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July 31, 2005: Artificial Intelligence. Flying High column by Roshmi Raychaudhuri. The Statesman. "To make it clear to the uninitiated, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a subject that explores the scientific basis of intelligence in animals and machines, and attempts to build intelligence into different sorts of machines. Had it not been for this new knowledge, many of the ‘happenings’ taking place today would have remained the stuff that made up storybooks and dreams of yesterday. ... The career possibilities in the area of AI seem to be limitless. ... As a student of AI you will learn about the technologies required to do all these things and more.... Most university courses in AI offer the study of robotic and adaptive systems and intelligent computer systems in addition to programming, web computing, animation, software engineering and professional issues. Some institutions allow students the choice between extending the degree in the direction of computer science or of cognitive science. ... However, there is one aspect that is paramount in any discussion about AI -- the question of ethics -- which is outside the ambit of this article." July 27, 2005: Robots fly by competition. By Matt Wilson. Technician. "According to Dan Edwards, it's a problem the aerospace industry spends millions of dollars on: making a fully autonomous vehicle capable of flight. This was also the challenge a group of N.C. State students have been working on. The Student Aerial Robotics Club placed 3rd overall at the international Student Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Competition, hosted at Patuxant Naval Air Station in Maryland. According to Edwards, a senior in aerospace engineering and president of the Aerial Robotics Club, unmanned aerial vehicles are on the cutting edge of technology and the club is helping to push the envelope. ... Both the take-off and landing could be done manually, but the rest of the flight had to be done autonomously via software onboard the vehicle." July 27, 2005: Awards to applaud women in tech. BBC News. "Top women in the field of technology are to be recognised in the first Blackberry Women and Technology awards. The awards have been set up by Research in Motion, the company behind the Blackberry mobile device, and Aurora, a women's business networking group. Prizes will be given to women who have been leading lights in academia, journalism, public and private sectors, as well the top female mentors. The awards will raise their profile in what has been a male-dominated world. ... Only 17% of computer science degree entrants are women; most of these are from overseas. Many are put off from considering careers in the field of technology because there seems to be a lack of successful role models. ... The British Computer Society (BCS) found recently that 28% of UK organisations do not employ women technologists. But there are signs that the trend is changing. The BCS also recently reported that more girls were being attracted to careers in technology...." July 27 - August 2, 2005: Chess, China, and Education - An interview with Feng-Hsiung Hsu. Ubiquity (Volume 6, Issue 27). "Feng-Hsiung Hsu, whose book 'Behind Deep Blue' told the story of world chess champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by the IBM computer known as Deep Blue, is now a senior manager and researcher at Microsoft Research Asia. ... UBIQUITY: When did you get interested in chess, and then computer chess? HSU: I think I started playing chess when I was in primary school. I thought of it as just another game, and liked it the way kids always like to play games. But then when I was in college one day I bumped into a book in the library that was a classic for computer chess, called 'Computer Skills in Men and Machines.' ... UBIQUITY: Your Deep Blue chess strategy was a brute force strategy, is that right? HSU: That was my initial starting point, after reading a paper by Ken Thompson that experimentally verified how you can increase program playing strength by improving computation speed. So we decided to push speed, which we knew how to do and was interesting by itself from a computer science point of view. Of course, when you compete against the world champion you realize you need more than just brute force, obviously. ... UBIQUITY: So where is the state of art of computer chess now? ... " July 25, 2005: Students imagine a world where technology kills boundaries. PublicTechnology.net. "Some of the top projects in this year’s Imagine Cup will fight it out from 27th July - it's a Microsoft-sponsored global technology competition designed to show students the real-world opportunities that are available through technology. ... Imagine Cup 2005 drew some 16,000 students from more than 92 countries — up from 10,000 students from 90 countries in 2004, and 1,000 students from 25 countries in its inaugural year of 2003. The growth is due in part to the addition by Microsoft of five new invitationals -- Visual Gaming, Office Design, IT Business Plan, Information Technology and Web Development -- some of which have categories for high-school students to enter. ... A team from Romania won the Web Development invitational ... the four-person team created a visually stunning Web site presenting information, forums and other interactive features focusing on fuzzy systems -- an alternative to traditional logic with applications at the leading edge of AI -- and their uses in medical rehabilitation. ... In addition to sections on theory and applications, the site includes quizzes, a functional 'expert system' and a 'fuzzypedia' -- a Web-based encyclopedia written collaboratively by peers and designed to spread information about AI techniques in medicine worldwide."
>>> Competitions (@ Resources for Students) July 21, 2005: On your marks, get set, code! Phil O'Sullivan, contributor. CNN. "Computer software code writing may not be everyone's idea of a competitive sport, but thanks to a type of contest that is growing in popularity, things may soon change. U.S.-based company TopCoder runs coding competitions for up-and-coming software programmers. The contests -- called codejams -- take place online as well as at venues, attracting up to 60,000 participants for big competitions, with prize money reaching up to $20,000. ... Yahoo chief executive Usama Fayyad told CNN that finding the right kind of future employees was no easy task. He said the code jams gave the company the chance to look at parts of the world it would not normally have access to." July 21, 2005: Yahoo! Chief Data Officer Dr. Usama Fayyad Chosen as 2005 Fellow by American Association for Artificial Intelligence. Yahoo! Inc. press release from Business Wire. "'The appointment of Dr. Usama Fayyad as a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence is a highly deserved recognition of his seminal contributions to both the theory and practice of artificial intelligence,' said prof. Tom Mitchell, chairman of the AAAI Awards Committee and past president of AAAI. 'His research in this area has produced important machine learning and data mining algorithms that open up new opportunities for automated, intelligent analysis of very large data sets. Dr. Fayyad's work both in developing the underlying technology of artificial intelligence and in using it to impact the commercial world will have great impact on the lives of individuals in new ways.' ... In addition to Fayyad, this year's AAAI newly elected fellows include Raymond J. Mooney, professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas, Austin; Andrew W. Moore, professor of Robotics and Computer Science at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University; and David E. Smith, planning & scheduling group lead at the NASA Ames Research Center. ... 'I have been a member of AAAI since I was a graduate student and published my first major publications in its conferences, and to be recognized by my peers as a 2005 AAAI Fellow for the work I have done at Yahoo! and elsewhere is indeed a great honor,' said Fayyad." July 20, 2005: High-tech show and tell. By Graeme McRanor. 24 hours Vancouver. "It was a high-tech show-and-tell at UBC [University of British Columbia] yesterday as some of Canada's sharpest minds powered up their wares for the official opening of the Institute for Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems/ Computer Science (ICICS/CS) addition. On display within the $40 million, state-of-the-art building was some of UBC's leading research into animation, artificial intelligence and autonomous robotics technology." July 19, 2005: Germany wins the RoboCup championship in several categories. By Hans-Arthur Marsiske & Craig Morris. heise online. "The finals in the league of four-legged robots was probably one of the most exciting of the tournament. ... But this year's RoboCup is not yet over with the end of this tournament. After all, the purpose of the entire event is to step up research on robotics and artificial intelligence. The participants will thus be meeting at a symposium on the following two days. Here, the Germans also lead the pack with 25 lectures, 17 of which are from the German Research Foundation's program 'cooperating teams of mobile robots in dynamic environments.' All in all, the event was a smashing success. The excellent work that the Japanese organizers did set the standards high for next year's RoboCup championship in Bremen from 14-20 June 2006."
>>> Sports, Hazards & Disasters, Robots, Competitions (@ Resources for Students) July 19, 2005: Who are the new computer whizzes? Not the guy with a pocket protector, but a middle-aged minority woman. By Sandra Lilley. NBC News & MSNBC.com. "Pop quiz: Which schools produced the most degrees in computer science in 2001? MIT? Carnegie Mellon? Georgia Tech? If you guessed any of these, you’re wrong: try Strayer University and DeVry Institute of Technology. And what kind of student is most likely to take up computer science at Strayer or DeVry? If you guessed a young geeky guy with a pocket saver, guess again: try a 35-year-old African American or Hispanic woman who already has a full-time job at a company where information technology (IT) skills are a key to advancement. ... 'We were so blown away by this,' remarked Dr. Shirley Malcom, director of Education and Human Resources at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and one of the authors of the report, 'Preparing Women and Minorities for the IT Workforce: The Role of Nontraditional Educational Pathways.' The researchers came up with an interesting -- yet disturbing -- conclusion. While adults, many of them women and minorities, are realizing they have to go out and obtain degrees in computer science to advance or just keep up at the workplace, the 'traditional' young students in four-year colleges are increasingly deciding not to major in computer science. ... At Strayer, over half the student body is comprised of women and minorities, and according to McCoy, the number of Latino students has been rising significantly." July 19, 2005: Gates laments decreasing interest in programming. By Todd Bishop. Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "Microsoft isn't able to hire enough computer scientists in the United States to fill its available positions, Bill Gates said yesterday, citing decreasing interest in the field and fierce competition for qualified talent. Gates, speaking to an international audience of computer science faculty members on the company's Redmond campus, said Microsoft's inability to meet its employment needs is affecting 'the speed at which we do things.' The Microsoft chairman said he was perplexed by the declining enrollment in computer science programs at the nation's universities. Citing all the advances made possible by computer science, he questioned why so many people would opt for careers in something such as physical education instead. 'I mean, are they making breakthroughs like speech recognition or artificial intelligence?' Gates asked, grinning. 'I'm dying to see these new games they're inventing.' ... A recent study by UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute found a 60 percent decline between 2000 and 2004 in the number of college freshmen who planned to major in computer science. But some question whether the scarcity of qualified employees is as dire as Gates made it sound during yesterday's event." July 18, 2005: Robots challenge teens on break - NASA gives summer class big boost. By Larry Slonaker. The Mercury News (registration req'd.). "Laura Williams, 16, has an educational background from early childhood that prepared her well for a summertime class in robotics she's taking at Homestead High School. ... Summer robotics was the inspiration of parent Kumar Thiagarajan, whose son is involved in robotics at Lynbrook High. ... [H]e enlisted the help of folks at NASA, which agreed to provide guest lecturers and 12 robotics kits for the class. ... In addition to the 35 area students who signed up for the class, 170 more -- in other parts of the United States, as well as Australia, India and other countries -- are taking it online. The only cost of the class is about $300 for a kit, which NASA covered for the teams of students at Homestead. The space agency also provided free kits for another 30 online students, based on need. ... [Steve] Headley wants the course to supplement the students' mastery of math and science, but Joseph Hering of NASA has a more specific goal: 'seeding.' Seeding, as in growing students who will go on to get doctorates in robotics. 'We're not shy about it,' Hering said." July 13, 2005: Computer scientists focus on developing programs that can learn game rules. By Kendall Madden. Stanford Report. "From mahjong to Monopoly, bridge to Bingo, Sorry to Scrabble -- games are serious fun. And with their diverse rules, they're also the perfect tools for exploring concepts in artificial intelligence (AI) and new approaches to programming, say Stanford computer scientists. 'Programs that think better should be able to win more games,' wrote Michael Genesereth, computer science professor with the Stanford Logic Group, and Nathaniel Love, a computer science doctoral student, in an article on general game playing (GGP) to be published in the summer 2005 issue of AI Magazine. The concept of general game playing is 'drastically different,' Genesereth said, from the computer programming done in the past to create programs like IBM's Deep Blue, which beat world chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997. ... General game playing requires that the computer be able to learn and understand rules, something that Deep Blue cannot do. ... Programs designed for general game playing exemplify a malleable and comprehensive type of system that harkens back to the early days of computer science theory, said Genesereth. When the idea of computers was first being developed in the 1950s, early programmers envisioned machines capable of synthesizing an array of different inputs to reach an independent decision, said Genesereth. The idea was for computers to be much more 'autonomous' than they currently are. It soon became clear that a system capable of synthesis would be much more complicated to design than one dependent on individual programs with specific functions, Genesereth said. ... One of Genesereth's favorite games to illustrate the differences between human intelligence and computer intelligence is called 'Hodge-podge.' The game is really three separate games all running at the same time: chess, checkers and tic-tac-toe. ... To encourage more work on GGP in the AI community, the Stanford group hosted a GGP competition at this year's American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference in Pittsburgh, Pa., July 9-13." July 13, 2005: Science non-fiction. By Allison M. Heinrichs. Pittsburgh Tribune - Review and PittsburghLIVE.com. "Grace was one of 19 robots participating in the conference's 14th annual Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition. Her job was to entertain the crowd and allow her Carnegie Mellon University team of creators to test how she uses social interactions, rather than sight and sound, to achieve a task -- in this case, finding a team member in a pink hat. ... Across from Grace, an android version of the late science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick sat in a chair candidly chatting about his novels and personal habits. A true conversationalist, he made eye contact and punctuated his remarks with smiles and scowls on his realistic, three-dimensional face -- sculpted by David Hanson, founder of Texas-based Hanson Robotics Inc. ... Nearby, several robots rolled through a section of a hallway, seeking bright balls and stuffed animals as part of a scavenger hunt. The robots had to make their own decisions about how to locate and retrieve the objects using artificial intelligence: No remote controls could be involved, said Paul Rybski, a CMU post-doctoral fellow and co-chairman of the competition." July 12, 2005: Artificial intelligence experts bring gaming to a new level in Pittsburgh. By Byron Spice. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Artificial intelligence researchers from around the world have come to Pittsburgh this week to play Chinese checkers. They've also been playing -- or, actually, having computers play -- a version of the board game Othello called Nothello, where the goal is to lose, not gain, as many chips as possible. And they've had computers playing other games you've never played and, more importantly, that the computers have never played. That was the whole point of the first General Game Playing Competition -- to design a computer program smart enough to play any previously unknown game when given only the rules. The contest at the American Association for Artificial Intelligence meeting concluded yesterday, with Jim Clune of UCLA beating David Kaiser of Florida International University in a game called 'Racetrack Corridor' to win the $10,000 prize. More than 1,000 scientists are attending this week's AI meeting, which concludes tomorrow at the Westin Convention Center. Playing games, such as chess, has served as a test of a computer's ability to mimic the thinking of a human ever since the field of artificial intelligence was invented almost 50 years ago." July 11, 2005: Five questions - Jason Kadarusman. Interview by Jonathan Sidener. The San Diego Union-Tribune & SignOnSanDiego.com. "Jason Kadarusman is a co-founder of the Intelligent Systems Society (www.IntelligentSys.org), an organization being set up to promote the study of robots and other intelligent systems. Kadarusman and co-founder Anuj Sehgal studied computer science and built robots as undergraduates at Brigham Young University-Hawaii. The two are seeking volunteers to serve on the group's board of directors as part of obtaining nonprofit status. [Q:] What is the Intelligent Systems Society? [A:] It's an organization to help students in high school, university or any level to gain experience with robotics, through workshops, training and competitions. There are national groups doing this, but we thought it would be cool to have this on a local level. We could have something for students here, so they wouldn't have to go somewhere else for workshops and competitions. ... [Q:] When did you become interested in robots? [A:] ... We were mostly working with software, not really getting our hands dirty, when we heard about a competition sponsored by The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International." July 9, 2005: AI marks 25 years of growth. By Jennifer Bails. Pittsburgh Tribune - Review & PittsburghLive.com. "Machines still aren't smart enough to do just about anything a person can, but artificial intelligence -- or AI -- researchers have made tremendous progress in the past few decades. More than 1,000 researchers, technologists and analysts are gathering here starting today for the 20th National Artificial Intelligence Conference to learn about the latest trends in AI science and technology. ... 'It's very important to have the AAAI conference in Pittsburgh on this occasion because two of the founders of AI worked at (Carnegie Mellon University),' said conference program co-chair Manuela Veloso, a professor of computer science at CMU. Veloso was referring to Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, who invented the first 'thinking machine' and launched the field that would become known as artificial intelligence at Carnegie Tech in the mid-1950s. ... Robots aren't serving us breakfast in our homes yet, but artificial intelligence has emerged as a quiet, but significant force in our lives, said Tom Mitchell, artificial intelligence expert and director of the Center for Automated Learning at Discovery at Carnegie Mellon University. 'We still aren't at the point of having systems that can behave as intelligently as you and me,' Mitchell said. 'But we're a lot further along in terms of building computers to do useful tasks in perception, natural language processing, and planning and scheduling.'" July 4, 2005: Gaming companies discover degrees of learning. New crop of hopeful game programmers now learn skill at college. By Victor Godinez. Dallas Morning News / available from Ohio.com. "The industry that once relied on self-taught tinkerers is growing up, and SMU is among the universities rushing to prepare the next generation of gaming professionals. [Brian]Harris is a student in SMU's Guildhall, which offers an 18-month certificate program in the art and science of video game development. ... [B]udgets for blockbuster titles are now $10 million to $20 million, and development teams of programmers, designers, artists, animators, musicians and artificial intelligence experts often number 100 or more. 'Because games are getting much more complex and teams are growing, it's becoming more of a structured discipline,' said Tim Willits, co-owner of id Software and lead designer at the company." July 2, 2005: Benilde-St. Margaret's eyes RoboCup title. By Patrice Relerford. Star Tribune. "Decades from now, when fire departments around the world use robots to locate victims trapped in collapsed buildings, 15 high school students from Benilde-St. Margaret's in St. Louis Park can remember the part they played. They helped develop early versions of the life-saving machines. But they won't have to wait that long to make their mark. Next week they will head to Osaka, Japan, where they will be the only high school team competing in the RoboCup world championship. They'll put the four robots they've developed up against those from 25 teams from 10 countries." July 2005: Game On! Video games are a multibillion-dollar industry where few African Americans manage to get at the controls. Some industries are taking aim at this sector's invisible hurdle. By Wendy Harris. Black Enterprise (subscription req'd.). "There are lucrative careers in designing, programming, and marketing these games, but sadly, it's yet another booming sector overlooked by African Americans. In fact, there are so few African Americans working in the video game industry that there is no official statistic that records their placement in this field. ... Over the next few pages, we'll introduce you to a few individuals who've already entered the West Coast-based industry with great success. They are ambitious, interesting, and without question, on top of their game. ... Rob Gatson, Senior Artificial Intelligence Software Engineer, Visual Concepts Inc. - While most 9-year-old boys spend their afternoons playing video games, as a boy growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Rob Gatson spent his free time learning how to make them. ... Today, Gatson, 34, is a software engineer for Visual Concepts Inc., the major development and production arm of 2K Sports video games brand and video game franchise. ... Gatson is one of only two African American programmers at Visual Concepts. He says the number of blacks working in the industry, particularly as engineers, is small because the idea of making video games a career path is simply not encouraged. 'Computer science isn't cultivated enough within our community,' says Gatson, who talks with many kids about the industry." June 28, 2005: Microsoft, Japanese universities bolster ties. Reuters / available from ZDNet. "Microsoft is bolstering its joint research with Japanese universities, targeting such areas as security and natural language processing, the world's largest software maker said Tuesday. The company will set up a collaboration network on July 1, hoping to promote exchange with researchers at top schools including the University of Tokyo, which is often called the Harvard of Japan. ... Gates, in Japan this week to meet academics and business partners, said he hoped the joint research will yield results in the areas of security, natural language understanding, speech recognition and user interface software. ... Microsoft expects to spend $6.7 billion globally on research and development this year." June 28, 2005: Exploring
new frontiers. By John Michael. Drayton Valley Western
Review. "This summer, three local students will explore
new frontiers as they spend time at the University of Alberta's
research labs in Edmonton as part of the U of A's 21st annual
Women in Scholarship, Engineering, Science and Technology
(WISEST) summer research program. ... [Emma] Rapati, who attends
Warburg school, will spend the summer in the U of A's computer
science lab, developing software for interactive games. ...
[Amanda] Brewer, who attends Frank Maddock high school, will
study artificial intelligence this summer. She is not sure
at this point in time if she would pursue robotics as a career
choice, although she may decide otherwise by the end of the
WISEST program." June 24, 2005: How-to
book shows secrets behind 'bots. By S. Jane Szabo. Anchorage
Daily News. "C-3P0 and R2D2, eat your hearts out. Dennis
Vecera's third-graders have created competitors for robot
fame. Vecera is an Ursa Minor Elementary School teacher who
has included robot-building in his curriculum for 16 years.
This year, he and his students added a new dimension to the
effort by working with not only matter but printed matter.
They made a booklet, 'Build a Remote-Controlled Showbot.'
... It centers on a building primer, with side trips into
the history of robotics and current and future uses. Movies
with characters like 'Gort' (from 'The Day the Earth Stood
Still') are covered, along with toys such as Furby, Lego Mindstorms
and Robosapien." June 23, 2005: The robots are coming. By Mireia Pomar. ireland.com / available from eircom net. "Can you believe that there are dog robots that can roam the streets in search of toxic chemicals? It might sound like the next Hollywood science fiction film, but in fact, all these robots already exist, and they will be on display this summer in Dublin. Save the Robots is the name of the exhibition where science fiction becomes science fact. It opened to the public yesterday at the Ark cultural centre in Temple Bar, Dublin, and will run until late September. Visitors will be able to see and operate all kinds of robots, including veteran robots from the 18th century right up to the latest in robot technology. ... This summer and for the first time in Europe, Dublin will welcome the International Robot Talent Show, also known as 'Artbots'. " June 22, 2005: Summer of Rock and Rockets - Specialty camps help kids broaden interests, hone skills. By Andrew Eder. The Kansas City Star. "Peg Smith, chief executive officer of the American Camp Association, says it has seen a rise in specialty camps nationwide in recent years. That has helped boost the number of campers overall from about 9 million in 1998 to more than 11 million. Smith attributes the popularity of short specialty camps to the growth of a 'developmental model.' Instead of camp being just a place to stash the kids, it’s now gives them a chance for growth and development. 'One trend we’ve noticed is that kids in general tend to collect a menu of activities today,' she says. Robotics camp in Kansas City, Kan., kicked off Chris Smith’s full summer schedule. ... For kids who lean toward science, the place to be is the Kansas City Starbase, held at the National Guard Armory in Kansas City, Kan. On a recent Thursday, the facility held its $90 robotics camp. The camp’s nine boys and one girl were divided into three teams, code-named Alpha, Bravo and Charlie. Site coordinator Jason Johnston gives the campers their mission: Build a Lego model that can navigate a patch of rocks and sand meant to replicate the surface of Mars." June 20, 2005: Making progress. By Fernando Diaz. Daily Herald. "NextFest, now in its second year, showcases technological innovations in seven categories: communication, design, entertainment, exploration, health, security and transportation. The 'World’s Fair of the Future' grew from the tantalizing task of covering emerging technologies at San Francisco’s Wired Magazine, considered the 'journal of record for the future,' and a desire to expose those developments beyond its pages. 'We get to write about a lot of really interesting and cool stuff, but unless we are the writers, we don’t get to see them,' said Adam Rogers, a senior editor at the magazine. Rogers is dying to see the Philip K. Dick robot, an android that bears an eerie resemblance to the famed science fiction writer and responds to commands through artificial intelligence software. It draws, too, Rogers said. ... [M]any of the exhibits are more than fun and games. The prosthetic C-Leg is already allowing amputees to reclaim some mobility, iRobot’s Rumba vacuums are moving into homes via infomercials and the company’s PackBot Scout, an 8-inch tall, 40-pound battle-bot is currently deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan assisting soldiers." June 15, 2005: Students put tech skills on display. By Ryan Foust. NewsTimesLive.com. "The company's Web site promises better learning through technology. The problem is that not all students learn the same way, and teachers are unable to adopt their teaching styles to fit each student in the classroom. The solution, according to Adaptive Education Management Services (AEMS), is a software tutoring system called U-Gene, utilizing Artificial General Intelligence that allows it to learn to a student's strengths and weaknesses through direct interaction. U-Gene is then able to cater to the student's individual needs as a learner. However, U-Gene doesn't exist today. Then again, neither does AEMS. The company and program are a project of New Milford High School's Information Technology Leadership Academy team. The team showcased its project last month at IT Expo 2005, where it won the IBM Business Case White Paper Award for its use of IBM technology, research and patents. ... 'The more I learned about the capabilities of AI (artificial intelligence), the more I wanted there to be a system like U-Gene available,' said [Megan] Kapsiak." June 10, 2005: Games course aims to alleviate skills shortage. By Brian Skelly. SiliconRepublic.com. "The anticipated growth in the computer games software sector in Ireland is being catered for by a new computer games programming and design course at the University of Limerick from September next. ... They will study computer science, with special emphasis on topics relevant to game design such as computer graphics, artificial intelligence, digital video and audio fundamentals." June 10, 2005: A Matter of Artificial Intelligence. Anshuman Joshi interviews Dr. Michael Rovatsos, lecturer at the Centre of Intelligent Systems and their Applications, School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh. Khaleej Times Online. "[Q] In recent times Artificial Intelligence have been given a preference to more traditional computer science approaches. Is it hype or is there something more? [A] It is certainly not hype because research in this area has now been going on for 50 years and has produced a lot of results. If you only think of robotics and autonomous unguided vehicles, neural networks in industrial automation, fuzzy logic controllers contained in many microelectronic devices and household appliances, expert systems in business applications, all these would not exist without AI. [Q] Isn't AI about understanding and simulating human intelligence? [A] This is the 'grand vision' of the area, but most people working in AI focus on specific sub-problems. You will find that in their day to day work, AI researchers mostly follow a very 'normal' science/engineering approach, i.e. they work on concrete problems like 'how can I recognise faces in data from a video camera?', 'what should I bid in an electronic auction if I don't know what other people might bid?', 'how can I learn to move in an unknown environment without colliding with other objects?'" Other questions include: Critics of Artificial Intelligence have labelled the whole idea behind Artificial Intelligence as obscene, anti-human and immoral? What is your opinion? ... Comparisons have been drawn between AI and philosophy. Even movies (Terminator, The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, and Steven Spielberg's AI have tended to describe them as being 'symbiotic' to each other. Is there an element of truth there? ... What is the future of AI? June 9, 2005: Fields of learning theory, machine learning grow together at University. By Steve Koppes. University of Chicago Chronicle. "Approximately 100 students from across the country and around the world completed a two-week crash course in machine learning at the end of May, at the University’s International House. ... The students attended the Machine Learning Summer School, which was held in North America for the first time since researchers in Europe and Australia launched the program in 2002. ... Machine learning is a growing segment of artificial intelligence that involves teaching a computer to learn from experience to perform tasks that a human could not do or that a human could do, but a machine could do at a much lower cost. A typical example from the business world would be teaching a computer to detect credit card fraud." June 8, 2005: Shattering Myths That Women Can’t Be Leaders in Science. Spelman College release available from Newswise. "Spelman College students are defying the myth that women are not equipped to be leaders in the sciences. Countless hours of computer programming in between hitting the books have paid off for these students, who have earned the College a coveted spot in an international competition. From July 13-19, 2005, the all-female team will be in Osaka, Japan, for RoboCup 2005, where they will compete against 23 other academic institutions from around the world that have also programmed Sony AIBO robot dogs. The Coca-Cola Company is sponsoring the team to ensure they have the resources needed to successfully compete in this prestigious competition. ... Spelman President Beverly Daniel Tatum, Ph.D., and the Spelman community are proud of the SpelBots, the name for the Spelman team. 'The opportunity for six young Black women to lead a robotics team in international competition is so fantastic, and such a great testament to what is possible when the expectations are high,' said Dr. Tatum. 'It speaks to the continued importance of an institution like Spelman. We still need environments where those who have been historically left out are expected to succeed without the barriers often associated with gender or race, particularly in science and technology.'" June 8, 2005: National ExploraVision Winners in Washington. By Kristin Collins. NSTA. "Combining creativity with scientific knowledge and research to envision a future technology is no easy task. Eight student teams from across the United States and Canada, however, achieved that goal and are winners in this year’s Toshiba/National Science Teachers Association ExploraVision Awards program. ... Grades 10–12 Don Mills Collegiate Institute, Toronto, Canada ... 'Body M.A.S.S.' is a minimally invasive artificial intelligence system that monitors vital signs and nutrient mineral levels. Worn as clothing, it allows patients to monitor their health and provide information to their doctors." June 8 - 15, 2005: Immersed in the Future - Randy Pausch on the Future of Education. Ubiquity (Volume 6, Issue 20). "UBIQUITY: As the head of an entertainment technology center, do you have to defend the seriousness of what you do? PAUSCH: Yes and no. The first thing is that, I don't focus as much on entertainment as you might think. So, for example, we run an entertainment technology center here. And I would say that almost a quarter of the students in our student body want to go out and use their powers for good and not evil, meaning that they want to work for non-profits. They want to do museum exhibits. They want to do educational software over the Web. ... PAUSCH: ... The biggest project we have going on at the Entertainment Technology Center is called Hazmat, and is for training firefighters and other first responders to respond to chemical attacks — whether they're poison gas attacks or just industrial chemical hazards. ... PAUSCH: I was referring specifically to the Alice Project, and what I was saying there was that if you ask, 'Who here has any kind of a potential solution to the fact that enrollments are dropping like a stone?' you don't get many answers from people. Do you know anybody in the computer science community who says, 'Oh, here is something that could change the fact that young people are not going into our discipline'? When I say I'm the only game in town, I'm saying that we have an entirely novel way to introduce people to programming, where we have huge amounts of evidence that we have a teaching strategy that works even at the middle school level. Typically, a kid's first exposure to programming frankly sucks, right? It's not an accident that the highest rates of academic dishonesty occur in introductory programming courses, and that's not just because it's mechanically easy to copy code; the reason is that we put people into the most frustrating situation in the world. ... PAUSCH: I am. And by the way, why is it that programming is the gateway to computer science? I mean, I realize that it's a valuable skill, and computer scientists should be able to program. But other disciplines have figured out that the first course should be a survey of all the cool things in the discipline, you know, mixed in with some laboratory sessions about doing the stuff. To us, it's all laboratory sessions. I used to teach in a lecture format, which is kind of a stupid way to teach people a lot of this stuff. But with the Alice system, you drag words around, you can't make a syntax error." June 7, 2005: Redefining
the Power of the Gamer - The first Artificial Intelligence
and Interactive Digital Entertainment conference explored
a future where games are driven as strongly by characters
as combat. By Seth Schiesel. The New York Times (registration
req'd.). "Standing outside the apartment on Thursday,
Walter could hear the barbs and retorts of a failed marriage's
final throes. Walter's friends, Grace and Trip, had invited
him over. ... This is the future of video games. In their
modern riff on 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' Walter was
the only human. Grace and Trip were virtual characters powered
by advanced artificial intelligence techniques, which allowed
them to change their emotional state in fairly complicated
ways in response to the conversational English being typed
in by the human player. It was one version of the future here
this past week at the first Artificial Intelligence and Interactive
Digital Entertainment conference. It is a future where games
are driven as strongly by characters as combat, where games
are as much soap opera as shooting gallery and as much free-form
construction set as destruction arena. The apartment drama,
a 15-minute interactive story called 'Facade' that is scheduled
to be released free next month (interactivestory.net), was
one of the demonstrations offered to the roughly 120 game
makers and academic computer experts who attended. 'As we
try to create more immersive experiences, these artificial
intelligence techniques are helping drive games forward and
this is one of the areas that could really explode,' Bing
Gordon, chief creative officer at Electronic Arts, the No.
1 video game company, said after his talk Wednesday night.
'We hope that the folks here start thinking about artificial
intelligence as a feature, like graphics is a feature or sound
is a feature.'" June 6, 2005: What Women Want - Equality remains an ideal in science and technology. Experience and the numbers suggest it is still a dream. Red Herring. "More than a few of our readers will ask why we’re focusing on the status of women in technology at this particular time. Marissa Mayer’s story about looking for a job may help you better understand our reasons. Ms. Mayer, a computer science graduate of Stanford University, wanted what a lot of brand-new jobseekers want -- a welcoming environment and an intellectual challenge. But she saw something puzzling at many of the companies where she interviewed. ... It appears that the role of women in technology is far from settled. Technology, an equalizer in many ways, has yet to balance the numbers of men and women working. Five years into the 21st century, the percentage of women in the sciences is considerably less than their presence in the general work force. Even fewer women hold leadership roles at technology companies and science centers. ... The female presence is stronger when you step down from the executive suite to the lab and the computer center. In 2003, women accounted for 10.4 percent of all computer hardware engineers and 7.1 percent of electrical and electronics engineers in the United States. They fared better as computer and information systems managers, making up 30 percent of the work force in this category. The best news about new technology talent is at the undergraduate level, where U.S. women now outnumber men in earning engineering and science degrees. If you look at the nearly 27,000 engineering graduates in the same year, 21.4 percent are women. ... These numbers are rooted in the choices girls are encouraged to make as early as grade school, say many women who have survived—and even thrived—in high tech."
>>> Equality & Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students), Computer Science, Employment Statistics (@ AI Industry Statistics) June 3, 2005: Tech-minded kids pass up canoes for computers. By Seth Sutel. Associated Press / available from TheJournalNews.com. "With the summer camp season fast approaching, kids across the country will be stocking up on hiking shoes, bug spray and other necessities for adventures in the great outdoors. Thousands of others, however, will be enjoying adventures of the indoor variety: creating video games, building robots and designing Web pages. Computer camp, as it was known to an earlier generation, just isn't what it used to be. With the booming growth of video games, the Internet and digital media, technology-minded kids have an enormous variety of things to learn at technology camps, which are often taught on the campuses of major universities. ... Camp administrators say enrollment is up from last year.... And while the kids are on the computers for five to six hours a day, the instructors also take them outside for activities to break up the day." June 2, 2005: Grad
shooting for stars. By Sally Mesarosh. The Gilbert Republic
/ azcentral.com. "A few decades ago, Steffanie Kuehn's
career choice of electrical engineering might have been considered
unusual. In today's workplace, stereotypes are no longer as
likely to influence a student's career goals. Kuehn, 18, a
recently graduated senior at Gilbert High School, will be
pursuing a degree in electrical engineering at Brigham Young
University with an eye toward a doctorate in astrophysics.
'I want to go into artificial intelligence,' said Kuehn, who
scored a perfect 1600 on her SAT. 'I'm interested in helping
build technology that goes into space, like probes that make
decisions on their own.' ... Non-traditional career paths
such as Kuehn's can offer both men and women broader opportunities
and greater job satisfaction. The U.S. Department of Labor
defines non-traditional careers as occupations where at least
75 percent of the workers are of one gender. For women, jobs
traditionally held by men offer wages 50 to 75 percent higher
than traditional female-dominated jobs. But Department of
Labor statistics show that 15 percent of the 58 million women
in the workforce are employed in non-traditional occupations
such as auto mechanics, firefighting or engineering. Debbie
Graham, career technician at Mountain Pointe High School in
Ahwatukee Foothills, said she finds that high school students
haven't been educated about non-traditional classes as much
as they should be. 'When I walk into computer networking or
programming classes, they're all male,' Graham said. ... Graham
said the time for parents and teachers to begin pointing out
non-traditional career options is before students enter high
school. She said the state plans to build more information
on non-traditional career options into the career curriculum." June 2005: NextFest
2005 - The Wired World's Fair:June 24 - 26, Chicago.
Wired (Issue 13.06). "Building on the success of last
year's NextFest in San Francisco, we'll offer more than 100
exhibits about the future of exploration, entertainment, transportation,
science and medicine, communication, design, defense, and
-imagination (a pavilion dedicated to developments by NextFest
sponsor GE). On the pages that follow, we've highlighted the
cool things you'll be able to see, touch, and in some cases
test-drive." June 2005: The Start of Computer Games. By Corie Lok. Technology Review. "The first game invented specifically for the computer appeared in early 1962. A new $120,000 computer had just arrived at MIT that was faster and easier to use than the handful of other hulking machines on campus. And a group of young MIT programmers who just happened to be reading science fiction books about space battle had been itching to test it out. In less than a year, the programmers, led by Steven Russell, produced Spacewar.... At the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, a group of engineers will soon complete the restoration of a PDP-1, which will be exhibited to the public. Visitors will then get to experience computing history by playing Spacewar for themselves." May 28, 2005: Teachers tinker with robots at workshop. By Jenny Lee Allen. HeraldTribune.com. "[Linda] Chambers joined about two dozen teachers from Manatee, Sarasota and Polk counties at a workshop at Lakewood Ranch High School on Friday to learn how to bring more robotics lessons into the classroom. ... Each summer, local school districts hold workshops to keep teachers up-to-date on technology. 'Technology changes so fast,' said Arnall Cox, a career and tech education curriculum specialist in Sarasota County. Last year, teachers from Manatee and Sarasota counties attended a 10-day workshop taught by a robotics expert from Brigham Young University. Gov. Jeb Bush's office heard about this year's workshop and offered to pay for three Manatee County teachers to attend a BattleBots IQ Teacher's Institute course this summer." May 27, 2005: Student Interest in Computer Science Plummets - Technology companies struggle to fill vacant positions. By Andrea L. Foster. The Chronicle of Higher Education. "Computer scientists say their ranks need to grow for them to tackle such challenges as protecting the country's financial, utility, telecommunications, transportation, and defense systems from terrorist attacks. In response, the National Science Foundation and some colleges are stepping up efforts to promote computer science -- especially to women and some minority groups, whose representation in the field is minuscule. ... Computer scientists and undergraduates blame the field's anemia mostly on news-media reports of technology jobs moving to developing countries, and on the bursting of the dot-com bubble. ... Some computer-science professors say that much of the news coverage is exaggerated, and that jobs in information technology remain plentiful. ... In some cases, computer-savvy students are turning to more glamorous fields like bioinformatics and molecular biology.... Professors say the creation in the last five years of new degrees in information technology or information systems may also be offering more-attractive alternatives to computer science. ... 'Women seem to come to computer science later,' says Ms. [Janice E.] Cuny, citing research by Jane Margolis, of the University of California at Los Angeles Graduate School of Education, and Allan Fisher, a former associate dean of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. 'Women seem to be more interested in the uses of computer science, whereas guys seem to be more interested in the technology itself.' For that reason, Ms. Cuny and other professors advocate that colleges restructure their curricula. Too many teenagers naïvely assume that the field is just about programming, they say, a perception reinforced by the Advanced Placement examination in computer science."
>>> Computer Science, Something for Everyone & Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students), Bioinformatics, Applications May 22, 2005: Innovative curriculum helps blind students get start in computer science studies. By Shannon Fiecke. Winona Daily News. "Abdel-Magid and eight other visually impaired students were the first in the nation to participate in a program designed to make it possible for visually impaired people to pursue a career in computer science. With further tutoring in programming from another student, Abdel-Magid entered the computer science program at Winona State University this school year. Saint Mary's and WSU started the Computer Science Curriculum Accessibility Program four years ago with a $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. ... Not only has the program helped professors learn how to teach visually impaired students, but student workers are advancing software applications for the blind." May 19, 2005: "Machine learning" is Beal’s focus - Computer scientist adapts "hot" technology to bioinformatics, artificial intelligence. By Irene Liguori. UB Reporter. "MIT calls it one of the hot 10 emerging technologies that will change your world: Bayesian Machine Learning. It also happens to be the focal point of research for Matthew J. Beal, who last fall joined the faculty in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Bayesian Machine Learning is a head-spinning concept based on a mathematical basis for probability inference discovered by 18th-century mathematician and clergyman Thomas Bayes. Today it is used in applications such as tracking the time evolution of cells, gene expression and interaction, and drug development. 'Students like courses where they are trying to build intelligent algorithms,' says Beal, who won the UB Graduate Student Association's Distinguished Teacher Award after his very first semester as an assistant professor in the fall of 2004 teaching 'Introduction to Machine Learning.'" May 19, 2005: New Institute for Artificial Intelligence Studies. Press release available from Newswise. "Suppose the computer from the starship Enterprise or the HAL 9000 from '2001, A Space Odyssey' had been scanning intelligence data four years ago. Perhaps it would have made the connection humans missed between terrorists and flight schools. Or suppose such a computer were designing airline flight schedules: You might get home for Christmas a little faster. These are just some of the possibilities of 'artificial intelligence,' or AI, which is not really about making computers that talk back but rather about using computers for the things they are good at: dealing with massive amounts of data or problems with a vast number of choices. These are the sorts of problems that are being examined by Cornell University's new Intelligent Information Systems Institute, launched this year with a $5 million, five-year grant from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). In keeping with university policy, none of the research will be classified. Other problems on the table include game theory, information retrieval and automatic verification of software and hardware, according to Carla Gomes, Cornell associate professor of computing and information science and applied economics and management, and director of the new institute. ... The creation of the institute has created a buzz in the academic community, according to Robert Constable, Cornell's dean of computing and information science. ... This year, he said, there have been more applications from students wanting to work in AI than any other field, and more of those accepted have decided to come to Cornell than ever before." May 18, 2005: Hilo student racks up science accolades. By Helen Altonn. Honolulu Star-Bulletin. "[Seventeen-year-old Kimberly Reinhold] just got back to Hilo from the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix, she said in a telephone interview. ... After she graduates Sunday from St. Joseph Junior Senior High School and tallies her awards, she'll find: *A second-place Grand Award of $1,500 for a project in computer science, 'Artificial Cognition and Memory: Tissue Image Analysis for Tumor Diagnosis.' *First-place award of $3,000 from the U.S. Air Force. *Second-place award of $2,500 from IBM. *$500 from the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. *$1,000 from the Association for Computing Machinery. ... She won a first place $16,000 scholarship last month at the National Junior Science and Humanities Symposium sponsored by the Army, Navy and Air Force in San Diego. That was on top of $2,000 she won at the Pacific Symposium for Science and Sustainability in Honolulu in January. ... She will attend Massachusetts Institute of Technology this fall. She wants to continue looking at artificial intelligence and figure out how the human brain works." May 17, 2005: Building bridges - MESA program aims to increase the presence of underrepresented students in science and engineering. By Sue Pesznecker. The Daily Vanguard. "It is Friday, May 13, MESA Day at Portland State, and groups of middle and high school students chatter on the steps outside the Stott Center, some holding posters, others clutching balsa bridges or odd-looking model vehicles. MESA - Math, Engineering and Science Achievement - is a program encouraging underrepresented students to pursue college math, science, engineering and computer science. ... Created 35 years ago in California, there are now MESA USA chapters in 11 states, as well as a waiting list of states that want a program. Chapters are anchored at a four-year college or university." May 16, 2005: Getting a degree in 'Mortal Kombat.' By John Borland. CNET News.com. "Like other colleges around the United States, the University of Denver saw enrollment in computer science courses slide precipitously over the past few years. Unlike some others, the school came up with a remedy that seems to be working: games. Last year, the Denver school became one of the first four-year universities in the United States to open an undergraduate major in game development, by merging elements from the school's computer-science and design programs. ... Universities' burgeoning interest in computer and video games may be as powerful a sign of the medium's maturation as are the tens of billions of dollars now made by the industry every year. ... The relationship between colleges and game companies desperate for talent nevertheless remains an uncertain one. On one side are academics who are eager to bring their own brand of analysis and research to the table.... On the other side are more practical programs...." May 9, 2005: Game over for women programmers. Press Association / available from Guardian Unlimited Online. "An industry which celebrates violence and the exaggerated female form might expect to be an all-male domain - but a university launched a frantic search today after a prestigious new computer games degree failed to attract a single woman. The Microsoft-backed honours course has had applications from 106 male undergraduates, but now hopes to strike a gender balance by holding a series of summer camps. Staff at the University of Derby said it believes the women-only taster days will persuade female students they have important roles to take up in the sector. ... [Industry researcher Lizzie Haines] said: 'Girls don't know that they can work in the games industry, they're not told that games is a good career choice either and if they don't play games themselves it may never occur to them to try it. If they do, they find mostly that it's full of challenges and the opportunity to do cutting-edge programming, as well as good pay, great prospects, and the chance to be creative.'"
>>> Summer Programs, Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students), Video Games April 22, 2005: Minorities sought for DHS research. By Dibya Sarkar. FCW.com. "Homeland Security Department officials are seeking applications for summer research appointments for teachers and students involved in science, technology, engineering and mathematics from minority-serving higher education institutions. The Science and Technology Directorate's Office of University Programs, which administers and oversees such educational programs, wants teachers and students from historically black colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, tribal colleges and universities, and Alaska native- and native Hawaiian-serving schools to gain a better understanding of homeland security-related research through participating DHS-affiliated venues." April 20, 2005: Studies recharge Computer Science. By Susie Poppick. Yale Daily News. "AK Watson can tell if your tone of voice is angry or happy, but not what your words mean. Possessing a 'brain' made up of 16 computers connected over a network, Watson is the latest humanoid robot under development in computer science professor Brian Scassellati's lab. The robot is designed to evaluate models of social development in children and help diagnose disorders like autism. Scassellati's creation is just one of the many projects researchers in the Computer Science Department intend to develop into practical applications. ... Other ongoing research in the Computer Science Department involves artificial intelligence, machine learning, mathematical theories of human vision, cryptography and programs for physical- or biological-science research." April 20, 2005: Students rah, rah, rah their 'bot - Proud and of good cheer, young robot engineers gear up for world competition. By Katy Human. DenverPost.com. "The group of nine, aged 10 to 14, unexpectedly won a state robot competition in January. Later this week, they will represent Colorado at an international contest of about 75 teams in Georgia. ... In middle-school robot competitions directed by FIRST - a science and technology education program established by Segway inventer Dean Kamen - it's not just robot performance that counts, said communications manager Marian Murphy. ... Also, teams had to write a research report, and that's where Reed's group really shined, team members boasted. 'We proposed this device that would help a person who is blind get across an intersection,' said Katrina Atkinson, 13. ... So the team wrote about building a small computer that would snap a picture of the 'Walk' or 'Don't walk' symbol, compare it with images stored in memory and indicate to its user whether it was safe to walk." April 8, 2005: People to watch: David Fogel. By Bruce V. Bigelow. The San Diego Union-Tribune & SignOnSanDiego.com. "Natural Selection was founded in 1993 by David Fogel and his parents, Lawrence and Eva Fogel. Their family business specializes in evolutionary computation, algorithms that simulate the Darwinian process of random variation and selection, to solve challenging problems. [Question] What is the recent trend in defense funding for intelligent systems and how does the grant you just received fit? [Answer] There is certainly more recognition that intelligent systems will be needed for UAVs and in other operations. ..." April 8, 2005: Robot camp, courtesy IIIT-Hyderabad, soon - On the lines of the annual camp organized by NASA, IIIT aims at holding a camp with at least 50 functional robots in place. By Sunitha Natti. CIOL (Cyber India Online Ltd.). "In an attempt to build awareness on navigating a robot, Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Hyderabad is planning to hold an annual robot camp for students of eleventh and twelfth standard soon. The proposed camp would be similar to the one that is being organized by NASA for students in the month of June every year. IIIT-Hyderabad associate professor PJ Narayanan said, 'Such camps are essential to convey the thrill of robotics to students and educate them on robotics applications.'" April 7, 2005: Engineering students show off robot creations. By Rachel Anderson. Daily Universe & BYU NewsNet. "Teams of engineering students crowded around a square of green carpet last week in a seeding competition for Thursday’s robot soccer tournament. After spending a semester writing codes and building the robots for their senior project, all the students could do was watch and cheer for the soccer players. ... Brad Perry, a computer engineering major on a team named Combat Alfalfa, spent more than 10 hours a week developing his specialty assignment, the robots’ artificial intelligence. 'The artificial intelligence will choose a play -- tell the group what to do,' Perry said. 'You could see, for example, when the ball got to the edge of the field, the robot would start hitting it against the wall. It was trying to rebound the ball.' ... As a junior in his major, Perry has taken classes that support his experience, but the challenge is applying that knowledge to programming the robots. ... 'For us, this competition is a way of saying ‘Hey, this is just a taste of the tremendous things you can do in engineering,’'Archibald said. 'Creative expression is not something that is just limited to people in the arts or in literature.'" April 6, 2005: UCD scientist patents ‘smart’ email. By Brian Skelly. SiliconRepublic.com. "A University College Dublin (UCD) scientist has filed a patent application for a new technology that he believes can turn email into a much more effective business tool. US-born Dr Nicholas Kushmerick, a senior lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at UCD, has developed the technology over the past year during his part-time position as visiting scientist on IBM’s Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) initiative. This is a programme that aims to forge links between the computer maker’s Dublin software lab and the academic community in order to turn new technology into marketable products. Kushmerick developed the technology, known as Active Email Manager (AEM), in concert with New York-based IBM researcher Tessa Lau. Together they developed a machine-learning algorithm that automatically keeps track of tasks and associated emails, in order to build up a work flow for each task. ... [T]he advent of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) has...made Ireland one of the best places in the world to do research, according to Kushmerick, who doubts whether he would still be in Ireland were it not for SFI. 'When I arrived in Dublin there was a modest amount of funding for computer science. With SFI it’s completely changed.'" April 6, 2005: Honda Robot Helps Teach in Classrooms. By Yuri Kageyama. The Associated Press / available from the Casper Star Tribune. "A walking childlike robot from Japanese automaker Honda Motor Co. is entering classrooms to help teachers demonstrate the wonders of science. ... 'Adults must work harder to make learning about science more interesting for children,' said Mamoru Mohri, an astronaut who heads the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo." April 5, 2005: Colleges spend big to look cool. By Dawn Weinberger. The Christian Science Monitor. "Though difficult to track exactly how many universities are involved in construction projects at any given moment, schools across the nation are adapting to significant technological advancements and student enrollment growth by remodeling, renovating, and expanding outdated architecture. ... Last year the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., opened its new Stata Center, a $300-million complex designed by celebrity architect Frank Gehry. The state-of-the-art building houses labs for computer science and artificial intelligence, classrooms, a child-care facility, and a gym. Next December the school will open its $156-million brain and cognitive science project.... The goal of much of the new building: establishing or maintaining programs that interest students. Most construction projects 'generally tend to be related to student life and making sure the university is current in terms of education and research in areas that are germane to society,' says Mr. [Jim] Becker..... A lab built in the 1960s, for example, isn't equipped to handle programs like nanotechnology, or even computer science." April 4, 2005: Attack of the Soccer Robots - When will androids beat us at sports? By Sam Schechner. Slate. "The CMU robot dogs, known as CMDash'05, are the defending champions in the four-legged division of the RoboCup U.S. Open. ... Will a team of robots beat the World Cup champions -- or at least the best team in MLS -- in our lifetime? After a couple of days spent watching foot-long, plastic dogs waddle after a bright orange ball, I admit it's hard to imagine. But even if it does take longer than a half-century, the robot-soccer scientists will one day meet their objective. And when the robots do kick us into submission, it won't be because they've unlocked some dominant strategy or because they've dramatically surpassed our stamina, coordination, and flexibility. It'll be because the robots have finally learned to see as well as you and I do every day. ... Manuela Veloso, the head of CMU's MultiRobot lab and one of RoboCup's founders, thinks fears of robot rebellion are misplaced. 'They only have to understand where's the ball, where's the goal, where are my teammates, where's the end of the field -- not what's a house or what's a tree or what's anything,' she says. 'And that's why they'll be able to win.'" April 4, 2005: Kids' camps - more careers than crafts. Forget the image of years gone by. Many of today's summer camps are tailored for instruction, from robotics to rock 'n' roll. By Sharon Ginn. St. Petersburg Times / Floridian. "Many of these niche camps are less than 10 years old, some only a few years old. They run the gamut from outrageous luxury to intensive instruction to a special place to just make some friends. Here are some of the more interesting residential camps in Florida and around the nation. ... Computer camp sounds dull, until you get to the part where they let you make a robot. That's the big bonus of CyberCamps' robotics course, which is programming camp in disguise. 'During the week of camp, kids will actually build a robot that they will have to program to do some things,' said David Kinard, marketing director at CyberCamps, based in Washington state." April 4, 2005: The higher education of gaming - Musem exhibit offers visitors look at the evolution of video games. The Columbia Chronicle Online. "After more than 40 years of joysticks, cartridges and copious titles, one Chicago institution is currently chronicling the history of video games, while another is hoping to enter the lucrative market. Currently at the Museum of Science and Industry, 57th Street and Lake Shore Drive, an exhibit, 'Game On: The History, Culture and Future of Video Games,' documents the origins of the pixelated medium through a labyrinthine exhibit with playable consoles, original character sketches and game cover art. ... Scott Beveridge, network and multimedia exhibit manager with the museum, said that video gaming and academia share a close relationship. 'With these games and ideas of artificial intelligence and immersed environments, you see a long tradition [between] higher education and video game development,' Beveridge said. 'Now, a team of 50 is needed to develop a game, along with a certain amount of education and sophistication.'" April 3, 2005: Celebrating science. By Rod Ohira. The Honolulu Advertiser. "Can a computer model the activities of the human brain? ... The answers to these questions -- and many more -- can be found among 345 projects from 427 students on display Wednesday at the 48th Hawaii State Science & Engineering Fair at Blaisdell Center's Exhibition Hall.... Kimberly Reinhold's computer science projects have progressed into uncharted territory over a four-year period. The only child of Big Island pathologists Rhoda and Charles Reinhold, Kimberly became interested in artificial intelligence research after reading an article in one of her father's magazines, Scientific American. ... Reinhold, who has been accepted by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the Science Fair inflamed her interest in artificial intelligence research. 'I decided it's what I want to do in life,' she said. ... Kimberly Reinhold's favorite part of the Science Fair is the verbal requirement, which counts as 10 percent of the judging. 'If you can't articulate your project, people won't ever understand its significance,' Reinhold said." April 2005: La Vida Robot - How four underdogs from the mean streets of Phoenix took on the best from M.I.T. in the national underwater bot championship. By Joshua Davis. Wired (Issue 13.04). "The robot competition (sponsored in part by the Office of Naval Research and NASA) required students to build a bot that could survey a sunken mock-up of a submarine - not easy stuff. The teachers [at Carl Hayden Community High School] had entered the club in the expert-level Explorer class instead of the beginner Ranger class. They figured their students would lose anyway, and there was more honor in losing to the college kids in the Explorer division than to the high schoolers in Ranger. Their real goal was to show the students that there were opportunities outside West Phoenix. The teachers wanted to give their kids hope. ... They hope to see all four kids go to college before they quit teaching, which means they're likely to keep working for a long time. Since the teenagers are undocumented, they don't qualify for federal loans. And though they've lived in Arizona for an average of 11 years, they would still have to pay out-of-state tuition, which can be as much as three times the in-state cost. They can't afford it." March 30, 2005: Building a robot -- and teamwork - After-school program challenges students to create machines that work. By Charlie Breitrose. MetroWest Daily News. "Sifting through a pile of tiny screws and nuts, gears and wheels, a group of boys at Westborough's Mill Pond School painstakingly work on what will become a working robot. The students get a helping hand from Ed Harrow, the after-school program's director and a former high-tech worker. The after-school program is considered an enrichment activity to give the students a challenge they wouldn't get in class. The fourth-graders in the program all want to know more about robots. ... While he wants them to learn how to assemble the robots, Harrow said one of the goals is actually just getting them to work in teams. He got the idea for trying to build good working relationships after seeing what can happen when people can't work together during his time in the high-tech industry. ... Not all of Harrow's classes are the same. In some towns, he uses the Lego robotics system, where students will build their machine out of Lego pieces, and can program them. ... Robotics fits in perfectly with the interests of students, Sholler said. 'I think it's definitely a hot topic now. I think it is interesting for the kids, who are really intrigued by things like robotics,' [Kim Sholler, director of Community Education] said. 'A lot of kids are tech savvy, so creating something and be able to program it intrigues them.' " March 25, 2005: Robots ready to rumble. By Richard Shim. CNET News.com. "Learning and sharing knowledge are the goals of the second annual robot competition called RoboGames, formerly Robolympics. That might sound hokey, but it's something that doesn't happen enough -- to the detriment of robotics, said David Calkins, president of the Robotics Society of America and organizer of the event. 'The participants never really talk to each other, and they have so much to learn from one another,' said Calkins, also a professor of robotics and computer engineering at San Francisco State University. "'At something like this, people can cross-pollinate in different disciplines, since they're all in the same place at the same time, when so many new things are going on.' At RoboGames, 650 participants compete in a number of categories, from combat to sumo. ... People from 15 countries have come here to take part, and the competition is growing--the number of entrants is up 20 percent." March 24, 2005: UCSC adds new track for computer science majors - Game design. By Jondi Gumz. Santa Cruz Sentinel. "If you thought computer games were just a hobby, think again. Next fall, UC Santa Cruz will offer a track in game design for computer science majors, preparing graduates for jobs in a $7-billion industry. 'By the end of their four years, they will create a computer game,' said Ira Pohl, UCSC’s chairman of computer science. ... Senior Jeremy Hayes is part of a team creating a role-playing game involving the crew of a rocket ship. Designing such a game requires knowledge of 'distributed systems' so more than one person can play, Pohl said, adding that artificial intelligence comes into the picture when characters learn how to deal with new situations." March 21, 2005: Robots
set to take over Wilkes. By Joe DeAngelis. The Beacon
(registration req'd.). "Although still in its infant
stages, the robotics club commenced at Wilkes University with
its first meeting on Tuesday, March 8. ... The club aims to
teach students how to build, operate, maintain and program
autonomous robots, which are robots that can be operated without
human interference. 'Our club primarily will focus on mobile
robots that are autonomous,' said Matt Zukoski, an assistant
professor of mathematics and computer science and a co-advisor
for the club. ... 'There's a growing interest across the country
in robotics, partly due to the war in Iraq,' said Zukoski.
Because of this, along with an increasing demand for robots
in manufacturing industries, there will be more careers available
in robotics. ... Both Zukoski and Abu-Nabaa plan for the club
to participate in national competitions such as RoboCup....
Since it involves a lot of disciplines, the club is open to
all majors." March 20, 2005: Q&A
with Mark Dean - director of IBM's Almaden Research Center
spoke about his research, his work on the original IBM personal
computer and promoting African-Americans' interest in science.
By Therese Poletti. The Mercury News. "Q
What kind of research is IBM Almaden working on right now
that excites you? A We are starting down
the path of thinking about things like recording my day. ...
The key is not the recording of the information, but the key
is being able to have a vast store of this, where I can go
back and reference it, and use it for personal improvement
on how I work, or just for reference. ... You want software
that automatically tags and creates what we call meta data
-- data that says what this data is -- so I can go back and
find it. ... Q You are a rare African-American
very high up in the engineering ranks in technology. Do you
go out to try and get more blacks interested in science? A
It's a big part of my time, spare and otherwise. IBM has a
tremendous amount of effort in promoting and recruiting minorities
in engineering and the sciences. We believe that the industry
needs to mimic society. We need to mix, we need to match the
mix that exists in society, or we won't be able to produce
products that get to all of our constituency. We have a heavy
push. I'm so serious that I'm looking for every minority Ph.D.
graduate that is coming out of school, from computer science,
electrical engineering, chemistry, physics, and maybe a few
others. But I need to find every under-represented minority.
We have blacks, Hispanics, American Indians. I want to hire
every one of them. The good and the bad is that it's possible
because there aren't that many. ..." March 17, 2005: Getting
Girls to Excel - GEMS conference provides ways to encourage
girls to take math and science courses. By Mirza Kurspahi.
Reston Connection - Connection Newspapers. " The enrollment
in computer science classes and programs in Fairfax County
Public Schools between 1997 and 2003 was 76 percent boys,
24 percent girls. In 1984, women constituted 37 percent of
those who received computer science degrees from universities
and colleges, while today the percentage is down to 27. Dogwood
Elementary School, in cooperation with Lockheed Martin, its
corporate sponsor, and the American Association of University
Women (AAUW) sponsored a conference for fifth- and sixth-grade
girls to encourage them to take math and science classes.
Girls Excelling in Math and Science (GEMS) started in 1991
through the AAUW. ... The conference, held on Saturday, March
12, hosted 27 hands-on workshops for the fifth- and sixth-grade
girls. They were taught by professional women in fields of
math and science, including employees of NASA and Lockheed
Martin, among others. ... Elizabeth Vandenburg, the co-presenter
of the workshop and the co-director of AAUW's Tech Savvy Girls
Project, said it is important to show the girls the math and
science jobs are not boring. 'You don't just sit behind computers
the whole day -- you work on teams,' she said. ... Vandenburg's
co-presenter, Laura Jones, urged the parents to change their
daughters' outlook on computer scientists." March 14, 2005: This net is child's play for elite high schoolers. By Carolyn Duffy Marsan. Network World. "Meet the upperclassmen at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the nation's premier technical high school, which is affectionately known as TJ. The 30 students who hang out in TJ's Computer Systems Lab are likely to be the next generation of computer masterminds. ... 'In my opinion, it's the best public high school in the nation,' says Marilee Jones, admissions director at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which accepts as many as 20 TJ students each year. 'All their programs are strong . . . but they have such excellent, excellent teachers there in computer science.' TJ's four-year computer science program includes courses in artificial intelligence and supercomputer applications. ... What's special about TJ's computer science program is its hands-on approach." March 14, 2005: Robotic Bid to Answer Question. Aberdeen Evening Express & this is north scotland. "A Top expert is taking his pet robot to Aberdeen to answer the question that has long troubled science-fiction enthusiasts. ... Tom [Sgouros] and Judy [the robot] use music, games and other interaction to explore the concept of artificial intelligence. ... Professor Susan Craw, Head of the School of Computing said, 'Tom Sgouros's witty play, co-starring the charming robot Judy, is an imagination-stretcher that delights while it exercises your mind. ... The show cleverly explores deep and quirky philosophical questions of consciousness in relation to Artificial Intelligence. The show will suit everyone.'" March 13, 2005: Q&A with CEO of SpikeSource. Kim Polese, chief executive of SpikeSource, spoke recently with staff writer Matt Marshall.The Mercury News. "Q: What would you say to high school girls and students? A: I'd say this stuff is fun, and that you can't have a more exciting career than in the technology industry. It's dynamic, it's changing all the time, you're exploring new ground, you're creating new inventions...I got turned on to technology because I was fortunate enough to live in Berkeley and go the Lawrence Hall of Science when I was a little girl, and started playing on computers, and just got hooked, because it was a mystery. There was a program called Eliza, one of the early artificial intelligence programs, which was a psychiatrist, with whom you could have a conversation online. At a certain point she would screw up and go into an infinite loop. I loved making her do that, and trying to figure out what's behind this. That was my first exposure to computers."
>>> Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students), Chatbots (@ Natural Language Processing), Interviews March 7, 2005: CMU's Red Team preparing for Grand Challenge, Part II- Whitaker's group preparing two vehicles to go against tougher field in desert race. By Byron Spice. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "'The game is on,' said William 'Red' Whittaker, the famed CMU robotocist and Red Team namesake. Last year, 'you could win just by finishing,' he said, but the size and strength of this year's competition suggests several teams likely will finish the 175-mile race within the 10-hour limit set by DARPA. So that means Whittaker, a former Marine, is keeping the pressure on his team of roughly 50 people -- ranging from student volunteers to full-time professional engineers -- as it attempts to field two vehicles for the Oct. 8 race. ... DARPA has received applications from 195 teams for this year's event, which once again will be in the southwestern United States. ... 'Of the new teams that weren't around last year, Stanford [headed by former CMU computer scientist Sebastian Thrun] is probably the one to watch,' added [Richard] Mason, whose [Golem Group] team this year is allied with UCLA. ... DARPA, the research and development arm of the Pentagon, is sponsoring the Grand Challenge to spur innovation in autonomous vehicles, which military officials expect will play increasingly large roles both on and off the battlefield. This year's event boasts a $2 million prize for the winner...." March 5, 2005: Microsoft aims for video game heights. Wanted: Programmer 'with severe god-complex.' By Dina Bass. Bloomberg News / available from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "Microsoft Corp., already the biggest software company, is looking for a video-game programmer to help 'in our quest for world domination.' The ideal candidate: a 'megalomaniac genius with severe god-complex,' the company says on its Bungie Studios Web site. The artificial-intelligence engineer Microsoft seeks is one of about 60 people the Redmond company is hiring to create the next generation of 'Halo'.... Companies such as Microsoft, Electronic Arts Inc. and Sony Corp. are boosting payrolls to sharpen animation, music and story lines to capture a bigger share of the more than $20 billion a year spent on video games. ... The video-game industry now employs about 100,000 people in North America, according to the International Game Developers Association in San Francisco. Experienced programmers can make $86,000 a year; artists and animators can receive $64,000, and game designers get $64,000, according to a Game Developer magazine survey." March 2, 2005: Meet the First Robot in Costa Rica. Inside Costa Rica. "The Museo de los Niños is giving Costa Ricans the first opportunity to meet a robot pet. The robot AIBO by Sony costs ¢1.6 million colones (approx. us$3.500 dollars) was brought in directly from Japan by microprocessor firm, Intel, and dontated to the museum. The robot is an autonomous artificial intelligence that is capable of completing multiple tasks that surprises visitors. The robot does not have fur, nor does it bark or bite, it can however dance, walk, greet it's visitors and sit at attention." March 2, 2005: Robot students set for global trip. Evening Star. "A talented group of robot-building students are today looking forward to taking their prize-winning creations to competitions in America and Japan. The six girls from Amberfield School in Ipswich recently picked up the title of Lego League Robotics UK Champions. And the same brainy group of 12 and 13-year-olds also scooped the UK Robocup Junior Robotic Dance award at the recent finals held at Cranfield University in Bedfordshire. The team was required to choreograph, design and build the robot as well as programming its dance routine. ... The girls have already secured the funding for the trip to America, but are keen to hear from businesses willing to give them financial backing for the competition in Japan." March 2, 2005: Botball team just misses nationals. By Gale Rose. The Pratt Tribune. "The Pratt High School Botball team came within less than one point of going to the national competition at the conclusion of the Botball district competition held in Oklahoma City on Saturday, Feb. 26. ... The team constructed a robot out of Legos, including a small computer, that had to work on it's own and complete tasks without any outside help." March 1 - 8, 2005: Microsoft's Hong-Jiang Zhang - The Process of Product Innovation. Ubiquity (Volume 6, Issue 7). "ZHANG: I'm Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia Advanced Technology Center (ATC) here in Beijing. Previously I was the Assistant Managing Director, and managed all the research activities around multimedia, Web search, data mining, etc. I'm still involved with research but with my new job I'm more focused on putting research into actual products, which is what the ATC was created for: to basically transfer research innovations into product. UBIQUITY: Give us some examples. ZHANG: Well, for instance, one thing we did involves video content summarization and editing, where the problem is to look at the video content and decide automatically which parts are most important and interesting, so that you can keep those parts and delete the less interesting parts. But of course all those decisions are made by a computer instead of by people looking at the content and deciding what's interesting and what is not UBIQUITY: How do you decide what's interesting? ZHANG: ... UBIQUITY: And what are your biggest challenges? ZHANG: I think number one is simply that it's never been easy to transfer research innovation into product, so that's really been a challenge. ... ZHANG: When I show people the computer program in which I automatically edit 10 hours of raw video footage down to a 10-minute highlight synchronized with them with the music, people don't believe me. They say, 'How could you do that?'" February 22, 2005: Mission - Make cool stuff. Creator of robotic vacuum visits aspiring young inventors By K.C. Myers. Cape Cod Times. "Cape Cod high school students showed off their robotic inventions to Colin Angle, the cofounder and chief executive officer of iRobot, Thursday before the Cape Cod Technology Council's annual dinner and meeting. ... Angle, an MIT graduate who brought low-cost robotics into households, is a successful guy. But he said he was not able to build a successful trebuchet in high school. Not like the students from Cape Cod Tech in Harwich.... Cape Cod students' creations were made possible because of GEARS, a kit containing the basic ingredients of machines and robotics. ... [T]he idea behind GEARS is to make science and math more interesting and fun. ... To illustrate the limitless possibilities was the story of Angle and the Roomba." February 22, 2005: New university course puts the 'human' in the humanities - PSY 214 examines the the blurred lines of what it means to be human. By David Campbell. The Princeton Packet. "'The course is timely because of the great advances achieved in neuroscience and artificial intelligence over the past few decades,' said psychology Professor Daniel Osherson, who coordinated the course, offered for the first time at Princeton last fall. 'They prompt new reflection about the place of humans in the biological world and the world of intelligent devices,' he said. The new psychology class is interdisciplinary. In the fall term, it featured guest lecturers from 13 different academic departments, including classics, computer science, economics, molecular biology and genomics, philosophy and physics. Subjects ranged from Aristotle to artificial intelligence. ... 'It was a great introduction to the range of cognitive science research being done on campus, and I learned a lot in the course myself,' [Professor Adele Goldberg] said. Why this course, and why now? 'The explosion in neuroscience is a recent phenomenon, facilitated by new experimental techniques that make it possible to study the brain in noninvasive ways,' Professor Goldberg said. 'Impressive advances in intelligent systems have also been made in the last decade. The more understanding we gain about how our brains work, the more the question arises as to whether we are simply chemical machines.'" February 21, 2005: Poker Academy Donates $13,000 of Texas Hold’em Software to Lehigh University for Continued Research and Development in Artificial Intelligence. Press release available from PRWeb. "Hector Munoz-Avila, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, said the donated software will be used in 'Artificial Intelligence: Game Programming,' a course offered last fall for the first time that will be taught again next fall. The goal of the students using the donated software in the new class, which Munoz-Avila teaches, will be to make better, more challenging computer games that adapt to a player’s behavior, style and level of skill. 'Only a few games currently employ adaptive artificial intelligence, which is also called machine learning,' said Munoz-Avila, who has a grant from the Naval Research Laboratory to study game programming. 'Most are ‘hard-coded’ to operate at a fixed level or levels. Adaptive AI is code that allows computer software to adapt over time to a players’ skill levels and even to improvements they make,' said Munoz-Avila. 'A chess game equipped with adaptive AI will ‘dumb down’ in a few moves against an inexperienced player, but play tougher against a grandmaster.'” February 19, 2005: Science is this man's cup of tea. Science is more than a subject – it is everything that is around us, British science presenter Quentin Cooper says. By Colin Patterson. Stuff. "'Science is shaping your everyday life. It's your food, it's your mobile phone, it's a cup of tea and a biscuit.' Every week more than a million people tune in to Cooper's Radio 4 show Material World, in which he discusses in layman's terms the latest developments in science. ... He believes some of the biggest problems with science are the scientists who make it happen. Many are unable to talk in everyday language, so the ordinary person has no idea what they do. 'Most people think of scientists as people who go into a lab in the morning, invent a chemical, go out for lunch, come back and discover a planet in the afternoon. But science is not like that. There are lots of failures, setbacks and dead ends. Scientists need to talk about that.' Cooper believes scientists should come out from behind their barrier of jargon and science-speak and show they are real people. 'Scientists do have a human side. They follow soap operas and watch football like the rest of us.'" February 11, 2005: Less work, more play on new games degree course. A new BSc degree course at Carlow IT is the first of its kind to be backed by Microsoft. By Karlin Lillington. The Irish Times & ireland.com (subscription req'd.). "The first and second year include classes ... standard for computing degrees anywhere. Once that grounding is there, students move into more games-specifics classes on modelling, artificial intelligence for games.... The rigour of the course arises from the way in which it was developed, as a direct response to a report on computing in Ireland by Forfas, the national policy board for enterprise, trade and science. The report called for the Irish education system to make sure graduates could supply the technology industries located or developing in Ireland. Gaming was highlighted as a sector of promise. ... Certainly, the global figures are impressive for an industry which has largely avoided being touched by recession. In 2002 the global market for games and edutainment/reference software, excluding hardware sales, was estimated at over $18 billion (EUR 14 billion) in a report commissioned by European Leisure and Software Publishers Association." February 9, 2005: William 'Red' Whittaker - A Man and His Machines. By Bjorn Carey. Space.com. (The article also appears in USA Today: Whittaker takes robotics where no man can go.) "A self described 'old man of the trade', [William 'Red'] Whittaker is celebrity in the rarified world of robotics, having won many awards for his innovative designs which have applications on Earth and in Space. ... This October, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ... will sponsor its second annual Grand Challenge. The Grand Challenge pits robotically operated vehicles against each other in a 175 mile race across the Mojave Desert. ... Last year, Whittaker’s entry, Sandstorm, burst off the starting line before getting stuck on an obstacle 7.4 miles from the start -- the furthest any of the vehicles in the race made it. ... '[It is] more than just another competition -- like the [Ansari] X-Prize, or Lindbergh [flying over the Atlantic Ocean], or computer beating a human at chess -- it grabs your attention,' adding that, 'It’s a hard hitting competition so the world brings its best." ... There is currently a robotic revolution taking place in many markets and arenas. Whittaker says we have gotten past the ‘no robots allowed’ stigma that hurt the early days of robotics, and now the technology is being embraced in agricultural and automotive industries, as well as in Space. ... 'It’s no longer a question of could there be robots, could they move around, could they gather data, could they survive,' says Whittaker. 'In many ways they are the agents of choice to the universe.' ...The biggest shortfall, in Whittaker’s opinion, is that right now robotics is a well kept secret and not in mainstream conversations enough. Robotics, as a field, has also suffered somewhat for the failure to meet the lofty and imaginative heights that science fiction fans dream about, but Whittaker sees a change coming." February 7, 2005: Opening doors for women in computing. By Ed Frauenheim and Alorie Gilbert. CNET News.com. "Data from the National Science Foundation shows that the female share of bachelor's degrees in computer science dropped from 37 percent in 1985 to 28 percent in 2001. And while women comprised 33 percent of information technology professionals in 1990, that figure was down to 26 percent in 2002, according to NSF. The drop is puzzling in part because women are making progress in related areas such as the natural sciences. On the other hand, some efforts to bring women back to computing appear to be paying off. That's seen as vital for reasons including fueling the nation's tech economy and preventing male bias in the way future technology is developed. ... One of the newest and most ambitious groups to emerge is the National Center for Women and Information Technology, a nonprofit based at the University of Colorado at Boulder that received a four-year, $3.25 million grant last year from the National Science Foundation. The group's goal is to increase the ranks of women in the U.S. computing and IT work force from about 25 percent today to 50 percent over the next 20 years. ... Another focus is reforming college computer science programs to make them less about weeding out weak students and more about encouraging all comers to succeed." February 3, 2005: Courses examine technology-culture link - Cyberspace fertile ground for knowledge, lust, commerce and crime, UB faculty say. By John Della Contrada. BU Reporter. "The Internet, mobile technologies and new-media technologies may be the most influential drivers of cultural change in American society today, according to UB faculty members offering courses this semester exploring the social and cultural consequences of information and communication technologies. The courses -- 'The Age of Information,' 'Cyberporn and Society,' 'Technology Law and Cyberspace' and 'Elements of Machine Culture' --will examine how new technologies are shaping culture and changing human behavior. A wide range of technology-driven topics and issues will be covered, some of which -- such as obscenity and free speech, privacy and intellectual property -- often are debated during periods of significant cultural or technological change; while other issues -- cybercrime, virtual reality, spam and artificial intelligence -- are new to the cultural landscape." February 2005: Ayanna Howard: Robot Wrangler. By Stephen Cass. IEEE Spectrum Online. (She is one of the 10 people spotlighted in the feature article: Dream Jobs 2005.) "NASA's twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have already rewritten the book on the Red Planet's history, their amazing discoveries transmitted to an audience of millions. But Ayanna Howard is not content to let NASA rest on its laurels. She's designing future generations of robotic explorers to bring back even more science for the buck. Her goal: a robot that can be dropped off on a planet and wander around on its own, eliminating the kind of intense supervision from Earth that Spirit and Opportunity require -- their every move must be meticulously choreographed in advance and on a daily basis. ... Space exploration, however, is only a test bed for Howard's ultimate technical objective: making robots better at helping people. 'It's bigger than space exploration - it's robots assisting people,' she says. ... The 1970s TV show The Bionic Woman sparked Howard's interest in human-robot interaction and inspired her to become an engineer. ... [S]he studied computer engineering ... and she was accepted to JPL's summer program for students. ... Howard also mentors disadvantaged girls and frequently addresses elementary and high school students, often in poor neighborhoods. Although a lack of computers and other resources can be a big problem, she finds that simply showing up and explaining that you can make a good living as an engineer can widen a child's horizons." February 2005: The Super Bowl of Smart - Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be slackers when the difference between success and failure is as simple as building a robot. By Brad Lemley. Discover Magazine (Vol. 26 No. 02). "[Joseph] Parker is one of 36 students from Clinton High School in Clinton, Massachusetts, who designed and built Gael Force as their entry in the First (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition, an annual challenge that brings together hundreds of teams of junior high and high school technophiles from around the world. ... First is doing what it was designed to do at schools like Clinton --- drastically alter the career paths of students. Fifteen years ago, maybe three Clinton graduates a year went on to pursue a technical or engineering career; now, about 20 do so. In 2003, for the first time in the school’s recent history, a Clinton grad went to MIT. ... Also striking is the bond forged between students in the program and the adults who volunteer to help them. As Dean Kamen predicted when he dreamed up First, one emergent property of robot-building is hero realignment." January 13, 2005: Young science stars took different routes. By Jon Fortt and Luis Zaragoza. Mercury News (registration req'd.). "The three students hail from two very different Silicon Valley high schools. Each is brilliant. Each aspires to earn an advanced degree. Each is deeply involved in the community. They are among 18 students in California and 300 nationwide named semifinalists on Wednesday in the annual Intel Science Talent Search, known through most of its 64-year history as the Westinghouse search. ... Jong-Moon Kim, 17, attends Monta Vista High.... Jong-Moon saw TV images of the wildfires in Southern California that led to his entry on ways to use artificial intelligence not only to detect fires but predict their path. ... Jong-Moon began his essay on scientific attitude with this: 'The first thing I do when I get a problem is get excited.' His research in artificial intelligence could have applications in many situations, he says." January 11, 2005: Face to face in the technology age. Column by Kate Heartfield. Ottawa Citizen (subscription req'd.). "The course is informally called TechnoRico, and formally called 'Building Better Humans? Legal and Ethical Issues at the Human-Machine Merger.' Mr. [Ian] Kerr, a law professor at the U of O, began teaching a special course in Puerto Rico in January 2000. This is the first year TechnoRico has taken place in Ottawa as well as Puerto Rico. Much of the discussion is about artificial intelligence and transhumanism (a philosophy that sees technology as a way to expand human capacity, often through its interaction with the human body). In other words, robots and cyborgs." January 9, 2005: Lapeer East robotics team readies for first competition. By James L. Smith. The Flint Journal on MLive.com. "There's a new competitive team at Lapeer East High School whose members are training for their first regional meet. But instead of hitting the blocking sled or practicing jump shots, these competitors are brainstorming, designing and building. Lapeer East is forming its first robotics team, which is getting ready to compete in a regional meet March 10-12 at Eastern Michigan University. ... This year's game is 'Triple Place.' Two teams of three robots each must complete a 15-second pre-programmed autonomous mode, using a color-tracking sensor to find and obtain a series of objects. ... While the competitions are fun, they have a serious purpose and the rewards are not unlike those for star athletes. About 200 scholarships to 45 schools - worth about $5 million - are linked to the FIRST Robotics competitions, said Ed Bretzloff Sr., a DaimlerChrysler electrician who has been a mentor to the Goodrich [High School] team for four years." January 7, 2005: How robotics can enhance and motivate maths learning across the curriculum. By Sue Johnston-Wilder and Tony Hirst. This is one of the articles in this week's 6-page subject focus: Maths. The Times Education Supplement (subscription req'd.). "Many students do better at maths if they understand how it is put to use in the world around them. As highlighted by the recent Smith report, the maths curriculum is failing to excite interest in and provide appropriate motivation for maths in many pupils, who are not sufficiently aware of the importance of mathematical skills for future career options and advancement. ... Those of us involved in work with young people using robotics have seen that robotics is an area of particular motivation for many of them." January 5, 2005: Schools grow as gaming industry comes of age. By Victor Godinez. The Dallas Morning News & Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services // available from MENAFN. "The industry that once relied on self-taught tinkerers is growing up, and SMU [Southern Methodist University] is among the universities rushing to prepare the next generation of gaming professionals. [Brian] Harris is a student in SMU's Guildhall, which offers an 18-month certificate program in the art and science of video game development. ... Game makers have been mostly home-schooled up to now, fiddling with code on their personal computers or designing add-on levels for existing games. But budgets for blockbuster titles are now $10 million to $20 million, and development teams of programmers, designers, artists, animators, musicians and artificial intelligence experts often number 100 or more. 'Because games are getting much more complex and teams are growing, it's becoming more of a structured discipline,' said Tim Willits, co-owner of id Software and lead designer at the company. ... Among the highest profile of the new video game courses is the Electronic Arts Interactive Entertainment Program in the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television. It's a three-year master of fine arts program created earlier this year when EA, the industry's largest publisher, invested $8 million to create a training ground for designers and developers." January 3, 2005: Mills teacher computes way to advance women. By Jessica Guynn. Contra Costa Times. "Ellen Spertus wants women to get with the programming. Computer programming, that is. This Mills College computer science professor wants to develop opportunities for women and help them buck the odds in a male-dominated field. ... 'Computer science is magic,' Spertus said. 'Writing programs is like writing spells.' ... It was only when a female graduate student at MIT handed her a 1983 report called 'Barriers to Equality in Academia: Women in Computer Science at MIT' that Spertus began to recognize the obstacles women face. Curious, Spertus joined Systers, an online community for women in computer science founded by Silicon Valley pioneer Anita Borg. In a humanities course on women in computing, Spertus turned a 25-page term paper into a 100-plus-page treatise. The stories and statistics she uncovered dumbfounded her. 'Why are there so few women in computer science?' is still widely distributed and discussed in computer science departments. 'It helped other people see that this wasn't a level playing field,' Spertus said. 'It really changed my view.'" |
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