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<< Headlines are listed according to date posted <-> Articles are organized by date published >>
March 31, 2006: MedMined on fire with infection 'smoke alarm' - No. 1 Fastest-Growing Emerging Company. By Kelli M. Dugan. Birmingham Business Journal. "The braintrust behind MedMined Inc.'s 179 percent revenue growth in 2005 can certainly gauge success by the bottom line. But the trio would just as soon evaluate the cost savings their Data Mining Surveillance services have realized for their rapidly expanding roster of client hospitals across the country. And let's not forget the lives saved. MedMined uses artificial intelligence to monitor possible warning signs of hospital-acquired infections. ... 'MedMined's technology learns from a hospital's own data what's typical and recognizes when something unusual happens,' [G.T. LaBorde] says." March 31, 2006: Other business news. Pittsburgh Tribune-Review & PittsburghLive.com. "Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science has created what's believed to be the nation's first Machine Learning Department, formerly the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery. ... Tom M. Mitchell... heads the department." March 31, 2006: Launching net gains - Bright ideas are the source of this entrepreneur's success. By Cameron Cooper. The Australian. "Liesl Capper creates great businesses -- and then walks away. ... As the tech-wreck unfolded in 2001, Capper launched Mooter Media, a search engine that uses predictive personalisation, clustering and theme analysis to provide search results. ... After overseeing Mooter's capital-raising phase, taking it into international markets, inking deals with major clients including Yahoo and Fairfax, and preparing the company for last year's listing, Capper left to chase new goals. Today, her focus is artificial intelligence through LookMedical, a health self-management portal that is set for launch later this year through an alliance with print publisher Optimal Health Communications and the University of Queensland research division, Your Health Group. The portal will feature a 'cyber doc' that people can talk to online. It will make recommendations about medical information." March 30, 2006: Interview - Dr. Barry Chaiken on changing healthcare, AI and pandemic flu. By Jason Stitt. Wisconsin Technology Network. "WTN: You've written about artificial intelligence's role in healthcare. But is anything actually happening? Chaiken: Isabel Healthcare is basically using a system where you enter in signs and symptoms and it gives you a differential diagnosis. Now, funny enough, Larry Weed, 20-plus years ago, developed something called the problem-knowledge coupler. You entered in all these signs and symptoms, and it gave you a differential diagnosis based on probability. Then it would learn over time. WTN: 20 years ago? Chaiken: More than 20 years ago. Unbelievable. Nobody talks about it anymore, but it was really the first thing that was done in the area of these expert systems. But you know what, expert systems are great, and I'm glad people are developing them, but until we start to say to ourselves 'How are we going to use them and make them part of the workflow?' they aren't going to be used." March 30, 2006: Lights...camera...robot! New Scientist Technology Blog, posted by Tom. "I don't think Spielberg needs to be worried, but this film-making robot seems to have all the makings of a decent director." March 30, 2006: Work on hi-tech centre under way. BBC News. "Work to transform an Edinburgh city centre site into a leading centre for computer science and artificial intelligence has started. Edinburgh University's new £42m Informatics Forum in Crichton Street will attract top researchers and students from around the world. It is hoped the new building, set to be completed next year, will generate world class research. The department was destroyed more than three years ago by the Cowgate fire."
>>> Academic Departments (@ Resources for Students) March 30, 2006: 12 student plays make the finals. By Frank Herron. The Post- Dispatch & Syracuse.com. "12 Central New York high school students ... have emerged as finalists in the eighth annual Writing the Future: Young Playwrights Festival, sponsored by Syracuse Stage and JPMorgan Chase. ... The finalists cover a wide range of issues and settings, says Pat Pederson, artistic assistant at Syracuse Stage. ... Another, 'Artificial Intelligence,' by Mike Kenien, of Christian Brothers Academy, focuses on a widower who tries to re-create his dead wife." March 29, 2006: Device warns you if you're boring or irritating. By Celeste Biever. New Scientist (Issue 2545: page 30). "A device that can pick up on people's emotions is being developed to help people with autism relate to those around them. ... The 'emotional social intelligence prosthetic' device, which [Rana] El Kaliouby is constructing along with MIT colleagues Rosalind Picard and Alea Teeters, consists of a camera small enough to be pinned to the side of a pair of glasses, connected to a hand-held computer running image recognition software plus software that can read the emotions these images show. If the wearer seems to be failing to engage his or her listener, the software makes the hand-held computer vibrate. ... Her program is based on a machine-learning algorithm that she trained by showing it more than 100 8-second video clips of actors expressing particular emotions. ... Timothy Bickmore of Northeastern University in Boston, who studies ways in which computers can be made to engage with people's emotions, says the device would be a great teaching aid." March 29, 2006: CMU uses game maker's characters to interest girls in computer programming. By Mark Roth. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "The delights of computer programming can be a tough sell to many students -- particularly girls. 'If you walk into a roomful of middle school girls and say "Do you want to learn how to program a computer?", only a few hands will go up,' says Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor Randy Pausch. 'But if you walk in and say "Do you want to learn how to tell a story and make a movie?", all the hands go up.' That's one reason why Dr. Pausch is so excited about a groundbreaking deal announced earlier this month in which video game giant Electronic Arts has agreed to donate the animation for characters from 'The Sims' to Carnegie Mellon for use in a novice programmers' course the school has developed. ... If that encourages more students, particularly girls, to become computer science majors, no one will be happier than video game companies like Electronic Arts. A survey by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA showed that the number of college freshmen interested in becoming computer science majors has dropped more than 60 percent over the last four years. The dropoff has been worse for women. ... 'There's kind of a critical period during middle school where girls sort of decide for or against math and science,' Ms. [Caitlin] Kelleher said." March 29, 2006: HK AI expert awarded Croucher Fellowship. Xinhua / available from The People's Daily Online. "An artificial intelligence (AI) expert from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has been awarded a Croucher Senior Research Fellowship for his outstanding research, announced the university on Tuesday. The awardee, Fangzhen Lin is an associate professor of computer science at the university. ... He also gained ... an Outstanding Paper Award Honorable Mention in 2004 from the American Association for Artificial Intelligence." March 28, 2006: Ulster University explores intelligent systems. Vision Systems Design Online. "'The objective is to study sensory fusion in biological systems and then translate that knowledge into the creation of intelligent computational machines,' says Martin McGinnity, director of the Intelligent Systems Engineering Laboratory (ISEL). ... 'The ultimate aim is to create machines that can capture information through sensory perception, process it in a way similar to the brain, and then act intelligently on that information. The research will have practical application in a range of areas including robotics and industrial automation,' he says." March 28, 2006: PC, leave me alone -- I’m busy. By Danny Bradbury. Financial Times & FT.com. "Could modern systems be made more considerate by understanding our working patterns and adapting their behaviour to suit? Eric Horvitz thinks so. The senior manager and research area manager at Microsoft Research has worked for years on building context-sensitive IT systems that know when to leave us alone until we have finished what we are doing. 'We have systems that calculate the cost of interrupting someone in dollar terms. How much would a person be willing to pay to avoid an interruption of this type in this situation?' says Horvitz. 'We can also forecast when that person will have a lower cost in the future, to help schedule communications.' Horvitz’s system uses artificial intelligence to guess when a person may be contactable and then tells callers how long they can expect to wait. ... Inferring new rules from our behaviour might seem like science fiction but most human activity is depressingly predictable. For example Reality Mining, a project run by MIT’s Media Lab, used data from participants’ mobile phones to build a profile of their behaviour. ... The application of such systems could be broad, but home healthcare could be one. Understanding the behavioural patterns of the elderly, or someone in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, could alert a computer when they deviate from the norm." March 28, 2006 [broadcast date]: The Great Robot Race. NOVA, the PBS science television series. "Join NOVA for an exclusive backstage pass to the DARPA Grand Challenge -- a raucous race for robotic, driverless vehicles sponsored by the Pentagon, which awards a $2 million purse to the winning team. Armed with artificial intelligence, laser-guided vision, GPS navigation, and 3-D mapping systems, the contenders are some of the world's most advanced robots. Yet even their formidable technology and mechanical prowess may not be enough to overcome the grueling 130-mile course through Nevada's desert terrain. From concept to construction to the final competition, 'The Great Robot Race' delivers the absorbing inside story of clever engineers and their unyielding drive to create a champion, capturing the only aerial footage that exists of the Grand Challenge." The program will be available online on March 29th.
>>> Grand Challenges, Autonomous Vehicles, AI Overview, Robots, Applications, Resources for Educators; also see this related interview and these related articles Late March 2006: A.I. Gone Awry
- The Futile Quest for
Artificial Intelligence. By Peter Kassan. Skeptic (Volume 12, Number 2: pages 30 - 39; subscription req'd). "AI has splintered into three largely independent and mutually contradictory areas (connectionism, computationalism. and robotics), each of which has its own subdivisions and contradictions. Much of the activity in each of the areas has little to do with the original goals of mechanizing (or computerizing) human-level intelligence. However, in pursuit of that original goal, each of the three has its own set of problems, in addition to the many that they share." March 27, 2006: Competitive Shakeups. Technology News Commentary by Rob Enderle. TechNewsWorld. "Improvements in gaming artificial intelligence are also significant. A platform called AI.Implant is helping to drive this trend. AI.Implant specializes in easily giving game characters complex personalities so that the experience is more realistic. Characters act and react to players and to each other realistically and dynamically, which vastly improves the gaming experience. ... When you put all three of these -- voice, AI and physics -- together, as a number of compelling new game titles are going to do, you get a gaming experience that is generations ahead of anything we've seen the past. This is the future of gaming." March 27, 2006: VC Money Finds Local Search - Search engines that help people get information on their neighborhood are exploring search’s last frontier. Red Herring. "Insider Pages, a search engine that helps users track down local information such as the location of the nearest hairstylists, say, and get reviews on how talented they are with the scissors, said Monday it raised $8.5 million in venture funding, in yet another sign 'local' is the catchword in search. ... Of course there are also a lot of startups that want a piece of this market. One of them is GenieKnows.com, which launched a beta of its local search site Monday. ... The differentiator, [Hyun Chul Lee, director of research] says, is that his engine, which also uses artificial intelligence, extracts geographic information from web pages and then uses it to determine relevance." March 27, 2006: Chip ramps up neuron-to-computer communication. By Tom Simonite. NewScientist.com news. "A specialised microchip that could communicate with thousands of individual brain cells has been developed by European scientists. The device will help researchers examine the workings of interconnected brain cells, and might one day enable them to develop computers that use live neurons for memory. ... A team from Italy and Germany worked with the mobile chip maker Infineon to squeeze 16,384 transistors and hundreds of capacitors onto an experimental microchip just 1mm squared." March 27, 2006: Artificial Intelligence - Working backwards from HAL. By Nick Hampshire. ZDNet UK. "Part 1: In the first part of a three-part special report looking at the past, present and future of AI, we examine the origins of machine intelligence and neural networks. ... The phrase 'artificial intelligence' was first coined by John McCarthy at a conference at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in 1956, but the concept of artificial, or machine, intelligence is in fact as old as the computer. The computer was, after all, initially developed during the Second World War to break codes that were too hard for humans and required high speed 'machine intelligence'. It was one of the most celebrated of the Second World War code breakers, Alan Turing, a man who many would describe as the inventor of the first modern computer, who proposed in 1950 what has become known as the Turing Test. This simply said that we could consider a machine to be intelligent if its responses in some sort of conversation were indistinguishable from those of a human. It is this proposal that is seen by many not only as the definitive test of machine intelligence but also the point at which today's quest to develop artificial intelligence was born."
>>> AI Overview, Applications, History, Turing Test, Machine Learning, Agents, Robots, Reasoning, Games & Puzzles, Systems, Cognitive Science, Philosophy, The Future March 27, 2006: Robot to rescue of agoraphobic genius. By Robert Hurwitt. San Francisco Chronicle & SFGate.com. "It's almost unfair. Rolin Jones' 'The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow' is so snarkily funny, so filled with youthful creativity and satiric edge that it scarcely prepares you for the emotional depth it develops or the dramatic punch it delivers in the end. ... The play -- it should be said right away -- has nothing to do with pseudo-scientific fantasies about the origins of life. The preoccupation of its intriguingly imagined central character is intelligence design, as in the creation of artificial intelligence. Jones' Jennifer Marcus (a magnetic Sue Jean Kim) is an exceptionally bright, comically foulmouthed, blisteringly impatient 22-year-old cyber-genius trapped in extended adolescence by an increasingly debilitating case of agoraphobia. She's also an adopted daughter, thoroughly Southern Californian in attitude, who's become obsessed with finding her birth mother in China. Because she can't leave the house, she decides to create a robot version of herself, one that can at least partially think, to conduct the search and make contact for her." March 27, 2006: Cars that drive themselves en route. By R. Colin Johnson. EE Times Online. "The team behind Stanley, the car that won the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's 2005 autonomous-vehicle race over 132 miles of Nevada desert, is at it again. By 2008, the Stanford University group will be steering its self-driving car onto the interstate. 'The next big milestone we are heading for now is proving self-driving is possible in traffic,' said professor Sebastian Thrun, director of Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the university's racing-team leader. 'Our goal at Stanford is to be able, within the next two years, to drive from downtown San Francisco to downtown Los Angeles with 100 percent autonomy--without any human intervention whatsoever.' ... Stanford's Thrun predicts that full autonomy--not just convoy lanes on the freeway--is at least 30 years away. But between then and now will come many milestones, such as autonomous military convoys and a whole raft of convenience and safety features that will slowly bestow various degrees of autonomy onto commercial and consumer vehicles. ... Freescale's [Peter] Schulmeyer sees collision avoidance as a passing goal on the way to full autonomy, with all new innovations in automobiles pointing to increased automation."
>>> Autonomous Vehicles, Transportation, Military, Grand Challenges, Robots, Applications; also see this article about a related broadcast March 27, 2006: Brace yourselves - the perfect storm is coming your way. Gales, tidal surges, flooding and widespread havoc - but this time it's only a simulation. By Ian Sample. The Guardian & Guardian Unlimited. "The virtual storm lies at the heart of an unprecedented £5.5m experiment involving the Environment Agency, the Met Office and eight universities to test cutting-edge artificial intelligence systems designed to foresee dangerous storm surges. Beginning tomorrow, they will be put through their paces, when a team led by Brian Golding, head of weather forecasting at the Met Office, will digitally recreate a storm that struck Britain in November last year. ... The simulation will give the researchers a unique opportunity to test whether artificial intelligence can predict such events and also be used to save lives and prevent damage. 'We want to see if these systems can tell us further ahead when we've got a major issue. And we want to know definitely what's going to happen, because if you get a pile of false alarms, it just causes chaos,' Prof Cluckie said." March 26, 2006: High schoolers stage a robot war. Reuters. "Teens from the U.S., Brazil, and the UK design and build robots to compete in a high tech sport. These teens may not be pros on the basketball court, but their robots sure are. More than 800 students from the U.S., Brazil, and the U.K. converged on New York Friday (March 24) for the 6th annual 'New York City For Information and Recognition of Science and Technology' (FIRST) Robotic Competition.' The student-built and -operated machines were put to the test as they competed against each other in a part basketball, part soccer match. ... The President of FIRST, Paul Gudonis said that the competition was designed to encourage these technically-gifted students to pursue careers in scientific fields." March 25, 2006 : Rules for the modern robot. New Scientist (Issue 2544). "Is there a way to ensure robotic fighter planes do not mistake civilians for enemy soldiers and kill innocent people? Is 'system malfunction' a justifiable defence for contravening the Geneva Convention? Should robotic sex dolls resembling children be allowed? Such are the concerns of a group of leading roboticists, who met this week in Palermo, Sicily, to discuss measures to prevent robots unnecessarily harming people." March 24, 2006: Podcast - Artificial intelligence and machine learning; Now and the future. Vanderbilt News Service. "Doug Fisher, associate professor of computer science and computer engineering at Vanderbilt University, talks about the state of the art in artificial intelligence and robotics in this interview by Adelyn Jones of WRLT FM radio in Nashville." Also available from the Internet Archive. March 24, 2006: Car - Where's my dude? By Alex Kingsbury. U.S.News & World Report and USNews.com. "The Great Robot Race, a Nova documentary airing March 28 on PBS, covers the contest sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (aka DARPA -- they're the guys who actually invented the Internet). We won't spoil the ending, but one contestant, Stanford University robotics Prof. Sebastian Thrun, spoke with U.S. News about the event and the future of robotic cars. ... [Q:] You approached the road recognition problem quite differently from your competition. [A:] We used two things: multiple sensors and artificial intelligence. We put lasers, cameras, and radar all together on the car. And we invested very heavily in software that can tell with a great deal of accuracy what it knows and what it doesn't know and how it can acquire more information. We taught the computer to recognize the road and seek out more of the road. So our emphasis on software was what made us different from the competition." March 24, 2006: Robots take the field in name of science - High school competitors build their own mechanical players. By Robert Weisman. The Boston Globe & boston.com. "The geek olympics have come to town. ... [H]undreds of tech-crazed high school students gathered in Boston University's Agganis Arena yesterday to ready their robots for the FIRST Robotics Competition opening today. ... 'Businesses recognize that we really need a change in American culture,' said Brookline technology entrepreneur Marc A. Hodosh, chairman of the Boston FIRST event. 'This country celebrates athletes and entertainers. The average high school kid around Boston could probably name the entire Red Sox team, but they couldn't name a single living inventor. A career in science and technology is much more accessible and realistic than a career in sports.'"
March 24, 2006: Inside MIT’s Surprising Museum. By Kara Peters. AmericanHeritage.com. "History-hungry visitors to Boston may cross the Charles River to stroll through Harvard Yard, but they don’t often visit MIT. The university synonymous with America’s technological forward march remains stubbornly identified with the future, not the past. But a visit to the sorely underappreciated MIT Museum offers a different perspective. ... Some of the museum’s other treasures include ... a riveting robotics exhibit that affords visitors a glimpse of some of the world’s most significant research in artificial intelligence. The museum’s directors have an ambitious five-year plan to establish it as a gateway to MIT. This will mean moving to a larger facility, continuing to engage the community with lectures and forums on pressing issues in science and technology, and mounting new exhibits. ... 'When you come here, you’re part of a fairly unusual space in a cultural sense, but you’re also part of an experiment, an experiment in how best to communicate the science, technology, history, social, and cultural significance of scientific research,' [Deborah] Douglas says." March 24, 2006: Internet taking on new role in education. By Gina Delfavero. Blairsville Dispatch / available from PittsburghLive.com. "A decade ago, computers and the Internet were a rare commodity in schools. Today, they are as commonplace as the textbook. And the role of technology within education is continually growing, reaching into new areas. ... [The Apangea Learning] system, called SmartHelp, uses artificial intelligence with all of its tutoring, but it integrates the use of human tutors, as well. According to Matt Hausmann, vice president of marketing and business development for Apangea, the artificial intelligence system handles 80 percent to 90 percent of the tutoring. But it will recognize when the student needs more help than it can provide, and flags a live online tutor to 'help students through the hurdles,' he said." March 23, 2006: Stealth underwater craft targets minefields - Autonomous technology may make mine clean-ups safer. By Mark Peplow. news @ nature.com. "An underwater craft that can seek out and destroy mines has been unveiled. The sub, dubbed Talisman, relies on computer software that allows it to complete its mission without being guided by an operator. ... The Talisman craft is a prototype to demonstrate how autonomous technology developed for land and aerial vehicles can also be used underwater, says Andy Tonge, manager of BAE Systems' UUV (unmanned underwater vehicle) project in Waterlooville, UK, which developed the sub. They hope to create a market for the vehicles by convincing military customers that it could save them time, equipment, and even lives." March 23, 2006: In this soccer match, the players are robots. By Scott Patterson. The Wall Street Journal (subscription req'd) / also available from post-gazette.com. "Blending artificial intelligence, robotics and soccer, RoboCup is an obscure competition known mostly to computer-science wonks at top universities around the world. ... RoboCup, which is shorthand for Robot Soccer World Cup, has an eye-popping long-term goal. By 2050, it wants to create a humanoid robotic soccer team that can defeat the winner of soccer's real World Cup. ... In June, more than 100 teams will square off in Bremen, Germany, for the 10th-annual RoboCup World Championship. ... The idea to use soccer as a way to experiment with robots appeared in a 1993 paper called 'On Seeing Robots,' by Alan Mackworth, professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. ... The Aibo teams have an even bigger challenge ahead of them. In January, Sony pulled the plug on the Aibo Entertainment Robot line." March 23, 2006: James Bai's 'Puzzlehead' Depicts a Love Triangle With a Twist. Movie review by Jeannette Catsoulis. The New York Times & nytimes.com. "'Puzzlehead' plays out in a bleak and barren future where people have become so scarce that the only permissible use of technology is for repopulation. Fudging this rule somewhat, a lonely scientist builds a robot companion, an exact likeness of himself down to the bouffant hairstyle and lovelorn memories (Stephen Galaida plays both roles). He calls his creation Puzzlehead and trains him to play chess, clean house and spy on Julia (Robbie Shapiro), the pale, jittery salesgirl whom the scientist has been secretly coveting." March 23, 2006: Schools fail to teach scientific computing skills - Poor education standards are to blame for lack of UK scientists. By Matt Chapman. vnunet.com. "Schools and colleges are failing the next generation of scientists by not providing the computer skills they need to do the job, according to the scientists behind Microsoft Research's 2020 report. 'Our findings show that computer science is set to become as fundamental to the natural sciences as mathematics has become to the physical sciences,' said Stephen Emmott, a director at Microsoft Research Cambridge. 'This means that tomorrow's scientists will need to be highly computationally literate as well as being highly scientifically literate. As a consequence we need to rethink how we educate today's children in order to ensure that we have the new kinds of scientists that we need for tomorrow's science.' ... 'A scientist not interested in computing is an oxymoron,' suggested Ehud Shapiro, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science. "
>>> Computer Science, Applications, Resources for Educators, Resources for the Scientific Community March 23, 2006: 2020 Computing: Exceeding human limits. Scientists are turning to automated processes and technologies in a bid to cope with ever higher volumes of data. But automation offers so much more to the future of science than just data handling. By Stephen H. Muggleton. Nature 440, 409-410. "During the twenty-first century, it is clear that computers will continue to play an increasingly central role in supporting the testing, and even formulation, of scientific hypotheses. This traditionally human activity has already become unsustainable in many sciences without the aid of computers. This is not only because of the scale of the data involved but also because scientists are unable to conceptualize the breadth and depth of the relationships between relevant databases without computational support. The potential benefits to science of such computerization are high -- knowledge derived from large-scale scientific data could well pave the way to new technologies, ranging from personalized medicines to methods for dealing with and avoiding climate change [fn]. ... Meanwhile, machine-learning techniques from computer science (including neural nets and genetic algorithms) are being used to automate the generation of scientific hypotheses from data. Some of the more advanced forms of machine learning enable new hypotheses, in the form of logical rules and principles, to be extracted relative to predefined background knowledge. ... One exciting development that we might expect in the next ten years is the construction of the first microfluidic robot scientist, which would combine active learning and autonomous experimentation with microfluidic technology."
>>> Computer Science, Applications, The Future, Systems, Machine Learning, Scientific Discovery, History, Bioinformatics March 22, 2006: Officers sound off on military. By Seth Mauzy. Arizona Daily Wildcat Online. "UA students had a chance to pick the brains of some of the military's top brass yesterday about issues of foreign policy, national defense and the future of combat technology. ... Other questions probed the future of the military, which U.S. Army Col. J.J. Frazier, a technology expert, said is primarily focused on collecting and communicating more information across the battlefield, but also on advances in automation. 'You may have seen that movie 'Stealth' and thought it was pretty far-fetched, but technology is moving farther and farther into the realm of artificial intelligence,' Frazier said. 'The caution is: once we take the pilot out of the cockpit, I have a fear.'" March 22, 2006: He's an expert guide, fluent in Italian, takes you round the museum - and he's a robot. By Barbara McMahon. The Guradian & Guardian Unlimited. "It looks like an oversized vacuum cleaner, but can call on enormous amounts of information. It has wheels, a keyboard and monitor, and can navigate itself around a room of objects, many of them precious. Welcome to your latest tour guide, a 1.5-metre tall robot that from next month will greet visitors, in Italian, to the Agrigento archaeological museum in Sicily and then take them around it. Cicerobot can plan tours and respond to a visitor's wishes. Harris Dindo, part of the science team at Palermo University that developed the robot, said: 'It uses the technique of latent semantic analysis, which means it can answer many of the questions tourists throw at it and have intelligent interaction with them.'"
>>> Robots, Natural Language Processing, Customer Service, Applications March 21, 2006: Flight without flaps. The Engineer Online. "An innovative pilotless aircraft with flapless wings has completed a test flight in the UK. The model aeroplane was developed by a cross-disciplinary team from UK Universities as part of a £6.2m programme, funded jointly by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and BAE Systems. The five-year programme, called FLAVIIR (flapless air vehicle integrated industrial research).... The results from the different groups will be brought together in a single flying demonstrator in about 2009. The concept of a flapless vehicle, using fluidic thrust vectoring - where direction is changed with a secondary airflow - and air jets, is one important area of investigation. Another is the replacement of the pilot by sophisticated software that can autonomously fly the vehicle without collisions in what might be dangerous or remote environments. March 20, 2006: A few bright spots in a bleak landscape. Part of the FT World Report: Portugal 2006. Financial Times & FT.com (subscription req'd) / also available from The Economist Intelligence Unit's Global Technology Forum. "In the Netherlands, the state railway company uses artificial intelligence (AI) to determine the best use of its employees and trains according to the complex variants of train timetables, driver availability, labour regulations and network conditions. The software is supplied by Siscog, a Portuguese company that uses AI to provide interactive scheduling systems for companies managing intricate and constantly evolving resources. The American Association for Artificial Intelligence has twice presented Siscog with its Innovative Application Award, most recently for a crew planning and management system it developed for Norway's state railway. ..." March 20, 2006: Delving into the meaning of artificial life - Consortium's report aims to define, classify synthetic biology's many branches. By Chappell Brown. EE Times Online. "A study that is being conducted by a consortium of companies delves into the issue of artificial life in detail, since it is fundamental to defining and classifying different branches of synthetic biology. Loosely defined as the engineering of systems using mechanisms and principles from molecular biology, synthetic biology could have a wide impact on the field of engineering and on society as a whole, according to a report of the study. The report was written principally by Hubert Bernauer of ATG:Biosynthetics (Feiburg, Germany) for consortium leader Sociedade Portuguesa de Inovação (Baltimore). ... Such current computer-related fields as genetic algorithms, autonomous agents, neural networks and artificial intelligence mimic aspects of living systems. But just how close are they to actual living organisms? The gap is not just a matter of complexity, the authors argue; it also critically depends on the relationship between information and the physical system that represents it. Biologists have identified three critical principles that must be present in any living system: They must be self-creating, self-organizing and self-sustaining." March 20, 2006: Let the games begin at GDC. By Daniel Terdiman. CNET News.com. The heart and soul of the video game world will descend on San Jose, Calif., beginning Monday as more than 12,000 industry professionals arrive for the Game Developers Conference [GDC]. ... But GDC is also as much about the hard-core inner workings of the game development process as it is about high-concept ideas. Thus, the conference schedule is filled wall-to wall with panels such as '3ds Max--Complex data mapping production techniques,' 'Advanced light and shadow culling methods,' 'Artificial intelligence in computer games--present and future' and 'How ambient experiences can take adventure gaming to the next level.'" March 20, 2006: Automatic Code Generators - Even nonprogrammers can 'program' with these tools. By Gary H. Anthes. Computerworld. "While there is still no silver bullet in sight, an array of new techniques promises to further boost programmer productivity, at least in some application domains. The techniques span a broad spectrum of methods and results, but all are aimed at generating software automatically. Typically, they generate code from high- level, machine-readable designs or from domain-specific languages -- assisted by advanced compilers -- that sometimes can be used by nonprogrammers. Gordon Novak, a computer science professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the school's Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence, is working on 'automatic programming' -- using libraries of generic versions of programs, such as algorithms -- to sort or find items in a list. But unlike traditional subroutines, which have simple but rigid interfaces and are invoked by other lines of program code, his technique works at a higher level and is therefore more flexible and easier to use. ... Douglas Smith, principal scientist at Kestrel Institute, a nonprofit computer science research firm in Palo Alto, Calif., is developing tools to 'automate knowledge and get it into the computer.'" March 20, 2006: High-tech art looks at man and machine relationships. By Mary Thomas. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "The curator and artists of 'Can We Fall in Love With a Machine?' at Wood Street Galleries go so far as to suggest that, as technology becomes more sophisticated, the man-machine relationship has potential to surpass the simplistic fascination that gimmickry affords. ... Though a variety of technology is employed -- including voice recognition, robotics, touch-screen responses, synthesized vocals and a biofeedback handset -- the exhibition is accessible to the average visitor. But this entertaining sampler of new media works may also be read on deeper layers." March 20, 2006: Upstarts and rabble rousers - Stanford fetes 4 decades of computer science pioneers. By Tom Abate. San Francisco Chronicle & SFGate.com. "A little over 40 years ago, Stanford University recognized computer science as a new academic discipline. Since then, its scientists have spawned companies like Yahoo and Google and helped create futuristic fields like artificial intelligence. On Tuesday, Stanford will fete the field that has been one of the spark plugs of Silicon Valley. The daylong event will honor academic pioneers like artificial intelligence guru John McCarthy and look ahead at technologies that are still in the dreaming stages. ... [David Patterson, president of the Association for Computing Machinery] cited studies that show computer science has spawned 19 different industries during the past four decades, starting with timeshare computing in the 1960s to the World Wide Web today. Stanford deserves special note even among the big four computer science schools, Patterson said -- the others being Berkeley, MIT and Carnegie-Mellon -- not only because it was early to make the field a separate discipline, but also because it has a strong tradition of research with a practical spin."
>>> Computer Science, History, Applications, Academic Departments (@ Resources for Students) March 20, 2006: How to work the Web to find work - Companies use software to weed out candidates, but here are five strategies that help job-seekers get noticed. By Gregory M. Lamb. The Christian Science Monitor. "In recent years, some tough new bouncers have begun to stand watch outside the door to corporate personnel offices. If you want to get your résumé into the hands of a recruiter, you have to get it by them first. These guardians are sophisticated computer programs that use 'conceptual matching' and other artificial intelligence to weed out candidates who don't fit the job profile. While they usually leave the final hiring decision to a human, these programs can whittle down hundreds of applications to just a handful that will be seen by human eyes. ... Recruiting software can help firms handle huge hiring situations, says Bertrand Dussert, managing director of research for Vurv Technology in Jacksonville, Fla., a supplier of such technology. He estimates that roughly three-quarters of American employers do some kind of computerized screening of applicants." March 19, 2006: Paul Hawkins - Doctor's antidote to court controversies. Innovative expert in Artificial Intelligence is set to transform tennis with his electronic line judges. By Ronald Atkin. The Independent Online. "It will be a historic occasion, one of those moments which promises to change a sport's time-honoured direction and momentum. So say tennis's top administrators of the Hawk-Eye electronic line-calling system which will be introduced for the first time on Wednesday at an official tournament on the professional tour, the Nasdaq-100 Open in Key Biscayne, Florida. ... Exactly what will be affecting the results is a system using six cameras which record the trajectory of the ball and transmit the information to a computer which gives a verdict on the ball's position, accurate, it is claimed, to within four millimetres, or 99.99 per cent. This verdict can be transmitted via video boards within five seconds of a player querying a call." March 18, 2006: Chatbot George gets a makeover. New Scientist (Issue 2543; page 27). "George, the winner of last year's illustrious Loebner prize for most convincing conversational program, has been given voice-recognition software so that people can to talk to him rather than typing in text." March 17, 2006: If you give a bot a basketball...By Stefanie Olsen. CNET News.com. "If you want a glimpse of the future of technology in the United States, look no further than the Ice Weasels, Space Cookies and Cheesy Poofs. No, these aren't code names of secret projects at Google. They're the names of high school teams competing here this weekend for top merit in the 15th annual robotics contest sponsored by FIRST (For the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a nonprofit founded by Segway inventor Dean Kamen. With about $10,000 worth of donated hardware and software, high school students were given roughly six weeks to assemble a functioning robot that can move around a court and shoot Nerf basketballs for points, which is this year's chosen game. ... The contest is designed to inspire kid's interest in math, science and technology. The youngsters' enthusiasm for their robots offers a ray of hope for the future of science and math in the United States at a time when many educators are concerned about test scores and flailing interest among young people in the fields. ... The competition is a community effort. Part of the challenge is for teens to find and work with mentors who are experts in technology and science." March 17, 2006: Exhibit Displays Robots of Future. By Tracy Staedter. Travel Channel News. "A unique exhibit that opened this week at the Royal Museum in Edinburgh uses video augmented reality and artificial intelligence to show how biologically inspired robots of the future will work together to solve complex tasks. The Robot Ships installation, produced by John Robinson and his team from the department of electronics at the University of York, consists of a table on which an overhead projector casts animations of ocean water, ships, and oil tankers. ... In the exhibit, scout ships seek out toxic spills. When they find it, they return to their base, laying down a trail of flashing light beacons, so that clean-up ships can follow the beacons back to the slick. The artificial intelligence software enables each ship to be aware of its immediate surrounds, but it can only communicate with the other ships by dropping the beacons." March 16, 2006: Association for Computing Machinery Honors Berkeley Professor for Contributions to Computing Education. AScribe Newswire. "The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has named Stuart J. Russell of the University of California, Berkeley for its 2005 Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. Professor Russell was cited for his contribution to placing the teaching of artificial intelligence on a statistical and quantitative foundation. The recipient is co-author of 'Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach,' with Dr. Peter Norvig."
>>> Associations (@ Resources for Students) March 16, 2006: Mars rovers win an upgrade - Spirit and Opportunity learn to single out good images. By Mark Peplow. news @ nature.com. "The rovers Spirit and Opportunity will soon be able to spot interesting features of the martian weather automatically. Their new software, due to be installed in June, will help the rovers to identify swirling dust devils and thin clouds in the sky. ... [A]rtificial-intelligence experts have developed software to help the robots spot the most important images. The rovers should even be able to crop the images so that only key features are sent home. ... The project's leader, Steve Chien, an artificial-intelligence expert at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, says that the upgrade should quintuple the number of scientifically interesting snaps in each block of data sent." March 16, 2006: The Shape of Robots to Come. By Michel Marriott. The New York Times & nytimes.com. "A segmented tower on a metal and plastic base swiveled around. Two glowing segments, suggesting a head, tilted forward and spoke: 'Hello. My name is Scoty. Let me explain a few things about myself.' n a vaguely female synthesized voice -- but always in plain English -- Scoty [smart companion operating technology], the latest robot from the robotic-toy maker WowWee, demonstrated its functions for a visitor recently. Chief among them are managing a personal computer's communication and entertainment abilities, finding and playing songs by voice request, recording television shows, telling users when they have e-mail and, again by voice request, reading the e-mail aloud. It takes and then sends voice-to-text e-mail dictation. It takes pictures, and gives the time when asked. ... As robots increasingly migrate from heavy industrial tasks, like welding automobile chassis on assembly lines, to home uses as restless toys and venturesome vacuum cleaners, a fetching personality and appealing appearance become critically important. A flashy show called 'Robots: The Interactive Exhibition' is touring museums and science centers in the United States through 2012 with the aim of demystifying robotics, especially their harder edges. ... 'The overall mission is to find ways of bringing robotics into useful interaction with people,' said Colin Angle, chief executive of iRobot...." March 15, 2006: Big Brother's Big Business - In a world of fear, American cities and corporations are spending billions on high-tech surveillance equipment. A look at the economic engine and privacy concerns surrounding 'smart cameras' and other devices. By Jessica Bennett. Newsweek Web Exclusive / available from MSNBC. "Video surveillance has become the fastest-growing industry within the major categories of electronic security -- with nearly one in four major cities in America investing in new technology, analysts say. It has more than doubled in the last five years, becoming an estimated $9.2 billion business in 2005 and expected to grow to $21 billion by 2010, says Joe Freeman, a columnist for Security Technology & Design Magazine and founder and president of J.P. Freeman, a market research and consulting firm. ... The future of video surveillance, using so-called 'intelligent cameras' and software, is designed to function far beyond what is humanly possible. ... They are high resolution, and can recognize sounds and movements -- if necessary, sending signals to appropriate authorities. Their manufacturers say they can tell if a gunshot goes off: using acoustic sensors to point the camera toward the direction of the shot, and can recognize if a suitcase is left unattended or a car is parked illegally. They can monitor erratic behavior, and create invisible 'trip wires' to guard no-trespassing zones. They'll even inform authorities with suggestions on how to respond to what they see. ... Debate over surveillance systems has long been a heated subject. But with new systems replacing the old, civil liberties groups are raising additional concerns about the pervasiveness -- and room for abuse -- within the new technology. ... Does the potential protection outweigh the occasional abuse or invasion of privacy? ... "
>>> Law Enforcement, Vision, Industry Statistics, Ethical & Social Implications, Applications March 15, 2006: Bacteria could power tiny robots. By Michael Kanellos. CNET News.com. "A strain of bacteria that releases electrons as a waste product could become the secret ingredient for developing fuel cells for spy drones and other small robots. Researchers at Rice University and the University of Southern California have embarked on a project to harness the power of Shewanella oneidensis, a microorganism that essentially spits lightning. Rather than consume oxygen to turn food into energy, Shewanella consumes metals." March 15, 2006: Event explores philosophy of robotics. By Teresa Hou. Spartan Daily. "The philosophy of personal robotics technology will take center stage this afternoon as the Philosophy Club of San Jose State University will be hosting 'Friends by Design: A Design Philosophy for Personal Robotics Technology.' The event ... will feature a discussion led by John Sullins, an assistant philosophy professor from Sonoma State University. ... According to Sullins, designing personal robots are more problematic than designing any other type of technology. 'From the technical standpoint, we are attempting to create machines that exhibit human behaviors, such as intelligence, language use, and reasoning, which are things we barely understand in ourselves,' Sullins said. 'From the social standpoint, we are not only designing a mechanical instrument, but one that requires a personality of its own and the ability to closely interact with humans as a fellow agent.'" March 15, 2006: Japan builds robots to look after old folks. IOL, The Independent Online. "A Japanese-led research team on Tuesday said it had made a seeing, hearing and smelling robot that can carry human beings and is aimed at helping care for the country's growing number of elderly. Government-backed research institute Riken said the 158cm RI-MAN humanoid can already carry a doll weighing 12kg and could be capable of bearing 70kg within five years."
>>> Assisitive Technologies, Robots, Applications March 14, 2006: Ikea robot. The Engineer Online. "Some of Europe's leading research institutes, universities and automation technology companies are planning to bring industrial robotics to the masses. The masses in this case are Europe's 200,000-plus smaller manufacturing firms, who will have access to intuitive, affordable self-assembly 'light' robots if the EU's SMErobot project within the 6th Framework Programme project is successful. ... A team of leading research institutes, universities and robot manufacturers, including ABB and Kuka, have three main goals. The first of these is to design a robot capable of understanding human instructions. They hope to achieve this by developing a combination of existing devices and methods to create intuitive instruction paradigms. The team wants to produce robots that understand speech and human gestures as well as other automatically generated instructions that will ultimately limit the programming effort." March 14, 2006: Meet the new science wunderkinds. By Stefanie Olsen. CNET News.com. "What do an environmentalist from Utah, a math whiz from California and an aspiring geneticist from Maryland have in common? Well, it's a good bet they aced their SATs. They're also the teen winners of this year's Intel Science Talent Search (STS), a prestigious annual contest honoring high school seniors for extraordinary work in science, with scholarship prizes totaling $530,000. ... Started by Westinghouse in 1942, STS is the oldest, and generally most prestigious, national science competition for high school students. Intel took over the competition in 1998 as part of its overall effort to promote science education, for which it spends $100 million annually." March 14, 2006: Speech Recognition Comes of Age. By Elizabeth Millard. NewsFactor Network's NewsFactor Magazine Online. "Although speech recognition by computers has been around for decades, to most people it remains the stuff of science fiction. Think of HAL, the all-controlling yet conversant machine from 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the real world, speech-recognition technology has not become so ubiquitous as to replace the keyboard completely. But that day might come sooner than you think. The past five years have seen great strides in the field. Software developers are looking more and more at the potential of speech recognition in applications related to entertainment, health, business, and security. Already, speech recognition is making significant inroads in places like the court system, where better technology has led to more-accurate transcriptions. One up-and-coming trend is speech analysis that can relate to emotion and articulation. Programs are being designed to tweeze out job interviewees and romantic contenders on the basis of how they talk rather than on what they type. ... The combination of improved accuracy and natural-language processing makes it possible to design applications that can dig deep into other databases and retrieve information faster than a human might. 'With this type of processing, the system can understand that when you string words together, there's meaning beyond just the individual words,' said Tim Kraskey, vice president of Spanlink Communications, a company that develops customer-interaction tools for call centers. 'But beyond that, it can use that meaning and route the caller or the agent to relevant information.'" March 14, 2006: Florida Tech's youngest turns 12. By Maria Sonnenberg. Florida Today. "[Aaron] was 11 when he enrolled in the spring semester this year, making him the university's youngest student by four years. Parents Melanie and Mitch Rotenberg of Satellite Beach weren't pushing their gifted child into college. Aaron just needed a bit of a challenge. ... Florida Tech's admissions office contacted the Rotenbergs and offered Aaron a spot in the computer science class. The university's youngest student is doing just fine in college. 'He just got a 99 on his midterm in his FIT programming course, so, yes, he is doing OK in college,' his mom said via e-mail. ... Although he's good at anything he tries, Aaron thinks his chosen field will relate to computers. 'I think I'll be involved in computers, but I'm not sure,' he said. 'It will most likely be something doing with artificial intelligence.'" March 14, 2006: Man vs. Machine in Newsreader War. By Ryan Singel. Wired News. "Man vs. machine stories are an old standby in journalism. Think back to John Henry racing a steam drill and forward to Garry Kasparov trying to outmaneuver IBM's Deep Blue in 1997 to the Onion tweaking the genre with its accountant battles Excel story. But the latest twist on the meme takes it to the meta-level by raising the question: in the future, will you find your man vs. machine story relying on a human-edited source or from an algorithm? Standing up for the human intellect, upstart Digg is betting that its formidable legion of users can find better and more interesting news faster than any algorithm Google -- or a number of upstart companies -- can code. ... Likewise, Tailrank, a San Francisco-based startup founded by Kevin Burton, also relies heavily on smart code to find cool stories -- not just from news outlets, but also from tens of thousands of blogs. ... Findory, NewsVine, Memeorandum, and Megite, among others, are also trying to find various ways to trick computers into being editors. ... Not long ago, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves both thought they could categorize the web with inexpensive or even volunteer human power. Google put paid to those ambitions. But notably, Google didn't do so with ultra fancy, wickedly intelligent natural language processing. Instead it married a recursive algorithm to the natural behavior of web users (linking) and created a search that actually worked. What Google developed wasn't artificial intelligence, but something closer to what O'Reilly Media tech guru Rael Dornfest calls 'artificial artificial intelligence'. That's the brand of technology most likely to win this race: not the machines we use, but the machines that know how to use us." March 13, 2006: Pilotless Planes. Imagine planes without pilots - they are known as UAVs, Unmanned Airborne Vehicles and it's a fast growing market, both military and civilian. Innovations program from Radio Australia, hosted by Desley Blanch. "[Blanch]: : But it's the civilian applications that the new Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation in Brisbane, Queensland, will be concentrating on in their facility at Brisbane International Airport. These applications include coastal surveillance, monitoring traffic and bush fires, and counting stock on Australia's vast Queensland cattle stations. Robyn Williams asked Doctor Rodney Walker, from the Queensland University of Technology, what's going on in Australia's aerospace industry and with UAVs in particular. ... [Williams]: And the main job surveillance in every case? [Walker]: At this stage, yes. Surveillance is the primary motivation for developing the UAV platforms for a wide range of reasons. ... [Williams]: And you did mention helicopters before - are these unmanned helicopters as well? [Walker]: Yes, unmanned helicopters. In fact, the platform that we'll be using is called a Yamaha RMAX, and it's probably a little known fact in Australia that there's already over 2000 of these helicopter platforms being used daily across Japan for fertiliser purposes. ... [Williams]: And the people controlling this are they sitting at the outside like these sort of amateur aircraft enthusiasts or are they in a mission control? [Walker]: Yeah, I guess there's two different concepts of operations for UAVs. There are the truly autonomous aircraft that you give them a high level mission and they go off and they do that mission and they come back and they land. And the next level, which is slightly less autonomous, is what's called an ROA or remotely operated aircraft and they still are essentially flying themselves but there's always a human person there to monitor how they're going and to make decisions and to keep the aircraft doing its mission. [Williams]: They can't go feral? ..."
>>> Autonomous Vehicles, Military, Agriculture, Robots, Applications, Ethical & Social Implications March 13, 2006: Face recognition comes to photo albums. By Michael Kanellos. CNET News.com. "Facial-recognition technology has been used by the FBI and law enforcement for years--but starting next week, start-up Riya will bring it to the living room. The company, founded by a group of facial recognition Ph.D.s from Stanford University, has created a Web site that will search through digital photo albums through 'contextual recognition' to find matches, co-founder Munjal Shah said during a presentation at PC Forum, a three-day conference taking place here. Give the Web site a couple of pictures of your mother-in-law as a sample, and it will find the other pictures of her on your hard drive. Contextual recognition is an amplified version of facial recognition, according to Shah." March 13, 2006: Scientists have 'moral duty' to help us live beyond 100. By Mark Henderson. Times Online & www.timesonline.co.uk. "Humanity has a 'moral duty' to pursue scientific research that could enhance intelligence and allow people to live well beyond 100 years as a matter of routine, according to an expert on medical ethics. John Harris, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Manchester, will argue tomorrow that the human race has not only the right but the responsibility to embrace contentious technologies such as genetic engineering and drugs that improve mental capacity. ... Improving on Nature ... Cybernetic enhancements - Computers may think independently, leading to a merging of human and machine intelligence." March 13, 2006: Software Helps Develop Hunches. By Quinn Norton. Wired News. "It's the paradox of human-computer interaction. Computers can process huge numbers quickly and without bias, but programming them to detect faces, trees and puppies is incredibly difficult. Determining beautiful, pristine or cute is impossible. People, on the other hand, are adept at recognizing patterns. Even newborn humans show a tendency to prefer human faces, demonstrating that the pattern-recognition part of us is deep and innate. Now researchers are readying a new suite of tools that marry those two complementary skills, using software to enhance and refine human intuition. 'The computers do the computer stuff, and the humans do the human stuff,' says Eric Bonabeau, founder of Icosystem. ... When the user starts the hunch engine he is presented with a seed -- a starting point -- and a set of mutations. The user selects mutations that look promising in his eyes, and the application uses that selection to generate another set of mutations, continuing in that fashion until the user is satisfied with what he sees. Call it guided natural selection, where the selector for fitness is what looks good to the human in front of the monitor. ... 'Computers only deal with explicit data, but so much of what we care about is implicit,' says [Dave] Weinberger. 'It provides a way for a human to guide a computer through the inarticulate and implicit direction she wants to go.'"
>>> Genetic Algorithm, Machine Learning, Applications March 13, 2006: Searching the World, From Jersey City. By BobTedeschi. The New York Times & nytimes.com. "Since Google reached its perch atop the Internet world, challengers have emerged from all over Silicon Valley. So why not from Jersey City? That's the home of Accoona.com, the latest entry on the list of would-be search engine kings. The privately held Jersey City-based company announced last week a search engine that it says uses a heavy dose of artificial intelligence to find results that Google and other search sites may miss. ... The early intent of Accoona was to build a system to ease e-commerce between the United States and China in advance of the 2008 Olympics, but Mr. [Stuart] Kauder said the process of 'helping one person in one location, language and culture find a business in another location, language and culture' quickly led it to pursue a search strategy." March 12, 2006: Q&A: Nuance’s Paul Ricci - Head of speech technology leader discusses improvements in the voice business and his acquisition strategy. Red Herring. "Q: What kinds of progress have you seen in speech technology? A: Speech technology has improved in several ways over the last few years. The general accuracy rate has improved. That’s the single most important variable. ... The capacity of the systems to understand more free-form language and queries has also improved, which we refer to as natural language processing. In call centers, people can’t be expected to ask questions in a structured way. Enterprises deploying call centers for speech find it more advantageous. The third area is dialogue management.... Q: Is the industry moving more toward natural language processing? A: Our leading customers in enterprise solutions are deploying these natural language tools today. There is going to be a steady trajectory in the enterprise. ... Q: Do you see uses for defense, such as the stories we hear about using speech recognition during wiretaps to mine for data? ... Q: Has the use of speech technology in automobiles advanced much? It seemed like there was a lot of hype a few years ago about telematics, but many companies in that area seem to have disappeared. ... " March 12, 2006: Carnegie Mellon to use 'Sims' in educational software. By Daniel Lovering. The Associated Press / available from USA Today.com. "Carnegie Mellon University plans to incorporate characters and animation from the popular video game The Sims in its free educational software that strives to make computer programming more appealing to students. The university will use the animation to enliven the next version of Alice, a teaching program developed over the past decade and used at more than 60 colleges and universities and about 100 high schools, said Randy Pausch, a computer science professor and director of the Alice Project. ... The effort to revamp Alice is intended to boost interest in computer programming among students, who have historically found the skill frustrating to learn. ... Redwood City, Calif.-based Electronic Arts Inc., which publishes The Sims, wants 'more women in computer science, they want more minorities in computer science ... any underrepresented group,' Pausch said. ... Steve Seabolt, vice president of Electronic Arts, said that 'by marrying the characters, animations and playful style of The Sims to Alice, we are helping make computer science fun for a new generation of creative leaders.'" March 11, 2006: Has chatbot Alice crossed to the dark side? New Scientist (Issue 2542, page 25). "Fears are growing that a clone of the open source chatbot Alice is being used to dupe users of MSN's instant messaging service into downloading spyware. Thanks to her ability to engage people in conversation, Alice is a three-time winner of the prestigious Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence." March 10, 2006: Program Teaches Kids About Cyber Security. By William Kates. The Associated Press / available from the Chicago Tribue / also available from Wired News (Kids Learn About Cyber Security - A New York school program teaches high-school students about data protection, firewalls and forensics, as well as ethical and legal aspects of security. It's set to go statewide next year.). "A group of students at Rome Catholic School are learning how to become the future defenders of cyberspace through a pilot program that officials say is the first of its kind in the country. The program teaches students about data protection, computer network protocols and vulnerabilities, security, firewalls and forensics, data hiding, and infrastructure and wireless security. Most importantly, officials said, teachers discuss ethical and legal considerations in cyber security. ... 'A high school student with this kind of background would be an asset anywhere they went,' [Eric Spina, dean of Syracuse University's engineering and computer science programs, which also helped with the pilot's development] said. ... The curriculum will be offered statewide beginning next year." March 10, 2006: Bioinformatics Pioneer David Haussler Receives Carnegie Mellon's Prestigious Dickson Prize in Science. By Teresa Thomas. Carnegie Mellon Today. "A Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, Haussler directs the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at UCSC and is scientific co-director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research. He has done pioneering work in the fields of computational learning theory and bioinformatics, and has been instrumental in establishing strong and productive interdisciplinary interactions between computer scientists and molecular biologists. ... In his most ambitious project, Haussler and his colleagues are using the genomes of living mammals to attempt to reconstruct by computer the entire genome of the common ancestor of all placental mammals. While this work is still in its very early stages, it has already generated considerable interest. A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Haussler received the 2003 Association for Computing Machinery/AAAI Allen Newell Award, and R&D Magazine named him 'Scientist of the Year' in 2001." March 10, 2006: Mind reading Computers anticipate your next move. By Jon Van. The Courier-Mail. "Many viewers were probably impressed when a character on Star Trek asked a computer for a cup of tea and it was produced immediately. Not Kristian Hammond. 'I wondered why he had to ask,' says Hammond, co-director of America's Northwestern University intelligent information computer lab. 'A truly intelligent machine would anticipate that its operator wanted tea.' That's the kind of brains Hammond and his colleagues put in computers -- machines ready to answer questions you haven't yet formed. To Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, the lab's other co-director, too many scientists working with artificial intelligence spend time on esoteric rather than practical pursuits. 'To be useful, anything you build has to be scalable,' Birnbaum says, so that one solution can be applied to many problems. ... Northwestern's lab specialises in guiding computers through the mountains of information that reside on the internet and in other databases, plucking out gems a person might use. The secret is context, letting the machine know its user's immediate interests. The first commercial product to emerge from the lab is Watson, a program that watches what you're doing on the computer and presents links to information you might want. " March 9, 2006: Array of tech products helps fight terrorism. By Doug Beizer. Washington Technology. "Tucked into a quiet corner of the FOSE government IT trade show conference this week was a selection of products that many government customers use, but would prefer no one knows they buy. The show’s area for the intelligence community featured an array of products aimed at culling through data, protecting data and helping thwart terrorism. ... Another tool from Basis Technology Corp., the Rosette Linguistics Platform, unlocks the meaning of unstructured text. Rosette uses advanced natural language processing techniques to help your applications unlock the meanings." March 9, 2006: 'Mental typewriter' controlled by thought alone. By Will Knight. NewScientist.com news. "A computer controlled by the power of thought alone has been demonstrated at a major trade fair in Germany. The device could provide a way for paralysed patients to operate computers, or for amputees to operate electronically controlled artificial limbs. But it also has non-medical applications, such as in the computer games and entertainment industries. The Berlin Brain-Computer Interface (BBCI) -- dubbed the 'mental typewriter' -- was created by researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin and Charité, the medical school of Berlin Humboldt University in Germany. ... [Gabriel] Curio says users can operate the device just 20 minutes after going through 150 cursor moves in their minds. This is because the device rapidly learns to recognise activity in the area of a person's motor cortex, the area of the brain associated with movement. 'The trick is the machine-learning algorithms developed at the Fraunhofer Institute,' Curio says." March 9, 2006: USS Scranton Completes Successful UUV Test. Navy Newsstand. "The fast-attack submarine USS Scranton (SSN 756) successfully demonstrated homing and docking of an Unmanned Undersea Vehicle (UUV) system during at-sea testing in January 2006. The two UUVs used in the testing are a part of the AN/BLQ-11 Long Term Mine Reconnaissance System (LMRS), which was designed to enable submarines to conduct clandestine undersea surveys to locate mines. ... ''Achieving the first successful at sea docking of an autonomous UUV with a submarine was the result of a seamless joint effort between Scranton and the LMRS team,' said Cmdr. Mike Quinn, commanding officer, Scranton. ... 'Improvements in autonomy -- the artificial intelligence that enables UUVs to function beneath the water for long periods of time without communication with human operators -- will enable UUVs to accomplish very sophisticated missions with complex payloads,' [Capt. Paul D.] Ims added." March 9, 2006: Summer fun - Vacation offers a time to learn. Camps, events to draw children in. By Niesha Lofing. The Sacramento Bee (El Dorado section; page G1) & sacbee.com. "School may let out for summer, but that doesn't mean lessons and learning should be shoved to the wayside as soon as it's hot enough for your child to belly-flop into the pool. ... From building robots in Rocklin to doing art projects in the mud in Sacramento, many programs are making active learning a key element of their camps, something experts agree is beneficial for children both during the summer and when they return to school. ... At Sierra College in Rocklin, three educational summer camps are being offered. Children participating in Gizmo's Robot Factory will build robots that can move and even dance." March 9, 2006: Games come of age with their own Baftas - Awards will put 'one of the principal art forms' on same level as film and television. By Mark Brown. The Guardian & Guardian Unlimited. "The British Academy of Film and Television Arts yesterday announced that video games are as important to popular culture as film and television. As a result, what it regards as 'one of the principal contemporary art forms' will be rewarded with a beefed-up British Academy video games awards in October. ... Ian Livingstone, product acquisition director at games company Eidos, and one of those responsible for Lara Croft, said the move was long overdue. 'Games are part of our culture and they're here to stay whether we like it or not.' The industry was evolving fast. While 15 years ago two men in a garage might be working on a game, now it might take two years, £5m and an army of scriptwriters, cinematographers, animators and even artificial intelligence programmers to develop one game. 'For me they've become a new art form. We're making games that can make people laugh, make them cry, take them on the full emotional rollercoaster.' The industry is worth an estimated £2bn a year in Britain alone. Research for the BBC showed that there are 26.5 million gamers in the UK." March 9, 2006: Science Quickens Its Steps - High-tech prostheses help a new generation of war veteran amputees regain mobility like never before. Some even return to active duty. By Shari Roan. Los Angeles Times & latimes.com. "In the history of war, the more proficient combatants have become at fighting, the better medicine has become at healing. ... Unlike the dead-weighted and immutable arms, feet and knees offered to veterans of the Vietnam War, the best prosthetic knees currently available rely on artificial intelligence to anticipate the user's movements. One knee, expected to become available in a few months, will even mimic lost muscle activity by powering ankle and leg amputees up stairs, or up from a sitting position. But that's just the beginning. Advances in robotics, electronics and tissue engineering ultimately could create ways to lengthen damaged limbs, grow new cartilage, skin and bone, and permanently affix a prosthesis to the body. Some researchers are even designing a so-called biohybrid limb --- a prosthesis that can be controlled by the user's thoughts. ... 'A decade or two ago we imagined a neural interface, but it was science fiction,' said Hugh Herr, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who lost his feet at age 17 to frostbite during mountain climbing. 'But now these things are pretty close to being realized in the laboratory.'... The Rheo knee --- which uses artificial intelligence, in effect mimicking the ability to think --- is considered the most sophisticated prosthetic limb available. ... The ultimate goal of biohybrid limbs, however, lies in neuroprosthetics --- the ability to control an artificial limb using thoughts. This technology works by capturing brain signals, or nerve impulses from the residual limb, and translating those into computer commands that tell the prosthesis what to do: lift, move left or right, speed up, stop." March 8, 2006: 2006 IGF Student Showcase Q&A: Michael Chrien (NERO). By Frank Cifaldi. Gamesutra. "In the run-up to the 2006 Independent Games Festival, which is held at Game Developers Conference 2006 in San Jose from March 20-24, 2006, Gamasutra is showcasing a number of the IGF finalists in different categories. As part of a series of Gamasutra Education-exclusive articles, we profile the 2006 IGF Student Showcase winners by interviewing them about their award-winning titles, which will be playable at the IGF Pavilion at GDC this March. Today Gamasutra interviews Michael Chrien, lead designer of NERO, which was developed at the Digital Media Collaboratory/Innovation Creativity and Capital Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. ... GS: Tell us a little bit about the school and school program which were behind the game's genesis? Was this part of a course or final project? What kind of degree program did it count towards? [MS:] The game was not created as a part of a course, nor did it count towards anyone’s degree program. The game was created in order to research and promote the area of using neural networks as artificial intelligence in video games. ..." March 8, 2006: AI-based Accoona search engine aims at Google. By Spencer Chin. EE Times. "The company, founded in December 2004, has been refining its search engine technology for over a year, which is based on the extensive use of artificial intelligence techniques. The artificial intelligence algorithms enable retrieval of more results for stories associated with the search term and not just containing the term, according to Kevin Shea, director of marketing for Accoona, in an interview with EE Times prior to the briefing." March 8, 2006: Pennies for Web Jobs - Amazon wants to employ people to do menial Web tasks that computers can't handle. By Sam Williams. Technology Review. "Luis Felipe Cabrera, Amazon's vice president of software development, outlined a project to harness human intelligence for tasks that computers can't handle well, such as recognizing objects in images. The backbone of the plan is a Web-services platform called Mechanical Turk. It uses an auction-style system to farm out complex tasks -- complex for a computer, that is -- such as recognizing the difference between a human face and a nearby bush, or accurately transcribing an audio recording. Cabrera likes to call the platform 'artificial artificial intelligence' -- it's computers asking humans to do tasks, rather than the other way around. ... While Amazon's use of the name might suggest a betrayal of the concept of artificial intelligence (AI), it's actually the latest in string of experiments dealing with the complementary nature of machine and human intelligence. Two of the best-known AI applications are Google's PageRank algorithm, which counts each human-initiated inbound link to a site as a 'vote' for that site's content quality, and Amazon's recommendation system, which uses algorithms to seek out patterns in customer purchase data to market books and other products to customers whose purchase decisions fit the same pattern. A more recent example is exemplified by sites like Flickr and del.icio.us, which use human-supplied keywords, or tags, to summarize complex information, such as the thematic content of a photographic image or the functional purpose of a website." March 8, 2006: Democrats' Data Mining Stirs an Intraparty Battle With Private Effort on Voter Information, Ickes and Soros Challenge Dean and DNC. By Thomas B. Edsall. The Washington Post (page A01) and washingtonpost.com. "A group of well-connected Democrats led by a former top aide to Bill Clinton is raising millions of dollars to start a private firm that plans to compile huge amounts of data on Americans to identify Democratic voters and blunt what has been a clear Republican lead in using technology for political advantage. ... Democrats have become increasingly fearful that the GOP is capitalizing on high-speed computers and the growing volume of data available from government files and consumer marketing firms -- as well as the party's own surveys -- to better target potential supporters. ... The advantage of data-based targeting is that political field operatives can home in on precisely the voters they wish to reach...." March 7, 2006: Targeted attacks mean this time it’s personal. By Chris Nuttall. Financial Times & FT.com. "After learning to cope with the carpet-bombing of spam and massed armies of zombie computers assaulting websites, the computer security industry has identified a startling new threat from an increasingly criminalised and sophisticated breed of hacker. Much more subtle, 'laser-focused' strikes are now taking place that can slip under most radar, with stealth attacks on a single company, 'inside jobs' and selective stings finding favour. ... IBM last month launched its Identity Risk and Investigation product for monitoring the behaviour of employees on company networks. It uses mathematical modelling to compare the online access patterns of a user with their previous behaviour and that of peer groups. Deviations from norms send alerts to administrators. ... The threat from outside attacks will also require more sophisticated solutions from security vendors, says Panda Software’s Mr [Patrick] Hinojosa. 'It is going to take an AI [artificial intelligence] based approach because the human element is not going to be able to handle the sheer number of possibilities of a real-time attack on a node to figure out what is going on. AI will have to be able to detect something that’s never been seen before and eradicate it.'" March 7, 2006: Robots To Slash Farm Labour Costs. University of Warwick Media Centre. "The researchers from the University of Warwick's horticultural arm, Warwick HRI, and its manufacturing engineering section, Warwick Manufacturing Group, are working on a number of robotics and automation products that will vastly reduce the labour costs of farmers and growers. Those projects include: A robotic mushroom picker: the robot uses a charged coupled camera to spot and select only mushrooms of the exact size required for picking achieving levels of accuracy far in excess of human labour. ... Robot Grass Cutter ..." March 7, 2006: Tiny robots gear up for soccer competition. By Hayashi Sakawa, with Jennifer Guevin contributing. CNET News.com. "The Eco-Be, which measures less than one square inch, features a motor unit adapted from tiny watch motors. With a lithium battery, small LED and microprocessor on board, the robot can move forward and backward, as well as turn around. ... Citizen [Watch] is working with the University of Osaka's engineering department, along with robot development specialists from Robot Laboratory and Vision. The organizers of RoboCup, an international robotics soccer competition held annually, plan to have a new category this year named the 'RoboCup Citizen Eco-Be League'.... The University of Osaka is a leading institution in artificial intelligence-enhanced robot development."
>>> Robots, Competitions (@ Resources for Students) March 7, 2006: Kosmix Plays Politics With Search. By Seán Captain. Wired News. "In light of the recent row over Google and Yahoo doing business in China, many people are concerned with the politics of web searching. But one company is turning its attention to the web searching of politics. Search engine newcomer Kosmix, which lets users look in specific topic areas, recently introduced its politics engine. For any search term, Kosmix organizes results into conservative, liberal or libertarian categories, allowing seekers to explore results associated with a certain political persuasion." March 6, 2006: Software shows Mona Lisa to be neither man, nor da Vinci. By Greg Kline. The News-Gazette. "Mona Lisa probably wasn't a man, and it's even more unlikely that the famous artist who painted the famous painting used himself as the model. So conclude University of Illinois researchers, who created a buzz last year when their facial-recognition software was used to analyze the Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile. ... [Thomas] Huang, who co-leads the Human-Computer Intelligent Interaction group at the UI's Beckman Institute, is working on facial recognition for a variety of purposes. Those include security systems and making your computer more personal by getting it to recognize you and set itself up accordingly, even adjust to the moods reflected on your face. Businesses might use the system to collect customer data, like the ratio of guys to gals who order Quarter Pounders at McDonald's, or for 'adaptive displays,' billboards that change ads from ESPN to Victoria's Secret depending on whether a man or woman walks by, for instance. Huang said the technology also might be used in 'smart kiosks' -- electronic bank tellers, for example -- that could recognize and address a user properly." March 6, 2006: Dorms take on themes. By Amit Arora. The Standford Daily Online. "Added to the list of residential programs will be two new initiatives, as Wilbur Hall’s Arroyo will feature a symbolic systems focus for its upper-class students and Manzanita Park’s Lantana House will host a one-unit residential humanities program. Devised by the resident fellows of these dorms, the initiatives aim to attract upper-class students with similar academic interests. ... Termed the 'Mind and Intelligence Focus,' Arroyo’s symbolic systems program looks to draw in a range of students attracted to the interdisciplinary field. As described in a University press release, the dorm will offer residential seminars, guest speakers and coordinated discussions. 'The Mind and Intelligence Focus is intended to be of interest to anyone who wonders how the mind works, how people behave and communicate and what the future holds for computers and artificial intelligence,' the release noted." March 6, 2006: My robot - Hackers reprogramming Roombas to do more than just clean floors. By Hiawatha Bray. The Boston Globe & boston.com. "Some people are tinkering with their Roomba robotic vacuums, but not much of it has to do with cleaning floors. ... And iRobot is happy to help them experiment. In October, it introduced a $30 kit that lets people reprogram the software in older Roombas so they can modify how it works. The newest models feature a digital data port, similar to those found on PCs, that allows the robot's sensors and motors to be controlled by a computer. And iRobot is even giving university robotics labs free Roombas to use as teaching aids. ... Phillip Torrone, associate editor of Make, a magazine for do-it-yourselfers, has turned his Roomba into a roving camera that relays pictures from his house to the Internet site Flickr." March 6, 2006: Advancements in hearing devices highlighted. By Jennifer Walker. Maple Creek News. "Karla Rissling of the Medicine Hat Hearing Centre was the guest speaker at the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association Meeting, Maple Creek Branch on February 25th. She is Board Certified in Hearing Instrument Sciences and is a Registered Hearing Aid Practitioner. Rissling spoke about the new features of advanced digital hearing instruments. The new artificial intelligence in hearing devices provides the wearer with increased speech enhancement abilities. The speech enhancement features help to suppress background noise. The artificial intelligence also optimizes speech for specific preferences according to personality of the user." March 6, 2006: Security in the spotlight at CeBIT - Annual trade show features security products for VoIP, handhelds, printing. By Peter Sayer. IDG News Service & InfoWorld. "Swiss software developer Nexthink will debut its K-One software, a distributed intrusion detection system for LANs, which uses artificial intelligence techniques to monitor network users' communications activity and signal unusual or suspicious events based on criteria such as confidence, severity, strangeness, and impact." March 6, 2006: Disaster game to the rescue - A computer program in the works for training would allow L.A. fire officials to simulate responses with more efficiency. By Nick Green. The Daily Breeze. "'It's so costly to have large exercises,' said Capt. Ron Roemer, a San Pedro resident who is one of three Los Angeles Fire Department officials in charge of the regional training unit. At the same time, the limitations associated with simulations planned on a piece of paper can undermine a drill's authenticity. But what if you could design what is essentially a sophisticated video game as a training device instead? Using artificial intelligence, a computer program acting on its own could dictate the elements of the disaster scenario based upon set parameters within a 3-D environment. No need for the clumsy make-believe scenario of today. What artificial intelligence experts dub 'autonomous software agents' -- programs embedded within the overall simulation -- would dictate how it plays out. For instance, software dictates how fire propagates and which buildings 'burn' based on such variables as wind speed, the type of structural materials and street widths. ... It may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but the day of creating realistic simulated macro-disasters on a citywide scale is drawing near. Rancho Palos Verdes resident Milind Tambe, an associate professor in the USC Department of Computer Science, is leading a computer-modeling effort to create just such a program in conjunction with the Los Angeles Fire Department. Funding comes from USC-based CREATE -- the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events -- the first university center in the nation backed by money from the Department of Homeland Security. The idea behind CREATE is to develop tools emergency responders can use to protect lives and property in the aftermath of a disaster such as a major terrorist strike. The simulation Tambe is creating along with doctoral student Nathan Schurr is an outgrowth of a competition for computer science geeks dubbed RoboCup." March 6, 2006: Artificial Intelligence Turns 50 - July conference will celebrate field's founding at Dartmouth. By Susan Knapp. VOX of Dartmouth. "'AI@50,' [http://www.dartmouth.edu/~ai50/homepage.html] a conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of artificial intelligence --- a field of research that was officially named by the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence --- will be held July 13 through 15 on campus. The conference will reunite four researchers who were at the original 1956 meeting, and will feature numerous current AI scholars from around the world. ... The 2006 conference will commemorate those pioneering efforts and consider the future of AI. According to [James] Moor, the major goal of 'AI@50' will be to define and measure future prospects for AI in a modern human society that is increasingly served by computer intellect. 'Because artificial intelligence touches so many aspects of our society, this conference holds promise for productive discussions about where the field is going, how it will get there, and what important ethical decisions and technological discoveries must be made along the way,' says Provost Barry Scherr." March 5, 2005: Science Fiction - New books focus on young readers. By Steve Powers. Dallas Morning News & DallasNews.com. "Several new science-fiction books that are reviewed today focus on youth and young readers. Silver Screen [by] Justina Robson (Pyr, $15) ... The plot accelerates after Roy is found dead, having uploaded his essence into the giant artificial intelligence machine that Opti-Net owns. As Anjuli probes the mystery of Roy's death, assassins who want to stop her interference target her. This exciting novel raises interesting questions about the interactions between humans and machines." March 5, 2006: Artificial intelligence and globalisation. By Kenneth Rogoff. Daily Times / also available from The Korea Herald (March 7, 2006). "Today’s conventional wisdom is that the rise of India and China will be the single biggest factor driving global jobs and wages over the twenty-first century. ... But I wonder whether, even within the next few decades, another factor will influence our work lives even more: the exponential rise of applications of artificial intelligence. My portal to the world of artificial intelligence is a narrow one, the more than 500-year-old game of chess. You may not care a whit about chess, long regarded as the ultimate intellectual sport. But the stunning developments coming out of the chess world during the past decade should still command your attention. Chess has long been the centerpiece of research in artificial intelligence. ... The 'Turing test' is the holy grail of artificial intelligence research. Well, for me, a chess game is a conversation of sorts. From my perspective, today’s off-the-shelf computer programs come awfully close to meeting Turing’s test. Over the course of a small number of games on the Internet, I could not easily tell the difference. ... [T]he vast body of evidence suggests that technological changes were a much bigger driver in global wage patterns than trade. ..." March 5, 2006: The Art of Building a Robot to Love. By Henry Fountain. The New York Times & nytimes. com. "Marvin the Robot, a supporting player in 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,' speaks in the dull monotone of the chronically depressed. In the "Star Wars" films, C-3PO is a bundle of anxiety and neuroses. And in '2001: A Space Odyssey,' the HAL 9000 is creepily homicidal. These are all fictional machines, far removed from real robots of the present or even those that scientists envision for the future. Yet they raise questions: If robots can act in lots of ways, how do people want them to act? We certainly don't want our robots to kill us, but do we like them happy or sad, bubbly or cranky? 'The short answer is no one really know what kind of emotions people want in robots,' said Maja Mataric, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California. But scientists are trying to figure it out: ..." March 4, 2006: The next big thing - chatbots. By David Rowan. Times Online & technology.timesonline.co.uk. "Programmed by San Franciscan Richard Wallace, Alice has three times this decade won the annual Loebner contest for the most human-like form of AI. But when she was defeated last September by a British chatbot called George, a wave of excitement swept through this country’s AI programming community. If we could lead the way in making computers answer questions like real people, why not go the whole hog and build a new generation of synthesised TV personalities? George, created by British programmer Rollo Carpenter as part of his Jabberwacky AI software, is constantly learning new language patterns and facts as he chats online.... Now Carpenter’s firm, Icogno, is working with Norwich-based Televirtual to turn George into a 'virtual human'...." March 3, 2006: IBM's research juggling act. By Martin LaMonica. CNET News.com. "Paul Horn, the director of IBM Research and a physicist by training, faces one of the toughest math problems at the computing giant: how to divide a $5 billion to $6 billion yearly research budget across hardware, software and--increasingly--services. ... Horn spoke to CNET News.com about research in services and IBM's investment in emerging technologies, from natural language processing to special-purpose hardware appliances to open source software. ... [Q:] One of the high-profile projects that came out of IBM Research in the last couple of years was WebFountain, which was called 'Google for the enterprise.' Where are you going with that? Horn: It continues to be a big thing for IBM and for IBM Research, but it's not just WebFountain. The basic issues are, really, natural language understanding in general. What WebFountain was able to do, which made it powerful, was it would go in and would scan text documents on the Web and it would understand enough about what people were saying that you could query it about what people were saying. ... WebFountain is an example of a natural language technology that allows you to essentially analyze from an intelligence point of view what people are saying, but the important point is that this is just a small piece of many, many problems that companies have and where you want to take advantage of natural language understanding, such as translating spoken English to Russian and back again. We talked about call centers. Natural language understanding can be incredibly powerful, even if you've got a call center operator, just by monitoring the calls and trying to understand what the issues are. ... " March 3, 2006: Robotic 'pack mule' displays stunning reflexes. By David Hambling. NewScientist.com news. "A nimble, four-legged robot is so surefooted it can recover its balance even after being given a hefty kick. The machine, which moves like a cross between a goat and a pantomime horse, is being developed as a robotic pack mule for the US military. BigDog is described by its developers Boston Dynamics as 'the most advanced quadruped robot on Earth'. The company have released a new video [available via link in article] of the robot negotiating steep slopes, crossing rocky ground and dealing with the sharp kick. ... The project is sponsored by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), who want the robotic pack mule to assist soldiers in terrain too tough for vehicles. Ground-based soldiers often need to carry 40 kilograms of equipment." March 3, 2006: Swarming ants hold clues to ending traffic jams. By Deborah Tetley. Calgary Herald & canada.com. "'People in cars in a traffic system do not behave much differently than birds in a flock, fish in a school, bees in a hive or buffalo,' says Christian Jacob, an associate professor at [University of Calgary], where he holds a joint appointment with the departments of computer science and biochemistry and molecular biology. 'When you have a few ants together, not much happens,' said Jacob, who also heads the evolutionary and swarm design research group of the Artificial Intelligence Research Lab. 'But get 10,000 ants together, or a critical mass, and something spectacular happens. They build bridges and just generally exhibit collective intelligence or swarm intelligence. We have the technology to build a road system inspired by ants.' Jacob has taken that swarm intelligence model -- where ant colonies behave like 'super organisms' -- and built a traffic simulator." March 3, 2006: Will Home Robots Ever Clean Up? Helen Greiner of iRobot talks about how the company's Roomba vacuum cleaner succeeded -- and why they don't have competitors. By Wade Roush. Technology Review. "Helen Greiner, one of three co-founders and current chairman of iRobot, believes the market for home and office robots is about to grow. She started iRobot in 1990 with fellow computer-science student Colin Angle and Rod Brooks, a professor in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and she holds two degrees from MIT, a bachelor's in mechanical engineering and a master's in computer science. ... TR: Why aren't there more companies bringing out home robots? HG: I think that bringing all the parts together in one place is a nontrivial matter. Robots are a true integration of electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer science, production engineering, and a real focus on the cost structure and the real needs people have in their homes, or in the military. ..." March 2, 2006: Perception: Rosie. Reality: Roomba - We’ve come a long way since the Hoover, but an autonomous robot-maid is still a long way off. Don’t throw away the dish gloves just yet. By Larry Smith. Popular Science. "Today’s best home robots prove that good, cheap help is still hard to find. Find three of the most promising potential robo-maids on the following pages: ZMP’s Nuvo ... White Box’s 914 PC-Bot ... Honda’s ASIMO." March 2, 2006: Computer scientist saves lives by putting names to new drugs - Software avoids confusion by eliminating guesswork. By Jodie Sinnema. CanWest News Service / available from Times Colonist & canada.com. "'There is a lot of confusion. There are a lot of errors,' said [Greg] Kondrak, a professor at the University of Alberta who developed two computer programs now being used by the U.S. Federal Food and Drug Administration to create drug names that won't be confused with others. 'There are thousands and thousands of cases where people are actually taking the wrong drug because of that confusion and sometimes in some cases, it ends tragically.' ... 'I think it's my responsibility to help,' said Kondrak, who originally created his computer program to help linguists find similarities between words in their search for language histories. ... The program used by the FDA is able to identify over 90 per cent of words that people may confuse, compared with 40 to 80 per cent of names identified by other programs, says a study co-authored by Kondrak and published in January's edition of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine [36(1): 29-42]." March 2, 2006: Masters of Chinese chess to battle it out against robots. Agence France Presse / available from Yahoo! News. "Masters of Chinese chess are to face the ultimate challenge later this year when they battle it out against a team of robots, the Chinese Society of Artificial Intelligence revealed. Five masters of Xiangqi, which is called Chinese chess in the West, would take on a robot team in the July 25-31 competition, the first of its kind, the official Xinhua news agency said, quoting the society." March 2, 2006: Expo on artificial intelligence to be held in Beijing. Xinhuanet. "China's first exposition on the achievements of artificial intelligence science will be held in Beijing in August to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the science. The chief organizer, the Chinese Society of Artificial Intelligence, told Xinhua that the exposition will include a wide range of subjects using artificial intelligence, such as housing facilities, examination devices, controlling devices, transportation tools, software and games, as well as robots." March 2, 2006: Why-I Robot. By Louise Redvers. The Evening Chronicle & icNewcastle. "The survey was commissioned by the NewcastleGateshead Initiative (NGI) ahead of the AV festival of film, art and new media, which has the theme of life, exploring the bounds of the natural and synthetic from social, ethical and technological perspectives. But it seems some expect the perfect person to come in synthetic form as 15% of us in the North East believe robots will be a fully integrated part of our lives within 20 years. Although robots already exist in many forms, such as in car production lines and hospital pharmacies, people from our region have a more fantastical idea of their possibilities. They cited the robot from Will Smith's futuristic film I Robot and Spielberg's AI (Artificial Intelligence), which stars British actor Jude Law, as the sort of creatures they expect to be sitting in our offices in coming years." March 1, 2006: Evolution inspires Artificial Intelligence at Kent. Innovations Report. "The University of Kent is launching a unique cross-disciplinary degree course that explores artificial intelligence (AI) from the combined perspectives of computer science, philosophy, psychology, biology and electronics. Championed by technology experts and visionaries ranging from Bill Gates to film-maker George Lucas, AI is about making computers behave intelligently -- for instance, by performing tasks requiring the ability to learn, to reason and to cope with unpredicted situations. Lucas told delegates at a recent computing conference in Los Angeles that advancements in AI will vastly change technology 'to a point where you can talk to a computer game and the game will talk back'. Other important applications include robotics, data mining and computer vision." March 1, 2006: Artificial Intelligence Gains Momentum - New robotics center plans to develop machines to do human tasks. By Rosalind Guy. Memphis Daily News (Volume 121, Number 49). "These types of technological advances inspire the research at the FedEx Institute of Technology [FIT] at the University of Memphis. To that end, the institute is planing to open its robotics research center this month. ... Eric Mathews, associate director for corporate research and development at the institute and director of the new robotics center, said the idea for the center grew out of a project the institute is working on with FedEx called 'yard management.' It involves researching and creating an autonomous vehicle that will be able to move cargo bins on a tarmac. ... The research center's first couple of years will be spent looking at smaller robots, experimenting with them and developing artificial intelligence and mechanical systems that can be scaled up in subsequent years. So two types of robots could evolve from this particular project. 'One of the robots will be the off-the-shelf research robot already pre-made with all the sensors,' Mathews said. The other will come from a vehicle that can navigate through the halls of FIT." March 1, 2006: Microsoft seeking ways to help illiterate. By Allison Linn. Associated Press / available from BusinessWeek online. "Can someone who doesn't even know how to read or write use a computer? Microsoft Corp. is probing that question at a research lab in India. Working with a local advocacy group, Microsoft has developed a prototype of a system that would connect illiterate domestic workers in India with families seeking their services. ... The software was on display Wednesday as part of Microsoft Research TechFest, an annual gathering of employees from the company's various research and development centers. ... Raj Reddy, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who is also working on ways for illiterate people to use computers, said his early research in rural Indian villages showed a disconnect between what people think rural residents need from technology, and what those people really want. ... Reddy, who is also on Microsoft's technology advisory board, said he thinks Microsoft's approach of using cartoon-like images may be ahead of its time. But he supports the company's efforts in a field that, he says, isn't getting nearly as much attention as it should. 'There are many paths to nirvana,' he said. 'There are many ways that one can attack these problems.'" March 1, 2006: Looking for Meaning in the Semantic Web. By Neil Raden. Intelligent Enterprise Magazine. "What is the Semantic Web and how can it help you? The concept may help solve tough corporate information-management problems. The technology behind semantics includes linguistic programming, artificial intelligence, content management and a few new areas as well. The motivation behind it can be attributed to Tim Berners-Lee and a group of Web devotees who coined the phrase 'Semantic Web' more than 10 years ago. The idea was to turn the Web into a single repository of information -- rather than a collection of Web sites and pages -- that could be queried for its content. They created a new type of metamodel called an ontology to capture the rich meanings and relationships of all the Web's resources." March 2006: Debabelizing Libraries - Machine Translation by and for Digital Collections. By David A. Smith. D-Lib Magazine (Volume 12, Number 3). "Just as translation builds libraries, libraries nurture translation. Machine translation, even in embryo, provides some hope that ever expanding digital collections can also greatly expand their audience. That hope derives, in part, from the ways that massive digital libraries can enrich and change research on machine translation. Works in digital (and print) collections are translated at unequal rates. A small number of works -- in religious and literary canons -- are translated again and again. A moderate number are translated once or a few times, and the great mass are never translated at all. This Zipfian distribution (with its 'long tail') provides a mutual opportunity for MT and digital libraries: at the peak, MT can benefit from massively parallel translations; in the middle, MT can help DLs find and align existing translations; in the tails, MT can provide readers with finding and browsing aids for multilingual texts (Figure 1). I will first ground these predictions in the origins and development of data-driven, or empirical, machine translation (MT). I then describe some major subproblems in MT research and note how they might adapt to benefit, or benefit from, emerging comprehensive digital libraries. Finally, we see how MT and digital libraries could enter a virtuous cycle of collection, augmentation, and access. ... The generation of Second World War code breakers Turing, von Neumann, Shannon, and Wiener invented computing machinery and, almost simultaneously, the idea of translation as mechanized 'decoding'. Hopes for easily ingesting Russian technical literature receded into the future until the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) report of 1966 recommended that the U.S. government stop funding machine translation." March / April 2006: Brain Quest - Pat McGovern ’59 founded an IT publishing empire, but his first love remains neuroscience. By Alice Dragoon. Technology Review. "Pat McGovern '59 spent most of his boyhood Saturdays at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, entranced by the wonders of organic chemistry, electrostatic power, and airplane design. In 1953, at age 15, he borrowed Edmund Berkeley's Giant Brains: or, Machines That Think from the library. Reading it, McGovern became enthralled with the idea that machines could emulate, and perhaps even expand the capacity of, the human brain. The book would have a profound impact on his life; the development of thinking machines and the study of thinking became his driving passions. McGovern's fascination with brain science dominated his career at MIT. His eagerness to accelerate the advance of computing led him to found an empire around information technology research and publishing. And once computers grew powerful enough to become useful tools in the quest to unravel the mysteries of the brain, McGovern's two passions converged with the founding of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT (see 'Neuroscience Central'). ... At MIT, McGovern majored in biology and life sciences, taking courses taught by Walter Pitts, Warren McCullough, and Jerry Lettvin, and completed an undergraduate thesis under neurophysiologist Pat Wall. 'There was a lot of excitement about artificial intelligence at that time,' says McGovern. ... Although primitive, computers were clearly the wave of the future. So in 1957, during his junior year, McGovern answered a bulletin board notice advertising an opening for a part-time editor at Computers and Automation, the first computer magazine." March 2006: Halfway to Mars - How a hardy band of researchers braved freezing nights, bad food, and high winds in the Chilean desert to test the next generation of planetary rovers. By Jean Kumagai. IEEE Spectrum Online. "[David] Wettergreen, an associate research professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, in Pittsburgh, and his team have been roughing it here in the Atacama since August, and they'll remain until November, just as South America's spring gives way to summer. They've come to test out new concepts and designs for the next generation of planetary rover, because this place, more than any other on Earth, approximates the barren, arid rockiness of the Red Planet. Testing the rover means pushing the technology to its limits, and sometimes beyond. The robot is so unusual and so new that breaking down is, for now, anyway, what it's supposed to do. 'A hundred percent success means we're not really trying hard enough,' Wettergreen says. It isn't the most elegant-looking machine ever built. Weighing in at 180 kilograms, the rover, dubbed Zoë, looks something like a motorized, overgrown ice cream cart. But it is beautiful in the one way that really matters to planetary scientists: unlike all the rovers built thus far, Zoë can roam autonomously. ... The rover can even make some rudimentary decisions about what terrain to explore. In a set of experiments conducted in Chile, Zoë successfully determined which tests to run at a given location." March 2006: There's a Chip in My Pants - Welcome to the fashionable world of digitized duds (batteries not included). Emerging Technology column by Steven Johnson. Discover (Volume 27, Number 03). "Digital processors are getting impossibly cheap, and new experimental materials can carry digital signals. Rub those two sticks together long enough and the era of smart clothes is bound to happen. The most celebrated example to date is the Adidas 1 running shoe, released in March of last year. A second generation, intelligence level 1.1, followed close on its heels this past November. ... The feedback of the Adidas shoes focuses on the wearer's relationship to externals: changes in surfaces, changes in movement patterns. But smart clothes can also peer inward. ... There's a precedent of sorts for the smart-clothes revolution. Think of all the intelligent technologies that have become standard in our automobiles over the past decade or so: antilock braking systems, air bags, OnStar, and new collision-detection technologies." March 2006: Cognitive Radio - Smart radios and other new wireless devices will avoid transmission bottlenecks by switching instantly to nearby frequencies that they sense are clear. By Steven Ashley. Scientific American. "During the coming decade, cognitive radio technology should enable nearly any wireless system to locate and link to any locally available unused radio spectrum to best serve the consumer. Employing adaptive software, these smart devices could reconfigure their communications functions to meet the demands of the transmission network or the user. Cognitive radio technology will know what to do based on prior experience. ... After ascertaining the varying energy patterns in each band, cognitive radio devices will be able to use Semantic Web technology [see 'The Semantic Web,' by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila; Scientific American, May 2001] to exchange this information freely with others." March 2006: The Elusive Goal of Machine Translation - Statistical methods hold the promise of moving computerized translation out of the doldrums. By Gary Stix. Scientific American (subscription req'd). March 2006: AI - 50 Years Young. Editorial by Jonathan Erickson, Editor-in-Chief. Dr. Dobb's Journal (page 6; registration req'd). Also appears in Dr. Dobb's Portal (January 28, 2006). "Anniversaries come and go, sometimes with fanfare, often times unnoticed. Take, for instance, 'artificial intelligence.' It's hard to believe, but this year marks the 50th anniversary of the term --- and the discipline --- of AI. It was in 1956 that John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky (who along with McCarthy founded MIT's AI lab), IBM's Nathaniel Rochester, and Bell Lab's C.E. Shannon presented 'A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence' at the Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Conference (http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html). The conference and the project, convened with the goal of creating truly intelligent machines, established AI as a unique field of study within computer science. AI immediately leaped to the forefront in academic, research, and commercial communities. AI-centric programming languages sprang up, with more than 25 commercial implementations of Prolog and nearly 20 implementations of Lisp. Companies such as Texas Instruments, Intel, and Apple waded into the fray with hardware-based AI solutions. ..." |
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