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September
30, 2004: New
Company Starts Up a Challenge to Google.
By John Markoff. The New York Times (no fee reg.
req'd.). "Google executives have long conceded
that one of their great fears is to be overtaken
by a more advanced Internet search technology.
Vivisimo, a company founded by three former Carnegie
Mellon University computer scientists, is hoping
to prove that Google's worries are well founded.
Four-year-old Vivisimo plans to start Clusty,
a free, consumer search service based on results
from Yahoo's Overture engine, Thursday. ... The
service is meant to address the confusion that
can be created when search engines return huge
lists. Clustering is also intended to help users
find related material they may overlook when
they employ services that utilize page ranking
methods. Such methods employ a variety of software
algorithms to rank Web pages by their perceived
relevance to a query. ... Vivisimo's co-founder
and chief executive, Raul Valdes-Perez, was a
protégé of Herbert A. Simon, a
Nobel laureate who was a pioneer in artificial
intelligence research. Before co-founding Vivisimo,
Mr. Valdes-Perez was a computer scientist at
Carnegie Mellon University. He professes that
the way to deal with information overload is
with information 'overlook' - techniques that
strip away extraneous information." September 27, 2004: The Grand Challenges of IT -
Researchers are inventing new ways to tackle
old problems. Emerging Technology by Thomas Hoffman.
Computerworld. "Fundamental research on how to make computer hardware more powerful and software smarter goes back 50 years or more, but many of the traditional methods have nearly reached their limits. Now, researchers moving in bold new directions may be setting the course of IT for decades to come. There are literally dozens of grand challenges that scientists and economists are attacking, ranging from societal issues to technical advances. Here, we take a look at the challenges in three key areas of IT research: processor performance, chip miniaturization and artificial intelligence. ... AI, very broadly defined, comprises three primary disciplines: natural-language processing, machine-based learning and robotics. Recent advances in these areas have led to commercial technologies ranging from a robotic vacuum cleaner called Roomba, made by Burlington, Mass.-based iRobot Corp., to customer-service-oriented speech recognition systems from vendors such as Peabody, Mass.-based ScanSoft Inc. But despite these inroads, computer systems continue to have a tough time handling reasoning. 'The biggest challenges are figuring out how to organize computer programs to have more common sense,' says Tom Mitchell, the Fredkin professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. ... The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is funding research to develop a computer-based 'executive assistant' that could handle administrative tasks like prioritizing e-mail requests for a military commander or a business executive. ... Using a grading scale of A to F, 'we would be thrilled if these systems could give us C-level performance over the next three to four years,' says Ron Brachman, director of the information processing technology office at DARPA. Computers also have trouble understanding context like humans do.... Systems that can handle more complicated human-to-computer interactions, like processing a request for movie tickets at a particular theatre via speech recognition, should be in use within five to 10 years, says
Victor Zue, co-director of the MIT computer science
and artificial intelligence laboratory." September 26, 2004:
Crick's
other goal - Unlocking riddle of the mind.
Scientists continuing study of consciousness.
By Bruce Lieberman. San Diego Union-Tribune & SignOnSanDiego.com. "Francis Crick focused on looking for an area of the brain that might be critical to human consciousness. As a young scientist in 1940s England, Francis Crick decided to devote his life to unraveling two mysteries: the foundation for all living things and how the brain gives rise to the mind. ... Tomorrow, when the Salk Institute in La Jolla hosts a public memorial for Crick, who died July 28 at 88, that unfinished business will most certainly be talked about. How billions of brain cells interpret sensations, draw on memory and association to make sense of them, and create conscious thoughts about the world is unknown. 'It's inconceivable to us, but somehow it happens,' said Terry Sejnowski, a computational neurobiologist at the Salk Institute who studies how computers can be used to understand the brain. 'Consciousness is elusive,' he said. 'It's hard to pin down.' ... Illuminating how the brain creates consciousness would profoundly change the way humans view themselves, scientists say. ... Engineers could build machines that truly think, bringing artificial intelligence out of science fiction and into the real world. ... [C]onsciousness is really about how all the parts come together to create the thinking mind. 'Being reductionist is a good way to start, but at some point you have to . . . put together the pieces and see how they work together,' Sejnowski said. He calls the effort to assemble the big picture of consciousness 'the Humpty Dumpty project.'" September 26, 2004: Consumers must be mindful of credit theft - ID thieves ingenious, but card networks are making it tougher to defraud victims. By Paul Gores. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / available from IndyStar.com. "[A]lthough illegal card purchases are the most common type of identity-theft crime, they are starting to decline because of increasingly sophisticated computer programs that spot credit-card fraud, she said. So-called 'neural' computer networks know who holds a credit card, the bank that issued it, how much the cardholder normally spends, the categories of things typically purchased, and the locations where the card usually is used. The computer is constantly learning and updating patterns. It also knows where rashes of credit-card fraud are taking place. 'It keeps getting smarter and smarter all the time. It's almost like artificial intelligence,' [Avivah Litan, vice president and research director at Gartner Inc.] said. The network looks for abnormal patterns, huge purchases, rapid purchases, items not normally bought by the cardholder and purchases too far apart geographically -- and too close chronologically -- for one person to have made them." September 21, 2004: Chicago
Moving to 'Smart' Surveillance Cameras.
By Stephen Kinzer. The New York Times (no fee
reg. req'd.). "A highly advanced system
of video surveillance that Chicago officials
plan to install by 2006 will make people here
some of the most closely observed in the world.
Mayor Richard M. Daley says it will also make
them much safer. ... Police specialists here
can already monitor live footage from about
2,000 surveillance cameras around the city,
so the addition of 250 cameras under the mayor's
new plan is not a great jump. The way these
cameras will be used, however, is an extraordinary
technological leap. Sophisticated new computer
programs will immediately alert the police
whenever anyone viewed by any of the cameras
placed at buildings and other structures considered
terrorist targets wanders aimlessly in circles,
lingers outside a public building, pulls a
car onto the shoulder of a highway, or leaves
a package and walks away from it. Images of
those people will be highlighted in color at
the city's central monitoring station, allowing
dispatchers to send police officers to the
scene immediately. ... Many cities have installed
large numbers of surveillance cameras along
streets and near important buildings, but as
the number of these cameras has grown, it has
become impossible to monitor all of them. The
software that will be central to Chicago's
surveillance system is designed to direct specialists
to screens that show anything unusual happening.
... 'With the aggressive way these types of
surveillance equipment are being marketed and
implemented,' Mr. [Edwin C.] Yohnka said, 'it
really does raise questions about what kind
of society do we ultimately want, and how intrusive
we want law enforcement officials to be in
all of our lives.' ... 'The value we gain in
public safety far outweighs any perception
by the community that this is Big Brother who's
watching,' Mr. [Ron] Huberman said. 'The feedback
we're getting is that people welcome this.
It makes them feel safer.'" September 16, 2004: Duo-Mining
-Combining Data and Text Mining. By
Guy Creese. DMReview.com. "As standalone
capabilities, the pattern-finding technologies
of data mining and text mining have been around
for years. However, it is only recently that
enterprises have started to use the two in
tandem - and have discovered that it is a combination
that is worth more than the sum of its parts.
First of all, what are data mining and text
mining? They are similar in that they both
'mine' large amounts of data, looking for meaningful
patterns. However, what they analyze is quite
different. ... Collections and recovery departments
in banks and credit card companies have used
duo-mining to good effect. Using data mining
to look at repayment trends, these enterprises
have a good idea on who is going to default
on a loan, for example. When logs from the
collection agents are added to the mix, the
understanding gets even better. For example,
text mining can understand the difference in
intent between, 'I will pay,' 'I won't pay,'
'I paid' and generate a propensity to pay score
- which, in turn, can be data mined. To take
another example, if a customer says, 'I can't
pay because a tree fell on my house;' all of
a sudden it is clear that it's not a 'bad'
delinquency - but rather a sales opportunity
for a home loan." September 15, 2004:
Artificial
Intelligence lab works to hunt terrorists, cure
cancer. By Joe Ferguson. Arizona Daily Wildcat. "The director of the UA's Artificial Intelligence
Lab, Hsinchun Chen, said the goal of the AI Lab
is to provide academics and professionals with
a better way to get information in their high-tech
worlds. ... COPLINK takes data from various law
enforcement databases, based on existing criminal
records, and allows law enforcement to coordinate
their information using the software. 'It is like
Google for cops,' said Chen. "'But it is much better.'
... Catherine Larson, associate director of
the
AI Lab, said the lab is also active in the war
on terror by helping the Department of Homeland
Security
identify terrorists. By working closely with
available data, the AI Lab identifies patterns
with the
data
to discover the true identities of criminals
using aliases, Larson said. ... Chen said the AI
Lab
also
works closely with the University Medical Center's
Cancer Center in informatics, a field that analyzes
exiting medical data to find patterns that could
help researchers at the Cancer Center find new
ways
to treat cancer." September 13, 2004:
Poly,
varsities use software to spot copying from Net
- Ngee Ann Poly tries out anti-plagiarism software
that dons at 3 varsities are using to spot text
students lift from websites. By Lynn Lee. The Straits
Times Interactive. " Blithely, the group of
undergraduates lifted a chunk of text from the website
of a Singapore bank's branch in Thailand and passed
it off as their own. ... But their misdeed was exposed
swiftly by Turnitin, a software which matches student
work against millions of documents on the Internet.
... In the future, artificial intelligence may be
used to distinguish one student's essay from others.
German academic Joachim Diederich, 46, in Singapore
last week to talk about his research on new technologies
to fight plagiarism, aims to produce such a software.
Professor Diederich, who disclosed his research
at the International Conference On Educational Technology,
has been conducting his research on the topic since
1999." September 13, 2004:
Pentagon
Revives Memory Project. By Noah Shachtman. Wired
News. "It's been seven months since the Pentagon
pulled the plug on LifeLog, its controversial project
to archive almost everything about a person. But
now, the Defense Department seems ready to revive
large portions of the program under a new name.
Using a series of sensors embedded in a GI's gear,
the Advanced Soldier Sensor Information System and
Technology , or ASSIST, project aims to collect
what a soldier sees, says and does in a combat zone
-- and then to weave those events into digital memories,
so commanders can have a better sense of how the
fight unfolded. ... To crunch all the information
it receives, ASSIST will have to be smart and able
to learn from the experiences its wearers feed it.
Building these types of thinking machines has been
the goal of Ronald Brachman since he took over Darpa's
Information Processing Technology Office in 2002.
'It is the progressive improvement of the knowledge
base of the system over time that we believe will
best support soldiers on later missions,' Brachman
wrote in an e-mail. It will 'allow them to understand
what prior patrols saw and heard, and to recognize
salient (and potentially life-threatening) changes
in the situation when they go out on a mission.'"
September 11, 2004:
CPW
studies ways to foil attack on water supplies.
By Robert Behre. The Post and Courier & Charleston.net.
(no fee reg. req'd.) "John Cook knows the next
terrorist strike might not come by air. As assistant
manager with Charleston's Commissioners of Public
Works, Cook is privy to terrorist talk about undermining
the nation's water supply. ... Working with Ed Roehl
of the Greenville firm Advanced Data Mining, Cook
has drawn up a $400,000 research project that aims
to couple everyday sensor technology with advanced
number-crunching models to create a reliable, affordable
way to monitor water distribution lines. ... The
hard part is making sense out of millions of measurements
each day. 'No normal person can take all the data
in from all these points and analyze it,' Cook says.
'That's where the artificial intelligence is important
to make this work.' ... He and Roehl are developing
software that can 'learn,' as humans provide it
feedback about what caused an abnormal readout,
such as a heavy rain." September 9, 2004:
Mimicking
fraudsters - If your card use has been queried,
it's probably because more banks are now using artificial
intelligence software to try to detect fraud. By
Ken Young. The Guardian. "Credit card fraud
losses in the UK fell for the first time in nearly
a decade last year, by more than 5% to £402.4m,
according to research by the Association of Payment
Clearing Services (Apacs). The fall has put a spotlight
on the increasing use of neural networks that have
the ability to detect fraudulent behaviour by analysing
transactions and alerting staff to suspicious activity.
As commercial applications of research into artificial
intelligence, these systems give the impression
of mimicking human abilities for recognising unusual
activity. Karina Purang, a financial analyst at
Datamonitor in London, says the use of neural networks
is growing: 'These systems are very important to
banks trying to reduce fraud, and are becoming standard
across the card industry to detect unusual spending
patterns.' She says Barclays reported that after
installing Fair Isaac's Falcon Fraud Manager system
in 1997, fraud was reduced by 30% by 2003. The bank
attributed this mainly to the new system. ... Nick
Sandall, head of retail banking at Deloitte, says
that banks also use other technologies. 'The artificial
intelligence community is constantly bringing us
new solutions. ...'" September 9, 2004:
MyVista
ready for market. By Charles F. Moreira. The
Star Online. "Intelligence Systems Sdn Bhd
director See Wan Chee said his company acquired
20 customers for its SmartScan imaging application
since it won the regional APICTA 2003 award in the
Best in Education category in Bangkok last December.
'Most of them, including Nottingham University's
Malaysian campus, use SmartScan to read and mark
answers to multiple-choice exam questions, as well
as for data collection,' See told In.Tech at ACM2004.
It also indicates students' strengths and weaknesses
so that teachers can take remedial action to help
students improve in those areas where they are weak.
SmartScan (www.smartscan.com.my) uses artificial
intelligence (AI) techniques, including pattern
recognition, neural networks and fuzzy logic to
analyse answers on an objective test answer sheet." September 8, 2004:
Artificial
Intelligence Creeps into the Commercial Market Despite
Initial Hurdles. PhysOrg.com. "When artificial
intelligence (AI) was developed to emulate human
intelligence, scientists hoped it would be a blockbuster
technology. Instead, the inability of end users
to deal with its complexity and expensiveness and
their lack of understanding of its potential caused
these expectations to dwindle. These factors slowed
down the adoption rates of AI, but not the efforts
of researchers. After a couple of decades, AI, now
in the form of applications, is slowly making its
way out of laboratories into the mainstream market." September 7, 2004:
Security
IT tops NSW tech showcase awards. By Fleur Doidge.
CRN / available from iTNews Australia. "Two
security-focused IT developers creamed the competition
this year at the patrons' awards for the NSW Government's
export-focused Australian Technology Showcase (ATS).
... Michael Egan, NSW Treasurer and Minister for
State Development, said Argus had won for its success
in growing export deals. ... Argus' patented iris
recognition system had netted $600,000 in export
sales in two years -- a considerable achievement
for a new, innovative technology, he said. ... Second
place went to another IT surveillance system developer,
iOmniscient, based in Sydney's Chatswood. ... iOmniscient
had patented a surveillance system using artificial
intelligence to detect unmoving, suspicious objects
-- such as bags and boxes that could contain bombs
-- in crowded areas such as airports and train stations,
[Warren Dick] said." September 4, 2004:
Robots
invade the table football pitch. By Duncan Graham-Rowe.
New Scientist Magazine (appears on page 18 with
the title: Play table football against a robot).
"Fans of table football, or foosball, will
no longer have to hang around at the pub waiting
for a friend to turn up before they can play. A
robotic foosball table will be able to give them
just as good a game. ... To allow the control system
to track the ball, the base of the table is made
of translucent glass, tinted green. A camera underneath
photographs the ball 50 times per second, and sends
this data to a built-in computer that maps the ball's
position. Intelligent software then works out the
effect of one of the figures kicking the ball. ...
[Bernhard Nebel's University of Freiburg] team is
now working on being able to stop the ball and pass
it -- a capability that will be essential if the
robot is ever going to beat good players." September 4, 2004:
Brain
research? Pay it no mind. Mystery of consciousness
still outwitting scientists. By Philip Marchand.
The Toronto Star. "Scientists who have been
trying to understand the brain have recently tried
to measure neural activity of Republicans and Democrats
to see if political affiliations had anything to
do with brain chemistry. The results were inconclusive.
... What really caught my eye about a New York Times
Magazine article on the topic was the following
statement: 'One of the most celebrated insights
of the past 20 years of neuroscience is the discovery
-- largely associated with the work of Antonio Damasio
-- that the brain's emotional systems are critical
to logical decision-making. People who suffer from
damaged or impaired emotional systems can score
well on logic tests but often display markedly irrational
behaviour in everyday life.' I'm sure Damasio has
done good work, rooting around the neocortex. But
what does it say for neuroscience that one of its
'most celebrated insights' is something we've known
for three or four millennia? ... The bravest of
the neuroscientists are trying to tackle the toughest
nut of all, the mystery of consciousness. ... A
professor named Howard Gardner, for example, whose
1985 book The Mind's New Science helped to popularize
the field of cognitive science, told Horgan that
questions such as consciousness and free will were
'particularly resistant' to the scientific habit
of trying to break down a subject into its most
elemental parts, like neural pathways in the brain.
... The human brain is so complex it simply defies
the same kind of analysis that scientists devote
to subatomic particles or human immune systems.
'Like neuroscientists, researchers in evolutionary
psychology and artificial intelligence are both
bumping up against the Humpty Dumpty dilemma,' [John]
Horgan writes. 'They can break the mind into pieces,
but they have no idea how to put it back together
again.'" September 3, 2004:
Software
firm finds gold in diverse data mining. By Mary
Ann Azevedo. Houston
Business Journal / also available from MSNBC
(9/5/04). "Customers of PolyVista range from
technology giant Hewlett-Packard Co. and global
energy conglomerate British Petroleum to telecom
heavyweight Verizon and the University of Texas
M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. The company founded
by Shabhaz Anwar in 1998 helps users discover anomalies,
identify trends and pinpoint relationships within
huge databases over a short period of time. The
data is mined by letting unstructured text interact
with structured mathematical information, according
to Anwar, who uses decks of cards to describe the
software system. 'Imagine having six decks of cards
all mixed up in a big pile,' Anwar explains. 'It's
a tedious and time-consuming process to separate
them manually into six separate packs. PolyVista
takes the pile and automatically stacks the cards
in order, in six separate stacks -- all in one step.'
The process yields nuggets of information that humans
might miss in the overwhelming abundance of data,
he says, and the software can be customized to meet
the needs of diverse users. ... The company's success
can be attributed to the fact that it focuses on
data mining, which is increasingly becoming more
a part of data access for most companies, according
to [William] McKnight." September 1, 2004: Turn Search Into Find. By Nathaniel Palmer. Transform Magazine. "Web-based customer self-service is gaining rapid adoption as one of the most promising opportunities for customer-facing firms in all industries to decrease customer transaction costs while maintaining or improving service quality. ... Information retrieval, or search, software is built upon two fundamental components: an indexing engine that maps and categorizes content, and a retrieval engine that deploys algorithms to find and return indexed content. ... A taxonomy refers to structures built to organize information -- a collection of relevant topics and subtopics arranged in a hierarchical structure. Humans use taxonomies to make sense of formerly unstructured information. ... Taxonomy and classification within customer self-service solutions is enabled by software that creates hierarchical structures and defines characteristics throughout the branches of the structures. Once these structures are in place, classification is accomplished by parsing collections of content and assigning individual documents to appropriate categories within the taxonomy structure. This can be done manually (with the aid of software) or automatically based on specific algorithms (see 'Behind the Jargon: Five Approaches to Classification')."
>>> Information Retrieval, Customer Service, Machine Learning, Probability, Bayes (@ Namesakes), Neural Networks, Natural Language Processing, Representation, Reasoning, Applications August 30, 2004: In
Search Of Better Video Search. IBM, Microsoft,
and academic researchers are trying to invent ways
to find specific images in video footage. By Aaron
Ricadela. InformationWeek. "At a conference in
Cambridge, England, last week, an IBM researcher gave
the first public demonstration of a computer system
called Marvel that uses statistical techniques to
learn about relationships between colors, shapes,
patterns, sounds, and other clues from video footage
that can help identify its content. IBM's prototype
then labels the footage so users can go back and find
individual shots. That could be a boon not only to
TV news producers but intelligence analysts watching
surveillance video and even PC users editing home
movies. Today's state of the art relies on searching
for keywords embedded in video files, says IBM Research
senior manager John Smith, who heads the project.
... Smith's team also is working with Columbia University's
digital video multimedia lab on a project to search
news footage from U.S. and foreign broadcasters for
related topics, combining computer vision and image
understanding with machine learning approaches that
analyze each station's signature approach to a story." August 30, 2004: An
apple for the computer - Machines are so sophisticated
they can be used to grade essays. But in some ways,
artificial intelligence still lacks common sense.
By Faye Flam. Philadelphia Inquirer. "First,
computers learned to beat people at chess, then they
started answering 411 calls. Now, computers endowed
with artificial intelligence are going where only
teachers ventured before: They're grading essays.
At least three companies are marketing computerized
essay graders, and thousands of schools across the
country are using them as teaching tools and to score
standardized tests. ... Jill Burstein, [E-rater's]
lead scientist and a computational linguist, said
the computer is 'trained' by feeding it thousands
of essays that have already been scored and then asking
the system to look for patterns that distinguish the
good from the bad. ... [E]ssay-scoring programs will
work for students who make a good-faith effort, said
Harry Barfoot, vice president for marketing and sales
at Vantage Learning. 'It can't score poetry and creative
writing,' he said, but that was never promised. ...
[Henry] Lieberman and other artificial intelligence
researchers say computers could become dramatically
smarter and more humanlike in the future. The brain
is just a physical machine, albeit a complicated one
we don't yet understand, they argue. 'People have
this illusion that what we do is magic and it will
never be automated,' said University of Pennsylvania
computer science professor Lyle Ungar. When he first
started studying artificial intelligence, he said,
no one thought a computer could play chess well enough
to beat the masters. Today, computers can beat everyone
at chess, he said, and we're no longer impressed." August 26, 2004: From
factoids to facts. At last, a way of getting answers
from the web. The Economist. "Ask MSR is still
a prototype, although Microsoft is trying to improve
it and it may be launched commercially under the name
AnswerBot. Dr [Eric] Brill, meanwhile, has moved to
a more difficult task. One of his most recent papers,
written jointly with Radu Soricut of the University
of Southern California, is entitled 'Beyond the Factoid'.
It describes his efforts to build a system capable
of providing 50-word answers to questions such as
"What are the rules for qualifying for the Academy
Awards?" This is harder than finding a single-word
answer, but Dr Brill thinks it should be possible
using something called a 'noisy channel' model. Such
models are already employed in spell-checking and
speech-recognition systems. They work by modelling
the transformation between what a user means (in spell-checking,
the word he intended to type) and what he does (the
garbled word actually typed). ... Rather than relying
on a traditional 'artificial intelligence' approach
of parsing sentences and trying to work out what a
question actually means, this quick-and-dirty method
draws instead on the collective, ever-growing intelligence
of the web itself." August 25, 2004: Card
fraud prevention 'pays off'. BBC News. "Market
analyst Datamonitor said credit card fraud fell 5%
to £402.4m last year, from £424.6m in 2002. ... 'The
efforts spent by the various players in preventing
card fraud are finally paying off,' report author
Karina Purang said. She added that the introduction
of new technology - such as neural network systems
which flag up transactions that do not match a cardholder's
usual spending behaviour - had helped to curtail card
fraud." August 23, 2004: WebGen
keeps rooms cool and electric bills down at UM.
The Miami Herald & Herald.com.
"[W]hen you're the University of Miami , it's
next to impossible to monitor what's happening in
each classroom, office and lab on a 260-acre campus
that includes two colleges and seven schools. Enter
WebGen, a Cambridge, Mass., company that has developed
a software-based system that allows businesses and
organizations to control their energy use and costs.
... At UM, each floor in a building is divided into
zones. ... The WebGen systems check in every two minutes.
... The system also factors in the weather and how
the room is being used. At UM, WebGen is tied into
the school's scheduling system so it knows when classes
are in session and rooms in use. ... The four partners
who wrote the business plan for WebGen came from disparate
backgrounds, but they brought the expertise needed
to make the company work. ... Dirk Mahling provided
the technology through his work with artificial intelligence
and neural networks...." August 20, 2004: Diverse
Sciences Propel Bioinformatics. By Jessica D. Tenenbaum. eWeek.
" At conferences in computational biology, speakers generally
start with questions: 'How many people in the room are biologists?
Computer scientists? Other?' It can be hard to predict what kinds
of experts will show up in the audience. This year's Computational
Systems Bioinformatics Conference, the third of its kind, was no exception.
The CSB 2002 Web site described the conference's goal as bringing
together 'biology and computer science' experts. This year, the conference
organizers hope to 'promote a systems biology approach that links
biology, computer science, mathematics, chemistry, physics, medicine
and engineering.' That's five new disciplines in two years. Even so,
we've left out statistics. ... One is struck both by how far the field
has come in a relatively short period of time, and also by how far
it has yet to go. In the past 10 years, the numbers of sequences stored
in public databases such as GenBank, SwissProt and even the Protein
Data Bank all have increased exponentially. ... The conference agenda
itself highlighted how interdisciplinary this field is. ... Other
presentations included methods from high-throughput microscopy, text
processing, data mining, artificial intelligence and more. Fusions
of fields are not just expected but required. Stephen Wong of Harvard
University explained how to use robotic automation and digital microscopy
to screen thousands of cells simultaneously for, among other tasks,
high-throughput drug screening." August 19, 2004: Future
Route releases AI-based fraud detection product. finextra news.
"UK-based Future Route is releasing a new card fraud detection
system, iHex, based on artificial intelligence technology developed
at Oxford University's computing laboratories for bio-informatics.
The product has been designed for use by financial services firms,
government agencies and corporations. IHex detects fraud using Inductive
Logic Programming (ILP) techniques - an artificially intelligent method
of identifying fraud patterns and anomalies. The vendor says unlike
many other pattern detection products, the system automatically generates
and continuously enhances underlying rules." August 18, 2004: Popular
stock market invt theories. By Richard J. Maturi. Sify.com. "There's
a myriad of broad based investment theories within which numerous
investment strategies can be implemented. Here we will look at the
rationale behind these theories and how they work. ... Jerry Felson
offers an alternative to the efficient market theory in his book,
Cybernetic Approach to Stock Market Analysis (Exposition Press, 1975)
in order to bypass its perceived limitations and deficiencies. ...
Using cybernetics concepts (the science and control of communication,
and mathematical analysis of the flow of information) and artificial
intelligence (advanced cybernetics) techniques, Felson proposes developing
judgmental decision-making processes by weighing evidence and formalizing
investment analysis. In plain language, the cybernetics approach automates
the investment decision-making process through the use of pattern
recognition, learning system theory, and other methods, removing the
imperfect human factor and theoretically improving investment returns" August 17, 2004: Funding for UCD-based Lightwave. Radio Telefís Éireann (RTÉ), the Irish Public Service Broadcasting Organisation. "Lightwave is close to developing its first product, called ICE (Intelligent Control of Energy), which uses artificial intelligence techniques to anticipate how a building will react to new conditions such as the outside temperature or the number of people occupying the building."
August 17, 2004: The
'Nose' Knows A Sweet Smell Of Success. SpaceDaily. "What
about detecting chemical leaks in enclosed spaces, like the International
Space Station or Space Shuttle? NASA built 'E-Nose' to come to the
rescue. The Agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and the
California Institute of Technology jointly developed a method for
a machine to 'smell.' ... E-Nose technology has the ability to send
a signal to an environmental control system where a central computer
decides how to handle the problem, without human interaction. The
device also can be 'trained' in one session to detect many specific
contaminants. ... Commercial companies were quick to see E-Nose's
potential. In March 1997, JPL licensed the technology to Cyrano Sciences,
of Pasadena, Calif. The company renamed the device 'Cyranose 320'
and put it to work in the food industry, testing for spoilage. The
technology is also being tested to detect toxic materials, water pollutants
and chemical leaks." August 12, 2004: When
machines breed - Evolvable hardware -- gadgets that design themselves
-- can get the job done, even if humans have no idea how they do it.
By Sam Williams. Salon.com (subscribe or watch a brief ad to get a free
day pass). "Paul Layzell is a specialist in the budding field of
evolvable hardware. Simply put, he helps machines design themselves,
using principles borrowed directly from biological evolution. ... Using
evolutionary processes to optimize machine performance is nothing new.
Since the 1960s, artificial intelligence researchers have exploited
the dynamics of Darwinian evolution to solve software problems in fields
as diverse as financial investment, manufacturing and biochemistry.
What is new, however, is the application of evolutionary processes in
the hardware realm." August 3, 2004: Neural
network mimics human thought process. HP interested in technology
invented at U of I. By Julie Howard. The Idaho Statesman. "Creation
of a machine that thinks like a person is a step closer to reality with
a discovery from a team of researchers at the University of Idaho in
Moscow. The new technology, with a patent pending, 'opens the door'
for computers or robots to do rapid computations in a much more complex
way than scientists had thought possible, said inventor Richard Wells.
... The technology is called a neural network, and it operates much
as the human brain does, Wells said. Instead of a microprocessor, which
performs computation after computation, a neural network can do several
computations simultaneously. In addition, a 'neurocomputer' uses what's
called 'neuro-fuzzy logic,' meaning it deals with uncertainty, the missing
function of traditional programmed integrated circuitry. ... Having
a neural network formed on a computer chip could revolutionize the way
computers function, said Gene Merrell, acting director of the Idaho
Research Foundation Inc., based at the university." August 2004: A
Machine With a Mind of Its Own - Ross King wanted a research assistant
who would work 24/7 without sleep or food. So he built one. By Oliver
Morton. Wired Magazine (Issue 12.08). "For a machine that's changing
the world, the device on the lab bench in front of me doesn't look very
impressive - it just goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
... [Ross] King's humble robot is based on a Biomek 2000, a low-rent
fluid-handling device that goes for only $37,900. But it can do something
its more nimble cousins can't. Its components - the tireless robot arm,
an incubator in which cells cultured on the platter either wither or
thrive, and a plate reader that examines the little depressions to see
whether anything is growing there - are linked up to a much more exceptional
brain. The artificial intelligence routines in that brain can look at
the results of an experiment, draw a conclusion about what the results
might mean, and then set off to test that conclusion. The 'robot scientist'
(King has resisted the temptation of a jazzy acronym) may look like
a mere labor-saving gizmo, shuttling back and forth ad nauseam, but
it's much more than that. Biology is full of tools with which to make
discoveries. Here's a tool that can make discoveries on its own. ...
Studying AI at the Turing Institute in Glasgow, [King] set about using
machine-learning techniques to predict the shapes of proteins, one of
the fundamental challenges of bioinformatics. King, though, found a
twist. With his friend Colin Angus, whom he'd met at Aberdeen, he developed
software that translated protein structures into musical chord sequences....
Stephen Muggleton argues that the life sciences are peculiarly well
suited to machine learning. 'There's an inherent structure in biological
problems that lends itself to computational approaches,' he says. In
other words, biology reveals the machinelike substructure of the living
world; it's not surprising that machines are showing an aptitude for
it." July / August 2004: Spotting
Cancer Sooner - Blood tests that detect cancer in its early stages
would save countless lives. The first could arrive within a year. By
Ken Garber. Technology Review. "The individual fates of the 1.3
million Americans diagnosed with cancer this year will be largely decided
by one simple factor: at what stage was the disease spotted? ... The
problem, of course, is that cancers, which begin with just a few deviant
cells, are by their very nature hard to diagnose early. In the last
few years, though, a new method has emerged that promises to deliver
simple blood tests that identify the telltale molecular profiles of
various cancers easily and accurately. ... Like [George] Wright, [Emanuel]
Petricoin and [Lance] Liotta used a Ciphergen system to generate protein
profiles from blood samples. Their early attempts to find cancer patterns
failed, though, because they were simply trying to juggle too much information.
Then, in June 1999, a solution appeared. Petricoin and his friend Peter
Levine, a Maryland lawyer with a background in data analysis, were chatting
about the problem over brunch; Levine suggested using pattern recognition
algorithms to make sense of the massive amount of data. Levine, who
had considered using such algorithms to analyze stock market trends
and commodities trading, sketched out the cancer idea on a napkin. 'In
about five minutes, we both realized this would be a really fascinating
approach,' Petricoin recalls. So they tested it, together with Ben Hitt,
a software engineer who borrowed the necessary algorithms from artificial-intelligence
theory. In fact, cancer patterns did emerge, and in 2000 Levine and
Hitt founded Correlogic Systems to develop blood tests for cancers.
In early 2002, the researchers published results in the British medical
journal Lancet , showing they could use a specific protein pattern to
spot ovarian cancer." July 29, 2004: Organic
PC goal of UK project. By Harry Yeates. Electronics Weekly. "In
the future, alongside the box of lifeless silicon you call your PC,
you might find a little tub of living tissue. For particular specialist
tasks involving complex, non-linear problems your inorganic circuits
would find daunting, you would turn to the box of organics. That's the
ultimate aim of a new £1.2m, four year research project involving the
universities of the West of England (UWE), Leeds and Sussex. 'For fifty
years AI has been trying to build systems that have got complicated
behaviour, with some success,' said Dr Larry Bull from UWE, who will
lead the project. 'But given this complex behaviour seems to be easy
in the natural world, networks of neurons and chemical systems, why
don't we try to build AI systems out of that stuff, rather than try
to write clever programmes?'" July 28, 2004: Amplified
Intelligence - The AI Problem. Interview with Ken Ford. Astrobiology
Magazine. "Astrobiology Magazine (AM): The IMHC [Interdisciplinary
Study of Human & Machine Cognition] research agenda broadly seems to
cover robotics, cognition and simulations. Are there parts of machine
intelligence that your research institute doesn't cover today, but that
you see as growth areas? Ken Ford (KF): Don't forget that second
letter is 'H'. Although a lot of our research could be categorized as
AI, and five of our researchers are AAAI (American Association for Artificial
Intelligence) Fellows, IHMC is not a traditional machine intelligence
laboratory. The focus and theme of our research is what has become known
as human-centered computing which, in a nutshell, is about fitting technology
to people instead of fitting people to technology. The human is part
of the system, and it is the performance of the whole system, including
the human, that we are interested in. This requires that machines should
be designed to fit us physically, cognitively, and perhaps even socially.
We think of AI as meaning 'Amplified Intelligence.' The interesting
thing is that many traditional AI technologies in fact are being used
in just this way. We like to refer to it as building cognitive prostheses,
computational systems that leverage and extend human intellectual capacities,
just as eyeglasses are a kind of ocular prosthesis. Building cognitive
prostheses is fundamentally different from AI's traditional Turing Test
ambitions -- it doesn't set out to imitate human abilities, but to extend
them. ... AM: In your opinion, how well do the machine intelligence
problems (like navigation, data-mining, or simulations with agents)
map to the basic computer science [CS] problem of efficient 'search'?
KF: Wow, efficient search is a 'basic computer science problem'?
Not long ago, search was being suggested as a defining characteristic
of AI to distinguish it from 'mainstream' CS. But to return to the question:
search is certainly a central technique in AI, but the search spaces
arising in AI are often impossibly huge, and a more interesting aspect
is not so much how to search them efficiently as how to re-cast problems
so that the search space itself is reduced in size. Searching is what
you do when you can't think of anything smarter." July 16, 2004: I.T.
May Help Clean a Polluted Sea, Say Researchers. By Mike Martin.
NewsFactor Network. "If an article in this week's journal Science
is on target, air pollution fouls not only our skies but our oceans
as well. ... But software and information technology may play an equally
important role, claim the authors of a study published in a recent special
issue of the journal Management of Environmental Quality, which is devoted
to 'information technologies in environmental engineering.' 'Rapid environmental
changes call for continuous surveillance and online decision-making
-- two areas where I.T. can be valuable,' say study authors Ioannis
Athanasiadis and Pericles Mitkas. Both are computer science researchers
at the Informatics and Telematics Institute Center for Research and
Technology in Thessaloniki, Greece. In their study, entitled 'An Agent-Based
Intelligent Environmental Monitoring System,' the researchers 'present
a multi-agent system for monitoring and assessing air-quality attributes,
which uses data coming from a meteorological station.' Their system,
the study explains, uses a 'community of software agents to monitor
and validate measurements coming from several sensors to assess air-quality.'
Software agents are computer systems to which an operator can delegate
tasks. Like the robots in the new movie 'I, Robot,' software agents
are more autonomous, proactive and adaptive than the everyday software
we normally use. ... Using agents to monitor the environment is a branch
of 'enviromatics -- the research initiative examining the application
of information technology in environmental research, monitoring, assessment,
management and policy,' Athanasiadis explains. ... 'In O3RTAA, several
software agents operate in a distributed-agent society in order to monitor
both meteorological and air pollutants, to evaluate air quality and,
ultimately, to trigger alarms' about environmental damage, Mitkas explains,
adding that the system uses machine-learning algorithms and data-mining
methodologies for 'extracting knowledge.'" July 16, 2004: Movie
tests Asimov's moral code for robots. By Will Knight. New Scientist
News. "The possibility of developing truly intelligent machines,
and their potential to be friend or foe to humanity, gets the Hollywood
treatment in a new blockbuster film I, Robot, which opens in the US
on Friday. At the heart of the movie are Isaac Asimov's 'Three Laws
of Robotics', invented as a simple, but immutable moral code for robots.
... [R]obotics and artificial intelligence experts admit they are a
long way from having to worry about such rules yet. 'The difficulty
is building something that would understand them,' says Alan Bundy,
at Edinburgh University's Artificial Intelligence Institute in the UK.
'That is well beyond the state of the art at the moment.' Bundy notes
that simple safety measures are already a crucial part of the design
of industrial robots, which have in rare cases caused the death of people.
... 'Asimov's laws are about as relevant to robotics as leeches are
to modern medicine,' says Steve Grand, who founded the UK company Cyberlife
Research and is working on developing artificial intelligence through
learning. 'They stem from an innocent bygone age, when people seriously
thought that intelligence was something that could be 'programmed in'
as a series of logical propositions.'" July 14, 2004: Computer
brains. e4engineering.com. "A team of computer scientists and
mathematicians at Palo Alto, CA-based Artificial Development are developing
software to simulate the human brain's cortex and peripheral systems.
As a first step along the way, the company recently disclosed that it
has completed the development a realistic representation of the workflow
of a functioning human cortex. Dubbed the CCortex-based Autonomous Cognitive
Model ('ACM'), the software may have immediate applications for data
mining, network security, search engine technologies and natural language
processing." July 14, 2004: Attack
of the killer vacuum cleaners. By Charles Arthur. The Belfast Telegraph
Digital. "Things are about to happen with robots, because the element
they need to make them truly useful - the software, which needs to be
able to adapt to a wide range of situations - is getting cheaper all
the time. Future Horizons, a semiconductor analyst based in Kent, forecasts
that by 2010 there will be 55.5 million robots, in a world market worth
£30bn - up from £2.4bn last year. 'The electronics industry is on the
cusp of a robotics wave, a period in which applications are aimed at
labour-saving and extending human skills,' it reports. Of those, it
says that 39 million will be domestic robots, and 10.5 million 'domestic
intelligent service' robots. That is because there's a growing need
for robots to help the elderly and handicapped. ... But the real explosion
in robotics is coming among the 'immobots' - or, more simply, just 'bots'.
These are bits of software that are incorporated into larger objects,
and that remove a lot of the strain of having to decide what to do next.
We're getting glimpses of how good these could be at present: the tiny
number of Britons with a TiVo personal video recorder have something
that decides, based on the programmes they choose to record, what other
programmes they might like to see, and records those, too. ... The reason
why we can't yet declare 'The Year of the Robot', however, is that researchers
are still fundamentally split about how robots should behave and learn.
One group favours the 'top-down' approach, in which all the behaviour
of the robot is mapped out, and its software is written to fill out
that behaviour. The Roomba vacuum cleaner is a classic example.... The
alternative is something assembled from smaller, self-contained units,
which creates a gestalt of behaviour based on that. Thus the system
that controls the legs learns to 'walk' independently.... Sony's Aibo
draws on a form of this.... July 7, 2004: Software
aids future tennis stars. BBC News. " As Britons bemoan another
year without a Wimbledon hero, there could be some hope in a computer
model being worked on at Kingston University in London. ... It will
create a computer-generated competitor which rival players can pit themselves
against. The system will analyse video footage of champions and allow
other players to explore tactics to beat them. ... The research will
focus initially on tennis but will move on to look at more complex sports
such as football and basketball. 'As well as helping specialised sports
training, the technology we are developing could have benefits in fields
such as realistic computer gaming, virtual reality and surveillance,'
said Dr Ahmed Shihab of the School of Computing and Information Systems
at Kingston University." July 6, 2004: Programmer
seems to have a technology that does everything. By Rachel Melcer.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch / STLtoday.com. "Steven Thaler, founder
of Imagination Engines Inc. in Maryland Heights, says he has a unique
challenge: figuring out what to do with a technology that does everything.
He and his supporters say his creation, a computer program called the
Creativity Machine, has huge economic potential. It could be the first
successful form of artificial intelligence, a machine that learns and
thinks by simulating the human brain's activity. ... Imagination Engines
also is experimenting with spinoff companies that license the core technology
and adapt it for specific uses. ... The first spinoff, Synaptrix Financial
Prediction LLC, was created last year as a partner for Stann Financial.
It aims to analyze a real-time flow of information on trades in the
financial markets to predict the best time to buy or sell a particular
stock. The project showed early promise, reaching a 60 percent to 65
percent accuracy rate, but it stalled over problems with the information
feed and the need to refine its programming, [John] Stann said. ...
Synaptrix Parts Inspection LLC, another of his spinoffs, combines an
ordinary video camera with the Creativity Machine's neural network and
custom software to perform quality-control checks in manufacturing.
The system is 'shown' a variety of objects that it can learn to instantly
identify for sorting or to use as an ideal to spot defects and variations.
... On the government side, Imagination Engines is part of a consortium
developing an airport-security system for the Department of Homeland
Security. The group recently got an 18-month, $800,000 grant to design
and test a series of smart sensors at an airport in Butte, Mont. The
system would be able to identify vehicles on airport property, monitor
them, spot and warn of suspicious activity, Thaler said." July 6, 2004: Evolution
could speed net downloads. By Will Knight. New Scientist News. "Transferring
popular data across the internet repeatedly can be inefficient and costly,
so networking companies have developed ways of temporarily storing,
or 'caching', data at different locations to reduce costs and increase
download speeds. But figuring out where to store data and for how long
is a complex problem. One solution might be to have caches 'talk' to
each other repeatedly, but this is inefficient as it takes up a lot
of bandwidth. To tackle the challenge, Pablo Funes of US company Icosystem
and Jürgen Branke and Frederik Theil of the University of Karlsruhe
in Germany used 'genetic algorithms', which mimic Darwinian evolution,
to develop strategies for internet servers to use when caching data.
Using a simulation they were able to improve download speeds over existing
caching schemes. ... Funes told New Scientist the scheme could eventually
be used to allow caches to automatically 'evolve' their configuration." July 4, 2004: His
quest - Do Disney in a day. By Larry Bleiberg. The Dallas Morning
News / available from Mickey News. "Rich Vosburgh worked out hard,
spending four months with a personal trainer. He scrutinized maps and
a detailed timetable. He even deployed a secret weapon: artificial-intelligence
research to chart a course through death-defying drops, torrents of
water and fiery heat.And when this Texas adventurer clambered out of
a floating log a year ago, he had reached his holy grail: visiting -
in a single day - each of the 41 operating rides, attractions and shows
at the Everest of theme parks, Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom. His
time: a record 10 hours, 40 minutes. ... At heart, the challenge is
an enduring and perplexing quandary: What's the most efficient way to
route someone to multiple places, taking into account constantly changing
conditions? Logistics and timing Mathematicians call it the Time Dependent
Traveling Salesman Problem. The answer could help fighter-jet pilots
chart bombing targets or freight companies schedule package deliveries." July 2004 [issue date]: Homeland
Security as Catalyst - Innovative software firms are answering the
call from U.S. government agencies for advanced analytics to help combat
terrorism and criminal activity. What's the potential of this software
for strategic business applications? By Jesus Mena. Intelligent Enterprise
Magazine. "Ever heard of NORA? Or how about these guys: InferAgent,
CopLink, NameHunter, Bladeworks, and Sentinel? These ominous-sounding
fellows are products from tiny software firms that are developing some
of the most advanced analytic technologies today for homeland security.
Some provide solutions for the conversion of garbled text into knowledge
discovery. Others tend to the unearthing of associations of individuals
to actions, locations, and events from hundreds of thousands of internal
and external records. Still others offer innovative methods for detecting
fraud, categorizing foreign names, and virtual, remote analysis of data
or text from any database in the world for agencies such as the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security's Terrorist Threat Integration Center
(TTIC). Given the growing diversity and globalization of business enterprises,
is it possible that these innovative technologies, finding clear purpose
for homeland security, could also be of interest to private business
enterprises? In this article, I will describe some of these new technologies
and how they may be applied to your company today and tomorrow. Who
Are These Guys? Innovative products I mentioned at the beginning
are commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software -- a term favored by military
and government agencies -- originating from such companies as Attensity,
InferX, Infoglide, Knowledge Computing Corp. (KCC), Language Analysis
Systems (LAS), Searchspace, System Research & Development (SRD), and
others. Almost all have developed applications based on artificial intelligence
technologies to meet demand from first military and intelligence communities,
and now from the emerging homeland security market." Spring 2004: What
We Don't Know Can Hurt Us. By Heather Mac Donald. City Journal (Vol.
14, No. 2). "Immediately after 9/11, politicians and pundits slammed
the Bush administration for failing to 'connect the dots' foreshadowing
the attack. What a difference a little amnesia makes. For two years
now, left- and right-wing advocates have shot down nearly every proposal
to use intelligence more effectively -- to connect the dots -- as an
assault on 'privacy.' Though their facts are often wrong and their arguments
specious, they have come to dominate the national security debate virtually
without challenge. The consequence has been devastating: just when the
country should be unleashing its technological ingenuity to defend against
future attacks, scientists stand irresolute, cowed into inaction. 'No
one in the research and development community is putting together tools
to make us safer,' says Lee Zeichner of Zeichner Risk Analytics, a risk
consultancy firm, 'because they're afraid' of getting caught up in a
privacy scandal. The chilling effect has been even stronger in government.
'Many perfectly legal things that could be done with data aren't being
done, because people don't want to lose their jobs,' says a computer
security entrepreneur who, like many interviewed for this article, was
too fearful of the advocates to let his name appear. ... The goal of
TIA [the Total Information Awareness project] was this: to prevent another
attack on American soil by uncovering the electronic footprints terrorists
leave as they plan and rehearse their assaults. ... TIA would have been
the most advanced application yet of a young technology called 'data
mining,' which attempts to make sense of the explosion of data in government,
scientific, and commercial databases. Through complex algorithms, the
technique can extract patterns or anomalies in data collections that
a human analyst could not possibly discern. ... Without question, TIA
represented a radical leap ahead in both data-mining technology and
intelligence analysis, not surprising for a visionary group like DARPA,
which created the Internet. ... As with any public or private power,
TIA's capabilities could have been abused -- which is why DARPA planned
to build safeguards throughout the system. But it differed from existing
law enforcement and intelligence techniques only in degree, not kind.
Though the scale of data it would have made immediately available to
government was unprecedented, the type of evidence was identical to
what government had had legal access to for decades. ... Information
technology can help government in its constitutional responsibilities
to protect the nation; indeed the congressional jo int inquiry into
September 11 found that 'a reluctance to develop and implement new technical
capabilities aggressively' was a cause of the pre-9/11 intelligence
failures. The report added: 'While technology remains one of this nation's
greatest advantages, it has not been fully and most effectively applied
in support of U.S. counterterrorism efforts.' The privocrats will rightly
tell you that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; trouble is,
they are aiming their vigilance at the wrong target." [Other projects
discussed in this article: Human Identity at a Distance ; LifeLog; CAPPS
II, Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System; MATRIX, Multistate
Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange; and FIDNet.] June 29, 2004: Panel
Seeks Protections From Data Mining. By Brian Bergstein. Associated
Press / available from The Herald News. "Even as the government
increasingly relies on of data mining - scouring databases in search
of clues about terrorism and everyday waste and fraud - there aren't
clear rules about the practice. Privacy activists say it's like the
wild West, dangerously unregulated. ... The data mining frontier could
finally be seeing some civilizing influences take shape, particularly
in the recommendations of a panel headed by former Federal Communications
Commission chief Newton Minow that are getting particular praise. The
panel's report, released in early June, acknowledged the importance
of data mining in fighting terrorism. But it also said broad searches
through reams of records and commercial files, on citizens who have
done nothing to warrant individual suspicion, threaten fundamental protections
in the Bill of Rights. To strike a balance, the group, known as the
Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee (TAPAC), called for technological
changes that would 'anonymize' data so investigators could hunt for
suspicious activities and associations without immediately knowing whom
they were probing." June 24, 2004: | |||