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JUNE 2005 June 30, 2005: Earlier predictions from Vision users. CNN.com. "Here is what some of you predicted would happen in the next 10 or 20 years. Got a vision? E-mail it to us at Vision. ... [What follows are excerpts from some of the letters that appear in this report.] ** Top 10 predictions: In the 21st century, I bet the following 10 things happening: ... 7) Wireless robotics and artificial intelligence will be fine tuned (especially in military purposes, ie. Unmanned Mobile Turrets/Warplanes). Households will begin purchasing smaller robots that automatically do things such as mowing lawn, clearing snow, vacuum floor, clean windows, and even garden! ... ** Who will be in control? There is only one unanswerable question regarding the future of mankind. Will conscious computers attain spiritual enlightenment before it's too late for mankind? The expectation of future A.I. (artificial intelligence) machines which know they exist as we and other animals do is all but inevitable. ... ** Energy and automation: Advances in computer technology will bring developments in the following areas: ... Automation: Intelligent and mechanical automation will replace most everyone in existing jobs. This has serious ramifications. ... ** Virtual reality: The next 20 years will bring technologies that are difficult to imagine now. We will be able to download people's personalities and memories to a computer, which will enable them to live in virtual reality. ... ** Little will change: I believe that many of the visionaries on the Vision Web site are very far-fetched. Wasn't it imagined that around the year 2000 we would be driving flying vehicles like in the 'Jetsons.' I can't see any around in 2005. How about the 'robots taking over our lives' theory? I don't see that happening either. ... ** Super brains: By the time supercomputers can download the 'brains' of the rich and of geniuses, the common folk will be able to get implants that will hook up to computers." June 29, 2005: Severe Storms And Reducing Their Impact On Communities. Hearing before the US Senate Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee's Disaster Prevention and Predication Subcommittee. "On Wednesday June 29, 2005, at 2:30 p.m., in room 253 of the Russell Building, the Senate Commerce Committee's Disaster Prevention and Predication Subcommittee will hold a hearing on how effectively the National Weather Service is at predicting the impact of severe storms and what can be done to increase their accuracy."
>>> Atmoshpheric Science, Applications June 29, 2005: Your brain - Search engine, or calculator? By Michael Kanellos. CNET News.com. "For years, cognitive theorists have likened the human brain to a computer that completes tasks by breaking down complex problems into a series of small yes/no decisions. A recent study, however, shows that the brain adjusts its thinking as more data arrives. In a study published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Michael Spivey, a psycholinguist and associate professor of psychology at Cornell University, tracked the mouse movements of 42 undergraduate students while working at a computer. ... Interestingly, the whole field of artificial intelligence has moved from a Boolean model, in which systems guide themselves through a series of embedded rules, to a Bayesian model, in which machines guide themselves by studying past experiences. Bayesian probability also underlies search engines." June 29, 2005: Web Content by and for the Masses. By John Markoff. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "While Hollywood studios have generally scoffed at competition from amateurs, the most striking example of user-generated content may come from Spore, an online game being developed by Will Wright, the developer of the Sims series of video games. Spore, scheduled for release next year, will incorporate a variety of software tools that let users 'evolve' a civilization. Rather than a massively multiplayer game, the current fashion in online role playing, it will be a 'massively single player' game. Although they will all be connected by the Internet, game players will not interact with one another, but rather with the civilizations that other players have evolved. The entertainment value will be in exploring civilizations created by other players and interacting with characters controlled by artificial-intelligence software. Spore is intended to appeal to young game players who have no interest in being entertained passively. 'We have a whole generation of kids who feel entitled to be game designers,' Mr. Wright said." June 29, 2005: Invasion of the Humanoid Robots - a special report slide show. BusinessWeekOnline. "Japanese electronics companies are hard at work on a new generation for the home and office that can do anything from baby-sit to send e-mail Japan's demographics betray a declining population, but one group is growing fast: humanoid robots. ... Meet some of the latest humanoid robots coming out of Tokyo ...." June 29, 2005: Robots help patients help themselves. By Jim Ritter. Chicago Sun-Times. "Lokomat is among the robotic devices being showcased this week at the International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics hosted by the Rehab Institute and Northwestern University. Robots, initially used in car factories and other heavy industries, are being adapted for use by amputees and people with spinal cord injuries, strokes, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease and other disabilities. Here's a sampling of the rapidly advancing technology: .... Robot technology raises ethical issues that will be addressed at the conference: Will robonurses remove the human touch from medicine? ..." June 28, 2005: Microsoft, Japanese universities bolster ties. Reuters / available from ZDNet. "Microsoft is bolstering its joint research with Japanese universities, targeting such areas as security and natural language processing, the world's largest software maker said Tuesday. The company will set up a collaboration network on July 1, hoping to promote exchange with researchers at top schools including the University of Tokyo, which is often called the Harvard of Japan. ... Gates, in Japan this week to meet academics and business partners, said he hoped the joint research will yield results in the areas of security, natural language understanding, speech recognition and user interface software. ... Microsoft expects to spend $6.7 billion globally on research and development this year." June 28, 2005: Exploring new frontiers. By John Michael. Drayton Valley Western Review. "This summer, three local students will explore new frontiers as they spend time at the University of Alberta’s research labs in Edmonton as part of the U of A’s 21st annual Women in Scholarship, Engineering, Science and Technology (WISEST) summer research program. ... [Emma] Rapati, who attends Warburg school, will spend the summer in the U of A’s computer science lab, developing software for interactive games. ... [Amanda] Brewer, who attends Frank Maddock high school, will study artificial intelligence this summer. She is not sure at this point in time if she would pursue robotics as a career choice, although she may decide otherwise by the end of the WISEST program." June 27, 2005: A world of hunter-killer machines is a frightening prospect. Aretha Williams' column. San Antonio Express-News & MySA.com. "Dear Aretha: I just read this article in Wired about robots that can reproduce themselves and it made me think of you. Get ready! Not only mass produced military robots, but NOW they can reproduce themselves. ... Dear Aretha: This is another robot alert from me. Now the robots have begun invading the hospitals. What's next? ... Dear Aretha: Your column on battlefield robotics serves to demonstrate clearly how utterly divorced from reality you are. ..." June 27, 2005: Computers Get The Meaning. Software language uses artificial intelligence and language analysis to help computers reason more precisely than they do now. By Eric Chabrow. InformationWeek. "Developed by federal government researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and colleagues in France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom, the process-specification-language software should make computers reason much more precisely than they do now. The notion of process underlies the entire manufacturing cycle, coordinating the workflow within engineering and shop-floor manufacturing. The ISO 18629 PSL software employs artificial intelligence and language analysis to denote computer commands in the framework of a production plan. ... The International Organization for Standardization, which has endorsed six sections of the standard, is reviewing the last of its three sections. Once ISO gives its blessing, software vendors can begin to use the language to build a variety of advanced manufacturing systems." June 27, 2005: KlearVision Software Now Downloadable. By E&P Staff. Editor & Publisher. "Photo-D relies on a rule-based Intelligent Expert System to automatically optimize and enhance digital image files, preparing them for printing or viewing. Using fuzzy logic and artificial intelligence algorithms, it emulates the decision-making expertise of a traditional color expert or digital-imaging professional to analyze, correct, and produce high-quality image files." June 27, 2005: Monitored by MedMined IT, infections decline. Birmingham Business Journal. " The Alabama Hospital Quality Initiative helped six pilot medical centers across the state reduce their rate of infections by more than 19 percent between 2002 and 2004, significantly lowering the financial burden for payers. ... Hospital-acquired, or nosocomial, infections affect nearly 2 million patients each year nationwide, contributing to roughly 88,000 deaths. MedMined's Data Mining Surveillance service, currently in use by more than 100 hospitals across the country, uses artificial intelligence to monitor possible warning signs of hospital-acquired infections." June 27, 2005: Space station gets HAL-like computer. By Maggie McKee. NewScientist.com news. "A voice-operated computer assistant is set to be used in space for the first time on Monday -- its operators hope it proves more reliable than 'HAL', the treacherous speaking computer in the movie 2001. Called Clarissa, the program will initially talk astronauts on the International Space Station through tests of onboard water supplies. But its developers hope it will eventually be used for all computer-related work on the station. ... Clarissa queries astronauts about the details of what they need to accomplish in a particular procedure, then reads through step-by-step instructions. Astronauts control the program using simple commands like 'next' or more complicated phrases, such as 'set challenge verify mode on steps three through fourteen'." June 27, 2005: Loyola scholars study death sentence. By Coleman Warner. The Times Picayune & NOLA.com. "Their research isn't easy to explain, and its uses aren't yet clear. But Loyola University professors Stamos Karamouzis and Dee Wood Harper are drawing worldwide notice with their development of a computing system that can more or less predict whether a sentence of death in America will actually be carried out. ... Findings have been discussed at international conferences on criminology and artificial intelligence. ... The professors have developed a multiprocessor computing system, called an artificial neural network, and 'trained' it to predict the fate of a person on death row based upon data unrelated to facts of the criminal case." June 27, 2005: Toward a `scientific revolution' - Imagine vehicle that avoids crashes. By Matt Nauman. MercuryNews.com. "With Stanford University, and organizational and monetary help from the valley's venture capital firm Mohr, Davidow Ventures, the VW lab is pursuing an entry in the DARPA Grand Challenge. The federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency sponsors the event with a $2 million prize for a driverless vehicle that can travel up to 175 miles in the desert in 10 hours. ... Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford professor and artificial-intelligence expert heading the effort, sees autonomous driving as 'the beginning of a scientific revolution.' The goal is to reduce the more than 40,000 American deaths from car crashes each year." June 27, 2005: Emotional issue. The Engineer. "An emotion-sensitive computer system that can detect customers’ anger or frustration and react accordingly could be used in BT call centres. The UK telecoms giant is a partner in the EU-backed ERMIS project, which has created a prototype computer character able to understand and replicate a variety of human emotions. These range from straightforward anger through to more subtle states such as sadness or boredom. ... Martin Spott, BT’s principal researcher on the project, said: 'We are looking into using this technology in call centres to help in customer service by detecting the caller’s underlying emotions and reacting appropriately.' ... Spott believes emotion-recognition systems like ERMIS could be used to care for the elderly within an ambient technology framework. If the system detected that an elderly person had been unhappy for a long period, it would automatically alert a staff member." June 26, 2005: St. Paul's School - A place to 'learn for the sake of learning.' Summer study session draws students statewide. By Chris Baxter. Concord Monitor Online. " The five-week intense summer session [of the St. Paul's School Advanced Studies Program], which began Friday, gives students a preview of life away from home and more challenging schoolwork. ... [Jeff] Mekler, who hopes to study engineering in the future, enrolled in the artificial intelligence class. 'I'm excited to discuss the possibilities - and build a robot,' Mekler said." June 25, 2005: Robot cleaner ready to serve. By Li Fangchao. China Daily. "China’s first robot for use around the house is expected to be available by the end of the year from the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) in Northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, university researchers said on Friday. Hong Bingrong, the professor in charge of the programme, told China Daily that the university is developing a humanoid robot designed exclusively for family use. The half-metre-tall wheeled robot can talk, do the vacuuming and guard the house." June 24, 2005: Navy looks into how to control next-generation autonomous unmanned aircraft. By John Keller. Military & Aerospace Electronics. "DTI [Defense Technologies Inc.] engineers are working under terms of an $8.8 million contract awarded June 22 from the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division at Patuxent River Naval Air Station, Md., for research into a prototype intelligent autonomous unmanned control station. The intent is to reduce military manning levels by introducing more machine autonomy into future unmanned vehicles." June 24, 2005: NASA, Xerox to Demonstrate 'Virtual Crew Assistant'. NASA press release / available from SpaceRef. "Intelligent conversation with robots - long the bread and butter of science fiction authors - soon may take another step closer to reality for astronauts on the International Space Station. Scientists from NASA Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley and Xerox Corporation (NYSE:XRX - News) will demonstrate a sophisticated, voice-operated computer system on June 26 at the Association for Computational Linguists' 25th annual meeting at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Called Clarissa, the system was developed in an effort to ease astronaut workload. 'Clarissa is a fully voice-operated 'virtual crew assistant,' enabling astronauts to be more efficient with their hands and eyes and to give full attention to the task while they navigate through the procedure using spoken commands,' said Beth Ann Hockey, project lead on the team that developed Clarissa at NASA Ames. ... Clarissa is 'hands-free' and responds to astronauts' voice commands, reading procedure steps out loud as they work, helping keep track of which steps have been completed, and supporting flexible voice-activated alarms and timers. ... In 2004, Clarissa lead implementer Manny Rayner of NASA Ames contacted Xerox researcher Jean-Michel Renders of Xerox Research Centre Europe in Grenoble, France, about a possible collaboration. They hoped that Xerox's experience in machine learning, linguistics and text categorization would increase the system's accuracy on the 'open microphone' task. ... The technology developed by Renders to address the NASA speech-recognition problem is also being used at Xerox to improve categorization results for printed or digital documents." June 24, 2005: This week in robots. By Steven Musil. CNET News.com. "Robots are being enlisted for a variety of tasks these days, from military manuevers with guns to more dangerous jobs--keeping an eye on your toddlers." June 24, 2005: How-to book shows secrets behind 'bots. By S. Jane Szabo. Anchorage Daily News. "C-3P0 and R2D2, eat your hearts out. Dennis Vecera's third-graders have created competitors for robot fame. Vecera is an Ursa Minor Elementary School teacher who has included robot-building in his curriculum for 16 years. This year, he and his students added a new dimension to the effort by working with not only matter but printed matter. They made a booklet, 'Build a Remote-Controlled Showbot.' ... It centers on a building primer, with side trips into the history of robotics and current and future uses. Movies with characters like 'Gort' (from 'The Day the Earth Stood Still') are covered, along with toys such as Furby, Lego Mindstorms and Robosapien." June 24 - 30, 2005: Tickle Me Elmo With an Inferiority Complex - The Needies want you to want them . . . or else --- just like real-life obsessives. By Chris Ziegler. Orange County Weekly (OC Weekly; Volume 10, Number 42). "Once upon a time, there was Tickle Me Elmo. But this year’s hottest holiday toy might just be the Needies, the gift that keeps on taking: a codependent stuffed animal with a supersophisticated computer brain that lets it know when you’re paying attention to it . . . and when you’re not. ... The Needies team -- known as Codependent Designs -- use the term 'bleeding-edge' to describe their toy, and they’re right. Emotions are the last real frontier of robot research; as artificial intelligence grows more and more sophisticated, it develops a concurrent capacity for artificial emotions. British futurologist Ian Pearson predicts superhuman machine consciousness -- a computer that can think and feel -- before 2020. ... Beneath the novelty of the Needies is a morass of psychology and philosophy, the sort of issues one might find not in Bradbury but in Philip K. Dick: As our machines become more human-like, do we ourselves become more machine-like?" June 24, 2005: Sims on steroids - researchers to study society of computer-based agents. By Peter Clarke. EETimes.com. "A team of European academics is set to take the computer simulation of artificial worlds further than it has been taken before and create a world of beings that can interact, evolve and learn. The researchers hope the computer-hosted beings will create their own language and pass it from 'parents' to 'children', even at the risk that the language may not be understood by their academic observers. ... [T]he European Union's NEW-TIES project is expected to have implications for the design of computer systems, for agent-based computer programming, for ambient intelligence systems, and for the study of linguistics and sociology. ... The project is being conducted by a consortium of researchers in artificial intelligence, language evolution, agent-based simulation and evolutionary computing, drawn from universities in the Netherlands, the U.K. and Hungary.... The agent population is being given three types of ability to learn; individual learning, evolutionary learning and social learning." June 23, 2005: Today in History. CNA News, Government Information Office, Republic of China. "1912: Alan Mathison Turing, British mathematician and computer expert, is born. He pioneered the Turing machine, which greatly advanced computer development." June 23, 2005: Marketers Scan Blogs For Brand Insights. By William M. Bulkeley. The Wall Street Journal. "Many marketers suspect there are probably some valuable insights contained in the Web logs produced by the estimated 12 million online diarists. But in the cacophony of trivia, vitriol and bombast that fills the blogosphere, useful nuggets have been hard to find. Now, a growing number of marketers are using new technology to analyze blogs and other 'consumer-generated media' -- a category that includes chat groups, message boards and electronic forums -- to hear what is being said online about new products, old ad campaigns and aging brands. ... Intelliseek and most other blog-watching services combine technology with some human analysis. ... The technologies make use of software technologies known as 'natural-language processing' and 'unstructured-data mining' to understand even ungrammatical writing. ... Polaroid recently found that consumers online frequently discuss photo longevity and archiving, making that an important issue in product development." June 23, 2005: The robots are coming. By Mireia Pomar. ireland.com / available from eircom net. "Can you believe that there are dog robots that can roam the streets in search of toxic chemicals? It might sound like the next Hollywood science fiction film, but in fact, all these robots already exist, and they will be on display this summer in Dublin. Save the Robots is the name of the exhibition where science fiction becomes science fact. It opened to the public yesterday at the Ark cultural centre in Temple Bar, Dublin, and will run until late September. Visitors will be able to see and operate all kinds of robots, including veteran robots from the 18th century right up to the latest in robot technology. ... This summer and for the first time in Europe, Dublin will welcome the International Robot Talent Show, also known as 'Artbots'. " June 23, 2005: The simple things are hardest. Alok Jha meets Igor Aleksander, an engineer who isn't afraid of treading on philosophers' toes as he attempts to replicate consciousness in a machine. The Guardian. "'Consciousness is an incredibly delicate subject because it offends,' says the emeritus professor of neural systems engineering at Imperial College London. 'It's a subject that scientific groups kept away from. They said it was a philosophical concept.' Traditionally, research on making a computer do anything remotely human-like has been the domain of artificial intelligence. Aleksander says he is too much of a maverick to follow that herd. 'I never went along with the mainstream of artificial intelligence,' he says. 'I don't like the words artificial intelligence because the intelligence of a human being has to do with being good at this, being good at that. Whereas the intelligence of an artificial system consists in doing very simple things.' ... [H]ow would consciousness be useful in a machine? ... 'The ethical question of any machine that is built has to considered at the time you build the machine,' says Aleksander. 'What's that machine going to be capable of doing? Under what conditions will it do it, under what conditions could it do harm?' He says these are engineering problems rather than ethical dilemmas. 'A properly functioning conscious machine is going to drive your car and it's going to drive it safely. It will be very pleased when it does that...."
>>> AI Overview, Philosophy, Cognitive Science, Ethical & Social Implications, Neural Networks, Interviews; also see this related article June 23, 2005: How the Web changes your reading habits. By Gregory M. Lamb. The Christian Science Monitor. "Dr. Chi, of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California, has found out one thing already. Almost all his reading - text messages, e-mails, journal articles, even books - is done on-screen. Computers and the Internet are changing the way people read. Thus far, search engines and hyperlinks, those underlined words or phrases that when clicked take you to a new Web page, have turned the online literary voyage into a kind of U-pick island-hop. Far more is in store. ... The reading experience online 'should be better than on paper,' Chi says. He's part of a group at PARC developing what it calls ScentHighlights, which uses artificial intelligence to go beyond highlighting your search words in a text. It also highlights whole sections of text it determines you should pay special attention to, as well as other words or phrases that it predicts you'll be interested in. 'Techniques like ScentHighlights are offering the kind of reading that's above and beyond what paper can offer,' Chi says." June 23, 2005: Enlisting robots for day care. By Michael Kanellos. CNET News.com. " Rubi, a teacher's assistant at the Early Childhood Education Center in San Diego, has eyes sometimes in back of her head, along with antennas and a couple of microprocessors. The robot is part of an experiment at the University of California San Diego to study how robots and humans interact. Rubi is capable of tracking heads, detecting faces and interpreting basic expressions. Additionally, it can teach songs and -- through the touch-screen -- conjure up interactive games. The robot is also animated with Bayesian artificial intelligence, meaning that it compiles data on its past experiences and changes its behavior to try to achieve certain outcomes. ... [T]he researchers want to study how robots can be built that will interact with humans more on a social level." June 22, 2005: Robo-pups created with curiosity in mind. By Will Knight. NewScientist.com news. "A litter of robotic puppies exhibiting a form of artificial curiosity is being put through kindergarten at Sony's research and development lab in Paris, France. The Aibo pups display an innate artificial curiosity similar to that seen in baby animals. They slowly learn to explore the surrounding world, before playing with toys and trying to communicate with other Aibo dogs. ... Each of the new Aibo dogs was given two software control mechanisms. Firstly, a 'low-level learning system' which controls simple behaviour but also tries to predict how this will affect the surrounding sensory world - how kicking a ball will cause it to move across the floor, for example. Secondly, a 'meta-learning system' which analyses the accuracy of predictions made by the low-level system and controls overall 'motivation'. Interaction between these two components is critical to the reprogrammed Aibos' uncannily inquisitive nature. ... [Pierre-Yves Oudeyer] believes the research could eventually help robot designers create machines that are much more flexible and adaptive in unpredictable circumstances. But he also says the project could shed light on how human intelligence benefits from curiosity and experimentation." There is a link in the article to a video made available by the researchers. June 22, 2005: Summer of Rock and Rockets - Specialty camps help kids broaden interests, hone skills. By Andrew Eder. The Kansas City Star. "Peg Smith, chief executive officer of the American Camp Association, says it has seen a rise in specialty camps nationwide in recent years. That has helped boost the number of campers overall from about 9 million in 1998 to more than 11 million. Smith attributes the popularity of short specialty camps to the growth of a 'developmental model.' Instead of camp being just a place to stash the kids, it’s now gives them a chance for growth and development. 'One trend we’ve noticed is that kids in general tend to collect a menu of activities today,' she says. Robotics camp in Kansas City, Kan., kicked off Chris Smith’s full summer schedule. ... For kids who lean toward science, the place to be is the Kansas City Starbase, held at the National Guard Armory in Kansas City, Kan. On a recent Thursday, the facility held its $90 robotics camp. The camp’s nine boys and one girl were divided into three teams, code-named Alpha, Bravo and Charlie. Site coordinator Jason Johnston gives the campers their mission: Build a Lego model that can navigate a patch of rocks and sand meant to replicate the surface of Mars." June 22, 2005: Prosthesis with a brain. Ivanhoe Newswire / available from News 14 Carolina. "Prosthetics can significantly improve a person's quality of life after an amputation, but it's far from the real thing. Now, a new prosthetic foot is changing everything. ... Jay Martin invented the prosthetic ankle. He said, 'The system uses several sensors again with the artificial intelligence system to be constantly thinking and analyzing the patient's walking just like the person's brain." June 22, 2005: Police officers riding high-tech at expo in A.C. By Julia Glick. PressofAtlanticCity.com. "Police officers test-drove a stealthy chariot that can chase down suspects without a drop of gas and gave voice commands to a patrol car with artificial intelligence at the Police Security Expo on Tuesday at the Convention Center. ... The [Info-Cop] company's Project 54 makes police cars a little bit more like KITT, the talking, thinking car from the '80s TV show 'Knight Rider.' Instead of fumbling with sirens, lights and other controls or combing hundreds of radio frequencies, the officer can keep his eyes on the road and simply tell the car what to do, said William Lenharth, the project director and a professor at the University of New Hampshire. The system prevents accidents and helps police pursue criminals, he said." June 22, 2005: Herbie - Fully Loaded. By Roger Ebert. rogerebert.com & Chicago Sun-Times. "The question that haunted me during 'Herbie: Fully Loaded' involved the degree of Herbie's intelligence. ... If Herbie is alive, or able to seem alive, isn't this an astonishing breakthrough in the realm of Artificial Intelligence? That's if computer scientists, working secretly, programmed Herbie to act the way he does. On the other hand, if Herbie just sort of became Herbie on his own, then that would be the best argument yet for Intelligent Design. Either way, a thinking car is a big story." June 21, 2005: Memphis Airport adopts security surveillance system. Memphis Business Journal. "Memphis International Airport will install a closed circuit video surveillance system along 34,000 feet of its perimeter, designed to detect anyone attempting to sneak into the airport. ... ObjectVideo's system of cameras and software uses artificial intelligence, to identify, track and analyze potential threats. ... Versions of it are also used at borders, seaports, oil refineries and chemical and nuclear plants." June 21, 2005: Speech recognition by humanoid robot in real environment. News-Medical.Net . "Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), an independent administrative institution, has developed a speech recognition function in real environment using an array of microphones, successfully extending the sensing capability of humanoid robot under the Humanoid Robotic Project HRP-2 'Prométhée'. ... Stable speech recognition is obtained by combining information derived from the microphone array and the camera and by isolating and eliminating noises. ... In the living environment, where practical use of next generation robots is expected, direct human-robot interaction through voice channel is growing to one of key perceptive functions of robot. ... The present study has made it possible to install a voice interface on a humanoid robot operable in the environment involving a lot of sound sources." June 21, 2005: Robots take on poker's top hands. By James Doran. Times Online. "The search is on to find a computer capable of beating the world’s top poker players -- in other words, a machine that can lie and cheat with the best of them. Poker-playing robots, which are known as poker bots, will compete for the first World Series in Las Vegas next month, and a $100,000 (£54,850) prize, in an event that will run in tandem with its more established human equivalent. ... The competition is being seen as a chance for software designers to devise poker’s own version of Deep Blue, the IBM computer that outwitted Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, in 1997. Darren Shuster, an entrepreneur and publicist from California who is staging the world series of Poker Robots, said: 'Chess is a game of pure strategy. To play it well involves the absence of emotion. Poker is the opposite. It involves skill and strategy but it is also a game of chance.' The problem facing programmers is to create a computer that is capable of cheating and lying, a technique that has so far eluded artificial intelligence experts." June 21, 2005: In Chess, Masters Again Fight Machines. By Dylan Loeb McClain. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "It has been eight years since Garry Kasparov, then the world chess champion, lost a match to the computer Deep Blue. In the wake of Deep Blue's victory, it would not have been surprising if elite players stopped competing against computers. After all, if the world's best player could not beat a computer, how could lesser ones? The possibility, even probability, of losing - and perhaps losing badly - to a machine could have particularly discouraged grandmasters, who are known to have egos that match their abilities and who sometimes have difficulty accepting defeat. But, rather than being the final word in the battle of man vs. machine, the Kasparov-Deep Blue match spurred the competition. More grandmasters are taking up the challenge posed by computers." June 20, 2005: Expert System Developed to Enhance Diagnostic Accuracy of Alzheimer's Disease with FDG PET Scans. RedNova News. "German scientists developed a computer program that enhances the diagnostic accuracy of positron emission tomography (PET) scans with Alzheimer's patients, opening the door for earlier treatment of this progressive brain disorder.
... 'The knowledge of several experts in the field was utilized in the development of the computer program by defining several rules used by these experts for diagnosing and excluding Alzheimer's,' explained [Peter] Bartenstein. Based on this knowledge, the program identifies abnormalities in the PET images and detects Alzheimer's typical changes, he said. 'Besides determining the probability that a patient has Alzheimer's, it is able to identify various other dementia disorders (like frontal lobe dementia or Lewy body disease) that also show typical, but different abnormalities in the FDG-PET image,' he added." June 20, 2005: New Computer Language Taps into AI Technology. By Jennifer LeClaire. TechNewsWorld. "The developers said the ISO 18629 language is especially suited for the exchange of process planning, validation, production scheduling and control information for guiding manufacturing processes. Researchers have incorporated approximately 300 concepts, such as 'duration' and 'sequence,' into its software structure. ... A new software language promises to allow computers to consider the consequences of their commands. Analysts said this Artificial Intelligence technology looks promising for both manufacturers and business management processes. ISO 18629 becomes part of what Business Communication Company (BCC) predicts will be at least a US$21 billion market by 2007. While computers today merely respond to user commands without ever 'thinking' about the effects, National Institute of Standards and Technology researchers, along with colleagues in France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom, have developed a process specification language that enables computers to reason much more precisely and therefore better reflect subtleties intended by commands of human operators." June 20, 2005: Japan Dreams of Robot Moon Base in 2025 - Advanced humanoid robots could take over mining, telescope-building chores for humans. By Paul Kallender. PCWorld.com & IDG News Service. "The idea is more than a pipe-dream; it is part of a 20-year plan, called JAXA Vision 2025, that was drawn up by Keiji Tachikawa, a former president of Japan's largest mobile operator NTT DoCoMo, who is now president of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency(JAXA). As part of the plan, Japan would use advanced robotic technologies to help build the moon base, while redeveloped versions of today's humanoid robots, such as Honda Motor's Asimo and Sony's Qrio, could work in the moon's inhospitable environment in place of astronauts, he said in a recent interview. Japan's lunar robots would do work such as building telescopes and prospecting and mining for minerals, Tachikawa said. 'I see a big role for Japan's robotics technologies on the moon,' he said. 'Japanese robots will be one of our big contributions. If there is work where robots can replace humans, they will.'" June 20, 2005: Making progress. By Fernando Diaz. Daily Herald. "NextFest, now in its second year, showcases technological innovations in seven categories: communication, design, entertainment, exploration, health, security and transportation. The 'World’s Fair of the Future' grew from the tantalizing task of covering emerging technologies at San Francisco’s Wired Magazine, considered the 'journal of record for the future,' and a desire to expose those developments beyond its pages. 'We get to write about a lot of really interesting and cool stuff, but unless we are the writers, we don’t get to see them,' said Adam Rogers, a senior editor at the magazine. Rogers is dying to see the Philip K. Dick robot, an android that bears an eerie resemblance to the famed science fiction writer and responds to commands through artificial intelligence software. It draws, too, Rogers said. ... [M]any of the exhibits are more than fun and games. The prosthetic C-Leg is already allowing amputees to reclaim some mobility, iRobot’s Rumba vacuums are moving into homes via infomercials and the company’s PackBot Scout, an 8-inch tall, 40-pound battle-bot is currently deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan assisting soldiers." June 20, 2005: Robo- Legs. By Michel Marriott. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "The line that has long separated human beings from the machines that assist them is blurring as complex technologies become a visible part of people who depend upon them. ... Long an eerie theme in popular science fiction, the integration of humans with machines has often been presented as a harbinger of a soulless future, populated with flesh-and-metal cyborgs, RoboCops and Terminators. But major universities like Carnegie Mellon and the University of California at Berkeley, as well as companies and the United States military, are exploring ways in which people can be enhanced by strapping themselves into wearable robotics, or exoskeletons. 'There is a kind of cyborg consciousness, a fluidity at the boundaries of what is flesh and what is machine, that has happened behind our backs,' said Sherry Turkle, the director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is writing a book on robots and culture. 'The notion that your leg is a machine part and it is exposed, that it is an enhancement, is becoming comfortable in the sense that it can be made a part of you.'"
>>> Assisitive Technologies, Robots, Ethical & Social Implications, Systems, Science Fiction, Applications June 19, 2005: Taking a trip down memory-chip lane. By Will Knight. NewScientist.com news. "This renewed interest in old-school computing is more than just a trip down memory-chip lane. Early computers are a part of our technological heritage, and also offer a unique perspective on how today's machines work. And within growing collections of original computers and home-made replicas, and the anecdote-filled web pages and blogs devoted to them, lies the equipment and expertise that will one day help unlock our past by reading countless computer files stored in outmoded formats. ... 'They hark back to another time,' says Hamish Carmichael, secretary of the UK's Computer Conservation Society, which works with the Science Museum in London to restore and rebuild classic machines. ... Many enthusiasts actively rebuild old computers in a bid to learn what made them tick. For instance, local programmers help the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, home to the largest collection of obsolete computers anywhere, restore its more exotic exhibits for free." June 19, 2005: Spam way to top of field - Computer science grad models filter on immune system. By Derek Puddicombe. Ottawa Sun Online. "Terri Oda thinks she has found a way to filter out all that nasty, nagging spam that pesters and plagues our e-mail. It's an artificial intelligence computer application based primarily on the human immune system -- a whole branch of computing based on biology rather than those complicated algorithms. ... Being one of those kids who was a voracious reader of science fiction, her move toward studying computer science was a natural path. Her studies led her to the link between our immune system attacking viruses and the computer world. A field of study, she discovered, that hadn't yet been tackled. 'The way our immune system handles viruses is a bit of a pattern-recognition system,' Oda explained. 'You get a virus and your immune system goes and checks it out.'" June 18, 2005: Girls learn about careers in technology. By Justin Wolfgang. American News & About AberdeenNews.com. "Summer break may have started more than three weeks ago in Aberdeen, but don't tell that to a group of girls who spent this week working with computers at the Workforce Development Center. Eight girls, ages 12 to 13, spent Monday through Friday taking tours of local businesses, building computers and programming robots in a program called Girls Discover Information Technology." June 18, 2005: Government vows to build robot industry. JoongAng Daily. "The Information and the Commerce ministries said yesterday that they will nurture the nation's robot industry because it has the potential to grow into a 30 trillion won ($29.7 billion) business by 2013. At a workshop in Seoul on artificial intelligence, the ministries predicted that by 2013, Korea will emerge among the top three nations in robot technology, securing 15 percent of the world robot market, with $20 billion in exports." June 17, 2005: Bar room philosophy. By Stephen Pincock. Financial Times. "The Prince Albert is one of a growing number of pubs to hold regular evenings of philosophical debate or scientific discussion as an alternative to quiz nights or darts competitions. ... However, on the evening I visited we were going to listen to a scientist. ... [Igor] Aleksander, a dapper man of eastern European heritage who grew up in South Africa, is a professor emeritus at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. He has been researching artificial intelligence and consciousness using computers for something like 30 years. The fact that his talk drew such a large crowd is testament to the enduring fascination of consciousness. ... Put simply, he says consciousness involves: a sense of being an entity in an 'out there' world; a concept of having a past and future; attention, which affects our ways of being conscious; a process of making decisions about what to do next; and emotion, which helps us to evaluate our options. ... Armed with these ideas, Aleksander and his colleagues have been generating virtual models to unpick the puzzles that consciousness throws up. In his office at Imperial College, for example, a laptop computer runs a 'neural representation modeler' that uses these axioms to study the mechanics of perception and imagination." June 17, 2005: New Software Language Helps Computers Better Understand Nuanced Commands - The process specification language should make computers much more useful in manufacturing, federal researchers say. By Eric Chabrow. InformationWeek. "A new software language will let computers think about the consequences of their commands. The language, ISO 18629, promises to let computers reason much more precisely than they do now and better ponder nuances intended by commands given by their human operators. Developed by federal government researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and colleagues in France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom, the process-specification-language software should make computers much more useful in manufacturing. The process specification language describes a neutral representation for manufacturing processes. ... ISO 18629 employs artificial intelligence and language analysis to denote computer commands in the framework of a production plan." June 17, 2005: Grand Theft Auto Meets Robocop. By Cyrus Farivar. Wired News. "An automatic license-plate reader that can scan 500 license plates an hour looking for stolen vehicles underwent its first field tests by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department last week. Using character-recognition technology developed for the Italian Post Office to read postal addresses, four robot eyes in the course of one night queried more than 12,000 license plates, recovered seven stolen cars and resulted in three arrests. ... The system works at 'patrol car speeds,' optimally at about 35 mph. It can scan the plates of vehicles almost anywhere on the road. 'We read them coming at us. We read them going by us. We read them parked,' said Mark Windover, president of Remington-Elsag." June 16, 2005: Meet Penelope - The Robot Nurse. By Dr. Jay Adlersberg. WABC / 7Online.com. "Seven's On Call with high-tech surgery, specifically a robotic assistant that can recognize surgical instruments and hand them to the surgeons. How does it work? ... Robots in the operating room are not new, some now assist surgeries. But Penelope's specific role will be handing over and keeping track of the surgical instruments. ... Dr. Amory performed the simple surgery this morning with Penelope as part of the surgical team. The surgery removed a benign cyst from the arm of Iris Lopez, a patient at the hospital. Penelope's software recognizes the voice command. She can scan the instruments and retrieve the correct one. " June 16, 2005: 2005 movie forecast. SouthFlorida.com. "Stealth: Three pilots (Jamie Foxx, Jessica Biel, Josh Lucas) attempt to stop an artificial-intelligence program from initiating a third world war." June 16, 2005: Minorities make small gains in science jobs. By Alorie Gilbert. CNET News.com. "The proportion of minorities in science occupations has inched up over the past 10 years, but progress is slow-going, according to a new study released this week." June 16, 2005: Campus busy with middle-school pupils. By Beth L. Jokinen. LimaOhio.com. "The OSU-Lima/Rhodes State campus was full of activity Wednesday as middle-school pupils experienced a college campus and learned a few new skills. ... About 20 girls are also on campus for Rhodes State’s Engineering Camp. Forty-five boys and girls will take part in the same camp next week. 'This is an opportunity for us to expose students to careers in technology and give them as many hands-on activities as we can to increase the awareness of engineering technology,' said Traci Cox, Rhodes’ director of admissions. The pupils are taking part in various engineering projects, including building a light-powered spider robot and making bottle rockets." June 15, 2005: New Skin Lets Robots Get Sensitive. By Bjorn Carey. LiveScience. "Scientists are working on a type of skin that will allow robots to be more touchy feely. The high-tech skin has fingernail sized sensors embedded all over its surface. The sensors allow a robot to 'feel' changes in its surroundings and move accordingly. 'Robots move well on their own, especially when nothing is in the way,' NASA technologist Vladimir Lumelsky said. However, trouble arises when something gets in a robot’s way. 'Robots should be able to react, but today's robots can't.'" June 15, 2005: Intelligent Carpet Directs Robot Vacuum. By Tracy Staedter. Discovery News. "Now the manufacturing company Vorwerk in Hamlin, Germany, has partnered with Infineon in Munich to develop an electronic carpet that wirelessly navigates a self-propelled robot over every square inch of a floor, and can even direct the machine to revisit sections it unintentionally missed. 'The robot can easily store or remember the path he didn't clean so far and try later,' said Christl Lauterbach, senior staff engineer and project manager at Infineon who conceived of the so-called Smart Carpet." June 15 / 22, 2005: Robot runs like humans. By Eric Smalley. Technology Research News. "Scientists have been making bipedal robots for years but have only recently begun to use mathematical models to tackle the challenge of making two-legged robots that walk and run without falling down. Researchers from the Communications and Cybernetic Research Institute of Nantes in France and the University of Michigan have developed mathematical principals for enabling human-like running in bipedal robots, including the ability to recover balance. They used the principals to develop control software that allows a two-legged robot to run. The software could also lead to improved prosthetic and robotic rehabilitation aids." June 15 / 22 , 2005: Single camera measures speed. Technology Research News "One of the challenges of using cameras to give computers a way to see is finding a way to capture information about depth. ... Researchers from Clemson University and the University of Florida have improved a method of determining depth information using a single camera. The advance allows a single camera to detect the speed of objects and could be used anywhere robotic vision is needed. The method promises to decrease the cost of robotic vision and enable vision for applications like tiny flying robots." June 15, 2005: Students put tech skills on display. By Ryan Foust. NewsTimesLive.com. "The company's Web site promises better learning through technology. The problem is that not all students learn the same way, and teachers are unable to adopt their teaching styles to fit each student in the classroom. The solution, according to Adaptive Education Management Services (AEMS), is a software tutoring system called U-Gene, utilizing Artificial General Intelligence that allows it to learn to a student's strengths and weaknesses through direct interaction. U-Gene is then able to cater to the student's individual needs as a learner. However, U-Gene doesn't exist today. Then again, neither does AEMS. The company and program are a project of New Milford High School's Information Technology Leadership Academy team. The team showcased its project last month at IT Expo 2005, where it won the IBM Business Case White Paper Award for its use of IBM technology, research and patents. ... 'The more I learned about the capabilities of AI (artificial intelligence), the more I wanted there to be a system like U-Gene available,' said [Megan] Kapsiak." June 15, 2005: AI developed for Mars explorers. BBC News. "A computer system designed to look for life on Mars has been tested at a site on Earth resembling a Martian region being explored by one of Nasa's rovers. The system, to be worn by an astronaut, underwent a trial at red sandstone beds in Spain with similarities to Meridiani Planum, where Opportunity rover landed. Software picks out interesting features and highlights them in real-time in a visor on one eye or a tablet display. The 'intelligent' system can replace geologists' duties, say its creators." June 14, 2005: Scheme promoting IT jobs to girls. BBC News. "A scheme aimed at getting more girls interested in IT careers is being launched by the education secretary. Women make up just one in five of the technology workforce. The same percentage of those studying IT-related degrees is female. Computer Club for Girls (CC4G) seeks to persuade girls that IT jobs are not 'just for boys', and is being rolled out to 3,600 schools across England." June 14, 2005: Discovery to feature 'Science of Star Wars.' Indiantelevision.com. "When Star Wars first hit movie theatres in 1977, the world had never seen a motion picture quite like it -- featuring massive space stations, intelligent robots, light sabers and hovercraft vehicles to name just a few. In the 30 years since, it has infiltrated the way we live today. ... Science of Star Wars, premiering on June 17, 18 and 19 at 10 pm, explores how the imagination of the films has influenced, and continues to influence, life-changing technology and inventions in the real world. From artificial intelligence to robotics to cutting-edge transportation to military technology, Science of Star Wars reveals the impact of one of cinema's greatest and most successful sci-fi classics on the real world." June 14, 2005: Knowledge is Power. By Maria Bruno-Britz. Bank Systems & Technology. "ScoreRight employs a powerful artificial intelligence element, claims [Matt] Schwab. This AI automates the process of scanning raw credit data. The simulation tool automatically compares an applicant's credit data across all three reporting agencies to check for discrepancies and areas that might negatively impact the credit score. ... 'This goes beyond a score to what specifically impacts a score.'" June 14, 2005: Mining meaning to thwart terrorists. By Jennifer Foreshew. Australian IT. "Australian-developed text mining software has won interest from local and international intelligence and crime agencies as a tool for monitoring threats such as terrorist activities. The Leximancer software, developed at the University of Queensland, allows single desktop users to analyse large amounts of unstructured text, such as a 100-page document or 10,000 emails, at a glance. ... The software, developed with funding from the Australian Research Council, differs from the rules-based linguistics approach typically used in text mining. It uses a complex-systems method drawing on Bayesian theory and machine learning. ... 'The idea is to use Leximancer to automatically discover the concepts in the material, and then classify it using those concepts to show what is in a stream of data,' Dr [Andrew] Smith said." June 14, 2005: Sony researchers create 'curious' Aibos. By Paul Kallender. IDG News Service / available from ITworld.com. "Sony Corp. has succeeded in giving selected Aibo pet robots curiosity, researchers at Sony Computer Science Laboratory (SCSL) in Paris said last week. Their research won't lead to conscious robots soon, if ever, but it could help other fields such as child developmental psychology, they said during an open day in Tokyo. ... [W]hat if a robot could be made inherently 'curious?' And what if its curiosity was backed by awareness of the value of its learning? Such qualities are precisely what [Frederic] Kaplan and his fellow SCSL researcher Pierre-Yves Oudeyer believe they have achieved with Aibo ERS-7 robot dogs in experiments over the last three years, Kaplan said. ... To achieve this, the researchers equipped the Aibos with what they call an adaptive curiosity system or a 'metabrain,' an algorithm that is able to assess the robots' more conventional learning algorithms, they said. In the experiments, the metabrain algorithm continually forced the learning algorithm to look for new and more challenging tasks and to give up on tasks that didn't seem to lead anywhere. ... The idea behind this approach to AI was to recreate the world of a human infant; in other words, an entity with a sense of being, with a notion for exploring its environment, and the ability to wiggle its body, arms and legs, Kaplan said." June 14, 2005: Cyber servant. The Engineer. "The notion of a computer with human attributes has long been standard sci-fi fodder. But now engineers from Philips in Germany aim to bring the concept into the home courtesy of the Smart Companion: a nodding, talking and listening robot designed to act as a friendly link between the human and the digital world. Hans Driessen, spokesman for Philips Home Dialogue Systems (HDS), which developed the Smart Companion, said the device combines advances in robotics and image processing, as well as face, gesture and speech recognition, to provide an unthreatening and intuitive interface with the digital devices in a user’s home." June 13, 2005: Where's Waldo? [column headline = Why Democrats backed off education budget] Matter and Ross column by Phillip Matier & Andrew Ross. San Francisco Chronicle (page B-1) & SFGate.com. "Waldo the pill-dispensing robot apparently went berserk this past week at UCSF Medical Center, sending a doctor and patient running for cover. Whacked-out Waldo is one of three battery-operated, rolling robots that dispense pills at the hospital. The other two are named Elvis and Lisa Marie. ... UCSF spokeswoman Carol Hyman said she didn't know anything about any doctor and patient having to beat feet -- but confirmed that the wandering Waldo did wind up in an examination room. 'This is the first time anything like this has happened,' Hyman said. 'Our technology folks are going to have to take a look.'" June 13, 2005: Cockroach Driver Controls Robot. By Tracy Staedter. Discovery Channel News. "A robot driven by a cockroch is helping put a biological twist into artificial intelligence. In an unusual juxtaposition of art and technology, Garnet Hertz, a student at the University of California, Irvine, developed the 'biorobotic' system to build on the fascination engineers have with cockroaches, which can maneuver swiftly over complex terrain and adapt to a variety of environmental conditions, even though they have no brains. ... 'Artificial intelligence doesn't necessarily involve complicated computer algorithms, but could involve this kind of hybridization,' said Mark Allen, a professor of visual arts at Pomona College in Claremont, California, and the executive director of the Machine Project art gallery in Los Angeles." June 13, 2005: The Ethics of Creating Consciousness. The Connection radio program hosted by Dick Gordon, with guests: Marvin Minsky, Brian Cantwell Smith, and Paul Davies. From WBUR Boston and NPR. "Next month, IBM is set to activate the most ambitious simulation of a human brain yet conceived. It's a model they say is accurate down to the molecule. No one claims the 'Blue Brain' project will be self-aware. But this project, and others like it, use electrical patterns in a silicon brain to simulate the electrical patterns in the human brain -- patterns which are intimately linked to thought. But if computer programs start generating these patterns -- these electrical 'thoughts' -- then what separates us from them? Traditionally human beings have reserved words like 'reasoning,' 'self-awareness,' and 'soul' as their exclusive property. But with the stirring of something akin to electronic consciousness -- some argue that human beings need to give up the ghost, and embrace the machine in all of us." Links to the broadcast are provided. June 13, 2005: Robots putting their heads together. By Peter Key. Philadelphia Business Journal (from the June 10th print edition). " The key to getting robots to perform complex tasks may not be in making them smarter. Instead, it may be in getting a lot of dumb robots to act together. That's the idea behind a project being led by the University of Pennsylvania that recently received a five-year, $5 million grant from the Department of Defense. The purpose of the Scalable Swarms of Autonomous Robots and Sensors project is to create software and tools that enable a person to direct a swarm or swarms of small robots. ... In addition to robotics experts, the Swarms project will involve researchers in the fields of artificial intelligence, control theory, systems engineering and biology." June 12, 2005: Enough Keyword Searches. Just Answer My Question. By James Fallows. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "Last week, I spent a day at a workshop near Washington for the Aquaint project, whose work is unclassified but has gone virtually unnoticed in the news media. The name stands for 'advanced question answering for intelligence,' and it refers to a joint effort by the National Security Agency, the C.I.A. and other federal intelligence organizations. To computer scientists, 'question answering,' or Q.A., means a form of search that does not just match keywords but also scans, parses and 'understands' vast quantities of information to respond to queries. An ideal Q.A. system would let me ask, 'How has California's standing among states in per-student school funds changed since the 1960's?' - and it would draw from all relevant sources to find the right answer." June 12, 2005: Mind-bending vision of future all too plausible. Bill Sass' review of Mindscan, by Robert J. Sawyer. The Edmonton Journal (subscription req'd.). "Throughout modern history there have been several landmark cases in which the definition of 'people' has been tested. In 1847, the American slave Dred Scott sued his owner for his freedom, beginning a decade-long legal process that eventually saw the U.S. Supreme Court deny him not only his freedom, but his existence as a person. ... Author Robert Sawyer moves the issue of personhood to the year 2045 when technology has advanced enough to allow the 'mindscan' and transfer of a person's consciousness into an artificial brain housed in a reasonable, mostly indestructible facsimile of the person's body." June 12, 2005: Poker-Faced
-- The opponent in the online card game might be a computer. 'Bots'
are beatable because they miss human nuances, but they're learning.
By Joseph Menn. Los Angeles Times. "In his spare time, he's perfecting
a computer program to go online and play the game for him. His BlackShark
software is still a work in progress, but [Roger] Gabriel has no doubt
that such programs eventually will be championship quality. 'In the
future,' he said, 'robots are going to take over.' Gabriel is one of
an increasing number of computer professionals who design poker robots,
or 'bots,' that pose as human gamblers but can play endlessly without
tiring or losing concentration -- for real money. ... The march of the
machines will be celebrated in Las Vegas next month with the world's
first money tournament for robots -- and the $100,000 prize is drawing
a handful of coders out of anonymity. ... Computer programs have conquered
checkers, chess and, most recently, backgammon. By rapidly evaluating
plays more moves ahead than a person can, computers routinely beat the
strongest human players in those games. ... [I]n poker there's no such
thing as an absolutely correct play, except in retrospect. If someone,
or something, bets heavily with a lousy hand and everyone else folds,
that was the right bet. This makes poker bot design fascinating to academics
like Jonathan Schaeffer, a computing science professor at the University
of Alberta in Edmonton who for 14 years has headed a project to build
poker programs. Schaeffer said cards were more likely than chess to
produce computing approaches useful in the real world because poker
players must deal with incomplete information. But before such research
can contribute dramatically to solving real-world problems, Schaeffer
said, it has to solve the challenge of poker -- and that's several years
away." June
12, 2005: The
People vs. Pixel - Will real actors lose out to computers? By Bill
Muller. The Arizona Republic. "Director George Lucas often replaced
actors, either whole or in part, with computer-generated images, and
summer moviegoers doubtless will see more of the same in such action
films as Fantastic Four (July 8), The Island (July 22) and Stealth (July
29). That leads to the question: Can actors be replaced with digital
replicas? ... Lucas says it's the acting that will keep CGI actors limited
to action sequences and other stunt work. 'We've never been able to
teach a computer to act,' he says. 'It's a talent, it's a skill, it's
something you learn, it's something you're born with, and I don't see
in the foreseeable future that computers can become human enough in
their artificial intelligence to have the same crazed psychology you
need in order to relate to other people, so you can emotionally express
ideas. The art of acting is to transfer emotions from one human to another
by imitating various fabricated characters. A computer can make a perfect
visual representation, but the computer cannot act.' ... Paul Giamatti,
who's starring in the boxing film Cinderella Man with Russell Crowe,
is less dismissive of simulated thespians, saying the constructs may
lead to a new form of acting." June 10, 2005: Emotional
intelligence for computer-based characters? IST Results. "A
computer character, capable of realistic emotional expressions in human-computer
communication has been prototyped and may soon be incorporated into
working applications. The research team in the IST project ERMIS, which
focused on linguistic and paralinguistic cues in human speech and finished
at the end of December 2004, created a prototype able to analyse and
respond to user input. The team included researchers with skills ranging
from engineering and computer science to psychology and human communication.
... The result of the ERMIS team’s work is what they call the
'sensitive artificial listener,' a computer character that is capable
of much more realistic expression of emotions in human communication.
The project partners have taken these results and are now analysing
them with a view to incorporation into their own products." June 10, 2005: Games
course aims to alleviate skills shortage. By Brian Skelly. SiliconRepublic.com.
"The anticipated growth in the computer games software sector in
Ireland is being catered for by a new computer games programming and
design course at the University of Limerick from September next. ...
They will study computer science, with special emphasis on topics relevant
to game design such as computer graphics, artificial intelligence, digital
video and audio fundamentals." June 10, 2005: Rodents'
Talk Isn't Just 'Cheep.' By Jeff Rice. Wired News. "Imagine
a device that would let you 'talk' with your dog or cat. One that could
help you ask a cow a question or converse with a dolphin. Two Arizona
scientists say computers may someday bridge the language gap between
humans and other animals. 'You could have this little thing hooked to
your belt and you could speak and it could be translated into animal
language,' says John Placer, a computer scientist at Northern Arizona
University. It sounds like pure science fiction, and at this point it
is. 'We're a long way off from that,' says Placer. But he and biologist
Con Slobodchikoff, also of NAU, are working toward this very goal. The
two are applying principles of artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic
to animal language systems in the hope of cracking the code. ... Several
years ago, Slobodchikoff began collaborating with Placer. The two began
using customized speech-recognition software to slice up prairie dog
sounds and to search for deeper, hidden linguistic patterns. ... So
far, they have trained a computer to recognize three key prairie dog
calls more than 90 percent of the time based on this technique." June 10, 2005: A
Matter of Artificial Intelligence. Anshuman Joshi interviews Dr.
Michael Rovatsos, lecturer at the Centre of Intelligent Systems and
their Applications, School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh.
Khaleej Times Online. "[Q] In recent times Artificial Intelligence
have been given a preference to more traditional computer science approaches.
Is it hype or is there something more? [A] It is certainly not hype
because research in this area has now been going on for 50 years and
has produced a lot of results. If you only think of robotics and autonomous
unguided vehicles, neural networks in industrial automation, fuzzy logic
controllers contained in many microelectronic devices and household
appliances, expert systems in business applications, all these would
not exist without AI. [Q] Isn't AI about understanding and simulating
human intelligence? [A] This is the 'grand vision' of the area, but
most people working in AI focus on specific sub-problems. You will find
that in their day to day work, AI researchers mostly follow a very 'normal'
science/engineering approach, i.e. they work on concrete problems like
'how can I recognise faces in data from a video camera?', 'what should
I bid in an electronic auction if I don't know what other people might
bid?', 'how can I learn to move in an unknown environment without colliding
with other objects?'" Other questions include: Critics of Artificial
Intelligence have labelled the whole idea behind Artificial Intelligence
as obscene, anti-human and immoral? What is your opinion? ... Comparisons
have been drawn between AI and philosophy. Even movies (Terminator,
The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, and Steven Spielberg's AI have tended
to describe them as being 'symbiotic' to each other. Is there an element
of truth there? ... What is the future of AI? June 9, 2005: Models that take drugs - Biosimulation: Designing drugs in computers is still some way off. But software is starting to change the way drugs are tested. The Economist Technology Quarterly. "Five years ago, when the first draft of the human genome was unveiled and the dotcom boom was in full swing, hopes were high for the union between biology and computing. The deluge of genomic information would, the theory went, be funnelled into powerful computers, which would then be able to model biological systems, figure out how they went wrong, and design drugs to fix them. Test-tubes would give way to microchips; biology would go from 'in vitro' to 'in silico'. All of this promised to benefit not just the health of patients, but of drug companies too, by improving the predictability, and hence the economics, of drug development. ... GNS, based in Ithaca, New York, combines the bottom-up simulation of physiological processes with a top-down 'inference modelling' approach based on the analysis of clinical-trial data. Using machine-learning and data-mining techniques, which sort through mountains of data looking for patterns, it is possible both to confirm known behaviours of biological systems, and to predict other, unknown behaviours. The firm's clients include Novartis, Merck and Johnson & Johnson." June 9, 2005: Technology
that imitates nature - Biomimetics: Engineers are increasingly taking
a leaf out of nature's book when looking for solutions to design problems.
The Economist Technology Quarterly. "Velcro is probably the most
famous and certainly the most successful example of biological mimicry,
or 'biomimetics'. In fields from robotics to materials science, technologists
are increasingly borrowing ideas from nature, and with good reason:
nature's designs have, by definition, stood the test of time, so it
would be foolish to ignore them. ... here are some fields -- such as
robotics -- in which borrowing designs from nature is self-evidently
the sensible thing to do. The next generation of planetary exploration
vehicles being designed by America's space agency, NASA, for example,
will have legs rather than wheels. That is because legs can get you
places that wheels cannot, says Dr Kenny. Wheels work well on flat surfaces,
but are much less efficient on uneven terrain. Scientists at NASA's
Ames Research Centre in Mountain View, California, are evaluating an
eight-legged walking robot modelled on a scorpion, and America's Defence
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding research into four-legged
robot dogs, with a view to applying the technology on the battlefield.
Having legs is only half the story -- it's how you control them that
counts, says Joseph Ayers, a biologist and neurophysiologist at Northeastern
University, Massachusetts. He has spent recent years developing a biomimetic
robotic lobster that does not just look like a lobster but actually
emulates parts of a lobster's nervous system to control its walking
behaviour." June 9, 2005: Fields
of learning theory, machine learning grow together at University.
By Steve Koppes. University of Chicago Chronicle. "Approximately
100 students from across the country and around the world completed
a two-week crash course in machine learning at the end of May, at the
University’s International House. ... The students attended the
Machine Learning Summer School, which was held in North America for
the first time since researchers in Europe and Australia launched the
program in 2002. ... Machine learning is a growing segment of artificial
intelligence that involves teaching a computer to learn from experience
to perform tasks that a human could not do or that a human could do,
but a machine could do at a much lower cost. A typical example from
the business world would be teaching a computer to detect credit card
fraud." June 9, 2005: Modelling
the brain - Grey matter, blue matter. The Economist. "The first
serious attempt to build a computer model of the brain has just begun.
... Henry Markram, the boss of the Brain Mind Institute, and the leader
of the EPFL's side of the collaboration, stresses that Blue Brain's
formal goal is not to build an artificial intelligence system, such
as a neural network. Nor is it to create a conscious machine. The goal
is merely to build a simulacrum of a biological brain. If the outputs
produced by the simulation in response to particular inputs are identical
to those in animal experiments, then that goal will have been achieved.
On the other hand, he also says, 'I believe the intelligence that is
going to emerge if we succeed in doing that is going to be far more
than we can even imagine.' Watch this space." June 9, 2005: Robots
Dance, Play at World Robot Expo. By Yuri Kageyama. Associated Press
/ available from The Washington Post. "They could hit fastballs,
draw portraits and be seen breathing. Not bad for robots. ... The Japan
Robot Association, a trade group, expects the Japanese market for next-generation
robots - those being developed now as opposed to industrial robots currently
in use - to reach $14 billion by 2010 and more than $37 billion by 2025.
... [T]he Batting Robot, has a vision system that handles 1,000 images
a second, more than 30 times the human eye, allowing it to accurately
hit pitches up to 100 mph. At the expo, however, it was using a plastic
bat to hit rubber balls at far slower speeds. ... Optical-tongue robot
checks an apple to measure its sugar content during the Prototype Robot
Exhibition at Aichi World Expo in Nagakute, central Japan. This robot uses infrared ray to analyze the ingredients
of foods and drinks before serving to a guest, checks the guest's medical
profile and then gives the guest health-related advice." June 9, 2005: In
pictures: Japanese prototype robots. BBC News. "Meet ACM-R5
which is designed to negotiate restrictive spaces in search and rescue
operations. It is one of the robots on show at the Prototype Robot Exhibition
at the 2005 World Exposition in Nagakute, Japan, which runs for 11 days."
June 9, 2005: Battlefield
robots saving lives, proving their worth in Iraq. By Byron Spice.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "One measure of how effective battlefield
robots have become, says a top Pentagon robotics official, is that the
enemy has begun to target them. ... The success with small ground robots,
as well as with unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, has bolstered confidence
as the armed forces move toward larger vehicles, such as Carnegie Mellon's
1-ton Gladiator recon robot, which will have longer range and, eventually,
operate autonomously. ... Autonomous ground navigation is a technical
'tough nut,' [Cliff] Hudson said, which is why the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency has targeted that technology with its Grand
Challenge race. ... Many robotics firms are small businesses, Hudson
said, so the Pentagon has begun a mentor-protege program, matching the
small, young companies with large, experienced military contractors." June 8,
2005: Shattering
Myths That Women Can’t Be Leaders in Science. Spelman College
release available from Newswise. "Spelman College students are
defying the myth that women are not equipped to be leaders in the sciences.
Countless hours of computer programming in between hitting the books
have paid off for these students, who have earned the College a coveted
spot in an international competition. From July 13-19, 2005, the all-female
team will be in Osaka, Japan, for RoboCup 2005, where they will compete
against 23 other academic institutions from around the world that have
also programmed Sony AIBO robot dogs. The Coca-Cola Company is sponsoring
the team to ensure they have the resources needed to successfully compete
in this prestigious competition. ... Spelman President Beverly Daniel
Tatum, Ph.D., and the Spelman community are proud of the SpelBots, the
name for the Spelman team. 'The opportunity for six young Black women
to lead a robotics team in international competition is so fantastic,
and such a great testament to what is possible when the expectations
are high,' said Dr. Tatum. 'It speaks to the continued importance of
an institution like Spelman. We still need environments where those
who have been historically left out are expected to succeed without
the barriers often associated with gender or race, particularly in science
and technology.'" June 8, 2005: National
ExploraVision Winners in Washington. By Kristin Collins. NSTA. "Combining
creativity with scientific knowledge and research to envision a future
technology is no easy task. Eight student teams from across the United
States and Canada, however, achieved that goal and are winners in this
year’s Toshiba/National Science Teachers Association ExploraVision
Awards program. ... Grades 10–12 Don Mills Collegiate
Institute, Toronto, Canada ... 'Body M.A.S.S.' is a minimally invasive
artificial intelligence system that monitors vital signs and nutrient
mineral levels. Worn as clothing, it allows patients to monitor their
health and provide information to their doctors." June 8 - 15, 2005:
Immersed
in the Future - Randy Pausch on the Future of Education. Ubiquity
(Volume 6, Issue 20). "UBIQUITY: As the head of an entertainment
technology center, do you have to defend the seriousness of what you
do? PAUSCH: Yes and no. The first thing is that, I don't focus as much
on entertainment as you might think. So, for example, we run an entertainment
technology center here. And I would say that almost a quarter of the
students in our student body want to go out and use their powers for
good and not evil, meaning that they want to work for non-profits. They
want to do museum exhibits. They want to do educational software over
the Web. ... PAUSCH: ... The biggest project we have going on at the
Entertainment Technology Center is called Hazmat, and is for training
firefighters and other first responders to respond to chemical attacks
— whether they're poison gas attacks or just industrial chemical
hazards. ... PAUSCH: I was referring specifically to the Alice Project,
and what I was saying there was that if you ask, 'Who here has any kind
of a potential solution to the fact that enrollments are dropping like
a stone?' you don't get many answers from people. Do you know anybody
in the computer science community who says, 'Oh, here is something that
could change the fact that young people are not going into our discipline'?
When I say I'm the only game in town, I'm saying that we have an entirely
novel way to introduce people to programming, where we have huge amounts
of evidence that we have a teaching strategy that works even at the
middle school level. Typically, a kid's first exposure to programming
frankly sucks, right? It's not an accident that the highest rates of
academic dishonesty occur in introductory programming courses, and that's
not just because it's mechanically easy to copy code; the reason is
that we put people into the most frustrating situation in the world.
... PAUSCH: I am. And by the way, why is it that programming is the
gateway to computer science? I mean, I realize that it's a valuable
skill, and computer scientists should be able to program. But other
disciplines have figured out that the first course should be a survey
of all the cool things in the discipline, you know, mixed in with some
laboratory sessions about doing the stuff. To us, it's all laboratory
sessions. I used to teach in a lecture format, which is kind of a stupid
way to teach people a lot of this stuff. But with the Alice system,
you drag words around, you can't make a syntax error." June 8, 2005: A
case of mistaken identity crisis - People afflicted with multiple
personalities reveal that the idea of the self is a fiction. Comment
by Matthew Syed. The Times Online. "Pamela, the subject of a haunting
documentary on Channel 4 tonight, developed a novel, if somewhat disquieting,
mechanism to cope with her sadistic upbringing: she created new selves.
... What about the notion of the self as instigator of action? We naively
suppose that we consciously decide to move, and then move. When Benjamin
Libet conducted an experiment on voluntary action in 1985 he found that
the brain activity began about half a second before the person was aware
of deciding to act. The conscious decision came far too late to be the
cause of the action, as though consciousness is a mere afterthought.
Many reacted to this with astonishment. Why? Did they really suppose
the body was animated by some ghostly mini me lurking behind the brain?
A more plausible theory is that which is emerging from both biology
and artificial intelligence. As Daniel Dennett, the philosopher, puts
it: 'Complex systems can in fact function in what seems to be a thoroughly
‘purposeful and integrated’ way simply by having lots of
subsystems doing their own thing without any central supervision.' The
self, then, is not what it seems to be. There is no soul, no spirit,
no supervisor. There is just a brain, a dull grey collection of neurons
and neural pathways -- going about its business. The illusion of self
is merely a by-product of the brain’s organisational sophistication.
Seen in this light, DID [Dissociative Identity Disorder] is neither
a philosophical absurdity nor a medical fantasy but a vivid demonstration
of the infinite adaptability of the human mind in the quest for survival." June 8, 2005: PeopleFilter
sifts through 'resume spam' for best talent. By Sandra Guy. Chicago
Sun-Times. "[Kevin] Harrison has co-founded with his MyPoints colleague
Frank Pirri a startup with a name any idealistic techie would love --
Talentology -- to help companies deal with the problem. Pirri is president
and CEO, and Harrison is chief operating officer. The company, based
in Rolling Meadows, uses artificial intelligence in a system it calls
PeopleFilter to track applicants through the hiring process. It goes
a step further by speeding through tens of thousands of applications
to try to identify the best candidate before a rival notices him or
her." June 7, 2005: Semifinalists
Named in Desert Robot Race. By Alicia Chang. Associated Press /
available from Newsday.com. "Let the battle of the machines begin
again. Forty self-navigating robots were chosen Monday to compete in
the Oct. 8 sequel to last year's first-ever robot race across the Mojave
Desert. Only half of the semifinalists will qualify for a spot on the
starting line, based on how they maneuver -- without human help -- through
a series of obstacle courses. ... This year's semifinalists include
most of last year's participants vying for a second chance. The teams,
which come from 16 states and Canada, include individuals, universities,
corporations and a high school. Nearly 200 teams applied for this year's
race. The so-called Grand Challenge contest is sponsored by the research
and development arm of the Pentagon known as the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency to foster the development of unmanned vehicles that
could be used in combat." June 7, 2005: Redefining
the Power of the Gamer - The first Artificial Intelligence and Interactive
Digital Entertainment conference explored a future where games are driven
as strongly by characters as combat. By Seth Schiesel. The New York
Times (registration req'd.). "Standing outside the apartment on
Thursday, Walter could hear the barbs and retorts of a failed marriage's
final throes. Walter's friends, Grace and Trip, had invited him over.
... This is the future of video games. In their modern riff on 'Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' Walter was the only human. Grace and Trip
were virtual characters powered by advanced artificial intelligence
techniques, which allowed them to change their emotional state in fairly
complicated ways in response to the conversational English being typed
in by the human player. It was one version of the future here this past
week at the first Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment
conference. It is a future where games are driven as strongly by characters
as combat, where games are as much soap opera as shooting gallery and
as much free-form construction set as destruction arena. The apartment
drama, a 15-minute interactive story called 'Facade' that is scheduled
to be released free next month (interactivestory.net), was one of the
demonstrations offered to the roughly 120 game makers and academic computer
experts who attended. 'As we try to create more immersive experiences,
these artificial intelligence techniques are helping drive games forward
and this is one of the areas that could really explode,' Bing Gordon,
chief creative officer at Electronic Arts, the No. 1 video game company,
said after his talk Wednesday night. 'We hope that the folks here start
thinking about artificial intelligence as a feature, like graphics is
a feature or sound is a feature.'" June 7, 2005: A
Better Robot, With Help From Roaches. By John Schwartz. The New
York Times (registration req'd.). "Garnet Hertz, a graduate student
at the University of California, Irvine has given a roach a car. ...
Mr. Hertz, a Fulbright scholar from Canada, was inspired by robotics
pioneers like Rodney Brooks of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
who have suggested that robot intelligence should resemble that of roaches
and other insects that react quickly and instinctively to their environment.
... He said that Robo-roach was conceived as a project for his master's
in fine arts thesis. He calls it 'dialogical,' a term for works created
to spark discussion. In an unpublished essay, Mr. Hertz said he hoped
the project would inspire 'discussion about the biological versus computational,
fears about technology and nature, a future filled with biohybrid robots,
and a recollection of the narrative of the cyborg.'" June 6, 2005: Tech
Vs. Terrorism - The FBI stumbled badly in modernizing its IT to
help fight terrorism. Here's how the bureau plans to get on track. By
Larry Greenemeier. InformationWeek. "Rather than trying to fix
the Virtual Case File software, the FBI over the past couple of years
has initiated an extensive overhaul of IT management. The first big
test of this makeover is Sentinel, an electronic information-management
system under development that's designed to help the bureau leverage
newer, standardized IT. Sentinel will test more than whether the FBI
can finally get the file-sharing ability envisioned for the abandoned
Virtual Case File project." June 6, 2005: Massive
Gets Bigger. Digit Online News. "Massive Software has released
version 2.0 of its eponymous crowd animation software. Massive uses
artificial intelligence to automatically create and animate crowd scenes
with animators having to manipulate individual characters, and was originally
developed for the huge battle scenes within the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
It uses a compositing suite-style node-based interface that's designed
so that animators can avoid programming. ... Agents, as Massive calls
its characters, have been given a memory - so that they can base their
actions on previous events they've taken part in or seen." June 6, 2005: A
continental security job - Border officials eye technologies that
help a limited corps of agents cover more ground. By Brian Robinson.
FCW.com. "But adding more employees is unlikely to completely solve
the problem. ... So to improve border protection, DHS officials will
rely on technology programs to help extend border agents' reach. The
America's Shield Initiative (ASI), formerly known as the Integrated
Surveillance Intelligence System, is one such program. It's a major
component of the government's technology-intensive smart borders strategy.
... The next part of this strategy is to develop technologies that allow
finer analysis of the data and better recognition of potential problems.
The primary needs are new rules engines, link analysis and pattern-recognition
software, which would enable DHS' limited resources to more accurately
identify potential threats, [Rod MacDonald] said. ... During the past
few years, DHS has developed video technologies to simplify an agent's
task. Video cameras strategically placed along the borders have helped
agents secure large portions that they would otherwise have no hope
of covering. ... For example, Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects
Agency officials recently awarded contracts to study an emerging field
called automated scene understanding; ObjectVideo won two of those contracts.
Border agents need automated intelligence that can recognize a problem
from video feed and then alert them to threats. ObjectVideo's video-analysis
algorithms are based on artificial intelligence technology called 'computer
vision,' which compares all images in a camera's view against standard
rules." June 6, 2005: IBM Aims To Simulate A Brain. By Matthew Herper. Forbes.com. "IBM has embarked on a quest for the holy grail of neuroscience--the far-off goal of creating a computer simulation of the human brain. When the first mammals evolved from reptiles 200 million years ago, one of the biggest changes was inside their heads. Their brain cells were structured together into columns, an innovation that could be repeated like a computer chip to make larger and more powerful minds-- from mice to cats and dogs to humans. ... Now, [Henry] Markram is announcing a collaboration with IBM to create a computer simulation of these fundamental neurological units, called neocortical columns. ... Markram and IBM both emphasize that the project would not create artificial intelligence but a way to study how neurons in the brain interact with one another."
>>> Cognitive
Science, Neural Networks & Connectionist
Systems, Machine Learning, Systems;
also see this related article June 6 - 12, 2005:
Symposium
showcases graduate research throughout campus. By Louise Donahue.
UC Santa Cruz currents online. "There’s no doubt about it:
UCSC’s first Graduate Research Symposium won’t be its last.
... Standing in front of her research poster, [Catherine S.] Pesko explained
that she is developing a technique using artificial intelligence to
count craters of a certain size on Mars. The new method takes less than
a second per image, while each image takes people about half an hour
to count. 'When you consider the number of images that need to be surveyed,
it makes an impossible task possible,' she said. Her most recent paper
is posted online [and available via link in article]." June 6, 2005: What Women Want - Equality remains an ideal in science and technology. Experience and the numbers suggest it is still a dream. Red Herring. "More than a few of our readers will ask why we’re focusing on the status of women in technology at this particular time. Marissa Mayer’s story about looking for a job may help you better understand our reasons. Ms. Mayer, a computer science graduate of Stanford University, wanted what a lot of brand-new jobseekers want -- a welcoming environment and an intellectual challenge. But she saw something puzzling at many of the companies where she interviewed. ... It appears that the role of women in technology is far from settled. Technology, an equalizer in many ways, has yet to balance the numbers of men and women working. Five years into the 21st century, the percentage of women in the sciences is considerably less than their presence in the general work force. Even fewer women hold leadership roles at technology companies and science centers. ... The female presence is stronger when you step down from the executive suite to the lab and the computer center. In 2003, women accounted for 10.4 percent of all computer hardware engineers and 7.1 percent of electrical and electronics engineers in the United States. They fared better as computer and information systems managers, making up 30 percent of the work force in this category. The best news about new technology talent is at the undergraduate level, where U.S. women now outnumber men in earning engineering and science degrees. If you look at the nearly 27,000 engineering graduates in the same year, 21.4 percent are women. ... These numbers are rooted in the choices girls are encouraged to make as early as grade school, say many women who have survived -- and even thrived -- in high tech."
>>> Equality
& Careers in AI (@ Resources
for Students), Computer Science, Employment
Statistics (@ AI Industry Statistics) June 6, 2005 : Future
Teller. By Victoria Murphy. Forbes. "Doctors tell us whats
wrong with our body's today. Computer scientist Astro Teller says his
software will predict what is going wrong tomorrow. Eric Teller's Ph.D.
is in artificial intelligence, but his practice is more in medicine.
He collects numbers, lots of them, from tiny computers silently monitoring
subtle changes on thousands of bodies. 'Your body is spewing off millions
of data points a second,' he says. ... [W]ithin a year, Teller expects
them to have ten times their current store of data, enough, he says,
to write programs that may predict when someone will suffer a cold,
epileptic fit or heart attack. ... His inspiration for BodyMedia came
near the end of his doctoral work at Carnegie Mellon. His thesis set
out to explain how computers learn from experience by simulating evolution.
He input raw data, in this case brain and eye activity from sleep studies
of people with psychological and neurological disorders. With the help
of a learning algorithm, his computer evolved by itself the best way
to determine which patients were narcoleptic or depressed." June 5, 2005: Ballroom
Robot Unveiled. Sky News. "For those short of a partner to
twirl with, Japanese scientists may have the answer with the creation
of a ballroom dancing robot. The romantically-named Partner Ballroom
Dance Robot comes in a woman's figure, apart from the mouse-like ears,
and can predict its human companion's steps." June 5, 2005: Mt.
Everest 2005 - Robert William Milne dies on Everest. EverestNews.com.
"As per the report of Liaison Officer and the concerned trekking
agency, the following one member ... died at the altitude of 8450 m.
on the way to the summit of Mt. Everest on 5th June 2005. 1. Mr. Robert
William Milne (49 yrs.), Software Engineer, Livingston, Edinburgh, Scotland,
UK. ... EverestNews.com spoke with Rob several time before he left for
Everest. ... Rob was very interested in new technology that might save
climbers lives."
>>> Tributes;
also see these related "AI in the news" articles and links:
1 & 2 June 5, 2005: Play
It Again, Vladimir (via Computer). By Anne Midgette. The New York
Times (registration req'd). "This is the new world of computer music.
In its infancy, way back in the 1960's, the goal was to use digital technology
to create new sounds and new musical forms. Today scientists around the
world are turning computers on human performance, seeking to quantify
an element once thought to be intangible: the expressivity of a human
artist. ... The reactions demonstrate a basic difficulty with mechanical
reproduction of music: there is a subjective element involved in determining
if it works. The final criterion for any such reproduction is the rather
imprecise 'Turing test' of artificial intelligence: that is, whether it
can make the listener think he or she is hearing a person rather than
a machine. At the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence,
a group of leading researchers known as the Machine Learning, Data Mining
and Intelligent Music Processing Group are trying to pinpoint just what
it is that fools the ear. Led by Gerhard Widmer, they are looking at everything
from improving the way computers 'hear' music to isolating the elements
of individual performance style, as well as creating graphs and animations
to illustrate different pianists' interpretations of the same passage
of music. In a 2003 paper, 'In Search of the Horowitz Factor,' Dr. Widmer
and his team described giving the computer 13 recordings of Mozart piano
sonatas, played into a Bösendorfer Disklavier by the pianist Roland
Batik, to see if they could use the computer to determine rules that described
the pianist's interpretive choices. ... [T]here's still the thorny matter
of how to get data from an audio recording into the computer. It's a question
not just of having the computer play back a CD, but of translating the
music into a language the computer can understand. A computer, by itself,
can't recognize the difference between a note of music and a cough." June 4, 2005: Terse,
lyrical text opens up world of wondrous complexity. By Matt Radz.
Montreal Gazette (subscription req'd.). "Sure enough, Toronto playwright
John Mighton's first new play in more than eight years, Half Life, turns
out to be funny, smart and touching. ... Only machines possess perfect
memory. The point is made in one of the establishing scenes. Mighton makes
dramatic use of the so-called Turing Test used to distinguish between
human grey-matter and computer-chip moxie. The character of Donald, an
artificial-intelligence expert...." June 3, 3005: Robots
help vision-impaired in study. Australian Associated Press / available
from Channel Nine & ninemsn. "Robotic dogs are making life easier
for vision-impaired toddlers and adults taking part in a new study, a
researcher says. Gold Coast-based Griffith University PhD student Stuart
Seymon said on Friday he and fellow researchers were developing software
packages for the robot dogs to suit the daily needs of vision-impaired
people of all ages." June 3, 2005: Big
brother really is watching us all. By Daniel Winterstein. Scotsman.com
News. "There are four million CCTV cameras in Britain, with the number
set to rise and rise. They have had a considerable impact on crime, but
this is nothing compared to their potential if projects to create 'smart'
CCTV cameras are successful. Smart cameras could recognise criminal or
anti-social behaviour, and alert the authorities. They could also be hooked
up to a database of photos (eg those collected for ID cards) and used
to automatically track the movements of people, which currently requires
a (junior) police officer to spend a lot of low-quality time watching
footage duller than the cricket. ... This is where computers come in -
they are very good at calculating the kind of probability-based problems
that forensics throw up. There's a Scottish project to develop this idea
into a usable technology. It involves pooling the knowledge of forensic
scientists to build an 'expert system'; a computer with an in-depth knowledge
of forensics. All of this is rather scary. It places powerful snooping
tools in the hands of government." June 3, 2005: Reducing
the cost of cotton production. By By Rob Hogan, Scott Stiles, Kelly
Bryant, and James Marshall. Delta Farm Press. "Late-season insecticide
sprays can be reduced by using the Bollman program. Cotman is a computer-based
expert system developed by the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture
and contains Bollman as one of its components." June 3, 2005: Video-game
industry mulls over the future beyond shoot-'em-ups. By Gloria Goodale.
The Christian Science Monitor. "Video games are no longer the geeky
stepchild of popular entertainment. Last year, US sales of what is now
called 'interactive entertainment' topped $7 billion, closing in on the
$9 billion film industry. Throw in a host of other measurements, say those
who study popular media, and what used to be the noisy baby in the backseat
is now helping steer the entire culture, technologically and creatively.
... Perhaps most important, interactive entertainment is changing the
way an entire generation sees itself in relation to the world, expanding
popular storytelling beyond passive consumption to include involvement
in the development and outcome of an experience. ... Peer Schneider, editorial
director of IGN.com, a game website, points to the emerging world of educational
and training software being used in venues such as hospitals ('Escape
from ObeezCity,' a game to teach children about obesity) and the military
('America's Army'). All these tap the sophisticated interactive tools
developed by the video-game industry." June 3, 2005: Varsity
to Host Artificial Intelligence Conference. The Press and Journal
/ this is north scotland. "A Conference examining how advances in
artificial intelligence could benefit patients is being hosted by Aberdeen
University next month. The 10th International Conference on Artificial
Intelligence in Medicine will attract delegates from across the UK and
worldwide to hear presentations from leading experts in the field." June 3, 2005: Tech-minded
kids pass up canoes for computers. By Seth Sutel. Associated Press
/ available from TheJournalNews.com. "With the summer camp season
fast approaching, kids across the country will be stocking up on hiking
shoes, bug spray and other necessities for adventures in the great outdoors.
Thousands of others, however, will be enjoying adventures of the indoor
variety: creating video games, building robots and designing Web pages.
Computer camp, as it was known to an earlier generation, just isn't what
it used to be. With the booming growth of video games, the Internet and
digital media, technology-minded kids have an enormous variety of things
to learn at technology camps, which are often taught on the campuses of
major universities. ... Camp administrators say enrollment is up from
last year.... And while the kids are on the computers for five to six
hours a day, the instructors also take them outside for activities to
break up the day." June 3 - 9, 2005: Man-Machines
of Loving Grace - Kraftwerk return! By Jay Babcock. LA Weekly. "Next
Tuesday, German electronic-music pioneers Kraftwerk will perform in Los
Angeles for the first time since their now-legendary show at the Hollywood
Palladium in 1996. ...We all know Kraftwerk songs -- odes to transportation
like 'Autobahn' and 'Trans-Europe Express,' future/now manifestoes like
'Man/Machine' and 'The Robots' -- but it's in the live context, where
the songs are joined to specially designed graphics, that Kraftwerk achieves
a purity of all-encompassing vision that secular music rarely touches.
It's all about rapture, and an interaction with -- or longing for -- a
relationship with something other than human. On the telephone, Ralf Hutter
-- co-founder of Kraftwerk with Florian Schneider, and now approaching
60 years of age -- is helpful and deliberate, like a professor pleased
to have a visitor who's interested in his research on an obscure subject.
L.A. WEEKLY: There's a bumper sticker that says 'Drum machines have no
soul.' Do you think that is true? ... Would you consider the Kraftwerk
concept to be basically optimistic about the relationship between man
and machine? ... There’s an almost universal fascination with machines
and computers, but at the same time, isn't there a cultural fear of the
future, of machines taking over? A fear of cyborgs? ... What do you think
about artificial intelligence? Do you think it's possible that a machine
can become sentient? ... When you let machines play at concerts -- especially
when there are actual robot versions of Kraftwerk onstage in place of
the humans -- when you do that, and the audience applauds at the end of
the song, what are the people applauding for?..." June 2, 2005: Talk Time - Danny Hillis.
Danny Hillis invented parallel computing in the 1980s and wrote Pattern on the Stone.
Interviewed by Hamish Mackintosh. The Guardian. "How about artificial intelligence? The interesting thing about AI is that a lot of the things we thought were going to be hard turned out to be easy and vice versa. We assumed the things that were hard for us were going to be hard for computers. Playing chess is hard for us but it turned out to be pretty easy for a computer. We hardly notice understanding a voice or recognising a face, yet those things are on the cutting edge for computers. AI has taught me how much of what the brain does is at the unconscious level. So is the voice recognition we see in movies some way off? ..." June 2, 2005: Making
SMART Homes Smarter. AZoBuild. "A University of Ulster researcher
is at the cutting edge of innovative technology designed to make homes
smarter. Dr Juan Carlos Augusto, a lecturer in the School of Computing
and Mathematics says the research area could have major implications,
particularly for elderly or vulnerable people living alone. Based at the
University’s Jordanstown campus, Dr Augusto specialises in the area
of Artificial Intelligence and recently his research has focused on 'Ambient
Intelligence' - which uses technology to increase the range of services
that buildings can provide for their occupants. ... According to Dr Augusto,
while there are many houses advertised as 'Smart Homes', it would be hard
to say how many actually deserve the label - as this depends on where
the line is drawn between something behaving intelligently or not. The
market for Smart Homes technology is growing, particularly in Northern
Europe, the USA and Japan. Some charitable trusts in the UK like the Joseph
Rowntree Housing Trust have basic Smart Homes functioning to provide independent
living to elderly people." June 2, 2005: The
future is always zooming toward us. By Ed Willett. Regina Leader-Post
(subscription req'd.). "Canadian science fiction writer Robert J.
Sawyer has written about the mystery of human consciousness several times.
In his latest novel, Mindscan, he postulates in about 40 years it will
be possible to download a human consciousness into an android body. Several
other science-fiction writers have recently written books or stories dealing
with similar ideas." June 2, 2005: Japanese
Has High Hopes for Robot. By Yuri Kageyama. Associated Press / available
from MSN Money. "Ten teenagers anxiously huddled over a Transformer-like
robot in a humble classroom are pioneers in Japan's initiative called
'super science' -- a nationwide effort in public education to nurture
future leaders in technology. At a time when fears are growing that Japan
is being overshadowed by the clout of China as well as increasingly successful
businesses in other Asian nations, hopes are high for the program, which
grants high schools money to fund their own original technology curriculum.
... Robotics is one area where Japan is still among the world's leaders,
says Shigeaki Yanai of the Japan Robot Association, a trade group. The
Japanese market for next-generation robots is expected to grow to 1.5
trillion yen (US$13.8 billion; euro11.3 billion) by 2010, and to more
than 4 trillion yen (US$37 billion; euro30 billion) by 2025, according
to the association. At a recent class, the students in the high school's
robotics course were grappling with the basic language of computer programming
to make the robot move. ... Teacher Yoshikazu Oonishi hopes students'
programming skills will improve by the end of the school year, to give
them some understanding about artificial intelligence." June 2, 2005: Grad
shooting for stars. By Sally Mesarosh. The Gilbert Republic / azcentral.com.
"A few decades ago, Steffanie Kuehn's career choice of electrical
engineering might have been considered unusual. In today's workplace,
stereotypes are no longer as likely to influence a student's career goals.
Kuehn, 18, a recently graduated senior at Gilbert High School, will be
pursuing a degree in electrical engineering at Brigham Young University
with an eye toward a doctorate in astrophysics. 'I want to go into artificial
intelligence,' said Kuehn, who scored a perfect 1600 on her SAT. 'I'm
interested in helping build technology that goes into space, like probes
that make decisions on their own.' ... Non-traditional career paths such
as Kuehn's can offer both men and women broader opportunities and greater
job satisfaction. The U.S. Department of Labor defines non-traditional
careers as occupations where at least 75 percent of the workers are of
one gender. For women, jobs traditionally held by men offer wages 50 to
75 percent higher than traditional female-dominated jobs. But Department
of Labor statistics show that 15 percent of the 58 million women in the
workforce are employed in non-traditional occupations such as auto mechanics,
firefighting or engineering. Debbie Graham, career technician at Mountain
Pointe High School in Ahwatukee Foothills, said she finds that high school
students haven't been educated about non-traditional classes as much as
they should be. 'When I walk into computer networking or programming classes,
they're all male,' Graham said. ... Graham said the time for parents and
teachers to begin pointing out non-traditional career options is before
students enter high school. She said the state plans to build more information
on non-traditional career options into the career curriculum." June 1, 2005: Pentagon
envisions electronic office assistant for busy human bosses. By Robert
S. Boyd. Knight Ridder Newspapers / Knight Ridder Washington Bureau. "With
a strong push from the Pentagon, computer scientists are trying to create
an artificial 'personal office assistant' that's smart enough to handle
routine tasks for a human boss, military or civilian. The researchers
aim to build an electronic system that understands human language, takes
and remembers instructions, learns from its experiences and copes with
unexpected situations. ... The office assistant program is sponsored by
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Pentagon unit that pioneered
such once blue-sky developments as the Internet, stealth aircraft and
microelectronic machines. DARPA Director Anthony Tether told the House
Science Committee last month that his agency is moving into the field
of 'cognitive computing,' meaning computer systems that 'perceive, reason
and learn,' not just crunch numbers and manipulate data. The Pentagon
project is called PAL, an acronym for 'personalized assistant that learns.'
'Cognitive systems that learn to adapt to their users could dramatically
improve a wide range of military operations,' said Ronald Brachman, the
director of DARPA's Information Processing Technology Office. 'They could
learn and even improve on their own.'" June 1, 2005: Low-tech
valet parking gets high-tech treatment. By Chris Woodyard. USAToday.com.
"For Computerized Valet Parking Systems, the latest technology is
the ability for the system to automatically read license plates. That
came through a partnership with another firm, Active Recognition Technologies
in Phoenix, about a year ago. Among other things, having the capability
allows the system to know how many times a vehicle has come on the property
previously. Casinos can use the license-plate-recognition technology not
only to keep track of cars, but also to let casinos instantly know who
is pulling up to the front door. ... The next goal is to make the system
even more sophisticated. Instead of just recognizing license plates, the
next generation could include the ability for the computer to automatically
discern makes and colors of cars." June 1, 2005: Linux
Powers Airborne Bots. By Kevin Poulsen. Wired News. "British
researchers are turning to Linux and embedded processors to build a fleet
of tiny, robotic helicopters capable of swarming like angry bees and evaluating
their surroundings with a single hive mind. The University of Essex's
UltraSwarm project is an experiment in swarm intelligence and wireless
cluster computing that might one day spawn military surveillance applications.
... If all goes according to plan, the helicopters will communicate with
one another over Bluetooth, allowing them to move as one entity, and even
to carry out sophisticated computation-heavy tasks using distributed computing
techniques. 'We'll have a flock of helicopters; they will be autonomous
individually and as a swarm, and they will be gathering and processing
visual data in distributed way,' says Owen Holland, project director and
deputy head of the university's computer science department. The team
says the concept was inspired by the graceful flow of flocking starlings,
and the knowledge that the accumulated brain mass of a flock of 1,000
birds adds up to that of a human brain." June 1, 2005: Imagining
homes of the future. BBC News. "A unique project is under way
in Sheffield to monitor the movements of a family living in a futuristic
home packed with the latest technological innovations. The aim is to help
house builders predict how we will want to use our homes 10 or 20 years
from now. But what will the homes of the future be like? Experts Christopher
Sanderson, of The Future Laboratory and Richard Brindley, of the Royal
Institute of British Architects, outline their visions of what might be
to come. ... Your fridge could also suggest recipes using the item, possibly
paired with other items on its shelves, or suggest complementary items
for a shopping list. ... Mr Sanderson says robots look likely to start
appearing in our homes quiet soon, with models ranging from Sony's childlike
Qrio and robot pet dog to robotic vacuum cleaners already in development.
But Mr Brindley expects most robots to be more functional than lifelike." June 2005: A new vision -
Industrial robots once were blind, but now they see.
By Alice Shepherd. Manufacturing Automation Magazine. "In the past, robotic vision was confined to the laboratory and perhaps a few custom applications. Nowadays, robust robots are using sight in non-fixtured, unstructured factory environments, thanks to the integration of artificial intelligence with traditional industrial robotics. A camera, robot and robot controller are linked to a computer, allowing the robot to see, move and react much like a human being. Many automotive parts manufacturers have embraced vision-guided robotics (VGR) and integrated the technology into their factories." June 2005: NextFest
2005 - The Wired World's Fair:June 24 - 26, Chicago. Wired
(Issue 13.06). "Building on the success of last year's NextFest in
San Francisco, we'll offer more than 100 exhibits about the future of
exploration, entertainment, transportation, science and medicine, communication,
design, defense, and -imagination (a pavilion dedicated to developments
by NextFest sponsor GE). On the pages that follow, we've highlighted the
cool things you'll be able to see, touch, and in some cases test-drive." June 2005: Rise
of the Plagiosphere. By Ed Tenner. Technology Review. "The 1960s
gave us, among other mind-altering ideas, a revolutionary new metaphor
for our physical and chemical surroundings: the biosphere. But an even
more momentous change is coming. Emerging technologies are causing a shift
in our mental ecology, one that will turn our culture into the plagiosphere,
a closing frontier of ideas. ... What NASA did to our conception of the
planet, Web-based technologies are beginning to do to our understanding
of our written thoughts. We look at our ideas with less wonder, and with
a greater sense that others have already noted what we're seeing for the
first time. The plagiosphere is arising from three movements: Web indexing,
text matching, and paraphrase detection." June 2005: The
Start of Computer Games. By Corie Lok. Technology Review. "The
first game invented specifically for the computer appeared in early 1962.
A new $120,000 computer had just arrived at MIT that was faster and easier
to use than the handful of other hulking machines on campus. And a group
of young MIT programmers who just happened to be reading science fiction
books about space battle had been itching to test it out. In less than
a year, the programmers, led by Steven Russell, produced Spacewar....
At the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, a group of engineers
will soon complete the restoration of a PDP-1, which will be exhibited
to the public. Visitors will then get to experience computing history
by playing Spacewar for themselves." June 2005: Conversational
Computers. By Andy Aaron, Ellen Eide and John F. Pitrelli. Scientific
American (subscription req'd). "Call a large company these days,
and you will probably start by having a conversation with a computer.
Until recently, such automated telephone speech systems could string together
only prerecorded phrases. ... Computer-generated speech has improved during
the past decade, becoming significantly more intelligible and easier to
listen to. But researchers now face a more formidable challenge: making
synthesized speech closer to that of real humans--by giving it the ability
to modulate tone and expression, for example--so that it can better communicate
meaning. This elusive goal requires a deep understanding of the components
of speech and of the subtle effects of a person's volume, pitch, timing
and emphasis. That is the aim of our research group at IBM and those of
other U.S. companies, such as AT&T, Nuance, Cepstral and ScanSoft, as
well as investigators at institutions including Carnegie Mellon University,
the University of California at Los Angeles, the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology and the Oregon Graduate Institute." |
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