| -
EXPERT SYSTEMS - General Index by Topic to AI in the news General Index by Topic to AI in the news |
AI Topics Home | ||
|
September 24, 2007: DARPA leads new AI research - Defense agency wants to create computers that can learn from subject-matter experts. By Brian Robinson. FCW.com. "Computer scientists have long sought to develop computers that can match the subject expertise that humans acquire during a career or a lifetime. Despite intensive work with expert systems and other forms of artificial intelligence, researchers have discovered that building a computer that can learn like a person is more difficult that they expected. Now, with a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program called Bootstrapped Learning, the agency wants to generate renewed interest in achieving that objective. SRI International recently won a $10 million contract to lead the first 15-month development phase of the program. ... The objective of the SRI-led first phase of DARPA’s Bootstrapped Learning program is to develop a learning system called Phased Learning through Analyzing, Teaching and Observation (PLATO). The result will be a domain-independent electronic student that can learn from human instructors, understand the implications of that instruction in a particular context and be able to refine that learning over time, as necessary. ... The second phase of the Bootstrapped Learning program, for which contracts have not been awarded, will be to develop a simulated person that can teach the electronic student." September 11, 2007: NCAR targets bumpy flights. By Chris Walsh. Rocky Mountain News. "The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder is looking to minimize such disruptions and delays and save airlines money through a new system that provides updated snapshots of turbulence across the country. The goal is to pinpoint areas of turbulence in clouds, allowing pilots to efficiently reroute flights to avoid rough patches. The system, currently being tested by United Airlines, uses the nation's network of Nexrad ground-based radars to gather information on precipitation and cloud density. It also measures wind gusts within clouds. A software program then filters out information that can distort the data - such as flying insects and birds - and creates a three-dimensional map of turbulence for a given area. 'What we're doing that's really new is applying artificial intelligence to get rid of data that contaminate the measurements,' said John Williams, a scientist with NCAR. 'The idea is to mimic how a human expert would look at the information. Our hope is that it will help reduce unnecessary delays and diversions and guarantee passenger safety and comfort.'"
>>> Transportation, Earth & Atmospheric Science, Expert Systems, Applications September 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 9, 2007: CityU receives international award in artificial intelligence application. By Zoey Tsang. CityU News Center. "Dr Andy Chun Hon-wai, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at City University of Hong Kong (CityU), received an international award in July for the artificial intelligence (AI) system he designed for the Immigration Department in Hong Kong. The Innovative Applications of AI (IAAI) Award was given by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the world’s leading organization for AI academics and practitioners. The IAAI Award is the only well-known award for AI applied research in the world. This award is global recognition for CityU’s excellence in applied research. The award-winning AI technology is an automatic assessment and decision support system that helps the Immigration Department streamline processes for issuing documents. ... 'The AI design for the Immigration Department was challenging. The laws and regulations, as well as the modeling of the decision-making process, were all highly complex,' Dr Chun said. 'To solve this multi-faceted problem, we used multiple AI paradigms, such as business rules, clustering, case-based reasoning and data mining to provide rapid decision support,' he added. ... Many organizations in Hong Kong have benefited from CityU’s AI technologies, such as the Hongkong International Terminals, Hospital Authority, Airport Authority, MTR Corporation, among others."
>>> Law Enforcement, Machine Learning, Case-Based Reasoning, Expert Systems, Data Mining, Applications July 12, 2007: Arresting developments - Computer science and biological science have a lot to teach each other. The Economist. "Working with Stephen Muggleton of Imperial College, London, [Stephen Emmott of Microsoft Research] is developing an 'artificial scientist' that would be capable of combining inductive logic with probabilistic reasoning. Such a computer would be able to design experiments, collect the results and then integrate those results with theory. Indeed, it should be possible, the pair think, for the artificial scientist to build hypotheses directly from the data, spotting relationships that the humble graduate student or even his supervisor might miss. ... [Luca Cardelli's] colleagues, meanwhile, are examining how the spread of diseases such as malaria and AIDS can be thought of as information systems. They are using what used to be called artificial intelligence and is now referred to as machine learning to explore the relationships between the two. All of which raises some interesting philosophical points. If, say, a computer were used to diagnose a patient's symptoms and recommend treatment, and the result was flawed, could the computer be held responsible? Peter Lipton of the University of Cambridge, who ponders such matters, suggests that such expert systems could indeed be held morally responsible for the consequences of their actions (although the designers of such systems would not necessarily be off the hook). ..." June 6, 2007: Beware the Unauthorized Practice of Law in Cyberspace. By Shari Claire Lewis. New York Law Journal / available from Law.com. "Consider the recent decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in In re Reynoso [fn]. ... Frankfort sold access to Web sites where customers could access browser-based software for preparing bankruptcy petitions and schedules, as well as informational guides promising advice on various aspects of relevant bankruptcy law. Included in the site was the following representation: 'Ziinet is an expert system and knows the law. Unlike most bankruptcy programs which are little more than customized word processors the Ziinet engine is an expert system. It knows bankruptcy laws right down to those applicable to the state in which you live.' ... The circuit [court] concluded that Frankfort had engaged in the unauthorized practice of law. It observed that Frankfort's sites offered extensive advice on how to take advantage of so-called loopholes in the Bankruptcy Code, promised services comparable to those of a 'top-notch bankruptcy lawyer,' and described its software as 'an expert system' that would do more than function as a 'customized word processor.' Moreover, the appellate court added, the software went 'far beyond providing clerical services.' It determined where (particularly, in which schedule) to place information provided by the debtor, selected exemptions for the debtor, and supplied relevant legal citations. Providing such personalized guidance amounted to the practice of law, the appellate court held." June 4, 2007: Putting health records to work - Emerging medical decision-support technologies use insurance claims data to alert caregivers when treatments stray off course. By John Moore. FCW.com News. "As regional health information organizations struggle to find their place in the health care market, one group in the central Appalachians has tapped an emerging technology for help: clinical decision-support systems. ... The decision-support technology CareSpark and other organizations now deploy traces its roots to the 1980s, when university researchers began applying artificial intelligence to the practice of medicine. The goal was to create software that would capture medical knowledge and assist physicians in diagnosing ailments. ... The CareSpark RHIO’s use of clinical decision support is just getting under way and will evolve in the coming months. The system’s deployment follows the software-as-a-service model. ActiveHealth hosts the system, which is based on its CareEngine technology. The rules-based artificial intelligence system analyzes an array of data and generates clinical recommendations. CareEngine gathers clinical information from patients’ medical claims, pharmacy claims and laboratory results, among other sources. The system then analyzes that data against evidence-based clinical guidelines that are rooted in the medical literature. The system identifies deviations from the guidelines and flags errors in care." May 3, 2007: HAL 9000-Style Machines, Kubrick's Fantasy, Outwit Traders. By Jason Kelly. Bloomberg.com. / also available from the International Herald Tribune's Marketplace by Bloomberg (Computer scientists working on machines that can match Wall Street traders; May 4, 2007) "Way up in a New York skyscraper, inside the headquarters of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Michael Kearns is trying to teach a computer to do something other machines can't: think like a Wall Street trader. ... The programs they're writing are designed to sift through billions of trades and spot subtle patterns in world markets. Kearns, a computer scientist who has a doctorate from Harvard University, says the code is part of a dream he's been chasing for more than two decades: to imbue computers with artificial intelligence, or AI. ... A third of all U.S. stock trades in 2006 were driven by automatic programs, or algorithms, according to Boston-based consulting firm Aite Group LLC. By 2010, that figure will reach 50 percent, according to Aite. AI proponents say their time is at hand. Vasant Dhar, a former Morgan Stanley quant who teaches at New York University's Stern School of Business in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, is trying to program a computer to predict the ways in which unexpected events, such as the sudden death of an executive, might affect a company's stock price. Uptown, at Columbia University, computer science professor Kathleen McKeown says she imagines building an electronic Warren Buffett that would be able to answer just about any kind of investing question. ... One day, a subfield of AI known as machine learning, Kearns's specialty, may give computers the ability to develop their own smarts and extract rules from massive data sets. Another branch, called natural language processing, or NLP, holds out the prospect of software that can understand human language, read up on companies, listen to executives and distill what it learns into trading programs. ... Rex Macey, director of equity management at Wilmington Trust Corp. in Atlanta, says computers can mine data and see relationships that humans can't. Quantitative investing is on the rise, and that's bound to spur interest in AI, says Macey.... AI proponents are positioning themselves to become Wall Street's hyperquants." April 17, 2007: New system launched to help citizens self-serve. By Ian Morgan. 24dash.com. "To help local authorities reduce the burden of in-bound calls relating to application queries, CAPS Solutions is launching PublicAccess Expert System at this year’s t-Gov EXPO, which opens tomorrow (Wednesday). The intelligent web-based system uses a flow-chart approach to advise citizens what course of action they should take, based upon their responses to a set of questions." April 16, 2007: Newton, Einstein Go Digital. By Tracy Staedter. Discovery News. "These are not actors but rather a curious modern-day boy interacting with a life-like, computer-generated version of the famous physicist who authored the three laws of motion -- among other things. So far, that kind of conversation is still fiction. But it's the ultimate goal of a new research project that plans to merge gaming technology with artificial intelligence to build an archive of virtual figures that behave and respond as naturally as real people. 'We are for the first time creating technology that is focused on archiving people rather than artifacts,' said Jason Leigh, associate professor and director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. ... Leigh is collaborating with artificial intelligence scientists Avelino Gonzalez and Ronald DeMara from the University of Central Florida in Orlando over three years to create an avatar for a senior program manager at the National Science Foundation who has a wealth of institutional knowledge that could be useful to future program managers at the foundation." March 29, 2007: AI tool to enhance computer-aided fire dispatch - An Ontario firm works with universities to develop a system that could assist departments across the country. The project leader discusses why real-time data has never been more important. By Briony Smith. IT Business. "The old-school fire response systems employed across the country could be hitting the junkyard in a couple of years when Markham, Ontario-based safety system company CriSys rolls out a system powered by artificial intelligence that can process a pile of information to 'decide' how to best battle a blaze. ... Nowadays, according to Paus, the expanded role of fire services -- including first response, vehicle accidents, and hazardous material situations -- makes it impossible for the simple rules of thumb that powered the previous systems to work well anymore. [Dale Paus] said, 'AI is the only way we can adequately deal with the level of complexity we have now.' ... 'We want to create a piece of software that mimics the reasoning of an experience firefighter,' said Paus. ... CriSys plans to set out to interview fire chiefs about their reasoning come early summer...." March 23, 2007: 'Thinking' computer may copy doctors. By Robin Turner. Western Mail / icWales. "A thinking computer which can imitate doctors' decisions about treatment for patients is being developed by scientists at a Welsh university. The system will monitor patients' vital signs then evaluate and administer drugs, a job now done by specialist medics. Decisions would be made in seconds, freeing up valuable time for doctors and specialist nurses. Engineers at Swansea University hope the NHS will eventually benefit from its new software that enables computers to learn from their mistakes. But X1 Recall, the world's first self-learning, web-based software using Artificial Intelligence (AI) is also being used in other areas, initially in industry. Science fiction could become science fact...."
>>> Medicine, Manufacturing, Expert Systems, Machine Learning, Science Fiction, Ethical & Social Implications, Applications; also see these related articles March 23, 2007: The Subprime Loan Machine. By Lynnley Browning. The New York Times. "The rise and fall of the subprime market has been told as a story of a flood of Wall Street money and the desire of Americans desperate to be part of a housing boom. But it was the little-noticed tool of automated underwriting software that made that boom possible. ... Automated underwriting is now used to generate as much as 40 percent of all subprime loans, according to Pat McCoy, a law professor at the University of Connecticut who has written on real estate lending. The software itself, of course, cannot be blamed for lowered lending standards or lax controls. ... 'Used properly, automated underwriting is a wonderful thing,' Professor McCoy said. The problem, she said, comes when lenders customize it to approve the wrong borrowers. ... Subprime lenders like automated underwriting because it is cheap and fast. A 2001 Fannie Mae survey found that automated underwriting reduced the average cost to lenders of closing a loan by $916. The software quickly weeds out the very riskiest of applicants and automatically approves the rest. ... By mid-2004, Countrywide Financial, a major subprime lender, had used MindBox’s automated underwriting system to double the number of loans it made, to 150,000 monthly. 'Without the technology, there is no way we would have been able to do the amount of business that we did and continue to do,' Scott Berry, executive vice president for artificial intelligence at Countrywide Financial, told a trade publication, Bank Systems & Technology, in the summer of 2004. ... Proponents say the software makes things fairer and more objective for risky borrowers." March 15, 2007: Logical endings. The Economist. "In 1947 a psychologist called Theodore Sarbin made a controversial suggestion to a medical conference. He proposed that a doctor is really just a machine whose purpose is to make actuarial judgments about the best treatment for a patient. And not a very good machine, at that, for Sarbin also suggested that medicine would benefit if 'we could replace [the doctor's] eyes and brain with a Hollerith machine'. It was a remarkably prescient vision. The idea that Hollerith machines (or computers, to give their modern name) might sometimes be better than doctors at deciding how to treat a patient is now universally accepted. A computer program is, for instance, sometimes used to recommend whether the horrors of chemotherapy are likely to outweigh its blessings. When machines trespass into the area of medical ethics, though, hackles rise. ... The question is, if you were in a coma, whom would you more trust to come to the conclusion that you would want: your spouse or a machine? David Wendler, of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and his colleagues have looked into this question. ..."
>>> Medicine, Expert Systems, Ethical & Social Implications, Applications; also see this related article March 13, 2007: Can computers make life-or-death medical decision? By Roxanne Khamsi. NewScientist.com news. "A simple formula can predict how people would want to be treated in dire medical situations as accurately as their loved ones can, say researchers. The finding suggests that computers may one day help doctors and those acting as surrogate decision-makers to better estimate the wishes of people in a coma. ... [David] Wendler now wants to collect medical care preferences from people of various ethnic, religious and gender groups, which will help his team refine the formula. He believes that a computer program might one day predict patient’s wishes to an accuracy of 90%." February 28, 2007: Seller of Software Used in Bankruptcy Petitions Held ‘Preparer.’ By Tina Bay. Metropolitan News-Enterprise. "The seller of web-based software used to prepare bankruptcy petitions qualifies as a 'bankruptcy petition preparer' subject to the requirements of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday. The court unanimously agreed with a Ninth Circuit Bankruptcy Appellate Panel that now-defunct Ziinet.com owner and operator Henry Ihejirika violated 11 U.S.C. Sec. 110, which imposes certain obligations on bankruptcy petition preparers and penalizes negligent or fraudulent preparation. The court also affirmed the BAP’s conclusion that Ihejirika had engaged in the unauthorized practice of law. ... One of the sites owned and operated by Ihejirika was the 'Ziinet Bankruptcy Engine,' which represented itself to prospective customers as being 'an expert system' and claimed to 'know [ ] bankruptcy laws right down to those applicable to the state' in which the particular user lived."
>>> Law, Expert Systems, Applications, Ethical & Social Implications February 12, 2007: FCW Time Machine: 1988 Kick-starting artificial intelligence. FCW.com. "The director of the Army's Artificial Intelligence Center, Lt. Col. Anthony Anconetani, was thrilled in June 1988 to be developing expert systems using computers based on Intel's powerful new 80386 processor. The center had at least four artificial intelligence projects under way when Federal Computer Week reporter Fred Reed talked to Anconetani. Here is how Reed described them. * Document Designer ... * OT War ... * Force Alignment Planner, a knowledge-based program, relates force structure to the pool of military personnel with an eye to maintaining career paths that will keep people in the Army. ... * The Physical Disability Rating Adviser is an expert system that recommends the percentage of disability that should be assigned to patients. ..." January 7, 2007: Alarming rise in number of missing persons. By B.S. Ramesh. The Hindu. "The High Court took upon itself the role of a catalyst and sought assistance from the State Public Prosecutor, the State and city police, the Corps of Detectives, (CoD), computer experts, Forensic Science Laboratory and others so that it could help the State and Bangalore city police to come up with a user-friendly and more comprehensive website on missing persons. ... Another radical suggestion was creation of an artificial intelligence-based expert system, which could be used by an investigation officer (IO) while dealing with a missing person's case. The system, he said, could help the officer take further steps while investigating such cases and also guide him through the investigation." December 7, 2006: Lederberg receives Presidential Medal of Freedom. Rockefeller University Newswire. "President Emeritus Joshua Lederberg is one of 10 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civil award, President George W. Bush announced today. ... In 1947 Lederberg joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, and in 1959 he moved to the Stanford University School of Medicine, where he founded the genetics department and also served as a professor of biology and computer science, pioneering the area of artificial intelligence. ... In addition to the Nobel Prize and the Medal of Freedom, Ledeberg has received numerous awards, including the 1989 National Medal of Science." November 13, 2006: Fusing human knowledge and technological data. Engineer Live! "Now scientists at the universities of Reading and Leicester in the UK have teamed up with Alcoa to develop new state-of-the-art ‘fused expert system’ that has shown through plate rolling trials how mills could work at optimum performance levels. Dr Will Browne of Reading’s School of Systems Engineering, together with professor Ian Postlethwaite and Dr Liqun Yao from Leicester, created the system that fuses the human and computer knowledge of a rolling mill and uses that combined understanding to produce high quality plates of aluminium -- potentially saving manufacturers millions of Euros. The system is described in the latest issue of Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence." October 30, 2006: More Expert Systems Migrate To Handheld Devices. By Eric Chabrow. InformationWeek. "You may soon be carrying expert systems in your pocket or briefcase. More companies are adapting their software to run on handheld devices that use inference engines rather than hard coding, and customers should have more choices in the coming months and years. ... The National Park Service is looking at using the handheld version of Corvid to evaluate areas that experienced environmental damage, Exsys CEO Dustin Huntington says. With the software, the Park Service could hire people with limited environmental background...." October 14, 2006: Detecting art fakes at a stroke. New Scientist (Issue 2573: page 29; subscription req'd). "Spotting a forged painting usually takes an expert eye and hours of analysis. That could change with a computer program that analyses artwork for signs of an artist's unique style. The software, called Authentic, can also help date paintings by a particular artist." September 14, 2006: Artificial Intelligence ''DIY Expert Bots'' Can Answer Questions regarding Home Improvement Products. BuildingOnline. "Not many customers want just a bullet list, most want to talk to and ask a human questions. To the viewer, DIY-Expertbots look like a real human on standard web cams, helping and communicating with the customer. Combining our Artificial Intelligence technology with a video library of numerous shots of with a live model, DIY-Expertbots creates the realistic appearance of a live, real time interaction with a human expert on the other end." September 4, 2006: Instaknow Puts the Navy in the Know. By Joao-Pierre Ruth. NJBIZ. "Instaknow is going to war. Armed with a U.S. Navy grant, the Plainfield maker of artificial intelligence software is developing programs to seamlessly integrate and retrieve information received from surveillance and tactical operations. 'Our software automatically learns how many information sources the person is going to manually and what the person is doing with that information,' says Instaknow CEO Pramod 'Paul' Khandekar. 'It remembers and starts replicating that person’s decision-making from then on.' ... Philadelphia has incorporated Instaknow’s No-Code Business Process Management software into a system called CARES that integrates information for the Department of Social Services. The system brings together data from a host of social services and related family information sources." August 16, 2006: Go, digital - The Chinese game has programmers on a quest for an algorithm to defeat other computers -- and then lead to artificial intelligence applications. By Brendan Borrell. The Oregonian. "For the past four years, [Peter] Drake and his [Lewis & Clark College] students tried nearly every novel approach out there: neural networks, cellular automata, and genetic algorithms. Their victory with this ingenious algorithm marked a turning point for Orego and was the latest application of a promising new strategy in artificial intelligence. ... Go is a board game that originated in China more than 2,000 years ago. ... The challenges of Go are more representative of the real world problems humans face: The pieces may be black and white, but the solutions never are. Drake says that solving this class of problems will help in designing electronic circuits, controlling flows in a sewage plant, or building cars that can drive themselves. 'It's considered an open question in artificial intelligence,' he adds. ... The night that Orego beat JacquelineGo ... Drake was using a new strategy pioneered by Remi Coulom at Universite Charles de Gaulle in Lille, France. Drake says, 'Rather than trying to come up with some special rules that are specific to Go and require lots of time and an expert player to come up with, you just say, "Well, I'm at this position, and I will play the rest of this game out randomly a hundred times or a thousand times and if black usually wins then this is a good position for black."' Mathematicians call this a Monte Carlo method because of its likeness to games of chance found in that European city's casinos." August 15, 2006: Trading software helps investors stay on top of market trends - City company months away from releasing N1 Expert program. By Ron Chalmers. The Edmonton Journal [canada.com]. "A small Edmonton company is nearing completion of a software program that scans global financial markets to find the best opportunities to trade financial securities. The N1 Expert trading system, being developed by Titan Trading Analytics Inc., can tell an investor when to buy or sell any security -- and can automatically execute the trade. N1 Expert monitors second-by-second trading activity of thousands of securities issues. It uses 'textbook technical analysis' and pattern recognition based on artificial intelligence to discover promising opportunities, Titan director Philip Carrozza explained at the company's AGM." August 14, 2006: What's The Greatest Software Ever Written? Witness the definitive, irrefutable, immutable ranking of the most brilliant software programs ever hacked. By Charles Babcock. InformationWeek. "First, let's set criteria for what makes software great. Superior programming can be judged only within its historical context. It must represent a breakthrough, technical brilliance, something difficult that hadn't been done before. And it must be adopted in the real world. ... The AI application that produced the first real breakthrough was the inference engine, a system with a knowledge base of conditions and rules. Such a computer can match a condition, such as a 104-degree fever in a patient, to a rule, such as the fact that bacterial infections cause high fevers. One of the best, the Mycin medical diagnosis system, could correctly identify bacterial infections in people based on their symptoms 65% of the time. That's better than most nonspecialized physicians. But it never moved out of the lab into popular use. No one knew who to sue when it was wrong. My favorite AI package was IBM's Deep Blue program, which defeated chess Grand Champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match. ... AI software can be impressive, but all my examples fall short of being among the greatest. ... Continuing into modern times, Google, in one aspect at least, represents great software. ... American Airlines' Sabre system was great, showing how software could evolve beyond the tactical needs of business and into the strategic. Sabre had the ability to match a customer's travel needs with the flights available at a travel agent's office. ... So how do I rank my candidates on a list from 1-12? In descending order, the greatest software ever written is: ...." August 14, 2006: Which Travelers Have 'Hostile Intent'? Biometric Device May Have the Answer. By Jonathan Karp and Laura Meckler. The Wall Street Journal (page B1) / also available from post-gazette.com (Biometric device analyzes travelers' intents; August 16, 2006). "At airport security checkpoints in Knoxville, Tenn. this summer, scores of departing passengers were chosen to step behind a curtain, sit in a metallic oval booth and don headphones. With one hand inserted into a sensor that monitors physical responses, the travelers used the other hand to answer questions on a touch screen about their plans. A machine measured biometric responses -- blood pressure, pulse and sweat levels -- that then were analyzed by software. The idea was to ferret out U.S. officials who were carrying out carefully constructed but make-believe terrorist missions. The trial of the Israeli-developed system represents an effort by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration to determine whether technology can spot passengers who have 'hostile intent.' In effect, the screening system attempts to mechanize Israel's vaunted airport-security process by using algorithms, artificial-intelligence software and polygraph principles. ... Here is the Cogito concept: A passenger enters the booth, swipes his passport and responds in his choice of language to 15 to 20 questions generated by factors such as the location, and personal attributes like nationality, gender and age. The process takes as much as five minutes, after which the passenger is either cleared or interviewed further by a security officer." August 10, 2006: Your bosom buddy - A new technology that may improve the detection of breast cancer. The Economist. "Successful treatment of breast cancer depends on early diagnosis. The most widely used test relies on a low dose of X-rays to generate detailed images of the organ. This technique, known as mammography, can show changes in the breast well before a woman or her doctor can feel them, and it has significantly reduced mortality from the disease. Reading mammograms, however, is a tricky business. ... Computer-aided detection (CAD) can help. ... In addition, existing CAD systems do not provide any explanation about how they came to their conclusions. Without such an explanation, some radiologists are reluctant to accept a diagnosis at odds with what they think their eyes are telling them. Georgia Tourassi, of Duke University Medical Centre, North Carolina, and her colleagues hope to overcome this reluctance to be overruled by a machine. They are developing a CAD system that not only detects cancer more accurately than existing ones, but also acts more like an intelligent colleague than a black box. ... The knowledge-based system has another bonus, too. As mammograms of new cancer cases are added to the database it is looking at, it will become cleverer -- just as radiologists and physicians become more experienced and skilful as they come across more patients."
>>> Medicine, Expert Systems, Machine Learning, Applications August 7, 2006: Can’t stump an expert. By Brad Grimes. GCN (Government Computer News; Vol. 25 No. 23). "It’s been a while since we’ve heard much about so-called expert systems, but that was what Dustin Huntington, president of Exsys Inc. (www.exsys.com) of Albuquerque, N.M., wanted to talk about recently. Maybe it’s because 'expert system' has been subsumed by terms such as 'knowledge management' and 'decision support.' Maybe it’s because anyone making a customer relationship management or similar tool considers it 'expert' without having to say so. Either way, the latest version of Exsys’ expert system development software, Corvid 3.3, included some improvements that could help pin the 'expert' label on just about any Web-based application. ... The Occupational Health and Safety Administration uses Corvid for its eLaws Advisors program, which offers advice about Federal employment laws related to compliance issues, workplace laws, rights and responsibilities. And the Agriculture Department’s Farm Service Agency recently used Corvid to build what it calls a Cultural Resources Expert Advisor into its larger Environmental Knowledge Automation Management System." July 6, 2006: Honoring Asia's best. By Isabelle Chan. ZDNet Asia. "ZDNet Asia also handed out special awards in six categories. We salute the winners of the Project of the Year Awards--their IT departments, initiative and commitment to making their IT project a success. Winning these awards is no mean feat, as the quality of entries was extremely high and the judges had a difficult time picking the winners. The winners are: ... Project of the Year: ... There were several hot favorites, but the winner was MTR's Engineering Works & Traffic Information Management System (ETMS). The Hong Kong rail transportation company developed the system to ensure better utilization of MTR's limited resources--people, tools, workspace and time--during four non-traffic hours of the day. Developed using artificial intelligence technology, the system automates the planning, monitoring, controlling and reviewing of all maintenance and engineering works."
>>> Transportation, Planning & Scheduling, Expert Systems, Applications July 2006: The Search for Artificial Intelligence - For 50 years the finest minds have been telling computers what to do. What they haven't been able to instill in them is common sense. By Tom Bethell. The American Spectator (subscription req'd). "In a semi-official way, the search for artificial intelligence began 50 years ago. In the summer of 1956, a two-month conference at Dartmouth College set out to explore 'the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.' Computers could do what the mind does, in other words. An attempt would be made 'to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves.' The four authors of the grant proposal added -- optimistically it turned out: 'We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.' The Rockefeller Foundation put up the money. The conjecture that machines could be built with the ability to think had been made by the British mathematician Alan Turing in the 1930s. By the end of the 20th century, he believed, 'one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.' In 1950 he devised what became known as the Turing test. If a human behind a screen cannot distinguish human from machine responses, then the machine must be considered intelligent. Fifty years after the Dartmouth conference, the computer science people are still working on these problems. Computers have not yet passed the Turing test. A 'significant advance' has been made in solving some problems 'now reserved for humans.' But the advance belongs in the realm of what is called 'applied' artificial intelligence. Computers can do useful things like multiplication and division, and they are also very good at chess. An IBM program beat the world chess champion. As to machines forming abstractions on their own, there has been no progress. ... In the past half century, an important distinction has emerged: between 'strong' and 'weak' AI. It divides what is often called 'cognitive' and 'applied' artificial intelligence. It distinguishes between computers on the one hand actually knowing and thinking -- the still unattained goal of 'strong' AI; and on the other hand performing a programmed sequence of tasks in order to achieve a well-defined goal -- 'applied' AI." June 19, 2006: An intelligent valuation system. Basque Research. "Researchers at the Public University of Navarre are working on a computerised property valuation system which, by means of artificial intelligence techniques, tries to emulate the behaviour of a property valuer and thus offer the market price of a property in any city in the world, although the trials, for the moment, are being carried out in the housing market of Pamplona. The project, due to be finished for next December, is being undertaken with the collaboration of the Trabajos Catastrales company." May 3, 2006: The importance of business rules - After a near-death experience, business rules management technologies are back in demand as a prerequisite for business agility. By Madan Sheina. Computer Business Review Online. "Business rules touch our lives in many interesting ways. They can dictate your credit worthiness, what type of loan or insurance rate you qualify for or even why you are overlooked for the last business class upgrade at the airport. Driving these decisions is a new generation of business rules management systems (BRMS) designed to automate decision making in enterprise IT applications. These systems differ radically from the old 'expert systems' of yesteryear that failed to catch corporate IT attention because they were too complex, expensive to run and maintain and not business-user friendly. ... What has really changed in BRMS is that rules have been formally introduced to business users, who are now presented with an opportunity to control the behaviour of corporate processes, workflows and mission-critical applications without depending on IT. In other words business, not IT, makes the rules. BRMS vendors have responded in kind by making their software more usable through new graphical interfaces that let non-programmers intuitively create, view and modify rules logic in their production applications in a controlled manner without knowing anything about the underlying syntax or code. Fair Isaac's Blaze Advisor BRMS hides the complexity of the rules development behind an intuitive graphical interface, that masks a complex conditional programming language with English-like statements that are easily understood by business staff. ... Commerzbank, one of Germany's leading private sector banks, implemented rules technology to streamline its customer credit applications by an impressive 50%. It improved the ability of business users to tweak and change hundreds of rating assessment criteria rules in near real-time. The company also managed to shave off 50% in overall deployment costs and times. ... [Mark] Layden believes the next big opportunity is to combine the agility and automation of BRMS with the segmentation of data mining analytics and optimisation techniques for automated, predictive analytics." May 1, 2006: Expert system fuses human and computer knowledge. News Release from The University of Reading, edited by & available from Engineeringtalk. "[S]cientists at the University of Reading, in conjunction with the University of Leicester and Alcoa, have developed a new state-of-the-art fused expert system that has shown through plate rolling trials how mills could work at optimum performance levels. ... The EPSRC-funded research (following on from groundbreaking work by University of Leicester) involved the combining of knowledge-elicitation and data-mining techniques to develop the fused expert system. Knowledge elicitation involves establishing important facts and heuristics (rules of thumb) from plant experts, whereas data mining is the process of analysing data, often using advanced artificial intelligence techniques, in order to identify patterns or relationships." March 30, 2006: Interview - Dr. Barry Chaiken on changing healthcare, AI and pandemic flu. By Jason Stitt. Wisconsin Technology Network. "WTN: You've written about artificial intelligence's role in healthcare. But is anything actually happening? Chaiken: Isabel Healthcare is basically using a system where you enter in signs and symptoms and it gives you a differential diagnosis. Now, funny enough, Larry Weed, 20-plus years ago, developed something called the problem-knowledge coupler. You entered in all these signs and symptoms, and it gave you a differential diagnosis based on probability. Then it would learn over time. WTN: 20 years ago? Chaiken: More than 20 years ago. Unbelievable. Nobody talks about it anymore, but it was really the first thing that was done in the area of these expert systems. But you know what, expert systems are great, and I'm glad people are developing them, but until we start to say to ourselves 'How are we going to use them and make them part of the workflow?' they aren't going to be used." February 21, 2006: Project Eagle. By Richard Susskind. Law News and Law Reports from The Times & Times Online. "The story of Project EAGLE is sad yet inspiring. It is about under-funded innovation in the public and voluntary sectors. From 2002 to 2005, the Legal Services Commission and two Citizens Advice Bureaux collaborated in developing a prototype, internet-based system that provides expert help on employment law for generalist advisers (www.projecteagle.org.uk). ... [G]overnment funding has now run out and the project has been brought unceremoniously to a close." February 13, 2006: A Pill, A Scalpel, A Database - Health care is embracing IT to analyze a glut of medical data, find new cures, and provide more-personalized treatment. By Marianne Kolbasuk McGee. InformationWeek. "A few generations ago, most good physicians knew pretty much all there was to know about medicine. Today, no doctor can keep up with the explosion of medical and health information. It's a problem with consequences for how we live and die. Yet, the solutions--while still out of reach--are taking shape as information technology transforms mass-market medicine into the equivalent of a hospital built for one. This isn't a story of miracle cures and happy endings. But we can paint a picture of three big areas in which health care is showing great promise and some progress in harnessing the spiraling volume of medical information in ways that improve care. The first area is filtering and then delivering information to the bedside, giving doctors data uniquely tailored to.... The second involves putting existing data into forms that make it more useful fuel for all these efforts. ... The third area is using analytics to mesh data that provide new insights.... Different doctors may use different phrases in written or dictated reports to describe the same thing, which can make it difficult to combine and correlate information in a standardized way. Artificial-intelligence software that includes 'intelligent language parsing' and 'natural language understanding' can translate doctors' reports into a format that can be queried and analyzed, says David Johnson, an IBM researcher involved in the Memorial Sloan-Kettering project." January 11, 2006: Problem solving made simpler. IST Results. "[T]he IST-funded K-Wf Grid project addresses the need to develop a better infrastructure for future Grid services. The project aims in particular to develop a rule-based expert system which will underpin the use of a workflow approach to solving problems, rather than the present Grid system, which is based mostly on a series of independently-running batch processing jobs. The K-Wf Grid expert system is designed to help users construct workflow-based applications. Now halfway, the project is due to finish in February 2007, and the participants have already developed an experimental prototype of the system. 'A user may ask, "I want to produce a flood forecast for Slovakia for the period of the next two weeks",' says project coordinator Steffen Unger of Fraunhofer First in Berlin. 'This is the purpose of the K-Wf Grid system, to help users with such problems by giving advice and answers in normal language.' ... The project partners are developing an ontological approach to knowledge representation for the expert system to help with the construction of workflows." January 2, 2006: Over the holidays 50 years ago, two scientists hatched artificial intelligence. By Byron Spice. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette & post-gazette.com. [Also available from the Scripps Howard News Service: Fiftieth anniversary of invention of artificial intelligence (January 5, 2006).] "Fifty years ago, Herbert A. Simon and Allen Newell had a Christmas break story that would top them all. 'Over the Christmas holiday,' Dr. Simon famously blurted to one of his classes at Carnegie Institute of Technology, 'Al Newell and I invented a thinking machine.' It was another way of saying that they had invented artificial intelligence -- in fact, the only way of saying it in the winter of 1955-56 because no one had gotten around to inventing the term 'artificial intelligence.' ... It would be eight more months before their program, called Logic Theorist, would successfully run on a computer, the Rand Corp.'s JOHNNIAC. But they had helped invent artificial intelligence and their work 'inspired generations of researchers to work in that area,' said Randal E. Bryant, dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Tech's successor institution, Carnegie Mellon University. ... Though many of the specific methods used by the pair have been superseded, 'a huge fraction of what we do today ties back to Newell and Simon's work,' he added. Language translation by machine, speech recognition, robotics -- all embody or depend heavily on artificial intelligence. In his 1991 autobiography 'Models of My Life,' Dr. Simon noted he became involved in the work almost by happenstance, after first coming in contact with computers at the Rand think tank in California in the early '50s. ... The symbolic view of artificial intelligence -- that knowledge and information could be programmed into a computer -- was one of two camps that came to dominate AI research, Dr. Bryant said. The other approach, championed by John McCarthy of Stanford, was to express intelligence as formal logic. In the last decade or so, however, AI has achieved great success with a radically different approach, which uses statistical tools rather than human-like reasoning." November 10, 2005: Robot Lawyers Set for Trial Against Humans. By Lesley Stones. Business Day (Johannesburg). "Next year the Buys legal firm will find out just how popular or unpopular its lawyers actually are, when it introduces robotic rivals to its human staff. The company is developing three robots, Stacy, Dave and Nathan, to see if artificial intelligence can be as successful as the real thing. The robots will provide online legal opinions and advice to its customers early next year, says Reinhardt Buys. ... According to AI Expert Systems at the University of Texas, artificial intelligence (AI) technology will let computers autonomously reason with the law to draw legal conclusions. The head of that team, Selmer Bringsjort, says: 'Our intuition is that people won't mind in the least if their lawyers are empowered by artificial colleagues -- quite the contrary, if they are the beneficiaries of quicker turnaround time, lower legal fees and higher quality work.'" November 10, 2005: Present and correct - Ten years on, Richard Susskind is sticking to his guns over The Future of Law’s predictions. By Kieran Flatt. Legal Week. "[Richard Susskind's] early work, on expert systems, met with a mix of incredulity and hostility from some leading practitioners. Nonetheless, he persevered with his message and by the time he convinced a major publisher to print his first book, The Future of Law, in 1995, some of his disciples were already trying to implement his ideas in major law firms. Ten years on, The Future of Law still makes interesting reading. It describes a 20-year process of radical and irrevocable transformation in the legal sector. Susskind predicts that by 2015 legal services will be largely commoditised and for most commercial purposes clients will get the bulk of their legal advice online from expert systems, maintained and honed to near-perfect reliability by teams of lawyers. ... Susskind is sticking to his guns. 'The Future of Law was a 20-year prediction and we are only halfway through the cycle,' he says." November 9, 2005: The Search for the Next 'Killer Technology'. By Anthony O'Donnell. FinanceTech. "Speaking at yesterday's ISO Tech session, 'The Next 'Killer Technology' In Insurance,' in Las Vegas, a panel of industry experts made the case for data analysis and distribution, integration, geographic information systems, next-generation visualization tools, sensing technology and artificial intelligence. ... 'Carriers are coming to recognizing that one of the true resources that the insurance industry has is its data,' said Jamie Bisker.... Pat Saporito, New York-based Information Builders' insurance industry practice manager, offered that, 'I think the next wave is in artificial intelligence, but in a more truly operational way, as used in underwriting and claims adjusting, for example.' Saporito argued that, among other uses, artificial intelligence could supplement the growing deficit of qualified underwriters in the insurance industry." August 22, 2005: AI Knows It’s Out There - Artificial intelligence may not be living up to Sci-Fi visions, but it has gone underground into many day-to-day systems. Red Herring (print issue). "Many people think of artificial intelligence (AI) as a high-flying 1980s tech concept that crashed and burned back in the early 1990s after a good deal of hype. The fact is, AI technology has become pervasive in much of the software we use today. Take the word processor. Start to write a memo, and your word processor will try to decide which words you really mean to type, and which icons to hide because you rarely use them. Or do an online search, and notice the ads that the search engine displays based on the topics it decides must interest you. 'The big picture is that AI is almost everywhere, but we don't call it such,' says Alex Linden, vice president in the Frankfurt office of research firm Gartner. Turn up your nose at AI and you’ll be ignoring some of the latest technologies and business opportunities. AI experts point to exciting innovations in fields such as machine vision, data mining, and the semantic web, while old-school AI technologies like neural networking and expert systems still soldier on." August 2, 2005: 'Robo-doc' to treat seriously ill. BBC News. "An intelligent computer system which can imitate doctors' decisions about treatment for intensive care patients is being developed by scientists. ... Team leader [University of Sheffield] Professor Mahdi Mahfouf said the system's ability to learn, adapt and make informed decisions was unique. Intelligent decisions 'This new system not only monitors and treats critical patients, but it can also learn from the experiences of medical staff, who can override the machine at any time,' he said. If overridden, the system assimilates the doctor's input and uses the new information to make decisions about similar cases in the future." July 2005: AI In Control - Artificial intelligence, expert systems, fuzzy logic, neural nets, and rules-based algorithms for factory control. Although the buzz is quieted, all of it is still around. You just don't notice it. Automotive Manufacturing & Production. "'Real-time rule engines' and 'adaptive control' are two of today's monikers for artificial intelligence (AI), fuzzy logic, and similar information technologies that were so widely touted in the 1980s. ... Toyota Motor Corp. uses Gensym G2 to plan its final assembly line. ... Volkswagen (VW) Group (Madrid, Spain) uses the inference engine from ILOG Inc. for new-car sequencing and production planning at the group's SEAT Martorell and the VW Navarra plants. ... In reality, rules-based technology 'gets embedded in solutions so that the end user doesn't even know there's AI inside,' says [David] Siegel. 'I don't know of many total standalone AI/expert system-type applications. They're almost always a part of the larger picture.' ... The IMS [Intelligent Maintenance Systems] Center has developed a toolbox of algorithms. Of particular interest is the Watchdog Agent. This agent, explains Lee, 'can assess and predict the process or equipment performance based on the inputs from the sensors mounted on it. ... A second IMS project is the Device-to-Business (D2B) platform, basically an autonomous intelligent agent that links factory floor devices directly to a business system, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), thereby circumventing traditional factory supervisory control systems, such as programmable controllers." June 27, 2005: KlearVision
Software Now Downloadable. By E&P Staff. Editor & Publisher. "Photo-D
relies on a rule-based Intelligent Expert System to automatically optimize
and enhance digital image files, preparing them for printing or viewing.
Using fuzzy logic and artificial intelligence algorithms, it emulates
the decision-making expertise of a traditional color expert or digital-imaging
professional to analyze, correct, and produce high-quality image files." June 20, 2005: Expert
System Developed to Enhance Diagnostic Accuracy of Alzheimer's Disease
with FDG PET Scans. RedNova News. "German scientists developed
a computer program that enhances the diagnostic accuracy of positron emission
tomography (PET) scans with Alzheimer's patients, opening the door for
earlier treatment of this progressive brain disorder. ... 'The knowledge
of several experts in the field was utilized in the development of the
computer program by defining several rules used by these experts for diagnosing
and excluding Alzheimer's,' explained [Peter] Bartenstein. Based on this
knowledge, the program identifies abnormalities in the PET images and
detects Alzheimer's typical changes, he said. 'Besides determining the
probability that a patient has Alzheimer's, it is able to identify various
other dementia disorders (like frontal lobe dementia or Lewy body disease)
that also show typical, but different abnormalities in the FDG-PET image,'
he added." June 3, 2005: Big
brother really is watching us all. By Daniel Winterstein. Scotsman.com
News. "There are four million CCTV cameras in Britain, with the number
set to rise and rise. They have had a considerable impact on crime, but
this is nothing compared to their potential if projects to create 'smart'
CCTV cameras are successful. Smart cameras could recognise criminal or
anti-social behaviour, and alert the authorities. They could also be hooked
up to a database of photos (eg those collected for ID cards) and used
to automatically track the movements of people, which currently requires
a (junior) police officer to spend a lot of low-quality time watching
footage duller than the cricket. ... This is where computers come in -
they are very good at calculating the kind of probability-based problems
that forensics throw up. There's a Scottish project to develop this idea
into a usable technology. It involves pooling the knowledge of forensic
scientists to build an 'expert system'; a computer with an in-depth knowledge
of forensics. All of this is rather scary. It places powerful snooping
tools in the hands of government." June 3, 2005: Reducing
the cost of cotton production. By By Rob Hogan, Scott Stiles, Kelly
Bryant, and James Marshall. Delta Farm Press. "Late-season insecticide
sprays can be reduced by using the Bollman program. Cotman is a computer-based
expert system developed by the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture
and contains Bollman as one of its components." May 26, 2005: The
wizard of medical informatics. By Aviva Lori. Haaretz. "[T]he
tenured professor of computer sciences [Yuval Shahar] who is also a member
of the Israel Magicians Association, a physician, holder of a master's
degree in mathematics and a doctorate in medical information sciences
from Stanford University, an expert in artificial intelligence, a professional
bridge player, an associate consulting professor to Stanford University,
and the vice-dean of the Faculty of Engineering and head of the Medical
Informatics Research Center at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be'er
Sheva (BGU). ... The public will have a chance to become acquainted with
Shahar's colorful personality next week at a professional conference,
Information 2005, being organized by the Tel Aviv-based Teldan Information
Systems. ... Shahar is an international expert in a relatively new field
- automated medical-decision support systems. He and his team of researchers
at BGU and at Stanford developed complex computer programs using AI (artificial
intelligence) technology. His algorithms are capable of monitoring large
amounts of data for lengthy periods, processing them in a supercomputer
and drawing almost human conclusions on the basis of the human information
that was fed into them. ... 'I see the computer as a medical student -
fourth or fifth year - with a vast brain but not overly intelligent: the
diligent, industrious student, the one who always sits in the front row
and raises his hand even before the teacher has asked the question.' ...
In the summer vacation between 11th and 12th grades he attended a summer
camp at the Weizmann Institute of Science...." May 12, 2005: Digital
technology smartens up the sales force. By Denise Deveau. The Globe
and Mail. "If you ask the sales staff at the Broli La Source du Sport
(Brolisport) store for help finding the right piece of extreme sports
equipment, you'd be surprised at how knowledgeable the staff is. The truth
is they're using high-tech crib notes. ... It's a pilot site for an interactive
digital sales force technology developed by Montreal's Dakis Decision
Systems Inc. Called the Dakis Humanized Expert, the software uses artificial
intelligence to provide product and cross-selling recommendations for
sales staff and/or customers. ... As the original and most seasoned user
of the Humanized Expert, Brolisport manager François Fortier has
seen some strong results. He estimates sales have increased more than
12 per cent for those items programmed into the Humanized Expert."
May 10, 2005: Your
virtual assistant for personal financial advice. IST Results. "Added
usability and intelligence has been brought to virtual assistants thanks
to technology developed by European researchers, offering online users
an entertaining, yet competent professional financial service. 'The interaction
of natural language, online translation, 3D-avatar technology and artifical
intelligence creates a powerful instrument that will find a wide acceptance
among users,' says Ulrich Thiel at Germany’s Fraunhofer Integrated
Publication and Information Systems Institute (IPSI) and partner in the
European IST project VIP ADVISOR." April 19, 2005: Estimator
puts an end to guess-timation. By Charles F. Moreira. The Star Online
- Tech Central. "In a previous job, C.K. Yu realised that it took
local printers up to three hours on average to produce a quotation for
a single print run of brochures, cardboard boxes or name cards. ... 'The
problem was that local printers rely heavily on experienced employees
to work out the costing based on the price of ink, labour, and so on,'
he said. ... [H]e decided to set up Printelli Sdn Bhd in 1996 and began
developing an artificial-intelligence-based (AI) program, using the C++
and Visual Basic programming languages, that would do those tasks. ...
It was not until he teamed up with Daniel Chan, a printer with 17 years
experience under his belt, that he worked the bugs out of his program.
'Daniel gave me an in-depth understanding of the workings of the printing
industry.'" April 14, 2005: New
Tools Help Hospitals Handle Terror Attacks And Other Disasters. By
Marianne Kolbasuk McGee. InformationWeek. "When hospitals deal with
a disaster, whether treating dozens of casualties from a serious highway
pileup or hundreds of potential terrorist-attack victims, emergency workers
and hospital administrators rely predominately on ringed binders containing
hundreds of pages of emergency instructions and procedures. ... To help
make disaster management more efficient, health-care purchasing group
Amerinet is making available to its 1,800 hospital members a new interactive,
Web-based disaster-management system developed by PortBlue Corp., a maker
of expert-system software. PortBlue's new Hospital Incident Response System
helps hospital workers deal with smaller-scale crises, such as an internal
fire; larger disasters, like plane crashes; and potential national emergencies,
such as biological or chemical attacks, PortBlue CEO and founder Paul
Dimitruk says." April 6, 2005: GIDEON
- Global Infectious Disease and Epidemiology Network. Media review
by Vincent J. Felitti. JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association
( Vol. 293, No. 13, pages 1674-1675; subscription req'd.). "GIDEON:
The Global Infectious Disease and Epidemiology Network is a superbly designed
expert system created to help physicians diagnose any infectious disease
(337 recognized) in any country of the world (224 included). The program
was created and has been progressively refined over more than a decade
by a talented group of Americans, Canadians, and Israelis. ... If I have
at least whetted the reader’s interest, he or she should go directly
to http://www.gideononline.com for a tutorial demonstration of the program." March 12, 2005 : AI
am the law. The Economist Technology Quarterly (pages 34 - 46; posted
online March 10, 2005)."Given the choice, who would you rather trust
to safeguard your future: a bloodsucking lawyer or a cold, calculating
computer? Granted, it's not much of a choice, since neither lawyers nor
computers are renowned for their compassion. But it is a choice that you
may well encounter in the not-too-distant future, as software based on
'artificial intelligence' (AI) starts to dispense legal advice. Instead
of paying a lawyer by the hour, you will have the option of consulting
intelligent legal services via the web. While this might sound outlandish,
experts believe that the advent of smart software capable of giving good,
solid legal advice could revolutionise the legal profession. ... What
makes both these programs so smart is that they do more than just follow
legal rules. Both tasks involve looking back through past cases and drawing
inferences from them about how the courts are likely to view a new case.
To do this, the programs use a combination of two common AI techniques:
expert systems and machine learning. ... [S]mart software has the potential
to make legal advice more readily available, unnecessary court battles
less frequent, and rulings more consistent." February 23 - March 1, 2005: Leonard
and Swap on 'Deep Smarts.' Ubiquity (Volume 6, Issue 6). [Dorothy
Leonard and Walter Swap are co-authors of the new book "Deep Smarts: How
to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom." Leonard is a professor
emerita at the Harvard Business School and Swap is a professor of psychology
emeritus at Tufts, where he was also dean of the college.] "UBIQUITY:
Have you ever had anything to do with 'expert systems'? LEONARD: Yes,
quite a bit, actually. UBIQUITY: What's your take? LEONARD: Yes, in the
mid-1980s I actually studied the beginnings of expert systems. Digital
Equipment had one of the very first industrial expert systems in use --
something called 'Xcon,' which was used to help configure computers during
assembly; then they tried to transfer that system over to Sales, in a
system called XCEL.. These were rule-based systems, and were the beginnings
of commercial expert systems. Some of the early proponents of expert systems,
people like Ed Feigenbaum, would argue that given enough time and enough
money, they could recreate every bit of the knowledge that's in your head.
I don't believe that's true for deep smarts. I think that the type of
knowledge we're talking about is so contextual and situational that it
would be impossible to extract it except through producing every conceivable
situation and context that the expert would have experienced. Granted,
to a certain extent you certainly can get some tacit knowledge out of
people's heads; and you can certainly extract rules; and you can certainly
get a lot further along towards mimicking the decision-making process
that an expert goes through. ... " January 3, 2005: Health
site naturally wants you to be well. By Tricia Duryee. The Seattle
Times. "What: Salugenecists.... What it does: A
Web site that offers information to people on why they are sick. It pulls
information from databases using artificial intelligence; the technology
mimics how an expert with natural-medicine experience would think about
an ill patient." January 2005: Digital
Dullard - Billionaire Paul Allen's electronic science tutor fails
to make the grade. By Steven Cherry. IEEE Spectrum Online. "Digital
Aristotle began in 2003 as a contest, dubbed Project Halo. Three sets
of high-powered researchers competed to create software that could do
well on a high school advanced-placement exam in chemistry. They all succeeded.
The winning program, written by a collaborative team from SRI International,
in Menlo Park, Calif.; the University of Texas at Austin; and Boeing Phantom
Works, in Seal Beach, Calif., scored a 3.00 on the exam out of a possible
5.00. That's better than the human student median grade of 2.82. ... Now,
for a second stage of the contest, the same three teams are designing
software tools that would allow Ph.D. graduate students to create collections
of facts and inferences, so-called knowledge bases, much more cheaply.
These tools would turn ordinary sentences of scientific knowledge -- a
definition of electrical resistance, for example, or the fact that all
mammals are vertebrates -- into what are called 'knowledge constructs':
well-defined concepts and quasi-mathematical relationships among them.
Once the constructs have been collected and stored, tried-and-true problem-solving
methods and other AI technologies could be brought to bear on the task
of answering questions on the chemistry test, for example. ... And if
Allen is the wealthiest knowledge suitor to be smitten by the charms of
AI, he's hardly the first. That honor might go to Aristotle himself, the
human one. Some 2200 years ago, he dreamed of an 'instrument' that 'could
accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others.'
At the dawn of the computer age, Alan Turing dreamed of a machine so humanlike
that a panel of judges wouldn't be able to distinguish it from a real
person. Since then, AI has had more flashes in the pan than a French restaurant.
To be sure, AI has its successes. ... Part of AI's image problem stems
from the fact that whenever a development moves from lab to market, it's
no longer artificial intelligence; it's just software." December 13, 2004: WebMed
dispenses advice to students. By Robyn Shelton. Orlando Sentinel.
"The site -- 24/7 WebMed -- takes students through questions, judges
the severity of their symptoms and offers guidance for what to do next.
... 'It's decision-support systems, or artificial intelligence in a way,'
said Dr. Scott Gettings, DSHI medical director. 'The system learns about
you as you flow through and answer questions and determines how ill you
are.' It makes no attempt to go further and diagnose the patient's illness
-- but gauges the seriousness of the symptoms. 'This is not intended to
take the place of human interaction, but to augment it,' said Dr. Michael
Deichen, associate director of clinical services at the UCF Student Health
Center. 'It really just helps the students know with what urgency they
should be evaluated.'" November 22, 2004: Some Housing Markets Still
Red Hot. The Flip Side
- CNNFN television broadcast hosted by Kathleen Hays, JJ Ramberg and Stephanie
Elam (video and/or transcript available for purchase). "Hays:
Homeownership continues to grow in the United States, but our next guest
says a housing bubble is not going to occur. Even so, people are wondering.
The market`s been kind of overheated in some places, prices going up or
down. If you want to jump in, what`s the best mortgage to buy right now?
Joining us from Dallas is Jim McMahan, mortgage lender with CTX Mortgage.
... McMahan: ... Now I`ll tell you, because I know the
next question many times is, well, gosh, isn`t that alarming to take those
high loan-to-value products? The market has changed because of FICO scoring,
because of better artificial intelligence. The default rate nationally
is still less than 1 percent, which is where lenders like to see it. ...
I think that a question has to be asked that we ask all of our customers:
what`s most important about this home loan to you. If there`s other debt
in place, we`ve got to look at that. Again, FICO scoring today and the
models we use, DU, Desktop Underwriters, some of the basically artificial
intelligence underwriting models where you put it into a computer and
it says yes or no, is certainly helping with that." November 20, 2004: A
Different Kind of Laboratory Mouse. By Grant Buckle. DigitalJournal.com.
"It is possible to find viable alternatives to tests on live animals
and, thanks to technology, at least some of them can saved without abandoning
important research. ... In silico testing is an example of how
technology continues to successfully create beneficial methods because
once a model has such data, it may be able to predict the likely effects
of chemicals and drugs without testing on live animals. But tests using
computer models are still relatively new, so they’re not yet sufficient
for making final decisions about the safety of drugs or chemicals for
human consumption. The good news, though, is that if pre-screening with
computer models determines that a compound is likely to be dangerous,
the developer can decide not to pursue it further, saving time and money.
... A handful of software packages exist for doing in silico
testing. ... Lhasa Ltd., a spinoff of the chemistry department of the
University of Leeds in England, developed Deductive Estimation of Risk
from Existing Knowledge (DEREK) for Windows, a knowledge-base expert system
that analyzes the structure of chemicals and predicts whether they will
be toxic. ... Computer models are still not good enough to be used as
the only means of testing new drugs and chemicals, but with the ballooning
growth of technology, never say never. As artificial intelligence improves,
and science sees a few more breakthroughs in the way the models are developed,
it might not be that far off." November 18, 2004: Sex, lies and AI - A Hong
Kong-based company's creation of a virtual girlfriend raises philosophical
questions about the curious evolution of artificial intelligence. By Alex
Lo. South China
Morning Post (subscription req'd.). [This article
can also be found in Artificial
Life, Inc.'s news collection.] "The
German-born polymath-philosopher, mathematician, computer scientist, author
and businessman brooks no criticism of his cyber-girlfriend, who will
be officially launched at the 3G World Congress and Exhibition at the
Convention Centre today. By now, you have probably heard all about Vivienne,
with whom you can have a cyber-affair, sans sex, in a hyper-real graphic
environment on your 3G phone. 'I don't like it when people say, 'Oh it's
just a dumb chatter bot. It doesn't really understand anything and will
never pass the Turing test',' Mr [Eberhard] Schoneburg says. (The Turing
test decrees a computer program must be considered intelligent if, after
interacting with it over a period of time, you cannot tell if you are
dealing with a computer or a human.) 'Artificial Intelligence has been
criticised since day one,' Mr Schoneburg continues, "mostly because of
incompetent public writers who have collected their AI knowledge from
reading three books ... who have no clue what they are writing about,
and from tonnes of bad science fiction, where AI-driven robots kill and
eat people... it's just horrifying how dumb people can be. 'Why is it
that reporters always have to find a negative edge? The V-Girl is 'not
just a chat bot with high resolution graphics'. We have tried - within
the boundaries of the current technical AI possibilities - to simulate
life-like behaviour as much as possible. That's the edge - the chatting
is just one small component of it.' ... Eliza, Parry and Racter are the
precursors of so-called chat bots. ... There are also expert systems,
some of which have chat-bot features, which can answer most questions
you want to know in a specific field." October 11, 2004: Virtual
Manufacturing - This factory flickers on your monitor. By Joseph Ogando.
Design News. "Want to see a factory of the future? Well, turn on
your computer. A New Jersey company called eMachineShop recently launched
a new on-line factory that lets engineers quickly design, price, and order
machined metal and plastic parts. ... Once the geometry has been established,
the software's machining 'expert system' evaluates each design for manufacturability.
'One of our major technology innovations involved incorporating a huge
amount of machining knowledge in the system,' says Lewis. For example,
the system can currently flag issues related to milling, bending, part
finish, and more. The bottom line, says Lewis, is that the system 'won't
let users design any parts we can't make.'" October 6, 2004: Local lending company soars after flying "under the radar." By Cydney Gillis. The Seattle Times. "Layne Sapp started | |||
