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October 29, 2007: The Semantic Web Goes Mainstream - Radar Networks is unveiling a new tool that provides a smarter way to find information and increase productivity. By Kate Greene. Technology Review. "Radar Networks, based in San Francisco, is releasing a free Web-based tool, called Twine, that it hopes will change the way people organize their information. Twine is a website where people can dump information that's important to them, from strings of e-mails to YouTube videos. Or, if a user prefers, Twine can automatically collect all the Web pages she visited, e-mails she sent and received, and so on. Once Twine has some information, it starts to analyze it and automatically sort it into categories that include the people involved, concepts discussed, and places, organizations, and companies. This way, when a user is searching for something, she can have quick access to related information about it. ... The idea underlying Twine's function and technologies is known as the Semantic Web, a concept, long discussed in research circles, that can be described as a sort of smart network of information in which data is tagged, sorted, and searchable. ... In addition to employing the Semantic Web standards, Twine is also using extremely advanced machine learning and natural-language processing algorithms that give it capabilities beyond anything that relies on manual tagging. ... Twine will open up to invited users starting today." October 25, 2007: Rating Facial Expressions - New software could help mental-health professionals assess patients and ensure that salespeople project a positive attitude. By Anna Davison. Technology Review. "Software that recognizes and rates smiles was demonstrated recently at an exhibition in Tokyo, where attendees competed to outsmile one another. The smile-checking technology is the latest addition to Omron Corporation's OKAO Vision software suite, which detects faces in images and can determine the person's gender and approximate age, or verify his or her identity from a database of faces. The smile software is Omron's first foray into facial-expression detection and analysis, a field that could revolutionize how humans interact with machines, and with each other. ... 'Clearly, it's an interesting thing,' says Joseph Atick of L-1 Identity Solutions, based in Stamford, CT, which supplies identification technology, primarily for security applications. 'If you can read people better, you can serve them better.' ... Sophisticated facial-expression analysis could help mental-health professionals evaluate their patients and monitor their progress." October 19, 2007: What I Meant to Say Was Semantic Web. John Markoff's post to Bits, The New York Times' Technology Blog. "One great way to start a fight in a crowded Silicon Valley cocktail party (and there are a lot of them these days) is to mention Web 3.0. There is no easy consensus about how to define what is meant by Web 3.0, but it is generally seen as a reference to the semantic Web. While it is not that much more precise a phrase, the semantic Web refers to technology to make using the Internet better by understanding the meaning of what people are doing, not just the way pages link to each other. ... So companies are bubbling up all over the place that claim to be building part of the semantic Web. Some are building voice recognition systems to use while browsing the Internet on a cell phone. Some want to challenge Google head on with a better search engine. ... In a demonstration I saw earlier this week Twine appeared to do a good job of what artificial intelligence researchers refer to as 'entity extraction,' that is categorizing things like people and places automatically."
>>> Interfaces, Representation, Web-Searching Agents, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Knowledge Management, Applications October 19, 2007: Newsmaker - Gates still finding his voice. By Ina Fried. CNET News.com. "Bill Gates has been saying for years that one day soon we will use handwriting, voice and touch to control our computers. He's still saying that. In an interview with CNET News.com, Gates talks about some of the ways that speech recognition has already made inroads and discusses some of the places it will eventually go. ... Q: When did you really first see the possibilities of voice? Was there a real early demo you saw years ago that sort of--you saw it and could really see the possibilities? Gates: Well, certainly the idea that computers should deal with voice has been around a long time. It's kind of a natural way to communicate. In the 1970s, DARPA was funding people, including people at Harvard, to do speech recognition. And so people kind of thought, hey, this should be easy to do. The dream of computers understanding voice goes way back. And the dream that the data network and the voice network would be one in the same goes way back as well. ... [Q:] What are some of the areas where you see voice going that people aren't necessarily thinking about today? Gates: To me, voice is in the broad realm of natural interface. ..."
>>> Speech, Natural Language Processing, Interfaces, Applications, Interviews October 10, 2007: Virtual human has a roving eye. By Belle Dumé. NewScientist.com news. "Virtual characters that meet your gaze just like a human have been developed by speech and cognition scientists in France. New software lets them to look at scenes and people the way humans do. The goal is to make virtual humans and perhaps humanoid robots easier to relate to. A video [in the sidebar] shows one of their characters playing a game that involves looking at cards and a researcher. ... Gérard Bailly and colleagues in the GIPSA Lab at the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, France, have developed software that mimics human gaze patterns. ... 'This research is important because it focuses on adding a social aspect [to characters],' comments Christopher Peters of the University of Paris VIII, who has researched similar problems. ... Giving virtual characters more subtle behaviours like eye movements is important if they are to be realistic, says Peters. 'Along the way we are also making discoveries about how the behaviour of real humans is perceived,' he adds." 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: 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 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 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: 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 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." August 31, 2007: CSI could benefit from computer sidekick. By Tom Simonite. NewScientist.com news. "A computerised sidekick for crime scene investigators that takes care of the tedious task of correctly documenting evidence is being tested in the UK. Initial results from the trials indicate that the device enables investigators to put together better reports in half the time. ... Computer scientist Chris Baber and colleagues from the University of Birmingham, UK, built their system to make the process quicker, and to facilitate richer reports that might improve detection. ... The computer is worn by the CSI, who uses a headset to give voice commands to the system -- to trigger the attached digital camera, for example, or to record a verbal description of evidence. ... The Birmingham team are now developing an improved version of the device that is better at sharing data between different teams of investigators called to the same scene." August 8, 2007: Cognitive Science and Technology Program becomes Sandia initiative. Press release from Sandia. "Imagine a world where a machine creates a 'virtual you' by modeling how you think and your expertise on a subject. Or one where your car’s computer appreciates your driving skills and compensates for your limitations. That’s the world Sandia National Laboratories has entered full throttle through its Cognitive Science and Technology Program (CS&T). A revolution is at hand, says Chris Forsythe, member of the Labs’ cognition research team. It’s not one of just better guns and weapons for national security. Instead, 'it’s a revolution of the mind -- of how people think and how machines can help people work better.' ... The term 'cognitive systems' has been used worldwide to identify a variety of programs, initiatives, and technologies. However, so many varied uses have led to ambiguity of meaning. Sandia has established its own definition of cognitive systems: 'Cognitive systems consist of technologies that utilize as an essential component one or more computational models of human cognitive processes or the knowledge of specific experts, users, or other individuals.'"
>>> Cognitive Science, Agents, Interfaces, Systems, Education, Military, Law Enforcement, Transportation, Ethical & Social Implications, Applications July 31, 2007: AUC professor wins state achievement award. By Killian Clarke. Daily News Egypt. "Professor of computer science at the American University in Cairo Sherif Aly was recently awarded Egypt’s State Achievement Award for Science and Technology. ... It was given to Professor Aly for his work in mobile and pervasive computing. ... The fundamental premise behind pervasive computer devices is that they react to their surroundings and environment. Aly calls this ability 'context awareness.' Computers of this description do not require a human being to input information into them but rather take in data from their surroundings and process this data independently. ... 'This is going to be the trend for the future,' he continued. 'It’s going to change the way we live our lives.' He said that in the future these devices could become so advanced as to be considered a form of artificial intelligence. 'As the devices take in information and data they must be able to process it and make intelligent decisions. So yes, a part of pervasive computing does involve artificial intelligence,' he said." July 26, 2007: An Emotional Cat Robot. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. Technology Review. "Scientists in the Netherlands are endowing a robotic cat with a set of logical rules for emotions. They believe that by introducing emotional variables to the decision-making process, they should be able to create more-natural human and computer interactions. 'We don't really believe that computers can have emotions, but we see that emotions have a certain function in human practical reasoning,' says Mehdi Dastani, an artificial-intelligence researcher at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. By bestowing intelligent agents with similar emotions, researchers hope that robots can then emulate this humanlike reasoning, he says. ... In addition to improving interactions, this emotional logic should also help intelligent agents carrying out noninteractive tasks.... 'It's a heuristic that can help make rational decision-making processes more realistic and much more computable,' says Dastani. ... Other robots have been designed to mimic human expressions. But Dastani's focus on how emotions might affect decision makes it different from many of the other projects on emotional, or affective, computing, such as MIT's Kismet robot, developed by Cynthia Breazeal. With Kismet, like other affective robots, the focus is on how to get the robot to express emotions and elicit them from people." July 18, 2007: 12 IT skills that employers can't say no to. By Mary Brandel. Computerworld. "Suffice it to say, the market for IT talent is hot, but only if you have the right skills. If you want to be part of the wave, take a look at what eight experts -- including recruiters, curriculum developers, computer science professors and other industry observers -- say are the hottest skills of the near future. 1) Machine learning ... 4) Human-computer interface ... 9) Business intelligence systems ..." June 4, 2007: UIC working on making virtual chats a reality. By Jon Van. Chicago Tribune. "In five or six years, you probably will be able to chat face-to-face with your favorite actor, musician or politician whenever you feel like it. The technology for such virtual, three-dimensional visits mostly exists or is being developed by video game companies. Now, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago are at work to apply this to virtual conversations. Working with colleagues at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, the computer scientists have a three-year, half-million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation to do the job. ... 'The goal is to combine artificial intelligence with the latest advanced computer graphics and video game technology to enable us to create historical archives of people beyond what can be achieved using traditional text, audio and video footage,' Leigh said. The technology developed for this project also should be valuable in helping computers better understand what the people using them want. ... 'It could be a whole new way of interacting with computers,' said Leigh. 'We're moving toward interfaces that learn about us.'" May 28, 2007 [issue date]: Remember This? A project to record everything we do in life. By Alec Wilkinson. The New Yorker. "October arrived in 1998, and Gordon Bell went paperless, after hearing from a professor at Carnegie Mellon who was engaged in a project to scan a million books and post them online. The professor, a friend of Bell’s named Raj Reddy, had called to ask if he could scan and post Bell’s books, including one on how to start a high-tech business. Bell said, 'Of course.' ... The first epiphany of three in the making of Bell’s archive occurred when Bell realized that if Reddy was scanning books into a computer, Bell could scan all the papers in his file cabinets and in the boxes crowding his garage, in California, and then throw them away. ... Then he had his second epiphany. He recalled a piece, published in The Atlantic in July, 1945, by Vannevar Bush, called 'As We May Think.' ... Bell’s principal collaborator, for the past five years, has been Jim Gemmell, a senior researcher whose office is at the Microsoft facility in Redmond, Washington. The project is called MyLifeBits, and its purpose is to find uses for the material that Bell is storing and that he and Gemmell believe everyone will eventually store on their computers. (By 2010, a typical life, they feel sure, will fit on a cell phone.) ... One of the models Bell is interested in is proposed by the work of a principal researcher at Microsoft named Eric Horvitz. Horvitz is engaged in what he calls 'complementary computing, where the computer understands human limitations and fills in the gaps,' he told me in his office, in Redmond. Horvitz, who is the president-elect of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence -- 'triple-A. I.,' he says -- would like to see computers provide 'a fabric that would extend us in areas where we’re weak. If you look at twentieth-century cognitive psychology, what it showed was that people have vast abilities coupled with characterizable limitations and bottlenecks. ... To create a computation that understands those grooves and nooks and crannies, and using it in places where a computer can do well in a complementary way to extend people, is what I’m trying to do.' Horvitz is working on a project called Lifebrowser, which uses time lines as a means of locating images and information.... 'It comes to understand your mind, how you organize your memories, by what you choose. It learns to become like you, to help you be a better you. Computers are going to become tools we work with and trust, rather than merely appliances.' At night, he said, he sometimes hears his computer working. 'I hear the fan, and I think, My system is consolidating new memories,' he said. 'It’s like a human being dreaming.'" May 21, 2007: 'Laura' makes digital health coaching personal. By Catherine Elton. The Boston Globe (boston.com). "As a computer scientist, one wouldn't expect Timothy Bickmore to concern himself with making sure that schizophrenics take their medications or the elderly get enough exercise. But that's where Laura comes in. Laura, a computer-generated character, raises and knits her eyebrows, nods her head ever so gently, and almost seems to sigh as she commiserates with a patient over how challenging it is to remember to take pills or get out for a walk. A virtual health coach, she asks questions of patients and responds empathetically and encouragingly to their answers. Bickmore's creation of Laura puts this Northeastern University professor at the forefront of growing attempts to build technology to help people stick to health regimens and increase the flow of information between health care providers and patients." May 21, 2007: 25 years of 'eureka' moments. Produced by Frank Pompa and Denny Gainer. USAToday.com. " ... 22: TiVo The gadget is now a verb, with 4.4 million subscribers TiVo-ing their favorite TV shows. ..." April 25, 2007: IBM, Intel, And Microsoft Tout Technology Future - Though each company is working on something different, together they paint a picture of life with faster and more ubiquitous computing technology. By Thomas Claburn. InformationWeek. "At the Gartner IT/xpo, Jerry Battista, director of technology management for Intel; Eric Horvitz, principal researcher for Microsoft Research; and Paul Bloom, IBM's research executive for communications industries, fielded questions on stage from two Gartner VPs about future technology. ... Microsoft's Eric Horvitz predicted "the rise of the intention machine," which describes computers enlisted to predict user intentions and deliver useful information. Think of it as just-in-time manufacturing for your brain. Microsoft, Horvitz said, was spending about 25% of its research budget on artificial intelligence-related projects. ... Horvitz presented a prototype application called LifeBrowser, which monitors user activity over time on multiple computers and devices. 'The idea is to build a really rich timeline ... and be able to navigate that memory backbone and be able to search against it,' he said. ... 'Solving the privacy challenge is going to be critical for these technologies,' Horvitz said." April 14, 2007 [issue date]: Spawn of Microsoft's Clippy wants to help. New Scientist (Issue 2599: page 25). "People are often too proud to press a 'help' button and so they just give up. To keep them going, researchers at Microsoft are developing a "frustration detector" that works out when people are having problems and begins a dialogue with them, offering to go back over important points (International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, DOI: 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2007.02.003)." March 22, 2007: If you're happy, the robot knows it. By Celeste Biever. New Scientist (Issue 2596: pages 30-31). "Meet RoCo, the world's first expressive computer (.mov video). Inhabiting a back room in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, the robotic computer has a monitor for a head and a simple LCD screen for a face. It expresses itself using its double-jointed neck, which is equipped with actuators that shift the monitor up and down, tilt it forward and back and swivel it from side to side, rather like Pixar's animated lamp. An attached camera can detect when its user moves, allowing RoCo to adjust its posture accordingly. Unveiled at a human-robot interaction conference in Washington DC on 11 March, RoCo's creators hope that by responding to a user's changes in posture, people might be more likely to build up a 'rapport' with the computer that will make sitting at a desk all day a little more enjoyable. ... The team is among a growing number of researchers who are investigating how far a robot's physical presence can influence people."
>>> Robots, Cognitive Science, Interfaces, Applications, Music, Ethical & Social Implications March 21, 2007: Pentagon Preps Mind Fields. By Noah Shachtman. Wired News. "The U.S. military is working on computers than can scan your mind and adapt to what you're thinking. Since 2000, Darpa, the Pentagon's blue-sky research arm, has spearheaded a far-flung, nearly $70 million effort to build prototype cockpits, missile control stations and infantry trainers that can sense what's occupying their operators' attention, and adjust how they present information, accordingly. Similar technologies are being employed to help intelligence analysts find targets easier by tapping their unconscious reactions. It's all part of a broader Darpa effort to radically boost the performance of American troops. 'Computers today, you have to learn how they work,' says Navy Commander Dylan Schmorrow, who served as Darpa's first program manager for this Augmented Cognition project. He now works for the Office of Naval Research. 'We want the computer to learn you, adapt to you.'" March 17, 2007: Vehicle warning system trialled. By Mark Ward. BBC News. "Vehicles may soon be swapping information about road conditions to warn drivers about jams and dangers. A German research project on show at hi-tech trade fair Cebit envisions a peer-to-peer network for vehicles on a road passing data back and forth. Cars or bikes experiencing problems would pass data that would ripple down the chain of vehicles behind them. Information would be conveyed to drivers via a dashboard screen or through a mobile phone headset. Dr Anselm Blocher - a researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence who is co-ordinating the project - said the ad hoc communication system could mean that drivers found out about dangers or jams ahead much more quickly than they do now. ... The system was smart enough to recognise how busy a driver was and would adjust warnings to take account of the 'cognitive load' a driver was under, he said. ... The SmartWeb project is being co-ordinated by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence but has 16 other partners including BMW, Siemens, Daimler Chrysler, Deutsche Telekom and the European Media Lab." March 15, 2007: A quiet death for bold project to map the mind - Military scraps research at Rutgers and other schools to engineer a brain. By Kevin Coughlin. The Star-Ledger (nj.com). "The Star-Ledger has learned the Pentagon quietly has killed a project to 'reverse-engineer' the human brain, a goal one participant compared to inventing the atomic bomb or landing men on the moon. ... The program was called BICA, short for Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures. It was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the agency that spawned the Internet. About $9.5 million was earmarked to chart a game plan, the brain project's first phase. But the next stage -- a five-year, $50 million to $100 million push to design and test brainlike software -- never got launched. ... The brain effort linked experts from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, robotics and artificial intelligence. They wanted to replicate how different parts of the brain interact -- sometimes pulling together, sometimes not -- to solve problems. ... One ongoing project is PAL, short for Personalized Assistant that Learns. Computers are adapting to users' quirks, to customize information in busy command centers. ... 'We really hoped this would be an important project and would lead to some real breakthroughs,' said University of Michigan computer scientist John Laird, who had wanted to explore how emotions shape decision-making." March 3, 2007: CMU technology counts on 'sidekick' to win competition. By Corilyn Shropshire. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "AbbyMe.com wants to be the obsession of the work-hard, play-hard crowd that wishes it had time for poker night, but have found that even instant messaging takes too much time from a busy day. The site, based on artificial intelligence technology harnessed from Carnegie Mellon University, is an online community where a roster of very good-looking avatars act as personal assistants or 'sidekicks' who take over the hard work of managing overstuffed social and professional calendars." March 2007: A Digital Life - New systems may allow people to record everything they see and hear--and even things they cannot sense--and to store all these data in a personal digital archive. By Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell. Scientific American. "[O]ur team at Microsoft Research has begun a quest to digitally chronicle every aspect of a person's life, starting with one of our own lives (Bell's). For the past six years, we have attempted to record all of Bell's communications with other people and machines, as well as the images he sees, the sounds he hears and the Web sites he visits--storing everything in a personal digital archive that is both searchable and secure. ... Our research project, called MyLifeBits, has provided some of the tools needed to compile a lifelong digital archive. ... Computers can analyze digital memories to help with time management, pointing out when you are not spending enough time on your highest priorities. ... The vision of machine-extended memory was first expounded at the end of World War II by Vannevar Bush, then director of the U.S. government office that controlled wartime research. Bush proposed a device called the Memex (short for 'memory extender').... Guarding the privacy of digital memories will be critical. ... An even bigger challenge will be devising software that can enable computers to perform useful tasks by tapping into this gigantic store of collected knowledge. The ultimate goal is a machine that can act like a personal assistant, anticipating its user's needs. ... Consequently, our research group is very interested in applying artificial intelligence (AI) to digital memories. Although many experts are skeptical about AI efforts, we believe that such software may yield practical results if it can draw on the tremendous stores of data in personal archives." February 27, 2007: European research goes for gold. By Jonathan Amos. BBC News. "The European Research Council (ERC) has been given a budget of 7.5bn euros (£5bn) to 2013, and will focus solely on fundamental, or 'blue skies', study. ... [German Chancellor, Dr Angela Merkel] said the Council would become 'a champion's league for research', giving scientists the freedom to be creative and innovative. ... [UK's Sheffield University] has put in place an administrative structure it believes can support young researchers who want to set up their own investigation teams - people like Dr Kalina Bontcheva, who works in the university's computer science department. Dr Bontcheva's expertise is in natural language processing: she develops advanced search tools that enable documents and databases to be sifted for the most relevant information. She is putting together an ERC application that would allow her to investigate more user-friendly ways of interfacing a computer. This would involve talking to 'virtual characters'." February 13, 2007: Moving pictures. The Engineer Online. "A project combining 3D imagery with hand-tracking and speech recognition technology could change the way in which the next generation of computers presents information -- as well as how we interact with it. One of the key aims of the EU-funded Interact project is to develop a system that provides interaction with 3D images without the need for any additional hardware such as gloves or virtual reality goggles. ... The second form of interaction uses speech recognition to enable the user to turn, flip or resize 3D objects with simple verbal commands. The user will also be able to call up contextual information about the product from the system using speech." January 23, 2007: Sentimental Journey. New computer software applications -- in the labs and in the market -- are using emotion as data input and responding to it. 'How does that make you feel?' asked the computer. By Esther Schindler. CIO. "Many science-fiction stories begin with a premise of computers gaining sentience, self-awareness, or the ability to feel -- or fake -- emotion. In these utopian (or sometimes, dystopian) stories, humanity demonstrates its underlying assumption that 'being human' means 'feeling emotion.' Yet, for business purposes, it isn't necessary for a computer to emote -- as long as it can respond to our emotions. We want companies (and the systems they build, whether silicon- or carbon-powered) to acknowledge and respect our feelings, particularly when those feelings are strongly felt. Enterprises are starting to see good dollars-and-cents reasons to take action on emotion. ... The intent isn't to create an empathic artificial intelligence that experiences emotion. In these applications, the software analyzes human behavior and helps humans to make better business decisions. ... NICE software detects emotion from both the content and audio behavior. ... Corpora's Sentiment doesn't deal with spoken words; it examines print. The software employs natural language processing to determine the 'document level author sentiment' of a text document. ...The research community HUMAINE (Human-Machine-Interaction Network on Emotion) started in 2004, intending to lay the foundation for software development to register, model and/or influence human emotional and emotion-related states and processes, which they call 'emotion-oriented systems.' Among its goals is working toward a standard markup language. In 2006, the W3C created an Emotion Incubator Group for discussing standardization. ... One example of emotion-based computing is eMoto, a joint project between the Swedish Institute of Computer Science and Stockholm University/KTH. eMoto is a mobile messaging service for sending and receiving 'affective messages'...." January 22, 2007: Q & A: Ronald J. Brachman, Head, Worldwide Research Operations Yahoo! Research: ‘Yahoo research uses artificial intelligence everywhere.’ Interviewed by BV Mahalakshmi. The Financial Express. "[Q] Why is there is so much talk on artificial intelligence (AI) globally? How does this system of learning help in developing intelligent systems? [A] Artificial intelligence is about understanding intelligent behaviour in machines and converting them to natural languages. We want to produce PCs that can perform natural language conversations. Moreover, it helps in planning ahead for the human activities in various applications. ... AI is a form of science having a potential for long-term aspirations like making computers more intelligent. ... [Q] How did the study of AI originate? What is its history ? ... [Q] How do you propose to develop your India R&D centre? What will be its focus area? ... AI is being used in every part of Yahoo’s research especially since we collect over 12 terabytes of data everyday. ... [Q] What is the AI’s future and how does your company propose to capitalise on this ? ..." January 19, 2007: Microsoft Predicts The Future With Vista's SuperFetch - SuperFetch, a feature within Vista, predicts which applications are used when, then pre-loads them so that they're instantly available. By Gregg Keizer. InformationWeek. "Microsoft Research contributed to the SuperFetch effort, a feature within Vista that predicts which applications are used when, then pre-loads them so that they're instantly available. 'As part of a long term set of projects, we want to teach the computer to learn from users to make the machine more proactive,' says Eric Horvitz, a principal researcher with Microsoft's R&D as well as the president-elect of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. 'We want to use the system's idle time to make things punchier.' Horvitz and his colleagues developed the core algorithms that make up the predictive part of SuperFetch, the technology that plays Nostradamus for the operating system. ... Long-range, says Horvitz, he'd like to extend SuperFetch-like predicting to actions within individual applications" January 5, 2007: Emotion-aware teaching software tracks student attention. By Tom Simonite. NewScientist.com news. "Tutoring software that knows when students' are losing interest in a lesson and can adjust to keep them on track is being tested by researchers in China and the UK. The system keeps track of students' attention by measuring physical signs of emotion. ... 'We've built a prototype that can moderate the flow of educational information as a result,' Callaghan told New Scientist. For example, it can slow down or change topic if a student seems disinterested, or appears to be falling behind. The software might also try a different mode of delivery, switching from text to video, for example. 'It can also learn that certain types of material are more stressful to the student than others,' he adds. This could help the system determine which material is most difficult for a student and requires further focus." January 3, 2007: IBM's Software Predictions - New software visualization tools will help make sense out of the increasing abundance and complexity of information. By Kate Greene. Technology Review. "Technology Review interviewed Kristof Kloeckner, the vice president of strategy and technology for IBM's software group, to find out how software can be used to help people and businesses cope with the increasing amount of information, and how software will evolve as that information grows more complex. ... TR: How is this complexity being tackled? KK: At IBM, we call it 'Information on Demand.' It's a combination of software that analyzes data, detects patterns, and allows patterns to be visualized, basically showing you the information in the data in a way that you can see the important trends and the important results. ..." December 18, 2006: What if your laptop knew how you felt? Researchers train computers to 'read' emotions, which could help with teaching, security, people with autism -- and cranky users. By Cristian Lupsa. The Christian Science Monitor. "Faces reveal emotions, and researchers in fields as disparate as psychology, computer science, and engineering are joining forces under the umbrella of 'affective computing' to teach machines to read expressions. If they succeed, your computer may one day 'read' your mood and play along. Machines equipped with emotional skills could also be used in teaching, robotics, gaming, sales, security, law enforcement, and psychological diagnosis." December 13, 2006: Instant messaging goes intelligent advertisement. By Liz Tay. PC World. "'Is it possible to train machines to understand the way humans write and speak naturally, and to be able to then visualise people's ideas?' asks Sydney start-up Morf Interactive Communications when designing its artificial intelligence technology. The company answers its own question with the MOJI Intelligent Messenger (MOJI IM), a three dimensional instant messaging application with intelligent virtual pets to enhance users' communication online. Built from artificial intelligence technology initially developed by researchers at the University of New South Wales, MOJI IM uses an interactive heuristic engine to extract meaning, emotional nuances and syntax from what users type or say." November 27, 2006: Smart Spaces - If These Walls Could Talk. They may do that and more if the promise of smart spaces is ever realized. The technology is available, but cost and other factors remain obstacles. By Gary Anthes. Computerworld. "It’s fun to think about these scenarios, but we rarely encounter them in the real world. Who besides Bill Gates lives in an environment in which IT senses and responds to the behavior of the people in it? Your PC knows you haven’t touched it for 30 minutes, so it turns on the screensaver. That’s about it. Yet the technology to make our environments smarter and more responsive to our needs largely exists. Sensors of all types, actuators, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, large touch-screen displays, digital cameras, personal software agents, machine-learning algorithms, voice- and image-recognition software, even robots these aren’t just the dreams of science fiction writers anymore. The impediments to the widespread deployment of smart spaces lie elsewhere -- in the form of problems related to cost, interoperability, accuracy and reliability. And there are the social and cultural challenges. ... Still, progress is being made. For example, researchers at Stanford University have invented a collaboration space called the iRoom, or 'interactive room.'" November 21, 2006: Child's Play - Robot is taught hide-and-seek. By Seth Borenstein. The Associated Press / available from STLtoday.com / also available from USAToday.com (Scientists try to make robots more human; November 22, 2006) and post-gazette.com (Scientists work on helping robots 'understand people as people'; November 22, 2006) and MSNBC.com (Robots with humanity + slide show: November 24, 2006). "George the robot is playing hide-and-seek with scientist Alan Schultz [director of the Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence]. George whirrs and hides behind a post until he's found. Then a bit later, he hunts for and finds Schultz hiding. If that sounds childish, consider that Schultz is working his way up to teaching the robot to play Capture the Flag. What's so impressive about robots playing children's games? For a robot to actually find a place to hide, and then hunt for its human playmate is a new level of human interaction. The machine must take cues from people and behave accordingly. This is the beginning of a real robot revolution: giving robots some humanity. 'Robots in the human environment, to me that's the final frontier,' said Cynthia Breazeal, robotic life group director at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ... The scientists trying to engineer robots to work with humans are learning more than they expected. They have a new appreciation for our own unique abilities. Said Deb Roy, director of MIT's Cognitive Machines Group: 'It's not until you try to build a machine that does the same task (that people do) ... that you realize how incredibly hard it is.'" November 16, 2006: 'To Microsoft, we're a source of smart people' - The head of the Redmond giant's research lab at Cambridge is justifiably proud of the successes clocked up by the team he took over in 2003. Andrew Herbert is interviewed by Jack Schofield. The Guardian & Guardian Unlimited. "TG: Have there been any notable successes in getting UK research into products?AH: Yes, there's the network mapper in Vista - that was done in Cambridge. There's an algorithm called BM25F, which is about improving web search ranking by incorporating user behaviour. Search is obviously a big part of Vista, of Office, of Windows Live, so there we essentially just transferred a pile of Greek letters three inches long. We're also proud of Xbox Live's online ranking system, which helps you find opponents ... TG: Gamertags! AH: Absolutely! That was all done by our machine learning group, in the Cambridge lab. It is probably the world's largest online machine learning application. TG: In what way is it machine learning?AH: Because what we're trying to observe, as people play each other, is what is a good predictor of skill. We're seeing who plays who, what the outcomes are, and what is a statistical model of skill across the number of games, and so on. We're trying to build models of human behaviour, essentially." November 4, 2006: Military thinks big with help from OSU brains. By Patrick Lair. Albany Democrat-Herald. "Projects to construct an entire computer system on a single chip or create artificial intelligence put graduate students through school and earn them jobs in the high-tech market, garner patents and royalties for organizations like OSU, and often lead to successful start-up companies. But the funding behind much of it happens to come from the U.S. Department of Defense. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is a group of federal offices in Arlington, Va., which doles out close to $2 billion each year to fund high-risk but potentially high-yield experiments around the country. The idea is to keep the U.S. military one step ahead of its enemies, but the groundbreaking research affects people at all levels of civilian life as well. In a computer lab in OSU’s Kelley Engineering Center, Professor Tom Dietterich opens a laptop to display the results of a three-year project to create artificial intelligence, or a machine that learns. ... Dietterich, director of Intelligent Systems Research in OSU’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, is in charge of three projects supporting 16 graduate students and several undergraduates. 'In the artificial intelligence field, people always ask how smart a computer can be,' he said. 'We don’t know. We think we can make them smarter.'" October 30, 2006: Software learns cartography by watching mapmakers. By Robert Adler. NewScientist.com news. "Map-making software that learns from the choices made by a human cartographer could dramatically speed up the creation of useful maps. Creating maps from aerial photographs is time-consuming and must currently be done by hand. It can take several years to update vital maps, like those produced by the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Walter Bischof and Jun Zhou, computer scientists at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and Terry Caelli from the Australian National University in Canberra, created the new computer program, which learns to detect and track new features such as roads on standard aerial photographs." October 26, 2006: 'Big Brother' call-router may stop interruptions. By Tom Simonite. NewScientist.com news. "An intelligent switchboard that monitors workers' activity and only lets calls through when they are free to talk is being developed in Germany. The researchers behind the system say it could prevent the frustrations of inappropriately-timed calls and missed connections. The 'Connector' system is being developed at Karlsruhe University in west Germany. A prototype setup tracks a person's busyness by analysing video footage captured by cameras positioned in each corner of their office and by monitoring their computer use." October 20, 2006: Electronic map keeps drivers away from jams. By Celeste Biever. New Scientist (Issue 2574: page 32; subscription req'd). "Now a smart electronic map has been developed to help drivers find the best route, using information on nearby roads together with the day of the week, time, weather conditions and the speed of traffic on nearby roads. Crucially, the software can use road configurations it already knows about to predict how traffic on unfamiliar ones will behave. Route-planning systems have been developed before to predict when jams on major roads will ease, or when traffic will start to snarl up. However, these are based on how traffic on the road has behaved in the past, and cannot advise drivers about minor roads that haven't been monitored, says Eric Horvitz at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington."
>>> Applications, Interfaces October 17, 2006: On the road to intelligence. The Engineer Online. "Volvo and DaimlerChrysler are part of a nine-member consortium that has received €22.9m (£15.5m) from the European Commission to give cars and their drivers more autonomy on the road. Researchers on the 30-month Dynamically Self-Configuring Automotive Systems (DySCAS) project aim to design an intelligent car that can, among other things, self-diagnose and ultimately self-heal its own faults, update its own computer devices and interface with a drivers' mobile phone, personal organiser and satellite navigation systems." September 21, 2006: Computers that read your mind - Software systems that work out what users are doing, and then respond accordingly, could help people to work more effectively. The Economist Technology Quarterly (subscription req'd.). "Augmented cognition promises to be a different story, insists Eric Horvitz, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, and president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. The emphasis now is on filtering information before it reaches the user, he says. By controlling the flow of information, it should be possible to increase the amount of information people can absorb without overloading them, says Dr Horvitz." September 4, 2006: Instaknow Puts the Navy in the Know. By Joao-Pierre Ruth. NJBIZ. "Instaknow is going to war. Armed with a U.S. Navy grant, the Plainfield maker of artificial intelligence software is developing programs to seamlessly integrate and retrieve information received from surveillance and tactical operations. 'Our software automatically learns how many information sources the person is going to manually and what the person is doing with that information,' says Instaknow CEO Pramod 'Paul' Khandekar. 'It remembers and starts replicating that person’s decision-making from then on.' ... Philadelphia has incorporated Instaknow’s No-Code Business Process Management software into a system called CARES that integrates information for the Department of Social Services. The system brings together data from a host of social services and related family information sources." THERE'S MORE
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