It's a girl,' says my wife. 'It's round.
It's close to the floor. It ends with an 'a'. I always think of it as
a 'wom-ba.'' But if the Roomba is a girl, then Asimo is definitely a
boy. ... Whether or not you think that gender belongs in our mechanical
creations has a lot to do with your vision of how these creatures will
fit into our future. It certainly takes more effort to make a robot
that's gendered than one that's asexual. But engineers just want to
have fun. Building gender into robots might be a way for the robots'
designers to express their own playfulness and creativity. Dig a little
deeper, though, and you'll discover another reason why gender might
be a good thing for our robot servants: gender will make robots more
compatible with their human masters. As human beings, we constantly
try to layer emotions, desires, and other human qualities onto our machines.
... [I]f you are interested in building an effective interface between
humans and computers, you might just be better off creating a machine
that projects a simulated emotional response. ... Can you have sociability
without gender?" May 5, 2004: Brain
Fingerprinting. The Washington Post hosted an online discussion
with neuroscientist Lawrence A. Farwell, Ph.D., filmmaker Michael Epstein
and series producer Jared Lipworth to discuss the PBS Innovation documentary.
"[Question from] Laurel, Mont.: How much from
the brain can we learn to help us develop artificial intelligence? Jared
Lipworth: Much work is being done in various parts of the world
to use what we know about the brain for the development of artificial
intelligence. Some researchers are trying to build AI machines from
the bottom up--using simple processes to perform complex tasks. Others
take the opposite approach, trying to build machines that can mimic
the brain. These efforts are still a long way from producing a machine
with the compexity of the human brain, but everything researchers learn
about the brain helps. Artificial Intelligence is an area Innovation
is following closely, so some time in the near future you may see a
program that delves into exactly the question you asked." May 3, 2004: Facing
facts in computer recognition. The elements of a face can be hard
for computers -- and for some people -- to recognize. By Byron Spice.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Neuropsychologists debate whether people
have an inborn ability to recognize faces, or whether it is a skill
that develops from earliest infancy. It is a task of such difficulty
and importance, however, that the brain has one area that is largely
devoted just to faces. ... [Henry] Schneiderman said computers have
less trouble telling the difference between faces than they do simply
picking out faces from other objects in an image. In developing a face
detection program, Schneiderman and other computer vision researchers,
such as former Robotics Institute director Takeo Kanade, can't tell
the computer precisely what a face is supposed to look like. So part
of the development process involves showing the computer examples of
faces and non-faces and letting the computer program gradually develop
its own statistical rules for determining what constitutes a face. No
one knows how the human brain represents images, but computers use numbers,
with each number representing one point, or pixel, in an image. In black
and white images, the larger the number, the brighter the pixel. ...
Schneiderman's Face Detector has been exhibited at the Science Museum
of Minnesota and next week will be one of the technologies featured
at Wired magazine's NextFest exhibition in San Francisco. The Face Detector
is being exhibited as a security technology; presumably it might be
used to detect people who are in secure areas, or to pick out faces
for identification in crowds. But Schneiderman noted its first use was
in photo processing. ... Eventually, Schneiderman envisions it being
used to organize and search images produced by digital cameras." April 17, 2004: The
semantic engineer - Profile: Daniel Dennett. By Andrew Brown. The
Guardian. "It was at Oxford, too, that he first became interested
in computers and the brain. The Oxford philosopher John Lucas had published
a paper - still famous - arguing that Gödel's theorem disproved any
theory that humans must be machines, and that human thought could be
completely simulated on a computer. This is the position Dennett became
famous for attacking. ... The essential doctrine that Dennett took from
Quine was that knowledge - and philosophy - had to be understood as
natural processes. They have arisen as part of the workings of the ordinary
world, which can be scientifically studied, and are not imposed or injected
from some supernatural realm. So there is nothing magical about human
brains - no ghost in the machine, to use Ryle's phrase. When we talk
about 'intelligence' we are describing behaviour, or a propensity towards
certain behaviour, and not the exercise of some disembodied intellect.
How these propensities arise is an empirical question, to be answered
by looking at the engineering involved in brains (or computers) and
philosophers who don't do this can't be serious.... He's famous among
philosophers as an extreme proponent of robot consciousness, who will
argue that even thermostats have beliefs about the world. ... 'Somehow,
you've got to reduce the [inner] representation, and the representation
understanders, to machinery. And a computer can do that. That's the
great insight. Turing saw that AI [artificial intelligence] might not
be the way the brain did it in many regards. But it was a way of reducing
semantic engines to syntactic engines. Our brains are syntactic engines.
They have to be, because they're just mechanisms. But what they do is
they extract meaning from the world. Hence they're semantic engines.
Well, how can they be semantic engines? How could there be a semantic
engine?' ... What matters to him is that consciousness arises from what
the brain does - its work as a 'syntactic engine' - not from what it
is made of. ... 'Conscious robot is not an oxymoron - or maybe it was,
but it's not going to be for much longer. How much longer? I don' t
know. Turing [50 years ago] said 50 years, and he was slightly wrong,
but the popular imagination is already full with conscious robots.'" April 11, 2004: Machine
rage is dead ... long live emotional computing. Consoles and robots
detect and respond to users' feelings. By Robin McKie. The Observer.
"Computer angst - now a universal feature of modern life - is an
expensive business. But the days of the unfeeling, infuriating machine
will soon be over. Thanks to break throughs in AI (artificial intelligence),
psychology, electronics and other research fields, scientists are now
creating computers and robots that can detect, and respond to, users'
feelings. The discoveries are being channelled by Humaine, a £6 million
programme that has just been launched by the EU to give Europe a lead
in emotional computing. As a result, computers will soon detect our
growing irritation at their behaviour and respond - by generating more
sympathetic, human-like messages or slowing down the tempo of the games
they are running. Robots will be able to react in lifelike ways, though
we may end up releasing some unwelcome creations - like Hal, the murderous
computer of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey . 'Computers that can detect
and imitate human emotion may sound like science fiction, but they are
already with us,' said Dr Dylan Evans, of the University of the West
of England and a key Humaine project collaborator. ... A key breakthrough
has been the discovery that cool, unemotional decision-making is not
necessarily a desirable attribute. In fact, humans cannot make decisions
unless they are emotionally involved. 'The cold, unemotional Mr Spock
on Star Trek simply could not have evolved,' said artificial intelligence
expert Professor Ruth Aylett of Salford University, another Humaine
project leader." March 27, 2004: The
Isaac Newton of logic - It was 150 years ago that George Boole published
his classic The Laws of Thought, in which he outlined concepts that
form the underpinnings of the modern high-speed computer. By Siobhan
Roberts. The Globe and Mail (page F9). "It was 150 years ago that
George Boole published his literary classic The Laws of Thought, wherein
he devised a mathematical language for dealing with mental machinations
of logic. It was a symbolic language of thought -- an algebra of logic
(algebra is the branch of mathematics that uses letters and other general
symbols to represent numbers and quantities in formulas and equations).
In doing so, he provided the raw material needed for the design of the
modern high-speed computer. His concepts, developed over the past century
by other mathematicians but still known as 'Boolean algebra,' form the
underpinnings of computer hardware, driving the circuits on computer
chips. And, at a much higher level in the brain stem of computers, Boolean
algebra operates the software of search engines such as Google. ...
The most basic and tangible example is the machinations of Boolean searches,
which operate on three logical operators: and, or, not. Algebra gets
factored in to this logical equation when Boole designates a multiplication
sign (x) to represent 'and,' an addition sign (+) to represent 'or,'
and a subtraction sign (-) to represent 'not.' ... The same 'and' gates
and 'or' gates drive computer circuitry, with streams of electrons performing
Boole's algebraic operations -- a computer's bits and bytes operate
on the binary system, as does Boole's algebra. He employs the number
1 to represent the universal class of everything (or true) and 0 to
represent the class of nothing (false). ... With his PhD in artificial
intelligence, it might appear that ['Geoffrey Hinton, a computer-science
professor at the University of Toronto and his great-great-grandson']
followed after Boole. But in fact, he says, 'I'm entirely on the other
side.' The field of artificial intelligence, in its early years circa
1950-60, was committed to the Boolean idea that symbols effectively
represent human reasoning. Since the eighties, however, artificial intelligence
has come to see human reasoning as not purely logical. Rather, it is
more about what is intuitively plausible. 'Boole thought the human brain
worked like a pocket calculator or a standard computer,' Prof. Hinton
says. 'I think we're more like rats.'" March 23, 2004: FIT
speaker to discuss computers' intelligence. By Alex McPeak. Daily
Helmsman. "One of the major challengers of artificial intelligence
will speak in The Zone at the FedEx Institute of Technology at 1:30
p.m. Wednesday. John Searle, Mills Professor of the Philosophy of Mind
and Language at the University of California at Berkeley, will discuss
consciousness, causation, reduction and the symbol grounding problem
-- tongue-twister concepts that confront whether a computer can ever
understand what it is doing. ... The author of 13 books related to cognitive
science, Searle is best known for his Chinese Room thought experiment,
which challenged the idea of a computer ever achieving true intelligence
and understanding. The Chinese Room proposed that if a person were given
Chinese characters with which to interpret Chinese writings in a room,
that person could match characters to understand what was written on
the walls. ... Searle was the top pick for the cognitive science seminar
this semester, [Lee] McCauley said. The seminar will look at responses
to Searle's intellectual challenge and the systems that claim to answer
it. ... The culmination of the cognitive science seminar this semester,
he said, was to set up criteria to prove if artificial intelligence
can really answer the Chinese Room challenge." March 18, 2004: A
Grand plan for brainy robots. By Nick Dermody. BBC News. "On
a good day, Lucy can tell a banana apart from an apple. And that's handy
skill to have if you are an orang-utan. Even a robotic one. It might
not sound like much to a too-clever-to-know-it human like you or me,
but it represents pioneering work in the field of artificial intelligence.
... By going back to first principles, this self-taught scientist[Steve
Grand] has created one of the most advanced robot 'brains' in the world.
His baby, Lucy, may not be much to look at, but she represents perhaps
the best example yet of how far we can get computers to 'think' for
themselves - one of the most advanced artificial life-forms in existence.
... [H]e is still waiting for the key breakthrough, the one sentence
or 'formula' for describing what the brain - and its intelligence -
is actually for. 'Until we've got that, we will never be able to make
artificial intelligence,' he said." March 5, 2004: Robo
doc. By Jon Excell. The Engineer / e4engineering.com. "It is
tempting to view the robot simply as a clever marketing tool, and as
a sophisticated showcase for Honda's technical skill its impact is undeniable.
But the diminutive android is much more than an impressive branding
exercise. Prof Edgar Korner, the company's robotics and artificial intelligence
(AI) supremo, insists that Asimo represents a key step towards the era
of the domestic robot. ... In the longer term, Korner claimed, it is
the technologies that we broadly define as AI that require the most
work. 'Asimo is a marvellous walking machine, a masterpiece of engineering,'
he said. 'But the next stage is to enable it to develop the ability
to 'think' for itself, to an extent where it can get on with its chores
without bothering its owner.' ... The further development of AI will,
claimed Korner, be made possible by ongoing advances in the understanding
of human and animal brains. ... In the shorter term, technology developed
for Asimo is already having some interesting spin-off applications.
... Honda's work on machine intelligence is now being used to develop
an accident-prevention system for cars. ... Some have claimed that there
is a sense in which humanoid robot development - and more specifically
AI - occupies a similarly ambiguous moral space to genetic engineering
or nanotechnology, with scientists developing technology that has the
potential to completely change the way we think about the world. Korner
does not agree. 'From the point of ethics Honda was very careful to
stress from the beginning that this is a machine. This is not intended
to copy a human. The message is that we don't want to copy humans, we
want to create a useful machine for serving humans.'" February 29, 2004: Artificial
emotion. By Sam Allis. Boston Globe / available from Boston.com.
"Sherry Turkle is at it again. This Friday, she's hosting a daylong
powwow at MIT to discuss 'Evocative Objects.' ... Over the past two
decades, the founder of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self has
been watching how our relationships with machines, high tech and low
tech, develop. Turkle is best known for her place at the table in any
discussion of how computers -- and robots in particular -- will change
our lives. This makes her an essential interlocutor in the palaver,
sharpened two years ago by a piece written by Sun Microsystems cofounder
Bill Joy, that robots are going to take over the world, soon. 'The question
is not what computers can do or what computers will be like in the future,'
she maintains, 'but rather, what we will be like.' What has become increasingly
clear to her is that, counterintuitively, we become attached to sophisticated
machines not for their smarts but their emotional reach. 'They seduce
us by asking for human nurturance, not intelligence,' she says. ...
The market for robotics in health care is about to explode, Turkle says.
The question is: Do we want machines moving into these emotive areas?
'We need a national conversation on this whole area of machines like
the one we're having on cloning,' Turkle says. 'It shouldn't be just
at AI conventions and among AI developers selling to nursing homes.'" February 8, 2004: Mind
over gray matter - York philosopher's new book explores controversial
relationship between culture and consciousness. Book review by Olivia
Ward. Toronto Star. "[David Martel] Johnson's newly published book,
How History Made the Mind, goes to the heart of a scientific controversy
between those who believe the physical brain is the most important factor
in development of the mind, and those who believe culture is the determining
factor. ... Johnson's theory takes its place in the relatively new discipline
of cognitive science, the study of the mind and how it works. Launched
only 50 years ago, the field is a catch-all for mathematicians, psychologists,
linguistics specialists, anthropologists, biologists and artificial
intelligence experts as well as philosophers. ... In Johnson's view,
it took some 100,000 years or more before mankind first formed the kind
of abstract thoughts that led to painting on cave walls, fashioning
jewellery and designing complicated tools. 'Before that time people
thought in very concrete terms, not in symbols,' he says. 'They hunted
prey, mastered survival and buried their dead, just as the Neanderthals
did.' It's a theory opposed by strict followers of Charles Darwin, who
believe that because of their large brains, the first humans were capable
of the same thought processes we know today as soon as they evolved
from apes. ... According to [Julian] Jaynes, a new kind of thought arose
because all the accumulated experience of the past wasn't enough to
help people cope with the increasingly sophisticated societies that
were taking root at that time. A new kind of thinking was required,
one that looked at the world objectively. The Greeks rose to the challenge
and developed 'conscious thought.' However, says Johnson, 'it's an exciting
theory, but it's wrong. After all, a dog has consciousness. So did early
man. He may have been different from us, but he wasn't that different.'
Johnson's historically based theories may be less popular than some
of the prevailing ones -- such as Noam Chomsky's 'computationalism,'
that the brain is a kind of genetically determined computer." February 4, 2004: Pentagon
Kills LifeLog Project. By Noah Shachtman. Wired News. "The
Pentagon canceled its so-called LifeLog project, an ambitious effort
to build a database tracking a person's entire existence. ... LifeLog's
backers said the all-encompassing diary could have turned into a near-perfect
digital memory, giving its users computerized assistants with an almost
flawless recall of what they had done in the past. But civil libertarians
immediately pounced on the project when it debuted last spring, arguing
that LifeLog could become the ultimate tool for profiling potential
enemies of the state. ... LifeLog would have addressed one of the key
issues in developing computers that can think: how to take the unstructured
mess of life, and recall it as discreet episodes -- a trip to Washington,
a sushi dinner, construction of a house. 'Obviously we're quite disappointed,'
said Howard Shrobe, who led a team from the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory which spent weeks preparing
a bid for a LifeLog contract. 'We were very interested in the research
focus of the program ... how to help a person capture and organize his
or her experience. This is a theme with great importance to both AI
and cognitive science.'" January 30, 2004: U
of M starts new company for research inventions. By Scott Shepard.
Memphis Business Journal. "As artificial intelligence goes from
science fiction to an everyday tool, the scientists who are at the center
of it aim to keep it closer to home. ... That's the intent of IIDSystems,
a business being developed at the University of Memphis in conjunction
with the Technology Resources Foundation to commercialize the university's
technology and encourage small businesses to form in Memphis. ... Or,
IIDSystems could own a suite of integrated products. One candidate for
that is ePal, which will integrate several forms of artificial intelligence
to create a personal teaching mentor, with a talking head on the computer
screen. 'Maybe we can combine all of our intelligent systems, and not
just those for learning,"'[Eric] Mathews says. ... The U of M is on
the cusp of churning out a wide array of learning tools in the next
few years. There are concepts that teach critical, creative thinking,
and systems that can read and react to human emotion. Technology development
is beginning to slip out of the hands of technocrats, [Art] Graesser
says, and that's good. 'We already know that when you put a CD in your
computer and you hit a glitch and get stuck, 98% of the time you stay
stuck right there and that CD ends up on a pile,' he says. 'It's counterintuitive,
but cognitive psychologists now develop a lot of software. We're not
all Freudians; if you're going to design something that people use,
you have to know a lot about how people think.'" January 16, 2004: Yale
holds discussion on computers, emotions, and artificial intelligence.
By Laura Young. The Yale Herald (Volume XXXVII, Number 1). "Laura
is part of an endeavor to push the limits of human-computer relations
-- a computerized personal trainer designed to build a longterm, social-emotional
relationship with her user as she jokes, coaches, and converses with
him. She's the next step in the attempt to build emotional computers
-- machines capable of having relationships with human beings. Laura
was just one of the programs demonstrated by Rosalind W. Pickard in
her workshop on Wed., Jan. 15. 'Towards Computers that Recognize and
Respond to Human Emotion' was part of a series sponsored by the Technology
and Ethics Working Group, devoted to the question of computers' capability
for emotional intelligence. ... Picard feels that the interaction between
humans and computers is natural and social, but that its current state
is more frustrating than anything else. She likened the human-computer
relationship to the relationship between a driver and an annoying passenger
who just cannot understand how the other person feels." January 15 -21, 2004: My
Service Bot. Techsploits column by Annalee Newitz. Metro. "[Peter]
Plantec's book is a guide for creating what he calls V-people: social
bots that businesses can use to replace service workers or game players
online. Programmed Ask Jeeves-style to answer questions in a way that
sounds natural and to deploy friendly facial expressions at the right
moments, V-people are the bank tellers and customer-service reps of
the future. According to Plantec and researchers like Cory Kidd at MIT,
people warm up to V-people fairly quickly after their initial moment
of disbelief that the person talking to them and smiling is just a program.
Kidd conducted a series of psychological experiments last year showing
that people respond to animated and automated creatures in almost exactly
the same way they respond to humans. ... Plantec writes in his book
that his main concern about the ethics of using V-people in customer
service situations is that users tend to credit machines with more honesty
and innocence than they do their fellow humans. In trial runs of his
V-people, he reports that users 'took what the V-person said as truth
or error but never considered that the character was trying to deceive
them. ... After all, how could a virtual human have ulterior motives
... how could they have any motives at all?'" January 2004: Why
Machines Should Fear - Once a curmudgeonly champion of "usable"
design, cognitive scientist Donald A. Norman argues that future machines
will need emotions to be truly dependable. By W. Wayt Gibbs. Scientific
American. "'The cognitive sciences grew up studying cognition--rational,
logical thought,' he notes. Norman himself participated in the birth
of the field, joining a program in mathematical psychology at the University
of Pennsylvania and later helping to launch the human informationprocessing
department (now cognitive science) at the University of California at
San Diego. 'Emotion was traditionally ignored as some leftover from
our animal heritage,' he says.' 'It turns out that's not true. We now
know, for example, that people who have suffered damage to the prefrontal
lobes so that they can no longer show emotions are very intelligent
and sensible, but they cannot make decisions.' Although such damage
is rare, and he cites little other scientific evidence, Norman concludes
that 'emotion, or 'affect,' is an information processing system, similar
to but distinct from cognition. With cognition we understand and interpret
the world--which takes time,' he says. 'Emotion works much more quickly,
and its role is to make judgments--this is good, that is bad, this is
safe.' ... 'I'm not saying that we should try to copy human emotions,'
Norman elaborates. 'But machines should have emotions for the same reason
that people do: to keep them safe, make them curious and help them to
learn.' Autonomous robots, from vacuum cleaners to Mars explorers, need
to deal with unexpected problems that cannot be solved by hard-coded
algorithms, he argues." January 7, 2004: The
ultimate global network - Within 20 years computers will be everywhere,
and they'll all be talking to each other. Daunting? Not if we're prepared,
says a group of British scientists. By Richard Sarson. The Independent.
"To ward off these evils and prepare for the future, [Tony] Hoare
and [Robin] Milner are launching a series of 'Grand Challenges' to the
UK's computer scientists. The seven challenges spin off in different
directions from a single big idea: that all the computers in the world
will become part of one Global Ubiquitous Computer. Hoare wants 'to
understand these enormous artefacts, which have rather escaped the control
of their original designers. At one time, the complexity may have been
artificial, but now it is almost natural, rather like the complexity
of organic chemistry.' ... The final challenge moves from basic biology
to 'the architecture of brain and mind'. This will bring together biologists,
brain physiologists, nerve scientists, psychologists, linguists, social
scientists and philosophers to work out how the grey and white mush
of our brain can constitute the most powerful and complicated computer
on the planet: our mind. Scientists have been trying to create intelligent
robots for years, with little success. This grand challenge is having
another go at understanding how to do this. ... The challenges will
not end up as instant software tools to run the world. That, says Hoare,
is the 'job of the entrepreneur'. But the scientists can provide the
theory behind those tools." December 28, 2003: Mother
of Invention - Virtual cow fences and self-reconfiguring automatons
are just two of MIT roboticist Daniela Rus's futuristic visions. By
Rich Barlow. The Boston Globe /available from Boston.com. "[Daniela]
Rus, who last year won a MacArthur 'genius' grant at age 39, invests
her work with quasi-spiritual purpose as well. Inventing machines that
build scaffolding and rescue victims -- in short, that act like people
-- 'means to study life, to get an understanding of how we're made up,'
she says. 'Understanding life is a great and noble quest, because that's
how we understand ourselves.' ... Some roboticists are 'absolutely aghast'
when critics question their brave new world, [Rodney] Brooks says. Rus
invited students to pause and ponder it. The mechanics of building robots
are fine, she says, but arguing big philosophical issues revs students'
passion, so that they just don't 'passively sit back and suck all the
information you give to them.' The climactic project of her artificial-intelligence
classes at Dartmouth (one she hopes to continue at MIT) assigned debate
teams to duel over such topics as whether robots might rule the world
someday, or the urgency of enacting writer Isaac Asimov's 'Three Laws
of Robotics,' mandating that robots never harm humans. Student Carl
Stritter's topic was whether artificial-intelligence research would
benefit humanity. 'Never before had I heard a professor,' he says by
e-mail, 'after teaching us a subject for 10 weeks, ask the class whether
or not it had been, in essence, a waste of time.'" December 2003: The
Love Machine - Building computers that care. By David Diamond. Wired
Magazine. "I have seen the future of computing, and I'm pleased
to report it's all about ... me! This insight has been furnished with
the help of Tim Bickmore, a doctoral student at the MIT Media Lab. He's
invited me to participate in a study aimed at pushing the limits of
human-computer relations. What kinds of bonds can people form with their
machines, Bickmore wants to know. ... Bickmore's area of study is called
affective computing. Its proponents believe computers should be designed
to recognize, express, and influence emotion in users. Rosalind Picard,
a genial MIT professor, is the field's godmother; her 1997 book, Affective
Computing, triggered an explosion of interest in the emotional side
of computers and their users. ... And she developed an interest in the
work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. In his 1994 book, Descartes'
Error , Damasio argued that, thanks to the interplay of the brain's
frontal lobe and limbic systems, our ability to reason depends in part
on our ability to feel emotion. Too little, like too much, triggers
bad decisions. The simplest example: It's an emotion - fear - that governs
your decision not to dive into a pool of crocodiles." November 21, 2003: Man
vs. Computer - Still a Match. Opinion by Charles Krauthammer. The
Washington Post. "To most folks, all of this man-vs.-computer stuff
is anticlimax. After all, the barrier was broken in 1997 when man was
beaten, Kasparov succumbing to Deep Blue in a match that was truly frightening.
Frightening not so much because the computer won but because of how
it won, making at some points moves of subtlety. And subtlety makes
you think there might be something stirring in all that silicon. It
seems to me obvious that machines will achieve consciousness. After
all, we did, and with very humble beginnings. ... Interestingly, in
each game that was won, the loser was true to his nature. Kasparov lost
Game 2 because, being human, he made a tactical error. Computers do
not. ... In Game 3 the computer lost because, being a computer, it has
(for now) no imagination. ... In the meantime, Kasparov is showing that
while we can't outcalculate machines, we can still outsmart them." October 22, 2003: Landmark
invention. By Scott Warren and Stephanie Brooking. Blue Mountains
Gazette. "Forget about the space age, artificial intelligence could
be among us in the near future thanks to a Glenbrook man who has developed
a robot prototype able to perform up to 16 tasks at once. The technology,
developed by Glenbrook's Dr Peter Hill, allows the robots to modify
their behaviour according to the situation. The program also mimics
a human approach to a problem, launching multiple tasks with any excess
capacity, a problem solving trait commonly attributed to women. 'We
deliberately chose mimic the female rather than the male mind. The distinct
differences in the way women prioritise and work, in particular the
ability to start new tasks while others are still in progress, is important
in this field of producing new technology.' Dr Hill said." October 14, 2003: Imagining
Thought-Controlled Movement for Humans. By Sandra Blakeslee. The
New York Times (no fee reg. req'd.). "Scientists at Duke University
reported yesterday in the first issue of the Public Library of Science,
a new journal with free online access at www.publiclibraryofscience.org,
that a monkey with electrodes implanted in its brain could move a robot
arm, much as if it were moving its own arm. ... The ability to make
machines that respond to thoughts rests on some fundamental properties
of the nervous system. The brains of monkeys plan every movement the
body carries out fractions of seconds before the movements actually
occur. Motor plans are in the form of electrical patterns which arise
from cells that fire at the same time, from various parts of the brain.
The plans are sent to spinal cord neurons that have direct access to
muscles. Only then are movements carried out. To link brains and machines,
researchers place electrodes directly into parts of the brain that produce
motor plans. They extract raw electrical signals that can be translated
mathematically into signals that computers and robots understand." October 14, 2003: Leading
humanity forward. By A. Asohan. The Star (Malaysia). "The whole
idea of linking humans with machines has two aspects to it, says [Professor
Kevin] Warwick. 'First, we're working with people with spinal injuries,
like the Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Britain, to see if the kind of
technologies that we deal with, can help people with one kind of disability
or the other.' ... 'The second aspect is looking at humans as we are
now. Can we take technology and by linking with it, create superhumans
give ourselves abilities that we don't simply have at the present
time? We're looking at machines and how they are intelligent, and asking
what kind of features they have that we humans do not, and questioning
what we can gain by linking much more closely to machines,' says Warwick
Inevitably, the most relevant technology in this idea is the computer.
... Thus his quest to link the human brain to a machine mind. It's not
a wholly new idea, but certainly one that found new impetus in the 1980s
with the cyberpunk literary movement. Groundbreaking novels like William
Gibson's Neuromancer and the increasing pervasiveness of computer
technology in our everyday lives had even the most sober of scientists
asking where our increasing interdependence on technology, and possible
integration with technology, might lead the human race to. ... Warwick
has been labelled a prophet of doom by the tabloids, quoted as saying
that machine intelligence would overtake humans in the near-future.
While he has been criticised heavily for it by some members of the scientific
community, on the surface, his dire predictions are reminiscent of those
expressed by others, not the least of whom is Bill Joy, previously the
chief scientist of US network computer company Sun Microsystems Inc.
... Warwick argues that it all depends on how one defines 'intelligence,'
a task he attempted in his book QI: The Quest for Intelligence.
'To me, intelligence is a very basic thing. In my book QI,
we tried to look at what is intelligence - human intelligence, animal
intelligence, machine intelligence and tried to get the basics of
it. The conclusion that I would come to now is that it's the mental
ability to sustain successful life.' ... Of course, we humans like to
pride ourselves on being conscious, self-aware beings. Cogito, ergo
sum I think, therefore I am, said the 17th century philosopher
and mathematician Rene Descartes. It's our edge over the machine - it
may process information much faster than us, but it is not aware of
what it is it processes. That edge is no big deal to Warwick's way of
thinking. Indeed, he argues that there is no evidence that being conscious
- the way humans are - is an effective protective mechanism." September 26, 2003: The
Octopus as Eyewitness. By Michelle Delio. Wired News. "Robots
and people may soon be looking at the world through octopus eyes. Albert
Titus, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University
at Buffalo, New York, has created a silicon chip that mimics the structure
and functionality of an octopus retina. His 'o-retina' chip can process
images just like an octopus eye does. The chip could give sight to rescue
or research robots, allowing them to see more clearly than human eyes
can in dark or murky conditions. ... His ultimate goal is to build a
complete artificial vision system, including a brain that mimics the
visual systems of various animals, so humans can look at the world differently.
... 'The visual system is more than eyes,' Titus said. 'An animal uses
eyes to see, but the brain to perceive. Yet, the retina is an extension
of the brain, so where does the distinction between seeing and perceiving
begin and end?'" September 23, 2003: Computers'
messages need poetic writers. Column by Desiree Cooper. Detroit
Free Press. "I'm beginning to think that the science fiction writers
were right: Machines will take over the world. Robotics is making it
possible for cars to drive themselves. In the near future, police will
use robotic dogs to sniff out drugs and biological weapons. Robotic
house-helpers now sweep the floor while guarding against intruders.
Machines do seem to have everything going for them: artificial intelligence,
nerves of steel, a durable constitution. But they won't stand a chance
at world domination until they improve their people skills. ... As far
as I can tell, the e-mail about the haiku error messages is probably
one of those cyber legends that has been circulating since late in the
last century. Still, it struck me as a marvelous idea. In addition to
merging artificial intelligence with machinery, why not add some creative
intelligence as well?" September 11, 2003: Beyond
Voice Recognition, to a Computer That Reads Lips. By Anne Eisenberg.
The New York Times (no fee reg. req'd.). "[T]eaching computers
to read lips might boost the accuracy of automatic speech recognition.
Listeners naturally use mouth movements to help them understand the
difference between 'bat' and 'pat,' for instance. If distinctions like
this could be added to a computer's databank with the aid of cheap cameras
and powerful processors, speech recognition software might work a lot
better, even in noisy places. Scientists at I.B.M.'s research center
in Westchester County, at Intel's centers in China and California and
in many other labs are developing just such digital lip-reading systems
to augment the accuracy of speech recognition. ... At Intel, too, researchers
have developed software for combined audiovisual analysis of speech
and released the software for public use as part of the company's Open
Source Computer Vision Library, said Ara V. Nefian, a senior Intel researcher
who led the project. ... Iain Matthews, a research scientist at Carnegie
Mellon University's Robotics Institute who works mainly on face tracking
and modeling, said that audiovisual speech recognition was a logical
step. 'Psychology showed this 50 years ago,' he said. 'If you can see
a person speaking, you can understand that person better.'" September 2003: The
Man Who Mistook His Girlfriend for a Robot. By Dan Ferber. Popular
Science. "No one asks why, of all the roboticists in the world,
only [David] Hanson appears to be attempting to build a robotic head
that is indistinguishable in form and function from a human. No one
points out that he is violating a decades-old taboo among robot designers.
And no one asks him how he's going to do it -- how he plans to cross
to the other side of the Uncanny Valley. ... In the late '70s, a Japanese
roboticist named Masahiro Mori published what would become a highly
influential insight into the interplay between robotic design and human
psychology. Mori's central concept holds that if you plot similarity
to humans on the x-axis against emotional reaction on the y, you'll
find a funny thing happens on the way to the perfectly lifelike android.
Predictably, the curve rises steadily, emotional embrace growing as
robots become more human-like. But at a certain point, just shy of true
verisimilitude, the curve plunges down, through the floor of neutrality
and into real revulsion, before rising again to a second peak of acceptance
that corresponds with 100 percent human-like. This chasm -- Mori's Uncanny
Valley -- represents the notion that something that's like a human but
slightly off will make people recoil. Here there be monsters. [Cynthia]
Breazeal, creator of Kismet, has, like many of her colleagues, taken
both inspiration and warning from the Uncanny Valley. ... As Hanson's
work progressed, it became ever more clear that making lifelike robot
heads meant more than building a convincing surface and creating realistic
facial expressions. So late last year he began to consider K-Bot's brain.
The Internet led him to a Los Angeles company, Eyematic, which makes
state-of-the-art computer-vision software that recognizes human faces
and expressions. ... [Javier] Movellan has asked Hanson to build him
a head, and is hoping to give it social skills. He and Marian Bartlett,
a cognitive scientist who co-directs the UCSD Machine Perception Lab,
have collaborated in the development of software featuring an animated
schoolteacher who helps teach children to read. ... The scientific question,
Hanson says, is 'whether people respond more powerfully to a three-dimensional
embodied face versus a computer-generated face.'" August 30, 2003: Mind-Expanding
Machines - Artificial intelligence meets good old-fashioned human
thought. By Bruce Bower. Science News Online ( Vol. 164, No. 9). "When
Kenneth M. Ford considers the future of artificial intelligence, he
doesn't envision legions of cunning robots running the world. Nor does
he have high hopes for other much-touted AI prospects -- among them,
machines with the mental moxie to ponder their own existence and tiny
computer-linked devices implanted in people's bodies. When Ford thinks
of the future of artificial intelligence, two words come to his mind:
cognitive prostheses. ... In short, a cognitive prosthesis is a computational
tool that amplifies or extends a person's thought and perception, much
as eyeglasses are prostheses that improve vision. ... Current IHMC projects
include an airplane-cockpit display that shows critical information
in a visually intuitive format rather than on standard gauges; software
that enables people to construct maps of what's known about various
topics, for use in teaching, business, and Web site design; and a computer
system that identifies people's daily behavior patterns as they go about
their jobs and simulates ways to organize those practices more effectively.
Such efforts, part of a wider discipline called human-centered computing,
attempt to mold computer systems to accommodate how humans behave rather
than build computers to which people have to adapt. ... Just as it proved
too difficult for early flight enthusiasts to discover the principles
of aerodynamics by trying to build aircraft modeled on bird wings, Ford
argues, it may be too hard to unravel the computational principles of
intelligence by trying to build computers modeled on the processes of
human thought. That's a controversial stand in the artificial intelligence
community." August 20, 2003: August 7, 2003: New
UC program explores brain/actions. By Roy Wood. The Cincinnati Post
"A new University of Cincinnati undergraduate study track is aimed
at helping future researchers understand the link between the brain
and human behavior. The new Brain and Mind Studies track for a bachelor's
degree in interdisciplinary studies could help scientists find cures
for neurological disorders, create artificial intelligence systems,
or simply foster understanding of how we think and act, university officials
say. ... Many other universities offer degrees in cognitive science,
which is focused in large part on how computers can replicate the mind
and its functions, [Michael] Riley said. The UC program adds the neurological
element to the mix, as well as philosophy." July 28, 2003: A
veritable cognitive mind. By R.Colin Johnson EE Times. " Marvin
Minsky, MIT professor and AI's founding father, says today's artificial-intelligence
methods are fine for gluing together two or a few knowledge domains
but still miss the 'big' AI problem. Indeed, according to Minsky, the
missing element is something so big that we can't see it: common sense.
'To me the problem is how to get common sense into computers,' said
Minsky. 'And part of that, it seems to me, is not how to solve any particular
problem but how to quickly think of a new way to solve it-perhaps through
a change in emotional state-when the usual method doesn't work.' In
his forthcoming book, The Emotion Machine, Minsky shares his accumulated
knowledge on how people make use of common sense in the context of discovering
that missing cognitive glue. ... Reasoning by analogy is a way of adapting
old knowledge, which almost never perfectly matches the present situation,
by following a recipe of detecting differences and tweaking parameters.
It all happens so quickly that no 'thinking' seems to be involved." July 28, 2003: Rat-brained
robot does distant art. By Lakshmi Sandhana. BBC. "The 'brain'
lives at Dr Steve Potter's lab at Georgia's Institute of Technology,
Atlanta, while the 'body' is located at Guy Ben-Ary's lab at the University
of Western Australia, Perth. The two ends communicate with each other
in real-time through the internet. The project represents the team's
effort to create a semi-living entity that learns like the living brains
in people and animals do, adapting and expressing itself through art.
... The computer translates any resulting neural activity into robotic
arm movement. By closing the loop, the researchers hope that the rat
culture will learn something about itself and its environment. 'I would
not classify [the cells] as 'an intelligence', though we hope to find
ways to allow them to learn and become at least a little intelligent.'
said Dr Potter. ... Dr Potter hopes the venture will provide valuable
insights into how learning occurs at a cellular level." June 24, 2003: Letting
your computer know how you feel. By Cliff Saran. ComputerWeekly.
"Kate Hone, a lecturer in the department of information systems
and computing at Brunel University, is the principal investigator in
a project that aims to evaluate the potential for emotion-recognition
technology to improve the quality of human-computer interaction. Her
study is part of a larger area of computer science called affective
computing, which examines how computers affect and can influence human
emotion. Hone described her research at Brunel as a human factor investigation.
She said, 'We are trying to build a system that recognises emotion to
support human-computer recognition.' The project, called Eric (Emotional
Recognition for Interaction with Computers) has three main goals. ...
'Many of the approaches used in speech recognition can be applied to
recognising emotion through facial recognition,' Hone said. ... Affective
computing can be defined as 'computing that relates to, arises from,
or deliberately influences emotion'. A number of different types of
research are encompassed within this term. For instance, some artificial
intelligence researchers in the field of affective computing are interested
in how emotion contributes to human and, by analogy, computer problem
solving or decision making..." | |||