September 30, 2001: Software agents can guide officials in complex crises. By Byron Spice. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "The scenario seems simple compared with events of past weeks: Terrorists have exploded bombs in Kuwait City, prompting the evacuation of U.S. civilians attending an international conference. It doesn't seem so simple to the U.S. ambassador, who is trying to pick the safest, quickest evacuation route. But in this crisis, simulated by software researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, computer programs called intelligent software agents help the ambassador sort through changing and sometimes conflicting information."
>>> Agents, Politics & Foreign Relations and Military.

September 29, 2001: Software robots may 'see' threats sooner. By Jim Krane. Associated Press / available from CNN.com. [Also available from USA Today - October 1, 2001: A.I.: Latest foot soldier in the war on terror. You can also find this article, courtesy of CMU's Intelligent Software Agents Group, as it appeared in the Washington Times (page D10) on Ocotber 1st under the headline, Military Tests Software Agents For Quick Intelligence.] "The intelligent agents, designed by teams of defense contractors and university researchers, deal with one of the chief challenges military and intelligence analysts face: information overload. Humans simply can't cope with the avalanche of incoming communications intercepts, satellite and spy plane images and other data quickly enough to coordinate reliable targets. Software agents can understand voice commands and screen, sort and deliver incoming data, researchers say."
>>> For related resources, see: Agents, Military, Speech and Data Mining.

September 28, 2001: Technology may boost jet safety. By Charles E. Ramirez. The Detroit News. "But another proposal may strike some as science-fiction fantasy: developing technology that would allow air-traffic controllers to remotely pilot an aircraft that has been hijacked or is in distress. While wild sounding, aviation and technology experts say the notion is plausible. ... 'The idea isn't far-fetched at all,' said Allan Wallace, projects administrator at Soar Technology Inc. in Ann Arbor. The company, which develops artificial intelligence software, has created a program that will pilot an unmanned military plane sometime during the first quarter of next year in Eurpoe. The military plans to have 30 percent of its aircraft unmanned by 2015, Wallace said."
>>> Find out more on our Autonomous Vehicles and Military pages.

September 28, 2001: USF Advances Robot Search-Rescue. By Ben Feller. The Tampa Tribune / also available from MSNBC. "Once dismissed as a laboratory curiosity, the miniature tanks appear more likely to become an accepted and valued part of search and rescue. That might be the true measure of success, according to engineering Professor Robin Murphy, back on campus after leading a robotics research team into the ash and rubble. ... By the fourth day of their 11- day stint, Murphy and her students had been embraced by emergency teams from Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Robots from USF and elsewhere made it onto the rubble pile 11 times. The mission shows the importance of basic research and the success that comes when universities work with broader communities, Murphy said."
>>> Scroll down this page for other articles about search & rescue robots in NYC.

September 27, 2001: In the Next Chapter, Is Technology an Ally? By Katie Hafner. The New York Times. "Over the last two weeks, computer scientists and others who think about technology have wondered aloud about its likely role in countering terrorism -- or in carrying it out. Have the limitations and dangers of technology been overlooked? Where, on the other hand, might technological innovation emerge or be redirected as a result of recent events?" Read the article to learn what Ray Kurzeil, Peter Neumann, and four other experts (including a law professor) had to say.
>>> Related information can be found in AI Topics on pages such as: Ethics, Law Enforcement, Fraud Detection & Prevention, and Telecommunications.

September 2001: Almost Human? Artificial Intelligence is back in the hearts and minds of technology gurus. By Robert J. Derocher. Insight (The Magazine of the Illinois CPA Society). "'In their tutorial, 'Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems,' [Carol] Brown and Daniel O'Leary, an accounting professor and AI expert at the University of Southern California, say that AI, from an intelligence perspective, is 'making machines 'intelligent' -- acting as we would expect people to act.' From a business perspective, it is 'a set of very powerful tools and methodologies for using those tools to solve business problems.'"
>>> Expert Systems. Applications, Finance

September 27, 2001: Will E-Tail Customer Relations Trip on International Legal Snares? By Erika Morphy. CRMDaily.com. "'If a consumer orders a book online from her home in Virginia from a seller physically located in Paris, is it as if the bookseller boarded a plane and delivered the book to the purchaser in Virginia, or as if the purchaser flew to Paris to buy the book off the shelf?" Vartanian queried. 'Does the 'push' and 'pull' of technology make a difference in how the law of jurisdiction should be applied? 'Should it matter where the hardwires, servers, routers and artificial intelligence agents we use are located?' [Thomas Vartanian] provided much food for thought. Unfortunately, his questions have yet to be answered."
>>> E-Commerce

September 24, 2001: Artificial Intelligence, Real Issue. By Neil Osterweil. WebMD. "If you create a machine that is capable of independent reasoning, have you created life? Do you have a responsibility to that life or have you merely assembled another piece of clever hardware that will be rendered obsolete by the next new thing? ... For us to say that a machine is self-aware and therefore is a conscious being, we must first know what it is to be aware. At least one human mind contends that when it comes to the nature of awareness, we don't have a clue. Margaret Boden, PhD, professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Sussex, England, tells WebMD that it may well be possible to create a robot that appears to be a self-aware, autonomous being."
>>> Philosophy, Ethical & Social Implications, AI: the movie

September 23, 2001: Few signs of intelligent life here. A.I. has stunning visuals and sounds great but it has a tin heart and a scarecrow brain. And who is it for? By Peter Preston. Guardian Unlimited Observer. "Visually sumptuous, technically brilliant, hugely ambitious? Yes."
>>> Also see the other articles that appeared this week as "AI" opens in the UK, and our page, AI: the movie.

September 21, 2001: The World Wide Translator. Will Web-wide "translation memory" finally make machine translation pay off? "Hour is the moment for all the good men to come to the subsidy of them country." By Alan Leo. MIT Technology Review. "'This whole area of language is extremely complex,' says IDC analyst Steve McClure. 'It's probably the most complicated problem in computer science that I'm aware of.' Computer-assisted translation typically involves two steps. First, a rules engine parses the original sentence, attempting to identify the relationships between the words. The engine then translates each word within the context that it believes to be correct -- often with mixed results."
>>> Machine Translation, Natural Language

September 21, 2001: A spacecraft's serendipitous rendezvous with a comet. A NASA probe is scheduled for a rare encounter with a comet's coma that may yield new insights. By Peter N. Spotts. The Christian Science Monitor. "During its three-year cruise, Deep Space 1 has tested a dozen new technologies, including souped-up solar panels, a navigation system that uses artificial intelligence, and a motor that generates a flow of ionized gas that gently pushes the craft."
>>> Space Exploration and Autonomous Vehicles.

September 21, 2001: Fight DDoS attacks with intelligence. By P.J. Connolly. InfoWorld. "In the past two years, DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks have gone from the realm of theory to the 6 o'clock news. Many high-profile corporate and government sites have fallen prey to these assaults ... Fortunately vendors are lining up with products and services for enterprises and ISPs that are designed to give potential victims the upper hand. Whether these are offered via a service model such as Arbor Networks' Peakflow DoS, via a more traditional box-based offering such as Asta Networks' Vantage System, or via Mazu Networks' TrafficMaster Inspector for DDoS, we see a commonality among them: They're expert systems for examining network traffic against a baseline of normal activity. ... Although there's some truth to the argument that these products and services aren't doing much that couldn't be accomplished by a skilled network engineer, there simply aren't that many networking gurus to go around, and that creates a market for expert anti-DDoS solutions."
>>> For related resources, see these pages in AI Topics: Expert Systems, and Network Security & Intrusion Detection.

September 20, 2001: Robot rescuers root around in rubble. By Tom Kirchofer. Business Today.com."'We felt so helpless, and then we got the call from the search and rescue people saying they would like the robots on call,' said Helen Greiner, president of iRobot Corp. of Somerville, which has close ties to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. iRobot has sent three of its experimental 'Packbot' robots to New York. Seven volunteer operating engineers went with them. Meanwhile, another Bay State firm, Foster-Miller Inc. in Waltham sent its own team of three engineers and four robots - one of which appears to have been lost in a 40-foot hole."
>>> Scroll down for related articles and links to relevant pages within AI Topics.

September 20, 2001: Machines with a human touch. The Economist. "Instead of using the ones and zeros of digital electronics to simulate the way the brain functions, 'neuromorphic' engineering relies on nature's biological short-cuts to make robots that are smaller, smarter and vastly more energy-efficient. ... People have become accustomed to thinking of artificial intelligence and natural intelligence as being completely different -- both in the way they work and in what they are made of. ... unlike conventional AI, the intelligence of many neuromorphic systems comes from the physical properties of the analog devices that are used inside them, and not from the manipulation of 1s and 0s according to some modelling formula. In short, they are wholly analog machines, not digital ones."
>>> Neural Networks, Vision, Autonomous Vehicles

September 20, 2001: Pilotless Copter Takes a Whirl as an Investigation Tool. By Jeffrey Selingo. The New York Times. "Last week F.B.I. officials called for the Autonomous Helicopter to provide a detailed three-dimensional diagram of the impact crater and surrounding debris at the United Airlines crash site in Pennsylvania. But federal officials later decided against using the helicopter for what turned out to be a criminal investigation because the new technology had never been used in an airplane crash inquiry, Dr. [Omead] Amidi said."
>>> For more about this story and links to related pages in AI Topics, see the related articles below.

September 19, 2001: Robot Help. High-Tech Devices to Search Wreckage Could Help Even More in Future. By Lee Dye. ABCNEWS.com. "These are pretty crude devices, in some ways, because the field is still in its infancy. But they seem to have helped a little in the tragic aftermath of Sept. 11 by finding some remains and providing evidence that one void was too close to collapsing for search crews to enter."

September 19, 2001: What can tech companies do? By Kevin Maney. USA Today. "I asked dozens of technology CEOs, venture capitalists and analysts about the role they should play. ... One possibility is in data-mining technology. ... Technology investor Vadim Yasinovsky, along with others in the industry, suggests putting an artificial intelligence computer aboard airliners."
>>> Data Mining

September 19, 2001: Doctors Perform Successful Transatlantic Telesurgery. By Steve Gold. Newsbytes. "Professor Marescaux said this morning that the successful procedure represents the third revolution in surgery the medical industry has seen in the past decade. The first was the use of keyhole surgery ... The second was the introduction of computer-assisted surgery, where artificial intelligence enhances the safety of the surgeon's movements during a procedure, making them more accurate, as well as adding the possibility of robotic surgery at a distance."

September 19, 2001: Robots join search and rescue teams. By Sylvia Pagan Westphal. New Scientist. "Low-tech aids include tethered cameras that can manoeuvre through holes and crevices to search for survivors, while high-tech probes have smart sensors and are semi-autonomous. It might be able to flip over, or if it loses contact with the rescuers it might come back to the tunnel to retune to the communications signal, says [John] Blitch."
>>> Scroll down for related articles and also see our Hazards & Disasters page.

September 19, 2001: Surgeons Perform First Trans-Atlantic Operation. Reuters Health / available from Excite. "French surgeons have performed the first trans-oceanic, robot-assisted operation on a human. The patient, a 68-year-old woman who had her gall bladder removed, did just fine, the surgeons said on Wednesday. ... [Dr. Jacques] Marescaux said this $1 million operation 'ushers in the third revolution we've seen in the field of surgery in the past 10 years.' The first two, he noted, were the arrivals of minimally invasive surgery and computer-assisted surgery in which 'artificial intelligence' is used to enhance the surgeon's accuracy. Both were necessary for telesurgery to be possible."
>>> For related information see our Medicine and Robot pages.

September 18, 2001: Robots Scour WTC Wreckage. By Leander Kahney. Wired News. "Dozens of experimental search-and-rescue robots are scouring the wreckage of the World Trade Center's collapsed twin towers. ... Some are secret military designs, declassified especially for the WTC rescue operation. ... Another team from Colorado, led by retired Marine Lt. Colonel John Blitch, are using secret military reconnaissance robots based on the Urbie design. ... Some of the robots at the WTC site appeared at this year's annual Robocup competition, held in Seattle during the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The Robocup competition includes an urban search-and-rescue obstacle course. "
>>> Scroll down for related articles and also see our Hazards & Disasters page.

September 17, 2001: Robots aid New York rescue workers. BBC News. "A team led by Dr Robin Murphy left for New York with the robots within hours of hearing news of the attacks. The robots have not found survivors but their operators hope they will be useful in locating bodies. ... Dr Murphy runs one of several research groups worldwide that are developing search-and-rescue robots. So far, only 40 such robots exist. Pedro Lima of the Institute for Systems and Robotics in Lisbon is working on experimental robots to operate on land and from the air. He said robots could enter areas that are too dangerous for human rescue workers."

September 14, 2001: Search-and-Rescue Robots Tested at New York Disaster Site. By Bijal P. Trivedi. National Geographic Today. "Three experimental robots, each about the size of a shoebox, are being used to search for victims in the mountain of rubble that was once the World Trade Center in New York City. Researcher Robin Murphy and three of her graduate students have been clambering over the jagged piles of debris - powdered concrete and twisted steel - with the camera-carrying robots, lowering them into voids that are inaccessible to people, dogs, and other cameras involved in the search for bodies."
>>> Related resources can be found on our Hazards & Disasters page.

September 14, 2001: Flight 93 Data Recorder Found In Somerset. WTAE ThePittsburghChannel.com. "Crowley said a robotic helicopter developed by Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh had not been used to find the black box. The copter, which can create 3-D color images of the terrain, may be used at some point in the search, Crowley said."
>>> For related information, please see these pages in AI Topics: Hazards & Disasters, Autonomous Vehicles, Robots and Image Understanding. [ALSO SEE UPDATE.]

September 13, 2001: Alleged Partial Flight 93 Cockpit Transcript Obtained. WTAE ThePittsburghChannel.com / available from Yahoo. "Carnegie Mellon University will be using a robotic helicopter to help in the investigation. The helicopter will be flown over the area to create 3-D color images of the terrain. It is hoped that the images could help locate the black box."

September 13, 2001: Robot brains become more human. By Mark Ward. The BBC. "As their name implies, neural networks are electronic circuits modelled on ideas about the way that brain functions. Many artificial intelligence researchers use them to form control programs for robots because they can 'learn' the best way to complete a task based on experience."
>>> Learn more about this by visiting the topic: Machine Learning.

September 12, 2001: Future path of artificial intelligence. By Roger Franklin. The New Zealand Herald. "In A I, a fractured fairytale which opens in New Zealand tomorrow about a robotic Pinocchio that was originally conceived by the late Stanley Kubrick, science hasn't made the world all neat and tidy. ... Nor are the Robotic Age's dilemmas and temptations so far away, either. The reason for Brooks' confidence holds pride of place in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory's main workshop. It is a machine called Kismet, a cute little guy with moving eyes, ears that wiggle in response to stimuli and cartoon lips that are really lengths of red surgical plastic."
>>> Meet Kismet and find out more about the movie on our page, AI: the movie.

September 12, 2001: State workers await fate of colleagues in World Trade towers. Associated Press / available from MSNBC. "The toll from the most devastating attack America has ever seen mounted Wednesday as thousands of National Guard soldiers, state police, firefighters, medical volunteers and federal robot teams searched for missing workers in state government and private companies."
>>> It is unclear to what extent these specific rescue robots utilize AI. For more information about rescue robots, click here.

September 12, 2001: Robot learns one step at a time. Like small child, smart machine develops slowly. By Robert S. Boyd. Knight Ridder News Service / available from the Miami Herald. "[John] Weng [at Michigan State University] is breeding a new kind of 'intelligent' robot that learns in a novel way: by experience, the way animals and people do. He said this approach to learning will be cheaper, faster and more flexible than traditional robot training methods, which mostly are limited to what a human programmer tells the machine to do. ... Weng calls his machine a developmental robot ... Named SAIL (for Self-organizing Autonomous Incremental Learner)."
>>> For related info, check out our Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Vision, Robots, and Entertainment pages.

Starting September 10, 2001: "Will robots one day rule the world? For decades Hollywood has intrigued us with its predictions. Ahead of the UK release of Steven Spielberg's film AI: Artificial Intelligence, BBC News Online looks at the fantasy and the reality of AI." [For our collection of related resources, see our page AI: the movie.]

• "Predicting AI's future. Predicting the future is always a hit and miss proposition, writes Kevin Anderson." (September 21, 2001)
• "In a special BBC News Online webcast from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reporter Kevin Anderson spoke to three leading AI experts: Ray Kurzweil, author of two books on AI; Dr Rodney Brooks, the director of MIT's artificial intelligence laboratory; and Colin Angle, CEO of the company iRobot." (September 21, 2001)
• The mind behind AI. "Brian Aldiss, the author who sparked the idea for AI speaks to BBC News Online." (September 20, 2001)
• Computer babbles away like baby. By Joanna Chen. (September 12, 2001)
• Life with a robot dog. By Jon Wurtzel. (September 11, 2001)
• Past is the future for Hollywood's robots. By Mark Ward. (September 10, 2001) "[N]otions of intelligence have changed too. In the early days of AI, intelligence was thought to be all about being good at maths, chess and logic; something that disembodied brains are good at because it requires no knowledge of the real world. 'Now we talk about intelligence in terms of the ability to survive in whatever environment you are in,' said Dr Martin Smith, chairman of the Cybernetics Society and an experienced robot maker."
• Timeline: Real robots Robots are not new. (September 10, 2001)
• AI looks into a dark future. By Tom Brook. ("This review was first published in June 2001.")
• ALSO SEE: our page about AI: the movie.

September 10, 2001: Future Vision: What's A Computer? By Aaron Ricadela. InformationWeek. "Twenty years hence, computing power will be sufficiently embedded in daily life so that the word 'computer' may disappear from our language, according to a prominent theoretical physicist. But computers' inability to account for common sense will prevent widespread artificial intelligence."
>>> For related resources, see our AI Overview and Commonsense pages.

September 10, 2001: Dancing with virtual wolves - The MIT team play at being wolves. By Alfred Hermida. The BBC. "The Alpha Wolf project presents a synthetic wolf pack comprised of autonomous and semi-autonomous wolves, which interact with each other much as real wolves do. ... Through this project, the researchers are trying build the computational scaffolding for intelligent computer systems. 'By intelligence, we don't mean creatures that can play chess or anything like that,' says Mr Tomlinson. 'We're talking about the basic, everyday common sense that animals exhibit - the ability to find food, the ability to know who they like, to build simple emotional relations with each other.'"
>>> For related info, see Commonsense and Multi-Agent Systems.

September 7, 2001: Sony's Robot Dog Has Pups. By Matthew Herper. Forbes.com. "The new generation of Aibos are modeled to look more like cartoon puppies rather than the grown dogs and lion cubs of the previous versions introduced by Sony over the past two years. ... It's getting more artificially intelligent as well."
>>> Read another article about the pups and then follow the link we've provided to a related page in AI Topics.

September 6, 2001: Novel Robots Being Tested for Mars Exploration. By Bijal P. Trivedi. National Geographic. "A robot called Hyperion weaves through hills and around obstacles, all the while avoiding shadows as it calculates a path that maximizes its exposure to sunlight, which it relies on for power. Named for the Greek word meaning 'he who follows the sun,' Hyperion was designed and programmed to always point its solar panel directly at the sun. 'What makes Hyperion different is that it is more aware of its surroundings. We have added intelligence to this machine,' said engineer Ben Shamah of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania."
>>> Interested in further exploration? Check out our Autonomous Vehicle and Space Exploration pages.

September 6, 2001: 'A.I.' Is Classic of the Future, Says Star Osment. By Luke Baker. Reuters / available from Yahoo News. "But Haley Joel Osment, the child star who was nominated for an Oscar for his role in 1999's 'The Sixth Sense,' reckons the movie may be too advanced for people to cope with yet. 'Some of the films might be so accurate about the future -- the films that Stanley has done and that Steven has done with 'A.I.' -- maybe they are so accurate that they might not mean today what they will mean in the future.' ... Producer Curtis said movie-goers had not always responded well in the first instance to Kubrick's films ... 'I appreciate the fact that audiences never completely, immediately understood a Stanley Kubrick film or received it, and it was in the years to come that they became classics.'"
>>>Two things you don't have to wait for are our SciFi and AI:the movie pages.

September 5, 2001: Sony Unveils New Robo-Pups to Play with AIBO. By Jan Paschal. Reuters / available from Yahoo. "The new little critters, equipped with artificial intelligence and digital cameras just like their big brother AIBO, will cost $850 apiece -- slightly more than half of the $1,500 price tag of the AIBO 2nd Generation, or ERS-210, series."
>>> Additional info about robotic pets (and soccer players!) can be found on our Video Games, Toys & Entertainment page.

September 3, 2001: Hawking warns of AI world takeover. By Wendy McAuliffe. ZDNet(UK). "In an interview published on Saturday by the German magazine Focus, Professor Hawking argues that the increasing sophistication of computer technology is likely to outstrip human intelligence in the future. ... Professor Hawking is not alone among highly reputable scientists who foresee such a future. His comments echo those of Sun Microsystems co-founder and chief scientist Bill Joy who in March 2000 warned of the potential dangers in the computer technologies he helped create."
>>> Additional resources can be found on our Ethics and SciFi pages.

September 3, 2001: A.I. Job Interviews - Filtering Job Seekers by Computer. By Larry Jacobs. ABCNEWS.com. "'The pattern of each applicant is compared with a neural network to the thousands of case histories that have gone before,' says [David ] Scarborough. By matching these patterns, Scarborough says the computer program could determine who, for example, wouldn't last thirty days at the job."
>>>For more info about neural networks, see our pages about Machine Learning, and Neural Networks & Connectionist Systems.

September 3, 2001: Rise of the humanoids. By Helen Briggs. BBC News. "Walking, talking humanoid robots with social intelligence will be commonplace in the future, raising new challenges for humankind. So says [Dr Frank Pollick] a psychology lecturer at the University of Glasgow, UK, who is conducting a study of the social interactions between humans and their robotic counterparts. ... 'The big question is what situations people will accept them in,' he added. 'And how intelligent people will want them to be, to accept them.'"
>>> Explore this further on our Robots and Interfaces pages.

September 2, 2001: Virtual kids in the incubator. Commentary by Clarence Page. The Washington Times. "Scientists in Israel are 'raising' a computer program as if it were a child, according to news reports. As a parent, I have a simple question for those scientists: Are you sure you want to do this? ... And, if your cyber-tyke gets through that rough teen patch, what about college? Somehow the thought of a 'My Kid Is an Honor Computer at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab' bumper sticker doesn't have much zing to it."

September 1, 2001: Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could best humans. The Associated Press / available from The Nando Times. "In an interview released Saturday with the newsmagazine Focus, Hawking said science could increase the complexity of DNA and 'improve' human beings. He conceded that it would be a long process, 'but we should follow this road if we want biological systems to remain superior to electronic ones.'"

August 31, 2001: Smart shooting with 3D cameras - AI gives games new perspective. By Steven Kent. MSNBC. "There have been 3D camera placement problems for as long as there have been 3D games. Run a character through a building, and walls get in the way. Place characters in natural settings, and the camera gets blocked by trees and hills. ... Thanks to pioneering work from Naughty Dog, the Sony-owned development house that created Crash Bandicoot, a new idea for overcoming camera problems is on the horizon - a camera that thinks for itself. While creating Jak and Daxter, The Precursor Legacy (JD), a 3D adventure game similar to Mario 64 and Tomb Raider, the team at Naughty Dog came up with the idea of building artificial intelligence (AI) into their game camera."
>>> For more info about AI and game development, check out our Video Games, Toys & Entertainment page.

August 31, 2001: Artificial Intelligence To Hit The Mainstream. By Tony Kontzer. Information Week. "Artificial intelligence may be coming soon to an application near you. In a development that will send programmers and developers scurrying around searching for potential uses, Cycorp Inc. is planning to make a portion of its Cyc knowledge base, as well as an accompanying binary version of its inference engine, available as open-source technology later this year. That could mean the introduction in the near future of a modicum of artificial intelligence in everything from search engines to customer-relationship management applications. ... The initial release of the OpenCyc knowledge base will offer a small subset of the Cyc ontology, which has been developed during the past 17 years, first by an industry consortium and subsequently as a project managed by Cycorp."
>>> What's an Ontology? Want to learn more about Common Sense?

August 31, 2001: Artificial Intelligence - Help Wanted - AI Pioneer Minsky. By Kevin Featherly. Newsbytes. "'It's between three and 300 years,' he said. 'Estimating how long it will take is a combination of how large we think the problems are and how many people will work on it.' Minsky compared the situation to the problem that another AI pioneer, Herbert A. Simon, ran into when he predicted in 1958 that it would take 10 years to create a world champion chess-playing program. Simon, who died this year, faced a lot of criticism when, in fact, it took until 1997 for the prediction to come true. 'Simon's mistake wasn't about chess,' Minsky said. 'It was about thinking that more people would work on it. And in fact, in that period, there were only a couple of significant people trying to do it.' Minsky laments that there are only 10 'significant' people in the world that he knows who are tackling the problem of AI from the same direction he is, which is from a basic common-sense perspective. ... The professor is working to drum up new enthusiasm for artificial intelligence himself, with his book, 'The Emotion Machine,' parts of which are online in early drafts. ... The book explores the idea that emotions are simply different ways of thinking, and that machines, to be effective, need to find various methods of considering problems to solve them efficiently."
>>> For related info, please see our AI Overview, Commonsense and Cognitive Science pages.

August 30, 2001: Michael L. Dertouzos, 64, Computer Visionary, Dies. By John Schwartz. The New York Times. "Though he worked in some of the highest realms of computer science, Mr. Dertouzos always insisted that technology be designed to serve people and not the other way around. In 1999, for example, the labs announced the 'Oxygen Project,' a $50 million effort undertaken with the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to make computers easier to use, the institute said, and 'as natural a part of our environment as the air we breathe.'"
>>> Related resources include his 1999 Scientific American article, The Future of Computing, and our collection of other Tributes.

August 29, 2001: Japan to invest in robotics. By Graeme Wearden. CNET. "The Japanese government plans to invest in the robotics industry, a move that could speed the development of robots that act as nurses, entertain people or carry out dangerous tasks. ... Before robots could reach this level of sophistication, however, breakthroughs in artificial intelligence will be needed. As a result, subsidies will be available to companies developing improved voice- and image-recognition systems."
>>> Find out more on these pages: Robots, AI Industry Statistics, Hazards & Disasters, Natural Language, Speech, and Vision.

August 28, 2001: What is Artificial Intelligence? By Dr. Russ Greiner. University of Alberta Express News. "The prevailing view holds that there are many 'species' of intelligence. Just as jets are not constrained to fly by flapping their wings, similarly, computers are not constrained to 'think' in the same ways as people. To illustrate this point, consider the University of Alberta Chinook program, which in 1994 won the world championship of checkers over all comers, both man and machine. To achieve this super-human level of performance, the Chinook authors ( Prof Schaeffer and colleagues) tailored their program to exploit the strengths of the computer (fast processors, repetitive computations, large infallible memories), avoiding human-like reasoning processes that are hard to implement on a computer (reasoning by analogy, case-based reasoning, etc)."
>>> You can continue to explore some of the ideas, concepts, and projects discussed in the article by visiting these pages in AI Topics: AI Overview, Checkers, Cognitive Science, the Nature of Intelligence, and AI: the movie.

August 27, 2001: Work on artificial intelligence moves along at slow pace. The Taipei Times Online. "Around 2,500 researchers assembled for the meeting, but a particularly popular part of the conference got underway before the regular presentations: the world championship of robot soccer, dubbed the Robocup. Engineers and computer scientists used soccer as an example of how robots are moving toward the goal of independent work."
>>> Look below for more articles about the recent conference in Seattle.

August 23, 2001: ARMA International 2001 Conference to Focus on Information Management. PR Newswire / available from Excite. "Leading-edge program topics for the 2001 conference include mergers and acquisitions, data mining, digital records, the role of artificial intelligence, E-sign and UETA, enterprise content management, e-learning, and Web technologies for information management."
>>> For more info, please see Knowledge Management, and Data Mining and Discovery.

August 21, 2001: Robots explored in Xmas lecture. By Shogo Hagiwara. The Daily Yomiuri. "Science fiction has long been a source of ideas feeding our fantasies and imaginations. But it often takes on the different role of heralding what we will experience in the future. Take A.I. (Artificial Intelligence), for instance. Steven Spielberg's latest film features humanoid robots that are almost indistinguishable from humans, both physically and mentally. They move and have feelings just like humans; they can even fall in love. The world A.I. presents, however, is not a fantasy or a fairy tale but a real possibility. This is the conclusion drawn from the 12th Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, which, under the title of 'Rise of the Robots,' showcased a selection of state-of-the-art robots. ... After shaking hands with [Professor Kevin] Warwick, ASIMO, which stands for 'Advance Step in Innovative Mobility,' showed off its motor skills, walking in a flawless figure eight to demonstrate the smoothness and ease with which it can change direction and speed. ... Ai-chan, which has been in development since 1994, cannot walk or dance like ASIMO, and its ugly 'face' comes as a surprise, given its cute name. But, unlike ASIMO, Ai-chan has sensors wired to its operating system that enable it to see, feel, hear and smell."
>>> Discover more info on our Artificial Noses, Robots, and Vision pages.

August 21, 2001: Sony's breeders rear Aibo 2. By Jack Kapica. Globe and Mail. "But if Aibo 2 - its breeding name is officially Artificial Intelligence Robot ERS-210, though everyone still refers to it as Aibo - is more lion-like in appearance, at heart it's still just a puppy. The new version, which Sony unveiled Tuesday in Toronto, is also lighter than its predecessor, has more sophisticated software to demonstrate a wider range of emotions, more motors (13 of them running 20 joints) for more tricks and it can now understand spoken commands instead of musical ones. ... Kicking the ball is so important to Aibo's behaviour that a team of Aibos has been entered in the RoboCup robotic soccer championships currently being held in Seattle. Aibo follows the ball and red-clothed people by responding to a small 160-by-180-pixel video camera lodged in its nose."
>>> For more info about RoboCup and AI pets, check out our Robots page and the Video Games, Toys & Entertainment page.

August 20, 2001: Dino robot has leg up, or two -Technology that puts model upright could one day help the disabled walk. By Kathleen Fackelmann. USA Today. "The technology used to make Troody will one day help scientists build smart wheelchairs, robotic legs or other devices that will help disabled people walk again, says Gill Pratt, director of the MIT Leg Lab. Tiny but ever more powerful computers will allow robotic researchers to begin fashioning such futuristic devices -- possibly within the next decade, says Tucker Balch, an artificial-intelligence researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. But to realize that dream, researchers must first figure out how to make robots that walk just like their biological counterparts. That's where Troody comes in."
>>>Please check out our page about Assistive Technologies for related material.

August 20, 2001: Hal Takes His First Steps - A Computer That Learns With Toddler-like Intelligence By Megan Goldin. Reuters / available from ABCNEWS.com. / also available from The Independent. "'We believe that human beings are complicated machines, computers are also machines, and we should be able to do with computers what human beings can do,' Hutchens said. The firm's philosophy is simple. If it looks intelligent and it sounds intelligence, then it must be intelligent. 'If you perceive other people are intelligent without knowing how their brains work and if you were to meet a robot that is indistinguishable in human appearance and indistinguishable in behaviour then you would think it was a human being,' Hutchens explains."
>>> Pursue this and other themes on pages such as Philosophy, Natural Language, and Turing Test.

August 17, 2001: Eliza Chat System Resurfaces For Mobile Phone Users. By Steve Gold, Newsbytes / The Washington Post. "Computer users with long memories will recall the early Eliza programs that offered apparently intelligent answers to their messages. Now a U.K.-based company has come up an artificial intelligence (AI) program that operates along similar lines, using text messaging channels on mobile phones."
>>> Meet Eliza and other chatterbots on our Natural Language page.

August 16, 2001: Robots Tested in Mock Search for Urban Disaster Victims. By Katie Hafner. The New York Times (you may have to register, but it's free). "A powerful earthquake has just hit an urban center. Instead of search- and-rescue teams of people and dogs, robots enter a collapsed building to seek victims. ... The earthquake simulation was part of the annual Robocup competition, held here this month in conjunction with the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence."
>>> For additional information, see our Hazards & Disasters page.

August 16, 2001: For quick and easy multi-lingual prowess, just hold the phone. By Tania Branigan. The Guardian. "The days of fumbling through a phrase book may be over for tourists, thanks to a new mobile phone system which can translate the spoken word in a fraction of a second. ... Accurate, speedy speech recognition and synthesis is something of a holy grail for researchers in artificial intelligence, because spoken language is ungrammatical and cluttered with background noise and ums and ahs. But the experts behind the new system have carried out 25,000 translation tasks and found the software 90% accurate. ... 'Enormous progress has been made,' said Professor Alex Waible, who has helped to develop Verbmobil through his work at Carnegie Mellon University in the US and at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany. ... People forget that even in the late 1980s independent speech recognition with a vocabulary of thousands of words was science fiction. Now we can buy it.'"
>>> Find out more on our Speech page.

August 15, 2001: Electronic nose sniffs out TB. The BBC. "The scientists at Cranfield took ideas used by makers of food flavourings, among others, to create sensors that can recognise smells. The sensors use artificial intelligence to identify bacteria in TB cases, as well as other respiratory diseases. The technique analyses sputum - saliva and mucus - converted into gas form."
>>> For related resources, see our Medicine and Artificial Noses pages.

August 13, 2001: Rise of the Robots - Artificially Intelligent Machines Take Over Seattle. TechTV / ABCNEWS.com. "Charles Callaway and James Lester, researchers at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, showed off an intelligent software system called Author that is already able to write convincing fairy tales. The program, which was originally developed to help children overcome reading problems, generates new fairy tales by changing details about the characters, props, and plot in existing stories. ... Software that can write is impressive enough, but nothing is sure to generate interest faster than a program that can make big bucks. That's where Jeffrey Kephart comes in. A scientist at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, N.Y., Kephart has developed a robotic software agent, or bot, that made more money trading commodities than humans doing the same job. ... While conference attendees presented their research upstairs, downstairs, on the Trade Center floor, teams of autonomous robotic athletes battled on makeshift soccer fields for the RoboCup 2001 championship."
>>> Some of the pages in AI Topics where related resources can be found are: Drama, Fiction & Poetry; Banking, Finance & Investing; and Robots.

August 12, 2001: Creative computer can invent to order. By William Peakin. The Sunday Times. "Scientists have built an 'intelligent' computer that may soon be able to invent and design products of its own. ... The computer's creator John Koza, a consulting professor in medicine and electrical engineering at Stanford University, California, has called the machine GP after the special form of 'genetic programming' it uses. 'It uses the Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest to produce and then sift through new ideas or solutions,' Koza said."
>>> For related info, check out our page about Genetic Algorithms.

August 11, 2001: Like human, like machine. By Brian Adliss. New Scientist. "Steven Spielberg's film AI opens in Britain on 21 September. The author of the original story, science fiction writer Brian Aldiss, was never asked to a preview screening - so New Scientist arranged for him to see it. Here Aldiss describes his part in the evolution of the film, lays out his vision for the future of artificial intelligence and asks whether human consciousness could ever be programmed into a machine."
>>> For more about the film, see our page AI: the movie.

August 10, 2001: Not Your Father's PC Meet Your Next Computer - Literally. By Paul Eng. ABCNEWS.com. "For example, shopping on the Internet for a large yellow sweater now requires hours of going from Web site to Web site. But Intel's Pinford says that the next generation computing devices - and the networks they are connected to - will learn from our past shopping experiences and simplify the process. So finding that perfect sweater may be a simple matter of showing a picture of a sweater to the computer and instructing it go find it. 'What we're talking about here is moving away from an interface designed to allow us to communicate with a machine,' says Intel's Pinford, 'To a machine that is more sensitive to us.' Already, some researchers say that such 'artificial intelligence' technology is only three to five years away."
>>> Finding more info about web-searching agents and interfaces is as simple as clicking here or here !

August 9, 2001: Rescue Robots, Waitrons Convene for Contest. RoboCup draws mechanical competitors and anxious human helpers to AI event. By Stuart J. Johnston. PCWorld.com. / also available from CNN.com. "True to its name, the AI event is not limited to robotics. Scholarly papers are being presented on all aspects of AI research, including natural language processing, speech recognition, neural networks, machine learning, intelligent agents, and decision theory. But it's the robots that grab the attention. Many of the robotic events are part of the annual RoboCup-2001 competition. One involves teams of robots about the size of a small vacuum cleaner that play soccer without direct human interaction. ... Not all of the competitions are fun and games. In Robot Rescue, the robots must successfully negotiate through three courses designed to simulate the hazards you might find in a collapsed building after an earthquake. ... As for the hors d'oeuvres competition, programmers were encouraged to think of innovative ways for robots to detect a person's presence and then serve them, with an emphasis on the human/robot user interface. The challenge was helping the robots autonomously negotiate a crowd of human partiers."

August 9, 2001: Artificial humanity. By Julia Gorin. Commentary/Opinion from The Christian Science Monitor. "It's called scientific advancement - and that it is. But as we've seen, every one of these achievements brings with it a moral dilemma, and a moral dilemma carries a moral responsibility."
>>> After you've read the article, be sure to see the resources we've collected on our Ethical & Social Implications page.