| - HISTORY - General Index by Topic to AI in the news |
AI Topics Home | ||||
|
October 9, 2007: Tracing computer history from “ancient” times to the latest technology. By Kathy Quirk. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee News. "Thomas Haigh, assistant professor of information studies at UWM, is among a very small number of computer experts in the world who are also historians, studying the role of technology in broader social change. These new experts are tracing how computers have changed business and society. ... While most computer histories focus on the hardware -- Univac and inventors tinkering in garages – Haigh also looks at the software -- from word processing to spreadsheets to databases -- that has changed the modern world. ... The first computer books quickly followed the development of the programmable computers in the late 1940s and early 1950s. 'The authors of these pieces wasted few superlatives in celebrating the unprecedented speed and power of these machines,' Haigh wrote in an article for the Business History Review published by the Harvard Business School. 'Indeed, the earliest and most influential of the books was entitled "Giant Brains, or Machines That Think," a title that more sober computer experts spend decades trying to dispel from the public imagination.'" October 1, 2007: The Grill - ARPA Pioneer Charles M. Herzfeld on the Hot Seat - The 'godfather' of ARPA talks about the days of funding crazy ideas like computer networks, today's lack of effective leadership in government research and the price we may pay. By Gary Anthes. Computerworld. "Charles M. Herzfeld is currently a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Arlington, Va. He was hired by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as ARPA, in 1961 to head up research in ballistic missile defense, and he became ARPA’s fifth director in 1965. (ARPA was later known as DARPA, after the word 'defense' was added to the agency’s name.) He also served as director of Defense Research & Engineering, to which ARPA reports, from 1990 to 1991. [Q] What was your introduction to computing? [A] When I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, in 1948 or so, John von Neumann came and gave three seminars on electronic computing. He was instrumental in getting the ENIAC built, and he came to tell us about it. It was hugely important stuff, and it changed my life absolutely. ... [Q] What else did IPTO [Information Processing Techniques Office] do in those early times? [A] We created the whole artificial intelligence community and funded it. And we created the computer science world. When we started [IPTO], there were no computer science departments or computer science professionals in the world. None." September 24, 2007: Happy Birthday, Sputnik! (Thanks for the Internet). By Gary Anthes. Computerworld. "Quick, what's the most influential piece of hardware from the early days of computing? The IBM 360 mainframe? The DEC PDP-1 minicomputer? Maybe earlier computers such as Binac, ENIAC or Univac? Or, going way back to the 1800s, is it the Babbage Difference Engine? More likely, it was a 183-pound aluminum sphere called Sputnik, Russian for 'traveling companion.' Fifty years ago, on Oct. 4, 1957, radio-transmitted beeps from the first man-made object to orbit the Earth stunned and frightened the U.S., and the country's reaction to the 'October surprise' changed computing forever. ... [T]he public demanded that something be done. The most immediate 'something' was the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a freewheeling Pentagon office created by President Eisenhower on Feb. 7, 1958. Its mission was to "'prevent technological surprises'.... [J.C.R.] Licklider [the first director of IT research at ARPA] had studied psychology as an undergraduate, and in 1962, he brought to ARPA a passionate belief that computers could be far more user-friendly than the unconnected, batch-processing behemoths of the day. Two years earlier, he had published an influential paper, 'Man-Computer Symbiosis,' in which he laid out his vision for computers that could interact with users in real time. It was a radical idea, one utterly rejected by most academic and industrial researchers at the time. (See sidebar, Advanced Computing Visions from 1960.) ... [A]round 2000, Kleinrock and other top-shelf technology researchers say, the agency, now called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), began to focus more on pragmatic, military objectives. A new administration was in power in Washington, and then 9/11 changed priorities everywhere. Observers say DARPA shifted much of its funding from long-range to shorter-term research, from universities to military contractors, and from unclassified work to secret programs. Of government funding for IT, [Leonard] Kleinrock says, 'our researchers are now being channeled into small science, small and incremental goals, short-term focus and small funding levels.' The result, critics say, is that DARPA is much less likely today to spawn the kinds of revolutionary advances in IT that came from Licklider and his successors. DARPA officials declined to be interviewed for this story. But Jan Walker, a spokesperson for DARPA Director Anthony Tether, said, 'Dr. Tether ... does not agree. DARPA has not pulled back from long-term, high-risk, high-payoff research in IT or turned more to short-term projects.' (See sidebar, DARPA's Response.) ... 'In the early years, ARPA was willing to fund things like artificial intelligence -- take five years and see what happens,' he says. 'Nobody cared whether you delivered something in six months. It was, "Go and put forth your best effort and see if you can budge the field." Now that's changed. It's more driven by, "What did you do for us this year?"' ... Meanwhile, funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for computer science and engineering -- most of it for universities -- has increased from $478 million in 2001 to $709 million this year, up 48%. But the NSF tends to fund smaller, more-focused efforts. And because contract awards are based on peer review, bidders on NSF jobs are inhibited from taking the kinds of chances that Licklider would have favored."
>>> AI Overview, History, Applications; also see this related article and 11 down in our AI Crossword Puzzle (or go straight to the annotated solution) September 23, 2007: King Algorithm - An Oracle for Our Time, Part Man, Part Machine. By George Johnson. The New York Times. "Last week, when executives at MySpace told of new algorithms that will mine the information on users’ personal pages and summon targeted ads, the news hardly caused a stir. The idea of automating what used to be called judgment has gone from radical to commonplace. What is spreading through the Web is not exactly artificial intelligence. For all the research that has gone into cognitive and computer science, the brain’s most formidable algorithms -- those used to recognize images or sounds or understand language -- have eluded simulation. The alternative has been to incorporate people, with their special skills, as components of the Net. ... In the 1950s William Ross Ashby, a British psychiatrist and cyberneticist, anticipated something like this merger when he wrote about intelligence amplification -- human thinking leveraged by machines. But it is both kinds of intelligence, biological and electronic, that are being amplified. Unlike the grinning cyborgs envisioned by science fiction, the splicing is not between hardware and wetware but between software running on two different platforms. ... In his 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence,' Alan Turing foresaw a day when it would be hard to tell the difference between the responses of a computer and a human being. What he may not have envisioned is how thoroughly the boundary would blur." 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.'" July 19, 2007: Robotics. An In Depth report from CBC.ca News. Features include:
>>> Robots, Medicine, Manufacturing, Ethical & Social Implications, History, Science Fiction, Robots (@ Software & Hardware), Summer Camps - and - AI Courses - and - Competitions - and - Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students), Applications, Industry Statistics July 16, 2007: Donald Michie, robotics and code-breaking pioneer, dies. By Chris Hipwell. ComputerWeekly.com. "Donald Michie, Bletchley Park code-breaker and a pioneer of artificial intelligence and robotics, died in a car accident on 7 July." July 11, 2007: UK computer history gets new home. BBC News. "Plans are taking shape to set up a museum that celebrates Britain's role in the origins of the digital age. The National Museum of Computing will be based at Bletchley Park where World War II code breakers built the first recognisably modern computers. The museum's centrepiece is the rebuilt Colossus computer that broke high-level German communications during WWII. ... 'This is not a museum of computers but of computing,' he said. Every machine on display would be restored to show how it worked, said Mr [Andy] Clark. ... The Museum gets an unofficial opening on 12 July 2007 when the British Computer Society stages a conference at Bletchley on the history of early computers and efforts to preserve them." July 9, 2007: Professor Donald Michie (obituary). Telegraph.co.uk (also appears in The Daily Telegraph; page 23). "Professor Donald Michie, who died in a motor accident on Saturday aged 83, was a pioneer in the creation of artificial intelligence; during the war he worked on breaking German codes at Bletchley Park and later, as Professor of Machine Intelligence at Edinburgh University, helped to bring about the world of robots, computer games and search engines. Known to his colleagues as 'Duckmouse', Donald Michie was one of the great multi-disciplinarians of his generation. A classical scholar at the start, he worked with mathematicians - and especially Alan Turing - at Bletchley, then went into genetics until computers caught up with his ambitions to 'build a brain' before putting together his team at Edinburgh. ... [A]t Edinburgh Michie produced innovations including MENACE (an early games machine) and FREDERICK, a prototype robot for industrial applications. Retiring in 1984 with the title of Professor Emeritus, he founded the Turing Institute at Glasgow University. ... He was awarded numerous honorary degrees and was a Fellow of the British Computer Society and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence."
>>> Tributes, History; also see this interview, and this debate July 7, 2007: Top academics killed in motorway crash. ITV News. "Two of Britain's leading academics have been killed in a car crash on the M11 motorway, their son has confirmed. Divorced couple Professor Donald Michie, 83, and Dame Anne McLaren, 80, died when their car left the motorway as they travelled from Cambridge en route to their London home. Prof Michie was a researcher in artificial intelligence who worked as part of the British code-breaking group at Bletchley Park during World War Two. He contributed to the effort to solve Tunny, a German teleprinter cipher."
>>> Tributes; also watch this 2002 interview with Professor Donald Michie. July 7, 2007 [issue date]: The programmable robot of ancient Greece. By Noel Sharkey (Professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield, UK. His forthcoming book is called The Tin Man). New Scientist (Issue 2611: pages 32-35; subscription req'd). "Constructing a mechanical lion that could walk, let alone present flowers to the king, can't have been a simple task back in 1515 - even for a genius like Leonardo da Vinci. How he managed this feat remained a mystery until 2000, when US robotics expert Mark Rosheim came to a surprising conclusion. ... [W]as da Vinci influenced by an earlier design? And if so, how far back in history can we trace programmable robots? In search of answers I followed the technology back through medieval Europe to the Islamic world, where I have found evidence of an even earlier programmable automaton, made in Baghdad by the brilliant 13th-century engineer Ibn Ismail Ibn al-Razzaz Al-Jazari. ... Yet the trail doesn't stop there. It led me even further back past the automata of the Byzantine court and ancient Rome to ancient Alexandria. It was here that Hero, one of the greatest Greek engineers, constructed a programmable robot that pre-dates da Vinci's by 1500 years. ... So what exactly do we mean by 'programmable'? ..." July/August 2007: Artificial Intelligence Is Lost in the Woods - A conscious mind will never be built out of software, argues a Yale University professor. By David Gelernter. Technology Review. "AI offers to figure out how thought works and to make that knowledge available to software designers. It even offers to deepen our understanding of the mind itself. Questions about software and the mind are central to cognitive science and philosophy. Few problems are more far-reaching or have more implications for our fundamental view of ourselves. The current debate centers on what I'll call a 'simulated conscious mind' versus a 'simulated unconscious intelligence.' We hope to learn whether computers make it possible to achieve one, both, or neither. ... To say that building a useful conscious mind is highly unlikely is not to say that AI has nothing worth doing. Consciousness has been a 'mystery' (as Turing called it) for thousands of years, but the mind holds other mysteries, too. Creativity is one of the most important; it's a brick wall that psychology and philosophy have been banging their heads against for a long time." June 19, 2007: The enigma of Alan Turing. By Richard Smith. Guardian Unlimited Arts blog. " Alan Turing is arguably the gay man who most changed the world in the 20th-century. It's thanks to him that you're reading this online - and in English, not German. He is widely acknowledged as the father of the computer and artificial intelligence. At Bletchley Park, the British intelligence HQ during the second world war, Turing's proto computer, the Bombe, cracked the Nazi's Enigma Code - helping to turn the tide in the allies' favour, and shortening the war by years. This week a new statue of Turing was unveiled at Bletchley Park. ... [M]y favourite tribute to Alan Turing may well be staring you in the face. Although never officially acknowledged, the Apple computer logo is often presumed to be not a reference to Adam and Eve, or even Sir Isaac Newton, but to the sad death of - and great debt owed to - Alan Turing." June 7, 2007: How we have been fooled by utopian visions of the future - Our expectations of technology are borne out of Cold War spin, according to a London academic. Book review by Christine Evans-Pughe. The Guardian. "Since the 1960s, politicians and pundits have predicted the imminent arrival of a digital utopia in which robots would do the washing up and we would live in peace and harmony in an electronically connected, global village, thanks to the net. So why are the utopian visions of 40 years ago strangely similar to the ones we hold today? Because business and political leaders have consistently pushed a carefully orchestrated fantasy of the future to distract us from the present, says Richard Barbrook, who explores the subject in Imaginary Futures - From Thinking Machines to the Global Village [Pluto Press]. ... He is particularly interested in exposing the 'nonsense of technological determinism', which he describes as 'the theory that someone builds a machine, the machine sprouts legs and runs around the world changing it'. ... Barbrook believes we can trace today's deterministic views of technology to the cold war.... 'Nasa's spaceships would evolve into luxurious interplanetary passenger liners,' says Barbrook. 'General Electric's nuclear fission reactors would become fusion plants providing limitless energy for all. IBM's computers were prototypes of artificial intelligence.' Soon, the implication went, loyal obedient robots would be at humanity's beck and call. ... So in 2007, with our mobile phones, computers and high-speed broadband connections, are we still hypnotised by cold war spin, patiently waiting for technology to deliver our utopian future? ..." June 2007: The Human Checkmate. Editorial. The New Atlantis 16, Spring 2007, p. 135. "The world’s greatest chess player lost to a computer ten years ago, in a match widely purported to portend the rise of machine intelligence, and perhaps eventually the supplanting of humans as the dominant intelligence on earth. ... The talk of intelligent machines taking over the planet thus reveals less about the reality of AI research -- which has had a long history of bold promises and gross failures -- than it does about the radically anti-human aspirations of the researchers. ... We need not worry about the technical excellence of the machines we create; indeed, we should admire it. It is the dreams of some of the machine-makers that should concern us."
THERE'S MORE ! |
|||||