Using Software: A Guide to the Ethical and Legal Use of Software for Members of the Academic Community from The Pennsylvania State University computer-related policies, guidelines, and laws. Computer Software and Intellectual Property Law from the Office of Laboratory Counsel, Patent Department, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "This web site was written specifically for any LBNL employee who writes computer programs at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It is intended to provide basic information on how the law of copyright applies to computer software. It is not intended to be a legal reference for copyright attorneys, but an accessible reference for the people whose creative efforts result in software others want to use." - from the Introduction. PLEASE NOTE: As explained in greater detail on our Notices & Disclaimer page, our links to third party resources (including vendors & distributors) do not imply any endorsement whatsoever or warranty of any type.

Interactive Learning Tools

Interactive Learning Tools from the University of British Columbia designed to teach basic concepts in AI.

Some Omnibus Collections

AI Software Packages from the CMU Artificial Intelligence Repository. You'll find software for more than 30 topics here, with some examples being:

• Classical AI Programs (ELIZA, PERRY, SHRDLU, and more)
• Expert System Shells
• Genetic Algorithms
• Machine Learning Databases and Software
• Neural Networks, Connectionist Systems, and Neural Systems
• Speech Recognition and Synthesis

AI FAQs. Maintained by Ric Crabbe and Amit Dubey. Here's a sample of what you can find:

• 1-6: Commercial Expert System Shells
• 5-7: Where can I get a machine readable dictionary, thesaurus, and other text corpora?
• 5-8: Where can I gettraining sets for machine learning algorithms?
• Part 6: Open Source AI Software (Blackboard Architectures, Constraint Programming, Data Mining, Expert Systems, Frame Systems, and much more)

Online Code Repository. Part of the web site for Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Second Edition), by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig. "The goal is to have working code for all the algorithms in the book in a variety of languages. So far, we have Lisp and Python versions of most of the algorithms, and a smaller subset of algorithms in Java. There is also some old code in C++ and Prolog, but these are not being maintained. We also have a directory full of data files."

Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems software collection from the Open Channel Foundation includes:

• the AI Toolkit from Caltech/Jet Propulsion Laboratory: "[W]e have developed an interactive AI toolkit, with a specific focus on soft computing techniques for robotic applications. The core elements of this educational software package are: * Comprehensible training modules on three AI soft computing technologies, namely: genetic algorithms, neural networks, and fuzzy logic. * Interactive graphical interfaces for providing hands-on examples of applying AI techniques to real-world research problems. * The three soft computing methodologies currently embedded within the toolkit include Fuzzy Logic, Genetic Algorithms, and Neural Networks."
• SAILE from Mitre Corporation: "the Synchronous and Asynchronous Interactive Learning Environment program, and its Asynchronous Replay Tool, ART, can help provide a general approach to sharing tools and promoting collaborative learning and problem-solving. SAILE is composed of a text chat tool that allows users to communicate, a palette to place any Java applications to be shared, a Java RMI server for managing the collaborative connection between users, and the Asynchronous Replay Tool (ART). ART allows an asynchronous learner and problem-solver to become a full participant in a collaborative learning or problem-solving session."

Artificial Intelligence Software from The Staffordshire University. Covers lots of topics from A-Life to XpertRule.

Artificial Intelligence programs from the Chicago Sun-Times.

Algorithms and Data Structures which have Links to Implementations. "This is the web page of terms with definitions that have links to implementations with source code. The language is in parentheses. We also list all entries by type, for instance, whether it is an algorithm, a definition, a problem, or a data structure, and entries by area, for instance, graphs, trees, sorting, etc. Don't use this site to cheat. Teachers, contact me if I can help." This page is part of the Dictionary of Algorithms, Data Structures, and Problems, created by Paul E. Black at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

ISI Software from The University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (ISI) is where you'll find programs such as:

• HALogen: a general-purpose natural language generation system.
• Pharaoh: a machine translation decoder released to the research community to aid research in statistical machine translation.
• PowerLoom: the successor to the Loom® knowledge representation system.
• Rewrite Decoder: a program that translates from one natural language into another using statistical machine translation.
• SPADE: (Sentence-level PArsing for DiscoursE) is a discourse parser at sentence level.
• Wings : (Workflow INstance Generation and Selection) is a knowledge-based framework for creating workflow instances.

Linux Software from SAL (Scientific Applications on Linux) ."In this section, you will find some software that work on Linux in the field of AI. For example, you will find some programs of artificial life simulation, cellular automata, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, neural networks, pattern recognition, .... "

Machine Learning and Inference Software from George Mason University's Machine Learning and Inference Laboratory include "programs for machine learning, data mining and knowledge discovery, machine inference, knowledge visualization and related tasks. Among its major programs are: ABACUS, AQ11, AQ15c, AQ16 (POSEIDON), AQ17-DCI, AQ18, AQ19, AQ21, CLUSTER, EMERALD-AQ, EMERALD-SUN, iAQ, INDUCE1..4, INLEN, VINLEN, KV1 and KV2, LEM1, LEM2, LEM3, RT, SPARC/E and SPARC/G. ... Some programs have already been arranged to be directly downloadable from this website."

Software Archive at The Internet Archive. "The Software Archive is designed to preserve and provide access to all kinds of rare or difficult to find, legally downloadable software titles and background information on those titles."

Programs [a mere sampling of what's available on the Web] "The ADIOS (Automatic DIstillation of Structure) algorithm relies on a statistical method for pattern extraction (The MEX algorithm) and on structured generalization, two processes that have been implicated in language acquisition. It has been evaluated on artificial context-free grammars with thousands of rules, on natural languages as diverse as English and Chinese, on coding regions in DNA sequences, and on protein data correlating sequence with function. This is the first time an unsupervised algorithm is shown capable of learning complex syntax, generating grammatical novel sentences, scoring well in standard language proficiency tests, and proving useful in other fields that call for structure discovery from raw data, such as bioinformatics."Developed by Zach Solan, David Horn, Eytan Ruppin and Shimon Edelman, the software can be downloaded from the Algorithm page.

AIED Software from the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education (IJAIED).

"Agent Construction Tools. This page provides a survey of agent construction tools. The tools are categorized as either commercially available products or academic and research projects." From AgentBuilder.

Agent Software and Educational Software from AgentLink, the European Network of Excellence for Agent Based Computing.

Automated Reasoning Tools from CoLogNet, the Network of Excellence in Computational Logic.

Bayesian Network Software Packages. Maintained by Kevin Murphy at U. C. Berkeley.

Cascade Neural Network Simulator: "a public domain C program that gives the user a choice of four learning algorithms: Cascade-Correlation, Recurrent Cascade Correlation, Cascade 2, and Recurrent Cascade 2. This program was written by Matt White, based on Scott Fahlman’s original code in Common Lisp." Made available by Scott E. Fahlman,Research Professor of Computer Science,Carnegie Mellon University.

CellTracker software for image browsing, processing and cell tracking. Hailin Shen of the Bioanalytical Sciences Group, University of Manchester, is the lead developer. (Also see this related article from AI in the news.)

CmapTools knowledge construction program from the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC). "The CmapTools program empowers users to construct, navigate, share and criticize knowledge models represented as concept maps. It allows users to, among many other features, construct their Cmaps in their personal computer, share them on servers (CmapServers) anywhere on the Internet, link their Cmaps to other Cmaps on servers, automatically create web pages of their concept maps on servers, edit their maps synchronously (at the same time) with other users on the Internet, and search the web for information relevant to a concept map. The CmapTools client is free for use by anybody, whether its use is commercial or non-commercial. In particular, schools and universities are encouraged to download it and install it in as many computers as desired, and students and teachers may make copies of it and install it at home."

Computer Vision Source Code from Computer Vision, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University.

"ConceptNet is a freely available commonsense knowledgebase and natural-language-processing toolkit which supports many practical textual-reasoning tasks over real-world documents right out-of-the-box (without additional statistical training)." From the development team of Hugo Liu, Push Singh and Ian Eslick at the MIT Media Laboratory.

Emerald (SUN version) - An Integrated Large-Scale Learning and Discovery System for Education and Research in Machine Learning. From George Mason University's Machine Learning and Inference Laboratory's collection. [NOTE: "An earlier version of this system, called ILLIAN, was presented at eight major U.S. Museums of Science."]

"Festival offers a general framework for building speech synthesis systems as well as including examples of various modules. As a whole it offers full text to speech through a number APIs: from shell level, though a Scheme command interpreter, as a C++ library, and an Emacs interface. Festival is multi-lingual (currently English, Welsh and Spanish) though English is the most advanced. The system is written in C++ and uses the Edinburgh Speech Tools Library for low level architecture and has a Scheme (SIOD) based command interpreter for control. Documentation is given in the FSF texinfo format which can generate, a printed manual, info files and HTML."

"FreeTTS [text-to-speech] is a speech synthesis system written entirely in the Java™ programming language [and built by the Speech Integration Group of Sun Microsystems Laboratories]. It is based upon Flite: a small run-time speech synthesis engine developed at Carnegie Mellon University. Flite is derived from the Festival Speech Synthesis System from the University of Edinburgh and the FestVox project from Carnegie Mellon University."

FRIL - the Fuzzy Relational Inference Language. From the Artificial Intelligence Group at the University of Bristol. "Fril is an uncertainty logic programming language which includes Prolog as a subset of the language, but which also allows probabilistic uncertainties and fuzzy sets to be included. This generalisation of logic programming provides a powerful and flexible environment for modelling and implementing Artificial Intelligence applications, and extends the semantics of Prolog by embodying open worlds and true logic negation."

FuzzyCLIPS: "[A]n extension of the CLIPS (C Language Integrated Production System) expert system shell from NASA. It was developed by the Integrated Reasoning Group of the Institute for Information Technology of the National Research Council of Canada and has been widely distributed for a number of years. It enhances CLIPS by providing a fuzzy reasoning capability that is fully integrated with CLIPS facts and inference engine allowing one to represent and manipulate fuzzy facts and rules."

Fuzzy Logic Control with the Intel 8XC196 Embedded Microcontroller. From Intel.

"The Genetic Algorithms Archive is a repository for information related to research in genetic algorithms and other forms of evolutionary computation. Available from this site are past issues of the GA-List digest, source code for many GA implementations, and announcements about GA-related conferences. Also, links are given to many interesting sites around the World with material related to evolutionary computation. This archive is maintained by Alan C. Schultz at The Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence."

GAlib - A C++ Library of Genetic Algorithm Components. Massachusetts Institute of Technology & Matthew Wall. "GAlib contains a set of C++ genetic algorithm objects. The library includes tools for using genetic algorithms to do optimization in any C++ program using any representation and genetic operators. The documentation includes an extensive overview of how to implement a genetic algorithm as well as examples illustrating customizations to the GAlib classes."

"Here's all the online game learning software I know of which isn't mentioned elsewhere on the web site. I've also included non-learning programs which may be useful starting points." From Jay Scott's Machine Learning in Games web site.

GeNIe & SMILE. From the Decision Systems Laboratory, part of the Department of Information Science and Telecommunications and the Intelligent Systems Program, University of Pittsburgh. "GeNIe and SMILE implement a sensitivity analysis algorithm for Bayesian networks. Given a set of target variables, the algorithm determines the sensitivity of the marginal posterior probability distributions over the target variables to every parameter in the network. An interactive interface allows for an orderly examination of the entire network." "The Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK) is a portable toolkit for building and manipulating hidden Markov models. HTK is primarily used for speech recognition research although it has been used for numerous other applications including research into speech synthesis, character recognition and DNA sequencing. HTK is in use at hundreds of sites worldwide." Provided by the Cambridge University Engineering Department (CUED).

"iAQ program demonstrates Natural Induction, that is, an ability of a computer program to learn knowledge from data in forms natural to people, and by that easy to understand and interpret." From George Mason University's Machine Learning and Inference Laboratory's collection.

Image. Developed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). "Image can be used to measure area, mean, centroid, perimeter, etc. of user defined regions of interest. It also performs automated particle analysis and provides tools for measuring path lengths and angles."

Incremental Decision Tree Induction. Developed by the UMass Machine Learning Laboratory. "ITI (Incremental Tree Inducer) is a program that constructs decision trees automatically from labeled examples. Although the program is called ITI, it includes both the ITI and DMTI (Direct Metric Tree Induction) algorithms. One runs the ITI program, but with certain command options invokes the DMTI algorithm within."

"Jess [Java Expert System Shell] is a rule engine and scripting environment written entirely in Sun's Java^TM language by Ernest Friedman-Hill at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, CA. Jess was originally inspired by the CLIPS expert system shell, but has grown into a complete, distinct, dynamic environment of its own. Using Jess, you can build Java software that has the capacity to 'reason' using knowledge you supply in the form of declarative rules. Jess is small, light, and one of the fastest rule engines available."

Linguistic Annotation: "This page describes tools and formats for creating and managing linguistic annotations. `Linguistic annotation' covers any descriptive or analytic notations applied to raw language data. The basic data may be in the form of time functions -- audio, video and/or physiological recordings -- or it may be textual. ... Related pages: Open Language Archives Community, Linguistic Exploration, Gesture Annotation, Italian version of this page by Piero Cosi, Speech Annotation and Corpus Tools." Maintained by Steven Bird, Mark Liberman, LDC [The Linguistic Data Consortium].

"The Link Grammar Parser is a syntactic parser of English, based on link grammar, an original theory of English syntax. Given a sentence, the system assigns to it a syntactic structure, which consists of a set of labeled links connecting pairs of words. The parser also produces a 'constituent' representation of a sentence (showing noun phrases, verb phrases, etc.)." From Davy Temperley, Daniel Sleator, and John Lafferty, School of Computer Science, at Carnegie Mellon University.

"MLC++ is a library of C++ classes for supervised machine learning. The MLC++ utilities were created using the library. MLC++ (up to version 1.3.X) was developed at Stanford University and was public domain; that version is still distributed as such by SGI. SGI MLC++ (V2.0 and higher) includes improvements to MLC++. These improvements are research domain only and are available in both source and object code formats through this web site."

Multi-agent system software from the Teamcore Research Group, part of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California.

"The Natural Language Software Registry (NLSR) [fourth edition] is a concise summary of the capabilities and sources of a large amount of natural language processing (NLP) software available to the NLP community. It comprises academic, commercial and proprietary software with specifications and terms on which it can be acquired clearly indicated." From the Language Technology Lab of the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH).

Neural Networks for Face Recognition. "This web page provides an implementation of the Backpropagation algorithm described in Chapter 4 of [Tom Mitchell's] textbook Machine Learning. It also includes the dataset discussed in Section 4.7 of the book, containing over 600 face images."

Neuromorphic Vision C++ Toolkit from the iLab at the University of Southern California: "a comprehensive set of C++ classes for the development of neuromorphic models of vision. Neuromorphic models are computational neuroscience algorithms whose architecture and function is closely inspired from biological brains. The iLab Neuromorphic Vision C++ Toolkit comprises not only base classes for images, neurons, and brain areas, but also fully-developed models such as our model of bottom-up visual attention and of Bayesian surprise."

The Open Agent Architecture™</sup>: A framework for integrating a community of heterogeneous software agents in a distributed environment. From SRI's AI Center.

ORTS - a free software Real-Time-Strategy Game Engine. From the University of AlbertaDepartment of Computing Science.

Otter. "Our current automated deduction system Otter is designed to prove theorems stated in first-order logic with equality. Otter's inference rules are based on resolution and paramodulation, and it includes facilities for term rewriting, term orderings, Knuth-Bendix completion, weighting, and strategies for directing and restricting searches for proofs. Otter can also be used as a symbolic calculator and has an embedded equational programming system.the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory."

Software and Hardware for Pattern Recognition and Image Processing Research. Maintained by Bob Duin at the Delft University of Technology.

Robot Programming in C.

Scratch: "a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, games, music, and animations -- and share your creations on the Web. Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design. Scratch is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab, with financial support from the National Science Foundation and the Intel Foundation. The software is available free of charge from http://scratch.mit.edu."

Shogi software from Shogi.Net

"The SimAgent toolkit provides a range of resources for research and teaching related to the development of interacting agents in environments of various degrees and kinds of complexity. It can be run as a pure simulation tool, or installed in a robot with a sufficiently powerful on-board computer, e.g. running linux. It was originally developed to support research on intelligent agents, but has also been used successfully for student projects developing a variety of interactive games and simulations. The toolkit was developed within the Cognition and Affect project, at the University of Birmingham, partly in collaboration with users at DERA Malvern ... The toolkit uses the Pop-11 language in the Poplog software development environment ... now available, free of charge, with full sources...."

• SimAgent: A Toolkit for Philosophers and Engineers - slides from a 30 Jan 2001 presentation.
• SimAgent Demo Movies

SLIPPER Rule Learning System. "Formally, it is based on confidence-rated boosting, a variant of AdaBoost developed by Rob Schapire and Yoram Singer in 1999. The code is based on William Cohen's widely-used RIPPER learning system. ... Like RIPPER, SLIPPER supports set-valued features, which makes it useful for text categorization using a 'bag of words' representation of text. ... A version of SLIPPER suitable for academic and research use can be downloaded from Rutgers University." See William Cohen's homepage at Carnegie Mellon University for additional software systems.

Soar Software Downloads from the Soar Group at the University of Michigan,

"Swarm is a software package for multi-agent simulation of complex systems, originally developed at the Santa Fe Institute. Swarm is intended to be a useful tool for researchers in a variety of disciplines. The basic architecture of Swarm is the simulation of collections of concurrently interacting agents: with this architecture, we can implement a large variety of agent based models."

TIELT - Testbed for Integrating and Evaluating Learning Techniques. "TIELT is a software tool that is designed to faciliate the evaluation of decision systems in simulators. Our initial focus is on decision systems that include machine learning components, and on simulators for several types of game engines (e.g., real-time strategy, discrete strategy, role playing, team sports, first-person shooter), with emphasis on those related to military simulators of Computer Generated Forces (CGF). However, TIELT can be used with decision systems other than those that have learning (or learned) components, and can be used with non-gaming simulators. ... TIELT's development is sponsored by DARPA's Information Processing Technology Office." - excerpt from "About"

TeamBots 2.0 "TeamBots is a Java-based collection of application programs and Java packages for multiagent mobile robotics research. The TeamBots distribution is a full source-code release."

VFML (Very Fast Machine Learning) toolkit for mining high-speed data streams and very large data sets.. From the University of Washington Artificial Intelligence Research Group. " VFML provides code to help read and process training data, to gather sufficient statistics from it, ADTs for several important machine learning structures, and various helper code. You can get an overview of what is provided by visiting the Core APIs and Utility APIs sections of the documentation. VFML contains a series of tools for working with data sets: cleaning them, sampling them, splitting them into train/test sets. It also has tools to help you experiment with learning algorithms."

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Open Source Projects

AI Foundry -- an internet portal for open source projects. Maintained by Alex J. Champandard at the AI Depot. "The AI Foundry is a collection of Open Source projects relating to Artificial Intelligence. It is intended as a hub for the developer community, allowing them to inform themselves about projects and get involved. ... The foundry is not only here to promote individual projects, but also to provide a common initiative. We interact together via the following media: Message Board ... Mailing List."

CougaarForge - "the Cognitive Agent Architecture (Cougaar) Open Source Project site. Cougaar is a Java-based architecture for the construction of large-scale distributed agent-based applications. It is the product of a multi-year DARPA research project into large scale agent systems and includes not only the core architecture but also a variety of demonstration, visualization and management components to simplify the development of complex, distributed applications."

Alice and Panda3D. From CMU's Entertainment Technology Center. "Students everywhere want to build interactive, 3D virtual worlds, but most tools for doing so are too complex, and take too long to learn. As a public service, we distribute two open-source authoring tools, and we suspect that one of them is right for you, no matter who you are!"

The European Robotics Research Network (EURON) collection of open source software.

jMarkets, from the Caltech Social Science Experimental Laboratories, "is meant to provide the infrastructure for running large-scale experiments. It is built around a specific theoretical framework, namely, General Equilibrium Theory (GE). This is the branch of Economics that studies large, competitive, interdependent systems. jMarkets is an open-source, pure-Java and J2EE compliant project. The goal is to make the software fast, flexible, robust, easy to port, and suitable for use through the World-Wide-Web. These features make the software accessible across disciplines, usable in a variety of locations and populations, and a tool to which many research groups will have easy access and to which they will be able to contribute."

JADE (Java Agent DEvelopment Framework), distributed in open source software by the copyright holder, Telecom Italia, "is a software Framework fully implemented in Java language. It simplifies the implementation of multi-agent systems through a middle-ware that complies with the FIPA specifications and through a set of graphical tools that supports the debugging and deployment phases."

Microsoft Computational Biology Tools: "Computational biology tools from Microsoft Research's Machine Learning and Applied Statistics group: PhyloD (Phylogeny-Based Association Analysis), Epitope Prediction, HLA Assignment, HLA Completion." Available from CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting web site.

• Also see this related article: Microsoft shares source code with AIDS researchers - Researchers hope to use four specialized software tools to identify genetic patterns that could help development of HIV vaccine.By Dawn Kawamoto. CNET News.com(June 13, 2007).

NASA Open Source Software:

• Ames Research Center: "The motivations for NASA to distribute software codes Open Source are:* to increase NASA software quality via community peer review* to accelerate software development via community contributions* to maximize the awareness and impact of NASA research* to increase dissemination of NASA software in support of NASA's education mission." Software available includes:
  • Livingstone2 - "a reusable artificial intelligence (AI) software system designed to assist spacecraft, life support systems, chemical plants or other complex systems in operating robustly with minimal human supervision, even in the face of hardware failures or unexpected events."
  • Vision Workbench: "Vision Workbench (VW) is a modular, extensible computer vision framework developed by the NASA Ames Autonomous Systems and Robotics Area (Intelligent Systems Division)."
• CLARAty: "This site contains information about the CLARAty reusable robotic software framework, videos of the capabilities that were demonstrated on real and simulated robotic platforms, and information on how to download and run the software. CLARAty stands for Coupled-Layer Architecture for Robotic Autonomy. It is a collaborative effort among four institutions: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA Ames Research Center, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Minnesota."
• Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) Open Source Software.

ocropus - open source document analysis and OCR system. Available from Google Code."OCRopus is a state-of-the-art document analysis and OCR system, featuring pluggable layout analysis, pluggable character recognition, statistical natural language modeling, and multi-lingual capabilities."

Open Channel Foundation collection of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems software includes:

• Qanda - "MITRE is in the process of making its TREC question answering system publicly available under an Open Source license. Qanda is composed of a number of components, including: question analyzer, IR wrappers, tokenizer, entity taggers, answer collators." Published by Open Channel Software.

OpenCyc: "The Project OpenCyc is the open source version of the Cyc technology, the world's largest and most complete general knowledge base and commonsense reasoning engine."

OpenLogos Machine Translation. Available from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). "The LOGOS system had been developed over 30 years to its present form. It requires enormous efforts and resources to develop such a system and extend it, e.g. to new languages. This has the effect that translation systems for smaller languages are commercially less attractive and therefore often are neglected. The availability of the LOGOS system as open source can change this situation...."

Open Source Computer Vision Library. Maintained by Intel.

• Related article: Beyond Voice Recognition, to a Computer That Reads Lips. By Anne Eisenberg. The New York Times (September 11, 2003; no fee reg. req'd.). "[T]eaching computers to read lips might boost the accuracy of automatic speech recognition. ... At Intel, too, researchers have developed software for combined audiovisual analysis of speech and released the software for public use as part of the company's Open Source Computer Vision Library, said Ara V. Nefian, a senior Intel researcher who led the project."

Open Source Initiative (OSI): "a non-profit corporation dedicated to managing and promoting the Open Source Definition for the good of the community, specifically through the OSI Certified Open Source Software certification mark and program. You can read about successful software products that have these properties, and about our certification mark and program, which allow you to be confident that software really is "Open Source." We also make copies of approved open source licenses here."

Open Source Rule Engines Written In Java. From Carlos E. Perez's Manageability site.

RODS Open Source Project: "Real-time Outbreak and Disease Surveillance (RODS) is open-source public health surveillance software. RODS collects and analyzes disease surveillance data in real time and has been in development since 1999 by the RODS Laboratory--a collaboration of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. In 2002, the Utah Department of Health used the software for monitoring during the Winter Olympics Games."

Second Life: a 3-D virtual world. Available from Linden Research, Inc.

• Also see: Second Life looks to open-source move for growth. By Todd R. Weiss. Computerworld (January 11, 2007).
• And be sure to visit AIAI2, The Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute's Office in Second Life: "This is being used to explore persistent task-supporting intelligent agents, AI applications, AI technology transfer, collaborative working in virtual community sims, and to have a bit of fun." (It's also where you'll meet Ai Austin, the AIAI2 Director.)

"SourceForge.net is the world's largest Open Source software development website, with the largest repository of Open Source code and applications available on the Internet. SourceForge.net provides free services to Open Source developers." Here's a sample of what you'll find there:

• Natural Language Toolkit: "NLTK, the Natural Language Toolkit, is a suite of Python libraries and programs for symbolic and statistical natural language processing. NLTK includes graphical demonstrations and sample data. It is accompanied by extensive documentation, including tutorials that explain the underlying concepts behind the language processing tasks supported by the toolkit."
• "OpenNLP is an organizational center for open source projects related to natural language processing." Projects include the OpenNLP CCG [Combinatory Categorial Grammar] Library and OpenNLP Tools.
• The Player Project - Free Software tools for robot and sensor applications.
• "Quackle is a world-class crossword game artificial intelligence and analysis tool. It includes a move generator, simulator, and Qt-based user interface and can be used with any board layout, alphabet, lexicon, and tile distribution."
• YALE: Data Mining / Machine Learning."
• And be sure to browse through their AI collection.

The CMU Sphinx Group Open Source Speech Recognition Engines. "The Sphinx Group at Carnegie Mellon University is committed to releasing the long-time, DARPA-funded Sphinx projects widely, in order to stimulate the creation of speech-using tools and applications, and to advance the state of the art both directly in speech recognition, as well as in related areas including dialog systems and speech synthesis. ... The packages that the CMU Sphinx Group is releasing are a set of reasonably mature, world-class speech components that provide a basic level of technology to anyone interested in creating speech-using applications without the once-prohibitive initial investment cost in research and development; the same components are open to peer review by all researchers in the field, and are used for linguistic research as well."

TeRK (Telepresence Robot Kit): Educational Robotics - Vehicles for Teaching and Learning from the Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. As stated in the overview: "Our aim with TeRK is to make educational robotics fun, affordable, and accessible to a diverse community of college students, pre-college students, and all individuals interested in robotics." Resources include Robot Recipes, Software, and Curricula for Instructors."

• Also see: Robots for the rest of us - Terk offers do-it-yourself robot recipes using off-the-shelf parts, onboard Linux controller. By Candace Lombardi.CNET News.com (April 26, 2007). "'Everything is open source and public domain,' [Illah] Nourbakhsh said. 'There is no incentive to make money here. None of the corporations that funded are looking to license this. These companies gave us gift money--even better than grant money because there's no strings--to help us try and come up with ways to get people to be more creative with tech and more tech-literate.'"

Tekkotsu Development Framework for AIBO Robots. "An open source project created and maintained at Carnegie Mellon University. ... Tekkotsu is an application framework for robotic platforms. An application framework is code which handles the low level or routine tasks for you, so that you can concentrate on whatever is unique to your application. If you are looking to program your Aibo to do new things, and are comfortable with C++, this may be for you."

Vélaldin, created by Hrafn Thorri Thórisson at Reykjavík University's A.I. Lab, The Center for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents (CADIA): "is an open-source engine for developing structures with emergent properties. Based on the basic concept of cellular automata, Vélaldin offers a new approach to emergence research through an abstract representation of cells -- leaving it up to the developer to determine the features, rules and states of cells in whatever way is required."

Related articles

• Open-Source Aibo Wants To Come Out And Play. Wired Gadget Lab blog by Rob Beschizza (September 18, 2007). "AIBO was euthanazed a couple of summers ago, with makers Sony only begrudgingly permitting third-party development amid the abandoned viscera of its cutest-ever product. Give thanks, then, to 'The New Robot,' an open-source copydog powered by dual 500 Mhz AMD Geode processors."
• IBM dives deeper into corporate search. By Elinor Mills. CNET News.com (August 7, 2005). "The company was set to release on Monday a new version of its WebSphere Information Integration OmniFind Edition corporate information management tool. It integrates technology called Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) that IBM designed to improve the processing of text within documents and other unstructured content sources to help find relationships and meaning beyond just keywords. IBM, a longtime supporter of the open-source movement in which developers freely write and modify software and share code, also is presenting UIMA to the Open Source Technology Group, a network of online technology resources. The updated software tool is available from IBM now and is expected to be available through the SourceForge developers Web site by the end of the year."
• Rating System Will Evaluate Free Software. By Steve Lohr. The New York Times (August 1, 2005; subscription req'd.). Carnegie Mellon University, Intel and SpikeSource, a company that supports and tests corporate open-source projects, have devised a rating system intended to reduce confusion and guesswork in evaluating such software. The initiative, Business Readiness Ratings, is to be announced today at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Ore. The rating system, the sponsors say, will employ an open-source model with scores determined by those who use certain programs and contribute their judgments. The idea can be seen as a software version of the Zagat survey of restaurants - rankings determined by customers."
• Visit the Business Readiness Rating site.
  • . Government Technology (May 20, 2005). "SourceForge.net's rapid growth has been fueled by the visibility of new projects posted by leading organizations such as NASA, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and SalesForce.com. ... SourceForge.net enables development and IT professionals worldwide to collaborate on Open Source projects, download code and projects, and actively interact with other members of the technology community through mailing lists and other forums."
• Lawyers form group to aid open source code writers. By John Boudreau. Mercury News (February 1, 2005). "A non-profit group has been formed to provide legal services to the worldwide community of code writers who contribute to open source development. It's an attempt to head off legal challenges and disputes that could hurt the growth of open source. Under the open source movement that has swept the tech world in recent years, software writers freely contribute and share code, but legal ownership of intellectual property can be murkier than with traditional proprietary software. Now the Software Freedom Law Center, with more than $4 million in seed money from Open Source Development Labs, will offer pro bono legal services to non-profit open source software projects and developers around the world."
  • According to the article, the Center's web site will be: www.software freedom.org
• Speech Code From I.B.M. to Become Open Source. By Steve Lohr. The New York Times (September 13, 2004); subscription req'd). "I.B.M. plans to announce today that it will contribute some of its speech-recognition software to two open-source software groups."
• Why Open Source Works - Author Steven Weber looks beyond the hype on Open Source. Interview in Ubiquity (May 12 - 18, 2004; Volume 5, Issue 11). "UBIQUITY: What is the core of the open-source idea in your opinion? WEBER: The core of the open-source idea is the GPL, the General Public License. It says, essentially, that we're going to put an intellectual product out for people to use, improve, customize, fuse with and do whatever they want. The single effective restraint is that anything they do with it, they need to give back to everybody so that as a whole, the community can select and incorporate the innovations, changes, and modifications that upgrade the common product in such a way that nobody can individually benefit without everybody benefiting. There are twists and turns, details that change the precise implementation of that core idea, but the core is there."
• Autopilot Telescopes Ease Gazing. By Michelle Delio. Wired News (November 5, 2003). "The eSTAR agent software is open-source, and the team hopes that other astronomers will be able to create their own agents to carry out their observational tasks."
• Meet OAP -- an open robot reference design project. LinuxDevices.com (November 5, 2003). "'Have you ever dreamed of building your own Linux-based droid [that could] roam around your home autonomously, intelligently obeying your commands?' asks Daffyd Walter. 'You may now be able to finally fulfill your dream.' Walters founded and leads the Open Automation Project (OAP), which aims to help enthusiasts assemble an intelligent mobile robot with stereo vision and state-of-the-art PC mainboard technology -- for about the cost of a good PC."
  • Visit the Open Automaton Project page at SourceForge.net.
• Introduction to the Open Source issue of Crossroads (8.4; Summer 2002) by Carolyn Wei. "One of the spectacular successes of open source is Linux, which is famed for its strong community of enthusiasts as well as its competitiveness as an operating system. Open source embodies a philosphy as well as software code. At its core, open source refers to open access to the source code of a program. But beyond the freely available code, the license for an open source program must give users the freedom to modify the code as well as to redistribute a program as a component of another software package. The rationale behind these guidelines is that a society of programmers modifying code is more likely to improve and innovate a program than a closed group would."

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Robots and More

• BeeBot: "An exciting new programmable floor robot for Early Years and Primary. The Bee-Bot's simple and child friendly layout is a perfect starting point for teaching control, directional language and programming to young children." Also see this related news article.
• CLARAty: "This site contains information about the CLARAty reusable robotic software framework, videos of the capabilities that were demonstrated on real and simulated robotic platforms, and information on how to download and run the software. CLARAty stands for Coupled-Layer Architecture for Robotic Autonomy. It is a collaborative effort among four institutions: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA Ames Research Center, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Minnesota."

• Components, Curriculum, and Community: Robots and Robotics in Undergraduate AI Education. By Zachary Dodds, Lloyd Greenwald, Ayanna Howard, Sheila Tejada, and Jerry Weinberg. AI Magazine 27 (1): Spring 2006, 11 - 22 [special issue: Robots and Robotics in Undergraduate AI Education]. "This editorial introduction presents an overview of the robotic resources available to AI educators and provides context for the articles in this special issue. We set the stage by addressing the trade-offs among a number of established and emerging hardware and software platforms, curricular topics, and robot contests used to motivate and teach undergraduate AI."
• DevBot. From Edinburgh Robotics.
• Dr. Robot Inc.: Robots & Components
• Evolution Robotics
• FlockBots: "This website describes an open design for a small, $800 robot suitable for 'swarm'-style multiagent research, robotics education, and other tasks. Our goal is to get as much functionality as possible from $800 per robot, replicate the robot many times to create a small collaborative swarm, and document the results to make it easier for you to do the same. We hope to foster collaboration in the wider community and, ultimately, lower the entry-level costs for building such robots. ... This project is the brainchild of the ECLab Evolutionary Computation Laboratory at George Mason University's Computer Science Department."
• Gostai: "an innovative company developing tools and software for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. The core of our technology is the parallel and distributed URBI platform."
• iRobot^® Create™ Programmable Robot: "No assembly is required to start controlling iRobot Create. Send it commands from a computer or add the fully programmable iRobot Command Module for onboard control."
• KISS Institute for Practical Robotics
  • How to Write a SIMPLE Interactive C (IC) Computer Program
  • Robots and Kits
• The Leaf Project: "The Leaf Project is a group robot development program. The objective is to develop a robot platform that supports experiments with Artificial Intelligence, vision, navigation etc. ...Leaf began as an Artificial Life program that Bruce Weimer demonstrated at our robotics club, the Robotics Society of Southern California. ...This is an open source project. Use of existing software is limited to that which is commonly available or free. All new development robot software is open source, free and fully documented. Hardware designs are either fully documented or have enough information and advice for a builder to develop their own compatible designs."
• LEGO MindStorms
  • Also see this related article about the development of the latest kit: Geeks in Toyland. By Brendan I. Koerner. Wired Magazine (February 2006; Issue 14.02).
  • And see: Brainier Robots, Brainier Kids? LEGO's enhanced Mindstorms kit could help spark an early interest in science -- but younger children will probably need an adult's help. By Stephen H. Wildstrom. BusinessWeek Online (August 23, 2006).
• Microsoft Robotics Studio: "end-to-end robotics development environment customer technical preview for hobbyist, academic, and commercial developers."
  • Also see these related articles:
    • A Robot in Every Home - The leader of the PC revolution predicts that the next hot field will be robotics. By Bill Gates. Scientific American (January 2007). "Concurrency is a challenge that extends beyond robotics. Today as more and more applications are written for distributed networks of computers, programmers have struggled to figure out how to efficiently orchestrate code running on many different servers at the same time. ... The answer that Craig [Mundie]'s team has devised to the concurrency problem is something called the concurrency and coordination runtime (CCR). ... These technologies are a key part of Microsoft Robotics Studio, a new software development kit built by Tandy [Trower]'s team. Microsoft Robotics Studio also includes tools that make it easier to create robotic applications using a wide range of programming languages."
    • Microsoft voltage to charge up robotics industry. By Benjamin J. Romano. The Seattle Times (December 13, 2006). "Microsoft is not making robots. Its Robotics Studio is software designed to program the devices to collect data from an array of sensors and perform all manner of functions. It includes a simulation program so that even if you don't have a $40,000 Pioneer P3DX robot, you can still program one then set it to work in an on-screen simulator complete with properties such as friction and gravity. The software, free for hobbyists, students and others pursuing robotics for non-commercial purposes, also has a host of tutorials, robot models and technology services for use by even programming novices."
• MobileRobots Inc.'s Educational Robots.
• Qwerkbot: CMU publishes open, Linux-based robot designs. LinuxDevices.com (August 23, 2006). "The Mobile Robot Programming Lab (MRPL) at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute has published the first in a planned series of open, educational robotics designs. The Linux-based 'Qwerkbot' can be built in two hours from detailed online instructions, at a cost of $550, the Lab says."
• The Player Project - Free Software tools for robot and sensor applications. Available from SourceForge. "The Player Project creates Free Software that enables research in robot and sensor systems. The Player robot server is probably the most widely used robot control interface in the world. Its simulation backends, Stage and Gazebo, are also very widely used.Released under the GNU General Public License, all code from the Player/Stage project is free to use, distribute and modify. Player is developed by an international team of robotics researchers and used at labs around the world."
• Pleo: The evolution of a dinobot -Take a look behind the scenes at Ugobe, maker of a robot named Pleo. Could this dinosaur device win your affection? By Daniel Terdiman. CNET News.com (December 17, 2007). "One of the many details that make Ugobe's new animatronic dinosaur, Pleo, interesting is that owners will soon be able to design custom animations with a development kit."
• Robot kit vendor collection from dmoz, the open directory project.
• Robotics miniFAQ for Beginners. By John Piccirillo (2004). "This miniFAQ is intended as a source to find the answers to questions most often posed by beginners - where do I start?, what do I need to know?, where can I find information and supplies?, and where do I go for help?"
• Robotics and Engineering Course (available online from NASA's Robotics Alliance Project): Robotics with the XBC Controller. Instructor: David Culp (August 8 - September 7, 2006). "An introduction to key robotics and engineering concepts by utilizing a hands-on and project based approach to learning. Students will explore autonomous mobile robotic systems using advanced robotics hardware and software from the KISS Institute for Practical Robotics."
• Robotics reviews (robot packages, toys, and other devices) from Generation5.
• Roomba Community: "The Roomba is a robotic vacuum cleaner from iRobot Corporation. As well as being a great way to clean your floors, the Roomba seems like it would make a great platform for experimenting with robotics. That is the motivation for this website." Also see the related articles below.
• Scribbler™ Robot from Parallax, Inc. "The Scribbler is a fully programmable, intelligent robot with multiple sensor systems that let it interact with people and objects. It navigates on its own as it explores its surroundings, and then reports back about what it senses using light and sound."
• Starter bots - Are kids' home-built robots laying the foundation for inspired inventions? By Denise Deveau. CBC.ca News (July 19, 2007).
• TekBots from Oregon State University: store & resources.
• TeRK (Telepresence Robot Kit): Educational Robotics - Vehicles for Teaching and Learning from the Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. As stated in the overview: "Our aim with TeRK is to make educational robotics fun, affordable, and accessible to a diverse community of college students, pre-college students, and all individuals interested in robotics." Resources include Robot Recipes, Software, and Curricula for Instructors.
  • Also see these related news articles.
  • Getting Vexed - A robot kit that's fun as well as funct ional. By Stephen Cass. IEEE Spectrum (May 2006). "Either you think building robots is cool, or you don't. But if you do, then you'll love the Vex Robotics Design System, a line of robot construction kits and accessories from RadioShack Corp., headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas. RadioShack developed the Vex system in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, in Pittsburgh, and the organizers of an international high school robotics competition sponsored by FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition in Science and Technology), a nonprofit organization based in Manchester, N.H. While the kit's target audience is high school kids in classroom and lab settings, it is versatile enough to appeal to a much wider audience. ... The controller module can also be configured to use a basic, but fully autonomous, preinstalled program that enables a robot to feel its way around a room on its own."
• Willow Garage
  • Start-up warms up personal robots - Silicon Valley company started by a Google veteran plans to make its robotics software open-source. By Stefanie Olsen. CNET News.com (October 23, 2007). "Willow Garage, based in Menlo Park, Calif., is developing a hardware and software development platform for personal-assistant robots, autonomous boats and unmanned cars. The privately funded company, quietly started almost a year ago by eGroups founder and veteran Google architect Scott Hassan, plans to make its robotics software open-source. That way, it hopes to draw a community of developers to build applications in these respective fields."
• Also see . . .
  • Open-Source Aibo Wants To Come Out And Play. Wired Gadget Lab blog by Rob Beschizza (September 18, 2007). "AIBO was euthanazed a couple of summers ago, with makers Sony only begrudgingly permitting third-party development amid the abandoned viscera of its cutest-ever product. Give thanks, then, to 'The New Robot,' an open-source copydog powered by dual 500 Mhz AMD Geode processors."
  • Autonomous driving systems aim to drive dirty.By Matthew Sparkes. NewScientist.com news service (March 23, 2007). "Autonomous model cars will race against one another in a contest designed to test different software approaches. The contest is being organised by researchers at the University of Essex in the UK, who are creating an affordable and standardised autonomous vehicle kit to encourage others to get involved. ... Simon Lucas of Essex University says the competition will be similar to the DARPA Grand Challenge (see Desert racers – drivers not included), which involves full-sized vehicles, but will be far less prohibitive. 'The challenges are the same for a full-size or model autonomous car, but you need pots of money,' Lucus told New Scientist. 'Our prototype hardware costs only £1000 ($2000).' The contest will be preceded by a simulated competition held at the 2007 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games in April 2007."
  • Technology clears a path for putting robots to work - Emphasis shifts at consumer show. By Hiawatha Bray and Carolyn Y. Johnson. The Boston Globe (January 8, 2007). "Robots have been instrumental in exploring Mars and doing heavy-duty industrial work for years, but robots for consumers have mostly been pricey toys. Now, as the largest consumer technology trade show opens today in Las Vegas, personal robots are striding away from the toy aisle and toward the tool department. ... 'They're ready for prime time,' said Tara Dunion , director of communications for the Consumer Electronics Association. ... That's exactly what Microsoft, iRobot, and other robot-makers hope to do as they release new robots and software that allow people to use their products as a starting point to create something of their own. ... That's exactly what Microsoft, iRobot, and other robot-makers hope to do as they release new robots and software that allow people to use their products as a starting point to create something of their own."
  • Don't be rude to this robot - A robotic dinosaur that gets depressed when its owner is curt? Yes, this highly sensitive little pet is coming in 2007. By Michael Kanellos. CNET News.com (November 21, 2006). "Pleo is a robotic dinosaur coming in the second quarter of 2007 that reacts 'emotionally' to its surroundings. ... 'You can consider it more of a lifelike creature than a toy,' Ugobe CEO Bob Christopher said during an interview at CNET's San Francisco headquarters. 'We're kind of putting psychology back into robots.' ... The company will publish a developers' kit and open its source code, making the Pleo something of a cousin to the Lego Mindstorms kits or the old Radio Shack 64-in-1 electronics kits. ... A paleontologist helped design the Pleo, and it is anatomically correct."
  • Ubiquity Interviews David Hanson. Ubiquity (May 9-15, 2006; Volume 7, Issue 18). "As CEO of Hanson Robotics, Inc, David Hanson creates robot faces that have been dubbed 'among the most advanced in the world' by the BBC, and inspired Science to label Hanson 'head of his class' in social robotics. ... UBIQUITY: Let's turn from software to hardware -- specifically, skinware. Is there something called skinware?HANSON: Sure, sure. Well, that would be part of the hardware, but yes, absolutely. ..."
  • Board grants autonomy to bots. By R. Colin Johnson. EE Times (April 3, 2006). "Analog Devices Inc. has teamed with robotics expert Fred Martin to create a single-board solution for autonomous robots. The Blackfin Handy Board, containing all the electronics needed for sensing, processing and actuating robots, will be announced this week at the Embedded Systems Conference. 'What this board provides, in addition to the Blackfin processor, is all the sensor input/motor output circuits built in for hooking up to external devices,' said Martin, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. 'This board will appeal to domain experts in electrical engineering as well as academic researchers in mechanical engineering, physics, microbiology, astronomy and artificial intelligence--basically, anybody who wants to automate a control system but wants to concentrate on their application instead of on wiring circuits and writing code.' The original Handy Board was designed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by then-students Martin, Mike Parker and Randy Sargent for MIT's Autonomous Robot Design Competition."
  • A Robot with Pom-Poms - The Media Lab toy makes programming children's play. By Tracy Staedter. Technology Review (September 2005). "The decades-long partnership between the Media Lab and Lego has spawned a new company and an innovative robotic toy that blends craft activities with engineering. This fall, the Montreal-based Playful Invention Company (Pico) will launch Cricket, a programmable computer about the size of a candy bar. ... The Pico Blocks software that accompanies Cricket gives kids an easy introduction to programming. Instead of struggling with a complicated computer language, kids click, drag, and snap together blocks of commands, controlling how and when a motor should start or a light should go off. The on-screen command blocks look more like puzzle pieces than code."
  • A Robot for the Home, Brains Not Included. By John Biggs. The New York Times (May 12, 2005; registration req'd.). "Robotics has always been an esoteric and expensive pursuit, with few avenues for the home dabbler to create a robot that can venture around the house or out into the world. The White Box Robotics Model 914 PC-BOT, however, aims to change that. ... What the PC-BOT lacks is a PC to make it go. But its drive bays and connections are standard, and you can trick it out with motherboards, optical drives, and memory and special circuitry...."
  • Plug-and-Play Robots - Personal robots may soon be as cheap and customizable as personal computers. By W. Wayt Gibbs. Scientific American (April 2004). "It is a trivial example of a powerful combination: easy-to-use software and easily customized hardware. Plug in a microphone, and the robot can respond to voice commands. Attach an infrared sensor and tuck a few speakers in its case, and it becomes a CD player that follows you around the house. Bolt on a couple of gripper arms, and you can program it to empty the kitty litter box every other day. Because the chassis can be stamped out by the same factories that make computer cases, the PC-Bots will cost in the neighborhood of $1,000--about as much as a decent desktop system, [Thomas J.] Burick declares: 'My goal is to make it affordable enough that a 14-year-old can buy one with the money earned on a paper route. I want people to use this platform like a blank canvas, to let their imaginations run wild.'"

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Hardware

(excluding Robot kits, etc.)

Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust. By John Markoff. The New York Times (December 17, 2007). "To accelerate its parallel computing efforts, Microsoft has hired some of the best minds in the field and has set up teams to explore approaches to rewriting the company’s software. If it succeeds, the effort could begin to change consumer computing in roughly three years. The most aggressive of the Microsoft planners believe that the new software, designed to take advantage of microprocessors now being refined by companies like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, could bring as much as a hundredfold computing speed-up in solving some problems. Microsoft executives argue that such an advance would herald the advent of a class of consumer and office-oriented programs that could end the keyboard-and-mouse computing era by allowing even hand-held devices to see, listen, speak and make complex real-world decisions -- in the process, transforming computers from tools into companions. ... In the future, Mr. [Craig] Mundie said, parallel software will take on tasks that make the computer increasingly act as an intelligent personal assistant."

Chemical computing- Silicon electronics has been the staple of the computing industry for more than half a century, but increasingly researchers are looking at other methods of computing to deliver increased computational power or allow specialist applications. BBC News (November 13, 2007). "Chemical computing is an unconventional approach to computation that uses a 'soup' where data is represented by different concentrations of chemicals. Chemical computers can exploit several different kinds of reaction to carry out the computation. ... Dr Andrew Adamatzky of the University of West England works on another type. 'I am dealing only with reaction-diffusion computing,' he explains. This type of computation exploits waves travelling through a beaker of chemicals to carry out useful calculations. ... Although slower than silicon, its key advantage is that it is cheap to produce and incredibly robust. Working with chemist Ben De Lacy Costello, Dr Adamatzky has already produced logic gates using the technique that can be used to make chemical 'circuitry'. 'Ultimately, we will produce a general purpose chemical chip,' he said. The chip would be capable of mathematical operations such as adding and multiplying numbers, he said. However, he believes he can take the research even further to create intelligent, amorphous robots."

Vintage Computer Festival [video] - The rare, historic, and bizarre. Reported by Kara Tsuboi. CNET News.com (November 6, 2007). "Blow off the dust and get ready to dig through boxes. News.com’s Kara Tsuboi takes a tour of the biggest garage sale for antique computers, vintage video games, and discarded gadgets--the Vintage Computer Festival at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. And for the first time in decades, the 45-year-old LINC personal computer lights up."

Intel Prototype May Herald a New Age of Processing. By John Markoff. The New York Times (February 12, 2007). "Intel will demonstrate on Monday an experimental computer chip with 80 separate processing engines, or cores, that company executives say provides a model for commercial chips that will be used widely in standard desktop, laptop and server computers within five years. ... In a white paper published last December, the [a group of Berkeley computer scientists] said that without a software breakthrough to take advantage of hundreds of cores, the industry, which is now pursuing a more incremental approach of increasing the number of cores on a computer chip, is likely to hit a wall of diminishing returns -- where adding more cores does not offer a significant increase in performance. During the briefing last week Mr. [Justin R.] Rattner essentially endorsed the Berkeley view, saying that the company believed that its Teraflop chip was the best way to solve a set of computing problems he described as 'recognition, mining and synthesis,' computing techniques that use artificial intelligence."

High-speed speech calls for hardware. By David Templeton. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (September 20, 2006). "Imagine a computer understanding everything you say, regardless of how fast you speak or the words you use. And while you're talking to that computer, it's also turning your words immediately into type. Then imagine technology that can do this a thousand times faster than real time as a means of processing thousands of hours of recorded speech in a fraction of the time. These are the goals of Rob A. Rutenbar, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the national MARCO Focus Center for Circuit System Solutions. ... Rather than rely on software, he's creating better hardware. His goal is to create a specialized computer chip that understands speech and processes it more quickly than current software is capable of doing. ... 'I think it's phenomenal,' [Teresa Meng] said. 'He's put grammar and structure in the chip in a multistep recognition process to cast a fairly wealthy set of thinking into hardware.'"

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Bits & Pieces

Invention kit takes tech design to kids - PicoCricket Kit lets tomorrow's young inventors fuse engineering with art, music and other creative fields. By Caroline McCarthy, CNET News.com (August 28, 2006). "Playful Invention Co., a child-oriented tech start-up, was warned that 'gender-neutral robotics set' was an oxymoron--but the company is hoping to challenge that notion with its new PicoCricket Kit. The PicoCricket Kit centers on a small device, appropriately called the PicoCricket. The tiny computer can be attached to all sorts of building blocks, sensors, motors and lights; connected via USB or serial cable to a Mac or PC; and programmed with a piece of software called PicoBlocks. Playful Invention Co. (Pico) is promoting the new toy as a way for children--the intended audience is 9 and older--to use technology to explore art, music and other creative fields. Kids can design light-up lamps, motorized toys, stuffed animals that make noise when patted, and other inventions. ... [A]s [Mitchel] Resnick insisted, the PicoCricket Kit isn't meant to be just a girl thing. Instead, it's designed for both girls and boys who could be interested in computers and electronics, but just don't know it yet."

Gates puts on the charm in visit. By Dean Takahashi. The Mercury News (October 2, 2004). "Bill Gates came in peace to Silicon Valley on Friday, charming his audiences with stories that when he was a boy, he would dive into dumpsters to see if he could find a clean printout of the source code for the PDP-11 minicomputer made by Digital Equipment. With that code, he and his buddy Paul Allen could crash the system. Decades after his boyhood dumpster prank, Gates is on the other side, deciding how much of Microsoft's software source code others should have. ... Gates also told the Berkeley students that, in the next 10 or 20 years, the problems of computer science will be far more interesting than in the past. He expects software to understand speech and artificial intelligence to provide real fruits in the form of aids for people."

Recycling law boosts hi-tech transfer. BBC (June 4, 2003). "Every year, 1.5 million old, but working, computers are buried in landfill sites. Now, an impending EU directive could mean these discarded machines, and many others, enjoy a more useful life. ... Computer Aid is shipping computers to projects in South Africa, Uganda, Kenya and Nigeria and many of the machines are going in to schools. Mr [Tony] Roberts estimated that 99% of schoolchildren in developing countries left school without touching or seeing a computer in the classroom."

"The personal computer industry began less than three decades ago, but already some of the early software programs that defined the era are an endangered species, the potential victims of 'bit rot,' according to a prominent digital archivist. ... The Internet Archive is working with Stanford University librarians to try to preserve several large collections of early personal computer software, [Brewster Kahle] said. The software publisher Macromedia recently made available a collection of 10,000 CD-ROM's for preservation by the Stanford archivists. Special exemptions need to be made to the law, said Mr. Kahle, who asked copyright officials to seek changes in the 1998 law so that archivists can bypass software copy-protection controls for historical preservation purposes." Threat Is Seen to Heirloom Software. By John Markoff. The New York Times (May 19, 2003; no fee reg. req'd).

"The explosion in storage capacity is adding urgency to the research. Currently, a terabyte of disk space costs about $1,600. In two to three years, it will only cost $400 and, consequently, become increasingly common. A terabyte...can hold one person's entire conversations from a lifetime, or all the video if someone kept a camera in his or her head for six months. More stored data and a vaster storage space makes finding something all the more difficult." - Microsoft Research seeks better search. By Michael Kanellos. CNET News (April 17, 2003).