September 27, 2004: If Hockey Is Out, Best Thing on Ice May Be a Computer Game. By Tom Zeller. The New York Times (no fee reg. req'd.). "Crestfallen hockey fans worried about filling the hours during the National Hockey League's labor dispute may now have a place to turn. Beginning Oct. 13, the cable channel G4techTV plans to resurrect each of the 1,230 regular-season games listed on the league's defunct 2004-2005 schedule by setting them in motion on a video game console. All 30 teams will face off in 'computer only' mode, meaning that the computer will control both teams, and the resulting scores, stats and highlights will be shown on the network's sports program, 'Sweat.'"
>>> Video Games, Sports, Applications; also see this related article
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September 27, 2004: The Grand Challenges of IT - Researchers are inventing new ways to tackle old problems. Emerging Technology by Thomas Hoffman. Computerworld. "Fundamental research on how to make computer hardware more powerful and software smarter goes back 50 years or more, but many of the traditional methods have nearly reached their limits. Now, researchers moving in bold new directions may be setting the course of IT for decades to come. There are literally dozens of grand challenges that scientists and economists are attacking, ranging from societal issues to technical advances. Here, we take a look at the challenges in three key areas of IT research: processor performance, chip miniaturization and artificial intelligence. ... AI, very broadly defined, comprises three primary disciplines: natural-language processing, machine-based learning and robotics. Recent advances in these areas have led to commercial technologies ranging from a robotic vacuum cleaner called Roomba, made by Burlington, Mass.-based iRobot Corp., to customer-service-oriented speech recognition systems from vendors such as Peabody, Mass.-based ScanSoft Inc. But despite these inroads, computer systems continue to have a tough time handling reasoning. 'The biggest challenges are figuring out how to organize computer programs to have more common sense,' says Tom Mitchell, the Fredkin professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. ... The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is funding research to develop a computer-based 'executive assistant' that could handle administrative tasks like prioritizing e-mail requests for a military commander or a business executive. ... Using a grading scale of A to F, 'we would be thrilled if these systems could give us C-level performance over the next three to four years,' says Ron Brachman, director of the information processing technology office at DARPA. Computers also have trouble understanding context like humans do.... Systems that can handle more complicated human-to-computer interactions, like processing a request for movie tickets at a particular theatre via speech recognition, should be in use within five to 10 years, says Victor Zue, co-director of the MIT computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory."
>>> AI Overview, Applications, Commonsense, Agents, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech, Robots, Reasoning
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September 26, 2004: Have a hobby? Try robotics. By Michael Sun. New Straits Times / New Sunday Times (subscription req'd.). "Schools should encourage students to design and operate simple robots as a hobby, said [Dr Don Faust] a visiting professor from the United States. Since application of sophisticated robotics in industry represents the cutting edge in 21st century technology, he suggested that young Malaysians should first acquire the necessary background through an all- consuming recreational pursuit. ... '[Artificial intelligence]is a multidisciplinary science, synthesising the current results of many fields - biotechnology, computer science, engineering, physics, biology, mathematics, education and psychology,' said Faust, who is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Northern Michigan University in the US. As technology plays an increasing part in 21st century professional life, he suggested that a love and an appreciation for the subjects mentioned earlier should be inculcated in young Malaysians."
>>> Robots, Resources for Educators, Summer Programs
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September 26, 2004: Crick's other goal - Unlocking riddle of the mind. Scientists continuing study of consciousness. By Bruce Lieberman. San Diego Union-Tribune & SignOnSanDiego.com. "Francis Crick focused on looking for an area of the brain that might be critical to human consciousness. As a young scientist in 1940s England, Francis Crick decided to devote his life to unraveling two mysteries: the foundation for all living things and how the brain gives rise to the mind. ... Tomorrow, when the Salk Institute in La Jolla hosts a public memorial for Crick, who died July 28 at 88, that unfinished business will most certainly be talked about. How billions of brain cells interpret sensations, draw on memory and association to make sense of them, and create conscious thoughts about the world is unknown. 'It's inconceivable to us, but somehow it happens,' said Terry Sejnowski, a computational neurobiologist at the Salk Institute who studies how computers can be used to understand the brain. 'Consciousness is elusive,' he said. 'It's hard to pin down.' ... Illuminating how the brain creates consciousness would profoundly change the way humans view themselves, scientists say. ... Engineers could build machines that truly think, bringing artificial intelligence out of science fiction and into the real world. ... [C]onsciousness is really about how all the parts come together to create the thinking mind. 'Being reductionist is a good way to start, but at some point you have to . . . put together the pieces and see how they work together,' Sejnowski said. He calls the effort to assemble the big picture of consciousness 'the Humpty Dumpty project.'"
>>> Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Neural Networks & Connectionist Systems, Events (@ Resources for Students), Machine Learning
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September 26, 2004: Mundane mechanical machinations. By Pavel Ivanov. The Sofia Echo. "For a summer box office banker, 'I, Robot' seems uncommonly un-ambitious for a film boasting the catchy name of a book by the father of 'serious' science fiction, it is bewilderingly shallow. When Isaac Asimov, the actual author of the three laws of robotics, which the film fails to credit to him, started working on the script of the same name some thirty years ago, he was aiming at creating the most thoughtful and intelligent science fiction up to date. ... Asimov fashioned the three laws of robotics, under the overriding precept that a robot under no circumstances should harm a human being. The characters in his books are often robots clever enough to explore and be fascinated by the logical conundrums presented by those laws; the postulates of their being. The robots in the film at hand however, are more into intuitive and violent denial of those laws...."
>>> Science Fiction, Ethical & Social Implications, Robots
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September 26, 2004: 'Synergy' leaves visitors spell-bound. Times of Oman. "The extra energy in the effectiveness of teamwork, mutual cooperation and understanding was resplendent in the annual exhibition (Senior Wing) -- ‘Synergy 2004’ -- at the Indian School Darsait. A floral welcome was extended to S. Sridharan, president of the Indian School Muscat management committee, who inaugurated the exhibition. ... The use of artificial intelligence in computers was a star attraction of the computer department."
>>> Events (@ Resources for Students), Bioinformatics
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September 26, 2004: Consumers must be mindful of credit theft - ID thieves ingenious, but card networks are making it tougher to defraud victims. By Paul Gores. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Thieves' booty in the cards; September 27, 2004) / available from IndyStar.com. "[A]lthough illegal card purchases are the most common type of identity-theft crime, they are starting to decline because of increasingly sophisticated computer programs that spot credit-card fraud, she said. So-called 'neural' computer networks know who holds a credit card, the bank that issued it, how much the cardholder normally spends, the categories of things typically purchased, and the locations where the card usually is used. The computer is constantly learning and updating patterns. It also knows where rashes of credit-card fraud are taking place. 'It keeps getting smarter and smarter all the time. It's almost like artificial intelligence,' [Avivah Litan, vice president and research director at Gartner Inc.] said. The network looks for abnormal patterns, huge purchases, rapid purchases, items not normally bought by the cardholder and purchases too far apart geographically -- and too close chronologically -- for one person to have made them."
>>> Fraud Detection & Prevention, Neural Networks, Banking, Machine Learning, Applications; also see our But is it AI collection
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September 25, 2004: Scholarship's future uncertain. By Darren Meritz. El Paso Times Online. "A scholarship program for Chihuahuan students attending the University of Texas at El Paso should be continued because it benefits both the United States and Mexico, officials said Friday at a ceremony at the university to honor outgoing Chihuahua Gov. Patricio Martínez García. Martínez established the Chihuahua Government Scholarship Program with UTEP in 2001 to help pay the tuition of undergraduate and graduate students attending the university. The program has awarded scholarships to 101 Chihuahuan students. The scholarships helped pay for Jaime Barragan's education. He is a graduate electrical engineering student who is attending UTEP specifically because he wants to learn about artificial intelligence."
>>> Resources for Students
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September 24, 2004: Gritty Realism Elevates 'Ghost in the Shell 2.' By Steven Snyder. Internet Broadcasting Systems Network & nbc5i.com. "A fusion of film noir, science-fiction and philosophy, 'Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence' stands as one of the most intriguing movie adventures the year. It also might be one of the year's most obscure. ... In researching 'Innocence,' I discovered that the first 'Ghost in the Shell' (1995) was an intellectual sensation among many circles in the film world, and that its sequel has been highly anticipated. I also read that, for some, this sequel feels like a rather stagnant rehashing of past Oshii techniques. Both films deal with the notion of a future world in which robots have been integrated into society. There are cyborgs, which are human spirits existing within mechanical bodies, and there are dolls, which are robotic entities devoid of any connection to the human species. This distinction is the basis for the film's philosophical arguments, as characters start to question their interactions with these pseudo-humans, and start to debate just what rights these beings have. Can they feel pain? If they seem human, do they start to become human? If they have a soul, but not a body, does that mean they belong to the realm of flesh or metal? Those who have seen Steven Spielberg's 'A.I.' will see a link between that story and this one...."
>>> Science Fiction, Ethical & Social Implications, Robots, "AI," the movie
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September 24, 2004: Learning science, virtually. By M. Harish Govind. The Hindu. "Thanks to a tie-up with the Centre for Development of Imaging Technology (C-DIT), the Science & Technology Museum at the PMG Junction here has got itself a new 'edutainment' corner, which boasts of a 'Cyberlady' and a virtual laboratory. The main attraction is that the visitor can interact with a computer screen projected on a large screen. ... The 'Cyberlady' is an artificial intelligence tool with audio-visual support. The software is designed to grip the user's attention by making an intelligent analysis of questions posed on a wide variety of topics. As the questions are keyed in, pop come the answers in Malayalam in a pleasing synthesised voice. The responses are strikingly natural, but if the conversation is prolonged, they become less and less intelligent. The software team of C-DIT, however, has designed the 'Cyberlady' to 'learn on her feet', as it were, since each question keyed in by the visitor is stored in the hard disc and new answers developed."
>>> Natural Language Processing, Education, Applications
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September 24, 2004: Can you imagine... By Peng Shaohu. China Daily / Beijing Weekend. "The Olympic Games not only brings fierce competition in sport, but also the latest technology available to deliver the latest results to everyone around the world. 'A digital Olympics will be a major highlight of the 2008 Olympic Games,' said Zhang Yuhang, division chief of the Beijing Municipal Office for National Information Infrastructure. 'It will fully take advantage of modern information technology innovations to create sound information portal and application systems.' Experts and government officials unveiled plans to transform Beijing into an electronic mecca in time for the 2008 Olympics. 'Digital Beijing' is the prime vehicle to deliver the information of the 2008 Olympic Games around the world. ... Artificial intelligence technology will be implemented to remove any language barrier between athletes, staff, and visitors."
>>> Machine Translation, Natural Language Processing, Applications
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September 23, 2004: System attackers up the ante - Attacks are not only rising in number, but in speed and sophistication too. By Madeline Bennett. IT Week. "The recent Internet Security Threat Report from security vendor Symantec painted a bleak picture for IT security - both now and into the future. The firm outlined myriad threats, including phishing attacks, spyware programs and the spread of malicious code via peer-to-peer networks and web browsers. ... Bob Jones, managing director of security company Equiinet, warned that the threats are increasing. '[The danger is worse] both in terms of the number of attacks and the time it's taking for each flaw to be exploited,' he said. Jones added that industry is now relying more heavily on artificial intelligence techniques to thwart attacks as early as possible. He cited Bayesian filtering as a useful self-refining technique that firms could add to the more conventional methods of detection and defence."
>>> Networks, Bayes (@ Namesakes), Applications
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September 23, 2004: A different way to study - Cram101 seeks to help students get better grades in less time. By Shannon Barney. fsunews.com. "Cram101 is an online program designed to help students study more effectively, and in turn, get better grades. This tool gives students the opportunity to view chapter outlines and take practice tests dealing with whatever textbook they are using. Cram101 was officially launched in 2003. Currently, it is offered nationally with 47 university bookstores selling Cram101.com. By January, an additional 768 participants are expected. Online registration is also available. 'Cram101 was designed by studying how students actually study and succeed,' CEO of Academic Internet Publishers Scott Parfitt said. 'Using artificial intelligence and our 25 years experience in educational technologies, we built a more efficient and effective tool for students to help them get better grades in less time.' Cram 101 automatically extracts all testable information from a textbook and arranges it into outline form."
>>> Education, Information Retrieval & Extraction, Natural Language Processing, Applications
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September 23, 2004: Catching crooks in virtual Hawaii - Developers predict what types of video games we'll be playing in 20 years. Game Over column by Chris Morris. CNN Money. "When I asked several prominent developers about what the future might hold for game machines, we also discussed software. Would the games of 2025 conform to today's genres? And what sort of advances can gamers expect? ... One big hurdle developers will face is creating a truly lifelike artificial intelligence. In today's games -- even the most sophisticated ones -- your enemies tend to be either overly simplistic or blessed with unbeatable aim and reflexes. Goal one for some developers is to rectify that. 'I think the power of the future systems will be harnessed to make characters in our games seem absolutely real in every respect,' said Greg Zeschuk, joint CEO at Bioware, which created 'Baldur's Gate.' Meanwhile, the evolution of artificial intelligence could give birth to new genres, suggests [Ted Price, CEO of Insomniac Games]. 'Can we really create truly convincing A.I.?," he said. "And will that make our games more fun and immersive? I'll bet that the attempt to answer these questions in our games will give rise to a host of new genres that are much more dependent on believable character interactions than on fast reflexes.'"
>>> Video Games, Applications
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September 23, 2004: 100 reasons why it's Great Up North. The Journal / available from ic Newcastle. "Studying 'science fiction' - Sunderland University's School of Computing and Technology is an international leader in the future technology that is artificial intelligence."
>>> AI Academic Departments (@ Resources for Students)
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September 23, 2004: A Robotic Research Lab. Workspaces feature by Nancy D. Holt. From The Wall Street Journal Online & CareerJournal.com. "Who: Rodney Brooks, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Where: 32 Vassar St., Cambridge, Mass. What you see: A science project. Like an implausible vision, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory juts out from the fantastic facade of MIT's new Ray and Maria Stata Center. ... What he sees: 'A wonderful experiment. ... What we do in our research is challenge existing notions and try to figure out how the world can be different. The interesting thing here is that people are challenged in their own personal space....'"
>>> AI Academic Departments (@ Resources for Students), Robots
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September 22, 2004: If the NHL is still looking for open ice, it can find it here. By Malcolm Kelly. National Post. "Electronic Arts went into development of NHL 2005 (rated Everyone, for PS2, Xbox, GameCube and PC), already an excellent game as NHL 2004, with one overwhelming goal -- create open ice. ... You can now create open ice by pressing a designated button as you go on offence, which will switch the puck carrier to the artificial intelligence and allow you to play as one of the streaking wingers."
>>> Video Games, Sports, Applications; also see this related article: If Hockey Is Out, Best Thing on Ice May Be a Computer Game (September 27, 2004)
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September 22, 2004: Eavesdropping call centre computers cut talk time. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist Magazine (September 25th issue; page 22). "Phone a call centre and you are likely to spend ages on hold listening to canned music -- and then find the operator cannot find the information you need. But an artificial intelligence system that hunts down the required information is aiming to slash the time people waste this way. Using a mixture of speech recognition and search engine technology, the system, being developed by IBM, will trawl a call centre’s databanks for the information a customer wants and present it to the operator before the caller has finished explaining what they want. By giving operators rapid access to the right information, calls will be dealt with faster. The system works by listening in to the conversation and identifying keywords spoken by the customer."
>>> Customer Service, Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Speech, Applications
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September 22/29, 2004: Agent model yields leadership. By Kimberly Patch. Technology Research News. "Complicated systems that involve many agents making independent decisions -- like the stock market -- are difficult to predict. ... One way to gain at least a moderate ability to predict is to start in the middle -- construct a system using quantitative representations for agent-level behavior and interactions observed from real life, let the simulation evolve according to a set of rules, then compare the system to qualitative observations from real life to see how close the model has come to representing the behavior of a real system. Researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of Houston, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a quantitative model of software agents competing for limited resources that is representative of more complex systems. The model is a simple, expandable framework that accounts for social behavior in agent-based markets, said Marion Anghel, a technical research staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It could eventually be used to study financial markets, behavioral economics, and quantitative sociology, and to optimize agent communications networks, including robot collectives, said Anghel. The researchers based their system on an existing multi-agent-competition model dubbed the minority game.... The researchers added a network of acquaintances that give advice to each other based on the agents' predictions about the best move in the game at any given moment. ... The researchers are aiming to eventually produce artificial agent systems that perform optimally as a collective, said [Zoltan] Toroczkai."
>>> Multi-Agent Systems, Finance, Social Science, Space Exploration, Agents, Applications
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September 22, 2004: Museum home to a new Zone. Edinburgh Evening News. "The Royal Museum of Edinburgh will be the home of a new £1 million exhibition centre featuring 'iconic' science exhibits such as Dolly the sheep and a Ford Formula 1 car. ... Other icons include Freddie the Robot, which was built in Edinburgh in the 1970s and is considered one of the cornerstones of artificial intelligence."
>>> History, Robots
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September 21, 2004: A little stroke of genius. A one-day symposium explores the link between neuroscience and music. By Arminta Wallace.The Irish Times (subscription req'd.). "Another speaker at the symposium will be Prof Paul Robertson, a musician who has acquired a considerable amount of expertise on the medical front. For many years as leader of the Medici String Quartet, he developed an interest in neuropsychiatry and presented a series called Music and the Mind for Channel 4. 'It was a fantastic opportunity to talk to people who were doing fascinating work - the most fascinating aspect of which was that none of them knew about each other,' he says. 'So, for example, there are people doing work with brain-damaged children using music therapy but there's very little contact between them and the people doing brain mapping. And there's virtually no connection between either of those groups and the people doing artificial intelligence in computing. But it doesn't take a mastermind to see that a huge cross-fertilisation is possible in those areas.'"
>>> Cognitive Science, Music
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September 21, 2004: Chicago Moving to 'Smart' Surveillance Cameras. By Stephen Kinzer. The New York Times (no fee reg. req'd.). "A highly advanced system of video surveillance that Chicago officials plan to install by 2006 will make people here some of the most closely observed in the world. Mayor Richard M. Daley says it will also make them much safer. ... Police specialists here can already monitor live footage from about 2,000 surveillance cameras around the city, so the addition of 250 cameras under the mayor's new plan is not a great jump. The way these cameras will be used, however, is an extraordinary technological leap. Sophisticated new computer programs will immediately alert the police whenever anyone viewed by any of the cameras placed at buildings and other structures considered terrorist targets wanders aimlessly in circles, lingers outside a public building, pulls a car onto the shoulder of a highway, or leaves a package and walks away from it. Images of those people will be highlighted in color at the city's central monitoring station, allowing dispatchers to send police officers to the scene immediately. ... Many cities have installed large numbers of surveillance cameras along streets and near important buildings, but as the number of these cameras has grown, it has become impossible to monitor all of them. The software that will be central to Chicago's surveillance system is designed to direct specialists to screens that show anything unusual happening. ... 'With the aggressive way these types of surveillance equipment are being marketed and implemented,' Mr. [Edwin C.] Yohnka said, 'it really does raise questions about what kind of society do we ultimately want, and how intrusive we want law enforcement officials to be in all of our lives.' ... 'The value we gain in public safety far outweighs any perception by the community that this is Big Brother who's watching,' Mr. [Ron] Huberman said. 'The feedback we're getting is that people welcome this. It makes them feel safer.'"
>>> Law Enforcement, Vision, Machine Learning, Ethical & Social Implications, Applications; also see the Fall 2002 and Spring 2003 AI in the news columns in AI Magazine
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September 21, 2004: Education Briefs. The Hartford Courant & ctnow.com. "Ingrid Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of Hartford has received a $99,469 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop ways to teach college students about artificial intelligence. ... Russell is working on the project with Zdravko Markov of the computer science department at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain and Todd Neller of the computer science department at Gettsyburg College."
>>> Resources for Educators
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September 21, 2004: Tech ethics - Technology of the not-too-distant future will allow a Gillette razor to tell its manufacturer where it is, when it left the store and who is using it, according to a former Chattanoogan who has helped start or direct several high-tech ventures. By Clint Cooper. Chattanooga Times Free Press (subscription req'd.). "'We have to understand the ethical side of these issues,' said Mr. [Jim] Phillips, who founded the FedEx Institute at the University of Memphis, a center that studies next-generation transportation issues, artificial intelligence and supply chain management. 'But we're not studying that enough. These are important national issues. We probably ought to be building a center of the ethics of technology.'"
>>> Ethical & Social Implications
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September 21, 2004: Nothing Robotic About Robo-Art.  By Cyrus Fariva. Wired News. "For 18 hours, robots invaded Harlem, but they came in peace. The third annual ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show was held in New York City this past weekend, and it showcased some of the best and most creative applications of modern robotics that make or are themselves art."
>>> Robots, Art, Events & Competitions (@ Resources for Students)
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September 21, 2004: Robot Telescopes Comb the Skies.  By Lakshmi Sandhana. Wired News. "British astronomers have just begun to operate RoboNet-1.0, a global network of the world's biggest robotic telescopes, controlled by intelligent software to effectively act as one giant eye that can be focused anywhere in the sky within a minute. It's a dream come true for the astronomers at Liverpool John Moores University who pioneered the development of a fully automated intelligent robotic network. They developed the network to allow astronomers to follow up unpredictable events or appearances of objects in the sky as rapidly as possible, something that isn't ordinarily possible with a single telescope at a fixed position. ... ESTAR, a joint project of Liverpool John Moores University and Exeter University, developed intelligent autonomous software programs, known as agents, that will function as the brains of the network. Acting as 'virtual astronomers,' the agents will collect and analyze data 24 hours a day, alerting their flesh-and-blood counterparts only when they catch sight of something noteworthy."
>>> Astronomy, Agents, Applications
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September 20, 2004: High-tech tools help with FCAT - Students can access online tutors and test aids that monitor individual progress. By Beth Kormanik. The Times-Union & Jacksonville.com. "A friendly genie and Merlin the Magician spout instructions on math and reading problems from a computer screen, and brightly colored handheld computers that resemble a combination of an iMac and a GameBoy are the newest tools and toys to help students on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. ... Hip design and kid-friendly software draw students into online tutoring programs offering extra help preparing for the FCAT. Web-based programs have grown in number and popularity, and advances in technology customize lessons for students and pinpoint where they get stuck on math problems or reading comprehension. ... One research-based online program could be headed to Florida. The 'Assistment' tutoring system helps middle-school students prepare for standardized math tests. It quickly predicts a student's score on a standardized test, provides feedback to teachers about how to adapt their lessons to help students and tailors tutoring for each student. The program combines research on artificial intelligence and the psychology of human learning, said Ken Koedinger, professor of human-computer interaction and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, which developed the model. 'The system is smart enough to solve problems in a step-by-step way,' he said. 'If a student gets stuck, it knows where in a problem the student gets stuck.' ... Effective personal tutors can raise student scores by two grade levels, Koedinger said, but the average human tutor helps raise grade level only by one-half. His computer-based system falls in between, raising students' scores by one grade level."
>>> Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Education, Applications, Industry Statistics
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September 20, 2004: Are poker ‘bots’ raking online pots? Some suspect computer programs have infiltrated Internet games. By Mike Brunker. MSNBC. "Concern is growing in online chat rooms and news groups devoted to poker that sophisticated card-playing robots -- known as 'bots' in the nomenclature of the Web -- are being used on commercial gambling sites to fleece newcomers, the strategy-impaired and maybe even above-average players. ... But skeptics -- and there are many -- argue the complexities of the game and the changing strategies ensure that creation of a program that can 'read' opponents’ cards using screen scanning techniques and respond in real time is years away at best. ... [Gautam] Rao and his fellow believers have a ready answer: A bot capable of playing against the best humans already exists. The University of Alberta’s Computer Poker Research Group has developed an artificially intelligent automaton known as 'Vex Bot,'  capable of playing poker at the master level, though as yet it can only apply its gambling genius to two-player games. Vex Bot has been used by researchers to test the frontiers of artificial intelligence -- and as the basis for a commercial poker tutorial program, Poki’s Poker Academy -- but some fear it may become a blueprint for programmers with more sinister motives. Darse Billings, lead designer of the Vex Bot said he believes the odds are better than 50-50 that other programmers have secretly unleashed bots on commercial poker sites, apart from the commercial bots. But he throws his chips in with the skeptics, saying it is unlikely they would be anywhere near as capable as the Vex Bot -- so named for its ability to frustrate human opponents -- which is the result of more than a decade’s research by the University of Alberta team. ... 'With chess -- I don’t want to trivialize it -- but it’s just a matter of calculation,' he said. 'With poker, you really need to write a program that can think about the game and reason.' The solution, in the case of the Vex Bot, was adding a layer of artificial intelligence over its ability to calculate probabilities. 'It will show you things that no human player has ever shown you before,' Billings said of the latest incarnation of the bot, which also has the ability to model its opponent’s behavior."
>>> Poker, Chess, Games & Puzzles, Applications, Ethical & Social Implications
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September 15, 2004: Better health treatment, cheaper. By Andrew Mayeda. The Ottawa Citizen (subscription req'd.). "While Canada's political elite bickered about how much to spend on health care, a handful of researchers and entrepreneurs showcased technologies that could significantly lower the bill in the first place. To them, 'smart' means intelligent systems, or technologies such as robots and sensors that imitate the human ability to perceive, reason and act. Such technologies have the potential not only to reduce health care costs but also to improve patient care, says Anthony Eyton, president and chief executive of Precarn Inc. ... Take the intelligent eHealth Portal, one of the technologies demonstrated by Precarn. The portal allows doctors and nurses to combine information such as medical histories and treatment updates on a convenient Web-based platform."
>>> Knowledge Management, Medicine, Applications, Interfaces; also see this related article
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September 15, 2004: Puppets, popping up everywhere, manipulate the imagination and feed a primal fascination. By John Habich. Newsday.com. "Although puppets will probably never be as common as moonlighting TV and movie stars at New York playhouses, they have moved from the margins of avant-garde and ethnic theater into the mainstream. The eccentric geniuses who create and manipulate puppets credit their growing popularity to a paradox. On one hand (so to speak), puppets embody age-old curiosity about magic and the nature of being. 'It's not an innocence particular to children,' says the acclaimed puppet-artist Basil Twist, 'but a deep part of our souls that sees the life in lifeless things.' On the other hand, puppets feed the contemporary preoccupation with robots and artificial intelligence."
>>> Robots, Ethical & Social Implications
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September 15, 2004: New start-up breed: Born in USA, made in India. Reuters / available from The Indian Express & Express India. "Multinationals have trimmed the fat for years by shifting low-value work to India. Now, slim Silicon Valley start-ups are leading a new outsourcing wave, moving cutting-edge product development to Bangalore and beyond. The start-ups have their top managers and sales teams in the United States, but design products in India, where high-tech engineers earn a third of their US counterparts.... The revival is funded by venture capitalists, who want more bang for their bucks now that making money on start-ups has become tougher amid sluggish demand for initial public share offerings. India-born entrepreneurs and venture capital (VC) firms are backing a clutch of companies.... New middlemen have sprung up to help the young firms, such as Pari Natarajan, chief executive of Zinnov -- short for 'zeal with innovation' -- a consulting firm that specialises in offshore outsourcing by US start-ups. ... [H]e noted the economic pull was strong, given that it generally costs just $2 million to develop a modest software product in India, against $5 million in the United States. 'The VCs can put that kind of money in three firms and hedge their bets,' he said. Nonetheless, developed countries were likely to keep their edge in high-end areas such as artificial intelligence, he added."
>>> AI Overview, Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students)
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September 15, 2004: Artificial Intelligence lab works to hunt terrorists, cure cancer. By Joe Ferguson. Arizona Daily Wildcat. "The director of the UA's Artificial Intelligence Lab, Hsinchun Chen, said the goal of the AI Lab is to provide academics and professionals with a better way to get information in their high-tech worlds. ... COPLINK takes data from various law enforcement databases, based on existing criminal records, and allows law enforcement to coordinate their information using the software. 'It is like Google for cops,' said Chen. "'But it is much better.' ... Catherine Larson, associate director of the AI Lab, said the lab is also active in the war on terror by helping the Department of Homeland Security identify terrorists. By working closely with available data, the AI Lab identifies patterns with the data to discover the true identities of criminals using aliases, Larson said. ... hen said the AI Lab also works closely with the University Medical Center's Cancer Center in informatics, a field that analyzes exiting medical data to find patterns that could help researchers at the Cancer Center find new ways to treat cancer."
>>> Law Enforcement, Medicine, Knowledge Management, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Machine Learning, AI Academic Departments (@ Resources for Students)
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September 14, 2004: Speech recognition 'on a chip' in three years. By Lucy Sherriff. The Register. "The US National Science Foundation has awarded a $1m grant to researchers in the US who want to put speech recognition on a chip, a move the project's proponents claim will revolutionise the way we communicate. Rob Rutenbar, Jatras professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, will lead the project. The research will be conducted in tandem with scientists from the University of California in Berkeley. Currently, speech recognition takes place at the software level, and its precision varies enormously, depending on what you want the system to do. Matching input to a specific set of expected words is relatively trivial, but capturing the full meaning of a conversation in a noisy room is much, much harder. ... To process arbitrary speech, you need a very powerful and power-hungry processor. ... " And this is where this research project comes in, because to really crack speech recognition, the researchers say, we have to go to dedicated silicon."
>>> Speech, Systems
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September 14, 2004: Happy Landing for Pupils After Texas Space Treat. Aberdeen Press and Journal & this is north scotland. "A group of Scots pupils came back down to earth yesterday after the trip of a lifetime to a US space camp. The 25 sixth-year pupils arrived back on home soil having spent the last 10 days taking part in Scottish Space School 2004, during which they touched down at Nasa's Johnson Space Centre, in Houston, Texas. Last night, Stephen Kershaw, 17, of Bridge of Don Academy, said the trip - during which he met astronauts and worked alongside space scientists - had flown by so quickly he could hardly believe it was over. He was delighted his team won a medal for being the best overall in a series of challenges. Stephen is now determined to study a robotics and artificial intelligence at university."
>>> Space Exploration, AI Academic Departments (@ Resources for Students)
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September 14, 2004: Coming to a Dashboard Near You. By Alex Salkever. BW Online. "More and more, though, auto makers are focusing on building control systems that don't require a driver to look away from the road to check the dashboard. These new systems will communicate with the driver either through sound or touch. Carmakers believe that this will alleviate existing visual overload and allow drivers to focus on the main task at hand. ...   That's why most auto makers are busily enhancing the voice-recognition systems they're building into their luxury models. In early September, Honda announced that it would include new IBM-powered voice recognition in three 2005 models. ... Voice recognition will supposedly allow drivers to ask the car normal questions and give it commands in conversational sentences. ... Carmakers sold about 2 million voice-recognition systems in the U.S. in 2003, according to Telematics Research Group, an auto technology consulting firm. That number is expected to surpass 11 million by 2010 as the cost of voice recognition declines to a fraction of its current $500 to $1,000 per car."
>>> Natural Language Processing, Speech, Transportation, Applications, Interfaces
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September 14, 2004: Massive Founder Receives World Technology Award Nomination - Developer of crowd animation technology recognized by industry peers. Press release available from Creative Mac. "Massive, developer of the premiere 3D animation system for crowd-related visual effects in cinema and television, announced that its founder and product manager Stephen Regelous has been nominated for a World Technology Network Award. Determined by a vote of industry peers, the prestigious accolades are presented by the World Technology Network (WTN) to recognize work that has a high level of innovation and lasting significance in fields including biotechnology, space, energy, ethics, design and entertainment. Winners will be named October 8th at the World Technology Awards in San Francisco. Regelous conceived and developed the artificial intelligence-driven software necessary for producing the epic-scale crowd and battle scenes in 'The Lord of the Rings' film trilogy."
>>> Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, Entertainment, Applications
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September 14, 2004: Will AI Reach the Mainstream? Artificial intelligence has so far carried high expectations and little reality, but research slowly carrying through to the business marketplace, says analyst firm. By Jim Ericson. Line56.com. "'Artificial Intelligence' is a term that has grown old enough to almost be quaint. The prospect of a manmade technology able to simulate human thinking is certainly exciting, but in the absence of products, Spielbergian visions of AI are taken by most as entertainment. There have been moments, like IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer knocking off grand master Garry Kasparov in a chess match, though many believe this was the result of a massive data load and not intellect. ... AI won't soon be a part of everyday life, but that hasn't stopped researchers from working on pattern recognition and its business applications. Computers and software can now perform tasks that were impossible five years ago, so it pays to keep an open mind, according to Amreetha Vijayakumar, Frost & Sullivan Technical Insights research analyst. 'AI is slowly starting to propagate in the normal business case, especially in applications risk assessment, CRM, data mining, these applications are starting to reach users.' ... In some cases she says, AI goes unnoticed because developers don't accept that AI is used in their products."
>>> Applications, The AI Effect, Chess, Data Mining, Customer Service, Banking, Business, Pattern Recognition
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September 14, 2004: Vietnamese students win first prize at Robocon 2004 in Seoul. Viet Nam News. "Viet Nam’s FXR boys won Saturday’s final round at the Asia­Pacific Robot 2004 (Robocon), held in the Republic of Korea. ... This year’s competition used the tale The Reunion of the Shepherd and the Weaver as its theme. The story goes that the gods become upset with the laziness of a Shepherd and his Weaver wife and separate them. Annually, the gods take pity on the pair and erect a bridge so they may meet. Each round, teams drove their robots (shepherds) across an area (the bridge) carrying red boxes (gifts for the Weaver). The team that could carry the most items within an allotted amount of time would win the round."
>>> Robots, Competitions & Events (@ Resources for Students)
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September 14, 2004: Show me the money - new grants to shout about in the field of science communication. By Linda Nordling. Guardian Education Weekly. "There is a lot of new funding up for grabs for the talkative researcher. Last week, the Office of Science and Technology announced it is offering up £1.2m for scientists eager to talk about their work. ... To get to the cash, you will have to show a genuine interest in what the public wants from science, and not just the other way around. The OST's Sciencewise scheme will focus on areas of science where there has been, or where there is expected to arise, friction between scientists and the public. Artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and the use of animals in research are some key issues. Climate change and security issues related to the internet are others."
>>> Resources for the Scientific Community
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September 13, 2004: Let a Thousand Ideas Flower: China Is a New Hotbed of Research. By Chris Buckley. The New York Times (no fee reg. req'd.). "When Microsoft opened its Beijing lab in late 1998, it was among the first multinationals to establish a large research center in China. It hoped investing in research here would help pry open the door to two dazzling prizes: China's large reservoir of skilled but inexpensive scientists, and its consumers, still relatively poor but growing richer and eager for new technology. ... 'There are a lot of really good scientists and engineers coming from Chinese universities,' said Maximilian von Zedtwitz, who teaches management at Qinghua University here. 'Their first choice is to go abroad, but their second choice is to work in China for foreign companies.' ... It is no surprise that Microsoft Research Asia has such popular appeal. It is one of the few labs here spared the pressure of developing products for direct application; its researchers, like those in Microsoft's labs in Redmond, San Francisco and Cambridge in Britain, are given leeway to explore ideas with no immediate commercial payoff. But Microsoft researchers here also said they were conscious of their untested 'outsider' status, which makes them especially eager to find product applications for their theoretical findings. Among other things, researchers are working on computer graphics, speech recognition and text translation."
>>> Natural Language Processing, Speech, Machine Translation, Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students)
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September 13, 2004: Cybertron - The Bulgarian Sensation. By Tanya Gavrilova. Pari Daily (subscription req'd.). "are three 20-year-old boys. They dream of making a human-like robot and say the project design is ready. All they need is financing to complete the prototype. But they believe in success and say there is only one path ahead: to the future. ... The three are the only enthusiasts in Bulgaria developing an artificial intellect. Therefore they remain misunderstood. The more conservative people do not even believe us. ... The innovative approach used for creating Cybertron's intellect helps expand its functions. We simply reject the approaches used so far. We apply a new, revolutionary method, which is based not only on technology but also on human psychology and biology. All robots made so far have been programmed to react in a certain way to certain situations, they cannot think. We use the reverse approach: the robot will not be able to do anything in the beginning, it will develop and learn from experience. Like people do."
>>> Robots, Cognitive Science, Machine Learning
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September 13, 2004: Poly, varsities use software to spot copying from Net - Ngee Ann Poly tries out anti-plagiarism software that dons at 3 varsities are using to spot text students lift from websites. By Lynn Lee. The Straits Times Interactive. "Blithely, the group of undergraduates lifted a chunk of text from the website of a Singapore bank's branch in Thailand and passed it off as their own. ... But their misdeed was exposed swiftly by Turnitin, a software which matches student work against millions of documents on the Internet. ... In the future, artificial intelligence may be used to distinguish one student's essay from others. German academic Joachim Diederich, 46, in Singapore last week to talk about his research on new technologies to fight plagiarism, aims to produce such a software. Professor Diederich, who disclosed his research at the International Conference On Educational Technology, has been conducting his research on the topic since 1999."
>>> Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Fraud Detection & Prevention, Applications
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September 13, 2004: Artificial intelligence helps prevent highway disasters. By Scott Foster. Ottawa Business Journal. " The idea first came to Takashi Gomi after hearing about a fatal landslide in Japan in 1994. A dam had broken near the mountainous border of Niigata and Nagano prefectures, creating a landslide that swept away highway construction workers and their heavy equipment. Days later, 14 bodies were recovered from the rubble. Mr. Gomi, president of Ottawa's Applied AI Systems, Inc., realized intelligent technology could have helped prevent the disaster. ... With more than $2 million in R&D funding, Applied AI has been working with the Japanese government to develop a solution. ... In 1997, the firm proposed installing an 'AI filter' in each of the cameras, so images could be captured automatically and viewed in real-time by a field officer. For example, a falling rock could be a precursor to a larger disaster, says Mr. Gomi. ... Other projects include an intelligent wheelchair that can move autonomously. ... Another project is a robotic assistant for farmers who pick fruit. The machine would move autonomously while the farmer collects the produce, easing the burden of carrying heavy fruit baskets."
>>> Image Understanding, Transportation, Assisitve Technology, Agriculture, Robots, Vision, Applications
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September 13, 2004: Robots to the fore. By Kamal A. Othman. New Straits Times Computimes. "Over the years, interest in robot technology has grown with the robotic field being taught in schools and universities worldwide. The major focus of this robotic field has been the search for autonomous robots which can think and this drives much development in machine intelligence or artificial intelligence field. Robots entered the mainstream culture with the introduction of Sony’s Aibo in 1999. Since then several Japanese corporations have succeeded in developing humanoid robots. ... Robofest aims to create and stimulate Malaysian interest in robotic and artificial intelligence technology which is becoming even more crucial as the country pushes forward to become a developed nation. Already in its fourth series, the Robofest competition was organised by the Science, Technology and Innovation Ministry (Mosti). ... [Datuk Kong Chong Ha, the Ministry’s Deputy Minister] hopes the competition will become a platform that would spur creativity and innovation among students and the public in the field of robotic and artificial intelligence. ... Some 180 teams were assembled to compete in six categories, namely Survival Robot, RoboClimb, RoboGrab, RoboDance, Partner Robot, Robot Jr. Football League and Robot Drawing Contest."
>>> Robots, Competitions & Events (@ Resources for Students), Science Fiction, Manufacturing, Robotic Pets, Applications
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September 13, 2004: Game sequel takes leaps in AI technology. By Dean Takahashi. Mercury News. "What's remarkable about this computer game, being released worldwide Tuesday , is that the domestic drama is not scripted. The characters act the way they do because that is what naturally unfolds. It's a quality dubbed 'emergence,'' based on the history of the characters' relationships and their own artificial, or preprogrammed, intelligence. Electronic Arts, which is publishing the sequel to the bestselling 'The Sims,'' believes this leap forward in artificial intelligence is what will keep gamers by the millions entranced with their virtual Sims. That's why the 140-person team that developed the game over four years took great pains to make the Sims, as the virtual characters are called, act and feel smarter. ... For EA programmers, a character appears to possess intelligence if it behaves intelligently. Behavior is a collection of actions and each action is governed by a choice. And so the Sims face a web of inter-connected choices. If they make a friend, they have the option to hug the friend. If the friend accepts the hug, they have the option to kiss. Each choice leads to other choices. The Sims make choices and therefore they seem intelligent."
>>> Video Games, AI Overview, Applications
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September 13, 2004: Speech Code From I.B.M. to Become Open Source. By Steve Lohr. The New York Times (no fee reg. req'd). "I.B.M. plans to announce today that it will contribute some of its speech-recognition software to two open-source software groups. The move is a tactical step by International Business Machines to accelerate the development of speech applications and to outmaneuver rivals, especially Microsoft , in a market that is expected to grow rapidly in the next few years with increased use in customer-service call centers, cars and elsewhere. To do this, I.B.M. is again using the strategy of placing some of its proprietary software in open-source projects, making it available for other programmers to improve. ... After decades of research and development, speech recognition is moving toward mainstream use. Advances in statistical modeling, pattern-matching algorithms and processing power have enabled speech recognition to interpret a far broader vocabulary of words and phrases than in the past, though glitches remain."
>>> Speech, Natural Language Processing, Customer Service, Open Source Projects, Applications
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September 13, 2004: Pentagon Revives Memory Project. By Noah Shachtman. Wired News. "It's been seven months since the Pentagon pulled the plug on LifeLog, its controversial project to archive almost everything about a person. But now, the Defense Department seems ready to revive large portions of the program under a new name. Using a series of sensors embedded in a GI's gear, the Advanced Soldier Sensor Information System and Technology , or ASSIST, project aims to collect what a soldier sees, says and does in a combat zone -- and then to weave those events into digital memories, so commanders can have a better sense of how the fight unfolded. ... To crunch all the information it receives, ASSIST will have to be smart and able to learn from the experiences its wearers feed it. Building these types of thinking machines has been the goal of Ronald Brachman since he took over Darpa's Information Processing Technology Office in 2002. 'It is the progressive improvement of the knowledge base of the system over time that we believe will best support soldiers on later missions,' Brachman wrote in an e-mail. It will 'allow them to understand what prior patrols saw and heard, and to recognize salient (and potentially life-threatening) changes in the situation when they go out on a mission.'"
>>> Agents, Knowledge Management, Machine Learning, Military, Applications, Ethical & Social Implications; also see related articles in our News Archive such as Helping Machines Think Different (July 2003)
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September 12, 2004: Online textbook service draws interest from Memphis investors. By Michael Sheffield. Memphis Business Journal / available from MSNBC. "College students will get one more learning resource with Cram101, a new company with a Memphis connection. Cram101 is an online service that uses artificial intelligence to read textbooks, summarize them and post highlights and key points of the material online. ... Cram was started by Scott Parfitt, a former Harvard professor who has been working with artificial intelligence since the 1990s. ... He says the goal is to provide students with a new method of studying. ... Daniel Brown, president of Preferred Advisors, the investment banking firm that coordinated the capital funding of Cram101, says when he first met Parfitt in 2003, he was skeptical that the artificial intelligence service could perform at the level Parfitt said it could, but was quickly won over. ... Despite obvious comparisons, Phillips says Cram is not an 'online Cliff Notes' program."
>>> Information Retrieval & Extraction, Education, Natural Language Processing, Applications
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September 11, 2004: CPW studies ways to foil attack on water supplies. By Robert Behre. The Post and Courier & Charleston.net. (no fee reg. req'd.). "John Cook knows the next terrorist strike might not come by air. As assistant manager with Charleston's Commissioners of Public Works, Cook is privy to terrorist talk about undermining the nation's water supply. ... Working with Ed Roehl of the Greenville firm Advanced Data Mining, Cook has drawn up a $400,000 research project that aims to couple everyday sensor technology with advanced number-crunching models to create a reliable, affordable way to monitor water distribution lines. ... The hard part is making sense out of millions of measurements each day. 'No normal person can take all the data in from all these points and analyze it,' Cook says. 'That's where the artificial intelligence is important to make this work.' ... He and Roehl are developing software that can 'learn,' as humans provide it feedback about what caused an abnormal readout, such as a heavy rain."
>>> Public Health & Welfare, Law Enforcement, Machine Learning, Applications
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September 10, 2004: Vidus has the Midas touch. By Ben Fountain. Business Weekly. "Vidus, which has developed artificial intelligence technology to manage mobile workforces, is no stranger to doing big business with the ‘big boys.’ ... According to Vidus, its taskforce scheduling software is the product of 1000 man-years of work within BT's research labs and more than £100m of investment. In simple terms, the solution addresses one of the major hassles of modern life - namely waiting around for workmen or deliveries to arrive, as [Stuart] Potchinsky explained: 'Most of us are familiar with the phenomenon of waiting around at home for field service engineers or deliveries. Many companies providing a home service are still unable to be more precise with their expected time of arrival than, for example, Thursday AM or Friday PM. Clearly that is too wide a window for most busy lives. Taskforce is accurate and responsive enough to allocate a much narrower window for a home visit - two hours or less. It employs artificial intelligence functionality to provide real-time, reactive scheduling.'"
>>> Business, Customer Service, Scheduling, Applications
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September 10, 2004: Wireless campus brims with high technology. By Zachary Goldstein. The Dartmouth Online. "In October 2002, Wired Magazine even dubbed the college 'Unplugged U.' for its widespread use of wireless technology. As far as technology is concerned, Dartmouth has been pulling out all the stops for the past 50 years. In 1955, four young mathematicians conducting summer research coined the term 'artificial intelligence' for the first time."
>>> History
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September 10, 2004: Beware of Bots Bearing Messages. By Daniel Terdiman. Wired News. "If you get an instant message from someone with an unfamiliar screen name in the near future, you might want to think twice before getting emotionally invested in the conversation. That's because you may be talking with Chatting AIM Bot , a free service that lets anyone play a devious practical joke on a friend, in which an artificially intelligent AOL instant message, or AIM, bot carries on an innocuous, 10-minute conversation before finally lowering the boom and informing the unwitting human at the other end they've been had. 'People fall for it all the time,' said Greg Paradee, a Chatting AIM Bot, or CAB, fan. 'It acts so much like a real human, sometimes it's hard not to fall for it. The bot ... keeps conversation going with normal, everyday questions, so people answer those thinking it's a real person.'"
>>> Chatbots (@ Natural Language Processing), Turing Test
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September 9, 2004: Robot beetle detects killers beneath the soil. By Jonathan Heddle. The Guardian. "The team at Chiba University is led by Kenzo Nonami. 'There are almost 70 countries in the world with a land mine problem,' he says. There are estimated to be more than 100m land mines strewn across the world. In most cases, the exact location of the mines is unknown. As a result about 800 people per month are killed and 1,000 more maimed due to accidentally triggering a hidden mine. In addition the minefields cause economic damage, hampering construction and tourism. Nonami's solution is an intelligent robot with excellent vision, and a dual propulsion system; caterpillar tracks for fast movement and six insect legs for more delicate manoeuvres in the minefield."
>>> Hazards & Disasters, Robots, Vision, Applications
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September 9, 2004: He, robot - 'Untouched by Hands' is an intriguing idea carried to fruition -- it's artistic, but is it art? By Robert L. Pincus. The San-Diego Union-Tribune & SignOnSanDiego.com. "The images are by AARON. The signature on them reads Harold Cohen. That would be highly unusual in most circumstances, but these pictures are by a program rather than a person. AARON is Cohen's creation, a project that has preoccupied him for 30-plus years. The program never tires. It is running continuously during an exhibition at the Earl & Birdie Taylor Library in Pacific Beach -- 24 hours a day in fact -- creating new works and erasing works as soon as AARON determines they are done. ... The program, though a highly sophisticated example of artificial intelligence, hasn't expressed any desire to have its work preserved and exhibited. That is where Cohen enters the picture. ... Cohen has selected works he's determined to be particularly successful, compelling or, well, artistic. These make up the 36 picture exhibition titled 'Untouched by Hands: Recent Digital Prints by AARON, a Computer Program Written by Harold Cohen.' ... AARON is artistic, to be sure. It displays a finely calibrated sense of color and structure. ... It also carries with it the imprimatur of a creator who was himself accomplished painter, which clearly has something to do with AARON's skills. Cohen, who trained at London's Slade School, was a well-established artist in England before venturing into the world of computer science and artificial intelligence. ... But when artificial intelligence creates art, philosophical questions naturally arise. How much of art is technique and how much is rooted in soul or psyche? Metaphorical and symbolic thinking is at the core of much art ­ is it possible for a machine to possess such thought? Artificial intelligence can likely surpass what its creators had planned for it. This is the stuff of science fiction, of course, which often takes a dark view of the issue, from 'Frankenstein' to the recent movie version of 'I, Robot.'"
>>> Art, Creativity, Philosophy, Science Fiction, Applications
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September 9, 2004: Gaming conference targets women. By Erin Ochoa. News 8 Austin. "More than a thousand video gamers from around the world attended the Austin Game Conference Thursday. Austin is third in the nation when it comes to game development. This year, it features the first-ever Women's Game Conference aimed at changing assumptions about the gender of people who make and play the games. 'I'm hoping to apply artificial intelligence to games to make games more interesting,' Astrid Glende, a recent graduate hoping to 'play the game', said. But Glende is stepping into an industry traditionally dominated by men. ... 'The game industry doesn't seem to be on the radar for most women when they're considering careers. It's not that women look at the game industry and discard it, it's actually not even something that comes up to be considered,' [Sheri Graner] Ray said."
>>> Video Games, Conferences & Careers in AI & Equality (@ Resources for Students)
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September 9, 2004: At Your Service (or Wits' End). By Katie Hafner. The New York Times (no fee reg. req'd.). "After he cut a wire by mistake and disrupted phone service to his home late one Sunday evening a few months ago, Gary Beach picked up his cellphone and called Verizon's Repair Resolution Center. 'Do you have dial tone?' he was asked. (No.) Were all his lines affected? (Yes.) He was then told that a remote test of all lines in his house would be conducted. Within 10 minutes Mr. Beach had isolated the wire problem, and service was restored. You would hardly have known that he never spoke to a human. The entire exchange was with an automated voice. ... Speech recognition has come a long way in the last few years, particularly in relatively straightforward customer-service use. Consumers now routinely call automated agents at airlines to get flight information. Customers of Charles Schwab and Merrill Lynch give voice robots orders to buy and sell stocks and transfer money. In the San Francisco Bay Area, a cheerful fellow nicknamed Cal North dispenses specific, up-to-the-minute traffic reports on command. But teaching machines to hold their own through the twists and turns of most actual conversations is still a challenge. ... Hynek Hermansky, a speech recognition expert who is director of research at 2IDIAP, a research institute in Martigny, Switzerland, agreed. 'The recognizers in general are pretty fragile,' said Dr. Hermansky. 'They're like Ferraris. They do well on very good roads, but they don't go well on roads they weren't built for.' Even with those limitations, companies are saving tens of millions of dollars in labor costs with speech systems, having the automated agents handle the routine inquiries and freeing the live agents to do things the machines cannot do."

September 9, 2004: Mimicking fraudsters - If your card use has been queried, it's probably because more banks are now using artificial intelligence software to try to detect fraud. By Ken Young. The Guardian. "Credit card fraud losses in the UK fell for the first time in nearly a decade last year, by more than 5% to £402.4m, according to research by the Association of Payment Clearing Services (Apacs). The fall has put a spotlight on the increasing use of neural networks that have the ability to detect fraudulent behaviour by analysing transactions and alerting staff to suspicious activity. As commercial applications of research into artificial intelligence, these systems give the impression of mimicking human abilities for recognising unusual activity. Karina Purang, a financial analyst at Datamonitor in London, says the use of neural networks is growing: 'These systems are very important to banks trying to reduce fraud, and are becoming standard across the card industry to detect unusual spending patterns.' She says Barclays reported that after installing Fair Isaac's Falcon Fraud Manager system in 1997, fraud was reduced by 30% by 2003. The bank attributed this mainly to the new system. ... Nick Sandall, head of retail banking at Deloitte, says that banks also use other technologies. 'The artificial intelligence community is constantly bringing us new solutions. ...'"
>>> Banking, Fraud Detection & Prevention, Neural Networks, Applications, Machine Learning, Industry Statistics
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September 9, 2004: MyVista ready for market. By Charles F. Moreira. The Star Online. "Intelligence Systems Sdn Bhd director See Wan Chee said his company acquired 20 customers for its SmartScan imaging application since it won the regional APICTA 2003 award in the Best in Education category in Bangkok last December.  'Most of them, including Nottingham University’s Malaysian campus, use SmartScan to read and mark answers to multiple-choice exam questions, as well as for data collection,' See told In.Tech at ACM2004.  It also indicates students’ strengths and weaknesses so that teachers can take remedial action to help students improve in those areas where they are weak.  SmartScan (www.smartscan.com.my) uses artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, including pattern recognition, neural networks and fuzzy logic to analyse answers on an objective test answer sheet."
>>> Pattern Recognition, Neural Networks, Fuzzy Logic, Education, Applications, Machine Learning, Reasoning
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September 9, 2004: Rise of the robot. By Charles Arthur (The Independent - with additional reporting by Nicole Manktelow and Peter Barrett). LiveWire section of The Age. "'Hollywood robots don't help us at all,' says Peter Corke, a robotics expert and scientist with the CSIRO. 'After C-3PO, when you show people what we are working on, it's a let-down.' Some machines, even those on the cutting edge or that make a breakthrough, are still essentially one-trick wonders. ... The robots of the near future are going to be a lot less visible and their usefulness more tightly focused. We already have room-cleaning robot vacuum cleaners - the iRobot Roomba and the Electrolux Trilobite. ... [T]hings are about to happen with robots because the element they need to make them truly useful - software that can adapt to a wide range of situations - is getting cheaper all the time. ... Future Horizons, a semi-conductor analyst company based in Kent, in England, believes that by 2010 there will be 55.5 million robots, in a world market worth more than $75 billion - up from $6.13 billion last year. ... Of those, it says that 39 million will be domestic robots and 10.5 million 'domestic intelligent service' robots. ... But the real explosion in robotics is coming among the "immobots', or 'bots'. These are bits of software that are incorporated into larger objects, which remove a lot of the strain of having to decide what to do next. We're getting glimpses of how good these can be: the TiVo personal video recorder has something that decides, based on the programs you choose to record, what other programs you might like to see and records those, too. ... [R]esearchers are still fundamentally split about how robots should behave and learn. One group favours the 'top-down' approach, in which all the behaviour of the robot is mapped out and its software written to fill out that behaviour. ... The alternative is something assembled from smaller, self-contained units, which creates a gestalt of behaviour.
>>> Robots, Science Fiction, Agents, Systems, Assisitive Technologies, Household Appliances, Robotic Pets, Industry Statistics, Applications, Reasoning, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing
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September 9, 2004: Self-sustaining killer robot creates a stink. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist News. "It may eat flies and stink to high heaven, but if this robot works, it will be an important step towards making robots fully autonomous. To survive without human help, a robot needs to be able to generate its own energy. So Chris Melhuish and his team of robotics experts at the University of the West of England in Bristol are developing a robot that catches flies and digests them in a special reactor cell that generates electricity. So what is the downside? The robot will most likely have to attract the hapless flies by using a stinking lure concocted from human excrement. Called EcoBot II, the robot is part of a drive to make 'release and forget' robots that can be sent into dangerous or inhospitable areas to carry out remote industrial or military monitoring of, say, temperature or toxic gas concentrations."
>>> Robots, Hazards & Disasters, Military, Applications, Systems
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September 8, 2004: Artificial Intelligence Creeps into the Commercial Market Despite Initial Hurdles. PhysOrg.com. "When artificial intelligence (AI) was developed to emulate human intelligence, scientists hoped it would be a blockbuster technology. Instead, the inability of end users to deal with its complexity and expensiveness and their lack of understanding of its potential caused these expectations to dwindle. These factors slowed down the adoption rates of AI, but not the efforts of researchers. After a couple of decades, AI, now in the form of applications, is slowly making its way out of laboratories into the mainstream market."
>>> Medicine, Case-Based Reasoning, Scientific Discovery, Bioinformatics, Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery, Customer Relations, Expert Systems, Applications, Reasoning, Machine Learning
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September 8 / 15, 2004: Automatic icons organize files. By Kimberly Patch. Technology Research News. "Researchers from the University of Southern California, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and ESC Entertainment are aiming to improve the lost-in-cyberspace problem with a tool designed to tap people's facility with pictures. The system, dubbed VisualID, automatically generates detailed icons for specific files. It assigns similar icons to related files by mutating the original icon in a series. The degree of mutation depends on the degree of similarity of the file names, which gives the user an approximate visual sense of saliency, according to J.P. Lewis, a researcher at the University of Southern California. ... Beyond file management, the icons system could be used for systems like air-traffic control, said Lewis. ... The system 'exploits the fact that appearance is efficiently learned, searched and remembered, probably more so than file names,' said Lewis. 'Psychological research has shown that searching for a picture among other pictures is faster than searching for a word among other words.' The bottom line is that interfaces need scenery, said Lewis."
>>> Interfaces, Cognitive Science
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September 8, 2004: 'Revolution' goes inside consoles. By Eric Gwinn. Chicago Tribune. "The evolution of video games has been chronicled repeatedly, but never like this. PBS' two-hour documentary 'The Video Game Revolution' (9 p.m. Wednesday, WTTW-Ch. 11) pulls back the curtain on the multibillion-dollar industry, revealing a universe whose allure is baffling to half of us and beautiful to the rest. ... Writer, host and narrator Greg Palmer takes us back to 1950s Cambridge, Mass., where grad student A.S. Douglas became the first computer game programmer by writing software that played tic-tac-toe. ... 'The Video Game Revolution' explains how, as computing power grew throughout the 1990s, better graphics and artificial intelligence made games more compelling... The documentary also doesn't shy away from the violence and misogyny in games aimed at adult men, who make up most of the gaming population."

>>> Video Games, History, Ethical & Social Implications, Games & Puzzles, Applications
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September 7, 2004: Building a World (Robo)Cup football team in Vaasa - AI researchers trying to develop a team of autonomous footballing robots that could defeat the humans in 2050.By Timo Paukku. Helsingin Sanomat. "Robofootball is increasing in popularity at a dizzying pace. The 2004 Robocup in Portugal had 346 teams taking part and 1,600 devices battling for the ball. There are numerous different categories, from four-legged Aibo dog robots to full-sized humanoids. In Fukuoka two years earlier, the robots were watched by a total of 135,000 spectators. Finland’s best performance to date remains the 8th spot secured by the Samba team from Oulu University’s Intelligent Systems Group, in the football simulation category in 1998. Nadir Ould Khessal presented the preliminary line-up and tactics of his robot footballers at a seminar arranged by the Finnish Artificial Intelligence Society and held at the beginning of the month in the Heureka Science Centre in Vantaa. ... Robocup is a testbed for practically all the world’s laboratories working on AI issues. The visiting lecturer Khessal and his group at the Vaasa Polytechnic’s Information Technology Department are therefore carrying forward the development of sensors, hardware and software for computer vision, and the autonomous interplay between machines."
>>> Robots, Sports, Competitions (@ Resources for Students), Multi-Agent Systems, Vision, Smart Houses, Chess, Applications
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September 7, 2004: Human/Robot Soccer Team to be shown off during anniversary. By Corrine Pascale. The Tartan (Volume 99, Issue 1). "This year, Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute will be celebrating its 25th Anniversary with four days packed full of events, ranging from the Robot Hall of Fame inductions to a multitude of seminars and demonstrations. ... The CORAL Research Group will be showcasing its modified Segway Robotic Mobility Platform (RMP) in a demonstration soccer game. ... The fully-autonomous robots have integrated perception, cognition, and are capable of many different actions. Deviating from the norm, the group’s robots are independent; instead of receiving commands from a human, they will function as peers. They will be able to collaborate and communicate with team members to be successful in the game. In the future, Professor [Manuela] Veloso hopes to see applications of this research in the home: robots that can return to the supermarket to pick up forgotten items, walk a dog, or handle household chores."
>>> Robots, Sports, History, Smart Houses, Applications
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September 7, 2004: Security IT tops NSW tech showcase awards. By Fleur Doidge. CRN / available from iTNews Australia. "Two security-focused IT developers creamed the competition this year at the patrons’ awards for the NSW Government’s export-focused Australian Technology Showcase (ATS). ... Michael Egan, NSW Treasurer and Minister for State Development, said Argus had won for its success in growing export deals. ... Argus’ patented iris recognition system had netted $600,000 in export sales in two years -- a considerable achievement for a new, innovative technology, he said. ... Second place went to another IT surveillance system developer, iOmniscient, based in Sydney’s Chatswood. ... iOmniscient had patented a surveillance system using artificial intelligence to detect unmoving, suspicious objects -- such as bags and boxes that could contain bombs -- in crowded areas such as airports and train stations, [Warren Dick] said."
>>> Law Enforcement, Biometrics (@ Image Understanding), Pattern Recognition, Vision, Machine Learning, Applications
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September 6, 2004: New home technology preserves independence. By Cathy Nicoll. The Daily News (access article by going to the pull-down menu on the "News" page). "Researchers are looking at ways of using computers to help people with dementia stay in their homes longer. Nick Cercone, dean of the faculty of computer science at Dalhousie University, is the principal investigator with a team of nine others across Canada. ... The research team is also studying the repetitive questions that Alzheimer’s patients ask, often driving their caregivers to distraction. They’re wondering if they can build a computer that would respond to these questions intelligently, giving the caregiver a break and calming the patient. He and two others have been looking at language and Alzheimer’s, and discovered speech patterns in transcripts of taped conversations between patients and caregives that could lead to a new diagnostic tool. They wrote a computer program that was able to classify patients as demented or non-demented, with the same accuracy as doctors."
>>> Assisitive Technologies, Natural Language Processing, Expert Systems, Applications
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September 6, 2004: Agents of Change - Autonomous agents are still in the labs but could eventually play a critical role in areas ranging from setting market prices to creating more resilient networks. By Patrick Thibodeau. Computerworld. "Over the past year, NASA has been uploading software into the Earth Observing-1 satellite, turning it into a testbed for autonomous agents. The agents -- software programs that are able to learn and can function independently -- are used to manage experiments and operate the spacecraft. The effort is part of a technology initiative that researchers say will reshape IT over the course of many years. Autonomous agents have the potential to become an extraordinarily powerful technology, with the capacity to learn, experiment and act independent of human control. Agents could ultimately improve productivity, increase software reliability and change the operation of markets, particularly supply chains. ... Making markets, supply chains, telecommunications and other systems more efficient through the use of agents is a subject of intense interest. Some 800 researchers recently gathered at Columbia University for the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems, the leading conference on the technology. ... Negotiation was one of the key agent capabilities tested at the conference's Trading Agent Competition. ... IBM is building agent technology to support its autonomic computing systems, which have the intelligence to reconfigure themselves in response to changing conditions...."
>>> Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, Space Exploration, E-Commerce, Finance, Networks, Conferences & Competitions (@ Resources for Students), Applications
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September 6, 2004: Bradley Hannigan-Daley. By Lauren Krugel. Halton Public & TheStar.com. "One might think that someone with virtually flawless grades in calculus and computer science would spend the better part of his life buried under textbooks, with a calculator and laptop close at hand. But 18-year-old Bradley Hannigan-Daley of Oakville managed to pull off a 98.6 per cent Grade 12 average while serving on his student council's executive, competing in academic tournaments and spending time with friends. ... Hannigan-Daley leaves for the University of Waterloo, where he will be studying mathematics in a co-op program. ... He's not sure where the future will take him, but says he's considered going on to study artificial intelligence and cognitive science."
>>> Resources for Students
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September 6, 2004: Let's chat, shall we? Science news briefs. post-gazette.com. "Mix scientific issues with a mug of beer -- or even a cup of joe -- and you've got something called Cafe Scientifique, a form of informal science discussion that's become popular in Europe. ... Phil Campbell, a senior research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Institute for Complex Engineered Systems, will give a short talk on medical robotics and tissue engineering, which will be followed by an hour of discussion with the audience. It is free and open to the public."
>>> Events (@ Resources for Students), Resources for the Scientific Community, Robots, Medicine
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September 5, 2004: Fossil fuel hikes a boon for new energy firms. By Chris Pillow. ThePost.ie. "Recent developments, such as rising fuel prices, renewable energy policies and carbon taxes mean that sustainable energy is not just an environmental issue, but a preferable commercial option. A small number of Irish companies have begun to tap into this high-growth area in a bid to turn sustainable energy options into profitable businesses. ... Lightwave takes a different approach to energy use. Instead of changing the way heat and electricity is produced, it has developed new ways of conserving energy supplies. ... The central idea behind the company, which has its base on the campus of UCD, is to minimise energy demands in large office buildings using artificial intelligence. The objective is to save up to 35 per cent of energy costs for clients."
>>> Smart Houses, Applications, Machine Learning; also see these related articles
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September 5, 2004: Crash course 101 - sci-fi dystopia on film. By Ty Burr. The Boston Globe & Boston.com. "It couldn't be a better time for a director's cut of 'THX 1138,' George Lucas's striking 1971 debut, to resurface in a combination theatrical revival/DVD release. ... s one of the first sci-fi dystopias to hit the screen, it set a template that has since been adapted, altered, ignored, and rediscovered. ... Some perspective: Futuristic classics such as Fritz Lang's 1927 'Metropolis' and the 1936 'Things to Come' -- made with the input of author H. G. Wells himself -- had always posited a busy, ultimately optimistic future for mankind. Then Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968) put man at the mercy of computers, aliens, and his own murderous nature, and did so with trippy high style. 'THX 1138' is a film made in the shadow of '2001,' but it was also the most successful '1984' knockoff to date, distilling the dour warnings of the George Orwell novel into imagistic visuals and cryptic dialogue."
>>> Science Fiction
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September 4, 2004: Marist to teach video, computer game skills. By Sarah Bradshaw. PoughkeepsieJournal.com. "Starting this month, Marist College will offer a noncredit online program leading to a certificate in computer and video game development in just one year. The program is offered in conjunction with the Game Institute, which provides professional training in the field of video game production and development. ... The online forum allows people from all over the world to enroll. Sales of game software generated more than $6 billion last year, according to data from NPD Interactive Entertainment. ... 'What we are seeing is a new trend in education. Using game development training and technology to teach concepts in fields like computer science, mathematics and physics creates a multidisciplinary system, which engages students in a way that most other learning models cannot,' [Joseph] Meenaghan said. Students are required to take classes in game mathematics, artificial intelligence for games, and computer, graphics and network programming."
>>> Software Development, Video Games, AI Courses & Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students), Resources for Educators, Industry Statistics, Games & Puzzles
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September 4, 2004: Robots invade the table football pitch. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist Magazine (appears on page 18 with the title: Play table football against a robot). "Fans of table football, or foosball, will no longer have to hang around at the pub waiting for a friend to turn up before they can play. A robotic foosball table will be able to give them just as good a game. ... To allow the control system to track the ball, the base of the table is made of translucent glass, tinted green. A camera underneath photographs the ball 50 times per second, and sends this data to a built-in computer that maps the ball's position. Intelligent software then works out the effect of one of the figures kicking the ball. ... [Bernhard Nebel's University of Freiburg] team is now working on being able to stop the ball and pass it -- a capability that will be essential if the robot is ever going to beat good players."
>>> Sports, Entertainment, Vision, Planning, Machine Learning, Robots, Reasoning, Applications
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September 4, 2004: Brain research? Pay it no mind. Mystery of consciousness still outwitting scientists. By Philip Marchand. The Toronto Star. "Scientists who have been trying to understand the brain have recently tried to measure neural activity of Republicans and Democrats to see if political affiliations had anything to do with brain chemistry. The results were inconclusive. ... What really caught my eye about a New York Times Magazine article on the topic was the following statement: 'One of the most celebrated insights of the past 20 years of neuroscience is the discovery -- largely associated with the work of Antonio Damasio -- that the brain's emotional systems are critical to logical decision-making. People who suffer from damaged or impaired emotional systems can score well on logic tests but often display markedly irrational behaviour in everyday life.' I'm sure Damasio has done good work, rooting around the neocortex. But what does it say for neuroscience that one of its 'most celebrated insights' is something we've known for three or four millennia? ... The bravest of the neuroscientists are trying to tackle the toughest nut of all, the mystery of consciousness. ... A professor named Howard Gardner, for example, whose 1985 book The Mind's New Science helped to popularize the field of cognitive science, told Horgan that questions such as consciousness and free will were 'particularly resistant' to the scientific habit of trying to break down a subject into its most elemental parts, like neural pathways in the brain. ... The human brain is so complex it simply defies the same kind of analysis that scientists devote to subatomic particles or human immune systems. 'Like neuroscientists, researchers in evolutionary psychology and artificial intelligence are both bumping up against the Humpty Dumpty dilemma,' [John] Horgan writes. 'They can break the mind into pieces, but they have no idea how to put it back together again.'"
>>> Emotion, Creativity, Cognitive Science, Reasoning, Philosophy, Neural Networks, Machine Learning
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September 3, 2004: Queen’s prof builds pool-playing robot. By Paul Gurnsey. Kingston This Week, "Michael Greenspan is no pool shark, but the Queen’s prof has built a robot he hopes one day might rival the best players in the world. ... With the help of a group of grad students and some government seed money, Greenspan is now a year into the artificial intelligence project at Queen’s University, where he is an associate professor in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and School of Computing. ... Deep Green looks more like something in a dentist’s office with the end of a pool cue attached to it. Making it understand the intricacies of pool will depend on equipping it with four different technical areas of expertise. ... The next aspect is giving the robot 'vision' -- Greenspan’s main area of research. ... The project may seem like fun, but Greenspan -- who is also involved in another robot project to retrieve and repair satellites from outer space -- says teaching a machine to play pool is serious work with 'a number of possible benefits,' he says. 'When we start to achieve goals we previously thought were uniquely human capabilities, we redefine ourselves.'"
>>> Sports, Vision, Applications; also see this related article
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September 3, 2004: Software firm finds gold in diverse data mining. By Mary Ann Azevedo. Houston Business Journal / also available from MSNBC (9/5/04). "Customers of PolyVista range from technology giant Hewlett-Packard Co. and global energy conglomerate British Petroleum to telecom heavyweight Verizon and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. The company founded by Shabhaz Anwar in 1998 helps users discover anomalies, identify trends and pinpoint relationships within huge databases over a short period of time. The data is mined by letting unstructured text interact with structured mathematical information, according to Anwar, who uses decks of cards to describe the software system. 'Imagine having six decks of cards all mixed up in a big pile,' Anwar explains. 'It's a tedious and time-consuming process to separate them manually into six separate packs. PolyVista takes the pile and automatically stacks the cards in order, in six separate stacks -- all in one step.' The process yields nuggets of information that humans might miss in the overwhelming abundance of data, he says, and the software can be customized to meet the needs of diverse users. ... The company's success can be attributed to the fact that it focuses on data mining, which is increasingly becoming more a part of data access for most companies, according to [William] McKnight."
>>> Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Business, Applications, Machine Learning
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September 3, 2004: EU-backed group researches digital home. By John Blau. IDG News & PC Advisor. "Perhaps the quickest and most efficient way to achieve end-to-end operability of networked devices in the home is to open the development of middleware to as many participants as possible. That's the aim of a research project, called Amigo, which is being sponsored by the European Union (E.U.). ... [Harmke] De Groot talked about the role of 'ambient intelligence.' Ambient intelligence, according to a link published on De Groot's Amigo Web page(http://www.extra.research.philips.com/euprojects/amigo/), is characterized by four basic elements: ubiquity, awareness, intelligence and natural interaction. ... A total 15 companies are participating in the Amigo project...."
>>> Smart Houses, Systems, Interfaces, Vision, Natural Language Processing, Speech, Applications
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September 3, 2004: Holonics -whole new era for machines. Process may be more reliable, lower-cost alternative for manufacturing. By Jim Mackinnon. Beacon Journal. "Jim Barlow thinks he has found a way to save manufacturing from disappearing in the United States. It's called holonics. That's a short word for a complex, evolving process using state-of-the-art technology and software to design, build and implement flexible manufacturing systems. In some circles it is also called intelligent automation. Barlow is among those who believe holonic manufacturing, which is still in its infancy, is the next generation of manufacturing technology and will revolutionize how America makes things. ... A lot of work developing holonic manufacturing is being done in Northeast Ohio, primarily at Rockwell Automation's advanced technology laboratory. Work is also being done in Europe and Asia. 'We've been doing work on this the last seven or eight years,'' said Kenwood Hall, vice president of architecture and systems technology at the Mayfield Heights lab. 'It's a form of distributed intelligence.'"
>>> Multi-Agent Systems, Manufacturing, Robots, Applications, Agents
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September 3, 2004: Looking for a job? Google might hire you. Newindpress.com. "Google, the world’s largest search engine, is hiring. Great! What’s even more exciting: It is hiring for the recently opened research and development centre in Bangalore, its latest full-fledged engineering facility outside Mountain View headquarters in California. ... The Bangalore office’s charter is to innovate, implement and launch new Google technologies and products. 'Anything is fair game and the team here gets to decide its agenda.' The focus will be on fundamental areas of computer science, including information retrieval, distributed systems, machine learning, data mining, theoretical computer science, statistics and user interfaces."
>>> Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students)
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September 3, 2004: Helping man and machine communicate in perfect harmony. IST Results. "By pioneering the commercial use of sophisticated natural language technologies, SemanticEdge is enabling users to rapidly find information from the Internet, intranets and databases, and make it available anytime, anywhere from any digital device. ... Working together with Nuance, a speech recognition company, SemanticEdge successfully implemented a voice-activated customer service system for Sparda Bank Hamburg. Previously the bank’s 140,000 customers had to navigate a lengthy and inconvenient touchtone menu to get answers to queries such as account status and bills. Now the entire first level of customer service is available via German language-based speech recognition and the new system processes over 50,000 customer service calls per month."
>>> Customer Service, Information Retrieval, Knowledge Management, Natural Language Processing, Applications
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September 3, 2004: Search and rescue robots. Associated Press / available from The Sydney Morning Herald (no fee reg. req'd.). "Amid collapsed walls and debris, arms and legs of survivors waved through the rubble. The body parts were artificial. But they were the most important component of a mock disaster area set up at an artificial intelligence conference late last month at the San Jose McEnery Convention Centre. ... Robotics researchers are focusing on using small robots to venture where humans cannot go to search for survivors of earthquakes, collapsed mines and other disasters. 'Search and rescue is one opportunity we are pursuing,' said Mark Yim, manager of smart electronics mechanical systems at the Palo Alto Research Centre, or PARC. ... Robin Murphy, who heads the Centre for Robot Assisted Search and Rescue at the University of South Florida, took robots to the World Trade Centre disaster area after the September 11 terrorist attacks."
>>> Robots, Hazards & Disasters, Conferences & Competitions (@ Resources for Students)
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September 3, 2004: SiamGuru speeds searches by tweaking engine for Thai. The Nation. "While many Internet users are familiar with SiamGuru’s search engine, which was launched in June 2000, few realise that the technology developed by Surapan [Meknavin] and his SiamGuru team required dealing with unique Thai-language structural issues, particularly the lack of spacing between words. ... Siamguru then developed a search engine with algorithms that could swiftly sort through any data input typed in Thai. The power of SiamGuru’s search engine is derived from the company’s expertise in a branch of artificial intelligence called 'natural language processing' -- or NLP. ... Major banks and financial institutions use SiamGuru’s core search engine to help them accumulate CRM [customer relationship management] data for their databases."
>>> Information Retrieval, Business, Natural Language Processing, Applications
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September 2, 2004: 'Write smart software, forget the Net'. Press Trust of India / available from The Economic Times. "The internet is going to have only minor impact on future businesses. Expert systems - essentially new kind of intellectual software - is what is going to transform future businesses, says [Larry] Smith, who teaches Economics at University of Waterloo, in a new book 'Beyond the Internet: How Expert Systems will truly transform business.' Expert systems are sets of computer applications for businesses, systems now in development that will impose order on information chaos, screen for corruption in the data stream, force us to make correct decisions, diminish mistakes, reduce waste and decrease waste and decrease costs. 'While the internet merely helps us talk, expert systems will change the very nature of human work,' says Smith. ... 'Instead of mere downloading information, the decision support programmes or expert systems as they are called, deliver solutions. They do so by organising and verifying knowledge, and by using this embedded knowledge to reorganise work, increase efficiency, reduce waste and prevent errors,' says Smith."
>>> Expert Systems, Business, Applications
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September 2, 2004: When E-Mail Points the Way Down the Rabbit Hole. Essay by Kirk Johnson. The New York Times (no fee reg. req'd.). "I've been getting more and more spam lately that promises to get rid of other spam. ... The very basis of the spam wars is a search for better analysis of the way human beings think. ... 'It brings home the idea of technology living an independent existence - a parallel universe of computer programs living in a world of their own, having their own quarrels,' said Sherry Turkle, the director of the Center on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 'Spam is a great example of autonomous technology raising philosophical questions, and it's playing out in everybody's in-box day after day.' Science fiction writers have theorized for years, of course, about the moment when the gloriously ambivalent machines of human creation develop consciousness. Usually, as in movies like 'The Terminator' or '2001: A Space Odyssey,' it comes to no good. But in science fiction, the engines of artificial intelligence are almost invariably the products of Big Science, developed in fancy labs by idealistic dreamers with good intentions. There's usually a moral about best-laid plans. A machine consciousness that evolved from spam would be quite different, because the spam wars - and here's where it starts to get scary again - are shaped, to a great extent, by the tiny number of people who actually reply to spam solicitations. ... Some theorists, like Professor Turkle at M.I.T., say the first real flash points of spam and human identity might come when our ever more sophisticated anti-spam programs start to understand us a little too well. ... 'As spam becomes more and more sophisticated, most people think your filter will be developed by a smart agent observing you carefully, so the question becomes, what kinds of information do people want their software agent to know?' Professor Turkle said."
>>> Filtering, Agents, Interfaces, Philosophy, Science Fiction, Ethical & Social Implications
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September 2, 2004: Programmed for stardom. By Sara Kincaid. Arizona Daily Sun. "This Coconino High School senior writes computer programs that are out of this world. Stars, planets and, recently, asteroids are the topics of programs that Erik Kuefler creates for Lowell Observatory and a science program this summer in Socorro, N.M. ... Kuefler attended the Summer Science Program, Inc. at New Mexico Tech. The Summer Science Program is a nonprofit corporation with several higher education institutions involved with the program, such as New Mexico Tech, Stanford University and the University of California at Los Angeles. ... He plans to study computer science in college, although he has yet to decide where he'll go to college. Ideally, he'd like to specialize in artificial intelligence, he said."

September 2, 2004: There and back again: a robot’s tale. By Ben Oldfield. The Phoenix Online. "Robots programmed by two Swarthmore students won top honors in a national competition in San Jose, Calif., continuing the college’s five-year winning streak in the event. Frederick Heckel ’05, Nicolas Ward ’05 and engineering professor Bruce Maxwell competed in the American Association for Artificial Intelligence’s competition, which was held July 27-29. Along with them were two robots, Frodo and Gollum, named after J.R.R. Tolkien’s characters. ... Frodo and Gollum competed in the competition’s urban search-and-rescue category, run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, as they have each year. ... 'There’s paper, rubble and chicken wire all over the place,' said Heckel. 'Hidden throughout are manikins that are either moving, yelling for help or staying still.'"
>>> Robots, Hazards & Disasters, Conferences & Competitions (@ Resources for Students)
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September 2, 2004: Finally, a Car That Talks Back. By John Gartner. Wired News. "Honda will soon become the first auto manufacturer to include, as standard equipment in some models, technology that enables drivers to converse with their cars about where to go and how to get there. Using voice-recognition and text-to-speech technology from IBM, the 2005 Acura RL, available in October, and Honda Odyssey, available in September, will produce maps and 'speak' turn-by-turn directions from the navigation system. Drivers will also be able to make phone calls or crank up the air conditioning, all while keeping their eyes on the road and their hands on the wheel. ... [Barbara] Britt said the system also takes into account regional differences in speech patterns...."
>>> Speech, Natural Language Processing, Transportation, Interfaces, Applications
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September 1, 2004: Science park aims for Korean link-up. The Journal & ic Newcastle. "South Korean investment is being sought to back developments at a Sunderland science park. St Peter's Gate is the only UK science park giving presentations at the prestigious Innotech conference in South Korea later this month. ... Science park manager Julia Macfarlane (correct) and tenant Phillip Tann hope to set up partnerships with South Korean companies by showing them what the park, managed by the University of Sunderland, has to offer. Mr Tann, an artificial intelligence (AI) scientist, will show companies the innovative ways in which he has pushed the boundaries of AI using new and evolutionary methods."
>>> Applications, AI Academic Departments (@ Resources for Students)
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September 1, 2004: Marshfield woman studies technology's effect on humans. By Matt Conn. Marshfield News-Herald. "The refrigerator said you were out of milk. Your virtual pet needs more virtual water or it will die. ... 'We don't understand the psychological ramifications of that,' said Julie Hillan of Marshfield, creator of Frontiernumber4, an online publication that focuses on artificial intelligence. 'Technology is developing so rapidly, we can't keep up, even academically.' That takes a multidisciplinary approach, including social sciences, neuroscience and some would even argue biology, said Hillan, 34. ... Such frontiers are being explored through the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute, a nonprofit organization that describes its mission as creating powerful, ethically positive artificial general intelligence. Founder Ben Goertzel, a former computer science research associate professor at the University of New Mexico, examined the distinction of human and artificial development in a recent contribution to Frontiernumber4."
>>> Interfaces, Ethical & Social Implications, Robots, Science Fiction
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September 1, 2004: From the science magazines - Do deaf children have a right to the sound of silence? By Jenny Kleeman. The Guardian. "Assuming we do all live to reach triple figures, there's a chance that we might have to contend with robot enemies, claimed Focus (September). Sunny Bains asked whether advances in robotics could endow machines with the 'means, motive and opportunity' for world domination. Most experts believe that 'machine intelligence will eventually be cracked', and with machines already being used for nefarious purposes, in the form of stealth fighters and smart bombs, a world of Terminators is not entirely inconceivable."

September 1, 2004: Engineer breaking ground in robotics. By Noriyuki Yoshida. Daily Yomiuri on-Line. "Toshitada Doi, 62, has become the representative director and president of Sony Intelligence Dynamics Laboratories Inc., which Sony Corp. established in July to develop an advanced form of artificial intelligence by fusing its achievements in robot technology. 'Our aim is to develop home information appliances--a computing system that can hold everyday conversations with humans,' he said. ... Doi, as an engineer, said his latest challenge was in a new field, what he calls intelligence dynamics. His challenge is create a robot that can mature and learn from its environment and experiences."
>>> Robots, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning
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September 1, 2004: Domestic bliss through mechanical marvels? By Kevin Maney. USA Today. "Never mind the humanoid Automated Domestic Assistants walking rich people's pets in the movie I, Robot, or the accordion-armed Robot B9 in TV classic Lost in Space warning of danger on lonely planets. The real force driving the development of personal robots -- and what will eventually create demand for them in the marketplace -- is aging baby boomers. That's the secret among robotics researchers and budding robot companies. As the horde of boomers become old, they increasingly will be unable to care for themselves or their homes. They'll face a social and medical system straining to help them. But they'll be comfortable with technology. ... In a way, robotics stands at a juncture similar to the earliest stabs at personal computing in the 1970s, when mammoth computers were familiar in business and government but unheard of in homes. Robots today help build cars on assembly lines and explore caves for the military. Eventually, they will scoot around our homes, as much a part of life as e-mail and Google. At a recent conference here of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, robots competed to rescue dummies in a disaster mock-up, while a robot named George greeted attendees as they arrived. Dozens of teenagers -- a next generation of roboticists -- showed off their robot creations in a contest. Presentations by scientists ran from the esoteric... to the practical topic du jour ("Intelligent Technology for Adaptive Aging," by the University of Michigan's Martha Pollack). ... Robots that are likely to serve the elderly seem to fall into three broad categories. Though the categories don't officially have names, you could call them homebots, carebots and joybots. A look at those categories speaks volumes about what's going on in robotics -- and what's still beyond technology's reach. ... 'Whether or not you have to love your robot is another question,' Brooks says. 'I don't need my ATM to be cute.' Here is a great point of departure between U.S. and Japanese robotics research. U.S. labs and companies generally approach robots as tools. The Japanese approach them as beings. That explains a lot about robot projects coming out of Japan."
>>> Robots, Assisitive Technologies, Household Appliances, Autonomous Vehicles, Hazards & Disasters, Multi-Agent Systems, Conferences & Competitions (@ Resources for Students), Applications
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September 1, 2004: Turn Search Into Find. By Nathaniel Palmer. Transform Magazine. "Web-based customer self-service is gaining rapid adoption as one of the most promising opportunities for customer-facing firms in all industries to decrease customer transaction costs while maintaining or improving service quality. ... Information retrieval, or search, software is built upon two fundamental components: an indexing engine that maps and categorizes content, and a retrieval engine that deploys algorithms to find and return indexed content. ... A taxonomy refers to structures built to organize information -- a collection of relevant topics and subtopics arranged in a hierarchical structure. Humans use taxonomies to make sense of formerly unstructured information. ... Taxonomy and classification within customer self-service solutions is enabled by software that creates hierarchical structures and defines characteristics throughout the branches of the structures. Once these structures are in place, classification is accomplished by parsing collections of content and assigning individual documents to appropriate categories within the taxonomy structure. This can be done manually (with the aid of software) or automatically based on specific algorithms (see 'Behind the Jargon: Five Approaches to Classification')."

September 2004: Einstein = Man of Conscience². SA Perspectives by Staff Editor. Scientific American (subscription req'd.). "[C]ritics sometimes suggest that science and politics should not mix. But Einstein knew that scientists have a moral responsibility to explain their work, including its political implications. To argue otherwise is to say that science does not matter."
>>> Ethical & Social Implications
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