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<< Headlines are listed according to date posted <-> Articles are organized by date published >>
March 31, 2007: Tech students create soccer-playing robot - DARwIn is equipped with motors that take the place of human joints. By Greg Esposito. The Roanoke Times. "Suddenly, walking doesn't seem so simple. That's one lesson a team of engineering students at Virginia Tech has learned as they've designed and programmed DARwIn. The 'Dynamic Anthropomorphic Robot with Intelligence' is the first humanoid robot from the United States to qualify for RoboCup, an international competition to promote robotics and artificial intelligence through a soccer skills competition. The ultimate goal of RoboCup is to field a team of robots by 2050 that can defeat a world champion soccer team. Based on how much work it takes to just keep the robots upright, it could be a pretty ambitious goal. ... DARwIn is also the subject of a YouTube clip that's been viewed more than 13,000 times. [A video of DARwin is available via a link in the article.]" March 30, 2007: Technology company adds 'sense of touch' to robotic medical devices. By Sheryl Ubelacker. Canadian Press / available from canada.com. "Quanser, a private Toronto-area technology company, unveiled three of its latest prototypes using 'haptic,' or feeling feedback, technology on Thursday. Although still in development, it hopes to market the machines for patient rehabilitation and as tools to help train doctors and other health providers. Among the prototypes is a robotic device to help stroke patients exercise weakened upper body muscles. ... 'If we send the person home, they may not do the exercises or comply with it because they lack the motivation, it's very boring,' said Alex Mihailidis, a scientist at Toronto Rehab who specializes in artificial intelligence and helped developed the technology with Quanser. 'One of the key things here is the artificial intelligence we're building in,' he said during a demonstration of the equipment. Just as a therapist would change the amount of resistance, the reaching distance or the type of object to push against to keep the exercise interesting, 'the system would do the exact same thing. It would learn about the person and how well the person is doing,' he said." March 29, 2007: AI tool to enhance computer-aided fire dispatch - An Ontario firm works with universities to develop a system that could assist departments across the country. The project leader discusses why real-time data has never been more important. By Briony Smith. IT Business. "The old-school fire response systems employed across the country could be hitting the junkyard in a couple of years when Markham, Ontario-based safety system company CriSys rolls out a system powered by artificial intelligence that can process a pile of information to 'decide' how to best battle a blaze. ... Nowadays, according to Paus, the expanded role of fire services -- including first response, vehicle accidents, and hazardous material situations -- makes it impossible for the simple rules of thumb that powered the previous systems to work well anymore. [Dale Paus] said, 'AI is the only way we can adequately deal with the level of complexity we have now.' ... 'We want to create a piece of software that mimics the reasoning of an experience firefighter,' said Paus. ... CriSys plans to set out to interview fire chiefs about their reasoning come early summer...." March 29, 2007: Dyson preparing a Roomba killer? New Scientist Technology Blog posting by Tom Simonite, New Scientist online technology reporter. "A job advert posted on the website of vacuum cleaner manufacturer Dyson hints at what its next headline-grabbing product may be. It seems they are trying to recruit roboticists - could they be aiming to sweep aside iRobot's Roomba and Electrolux's Trilobite robotic cleaners?" March 29, 2007: Obsessive Geniuses Strive to Create Almost Human Robots. Wired News interview. "In the book Almost Human: Making Robots Think, published this month, Lee Gutkind introduces us to some of the most prominent minds and memorable personalities among them. ... Wired News: A number of people in your book don't sleep, don't bathe. Is there something about robotics that appeals to this personality type, or does the work itself take over? Lee Gutkind: You can't just do this for eight or 16 hours and walk away. Even debugging a program will take a whole day. So I think it takes a patient but obsessive personality. Don't forget also, it's a very male-oriented culture. There's not a lot of joking, not a lot of flirting, because there's no one to joke and flirt with. You're flirting with your robot is what you're doing. WN: Although the field is overwhelmingly male-dominated, in your book we do meet a number of highly accomplished female roboticists. How are women influencing robotics? Gutkind: Just look at Manuela Veloso. It took a woman in a sea of men to get the men to start talking to one another. She gave them a game to play, and she triggered off their testosterone and set them in a competition that brought them together. Would they have come together in a room at MIT or the White House to share their code? No, but to play a game and beat the pants off somebody from Stanford, that's another matter entirely. Similarly, Nathalie Cabrol, the NASA representative, got the scientists and the roboticists to work together and get a robot to do science. ... WN: You cross paths with some very 'realistic,' humanlike robots. Did you ever get used to those encounters? ... WN: Of course, there are always going to be people who are going to be afraid of the notion of robots replacing humans. Is that something roboticists even think about? ..." March 29, 2007: Rough, but there's little lost in Google translation. By Adam Tanner. Reuters / available from The New Zealand Herald / also available from The Star (Google seeks world of instant translations) and CNNMoney.com (Google speaking everyone's language). "In Google's vision of the future, people will be able to translate documents instantly into the world's main languages, with machine logic rather than expert linguists leading the way. Google's approach, called statistical machine translation, differs from past efforts in that it sidesteps language experts who programme grammatical rules and dictionaries into computers. Instead, Google feeds documents that humans have already translated into two languages and then relies on computers to discern patterns for future translations. ... Google chairman Eric Schmidt also sees broad consequences in a world with easy translations. 'What happens when we have 100 languages in simultaneous translation? Google and other companies are working on statistical machine translation so that we can, on demand, translate everything all the time,' he told a conference this year. 'Many, many societies have operated in language-defined communities where they really don't understand and are not particularly sympathetic to other peoples' views because of the barrier of language. We're about to have that breakthrough and it is a huge thing.'" March 28, 2007: Raytheon’s robot car to get ‘Urban’ test. By Jay Fitzgerald. BostonHerald.com. "Raytheon and its partners plan to take their new car for a spin today in New Mexico. ... 'Chrome' plans to compete in next fall’s 'Urban Challenge,' sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the central research-and-development arm of the Pentagon. The military is pushing development of so-called 'autonomous vehicles' that can drive over hills, through streams, across deserts and into urban settings - without drivers or remote controls." March 28, 2007: System lets troops practice working with virtual interpreter. By Bill Hess. Sierra Vista Herald & The Bisbee Daily Review. "As the war on terrorism continues, GIs need faster capabilities to learn their jobs, such as becoming interrogators. General Dynamics C4 Systems of Orlando, Fla., has stepped up to provide a system for which student soldiers can interact with a virtual, screen-projected cast of characters. On Tuesday, the government contractor displayed its Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Tactical Proficiency Trainer, also known as a Human Intelligence Control Cell, a system that uses speech recognition, artificial intelligence and computer synthesized speech to train interrogators, at the Training and Doctrine Command Cultural Awareness Summit at The Palms. ... The avatars, as the characters on the screen are called, can be modified to add to or delete from a program to help a student react to changing circumstances, Lansverk said. While avatar is a computer word, its root is from Sanskrit, meaning god-like creatures. ... 'We’re learning from the gaming industry. But these are big-time games,' [Darryl Hackett] said." March 28, 2007: We love... Robots. By Robin Turner. icWales / Western Mail. "The word robot was first introduced by Czech writer Karel Capek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) which was written in 1920. It was an adaptation of the slavic word robota which meant drudgery. When sci-fi enjoyed a huge boom in the late 1940s and '50s with films, comic characters like Dan Dare and books like i, Robot from Isaac Asimov, robots began to become familiar. ... It was writer Arthur C Clarke who highlighted the potential dark side of robots with his invention HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic) computer which starred in the film 2001, A Space Odyssey. ... The cult movie Blade Runner centred on the dilemma faced by robots which become 'too human'. ... One of the first recorded designs of a humanoid robot was made by Leonardo da Vinci in around 1495." March 28, 2007: One Picture, 1,000 Tags. By Pamela LiCalzi O'Connell. The New York Times. "'Museums have recognized that their online collections are not doing the job -- we’re hiding the content away from nonspecialists,' said Jennifer Trant, a partner at Archives and Museum Informatics in Toronto. 'We’ve got to provide access on the same level as visual memory.' Now, after spending millions of dollars and years of effort on their virtual homes -- which draw many more visitors than their physical ones -- museums are rethinking their online collections. They are experimenting with one of the hottest Web 2.0 trends: tagging, the basis for popular sites like Flickr.com. In social tagging, users of a service provide the tags, or labels, that describe the content (of photos, Web links, art), thus creating a user-generated taxonomy, or folksonomy, as it’s called." March 28, 2007: Mining for Cheap Flights - Farecast claims to offer cheap tickets based on science, not marketing. By Kate Greene. Technology Review. "On a flight to his brother's wedding in 2001, Oren Etzioni discovered that the people sitting next to him had bought their tickets later than he did, yet had paid less. For some, this could have been an infuriating revelation, but Etzioni didn't get mad; as a professor of computer science and engineering at Washington University, in Seattle, he got inspired. 'I thought, "Why don't I collect historical data [on airfares] and use that to anticipate ticket prices?"' ... Farecast differs from these companies by using sophisticated algorithms to mine enormous data sets of more than 175 billion airfares from around the country. ... Farecast's data-mining algorithms look for trends in the prices and help determine the impact on prices of variables such as seasonal changes, conventions, and college graduations."
>>> Data Mining, Machine Learning, Applications March 27, 2007: The 'brain machines' of computer pioneers. By Nigel Scott. Yorkshire Evening Post. "Leeds University is to stage a major event on Friday to mark the 50th anniversary of the arrival of its first computer. ... The press dubbed them 'brain machines'. And when computers were delivered to six British universities 50 years ago, they heralded the dawn of a technological revolution."
>>> History, Events (@ Resources for Students) March 27, 2007: In the Lab - Robots That Slink and Squirm. By John Schwartz. The New York Times. "Robots, once the stuff of science fiction, are everywhere. Robotic geologists are puttering around on Mars, little Roombas suck up dirt in the breakfast nook. But most robots are made up of hard components and don’t much resemble the creatures that walk, crawl and squirm all around us. At Tufts University, a multidisciplinary team of researchers wants to take a softer approach. The Biomimetic Technologies for Soft-bodied Robots project is trying to make an ersatz caterpillar that will move around in pretty much the same way as the real thing. The researchers see the potential to use the squishable, relatively simple creations to find land mines, repair machinery in hard-to-reach spots and even diagnose and treat diseases. ... In trying to reproduce the caterpillar, the Tufts researchers are taking part in one of the biggest trends in robotics and locomotion studies, which are increasingly taking inspiration from the world of biology." March 27, 2007: The New Face of Emoticons - Warping photos could help text-based communications become more expressive. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. Technology Review. "By automatically warping their facial features, people can use a photo to depict any one of a range of different animated emotional expressions, such as happy, sad, angry, or surprised. ... To make this possible, [Xin] Li first created generic computational models for each type of expression. Working with Shi-Kuo Chang, a professor of computer science at the University of Pittsburgh, and Chieh-Chih Chang, at the Industrial Technology Research Institute, in Taiwan, Li created the models using a learning program to analyze the expressions in a database of facial expressions and extract features unique to each expression. Each of the resulting models acts like a set of instructions telling the program how to warp, or animate, a neutral face into each particular expression." March 27, 2007: Computing center connects CMU, Microsoft. By Mark Roth. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Jeannette Wing got angry with a friend recently when he advised his child to major in physics in college instead of computer science. Physics is exciting, he suggested, while computer science is mostly 'clerical' computer programming. Nothing could be further from the truth, said the impassioned Dr. Wing, head of Carnegie Mellon University's world-class computer science department. The chance to correct that misimpression is one reason she is happy that Microsoft announced yesterday that it is giving Carnegie Mellon $1.5 million over the next three years to establish the Microsoft Carnegie Mellon Center for Computational Thinking. ... One day, she would like to see parents advise their children to study computer science because 'you can go into computing and do anything.'"
>>> Computer Science, Academic Departments & Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students), Resources for Educators, Applications March 27, 2007: Firms See ‘Smart’ Closed-Circuit TVs as Good Way to Tap Into Rail, Mass Transit Security. By Matthew M. Johnson. CQ Homeland Security / Congressional Quarterly. "High-tech companies are getting into the business of a reinvigorated technology known as smart CCTV in an effort to cash in on the desire of rail and mass transit operators to guard against terrorist attacks. Instead of putting the burden of isolating suspicious behavior on security workers, the smart closed-circuit TVs can detect anomalies on their own and flash an alert. ... By adding software and computer processors to existing CCTV infrastructure, the systems can be upgraded with an artificial intelligence designed to scan locations for unattended objects, unusual motion and certain kinds of human behavior. ... . The technology holds so much promise that Cathleen Berrick, director of homeland security and justice issues at the Government Accountability Office, recommended that the federal government consider researching it. She made the remark while testifying at a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing in January." March 26, 2007: Pushing the limits - Andrew Herbert’s job is to think the unthinkable. As Microsoft UK’s research chief, he and his 100 staff are at the cutting edge of technology. By Jon Excell. The Engineer Online. "Microsoft was the first software company to create its own research organisation, which has developed a character apparently at odds with its parent company's corporate philosophy — its researchers' academic candour contrasts with the tight-lipped corporate approach found elsewhere in the organisation. Nowhere is this balance between the academic model and the business of product development more seamless than at the company's oldest research outpost, here in the UK at Cambridge University. And the relationship between academia and industry is embodied by Andrew Herbert, the group's managing director. ... The centre also hosts a group that is carrying out research into machine learning and perception. It is looking at the design of algorithms for applications in areas such as computer vision, image recognition, information retrieval and handwriting recognition. Herbert explained that the approach to these problems has changed in recent years. While computer scientists once attempted to program computers to work like the human brain, the emphasis today is on modelling the physics of the world using statistics, then building robust statistical algorithms. He said: 'We've built systems that will look at images and say "that's a picture that has a car in it, that's a picture that has a house in it", but the computer isn't being intelligent. 'It has been shown many pictures of cars and built up a statistical pattern. It's saying "this is like all the other things you showed me and if you said those are cars then this must be a car".' Herbert believes the development of this approach could be key to the future of computing." March 26, 2007: Readers tell us what robot would look like. By Cathy Tran. OCregister. "Welcome to The Public Mind, an occasional forum in which Orange County Register readers give us their thoughts on a variety of science topics, including flying cars, artificial intelligence and robots. ... This time, we asked you: If you could conjure up your own personal robot, what abilities would you give it? And what would the robot look like? We posed the questions because scientists are making significant progress in all areas of robotics. ... Here's a sample of the ideas you have for robots. ... " March 26, 2007: Draw, you're on camera. The Engineer Online. "The video surveillance company behind London's congestion charging scheme has announced trials in which CCTV technology will be used to provide real-time information both on board trains and at stations. ... Video surveillance cameras coupled with intelligent algorithms will be used to spot people engaged in graffiti activity at the station." March 26, 2007: Shoulder-worn camera acts as a third eye. By Tom Simonite. NewScientist.com news. "A shoulder-mounted camera system that automatically tracks head movements and can recognise hand gestures has been developed by UK researchers. Eventually, they hope the system could identify a wearer's activity and offer assistance, for example by accessing a telephone directory when they reach for the phone. ... 'If you are going to use wearable computers, you cannot use a computer and mouse,' Mayol Cuevas says." March 26, 2007: For fast-food help, call in the robots - Can artificial intelligence lead to a better drive-through burger? A Pittsburgh-based start-up thinks so. By Michael Kanellos. CNET News.com. "Some robots are destined to rove the surface of Mars. Others, like Hyperactive Bob, will work in fast-food restaurants. Pittsburgh's Hyperactive Technologies has come up with a system, based on the computer vision and artificial intelligence systems employed by robots, to manage the kitchens at so-called quick-service restaurants. ... The Zaxby's chain says it has saved an average of $8,000 in reduced food waste per year. And it sees other benefits as well. 'Your food is fresher because you are cooking small amounts more often,' said Brandi Clanton, who owns two Zaxby's outlets and installed the robot in both. 'Before Bob, they were basically cooking by guesstimate.' [Joe] Porfeli says that some stores have also seen indirect benefits in higher sales and lower employee turnover. ... Both Hyperactive founders are former CMU researchers." March 25, 2007: Artificial Intelligence, With Help From the Humans. By Jason Pontin. The New York Times. "Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon.com, has created Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online service involving human workers, and he has also personally invested in a human-assisted search company called ChaCha. Mr. Bezos describes the phenomenon very prettily, calling it 'artificial artificial intelligence.' Normally, a human makes a request of a computer, and the computer does the computation of the task,' he said. 'But artificial artificial intelligences like Mechanical Turk invert all that.' ... ChaCha.com, a start-up in Carmel, Ind., uses artificial artificial intelligence -- sometimes also called crowdsourcing -- to help individual computer users find better results when they search the Web." March 24, 2007: Students salt away science knowledge - Concord: Annual school event teaches young the practical applications of research, teacher says. By Shirley Dang. ContraCostaTimes.com. "[Junxing] Chen and 100 other students from across the county are showing off their discoveries at the second annual Contra Costa County Science & Engineering Fair, which concludes today. ... As officials from Dow Chemical and Bio-Rad shuffled up to his display, reigning junior sweepstakes champion Ummon Karpe unveiled his artificial intelligence project. The language recognition software he created answers online technical support questions typed into a computer." March 24, 2007: Language Theorist Lauded for Information Efforts. IEEE Spectrum Online. "A professor at Cambridge University is seeing her life's work in natural language and information processing reap a bouquet of awards from major computer science institutions this month. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced Wednesday that it has chosen Karen Spärck Jones as the recipient of both the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award and the ACM-W Athena Lecturer Award. Only weeks ago, she was also honored with the prestigious Ada Lovelace Medal by the British Computer Society (BCS). ... Spärck Jones will receive her ACM awards during presentation ceremonies this June and July. The Newell Award, bestowed each year in conjunction with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, recognizes those whose careers have demonstrated 'breadth within computer science.' The Athena Award, presented by the ACM Committee on Women in Computing, recognizes women who have made 'fundamental contributions to computer science.' The BCS's Lovelace Medal honors 'individuals who have made a contribution which is of major significance in the advancement of information systems.'" March 23, 2007: Art in Review; Leo Villareal. By Andrea K. Scott. The New York Times. "When you think about artificial intelligence, Mark Rothko isn't the first name that comes to mind. But 'Field,' the software-driven sculpture at the heart of Leo Villareal's third New York show, makes the leap. A computer code written by Mr. Villareal generates an autonomous system that illuminates thousands of colored LEDs, hidden behind a panel of opaque acrylic."
>>> Art, Applications March 23, 2007: Autonomous driving systems aim to drive dirty. By Matthew Sparkes. NewScientist.com news service. "Autonomous model cars will race against one another in a contest designed to test different software approaches. The contest is being organised by researchers at the University of Essex in the UK, who are creating an affordable and standardised autonomous vehicle kit to encourage others to get involved. ... Simon Lucas of Essex University says the competition will be similar to the DARPA Grand Challenge (see Desert racers – drivers not included), which involves full-sized vehicles, but will be far less prohibitive. 'The challenges are the same for a full-size or model autonomous car, but you need pots of money,' Lucus told New Scientist. 'Our prototype hardware costs only £1000 ($2000).' The contest will be preceded by a simulated competition held at the 2007 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games in April 2007." March 23, 2007: 'Thinking' computer may copy doctors. By Robin Turner. Western Mail / icWales. "A thinking computer which can imitate doctors' decisions about treatment for patients is being developed by scientists at a Welsh university. The system will monitor patients' vital signs then evaluate and administer drugs, a job now done by specialist medics. Decisions would be made in seconds, freeing up valuable time for doctors and specialist nurses. Engineers at Swansea University hope the NHS will eventually benefit from its new software that enables computers to learn from their mistakes. But X1 Recall, the world's first self-learning, web-based software using Artificial Intelligence (AI) is also being used in other areas, initially in industry. Science fiction could become science fact...."
>>> Medicine, Manufacturing, Expert Systems, Machine Learning, Science Fiction, Ethical & Social Implications, Applications; also see these related articles March 23, 2007: The Subprime Loan Machine. By Lynnley Browning. The New York Times. "The rise and fall of the subprime market has been told as a story of a flood of Wall Street money and the desire of Americans desperate to be part of a housing boom. But it was the little-noticed tool of automated underwriting software that made that boom possible. ... Automated underwriting is now used to generate as much as 40 percent of all subprime loans, according to Pat McCoy, a law professor at the University of Connecticut who has written on real estate lending. The software itself, of course, cannot be blamed for lowered lending standards or lax controls. ... 'Used properly, automated underwriting is a wonderful thing,' Professor McCoy said. The problem, she said, comes when lenders customize it to approve the wrong borrowers. ... Subprime lenders like automated underwriting because it is cheap and fast. A 2001 Fannie Mae survey found that automated underwriting reduced the average cost to lenders of closing a loan by $916. The software quickly weeds out the very riskiest of applicants and automatically approves the rest. ... By mid-2004, Countrywide Financial, a major subprime lender, had used MindBox’s automated underwriting system to double the number of loans it made, to 150,000 monthly. 'Without the technology, there is no way we would have been able to do the amount of business that we did and continue to do,' Scott Berry, executive vice president for artificial intelligence at Countrywide Financial, told a trade publication, Bank Systems & Technology, in the summer of 2004. ... Proponents say the software makes things fairer and more objective for risky borrowers." March 22, 2007: Son of TIA Will Mine Asian Data. By Sharon Weinberger. Wired News. "Nearly four years after Congress pulled the plug on what critics assailed as an Orwellian scheme to spy on private citizens, Singapore is set to launch an even more ambitious incarnation of the Pentagon's controversial Total Information Awareness program -- an effort to collect and mine data across all government agencies in the hopes of pinpointing threats to national security. The Singapore prototype of the system -- dubbed Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning, or RAHS -- was rolled out early this week at a conference in the Southeast Asia city-state. Retired U.S. Adm. John Poindexter, the architect of the original Pentagon program, traveled to Singapore to deliver a speech at the unveiling, while backers have already begun quietly touting the system to U.S. intelligence officials. ... While terrorism is a driving factor for RAHS, it was the SARS epidemic -- which crippled Singapore's economy -- that prompted interest in the technology, according to Patrick Nathan, deputy director of the Singapore National Security Coordination Center. 'We are studying the application of the RAHS concepts and tools to the social, and economic and financial domains,' [Nathan wrote in an e-mail interview. ... Steven Aftergood, head of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, said that while he wasn't familiar with RAHS, privacy issues are important in any data-mining system." March 22, 2007: welcome to the smart home. Analysis by Ian Williams. vnunet.com. "The German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence was one of a growing group of exhibitors at this year's CeBIT showing how computer systems and AI are being integrated into our homes and everyday lives. One system, which appeared at first glance to be just an ordinary wine rack, turned out to be an 'expert' sommelier. ... Similarly, the DAI Laboratory at the Technical University of Berlin is presenting intelligent services for the home environment. ... The Smart Home Energy Manager governs the intelligent use of light, heating and kitchen appliances, including monitoring energy consumption." March 22, 2007: Experts call for active surveillance of drug safety - Drug agency urged to use latest technology to spot side effects early. By Meredith Wadman. Nature 446, 358-359 (subscription req'd). "Last week, Mark McClellan, a former FDA commissioner, told a Senate committee considering new drug-safety legislation that the system 'needs to do better than just seeing the tip of the iceberg of a safety problem after it has already hit us'. Health-information technology for drug safety is 'an idea whose time has come', he added. McClellan and others are pushing the idea of data mining of existing health-record databases as an active surveillance system to pick up early warnings of adverse side effects. ... The same thinking is gaining currency in Europe." March 22, 2007: UCF researchers work on spy drones. By Chris Cobbs. Orlando Sentinel. "A flock of migratory birds can find its way over wide areas of the world. An army of ants working together can devour a large animal. Borrowing from their behavior, two researchers at the University of Central Florida are working to enable droves of small, unmanned aerial vehicles to operate together in an intelligent, coordinated manner, scoping out enemy troops in combat zones. The research is being conducted by College of Engineering and Computer Science professors Mubarak Shah and Niels da Vitoria Lobo, who recently received a grant furthering efforts to program unmanned drones to collect more useful battlefield intelligence. ... 'Our expertise is in automating video data collected by UAVs detecting a threat or determining if some event is happening,' said Shah, director of UCF's Computer Vision Lab." March 22, 2007: If you're happy, the robot knows it. By Celeste Biever. New Scientist (Issue 2596: pages 30-31). "Meet RoCo, the world's first expressive computer (.mov video). Inhabiting a back room in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, the robotic computer has a monitor for a head and a simple LCD screen for a face. It expresses itself using its double-jointed neck, which is equipped with actuators that shift the monitor up and down, tilt it forward and back and swivel it from side to side, rather like Pixar's animated lamp. An attached camera can detect when its user moves, allowing RoCo to adjust its posture accordingly. Unveiled at a human-robot interaction conference in Washington DC on 11 March, RoCo's creators hope that by responding to a user's changes in posture, people might be more likely to build up a 'rapport' with the computer that will make sitting at a desk all day a little more enjoyable. ... The team is among a growing number of researchers who are investigating how far a robot's physical presence can influence people."
>>> Robots, Cognitive Science, Interfaces, Applications, Music, Ethical & Social Implications March 22, 2007: MPs probe 'surveillance society.' BBC News. "An inquiry into the growing use of surveillance in society is to be held by an influential committee of MPs. ... The Information Commissioner last year warned the UK risked 'sleep-walking into a surveillance society'." March 22, 2007: Star Trek's 'Q' talks up technology. itnews.com.au. "The actor who played Q on three different Star Trek series says today's technology, whether it's cell phones or Second Life, is feeding off the fictional technology dreamed up by science fiction writers years ago. John de Lancie, who played an onmipotent being in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Voyager, gave the keynote address at the InfoSec World Conference in Orlando on Tuesday. ... A lot of the kids who grew up watching science fiction movies and television series, like Star Trek, went on to become today's IT professionals, de Lancie noted. ... 'Technologists have the tools to make it happen,' said the man who doesn't think he'll live long enough to really see artificial intelligence and robots take off. 'What's amazing is they are the ones who can put this all together. That's science fiction becoming science fact. It invites people to think outside the box and be bold and fearless and be explorers and get to the other side. What's exciting is the desire to explore.' Star Trek's cult hero William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk in the first series and several movies, has been outspoken in his belief that Star Trek exerted a strong influence on technology over the past 35 years. ... He even wrote a book, I'm Working on That: A Trek From Science Fiction To Science Fact." March 21, 2007: New restaurant review system launches online - Residents can now post their own reviews of local restaurants, make reservations and read reviews from across the Web. By Jay Thorwaldson. Palo Alto Online. "Visitors to Palo Alto Online, the Palo Alto Weekly's community Web site, can now rate local restaurants and access reviews written by both professional and amateur reviewers from across the Internet. The new feature, which can be found here, has been developed by a Palo Alto start-up company called BooRah, which plans to eventually roll out the system nationally. ... [T]he system behind BooRah is a highly sophisticated 'natural language processing' (NLP) technology. NLP automatically compiles evaluations of restaurants (or about anything else, such as hotels, local shops, movies or professional services) from the Internet. NLP is a specific area of the artificial intelligence field of research and development." March 21, 2007: Examining the Sensitive Side of Robots. [Radio broadcast.] NPR's Talk of the Nation. "Science fiction and pop culture have conspired to make most of us think of robots as something out of Terminator or I, Robot. But after six years of behind-the-scenes reporting from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Lee Gutkind knows better. Gutkind, the founder and editor of the literary journal Creative Nonfiction, examines the subculture surrounding these mechanical creatures in a new book, Almost Human: Making Robots Think. He found that today's robots are more fun than ferocious, and scientists are making wires and chips increasingly human-like. Gutkind talks with Neal Conan about the sensitive side of robots."
>>> Robots, Science Fiction, Assisitive Technologies, Hazards & Disasters, Applications, Ethical & Social Implications, AI Academic Departments -and- Competitions (@ Resources for Students); also see these reviews: 1 & 2 March 21, 2007: Computer Speakers for Your Ears Only - Microsoft researchers are developing an algorithm that would allow speakers to work like virtual headphones--even as you walk around your office. By Kate Greene. Technology Review. "The goal, [Ivan Tashev] says, is to 'target focused sound so that a person can walk around an office and hear' while on a video- or computer-aided audio conference call. Information about a person's location could be collected by hardware peripherals and fed back into the speaker software, allowing the virtual headphones to move with the user in real time. For example, Tashev says, a camera, either mounted on or embedded in a computer monitor, and image-processing software could determine a person's position. ... 'Tracking is a really hard problem,' [Stan Birchfield] says, one that no one has found a way to solve for an environment like an office." March 21, 2007: Pentagon Preps Mind Fields. By Noah Shachtman. Wired News. "The U.S. military is working on computers than can scan your mind and adapt to what you're thinking. Since 2000, Darpa, the Pentagon's blue-sky research arm, has spearheaded a far-flung, nearly $70 million effort to build prototype cockpits, missile control stations and infantry trainers that can sense what's occupying their operators' attention, and adjust how they present information, accordingly. Similar technologies are being employed to help intelligence analysts find targets easier by tapping their unconscious reactions. It's all part of a broader Darpa effort to radically boost the performance of American troops. 'Computers today, you have to learn how they work,' says Navy Commander Dylan Schmorrow, who served as Darpa's first program manager for this Augmented Cognition project. He now works for the Office of Naval Research. 'We want the computer to learn you, adapt to you.'" March 20, 2007: AI software to tighten up production lines. By Tom Simonite. NewScientist.com news. "Artificial intelligence software that provides expert advice on improving the efficiency of a complex production line has been created by researchers in the UK. The software analyses the relationship between an end product and the many variables in the production process. ... Companies that cast metal parts, including Rolls Royce, have already begun using the software to reduce waste. Called X1 Recall, the program can learn what affects the quality of a final piece of metal and suggest ways to improve production. ... They are also developing a version of the system for use in hospitals. This system will consider patients' medical history, symptoms, and test results." March 20, 2007: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies. By Steve Lohr. The New York Times. "John W. Backus, who assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died on Saturday at his home in Ashland, Ore. ... Fortran, released in 1957, was 'the turning point' in computer software, much as the microprocessor was a giant step forward in hardware, according to J.A.N. Lee, a leading computer historian. Fortran changed the terms of communication between humans and computers, moving up a level to a language that was more comprehensible by humans. So Fortran, in computing vernacular, is considered the first successful higher-level language. ... Back then, there was no field of computer science, no courses or schools. The first written reference to 'software' as a computer term, as something distinct from hardware, did not come until 1958."
>>> Tributes, Languages, History March 20, 2007: Inventor to pitch AI system to Government. By John Kennedy. SiliconRepublic.com. "he founder of a University College Dublin (UCD)-based campus company whose artificial intelligence (AI) technology helps reduce energy costs is planning to make a proposal to the Irish Government. Nicholas McNulty claims adoption of his technology could help Ireland meet its Kyoto obligations and prevent a likely fine of €1bn. ... Lightwave’s ICE system works in conjunction with existing building management systems and uses advanced artificial intelligence techniques to make real-time and efficient decisions for controlling the energy consumption in buildings while maintaining comfort levels." March 20, 2007: Students develop soccer bot. By Meg Miller. CollegiateTimes. com. "A crew of mechanical engineers from Virginia Tech will become the first team in the United States this year to qualify for and compete in the humanoid division of the Robocup competition held at Georgia Tech this July. DARwIn 2 is a 60 cm tall, four kilogram soccer-playing robot, and it will compete against other humanoid robots in a two-on-two soccer game, penalty kick challenge and technical skill challenges. ... The robot is programmed by a program called Lab View. It uses a fixed camera and a moving camera to find objects using color recognition. Once it finds the ball, it is programmed to give the best kick possible, and if there are others approaching, to kick it faster. ... Along with designing and creating the robot, this year the team also had a goal to meet the requirements and qualify for the Robocup. Robocup is an international competition aimed to promote artificial intelligence, robotics and related fields. The ultimate goal of Robocup is to develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team." March 19, 2007: Fighting against forgetfulness. By Nazila Reyhani. The Varsity Online. "For the past three years, a research team led by Dr. Alex Mihailidis, a mechanical and biomedical engineer at the Intelligent Assistive Technology and Systems Lab at the University of Toronto, have been developing a home-based computer system that uses artificial intelligence to promote independence and ensure the safety of older people living with cognitive disabilities like dementia. 'We are using artificial intelligence to support aging-in-place so that people can remain in their homes for as long as possible,' said Mihailidis. ... The team has also developed a personal emergency response system that detects when a person has fallen and calls for help. ... . If it decides there has been an accident, the speech recognition system asks the occupant if they need help." March 19, 2007: MTA takes global perspective on security. By Chuck Bennett,. AM NewYork. "The MTA's top executive is planning to visit transit systems around the world for ideas on making New York's subway and commuter rails a tougher target for terrorists. ... Since the [July 2005] attack, the London Underground began installing closed circuit television cameras with an artificial intelligence component that may be able to recognize suspicious behavior, such as someone hiding a bag under a seat." March 19, 2007: Someone has to get their hands dirty. Editor's File by Leo Valiquette. Ottawa Business Journal. "'Labour shortage' has become the buzz word of the decade. ... It's been said that Canada's economic future must rely on our economy being knowledge-based. Perhaps necessity will demand those knowledge-based areas will have to be artificial intelligence and robotics as we are forced to automate more and more." March 18, 2007: 'Almost Human' by Lee Gutkind - Scientists pursue the goal of robots that think. Book review by M.G. Lord. Los Angeles Times (www.calendarlive.com). "While wandering in the dead of night through the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, writer Lee Gutkind briefly mistook a robot for a person. The machine in question, known as Grace, or Graduated Robot Attending a Conference, was designed to schmooze and glad-hand with human attendees at a gathering sponsored by the American Assn. for Artificial Intelligence. 'The way she talked -- the direct manner in which she confronted me -- made her seem real enough so that, for an instant, I felt off-balance,' Gutkind writes. But the illusion was short-lived, because the robot's body 'resembled an oil canister and it navigated the hallway on wheels.' Gutkind recounts this episode in 'Almost Human: Making Robots Think,' an entertaining peek behind the scenes at the flesh-and-blood engineers of the groundbreaking Robotics Institute.... Despite the dearth of women in science, two of the institute's star roboticists are women. Before 2050, Manuela Veloso, a Portuguese electrical engineer with a PhD in artificial intelligence, hopes to have created a robot soccer team good enough to compete against humans in the World Cup championships. And chic French planetary geologist Nathalie Cabrol seeks to model a robot after part of herself -- not the chic part but the part that can tell an interesting rock from a boring one. The differences between roboticists seem far less significant than what they share: a passion for robot autonomy." March 17, 2007: Vehicle warning system trialled. By Mark Ward. BBC News. "Vehicles may soon be swapping information about road conditions to warn drivers about jams and dangers. A German research project on show at hi-tech trade fair Cebit envisions a peer-to-peer network for vehicles on a road passing data back and forth. Cars or bikes experiencing problems would pass data that would ripple down the chain of vehicles behind them. Information would be conveyed to drivers via a dashboard screen or through a mobile phone headset. Dr Anselm Blocher - a researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence who is co-ordinating the project - said the ad hoc communication system could mean that drivers found out about dangers or jams ahead much more quickly than they do now. ... The system was smart enough to recognise how busy a driver was and would adjust warnings to take account of the 'cognitive load' a driver was under, he said. ... The SmartWeb project is being co-ordinated by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence but has 16 other partners including BMW, Siemens, Daimler Chrysler, Deutsche Telekom and the European Media Lab." March 17, 2007: Evangelical Bioethics and the Web - Manassas Man's Religious Blog Takes Up Debates on Stem Cells, Abortion. By Michelle Boorstein. The Washington Post (page B09). "Glenn McGee, director of the Alden March Bioethics Institute in Albany, N.Y., and editor of the mainstream American Journal of Bioethics, said he checks [Joe] Carter's blog not for scholarly reasons -- 'most people in this field don't read blogs and are incredibly luddite' -- but more as cultural research. ... Some leading evangelical bioethicists are not hopeful about the future, populated with debates not only about embryonic stem cell research and abortion but also about organ farms and artificial intelligence." March 16, 2007: With 'easy oil' gone, companies turn to technology and talent. By James Pappas. Houston Business Journal. "In the not-too-distant future the exploration and production industry will have at its disposal more tools to increase productivity. ... Artificial intelligence will optimize flow rates for entire pipeline and well bore segments." March 16, 2007: Robot Code of Ethics to Prevent Android Abuse, Protect Humans. By Stefan Lovgren. National Geographic News. "The government of South Korea is drawing up a code of ethics to prevent human abuse of robots -- and vice versa. The so-called Robot Ethics Charter will cover standards for robotics users and manufacturers, as well as guidelines on ethical standards to be programmed into robots, South Korea's Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy announced last week. ... Gianmarco Veruggio of the School of Robotics in Genoa, Italy, is recognized as a leading authority on roboethics. 'Robotics is a new science with a manifold of applications that can assist humans and solve many, many problems,' he said. 'However, as in every field of science and technology, sensitive areas open up, and it is the specific responsibility of the scientists who work in this field to face this new array of social and ethical problems.' ... 'While I applaud the Korean effort to establish a robot ethics charter, I fear it might be premature to use Asimov's laws as a starter,' said Mark Tilden, the designer of RoboSapien, a toylike robot. 'From experience, the problem is that giving robots morals is like teaching an ant to yodel. We're not there yet....'" March 16, 2007: Science stars trace a long handwritten journey - Two teens hone a program to convert writing, in any language, into text. By Steven Carter. The Oregonian (OregonLive.com). "[Alan] Pierce, 17, and Nate Broussard, 18, have worked on a character recognition software program at the Science and Technology High School for three years. Not any recognition program, but one that is trainable by the user to recognize letters and words that the user writes in any language, converting it to text. t's been a long journey. The pair have spent hundreds of hours honing their program, using an open source software development Web site called SourceForge.net. ... They'll take the latest version of their software application to today's Intel Northwest Science Expo, to show the judges how it can translate characters written in different languages to printed computer text. ... Broussard and Pierce won first place for a team project in the physical sciences division of their science expo regional competition, earning them an automatic all-expenses paid trip to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, which this year is in Albuquerque, N.M., in May. ... Though Pierce and Broussard are assured of a spot at the international, today's event is still important. Portland State University, the University of Oregon, Oregon State University, Lewis & Clark College and Willamette University are offering more than $200,000 in college scholarships at the event, plus there are many awards from private employers and science organizations. Last year, Pierce and Broussard won a $3,000 renewable scholarship to Portland State at the expo, and a $500 award from the American Association for Artificial Intelligence at the international." March 15, 2007: Logical endings. The Economist. "In 1947 a psychologist called Theodore Sarbin made a controversial suggestion to a medical conference. He proposed that a doctor is really just a machine whose purpose is to make actuarial judgments about the best treatment for a patient. And not a very good machine, at that, for Sarbin also suggested that medicine would benefit if 'we could replace [the doctor's] eyes and brain with a Hollerith machine'. It was a remarkably prescient vision. The idea that Hollerith machines (or computers, to give their modern name) might sometimes be better than doctors at deciding how to treat a patient is now universally accepted. A computer program is, for instance, sometimes used to recommend whether the horrors of chemotherapy are likely to outweigh its blessings. When machines trespass into the area of medical ethics, though, hackles rise. ... The question is, if you were in a coma, whom would you more trust to come to the conclusion that you would want: your spouse or a machine? David Wendler, of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and his colleagues have looked into this question. ..."
>>> Medicine, Expert Systems, Ethical & Social Implications, Applications; also see this related article March 15, 2007: A quiet death for bold project to map the mind - Military scraps research at Rutgers and other schools to engineer a brain. By Kevin Coughlin. The Star-Ledger (nj.com). "The Star-Ledger has learned the Pentagon quietly has killed a project to 'reverse-engineer' the human brain, a goal one participant compared to inventing the atomic bomb or landing men on the moon. ... The program was called BICA, short for Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures. It was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the agency that spawned the Internet. About $9.5 million was earmarked to chart a game plan, the brain project's first phase. But the next stage -- a five-year, $50 million to $100 million push to design and test brainlike software -- never got launched. ... The brain effort linked experts from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, robotics and artificial intelligence. They wanted to replicate how different parts of the brain interact -- sometimes pulling together, sometimes not -- to solve problems. ... One ongoing project is PAL, short for Personalized Assistant that Learns. Computers are adapting to users' quirks, to customize information in busy command centers. ... 'We really hoped this would be an important project and would lead to some real breakthroughs,' said University of Michigan computer scientist John Laird, who had wanted to explore how emotions shape decision-making." March 15, 2007: New social justice industry the second law of robotics. The Wry Side by Stephen Matchett. The Australian. "According to the BBC last week, those cunning Koreans plan to have a robot in every home by 2020. (In South Korea, that is; in the north the dictatorship dreams of everybody having a can opener by 2020, with a can to follow a decade later.) But if the Koreans can pull it off they are on to a winner, at least until the social justice industry gets into the act. ... Because the advocacy industry is a business like any other, it always needs new products to sell, especially with competition for government grants so fierce. ... So people planning long careers in the rights industry are always on the lookout for a new cause, and cash flow. And the smarties will recognise it's time to get into the robot rights game. ... Here's how they will do it. First, lawyers against the oppression of artificial intelligence will argue the proposed Korean code does not go far enough in protecting artificial intelligences. They will call for a series of international conferences that will take a decade to demand a UN convention on the rights of robots. ..." March 14, 2007: Learning from mistakes. Technology Horizons. "Engineers at Swansea University have developed software that enables computers to learn from their mistakes. X1 Recall, a self-learning, web-based software, uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help manufacturing companies eliminate waste and improve quality control in their production processes. The system literally gives computers the power of thought and reason, and helps them to learn from their own experience. ... The software collates and analyses 'cause and response' data from the manufacturing process, effectively looking at how changes to different factors affect the quality of the end product.' ... Dr Ransing said: 'What makes this research unique is the fact that it doesn't rely on experts to interpret the data and analyse the best course of corrective action. The software makes the computer think about the problem and reason why the issue has occurred. And all the time it is storing up information to help inform its future decision making.' ... He sees the next stage of the research integrating X1 Recall's abilities with the NHS, facilitating more consistent diagnoses and treatments for patients, particularly in terms of recommending medical and pharmaceutical interventions." March 14, 2007: Outsized effort powers robots in 'Almost Human.' Book review by David Templeton. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "[I]t's the dramatic tale of Carnegie Mellon University roboticists working to build robots that feature human-like abilities when they move, see, record, learn, and even understand. Lee Gutkind, the self-described 'godfather of creative nonfiction,' tells their story in his latest book that provides an inside look into Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. 'Almost Human: Making Robots Think,' the 320-page book published by WW Norton.... 'It's a great test of character to get them to work,' Mr. Gutkind said of robots that do not make good eye contact with humans. 'The main thesis is that young people are making things happen.'" March 13, 2007: Can computers make life-or-death medical decision? By Roxanne Khamsi. NewScientist.com news. "A simple formula can predict how people would want to be treated in dire medical situations as accurately as their loved ones can, say researchers. The finding suggests that computers may one day help doctors and those acting as surrogate decision-makers to better estimate the wishes of people in a coma. ... [David] Wendler now wants to collect medical care preferences from people of various ethnic, religious and gender groups, which will help his team refine the formula. He believes that a computer program might one day predict patient’s wishes to an accuracy of 90%." March 13, 2007: Lip Reader Combines Audio, Video. By Tracy Staedter. Discovery News. "A lip-reading computer that could help solve crimes and assist consumers is the goal of a new project at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. When coupled with a speech recognition system, the technology could work to not only decipher the words of criminals captured on video but could also improve voice-activated computers in cars or mobile phones. 'There is interest in using lip-reading for all sorts of human computer interaction, particularly in noisy environments,' said Richard Harvey, a senior lecturer in the University's School of Computing Sciences." March 13, 2007: Search engine spawned from antiterrorism efforts finds place in business - Fetch uses AI technology to extract data from 'deep Web.' By Heather Havenstein. Computerworld. "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Air Force, the National Science Foundation and other agencies funded development of the Fetch technology by researchers at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute during the 1990s. A group of computer science professors who developed the core AI algorithms behind the Fetch Agent Platform founded the company in 1999 to build a commercial product. ... 'We can go to places and extract information where Google and Yahoo can't,' [CEO Robert] Landes said.... To do that, Fetch builds an artificial intelligence agent to extract that particular data, not just to look for Web sites that may contain that data, he said. The strength of the system, added Fetch Chairman and CTO Steve Minton, emanates from the machine learning focus of the search engine's agent-based tools. The system can recognize types of data based on a pattern and can apply what is learned about that pattern to future searches, Minton said. In addition, the tool can mimic human behavior by automatically filling out a form without human intervention...." March 13, 2007: Stepping up a gear. The Engineer Online. "This autumn, the latest version -- known as 'New Asimo' -- is due to reach Europe. Launched early last year in Japan, the robot's latest incarnation boasts a host of new features that bring it one step closer to full robotic autonomy. ... With the combination of eye cameras and new force sensors embedded in its wrists, Asimo can now perform basic tasks with a high degree of autonomy. ... 'Our first targets for robotic mobility have been reached,' said [William] de Braekeleer. 'It will never stop improving entirely, but we have reached a level and now it is the robot's intelligence that is the most important.' Asimo's artificial intelligence is already quite advanced. Its software allows it to recognise humans.... It also has fairly advanced gesture recognition software...." March 13 - 20, 2007: Visions of Technology. View by Dr. Bernhard Irrgang. Ubiquity (Volume 8, Issue 10). "Since the Industrial Revolution, the idea of alternative technological futures becomes increasingly central to plans for technical decisions. Thus arises the more general question of the concept for the future of technology, which we want to conceptualise in our vision, and for that purpose a technical utopia, perhaps a technological world-view, is necessary. ... A part of the acceptance crisis of modern technology could have to be attributed to missing visions of technological development. People would rather talk about the frightful visions than about positive utopias, as they are significant for technological development. During earlier times of technological development optimistic progress was allowed. ... A vision of technology is not to be confused with prognosis. It has no prognostic features." March 13, 2007: 'Mushroom' robot to plumb the depths. The Engineer Online. "After a successful deep-water test in Mexico, a NASA-funded autonomous robot [Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer, or DEPTHX] is a step closer to proving its ability to carry out a mission to seek life on Europa, an ice-covered moon of Jupiter. ... DEPTHX is built to find its own way around an underwater cave without tethers, guidance or outside communication. ... Autonomous navigation is only half of DEPTHX's mission, however. The robot will also have the ability to identify targets of scientific interest and bring them back alive." March 13, 2007: Is computer science dead? By Lia Timson. The Sydney Morning Herald. "Ms Wickramasinghe's course mate at Victoria's La Trobe University, Binh Nguyen, accepted a PhD offer to research artificial intelligence in gaming. He transferred from a commerce and science degree at Monash University to follow a path focused on IT. 'Before we finished our degree, we heard many people talking about how few opportunities there were and how hard (the job market) was,' Mr Nguyen says. 'Then, when we graduated, people were talking about how there were job offers. A large number of my friends have all been offered really good jobs in the industry.' He chose computer science because it allows him 'to take my thoughts and create something that works'. While Ms Wickramasinghe, Mr Nguyen and their classmates have benefited from their persistence, hundreds of undergraduates are ignoring computing as a career, despite Australia's increasing dependence on technology, a national IT staff shortage and society's infatuation with gadgets. ... Jenny Edwards, president of CORE - the peak body of computing science departments in Australian and New Zealand universities - says Australia's problem is not unique. It is shared with other English-speaking Western nations that have in recent years lost outsourcing contracts to countries such as India. British and American academics are also worried. 'I don't think (computer science) is dead at all but we are having a lot of problems,' says Professor Edwards, who is also professor in the IT faculty at UTS. 'The industry is absolutely starved for staff, but after the dotcom bust prospective students and their parents said there was no future in it. People forget our lives are now digital - sure there are tools that automate some of the (software) writing and some of the work is being outsourced to Asian countries, but still there is a demand for computer experts and now there are not enough graduates.' ... 'There will always be a need for computer scientists or technology will stop advancing,' [Professor Mark Looi] says." March 12, 2007: Virtual Reality for Virtual Eternity. News Release from University of Illinois at Chicago. "Imagine having a discussion with Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein on the nature of the universe, where their 3-D, life-sized representations looked you in the eye, examined your body language, considered voice nuances and phraseology of your questions, then answered you in a way that is so real you would swear the images were alive. This was an opening scene from an episode of the TV show 'Star Trek' almost a decade and a half ago. A new research project between the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Central Florida in Orlando may soon make such imaginary conversations a reality. Technology from computer games, animation and artificial intelligence provide the elements to make this happen. ... 'The goal is to combine artificial intelligence with the latest advanced graphics and video game-type technology to enable us to create historical archives of people beyond what can be achieved using traditional technologies such as text, audio and video footage,' said Jason Leigh, associate professor of computer science and director of UIC's Electronic Visualization Laboratory. Leigh is UIC's lead principal investigator." March 12, 2007: Bonding exercise. The Engineer Online. "Robots designed to grow emotionally in the same way as a human children are being developed at the University of Hertfordshire. The Feelix Growing project -- Feel, Interact, eXpress -- is a global approach to development with interdisciplinary grounding which is being funded to the tune of £1.68m from the European Commission's Sixth Framework programme. This aims to develop autonomous robots capable of interacting with humans in everyday environments, and growing emotionally with the individual with which they associate." March 12, 2007: Is That Just Some Game? No, It’s a Cultural Artifact. By Heather Chaplin. The New York Times. "When Henry Lowood, curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University, started preserving video games and video-game artifacts in 1998 he thought it was closer to professional oblivion than a bold new move into the future. In just a few years, however, Mr. Lowood’s notion that video games were something with a history worth preserving and a culture worth studying has gone from absurd to worthy of consideration by the Library of Congress. On Thursday at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Mr. Lowood announced a game canon.... Almost all of the games on the Lowood list represent the beginning of a genre still vital in the video game industry. Spacewar!, for example, created by a group of early computer programmers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was the first multiplayer, competitive game, and the first action game too. ... SimCity helped establish the genre known as god games...." March 12, 2007: Gained in translation - New trainer will aid Army intelligence analysts. Federal Times. "The Army’s Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation and General Dynamics C4 Systems are developing a simulator that allows intelligence personnel to work with virtual translators and talk with virtual people programmed to act like the real ones. The new trainer, called a human intelligence control cell (HCC), is intended to incorporate the latest advancements in speech recognition, speech synthesis and artificial intelligence. ... The computer’s speech recognition component translates the soldier’s questions to digital text, which is then processed by an artificial intelligence engine, which comes up with a response. That response is translated into the appropriate language, 'spoken' by the virtual local and 'translated' by the virtual translator." March 12, 2007: Mom saves world, Dad has affair but kid-with-robots plot gets lost. Theater review by Robert Hurwitt. San Francisco Chronicle (SFGate.com). "Charlie's in his bedroom, mixing up, not medicine, but the next major advance in nanotech robotics on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence. It's the teen genius' high-powered lawyer dad who's mixing the meds, a cocktail of whiskey, tranquilizers and performance-enhancing drugs as he pursues a hot affair. Mom is busy trying to save the world. Pressing issues of the uses and abuses of technology are explored in C. Michèle Kaplan's ' 'Bot,' which opened Saturday at the Magic Theatre. ... Robert Broadfoot's set is a high-tech vision of metallic surfaces, circuitry patterns and laptop and video screens (created with graduate students from the UC Davis theater and dance department, where Broadfoot teaches). Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center helped create the striking, animated computer images of Charlie's artificial intelligence clone."
>>> Science Fiction, Ethical & Social Implications March 12, 2007: Personalized Medical Monitors [one of the 10 Emerging Technologies 2007] - John Guttag says using computers to automate some diagnostics could make medicine more personal. By Jennifer Chu. Technology Review (March / April 2007 issue). "[F]or [John] Guttag, who was then head of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, it was a personal challenge. 'Health care just seemed like an area that was tremendously in need of our expertise,' he says. The ripest challenge, Guttag says, is analyzing the huge amounts of data generated by medical tests. ... 'People aren't good at spotting trends unless they're very obvious,' says Guttag. 'It dawned on me that doctors were doing things that a computer could do better.' ... Working with Collin Stultz, a cardiologist and assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, and graduate student Zeeshan Syed, Guttag is devising algorithms to analyze EKG readings for statistically meaningful patterns. ... There are known 'danger patterns' that physicians can spot on an EKG readout, but the Guttag group is leaving it up to the computer to find significant patterns, rather than telling it what to look for. ... Guttag feels he is well on his way toward integrating computing into medical diagnostics. 'People have very different reactions when you tell them computers are going to make decisions for you,' he says. 'But we've gotten to the point where computers fly our airplanes for us, so there's every reason to be optimistic.'" March 12, 2007: A Smarter Web - New technologies will make online search more intelligent--and may even lead to a "Web 3.0." By John Borland. Technology Review (March / April 2007 issue). "The Semantic Web community's grandest visions, of data-surfing computer servants that automatically reason their way through problems, have yet to be fulfilled. But the basic technologies that [Eric] Miller shepherded through research labs and standards committees are joining the everyday Web. They can be found everywhere--on entertainment and travel sites, in business and scientific databases--and are forming the core of what some promoters call a nascent 'Web 3.0.' ... Since 1998, researchers at W3C, led by [Tim] Berners-Lee, had been discussing the idea of a 'semantic' Web, which not only would provide a way to classify individual bits of online data such as pictures, text, or database entries but would define relationships between classification categories as well. Dictionaries and thesauruses called 'ontologies' would translate between different ways of describing the same types of data, such as 'post code' and 'zip code.' All this would help computers start to interpret Web content more efficiently. In this vision, the Web would take on aspects of a database, or a web of databases. ... In articles and talks, Berners-Lee and others began describing a future in which software agents would similarly skip across this 'web of data,' understand Web pages' metadata content, and complete tasks that take humans hours today. ... At the beginning of 2001, the effort to realize this vision became official. The W3C tapped Miller to head up a new Semantic Web initiative, unveiled at a conference early that year in Hong Kong."
>>> Ontologies, Web-Searching Agents, Representation, Information Retrieval, Applications March 12, 2007: Minsky on AI's Future - To move artificial intelligence forward we must unpack human mental states. Book review by Jennifer Chu. Technology Review. "As you start this review, you might be reading to see whether you'd like to read more. That might seem like a simple task, yet Marvin Minsky, an artificial-intelligence pioneer, says it is in fact an orchestration of many smaller mental processes. ... The Emotion Machine doesn't spend much time on actual advances in artificial intelligence. A few examples here and there tease rather than satisfy.... But in this book Minsky is less interested in AI's history than in its future." March 12, 2007: On Science Fiction - How it influences the imaginations of technologists. By Jason Pontin. Technology Review (March / April 2007 issue). "To this day, my tastes and choices as an editor and journalist are bluntly science fictional: I look for technologies that are in themselves ingenious and that have the potential to change our established ways of doing things. Best of all, I like technologies that expand our sense of what it might mean to be human. In this, I believe, I am an entirely conventional technologist. Most of us came to technology through science fiction; our imaginations remain secretly moved by science-fictional ideas. ... Robots first appeared in Karel Capek's play R.U.R. in 1921. Indeed, it is more useful to ask, What hasn't SF predicted? But the prescriptive power of science fiction has functioned both positively and negatively. Older computer scientists and electrical engineers such as Marvin Minsky and Seymour Cray, born in the mid-1920s, pursued a vision of humanlike artificial intelligence and mainframe computing popularized by science fiction after World War II (see Isaac Asimov's 'Multivac' stories)." March 12, 2007: Will Machines Ever Be Conscious? A debate worthy of Alan Turing. By Gregory Mone. Technology Review. "The surprisingly funny discussion, held in a packed Stata Center auditorium in November, was staged in honor of the 70th anniversary of Alan Turing's paper 'On Computable Numbers,' which defined the limits of computer science. At one podium stood Ray Kurzweil '70--inventor, best-selling author, and stubborn artificial-intelligence optimist. His oppo:ent, David Gelernter, Yale University computer scientist, software pioneer, and occasional conservative columnist. Rodney Brooks, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the event's host, kept the two on track while demonstrating a keen sense of geek humor." March 11, 2007: One day, 41 rides: It's no problem for the Line King. By Larry Bleiberg. San Francisco Chronicle (SFGate.com). "Rich Vosburgh worked out hard, spending four months with a personal trainer. He scrutinized maps and a detailed timetable. He even deployed a secret weapon: artificial-intelligence research to chart a course through death-defying drops, torrents of water and fiery heat. And when this adventurer clambered out of a floating log last year, he had reached his holy grail: visiting -- in a single day -- each of the 41 operating rides, attractions and shows at the Everest of theme parks, Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom. His time: a record 10 hours, 40 minutes. ... At heart, the challenge is an enduring and perplexing quandary: What's the most efficient way to route someone to multiple places, taking into account constantly changing conditions? Mathematicians call it the Time Dependent Traveling Salesman Problem. ... Seeking a solution - Enter Len Testa, a doctoral candidate from North Carolina A&T University with a Mickey Mouse-ear tattoo on his ankle. He developed a patent-pending artificial-intelligence program to give visitors the most efficient park-touring plan. Instead of testing every option to find the best route, a computer quickly settles on a plan that's almost the most efficient." March 11, 2007: Lesson 86 - Computer baduk. By Nam Chi-hyung. The Korea Times. "After the world championship-level performances of computer programs for chess, checkers, backgammon, othello and many other board games, all eyes have turned to baduk as the last frontier of computer game research. ... The A.I. techniques used in computer programs playing other games, however, are generally unsuccessful in computer baduk. Compared to the research on chess, where the computer started playing a reasonable game in around 1980 and is now playing at human World Championship level after some twenty or twenty-five years of persistent effort thereafter, the research on baduk is still at a very low level. Roughly speaking, the huge amount of branching in baduk is the main reason why the brute-force search technique, which enjoyed great success in computer chess, does not work in computer baduk." March 9, 2007: Students aim for career in games. By Diarmuid Mitchell. BBC News. "Competition for jobs in video game development has never been higher. ... An increasing number of UK universities offer degree courses in games design and development at graduate and post-graduate level. Most degree programmes in computer games cover core programming skills, using languages like C++, and focusing on game elements like engine architecture, game physics and artificial intelligence (AI). ... Games publisher EA also works closely with a number of British universities, advising on course content and providing guest lecturers, while offering internships to university students." March 9, 2007: Video games getting smart, social, and mobile. AFP / available from Middle East Times. "Reality, mobility, and community were prime themes at the international video game developers gathering that ends Friday in San Francisco, CA, USA. ... 'If films were the entertainment industry of the last century then this century it is video games,' said Paul Kruszewski, chief technology officer at Montreal-based Engenuity Technologies Inc. Kruszewski and his team showed off AI.implant, software that essentially made computerized video game opponents smarter with artificial intelligence." March 9, 2007: Introducing the blogbot. The Engineer Online. "NEC Corporation has developed a system for automatically creating multimedia blogs by talking to a speech recognition enabled robot which helps illustrate the day’s events. ... It integrates large-vocabulary, continuous speech recognition technology, which converts the speech content into text and extracts important keywords, and natural language text retrieval technology, which enables searching of contents on the internet." March 9, 2007: The ethical dilemmas of robotics. By Dylan Evans. BBC News. "Scientists are already beginning to think seriously about the new ethical problems posed by current developments in robotics. This week, experts in South Korea said they were drawing up an ethical code to prevent humans abusing robots, and vice versa. And, a group of leading roboticists called the European Robotics Network (Euron) has even started lobbying governments for legislation. ... As these robots become more intelligent, it will become harder to decide who is responsible if they injure someone. Is the designer to blame, or the user, or the robot itself? Software robots - basically, just complicated computer programmes - already make important financial decisions. Whose fault is it if they make a bad investment? Isaac Asimov was already thinking about these problems back in the 1940s, when he developed his famous 'three laws of robotics'. ... And the technology is progressing so fast that it is probably wise to start addressing the issues now." [Be sure to see the comments from readers at the end of the article.] March 9, 2007: Start-Up Aims for Database to Automate Web Searching. By John Markoff. The New York Times. "A new company founded by a longtime technologist is setting out to create a vast public database intended to be read by computers rather than people, paving the way for a more automated Internet in which machines will routinely share information. The company, Metaweb Technologies, is led by Danny Hillis, whose background includes a stint at Walt Disney Imagineering and who has long championed the idea of intelligent machines. He says his latest effort, to be announced Friday, will help develop a realm frequently described as the 'semantic Web' -- a set of services that will give rise to software agents that automate many functions now performed manually in front of a Web browser. ... Most search engines are about algorithms and statistics without structure, while databases have been solely about structure until now, [Esther Dyson] said. 'In the middle there is something that represents things as they are,' she said. 'Something that captures the relationships between things.' That addition has long been a vision of researchers in artificial intelligence. The Freebase system will offer a set of controls that will allow both programmers and Web designers to extract information easily from the system." March 8, 2007: Robo-salamander goes swimming - Bot throws light on the evolution of walking. By Emma Marris. news @ nature.com. "Auke Jan Ijspeert of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and his team made the robot to help test their theories on the evolution of walking: that famous moment when the first 'fish' scurried up onto land. The robotic creature helps to confirm their notion that the transition between swimming and walking can be quite simple."
>>> Robots, Artificial Life March 8, 2007: Experts develop robot ethics charter. Mark Colvin presents PM. ABC Radio [Australian Broadcasting Corporation]. "Mark Colvin: A team of experts in South Korea is putting together a code of ethics to stop humans abusing robots, and to prevent robots from taking control of humans. The Robot Ethics Charter will apply to manufacturers and users of increasingly sophisticated robots. Robot experts and futurists in Australia say it's a good time to start a debate over how we treat and protect robots, as Emily Bourke reports. ..." Listen to the podcast via sidebar links. March 8, 2007: Israel unveils portable killer robot. Reuters / available from CNET News.com. "An Israeli defense firm on Thursday unveiled a portable robot [named Viper] billed as being capable of entering most combat zones alone and engaging enemies with an onboard armory that includes a machine-pistol and grenades." March 8, 2007: Carnegie Mellon to celebrate accomplishments of robotics pioneer. By David Templeton. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Humans don't see well. Just ask any ophthalmologist. But add in the fact that people embrace illusions, harbor delusions and foster confusion. That's why Takeo Kanade, when he began programming robots to see, decided against using the human model. He developed his own theory of robotic vision that included origami, math and geometry. ... Decades ago, Dr. Kanade created the first complete face-recognition system and first direct-drive robotic arm. Both are still in use. Another famous creation was EyeVision, a system used during broadcast of the 2001 Super Bowl in Tampa that used 51 cameras plus computer software to provide viewers with 'virtualized reality' of action from any angle. Not one to relax, he's now working on an autonomous helicopter. ... Although robots are absent from everyday life, he said, specialized robotic systems have reached the market faster than he anticipated. Future houses might not have humanoid robots but, rather, embedded sensors that can help people complete daily activities. In time, a house will know where its occupants are, what they're doing and how to help them, he said."
>>> Vision, Robots, Smart Houses, Applications, Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students) March 7, 2007: Feds test new data mining program. By John Yaukey. Gannett News Service & USATODAY.com. "Lawmakers and privacy advocates are concerned that a powerful new data searching tool being tested by the Department of Homeland Security could pose a threat to Americans' privacy as it sifts through mountains of information for patterns that might reveal terrorists. Called ADVISE -- for Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement -- the program is capable of linking and cross-matching material from websites and blogs to government records and personal data. ... Data mining is a powerful technology used across the government and in business. Credit card companies routinely use it to look for suspicious patterns in customer spending. The GAO used data mining technology to uncover an estimated $1 billion in improper federal relief payments after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. At least 52 different federal agencies use data mining technology, and there are at least 199 different data mining programs in use, according to the GAO." March 7, 2007: Who -- or what -- is in charge? Opinion by Mel Copen. Forsyth County News. "In the popular TV series 'Battlestar Galactica,' humanity is at war with the 'Cylons,' a 'race' of intelligent robots that was designed to serve man, but became dominant and eventually evolved into an even more advanced form of intelligence. It's the stuff of entertaining science fiction -- but yesterday's science fiction has a way of becoming today's reality. ... As time goes by, more and more of the systems that help regulate our lives are being managed by computers. And with continued development of artificial intelligence, those computerized systems 'learn' how to perform better and even correct any errors that were made in their initial design. But as these systems are applied to more and more complex issues, the programs become larger and more complex. ... We should be proud of the progress we have made. But we need to make sure that we maintain control over the systems and technologies that we have developed." March 7, 2007: UCD [University College Dublin] tech firm cuts business energy costs by 30pc. By John Kennedy. SiliconRepublic.com. "An energy management and control system developed by NovaUCD-based Lightwave Technologies claims to be capable of saving up to 30pc of the gas and up to 20pc of the electricity consumption associated with operating commercial buildings Lightwave’s Intelligent Control of Energy (ICE) system works in conjunction with existing building management systems and uses advanced artificial intelligence techniques to make real-time and efficient decisions for controlling the energy consumption in buildings while maintaining comfort levels." March 7, 2007: Robotic age poses ethical dilemma - An ethical code to prevent humans abusing robots, and vice versa, is being drawn up by South Korea. BBC News. "The Robot Ethics Charter will cover standards for users and manufacturers and will be released later in 2007. It is being put together by a five member team of experts that includes futurists and a science fiction writer. The South Korean government has identified robotics as a key economic driver and is pumping millions of dollars into research. ... The new guidelines could reflect the three laws of robotics put forward by author Isaac Asimov in his short story Runaround in 1942, [Park Hye-Young] said. Key considerations would include ensuring human control over robots, protecting data acquired by robots and preventing illegal use. Other bodies are also thinking about the robotic future. ..."
>>> Robots, Science Fiction, Ethical & Social Implications, Assisitive Technologies, Household Appliances, The Future March 6, 2007: Jeff Hawkins and the Brain - The creator of the PalmPilot and the Treo is at it again. But his latest startup, Numenta, isn't just making another gadget. It's attempting to fuse silicon and gray matter to produce the ultimate intelligent machine. By Erick Schonfeld. Business 2.0 Magazine (February 1, 2007 issue) / now available from CNNMoney.com. "Hawkins believes that his latest startup, called Numenta, is on its way to creating the first truly intelligent computer - a thinking machine that, in essence, learns the same way the human brain does. ... Numenta, Hawkins stresses, has nothing to do with the field known as artificial intelligence. What he has in mind is far more supple and elegant. Rather than being inspired by biology, AI uses brute computing power and logic to make computers seem intelligent through their behavior. When IBM's (Charts) Deep Blue finally beat chess grand master Gary Kasparov a decade ago, it wasn't because it was smarter than he was. It was just faster. Even today, computers don't have intuition. ... Numenta's approach is radically different. Computers running Numenta software will not be programmed like regular computers. Rather, algorithms that Numenta has come up with allow machines to learn from observation, just as a child learns by observing the world around her. ... The key difference between an HTM and a regular computer is that you don't program an HTM ["hierarchical temporal memory" system]. It learns by itself through observation. This could fundamentally change the relationship between the programmer and the computer. 'The programmer's job is no longer to tell it what to do,' [Bill] Atkinson notes. 'An HTM can deliver more intelligence than the programmer has because it can learn things the programmer does not understand.' ... For Hawkins, the ultimate applications will be those that allow us to acquire new knowledge in areas of science such as quantum mechanics and biology. 'What is exciting to me,' he says, 'is the prospect of building intelligent machines that sit comfortably in the realms of science where we have difficulty thinking. It will be like having a dedicated Einstein working around the clock on these problems.' ... Moreover, there are deep moral dilemmas inherent in Hawkins's vision of intelligent machines, starting with the primal fears behind plots for everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Terminator:...."
>>> Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, AI Overview, Applications, Science Fiction, Ethical & Social Implications March 6, 2007: Faster Hotter Sooner. By Joanna Pachner. Financial Post (canada.com). "The importance of speed has risen in parallel with that of the drive-thru, which now accounts for two-thirds of fast-food sales. That means any improvement in this area will boost the bottom line faster than at the counter. The big players know that: In a QSR survey last year, 82% of industry respondents reported launching programs over the previous year to improve speed at the drive-thru. The initiatives range from the decidedly low-tech -- such as staffers walking up to drivers waiting their turn in lanes -- to The Jetsons-like HyperActive Bob, a system developed by a Pittsburgh company that uses artificial intelligence to predict the upcoming orders based on the number and kind of vehicles the rooftop cameras spy entering the lot." March 6, 2007: Look, ma, no scalpel - Software designed for plastic surgeons gives users a virtual nip-and-tuck while its creators learn about artificial intelligence. By Terrence Belford. The Globe and Mail. "Alireza Rabi decided to borrow some of the facial-recognition software created by his professor, Parham Aarabi, the renowned head of UofT's Artificial Perception Laboratory, write some new code of his own, and develop a program that might revolutionize plastic surgery. The goal was a software program that would use an actual photo to show a person, realistically and in advance, what he or she would look like after having cosmetic surgery. Such a system could put an end to disappointed patients and also help surgeons refine their craft, Mr. Rabi says. ... The current version of Modiface is actually the result of 10 years of research into facial-recognition software and about $1-million in research funding, explains Dr. Aarabi, the 30-year-old Canada Research Chair in Internet video, audio and image search. ... Both he and Mr. Rabi see spin-off benefits already from the current version of Modiface. For example, the program is helping to advance the understanding of artificial intelligence itself. Dr. Aarabi says the system actually learns from each attempt at reconstructing a face, slowly gaining the ability to correct its own errors (such as putting eyes in the wrong place) and refining its processes. Every three to four weeks the researchers fine tune the system to remove glitches caused by users who might, for example, submit a photo of a dog instead of a person. 'Essentially the software amends and updates its own algorithms automatically as it gains more experience,' Dr. Aarabi says. 'By seeing how it deals with learning, we, in turn, get insights into artificial intelligence.' ... To use the Modiface site (http://www.modiface.com), users upload digital photos...." March 6, 2007: Digital world isn't so infinite - About 161 exabytes of data was created in 2006 and storage space is running low. By Brian Bergstein. The Associated Press / available from IndyStar.com. "A new study that estimates how much digital information the world is generating (hint: a lot) finds that for the first time, there's not enough storage space to hold it all. ... Add it all up and the world generated 161 billion gigabytes -- 161 exabytes -- of digital information last year, IDC [a technology research firm] estimates. That's like 12 stacks of books that each reach from the Earth to the sun. Or you might think of it as 3 million times the information in all the books ever written, according to IDC. .... [T]he amount of stuff generated is expected to jump from 161 exabytes last year to 988 exabytes (closing in on 1 zettabyte) in 2010."
>>> Information Retrieval, Industry Statistics March 5, 2007: Intelligently Promoting AI - Numenta eyes computers that think just like humans -- if others don’t beat it to the punch. By Eydie Cubarrubia. Red Herring. "Artificial intelligence startup Numenta said Monday it would license for free its computer memory system, giving scientists, developers, and engineers the chance to create applications that work like the human brain. The Menlo Park, California-based company claims its technology is different from traditional AI software because it’s based on the human neocortex, which means can store and analyze data to make predictions or conclusions in the same manner as the human brain. ... Several other companies have developed projects or products based on brain-based computing." March 5, 2007: Carnegie Mellon hosts national linguistics olympiad - High school students in four cities will take on linguistics problems for a spot in the international competition. By Jun Xian Leong. The Tartan Online (Volume 101, Issue 19). "The first-ever North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NAMCLO) will be held in Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Ithaca, as well as online for students who are unable to attend these venues, on March 29. ... Computational linguistics is the study of natural language from a computational perspective. The field involves studying applications of computers in language interpretation, as well as analysis of languages in a logical and systematic form. ... [Thomas] Payne said that the goals of computational linguistics include machine translation between natural languages, artificial intelligence, handwriting and voice recognition, and text analysis and processing. The problems presented during NAMCLO will be representative of the challenges computational linguists face. ... The competition’s goal is to unearth new talents in linguistics among high school students, as well as to heighten student awareness of linguistics. ... The four best students nationwide will represent the United States at the International Linguistics Olympiad, which will be held in St. Petersburg, Russia, in early August." March 5, 2007: Protesters wage war on CMU military contracting. By Annika Rosenvinge. The Tartan Online (Volume 101, Issue 19). "Last Friday, approximately 50 anti-war protesters gathered in front of Carnegie Mellon’s National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) in Lawrenceville at 5 a.m. to protest the development of federal goverment-commissioned military technology. ... Since opening in 1996, the NREC has undertaken projects in unmanned vehicle design, autonomous vehicle technologies, operator assist technologies, innovative mechanisms, sensing and image processing applications, and machine learning applications. Many of the center’s robotic systems are geared towards applications such as automated crop harvesting, industrial material transport, or semi-automated paint removal. The NREC is also working with the federal government to develop technologies geared toward offensive and defensive military actions, such as unmanned combat vehicles and mobile surveillance technologies named 'Crusher' or 'Gladiator.' Many of these projects are designed for use by the Marine Corps in rugged or dangerous areas." March 5, 2007: Microsoft Prize of $10,000 to Promote Xbox Games. By Seth Schiesel. The New York Times. "Reaching out to millions of aspiring game developers around the world, Microsoft plans today to announce a contest that will award $10,000 and the opportunity to entice millions of eyeballs to the next great digital diversion for the company’s Xbox 360. ... With the new unit, Microsoft will also raise the official size limit on Xbox Live Arcade games to 150 megabytes, allowing enhanced graphics, sound and artificial intelligence. March 4, 2007: Big Brother, Armed With a Spotlight. By Hugh Hart. The New York Times. "A robot named Mojo will beam a spotlight on strollers in San Pedro later this month, whether they like it or not. What originated as a drawing titled 'Curious Lightpost,' sketched by the artist Christian Moeller on a scrap of tracing paper in 2004, has evolved into an interactive sculpture that will soon go live in this harbor area 20 miles south of downtown Los Angeles. ... Mojo is the latest twist in Mr. Moeller’s nearly two-decade exploration of human-machine interactivity.... After Mr. Moeller heard about 'emotion recognition' software being developed at the Machine Perception Laboratories at the University of California, San Diego, he collaborated with Pietro Perona, director of Caltech’s Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering, to put his own sardonic twist on the research. ...The resulting video installation, shown in 2003 in Pasadena...." March 4, 2007: Engineering's benefits given dynamic display at expo. By Sara Cunningham. The Courier-Journal. "One of the creators of the artificial intelligence project that entertained the Maloney brothers chuckled as he watched the boys. The program pits a human against a computer in a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. 'It looks for patterns in how you play and goes from there. I promise it really doesn't cheat,' said Christian Oudard, a University of Louisville computer science senior. ... Oudard's project was one of many on display yesterday at the U of L Speed School's annual Engineering Expo. ... 'The day is supposed to raise community awareness of engineering and what it can do to improve our lives and society,' said Allison Douglas, an engineering graduate student and coordinator of the expo." March 3, 2007: Middle East research points to future of computer communication. Press Release available from AME Info. "The British University in Dubai's (BUiD) focus on advanced research into important industry sectors could enable the creation of networks of computers conducting business discussions and legal arguments, according to leading artificial intelligence experts. ... Prospective applications for this advanced research include the use of artificial intelligence in legal disputes, business negotiations, labour disputes, scientific inquiry, risk analysis, scheduling, logistics and even - potentially- democratic debate. " March 3, 2007: CMU technology counts on 'sidekick' to win competition. By Corilyn Shropshire. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "AbbyMe.com wants to be the obsession of the work-hard, play-hard crowd that wishes it had time for poker night, but have found that even instant messaging takes too much time from a busy day. The site, based on artificial intelligence technology harnessed from Carnegie Mellon University, is an online community where a roster of very good-looking avatars act as personal assistants or 'sidekicks' who take over the hard work of managing overstuffed social and professional calendars." March 3, 2007 [issue date]: Mother robot tops up her kids' flagging batteries. By Paul Marks. New Scientist (Issue 2593, page 26; subscription req'd). "'No robot can be truly autonomous if it cannot revive itself after its battery has expired,' says Trung Dung Ngo, a robotics researcher at Aalborg University in Denmark. Too much research, he says, is directed at giving robots behavioural autonomy, instead of energy autonomy. 'They must have a means to self-power,' he says. So Ngo and his colleague Henrik Schioler have come up with a plan...." March 2, 2007: Practice makes perfect - Simulation labs and robotics help surgeons hone their skills. By Elizabeth Heubeck. Baltimore Business Journal. "SimMan is housed in the team training area of University of Maryland Medical Center's (UMMC's) newly launched, multimillion-dollar Surgical Simulation and Technology Center, one of the first of its kind in the nation. ... UMMC's simulation center ...includes an artificial intelligence program called the Maryland Virtual Patient (MVP), a work in progress that includes an exact replica, down to the molecular level, of the esophagus's anatomy and physiology. ... Anne Arundel Medical Center is the first hospital in the region to utilize the latest iteration of Intuitive Surgical's robotic system: the four-arm da Vinci S System. 'The fourth arm holds the lung up,' said Dr. Kenneth Lee, a thoracic surgeon at AAMC and a pioneer of laparoscopic robotic surgery." March 2, 2007: Search and rescue robots team up for tricky tasks. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. NewScientist.com news. "A team of search-and-rescue robots capable of collaborating to form a single larger robot when faced with certain challenges have been developed in Germany. ... The challenge is to increase the number of units that can work autonomously, [Henrik] Lund notes. 'We know that there are serious challenges in terms of connectivity, control, coordination and communication when scaling up to many modules.' At the moment, the behaviour of each robot module is entirely pre-programmed, although the team plans to make them autonomous and therefore more flexible." March 2, 2007: Lee ahead of times then, now. Mary E. O’Leary. New Haven Register. "A groundbreaking for a new building housing the Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences is expected this fall, a facility helped along with a $5 million grant from the state. ... For the future, Lee said 21st century forensics will be concerned with artificial intelligence, satellite tracking and data mining with UNH [University of New Haven] planning a Ph.D. program in forensic science." March 2, 2007: Walking robot steps up the pace. BBC News. "A humanoid robot is teaching itself to walk and eventually run around a California research lab. ... Dexter's designers say their robot differs from commercially available predecessors because it can learn from its mistakes. It is the culmination of six years' work by Anybots, an independent research group of three engineers. ... The aim is to design a robot that can adapt to several environments and roles, like a human does, rather than requiring specific programming." March 1, 2007: AAAI Changes Name to Reflect Its International Nature. AAAI Press Release. "Effective immediately, the new name for the American Association for Artificial Intelligence is the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. The acronym AAAI remains the same. 'AAAI’s original name no longer reflects our dual roles -- national and international -- in the global AI community,' explains AAAI President Alan Mackworth. 'Our membership has strong international representation. The same is true of the contributors to, and attendees of, AAAI-sponsored conferences, symposia, tutorials and workshops. ... There are no plans to change the scope or location of AAAI’s activities as a consequence of the name change."
>>> Associations (@ Resources for Students) March 1, 2007: It's 2001. Where Is HAL? A Dr. Dobbs podcast (in 3 parts) featuring a talk given by Marvin Minsky in 2001. "To Marvin Minsky, Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, it is clear that AI hasn't delivered on the promises made over 30 years ago. What happened? Minsky examines the failures of AI research and lays out directions for future development in the field." When you're finished with Part 1, go to Parts 2 & 3. [Also available from InformationWeek: Part 1 / 2 / 3 ] March 1, 2007: The sci-fi prophet who could see the problems coming our way. Opinion by Stephen McGinty. The Scotsman (subscription req'd). "Philip K Dick was deeply strange. ... He wrote science-fiction novels and stories, littered with the genre's essential accoutrements - spaceships, ray guns, colonies on Mars and robots - but infused them with his personal paranoia, religious beliefs and philosophies. In the Sixties and Seventies, he wrote with prescience about artificial intelligence and virtual reality. He was a prophet of tomorrow who wrote for a cent a word and died broke, at times unable to pay the late fines on library books. ... Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of Philip K Dick's death...." March 1, 2007: Novel search engine matches molecules in a flash. By Will Knight. NewScientist.com news. "Potential drugs could be identified very rapidly using a novel method for matching molecular shapes. The technique uses the relative position of the atoms in a molecule to quickly match molecules of a similar shape. ... It analyses the position of the different atoms within a molecule to understand its shape. These relative positions can be mapped and stored a molecular database. ... Luis von Ahn, an image analysis expert at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US, adds that the demand for such technology could soon extend beyond molecules. 'Being able to match 3D objects is an important problem that might become even more important as we get more and more 3D models of our world -- such as Google earth,' he told New Scientist." March 2007: A Digital Life - New systems may allow people to record everything they see and hear--and even things they cannot sense--and to store all these data in a personal digital archive. By Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell. Scientific American. "[O]ur team at Microsoft Research has begun a quest to digitally chronicle every aspect of a person's life, starting with one of our own lives (Bell's). For the past six years, we have attempted to record all of Bell's communications with other people and machines, as well as the images he sees, the sounds he hears and the Web sites he visits--storing everything in a personal digital archive that is both searchable and secure. ... Our research project, called MyLifeBits, has provided some of the tools needed to compile a lifelong digital archive. ... Computers can analyze digital memories to help with time management, pointing out when you are not spending enough time on your highest priorities. ... The vision of machine-extended memory was first expounded at the end of World War II by Vannevar Bush, then director of the U.S. government office that controlled wartime research. Bush proposed a device called the Memex (short for 'memory extender').... Guarding the privacy of digital memories will be critical. ... An even bigger challenge will be devising software that can enable computers to perform useful tasks by tapping into this gigantic store of collected knowledge. The ultimate goal is a machine that can act like a personal assistant, anticipating its user's needs. ... Consequently, our research group is very interested in applying artificial intelligence (AI) to digital memories. Although many experts are skeptical about AI efforts, we believe that such software may yield practical results if it can draw on the tremendous stores of data in personal archives." March 2007: The Thinking Machine - Jeff Hawkins created the Palm Pilot and the Treo. Now he says he’s got the ultimate invention: software that mimics the human brain. By Evan Ratliff. Wired (Issue 15.03). "It’s this fascination with the human mind that drove Hawkins, in the flush of his success with Palm, to create the nonprofit Redwood Neuroscience Institute and hire top neuroscientists to pursue a grand unifying theory of cognition. It drove him to write On Intelligence, the 2004 book outlining his theory of how the brain works. And it has driven him to what has been his intended destination all along: Numenta. Here, with longtime business partner Donna Dubinsky and 12 engineers, Hawkins has created an artificial intelligence program that he believes is the first software truly based on the principles of the human brain. Like your brain, the software is born knowing nothing. And like your brain, it learns from what it senses, builds a model of the world, and then makes predictions based on that model. The result, Hawkins says, is a thinking machine that will solve problems that humans find trivial but that have long confounded our computers -- including, say, sight and robot locomotion. ... Numenta is close to issuing a 'research release' of its platform.... It was while he was in his PhD program that Hawkins stumbled upon the central premise of On Intelligence: that prediction is the fundamental component of intelligence. ... Hawkins argues that [neural] networks have traditionally lacked 'neuro-realism'.... HTMs [hierarchical temporal memory] attempt to mimic the way the brain learns -- for instance, by recognizing that the common elements of a car occur together -- neural networks use static input, which prevents prediction." March 2007: Robot Chopper - The Navy's Smartest UAV. By Erik Sofge. Popular Mechanics. "The Fire Scout is arguably the smartest unmanned aerial vehicle ever built. Unlike remote-operated drones such as the Predator, this helicopter is a true robot, with enough computing power to take off, fly and land on its own. Last year a pair of test Scouts made history, landing on the deck of a moving ship without help from human pilots." March 2007: A Robotic Sentry For Korea's Demilitarized Zone. By Jean Kumagai. IEEE Spectrum Online. "Go ahead, make its day. A new gun-toting sentry robot, developed by Samsung Techwin Co. for the South Korean government, may soon be coming to a disputed border near you. The SGR-A1 robot uses a low-light camera and pattern recognition software to distinguish humans from animals or other objects and, if necessary, can fire its built-in machine gun -- a Daewoo K3. ... Should it detect an intruder, 'the ultimate decision about shooting should be made by a human, not the robot,' says [Myung Ho] Yoo, who led the team that designed the robot. But the robot does have an automatic mode, in which it can make the decision. ... By deploying the robots, Yoo thinks his government may be able to significantly reduce the mandatory two years of military service that all young Korean men now serve." |
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