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<< HEADLINES are listed in order of date posted here <-> ARTICLES are organized by date published >>
September 30, 2007: Computer turns prosaic dunces into lyrical poets - Software claims to hone anyone's written English. By David Smith. The Observer | Guardian Unlimited. " A computer software program claims that it can automatically turn garbled writing into clear and simple prose. WhiteSmoke, an American-Israeli company, says the new version of its 'text enrichment' software not only checks spelling and grammar but comes up with the word you are looking for when trying to finesse a legal form, a piece of creative writing or even a love letter. The concept reopens the question of whether computers can truly ever simulate human culture. ... Online writing tools already exist but attempts by computers to imitate language have often been clumsy and jarring. WhiteSmoke argues its system is different because it uses artificial intelligence to draw upon millions of examples of well-written English, then applies them to new contexts. ... Does it work? Two prose styles put to the test. ..." September 29, 2007: Digital critters shed light on human sleep. By Michael Reilly. New Scientist (Issue 2623: page 28; subscription req'd). "Digital 'organisms' that learn to sleep when energy is scarce and harvest it when it's abundant could help explain why sleep evolved in animals. The lifelike programs might also make gadgets more energy efficient. To simulate early life forms, Benjamin Beckman and colleagues at Michigan State University in East Lansing created 3600 self-replicating digital organisms each with its own refillable energy store and a 'genome' made of computer code to govern when the organism replenishes its store. Every time one of the organisms replicates, a portion of its energy store gets used up. To keep stores topped up, the organism executes a simple logic operation that uses up some energy, but results in it getting more back. ... Together with colleague Philip McKinley, Beckman is adapting the organisms to enable them to regulate energy consumption in wireless sensor networks."
>>> Artificial Life, Applications September 29, 2007: Robot makers - The future is now. By David Ho. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Decades later, [Colin] Angle says the age of household robots has truly arrived, and the Jetsons it's not.'In the '60s, it showed people what robots might have to offer, but it's a limited and impractical vision,' Angle said at the Digital Life technology show in New York this week. 'Say goodbye to the Jetsons, goodbye to Hollywood robots, and say hello to (perhaps a little boring) but fantastically useful robots.' Robots stole the show this year with models such as the Wi-Fi-controlled Spykee 'spy robot' from Meccano of France and toylike devices from Wowwee Robotics. ... Angle and robot experts say a hurdle for the young industry is getting people to accept robots as real-world tools, not science fiction. 'Having an actual physical moving robot, that's still pretty unusual for most people. But what people are not necessarily realizing is how that technology is creeping in in different places,' said Joel Burdick, a mechanical engineering professor and a robotics specialist at the California Institute of Technology. ... Burdick said people may not fill their homes with clearly identifiable robots, but everyday devices will gradually get smarter. As the novelty wears off, people will eventually stop using the term 'robot' to refer to these labor-saving devices, [Ayanna] Howard said."
>>> Robots, Science Fiction, Robotic Pets & Toys, Household Appliances, Applications September 28, 2007: Artificial Comedy -- A five giggle-byte program Julia Taylor's computer has detected a joke. By Shirley Smith. The Associated Press / available from The Modesto Bee. "Doctoral student Julia Taylor and Professor Larry Mazlack of the University of Cincinnati's Applied Artificial Intelligence Laboratory are giving computers a sense of humor."
>>> Natural Language Processing, Humor, Applications September 28, 2007: The Element of Surprise - To help combat the terrorism threat, officials at Los Angeles International Airport are introducing a bold new idea into their arsenal: random placement of security checkpoints. Can game theory help keep us safe? By Andrew Murr. Newsweek Web Exclusive available from MSNBC.com. "Security officials at Los Angeles International Airport now have a new weapon in their fight against terrorism: complete, baffling randomness. Anxious to thwart future terror attacks in the early stages while plotters are casing the airport, LAX security patrols have begun using a new software program called ARMOR, NEWSWEEK has learned, to make the placement of security checkpoints completely unpredictable. ... Randomness isn't easy. Even when they want to be unpredictable, people follow patterns. ... The ARMOR software is the real-world product of an idea that began as an academic question in game theory. USC doctoral student Praveen Paruchuri sought to find a way for one 'agent' (or robot or company) to react to an adversary who has perfect information about the agent's decisions. Using artificial intelligence and game theory, Paruchuri wrote a new, fast set of algorithms to randomize the actions of the first agent. ... Soon ARMOR will begin jumbling the placement of the bomb-sniffing canine patrols too, says Butts. Other potential uses are too secret to talk about. [James] Butts says that the new random placement 'makes travelers safer' and even gives them 'a greater feeling of police presence' by making the cops appear more numerous."
>>> Law Enforcement, Agents, Game Theory (@ Multi-Agent Systems), Applications; also see this related article September 28, 2007: Robots take on social tasks. By Mark Jewell. The Associated Press / available from globeandmail.com. "Dominated by home-cleaning gadgets, the consumer robotics market is expanding with the arrival of 'bots that can spy inside your home when you're away or arrange virtual meetings of family or friends. Robotics experts say gadgets introduced Thursday could usher more socially oriented robots into the U.S. market, though they bear little physical resemblance to humans or pets as robots embraced by consumers in Japan and South Korea do." September 28, 2007: Artificial brain falls for optical illusions - AI software that misjudges colour in the same way as humans suggests that robots must inherit our flaws if they are to have our strengths. By David Robson. NewScientist.com news. "A computer program that emulates the human brain falls for the same optical illusions humans do. It suggests the illusions are a by-product of the way babies learn to filter their complex surroundings. ... For some time, scientists have believed one class of optical illusions result from the way the brain tries to disentangle the colour of an object and the way it is lit. ... Until now there has been no way of knowing whether this theory is correct. Beau Lotto and David Corney at University College London, UK, think they have finally done it. They created a program that learns to predict the lightness of an image based on its past experiences -- just like a baby. And just like a human, it falls prey to optical illusions. ... Most creators of machine vision try to copy human vision because it is so well suited to a variety of environments. The new findings suggest that if we want to exploit its advantages, we also have to suffer its failings." September 27, 2007: Research adds new perspective to high-tech gender gap. By Jessica Mintz. The Associated Press / available from Nashuatelegraph.com / also available from TIME (Study Targets Gender Gap in Software; September 24, 2007) and CBS2.com (Study: Men, Women Use Software Differently; September 24, 2007). "For more than a decade, academics and technology executives have been frowning at the widening gender gap in computer science. Everyone has a theory, but no one has managed to attract many more women. Now, some computer science researchers say one solution may lie in the design of software itself – even programs regular people use every day. Laura Beckwith, a new computer science Ph.D. from Oregon State University, and her adviser, Margaret Burnett, specialize in studying the way people use computers to solve everyday problems – like adding formulas to spreadsheets, animation to Web sites and styles to word processing documents. ... Research like Beckwith's may help ensure that when the industry starts adding new features for those everyday computer users, differences between men and women aren't left out of the equation. What's more, making complex everyday software more accessible to women could help get more of them interested in computer science, Beckwith and Burnett believe. As it is, the percentage of bachelor's degrees in computer science awarded to women fell from 37 percent in 1985 to just 22 percent in 2005, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, even as women made gains in other science and math-based fields. Most gender-gap theories today have more to do with computer science's image as a haven for solitary male geeks. ... Julie Jacko, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and president of the Association for Computing Machinery's group on human-computer interaction, said research like Beckwith's could end up changing how young women feel about computers. 'We know from our colleagues in psychology and sociology that there are gender differences that can be very important to take into account in human-computer interaction and software design,' Jacko said. 'Projects like this can help us have a better impact, even at younger ages, where I believe interventions need to happen.'"
>>> Cognitive Science, Careers in AI -and- Diversity & Equality (@ Resources for Students), Computer Science; also see this related NewsToon September 27, 2007: Robot Diet Coach Keeps You in Line. Good Morning America | ABC News. "Across campus in the MIT Media Lab, Cory Kidd has been busy building his own robot, Autom. 'Autom is a weight-loss coach. So what she does is talk to you about how much you're eating and exercising. And the reason for that is we know that people who are trying to lose weight or keep off weight that they've lost who keep track of those two things are more likely to be successful,' said Cory Kidd, robot inventor. Autom helps people stick to their diets by verbally asking dieters to input data about what they ate on a touch screen. The robots then provide encouragement and advice. Automs are making test runs now in Boston-area homes. ... And the Autom already has a host of fans, singing its praises. Amna Carreiro lost 9 pounds in eight weeks."
>>> Robots, Assisitive Technologies, Applications September 26, 2007: Uni future is with the robots. By Tom Weatherill. Gazette. "Pioneers of artificial intelligence and advanced robotics are to launch a new department at Essex University. With the rapid advances in technology, the university is gearing itself to deal with the challenges ahead by creating the department. Computer Science and Electronic Systems Engineering have pooled their skills to form the new department of Computing and Electronic Systems with Dr Sam Steel at the helm." September 26, 2007: The Future of Computing, According to Intel - Massively multicore processors will enable smarter computers that can infer our activities. By Kate Greene. Technology Review. "Andrew Chien, the director of Intel Research, is looking beyond eight-core chips and into the range of terascale computing, in which machines with tens or hundreds of cores perform trillions of operations every second. Chien is working with computer scientists at Intel and at universities around the world to find the best uses for these future machines. ... Technology Review: What are the major projects at Intel Research? Andrew Chien: One of the things that we're very focused on is this idea of inference and understanding the world. The big idea is all about this question of whether inference and sensors are really the missing piece to make ubiquitous computing come to fruition. We can build small devices that fit into our pocket, but the things we're falling short on are inference, making the devices work together well, and making them interact with us in natural ways. ... TR: Why would anyone want their gadgets to infer their behavior? Walk me through an example. AC: One of the initial steps is to build systems that understand what we're doing and understand the importance of different activities in our lives. ... TR: The idea that you have sensors that record your activities raises quite a few privacy concerns. How is Intel addressing that? AC: One of the things Intel is driving hard is [figuring out] how to build platforms with integrity. ... TR: Why is inference possible now? AC: One thing is that computing systems are now able to tap into all the data that's available on the Internet and learn from it. ..." September 26, 2007: University Mourns Death of Prof. Michalski. The Mason Gazette. "Ryszard Michalski, PRC Professor of Computational Sciences and Health Informatics , died from cancer on Sept. 20, Provost Peter Stearns announced Tuesday. He joined the Mason faculty in 1988. ... Michalski was a pioneer and cofounder of the field of machine learning. To recognize his efforts to foster collaboration between Polish and American scientists, the president of Poland honored him with the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland in July. ... He cofounded the Journal of Machine Learning and helped organize the first international machine learning conferences." September 26, 2007: Intelligent playgrounds. By Michelle Jana Chan. CNN.com. "Pick me! Pick me! The weakest children may no longer be left out of playground games. New technology may help to put kids on a more level playing field, which may in turn motivate them to learn and encourage competitiveness. Using modern artificial intelligence and robotics, new playground games can recognize a child's behavior and respond accordingly -- in real-time -- to make the game harder or easier. The industry calls it augmented cognition, or 'aug cog', a technology that is also being developed by the armed services to reduce mental overload in the battlefield. ... The team at the University of Southern Denmark developed the technology by first studying children in a playground. They categorized the behavior of children, comparing those who played in a disruptive manner with those who played in a continuous way. When they brought a new set of children to the playground, the neural network they had programmed had learnt to recognize different children's abilities. It could even distinguish when a child was tiring. Every thirty seconds, the neural network re-categorized the child and changed its response if necessary. ... Denise Nicholson, Professor of Modeling and Simulation at the University of Central Florida, is also researching aug cog in the gaming industry, as well as in education and even advertising. 'We want to understand more about people's reactions and find ways to measure that.' Nicholson is currently looking at a system, which will aid speech therapy." September 25, 2007: MacArthur Foundation Gives Out ‘Genius Awards.’ By Felicia R. Lee. The New York Times. "24 recipients of this year’s $500,000 'genius awards,' to be announced today by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. ... 'Every class has its own tempo to it; they’re all wonderful,' Jonathan F. Fanton, the foundation’s president, said in an interview. 'There are some interesting clusters you might note. There are a lot of people creating technology for the future. Another cluster deals with people working on the frontiers of medicine, and yet another cluster comes from other countries.' Most of this year’s fellows are known primarily in their own fields, like Yoky Matsuoka, 36, a robotics researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, who creates prosthetic devices and develops rehabilitation strategies for disabled people."
>>> Neuroscience, Robots, Cognitive Science, Machine Learning, Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students) September 25, 2007: Gujarat girl to present paper on Indian fonts in US. Rediff.com. "Sandhya Sitaraman (20), studying national language processing at an institute in Surat, is the only representative from India invited to present a paper at the forum, which is specially for undergraduate women pursuing careers in computer sciences. ... Sitaraman is gearing up to overcome this handicap and will present a paper on 'Artificial Intelligence Recognition for Indian languages' at the conference at Carnegie Mellon University. ... Clearing the air about artificial intelligence, Sitaraman said 'Many people have the misconception that AI is all about cyborgs and inserting chips into human beings which is not true. A lot of AI today is just about fields like human computer interaction and natural language processing to make communication smoother to help solve complex problems easily.'" September 25, 2007: Robot dogs race to be soldier's best friend. By Will Knight. NewScientist.com news. "LittleDog was created for the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) by US robotics company Boston Dynamics. And now DARPA has selected six university research teams, including ones at MIT and Stanford, to compete to develop the best algorithms for controlling the robot puppy. The agency hopes this will help identify the best adaptive strategy for moving over irregular surfaces. ... The six teams have each been given a LittleDog and a section of near-identical artificial terrain for the robot to cross. The video (top, right) shows one the robots -- CMU's LittleDog -- in action. Videos of other LittleDogs can be found here, here and here. [All 4 videos can be accessed via links in article] ... Max Lungarella, a robotics researcher at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, says the project provides a great opportunity for comparing different approaches. 'What is really interesting about the whole project is the idea of a common research platform,' he told New Scientist. 'A lot of research in robotics is done on platforms built ad-hoc.'." September 25, 2007: Caltech's spin on DARPA's robot race. By Stefanie Olsen. CNET News.com. "Even in a collision between robot cars, size might make all the difference. That's the thinking of Team Caltech, a robotics group at the California Institute of Technology that is fine-tuning a large self-driving van, an 8,000-pound Ford E-350 reinforced with armor plating, for next month's semifinals of the Urban Grand Challenge. The government research arm known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency invited 35 teams to compete in its race of driverless vehicles, with a $2 million first place price. According to one of the road rules, if a team's robot hits another vehicle--which seems highly possible for a newbie machine driver--then that team is automatically disqualified from the competition. But if a car is the victim of a collision, that car's team has 30 minutes to fix the robot and continue in the race. If the damage is too great, it's out. ... Of course, physical hardware is just one consideration in a competition that's ultimately about testing artificial intelligence software on the road."
>>> Autonomous Vehicles, Robots, Grand Challenges, Competitions (@ Resources for Students) September 24, 2007: Computer elbowing out TV - News at Seven scours sources to present information that's tailored to viewer's interests. By Brad Spirrison. Chicago Sun-Times. "Last week, as hundreds of local broadcast and interactive marketing executives assembled to study the economic effects of media intersection, researchers from Northwestern's Intelligent Information Laboratory were literally making news. InfoLab co-director Kristian Hammond and two graduate students will soon introduce new features to News at Seven, an online service that uses avatars to read and present customized newscasts online. ... Visitors to www.newsatseven.com are asked to state their areas of interest -- whether they be the Cubs, Hillary vs. Obama or CTA funding. Those areas are then used to generate customized newscasts. The Web site aggregates news copy, video and commentary from all over the Internet around chosen topics. An animated newsreader then reads automatically edited reports (there is no human intervention in the process) with accompanying imagery similar to what you would see in a television newscast." September 24, 2007: Happy Birthday, Sputnik! (Thanks for the Internet). By Gary Anthes. Computerworld. "Quick, what's the most influential piece of hardware from the early days of computing? The IBM 360 mainframe? The DEC PDP-1 minicomputer? Maybe earlier computers such as Binac, ENIAC or Univac? Or, going way back to the 1800s, is it the Babbage Difference Engine? More likely, it was a 183-pound aluminum sphere called Sputnik, Russian for 'traveling companion.' Fifty years ago, on Oct. 4, 1957, radio-transmitted beeps from the first man-made object to orbit the Earth stunned and frightened the U.S., and the country's reaction to the 'October surprise' changed computing forever. ... [T]he public demanded that something be done. The most immediate 'something' was the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a freewheeling Pentagon office created by President Eisenhower on Feb. 7, 1958. Its mission was to "'prevent technological surprises'.... [J.C.R.] Licklider [the first director of IT research at ARPA] had studied psychology as an undergraduate, and in 1962, he brought to ARPA a passionate belief that computers could be far more user-friendly than the unconnected, batch-processing behemoths of the day. Two years earlier, he had published an influential paper, 'Man-Computer Symbiosis,' in which he laid out his vision for computers that could interact with users in real time. It was a radical idea, one utterly rejected by most academic and industrial researchers at the time. (See sidebar, Advanced Computing Visions from 1960.) ... [A]round 2000, Kleinrock and other top-shelf technology researchers say, the agency, now called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), began to focus more on pragmatic, military objectives. A new administration was in power in Washington, and then 9/11 changed priorities everywhere. Observers say DARPA shifted much of its funding from long-range to shorter-term research, from universities to military contractors, and from unclassified work to secret programs. Of government funding for IT, [Leonard] Kleinrock says, 'our researchers are now being channeled into small science, small and incremental goals, short-term focus and small funding levels.' The result, critics say, is that DARPA is much less likely today to spawn the kinds of revolutionary advances in IT that came from Licklider and his successors. DARPA officials declined to be interviewed for this story. But Jan Walker, a spokesperson for DARPA Director Anthony Tether, said, 'Dr. Tether ... does not agree. DARPA has not pulled back from long-term, high-risk, high-payoff research in IT or turned more to short-term projects.' (See sidebar, DARPA's Response.) ... 'In the early years, ARPA was willing to fund things like artificial intelligence -- take five years and see what happens,' he says. 'Nobody cared whether you delivered something in six months. It was, "Go and put forth your best effort and see if you can budge the field." Now that's changed. It's more driven by, "What did you do for us this year?"' ... Meanwhile, funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for computer science and engineering -- most of it for universities -- has increased from $478 million in 2001 to $709 million this year, up 48%. But the NSF tends to fund smaller, more-focused efforts. And because contract awards are based on peer review, bidders on NSF jobs are inhibited from taking the kinds of chances that Licklider would have favored."
>>> AI Overview, History, Applications; also see this related article and 11 down in our AI Crossword Puzzle (or go straight to the annotated solution) September 24, 2007: Public, private sectors work together to steer students toward careers in science. By Jennifer L. Berghom. The Brownsville Herald - Online Edition. "Aileen Palacios cheered on the battery-powered robot she helped make as it rolled through a maze Monday morning. A GEAR-UP family and community liaison at PSJA North High School, Palacios and a colleague were the first to complete their robot during a workshop at the University of Texas-Pan American as part of the sixth annual Hispanic Engineering, Science and Technology (HESTEC) Week festivities. 'Girls rule,' Palacios said. ... The weeklong event is a joint project between the university and U.S. Rep. Rubén Hinojosa, D-Mercedes, to encourage Hispanic youths to pursue careers in science and technology. ... Amy Uribe, a GEAR UP coordinator for PSJA North High School, said her ninth-grade students have worked with robots in the past and want to start a robotics club. 'They want something that’s challenging beyond the classroom,' Uribe said." September 24, 2005: AI is A-OK in new games. By Mike Snider. USATODAY.com. "Our video-game enemies are smart -- and getting smarter. The artificial intelligence that guides in-game characters today leads to far more natural actions and realistic friends and foes than in the past. 'As graphics improvements top out, artificial intelligence will (drive) game innovation,' says University of California-Santa Cruz professor Michael Mateas. A look at AI evolution: ...." September 24, 2007: DARPA leads new AI research - Defense agency wants to create computers that can learn from subject-matter experts. By Brian Robinson. FCW.com. "Computer scientists have long sought to develop computers that can match the subject expertise that humans acquire during a career or a lifetime. Despite intensive work with expert systems and other forms of artificial intelligence, researchers have discovered that building a computer that can learn like a person is more difficult that they expected. Now, with a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program called Bootstrapped Learning, the agency wants to generate renewed interest in achieving that objective. SRI International recently won a $10 million contract to lead the first 15-month development phase of the program. ... The objective of the SRI-led first phase of DARPA’s Bootstrapped Learning program is to develop a learning system called Phased Learning through Analyzing, Teaching and Observation (PLATO). The result will be a domain-independent electronic student that can learn from human instructors, understand the implications of that instruction in a particular context and be able to refine that learning over time, as necessary. ... The second phase of the Bootstrapped Learning program, for which contracts have not been awarded, will be to develop a simulated person that can teach the electronic student." September 24, 2007: New service eavesdrops on Internet calls. The Associated Press / available from MSNBC.com. "A startup has come up with a new way to make money from phone calls connected via the Internet: having software listen to the calls, then displaying ads on the callers' computer screens based on what's being talked about. ... [Ariel] Maislos stressed that the calls are not stored in any way, nor does Puddingmedia keep a record of which keywords were picked up from a particular call." September 23, 2007: King Algorithm - An Oracle for Our Time, Part Man, Part Machine. By George Johnson. The New York Times. "Last week, when executives at MySpace told of new algorithms that will mine the information on users’ personal pages and summon targeted ads, the news hardly caused a stir. The idea of automating what used to be called judgment has gone from radical to commonplace. What is spreading through the Web is not exactly artificial intelligence. For all the research that has gone into cognitive and computer science, the brain’s most formidable algorithms -- those used to recognize images or sounds or understand language -- have eluded simulation. The alternative has been to incorporate people, with their special skills, as components of the Net. ... In the 1950s William Ross Ashby, a British psychiatrist and cyberneticist, anticipated something like this merger when he wrote about intelligence amplification -- human thinking leveraged by machines. But it is both kinds of intelligence, biological and electronic, that are being amplified. Unlike the grinning cyborgs envisioned by science fiction, the splicing is not between hardware and wetware but between software running on two different platforms. ... In his 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence,' Alan Turing foresaw a day when it would be hard to tell the difference between the responses of a computer and a human being. What he may not have envisioned is how thoroughly the boundary would blur." September 22, 2007: Apple Co-Founder Looks to Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. By Michael Vizard. eWeek.com. "Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak says one of the primary emerging technologies that is capturing his imagination these days is area of robotics and how artificial intelligence will be applied on those types of systems. Wozniak said he hopes that someday the robotics field will take a page from the personal computer era by creating robots that are easily programmable by users to perform specific tasks rather than solely focusing on creating system that are preprogrammed to perform specific functions. 'People want things that are useful as opposed to things that do a lot of little things that we call artificial intelligence,' said Wozniak." September 21, 2007: 3rd generation of intelligent robots to be put on market. Chinanews.cn. "With improvement being made, home robots will have more functions and they will be safer. They can understand human language better and they can know whether its master is happy or sad. They can thus communicate with human beings, said a person in charge at Siasun Robot and Automation Company." September 21, 2007: 'Self-aware' space rovers would be speedy explorers. By Michael Reilly. NewScientist.com news. "Robots armed with an innate sense of self and an insatiable curiosity could be the next big thing in interplanetary exploration, covering an alien terrain much faster than today's turtle-paced rovers. ... Josh Bongard of the University of Vermont, US, has designed a simulated rover that shows how to work much faster. This rover 'imagines' itself and its immediate surroundings, and heads off to explore the areas that stimulate its curiosity. The approach lets it navigate uncharted territory much more quickly without putting itself in undue danger. To simplify the challenge, Bongard created a rover that does not use sophisticated camera vision, but instead relies on just two tilt sensors to gain information about its world." September 21, 2007: Smile - you're on camera! Face recognition is only the beginning. Web only Tech.view column. Economist.com. "Now face-recognition technology is getting even smarter. Next week, Sony is due to launch a digital camera that can be set so it won’t release the shutter until people in the picture are smiling. ... If the face-recognition problem can be truly solved (ie, if an identity can be attached to a person in an image, irrespective of lighting, orientation, occlusion, pose, expression or adornment), then we will be well on the way to licking one of the greatest challenges in artificial intelligence -- computerised vision. The pay off for cancer screening, road safety, security, computer interfaces, video compression and, of course, digital cameras could be immense." September 21, 2007: CMU rolls out prototype for robotic moon rover. By David Templeton. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Carnegie Mellon's Robotic Institute and School of Computer Science displayed their four-wheeled rover yesterday ... Scarab will be required to navigate in the perpetual darkness of craters at the moon's southern pole, where ground temperatures will dip to minus 385 degrees with no source of energy on hand. 'It's a place where humans can't work effectively, but where Scarab will thrive,' said William 'Red' Whittaker, Carnegie Mellon's Fredkin Research Professor and principal investigator in the project funded by NASA. By year's end, Carnegie Mellon roboticists hope to complete software to allow Scarab to travel more than a kilometer and then perform drilling procedures automatically, among other functions, said David Wettergreen, an associate professor at the university's Robotics Institute. A key feature will be its ability to lower itself to the ground for drilling operations, or to rise 21 inches off the ground to climb over rocks and rough lunar terrain. ... NASA has yet to announce a mission involving Scarab...."
>>> Space Exploration, Autonomous Vehicles, Robots, Applications September 20, 2007: Student studies 'symbiotic media.' By Will Prescott. The Daily [University of Oklahoma]. "Jesse Harlin, a fine arts graduate student, wants to be an artist. To reach his goal, he spends almost every waking hour studying computer programming, robotics and circuit design. He does all this for an idea -- symbiotic media -- he cannot fully explain. 'You have to realize the first jazz musicians didn’t sit down and go, "We are going to call this jazz, and it will have these chord changes, and it will do this,"' Harlin said. 'I didn’t create the term ‘symbiotic media.’ I just know what I personally want to do.' Harlin combines his musical background with an increasing proficiency in robotics and computer science to create new, interactive art forms. ... Interactivity and reliance on digital technology are the defining features of symbiotic media, a concept being propagated by Adam Brown, media arts professor." September 20, 2007: The Careers Adviser. By Caroline Haydon. Independent Online. "Q. I have a degree in mathematical physics and a Masters in artificial intelligence. I had a successful career as a computer programmer. But five years ago I developed RSI and was unable to use the computer. I took what I thought was to be temporary employment at a crammer. I am still there. I feel I have fallen off the ladder. A. ... You need to distinguish between finding a job you can get from your current position, and working your way into a career you will enjoy in the long term. ... One starting point might be to look at the potential careers in the IT industry that don't involve as much keyboard work, such as marketing, advisory or consulting roles. See the British Computer Society website (www.bcs.org) for profiles. Lateral thinking might get you to combine IT and education and come up with a marketing role in an educational software company. These are just starting-point ideas." September 20, 2007: Robots turn off senior citizens in aging Japan. By Emi Foulk. Reuters / available from canada.com. "Ifbot, the resident robot at a Japanese nursing home, can converse, sing, express emotions and give trivia quizzes to seniors to help with their mental agility. Yet the pale-green gizmo has spent much of the past two years languishing in a corner alone. " ... High-tech gadgets and futuristic robots which Japan had hoped might lend a hand when the population turns gray haven't caught on with the elderly, who according to forecasts will make up around 40 percent of the population by the middle of the century. "Most (elderly) people are not interested in robots. They see robots as overly-complicated and unpractical."
>>> Assisitive Technologies, Medicine, Robots, Applications, Ethical & Social Implications September 19, 2007: We need to find an IT celebrity. Editor's note by Peter Whitehead. Financial Times | FT.com. "If IT wants to attract bright youngsters, one thing it might do is find a celebrity champion - real or fictional - to give an idea of what working in IT really involves and where it can lead. Unfortunately, some role models, such as the IT experts in the absurd but compelling thriller series 24, tend to be oddball characters. Being at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, robotics, mobility, and so on, ought to be an exciting prospect for any student. But the overall message reaching them is muddled and unappealing." September 19, 2007: Stanford University Engineers Builds New Robot Car - Doesn't Need A Driver To Cruise Around. abc7news.com. " Stanford students are developing a concept car for a contest sponsored by the Pentagon. From a distance, it looks like a normal Volkswagen Passat with a roof rack. But this car, with it's eight laser sensors, a highly accurate GPS system, and two on board computers uses artificial intelligence to drive itself. 'That even means through moving traffic and even obeying California traffic laws,' said David Orenstein from Stanford University Engineering. Meet Junior, Stanford University's entry into this years urban challenge. The Pentagon is sponsoring the contest in the desert. ... Junior and it's creators at the Stanford racing Team hope to be one of the 20 finalists at the Urban Challenge Qualifiers to be held in Victorville next month."
>>> Autonomous Vehicles, Robots, Transportation, Grand Challenges, Competitions (@ Resources for Students) September 19, 2007: OKC named robotics competition site. By Brian Sargent. NewsOK.com. "Oklahoma City was announced as a regional site for the 2008 FIRST Robotics competition during a ceremony today at Southeast High School. Click Here The FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) competition challenges high school students to design and build a robot. They compete in high-intensity events that measure the effectiveness of robots."
>>> Competitions (@ Resources for Students), Robots September 19, 2007: The Singular Question Of Human vs. Machine Has a Spiritual Side. By Lee Gomes. The Wall Street Journal Online (subscription req'd). "A few Saturdays ago, I spent the day in an auditorium full of fellow citizens concerned with 'singularity.' The word refers to the day when the intelligence of computers will exceed our own. ... It turns out, there is a schism between the AGI [Artificial General Intelligence] and the AI worlds. The AGI faction thinks AI researchers have sold out, abandoning their early dreams of 'general' intelligence to concentrate on more attainable (and more lucrative) projects. They're right. The machines today that recognize speech or play chess are one-trick wonders. Of course, AI researchers defend that approach by saying their early dreams of general intelligence were naive." September 19, 2007: Intelligent, Chatty Machines - A startup hopes to help toys, cell phones, robots, and personal computers have meaningful conversations with people. By Kate Greene. Technology Review. "A new company called Cognitive Code has built software that it believes will let everyday gadgets talk with humans. At the Techcrunch40 conference in San Francisco on Monday, the startup unveiled a developer's studio with a set of algorithms that convert strings of words into concepts and formulate a wordy response. ... The problem that the company is tackling is called natural-language processing, and it's been the subject of intense research at world-renowned research labs for decades. Some computer programs are already able to parse basic information from inputs that don't match exact commands. Well-known examples are chatbots such as Alice and Jabberwacky, programs that simulate a conversation via text input. Spring claims that Cognitive Code's product, SILVIA (which stands for symbolically isolated, linguistically variable intelligence algorithm), is more advanced than chatbots for a couple of reasons. ... The system works like this: during a conversation, words are turned into conceptual data, Spring explains. SILVIA takes these concepts and mixes them with other conceptual data that's stored in short-term memory (information from the current discussion) or long-term memory (information that has been established through prior training sessions). Then SILVIA transforms the resulting concepts back into human language."
>>> Natural Language Processing, Chatbots (@ Natural Language Processing), Interfaces, Applications, The AI Effect September 19, 2007: CMU professor gives his last lesson on life. By Mark Roth. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Randy Pausch set the tone early on yesterday at his farewell lecture at Carnegie Mellon University. 'If I don't seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you,' said Dr. Pausch, a 46-year-old computer science professor who has incurable pancreatic cancer. It's not that he's in denial about the fact that he only has months to live, he told the 400 listeners packed into McConomy Auditorium on the campus, and the hundreds more listening to a live Web cast. It's more that 'I am in phenomenally good health right now; it's the greatest cognitive dissonance you will ever see -- the fact is, I'm in better shape than most of you,' he said. ... What he was there to discuss was how to fulfill your childhood dreams, and the lessons he had learned on his life's journey. ... In his 10 years at Carnegie Mellon, Dr. Pausch helped found the Entertainment Technology Center, which one video game executive yesterday called the premier institution in the world for training students in video game and other interactive technology. He also established an annual virtual reality contest that has become a campuswide sensation, and helped start the Alice program, an animation-based curriculum for teaching high school and college students how to have fun while learning computer programming."
>>> Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students), Drama, Video Games, Education, Resources for Educators September 18, 2007: Open-Source Aibo Wants To Come Out And Play. Wired Gadget Lab blog by Rob Beschizza. "AIBO was euthanazed a couple of summers ago, with makers Sony only begrudgingly permitting third-party development amid the abandoned viscera of its cutest-ever product. Give thanks, then, to 'The New Robot,' an open-source copydog powered by dual 500 Mhz AMD Geode processors." September 18, 2007: Brain connections cause rethink over human memory. New Scientist (Issue 2621: page 23; subscription req'd). "It was originally assumed that the number of memories was proportional to the number of neurons in a network. Given that even 1 cubic centimetre of the brain's cortex contains about 50 million neurons, it seemed that the brain could indeed store masses of information. However, this model relied on the notion that each neuron is connected to every other neuron, whereas a neuron is actually connected to between 5000 and 10,000 others. Neuroscientists then proposed that the number of memories was proportional to the number of connections per neuron. Now Yasser Roudi and Peter Latham at University College London have found a problem with this model too. ..."
>>> Neuroscience, Neural Networks & Connectionist Systems, Cognitive Science September 17, 2007: Colorado tax site eases e-mail burden. By Trudy Walsh. Government Computer News (Vol. 26 No. 24). "It began so quietly, so reasonably. Ro Silva started working on the Web site for Colorado’s Department of Revenue in 1995. A year later, she began answering e-mail from taxpayers through the site. It was a lot, but it was manageable. Within three years, Silva was answering 13,000 e-mail questions each tax season through the site at TaxColorado.com. ... Silva knew the department needed to find a better way to handle the e-mail deluge. In the summer of 2000, Silva got an invitation to see a demonstration of RightNow, a software product from RightNow Technologies that automates e-mail replies to common questions."
>>> Customer Service, Applications September 17, 2007: Mechanical mole could seek out disaster survivors. By Kurt Kleiner. NewScientist.com news. "A digging robot inspired by the mole is being built by UK researchers, who hope it could one day 'swim' through rubble at disaster sites to help find survivors. Roboticists are already experimenting with robots that roll, walk or even slither to locate or help survivors. But Robin Scott and Robert Richardson at the University of Manchester, UK, think a robot that digs would be most useful in an emergency."
>>> Hazards & Disasters, Robots, Applications September 17, 2007: No ‘Drop and give me 20’ - Next IT brings recruit-friendly avatar to Army. By Doug Beizer. Washington Technology. "Dressed in fatigues and wearing a black beret, Sgt. Star’s stern look doesn’t reveal the real man. Unlike drill sergeants in the movies, Sgt. Star is patient and tries to answer every question. That’s because he is a computer-generated avatar powered by artificial intelligence on the Army’s recruiting Web site, GoArmy.com. ... Army officials worked with Next IT Corp., of Spokane, Wash., to develop Sgt. Star using the company’s ActiveAgent application, said Patrick Ream, Next IT’s vice president of marketing. ActiveAgent is an interactive, conversational device that enables online users to communicate with it using natural language. It is a proprietary application based on artificial intelligence. ... 'If you look at the statistics coming out of the Army, they say that it is over 92 percent accurate,' he said. 'That is pretty phenomenal when you consider that when someone asks a question, there are thousands of different ways that that single question can be asked.' ActiveAgent looks at phrasing, word usage, intent and other factors, and boils them down to a single concept. ... Before Sgt. Star, the average session time on GoArmy.com was four minutes. Now it is up to 16 minutes and trending toward 17 minutes. Those numbers are important to recruiters." September 17, 2007: Search startup ready to challenge Google. By Michael Liedtke. Associated Press / available from MiamiHerald.com. "After nearly two years of hushed development, Powerset is finally providing a peek at a 'natural-language' technology that is supposed to make it easier to communicate with search engines. Powerset's algorithms are programmed to understand search requests submitted in plain English, a change from the 'keyword' system used by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and the owners of the other leading engines. ... This isn't the first time a search engine has tried to understand simple English, but Powerset has drawn more attention because its natural-language technology is being licensed from the Palo Alto Research Center. Better known as PARC, the Xerox Corp. subsidiary is renowned for hatching breakthroughs - like the computer mouse and the graphical interface for personal computers - that were later commercialized by other companies. PARC's top natural-language specialist, Ronald Kaplan, is now Powerset's chief technology and scientific officer."
>>> Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Applications September 17, 2007: BI and Analytics - A Power Couple: The marriage of BI and text analytics promises to give deeper meaning to BI data. By Jennifer McAdams. Computerworld. "The marriage of business intelligence and text analytics is starting to have a profound impact on companies in several industries, including health care, insurance and finance, which are just waking up to the benefits of tying structured BI data to unstructured text. Text analytics tools use linguistics, rules-based natural-language processing, specialized algorithms and other methods to impose order on unstructured text scattered throughout the enterprise. More IT executives are using text analytics software to mine disparate document- management applications, e-mail and phone systems, or even blogs and Web sites. The goal is to breathe new life into static BI reports. By extracting facts, concepts and data relationships buried in text, text analytics software transforms this unstructured information into modeled data that can then be tied to BI databases. Hence, text analytics promises to enhance the context and meaning of BI data, which is often presented as canned reports scraped from data warehouses or major applications, such as ERP and customer relationship management (CRM) databases." September 17, 2007: Robots That Sense Before They Touch - Intel researchers are using electric-field sensors to build pre-touch technology into robots to help them size up objects and people they encounter. By Kate Greene. Technology Review. "Currently, robotic arms and hands routinely grab and hold objects on factory floors, where the uncertainty has been engineered away, [Josh] Smith says. By adding pre-touch to a robot, it can sense the shape and size of unfamiliar objects at close range and react accordingly. Smith hopes that by improving this close-range interaction, robots will be more useful in homes, able to bring an elderly person a glass of water, for example, or pick up objects on a floor before the Roomba vacuums. ... Much of Smith's EF [electric-field] sensing research now involves developing algorithms that can make sense of the data, as EF signals tend to be complex, especially when an object or robot is in motion. ... EF sensing isn't the only form of sensing that robots use. Often, a machine will use a video camera to detect objects at a long range. And robotic cars, such as those built for the Urban and Grand Challenges, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, use laser range finders that shine an infrared beam onto objects and use the reflected light to build maps of their environment."
>>> Robots, Vision, Applications September 16, 2007: A future of artificial intelligence. By Thomas H. Thompson, guest columnist. WCFcourier.com. "We are associated on a daily basis with artificial intelligence. ... But there are a group of futurists who believe that artificial intelligence will develop a shocking and, for most of us, an unimaginable potency. I will attempt to summarize their arguments. Gordon Moore.... Ray Kurzweil.... Is all this science fiction or science fact? It's neither. Arthur Clarke, the author whose work was adapted for the film '2001: A Space Odyssey,' was no scientist. And Hal, that nasty super-computer, was fictional. But Kurzweil and his colleagues are serious scholars and their predictions deserve serious attention. Even if this technological imperative does not arrive on time and proves not to be as potent as its adherents imagine, it is evident that high technology will impact the future of humans alive today in profound ways."
>>> Ethical & Social Implications, The Future, Science Fiction, Robots, Applications; also see these related articles September 15, 2007: Big Brother is watching us all. By Humphrey Hawksley. BBC News.
>>> Law Enforcement, Military, Autonomous Vehicles, Biometrics (@ Image Understanding), Machine Translation, Ethical & Social Implications, Applications September 14, 2007: Using Math to Track Terrorists [radio broadcast]. NPR's Science Friday with guest host Joe Palca and guests Hsinchun Chen, director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and Bernard Brooks, professor of mathematics at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York. "Are there new weapons in the war on terror? Here's a suggestion. If you want to find a terrorist cell, consider asking a mathematician. Researchers in math, computer science, and criminology met this week to talk about ways in which mathematical techniques can be brought to bear on the problem of counterterrorism. In this segment, guests join Joe Palca for a look at how mathematicians and computer scientists can help track terrorist activity, find connections between seemingly unrelated pieces of data, and help hunt for a needle in a haystack." September 14, 2007: Threat detector. The Engineer Online. "Cranfield University researchers have been chosen as part of a team for the MOD’s first 'Grand Challenge' -- a national competition to design an autonomous robot that can identify, monitor and report military threats in urban areas. ... The team has just 12 months to carry out an ambitious task to produce their system, which will be comprised of two unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV)." September 13, 2007: The death of expertise. Review of "Super Crunchers" by Ian Ayres. The Economist. "Every time a world-class chess player loses to a computer, humans die a little. In this book Ian Ayres, a professor of law and management at Yale University, explains how in many less high-profile endeavours, human intuition and flair are more easily beaten. The sheer quantity of data and the computer power now available make it possible for automated processes to surpass human experts in fields as diverse as rating wines, writing film dialogue and choosing titles for books. ... Mr Ayres predicts that automated decision-making will soon see other professional jobs going the same way as that of the bank-loan officer...." September 13, 2007: Business by numbers. The Economist. "Algorithms sound scary, of interest only to dome-headed mathematicians. In fact they have become the instruction manuals for a host of routine consumer transactions. ... Algorithms can take many forms. At its core, an algorithm is a step-by-step method for doing a job. These can be prosaic -- a recipe is an algorithm for preparing a meal -- or they can be anything but: the decision-tree posters that hang on hospital walls and which help doctors work out what is wrong with a patient from his symptoms are called medical algorithms. ... [C]omputers have made algorithms far more valuable to companies. 'A computer program is a written encoding of an algorithm,' explains Andrew Herbert, who runs Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Britain. The speed and processing power of computers mean that algorithms can execute tasks with blinding speed using vast amounts of data. ... UPS uses algorithms to help deliver the millions of packages that pass through its transportation network every day in the most efficient way possible. ... Solving this 'travelling-salesman problem' means a lot to UPS. ... UPS reckons that VOLCANO has saved the company tens of millions of dollars since its introduction in 2000. Logistics firms are far from the only ones working on 'optimisation' algorithms. Telecoms operators use algorithms to establish the quickest connections for phone calls through their networks or to retrieve web pages speedily from the internet. ... Just as optimisation algorithms come in handy when people are swamped by vast numbers of permutations, so statistical algorithms help firms to grapple with complex datasets. Dunnhumby, a data-analysis firm, uses algorithms to crunch data on customer behaviour for a number of clients."
>>> Traveling Salesperson Problem, Data Mining & Discovery, Fraud Detection & Prevention, Business, Marketing, Telecommunications, Networks, Machine Learning, Applications September 13, 2007: Sebastian Thrun - Probabilistic Robotics and the DARPA Challenges. Audio podcast from Talking Robots. "In this episode we interview Sebastian Thrun who is the director of the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) in California. He tells us how he won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge along with the Stanford Racing Team and Stanley the robot car. 7 hours is all Stanley needed to find its way through 215km of California's Mohave Desert thanks to its secret ingredient: probabilistic robotics. Sebastian Thrun is widely acknowledged as a pioneer in the area of probabilistic robotics, which is concerned with perception and control in the face of uncertainty. It's all about computing the odds based on what you know and what you learn along the way." September 13, 2007: Online worlds to be AI incubators. By Mark Ward. BBC News. "Online worlds such as Second Life will soon become training grounds for artificial intelligences. Researchers at US firm Novamente have created software that learns by controlling avatars in virtual worlds. Initially the AIs will be embodied in pets that will get smarter by interacting with the avatars controlled by their human owners. ... 'The virtual world provides the body,' said Dr Ben Goertzel, founder and head of Novamente. He said the company had developed a 'Cognition Engine' that acted as the thinking part of the artificial intelligences it wanted to create. ... 'Robots have a lot of disadvantages, we have not solved all the problems of getting them to move around and see the world,' he said. 'It's a lot more practical to control virtual robots in simulated worlds than real robots.'"
>>> Machine Learning, Agents, Video Games, Robots, Applications September 13, 2007: Google puts $30 million behind lunar robot. By Stefanie Olsen. CNET News.com. "Google on Thursday announced it has sponsored the Google Lunar X Prize, a robotic race to the moon with a purse of $30 million. The contest invites private teams from around the world to build a robotic rover capable of roaming the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and then sending video, images and data back to Earth, among other feats. The idea behind the challenge is to urge private industry to develop new robotic and virtual-presence technology to reduce the cost of space exploration. ... The contest comes at a time when NASA is working on new spacecraft and technology to take man back to the moon within the next 12 years. At a recent artificial-intelligence conference, Peter Norvig, the former head of computation at NASA's Ames facility who is now Google's director of research, suggested that the space agency is taking the more expensive approach in trying to send astronauts to the moon and that it should focus on robotics."
>>> Robots, Space Exploration, Autonomous Vehicles, Grand Challenges, Applications September 13, 2007: IBM Research Demonstrates Innovative 'Speech to Sign Language' Translation System. IBM press release via Market Wire. "IBM (NYSE: IBM) has developed an ingenious system called SiSi (Say It Sign It) that automatically converts the spoken word into British Sign Language (BSL) which is then signed by an animated digital character or avatar. SiSi brings together a number of computer technologies. A speech recognition module converts the spoken word into text, which SiSi then interprets into gestures, that are used to animate an avatar which signs in BSL. ... This project is an example of IBM's collaboration with non-commercial organisations on worthy social and business projects. The signing avatars and the award-winning technology for animating sign language from a special gesture notation were developed by the University of East Anglia and the database of signs was developed by RNID (Royal National Institute for Deaf People). ... SiSi has been developed in the UK by a research team at IBM Hursley, as part of IBM's premier global student intern programme, Extreme Blue. In the European part of the programme, 80 of the most talented students from across Europe were selected to work on 20 projects and given whatever equipment, support and assistance they required. Working for an intense 12 week period alongside IBM technical and industry leaders, they focused on innovative technology projects, such as SiSi, all of which had real business value. ... For a video demonstration of the SiSi technology, visit the following url: http://youtube.com/watch?v=RarMKnjqzZU" September 13, 2007: Robot maker with a penchant for realism builds artificial boy. Associated Press / available from CNN.com. "At 17 inches tall and 6 pounds, the artificial Zeno is the culmination of five years of work by [David] Hanson and a small group of engineers, designers and programmers at his company, Hanson Robotics. They believe there's an emerging business in the design and sale of lifelike robotic companions, or social robots. ... Unlike clearly artificial robotic toys, Hanson says he envisions Zeno as an interactive learning companion, a synthetic pal who can engage in conversation and convey human emotion through a face made of a skin-like, patented material Hanson calls frubber. 'It's a representation of robotics as a character animation medium, one that is intelligent,' Hanson beams. 'It sees you and recognizes your face. It learns your name and can build a relationship with you.' ... Hanson has been recognized for his work, garnering accolades from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 2005 and a 'best design' award at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Triennial last year."
>>> Robots, Vision, Speech, Natural Language Processing, Science Fiction, Robotic Toys, Events (@ Resources for Students) September 12, 2007: The Edifice of Pinkerism. Book review by Seth Lerer. The New York Sun. "Not since the 18th century has there been so much argument about the mind. In that era, philosophers such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant argued about the relationships between thought and speech, and between sensation and knowledge, in terms that we still mull over today. Are human beings born with innate ideas, or are we just blank slates, filled up by experience as we grow up? Is language something that uniquely makes us human? Do words really represent things in the world or are they markers of ideas inside our brains? Is there a language of thought itself, or do different languages embrace and shape the world in different ways? Such questions have been asked afresh in recent years, not only by philosophers and linguists, but also by cognitive scientists and evolutionary biologists seeking the origins of human sensibility. Among the most prolific and most public of the current generation of inquirers into human understanding is the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. In a veritable bookshelf of recently published volumes, he has argued for what might be called a soft innatism: a theory of mind that holds that certain concepts or ways of thinking are hardwired into our brains at birth. ... This argument, what we might call Pinkerism, sets up a fundamental relationship between language and mind. Its implications have been seen across a gamut of human experiences: from understanding social relationships to developing artificial intelligence. Indeed, some adherents might claim that Mr. Pinker's work gives us not just a template for humanity, but a program for computer architecture. In short, this is a blueprint for the brain, whether it be organic or virtual." September 12, 2007: Software turns photos from bad to good - Program searches Flickr to make imperfect photos into great pictures. By Bryn Nelson. MSNBC.com. "With some help from the Flickr photo-sharing Web site, two researchers at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University have shown how a new picture-patching program can transform flawed vacation shots into 'Wow!'-worthy masterpieces. ... Unlike existing programs that use bits of the same photo to patch holes, the new program relies on an algorithm that first searches through heaps of digital photos -- 2.3 million downloaded from Flickr in this case -- for ones that match the gist of the scene. ... The program then looks within that subset for good patches by blending candidates with the target photo and finding boundaries that would be least noticeable to viewers. ... [Professor Alexei] Efros said getting a computer to produce a composite scene that is not only seamless but also contextually valid reflects a main challenge of artificial intelligence research."
>>> Vision, Image Understanding, Applications September 12, 2007: Japan eyes robots to support ageing population. By Masayuki Kitano. Reuters UK. "It looks like a washing machine on wheels, but the bulky contraption vacuuming the hallways of a Tokyo high-rise is a robot. Japanese researchers hope that robots like this one will be the answer to a pressing question hanging over the country -- how to cope with an ageing population and a declining labour force. ... Such robots capable of operating in homes, offices and other venues outside factories are still rare even in Japan, a powerhouse in the field of robotics and home to roughly 40 percent of the world's industrial robots. ... [Isao] Shimoyama is among a group of University of Tokyo researchers who are working with counterparts from seven leading Japanese firms -- including Toyota Motor Corp, Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd -- to develop robotic and information technology that will lead to a new generation of robots in the next 15 years. ... Such machines do not need to be humanoid, although robots that resemble people have some advantages, said Shimoyama, who researched humanoid droids earlier in his career. ... While safety is an obvious concern, robots also need to be sensitive to people's needs." September 11, 2007: NCAR targets bumpy flights. By Chris Walsh. Rocky Mountain News. "The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder is looking to minimize such disruptions and delays and save airlines money through a new system that provides updated snapshots of turbulence across the country. The goal is to pinpoint areas of turbulence in clouds, allowing pilots to efficiently reroute flights to avoid rough patches. The system, currently being tested by United Airlines, uses the nation's network of Nexrad ground-based radars to gather information on precipitation and cloud density. It also measures wind gusts within clouds. A software program then filters out information that can distort the data - such as flying insects and birds - and creates a three-dimensional map of turbulence for a given area. 'What we're doing that's really new is applying artificial intelligence to get rid of data that contaminate the measurements,' said John Williams, a scientist with NCAR. 'The idea is to mimic how a human expert would look at the information. Our hope is that it will help reduce unnecessary delays and diversions and guarantee passenger safety and comfort.'"
>>> Transportation, Earth & Atmospheric Science, Expert Systems, Applications September 10, 2007: AI power-cut predictor. Posted by Justin to the New Scientist Invention blog. [Roger Anderson, from the Center for Computational Learning Systems at Columbia University in New York, US.] and colleagues say the data could be put to better use by analysing it using an artificial intelligence technique called 'machine learning'. Anderson and his team have developed a system that uses this approach to predict where failures are most likely to occur, and to recommend preventative action." September 10, 2007: Scientists Use the "Dark Web" to Snag Extremists and Terrorists Online. Press release from the National Science Foundation (NSF). "Terrorists and extremists have set up shop on the Internet, using it to recruit new members, spread propaganda and plan attacks across the world. The size and scope of these dark corners of the Web are vast and disturbing. But in a non-descript building in Tucson, a team of computational scientists are using the cutting-edge technology and novel new approaches to track their moves online, providing an invaluable tool in the global war on terror. Funded by the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies, Hsinchun Chen and his Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona have created the Dark Web project, which aims to systematically collect and analyze all terrorist-generated content on the Web. ... Using advanced techniques such as Web spidering, link analysis, content analysis, authorship analysis, sentiment analysis and multimedia analysis, Chen and his team can find, catalogue and analyze extremist activities online. According to Chen, scenarios involving vast amounts of information and data points are ideal challenges for computational scientists, who use the power of advanced computers and applications to find patterns and connections where humans can not. One of the tools developed by Dark Web is a technique called Writeprint, which automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating 'anonymous' content online. ... Dark Web also uses complex tracking software called Web spiders to search discussion threads and other content to find the corners of the Internet where terrorist activities are taking place."
>>> Law Enforcement, Web-Searching Agents, Natural Language Processing, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Agents, Applications: also see the article below September 10, 2007: COPLINK data-sharing program aids crime-solving. By Katie McDevitt. EastValleyTribune.com. "Two years ago, a Phoenix homicide detective asked for help on a case. Someone had been killed, but police had few clues. 'Look for two brothers and a mother whose first name is all we know,' the homicide detective said. So planning and research Detective Ben Vermillion keyed the information into a special program that pools and searches police department databases. 'Within 15 minutes, I had the shooter for his homicide,' Vermillion said. 'They were listed in some departmental reports and ... (the program) links them together.' Vermillion says he couldn’t have done that so quickly without a tool called COPLINK. ... In Phoenix, detectives used COPLINK to catch the a.m. Rapist and in Washington, D.C., officials used the program in the hunt for the D.C. Sniper. ... The prototype of COPLINK was created by Hsinchun Chen, director of the University of Arizona’s Artificial Intelligence Lab and turned into a commercial product by Knowledge Computing Corp. of Tucson, which produces the software, said Bob Griffin, chief executive officer of the company." September 10, 2007: Artificial Intelligence under the spotlight at BA Festival. Posted by Joyce Lewis. University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science News. "Although Hollywood often likes to present us with a world full of self-aware and destructive robots in the style of I Robot, this is not the way the science of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is headed, says British Computer Society President and ECS Professor of Artificial Intelligence Nigel Shadbolt. Speaking at the BA Festival of Science in York tomorrow (Tuesday 11 September), Professor Shadbolt will outline how developments in the speed and power of computers, the emergence of the World Wide Web, and our deeper understanding of human and animal intelligence is producing a different but no less exciting future. 'AI has had a huge influence on the past and present of computer science -- it will be a large part of the future but not in the way you might think,' says Professor Shadbolt, an AI expert in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. ... He believes that we are now seeing the emergence of Assistive Intelligence which can be characterized as a different kind of AI. 'These results can be seen everywhere,' he says. 'Rather than being conscious brains in a box, as Hollywood would have it, they are in fact small pieces of adaptive and flexible software that help drive our cars, diagnose disease and provide opponents in computer games.'"
>>> Applications, Law Enforcement, Agents, Social Science, Ethical & Social Implications, Events (@ Resources for Students) September 10, 2007: Expanding Storage: Everything Must Stay! The cost of disk storage is so low that the easiest thing for companies to do is to just hold on to all their data. And that opens up radical new possibilities. By Gary Anthes. Computerworld. "'Since storage is almost free, you can kind of keep everything now,' says Kunle Olukotun, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University. And 'everything' is just what you need for an increasingly popular class of techniques called statistical machine learning, he says. As the name suggests, the idea is for a system to develop its own rules of logic by discovering patterns and relationships in data rather than having a programmer hard-code the rules in advance. 'There’s this notion of using large amounts of data to do things that previously were done by clever algorithms -- for example, language translation,' says Olukotun. Traditionally, automated language translation has been accomplished via bilingual dictionaries and databases of linguistic rules. Google Inc. uses that method for translating among English, Spanish, German and French. But it’s using machine learning in experimental translation engines for Arabic, Chinese and Russian. ... 'Where there are large stores of data, whether the company realizes it or not, there is a gold mine; there is free money,' says Kevin Scott, vice president of engineering at AdMob Inc. in San Mateo, Calif. 'Machine learning is going to be in wider and wider use as people begin to understand that it can fundamentally change the value proposition of your business.'" September 10, 2007: Robot Chic. By Brian Caulfield. Forbes.com. "Friday's soiree marked the beginning of this year's 'Singularity Summit,' a gathering of 900 computer scientists, techno-utopians and counterculture types, all intent on examining the proposition that machines -- or rather, artificial intelligences -- may one day destroy humanity. Or perhaps, save it. ... The best-case scenario: Radical new technologies make life 'smoothly but gradually better,' as new ideas are adopted a step at a time, or 'iteratively,' rather than all at once, setting up a catastrophic bust, a prospect [Peter] Thiel would like to avoid. Meanwhile, there's money to be made. The holy grail: so-called 'artificial general intelligence,' or the ability to pick up learning in one area and apply it in others. Those kinds of machines would not just beat humans at chess but, in the process, figure out how to play a better game of Go. For now, humans do that kind of learning easily, but machines do not. As machines creep towards that goal, entrepreneurs such as Barney Pell want to harness them to tackle more useful work. ... How will the new breed of super-intelligences behave? Even super-smart people concede it's hard to tell. The machines will have needs, including a need for space, time, matter and free energy, explained Steve Omohundro, president of Self Aware Systems. That could be a problem. (Will they ignore us? Eat us?) But they could be designed to have a superior moral code, to be 'machines of loving grace' as futurist Paul Saffo put it, borrowing from poet Richard Brautigan. ... One of Thiel's concerns, stemming from his interest in French philosopher Rene Girard, is that robots, like their human makers, could have a built-in need to compete."
>>> Ethical & Social Implications, The Future, Robots, Applications, Events (@ Resources for Students); also see these related articles: 1 & 2 September 10, 2007: U.S. Marines Define Simulation Objectives Through 2017. By Jack Weible. DefenseNews.com. "The U.S. Marine Corps’ new Training Modeling and Simulation Master Plan lays out objectives for the Corps through 2017, with specific goals for 2009, 2014 and beyond. ... If the Corps accomplishes its myriad objectives through 2017, the master plan sees the 'end state' of Marine Corps ground training featuring these M&S attributes: ... 'Simulation systems will utilize tailorable artificial intelligence and intelligent agents that exercise levels of decision-making through application of tactics, techniques and procedures; rules of engagement; and the Law of Armed Conflict. Systems will also have a robust capability to model and simulate kinetic and nonkinetic military operations, to include nation-building, force protection, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief that incorporate political, economic, cultural and informational lines of operation.'" September 9, 2007: What will Southampton be like in five decades time? By Sarah Jones. Daily Echo. "Life as we know it is going to change in a big way, and Southampton University Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Nigel Shadbolt, thinks he can offer a glimpse of the shape of things to come. Imagine a world where you don't need a driving licence because your car will navigate itself around the centre of Southampton. Or where your robot undertakes house-cleaning tasks in the background while you chat to your colleagues on a large screen from your front room. In his role as President of the British Computer Society (BCS), Professor Shadbolt looked into his crystal ball with fellow leading academics to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the organisation. The experts got together to predict what life will be like in the city in 2056 - the year of the BCS's centenary. ... 'When the BCS was set up in 1957, computer science was in its infancy and had limited appeal to a select group of people. 'Now we have the dual task of communicating with our members but also informing the public at large about the issues that surround IT use,' said Prof Shadbolt." September 8, 2007: Techies ponder computers smarter than us. By Marcus Wohlsen. The Associated Press / available from Yahoo! "'The Singularity Summit: AI and the Future of Humanity' brought together hundreds of Silicon Valley techies and scientists to imagine a future of self-programming computers and brain implants that would allow humans to think at speeds nearing today's microprocessors. Artificial intelligence researchers at the summit warned that now is the time to develop ethical guidelines for ensuring these advances help rather than harm. ... 'Technology is heading here. It will predictably get to the point of making artificial intelligence,' [Eliezer] Yudkowsky said. 'The mere fact that you cannot predict exactly when it will happen down to the day is no excuse for closing your eyes and refusing to think about it.'" September 8, 2007: Computers learn to fly kites for renewable energy. NewScientist.com news. "Now [Allister] Furey and his colleague Inman Harvey have developed a neural network that has learned to steer a kite like a seasoned professional. ... The algorithms that kept the kites aloft longer were 'bred' together and after 200 generations they had not only evolved the ability to fly the kites, but...." September 8, 2007: Face to faith - Intelligent machines may one day challenge humans the way Babel challenged God. Comment by Simon Rocker. The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited. "One of the Bible's boldest propositions is that man is made in the 'image of God'. ... I was reminded all of this not so long ago when I watched a programme on television about artificial intelligence. Advances in neuroscience and computing are leading some to predict that, before the century is out, we will evolve machines with mental capabilities vastly superior to our own. The Australian scientist Hugo de Garis calls them 'artilects', artificial intellects, 'almost godlike, massively intelligent machines' It's hard to know where sci-fi fantasy ends and realistic hypothesis begins. ... ." September 7, 2007: King me - Schaeffer solves checkers, then challenges poker champs. Concrete achievements in artificial intelligence research. By Richard Cairney. Folio - The U of A faculty and staff newspaper. "[Jonathan] Schaeffer was involved in two high-profile research projects which broke within a week of each other in July. The first was the culmination of an 18-year research project in which Schaeffer solved the game of checkers. After sifting through 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 (500 billion billion) checkers positions, Schaeffer and his colleagues built a checkers-playing computer program that cannot be beaten. Completed in late April, the Chinook program may be played to a draw but will never be defeated. Results of the research appeared in the July edition of the academic journal Science. ... 'I'm also really proud of the artificial intelligence program that we've built at the University of Alberta,' [Schaeffer] added. 'We've built up the premier games group in the world, definitely second-to-none. And we've built up a strong, international, truly world-class reputation, and I'm very proud of that.' Schaeffer's second big project was to pit his research team's computer poker program Polaris, against two of the world's top poker players, Phil 'the unabomber' Laak and Ali Eslami. The match up took place over two days at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's annual conference in Vancouver, B.C. Schaeffer, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence, said the event was a natural evolution of the 1994 match between IBM's Deep Blue chess program and then-world chess champion Gary Kasparov. ... Schaeffer cites a lengthy list of applications in which artificial intelligence helps in our day to day lives, from scheduling airline flights so that goods and pilots are moved around in the most efficient ways possible, to programs that monitor your our habits in order to detect credit card fraud." September 7, 2007: Spanish researchers develop award-winning ancient manuscript recognition system. CORDIS News. "The scientists, from the Autonomous University of Barcelona's Computer Vision Centre, have designed the efficient Blurred Shape Model (BSM) to be able to work with ancient, damaged or difficult to read manuscripts, handwritten scores and architectural drawings. According to the scientists, their research represents an effective human machine interface able to automatically reproduce documents while they are being written or drawn. The researchers won the first prize in the third edition of the Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (IbPRIA) for their model." September 7, 2007: Coming to grips with intelligent machines - Technologists will gather to discuss the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence, and how to deal with computers that are smarter than humans. By Stefanie Olsen. CNET News.com. "Scary scenarios aside, a group of accomplished technologists and investors will gather this weekend at the two-day Singularity Summit to discuss the benefits and risks of advancing artificial intelligence, technical issues surrounding accelerating technology in many fields, and what to do in the event that machines one day outthink humans. 'There are different definitions of singularity. But the most useful way to think about it is that we're in a period of accelerating technology change that our species has never faced before,' said Christine Peterson, vice president of Foresight Nanotech Institute, a public interest group focused on advanced technology. 'So the question is how do we address the issue of change so rapid that it becomes difficult to project how it will affect us?' ... [Peter] Thiel has said in a statement: 'It has been predicted for a long time that AI is right around the corner, and it's taking longer than many people thought it would, with many disappointments along the way. However, it's clear that there's a massive set of issues happening, and people who don't think there's something important going on are living in a fantasy, and need to wake up.'"
>>> Ethical & Social Implications, The Future, Applications, Events (@ Resources for Students) September 6, 2007: Intelligent software and web storage could create ‘memory companions.’ By Justin Richards. ComputerWeekly. "The challenge of using electronic tools to supplement human memory has been addressed by a BCS Thought Leadership debate on assistive memory technologies. ... The debate heard that assistive memory technologies will need to include intelligent software that can act as a 'companion' to the user, understanding their physical situation and offering up appropriate information from the user's data repositories. The challenge of building such companions is a variant of the challenge confronting artificial intelligence. How much adaptivity and intelligence do such companion systems need before they become useful? ... Another big issue is privacy. Storing large amounts of personal information online is a huge security risk. And, ethically, who has the right to view your 'memory' once it has been recorded?" September 6, 2007: Students construct practical helpers. By Brennan David. Hammond Daily Star Online. "While advances in science continue to change society, gathering tennis balls on the Southeastern Louisiana University campus courts just got a little easier. Twelve high school students from across the North Shore built robots during their weeklong summer camp, Practical Robots, on campus. The students had accepted a challenge at the start of the week to build a robot that could collect tennis balls along edges, supplied with only a kit of limited supplies. ... If one week of robotics camp wasn't enough, students at Hammond High School will be able to take a robotics class beginning this school year. The new class is the only one of its kind in the parish, an extension of the basic robotic skills students learned during camp." September 6, 2007: Robot-Assisted Rescuers Seek Answers in Wake of Utah Mine Collapse - Crews sent a hastily improvised robot crawler into the Crandall Canyon mine, but it was no match for seismic activity, groundwater and other challenges. By Larry Greenemeier. Scientific American News. "As Senate hearings get underway this week to probe the accident at the Crandall Canyon mine in Utah that claimed the lives of six miners and three rescuers, attempts are also being made to evaluate the performance of robotic equipment sent in to assist the failed rescue mission.... Workers, handicapped by time constraints and the continued shifting of the mountain's mass, were able to get only one mobile robot through a borehole and onto the mine's floor, where it traveled as far as seven feet from the point of entry, says Robin Murphy, director of the Institute for Safety Security Rescue Technology at the University of South Florida. The U.S. Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration, charged with overseeing all rescue and recovery operations in the aftermath of the August 6 cave-in, asked the Institute's Center for Robot Assisted Search and Rescue for help shortly after the accident. ... Murphy hopes that lessons learned at Crandall Canyon will be incorporated into any standards that the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, develops for future rescue robotics. Since every disaster is different, the best robotics designs give rescuers the most flexibility, she says, adding, 'You never get it all right, even if you think you know what's down there.'" September 6, 2007: Science fiction becoming science fact - Venu Govindaraju spearheads cutting-edge research at CUBS, CEDAR. By Kevin Fryling. UB Reporter. "In the future, UB faculty member Venu Govindaraju says, cameras will recognize passengers' faces at the airport, ... These are but a few applications of the cutting-edge research that Govindaraju spearheads as founding director of UB's Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors (CUBS) and associate director of the Center for Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR). ... About half of Govindaraju's research relates to the field of biometrics, which he describes as 'the science of identifying people.' His introduction to the subject, he notes, came from his thesis work on facial recognition -- a subject once considered more relevant to artificial intelligence than biometrics -- and since then he has been at the forefront of biometrics' transformation into a red-hot field in computer science due to rising interest in both personal and national security. ... Nowadays, Govindaraju says, CUBS looks at different aspects of biometrics. 'We look at facial recognition, voice recognition, fingerprint recognition' -- as well as iris recognition, gait recognition, odor detection and hand geometry -- 'and how to combine these different methods.' ... Govindaraju also points to his efforts to create algorithms that comprehend handwritten text in Arabic, English, Hindi and Sanskrit-he is fluent in the latter three languages -- as a further source of collaboration with UB colleagues. September 6, 2007: The trouble with computers - They may be powerful, but computers could still be easier to use. Might new forms of interface help? The Economist Technology Quarterly. "[M]aking computers simpler to use will require more than novel input devices. Smarter software is needed, too. For example, much effort is going into the development of 'context aware' systems that hide unnecessary clutter and present options that are most likely to be relevant, depending on what the user is doing. The trick, says Patrick Brezillon of University Paris VI, is to get computers to 'size up the temperament of users' and then give them what they want. This can be done by analysing the frequency of keystrokes, the number of typos, the length of work breaks, internet-search terms and background noise, among other things. ... The problem with all of this is that people may not want computers to make assumptions about their needs and preferences -- not least because those assumptions may be wrong. But proponents of context-aware computing say it is merely the next logical step from existing systems such as spam filters. ... Henry Holtzman, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says vehicles provide the most promising environment for context-aware interfaces. ... Many futurists and computer experts believe that the logical conclusion of all of these new input devices, sensors and smarter software to anticipate users' needs, will be for computing to blend into the background. In this 'ubiquitous computing' model, computers will no longer be things people use explicitly...."
>>> Interfaces, Systems, Smart Rooms & Houses, Applications September 5, 2007: Sheffield´s eccentric professor stars in new TV series. University of Sheffield news release. "A professor at the University of Sheffield is hoping to change the image of science and make it cool in a new TV series aimed at teenagers. Professor Noel Sharkey, from the University´s Department of Computer Science and famed for his role as chief judge on Robot Wars, will co-star in the new science series set in his native country, Northern Ireland. Bright Sparks, which starts on BBC Two Northern Ireland (Sky channel 992) on Sunday 9 September 2007, is a science, technology and engineering show where, each week, two sixth form teams compete for a place in the finals. The teams bring their own components and have half-an-hour to complete a challenge that the 'Professor' sets them. These range from making an automated dish washer to building a robot butler. In the seven-part series, Professor Sharkey takes on the character role as the eccentric 'Professor' based in the laboratory of Castle Bright Sparks. A world-famous authority in robotics and artificial intelligence, Professor Sharkey will discuss a wide range of science topics, from Quantum Tunnelling to the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence -- even describing a robot therapy for autism. He hopes that the comic tricks and the style will draw in the excluded communities that he wants to reach. He said: 'Student recruitment in science, engineering and technology has been falling year upon year for the last 10 years and a lot of this has to do with science´s image. ...'"
>>> Resources for Students, Resources for Educators September 5, 2007: UNL wins $3 million grant to expand robot-based curriculum. The Associated Press / available from the Sioux City Journal. "The five-year funding from the National Science Foundation will help a University of Nebraska-Lincoln team take its Omaha program to teachers nationwide. ...Last year UNL engineers at the Kiewit Institute and education faculty members from the University of Nebraska at Omaha launched the program in Omaha middle schools. They trained math and science teachers in fifth through eighth grades to build the small robots and worked with them to develop lessons plans. Called TekBots, the wheeled robots were invented at Oregon State University. 'We're taking advantage of 100 teachers who have attended our TekBot workshops to assist us in designing a curriculum that can be distributed on a national basis,' [Bing] Chen said." September 5, 2007: "Just Because We Can." Opinion by Jeremiah Magan. Fullerton College Weekly Hornet. "With technology and medical science moving in the direction it is, we have come to a point where someone, anyone, really, needs to ask the question 'Should we do this, just because we can?' Genetic manipulation and artificial intelligence would be at the top of the list of things we need to consider carefully before we do them." September 5, 2007: AI - It's OK Again! Is AI on the rise again? By Michael Swaine. Dr. Dobbs. "Over the last half century, AI has had its ups and down. But for now, it's on the rise again. ... On the occasion of the 22nd annual AAAI conference this past July, we thought it appropriate to reflect on AI's 51-year history and check in with some experts about the state of AI in 2007. ... The connectionist approach is basically synthesis, or bottom-up, the symbolist approach is analysis, top-down. Both are doubtless necessary. '[S]ymbols-only AI is not enough, [but] subsymbolic perceptual processes are not enough either,' Winston says. ... In terms of real engineering and applied science accomplishments, '[t]he most active and productive strand of AI research today is the application of machine learning techniques to a wide variety of problems,' [Terry] Winograd says, 'from web search to finance to understanding the molecular basis of living systems.' ... Rodney Brooks sees great progress being made in practical systems involving language, vision, search, learning, and navigation, systems that are becoming part of our daily lives. Nils Nilsson took time out from writing a book on the history of AI to share some thoughts on its state today, citing practical results of AI work in adjacent fields like genomics, control engineering, data analysis, medicine and surgery, computer games, and animation. ... AI advances are not trumpeted as artificial intelligence so much these days, but are often seen as advances in some other field. 'AI has become more important as it has become less conspicuous,' Winston says. 'These days, it is hard to find a big system that does not work, in part, because of ideas developed or matured in the AI world.'" September 5, 2007: Zeno Could Be Next Robot Boy Wonder. By Lance Ulanoff. PC Magazine. "David Hanson -- the genius inventor, father of 'Frubber' life-like robotic skin, and the man who brought us a robotic Albert Einstein head -- today introduced a prototype of what could become the next must-have personal robot. You can visit the Zeno web site www.zenosworld.com (editor's note: the site's URL isn't live yet, but should be available in time for Wired's NextFest) to see the first videos of Hanson's latest creation: a 17-inch-tall, 4.5-pound humanoid robot boy named Zeno. The prototype, which will have a formal unveiling at Wired Nextfest in California next week, is described as an intelligent 'conversational robot' and will ultimately be part of Hanson's 'Robokind' line of personal, interactive bots. ... Hanson has high hopes and big ambitions for Zeno. 'We're combining the best artificial intelligence with this theater for fiction so that the way that it's crafted the artistry makes the robot seem like it's more intelligent. It turns robotics into an art medium.'" September 5, 2007: Former Boxer Will Go to Space in April. By Cho Jin-seo. The Korea Times. "Ko San beat out Yi So-yeon in the race to become the first Korean in space next year. ... He graduated from Seoul National University and was a researcher at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in the artificial intelligence and computer vision field, before being picked for the astronaut program."
>>> Space Exploration, Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students) September 4, 2007: Narasimhan, doyen of Indian computer science, dead. By Dr. S. Ramani. The Hindu. "Dr. Rangaswamy Narasimhan, the designer of India’s first general purpose digital computer, died in Bangalore on Monday. ... His work on syntactic pattern recognition, carried out when he was spending a few years at Illinois, was seminal. He worked for over a decade on the modelling of natural language behaviour and on the evolution of language behaviour. ... Another long-term interest of Dr. Narasimhan has been in IT policy issues vis-à-vis developing countries."
>>> Tributes September 4, 2007: Robina exhibits a fine set of wheels. The Engineer Online. "Visitors to the Toyota Kaikan Exhibition Hall in Japan will be greeted not by a smiling, grey-suited guide, but by Robina -- a walking, talking robot on wheels that can even sign autographs should you want it. An acronym for Robot As Intelligent Assistant, Robina is a Toyota-developed autonomous tour guide robot capable of escorting visitors around the car-manufacturing exhibition. ... Robina is a part of a family known as Partner Robots that Toyota is planning to develop. Partners will be designed to live with and assist people in domestic duties, nursing and medical care, manufacturing and short-distance personal transport." September 4, 2007: A high-tech helping hand for soldiers - A Lockheed Martin project could give them the tools to more easily provide reports directly from the battlefield. By Henry J. Holcomb. The Philadelphia Inquirer (philly.com). "For several years, Celeste L. Corrado has been thinking about, as she put it, 'soldiers coming back to base, tired and hungry after a long day on patrol,' to face the unpleasant but important task of filling out reports. Her team of scientists and engineers at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories in Cherry Hill has come up with a way to change that scenario. Last week, they turned over a working prototype of their electronic solution to the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, the architects of future warfare. ... Their working prototype is called WIRE, for Wearable Intelligent Reporting Environment. It takes mature speech-recognition technology - software that turns spoken words into documents - to the battlefield. Here's how it works. ... Instead of working with hours-old information, commanders will have fresh data for sophisticated computers and artificial intelligence - another technology being refined in the Cherry Hill labs." September 4, 2007: Claremont man's BluffBot beats colleges' efforts. By Will Bigham. San Bernardino County Sun (sbsun.com). "A poker-playing robot co-developed by lifelong Claremont resident Jay Cordes overwhelmed its opponents and took first prize at a recent robot poker competition in Vancouver, British Columbia. The robot, called BluffBot 2.0, went undefeated in matches against its nine opponents, which included bots developed by teams at top research institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University, University of Minnesota and University of Alberta. The robot was created by software developer Teppo Salonen and developed by both Salonen and Cordes in their spare time. ... BluffBot is not yet advanced enough to consistently beat experienced poker players, said Cordes, a software developer at Prestige Software, but the developers hope to some day create a program that will. ... After being blindsided by BluffBot at this year's competition, which was sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, [Michael] Bowling and other researchers hope to learn from their defeat and develop a superior bot. 'A lot of the universities are wondering, "What did they do, and how can we learn from it?"' Bowling said. 'And we don't know the answers to that.' A free version of BluffBot 1.0 can be downloaded at www.bluffbot.com." September 3, 2007: Robot boats in ocean race trials. BBC News. "The small, robotic boats are taking part in sea trials with scientists from universities in Canada, Austria, France, as well as Aberystwyth. ... Called Microtransat 2008, the challenge was conceived by academics in Aberystwyth and Toulouse, France, and it is thought to be the world's first transatlantic race for such boats. ... Dr Mark Neal from the department of computer science at Aberystwyth came up with the idea for the race. He said: 'The aim of the race is to stimulate the development of autonomous sailing boats. This may seem esoteric and trivial, but there are large numbers of applications that would benefit greatly from robot sailing boats.' Dr Neal said next year's boats must be 'fully autonomous', self-sufficient in terms of energy and no longer than four metres in length." September 3, 2007: Career Watch - Back-to-School Edition. Compiled by Jamie Eckle. Computerworld. "Q&A: Chris Stephenson, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association, discusses hooking students on IT careers early. [Q] You say high school is the best time to grab students’ interest in IT careers. How should the K-12 curriculum change to do that? [A] Students and their parents have many misconceptions about the field, and it is essential that we let them know that there are job opportunities and that these jobs are important and connect to things that students care about in the real world. ... A comprehensive computing curriculum includes a variety of age-appropriate courses that teach the underlying scientific concepts of computing while helping students understand that there are many kinds of computing -- artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, robotics -- all of which can help solve real problems. ... [Q] What else is the CSTA doing to increase interest in the field? [A] CSTA provides a solid curriculum framework and resources to support its implementation. ..." September 3, 2007: The Thinkers - He's taking unknown out of teaching algebra. By Mark Roth. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Last month, Los Angeles School Superintendent Roy Romer said that high school algebra 'triggers dropouts more than any single subject. I think it is a cumulative failure of our ability to teach math adequately in the public school system.' ... It is that kind of dismal performance that Steve Ritter is dedicated to overcoming. Dr. Ritter is the chief scientist at Carnegie Learning Inc., a Downtown company that markets one of the leading computer-based math teaching programs in the United States. The company's a spinoff from Carnegie Mellon University. ... The Cognitive Tutor's software lets students learn at their own pace, Dr. Ritter said, and can automatically change the mix of problems a student sees to help him work on the skills he is struggling with the most. And, in an unexpected benefit, the company has found that during the computer-learning sessions, teachers interact with 91 percent of their students -- far more than they would during a regular classroom session. ... [S]tudies have shown that the Cognitive Tutor program not only outperforms traditional algebra teaching, but also is especially effective in raising the scores of special education students."
>>> Education, Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Applications, Resources for Educators September 2007: The Hard Science of Making Videogames - Behind every realistic explosion, racecar and Jedi are programmers solving some of the toughest problems in physics, psychology and math. By Jacob Ward, Doug Cantor and Bjorn Carey. Popular Science.
>>> Video Games, Agents, Applications September 2007: Gun-Toting Ground Robots See Action in Iraqi Streets. By Stew Magnuson. National Defense Magazine. "The U.S. Army quietly entered a new era earlier this summer when it sent the first armed ground robots into action in Iraq. So far, the robot army’s entry into the war has been a trickle rather than an invasion. Only three of the special weapons observation remote reconnaissance direct action system (SWORDS) have been deployed so far. ... Whether SWORDS and other armed robots become effective weapons remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the U.S. military is moving forward with dozens of other robotics programs -- from the now ubiquitous surveillance drones to ground robots that perform security and logistics duties. SWORDS could be the first step leading to a larger 'robot army.' ... [John] Saitta said until the day artificial intelligence can accurately identify targets, the military can’t take the human out of the equation. 'There are times in a combat environment -- particularly urban areas where not everyone is a bad guy -- there should be someone making the decision to pull that trigger.'" September 2007 [issue date]: Where Will the Next 50 Years in Space Take Us? Popular Mechanics. "Expert Opinions For our current cover story, which commemorates the first 50 years of spaceflight by looking ahead to the next 50, PM asked leading thinkers from Buzz Aldrin (a robot fan) to Arthur C. Clarke (he wants a sub-orbital joyride) where they thought the half-century ahead could lead. Check out their predictions...."
>>> Space Exploration, Robots, The Future September 2007: Swimming to Europa - A robot designed to explore Mexican sinkholes is pointing the way to Jupiter's watery moon. By Jean Kumagai. IEEE Spectrum Online. "Their goal is to field-test one of the most intelligent and agile underwater robots ever crafted, a possible predecessor of a machine that might someday swim the vast, ice-crusted ocean of Jupiter’s mysterious moon Europa. Called DEPTHX, for DEep Phreatic THermal eXplorer, the 1.3-metric-ton machine can maneuver freely, draw detailed, three-dimensional maps of its watery surroundings, and collect solid and liquid biological samples as it senses changing conditions in its environment. Most important, it does all that without any guidance from human operators. Such autonomy would be essential if the robot ever does swim on Europa -- which may be warm enough, thanks to geothermal activity, to have given rise to some sort of life. Human control of a robot sub that far away isn’t an option: ... DEPTHX is the brainchild of Bill Stone. ... Of the countless engineers who as children read the fictional adventures of Tom Swift and dreamed of becoming the fearless explorer-inventor, Stone is arguably the one who actually did it. ... Autonomy also means the robot has to decide on the fly where and whether to gather biological samples. The machine starts by characterizing its surroundings. ... The robot then 'trains' itself by taking a baseline water sample. The liquid is inspected under an onboard microscope, and a subroutine counts any moving objects (likely micro-organisms), tracks their paths, and measures their speed. Another subroutine tells the robot’s video camera to take a baseline reading of the cenote’s slime-covered walls, measuring their color, intensity or saturation, and texture. The result of each subroutine is a statistical classifier...." September / October 2007: Higher Games - On the 10th anniversary of Deep Blue's triumph over Garry Kasparov in chess, a prominent philosopher of mind asks, What did the match mean? By Daniel C. Dennett. Technology Review Magazine. "[F]or a decade, human beings have had to live with the fact that one of our species' most celebrated intellectual summits--the title of world chess champion--has to be shared with a machine, Deep Blue, which beat Garry Kasparov in a highly publicized match in 1997. How could this be? What lessons could be gleaned from this shocking upset? Did we learn that machines could actually think as well as the smartest of us, or had chess been exposed as not such a deep game after all? ... Silicon machines can now play chess better than any protein machines can. Big deal. This calm and reasonable reaction, however, is hard for most people to sustain. They don't like the idea that their brains are protein machines. When Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, many commentators were tempted to insist that its brute-force search methods were entirely unlike the exploratory processes that Kasparov used when he conjured up his chess moves. But that is simply not so. Kasparov's brain is made of organic materials and has an architecture notably unlike that of Deep Blue, but it is still, so far as we know, a massively parallel search engine that has an outstanding array of heuristic pruning techniques that keep it from wasting time on unlikely branches." September / October 2007: Talk to the Phone - Speech-recognition software from Vlingo could make the mobile Web easier to use. By David Talbot. Technology Review Magazine. "Mobile phones can do lots of things: search the Web, download music, send e-mail. But the vast majority of the 233 million Americans who own them never use them for more than calls and short text messages. One reason is that other features often require users to enter sentences or long search terms, a tedious task. Speech-recognition interfaces could make such features easier to use. Vlingo, a startup in Cambridge, MA, is coming to market with a simple user interface that provides speech recognition across mobile-phone applications. ... 'Small platforms need speech, and search is a powerful way to find information,' says James Glass, head of the spoken-language systems group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ... Mazin Gilbert, executive director of natural-language processing at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, NJ, says others, including AT&T, are also developing speech interfaces for mobile phones...." |
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