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November 1, 2007: Greek scientists blaze way in solving Internet questions - Experts at i-sieve are developing content-filtering technology. By Lina Giannarou. Kathimerini | eathimerini.com. "The firm, i-sieve technologies, is a Democritos spin-off company whose researchers have developed content-filtering technology to tune into the opinions of millions of people from all corners of the earth who use the Internet for everything from products and services to candidates for the leadership of the PASOK party. The job assigned to i-sieve is to use artificial intelligence to analyze the content of websites. These online media analysis methods are based on an innovative system of thematically organizing Internet content developed at the Software and Knowledge Engineering Laboratory at Democritos. 'In effect, this is an algorithm which we train to search the Web for what interests us and to classify it,' explained Costas Handrinos, the director of i-sieve." October 29, 2007: The Semantic Web Goes Mainstream - Radar Networks is unveiling a new tool that provides a smarter way to find information and increase productivity. By Kate Greene. Technology Review. "Radar Networks, based in San Francisco, is releasing a free Web-based tool, called Twine, that it hopes will change the way people organize their information. Twine is a website where people can dump information that's important to them, from strings of e-mails to YouTube videos. Or, if a user prefers, Twine can automatically collect all the Web pages she visited, e-mails she sent and received, and so on. Once Twine has some information, it starts to analyze it and automatically sort it into categories that include the people involved, concepts discussed, and places, organizations, and companies. This way, when a user is searching for something, she can have quick access to related information about it. ... The idea underlying Twine's function and technologies is known as the Semantic Web, a concept, long discussed in research circles, that can be described as a sort of smart network of information in which data is tagged, sorted, and searchable. ... In addition to employing the Semantic Web standards, Twine is also using extremely advanced machine learning and natural-language processing algorithms that give it capabilities beyond anything that relies on manual tagging. ... Twine will open up to invited users starting today." October 28, 2007: Bridging document search language barriers. The Sunday Times, Malta. "The Department of Artificial Intelligence within the University of Malta's new ICT Faculty is a one of 10 European partners involved in an EU-funded Framework Programme 6 (FP6) project that is using concept-based, as opposed to word-based profiles, to facilitate cross-lingual document searches, where the language used for the query is not necessarily the same as the language of retrieved documents. The Language Technologies for eLearning (LT4eL) project that uses language technology to automatically analyse linguistic data to improve access to learning materials within an eLearning context by automatically creating concept-based semantic profiles." October 22, 2007: Super search. The Engineer Online. "Unique software devised by Ulster University (UU) researchers has won the top prize at this year’s 25k Award organised by the Northern Ireland Science Park. Invented by a team of three UU researchers in collaboration with St Petersburg State University, Russia, the so-called SOPHIA software automatically trawls through documents to build structure by discovering key themes that naturally exist within them. Documents are then associated with the theme they are most closely aligned to with respect to their semantic content. When a user requests information, SOPHIA returns the themes that most closely match their needs." October 22, 2007: How Do You Say...Translation software is at last good enough to help companies do business in other languages. By Peter Loftus. The Wall Street Journal. "Thanks to the Internet, companies can leap over most geographical barriers to conduct business globally. But language barriers remain a tough hurdle. Increasingly, though, translation software is making it easier to do business in other languages. While computer translation isn't perfect -- human input is still needed to ensure complete accuracy -- the latest programs are faster and more accurate than earlier generations of translation tools. ... Ford Motor Co. uses translation software from Systran SA of France, along with some human input, to convert vehicle-assembly instructions written in English into four languages: Spanish, German, Portuguese and Dutch. It also uses software from Applications Technology Inc., of McLean, Va., for translations from English to Turkish. Nestor Rychtyckyj, a Ford technical specialist in artificial intelligence, says that while machine translation still isn't 100% accurate, it has improved over the years and is good enough to convey the substance of instructions to foreign workers. 'Machine translation just makes the process more efficient' than it would be using human translators alone, Mr. Rychtyckyj says. 'We're saving a lot of time and effort.'" October 21, 2007: When the Military Needs It Yesterday. By G. Pascal Zachary. The New York Times. "The Pentagon has long indulged in highly polished technological systems that are the product of many years of bureaucratic wheel-spinning, grinding meetings and wish-list overkill. But those soul-deadening procedures have come under intense criticism for turning creative people away from innovation for national security. ... BBN built a two-way translator, a hand-held device that allows an American soldier to understand an Arabic speaker, sort of. It is not perfect, Mr. [Mark] Sherman acknowledges, but at 50 percent accuracy, the digital translator may indeed improve security and save lives because human translators in Iraq often spy for the other side or are targets for assassination by insurgents. In late 2006, Mr. Sherman had a chance meeting with some Army officers at Harvard. Because BBN had been researching language translation for decades, a team was able to produce a single hand-held translator in just 42 days. It is now being tested in Iraq. The idea of bringing inventions quickly to the battlefield has roots stretching to World War II and the Korean War." October 19, 2007: What I Meant to Say Was Semantic Web. John Markoff's post to Bits, The New York Times' Technology Blog. "One great way to start a fight in a crowded Silicon Valley cocktail party (and there are a lot of them these days) is to mention Web 3.0. There is no easy consensus about how to define what is meant by Web 3.0, but it is generally seen as a reference to the semantic Web. While it is not that much more precise a phrase, the semantic Web refers to technology to make using the Internet better by understanding the meaning of what people are doing, not just the way pages link to each other. ... So companies are bubbling up all over the place that claim to be building part of the semantic Web. Some are building voice recognition systems to use while browsing the Internet on a cell phone. Some want to challenge Google head on with a better search engine. ... In a demonstration I saw earlier this week Twine appeared to do a good job of what artificial intelligence researchers refer to as 'entity extraction,' that is categorizing things like people and places automatically."
>>> Interfaces, Representation, Web-Searching Agents, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Knowledge Management, Applications October 19, 2007: Newsmaker - Gates still finding his voice. By Ina Fried. CNET News.com. "Bill Gates has been saying for years that one day soon we will use handwriting, voice and touch to control our computers. He's still saying that. In an interview with CNET News.com, Gates talks about some of the ways that speech recognition has already made inroads and discusses some of the places it will eventually go. ... Q: When did you really first see the possibilities of voice? Was there a real early demo you saw years ago that sort of--you saw it and could really see the possibilities? Gates: Well, certainly the idea that computers should deal with voice has been around a long time. It's kind of a natural way to communicate. In the 1970s, DARPA was funding people, including people at Harvard, to do speech recognition. And so people kind of thought, hey, this should be easy to do. The dream of computers understanding voice goes way back. And the dream that the data network and the voice network would be one in the same goes way back as well. ... [Q:] What are some of the areas where you see voice going that people aren't necessarily thinking about today? Gates: To me, voice is in the broad realm of natural interface. ..."
>>> Speech, Natural Language Processing, Interfaces, Applications, Interviews October 11, 2007: 'Dark Web' Project Takes On Cyber-Terrorism. By Steven Kotler. FOXNews.com. "'Since the events of 9/11, terrorist presence online has multiplied tenfold,' says Hsinchun Chen, director of the University of Arizona's Artificial Intelligence Lab. 'Around the year 2000, there were 70 to 80 core terrorist sites online; now there are at least 7000 to 8000.' Those sites are doing everything from spreading militant propaganda to offering insurgency advice to plotting the next wave of attacks, making the net, as Chen also points out: 'arguably the most powerful tool for spreading extremist violence around the world.' But thanks to Chen, that tide may be turning. He's the architect behind the newest weapon in the war on terror -- a giant, searchable database on extremists known as Dark Web. Using a bevy of advanced technologies, Dark Web is an attempt to uncover, cross-reference, catalogue and analyze all online terrorist-generated content. ... Dark Web is Chen's second foray into online crime-fighting. The first began in 1997, when he -- already an expert at tracking social change online (crime and terrorisms being extreme examples of social change) -- teamed up with the Tucson Police Department and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to help develop Coplink, a way for law enforcement forces around the country to link files and consolidate data. ... [Dark Web] utilizes existing technologies... as well as brand new technologies like sentiment analysis, which is capable of scanning documents for emotionally charged keywords such as 'that sucks.'... Civil-liberties concerns may continue to dog the technological front of the war on terror, but Dark Web is already producing results." October 2, 2007: Natural Language Understanding and Conversational Dialogue - A Different Kind of Self-Service Speech Recognition. By Stefania Viscusi. TMCnet. "For more insight into natural language understanding in speech technologies, I took some time to ask Luis Valles, Chief Scientist at GyrusLogic, some questions on the topic. [Q] What is Natural Language Understanding? [A] Natural Language Understanding (NLU) or Conversational Dialogue is the capability for a user to say and/or ask anything, and the system understanding what the user meant, together with the system finding an appropriate response -- as with any other conversation between humans. [Q] How is this deployed with Speech Recognition? ... [Q] Can you tell me a little about the solution you have developed to provide Natural Language Understanding capabilities? [A] GyrusLogic’s Platica product is patented artificial intelligence (AI) technology built with computational linguistic models for customers, employees or any other stakeholder to enter into a fully-automated conversational dialog. ..." September 30, 2007: Computer turns prosaic dunces into lyrical poets - Software claims to hone anyone's written English. By David Smith. The Observer | Guardian Unlimited. " A computer software program claims that it can automatically turn garbled writing into clear and simple prose. WhiteSmoke, an American-Israeli company, says the new version of its 'text enrichment' software not only checks spelling and grammar but comes up with the word you are looking for when trying to finesse a legal form, a piece of creative writing or even a love letter. The concept reopens the question of whether computers can truly ever simulate human culture. ... Online writing tools already exist but attempts by computers to imitate language have often been clumsy and jarring. WhiteSmoke argues its system is different because it uses artificial intelligence to draw upon millions of examples of well-written English, then applies them to new contexts. ... Does it work? Two prose styles put to the test. ..." September 28, 2007: Artificial Comedy -- A five giggle-byte program Julia Taylor's computer has detected a joke. By Shirley Smith. The Associated Press / available from The Modesto Bee. "Doctoral student Julia Taylor and Professor Larry Mazlack of the University of Cincinnati's Applied Artificial Intelligence Laboratory are giving computers a sense of humor."
>>> Natural Language Processing, Humor, Applications September 19, 2007: Intelligent, Chatty Machines - A startup hopes to help toys, cell phones, robots, and personal computers have meaningful conversations with people. By Kate Greene. Technology Review. "A new company called Cognitive Code has built software that it believes will let everyday gadgets talk with humans. At the Techcrunch40 conference in San Francisco on Monday, the startup unveiled a developer's studio with a set of algorithms that convert strings of words into concepts and formulate a wordy response. ... The problem that the company is tackling is called natural-language processing, and it's been the subject of intense research at world-renowned research labs for decades. Some computer programs are already able to parse basic information from inputs that don't match exact commands. Well-known examples are chatbots such as Alice and Jabberwacky, programs that simulate a conversation via text input. Spring claims that Cognitive Code's product, SILVIA (which stands for symbolically isolated, linguistically variable intelligence algorithm), is more advanced than chatbots for a couple of reasons. ... The system works like this: during a conversation, words are turned into conceptual data, Spring explains. SILVIA takes these concepts and mixes them with other conceptual data that's stored in short-term memory (information from the current discussion) or long-term memory (information that has been established through prior training sessions). Then SILVIA transforms the resulting concepts back into human language."
>>> Natural Language Processing, Chatbots (@ Natural Language Processing), Interfaces, Applications, The AI Effect September 17, 2007: No ‘Drop and give me 20’ - Next IT brings recruit-friendly avatar to Army. By Doug Beizer. Washington Technology. "Dressed in fatigues and wearing a black beret, Sgt. Star’s stern look doesn’t reveal the real man. Unlike drill sergeants in the movies, Sgt. Star is patient and tries to answer every question. That’s because he is a computer-generated avatar powered by artificial intelligence on the Army’s recruiting Web site, GoArmy.com. ... Army officials worked with Next IT Corp., of Spokane, Wash., to develop Sgt. Star using the company’s ActiveAgent application, said Patrick Ream, Next IT’s vice president of marketing. ActiveAgent is an interactive, conversational device that enables online users to communicate with it using natural language. It is a proprietary application based on artificial intelligence. ... 'If you look at the statistics coming out of the Army, they say that it is over 92 percent accurate,' he said. 'That is pretty phenomenal when you consider that when someone asks a question, there are thousands of different ways that that single question can be asked.' ActiveAgent looks at phrasing, word usage, intent and other factors, and boils them down to a single concept. ... Before Sgt. Star, the average session time on GoArmy.com was four minutes. Now it is up to 16 minutes and trending toward 17 minutes. Those numbers are important to recruiters." September 17, 2007: Search startup ready to challenge Google. By Michael Liedtke. Associated Press / available from MiamiHerald.com. "After nearly two years of hushed development, Powerset is finally providing a peek at a 'natural-language' technology that is supposed to make it easier to communicate with search engines. Powerset's algorithms are programmed to understand search requests submitted in plain English, a change from the 'keyword' system used by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and the owners of the other leading engines. ... This isn't the first time a search engine has tried to understand simple English, but Powerset has drawn more attention because its natural-language technology is being licensed from the Palo Alto Research Center. Better known as PARC, the Xerox Corp. subsidiary is renowned for hatching breakthroughs - like the computer mouse and the graphical interface for personal computers - that were later commercialized by other companies. PARC's top natural-language specialist, Ronald Kaplan, is now Powerset's chief technology and scientific officer."
>>> Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Applications September 17, 2007: BI and Analytics - A Power Couple: The marriage of BI and text analytics promises to give deeper meaning to BI data. By Jennifer McAdams. Computerworld. "The marriage of business intelligence and text analytics is starting to have a profound impact on companies in several industries, including health care, insurance and finance, which are just waking up to the benefits of tying structured BI data to unstructured text. Text analytics tools use linguistics, rules-based natural-language processing, specialized algorithms and other methods to impose order on unstructured text scattered throughout the enterprise. More IT executives are using text analytics software to mine disparate document- management applications, e-mail and phone systems, or even blogs and Web sites. The goal is to breathe new life into static BI reports. By extracting facts, concepts and data relationships buried in text, text analytics software transforms this unstructured information into modeled data that can then be tied to BI databases. Hence, text analytics promises to enhance the context and meaning of BI data, which is often presented as canned reports scraped from data warehouses or major applications, such as ERP and customer relationship management (CRM) databases." September 14, 2007: Using Math to Track Terrorists [radio broadcast]. NPR's Science Friday with guest host Joe Palca and guests Hsinchun Chen, director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and Bernard Brooks, professor of mathematics at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York. "Are there new weapons in the war on terror? Here's a suggestion. If you want to find a terrorist cell, consider asking a mathematician. Researchers in math, computer science, and criminology met this week to talk about ways in which mathematical techniques can be brought to bear on the problem of counterterrorism. In this segment, guests join Joe Palca for a look at how mathematicians and computer scientists can help track terrorist activity, find connections between seemingly unrelated pieces of data, and help hunt for a needle in a haystack." September 13, 2007: IBM Research Demonstrates Innovative 'Speech to Sign Language' Translation System. IBM press release via Market Wire. "IBM (NYSE: IBM) has developed an ingenious system called SiSi (Say It Sign It) that automatically converts the spoken word into British Sign Language (BSL) which is then signed by an animated digital character or avatar. SiSi brings together a number of computer technologies. A speech recognition module converts the spoken word into text, which SiSi then interprets into gestures, that are used to animate an avatar which signs in BSL. ... This project is an example of IBM's collaboration with non-commercial organisations on worthy social and business projects. The signing avatars and the award-winning technology for animating sign language from a special gesture notation were developed by the University of East Anglia and the database of signs was developed by RNID (Royal National Institute for Deaf People). ... SiSi has been developed in the UK by a research team at IBM Hursley, as part of IBM's premier global student intern programme, Extreme Blue. In the European part of the programme, 80 of the most talented students from across Europe were selected to work on 20 projects and given whatever equipment, support and assistance they required. Working for an intense 12 week period alongside IBM technical and industry leaders, they focused on innovative technology projects, such as SiSi, all of which had real business value. ... For a video demonstration of the SiSi technology, visit the following url: http://youtube.com/watch?v=RarMKnjqzZU" September 10, 2007: Scientists Use the "Dark Web" to Snag Extremists and Terrorists Online. Press release from the National Science Foundation (NSF). "Terrorists and extremists have set up shop on the Internet, using it to recruit new members, spread propaganda and plan attacks across the world. The size and scope of these dark corners of the Web are vast and disturbing. But in a non-descript building in Tucson, a team of computational scientists are using the cutting-edge technology and novel new approaches to track their moves online, providing an invaluable tool in the global war on terror. Funded by the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies, Hsinchun Chen and his Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona have created the Dark Web project, which aims to systematically collect and analyze all terrorist-generated content on the Web. ... Using advanced techniques such as Web spidering, link analysis, content analysis, authorship analysis, sentiment analysis and multimedia analysis, Chen and his team can find, catalogue and analyze extremist activities online. According to Chen, scenarios involving vast amounts of information and data points are ideal challenges for computational scientists, who use the power of advanced computers and applications to find patterns and connections where humans can not. One of the tools developed by Dark Web is a technique called Writeprint, which automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating 'anonymous' content online. ... Dark Web also uses complex tracking software called Web spiders to search discussion threads and other content to find the corners of the Internet where terrorist activities are taking place."
>>> Law Enforcement, Web-Searching Agents, Natural Language Processing, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Agents, Applications September 4, 2007: A high-tech helping hand for soldiers - A Lockheed Martin project could give them the tools to more easily provide reports directly from the battlefield. By Henry J. Holcomb. The Philadelphia Inquirer (philly.com). "For several years, Celeste L. Corrado has been thinking about, as she put it, 'soldiers coming back to base, tired and hungry after a long day on patrol,' to face the unpleasant but important task of filling out reports. Her team of scientists and engineers at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories in Cherry Hill has come up with a way to change that scenario. Last week, they turned over a working prototype of their electronic solution to the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, the architects of future warfare. ... Their working prototype is called WIRE, for Wearable Intelligent Reporting Environment. It takes mature speech-recognition technology - software that turns spoken words into documents - to the battlefield. Here's how it works. ... Instead of working with hours-old information, commanders will have fresh data for sophisticated computers and artificial intelligence - another technology being refined in the Cherry Hill labs." September / October 2007: Talk to the Phone - Speech-recognition software from Vlingo could make the mobile Web easier to use. By David Talbot. Technology Review Magazine. "Mobile phones can do lots of things: search the Web, download music, send e-mail. But the vast majority of the 233 million Americans who own them never use them for more than calls and short text messages. One reason is that other features often require users to enter sentences or long search terms, a tedious task. Speech-recognition interfaces could make such features easier to use. Vlingo, a startup in Cambridge, MA, is coming to market with a simple user interface that provides speech recognition across mobile-phone applications. ... 'Small platforms need speech, and search is a powerful way to find information,' says James Glass, head of the spoken-language systems group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ... Mazin Gilbert, executive director of natural-language processing at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, NJ, says others, including AT&T, are also developing speech interfaces for mobile phones...." August 29, 2007: Barney Pell - Pathways to artificial intelligence [podcast interview / 18:34]. Between the Lines blog posting by Dan Farber. ZDNet.com. "Barney Pell has a passion for artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP). His latest foray into those related fields is Powerset, a search engine that he hopes will challenge Google. He will be speaking, along with other experts in the AI field, at the Singularity Summit 2007, held at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco September 8-9. In this podcast interview, I talked with Pell about his views on AI and how the development of machines smarter than humans will play out in coming decades. ... Pell said that AI entities will get smarter but also humans, via intelligence augmentation, will gain new capabilities." August 28, 2007: Computers Programmed to Get the Joke. By Tracy Staedter. Discovery Channel News. "[A] group of researchers have equipped a computer with a sensor of humor. The technology could lead to programs that can solve problems that are informally stated, as well as to robots that are able to interact with humans more naturally. 'We rely on computers more and more, yet they don't seem to handle the way we communicate,' said Julia Taylor, a Ph.D. candidate for computer science and engineering at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio. 'I think it would be great for computers to understand natural language the way we use it,' she said. Taylor developed the program with associate professor Lawrence Mazlack, coordinator of the university's Applied Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ... The knowledge base, called an ontology, represents an innovative, and more complex approach, said Christian Hemplemann, chief scientific officer at Hakia, an Internet search engine company. ... With an ontology, the researchers must build a database that includes all of the things and events in a given world -- in this case, the world of children's jokes -- and how they relate to each other. The relationships are categorized in a hierarchical structural from general to a more precise meaning." August 16, 2007: Cognitive Science Initiative encapsulates expertise. By R. Colin Johnson. EE Times. "Armed with cognitive models of human behavior, Sandia National Laboratories is aiming to enhance soldiers' performance with knowledge augmentation, while simultaneously diminishing our enemies' effectiveness by second-guessing their next move. ... 'Using patterns instead of rules, we have achieved the goal of the Grand Challenge--building a software framework that we can populate automatically from text and spatio-temporal behavior,' said [John] Wagner. As a result of its success, the Cognitive Science and Technology Program has been upgraded to a strategic initiative, thereby making it a permanent part of Sandia's national security development efforts. ... By switching from outmoded rule-based expert systems, Sandia chose to instead use pattern-based artificial intelligence that employs semantic networks to store knowledge and statistics, thereby predicting actions. They also wanted their models to feel like humans feel, which meant including simulations of fatigue and other emotions from real situations. Now the researchers believe they have the tools to build cognitive models of people perceived as potential threats, in order to predict their behavior in response to current events. ... Sandia also plans to add a natural language interface to the system so that users can interact with experts--ask their advice using natural language." August 13, 2007: Visualize better government - Agencies are learning how to use Web tools to interact with constituents. By Trudy Walsh. Government Computer News. "Agencies have yet to harness the 2-D nature of electronic media, said Ben Shneiderman, professor of computer science at the University of Maryland. One of the goals of democracy is to make government a two-way process, and the Web offers a way to do this, he said. ... One of the most compelling examples of this new method is an interactive Web site the Army is using to achieve one of its most important missions: recruitment. Sgt. Star (which stands for the Army values of Strong, Trained and Ready) is ready to answer questions about Army life at www.goarmy.com (GCN.com, Quickfind 825). Clicking on a link on the right-hand side of the page, 'Ask SGT STAR,' takes the visitor directly to an interactive session with the virtual man himself. When Sgt. Star debuted in August 2006, a typical user’s session lasted about four minutes, said Jeff Brown, senior vice president of sales for Next IT, the company that designed software based on artificial intelligence technology that powers Sgt. Star. The AI core engine lets Next IT developers understand what questions users want answered. ... [I]n the past year, the average user session time there has increased to 17 1/2 minutes. This 'stickiness' of a site is the new way that Next IT is looking at Web site engagement." August 13, 2007: Translation Tools - New Approaches to an Old Discipline. Automated translation tools have been around for a long time, and new techniques are boosting their performance. But use them with caution. By Gary Anthes. Computerworld. "Language translation software isn’t likely to allow you to lay off your bilingual staffers -- at least not right away. But applied with discrimination and lots of preparation, translation tools can be fantastic productivity aids. And researchers say new approaches to this old discipline are greatly improving the performance of the tools. Ford Motor Co. began using 'machine translation' software in 1998 and has so far translated 5 million automobile assembly instructions into Spanish, German, Portuguese and Mexican Spanish. Assembly manuals are updated in English every day, and their translations -- some 5,000 pages a day -- are beamed overnight to plants around the world. 'It wouldn’t be feasible to do this all manually,' says Nestor Rychtyckyj, a technical specialist in artificial intelligence (AI) at Ford. ... Systran’s tool uses a tried-and-true translation technique called rules-based translation. ... Statistical machine translation is a newer technique that’s not yet in widespread use. It uses collections of documents and their translations to 'train' software. Over time, these data-driven systems 'learn' what makes a good translation and what doesn’t and then use probability and statistics to decide which of several possible translations of a given word or phrase is most likely correct based on context. ... 'The new direction in the research community is to see how you can combine these purely statistical techniques with some linguistic knowledge,' says Steve Richardson, a senior researcher at Microsoft. 'It’s modeling the rules with the statistical methods.' ... Automated translation in the corporate world succeeds to the extent that users are willing to carefully customize systems to their unique needs and vocabularies, he says. And the technology is most appropriate when translations don’t have to be perfect. 'We have serviced thousands and thousands of customers with articles we have machine-translated,' Richardson says. 'It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough. They get an answer without calling in. What’s that worth to the company' ... [H]ybrid systems, which combine translation memories and machine translation based on rules or statistics or both, are the wave of the future, researchers say, and they are becoming more sophisticated and complex. ... In essence, SRI’s approach is to do machine translations with the best available rules-based and statistical-based systems, and then have another system that 'adjudicates' among them in real time to find the best translation." August 9, 2007: Air Quality Information Service, Europe. Technology News Daily. "Weather forecasters can tell you if the sun is going to shine or if it is going to rain, but they rarely make predictions about something that may be even more important: the quality of the air we breathe. A new air quality information service, unlike any developed to date, promises to make obtaining data about pollution levels as easy as finding out tomorrow’s temperature. ... The Marquis system takes raw data from air quality monitoring stations – so far covering five European regions -- and uses advanced assessment and interpretation models incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning to generate information and predictions on air conditions. That information is then adapted to meet the requirements of individual end users by changing the way it is displayed -- from text to graphs and pictograms -- and translating it into their language. 'We are the first project in this field to use natural language processing. Our multilingual text processor generates information for all communication media from scratch, using generation grammars, instead of using a prefabricated response based on templates,' [Leo] Wanner explains." August 4, 2007 [issue date]: Sharing a joke could help man and robot interact. By Michael Reilly. New Scientist (Issue 2615: page 26). "A man walks into a bar: 'Ouch!' You might not find it funny, but at least you got the joke. That's more than can be said for computers, which, despite radical advances in artificial intelligence, remain notably devoid of a funny bone. Previously AI researchers have tended not to try mimicking humour, largely because the human sense of humour is so subjective and complex, making it difficult to program. Now Julia Taylor and Lawrence Mazlack of the University of Cincinnati in Ohio have built a computer program or 'bot' that is able to get a specific type of joke - one whose crux is a simple pun. ... Taylor presented the bot at the American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference in Vancouver, Canada, last week but stresses that it does still miss some puns. ... Meanwhile Rada Mihalcea and colleagues at the University of North Texas in Denton have built a different kind of humour-spotting bot."
>>> Humor, Natural Language Processing, Ontologies, Representation August 2007: The Next Big Thing? The state of the Arab Internet. By Tom Gara. Business Today Egypt. "When speaking to website owners and users as research for this article, the lack of a decent Arabic search engine was repeatedly cited as a bottleneck for the development of the Arabic internet. ... One Egyptian company hoping to capitalize on the opportunities available for an Arabic search engine is Taya IT. An upstart operation founded by three Egyptian entrepreneurs with a long history in business, science and technology, Taya has put extensive work into the semantics and quirks of the Arabic language, creating in the process what they believe is the best Arabic language search and translation software available. ... [Khaled] Wahba cites the search engine’s extensive use of natural language processing, a field of artificial intelligence that explores the ability of computers to understand languages, as a key advantage. ... Taya’s search engine can be found at www.tayait.com, and will be officially launched on August 6."
>>> Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, Natural Language Processing, Applications August 2007 [issue date]: Playing It by Ear - A machine-listening system that understands three speakers at once. By Tim Hornyak. Scientific American (subscription req'd). "Japanese researchers [led by Hiroshi G. Okuno of Kyoto University] have spent five years developing a humanoid robot system that can understand and respond to simultaneous speakers. ... Such auditory powers mark a fundamental challenge in artificial intelligence - how to teach machines to pick out significant sounds amid the hubbub. This is known as the cocktail party effect...." July 27, 2007: Building a Better Search Engine - A new natural-language system is based on 30 years of research at PARC. By Michael Reisman. Technology Review. "Powerset, Inc., based in San Francisco, is on the verge of offering an innovative natural-language search engine, based on linguistic research at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The engine does more than merely accept queries asked in the form of a question. The company claims that the engine finds the best answer by considering the meaning and context of the question and related Web pages. ... A key component of the search engine is a deep natural-language processing system that extracts the relationships between words; the system was developed from PARC's Xerox Linguistic Environment (XLE) platform. ... The company plans to release demo versions of the search engine on its Powerlabs website, where consumers can test-drive the product beginning in September. ... IBM is also in the midst of developing a semantic search engine, code-named Avatar, which is targeted at enterprise and corporate customers; it's currently in beta testing within IBM." July 16, 2007: Rise of Roboethics - Grappling with the implications of an artificially intelligent culture. By Lee Billings. Seed. "The close timing of these three developments [in Japan and South Korea, and an update from EURON] reflects a sudden upswing in international awareness that the pace of progress in robotics is rapidly propelling these fields into uncharted ethical realms. Gianmarco Veruggio, the Genoa University roboticist who organized the first international roboethics conference in 2004, says, 'We are close to a robotics invasion.' ... Of course, we've been grappling with the idea of physical and emotional dependence on our artificial creations since at least the time of the Romans. ... A scientific understanding of human response to social robots began with MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum's landmark experiments in 1966. ... Weizenbaum was deeply troubled by what he discovered during his experiments with ELIZA: Some of his students exhibited strong emotional connections to the program ... a phenomenon now known as the 'Eliza Effect.' ... Social scientist Sherry Turkle, the director of MIT's Initiative on Technology and Self and one of Weizenbaum's former colleagues, calls ELIZA and its ilk 'relational artifacts'.... [Brian] Scassellati points out that the effects of social robots move beyond the psychological; there is a sociological effect on us as a culture. 'There was a huge outcry when Sony decided not to continue producing the AIBO....'" July 16, 2007: The Future of Search - The head of Google Research talks about his group's projects. By Kate Greene. Technology Review. "Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, is an expert ace at building machines that answer tough questions. An authority in programming languages and artificial intelligence, he has written an oft-cited book on AI (Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach), has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California, and was the head of computational sciences at NASA. In 2001, Norvig came to Google to be the director of search quality. Four years later, he became Google's director of research, overseeing about 100 researchers who investigate topics that range from networking to machine translation. Technology Review spoke with Norvig to get a hint of what we can expect from search technology in the years to come. Technology Review: What does Google Research do? ... TR: What are the outstanding problems in search? ... TR: Your expertise is in artificial intelligence. Isn't Google, at its core, an artificial-intelligence company using machine-learning algorithms to search the Web, recognize speech, and match advertising with keywords? ..." July 2007 [issue date]: A Little Privacy, Please - Computer scientist Latanya Sweeney helps to save confidentiality with "anonymizing" programs, "deidentifiers" and other clever algorithms. Whether they are enough, however, is another question. By Chip Walter. Scientific American. "Certainly privacy is under siege, and that, [Latanya Sweeney] says, is bad. Debates rage over the Patriot Act and data mining at the federal level, and states have a hodgepodge of reactive laws that swing between ensuring privacy and increasing security. Although identity theft began a slow decline in 2002, one recent study revealed that 8.4 million U.S. adults still suffered some form of identity fraud in 2006. ... All this has kept Sweeney and her team [at Carnegie Mellon University's Laboratory for International Data Privacy] busy the past six years wrestling some of today’s thorniest confidentiality issues to the mat -- identity theft, medical privacy and the rapid expansion of camera surveillance among them. ... Another program 'anonymizes' identities. It was originally developed for the Department of Defense after the 9/11 attacks to help locate potential terrorists while still protecting the privacy of innocent citizens. The program prevents surveillance cameras from revealing an identity until authorities show they need the images to prosecute a crime. ... The clever algorithms at the heart of Sweeney’s lab go back to her days growing up in Nashville, when she would daydream about ways to create an artificially intelligent black box that she could talk to. ... Sweeney wrote a program called Scrub System that tapped her expertise in artificial intelligence to ingeniously search patient records, treatment notes and letters between physicians. Standard search-and-replace software had generally found 30 to 60 percent of personal, identifying information. Scrub System 'understands' what constitutes a name, address or phone number and eliminates 99 to 100 percent of the revealing data."
>>> Ethical & Social Implications, Data Mining, Law Enforcement, Medicine, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students), Applications, Interviews June 25, 2007: Computers Read News, And Trade on It Quickly. By Kevin Plumberg. Reuters / also available from The New York Times. "It takes a person about 10 minutes to read a 2,500-word, front-page feature story in the Wall Street Journal. Computer programs increasingly being used by investors to parse news stories can process one in about three one-hundredths of a second. ... Rather than just highlight words or phrases, some of the most sophisticated news mining platforms can take multiple strands of news from wire agencies and Web sites and score the significance of various items." June 21, 2007: Algorithmic trading - Ahead of the tape. The best newsreaders may soon be computers. The Economist. "As the time taken to process computer-generated trades falls to thousandths of a second, algorithms are being created to react to news headlines faster than the eye can scan them. Dow Jones and Reuters, the news providers, now offer electronically 'tagged' news products that algorithms pick up to make programmed trading decisions. (Dow Jones claims the business is so secretive that it cannot divulge details of customers.) Britain's Financial Services Authority, a regulator, also hopes to use algorithms to comb through trading data to find hints of suspicious activity, which it reckons takes place before about a quarter of all takeover announcements. Algorithmic trading accounts for a third of all share trades in America and the Aite Group, a consultancy, reckons it will make up more than half the share volumes and a fifth of options trades by 2010. ... According to TowerGroup, a research firm, $480m is likely to be spent in America this year on developing technology for algorithmic trading. ... Now that trading algorithms are reading the news, are they also getting the story faster than journalists can? " June 21, 2007: Xerox Aims to Improve Search Results - Xerox has developed FactSpotter, a search tool that analyzes written language rather than looking for keywords. By Peter Sayer. IDG News Service | PC World. "The tool, FactSpotter, analyzes the underlying grammar of a text in order to infer additional information, such as whether ambiguous words are being used as nouns or verbs, or to whom a pronoun refers, said Fridirique Segond, who manages the parsing and semantics research group at Xerox Research Center Europe near Grenoble, France. ... One of the first groups to use FactSpotter will be Xerox Litigation Services, which next year will build it into a suite of 'e-discovery' software for the legal profession, Segond said."
>>> Information Retrieval, Law, Natural Language Understanding, Cognitive Science, Natural Language Processing, Data Mining, Applications June 21, 2007: Searching Sportscasts - A new way to search video could help fans find footage. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. Technology Review. "A new kind of visual-search engine has been developed to automatically scour sports footage for clips showing specific types of action and events. According to its creators, borrowing a few tricks from the field of machine translation seems to make all the difference in improving the accuracy of video search. ... To cope with growing video repositories, cutting-edge systems are now emerging that use automatic speech recognition (ASR) to try to improve the search accuracy by generating text transcripts. ... [Michael] Fleischman and Deb Roy, director of MIT's Cognitive Machines Group, developed a system that provides a way to associate search terms with aspects of the video, and not just with what is being said as the video plays. ... Using speech and visual information together is a powerful combination for machine learning, [David] Hogg says. 'In machine learning, it is very likely to be easier the more information there is available about each situation.' Speech can help remove ambiguities in visual data, and visual data can help disambiguate speech, says Richard Stern, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. It's a natural marriage, he says, but one that's just beginning to emerge." June 7, 2007: Are you talking to me? Speech recognition - Technology that understands human speech could be about to enter the mainstream. The Economist Technology Quarterly. "Speech recognition has taken a long time to move from the laboratory to the marketplace. Researchers at Bell Labs first developed a system that recognised numbers spoken over a telephone in 1952, but in the ensuing decades the technology has generally offered more promise than product, more science fiction than function. ... Optimistic forecasts from market-research firms also suggest that the technology is on the rise. ... An area of great interest at the moment is in that of voice-driven 'mobile search' technology, in which search terms are spoken into a mobile device rather than typed in using a tiny keyboard. ... The resulting lower cost and greater reliability mean that speech-based systems can even save companies money. Last August, for example, Lloyds TSB, a British bank, switched all of its 70m annual incoming calls over to a speech-recognition system based on technology from Nuance and Nortel, a Canadian telecoms-equipment firm. ... Another promising area is in-car use. ... There are military uses, too. ..." June 4, 2007: UIC working on making virtual chats a reality. By Jon Van. Chicago Tribune. "In five or six years, you probably will be able to chat face-to-face with your favorite actor, musician or politician whenever you feel like it. The technology for such virtual, three-dimensional visits mostly exists or is being developed by video game companies. Now, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago are at work to apply this to virtual conversations. Working with colleagues at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, the computer scientists have a three-year, half-million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation to do the job. ... 'The goal is to combine artificial intelligence with the latest advanced computer graphics and video game technology to enable us to create historical archives of people beyond what can be achieved using traditional text, audio and video footage,' Leigh said. The technology developed for this project also should be valuable in helping computers better understand what the people using them want. ... 'It could be a whole new way of interacting with computers,' said Leigh. 'We're moving toward interfaces that learn about us.'" May 24, 2007: Found in Translation - Search Engines Make It Easier To Mine Foreign Content; French Lyrics in English. By Jessica E. Vascellaro. The Wall Street Journal Online. "Linguistically speaking, the World Wide Web has a way to go to live up to its name. As the number of Internet users expands globally, most consumers can still only access content in their native language, unless, like Mr. [Alexander] Bevilacqua, they are multilingual. But now, well-known search companies are trying to help bridge those language gaps with more sophisticated language-translation tools aiming to provide the most comprehensive search results no matter what language the user is searching in. ... [T]he relative share of the searchable Web that is in English is falling fast, roughly estimated at around 30% to 40%, according to Roger Bohn, a professor at the University of California in San Diego, requiring search engines to find a way to translate more pages faster or risk falling behind. ... Google Inc., of Mountain View, Calif., yesterday began to roll out a translation service that allows users to search Web pages in a dozen different languages but still enter their query -- and view their results -- in the language with which they are most familiar. ... Rival Yahoo Inc. is taking a more human-intensive approach based on its Yahoo Answers service, which is available in nearly a dozen languages, including Chinese, French and Portuguese and soon, Vietnamese and Thai. ... Meanwhile, Microsoft Corp. is working on improving its natural-language processing software that translates documents by extracting implied meanings behind a string of phrases or words as opposed to translating each word literally." May 24, 2007: Google introduces search translation tools. By Michael Liedtke. Associated Press / available from USATODAY.com. "Google planned to introduce a feature Wednesday that automatically translates Internet search requests and results in 12 languages, underscoring the rapidly growing company's ambitions outside the United States. The tools allow Google's users to enter search requests in their native languages and then choose to have the phrases as well as the accompanying results automatically translated into another language. Users can then click on a link and have the entire Web page translated through a service that Google had already been offering. ... Yahoo, which runs the Web's second largest search engine behind Google, already offers a service that has been automatically translating search results in Germany, France and Japan since 2005, spokeswoman Kathryn Kelly said. The Sunnyvale-based company also offers translation tools through its BabelFish site." May 23, 3007: Helping Citizens Participate in Government Rule-Making. Newswise (source: Cornell University). "At least 160 federal agencies churn out rules and regulations -- more than 4,000 a year -- from specifying the height of steps on buses for the disabled to the method of calculating food's fiber content. Before finalizing a rule, government agencies are required to solicit and consider public comment.... To help the agencies deal with rulemaking in the Internet age and make the process more accessible to the public, Cornell scientists and legal experts have created the Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative (CeRI).... The interdisciplinary collaboration involves Cynthia Farina, professor of law; Claire Cardie, professor of computing and information science; Erica Wagner, assistant professor of marketing strategy and information technology; and Thomas Bruce, director of the Cornell Legal Information Institute. ... Cardie, an expert in natural language processing, is developing computer programs to sift and categorize the masses of comments. First, agency staff will highlight sentences in the comments that connect with various issues. Over time, the computer will learn the rules of classification and take over. 'People can classify all of the phrases and sentences in about 40 to 50 comments per day, depending on length,' Cardie says. 'Software takes just seconds to classify all of the phrases and sentences in one document.'" May 22, 2007: If I only had a brain - Androids, it seems, have appearance in the bag. But is their intelligence only skin-deep? By Peter Spinks. The Sydney Morning Herald. "Androids - robots that resemble humans - are increasingly popular exhibits at robotics conferences and trade shows worldwide. Unlike humanoids, which have two arms and two legs but look more like machines than people, androids are appealing because they seem so much like us. Enticed by research suggesting that people relate better to robots the more they resemble humans, roboticists are developing androids that one day might assist in aged care and eventually supersede servile robotic home helps, such as automated floor-crawling vacuum cleaners. 'The appearance of androids is important and we cannot ignore its effect in communication,' says Professor [Hiroshi] Ishiguro, a pioneer in android science, which combines cutting-edge research in robotics with slow but sure advances in cognitive psychology. 'My purpose is to understand humans by building androids . . . The practical use of androids is a kind of by-product.' Until recently, roboticists had not taken them seriously, regarding androids largely as electronic puppets. ... The inability of androids to communicate intelligently with humans is their biggest bugbear. They may speak in limited ways on specific topics, but cannot converse widely and certainly not on abstract subjects such as philosophy. In short, they're a long way from passing the legendary Turing test, described in 1950 by British mathematician Alan Turing. ... Despite androids' limited communication skills, their physical make-up and prowess - from skin to limbs, muscles to motion - are progressing in leaps and bounds. ... How might tomorrow's androids function? In years to come, roboticists expect that advanced systems - incorporating neural networks, genetic algorithms and fuzzy logic - will run on an assortment of very small, very fast processors, each performing a specific task in parallel and communicating simultaneously over lightning-fast networks. ... A promising area of research, already under way at some labs, involves equipping robots with mood-detection software and giving them rudimentary forms of social and emotional intelligence. This might help them match a person's emotional state. ... Q&A Indulging in some crystal-gazing, Peter Spinks asked Paul Davies what a hypothetical cutting-edge android - let's call it 'Jim' - might be capable of doing in 2045. Jim would be a sophisticated NASA machine to assist astronauts on missions to Mars. ... " May 20, 2007: Reaping Results: Data-Mining Goes Mainstream. By Steve Lohr. The New York Times. "The Richmond experience is part of a wave of sophisticated computing and mathematical analytics that is moving into the mainstream. Fueling the trend are the digitization of information, ever faster and cheaper computing, and the explosion of online networks and data collection. The results, says Jon M. Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University, are a 'revolution in measurement' and the 'introduction of computing and algorithmic processes into the social sciences in a big way.' The phenomenon is strikingly evident in economics, business and crime prevention. ... Big retailers like Wal-Mart Stores and Kohl’s use today’s advanced computing and math to more accurately predict what sizes of clothes should go to what stores. Harrah’s and other casinos decipher slot-machine results to optimize customer traffic and profits, and they use face-recognition software to identify people with criminal records. And Stockholm and other cities use traffic data and patterns to determine 'congestion pricing.' In the financial industry, Capital One and other banks mine all kinds of transaction data to identify, and stop, fraudulent transactions. ... In the last year or so, Whirlpool, the appliance maker, has begun using new analytics software to automatically scan warranty reports as well as manufacturing, supplier, sales and service data to try to further trim its warranty costs and improve quality." May 17, 2007: Black Gold, Texas Tea - How energy exploration has new potential when information and geography are linked. By Kathryn Sutter. Directions Magazine. "Oil and gas exploration relies on decades' worth of documents that have been generated and/or purchased by oil companies to aid in exploration, drilling, production and all facets of upstream activities. As a result, energy companies invest billions of dollars each year gathering and processing data contained within these documents. Organizing these data can translate into a competitive advantage for the exploration of natural resources. ... According to the National Science Foundation, approximately 80% of information stored within an enterprise is 'unstructured' content that does not fit properly into a relational database. Unstructured content includes information found in emails, messages, Web pages, reports, analysis, well and field reviews and correspondence. ... Combining geography with text search allows users to find documents that mention specific words or phrases and references to places contained inside the map window. The technology employs a geospatial, natural language processing engine for an enterprise infrastructure. What this means is that it is able to analyze, extract and georeference both structured and unstructured content for names, places and other kinds of geographic references. May 14, 2007: Grading system put to the test. By Linda Conner Lambeck. The Connecticut Post Online. "Bridgeport is one of a handful of communities statewide selected for a pilot program using the computerized system to grade writing assignments. ... The program is much more sophisticated than the typical spell-check, combining artificial intelligence and the background to draw on thousands of human-scored essays so that it can offer critiques such as: 'You had a good opening sentence, but need to work on your transition between paragraphs.' If successful, the system could greatly increase the number of open-ended responses to questions on the Connecticut Mastery Test and perhaps eliminate the potential for human scoring errors that have plagued the state in recent years. 'Do I think it will encourage writing? Absolutely,' added Curiale Principal Milagros Vizcarrondo." May 10, 2007: Live Ink offers better way to read text online. By Mark Coker. VentureBeat. "When our ancestors first invented written language about 5,000 years ago, they unfortunately didn’t have armies of neuroscientists standing by to tell them block type was the wrong way to format their papyrus rolls. But fret not. Help is on the way. Walker Reading Technologies’ CEO and co-founder, Randall Walker MD, believes he and his team have developed a solution with a product called Live Ink that allows online publishers to improve reading speed and comprehension. Live Ink works by analyzing written language for meaning and language structure, and then applies algorithms that reformat the text into a series of short, cascading phrases. It breaks complex syntax into simpler syntax, which makes it easier for the brain to absorb the material. The company presented its latest findings yesterday at the sold out Digital Book 2007 conference here in New York." May 3, 2007: I Chat, Therefore I Am... Can a smooth-talking robot initiate good conversation, generate witty responses, and reveal profound thoughts? See what happens when two chatbots speak to each other. From Discover Magazine's special issue, The Brain: An Owner's Manual. "'Can machines think?' In 1950 mathematician Alan Turing pondered this question and invented an elegant game to answer it: Let a human chat via Teletype with a computer and another human; if the person can’t determine which is the computer, then it meets Turing’s standards for 'thinking.' In recent years Turing’s game has taken on a life of its own in cyberspace, thanks to artificial intelligence inventors worldwide who have produced dozens of 'chatbots' that anyone can talk to." 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." May 2007: Search for Tomorrow. By Max Chafkin. Inc. Magazine. "Powerset and Hakia, start-ups based in San Francisco and New York City, respectively, are developing 'natural language' technologies that aim to absorb the human nuances of a user's query. ... Using artificial intelligence technology from Xerox's (NYSE:XRX) famed Palo Alto Research Center, Powerset will debut later this year. The beta version of Hakia is already online, and it seems to work as promised. Type in 'Which club does Tiger Woods use?' and Hakia provides equipment-related results and serves you an ad for Callaway (NYSE:ELY). Google responds to the same search terms by offering you information on Tiger Woods video games. Natural language technology raises some questions. A site that handles searches better than Google could end up processing fewer of them. Would fewer searches yield less ad revenue? Plus, both Hakia and Powerset acknowledge that natural language sites are expensive to build and chug processing power. Are they doomed to lower profit margins? 'The short answer is we'll take them,' says Powerset founder and CEO Barney Pell." April 20, 2007: Your Virtual Clone - Chatterbots from MyCyberTwin can respond to questions about you when you're not online. By Wade Roush. Technology Review. "Historians of artificial intelligence never talk about AI's progress in the 1960s without a reference to Eliza, the first virtual personality. Eliza was a text-chat program written in 1966 by MIT AI expert Joseph Weizenbaum to parody a Rogerian psychotherapist, largely by turning every statement by the 'patient' back into a question. ... Now there's a Web-based service that, in essence, lets you set up your own Eliza and train it to mimic your own personality. No one will be fooled into thinking it's you, but MyCyberTwin, launched earlier this month, does a decent job of acting as your stand-in or virtual public-relations agent when you're not reachable. ... Of course, academic and corporate AI experts have built more-advanced chatterbots in hopes of one day passing the so-called Turing test by convincing human judges that a machine is human. Since 1991, the annual Loebner Prize competition has offered $25,000 to the programmer of the first chatterbot that passes this test in a text-only conversation; so far, the prize has gone unclaimed. But Jabberwacky, the winner of the smaller $2,000 prize for the most human-seeming chatterbot in 2005 and 2006, is capable of deep and sometimes bizarre conversations that make a cybertwin sound rather vacant. ... 'People are spending a lot of time putting their personalities online,' [Liesl] Capper notes, whether through their MySpace pages, blogs, or avatars in virtual worlds such as Second Life." 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." April 6,2007: New technology lets you read your voice mail - Several companies are betting on voice-recognition applications that transcribe those rambling messages into e-mail or text messages. By Marguerite Reardon. CNET News.com. "Why listen to your voice mail messages when you can read them? That's what a new crop of companies is asking--they're developing software that turns voice mail messages into transcribed e-mail or text messages. ... One indication that voice-recognition technology is getting hot is the recent Microsoft/Tellme deal. In March, Microsoft said it would buy privately held speech-recognition maker Tellme Networks in a deal believed to be in the range of $800 million. Tellme recently started testing a cell phone application that allows people to say out loud the information they are looking for and have data sent to their phone. 'Voice is still the killer application for any phone,' said Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research. 'And it is underappreciated as an opportunity and underutilized for development of new services. Carriers can use voice applications to drive data-oriented experiences.' ... [Jill Aldort,] agrees that voice recognition services are going to be hot, especially services like the one offered by Tellme, which can help people find information on the fly." April 3, 2007: IBM gives U.S. military $45M in translation tech. By Brian Bergstein. The Associated Press / available from USATODAY.com. "To honor an employee's son who was badly wounded in Iraq, IBM plans to give the U.S. military $45 million worth of Arabic-English translation technology that the Pentagon had been testing for possible purchase. ... IBM would not make [CEO Samuel] Palmisano available for comment. But according to other IBM executives, Palmisano had heard from several IBM employees who have returned from active duty in Iraq that a shortage of Arabic translators has severely hampered U.S. forces' efforts to communicate. With that and Ecker's experience in mind, Palmisano called and wrote Bush, offering to make IBM's Multilingual Automatic Speech Translator software, known as MASTOR, 'immediately available for use by our forces in Iraq."'Palmisano offered 10,000 copies of the MASTOR software and 1,000 devices equipped with it, plus training and technical support. ... It is also worth noting that MASTOR has been undergoing testing by the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command, in addition to a rival two-way translation technology known as IraqComm from non-profit SRI International. Both systems take English or Arabic that is spoken into a computer microphone, translate it into the other language and utter it through the machine's speakers." April 3, 2007: Online CyberTwin will talk on owner's behalf. By Sam Holmes. Herald Sun. "An Australian company has found a way for bloggers to chat with their friends online without having to be anywhere near a computer or communications device. Sydney-based outfit MyCyberTwin.com has developed an application that uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to simulate intelligent conversations. While such applications, known as chatterbots, have been around for a couple of decades now, MyCyberTwin is one of the first programs to allow users to actively educate their online personas to best suit their own. ... While the program is some way off recreating the depth and coherence of a conversation with a real human, Ms [Liesl] Capper says it opens up AI technology to the ordinary internet users." March 29, 2007: Rough, but there's little lost in Google translation. By Adam Tanner. Reuters / available from The New Zealand Herald / also available from The Star (Google seeks world of instant translations) and CNNMoney.com (Google speaking everyone's language). "In Google's vision of the future, people will be able to translate documents instantly into the world's main languages, with machine logic rather than expert linguists leading the way. Google's approach, called statistical machine translation, differs from past efforts in that it sidesteps language experts who programme grammatical rules and dictionaries into computers. Instead, Google feeds documents that humans have already translated into two languages and then relies on computers to discern patterns for future translations. ... Google chairman Eric Schmidt also sees broad consequences in a world with easy translations. 'What happens when we have 100 languages in simultaneous translation? Google and other companies are working on statistical machine translation so that we can, on demand, translate everything all the time,' he told a conference this year. 'Many, many societies have operated in language-defined communities where they really don't understand and are not particularly sympathetic to other peoples' views because of the barrier of language. We're about to have that breakthrough and it is a huge thing.'" March 28, 2007: System lets troops practice working with virtual interpreter. By Bill Hess. Sierra Vista Herald & The Bisbee Daily Review. "As the war on terrorism continues, GIs need faster capabilities to learn their jobs, such as becoming interrogators. General Dynamics C4 Systems of Orlando, Fla., has stepped up to provide a system for which student soldiers can interact with a virtual, screen-projected cast of characters. On Tuesday, the government contractor displayed its Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Tactical Proficiency Trainer, also known as a Human Intelligence Control Cell, a system that uses speech recognition, artificial intelligence and computer synthesized speech to train interrogators, at the Training and Doctrine Command Cultural Awareness Summit at The Palms. ... The avatars, as the characters on the screen are called, can be modified to add to or delete from a program to help a student react to changing circumstances, Lansverk said. While avatar is a computer word, its root is from Sanskrit, meaning god-like creatures. ... 'We’re learning from the gaming industry. But these are big-time games,' [Darryl Hackett] said." March 21, 2007: New restaurant review system launches online - Residents can now post their own reviews of local restaurants, make reservations and read reviews from across the Web. By Jay Thorwaldson. Palo Alto Online. "Visitors to Palo Alto Online, the Palo Alto Weekly's community Web site, can now rate local restaurants and access reviews written by both professional and amateur reviewers from across the Internet. The new feature, which can be found here, has been developed by a Palo Alto start-up company called BooRah, which plans to eventually roll out the system nationally. ... [T]he system behind BooRah is a highly sophisticated 'natural language processing' (NLP) technology. NLP automatically compiles evaluations of restaurants (or about anything else, such as hotels, local shops, movies or professional services) from the Internet. NLP is a specific area of the artificial intelligence field of research and development." March 12, 2007: Gained in translation - New trainer will aid Army intelligence analysts. Federal Times. "The Army’s Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation and General Dynamics C4 Systems are developing a simulator that allows intelligence personnel to work with virtual translators and talk with virtual people programmed to act like the real ones. The new trainer, called a human intelligence control cell (HCC), is intended to incorporate the latest advancements in speech recognition, speech synthesis and artificial intelligence. ... The computer’s speech recognition component translates the soldier’s questions to digital text, which is then processed by an artificial intelligence engine, which comes up with a response. That response is translated into the appropriate language, 'spoken' by the virtual local and 'translated' by the virtual translator." March 9, 2007: Introducing the blogbot. The Engineer Online. "NEC Corporation has developed a system for automatically creating multimedia blogs by talking to a speech recognition enabled robot which helps illustrate the day’s events. ... It integrates large-vocabulary, continuous speech recognition technology, which converts the speech content into text and extracts important keywords, and natural language text retrieval technology, which enables searching of contents on the internet." March 5, 2007: Carnegie Mellon hosts national linguistics olympiad - High school students in four cities will take on linguistics problems for a spot in the international competition. By Jun Xian Leong. The Tartan Online (Volume 101, Issue 19). "The first-ever North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NAMCLO) will be held in Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Ithaca, as well as online for students who are unable to attend these venues, on March 29. ... Computational linguistics is the study of natural language from a computational perspective. The field involves studying applications of computers in language interpretation, as well as analysis of languages in a logical and systematic form. ... [Thomas] Payne said that the goals of computational linguistics include machine translation between natural languages, artificial intelligence, handwriting and voice recognition, and text analysis and processing. The problems presented during NAMCLO will be representative of the challenges computational linguists face. ... The competition’s goal is to unearth new talents in linguistics among high school students, as well as to heighten student awareness of linguistics. ... The four best students nationwide will represent the United States at the International Linguistics Olympiad, which will be held in St. Petersburg, Russia, in early August." February 28, 2007: Is a 'Google killer' on the horizon? Industry leaders to little-known contenders are trying to develop easier ways for Web users to find what they're looking for. By Gregory M. Lamb. The Christian Science Monitor. "If a competitor could develop a system that truly understood ordinary human language -- responding accurately to a request such as 'I want to find the best pizza place in my area that's open on Sunday evening'– that would be a huge improvement over keyword searches, [Philipp Lenssen] says. But to understand 'natural language,' computers must be equipped with artificial intelligence (AI). One of Google's top priorities is to be the leader in AI, according to an internal Google document leaked to Lenssen last year. Speaking to a group of scientists in San Francisco earlier this month, Google cofounder Larry Page said, 'My prediction is that when AI happens, it's going to be a lot of computation and not so much ... clever algorithms [as] brute computing power.' And AI may be coming soon, he adds. 'I don't think it's [as] far off as people think.' Powerset Inc., a San Francisco-based start-up, is going the 'clever algorithm' route, using natural-language technology developed at the Palo Alto (Calif.) Research Center." February 27, 2007: European research goes for gold. By Jonathan Amos. BBC News. "The European Research Council (ERC) has been given a budget of 7.5bn euros (£5bn) to 2013, and will focus solely on fundamental, or 'blue skies', study. ... [German Chancellor, Dr Angela Merkel] said the Council would become 'a champion's league for research', giving scientists the freedom to be creative and innovative. ... [UK's Sheffield University] has put in place an administrative structure it believes can support young researchers who want to set up their own investigation teams - people like Dr Kalina Bontcheva, who works in the university's computer science department. Dr Bontcheva's expertise is in natural language processing: she develops advanced search tools that enable documents and databases to be sifted for the most relevant information. She is putting together an ERC application that would allow her to investigate more user-friendly ways of interfacing a computer. This would involve talking to 'virtual characters'." February 27, 2007: European research goes for gold. By Jonathan Amos. BBC News. "The European Research Council (ERC) has been given a budget of 7.5bn euros (£5bn) to 2013, and will focus solely on fundamental, or 'blue skies', study. ... [German Chancellor, Dr Angela Merkel] said the Council would become 'a champion's league for research', giving scientists the freedom to be creative and innovative. ... [UK's Sheffield University] has put in place an administrative structure it believes can support young researchers who want to set up their own investigation teams - people like Dr Kalina Bontcheva, who works in the university's computer science department. Dr Bontcheva's expertise is in natural language processing: she develops advanced search tools that enable documents and databases to be sifted for the most relevant information. She is putting together an ERC application that would allow her to investigate more user-friendly ways of interfacing a computer. This would involve talking to 'virtual characters'." February 23, 2007: A political agenda for multilingualism. Press Release from EUROPA [the portal site of the European Union]. "Linguistic diversity is a daily reality of the European Union. The European Commission is committed to preserving and promoting this key feature. The Commissioner's mandate will have as main objectives defining the contribution of multilingualism.... 1. Contribution to competitiveness, growth and better jobs ... A better understanding of the potential of new technologies to attract and train language learners is needed; hence, a study on new technologies and linguistic diversity will be launched in 2007. Moreover, research in new technologies for language learning and the use of artificial intelligence as a tool for translation and interpretation should be encouraged." February 21, 2007: Software That Will This Sentence Fix - Israel-based WhiteSmoke has devised a program that, by checking against a vast database, makes English text more fluent. Its top market? The U.S. By Neal Sandler. BusinessWeek.com. "An Israeli software company called WhiteSmoke has devised a software tool that uses artificial intelligence to scan written English text and suggest ways to make it stronger, clearer, and more fluent. Far more than just a spelling and grammar checker, like the ones built into Microsoft (MSFT) Word, WhiteSmoke performs a black art known as 'text enrichment.' In effect, the software parses your documents -- including e-mails, letters, and even legal contracts -- against a vast database of commonly accepted usage patterns to ensure that the writing is as good as possible." February 20, 2007: Darpa Chief Speaks. Noah Shachtman interviews Tony Tether. Wired's Danger Room blog. "NS: And how about something that maybe isn't on the battlefield right this second, but maybe just on the horizon? TT: Well, we are working hard. One problem is language. We realized that we're either going to have to teach all of our soldiers 16 different languages or come up with the technology to do so, to help them out. When 2001 came we had already been working on a Phraselator, which is a [simple,] one-way [translation] device. One-way in that it has phrases in it that in any of eight different languages -- ... NS: Do you know of anything that Darpa's working on right now that's really game changing? TT: Yes -- our cognitive program. The cognitive program's whole purpose in life is really to increase the tooth-to-tail ratio [military-speak for the number of combat troops to the number of support troops]. ... Our cognitive program's whole aim is to have a computer 'learn you,' as opposed to you having to learn the computer. ... The last real attempt -- other than this attempt now in the last four or five years -- was in the '80s. We had a program called the Strategic Computing Program. And that Strategic Computing Program showed a pyramid. And in that pyramid were many technologies that had to be developed -- microelectronics to get things smaller, memories larger, computers faster. But it all was leading toward coming up with a cognitive computer, although at that time we called it artificial intelligence. We did a great job on the component technology, but the architecture for the cognitive part went down a path that was more neural nets, expert systems. And they were OK for what they did. You know, if you built yourself an expert system or a neural net for a specific situation it worked quite well, but it was very fragile. If you got off of that, it crashed. It was back to the two-way translator for the checkpoint -- don't ask me what your golf game is like. Well, in Darpa fashion, we stopped in the late '80s or early '90s. Since the '90s to now, our ability to create algorithms that can reason -- can more abstractly reason -- about a problem and come up with answers, and also remember what they did using Bayesian techniques and changing values, has really advanced. I mean, it tremendously advanced in the past -- from the '90s to, say, the early 2000s. At the same time, computers became more powerful. ... NS: Let's change gears a little bit and talk about the challenges. TT: Challenges? NS: You know, the prizes [-- like Darpa's $2 million all-robot rally, the Grand Challenge.]. ..." February 19, 2007: ‘Star’ power Army uses artificial intelligence to lure new recruits. By William Jackson. GCN [Government Computer News]. "The Army has launched a virtual guide to lead visitors through its recruiting Web site, using artificial intelligence to replace online chat with live recruiters. Accurate answers by 'Sgt. Star' (for Strong, Trained And Ready) to users’ questions not only have reduced the number of live chat sessions but also increased traffic to www.goarmy.com and nearly quadrupled the length of the average visit since his rollout last August. At a time when the Army is facing growing challenges in meeting its recruiting goals, Sgt. Star appeals to a key demographic of young, tech-savvy males being sought by the service, said Gary Bishop, deputy director of the Strategic Outreach Directorate of the Army’s Accessions Command. ... The core technology is distinguished by the ability to understand natural language and to learn over time." February 16, 2007: Mark my words. The Economist. "For those who put their faith in technology, therefore, it was encouraging to hear Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, demonstrate his linguistic skills a few weeks ago with a palm-sized gizmo that provided instantaneous translations of spoken Japanese into near-flawless English and Chinese. ... [T]he fact that a pocket-sized device could interpret tourist-type phrases accurately and on the fly, from one language to several others, says much about the improvements that have been made lately in machine translation. This device, developed by the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International near Kyoto.... Machine translation has been an elusive goal since the earliest days of computer science. ... The main drivers for this more pragmatic approach to machine translation have been the enlargement of the European Union and the spread of the internet. Both have generated a pressing need for cheap and cheerful translations between numerous languages. In turn, this has spawned a wealth of new translation approaches." February 12, 2007: Improving the search for intelligence. By Paul Marks. New Scientist (Issue 2590: pages 22 - 23; subscription req'd). "Detective Gary Williams was investigating a rape last year when his leads dried up. From the victim's statement, he knew there had been a witness to the crime, he even knew his name, but the person had not come forward and could not be found at their registered address. So Williams, of South Yorkshire Police in the UK, turned to a smart search engine the force had begun trialling only 2 hours earlier. With just the name of the witness, the Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) [developed by Autonomy of Cambridge, UK,] trawled the force's database. ... In the US, for example, a number of police forces, including the Los Angeles Police Department, now use a system called Coplink, which connects all their databases together. The system, developed at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona in Tucson, allows investigators to find out whether people have been arrested or interviewed in other areas, information that was not available to them before. ... IDOL uses statistical techniques to return information and phrases related to, but not necessarily including, the search terms entered. ... The system harnesses a probability theory developed by Thomas Bayes, an English cleric and mathematician, in the 18th century. ... Autonomy is now extending the system to telephone calls. It has combined IDOL with speech-recognition software to create a voice-to-text system that translates calls made to the police into searchable statements." February 9, 2007: In a Search Refinement, a Chance to Rival Google. By Miguel Helft. The New York Times. "On Friday, PARC [Palo Alto Research Center] is announcing a deal.... It is licensing a broad portfolio of patents and technology to a well-financed start-up with an ambitious and potentially lucrative goal: to build a search engine that could some day rival Google. The start-up, Powerset, is licensing PARC’s 'natural language' technology -- the art of making computers understand and process languages like English or French. Powerset hopes the technology will be the basis of a new search engine that allows users to type queries in plain English, rather than using keywords. ... Meanwhile, other start-ups and several of the search giants are also working to develop natural-language search technology. The appeal is clear. A successful natural-language search engine could, in theory, answer real questions -- for example, what companies did I.B.M. acquire in the last five years? -- that existing search engines are not equipped to handle. And it could turn the process of finding information on the Web into a conversation between the search engine and the user." February 7, 2007: Found in Translation - Meadan is offering Arabic-English machine translation to create a virtual town square during troubled times. By Shereen El Feki. Technology Review. "September 11 affected millions of people in myriad ways. For Ed Bice, an American ex-architect, it sparked a desire to get ordinary Middle Easterners--and Westerners--talking together. Naturally, being based in the Bay Area, he turned to the Web for help. The result, six years later, is Meadan, which means 'town square' in Arabic. The basic idea is simple: it's a website that brings English and Arabic speakers together around daily postings of news articles, broadcasts, and events that are of common interest, and it gives users a platform to communicate through dialogues, blogs, and other exchanges. All the while, it allows users to pinpoint their location so that people can share views across continents. The hard part is creating a system that allows users to express their ideas in their native tongue. Enter IBM, which has committed $1.7 million to this not-for-profit project. The company has one of the most advanced systems for Arabic-English machine translation. It's 84 percent accurate and can transmute Arabic to English and back again at a blistering 500 words per second. This is no easy task, says Salim Roukos, a senior manager for multilingual natural-language processing technologies at IBM's Watson Research Center." February 5, 2007 [issue date]: Google's Moon Shot - The quest for the universal library. By Jeffrey Toobin. The New Yorker (posted January 29, 2007). "Google’s is not the only book-scanning venture. Amazon has digitized hundreds of thousands of the books it sells, and allows users to search the texts; Carnegie Mellon is hosting a project called the Universal Library, which so far has scanned nearly a million and a half books; the Open Content Alliance, a consortium that includes Microsoft, Yahoo, and several major libraries, is also scanning thousands of books; and there are many smaller projects in various stages of development. Still, only Google has embarked on a project of a scale commensurate with its corporate philosophy: 'to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.' ... The story of how Brin and Google’s other co-founder, Larry Page, met as graduate students in computer science at Stanford in the mid-nineties, and devised a series of elegant software algorithms that allowed Web searchers to find relevant information quickly and efficiently, has become part of Silicon Valley lore. Less well known is that, at the time, Brin and Page were also working on Stanford’s Digital Library Technologies Project, an attempt, funded by the federal government, to organize different kinds of stored information, including books, articles, and journals, in digital form. 'There was an attitude in computer science that putting things on dead trees was obsolete and getting it all into a searchable, digital format was a quest that had to be accomplished someday,' Terry Winograd, a Stanford professor who was a mentor to Page and Brin, said. ... The chief engineer of Google’s system for scanning books in the library collections is Dan Clancy, who joined the company after eight years at NASA, where he supervised teams of Ph.D.s. working on problems related to artificial intelligence. ... Copying all those pages presents many difficulties, but writing software to make the books useful to searchers is even harder. 'The scanning technology is boring,' Clancy said. 'The real challenge is to get somebody something that they are actually interested in, inside a book.'" February 2, 2007: Finding religion with code. By Celeste Biever. New Scientist Technology Blog. "To help the public find similar cases of biblical inspiration, [Noah Vawter of the MIT Media Lab ] has created the 'Religious Speech Sensor' (RSSense), a piece of software that can be used to search speeches and statements using phrases from an electronic transcript of the bible and flags any suspected matches. ... In future, Vawter hopes to extend the system to 'handle additional texts, such as the Quran and the Tao Te Ching' and to automate the program, so that all political speeches could be 'sourced' for its religious content." [A link in the article will take you to the program's code.] January 23, 2007: Sentimental Journey. New computer software applications -- in the labs and in the market -- are using emotion as data input and responding to it. 'How does that make you feel?' asked the computer. By Esther Schindler. CIO. "Many science-fiction stories begin with a premise of computers gaining sentience, self-awareness, or the ability to feel -- or fake -- emotion. In these utopian (or sometimes, dystopian) stories, humanity demonstrates its underlying assumption that 'being human' means 'feeling emotion.' Yet, for business purposes, it isn't necessary for a computer to emote -- as long as it can respond to our emotions. We want companies (and the systems they build, whether silicon- or carbon-powered) to acknowledge and respect our feelings, particularly when those feelings are strongly felt. Enterprises are starting to see good dollars-and-cents reasons to take action on emotion. ... The intent isn't to create an empathic artificial intelligence that experiences emotion. In these applications, the software analyzes human behavior and helps humans to make better business decisions. ... NICE software detects emotion from both the content and audio behavior. ... Corpora's Sentiment doesn't deal with spoken words; it examines print. The software employs natural language processing to determine the 'document level author sentiment' of a text document. ...The research community HUMAINE (Human-Machine-Interaction Network on Emotion) started in 2004, intending to lay the foundation for software development to register, model and/or influence human emotional and emotion-related states and processes, which they call 'emotion-oriented systems.' Among its goals is working toward a standard markup language. In 2006, the W3C created an Emotion Incubator Group for discussing standardization. ... One example of emotion-based computing is eMoto, a joint project between the Swedish Institute of Computer Science and Stockholm University/KTH. eMoto is a mobile messaging service for sending and receiving 'affective messages'...." January 23, 2007: You are wasting time. Find out why. The cost of ineffective search. By Jon Brodkin. Network World. "A company that employs 1,000 information workers can expect more than $5 million in annual salary costs to go down the drain because of the time wasted looking for information and not finding it, IDC research found last year. ... It turns out, analysts say, that most enterprises are not using the most up-to-date search applications. Not only that, enterprises aren’t using the applications they have as effectively as they should. ... Searching based on concepts is 'the generation of search that is just being adopted now.' Most enterprises have not yet upgraded to enterprise search platforms that use this technique, [Susan] Feldman says.... Feldman and some other analysts are optimistic that semantic technology will fuel the next generation of searches. The word semantic 'means meaning,' she says, so an application using semantic technology understands not just keywords but the relationships between subjects, verbs and modifiers. 'This means you can type in a question and it will understand it,' she says. 'More and more applications are able to understand who, what, when, where and why questions, and differentiate among them.' The so-called 'Semantic Web' has been a hot topic of discussion in technology circles for several years. The Semantic Web has been defined as 'an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.' ... The U.S. Army used artificial intelligence to create a virtual officer known as 'SGT STAR,' who is capable of answering a range of questions posed by potential recruits visiting the Army Web site." January 23, 2007: Keeping kids safe in chatrooms. By Christy Lee S.W. The Star Online. "In.Tech finds out how a technology startup's instant messaging software can help create a safer environment for kids on the Internet and keep paedophiles as well as other criminals at bay. ... [C]ompanies like Mor(f) Dynamics Pty Ltd are coming up with solutions that will keep children like Sarah safe from dangerous characters prowling the Net. Founded by Malaysians Robert Fong and Billy Chong in Sydney, Australia, the company is currently developing an instant messenger software that incorporates an artificial intelligence (AI) engine. ... While certain child-safety programs can tell when someone is being outright obscene in chatrooms, most sexual predators are cunning enough to disguise their advances so as not to raise alarms. However, Moji IM is being developed to be able to monitor certain potentially dangerous patterns of conversation. 'Our technology allows the pet to "understand" conversations so that no matter how something is said, it can detect the other person's intentions and determine where the discussion is heading,' said Chong, Mor(f)'s managing director. ... Fong noted that Mor(f)'s technology may also impact the way advertising is done online. Since Moji pets are able to understand user preferences, it could be programmed to suggest products to the user in a more personal manner. 'Say, when you're chatting with your friend about lunch, the pet might suggest a certain eatery -- it's very effective,' Fong said. "
>>> Natural Language Processing, Chatbots (@ Natural Language Processing), Machine Learning, Marketing, Applications January 22, 2007: A Peek Inside DARPA - Researchers at the defense agency invented the precursor to the Internet. So, what’s next? A fault-tolerant wireless network and the next generation of supercomputers. By Gary Anthes. Computerworld. "In 1958, in the aftershock of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik launch, President Eisenhower formed what was then known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Two years ago, DARPA Director Tony Tether told a congressional subcommittee, 'Our mission is still to prevent technological surprise, but also to create technological surprise for our adversaries.' ... DARPA’s six offices have undertaken hundreds of projects, including the following: The Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) is soliciting proposals for 'cognitive' technologies that enable systems to reason, learn from experience, explain themselves and reflect on their own capabilities. ... [T]he IPTO is developing technology to translate and analyze voices from Arabic and Chinese television and radio broadcasts. 'We’ve been in this for many years,' [Charles Holland, director of the IPTO] says, 'but about three years ago, the real requirement for this showed up, in Iraq. We had to really speed this up, to make it happen.' DARPA’s speech technology has been deployed in nine locations, and it can translate with about 50% accuracy -- 'good enough to see if public sentiment is going a certain way,' Holland says. By 2009, that’s expected to reach 90%, which is as good as human translators." January 12, 2007: Artificial Intelligence Used To Grade Medical School Tests. By K.C. Jones. InformationWeek. " The Association of American Medical Colleges will use artificial intelligence to score the writing portion of the Medical College Admission Test. Vantage Learning and Prometric announced this week that they will provide intelligent, computer-based essay scores beginning this year. ... The new format allows AAMC to administer the test 22 times annually, up from two." January 10, 2007: After Years of Effort, Voice Recognition Is Starting to Work. By Lee Gomes. The Wall Street Journal (page B1). "So maybe you won't be talking to your car anytime soon, the way Microsoft and Ford would like you to be. Odds are, though, that you are already on speaking terms with silicon, probably more than you realize. And you can expect to be chatting it up more and more. Almost since computers were invented, computer scientists have been working to get the machines to understand what people are saying to them. Until the past few years, they hadn't been successful enough to offer anything but lab demos. Now, though, computer speech recognition is sufficiently advanced that it is showing up in a surprising variety of places. Like automobiles. ... While voice-controlled computers are sci-fi staples, in practice most people find a keyboard and a mouse are fine for telling a PC what to do. Bill Meisel, a veteran observer of the speech-recognition market, says the main use of speech recognition at the moment is in specialized applications like law and medicine. Radiologists, for example, are increasingly dictating their diagnoses and observations into a speech-recognition program rather than into a tape recorder that must later be transcribed. At its core, speech recognition takes advantage of extraordinarily complex statistical methods to match the sounds you say with the right words. ... One of the biggest applications of the technology is in call centers. ... David Nahamoo, who oversees IBM's speech research, says that some other new applications are already at hand. One is a system that produces automatic translations of foreign-language broadcasts, such as those in Arabic, first by performing speech recognition of the spoken words and then by using translation software to render things in English." January 8, 2007: Consumer Electronics Show Abuzz About Mobility (radio broadcast). NPR Morning Edition report by Laura Sydel. Hear SpeechGear's machine translation demonstration at the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas. December 20, 2006: U.S. turns to tech for translators - Government seeks to bolster thin ranks of language specialists. By Richard Willing. USA Today. "Intelligence agencies and the military are turning to technology developed for call centers, sporting events and television shopping channels to compensate for an ongoing shortage of qualified translators, interviews and public documents show. In Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, the Defense Department's research arm is testing portable translation devices that allow English-speaking soldiers to hold conversations with Iraqis. ... Much of the spending is classified, but available public contracting and budget documents show that the Pentagon has at least $22 million to spend this year on research. In November 2005, the Pentagon announced $26 million worth of contracts for translation software." December 19, 2006: Face-hunting software will scour web for targets. By Tom Simonite. NewScientist.com news. "A search engine that uses sophisticated facial recognition to allow users to identify and find people in online images will launch next month. But civil liberties groups say the biometric-style tool could compromise the privacy of anyone who has their picture online."
>>> Information Retrieval, Biometrics (@ Image Understanding), Ethical & Social Implications, Applications, Chatbots (@ Natural Language Processing) December 14, 2006: V-Reps To Takeover Jobs Of Agents - Evolving virtual representatives pose threat to call centre agents as they take away standard jobs. By Priyanka Bhattacharya, EFYtimes.com. "Call centre companies are constantly looking to reduce expenses and improve margins. They may have just found a way. Or a virtual personality to be precise. There is an emerging trend in the call centre industry where more and more companies are employing what are called the V-Reps or Virtual Representatives. They are automated online personalities (software) that emulate the best in human customer service by providing personalised and immediate answers to customer questions via two-way natural language dialogue. ... Globally, companies like Convergys, GlaxoSmithkline, Ford Motors, Amtrax, Deutsche Telecom, Coca-Cola, Bank of America and others have been using v-reps to handle certain customer queries. ... Whether or not they are assigned human names, these v-reps are actually robots or, more specifically, human-relationship-emulating bots that are powered by artificial-intelligence software." December 13, 2006: When computers write obits. By Jonathan Skillings. News.blog from CNET News.com. "Ilya Yashin is very much alive, despite the best efforts of an AI program that wanted him dead. Not that the software had malicious intentions, mind you. It was really all a big misunderstanding, you see. The trouble started with a pun in a headline in a Russian newspaper, according to the blog VeryRussianTochkaNet. The linguistic trickery was misread by the artificial intelligence program used by Russian search engine Yandex to analyze news stories and then automatically generate profiles of politicians and other notable folks." December 11, 2006: Computers to fix themselves. By Anna Salleh. ABC Science Online. "The next time you email the IT help desk, you may find yourself dealing with a computer, not a human. If a new system that Australian researchers are developing takes off, 'intelligent' computers will generate their own answers to your queries. The research by computer scientists Dr Yuval Marom and Professor Ingrid Zukerman of Monash University in Melbourne will be presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Hyderabad, India next month. 'Help desk operators are generally dealing with the same thing over and over again,' says Marom. And he says many emails can be answered by mixing and matching parts of generic responses, which the researchers' software will generate." December 5, 2006: Nuance enhances mobile speech recognition. By Liz Tay. PC World. "To enable 'natural language processing', Nuance's speech recognition technology analyses a collection of utterances from local call centre data in Australia, the US, and the UK. Using statistical and semantic language modeling, the system compares the data against what is said, to decide on the most probable function the user is trying to perform. 'It's semi-artificial intelligence,' Chidiac said. 'You can say exactly what you want, and the system will route you to the right area, or the right person and so on. You don't have to go through the various prompts.'" December 2006 [issue date]: Me Translate Pretty One Day - Spanish to English? French to Russian? Computers haven't been up to the task. But a New York firm with an ingenious algorithm and a really big dictionary is finally cracking the code. By Evan Ratliff. Wired (Issue 14.12). "Jaime Carbonell, chief science officer of Meaningful Machines, hunches over his laptop in the company's midtown Manhattan offices, waiting for it to decode a message from the perpetrators of a grisly terrorist attack. Running software that took four years and millions of dollars to develop, Carbonell's machine -- or rather, the server farm it's connected to a few miles away -- is attempting a task that has bedeviled computer scientists for half a century. The message isn't encrypted or scrambled or hidden among thousands of documents. It's simply written in Spanish:.... Language translation is a tricky problem, not only for a piece of software but also for the human mind. ... From its genesis at the post-World War II dawn of computing -- when ambitious researchers believed it would take only a few years to crack the language problem -- until the late 1980s, machine translation, or MT, consisted almost entirely of what are known as rule-based systems. ... Over the past decade, however, machine translation has improved dramatically, propelled by the relentless march of Moore's law, a spike in federal funding in the wake of 9/11, and, most important, a new idea. The idea dates from the late 1980s and early 1990s, when researchers at IBM stopped relying on grammar rules and began experimenting with sets of already-translated work known as parallel text. In the most promising method to emerge from the work, called statistical-based MT, algorithms analyze large collections of previous translations, or what are technically called parallel corpora ... to divine the statistical probabilities of words and phrases in one language ending up as particular words or phrases in another. ... Instead, the Meaningful Machines system uses a large collection of text in the target language (in the initial case it's 150 Gbytes of English text derived from the Web), a small amount of text in the source language, and a massive bilingual dictionary. ... Born in Uruguay, Jaime Carbonell moved to Boston with his family when he was nine. He later enrolled at MIT, where he found part-time work translating Digital Equipment Corporation computer manuals into Spanish to help pay tuition. In an attempt to speed up the translation process, he built a small MT engine...." November 16, 2006: Not Lost in Translation - Computer programmers use statistics to convert Arabic and Mandarin Chinese texts into English. By Stephen Ornes. Technology Review. "As computer programmers develop new techniques for translating texts between languages with different alphabets, they are increasingly turning to a science that seems to have little in common with the conventions of grammar: statistics. Last week, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released the results of its yearly evaluation of computer algorithms that translate Arabic and Mandarin Chinese texts into English. Topping the charts was Google.... 'If you get a good score, you're doing well,' says Peter Norvig, Google's head of research. ... 'We look for matches between texts and find several different translations,' Norvig says. 'You take all these possibilities and ask, What is the most probable in terms of what's been done in the past?' ... Ongoing research at Kansas State University utilizes not only computer scientists, but also anthropologists, modern-language scholars, and psychologists to develop new approaches to machine translations. ..." November 16, 2006: Software distinguishes between online namesakes. By Tom Simonite. NewScientist.com news. "Scouring the web for someone with a common name could become easier with software that automatically distinguishes between individuals by analysing the details of search results. The software tool, developed by researchers at the University of Tokyo in Japan, picks apart the results of a search engine query, identifying unique identities within these results. For example, it can tell the difference between Michael Jackson the pop singer and a travelling beer expert of the same name, who also appears on the first page of results produced by Google." November 15, 2006: Nervana aims to aid job recruiting. By John Cook. Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "That new direction might put Nervana in competition with Jobster, the Seattle company whose online tools also are designed to help companies find the right candidates. Unlike Jobster, [Nosa] Omoigui said the company will not have a consumer offering.... Nervana's artificial-intelligence technology is now designed to help companies such as Microsoft and The Boeing Co. -- which receive thousands of resumes each day -- find qualified candidates by quickly sorting through the pile of resumes. Omoigui said traditional 'keyword' technologies do not get the job done because they don't 'capture the context' of the resume." November 13, 2006: Tech Solutions to Iraqi-U.S. Language Barrier. Xeni Jardin's Xeni Tech report for NPR's Day to Day. [Audio available.] "Part of the daily struggle for soldiers and Marines in Iraq is communicating with civilians and suspected insurgents. Few military personnel have enough fluency with Iraqi Arabic to be easily understood, and field translators are in short supply. But technology may help close that communications gap. A hand-held voice translator device developed by Integrated Wave Technologies, already in use in other parts of the world, converts simple English commands into Iraqi Arabic or 15 other languages." November 7, 2006: Chicago-Based StaffITnow Shoots For the Stars. By Darrell F. Dvorak. MidwestBusiness.com. "By comparing itself to eHarmony, StaffITnow is saying that it quickly narrows thousands of job and candidate possibilities to the best matches. ... StaffITnow’s technology is an example of powerful find-the-needle-in-the-haystack search engines that intelligently filter, rank, and prioritize limitless possibilities based on relevance to the searcher. It employs sophisticated technologies (e.g., natural language processing, artificial intelligence, pattern matching) that can read, understand and analyze job descriptions and resumes in any format, and do so quickly, easily, and cheaply. Their service is being successfully used by about 50 pilot customers." November 5, 2006: Top minds taxed by translation challenge - Creating a real-time translating machine is harder than it seems. By Brian Bergstein. The Associated Press /available from MSNBC.com. "The past few years have shown that U.S. government intelligence goes only so far. One of the biggest challenges is recognizing vital information in foreign languages -- and acting quickly on it. That's why the military would love software that can listen to TV broadcasts or phone conversations and read Web sites in Arabic and Chinese, translate them into English and summarize the key elements for humans. ... Last year DARPA launched a project that aims to create that real-time translation software. It’s called GALE, for Global Autonomous Language Exploitation. And on top of GALE’s technical challenges, DARPA added some twists. It hired three teams of researchers to chase the problem for up to five years. Each year, their progress would be evaluated, and the worst-performing team could be eliminated. Or the program could be shut down entirely. ... DARPA wants translations not only from such controlled, well-articulated sources. GALE incorporates man-on-the-street interviews and raucous colloquial chats on the Web. That’s where things get tricky. Background noise, dialects, accents, slang, short words like 'on' or 'of' that most speakers don’t bother to clearly enunciate -- these are the stuff of nightmares for speech-recognition and machine-translation engineers." November 3, 2006: News Made Your Way by New Software . By Tracy Staedter. Discovery News. "A news show that truly speaks to its viewers is the idea behind 'News at Seven,' an Internet-based program designed to automatically gather, edit and deliver a package of original news and information to people based on their specific interests. ... The host is a computer-animated person broadcasting from a familiar location, such as your favorite beach. ... 'The entire environment can be customizable. We want it to be hyper-personalized,' said Kristian Hammond, professor of computer science and director of the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University. At the heart of the program is software capable of grabbing a news feed from a website and using the text of the story to drive a search for images, video and opinionated blogs. ... The story is fed to a computer-animated character, whose tone and inflection are driven by language in the story's text and by the viewer's specific requests." November 2006: Sex, Lies, and Videogames - What if a computer program combined the action and graphics of a video game with the emotional power of great art? The result could revolutionize interactive entertainment -- and even change the meaning of “play.” By Jonathan Rauch. The Atlantic Monthly (298(4): 76-86; subscription req'd). "In certain rarefied circles of AI academia and video-game design, people sometimes theorize about a computer program that would combine the graphical realism of a modern video game with the emotional impact of great art. 'Interactive drama,' the concept is called. It might contain artificial people you could converse with, get to know, and love or hate. It might engineer dramatic situations, complete with revelations and reversals. Entering this world, you would feel as if you had been thrust into the midst of a soap opera or a reality-TV show. 'I had some idea how to do it,' [Andrew] Stern says. [Michael] Mateas, for his part, had dreamed since childhood of building artificial humans. It occurred to him that he could advance his dream by building artificial actors. ... In the end, they accomplished, they reckon, about 30 percent of what they had hoped to do. 'We shot for the stars in hopes of getting to the moon,' says Stern, 'and we made it into orbit.' In July 2005, standing together over Stern's computer in Portland, they pressed the button that 'shipped' over the Internet, a new game called Façade."
>>> Drama, Fiction, Poetry, Storytelling & Machine Writing, Video Games, Natural Language Processing, Applications, Interviews October 30, 2006: Military works to bridge the language gap - IBM and Joint Forces Command test new translation software. By Josh Rogin. FCW.com. "In Iraq, warfighters interact with the Iraqi people every day. The battle for hearts and minds takes place primarily in Iraqi homes, hospitals and classrooms. But translators are scarce, and the language barrier looms large. So the Defense Department is teaming with industry and academia to push new technology into the communications gap. This month, DOD will begin its second set of operational tests in Iraq of new language translation technology. The software, developed by IBM and deployed by the Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), facilitates two-way conversations between speakers of English and Iraqi Arabic. Warfighters will test the software, called the Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator (Mastor), in medical situations, psychological operations and the training of Iraqi security forces." October 26, 2006: It's the next best thing to a Babel fish. By Celeste Biever. New Scientist (Issue 2575: page 32). "Imagine mouthing a phrase in English, only for the words to come out in Spanish. That is the promise of a device that will make anyone appear bilingual, by translating unvoiced words into synthetic speech in another language. The device uses electrodes attached to the face and neck to detect and interpret the unique patterns of electrical signals sent to facial muscles and the tongue as the person mouths words. The effect is like the real-life equivalent of watching a television show that has been dubbed into a foreign language, says speech researcher Tanja Schultz of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. ... Their secret is to detect not just words but also the phonemes that form the building blocks of words. ... The researchers use software that has been taught to recognise which phonemes are most likely to appear next to each other and in what order."
>>> Machine Translation, Speech, Natural Language Processing, Applications October 24, 2006: Computer Beats Fastest Text Messenger. By Travis Reed. The Associated Press / available from Examiner.com. "Ben Cook's fingers flurried so fast you couldn't see what he was doing until he had done it. But when the cell-phone screens cleared, the world's fastest text messenger was handed his first head-to-head defeat Tuesday: a voice-recognition computer had bested his record time on a complicated 27-word message. ... [Michael] Thompson couldn't say how much the service would cost consumers because it will likely vary by carrier. He said it'll be available in some new phones, but existing phones can download software for use as well. Nuance envisions it as a tool for drivers and others who want to send text messages, instead of calling or leaving a voice mail, but don't have time to sit and type." October 24, 2006: Software generates video news bulletins. By Tom Simonite. NewScientist.com news. "Software that automatically generates timely video news bulletins, presented by computer-animated characters, could revolutionise current affairs broadcasting, researchers say. The system, called News at Seven, can produce reports tailored to a person's particular interests, from world affairs to celebrity gossip. ... 'The start point for News at Seven is a set of preferences for what the report should be about,' explains Kristian Hammond at Northwestern University, Illinois, US, who developed the system with graduate students Nathan Nichols and Sara Owsley. Using keywords entered by the user, the program selects news site RSS feeds and specific stories to focus on. ... Finally, the software generates a script from the collated material. Text-to-speech software then lets computer animated characters...." [Video clips available via links in article.] October 23, 2006: U. to help track threats - But the program raises free-speech concerns. By Brandy A. Lee. Deseret Morning News. "The University of Utah is participating in a major research effort to help the Department of Homeland Security track potential threats to the nation. Critics, however, are raising concerns about free speech. A new research program, to be developed along with Cornell University and the University of Pittsburgh, will teach computers to scan through text and sort opinion from fact. The three universities will comprise one of four University Affiliate Centers to conduct research that will contribute to national security. ... One of the worries the ACLU has, however, is the effect the project could have on someone who wants to write a letter to the editor. People may be more reluctant to do so because they fear becoming a government target. ... In addition to the research project, the new UAC has educational goals, like training students to work in information extraction and presenting seminars and workshops for other researchers, according to Claire Cardie, a professor of computer science at Cornell. The program also will emphasize recruitment of women and minorities. 'A substantial component of our University Affiliate Center will be aimed at increasing the representation of women and minorities in computer science,' [Ellen Riloff, University of Utah Associate Professor of Computer Science] said. 'We plan to reach out to women and minorities to increase their exposure to NLP technologies and their access to research opportunities.'" October 23, 2006: Putting blogs to work for Wall Street - How do you make money off all that info that bloggers provide? One start-up plans to parse for profits. By Michael Kanellos. CNET News.com. "Collective Intellect has a goal: Make bloggers work for The Man. The company has created a service that combs through thousands of blogs, news sites, chat rooms and other Web sites every day and then surfaces rumors and news reports that might be of interest to traders or corporate public relations executives. Other start-ups like Monitor 110 provide similar services. ... The system examines about 150,000 new postings a day. Then it analyzes them for sentiment--is it causing a stock to go up or down?--and credibility. The company then sends out data feeds and e-mails on stock activity and interesting news to subscribers." October 22, 2006: Go Ask Alice - 101 great pickup lines for robots. By Gene Weingarten. The Washington Post (page W36). "Below are actual excerpts from my hour-long online conversation with A.L.I.C.E., or Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity, a robot created by the Artificial Intelligence Foundation." October 17, 2006: CMU research professor made the world say :-) By Tim Stienstraw. The Pitt News. "Carnegie Mellon University researcher Scott Fahlman is the inventor of the emoticon, a popular way to express voice tone in an electronic message, but he also works with Artificial Intelligence and mentors students who work for him. 'I know this is going to be the first line in my obituary, "Scott Fahlman, the guy who created the smiley and did some other stuff,"' he said. ... Fahlman's real passion is his AI research. Since the 1970s, he has worked on making computers think more like humans Within the last five years, he has worked on the challenge of creating software that compiles information and experience to simulate common sense. He said he hopes one day his research will lead to a program that can actually create its own text about a subject, as opposed to simply reading and understanding things people have put into the computer, which is easier. He likened this to illiteracy, citing the fact that many more people can speak English than can read and write it. ... 'Really the Holy Grail is text comprehension and text generation.' [Cinar Sahin] Sahin inputs data from sources like the CIA fact book into the software, called SCONE. Ben Lambert, another of Fahlman's students, said SCONE has two definitions, depending upon Fahlman's mood. It either stands for "Scalable Ontology Engine" or "Scott's Ontology Engine." October 13, 2006: How to Say 'Don't Shoot' in Iraq. By Michael Hickins. InternetNews.com. "IBM has delivered a bi-directional speech-to-speech translation system for U.S. forces to use in Iraq. The ramifications of this are obvious: improving communication between U.S. armed forces and Iraqi civilians and military personnel will save lives on both sides. IBM has loaded the Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator (MASTOR) onto Panasonic Toughbook laptops used by the military. ... The goal of MASTOR is to convey the meaning of what is said, even if the speaker or speech recognizer makes minor errors. During operation, the user speaks into a microphone that is interfaced with MASTOR. The technology recognizes and translates the speech, then vocalizes the translation in the target language for the foreign language speaker to hear. ... In addition to the audible translation, MASTOR captures the spoken dialogue as text." October 12, 2006: Got A Question? Microsoft's Newly Acquired Software May Have The Answers. By Aaron Ricadela. Intelligent Enterprise Magazine. "Microsoft will be getting chattier with its customers soon. The world's largest software company said Thursday it had acquired privately held Colloquis Inc., which makes software that lets customers instant-message with a computer to get answers to tech-support questions or information about new products. ... Colloquis' technology lets Web users type free-form questions into a text box, and receive conversational answers via artificial intelligence technology known as natural language processing. The technique parses typed-in sentences to identify their subjects and other parts of speech, then assigns levels of importance to certain words. 'The best example I can give is if sometime types in, "My E-mail sucks", the natural language processing agent is able to understand that,' says Clinton Dickey, a group product manager at Microsoft who worked on the deal. 'It's about replicating live agents.'" October 11, 2006: Interview with W. Lewis Johnson, Founder of Alelo. By Ben Kuo. socalTECH.com. "We recently ran across Alelo (www.alelo.com), a startup and University of Southern California spinout developing interactive games used by the military. The company's very engaging, interactive 3D role playing games teach languages like Arabic and Pashto to troops being deployed to the Middle East. Using speech recognition and other technology, the titles teach foreign languages to players as they go through the game in simulated environments like Iraq. We spoke with Dr. W. Lewis Johnson, CEO of Alelo, about the firm's technology and plans. Ben Kuo: Tell us a little bit about Alelo, and what the company and product does? W. Lewis Johnson: Our overall company is called Alelo, and we also have a government subsidiary called Tactical Language Training LLC which develops projects for the government. We develop interactive products for teaching foreign languages and cultures using video game and artificial intelligence technology. We're a spinoff of the University of Southern California, where I am a research professor in Computer Science. ... Ben Kuo: Where's the idea come from for using games to teach a language? W. Lewis Johnson: I have been doing research for several years in what we call pedagogical agents - animated characters that can act as guides and tutors. ... Ben Kuo: Can you talk about the user experience with the language recognition? I was impressed by the fact that the software recognizes what you say in Arabic. ..." October 9, 2006: Interview with Janet Eden-Harris, CEO of Umbria. Techrockies.com. "Janet Eden-Harris is CEO of Umbria (www.umbrialistens.com), a Boulder, Colorado-based, venture-backed startup that is using blogs to provide market intelligence. We spoke to Janet about how the firm is using online opinions and information to help provide information to companies about their brands and products. Techrockies: Tell us a bit about Umbria--what's the idea behind the service? Janet Eden-Harris: Umbria is a marketing intelligence company that analyzes the unaided opinions, perceptions, attitudes and behaviors of the online world (comprised of blogs, message boards, Usenet, product review sites, etc.) and distills it into actionable insights about companies, brands, products, people and issues. We leverage proprietary Natural Language Processing and machine learning algorithms to dissect the who, what and why of online opinion. We're particularly unique in our ability to segment blogosphere authors by age and gender. ... Techrockies: Finally, can you tell us any of the interesting things that your clients have been able to do based on this data, or any anecdotes on how this has been useful to them? ... " October 9, 2006: Attensity masters linguistics. By Florence Olsen. FCW.com. "Text analytics software is proving to be immensely useful in federal programs that involve massive amounts of unstructured information that would overwhelm employees if they had to read it all. Powerful computers running software that doesn’t balk at such tasks are helping U.S. Patent and Trademark Office examiners, for example, review millions of lines of publicly available computer source code. One of the analytic engines that helps the examiners is from Attensity, which will release a new text analytics suite in mid-October. That Web-based suite, named Attensity 4, combines statistical and linguistic techniques to create a powerful analyst’s desktop PC, said Michelle DeHaaff, vice president of products and marketing at Attensity. By using Attensity 4, DeHaaff said, 'an analyst could take action on what’s in 20,000 documents without having to read them.'" October 4, 2006: Software Being Developed to Monitor Opinions of U.S. By Eric Lipton. The New York Times. "A consortium of major universities, using Homeland Security Department money, is developing software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas. A consortium of major universities, using Homeland Security Department money, is developing software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas. Such a 'sentiment analysis' is intended to identify potential threats to the nation, security officials said. ... The researchers, using an grant provided by a research group once affiliated with the Central Intelligence Agency, have complied a database of hundreds of articles that it is being used to train a computer to recognize, rank and interpret statements. The software would need to be able to distinguish between statements like 'this spaghetti is good' and 'this spaghetti is not very good -- it’s excellent,' said Claire T. Cardie, a professor of computer science at Cornell. Professor Cardie ranked the second statement as a more intense positive opinion than the first. ... The approach, called natural language processing, has been under development for decades. It is widely used to summarize basic facts in a text or to create abridged versions of articles. But interpreting and rating expressions of opinion, without making too many errors, has been much more challenging, said Professor Cardie and Janyce M. Wiebe, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Pittsburgh. ... 'There has to be guidelines and restrictions on the use of this kind of technology by the government,' Professor Wiebe said. 'But it doesn’t mean it is not useful. It can just as easily help the government understand what is going on in places around the world.'"
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