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December 29, 2004: Fear and loathing -Some of the worries about nanotechnology are rational, some not. The Economist (access to some articles in the survey require a subscription). "Not long ago Ella Standage was woken by a bad dream about nanobots. She was terrified that nanoscale machines might replicate uncontrollably and turn the entire planet into grey goo. Ms Standage is not the only one to worry about such imaginary horrors, but at least she has an excuse: she is only four years old. The grey-goo idea goes back to a prediction by Eric Drexler, chairman of the Foresight Institute, a nanotechnology-policy group in Palo Alto, that one day all manufacturing would be done by very tiny robots. ... For this plan to work, though, these robots would have to be able to make more of their own kind, otherwise things would take far too long to build. Mr Drexler thought these hypothetical nanobots would have to be self-replicating, and gave warning that care would have to be taken to ensure they did not replicate out of control. This idea launched a wave of public concern. If these nanobots started making copies of themselves by scavenging materials from their environment, it was suggested, they would eventually become visible to humans as a seething mass of tiny robots, or grey goo --- and might ultimately consume the entire planet. ... James Wilsdon, head of strategy at Demos, a British-based think-tank, thinks that nanotechnology needs to be 'opened up for discussion', and questions should be asked such as, 'What is the technology for? Who controls it? Who will take responsibility if things go wrong?' And Britain's Cambridge University recently recruited a staff ethicist at its Nanoscience Centre. The head of the unit, Mark Welland, says this is an experiment, aimed partly at ensuring that their scientists take ethical concerns on board. But it also allows the unit to engage with groups such Demos and Greenpeace, and cleverly allows it to be part of the debate rather than its subject. ... [N]obody really knows what the public wants from nanotechnology. According to two recent surveys in America and Britain, most people do not even know what it is."
>>> Systems, Robots, Ethical & Social Implications December 29, 2004: Fly-eating robot powers itself. CNN. "Scientists at the University of the West of England (UWE) have designed a robot that does not require batteries or electricity to power itself. Instead, it generates energy by catching and eating houseflies. Dr Chris Melhuish and his Bristol-based team hope the robot, called EcoBot II, will one day be sent into zones too dangerous for humans, potentially proving invaluable in military, security and industrial areas. Melhuish, who is director of the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Lab at the UWE, told CNN that the EcoBot II was a result of a quest for an intelligent robot that could function without human supervision. ... The EcoBot II powers itself in much the same way as animals feed themselves to get their energy, he said." December 29, 2004: Intelligent joint supports use wireless technology. E-Health Insider. "Joint supports for patients with arthritis or poor muscle strength could soon get an injection of artificial intelligence and wireless technology, thanks to the Instituto de Automácia Industrial (IAI) in Madrid. The device, called 'GAIT', incorporates electronic sensors into each support bandage (orthosis) that respond to the way the ankle, knee or elbow is moving, calculate the best way of responding, and then mechanically manipulate the bandage so it eases the flow of energy through the joint." December 27, 2004: Just How Old Can He Go? By Steve Lohr. The New York Times (reg. req'd.). "'Genes are sequential programs,' [Ray Kurzweil] said. 'We are learning how to manipulate the programs inside us, the software of life. And personally, I really believe that what I'm doing is reprogramming my biochemistry.' His new book shows a different side of Mr. Kurzweil's continuing fascination with the connection between humans and computers. In 'The Age of Spiritual Machines,' published in 1999, Mr. Kurzweil made the case for why computers will exceed human intelligence within a few decades. ... He has few qualms about technology, which he says is 'the continuation of evolution by other means.' Just as the boundaries of computing will soon seem limitless, Mr. Kurzweil insists that improving knowledge and technology will make death avoidable. The book describes three stages - the authors call them 'bridges' - over the next 20 to 25 years. By the late 2020's, Mr. Kurzweil predicts, the fruits of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, a technology that permits changes to the body at the cellular level, will really kick in so that science will enable people to rebuild their bodies, any way they want to. In 15 to 20 years, he contends that advances in the understanding of gene processes will make it possible for biotechnology therapies to turn off and reverse disease and aging. ... In 1965, as a teenager, he appeared on the television program, 'I've Got a Secret,' hosted by Steve Allen, for having written a computer program that composed piano music." December 24, 2004: Cryptic languages pronounced with a bit of a Lisp. By Tony Valsamidis. The Times Higher Education Supplement (Books, page 28; subscription req'd.). "Not many years ago, a review of artificial intelligence systems reported that the majority were coded in Lisp, a programming language that is particularly suited to their implementation. Lisp, which was devised in the earliest days of computers, survives in many systems today in various forms despite its clumsy syntax involving the extensive use of nested brackets. Thomas Dean, an AI specialist, is an aficionado of Lisp, and most of the examples in his book [Talking with Computers] are given in Scheme, a dialect of Lisp. That is not to say that he excludes more fashionable languages such as Java, indeed he points out that many programming languages vary only in minor syntactical ways from each other." December 20, 2004: Wear a phone, send a kiss: let the future get under your skin. By Adam Luck and Alan Hamilton. Times Online. "Following in the footsteps of Nostradamus and Old Moore, a new breed of professional futurist is taking centre stage in government and big business. ... Ian Pearson, who leads BT’s futurist section, said: 'In the early 1990s we pretty much predicted the world wide web, text messaging, PDAs (personal digital assistants) and the growth in portable computers. Now we are looking forward to a world where a lot of that technology will disappear. It will be invisible and embedded. ... Mr Pearson added: 'The growth of artificial intelligence is inevitable, so you will have a DVD recorder that knows your own tastes and will record programmes to suit those tastes.' By 2010-15, he says, we will be able to build devices into our bodies using nanotechnology." December 16, 2004: Tomorrow's chips, naturally. IST Results. "Visionaries more than half a century ago imagined machines capable of growth, self-repair and self-replication. By digitally mimicking biological tissue’s properties, European researchers recently demonstrated a platform for autonomous computer systems. 'There are three ways to model hardware on self-organising biology,' says Juan-Manuel Moreno, coordinator of the IST POEtic project. 'They are development, learning and evolution – respectively known to biologists as ontogenesis, epigenesis and phylogenesis. All three models are based on a one-dimensional description of the organism, the genome.' In the early 1990s, computer scientists tested systems that mimic the development of an individual as directed by their genetic code. Then they started to use artificial intelligence to copy the processes of learning, as influenced by an individual’s genetic code and their environment. 'But until our project, nobody had succeeded in bringing together all three models in a single piece of hardware,' adds Moreno. In May 2004, the partners received the first POEtic chips. Each one included a specially developed microprocessor, designed to run evolutionary algorithms, and a basic programmable unit. ... The chips will be tested in early 2005, using applications such as autonomous robots and speech synthesis software." December 12, 2004: An Adventurous Thinker. Interview with Ray Kurzweil. DevSource. "DevSource: In your writing, you've mentioned that the human tendency to pervasively accept innovations --- such as AI and machine intelligence --- causes it to become invisible. And, as a result, AI has become 'the pursuit of difficult computer science problems that have not yet been solved.' That's surely true for my 85-year-old Mom, who isn't quite sure how e-mail works and simply accepts the magic as delivered. Are developers (the people creating tomorrow's innovative solutions, or at least tomorrow's payroll processing) equally blind? Should they be? Ray: As we master and understand a technique, we think in terms of that technique --- Markov models, genetic algorithms, search techniques, signal processing methods --- and not generally about 'AI.' As we progress through the reverse-engineering of the human brain, we will expand our AI tool kit to incorporate the brain's methods for learning, pattern recognition, and decision making. Brain reverse engineering has not contributed that much to AI to date because we have not until recently had the tools to see the brain in action at sufficient temporal and spatial resolution. ... Most mainstream applications in a wide range of fields incorporate techniques that were AI research projects only a decade ago. Examples include search engines, automated investing, credit card fraud detection, automated analysis of electrocardiograms and blood cell images, monitoring intensive care units, flying and landing airplanes, guiding weapon systems, and many others." December 6, 2004: 'Thinking Cap' Controls Computer in New Experiment. Reuters. "'The results show that people can learn to use scalp-recorded electroencephalogram rhythms to control rapid and accurate movement of a cursor in two dimensions,' Jonathan Wolpaw and Dennis McFarland of the New York State Department of Health and State University of New York in Albany wrote. They tested their device on four people -- two partly paralyzed men who used wheelchairs and a healthy man and woman. During the experiments, the four volunteers faced a video screen wearing a cap that held 64 electrodes against the scalp to record brain activity. The key was a special computer algorithm -- a program that translated the brain signals into a meaningful directive of what the users wanted the computer to do." December 5, 2004: Nanotechnology: Small wonders. By Mike Toner. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Nanotechnology has been touted as the second industrial revolution --- a brave new world of atomic-scale engineering in which the ability to assemble individual atoms like Lego blocks will transform science, medicine and even our golf game. ... The National Science Foundation predicts that within a decade nanotechnology will be a $1 trillion market --- and provide as many as 2 million new jobs. An estimated 15.4 million people currently work in all U.S. industries that perform some research and development. To spur things along, the National Nanotechnology Initiative, with roots in 18 federal agencies, is providing one of the largest infusions of research money, $3.7 billion over four years, since the heyday of the space program. More than 30 states have spending initiatives to spur nanotech development. ... A survey this year by North Carolina State University found that 40 percent expect nanotechnology to produce more benefits than risks. Alas, 80 percent admitted they knew little about the subject, and most could not answer a single factual question about it. Nano comes from the Greek for dwarf. Nanotechnology is the manipulation of materials, devices or processes that are 100 nanometers or less in at least one dimension. One nanometer is a billionth of a meter, about 80,000 times less than the width of a human hair. ... In his oft-cited 'Engines of Creation,' nanotech pioneer K. Eric Drexler --- formerly a researcher at MIT's artificial intelligence lab --- warned that 'replicating assemblers and thinking machines pose basic threats to people and life on Earth' --- threatening to turn everything on the planet into an amorphous 'gray goo.' Michael Crichton breathed new life into the notion a few years ago with 'Prey,' a sci-fi thriller about the escape of microscopic, self-replicating assemblers from a secret desert research lab. ... Drexler, who now heads the nonprofit educational Foresight Institute, has recanted much of his original claim, but he insists that the industry should have a policy prohibiting 'the construction of anything resembling a dangerous self-replicating nanomachine.'" December 2, 2004: The laboratory shaping our future. CNN. "It is codenamed 'Oxygen' and its achievements are likely to affect the way we live and work for decades to come. That at least is the intention of researchers working on some of almost 400 separate projects that make up the Computer Sciences and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory's (CSAIL) grand research project into 'pervasive computing.' 'Project Oxygen is about pervasive human-centered computing -- that's our buzz phrase,' explains CSAIL director Rodney Brooks. 'How -- with so many computers, so many embedded systems, so many speech-based systems, so many tablets and computers -- are we going to interact with them? How are we not going to be overwhelmed by them? How is it going to be easy enough to use them without adding more and more complexity?'" November 29, 2004: Speedy computer chip for PlayStation near. By Michelle Kessler. USA Today. "The superfast computer chip expected to power Sony's next-generation PlayStation video game system and other cutting-edge consumer electronics will be ready next year, Sony, IBM and Toshiba said Monday. ... That's important, because video games are growing increasingly sophisticated. Future games will use artificial intelligence so characters can react to a player's moves, for example. 'Gamers are one of the last niches where you can never have enough performance,' says chip analyst Nathan Brookwood with semiconductor research firm Insight 64." November 18, 2004: MIT Wants to Make Computing as Easy as Breathing. By Leslie Walker. The Washington Post (no fee reg. req'd.). "[Anant Agarwal] reprogrammable chip -- called RAW for 'raw architecture workstation' -- is one of many key pieces in MIT's $50 million Project Oxygen, which has involved more than 150 researchers and is in its fifth year. The lofty goal of the project, funded partly by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is to create a new computing environment, in which computer firepower would be ubiquitous and manipulating computers as easy for people as breathing. ... One ambitious premise of Oxygen is integrating many cutting-edge technologies into a single, behind-the-scenes system to let people move around freely while still retaining access to computing resources, such as printers and databases. Accomplishing that means speech-recognition software has to work with visual-recognition software as well as sensor networks that track people's movements. MIT's attempts to develop such a complex computing environment have led to unusual experiments, including creation of a cluster of 1,020 microphones powered by the RAW chip." November 10, 2004: Birmingham in €6m AI project. By Harry Yeates. ElectronicsWeekly.com. "Researchers in artificial intelligence (AI) at the University of Birmingham are participating in a €6.25m, four-year European project to develop a cognitive robot. One of the project's aims is to help throw some light on human cognition. The plan is to take the various AI systems that have so far been realised in some form or other ('natural language' systems that process human voice inputs and can use bits of our grammar and machine vision) and create a robot that combines those cognitive abilities. 'The idea is to put it all back together, and that's what's hard,' said Dr Jeremy Wyatt, a lecturer in computer science at Birmingham." November 9, 2004: The age of the robot - The idea of machines taking charge of our daily chores has been the stuff of science fiction. But is that fantasy fast becoming a reality? By Charles Arthur. The Independent Online Edition. "They sing. They dance. They even play a limited game of golf - well, they're able to putt a ball into a well-defined hole, a talent that puts them on a par with many bored executives with too much office space. They are Sony's humanoid QRIO robots.... But do they herald a time when intelligent, autonomous machines will do our household chores, and then put on a show to entertain us as we sip a relaxing drink? Or are they no more than the phonetic spelling of their name implies - a curio, to be gazed at like a Victorian exhibit behind glass, but never taken out and used? More importantly, might the QRIO be a glimpse of the battlefield soldier of the future - a completely autonomous machine indifferent to humans in its path as it heads towards an objective? ... But even if the QRIO isn't going to be warbling in our living rooms any time soon, robots have already invaded our lives. They make our cars: almost every car is produced to some extent by robots, which perform welding, painting and simple assembly at car plants around the world. Any time you've been on an airplane you've entrusted your life to a robot - specifically, the automated pilot, which turns the entire aircraft into an autonomous machine where computers control the rudder, thrust and flaps. ... The concept of a mechanised automaton is almost a century old, first depicted in Karel Capek's stage play RUR (for "Rossum's Universal Robots") in the 1920s. ... Our expectations of what they should look like have been moulded by decades of science fiction books and films.... [T]he essential yardstick against which any robot application must be measured before it will become widespread is economic: that is, is it cheaper over the life of the machine to use a robot, or a human? ... And what about the fear that people express - that robots will first become more intelligent than humans, and then eradicate us?" October 27, 2004: Signals
from monkey's brain move robot. By Byron Spice. Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette. "The monkey sees a piece of zucchini and pops
the morsel into its mouth. It's a routine act -- or would be, if
the monkey had used its own arm. Here's how it works: A sensor
attached to the monkey's brain picks up electrical signals from
a group of cells in the motor cortex, the portion of the brain
that controls movements. A computer program interprets the signals
and sends the appropriate commands to the mechanical arm. ... In
June, researchers at Brown University implanted a chip in the brain
of a 24-year-old Massachusetts man with paraplegia. The first of
five patients to be implanted in the pilot study, the man is able
to move a computer cursor just by thinking about it, enabling him
to change TV channels or open e-mail. ... Getting a monkey to control
a robotic arm is tricky not only because Schwartz had to design
computer software that learns what the monkey is signaling, but
also because the monkey's brain is changing its signals as it learns
how to perform the task, said [William] Heetderks, now extramural
research director at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging
and Biotechnology." October 25, 2004: Brain cells in a dish fly fighter plane.
By Celeste Biever. New Scientist News. "An array of rat brain cells has successfully flown a virtual F-22 fighter jet. The cells could one day become a more sophisticated replacement for the computers that control uncrewed aerial vehicles or, in the nearer future, form a test-bed for drugs against brain diseases such as epilepsy. Enzymes were used to extract neurons from the motor cortex of mature rat embryos and cells were then seeded onto a grid of gold electrodes patterned on a glass Petri dish. The cells grew microscopic interconnections, turning them into a 'live computation device', explains Thomas DeMarse, a biomedical engineer at the University of Florida in Gainesville, US, who carried out the research. 'This is novel work,' says Mandayam Srinivasan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who used electrodes implanted in a monkey’s
brain to move a robotic arm. He says that in future living systems
could be combined with traditional computers to solve problems more
efficiently." October 23, 2004: Smart fabrics make for enhanced living. By Celeste Biever. New Scientist Magazine (The handbag that never forgets; page 23). "Imagine a handbag that warns you if you are about to forget your umbrella or wallet, and which you can later turn into a scarf that displays today’s pollution levels. Or how about creating a wall hanging that glows if someone tries to use your home’s wireless internet connection? All these bizarre objects could soon be possible thanks to a system of computerised fabric patches developed by engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Each patch contains a functional unit of the system - a microprocessor and memory plus either a radio transceiver, a sensor, a microphone, batteries or a display. Put the patches together in different ways and you can create a variety of information-providing or environment-sensing objects, say developers Adrian Cable, Gauri Nanda and Michael Bove at MIT’s Media Lab. ... Researchers in the field of pervasive computing have already come up with computers and sensors worn in jackets and waistcoats. But these cannot be reconfigured to do different jobs. With the patches, however, a user can easily swap modules to use the system for a variety of functions." October 22, 2004: Brain
in a Dish Flies Plane. By Jennifer Viegas. Discovery News. "A
University of Florida scientist has created a living 'brain' of
cultured rat cells that now controls an F-22 fighter jet flight
simulator. Scientists say the research could lead to tiny, brain-controlled
prosthetic devices and unmanned airplanes flown by living computers.
And if scientists can decipher the ground rules of how such neural
networks function, the research also may result in novel computing
systems that could tackle dangerous search-and-rescue jobs and
perform bomb damage assessment without endangering humans. ...
The brain can learn, just as a human brain learns, [Thomas DeMarse]
said. When the system is first engaged, the neurons don't know
how to control the airplane; they don't have any experience. ...
This brain-controlled plane may sound like science fiction, but
it is grounded in work that has been taking place for more than
a decade. A breakthrough occurred in 1993, when a team of scientists
created a Hybrot, which is short for 'hybrid robot.' The robot
consisted of hardware, computer software, rat neurons, and incubators
for those neurons. The computer, programmed to respond to the neuron
impulses, controlled a wheel underneath a machine that resembled
a child's toy robot." October 11, 2004: Welcome
to the internet 2014 - As the UK marks 10 years of e-commerce,
technology analyst Bill Thompson looks forward to what the coming
decade has in store for us. BBC News. "The mere fact that
everyone is online will change the way the world works, of course.
But the way we use the processing power available will shift
too. ... I have my laptop, my mobile phone/PDA, my digital music
player and all sorts of other technology in my briefcase at the
moment, and if I was willing to make the investment I could have
a 3G card and be online even as I type this on a train journey.
But these devices do not talk to each other very well, and they
do not really talk to other people's devices at all. I think
the big change we will see in the next 10 years is that programs
will get better at acting independently and communicating over
the network without our intervention. Cars will book themselves
in for servicing, hospitals will consult online diaries before
scheduling an appointment, and fishing boats will sell their
catch at market before reaching port, all thanks to these software
agents. Of course this brings with it massive risks, and poses
threats to privacy and social life which will worry many of us.
But we have proven able to absorb the impact the net has made
since 1994, and I am optimistic about our ability to do so in
future." September 14, 2004: Speech
recognition 'on a chip' in three years. By Lucy Sherriff.
The Register. "The US National Science Foundation
has awarded a $1m grant to researchers in the US who want
to put speech recognition on a chip, a move the project's
proponents claim will revolutionise the way we communicate.
Rob Rutenbar, Jatras professor of electrical and computer
engineering and computer science at Carnegie Mellon University,
will lead the project. The research will be conducted in
tandem with scientists from the University of California
in Berkeley. Currently, speech recognition takes place
at the software level, and its precision varies enormously,
depending on what you want the system to do. Matching input
to a specific set of expected words is relatively trivial,
but capturing the full meaning of a conversation in a noisy
room is much, much harder. ... To process arbitrary speech,
you need a very powerful and power-hungry processor. ... " And
this is where this research project comes in, because to
really crack speech recognition, the researchers say, we
have to go to dedicated silicon." September 9, 2004: Self-sustaining
killer robot creates a stink. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist
News. "It may eat flies and stink to high heaven, but if this
robot works, it will be an important step towards making robots fully
autonomous.
To survive without human help, a robot needs to be able to generate
its own energy. So Chris Melhuish and his team of robotics experts
at
the University of the West of England in Bristol are developing a
robot that catches flies and digests them in a special reactor cell
that generates
electricity. So what is the downside? The robot will most likely
have to attract the hapless flies by using a stinking lure concocted
from
human excrement. Called EcoBot II, the robot is part of a drive to
make 'release and forget' robots that can be sent into dangerous
or inhospitable
areas to carry out remote industrial or military monitoring of, say,
temperature or toxic gas concentrations." September 3, 2004: EU-backed
group researches digital home. By John Blau. IDG News & PC Advisor.
"Perhaps the quickest and most efficient way to achieve end-to-end
operability of networked devices in the home is to open the development
of middleware to as many participants as possible. That's the aim of
a research project, called Amigo, which is being sponsored by the European
Union (E.U.). ... [Harmke] De Groot talked about the role of 'ambient
intelligence.' Ambient intelligence, according to a link published on
De Groot's Amigo Web page(http://www.extra.research.philips.com/euprojects/amigo/),
is characterized by four basic elements: ubiquity, awareness, intelligence
and natural interaction. ... A total 15 companies are participating
in the Amigo project...." August 19, 2004: IT
trends transform everyday activities. By Kim Sa-hyuk. The Korea
Herald. "It could be said that information-technology is revolutionizing
every existing structure and method of business and everyday life. With
the rapid development in technology, it is becoming increasingly difficult
to predict the future of Korea's information-technology industry and
service market. However, analysts are pointing to a number of 'mega-trends'
that could have a fundamental impact in the future. Digitalization,
expansion of mobile and ubiquitous computing, expansion of broadband
infrastructure, convergence of digital media, personalization of information-technology
services and development of intelligent-agent technologies, are a few
of the trends that garner attention." August 16, 2004: Trying
to Take Technology to the Masses. By John Markoff. The New York
Times (no fee reg. req'd.) / also available from The International Herald
Tribune (At $250,
a PC that aims to connect world's poor). "Raj Reddy was fed
up debating the problem of the digital divide between the rich and the
poor and decided to do something about it. Reddy, a pioneering researcher
in artificial intelligence and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University,
plans to unveil his project this year. It is called the PCtvt, a $250
personal computer that is wirelessly networked for the four billion
people around the world who live on less than $2,000 a year. . He says
his combination PC can find a market in developing countries, particularly
those with large populations of illiterate people, because it can be
controlled by a simple television remote- control device and can function
as a television, telephone and videophone. ... The philosophy behind
the PCtvt grew from ideas first explored in the early 1980s by Jean-Jacques
Servan-Schreiber, the founder of the World Center for Computing and
Human Resources, based in Paris. The center was built on the idea that
developing countries could use biological and microelectronic technologies
to leapfrog the industrial stage of economic development. Reddy was
among dozens of leading international researchers working on design
projects at the center, including Alan Kay, Nicholas Negroponte and
Seymour Papert. Mr. Kay was the creator of the Xerox Alto, an early
PC. Mr. Negroponte had designed a pioneering videodisc system at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Mr. Papert was the inventor
of the LOGO programming language. ... 'We needed three decades,' Reddy
said, for those technologies to help advance developing nations. ...
With a small team of students and faculty at Carnegie Mellon's West
Coast campus in Mountain View, Reddy has built a simple control screen
that allows the PCtvt to be used for audio and video conferencing, electronic
mail and viewing local newspapers on the Web through a TV remote control.
... Reddy's team is also working with social scientists to determine
the effect that access to this technology has on communities."
July / August 2004: Rethinking
the Computer - Project Oxygen is turning out prototype computer
systems. By Lisa Scanlon. Technology Review. "[Howie] Shrobe's
computerized office is just one of dozens of pervasive-computing technologies
being developed as part of Project Oxygen, the lab's five-year, $50
million effort to design computer systems that are as ubiquitous as
the air we breathe and as easy to communicate with as other people.
The end result, as originally envisioned by Michael Dertouzos, PhD '64,
the late director of the Laboratory for Computer Science, is expected
to be a collection of technologies embedded in workplaces and homes
working together seamlessly-and often behind the scenes-to help us go
about our daily lives. ... Now in its fourth year, the project is turning
out working prototypes, including workspaces that adjust themselves
according to their inhabitants' habits, location-aware sensors that
help people find their way around buildings, and computer chips that
configure themselves to best suit different applications. In the process,
the project has brought together researchers from many disciplines who
may not have otherwise collaborated, often with unexpected results.
When Project Oxygen began in 2000, one of its first undertakings was
to further Shrobe's prior work on an intelligent conference room that
helps people run more efficient meetings. The latest version of the
room can, when prompted by spoken commands, show agenda items on a wall
display, transcribe and save participants' comments, or find pertinent
video clips from previous meetings. ... 'One of the things about Oxygen
is that it's not trying to develop [stand-alone] technologies in networking,
speech, and vision,' says [Victor] Zue. 'Increasingly, it's the integration
of these technologies.'" July 29, 2004: Organic
PC goal of UK project. By Harry Yeates. Electronics Weekly. "In
the future, alongside the box of lifeless silicon you call your PC,
you might find a little tub of living tissue. For particular specialist
tasks involving complex, non-linear problems your inorganic circuits
would find daunting, you would turn to the box of organics. That's the
ultimate aim of a new £1.2m, four year research project involving the
universities of the West of England (UWE), Leeds and Sussex. 'For fifty
years AI has been trying to build systems that have got complicated
behaviour, with some success,' said Dr Larry Bull from UWE, who will
lead the project. 'But given this complex behaviour seems to be easy
in the natural world, networks of neurons and chemical systems, why
don't we try to build AI systems out of that stuff, rather than try
to write clever programmes?'" July 14, 2004: Attack
of the killer vacuum cleaners. By Charles Arthur. The Belfast Telegraph
Digital. "Things are about to happen with robots, because the element
they need to make them truly useful - the software, which needs to be
able to adapt to a wide range of situations - is getting cheaper all
the time. Future Horizons, a semiconductor analyst based in Kent, forecasts
that by 2010 there will be 55.5 million robots, in a world market worth
£30bn - up from £2.4bn last year. 'The electronics industry is on the
cusp of a robotics wave, a period in which applications are aimed at
labour-saving and extending human skills,' it reports. Of those, it
says that 39 million will be domestic robots, and 10.5 million 'domestic
intelligent service' robots. That is because there's a growing need
for robots to help the elderly and handicapped. ... But the real explosion
in robotics is coming among the 'immobots' - or, more simply, just 'bots'.
These are bits of software that are incorporated into larger objects,
and that remove a lot of the strain of having to decide what to do next.
We're getting glimpses of how good these could be at present: the tiny
number of Britons with a TiVo personal video recorder have something
that decides, based on the programmes they choose to record, what other
programmes they might like to see, and records those, too. ... The reason
why we can't yet declare 'The Year of the Robot', however, is that researchers
are still fundamentally split about how robots should behave and learn.
One group favours the 'top-down' approach, in which all the behaviour
of the robot is mapped out, and its software is written to fill out
that behaviour. The Roomba vacuum cleaner is a classic example.... The
alternative is something assembled from smaller, self-contained units,
which creates a gestalt of behaviour based on that. Thus the system
that controls the legs learns to 'walk' independently.... Sony's Aibo
draws on a form of this...." July 8, 2004: Embedding
With A Lisp. By William Wong. ED Online (Volume 2004, Number 5).
"Lisp stands for List Processing, but there have been many other
descriptions provided such as Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses.
Experienced programmers without Lisp exposure normally go into shock
when looking at a Lisp program for the first time, but after a little
work Lisp coding becomes natural to the point where other languages
now start to look arcane. Trust me. Lisp code is not really totally
foreign. Take this little snippet for example.... Assuming you have
made it this far, you might be wondering why Lisp has not taken the
world by storm. Lisp is actually very old. It is only preceded by Fortran
in terms of age for high-level languages. Along the way, Lisp has seen
a number of myths built up around it. For example, many consider Lisp
to be a language for "artificial intelligence" (AI). While it is true
that Lisp is a key language for AI applications, AI is not the only
realm for Lisp. Lisp has been used in a range of applications from transportation
scheduling to web scripting applications. Emacs was a popular text editor
that was based on Lisp." June 23, 2004: The
Futurist - The Intelligent Internet. The Promise of Smart Computers
and E-Commerce. By William E. Halal. Government Computer News Daily
News (GCN). "Information and communication technologies are rapidly
converging to create machines that understand us, do what we tell them
to, and even anticipate our needs. We tend to think of intelligent systems
as a distant possibility, but two relentless supertrends are moving
this scenario toward near-term reality. Scientific advances are making
it possible for people to talk to smart computers, while more enterprises
are exploiting the commercial potential of the Internet. ... [F]orecasts
conducted under the TechCast Project at George Washington University
indicate that 20 commercial aspects of Internet use should reach 30%
'take-off' adoption levels during the second half of this decade to
rejuvenate the economy. Meanwhile, the project's technology scanning
finds that advances in speech recognition, artificial intelligence,
powerful computers, virtual environments, and flat wall monitors are
producing a 'conversational' human-machine interface. These powerful
trends will drive the next generation of information technology into
the mainstream by about 2010. ... The following are a few of the advances
in speech recognition, artificial intelligence, powerful chips, virtual
environments, and flat-screen wall monitors that are likely to produce
this intelligent interface. ... IBM has a Super Human Speech Recognition
Program to greatly improve accuracy, and in the next decade Microsoft's
program is expected to reduce the error rate of speech recognition,
matching human capabilities. ... MIT is planning to demonstrate their
Project Oxygen, which features a voice-machine interface. ... Amtrak,
Wells Fargo, Land's End, and many other organizations are replacing
keypad-menu call centers with speech-recognition systems because they
improve customer service and recover investment in a year or two. ...
General Motors OnStar driver assistance system relies primarily on voice
commands, with live staff for backup; the number of subscribers has
grown from 200,000 to 2 million and is expected to increase by 1 million
per year. The Lexus DVD Navigation System responds to over 100 commands
and guides the driver with voice and visual directions. ... BCC Corporation
estimates total AI sales to grow from $12 billion in 2002 to $21 billion
in 2007. ... This scenario is not without uncertainties. Cynicism persists
over unrealized promises of AI, and the Intelligent Internet will present
its own problems. If you think today's dumb computers are frustrating,
wait until you find yourself shouting at a virtual robot that repeatedly
fails to grasp what you badly want it to do. ... The main obstacle is
a lack of vision among industry leaders, customers, and the public as
scars of the dot-com bust block creative thought." June 21, 2004: Conference
hones tools for synthetic bio revolution. By Chappell Brown. EE
Times. "The first conference devoted to the emerging field of synthetic
biology brought a range of research projects and professionals together
recently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The tools being
generated by the synthetic biology movement are of interest to the biotechnology
industry, since they have the potential to create a direct, hands-on
genetic-engineering capability. ... The eclectic roster of 300 participants
at Synthetic Biology 1.0 included biologists from various subdisciplines,
artificial-intelligence experts, circuit designers, chemical engineers
and a small clutch of researchers from the biotech industry. One of
the most interesting topics was the current state of the BioBrick catalog.
... The similarity between synthetic biology and electronics may imply
that synthetic biology is nothing more than an attempt to build computing
machinery with biochemistry instead of silicon. There is one inherent
limitation, however: There is no direct way that biochemistry, which
involves the generation and diffusion of proteins, could compete with
silicon in terms of speed." June 21, 2004: The
Future of Business Intelligence & Predictions
For BI's Future By Mitch Betts. June 21, 2004: Oxygen
burst - MIT is readying new technologies that put humans in the center
of computing. By Robert Weisman. The Boston Globe / Boston.com.
"Three years ago, Michael Dertouzos, the high-spirited director
of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, spelled out his vision of
a future in which computers recede into the background as enabling tools.
'I don't want us to be slaves to our machines,' he declared. ''I want
our machines to serve us.' ... [H]e died suddenly the following summer.
Although his lab has since been merged and moved, the Dertouzos vision
lives on. And Project Oxygen -- so named because he believed computers
should be as invisible to their users as the air they breathe -- has
begun to bear technology fruit. ... Its technologies fall into four
broad categories: hardware, environments, networking, and interfaces.
Some research avenues favored by Dertouzos, such as machine-to-machine
interaction, have been put on hold, while new ideas have moved to the
fore, like secure chips that give devices individual identities. But
the project has retained enough elements of the Dertouzos vision --
location awareness, speech recognition, reconfigurable hardware -- to
cement his legacy. ... Hewing to the goal of making computing more invisible
and intuitive, the technologies demonstrated Wednesday included: ...
The Oxygen Kiosk network, called OK-Net, which serves as a building-wide
smart information repository. The speech-enabled kiosks use Web-crawling
software agents to provide employees with up-to-date data about projects
and meetings. Visitors with wireless portable devices can download maps
and track the whereabouts of their colleagues. An indoor location system
using electronic beacons, called 'crickets,' which can estimate the
distance to one another without a fixed reference point. Such a distributed
sensor network can be used, among other applications, for the real-time
tracking of autonomous robots. A program enabling conversation between
humans and computers. ..." June 21, 2004 [issue date]: Perspectives
from the field. Gail Repsher Emery interviews Alex Pentland. Washington
Technology (Vol. 19 No. 6). "The work of MIT's Alex 'Sandy' Pentland
encompasses areas such as wearable computing, human-machine interfaces
and artificial intelligence. ... WT: Your group pioneered
the idea of wearable computers about 15 years ago. How has the field
evolved? Pentland: About 15 years ago, the idea of
putting computers and sensors on the body sounded quite crazy. But we
won, it's here. All of you carry little computers, called cell phones,
that are Internet connected and have some sort of sensors. ... WT:Technology
can connect people, but it can also watch them without their knowledge.
How do we make sure it's used for good purposes? ... WT:
When will the technology be capable of knowing what I'm doing and when
to take a message or interrupt me? Pentland: We can
do that today. ..." June 14, 2004: Computing needs a Grand Challenge. By Lucy Sherriff. The Register. "Sir Tony Hoare - British computing pioneer and senior scientist at Microsoft Research - believes the computer industry needs a "grand challenge" to inspire it. In the same way that the lunar challenge in the 1960s sparked a decade of collaborative innovation and development in engineering and space technology, or the human genome project united biologists around the globe, so too must computer scientists pull together on such a scale to take their industry to its next major milestone. ... One of the grand challenges, then, is to re-write the basic foundations of the science, to find a theory of computation that is 'more realistic than the Turing model, and can take into account the discoveries of biology, and the promise of the quantum computer'.... 'An ultimate joint challenge for the biological and the computational sciences is the understanding of the mechanisms of the human brain, and its relationship with the human mind,' he says. '... This challenge is one that has inspired Computer Science since its very origins, when Alan Turing himself first proposed the Turing Test as a still unmet challenge for artificial intelligence.'"
>>> AI
Overview, Systems, Cognitive
Science, Artificial Life, Turing
Test, Alan Turing (@ Namesakes)
June 2 - 9, 2004: Rules
aim to get devices talking. By Eric Smalley. Technology Research News.
"In the not-too-distant future, when nearly all electronic devices
in the home contain computer chips, it would be nice if appliances could
communicate with each other in order to coordinate their activities to
carry out complicated tasks. Several thorny issues lurk beneath the much-hyped
vision of ubiquitous computing, including interoperability and adaptability.
Researchers and technology companies are tackling the problem in a variety
of ways, including vendor-specific communications protocols and multi-agent
artificial intelligence schemes. ... The researchers' goal is for smart
devices to cooperate behind the scenes to carry out users' high-level
instructions even if the necessary cooperation was not anticipated by
the devices' manufacturers, said Carlos Gershenson, a researcher at the
Free University of Brussels. The researchers have dubbed this scenario
'ambient intelligence.' The central element of the protocol requirements
is game playing, a common strategy in multiagent artificial intelligence
research. By framing interactions between devices in terms of rules of
a game, devices should be able to learn the meaning of messages and learn
which devices are cooperative, according to Gershenson." May 27, 2004: Thirty
years with computers. Perspective by Jakob Nielsen. CNET News. "
People who started using computers after the PC revolution have no idea
about the miserable user experience that centralized computers imposed.
Even the worst PC designs today feel positively liberating by comparison.
For me, the experience of moving from a small, relatively transparent
computer to an oppressively large and opaque one marked the start of my
passion for usability. I knew that it could feel good to use computers,
and I wanted to recapture that sense of empowerment and put humans back
in control of the machines. ... What 2034 will bring ... Even without
full artificial intelligence, computers will exhibit more signs of agency
and work to defend their owner's online interests rather than sitting
passively, waiting for commands. Richer interaction styles are also likely,
both in terms of gestures, physical interfaces, multidevice interfaces
and the long-awaited decent high-resolution flat screen." April 8, 2004: Robotics
gains in prestige, in part due to military conflicts. By Charles Sheehan.
Associated Press / available from USA Today / also available from the
Oakland Tribune Online (April 10th: Formerly
arcane research gets new respect - Pentagon, corporate world take
renewed interest in robotics.). "Researchers in robotics have traditionally
faced two debilitating obstacles: terribly expensive parts and difficulty
attracting funding from anyone outside of a small corps of true believers.
But the field could be in line for a major jolt. Robotics experts see
a 'perfect storm' heading their way, thanks in no small part to the human
ravages of war. Just as the constant march of technology is driving down
the cost of key components, top universities in robotics are reporting
major increases in federal funding, with the Defense Department the biggest
spender. ... The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University has
seen federal funding jump 48% since 2000, and by 117% since 1994. ...
Other universities, such as the California, Virginia and Georgia institutes
of technology, say funding for robotics is up at least 50% or more in
recent years. At the same time, the materials that comprise the most technologically
advanced components in robots, from optics to software, are becoming 'dirt
cheap,' said Dan Kara, who covers the industry for Robotics Trends.
Technology that lets robots perceive and overcome obstacles has made unparalleled
bounds largely because the cost of charge-coupled devices (the core of
every camera), microprocessors and varied sensors has fallen away as rapidly
as computing power and memory have expanded. ... Robert Michelson, a principal
research engineer at Georgia Tech, is holding the fourth annual International
Aerial Robotics Competition in July. Robotic aircraft will be required
to fly three kilometers (1.8 miles) to an urban setting, find a building,
then enter it via a window or a hole in the roof to find a target inside.
The robot must then transmit an image back to base -- all without human
interference." March 31, 2004: Computers
to be 'oxygen of the future.' By Tracey Logan. BBC News. "By
the year 2010, scientists predict we will be immersed in a sea of miniature
computers. ... Those predictions came at the launch of the Cambridge-MIT
Institute's Pervasive Computing initiative (CMI). It is part of a transatlantic
collaboration between information scientists and engineers at Cambridge
University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. ...
The challenge for CMI researchers is to build immersive systems that automatically
reconfigure data or voice call connections between the full range of digital
devices, without getting cut off. Keeping such systems secure from unauthorised
use and attack, will be crucial, as will be the inclusion of intelligent
filters that prevent the system pestering us with trivia. ... Energy efficient
processors running on wireless devices with vastly increased battery time
will be essential to the CMI's pervasive computing vision, as will enhancements
in computer vision and speech processing." March 27, 2004: The
Isaac Newton of logic - It was 150 years ago that George Boole published
his classic The Laws of Thought, in which he outlined concepts that form
the underpinnings of the modern high-speed computer. By Siobhan Roberts.
The Globe and Mail (page F9). "It was 150 years ago that George Boole
published his literary classic The Laws of Thought, wherein he devised
a mathematical language for dealing with mental machinations of logic.
It was a symbolic language of thought -- an algebra of logic (algebra
is the branch of mathematics that uses letters and other general symbols
to represent numbers and quantities in formulas and equations). In doing
so, he provided the raw material needed for the design of the modern high-speed
computer. His concepts, developed over the past century by other mathematicians
but still known as 'Boolean algebra,' form the underpinnings of computer
hardware, driving the circuits on computer chips. And, at a much higher
level in the brain stem of computers, Boolean algebra operates the software
of search engines such as Google. ... The most basic and tangible example
is the machinations of Boolean searches, which operate on three logical
operators: and, or, not. Algebra gets factored in to this logical equation
when Boole designates a multiplication sign (x) to represent 'and,' an
addition sign (+) to represent 'or,' and a subtraction sign (-) to represent
'not.' ... The same 'and' gates and 'or' gates drive computer circuitry,
with streams of electrons performing Boole's algebraic operations -- a
computer's bits and bytes operate on the binary system, as does Boole's
algebra. He employs the number 1 to represent the universal class of everything
(or true) and 0 to represent the class of nothing (false). ... With his
PhD in artificial intelligence, it might appear that ['Geoffrey Hinton,
a computer-science professor at the University of Toronto and his great-great-grandson']
followed after Boole. But in fact, he says, 'I'm entirely on the other
side.' The field of artificial intelligence, in its early years circa
1950-60, was committed to the Boolean idea that symbols effectively represent
human reasoning. Since the eighties, however, artificial intelligence
has come to see human reasoning as not purely logical. Rather, it is more
about what is intuitively plausible. 'Boole thought the human brain worked
like a pocket calculator or a standard computer,' Prof. Hinton says. 'I
think we're more like rats.'" March 11, 2004: The
gentle rise of the machines. Robotics - The science-fiction dream
that robots would one day become a part of everyday life was absurd. Or
was it? The Economist Technology Quarterly. "Since 1939, when Westinghouse
Electric introduced Electro, a mechanical man, at the World's Fair in
New York, robot fans have imagined a world filled with tireless robotic
helpers, always on hand to wash dishes, do the laundry and handle the
drudgery of everyday tasks. So far, however, such robots have proliferated
in science fiction, but have proved rather more elusive in the real world.
But optimists are now arguing that the success of the Roomba and of toys
such as Aibo, Sony's robot dog, combined with the plunging cost of computer
power, could mean that the long-awaited mass market for robots is finally
within reach. 'Household robots are starting to take off,' declared a
recent report from the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE).
Are they really? ... [R]obots have had their greatest impact in factories.
Industrial robots go back over 40 years, when they first began to be used
by carmakers. Unimate, the first industrial robot, went to work for General
Motors in 1961. ... Industrial robotics is a $5.6 billion industry, growing
by around 7% a year. But the UNECE report predicts that the biggest growth
over the next three years will be in domestic rather than industrial robots.
... While prices drop and hardware improves, research into robotic vision,
control systems and communications have jumped ahead as well." February 25, 2004: Intel's
inside robotic Humvee February 4-10, 2004: The
Great Principles of Computing - an interview with Peter Denning. Ubiquity
(Volume 4, Issue 48). "DENNING: ... We have historically taught programming
side-by-side with the basic concepts of computing. In the 1970s there
was no standard for the first language - Fortran, Algol, MAD, LISP, PL/I,
and a few others were common. In the 1980s we so liked Pascal for its
simplicity and cleanness, it became a de facto standard. But many industry
people complained that few workplaces use Pascal and urged us to work
with the 'real' languages of the workplace. Many faculty switched over
to C, then C++, and more recently Java as the primary language for the
first and second courses. These industry-strength languages involve many
professional practices that make them quite complex. They are sophisticated
languages and are not easily mastered in one or two semesters. ... Systems
are coordinated collections of hardware and software components that work
together to provide stated services." February 2004: Living
Machines - Technology and biology are converging fast. The result
will transform everything from engineering to art - and redefine life
as we know it. By Christopher Meyer, Jason Lohn, Karl Jacob, Dick Morley,
Shana Ting Lipton, Marco Dorigo, Avery Pennarun. Wired Magazine (Issue
12.02). "Copernicus demoted humanity by removing Earth from the center
of the universe. Darwin showed that, rather than being made in God's image,
people were merely products of nature's experimentation. Now, advances
in fields as disparate as computer science and genetics are dealing our
status another blow. Researchers are learning that markets and power grids
have much in common with plants and animals. ... It turns out that many
of life's properties - emergence, self-organization, reproduction, coevolution
- show up in systems generally regarded as nonliving." January - February 2004: Nature-Inspired
Computing - Increased understanding of biological systems will lead
to breakthroughs in computing and artificial intelligence. By Nigel Shadbolt.
IEEE Intelligent Systems. "It isn't hard to recognize the influence
of biological processes and methods on our science and technologies. Norbert
Wiener's cybernetics was very much influenced by feedback and control
processes that he observed in biological systems. Warren McCulloch and
Walter Pitts' characterization of the neuron owed much to their understanding
of biology, mathematics, and electronics. In artificial intelligence and
intelligent systems, we've also kept the faith with living systems even
when not aiming to build exact simulations. AI and IS have been fundamentally
interested in the phenomenology of living systems - perception, decision
making, action, and learning. So we might say that we've been doing nature-inspired
computing all along." January 7, 2004: The
ultimate global network - Within 20 years computers will be everywhere,
and they'll all be talking to each other. Daunting? Not if we're prepared,
says a group of British scientists. By Richard Sarson. The Independent.
"To ward off these evils and prepare for the future, [Tony] Hoare
and [Robin] Milner are launching a series of 'Grand Challenges' to the
UK's computer scientists. The seven challenges spin off in different directions
from a single big idea: that all the computers in the world will become
part of one Global Ubiquitous Computer. Hoare wants 'to understand these
enormous artefacts, which have rather escaped the control of their original
designers. At one time, the complexity may have been artificial, but now
it is almost natural, rather like the complexity of organic chemistry.'
... The final challenge moves from basic biology to 'the architecture
of brain and mind'. This will bring together biologists, brain physiologists,
nerve scientists, psychologists, linguists, social scientists and philosophers
to work out how the grey and white mush of our brain can constitute the
most powerful and complicated computer on the planet: our mind. Scientists
have been trying to create intelligent robots for years, with little success.
This grand challenge is having another go at understanding how to do this.
... The challenges will not end up as instant software tools to run the
world. That, says Hoare, is the 'job of the entrepreneur'. But the scientists
can provide the theory behind those tools." November 16, 2003: When
the House Starts Talking to Itself. By James Gleick. The New York
Times (no fee reg. req'd.). "The 'smart helpmeets' are on their way:
our homes, our offices, our cars and our clothes. They are meant to be
aware, not dumb; proactive, not inert. They are meant to be understanding.
If that sounds Frankensteinian -- well, get over it. ... To make them
work, we will have ubiquitous sensors -- microphones and cameras embedded
in walls -- and computers learning to interpret speech, gestures and facial
expressions. ... Intelligence cuts two ways. We might want our homes to
take care of us, but we don't want our virtual helpmeets to make us feel
inadequate. We certainly don't want them to have opinions of their own.
Yet the Smart House, even in its first, crude incarnation, often seems
to have a personality -- a will of its own." November 6, 2003: Has
Intel Broken the Heat Barrier? By Cliff Edwards. BusinessWeek Online.
"With the Santa Clara (Calif.) chipmaker planning to spend about
$4 billion annually over the next few years to advance research into chip
dynamics, the results could have massive implications on everything from
PCs to consumer electronics. Chips manufactured with any of these new
technologies promise to be a 100 times faster than those on the market
today, opening up the door for mass production of tiny devices featuring
voice recognition, artificial intelligence, and other hot new technologies." November 6, 2003: Sad
End to Computing's Inventor. By Michelle Delio. Wired News. "John
Mauchly, with J. Presper Eckert, were the inventors of the 'Electronic
Numerical Integrator and Computer' (ENIAC), widely considered to be the
world's first electronic general-purpose computer. Built in the basement
of Pennsylvania University's Moore School of Engineering , ENIAC was a
tremendously complicated and huge machine -- taking up 1,800 square feet
of floor space and weighing 30 tons with more than 17,000 vacuum tubes.
It sucked up 160 kilowatts of electrical power, and when turned on, often
caused the city of Philadelphia to experience brownouts. When it was unveiled
in 1946, the public wondered whether the machine could truly perform computational
tasks as well as a human could, and whether there would ever be more than
highly specialized scientific uses for the contraption. There certainly
were uses, judging by the ensuing decades of patent struggles that would
drain Mauchly both emotionally and financially." October 29, 2003: PerCom
Pervades R&D Centres At IIM-Kolkata, TCS, Infosys. By October 24, 2003: Students
Compete in $50K Inventors Contest. By Dan Wolpow. The Cornell Daily
Sun. "Two Cornell graduate students and a Cornell research assistant
have advanced to the final round of the Collegiate Inventors Competition.
Keith Aubin grad, Robert Reichenbach grad and research assistant Maxim
Zalautidinov created a dome-shaped micromechanical oscillator, a device
that would enable many electronic devices, especially telecommunication
technologies, to be produced at smaller sizes with more efficient performances.
... [Zalautidinov] believes their new oscillator could open doors in the
field of artificial intelligence, aiding in the creation of circuits capable
of advancing the A.I. technology. 'That's the most interesting thing to
me,' Zalautidinov said. ... The competition, now in its 14th year, is
committed to recognizing outstanding achievement in both undergraduate
and graduate inventions." October 21, 2003: Balancing
Utility With Privacy. By Mark Baard. Wired News. "Last week at
UbiComp 2003, a ubiquitous computing conference in Seattle, many engineers
confronted the damage their technology might cause to personal privacy.
'The more awareness you have in the system,' said one engineer who asked
not to be named, 'the less privacy you're going to have. That's the trade-off.'
Sociologists and anthropologists at the conference also worried that human
memory, which can be flexible and forgiving, will be supplanted by the
memory banks of ubiquitous computing systems. No human act, no matter
how benign or foolish or cruel, will escape the binary memory and cold
interpretation of an artificially intelligent computer. 'People are showing
me spatulas and frying pans with RFID (radio frequency identification)
tags on them, and AI (artificial intelligence) systems that can infer
when you're making an omelet,' said Carleton University sociologist Anne
Galloway. 'And that's fine. But think of all the embarrassing things we
do that we would like to forget. With everything stored on a disk somewhere,
that will be extremely difficult.' ... 'We have a diverse group of people
developing the technology, and many of the scientists here are especially
sensitive about privacy issues,' said Volodymyr Kindratenko, a research
scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications." October 14, 2003: Leading
humanity forward. By A. Asohan. The Star (Malaysia). "The whole
idea of linking humans with machines has two aspects to it, says[Professor
Kevin] Warwick. 'First, we're working with people with spinal injuries,
like the Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Britain, to see if the kind of technologies
that we deal with, can help people with one kind of disability or the
other.' ... 'The second aspect is looking at humans as we are now. Can
we take technology and by linking with it, create superhumans give ourselves
abilities that we don't simply have at the present time? We're looking
at machines and how they are intelligent, and asking what kind of features
they have that we humans do not, and questioning what we can gain by linking
much more closely to machines,' says Warwick Inevitably, the most relevant
technology in this idea is the computer. ... Thus his quest to link the
human brain to a machine mind. It's not a wholly new idea, but certainly
one that found new impetus in the 1980s with the cyberpunk literary movement.
Groundbreaking novels like William Gibson's Neuromancer and the
increasing pervasiveness of computer technology in our everyday lives
had even the most sober of scientists asking where our increasing interdependence
on technology, and possible integration with technology, might lead the
human race to. ... Warwick has been labelled a prophet of doom by the
tabloids, quoted as saying that machine intelligence would overtake humans
in the near-future. While he has been criticised heavily for it by some
members of the scientific community, on the surface, his dire predictions
are reminiscent of those expressed by others, not the least of whom is
Bill Joy, previously the chief scientist of US network computer company
Sun Microsystems Inc. ... Warwick argues that it all depends on how one
defines 'intelligence,' a task he attempted in his book QI: The Quest
for Intelligence. 'To me, intelligence is a very basic thing. In
my book QI, we tried to look at what is intelligence - human
intelligence, animal intelligence, machine intelligence and tried to
get the basics of it. The conclusion that I would come to now is that
it's the mental ability to sustain successful life.' ... Of course, we
humans like to pride ourselves on being conscious, self-aware beings.
Cogito, ergo sum I think, therefore I am, said the 17th century
philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes. It's our edge over the machine
- it may process information much faster than us, but it is not aware
of what it is it processes. That edge is no big deal to Warwick's way
of thinking. Indeed, he argues that there is no evidence that being conscious
- the way humans are - is an effective protective mechanism." October 2, 2003: History
of computer programming revealed. Channel Business Technical News.
"The history of UK computer programming will be revealed later this
month at the Museum of Computing. Two leading UK software developers will
be uncovering the virtues of computer programming on October 16th at the
museum, located at the University of Bath in Swindon. ... On 22 October,
Professor Max Bramer of Portsmouth University will talk on the history
of artificial intelligence. Debate has raged for 5 decades on whether
computers can think or whether the brain is anything more than a digital
computer. The term Artificial Intelligence was coined in 1956 and themes
will include the Turing Test, early AI systems, modern warfare and Science
Fiction. This talk will start at 5.30pm." September/October 2003: The
Quiet Revolution. Editorial by Nigel Shadbolt. IEEE Intelligent Systems.
"A recurrent theme in my editorials over the past 30 months has been
the success story this is artificial intelligence. I've argued that, despite
our failure to deliver Stanley Kubrick's HAL, or Steven Spielberg's David,
we've been busy providing firm foundations for intelligent systems. We
can see some of these achievements.... [S]cience and technology don't
exist in a vacuum. Clearly, social issues surround much of what we do.
... In other influential domains -- reproductive biology, genetically
modified crops -- various countries have instigated powerful overseeing
authorities, some of which have determined policy that even precludes
some kinds of research. The question arises -- do we need equivalent watchdogs
and safeguards for the advanced information-processing technologies we're
researching?" September 2003: 5
Technologies That Will Change the World. By Scott Kirsner. Fast Company.
"After the Internet bubble burst, people stopped thinking about the
transforming powers of technology. And technology companies were forced
to stop crowing about how they were set to change the world. Instead,
they ate crow -- and concentrated on staying alive. ... We set off in
search of those people who were bold enough to think that the world might
at some point be ready to take a giant leap again and to believe that
innovative technology can still put serious distance between a leader
and the rest of the pack. ... [Nagui] Halim is part of a group at IBM
that's working on what the company has termed 'autonomic computing': developing
computers that are smart enough to configure themselves, balance intense
workloads, and know how to predict and address problems before they happen.
At IBM, the leader in the field, the annual research budget for autonomic
computing approaches $500 million. And the quest to develop systems that
take care of themselves isn't just an abstract research initiative: Its
fruits have begun creeping into Big Blue's product line." September 24, 2003: The
Grand Challenges for computer science - Committee embarks on seven
projects to help advance technology. By Emma Nash. Computing. "The
UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC), a joint expert panel of the Institute
of Electrical Engineers and the British Computer Society is working with
the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing to start seven new projects.
The hope is that some, or at least one, of the initiatives will be taken
forward to become a Grand Challenge - a major, long term project that
will create great advances in computer science [footnote deleted]. Researchers
involved in the proposals exclusively told Computing about the projects
and what they hope to achieve. ... 1. IVIS: In Vivo <-> In Silico ...
2. Science for Global Ubiquitous Computing ... 3. Memories for Life ...
4. Scalable Ubiquitous Computing Systems ... 5. Architecture of Brain
and Mind ... 6. Dependable Systems Evolution ... 7. Journeys in Non-Classical
Computing." September 12, 2003: Voice-net
future: 'Hey phone, buy more milk!' said the fridge. By Kevin Coughlin.
The Star-Ledger / available from NJ.com. "The days of the computer
mouse may be numbered. Within a decade, people routinely will bark commands
at their computers -- and at just about every other electronic device
-- promises a Rutgers University computer scientist. July 28, 2003: Are
You Ready for a 64-Bit PC? The next generation of desktop computers
is coming, and here's why it matters. By Tom Mainelli, PCWorld. "New
processors coming soon from Advanced Micro Devices and Apple suggest 64-bit
computing will make its way to a desktop near you this year. But what
does that really mean for you? June 19, 2003: The
sentient office is coming. The Economist Technology Quarterly. "As
computing plays an increasing part in people's lives, much research is
being focused on making computers genuinely friendlier and more useful.
This is why 'sentient computing' has begun to capture people's attention.
... Sentient computing systems are always on, ubiquitously available,
and can adapt to their users. ... According to Emile Aarts at Philips
Research in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, these convivial technologies will
emerge in a number of ways. User interfaces, for example, will move from
'cognitive' to 'intuitive'. So, instead of having to turn the television
on, the TV will know what you want by combining an understanding of what
you say, your expression, your gestures and even how you walk. ... With
such usefulness in mind, research on sentient computing has become increasingly
active in information technology (IT ) laboratories in Europe and America.
Projects under way at the University of Cambridge, the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT ), Philips and elsewhere are attempting to stake out
the territory by delving into such topics as 'ambient intelligence', 'ubiquitous
computing', 'aware environments' and the 'intelligent home'." June 18, 2003: McCarthy,
'great man' of computer science, wins major award. By Dawn Levy. Stanford
Report. "John McCarthy, professor emeritus of computer science and
pioneer in artificial intelligence (AI), received the Benjamin Franklin
Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science on April 24. The Franklin Institute
in Philadelphia bestowed the award, lauding McCarthy for 'multiple contributions
to the foundations of artificial intelligence and computer science including
the development of the LISP language, the invention of time-sharing interactive
programming, and key developments in the application of formal logic to
commonsense reasoning.' ... One big remaining challenge, McCarthy says,
is getting machines to act in a spatial, or 3-D, world. 'Nobody has a
computer that could describe the mess on this desk,' McCarthy tells a
visitor to his office. 'If you asked a robot to find a stapler amidst
the clutter and then have a robot arm pick it up, that's a bit beyond
the current state of the art.' Computers can recognize patterns and conclude
'this is a stapler,' but humans can one-up computers because they are
not limited to the sense of sight to understand the 3-D world." May 16, 2003: Tools
for rules - Rules-based programming will either help us out or create
a different kind of mess. May 8, 2003: Canada
plans supercomputer - B.C., Alberta governments to build WestGrid
as one of world's 50 fastest. By David Akin. The Globe and Mail. "When
it's up and running this summer, WestGrid, as the supercomputer will be
called, will rank as one of the world's 50 fastest supercomputers, according
to researchers working on the plan. WestGrid, short for Western Canada
Research Grid, will give Canadian scientists a powerful new tool for research
in genetics, medicine, chemistry, artificial intelligence and other areas.
... Canada's place in that list of the world's top supercomputers is an
important issue, says Mr. [Jonathan] Schaeffer and many other Canadian
scientists. That's because the most important breakthroughs in many scientific
fields today require massive amounts of computational power. ... "We've
got an outstanding set of researchers in this country. But research is
changing. Science research, in general, is moving toward computational
solutions because computers can do things that you can't do in the real
world, whether it's model the Big Bang or design airplanes.'" April 19, 2003: Verification
startup offers Lisp-based testbench language. By Michael Santarini.
EEdesign. "Lisp, an artificial intelligence language dating back
to the 1960's, will make a re-appearance in EDA if a startup called Simantix
Systems has its way. Simantix, a five-person subsidiary of SynTest Technologies
Inc., is jumping into the crowded functional verification market with
a system-level testbench generation and simulation environment based on
Lisp." Week of March 29, 2003: Pictures
Only a Computer Could Love - New lenses create distorted images for
digital enhancement. By Peter Weiss. Science News (Vol. 163, No. 13; p.
200). "More and more, computers are being tasked with making sense
of the visual world in ways that people can't. With a new generation of
optics, engineers are recasting visual scenes for computers' consumption.
To the human eye, these pictures are visual gibberish, hardly worth a
single word, let alone a thousand. To computers, such data can be worth
more words than you'd care to count. Central to it all are new styles
of lenses. Instead of the familiar concave and convex disks, optical engineers
are making oddly shaped, radically different lenses tailored to the strengths
of computers. 'Once you break away from thinking that the optics have
to form something [people] recognize as an image, there are many things
that you can do,' says Joseph N. Mait of the Army Research Laboratory
in Adelphi, Md., and the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.
... Other optical engineers are developing novel lenses to help computers
sense motion and the physical properties of remote objects." March 22, 2003: UWF
on the forefront of technology. Opinion by J. Earle Bowden. Pensacola
News Journal. "[Dr. Kenneth M. Ford] and his associate director,
retired Admiral Timothy W. Wright, are building brainpower and futuristic
awesomeness touching the apex of artificial intelligence at 40 S. Alcaniz
St., in the old Pensacola police station that insurance company president
Skip Hunter cosmetically wrapped with a Spanish Mission, red-tiled roof
facade. ... Unknown to many Pensacolians, a lot of varied intelligentsia
floats in and out of the Institute of Human & Machine Cognition, one of
the nation's leading research centers investigating a broad range of disciplines
related to understanding cognition in both humans and machines. Founded
in 1990 by the Florida Board of Regents as a research unit of the University
of West Florida, IHMC is focused on human-centered computing. Ford sees
his mission as keeping human thought and action at the center of science,
extending rather than imitating human abilities." March 22, 2003: The
cyborg evolution. By David Stonehouse. The Sydney Morning Herald.
"[Kevin Warwick] believes this cyborg evolution is inevitable and
vital to our very survival as a species. 'If we don't, the alternative
is to have intelligent machines running everything. I don't really fancy
that,' the scientist says in a phone interview from his home near London.
'But this alternative, I see as quite a positive alternative: humans staying
in control of what is going on, even though we have to become cyborgs
to do it.' ... Warwick, a cybernetics professor at the University of Reading
in England, is involved in ambitious and dangerous experiments in the
quest to meld man and machine. In March 2002, an electrode was implanted
in his wrist in order to read the electrical signals pulsing through his
nerves and report the information to a computer, thus providing a link
between the machine and his nervous system. ... Scientists are making
significant breakthroughs in getting computers to interpret thought. ...
While Warwick worries that machines may conquer man if we don't become
part machine, he is not concerned that computers will end up taking over
if we do team up with them. 'The new system that we move to is essentially
an intelligent machine network that has human nodes connected to it. I
see it as if you are not connected to the network - if you are not a cyborg
- you're not part of it at all.'" February 14, 2003:Biology
to make mini machines. By Richard Black. BBC. "Computers of the
future will be built not by factory machines, but by living cells such
as bacteria. That at least is the vision which has been outlined by scientists
speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual
meeting in Denver. They have described how wires can now be made by yeast
organisms, and how solar panels could be built using substances produced
by sea sponges. Researchers believe these kind of technologies will be
essential if we are to continue to shrink the size of electronic devices.
Plants and animals produce an extraordinary variety of chemical substances,
all designed to help them in their lives. But some of these substances
- proteins or other kinds of molecule - might also be useful in the electronics
industry, as it seeks ways of making silicon chips smaller and faster.
Another potential application is nanotechnology - science which is done
at the scale of just billionths (nano) of a metre." Also see a related
article from the BBC: Nanotech
may spark fierce ethical row. By Alex Kirby (2/14/03). February 12, 2003: Analog
Chips - Making sense - In the coming years, look for analog--not digital--chips
to attract the new talent and investment. By Eric W. Pfeiffer. Red Herring.
"Analog chips enable computers to interact with the physical world--to
see, listen, touch--before that information is changed into the ones and
zeroes of computing's lingua franca. Analog is the yin to digital's yang;
it is capable of dealing with continuous states of information, waves
of light and sound. ... For decades all effort and focus has been on miraculous
advancements in digital chips, but the next ten years will see a shift
in emphasis to analog technologies. ... If we ever hope to reach computing's
final frontier--true artificial intelligence--similar advances must be
made with smell, taste, and touch. While human skin boasts millions of
sensors, a robot may have but 20, says Sebastian Thrun, a professor of
computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. 'Most senses
in the computer world are very impoverished,' he says. 'Robots are really
good at finding out small things with accuracy and repeatability, but
they are ages away from understanding the physical analog information
that humans can.'" January 29, 2003: Benjamin
Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science. The Franklin Institute.
"Dr. John McCarthy is awarded the 2003 Benjamin Franklin Medal in
Computer and Cognitive Sciences for his multiple contributions to the
foundations of artificial intelligence and computer science including
the development of the LISP language, the invention of time-sharing interactive
programming, and key developments in the application of formal logic to
common sense reasoning. John McCarthy is universally recognized as one
of the fathers of 'artificial intelligence,' (AI) a phrase he coined to
denote the field of research he significantly helped to define." December 2002: God
Is the Machine. In the beginning there was 0. and then there was 1.
A mind-bending meditation on the transcendent power of digital computation.
By Kevin Kelly. Wired Magazine. "From this perspective, computation
seems almost a theological process. It takes as its fodder the primeval
choice between yes or no, the fundamental state of 1 or 0. After stripping
away all externalities, all material embellishments, what remains is the
purest state of existence: here/not here. Am/not am. ... All creation,
from this perch, is made from this irreducible foundation. Every mountain,
every star, the smallest salamander or woodland tick, each thought in
our mind, each flight of a ball is but a web of elemental yes/nos woven
together. If the theory of digital physics holds up, movement (f = ma),
energy (E = mc2), gravity, dark matter, and antimatter can all be explained
by elaborate programs of 1/0 decisions. ... Our awakening to the true
power of computation rests on two suspicions. The first is that computation
can describe all things. To date, computer scientists have been able to
encapsulate every logical argument, scientific equation, and literary
work that we know about into the basic notation of computation. Now, with
the advent of digital signal processing, we can capture video, music,
and art in the same form. Even emotion is not immune. Researchers Cynthia
Breazeal at MIT and Charles Guerin and Albert Mehrabian in Quebec have
built Kismet and EMIR (Emotional Model for Intelligent Response), two
systems that exhibit primitive feelings. ... A third postulate ties the
first two together into a remarkable new view: All computation is one.
In 1937, Alan Turing, Alonso Church, and Emil Post worked out the logical
underpinnings of useful computers. They called the most basic loop --which
has become the foundation of all working computers -- a finite-state machine.
... When John von Neumann and others jump-started the first electronic
computers in the 1950s, they immediately began extending the laws of computation
away from math proofs and into the natural world. They tentatively applied
the laws of loops and cybernetics to ecology, culture, families, weather,
and biological systems. Evolution and learning, they declared, were types
of computation. Nature computed. If nature computed, why not the entire
universe?" November 19, 2002: Planned
supercomputers challenge human brain - Government contracts with IBM
to build two that will be fastest in world. By Michael Stroh. The Baltimore
Sun. " IBM Corp. has won a government contract to build two supercomputers
whose speed, company officials say, could for the first time approach
the theoretical raw processing power of the human brain. ... The first
machine, dubbed ASCI Purple, will be capable of performing 100 trillion
calculations per second when it's delivered in 2004, the company said.
That would make it nearly three times faster than the world's reigning
supercomputer champion, Earth Simulator, built for the Japanese government
by the NEC Corp. ... Some scientists contend that ASCI Purple could achieve
another computing milestone - the first machine to exhibit the same raw
computational power as the human brain. Hans Moravic, a researcher in
the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, has estimated the
brain can perform 100 trillion calculations per second. A robot with a
computer like ASCI Purple as its brain could, if it had the right software,
essentially mimic human behavior, he said." August 12, 2002: A
fresh breath of Oxygen - MIT researchers are working to make computers
more intuitive. By Hiawatha Bray. The Boston Globe (Page C1). "[Rodney]
Brooks's automated office is part of a major MIT research project called
Oxygen, a project aimed at finally creating the kind of interaction between
computers and people that we see every summer in Hollywood blockbusters,
but never in real life. ... 'I wanted to pull the computer out into our
world,' said Brooks - to give it a new capacity for human-like interaction
with humans. That means building machines that look you in the eye and
recognize you, machines that let you ask questions in casual, conversational
English, and answer them the same way, machines that know how to ask for
help from other machines, without having to be told. ... The computing
boom of the 1990s is decisively over, with companies like Apple Computer
Inc. and Intel Corp. cutting jobs in the face of dwindling profits. Even
when the economy recovers, the saturated market for traditional computers
will never grow as it once did. By breaking down the wall between people
and computers, Oxygen-based systems could consign today's relatively crude
digital products to the scrapyard, while spawning new demand among millions
of people who have never touched a mouse or a keyboard. ... The late Michael
Dertouzos, director of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, foresaw
a future in which computing power was as cheap, plentiful, and necessary
as the air we breathe. ... Dertouzos died of a heart attack last August,
but his successor, Victor Zue, shares the vision of a computer-saturated
world. 'In five to 10 years, in developed countries, computing and communications
are essentially going to be free, pervasive, everywhere,' said Zue. 'It's
going to be in your walls, in your cars, on your body.'" July 2002: Nvidia
- Meet Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, the man who plans to make the CPU obsolete.
By Jeffrey M. O'Brien. Wired Magazine (10.07). "For a perfect example
of the changing dynamic between the GPU [graphics processing units] and
CPU [central processing unit], look at the Xbox. It uses a special version
of Nvidia's nForce chipset, built around a tricked-out GeForce3 to handle
graphics and sound. Microsoft paid Nvidia more than it did Intel for its
733-MHz Pentium III. For Huang, it's a proof of concept. 'The Xbox is
how the computer will be built in the next 20 years. More semiconductor
capacity will go to the user experience,' he says. 'The microprocessor
will be dedicated to other things like artificial intelligence. That trend
is helpful to us. It's a trend that's inevitable." June 25, 2002: At
Los Alamos, Two Visions of Supercomputing. By George Johnson. The
New York Times (no-fee reg. req'd). "'Bigger and faster machines
simply aren't good enough anymore,' said Dr. Wu-Chun Feng, the leader
of the project. The time has come, he said, to question the doctrine of
'performance at any cost.' The issue is not just ecological. The more
power a computer consumes, the hotter it gets. Raise the operating temperature
18 degrees Fahrenheit, Dr. Feng said, and the reliability is cut in half.
Pushing the extremes of calculational speed, Q is expected to run in sprints
for just a few hours before it requires rebooting. A smaller version of
Green Destiny, called Metablade, has been operating in the warehouse since
last fall, requiring no special attention. 'There are two paths now for
supercomputing,' Dr. Feng said. 'While technically feasible, following
Moore's Law may be the wrong way to go with respect to reliability, efficiency
of power use and efficiency of space. We're not saying this is a replacement
for a machine like Q but that we need to look in this direction.'" April 21, 2002: How
to Get There? It Counts the Ways. By Sarah Milstein. The New York
Times (no-fee reg. req'd). "The founder of ITA, Jeremy Wertheimer,
said that the company began as what he half-jokingly called a 'thesis
avoidance project.' Mr. Wertheimer, 40, was a graduate student in artificial
intelligence at M.I.T. in the early 1990's when he became interested in
air-fare searching -- a classic computer science problem. ... Intrigued
by how computers could wade through so much information to search for
the cheapest fares quickly, he developed a demonstration program using
Lisp, an artificial intelligence language that allows enormous quantities
of data to be manipulated on a desktop computer. That program became the
basis for ITA, which Mr. Wertheimer founded with friends in 1996." March 2002: I,
PC. By Christina Wood. Popular Science. "The coming generation
of PCs, [Steven] Schwartz says, will know everything HAL knew, but they
won't be remote from us. Instead of residing in a box or being tethered
to the wiring of a ship, the''ll be intimately laced into the fabric of
our bodies and day-to-day lives. 'I don't think about my shoelaces all
day long,' says Schwartz. 'Neither should I have to think about my computer.
It will become a part of me.' If that's the next wave of computing, clearly
little that's come before fully prepares us for it -- a time when it will
be impossible to distinguish where the PC ends and the person begins.
We'll wear networks and technology the way we wear clothing; we'll have
personal software agents that will do our bidding even while we sleep,
exploring both the Web and real-world venues for things we need to know,
and keeping us prepared for even the most unlikely incidents." December 20, 2001: Project
Oxygen's New Wind. By Eric S. Brown. Technology Review. "An umbrella
for more than 30 faculty members, Oxygen supports research aimed at replacing
the PC with ubiquitous - often invisible - computing machines. Projects
run a gamut from video recognition to nomadic networking to chip design.
... [Victor] Zue: 'Oxygen tries to ensure that the technology and artifacts
are human-centered by attending to their needs and wants in a way convenient
to them rather than to the computers.' ... 'Privacy is one of four interlocking
issues that we must address in a pervasive, human-centered world.'" |
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