AI ALERT

2 August 2007

  
 

newspapersWelcome to the AI ALERT, a service from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, showcasing an eclectic subset from the AI in the news collection in AI TOPICS, the AAAI sponsored pathfinder Web site. As explained in our notices & disclaimers, the AI ALERT is intended to keep you informed of news articles published by third parties. The mere fact that a particular item is selected for inclusion does NOT imply that AAAI or AI TOPICS has verified the information (articles are offered "as is") or that there is endorsement of any kind. And because the excerpt may not reflect the overall tenor of the article, nor contain all of the relevant information, you are encouraged to access the entire article.

The Headlines:

The Articles:

July 21, 2007: Worried about getting old? Get a robot to help. By Erin Anderssen. Globe and Mail [no longer available for free].
"According to the 2006 Census, released this week, one out of seven Canadians is now over the age of 65 -- double the proportion half a century ago. Four million others are less than 10 years away from senior citizenship. The resulting burden on a limited group of caregivers will be immense. Young adults will be too busy keeping the economy running to tend to ailing parents. ... Their best hope may be the advent of robots who can serve as companions, nurses, drivers, household help and safety monitors for aging Canadians. And, luckily, robots are evolving just as fast as people are aging. ... Researchers around the world are fine-tuning a virtual ecosystem of robots, which may or may not look like science-fiction fantasies -- computers watching us through cameras, intelligent wheelchairs, machines with perky grins and cone-shaped bodies -- but can remember prescriptions, give directions, order takeout or just have a chat. ... The question is: Are we ready for them? Many scientists say it's no longer clunky software keeping robots in computer labs. It is the ethical and legal debate over what human beings want and expect of artificially intelligent machines once they head out into the world. ... To get an idea of just how far robotics has come in a decade, consider the RoboCup, a soccer tournament for smart machines. ..."

  • Also see: Home care goes high-tech. By Peter Muggeridge. 50Plus.com (August 2, 2007). "Technological advances like ASIMO could solve many of tomorrow's caregiving problems. In the next 20 years, Canada is going to see the number of over-65s more than double, reaching almost 10 million by 2025. Many of these folks are going to be relatively healthy and independent – able to live at home with only minimal home-care assistance. But will our home-care system be able to provide care for even their minor needs? Judging by the current system's inability to cope with its present caseload, how will it possibly function when the number of seniors doubles? That's why it's so important that the innovations coming from the technology revolution are applied to the societal issues arising from the upsurge in longevity. Spurred on by advances in the Internet, artificial intelligence and robotic technology, many high-tech products are being developed that could one day find their way into seniors' homes. Not only will they allow seniors to remain out of nursing homes but they will also allow medical professionals and family members to look after their needs from a distance. ... Here are some high-tech products that might one day allow seniors to age gracefully at home. Some are currently available while others are in the design state. ... Intelligent Wheelchair: Currently in the design stage, its creators hope this Canadian-designed wheelchair will allow elderly disabled patients to get about without assistance. Using artificial intelligence and infrared sensors, the intelligent wheelchair will be able to navigate dwelling spaces without bumping into objects and be able to squeeze through narrow hallways and doorways. ... QuietCare Home Health Security System ... It tracks habits such as wake-up time, bathroom usage, meal preparation and medication usage. The sensors can determine if the patient does not get out of bed at a specified time, if the house is too hot or cold, if the person does not exit the bathroom within a specified time or if they prepared a meal that day."

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July 23, 2007: Computer takes on poker aces to see who's the busted flush. By Ian Sample. The Guardian.
"A showdown pitting human brains against artificial intelligence goes ahead this evening when two professional poker players take on a computer in the world's first such man-machine challenge. Phil Laak and Ali Eslami will play Polaris, the most sophisticated poker-playing program yet written, the product of years of research and refinement by a team of artificial intelligence experts at the University of Alberta in Canada. ... The poker challenge has been organised by the American Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence as part of its annual meeting. ... Polaris has been written to learn its opponent's playing strategy and identify its weaknesses."

  • Also see:
    • Top poker players to take on machines. The Vancouver Sun (July 23, 2007; no longer available for free). "Poker faces won't matter when top players participate in the first man-machine poker championship at the Hyatt Regency Vancouver this week. ... Jonathan Schaeffer, a team leader with the program, said he believes the computer has enough artificial intelligence to compete with the human poker players."
    • Poker professionals to face off with computer. The Associated Press / available from CTV.ca (July 23, 2007). "'This match is extremely important, because it's the first time there's going to be a man-machine event where there's going to be a scientific component,' said University of Alberta computing science professor Jonathan Schaeffer. ... The two-day contest, beginning Monday, takes place not at a casino, but at the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in Vancouver, British Columbia. Researchers in the field have taken an increasing interest in poker over the past few years because one of the biggest problems they face is how to deal with uncertainty and incomplete information."
    • Man to battle machine in poker matchup - Two-day contest in Vancouver, B.C., will have scientific component. By Matt Crenson. MSNBC.com (July 21, 2007). "The Alberta researchers have endowed the $50,000 contest with an ingenious design, making this the first man-machine contest to eliminate the luck of the draw as much as possible. Laak will play with a partner, fellow pro Ali Eslami. The two will be in separate rooms, and their games will be mirror images of one another, with Eslami getting the cards that the computer received in its hands against Laak, and vice versa.
    • Taking on a computer with a poker face - Two human players challenge U of A's Polaris in four-match tournament. By Laura Payton. CanWest News Service | Edmonton Journal (July 24, 2007; no longer available for free). "Two successful poker players are trying to prove they know when to hold and when to fold against the reigning world champion computer poker program. Phil 'The Unabomber' Laak, a professional poker player, and Ali Eslami, a player experienced in high-stakes games, are taking on the University of Alberta's latest artificial intelligence poker playing technology. ... 'In some sense, we're aiming for a draw on match one,' said Michael Bowling, the leader of the team that created Polaris. The program needs to get used to the humans' style of play and learn what mistakes they tend to make. ... 'Our goal is to study imperfect information games. Games in the sense of a mathematical model for interaction between intelligent entities,' said Bowling, 'not in the sense of play.'"
    • Poker hotshots narrowly defeat bluffing computer. By Jim Giles. NewScientist.com news (July 25, 2007). "After two thousand hands and countless 'flops', 'rivers', and 'turns', two elite poker players have narrowly defeated a formidable computer opponent. The result means that, while chess world champions have fallen to computers, humans still hold sway in poker, a game where psychology plays a huge role. Phil "The Unabomber" Laak and Ali Eslami took on Polaris, software developed by researchers at the University of Alberta in Canada, in a set-up designed to reduce the role that luck normally plays in a game of poker. ... The game was played at a meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in Vancouver, Canada."
    • Humans win tense poker match against computer. CBC News (July 25, 2007). "About 1,000 scientists eagerly witnessed the contest, which took place at the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. The tension was thick as the fourth and final round was the tie-breaker, with the computer and the humans having each won a previous round."
    • Laak-Eslami Team Defeats Polaris in Man-Machine Poker Championship. By Martin Harris. Poker News (July 25, 2007). "I mentioned to Schaeffer recent controversies involving online poker and the use of "poker bots." "I want to be clear," he said. 'We do not play online poker. None of our software is enabled to play online poker on any of the sites.' He also noted that none of the Poker Academy software that incorporates some of his group's research is designed to play online, either. Rather -- as is explained on the match website -- games 'are an excellent domain for artificial intelligence (AI) research because games have well defined rules and clear goals.' Because poker 'contains uncertainty,' it poses an especially 'interesting research challenge.' For the same reason, poker is an especially fruitful game to study, since uncertainty is 'also prevalent in real-world problems for which AI techniques are being sought.' ... Much as Schaeffer had earlier downplayed the relative significance of a single sample of 2,000 duplicate hands, [Ali] Eslami likewise insisted afterwards 'this was not a win.' Indeed, over the 4,000 hands played, the humans ended with only a small ($365 or 36.5 small bets) cumulative advantage."
    • Humans narrowly beat computer in poker battle. Middle East Times (July 25 2007). "Two professional poker players narrowly beat a computer late Tuesday after four tense rounds that scientists called the world's first man-versus-machine poker championship. ... Rows of weary-looking computer scientists and a few spectators watched the grueling poker battle in an overheated hotel conference room as it stretched on until 11 pm (0600 GMT) Tuesday. When the humans won, the room erupted in cheers. 'I really am happy it's over,' said [Ali] Eslami, 30, adding that playing against the computer was more exhausting than any previous game in his career. Eslami, a former computer consultant, praised the machine and the computer scientists. 'I'm surprised we won ... it's already so good it will be tough to beat in future' as scientists make further improvements on Polaris' programming. ... Darse Billings, a one-time professional poker player and lead architect of the Polaris team at the University of Alberta, said that even though the program lost in the end it played 'brilliantly.'"
    • In Poker Match Against a Machine, Humans Are Better Bluffers. By John Markoff. The New York Times (July 26, 2007). "In a match of wits between man and machine this week, a software program running on an ordinary laptop computer fought a close match, but lost to two well-known professional human poker players. The contest, which was billed as the 'First Man-Machine Poker Championship' and which offered prize money totaling $50,000, pitted two professionals, Phil Laak and Ali Eslami, against a program written by a team of artificial intelligence researchers from the University of Alberta. They gave it a name that probably no gambler would ever choose as a nickname, Polaris. Poker is thought to be a more difficult challenge for software designers than games like chess and checkers. Computer scientists have to develop different strategies and algorithms to deal with the uncertainties introduced by the hidden cards held by each player as well as difficult-to-quantify risk-taking behaviors such as bluffing. ... Research interest has shifted to games like poker in recent years, in part because chess is no longer of keen interest and in part because rapid progress is being made in developing new algorithms with broad practical applications in areas such as negotiation and commerce, said Tuomas Sandholm, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist. ... The version of poker used in the match Monday and Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement Artificial Intelligence was a popular game called Texas Hold 'Em heads-up limit poker.... Mr. Laak, who is nicknamed the Unabomber because of his trademark hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses, would frequently gesticulate wildly at the laptop computer screen and repeatedly referred to the computer's play as 'sick' -- his way of describing an unexpected or extraordinary action on the part of the machine. ... 'Polaris was beating me like a drum,' Mr. Eslami said after the round."
    • Poker aces triumph over computer. Canadian-built gambling program suffers narrow defeat. CanWest News Service | The Vancouver Sun (July 27, 2007). "The contest was tied going into the final round but was finally won by the humans. The two-day event was staged as part of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's annual conference in Vancouver. The victors admitted they won by the narrowest of margins. "This was not a win for us," [Ali] Eslami said. 'We survived. I played the best heads-up poker I've ever played and we just narrowly won. I think this program is good enough to win against any of the best players in the world. The quality of this machine -- this beast -- is amazing.' Polaris, designed by artificial intelligence researchers at the University of Alberta, is the world's reigning poker program."
    • Chips are down as man beats poker machine - $50,000 challenge sees computer fall short - but makers say they'll be back. By Dan Glaister. The Guardian (July 27, 2007). "Far away from the kitsch glamour of Las Vegas, with not a showgirl or a hustler in sight, two professional poker players from Los Angeles took on a computer program in a hotel in Vancouver on Monday and Tuesday. Billed as the 'First Man-Machine Poker Championship', the event staged at the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence offered prize money of $50,000 (£25,000) to the winner of four hands of poker. For Ali Eslami and Phil 'the Unabomber' Laak - so named because he wears a hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses - the money was small change, but the stakes were high. 'I literally felt the same feeling that you would have if you beat 500 people in a tournament and won a million dollars,' Laak said after the game, which ended to the sound of whoops and cheers from the watching crowd of hundreds as the humans vanquished the computer. 'We won, not by a significant amount, and the bots are closing in.' ... Polaris has been 16 years in development at the University of Alberta in Canada."
    • How to beat a computer: lies, bluffing and taking risks are all on the cards. By Chris Ayres. Times Online (July 27, 2007). "Computers can fly aircraft, build cars, fire missiles and even calculate your taxes. But for those who fear that we may one day be ruled by machines, reassurance has arrived. It turns out that there is one thing computers still cannot do better than us: bluff. ... The victory, however, was as slim as silicon: the humans prevailed in the fourth and final game, and by a mere $570. 'I'm surprised we won,' an exhausted Prince Ali admitted as he left the table close to midnight on Tuesday after 48 hours of play. ... Man v machine ---- Deep Blue ... A virtual wine buff ... An unbeatable draughts-playing computer."
    • You Can Never Win Again. By Colby Cosh. National Post (July 27, 2007). "The irony is that Schaeffer's checkers research is one of the less philosophically interesting things his group has been up to in recent times. ... But his team is now developing software that can play Texas hold-'em poker against talented humans; the best iteration of their 'Polaris,' reigning world champion of computer poker, is being tested this week in a head-to-head game against star professionals Ali Eslami and Phil 'The Unabomber' Laak. So far, it is giving a decent account of itself, and perhaps that's bigger news than 'Checkers is solved.' Poker is much more like the things we ultimately want artificial intelligences to do; like marriage or politics, it is a rule-bound game environment in which each player has access to different information and psychology plays an enormous role. The solving of checkers is just one small step for the electronic children of man. The giant leap for automaton-kind lies ahead."
    • What's the story with . . . Computer games? The Herald (July 28, 2007). "It is now more than a decade since Deep Blue sank its silicon-edged teeth into the throat of the human race's greatest chess champion. ... It shook [Garry] Kasparov. Afterwards, he said it 'left a scar in my memory'. But it also shook the world, albeit in a subtle way. As our champion fell, our relationship with machines changed, too. The vision of computers as our passive servants was fatally compromised. Newsweek declared the match: 'The Brain's Last Stand'. In the years that have followed, games that were once the preserve of the human grandmaster have fallen, too. ... Researchers recently announced the creation of an 'artificial intelligence' machine that can never be beaten at draughts. ... This week, the team behind Chinook took on an entirely different challenge: a human versus machine poker match. The lexicon of poker is the very stuff of human psychology, from 'bluff' (kidding an opponent you have a better hand than you do) to 'tells' (unintentional twitches which reveal the strength of your hand). ... Even if computers eventually win all our games, does that make them intelligent? ..."
  • And see: Icelanders world champions in artificial intelligence. IcelandReview Online (July 28, 2007). "Dr. Yngvi Björnsson (right) and student Hilmar Finnsson (left) from Reykjavík University (RU) won the international General Game-Playing (GGP) Competition at the AAAI Conference in Vancouver, Canada, this week. The conference is one of the largest and most prestigious artificial intelligence (AI) conferences in the world and the GGP Competition, held for the third time this year, is one of several side events at the conference. ... The CADIA Player was developed by Björnsson and Finnsson at the Center for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents (CADIA) at RU, the only laboratory in Iceland dedicated to the research and development of artificial intelligence. ... Software entered in the competition is designed to play nearly all games, unlike conventional gaming software."

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July 24, 2007: Evil HAL 9000 or Benevolent R2D2 - The Future of A.I. << Listen to the podcast  >> Patt Morrison's live one-hour public affairs show with guest host, Jon Beaupre. 89.3 KPCC-FM , Southern California Public Radio.
"Our most vivid images of artificially intelligent machines tends to come from science fiction movies, and they usually fall into two categories: evil robots run amok, bent on destroying mankind or wise androids assisting and saving humans. The reality of A.I. machines is a little more complex, but the advancements are coming in leaps and bounds with ever more intelligent and autonomous systems that are being designed for such tasks as caretakers for children and the elderly, independent transportation vehicles and war making. There are still many ethical and safety concerns that must be addressed. How long before we can all expect to have our own A.I. robot friend in our homes?" Jon's guests are:

  • Alan Mackworth, President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia, and
  • Sebastian Thrun, Director of Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Lab, Associate Professor of computer science & electrical engineering at Stanford.

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July 25, 2007: Dogged determination leads to RoboCup victory - How does a small liberal arts college in Maine overwhelm computing legends in the sport of canine soccer? By Marsha Walton. CNN.
"Bowdoin College's RoboCup captain, Henry Work, says it was a combination of programming skills, competitive spirit, and fuel from Dunkin' Donuts. ... The RoboCup competition uses soccer-playing robots to promote research in computing and artificial intelligence. The engaging Sony AIBO dogs have lured undergrad and graduate students from around the world to competitions on four continents; Asia, Europe, Australia, and North America. Why use soccer to further such complex scientific goals? 'The reason for soccer is that everybody understands it. We don't have to explain that the goal is to get the ball in the goal. Everybody knows instantly,' said Tucker Balch, associate professor of computing and director of the Georgia Tech Institute for Personal Robots in Education. Georgia Tech hosted RoboCup 2007. ... The aspect of the game that becomes almost eerie for non-scientists is that once the game starts, the humans cannot give commands, but the dogs 'talk' to one another. ... And, as the creators of RoboCup, the Robot World Cup Initiative, realized when it premiered in 1997, the challenges faced by a robot playing soccer can translate to many other fields, such as manufacturing or medicine. ... About 300 teams, with 1,700 participants representing 37 countries, took part in all divisions of RoboCup 2007."

  • Also see: Search and rescue. By Bettina Grachtrup. Deutsche Presse-Agentur / available from The Sydney Morning Herald (July 23, 2007). "Robbie 8 is a robot developed by German information technology students with the long-term goal of helping to rescue earthquake victims. It is also a world champion. Robbie came top of its category in the recent RoboCup in Atlanta where nearly 300 teams from 33 countries competed in the annual showcase of artificial intelligence at the Georgia Institute of Technology. ... In the RoboCup competition in Atlanta, Robbie had 20 minutes to find his 'victims' - shop window dummies wrapped in heated blankets. Student Peter Schneider, who monitored the robot by computer, said Robbie scored most points for the map it drew of the affected region."

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July 27, 2007: Building a Better Search Engine - A new natural-language system is based on 30 years of research at PARC. By Michael Reisman. Technology Review.
"Powerset, Inc., based in San Francisco, is on the verge of offering an innovative natural-language search engine, based on linguistic research at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The engine does more than merely accept queries asked in the form of a question. The company claims that the engine finds the best answer by considering the meaning and context of the question and related Web pages. ... A key component of the search engine is a deep natural-language processing system that extracts the relationships between words; the system was developed from PARC's Xerox Linguistic Environment (XLE) platform. ... The company plans to release demo versions of the search engine on its Powerlabs website, where consumers can test-drive the product beginning in September. ... IBM is also in the midst of developing a semantic search engine, code-named Avatar, which is targeted at enterprise and corporate customers; it's currently in beta testing within IBM."
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July 29, 2007: The Real Transformers - Researchers are programming robots to learn in humanlike ways and show humanlike traits. Could this be the beginning of robot consciousness -- and of a better understanding of ourselves? By Robin Marantz Henig. The New York Times Sunday Magazine (cover story).
"I was introduced to my first sociable robot on a sunny afternoon in June. The robot, developed by graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was named Mertz. ... At the moment, no single robot can do very much. The competencies have been cobbled together: one robot is able to grab a soup can when you tell it to put it on a shelf; another will look you in the eye and make babbling noises in keeping with the inflection of your voice. One robot might be able to learn some new words; another can take the perspective of a human collaborator; still another can recognize itself in a mirror. Taken together, each small accomplishment brings the field closer to a time when a robot with true intelligence -- and with perhaps other human qualities, too, like emotions and autonomy -- is at least a theoretical possibility. If that possibility comes to pass, what then? Will these new robots be capable of what we recognize as learning? Of what we recognize as consciousness? Will it know that it is a robot and that you are not? ... [Cynthia] Breazeal realized how complicated it was to try to figure out what, or even whether, Kismet was feeling. 'Robots are not human, but humans aren’t the only things that have emotions,' she said. 'The question for robots is not, Will they ever have human emotions? Dogs don’t have human emotions, either, but we all agree they have genuine emotions. The question is, What are the emotions that are genuine for the robot?' ... Robot consciousness is a tricky thing, according to Daniel Dennett, a Tufts philosopher and author of 'Consciousness Explained,' who was part of a team of experts that Rodney Brooks assembled in the early 1990s to consult on the Cog project. In a 1994 article in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Dennett posed questions about whether it would ever be possible to build a conscious robot. His conclusion: 'Unlikely,' at least as long as we are talking about a robot that is 'conscious in just the way we human beings are.' But Dennett was willing to credit Cog with one piece of consciousness: the ability to be aware of its own internal states. ... Robot consciousness, it would seem, is related to two areas: robot learning (the ability to think, to reason, to create, to generalize, to improvise) and robot emotion (the ability to feel). Robot learning has already occurred, with baby steps, in robots like Cog and Leonardo, able to learn new skills that go beyond their initial capabilities. But what of emotion? ... Some believe that emotion is at least theoretically possible for robots too. Rodney Brooks goes so far as to say that robot emotions may already have occurred -- that Cog and Kismet not only displayed emotions but, in one way of looking at it, actually experienced them. 'We're all machines,' he told me when we talked in his office at M.I.T. 'Robots are made of different sorts of components than we are -- we are made of biomaterials; they are silicon and steel -- but in principle, even human emotions are mechanistic.' A robot's level of a feeling like sadness could be set as a number in computer code, he said. But isn’t a human's level of sadness basically a number, too, just a number of the amounts of various neurochemicals circulating in the brain? Why should a robot's numbers be any less authentic than a human's? ... 'I want to understand what it is that makes living things living,' Rodney Brooks told me. At their core, robots are not so very different from living things. 'It's all mechanistic,' Brooks said."

  • Online features include:
    • 4 videos embedded in the article
    • From the Archive - Further potential for domestic robots from annual Ideas issues of the past:
      • The RoboVac. By Virginia Heffernan. The New York Times Sunday Magazine (December 15, 2002; subscription req'd).
        • Also see this excerpt from our news archive.
      • The Robot Fielder. By Arianne Cohen. The New York Times Sunday Magazine (December 10, 2006).
        • Also see this excerpt from our news archive.
  • Also listen to this related radio interview: More Than Meets the Eye. The Leonard Lopate Show. WNYC, New York Public Radio (July 30, 2007). "Robots with artificial intelligence have been a science fiction staple for decades, but now some researchers might be close to making them a reality. New York Times contributing writer Robin Marantz Henig and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Rodney Brooks describe new machines that can make eye contact, read social cues, and even help out around the house. Are they too good to be true? Read Henig's article, 'The Real Transformers.' Weigh in: What would you like a robot to do?"
    • Listen to the interview: download MP3 or access via link in article
  • And see: Robotics and human nature. Opinion by John E. Casnellie, Porto, Portugal (August 2, 2007) from the International Herald Tribune, commenting on Robin Marantz Henig's July 28th IHT article, Robots: The future of personal tech? Attempts to build sociable machines still face major hurdles. "[T]he proof that human nature has a purely material and mechanistic basis may not come from studies of human physiology, but rather from investigations of robotics and artificial intelligence. It is these latter sciences that may reveal to us the undiluted horror of human existence."

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July 30, 2007: Virtual worlds: Perfect for studying humans? New Scientist Technology Blog by Will Knight, online technology editor.
"Fortunately, in the real world, it's pretty hard to overthrow a democracy and introduce a totalitarian regime, just to see what happens. Likewise, you can't mess with the rules of kinship or the rate of inflation on a whim. But that's not to say sociologists, anthropologists and economists wouldn't like to try. And that's why the rapid growth of virtual worlds, from Second Life to World of Warcraft, is such an exciting prospect for researchers in these fields. ... This prospect is explored in some detail in an interesting review paper in last week's Science [link]. ... it'll be interesting to see how the field develops. For example, I was intrigued to read, in the Science article, about research being done by Mary Lou Maher [link] and colleagues at The University of Sydney in Australia. They are using virtual worlds as a test platform for different artificial intelligence techniques. I see how virtual worlds would offer nice simple environment for testing AI on 'real people'."

  • Also see: Pentagon Wants 'Computer Model' for Irregular Warfare. Wired "Danger Room" Blog by Sharon Weinberger (July 31, 2007). "Can modeling tools help predict (or forecast) the future? Well, that's not quite what the Pentagon wants to do, but it's similar. The goal of 'Agent-Based Modeling of Irregular Warfare (ABMIW)' is to use computer models to forecast the consequences of specific actions on, for example, insurgency: ' The agent based model will include the interactions between decisions of individual members of a group and the top down decisions of the group leaders that affect the formation and dissolution of organized social groups. ...'"

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July 31, 2007: Robots battle for military prize. By Jonathan Fildes. BBC News.
"For two weeks during the summer of 2008, an army of autonomous robots will march across the Wiltshire countryside. The machines will compete in the UK Ministry of Defence Grand Challenge, a competition to find new technology to support ground troops in urban areas. Fourteen teams have now been picked as finalists to go head to head in a range of trials next year. Winning designs include a swarm of miniature helicopters and a host of sensor-laden unmanned aerial vehicles. ... The competition, carried out in August 2008, will focus on the urban environment and will be carried out at Copehill Down, an army training centre on Salisbury Plain."

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August 2007: Robots, Incorporated - Microsoft's best and brightest are quietly trying to bring robotics into the mainstream. By Steven Cherry. IEEE Spectrum Online.
"Software pundits and tech analysts can be forgiven for overlooking Microsoft's new robotics group. ... Yet this tiny group of elite software engineers, housed in a small set of open offices known as the 'Broom Closet,' handpicked by a 26-year company veteran who has the ear of Bill Gates, and tucked into a tiny corner of the company's research budget, has put together a set of tools that may bring robot manufacturers under one roof, the way Windows did for most PC makers. Indeed, future versions may someday find their way into more machines than Windows did -- and be just as lucrative. Microsoft's eventual plan is to charge users US $399 to license up to 200 copies of the software components that go into a commercial robot. ... Good robotics programming is far harder than writing a typical application for personal computers. Each component is expected to act autonomously and react to complicated events in the world of a kind that a printer or mouse never has to deal with. Robotics Studio, released in December, aims to handle much of that complexity for robot programmers. ... An enhanced version, previewed in April, will be used this fall in computer-science and engineering classes at Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, and other schools. And it's already being tested by a variety of manufacturers, from makers of the tiny iRobot units to Kuka Robot Group, in Augsburg, Germany, which in May released the first robot able to lift 1000 kilograms. ... Today's $11 billion robot sector -- mostly industrial robots -- will double by 2010, according to estimates by the Japan Robot Association, and it should exceed $66 billion by 2025. Most of the growth will be in nonindustrial applications -- especially, analysts say, in areas such as toys, transportation, and health and senior care. ... The International Federation of Robotics predicts that 5.6 million robots for domestic, entertainment, and leisure applications will be sold from 2006 to 2009.... The idea for the robotics group came from several different sources. ... The message to Gates was clear: go anywhere in the world, from Germany to Korea, and there's an excitement, an anticipation that something is happening with robots. They're a powerful attractor for students and everyone else. And concurrent, distributed programming on multicore multiprocessors was the new, disruptive technology that was going to take robots out of their largely industrial settings and put them everywhere. Once Gates decided to involve Microsoft in robotics, the next step was to figure out how."
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August 4, 2007 [issue date]: Sharing a joke could help man and robot interact. By Michael Reilly. New Scientist (Issue 2615: page 26).
"A man walks into a bar: 'Ouch!' You might not find it funny, but at least you got the joke. That's more than can be said for computers, which, despite radical advances in artificial intelligence, remain notably devoid of a funny bone. Previously AI researchers have tended not to try mimicking humour, largely because the human sense of humour is so subjective and complex, making it difficult to program. Now Julia Taylor and Lawrence Mazlack of the University of Cincinnati in Ohio have built a computer program or 'bot' that is able to get a specific type of joke - one whose crux is a simple pun. ... Taylor presented the bot at the American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference in Vancouver, Canada, last week but stresses that it does still miss some puns. ... Meanwhile Rada Mihalcea and colleagues at the University of North Texas in Denton have built a different kind of humour-spotting bot."

  • See: An Investigation into Computational Recognition of Children's Jokes. Julia M. Taylor, Lawrence J. Mazlack. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1904-1905. Menlo Park, Calif.: AAAI Press.
  • Also see: Ctrl + Alt + Del if you've heard this one before. AFP / available from The Sydney Morning Herald (August 2, 2007). "Here's an example of what tickles a circuit board: - Mother to boy: 'My, you've been working in the garden a lot this summer.' - Boy: 'I have to, because teacher told me to work a lot' (thus a pun on working the soil and doing schoolwork). The research, reported in next Saturday's New Scientist, was presented last week at a conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in Vancouver, Canada."

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The Expansion Slot

July 23, 2007: Teachers learn to use robots. By Brian Wallheimer. Journal and Courier Online. "Sheree Buikema's junior high school English students are going to get a strange assignment next year. Buikema, a teacher at Tecumseh Junior High School in Lafayette, will ask them to build a robot and write a paper on the technical aspects of the project. She was one of more than a dozen teachers who attended a robotics workshop at Ivy Tech Community College's Lafayette campus last week. 'We believe in teaching real life skills and showing students how they come together,' Buikema said. The Indiana Robotics Educators Workshop was paid for Indiana Workforce Development. ... [Rufus] Cochran said the robots can be used to teach math, science, physics, electronics, computer programming, computer-aided design and technical writing."
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July 23, 2007: Bare-Bones Program Learns English and Japanese Vowels - Computer model learns vowel sounds infant-style: on the fly By JR Minkel. Scientific American Science News. "A new computer model has learned to recognize vowel categories from multiple English and Japanese speakers without 'knowing' the number of vowels it is looking for or having a complete list of sounds to analyze, according to a new report. Instead, it gradually lumps vowels into distinct groups by considering them one at a time, reminiscent of how an infant might attend to sounds. The designers of the model say it is an early step toward improved voice recognition software and a better understanding of how the infant mind comes to recognize that the voices it detects are speaking one language and not another. 'We see this work as representing a movement towards thinking about language learning as an experience-dependent process,' says James McClelland, professor of psychology at Stanford University and co-author of the report appearing online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA."
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July 25, 2007: Robot laboratory set up at the University of Wales. By Steve Bush. electronicsweekly.com. "The University of Wales, Newport, is setting up a laboratory to develop intelligent robots. “In the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory we are going to have co-operative robots and we are also going to be pursuing projects on rather independent robots," Dr Chris Tubb told Electronics Weekly. 'We are very interested in machine learning.' Tubb will lead autonomous robot research and Dr Torbjorn Dahl - who recently started a multi-university cluster robot programme (Electronics Weekly 23/05/07) - will head co-operative robot research."
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July 26, 2007: An Emotional Cat Robot. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. Technology Review. "Scientists in the Netherlands are endowing a robotic cat with a set of logical rules for emotions. They believe that by introducing emotional variables to the decision-making process, they should be able to create more-natural human and computer interactions. 'We don't really believe that computers can have emotions, but we see that emotions have a certain function in human practical reasoning,' says Mehdi Dastani, an artificial-intelligence researcher at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. By bestowing intelligent agents with similar emotions, researchers hope that robots can then emulate this humanlike reasoning, he says. ... In addition to improving interactions, this emotional logic should also help intelligent agents carrying out noninteractive tasks.... 'It's a heuristic that can help make rational decision-making processes more realistic and much more computable,' says Dastani. ... Other robots have been designed to mimic human expressions. But Dastani's focus on how emotions might affect decision makes it different from many of the other projects on emotional, or affective, computing, such as MIT's Kismet robot, developed by Cynthia Breazeal. With Kismet, like other affective robots, the focus is on how to get the robot to express emotions and elicit them from people."
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July 28, 2007: Smarter and smarter. By Michael Fallow. The Southland Times (stuff.co.nz). "In May 2009, Japan will adopt a jury-style system to settle criminal cases. Most Japanese, unsure about prospects for human error, say they dread the change. So they should, warns satirical United States commenator Stephen Colbert. He reckons this 'jury of your peers' malarky is dangerously old-fashioned for such a hi-tech country. 'Keep in mind that through technological advances, robots are your peers. Robots have no mercy.' Creations of artificial intelligence do not yet sit in judgement on us, except perhaps for the tincture of of reproach in the beeps when you leave a fridge door open, or try to exit a car before it's good and ready. When it comes to combat, at least in its benign forms, the tide has surely turned. Canadian boffins have recorded what Science magazine considers a milestone in the development of artificial intelligence. It goes by the name of Chinook. ... Human brainboxes have long since accepted that one of the main problems with developing artificial intelligence is that it can't cope with life's little frustrations. Everything must be just-so. ... Right now, Auckland scientists have been developing a robot -- name of Albot -- that learns to find its way home, like animals and humans can. ... Far more expansively, Stanford University is working on a Knight Rider robotic car, capable of navigating urban traffic, and reckons it will be ready this time next year. Meanwhile, back in Auckland, university computer science student Alexander Schorin is working on a computer recognition system that won't spazz out when it it needs to ignore something unhelpful. ... More plausibly, the relentless march of artificial intelligence raises questions about who among us will find our jobs on the outer."
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July 28, 2007: Video Game Matches to Be Televised on CBS. By Seth Schiesel. The New York Times. "Tomorrow at noon, CBS, the august home of the Masters and March Madness, will become the first broadcast network in the United States to cover a video game tournament as a sporting event. ... mericans bought about $13 billion worth of video game systems and software last year, more than they spent at the film box office (around $10 billion). ... For gamers, the national model to emulate is South Korea, where video games are one of the dominant pop-culture pastimes and where there are at least three full-time video game television networks akin to ESPN."
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July 31, 2007: AUC professor wins state achievement award. By Killian Clarke. Daily News Egypt. "Professor of computer science at the American University in Cairo Sherif Aly was recently awarded Egypt's State Achievement Award for Science and Technology. ... It was given to Professor Aly for his work in mobile and pervasive computing. ... The fundamental premise behind pervasive computer devices is that they react to their surroundings and environment. Aly calls this ability 'context awareness.' Computers of this description do not require a human being to input information into them but rather take in data from their surroundings and process this data independently. ... 'This is going to be the trend for the future,' he continued. 'It's going to change the way we live our lives.' He said that in the future these devices could become so advanced as to be considered a form of artificial intelligence. 'As the devices take in information and data they must be able to process it and make intelligent decisions. So yes, a part of pervasive computing does involve artificial intelligence,' he said."
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July 31, 2007: Divorce Software Designed to Handle Negotiations. By Melinda Wenner. LiveScience. "Divorce is never pleasant, but new software is aimed at making the process a little less harrowing. The computer program combines artificial intelligence, game theory and an electronic or human external mediator to help divorcing couples settle their disputes in a fair and rational manner -- and hopefully with fewer gray hairs. The new software is a fresh incarnation of a project going back to 2004, when Emilia Bellucci and John Zeleznikow from Victoria University in Australia developed 'Family Winner' to help couples settle divorce disputes by focusing on compromise. ... While 'Family Winner' successfully met the needs of both husband and wife, it wasn't always fair to the needs of third parties, like children, according to Bellucci and Zeleznikow. So, to address this problem, they developed new software called 'Family Mediator.' As the name implies, the software relies on a mediator -- either a family law practitioner or an electronic decision support system...."
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August 1, 2007: Harold Cohen at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.San Diego CityBEAT "Calendar" [Issue 259: August 8, 2008]. "Downtown, 1001 Kettner Blvd. At 2 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 4, learn about his AARON program, a project that uses artificial intelligence to make art."
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August 2, 2007: Korn - No name for their pain. By Jason Nahrung. The Courier-Mail. "Korn have not named their new album, preferring to leave it to their fans to come up with a moniker. The record label is using Untitled. ... Speaking from the US on the eve of a headlining Family Values tour, [bandmember Jonathan] Davis says the band hasn't had any option but to keep changing their musical approach since they hit the scene with their self-titled debut album in 1994. ... Evolution is clearly a cry of disdain for the cycle of violence that ensnares humanity. 'Artificial intelligence could be the way to go, if the world was run by machines. It could bring in some peace and harmony. I don't know if humans can achieve that. We'd have to get rid of religion and wars and learn to look after the Earth. I want my kids to live in a clean, nice world. Maybe The Matrix movie makes sense, just using humans as batteries.'"
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