AI in the news
AUGUST 2008
August 18, 2008: Flying Saucers and Mini-Tanks Highlight Spy Robot Competition. Eleven teams, including universities, defense contractors and small companies, are competing in the British Ministry of Defense’s Grand Challenge with autonomous information-gathering vehicles that include flying saucers, a mini tank, several mini-helicopters and darts, among other machines. ... During the competition, the robots have to identify threats such as potential snipers and enemy vehicles and other threats, with minimal human guidance. The machines then have to report the information back to troops preparing for an assault. The judges will reward accuracy and autonomy. (info) 
August 18, 2008: 400,000 Essays Later, Vantage Learning Spells Success in Over Half of Utah's School Districts. Utah's students are boosting critical writing, reasoning, and computer skills in the classroom, thanks to a licensing agreement for MY Access! the award-winning online writing tool developed by Vantage Learning. Twenty four districts have decided to use MY Access! this school year after teachers, directors and administrators from across the state saw a marked improvement in student performance. Students submitted over 400,000 essays to MY Access! in one school year and administrators decided to expand their use of MY Access! to over 70,000 licenses in over twenty four school districts throughout the Utah school system. ... To use MY Access!, students write an essay based on a teacher's assignment, and submit it to the Web-based system. The program instantly analyzes over 350 semantic, syntactic, and discourse characteristics, and scores the students on focus and meaning, organization, content and development, language use and style, mechanics and conventions, and overall writing proficiency. (info)
August 18, 2008: Gates foresees another revolution. MICROSOFT chairman Bill Gates said last week the dramatic growth of the internet would help to eventually eliminate "the last constraints we have", leading to a software-writing revolution. ... The way people used computers would expand "to encompass all interactive techniques: the touch, the speech, the vision", said Mr Gates, who stepped down in June from his full-time role at Microsoft, which he co-founded. Major developments in internet services and computer interfaces, "because they're fairly developed in the labs, I can say that in 10 years will be widespread", he said. As for the following decade, he predicted: "You might get artificial intelligence or robotics, but those are still so undeveloped, at least in widespread impact.". (info)
August 15, 2008: A website that hopes to speak the language of freely available data . Flummoxed by a document in Welsh? Now you can get a free translation at cymraeg.org.uk. The Apertium-cy software, described as the first free automatic translator from Welsh to English, is the fruit of a multilingual effort involving developers in Spain, Wales and Ireland pushing forward the possibilities of open-source software and, they hope, free public-sector data. ... Work on the Welsh-language version was led by Francis Tyers and Kevin Donnelly. It contains about 10,000 words in Welsh and English and 150 grammatical rules - enough to get the gist of the text, the developers say. The idea is to provide an easy way for people who don't speak Welsh to keep an eye on Welsh-language media reports in an area of interest, and to provide a "first-pass" translation of documents, improving the productivity of human translators. (info)
August 15, 2008: Rapid7's NeXpose Named SC Magazine Recommended Product This Month. In a review published in the August issue, SC Magazine's technology editor and product tester, Peter Stephenson, identifies NeXpose's strengths as "vulnerability assessment and risk analysis in one box" and reports that there are no weaknesses to be found. He describes NeXpose as a "tool that always goes beyond expectations," and points out that NeXpose "can not only scan for network-based vulnerabilities, but also looks inside web apps and databases for potential threats." ... NeXpose discovers the vulnerabilities that hackers most exploit and other products fail to detect by using an expert system to chain together individual external vulnerabilities to reveal potentially hidden vulnerabilities at deeper levels of the systems.. (info)
August 15, 2008: 'Frankenrobot' Has Biological Brain. Meet Gordon, probably the world's first robot to be controlled exclusively by living brain tissue. Stitched together from cultured rat neurons, Gordon's primitive grey matter was designed at the University of Reading by scientists who unveiled the neuron-powered machine on Wednesday. Their groundbreaking experiments explore the vanishing boundary between natural and artificial intelligence, and could shed light on the fundamental building blocks of memory and learning, one of the lead researchers said. (info)
August 15, 2008: The Night Sessions (Book Review). Review of book by Ken MacLeod in which "Detective Inspector Adam Ferguson harbours a deep mistrust of religious faith and not a little unease at the recollection of the brutal methods with which he helped to suppress the religious minority. When a priest is murdered, then a bishop, atheists are at first suspected, and later aggrieved religious fundamentalists. But Ferguson's investigations soon uncover a more sinister plot involving artificial intelligence." (info)
August 15, 2008: Handle With Care . “The complexity of newly engineered systems coupled with their potential impact on lives, the environment, etc., raise a set of ethical issues that engineers had not been thinking about,” said William A. Wulf, a computer scientist who until last year headed the National Academy of Engineering. As one of his official last acts, he established the Center for Engineering, Ethics, and Society there. Rachelle Hollander, a philosopher who directs the center, said the new technologies were so powerful that “our saving grace, our inability to affect things at a planetary level, is being lost to us,” as human-induced climate change is demonstrating. ... “It’s a hot topic,” said Ronald C. Arkin, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech who advises the Army on robot weapons. “We need at least to think about what we are doing while we are doing it, to be aware of the consequences of our research.” ...Dr. Arkin said robotics researchers should consider not just how to make robots more capable, but also who must bear responsibility for their actions and how much human operators should remain “in the loop,” particularly with machines to aid soldiers on the battlefield or the disabled in their homes. (info)
August 15, 2008: iRobot preps pared-down PackBot for civilians. iRobot announced a new addition to its lineup of industrial robots Wednesday.... Like the PackBot, the Negotiator can climb stairs, work by remote control, and be outfitted with tools for reconnaissance and chemical detection.. (info)
August 15, 2008: Cell phone tech for swarm robots. The tiny motors normally used to vibrate cell phones can provide researchers with a significantly more affordable option for building robots. A team of students led by Alexis Johnson at the University of Southampton's electronics and computer science school realized the tiny motors intended for cell phone vibration are already designed and manufactured to be attached to circuit boards making them ideally suited for use in swarm robots. (info)
August 11, 2008: Computer cashes in big at Texas Hold 'Em tourney. In a series of matches that took place over the Fourth of July weekend in Las Vegas, the researchers' [at the University of Alberta] Polaris poker program won against a group of top-ranked online poker players. ...According to Prof. Bowling, the principal investigator on the Polaris project, "when you look at games where players are asked to make decisions with different amounts of information, missing information, poker is the quintessential game.". (info)
August 8, 2008: When Computers Meld With Our Minds. ...e-mails represent just a small sample of the vast amount of digital information being generated by the gigabyte every minute. If we can cope with this rising flood of information, we are likely to be on track for using technology in the creation of superhuman intelligence, according to Vernor Vinge, futurist, best-selling science fiction author, and retired professor of computer science. Machines will become far more than just tools; they will physically merge with us, seamlessly endowing powers that are currently beyond our imagination. And all of this will happen in our lifetime, Vinge says. (info)
August 8, 2008: Noted Inventor Files Patent for Combining Artificial Intelligence With Event-Driven Security. The field of Mr. Rodriguez's invention will set the industry standard for identity management in global companies and government agencies, by preventing identity theft before it happens. The solution provides real-time authentication and authorization of digital identities using an artificial intelligence (AI) based architecture which include neural and semantic network based algorithms. It answers three critical aspects in the new paradigm of security management (1) Are you who you say you are? (2) Where will I allow you to go? (3) What will I allow you to do? These algorithms promote and demote users, in real-time, to provide a multi-factor, risk based authentication model (info)
August 8, 2008: Language Lessons for Robots. "Language-learning techniques designed for children are being used in a bid to break new ground by developing algorithms that enable robots to learn and understand concepts. As part of the project by Plymouth University researchers, two robots will be built featuring software that allows them to interact with each other to exchange learned information like humans." (info)
August 5, 2008: Brain Signal Decoder. Interfacing with the brain to control devices such as wheelchairs, robots and prosthetic devices has great potential. Monkeys have shown impressive ability to control robot limbs using brain implants, but must "rewire" their brains through training to do it. ... It would make things easier to use the signals naturally used for hand-eye coordination. But nobody has been able to figure out how the part of the brain responsible for hand-eye coordination, the primary motor cortex, does its job. Even recording the activity of this brain region has proved difficult. ... The result is a brain implant that can translate the hand trajectory signals produced by the brain and use them to control an external device. (info)
August 5, 2008: Pneumatic robot arranges limbs for MRI 'sweet spot'. A pneumatic robot that positions patients' limbs inside an MRI scanner allows physicians to exploit a bizarre phenomenon where hard-to-see tendons jump into sharp focus when held at the right angle. That "magic angle" effect happens when a tendon is at 55° to a scanner's powerful magnetic field and can help with diagnosing tendon injuries. ... The robot judges its own position, and even uses image processing software to check whether it has reached the right angle. (with video). (info)
August 5, 2008: Avatars as communicators of emotions. Current interactive systems enable users to communicate with computers in many ways, but not taking into account emotional communication. A PhD thesis presented at the University of the Basque Country puts forward the use of avatars or virtual Internet personages as an efficient form of non-verbal communication, principally focusing on emotional aspects. (info)
August 5, 2008: A Conversation with Christos Papadimitriou. Christos Papadimitriou, the C. Lester Hogan Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, is this year's recipient of the Katyanagi Prize for Research Excellence. Carnegie Mellon University has cited Dr. Papadimitriou as "an internationally recognized expert on the theory of algorithms and complexity, and its applications to databases, optimization, artificial intelligence, networks and game theory." DDJ: Diverging from the philosophical to the mundane, your work on protein folding touches on an interesting economic phenomenon. Dr. Dobb's Journal is a magazine that addresses working programmers. As we pursue our careers, are we going to be sucked into biotech in large numbers? CP: I would say that, quite generally, computer scientists are going to find themselves interacting more with other fields. (info)
August 5, 2008: Sci-fi film: The apes weren't cuddly. Classic sci-fi films address issues that make adults think. 'Wall-E' promises the moon, then ends up just chasing the Happy Meal set. (info)
August 5, 2008: Theorist says humor is pattern recognition. A British science writer says he has determined humor is just the recognition of a pattern that a person finds surprising. "Humor occurs when the brain recognizes a pattern that surprises it and that recognition of this sort is rewarded with the experience of the humorous response, an element of which is broadcast as laughter," said researcher and theorist Alastair Clarke. "It is not the content of the stimulus but the patterns underlying it, that provide the potential for sources of humor. For patterns to exist it is necessary to have some form of content but once that content exists, it is the level of the pattern at which humor operates and for which it delivers its rewards." Clarke also predicts the use of his hypothesis will facilitate the creation of a less robotic form of artificial intelligence. (info)
August 5, 2008: Expert systems help Italian ministries provide quick, accurate responses to search terms. Expert System, leading provider of semantic software that discovers, classifies and interprets text information, today announces that the Italian Ministry of Culture and Heritage has chosen COGITO Semantic Search to improve and simplify the search of its online content and provide accurate, multi-lingual search results. (info)
August 5, 2008: Artificial Intelligence - alive and kicking. Artificial intelligence technology (AI) is being used all around us but don't expect any philosophical discussions with your hoover quite yet. "People think of AI and they think of brains in boxes or Terminator - kind of death destroying robots - and actually of course we haven't built those systems and there isn't a brain in a box somewhere worrying about its self existence," head of AI at Southampton University, professor Nigel Shadbolt, told silicon.com. "What AI's done by trying to set itself lofty goals about understanding how to build intelligent software or flexible software, it's produced along the waytonnes of methods and insights that are now routinely deployed everywhere." (info)
August 5, 2008: Four students in Portugal have built a robot which will helps clean floors.. Four Students in Portugal have built a cleaning robot designed to clean floors. (info)
August 5, 2008: Robots aim to top humans at air hockey . First, a supercomputer beats a chess master. Then, an artificial intelligence program deals defeat to a poker champion. Next: A robot takes on humans in air hockey. (info)
August 5, 2008: Linking Brains, Computers. Because it has been around for such a long time, and has either misled or annoyed so many people over the years, it ought to have a name. Let's call it the Synapse Equivalency Fallacy. Synapses are the interconnections between the neurons that make up the brain and nervous system. The fallacy occurs when a writer likens the transistors in a computer to the synapses in a brain, usually as part of an effort to make computers seem like brains. (info)
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