Subject: AI ALERT 30 January
2004
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January 13-19, 2004: Making Sense of Common Sense Knowledge - Benjamin Kuipers
on using commonsense reasoning to make useful conclusions, or, finding gold
nuggets in a pan of sand. Ubiquity (Volume 4, Number 45).
"UBIQUITY: Would it be wrong-headed to suggest that 'common sense' is a very
squishy term, since John McCarthy, Joe McCarthy, Eugene McCarthy and Charlie
McCarthy would have had radically different and incompatible views of what is
'commonsensical'? What is common about commonsense knowledge if there's no real
agreement on what commonsense knowledge actually means in ordinary life? And
if commonsense knowledge is undeterminable, how can you build on it?"
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/interviews/v4i45_kuipers.html
January 15 -21, 2004: My Service Bot. Techsploits column by Annalee Newitz.
Metro.
"[Peter] Plantec's book is a guide for creating what he calls V-people: social
bots that businesses can use to replace service workers or game players online.
Programmed Ask Jeeves-style to answer questions in a way that sounds natural
and to deploy friendly facial expressions at the right moments, V-people are
the bank tellers and customer-service reps of the future. According to Plantec
and researchers like Cory Kidd at MIT, people warm up to V-people fairly quickly
after their initial moment of disbelief that the person talking to them and
smiling is just a program. Kidd conducted a series of psychological experiments
last year showing that people respond to animated and automated creatures in
almost exactly the same way they respond to humans. ... Plantec writes in his
book that his main concern about the ethics of using V-people in customer service
situations is that users tend to credit machines with more honesty and innocence
than they do their fellow humans. In trial runs of his V-people, he reports
that users 'took what the V-person said as truth or error but never considered
that the character was trying to deceive them. ... After all, how could a virtual
human have ulterior motives ... how could they have any motives at all?'"
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/01.15.04/work-0403.html
January 15, 2004: Introducing robo-scientist - Could robots take over from graduate
students in the lab? By Mark Peplow. Nature.
"A robot scientist has been unveiled that can formulate theories, carry out
experiments and interpret results - all more cheaply than its human counterparts.
As far as artificial intelligence goes, the Robot Scientist - designed by Ross
King of the University of Wales in Aberystwyth, UK, and his colleagues - isn't
as smart as other computers, such as those that compete in international chess
competitions. But combining the smarts of a computer with the agility of a robot
wasn't trivial. ... Geneticist Stephen Oliver of the University of Manchester,
UK, who helped to select the robot's research project, says there is potential
for the robot to more than just drudgery. 'The next big step is to make our
robot discover something completely new,' says Oliver, 'perhaps by applying
it to drug discovery.'"
http://www.nature.com/nsu/040112/040112-9.html
January 15, 2004: A Robot Scientist - As ye sow... A machine can now do science.
The Economist.
"From the Luddites onwards, workers whose jobs have been destroyed by scientific
advances have voiced their complaints loudly. Such people might be amused by
a paper in this week's Nature, in which a group of scientists describe a way
of automating science itself. The robot scientist developed by Ross King of
the University of Wales at Aberystwyth, and his colleagues, does everything
a flesh-and-blood scientist does -- or, rather, it does what philosophers of
science say that scientists ought to do. That is, it formulates hypotheses from
observations, conducts experiments to test them, and then formulates new hypotheses
from the results. And worse, from the point of view of the human researcher,
it does so as effectively as a person. ... One question is, if their robot does
make an important discovery, will it be eligible to win a Nobel prize?"
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2350200
January 17, 2004: A robot that likes to play with test tubes. By David Akin.
The Globe & Mail.
"[I]f one were to design an artificial scientist -- say, a robot that likes
to play with test tubes -- one would have to tell it to play a hunch every now
and again. At some point in its investigations, the robot would have to throw
away the logic of its memory chips and engage in that uniquely human activity
of asking, 'What if?' Well, that has now happened. This week, a group of researchers
in Britain unveiled the Robot Scientist, a device five years in the making.
Not only can it ask, 'What if?' it can also design some experiments to test
its hypothesis, carry out those experiments and, finally, analyze the data collected
before confirming or altering its hypothesis. 'Putting all that altogether in
a working system is a major scientific achievement,' said Alan Mackworth, a
computer science professor at the University of British Columbia and the president-elect
of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence. ... There is a 40-year
history of robotics researchers designing and building systems that do some
of the things the Robot Scientist does. But in almost all of those cases, the
robot or the AI software program was built to operate in pristine, laboratory
conditions. One of the significant innovations with the British project is that
the Robot Scientist is built to work in the real world. It can handle the kind
of 'noise,' to use the researchers' term, that human investigators so easily
deal with."
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040117/ROBOT17/TPScience/
January 18, 2004: Dream built on a napkin. By John Harrington. Helena Independent
Record.
"It's as nondescript as offices get. The outside door, with no sign and no hint
of who labors behind it, opens onto an alley. But inside the vanilla downtown
Helena workplace, some of the most cutting-edge software development in the
country takes place. Working in virtual anonymity -- at least locally -- six
employees of the research lab SRI International find practical, commercial applications
for once-futuristic technologies like artificial intelligence or advanced voice
recognition and translation software. SRI is nearly 60 years old, founded in
Northern California as the Stanford Research Institute in 1946. (The lab formally
separated from the university in 1970.) ... Arnold said that when it comes to
finding real-world applications for the lab's research, there are advantages
to working in a satellite office. 'Living here, I have a much better, more balanced
sense of what would be of interest to the general public,' he said. 'You don't
have the general public in the Bay Area, and certainly not in Menlo Park.' ...
For a guy from Circle, the chance to stay in Montana in the high-tech field
was too good to pass up. 'I get to work on all these cutting-edge codes, close
to home and for a decent salary,' he said."
http://www.helenair.com/articles/2004/01/19/business/e01011804_01.txt
January 18, 2004: Standing On Principal. By Alan Taylor. Sunday Herald.
"Back in the mid-1970s, Timothy O'Shea had a vision of the future which he has
lived to see come to pass. In those far off days he was based at the University
of Edinburgh, of which he is presently Principal, in the department of artificial
intelligence. 'People just thought we were crazy,' he says. He is not exaggerating.
The way he and his colleagues were portrayed in the media you might have thought
Dr Who had been given an academic chair with Batman and Robin as research students.
'And now,' says O'Shea, resisting the urge to indulge in smugness, 'a lot of
the stuff we thought of as being crazy then is there in your mobile phone'.
... O'Shea, however, was initially inspired by science fiction, which he read
voraciously as a boy. 'One of the interesting things about good science fiction
writers - the really good ones, like HG Wells and Arthur C Clarke - is that
they are actually quite good at predicting the future. And not just in computing.
Quite a lot of technological inventions were predicted by those sort of writers.
In terms of the capabilities that we get in modern computers, they could see
some of that. What I find so interesting is that we start with these ideas which
we take to be fantastic and then people just get used to them.'"
http://www.sundayherald.com/39270
January 22, 2004: Game Over - Kasparov and the Machine. By James Christopher.
The Times (London).
"In 1997, one of the seminal battles between the human brain and artificial
intelligence was fought and lost by the greatest chess player of all time, Garry
Kasparov. In a contest of electrifying tedium, the Charles Atlas of mental arithmetic
was soundly thrashed by a fridge called Deep Blue. Kasparov never recovered
from the humiliation. The world shivered. Hollywood's nightmare fictions about
Nazi robots were suddenly touched by reality. Would machines take over the planet?
In his murky documentary, Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine, Vikram Jayanti
reassesses this epic contest with a cool objectivity."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7943-971960,00.html
January 25, 2004: The machine that invents. By Tina Hesman. St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
"Technically, Stephen Thaler has written more music than any composer in the
world. He also invented the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush and devices that search
the Internet for messages from terrorists. He has discovered substances harder
than diamonds, coined 1.5 million new English words, and trained robotic cockroaches.
Technically. Thaler, the president and chief executive of Imagination Engines
Inc. in Maryland Heights, gets credit for all those things, but he's really
just 'the man behind the curtain,' he says. The real inventor is a computer
program called a Creativity Machine. ... When Rusty Miller went to lunch one
day in 1998, he picked up a specialized computer magazine called PCAI journal.
He flipped through the pages and came across a story about [Stephen] Thaler
and his Creativity Machine inventing the ultra-hard substances. Instantly, Miller
knew that Thaler had taken a step beyond other artificial intelligence technologies,
such as fuzzy logic or genetic algorithms, he said. The brilliance of Thaler's
invention is the noise he introduces into the system, Miller said. 'Noise allows
neurons to have a little elbow room to dream up new ideas,' Miller said. Other
researchers have come to the same conclusion. Good old-fashioned artificial
intelligence uses human experts to input huge quantities of data and a list
of rules to create a model, said Robert Kozma, a computer scientist at the University
of Memphis. Kozma is experimenting with a similar technology. The rigidity of
traditional artificial intelligence technologies holds back creativity, Kozma
said."
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/News/Science%2B&%2BMedicine/E981DA33F2CF718986256E250061FFF6?OpenDocument&Headline=Computer%2BCreativity%2BMachine%2Bsimulates%2Bthe%2Bhuman%2Bbrain
January 26, 2004: Trip to Mars requires
intelligence. By Randall Edwards. Federal Computer Week.
"At the urging of President Bush, American astronauts may one day set foot
on Mars. However, such an ambitious feat won't be possible without the aid of
improved artificial intelligence, according to technology experts. ... [A]dvanced
artificial intelligence systems must be present on the mission, according to
David Kortenkamp, a senior scientist with Metrica Inc., a contractor at NASA's
Johnson Space Center in Houston. Artificial intelligence is the science of making
computers behave like humans. 'It's not only feasible, it's necessary to make
that happen,' Kortenkamp said. 'In Bush's vision, we see the need for robots,
computers and humans to work very closely together to accomplish the tasks.'
He expects artificial intelligence to improve dramatically during Bush's timeframe
for manned expeditions. ... Autonomous computer systems, those that can operate
independent of human control, have been used successfully in previous space
missions, though at a smaller scale than would be necessary for a Mars trip.
... 'I think by 2020 we're really going to be pretty excited about the robots
and the AI systems that we can field for the astronauts,' [Barney] Pell said."
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2004/0126/tec-mars-01-26-04.asp
January 29, 2004: Aqua Robot could splash
into space - Gregory Dudek's team has created a truly intelligent machine, and
here's the proof - it spent one of the worst weeks of January swimming among
coral reefs off the coast of Barbados. By Peggy Curran. The Montreal Gazette.
"Developed by researchers from McGill, York and Dalhousie universities, the
Aqua Robot is a sleek silver creature slightly bigger than a bread box. It trawls
underwater on six yellow flippers, using the latest advances in robotics and
computer vision to monitor and record what it unearths on the ocean floor. ...
'The vision skills exhibited by this robot are at the cutting edge of what robots
can do today,' said Dudek, who cited a technique by which the robot's computer
takes the image from a single camera and interprets how it would look in 3-D.
...
[Anthony Eyton] sees a variety of obvious uses for the robot, which could check
reefs or seabed conditions, monitor offshore drilling rigs or deteriorating
dams, without the risks or costs of sending people underwater."
http://www.canada.com/montreal/montrealgazette/columnists/story.asp?id=639C6EA2-6CBE-43F5-916F-8F251936E204
January 29, 2004: Smart cellphone antennas
boost coverage. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist (from the January 31, 2004
print edition; page 21).
"Smart cellphone antennas that reduce the number of masts needed to get
the new 3G broadband mobile networks up and running - and minimise 'dead' spots
in phone coverage to boot - will be tested on a novel network during the Olympic
Games in Athens this summer. ... It is no good expecting people in a control
centre to decide where coverage needs expanding, as demand changes too often
for them to keep up. So the researchers [at Queen Mary, University of London]
have placed an autonomous software agent in charge of each antenna. Software
agents are programs that cooperate with each other in unpredictable environments
without human intervention. You might ask one to buy something on the web when
the price is right, for instance, by negotiating with an agent on an e-commerce
site. In Adamant, if a cell has too many users, the software agent in charge
of that cell simply negotiates with those in charge of neighbouring antennas,
asking which can help. If a neighbour is not too busy, that antenna can 'reach
out' to those with no coverage."
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994613
January 29, 2004: Giving robots a human
face. By Matt Slagle. Associated Press / available from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
"[David]
Hanson and other robot makers believe social robots will one day serve a variety
of functions: tutor, companion, even security guard. But should they look human?
Hanson, who has worked as a designer, sculptor, and robotics developer for Walt
Disney Imagineering, Universal Studios and MTV, thinks precise human looks are
a must if people are going to effectively communicate with robots. ... Most
experts disagree. They cite one of the principles of social robotics, the so-called
'Uncanny Valley' theory. ... 'Our experience has shown that people quickly lose
the suspension of disbelief needed to interact with these creations once they
start interacting with them for any length of time, because the artificial intelligence
is not capable of producing human-level behavior,' said Reid Simmons, a researcher
at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. 'I strongly believe that
this problem would be exacerbated by having a more humanly realistic robot.'
Science fiction has long taken different approaches to imbue robots with personal
appeal. ... No matter what, we can expected future social robots to be more
alien than human, said Will Wright, creator of The Sims video games and a robot
enthusiast. 'The fact is, I will share much more evolutionary history, and hence,
brain circuitry and behavior, with my cat than I ever will with a machine intelligence,'
he said. 'The AIs we will be inventing soon will almost certainly be the first
true alien intelligences humans will meet.'"
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/158597_robotface29ww.html
January 30, 2004: Robots for No Man's Land
- Defense Companies Developing the 'Brains' to Remake War. By Yuki Noguchi.
The Washington Post.
"The idea is to teach Stryker to accomplish a mission on its own, as a robot.
By 2010, robotic Strykers and similar contrivances are slated to be in use as
all-purpose battlefield vehicles, surveying battlegrounds, sniffing for land
mines, or transporting supplies and troops to the front line. An unmanned Stryker
is part of the military's effort to move more machines into battle to save both
money and lives. 'Well before the end of the century, there will be no people
on the battlefield,' said Robert Finkelstein, a professor at the University
of Maryland's School of Management and Technology. ... 'We need to work on the
nervous system of the robots, so it can really learn on its own by picking up
patterns based on its prior experience,' said Charles Shoemaker, chief of the
Army Research Lab's robotics project office in Aberdeen, Md., which funds robotics
research at General Dynamics and at universities and other government agencies.
The Predator unmanned aerial vehicle is the most visible of these efforts to
have made it into combat. ... But autonomous navigation -- allowing an actual
unmanned land vehicle that thinks for itself to rove into battle situations
-- is a taller order. It requires maneuvering around obstacles, ditches, signs
and traffic, which are harder tasks to teach a machine."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61717-2004Jan29.html
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