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November/December 2007: Prediction is difficult, especially about the future - Michael Gough assesses the future of the IT industry and highlights some of the likely key developments. ITadviser (Issue 52). "At the 2007 conference for the Council of Professors and Heads of Computer Science (CPHC) there was recognition that computing had to be 'embedded' in all disciplines. This is not the end of computer science, simply the recognition that science, engineering and technology, commerce, media and communications, health etc. all require its capabilities directly applied to advancing their agenda, knowledge and capabilities. For me computer science was always an applied discipline and this realisation simply means an opportunity to regroup and refocus its attentions on computing architecture, programming languages, the human-computer interface, parallel computing, and artificial intelligence. ... The next generation of electronic devices will extend the ubiquity of computing significantly. In 1964 IBM released the 360 mainframe. At that time experts confidently stated that only a few of these machines would be needed to do all the tasks that could be conceived! Essentially, one computer serving millions of people. The ubiquitous computing revolution is characterised by everyone having not one but dozens of computers doing many utility and specialised tasks; i.e. many computers for everyone. The Virtual Retinal Display typifies this scenario. The user is wirelessly connected to the internet. A camera mounted on the frame offers real time image (people, places, etc.) recognition. Intelligent agents running in the embedded computer display information on the inside of the lens of the glasses. Voice recognition and synthesis provide the human interface. Essentially, you are a node on the internet!" 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. ..." 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 May 15, 2007: With simplified code, programming becomes child's play. By Carolyn Y. Johnson. The Boston Globe (boston.com). "The [Jonas Clarke Middle School] has been beta-testing Scratch [http://scratch.mit.edu/], a new programming language being released today by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. The program, named after the technique hip-hop DJs use to mix music, gives novices the ability to create dynamic programs without wading through a manual, teaching computer programming concepts while encouraging students to play. The goal: turn a daunting subject usually taught in college and considered the domain of geeks into an integral part of education for the grade-school set. ... MIT has 'a very long history of working in this area; finding ways to really engage students at a young age, to encourage their interest in computing and programming, and to give them a sense of mastery to help overcome the false conception that this is a really hard area and you have to be a genius to do it,' said Chris Stephenson , executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association, an organization based in New York that promotes computer science education. Efforts to make computer programming accessible to young people began in the late 1970s with the advent of the personal PC, when another programming language with roots at MIT -- Logo -- allowed young people to draw shapes by steering a turtle around a screen by typing out commands."
>>> Education, Software, Resources for Educators, Systems & Languages, History May 9, 2007: Robotic research centre for Derry. By Press Association and available from UTV. "Thinking robots which interact intelligently with humans - and each other - will become a reality if a new research centre opened in Northern Ireland today has its way. The University of Ulster opened the £20 million centre at its Magee campus in Londonderry where it will carry out intelligence systems research. The university has launched an international search to bring the world`s leading talent in the field to Northern Ireland. The centre will be at the forefront of global research in the fields of robotics, artificial intelligence and intelligent systems. ... Part of the research will focus on the creation of robotics systems that are more intelligent, have a greater understanding of their surroundings and what`s happening around them. ... The centre will also develop bio-inspired computational systems - creating more intelligent machines. ... Finally the centre will work on ambient intelligence, extracting intelligence from wireless sensors - something that could be an aid in the care of the increasingly large elderly population in western Europe."
>>> Academic Departments (@ Resources for Students), Robots, Neuroscience, Systems, Applications January 18, 2007: Fantastic Voyage - Departure 2009. By Emmet Cole. Wired News. "An international team of scientists is developing what they say will be the world's first microrobot -- as wide as two human hairs -- that can swim through the arteries and digestive system. ... The tiny robot, small enough to pass through the heart and other organs, will be inserted using a syringe. Guided by remote control, it will swim to a site within the body to perform a series of tasks, then return to the point of entry where it can be extracted, again by syringe. ... 'I think the use of this sort of technology is like any other technology in the sense that it is subject to the desires, for better or worse, of the people with the ability to make use of it,' [James Friend of the Micro/Nanophysics Research Laboratory at Australia's Monash University, who leads the team] said. 'In light of human history I wouldn't be surprised to see the entire gambit from dystopia to utopia played out in miniature here. Even so, I remain optimistic.'" January 8, 2007: Ancient Text Lisp is a very old computer language, and is still widely used. By Daniel Turner. Technology Review. "Lisp--the list processor language--is 'the greatest single programming language ever designed,' according to computer scientist Alan Kay. It was born in 1958 because John McCarthy, then an assistant professor at MIT, working on new tools for artificial-intelligence research, wanted a language in which one could write programs that would make logical inferences and deductions. ... Steele contends that 'Lisp is the practical application of Church's Thesis.'" [Be sure to follow the link in the article to an excerpt from McCarthy's 1962 Lisp 1.5 Programmer's Manual.] October 17, 2006: 'DNA computer' is unbeatable at tic-tac-toe. By Tom Simonite. NewScientist.com news. "A computer that uses strands of DNA to perform calculations has mastered the game tic-tac-toe. MAYA-II, developed by researchers at Columbia University and the University of New Mexico in the US, uses a system of DNA logic gates to calculate its moves. ... 'MAYA-II moves bio-computation up to the next level of power,' says Joanne Macdonald, a researcher at Columbia University, who helped build the system. 'It's similar to the invention of the first microchips with hundreds of logic gates.'" September 26, 2006: Study Says U.S. Has Lead in Nanotechnology. By Barnaby J. Feder. The New York Times. "The United States continues to lead the world in nanotechnology research, but the influence of the government’s multibillion investment in the field may take decades to become apparent, according to an assessment of the National Nanotechnology Initiative done for Congress. The National Research Council’s hopeful but guarded analysis fulfilled a requirement in a 2003 law that the initiative be reviewed every three years. ... But the report cautioned that too little money was being invested in understanding the potential health and environmental risks of manipulating matter on such a small scale."
>>> Systems, Ethical & Social Implications, The Future July 3, 2006: Getting machines to think like us. Newsmaker interview with John McCarthy. By Jonathan Skillings. CNET News.com. "In 1956, a group of computer scientists gathered at Dartmouth College to delve into a brand-new topic: artificial intelligence. ... It was [John] McCarthy who put the name 'artificial intelligence' to the field of study, just ahead of the conference. With Dartmouth hosting a 50th anniversary conference this month, McCarthy--now a professor emeritus at Stanford University--spoke with CNET News.com about the early expectations for AI, the accomplishments since then and what remains to be done. [Q;] You're credited with coining the term "artificial intelligence" just in time for the 1956 conference. Were you just putting a name to existing ideas, or was it something new that was in the air at that time? ... [Q;] And looking back, do you think that that's the right term? It seems fairly self-evident, but would there be a better way to describe this kind of research? ... [Q;] What are some of the big things that have been learned over the last 50 years that have helped shape research in artificial intelligence? ... [Q:] What's the next big thing, then, to accomplish? ... " July - August 2006: The Semicolon Wars - Every programmer knows there is one true programming language. A new one every week. By Brian Hayes. American Scientist Online. "Programming languages are usually classified in four families. Imperative languages are built on commands: do this, do that, do the next thing. The commands act on stored data, modifying the overall state of the system. The imperative approach was the default in most early programming languages, including Fortran, cobol and Algol. Functional programming began with Lisp, although most versions of Lisp allow other styles of programming as well. John Backus, the lead developer of Fortran and a contributor to Algol, later became an advocate of functional languages. Several 'pure' functional languages have emerged since then, including ML, Miranda and Haskell. In object-oriented programming languages the root idea is to bind together imperative commands and the data they act on, forming encapsulated objects. Instead of defining a procedure to manipulate a data structure, one 'teaches' the data structure how to carry out operations on itself. Most object-oriented languages also have some notion of inheritance, whereby an object is born already knowing default behaviors. The object-oriented languages trace their heritage back to SIMULA 67, but they began to attract attention only in the 1980s with Smalltalk. ... The languages of the fourth category are variously known as logic, relational or declarative languages. What they have in common is the idea of programming not by spelling out step-by-step algorithms but by stating facts or relations. The best-known exemplar of this technique is Prolog, which relies on an method called unification to make deductions from stated facts. ... In the chronology of programming languages, Lisp comes from the very dawn of time. It was conceived nearly 50 years ago by John McCarthy, now of Stanford University." July - August 2006: The Computational Universe. Jürgen Schmidhuber reviews Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos, by Seth Lloyd. American Scientist Online. "In the 1940s, computer pioneer Konrad Zuse began to speculate that the universe might be nothing but a giant computer continually executing formal rules to compute its own evolution. He published the first paper on this radical idea in 1967, and since then it has provoked an ever-increasing response from popular culture (the film The Matrix, for example, owes a great deal to Zuse's theories) and hard science alike. ... Lloyd does somewhat distinguish himself from his predecessors by focusing on the weird world of quantum computation. ... The book's central conceit is that the universe can be viewed as a giant quantum computer made up of connected quantum gates that flip quantum bits and thereby propagate information and uncertainty in an 'infectious' way. ... Lloyd spices his story with interesting and sometimes touching personal tales of his career at the border between computer science and physics." June 23, 2006: Out on a limb. By Stacey Higginbotham. The Deal.com (also available from CET News.com; July 8, 2006). "Advances such as telemedicine and the use of wireless devices in hospitals have become an accepted part of medical technology, but the notion of replacing limbs with computer-powered devices seems more like something out of 'RoboCop' or 'The $6 Million Man.' Since as far back as the Civil War, prosthetic limbs have consisted of unwieldy lumps of wood, plastic or metal. While some advances in materials have improved comfort for amputees, prosthetics still lack the responsiveness and feel of actual limbs. Icelandic prosthetic maker Össur hf. is trying to change that with its Rheo Knee. Billed as the first knee with artificial intelligence, it combines up to 15 sensors, a processor, software and a memory chip to analyze the motion of the prosthetic and learn how to move accordingly. ... Many experts in the bionics field view the next five years as a turning point for combining technology and biology. Hugh Herr, who directs the Biomechatronics group at MIT's media lab, cites two drivers of innovation in the area: availability of funding and progress in several different branches of science. Spending by the military and other groups continues to climb, while advances have been made in battery longevity, chip design, tissue regeneration and robotics, he says." June 19, 2006 @ 2PM: Artificial Intelligence - When Humans Transcend Biology - Web chat with Ray Kurzweil. The Washington Post. "Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil will be online Monday, June 19 at 2 p.m. ET to answer your questions about Artificial Intelligence. ... Beyond the Future is a weeklong series of live Web chats with noted experts and Washington Post reporters examining the kinds of technological advancements the world could see in 20, 50 or even 100 years."
>>> Ethical & Social Implications, Robots, Systems, Applications, Science Fiction, The Future June 8, 2006: New Sensor Feels Fine. By Adrian Cho. ScienceNOW Daily News. "Rivaling the human fingertip's sensitivity to texture, the new sensor could give robots a finer sense of the objects they manipulate and help surgeons feel as well as see their way around the insides of the body. Engineers can give robots eyes and ears by equipping them with video cameras and microphones. But enduing robots with a sense of touch is far more difficult. Simple sensors can tell a machine whether it is in contact with something, but detectors that also sense texture tend either to be too complicated and delicate for commercial use or lack the spatial resolution needed to detect details dozens of micrometers across. Now, chemical engineers Vivek Maheshwari and Ravi Saraf of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, have developed a relatively simple and sturdy sensor that can sense texture about as well as a human fingertip can."
May 29, 2006: Caught up in the 'Net - How the Internet has quietly changed our lives. CNN.com. "'Without question the ability to communicate, share data, develop projects jointly, network has magnified the human mind has changed everything,' says Peter Diamandis. 'The Internet is the nervous system of a new developing "meta-intelligence".' ... However we teach our children and however our society evolves, many scientists already have a clear vision of the way technology is leading us. 'Singularity,' the fusion of human, machine and the communication capacity of the web may enable a spectacular and fundamental shift in our understanding of human consciousness. 'I am still a big believer in Artificial Intelligence; new software 'shells' that surround us as individuals and becomes our interface with the outside world,' says Diamandi. 'These interfaces will allow us to communicate with individuals and machines more efficiently. The Internet will merge into these software shells, serving as a global nervous system interconnecting people to people in the way single cell life-forms grouped into multi-cellular organisms and eventually into an organism as complex as the human body.'" May 22, 2006: Scientists - Computers will be everywhere. United Press International. "Spanish scientists say this decade might become known as the dawn of pervasive computing, during which computers became embedded in nearly everything. The researchers say hardware exists that can easily accommodate features such as artificial intelligence and wireless connectivity and software is quickly catching up."
>>> Systems & Languages, Applications May 12, 2006: Smarter than thou? Stanford conference ponders a brave new world with machines more powerful than their creators. By Tom Abate. San Francisco Chronicle & SFGate.com. "Is technology poised to develop machines that can outsmart their human creators? And what will happen to mere mortals if such superintelligent machines arise? These will be among the questions pondered when experts in artificial intelligence, brain research and other futuristic fields gather at Stanford University on Saturday for what is being called the Singularity Summit. ... The speakers' lineup will include inventor and author Ray Kurzweil, whose recent book, 'The Singularity Is Near,' argues that a fusion of machine and biological intelligence is not only imminent but beneficial. ... More-skeptical speakers will include Douglas Hofstadter, a cognitive scientist at Indiana University who is probably best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, 'Gödel, Escher, Bach.' 'I don't think it's inconceivable that some kind of singularity entity could eventually have superior intelligence to humans, but I'd be very surprised if anything remotely like this happened in the next 100 to 200 years,' Hofstadter said, adding that if and when superintelligent machines arise, the question will be, 'whether we become animals in the zoo, or go extinct or just coexist (with it) like ants.' ... In a way, the daylong summit is shaping up as the Bay Area coming-out party for the tech-inspired philosophy called transhumanism. In a nutshell, transhumanism holds that genetics, nanotechnology and robotics are converging, creating the potential for 'human enhancements.' ... Although little known outside technological circles, transhumanism inspires intense opposition from ethical watchdog groups that dispute the notion that such technological tweaking would represent progress."
>>> The Future, Ethical & Social Implications, Systems; also see this other related interview April 18, 2006: Computers on Stamps. Image gallery from Wired News. "The following images of stamps from around the world are a window into the computer's history. ... Images and captions were provided by Larry Dodson, author of Computers on Stamps and Stationary." April 14, 2006: Life in Silico - A Different Kind of Intelligent Design. Engineers and computer scientists are trying to establish a standard tool kit for an emerging field of biology. By Kim Krieger. Science (Volume 312, Number 5771: pages 189 - 190; subscription req'd). "Just as engineers use the program AutoCad to create structures in virtual space, if an enterprising team of researchers has its way, biologists will have their own software to design and assemble models of organisms and their components. One group has already ventured into this exotic territory--a computer group at Harvard University led by mathematician Jeremy Gunawardena. They soon plan to unveil what they consider the first truly modular program for bio design, called 'Little b.' ... Whether Little b succeeds will depend in part on how it evolves and how widely it is accepted. Not everyone is enchanted with it, because it's based on an abstract language called LISP originally devised for artificial intelligence applications." April 12, 2006: Bionic Technology Takes Center Stage In Pgh. Reported by Bob Allen. KDKA.com & CBS. "This week, Pittsburgh doctors are being educated this week in some incredible technology that brings to mind really the bionic man. It's a robotic knee that helps amputees get around with ease. It is proof that technology is advancing by leaps and bounds. We haven't seen a bionic man yet, but there is a bionic knee or artificial limb that could potentially improve the quality of life for thousands of amputees. ... [Bill Dunham] had his right leg amputated above the knee after he was wounded by friendly fire in 1989 during the Panama conflict. He's seen the technology advance over the last 16 years to the first bionic knee with artificial intelligence." [Video available.]
>>> Assistive Technologies, Robots, Systems, Military, Applications March 27, 2006: Chip ramps up neuron-to-computer communication. By Tom Simonite. NewScientist.com news. "A specialised microchip that could communicate with thousands of individual brain cells has been developed by European scientists. The device will help researchers examine the workings of interconnected brain cells, and might one day enable them to develop computers that use live neurons for memory. ... A team from Italy and Germany worked with the mobile chip maker Infineon to squeeze 16,384 transistors and hundreds of capacitors onto an experimental microchip just 1mm squared." March 23, 2006: 2020 computing: Milestones in scientific computing. By Jacqueline Ruttimann. Nature 440, 399-405. March 15, 2006: Bacteria could power tiny robots. By Michael Kanellos. CNET News.com. "A strain of bacteria that releases electrons as a waste product could become the secret ingredient for developing fuel cells for spy drones and other small robots. Researchers at Rice University and the University of Southern California have embarked on a project to harness the power of Shewanella oneidensis, a microorganism that essentially spits lightning. Rather than consume oxygen to turn food into energy, Shewanella consumes metals." March 9, 2006: 'Mental typewriter' controlled by thought alone. By Will Knight. NewScientist.com news. "A computer controlled by the power of thought alone has been demonstrated at a major trade fair in Germany. The device could provide a way for paralysed patients to operate computers, or for amputees to operate electronically controlled artificial limbs. But it also has non-medical applications, such as in the computer games and entertainment industries. The Berlin Brain-Computer Interface (BBCI) -- dubbed the 'mental typewriter' -- was created by researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin and Charité, the medical school of Berlin Humboldt University in Germany. ... [Gabriel] Curio says users can operate the device just 20 minutes after going through 150 cursor moves in their minds. This is because the device rapidly learns to recognise activity in the area of a person's motor cortex, the area of the brain associated with movement. 'The trick is the machine-learning algorithms developed at the Fraunhofer Institute,' Curio says." February 24, 2006: A Quantum Swimmer Never Gets Tired. By Adrian Cho. ScienceNOW Daily News. "Theorists have pondered the idea of shape-changing robots squirming through a viscous fluid. Such studies provide insight into the finer points of fluid dynamics and might help to create real swimming robots. But taking a more whimsical tack, Joseph Avron and Boris Gutkin of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, and a colleague decided to see what would happen if they shrank the imaginary machines to nanometer size and set them loose in a supercold fluid of particles called fermions. In that extreme scenario, the fermions, like particles of light, behave like waves." February 15, 2006: Slime mould used to create first robot run by living cells. By Alok Jha. The Guardian & Guardian Unlimited. "Ever worried that the terrifying cyborgs that fill sci-fi stories might one day become a reality? Perhaps the latest research by Klaus-Peter Zauner of Southampton University will cause a stir: the engineer has invented a robot that is controlled by living cells. The cells in question are a specially grown type of 'slime mould' that naturally shies away from light. ... The work came out of a collaboration with scientists at Kobe University in Japan, who had been studying ways of using biological cells in robots. Dr Zauner himself had been trying to use individual molecules - rather than instructions from computer programs - to control the functions and movements of robots. ... 'What is very attractive to us is the fact that cells can self-repair and self-restructure, all the things that you can't achieve with conventional technology,' he said. Using biological cells provides some autonomy to the robot's movements. 'In a conventional computer we specify a program and if the computer doesn't do exactly what we want ... there's an error.'"
February 13, 2006: ENIAC - A computer is born. ENIAC -- monster and marvel -- debuted 60 years ago. By Michael Kanellos. CNET News.com. "In February 1946, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly were about to unveil, for the first time, an electronic computer to the world. Their ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, could churn 5,000 addition problems in one second, far faster than any device yet invented. The scientists knew that they had created something that would change history, but they weren't sure how to convey their breakthrough to the public. So they painted numbers on some light bulbs and screwed the resulting 'translucent spheres' into ENIAC's panels. Dynamic, flashy lights would thereafter be associated with the computer in the public mind. That touch of showmanship would later prove fitting for the importance of the ENIAC, which celebrates its 60th anniversary this week at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical of Electrical Engineering. Many historians acknowledge that other computers came earlier -- the Z3 in Germany, England's Colossus, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) at Iowa State. But ENIAC arguably accomplished something more important: It sparked the imagination of scientists and industrialists."
>>> History, Systems, Interviews February 6, 2006: Software That Learns by Doing. Machine-learning techniques have been used to create self-improving software for decades, but recent advances are bringing these tools into the mainstream. By Gary H. Anthes. Computerworld. "Attempts to create self-improving software date to the 1960s. But 'machine learning,' as it's often called, has remained mostly the province of academic researchers, with only a few niche applications in the commercial world, such as speech recognition and credit card fraud detection. Now, researchers say, better algorithms, more powerful computers and a few clever tricks will move it further into the mainstream. ... [Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory] used several new machine-learning techniques in software that literally drove an autonomous car 132 miles across the desert to win a $2 million prize.... Computer scientist Tom Mitchell, director of the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery at Carnegie Mellon University, says machine learning is useful for the kinds of tasks that humans do easily -- speech and image recognition, for example -- but that they have trouble explaining explicitly in software rules. In machine-learning applications, software is 'trained' on test cases devised and labeled by humans, scored so it knows what it got right and wrong, and then sent out to solve real-world cases. Mitchell is testing the concept of having two classes of learning algorithms in essence train each other.... Stuart Russell, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is experimenting with languages in which programmers write code for the functions they understand well but leave gaps for murky areas. Into the gaps go machine-learning tools, such as artificial neural networks. Russell has implemented his 'partial programming' concepts in a language called Alisp, an extension of Lisp. ... Meanwhile, research is pushing forward in a branch of machine learning called genetic programming (GP), in which software evolves in a Darwinian fashion." February 6, 2006 : Code-Breaker - The life and death of Alan Turing. Jim Holt's review of David Leavitt’s, "The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer" (Norton/Atlas). The New Yorker. "With the backing of John Maynard Keynes, he was elected a Fellow of King’s College in 1935, at the age of twenty-two. ... That spring, attending lectures in the foundations of mathematics, he was introduced to a deep and unresolved matter known as the 'decision problem.' A few months later, during one of his habitual runs, he lay down in a meadow and conceived a sort of abstract machine that settled it in an unexpected way. The decision problem asks, in essence, whether reasoning can be reduced to computation. That was the dream of the seventeenth-century philosopher Gottfried von Leibniz, who imagined a calculus of reason that would permit disagreements to be resolved by taking pen in hand and saying, Calculemus --- 'Let us calculate.' Suppose, that is, you have a set of premises and a putative conclusion. Is there some automatic procedure for deciding whether the former entails the latter? ... By ruthlessly paring away inessential details, he arrived at an idealized machine that, he was convinced, captured the essence of the process. The machine was somewhat homely in conception: it consists of an unending tape divided into squares (rather like an infinite strip of toilet paper). Over this tape a little scanner travels back and forth, one square at a time, writing and erasing 0’s and 1’s. ... Turing was able to do some amazing things with his abstract devices, which soon became known as 'Turing machines.' ... The boldest idea to emerge from Turing’s analysis was that of a universal Turing machine: one that, when furnished with the number describing the mechanism of any particular Turing machine, would perfectly mimic its behavior. In effect, the 'hardware' of a special-purpose computer could be translated into 'software' and then entered like data into the universal machine, where it would be run as a program.... At Princeton, Turing took the first steps toward building a working model of his imaginary computer, pondering how to realize its logical design in a network of relay-operated switches; he even managed to get into a machine shop in the physics department and construct some of the relays himself. In addition to his studies with [Alonzo] Church, he also had dealings with the formidable John von Neumann, who would later be credited with innovations in computer architecture that Turing himself had pioneered. ... Back at Cambridge, he became a regular at Ludwig Wittgenstein’s seminar on the foundations of mathematics. ... When Turing arrived at Bletchley Park, no work was being done on the naval Enigma, which many considered to be unbreakable. Indeed, it has been said, there were only two people who thought the Enigma could be broken: Frank Birch, the head of Bletchley’s naval-intelligence division, because it had to be broken; and Alan Turing, because it was an interesting problem. ... By 1942, Turing had mastered most of the theoretical problems posed by the Enigma. Now that the United States was ready to throw its vast resources into the code-breaking effort, he was dispatched as a liaison to Washington, where he helped the Americans get their own Bombe-making and Enigma-monitoring under way. Then he headed to New York, where he was to work on another top-secret project, involving the encryption of speech, at Bell Laboratories, which were then situated near the piers in Greenwich Village. While at Bell Labs, he became engrossed with a question that came to occupy his postwar work: was it possible to build an artificial brain?" February 2, 2006: PDP Planet.com - Computer History and Restoration Archive. Interview with Rich Alderson, the project's chief systems administrator. WebTalkGuys World Radio Show on Web Talk Radio, with hosts, Rob and Dana Greenlee. [Note: the broadcast can be accessed from several sources including this page at Yahoo! Podcasts.] "Rich Alderson: The kinds of programming that got done on systems like the DEC-10 and the DEC-20 were some of the biggest breakthroughs in areas like artificial intelligence and databases -- these things were invented on this kind of hardware and it was done in what was a very limited resource environment. Large disk drives were under 500 megabytes ... that's megabytes. ... We had to be smart about how we programmed. What Paul wanted to see was that the techniques that we learned under those conditions didn’t get lost when it came time for people to have to do the same sort of thing on a 500-gigabyte disk and a CPU that ran literally one million times as fast as the ones we were using. ... Rob Greenlee: Talk about what you can do at the site itself. ... You give [online] access to these older systems to help people learn ... " January 30, 2006: Man Machine - Robotic Exoskeletons. The Engineer (subscription req'd). "While many of the biggest recent advances in robotics have concerned artificial intelligence and enhanced autonomy, hopes are high that this parallel strand of development - a marriage of brain and machine - could soon yield results in a range of applications. ... Just as human bodies have evolved over time, so the systems for automated and robotic therapy change. 'There is a very wide spectrum of technologies that is being deployed,' said Prof David Bradley of the University of Abertay, Dundee's school of computing and creative technologies." January 10 - 17, 2006: Singularity - Ubiquity interviews Ray Kurzweil. Ubiquity (Volume 7, Issue 1). "Kurzweil: There are two key aspects to the concept of singularity -- the hardware and software sides of emulating human intelligence. We'll have sufficient hardware to recreate human intelligence pretty soon. We'll have it in a supercomputer by 2010. A thousand dollars of computation will equal the 10,000 trillion calculations per second that I estimate is necessary to emulate the human brain by 2020. The software side will take a little longer. In order to achieve the algorithms of human intelligence, we need to actually reverse-engineer the human brain, understand its principles of operation. And there again, not surprisingly, we see exponential growth where we are doubling the spatial resolution of brain scanning every year, and doubling the information that we're gathering about the brain every year. ... You may wonder: 'OK, what's the big deal with that? We already have human intelligence; in fact, we've got six billion human brains running around, so why do we need more?' One of the answers to that question is that it will be a very powerful combination to combine the subtle and supple powers of human pattern recognition with ways in which machines are already superior. Machines can think more quickly than we can. They're much better at logical thinking and much better at remembering things: a $1000 notebook computer can remember billions of things accurately whereas we're hard-pressed to remember a handful of phone numbers. And most importantly, machines can share their knowledge, their skills, and their insights at electronic speed, which is a million times faster than human language. My second point is that nonbiological intelligence, once it achieves human levels, will double in power every year, whereas human intelligence -- biological intelligence -- is fixed. ... Computers can't pass the Turing test today, but I'm predicting that they'll be able to do it in 2029. ... Ubiquity: Someone like H.G. Wells went from science and technology into world government and large social issues and such. Have you attempted to follow his example? Kurzweil: Well, I am involved with one important aspect, and that is to study the downside to these technologies. I'm not a utopian, and my view is not a utopian perspective. I've been articulating the dangers and downsizing of these technologies for a long time. Are you familiar with Bill Joy's 'Wired' cover story? ... " December 12, 2005: High-Tech for Seniors Moves Beyond Clapper. By Randolph E. Schmid. The Associated Press / available from the Chicago Tribune. "New technologies for seniors, supplementing conveniences like The Clapper and emergency warnings like Life Alert, are on display this week at the White House Conference on Aging. The goal is to provide technologies that 'help seniors and their families live happy and healthy in their own home,' said Eric Dishman, chairman of the Center for Aging Services Technologies, or CAST, and general manager and global director of Intel Health Research and Innovation Group. ... Health Watch has a medicine cabinet that can be programmed to keep track of what medicine it holds and when it should be taken. A built-on camera scans the face of the person at the cabinet and a voice can remind that it's time to take a pill. If the wrong bottle is chosen, the voice warns of the error."
>>> Assisitive Technologies, Robots, Speech, Systems, Applications, Events (@ Resources for Students); also see this related article December 8, 2005: A 'quantum' leap in communication - Superfast computers use photons, atoms. By Sarah Staples. The Ottawa Citizen. "American researchers [at the Georgia Institute of Technology] have taken a giant leap toward building future 'quantum' telecommunications networks and computers that could process information using combinations of matter and light. ... Ultimately, it might help usher in an age of computers and robots that would be capable of processing information at speeds well beyond the fastest, most formidable of today's supercomputers, the authors say. Quantum computing 'would be very useful for research that takes huge computational power,' said Thierry Chaneliere, the physicist and first author of a paper [published in Nature] with professors Alex Kuzmich and Brian Kennedy. ... 'Biology, medical applications like testing new drugs, artificial intelligence, robotics, weather simulation -- fields where you really need a lot of intelligence to simulate complex situations would all benefit,' said Mr. Chaneliere." December 8, 2005: Cyborg Suits Strut the Catwalk. By Mark Baard. Wired News. "It's been 10 years since Alex 'Sandy' Pentland's graduate students began strolling around the MIT campus looking like cyborgs, straining under the weight of bulky 'wearable' computers and heavy-duty eyeglasses with built-in displays. Now Pentland is taking a lighter approach to the problem of melding man and machine, collaborating with haute couture designers such as Jean Paul Gaultier on cyborg-inspired fashions built from so-called smart fabrics. Designs incorporating computer chips and sensors could monitor the wearer's health, or extend their social network, Pentland said.... Pentland encouraged scientists to look beyond the new coatings to the applications possible with wearable sensors and computers -- heart-rate monitoring systems and cognitive aids that could help memory-impaired people remember faces and complete day-to-day tasks." December 6, 2005: Developer keeps computing 'til the cows come home. By Jeanne-Vida Douglas. The Sydney Morning Herald. "Peter Corke wants to strap a computer to every cow in Australia. But he isn't stopping there. The CSIRO's research director for the Autonomous Systems Laboratory wants to sling computers from trees, throw them into rivers, and even partially bury them in soil. He then wants to get these devices to communicate and so create farms without fences, and waterways and pastures that self-regulate by warning livestock away before the land becomes overgrazed and barren. ... The idea of creating a network of tiny autonomous sensor devices harks back to the mid-'90s when the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency backed Kris Pister, a professor of robotics at the University of California Berkeley, to develop so-called smart dust. In theory smart dust would consist of tiny networked sensor devices that were designed to be scattered in the battlefield in order to gather intelligence, monitor borders and track troop movements." December 5, 2005: A motivated room. TRN Reserch News Roundup. "Intelligent rooms aim to track movement, recognize gestures and understand spoken commands in order to control lights, project information on the walls and tell you who called while you were out. ... Intelligent rooms will never be practical if they require a team of technicians to adjust them every time someone moves a camera or behaves in a way the room doesn't expect. ... Researchers from the University of Sydney in Australia have come up with a scheme that uses artificial intelligence software dubbed intrinsically motivated learning agents to make intelligent environments more intelligent." December 4, 2005: The Wi-Fi Wizard - Soon consumers will carry devices that sense their location and tell them what's available to buy. So says Northwestern expert Kristian Hammond, co-inventor of 'intelligent' software called Watson. By Jon Van. Chicago Tribune. "Q: As consumer products gain more computer intelligence, how will they change? A: Three trends are at work. Wi-Fi connects our portable devices at tremendous speeds. These devices sense where you are, so you get media associated with that location. All products are getting radio frequency ID tags. ... Q: How does computer intelligence come into this? A: It's all about systems anticipating your needs. The location-based capabilities [of the device] act as sensors, figuring out where you are, what you're doing. Artificial intelligence says: given this, what might you need? It gets information to people based on the context of their activity. The Watson software does that with computers. ... Q: So in the near future, we'll carry machines that know more about what we want than we do? ... Q: Does this raise privacy concerns? ..." November 21, 2005: Neat package takes gamers to the next level. By Matthew Yi. San Francisco Chronicle & SFGate.com. "The differences in the new Xbox 360 from its predecessor are not only on the outside, but under the hood. The central processing unit, the brains of the system, is a chip package containing three cores, each running at 3.2 GHz. The graphics chip is a custom processor from ATI Technologies that runs at 500 MHz. The result is a powerful computing system that takes graphics another step toward cinematic realism and improves artificial intelligence, which can make taking out a bad guy hiding behind a barrier more difficult." November 21, 2005: Computer R&D rocks on - Recomputing the Future (first of three parts). By Rick Merritt. EE Times. "Think computers have become a commodity, like pork bellies, and computer science an old set of solved problems? Think again. The computer research agenda is as big as ever before, if not bigger. Experts see important breakthroughs and whole new fields of investigation just opening up. Advances will come in natural-language searches, machine learning, computer vision and speech-to-text, as well as new computing architectures to handle those hefty tasks. Beyond the decade mark, Edward D. Lazowska, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington, expects computers based on quantum physics. November 15, 2005: Unto us the Machine is born. By Kevin Kelly. The Sydney Morning Herald [originally published in Wired: We Are the Web; Issue 13.08 - August 2005]. "The web continues to evolve from an entity ruled by mass media and mass audiences to one ruled by messy media and messy participation. How far can this frenzy of creativity go? ... What matters is the network of social creation, the community of collaborative interaction that futurist Alvin Toffler called prosumption. ... The real transformation under way is more akin to what Sun Microsystem's John Gage had in mind in 1988 when he famously said: 'The network is the computer.' His phrase sums up the destiny of the web: as the operating system for a megacomputer that encompasses the internet, all its services, all peripheral chips and affiliated devices from scanners to satellites, and the billions of human minds entangled in this global network. This gargantuan Machine already exists in a primitive form. In the coming decade, it will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies, but our minds. ... This planet-sized computer is comparable in complexity to a human brain. Both the brain and the web have hundreds of billions of neurons, or webpages. ... Danny Hillis, a computer scientist who once claimed he wanted to make an AI 'that would be proud of me', has invented massively parallel supercomputers, in part to advance us in that direction. He now believes the first real AI will emerge not in a stand-alone supercomputer such as IBM's proposed 23-teraflop Blue Brain, but in the vast tangle of the global Machine. ... Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush outlined the web's core idea - hyperlinked pages - in 1945, but the first person to try to build on the concept was a freethinker named Ted Nelson, who in 1965 envisioned his own scheme, which he called 'Xanadu'." November 14, 2005: Supercomputers set processor pace. BBC News. "IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer has kept its position as the most powerful number cruncher in the world. Its hold on the top slot was revealed in the latest list of the Top 500 supercomputers on Earth. Blue Gene/L was top of the biannually produced list because in June 2005 it set a new world record performance of 280.6 trillion calculations per second." October 26, 2005: New Microscopic Robot's Tiny Step Is a Huge Leap. By Brian Handwerk. National Geographic News. "Researchers have built one of the world's smallest controllable robots -- a machine tinier than the period that ends this sentence. The miniscule device is as narrow as a human hair. Its inventors note that some 200 of them could line up across the top of an M&M candy. A lab headed by Bruce Donald, a computer science professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, designed the robot. ... 'Cleary it's a really neat thing to have done,' said Kristofer Pister, a professor in the University of California at Berkeley's Robotics and Intelligent Machines Laboratory.... Pister notes that microrobots at this scale currently depend on much larger support apparatus, like the specially designed floor. In the future, he'd like to see them function on their own -- and also pack a more technologically sophisticated punch. ... Shrinking robots is a growing field of research. For that reason much of Dartmouth's microrobots' design will be in the public domain." October 25, 2005: Tech talk - The Furute is Nanobots. By San Grewal. Toronto Star (registration req'd.). "Some of Ray Kurzweil's ideas about the future may seem way too futuristic. But the Massachusetts-based computer scientist, inventor and author is convinced that artificial intelligence will completely change human life. 'Nonbiological intelligence will match the capabilities of human intelligence by 2029. And in the 2030s we will merge with this technology by sending intelligent nanobots (micro robots) into our brains through the capillaries,' Kurzweil wrote in an email interview. ... In the future, we will be media-savvy cyborgs. But we won't have to watch any more commercials -- unless we want to. 'For the next generation the quote won't be 'the medium is the message.' 'It will be 'I am the media,' says Watts Wacker, the former resident futurist at Stanford University's Stanford Research Institute. ... Futurist and University of Toronto professor Steve Mann agrees with [Ann] Clurman that a backlash could happen. Even though the electrical and computer engineer has invented a number of advanced computer devices and is considered one of the world's leading cyborg experts, Mann says if technology is only used to make people's lives more complicated the natural reaction will be to pull back." October 21, 2005: Nanobots Will Help Battle Ills In Future. By Brian Deagon. Investor's Business Daily & Investors.com. "Ray Kurzweil wears many hats. He's a prolific inventor and businessman. He wrote a book on how to live forever. He speaks eloquently on technology, artificial intelligence, genetics and robotics. But he is best known as a futurist. His new book, 'The Singularity Is Near,' is a bold view of what the world could be like in 30 years and beyond. And just how might that world be? Well, your best friend might be one you build yourself. Kurzweil's view of the future includes computers that function just like a human brain, with emotions. ... Kurzweil recently spoke with IBD about this brave new world. IBD: How did you become a futurist? ... IBD: Couldn't a computer go bad, just like some humans do? Kurzweil: I discuss this promise vs. peril of technology in my book. One of the most daunting is pathological artificial intelligence. How do you protect yourself from an intelligent entity that's destructive? My response is that AI will not be off in one corner. It will be deeply integrated into our civilization, society, our bodies and brains. And we will have conflicts with our enhanced intelligence. The way to counteract that is to keep our values of openness, freedom, civil liberties and democracy alive in our civilization. Because we are going to merge with the machines. IBD: So we shouldn't worry about machines taking control? ..." October 11, 2005: At Dartmouth, a Remote-Controlled Robot. By Kenneth Chang. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "For a steerable piece of dust, look somewhere at Dartmouth College. Researchers there have built what they say is the world's smallest untethered, controllable robot. When placed on a penny, it looks like a mole on the side of Lincoln's chin, measuring a hundredth of an inch by one four-hundredth of an inch. A traffic jam of 200 of them would stretch the length of an M&M. The robot contains no motors or circuitry. Rather, it is a carefully carved piece of silicon that moves across a special surface that contains an embedded electrical grid." [Video available via a sidebar link.] October 10, 2005: The Mind of an Inventor - He built his first computer as a child. In his 20s, he had moved on to supercomputers. Now Danny Hillis is thinking of bigger things. By Steven Levy. Newsweek / available from MSNBC.com. "The more complicated question is what makes a great inventor possible. Though [Danny] Hillis may not be a household word, he's definitely on the radar of those in the top ranks of science, government and business. ... Nonetheless, he insists that 'people tend to overestimate the individual inventor and underestimate the system that makes their inventions real.' If that's so, Hillis is a case where the system worked. He is a child not only of science but scientists.... As an MIT sophomore he built a computer out of Tinkertoys. But as he hung out at the school's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (he actually moved into the basement of its famous leader Marvin Minsky), he became consumed with creating a machine that could think. 'I want,' he once said, 'to build a computer that would be proud of me.' To pursue this goal, he rethought the architecture of the modern computer, whose 'brain' typically consisted of a single processor. Hillis imagined a supercomputer with thousands of processors all working together. Not only did this idea of 'parallel processing' become his doctoral thesis but, while still a grad student, he started a company based on it, called (what else?) Thinking Machines. ... There's nothing not possible. Maybe believing that is what makes an inventor. ... That upbeat sense of experimentation permeates the giant toy shop of Applied Minds." October 5 - 11, 2005: Indus: A New Platform for Ubiquitous Computing. By Kallol Borah. Ubiquity (Volume 6, Issue 36). "Indus is a software agent platform for ubiquitous computing. Ubiquitous computing is a term used to generally refer to computing across software platforms and hardware devices to seamlessly interface human to machine and machine to machine. Work on platforms for ubiquitous computing have been continuing throughout the past decade in academic and industry research organizations. The Indus project was conceptualized in 2002 and prototypes implemented at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore to demonstrate how general purpose object oriented programming languages can be extended to enable ubiquitous computing applications. ... The primary components of the Indus platform comprise of a programming language to implement software agents, libraries to provide services to agents on a distributed network and containers or run time environments to enable deployment of agents on a variety of hardware platforms starting from 8 bit devices onwards. In Indus, software agents represent language abstractions that are autonomic, adapt to existing computing environments and coordinate with other agents to cooperatively execute tasks." October 3, 2005: 2 way-out views of technology's role in shaping the future - Inventor predicts the fusion of human and machines; author says let go of technological fixes for humans' sake Tom Abate. San Francisco Chronicle & SFGate.com. "Inventor Ray Kurzweil's new book, 'The Singularity Is Near,' predicts the fusion of humans and machines to create powerful and potentially immortal life forms. In his book, 'Enough,' environmentalist Bill McKibben says that unless we forgo such technological fixes, and accept death, we will ultimately cease to be human. Between these extremes rages a debate about the role that technology will -- or should -- play in shaping the future. ... Kurzweil believes post-Singularity humans will cheat death. He writes: 'When our human hardware crashes ... software-based humans ... will live out on the Web, projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including virtual bodies in diverse realms of virtual reality.' Kurzweil admits the potential perils of a cyborgian future. He cites the 2000 essay, 'Why the Future Doesn't Need Us,' in which software-guru-turned-venture-capitalist Bill Joy argued that, 'We are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakes.' ... Kurzweil also acknowledges broader critiques from opposing thinkers like McKibben, whose 1989 book, 'The End of Nature,' put global warming into the public lexicon. McKibben's 2003 book, 'Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age,' established him as a critic of tinkering with ourselves."
>>> Ethical & Social Implications, Systems September 29, 2005: Deciphering a brave new world. By Declan McCullagh. CNET News.com. "Ray Kurzweil was one of the most remarkable and prolific inventors of the late 20th century. Now Kurzweil, who can claim credit for developing the first text-to-speech synthesizer and the first CCD flat-bed scanner, is busy inventing a future in which humans merge with machines and the pace of technological development accelerates beyond recognition. ... CNET News.com spoke with Kurzweil on Wednesday about his book tour, his views of the melding of man and machine and the political ramifications of having hyper-intelligence initially available to the very wealthy. ... [Q:] Your concept of the future relies heavily on 'Strong AI,' the idea that artificial intelligence will become self-aware and eventually surpass human intelligence. But it seems like AI researchers have abandoned that idea for focused real-world applications like face recognition. I was at a speech this week where computer science professor Rudy Rucker said that Strong AI was dead. Kurzweil: There are hundreds of applications where AI is performing projects that would have required a human level of intelligence a few years ago. Those include diagnosing heart disease, routing e-mail messages, cell phone routing, landing planes. We are now in an era of narrow AI, meaning it's not Strong AI. It's not the full range of human intelligence. But it's performing functions that used to require human intelligence. Looking for credit card fraud is one example of that. These were research projects 15 years ago. This isn't 2029. We'll make a billion-fold increase in hardware capacity between now and then. ... [Q:] You say in your book that augmented humans will run software programs and that 'government authorities will have a legitimate need on occasion to monitor these software streams' in our brains. Doesn't that sound Orwellian? Kurzweil: I think there's going to have to be a balance, like there is today. We need to be keenly aware of the empowerment that these technologies provide. We have an existential risk right now in terms of the ability to bioengineer biological viruses. Nanotechnology will have destructive applications. So will Strong AI. ... " [audio available] September 24, 2005: E-nose to sniff out hospital superbugs. By Paul Marks. New Scientist (Issue 2518: page 30). "E-noses analyse gas samples by passing the gas over an array of electrodes coated with different conducting polymers. Each electrode reacts to particular substances by changing its electrical resistance in a characteristic way. Combining the signals from all the electrodes gives a 'smell-print' of the chemicals in the mixture that neural network software built into the e-nose can learn to recognise. ... David Morgan, a surgeon at the hospital, says the idea of sniffing out superbugs came to him one day in the operating theatre. 'I was operating on neck abscesses on two different patients and noticed their infections had slightly different smells, so I wondered if a machine could work out what the bacterial infections were from the smell alone.'" September 16, 2005: Tiniest remote-controlled robot created. By Celeste Biever. NewScientist.com news. "The tiniest mobile robot ever has been created by US researchers. It is a sliver of silicon one ten thousandth of a millimetre thick that can be precisely steered like a remote-control car to move in any direction across the surface of a special plate. ... Its creators lead by Bruce Donald of Dartmouth University in Hanover, New Hampshire will present it at the International Symposium for Robotics Research on 14 October." Videos can be accessed via a link in the article. September 12, 2005: Georgia Tech's Ronald Arkin. "Technology Research News Editor Eric Smalley carried out an email conversation with Georgia Institute of Technology professor Ronald C. Arkin in August of 2005 that covered the economics of labor, making robots as reliable as cars, getting robots to trust people, biorobotics, finding the boundaries of intimate relationships with robots, how much to let robots manipulate people, giving robots a conscience, robots as humane soldiers and The Butlerian Jihad. ... TRN: Tell me more about what ever-increasing computational power is likely to enable and how supercomputing will enable fundamentally new approaches to problems. Arkin: Some of my colleagues feel more strongly than I do on this subject, e.g., interpreting Hans Moravec; it would seem that it's simply a matter of time that advances in computational speed will enable human-level intelligence in machines. My tack is somewhat different... I believe that now with better tools, we can explore our understanding, development and implementation of intelligence in novel ways, perhaps, for example, by creating highly efficient distributed and parallel machines that can enable us to better understand and recreate intelligence. The end result will be new paradigms. What specifically they will be remains to be seen, but just as better ships enabled man to voyage further on his expeditions, even into space, so will better computational engines facilitate new discoveries of this sort. TRN: Tell me about trends in robotics. What are the pluses and minuses of the technologies as they exist today? What do you see as the most urgent needs in robotics research and development? Arkin: ...." September 8, 2005: Coming to grips with robot learning. IST Results. "A 'living' artificial hand that learns through imitation has been developed, enhancing human-machine communication and paving the way for novel prosthetic aides. ... Exploring the functional and neuropsychological mechanisms of imitation learning was the aim of the ArteSImit project funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies initiative of the IST programme. The overarching goal was to reveal the neurophysiological structures for finger and hand movements in humans and monkeys, and design a computer-operational dynamic model of imitation learning. ... Research will be continued within the follow-up project JAST, which took up some of the ArteSImit findings. JAST aims to develop jointly-acting autonomous systems that communicate and work intelligently on mutual tasks in dynamic unstructured environments expanding the concept of group to human plus artificial agents." September 8, 2005: Clever artificial hand developed. BBC News. "At present, prosthetic hands either do not move at all or have a simple single-motor grip. But the University of Southampton team has designed a prototype that uses six sets of motors and gears so each of the five fingers can move independently. ... The human thumb can move in special ways the fingers cannot. ... To mimic this, the Remedi-Hand uses two motors - one to allow it to rotate and one to allow it to flex. The researchers say it has the first artificially-made opposable thumb. ... The next stage will be to integrate the latest sensor technology to create a 'clever' hand which can sense how strongly it is gripping an object, or whether an object is slipping." August 19, 2005: Supercomputer's key to the brain. The quest to simulate the mammalian brain on the world's most powerful supercomputer is neuroscience's most ambitious project yet. David Reid went to Lausanne in Switzerland to find out how the line is being blurred between man and machine. By David Reid. BBC News Click Online programme (video available via article sidebar). "Man has long wanted to discover the secrets of the brain, and has done so with varying degrees of success. Recently advancements in this area of science have been limited by the power of computers. But at Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, the Blue Brain Project aims to change this by simulating the structures and functions of the brain. The project's head, Professor Henry Markram, says that in the past there was no software environment capable of simulating the brain. ... 'We are not trying to build an intelligent device or robot or anything like that,' explains Professor Markram. 'We are trying to understand the brain, and one pathway is to take our available knowledge of the brain and put it to a test inside a model.' ... Mix brain research with one of the world's most powerful computers and people start wondering about artificial intelligence and whether a computer will ever be conscious or have, as they often appear to, a mind of its own. Markus Baertschi says that the computing power is not really up to it at the moment." August 18, 2005: The human touch - Robots need skin like ours to provide sensory data essential for even basic tasks. By Laura Spinney. The Guardian. "It was a nice idea: robots that vacuum the living room, lower the baby into the bath - having first tested the water - and carry granny upstairs to bed. Today's robots are more likely to scald the baby and vacuum granny. But the domestic revolution came a step closer this week when Japanese researchers reported the development of an artificial skin that senses both pressure and temperature, and stretches like human skin. ... 'Skin-like sensitivity, or the capability to recognise tactile information, will be an essential feature of future generations of robots,' [Takao] Someya says. ... [Fumiya] Iida says Someya' s skin could make a big difference. ... With that level of sensory discrimination, he says, a robot could detect more variation in the objects it encounters, and perhaps begin to learn about relationships between objects, their functions and meaning. That knowledge would in turn affect how it interacts with its environment. ... 'The skin is crucial for the development of a consciousness of the boundary between the robot or the organism and its environment,' says Riccardo Manzotti...." August 15, 2005: Thin skin will help robots 'feel'. BBC News. "Japanese researchers have developed a flexible artificial skin that could give robots a humanlike sense of touch. The team manufactured a type of 'skin' capable of sensing pressure and another capable of sensing temperature. These are supple enough to wrap around robot fingers and relatively cheap to make, the researchers have claimed. The University of Tokyo team describe their work in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ... The University of Tokyo scientists say their breakthrough has the potential to improve how robots will function in the real world."
>>> Systems, Robots; also see this additional article August 15, 2005: Long Live AI. Opinion by Ray Kurzweil. Forbes.com. "Many people think the so-called AI winter in the 1980s, when many AI companies folded, was the end of the story. But boom-bust cycles are sometimes harbingers of true revolutions (recall the railroad frenzy of the 19th century), and we see the same phenomenon in AI. Artificial intelligence permeates our economy. It's what I define as 'narrow' AI: machine intelligence that equals or exceeds human intelligence for specific tasks. ... AI programs diagnose heart disease, fly and land airplanes, guide autonomous weapons, make automated investment decisions for a trillion dollars' worth of funds and guide industrial processes. ... So what are the prospects for 'strong' AI, which I describe as machine intelligence with the full range of human intelligence? ... To understand the principles of human intelligence we need to reverse-engineer the human brain. ... The killer app of strong AI, combined with nanotechnology, will be blood-cell-size robots called nanobots. We'll have billions of them traveling in our bloodstream...." August 10 - 16, 2005: What the Dormouse Said: An interview with John Markoff. Ubiquity (Volume 6, Issue 29). "UBIQUITY: Congratulations on 'What the Dormouse Said' --- it's a fascinating book. Tell us about it. MARKOFF: Well, I guess I'd call it a revisionist history. It about things that happened around Stanford University between roughly 1960 and 1975, and is a kind of pre-history of personal computing and the personal computer industry. What I was trying to do was to get at some of the culture through which the technology was developed. UBIQUITY: Why the cultural emphasis? MARKOFF: Because technology never happens in a vacuum. The book was an effort to try to pin down how personal computing first emerged around the Stanford campus at two laboratories in the 1960's: one was run by John McCarthy, and was called the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; and the other was run by Doug Engelbart and known as the Augmentation Research Center or the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center. ..." August 7, 2005: Linux Robot - Could Be A Hero, Could Be A Toaster. Researchers are developing robots that run on Linux to do search-and-rescue in environments unsafe for people. By Mary Hayes. InformationWeek. "At LinuxWorld in San Francisco this week, scientists from SRI International's Artificial Intelligence Center demonstrated Linux-based robots that can search for objects and people in environments unsafe for rescue workers, such as the site of a chemical spill or an earthquake-damaged building. The research project is sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Linux was chosen for the robots, called Centibots, because they require a small, reliable operating system that has drivers for a variety of devices, can be automatically installed, and have a journaling file system, says Regis Vincent, a scientist with the nonprofit research institute." July 13 / 20, 2005: TRN's Top 10 Stories. Technology Research News. "The first half of 2005 was an exciting time for science and technology. TRN's top 10 picks encompass a wide range of technologies, from robotics to tissue engineering to natural language understanding. ... Making machines to do the dirty work: Computer vision, natural language processing and humanoid robotics are all about making machines more like people with the goal of handing off tedious, dangerous and dirty jobs to machines. ... Computer Vision: Advances in computer vision and image processing enable a pair of different areas: making machines that see as well as humans do, and making machines that see in ways humans can't. ... Another advance gives computers the relatively simple ability -- for humans -- to glance at a desk top and recognize the printed documents lying on it. ... Humanoid Robotics: Humanoid robotics is one of the most ambitious fields in technology research because it involves replicating human abilities to see, hear, walk and grasp objects -- abilities that evolved over millions of years. Most of this work involves complicated science and tricky engineering. ... Self-Assembly: ..Related to the notion of self-assembly are machines that reproduce, reconfigure and repair themselves. In a significant milestone, researchers developed simple modular robots that reproduce themselves. ... Natural Language Processing: Natural language processing research encompasses the long-term goal of giving computers the ability to understand language and shorter-term projects aimed at building tools that interpret and/or generate natural language for specific tasks. One area of atoms research focuses on converting natural language to computer code in order to allow nonprogrammers to write software." July 11, 2005: Sen. Clinton sounds off on Iraq, but not 2008 ambitions. By John Colson. The Aspen Times. "[New York Sen. Hillary] Clinton was speaking on the same stage that Bill Clinton had occupied two days earlier as part of the Aspen Institute's Aspen Ideas Festival. ... She noted that America has been on the crest of previous waves of progress, from the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century to the explosion of personal computers and creation of the Internet in the 20th century. But the pace of change is accelerating, she said, and there is no telling what the 'steam engine and the computer chip of this century will be.' One example of the next wave, Clinton said, is nanotechnology, the science of miniaturizing computers to the point where they are scarcely larger than a single cell. Clinton said she has been a sponsor of legislation supporting such research, but pointed out that other nations also are working along similar lines. An example of breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, she said, is ongoing research to develop silicon retinas - implants that could allow blind people to see or give the gift of sight to a robot. And, she said, the International Space Station is to soon be run by a voice activated computer named 'Clarissa,' much like 'Hal' the computer in the seminal science fiction film '2001: A Space Odyssey.'" July 3, 2005: Hurtling toward a brave new world. Book review by Lynn Yarris. The Mercury News. "Distinguishing fact from fantasy when it comes to the augmentation of human abilities is becoming increasingly difficult. What was science fiction at the end of the last century is making headlines in this one. A preview of what's in store is now available in one of the most provocative, entertaining and, yes, frightening science books in years. 'We are at an inflection point in history,' writes Joel Garreau. 'Four interrelated, intertwining technologies are cranking up to modify human nature. Call them the GRIN technologies -- the genetic, robotic, information and nano processes. These four advances are intermingling and feeding on one another, and they are collectively creating a curve of change unlike anything we humans have ever seen.' Garreau, a reporter and editor at the Washington Post, is a solid researcher with a fine sense of storytelling. In 'Radical Evolution,' he relies heavily on interviews with an engaging array of experts in the various GRIN technologies. ... Garreau lays out three scenarios for what might unfold over the next 25 years." July 2, 2005: Entering a dark age of innovation. By Robert Adler. NewScientist.com news. "[F]ar from being in technological nirvana, we are fast approaching a new dark age. That, at least, is the conclusion of Jonathan Huebner, a physicist working at the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California. He says the rate of technological innovation reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since. ... It's an unfashionable view. Most futurologists say technology is developing at exponential rates. ... Huebner draws some stark lessons from his analysis. The global rate of innovation today, which is running at seven 'important technological developments' per billion people per year, matches the rate in 1600. Despite far higher standards of education and massive R&D funding 'it is more difficult now for people to develop new technology', Huebner says. ... At the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a non-profit think tank in San Pedro, California, John Smart examines why technological change is progressing so fast. Looking at the growth of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, Smart agrees with [Ray] Kurzweil that we are rocketing toward a technological 'singularity' - a point sometime between 2040 and 2080 where change is so blindingly fast that we just can't predict where it will go. Smart also accepts Huebner's findings, but with a reservation. Innovation may seem to be slowing even as its real pace accelerates, he says, because it's slipping from human hands and so fading from human view. More and more, he says, progress takes place 'under the hood' in the form of abstract computing processes. Huebner's analysis misses this entirely. ... A middle path between Huebner's warning of an imminent end to tech progress, and Kurzweil and Smart's equally. ... " July 1, 2005: 125 Big Questions. Science (Vol 309, Issue 5731, 79). "In a special collection of articles published beginning 1 July 2005, Science Magazine and its online companion sites celebrate the journal's 125th anniversary with a look forward -- at the most compelling puzzles and questions facing scientists today. A special, free news feature in Science explores 125 big questions that face scientific inquiry over the next quarter-century; accompanying the feature are several online extras including a reader's forum on the big questions." Start with the editorial, 125, by Donald Kennedy, Editor-in-Chief, and then explore questions such as:
>>> The Future, Systems, Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Reasoning, Grand Challenges July 2005: Software Patents Don't Compute - No clear boundary between math and software exists. By Ben Klemens. IEEE Spectrum. [First of two articles on software patents.]. "What is relevant is that these patents are for purely mathematical algorithms, and for centuries prior to the 1990s, mathematics was not patentable. So how did these patents come to be granted? By U.S. law, scientific principles may not be patented. ... What has changed is that mathematics has become increasingly reliant on machines. Abstract algorithms that involve inverting large matrices or calculating hundreds of coefficients in a sequence are routine today and of only limited use without physical computers to execute them. Conversely, devices such as video drivers, network interface cards, and robot arms depend on algorithms for their operation. Because of the machine-intensiveness of modern mathematics and the math-intensiveness of modern machines, the line between mathematical algorithms and machinery is increasingly blurred. This blurring is a problem, because without a clear line delimiting what is patentable and what is not, creative entrepreneurs will eventually be able to claim sole ownership of abstract mathematical discoveries. But how do we draw a line that would ensure that mathematical algorithms are not patentable while innovative machines are? ... So where is the line drawn between software and mathematical expression? Based on Church's and Turing's work, there is none. Any legal attempt to force a wedge between pure math and software will fail because the two are one and the same. A patent on a program is a patent on a mathematical expression, regardless of whether it is expressed in C, Lisp, or lambda calculus. But while demolishing the distinction between software and math, Turing and Church's work offers a natural division between patentable machinery and unpatentable mathematics -- exactly what we have been looking for." June 20, 2005: Robo- Legs. By Michel Marriott. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "The line that has long separated human beings from the machines that assist them is blurring as complex technologies become a visible part of people who depend upon them. ... Long an eerie theme in popular science fiction, the integration of humans with machines has often been presented as a harbinger of a soulless future, populated with flesh-and-metal cyborgs, RoboCops and Terminators. But major universities like Carnegie Mellon and the University of California at Berkeley, as well as companies and the United States military, are exploring ways in which people can be enhanced by strapping themselves into wearable robotics, or exoskeletons. 'There is a kind of cyborg consciousness, a fluidity at the boundaries of what is flesh and what is machine, that has happened behind our backs,' said Sherry Turkle, the director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is writing a book on robots and culture. 'The notion that your leg is a machine part and it is exposed, that it is an enhancement, is becoming comfortable in the sense that it can be made a part of you.'"
>>> Assisitive Technologies, Robots, Ethical & Social Implications, Systems, Science Fiction, Applications June 19, 2005: Taking a trip down memory-chip lane. By Will Knight. NewScientist.com news. "This renewed interest in old-school computing is more than just a trip down memory-chip lane. Early computers are a part of our technological heritage, and also offer a unique perspective on how today's machines work. And within growing collections of original computers and home-made replicas, and the anecdote-filled web pages and blogs devoted to them, lies the equipment and expertise that will one day help unlock our past by reading countless computer files stored in outmoded formats. ... 'They hark back to another time,' says Hamish Carmichael, secretary of the UK's Computer Conservation Society, which works with the Science Museum in London to restore and rebuild classic machines. ... Many enthusiasts actively rebuild old computers in a bid to learn what made them tick. For instance, local programmers help the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, home to the largest collection of obsolete computers anywhere, restore its more exotic exhibits for free." June 15, 2005: New Skin Lets Robots Get Sensitive. By Bjorn Carey. LiveScience. "Scientists are working on a type of skin that will allow robots to be more touchy feely. The high-tech skin has fingernail sized sensors embedded all over its surface. The sensors allow a robot to 'feel' changes in its surroundings and move accordingly. 'Robots move well on their own, especially when nothing is in the way,' NASA technologist Vladimir Lumelsky said. However, trouble arises when something gets in a robot’s way. 'Robots should be able to react, but today's robots can't.'" June 1, 2005: Imagining homes of the future. BBC News. "A unique project is under way in Sheffield to monitor the movements of a family living in a futuristic home packed with the latest technological innovations. The aim is to help house builders predict how we will want to use our homes 10 or 20 years from now. But what will the homes of the future be like? Experts Christopher Sanderson, of The Future Laboratory and Richard Brindley, of the Royal Institute of British Architects, outline their visions of what might be to come. ... Your fridge could also suggest recipes using the item, possibly paired with other items on its shelves, or suggest complementary items for a shopping list. ... Mr Sanderson says robots look likely to start appearing in our homes quiet soon, with models ranging from Sony's childlike Qrio and robot pet dog to robotic vacuum cleaners already in development. But Mr Brindley expects most robots to be more functional than lifelike." May 31, 2005: Access all areas. The Engineer. "[N]ow a UK-based research project called MAPPED (Mobilisation and Accessibility Planning for People with Disabilities) is aiming to develop an integrated system to allow the disabled to find out more about access to buildings in their area. The researchers claim the project will also be the UK’s first real example of ambient intelligence technology being put into practice. ... Data is collected and filed by the system for use by the disabled user, covering content including transport, tourism and leisure, work, business and education. The system can adapt itself according to the user’s preferences, habits and the context in which it is being used, said Simon Edwards,senior research associate at the University of Newcastle. 'The system uses intelligent agents which are autonomous pieces of software that can learn from the user and present them with information they didn’t even know they needed.' ... For some time, the concept of ambient intelligent technology has been a computer scientist’s pipe dream, divorced from realistic applications and without the technology behind it to become a practical solution. But MAPPED will put the technology to practical use, and the University of Newcastle’s [Phil] Blyth claimed the project is just the start of the use of ambient intelligence in the UK." May 17 - 24, 2005: Reflections on Challenges to the Goal of Invisible Computing. By Arun Kumar. ACM Ubiquity (Volume 6, Issue 17). "We know that computers are complex beasts in their own right, but for all of their internal complexity computers are just as complicated in their embedding in the outside world, even though the complexity of this embedding is largely invisible to the people who design computers, and to people who make a living promoting their use. And it is possible that computers [fn] might have the power to change us even when we engage with them unconsciously, as when we relate to a tool through the performance of a skill like driving or typing. ... In this essay, I shall try to explore the challenges of invisible computing and simplify them, to make them visible for research on Ubiquitous Computing. First of all, I will discuss what ubiquitous computing is and what it is not. Then, I will attempt to refine some paramount issues of invisible computing: What are the impacts of this kind of computing in our society? What are the embedded computers and how are they of consequence to human beings? ... Ubiquitous Computing is roughly the opposite of virtual reality (VR), where virtual reality puts people inside a computer-generated three dimensional world, Ubiquitous computing forces the computer to live out here in the world, make connections with people. VR is primarily a horsepower problem: whereas ubiquitous computing is a difficult integration of human factors, components of computer science, engineering, and social sciences. ... Technology and society form an inseparable pair, but neither is intelligible without reference to each other. This new generation of philosophers [fn] reinterprets the relationship between technology and society to explore all of the different ways that our devices and systems mediate our lives." May 17, 2005: Couple receive grant to develop robots. Associated Press / available from USAToday.com. "A couple who work in the University of Wyoming's Computer Science Department have received a $100,000 National Science Foundation grant to further develop tiny robots that could help clean up oil spills or respond to a terrorist attack. ... [Diana] Spears and her husband, William, envision robots that would communicate with one another, relaying information back to humans or to a larger robot that would take care of the problem. ... The researchers have begun working on technology that will allow the robots to communicate and detect chemicals." May 14, 2005: The human strain. By Alan Boyle. The Australian. "So where are humans headed? Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says it's the question he's most often asked, and 'a question that any prudent evolutionist will evade'. Nevertheless, it is being raised even more frequently as researchers study our past and contemplate our future. ... But trend watchers point out that we're already wrestling with real-world aspects of future human development, if not a wholly new species, ranging from stem cell research to the implantation of biocompatible computer chips. The debates are likely to become increasingly divisive once all the scientific implications sink in. 'These issues touch upon religion, upon politics, upon values,' says Gregory Stock, director of the program on medicine, technology and society at the University of California at Los Angeles. ... Where are humans headed? Here's an imprudent assessment of possible paths, ranging from homogenised humans to alien-looking hybrids bred for interstellar travel. ... *Cyborgs (Homo roboticus): In some fields, artificial intelligence has already bested humans, with Deep Blue's 1997 victory over world chess champion Garry Kasparov providing a vivid example. Three years later, computer scientist Bill Joy speculated in an influential Wired magazine essay that a truly intelligent robot may arise by 2030. 'And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species, to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself,' he wrote. ... To others, it seems more likely that we could become part-robot ourselves: We're already making machines that can be assimilated - prosthetic limbs, mechanical hearts, cochlear implants and artificial retinas - so why couldn't brain augmentation be added to the list?" May 14, 2005: Gaming intelligence gets a new processing boost - More realistic images emerge with Xbox 360. By Steven L. Kent. Chicago Tribune. "The technological leap from the Xbox to the Xbox 360, the console Microsoft Corp. will release later this year, is so vast that processor speeds, polygon counts and other technical terms are meaningless. ... Each processor is four times faster than the original Xbox--but what matters is the way designers translate that power into games. 'One thing you will see is much more sophisticated artificial intelligence,' said David Zucker, the CEO of Chicago-based Midway Games. 'The artificial intelligence, it's the way in which the world works. When you walk up to an individual in the world, he reacts one way if you punch him. If you say hello to him, he does something else. It's how objects work when acted upon.'" May 11, 2005: Robots master reproduction - Modular machine assembles copies of itself in minutes. By Andreas von Bubnoff. news @ nature.com. "Humans do it, bacteria do it, even viruses do it: they make copies of themselves. Now US researchers have built a flexible robot that can perform the same trick. It's not the first self-replicating robot ever built, says Hod Lipson of Cornell University, who led the study. But previous machines with the capacity for copying themselves have been very simple, often spreading out in only two dimensions. And more complex devices existed only in computer simulations, not reality. ... The researchers envisage machines that automatically repair themselves, making them ideal for use in hazardous environments such as outer space. ... Lipson's robot consists of four cubes, each 10-cm to a side, which are sliced diagonally into halves that can rotate against each other. This allows the robot to change shape, he reports in Nature. ... Such studies may trouble those who fear that tiny self-replicating robots will one day run riot, as they do in thrillers such as Michael Crichton's Prey. 'As a matter of public policy, artificial machine systems should not be built that evolve, so that there can be no danger of them escaping our control,' says Robert Freitas, co-author of a book on self-replicating machines, who works at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing in Palo Alto, California." A video accompanies the article.
>>> Robots, Artificial Life, Space Exploration, Systems, Ethical & Social Implications, Science Fiction, Applications May 2005: Neuromorphic Microchips - Compact, efficient electronics based on the brain's neural system could yield implantable silicon retinas to restore vision, as well as robotic eyes and other smart sensors. By Kwabena Boahen. Scientific American (subscription req'd.). "Computers, for instance, cannot match our ability to recognize a friend from a distance merely by the way he walks. And when it comes to operational efficiency, there is no contest at all. A typical room-size supercomputer weighs roughly 1,000 times more, occupies 10,000 times more space and consumes a millionfold more power than does the cantaloupe-size lump of neural tissue that makes up the brain. How does the brain--which transmits chemical signals between neurons in a relatively sluggish thousandth of a second--end up performing some tasks faster and more efficiently than the most powerful digital processors? The secret appears to reside in how the brain organizes its slow-acting electrical components...." April 27, 2005: Lecture sings praises of nanotech - The president of the Royal Academy of Engineering has added his voice to the debate about nanotechnology. In the fourth of his BBC Reith lectures Lord Broers debunks the myth that nanomachines could turn the planet into grey goo. BBC News. "While some aspects of nanotech may need careful monitoring, other parts have been unfairly demonised, says Lord Broers. The idea of tiny machines self-replicating and breaking down biological material was first muted by Dr Eric Drexler, regarded by many as the father of nanotechnology. He has since refuted these claims. Lord Broers has added his voice to general scepticism that such machines could even be built let alone replicate. 'Our experience with chemistry and physics teaches us that we do not have any idea how to make an autonomous self-replicating machine at any scale,' he says." April 25, 2005: AI's Next Brain Wave. New research in artificial intelligence could lay the groundwork for computer systems that learn from their users and the world around them. Part four in The Future Of Software series. By Aaron Ricadela. InformationWeek. "Artificial intelligence, a field that has tantalized social scientists and high-tech researchers since the dawn of the computer industry, had lost its sex appeal by the start of the last decade. ... Now a new generation of researchers hopes to rekindle interest in AI. Faster and cheaper computer processing power, memory, and storage, and the rise of statistical techniques for analyzing speech, handwriting, and the structure of written texts, are helping spur new developments, as is the willingness of today's practitioners to trade perfection for practical solutions to everyday problems. ... Several industry trends also are helping move AI up on labs' agendas. The emerging field of wireless sensor networks, which have the potential to collect vast amounts of data about industrial operations, the ecosystem, or conditions in a building or home, could benefit from the use of AI techniques to interpret their data. ... InformationWeek took a look at four research labs working in artificial intelligence, at IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Xerox subsidiary Palo Alto Research Center. Instead of leading to another round of outsize expectations, this generation of research likely could lay the groundwork for a new breed of computer systems that learn from their users and the world around them." April 20 / 27, 2005: Overly smart buildings. By Ted Smalley Bowen. Technology Research News. "The notion of buildings as 'machines for living in, 'as pioneering modernist architect Le Corbusier put it in the 1920s, morphs to fit the technologies and issues of the day. In the '70s, it was energy efficiency. In the '80s, computer technology spawned 'smart' buildings sporting automated controls and pre-configured information systems. The latest crop of technologies [footnotes] include microelectromechanical systems that combine sensors and actuators, wireless sensor networks, and fuzzy logic control schemes, and has the makings of a sophisticated nervous system. ... One recent experiment measured the effectiveness of a decentralized control scheme in regulating the indoor environment of a Swiss office building. The researchers focused on a single performance metric -- user comfort -- putting aside energy use and security. The complexity of meeting multiple, sometimes conflicting criteria is one of the main challenges of designing intelligent buildings. The researchers' fuzzy logic software for controlling the building's heat and lighting is self-tuning, using feedback from sensors and switches. Measuring comfort in terms how often users changed the settings themselves, the researchers found that the building system gradually took over the controls and made the majority of adjustments." April 10, 2005: Storage space a key in helping computers learn. By Paul Gilster. The News & Observer. "We're a long way from such autonomy, but a new company called Numenta may be laying some of the groundwork. ... We call it common sense. [Jeff] Hawkins calls it 'hierarchical temporal memory,' or HTM. Translated into software and augmented by a mathematical technique called 'belief propagation,' such a system is not programmed in the traditional sense but 'trained,' discovering underlying patterns in its sensory input over time. Thus biological pattern-building is translated into software algorithms. What is exciting here is that the software to create this kind of artificial intelligence does not rely on brute computing power. Sure, powerful processors are important, but the real key is storage space, ensuring that the machine has at its disposal a vast variety of patterns." April 9, 2005: Non-acoustic
sensors detect speech without sound. By David Hambling. New Scientist
(Issue 2494; page 21). "DARPA is also pursuing an approach first
developed at NASA's Ames lab, which involves placing electrodes called
electromyographic sensors on the neck, to detect changes in impedance
during speech. A neural network processes the data and identifies the
pattern of words. The sensor can even detect subvocal or silent speech.
The speech pattern is sent to a computerised voice generator that recreates
the speaker's words." April 8, 2005: MIT seeks computing revolution - 'T-Party' venture with Taiwanese firm aims for 'human-centered,' intuitive technologies. By Robert Weisman. The Boston Globe & Boston.com. "MIT is teaming up with Taiwan's Quanta Computer in a five-year, $20 million research effort to define the future of computing and create the next generation of communications platforms and products. ... 'We're rethinking what computers are,' said Rodney A. Brooks, director of MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab, known as CSAIL, which will run the project.... T-Party is the natural successor to CSAIL's Project Oxygen, now winding down. It pioneered 'human-centered computing' innovations, such as reconfigurable microchips and voice-activated software, in an effort to make computers as invisible to users as the air they breathe, in the vision of MIT's late Michael Dertouzos, the project's founder. CSAIL researchers have worked with six business partners on that $30 million project. This time, MIT researchers will be paired with just one company."
>>> Systems, Smart Rooms & Houses, Interfaces April 7, 2005: Moore
on 40 years of his dictum. By Michael Kanellos. CNET News.com. "Gordon
Moore is one of the founding fathers of Silicon Valley and one of the
few still alive. His famous dictum turns 40 on April 19. He spoke to
reporters recently about the electronics industry's progress, artificial
intelligence, the emergence of China and the early days of the industry.
... Will the additional computing power you get from following Moore's
Law ever get us to computers with the equivalent of human intelligence?Moore:
Human intelligence in my view is something done in a dramatically different
way than Von Neumann computers, and I don't think the route we're pursuing
now is going to get to something that looks like human intelligence.
I do think, though, that eventually we will change our approach and
do things much closer to the way they're done biologically and have
a very big chance to get into something that looks for all intents and
purposes like human intelligence. But I really don't think it's a simple
approach. The amount of power that we would need to do everything the
human brain does is probably more than we generate on Earth by our current
approach." April 7, 2005: A tiny robot swarm - fiction no longer. By Robert C. Cowen. The Christian Science Monitor. "The cartoon superheroes were frustrated. They confronted a menacing robot that quickly repaired any damage they inflicted. It was made up of a swarm of microscopic robots - so-called nanobots - that could change its function and shape at will. Suddenly the swarm became fluid and flowed away. That cartoon scenario may seem entertaining. But the reality is startling. Engineers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration want to pull off a similar trick. They are testing a robot that they hope to shrink to nanobot size and eventually form what NASA calls 'autonomous nanotechnology swarms' (ANTS). The researchers aim to give ANTS enough artificial intelligence to make smart decisions as well as know intuitively when and how to walk and swarm. ... [E]ven though its major payoffs are decades away, nanotechnology already is a big deal. Worldwide government funding of nanotech research reached $3.6 billion last year with some 40 nations joining in, according to National Science Foundation (NSF) figures." April 3, 2005: Computers obeying brain signals. By Malcolm Ritter. The Associated Press / available from BusinessWeek online. "Researchers and volunteers around the world are taking early steps toward a complex but straightforward technological goal: to use electrical signals from the brain as instructions to computers and other machines, allowing paralyzed people to communicate, move around and control their environment literally without moving a muscle. ... Research into harnessing brain signals goes back some 20 years. But lately it seems the research pot is starting to come to a boil, as advances in brain science, electronics and computer software have combined to push the field forward. ... To see firsthand what all the excitement is about, I signed on as an able-bodied research subject at [Jonathan] Wolpaw's Brain-Computer Interface lab, part of the Wadsworth Center of the New York State Department of Health." April 2005: Self-Assembling Robots- The future belongs to shape-shifting machines that don’t look like humans. By Steven Johnson. Discover (Vol. 26, No. 04). "A jogging robot captures our imagination because we’re easily impressed by skills that mimic our own. But a robot that runs isn’t necessarily better than one that doesn’t. The future of robotics lies beyond mimicking humans and in machines that transform themselves into configurations based on changing circumstances. Some of these machines may resemble creatures from the natural world, but others may be original, concocted to repair a sudden failing or find a way around an unexpected obstruction. ... Self-assembly and self-repair are defining attributes of complex life. ... [W]ith the exception of the virtual machines of software, most technology isn’t capable of adaptive self-assembly. The fax machine can’t morph into a toaster when you’re in the mood for jam and bread. But a new generation of experimental robots are capable of precisely this kind of self-maintenance and transformation. ... There are two basic underlying designs for modular robots: lattice-based systems and chain-based systems." March 29, 2005: Shape-Shifting Robot Nanotech Swarms on Mars. By Bill Steigerwald. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. "[T]he robot pyramid traveled across the floor of a lab at NASA Goddard. Robots of this type will eventually be miniaturized and joined together to form 'autonomous nanotechnology swarms' (ANTS) that alter their shape to flow over rocky terrain or to create useful structures like communications antennae and solar sails." Movies and related information can be accessed via a link at the end of the article.
>>> Space Exploration, Robots, Autonomous Vehicles, Multi-Agent Systems, Applications, Artificial Life, Systems March 26, 2005: Introducing the glooper computer - How do you turn a blob of jelly into a thinking, feeling liquid brain? New Scientist investigates the development of chemical-based processors. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist (Issue 2492; subscription req'd.). "Most of us find a shot of caffeine or a brisk walk does the trick. But when Andrew Adamatzky feels his brain needs a little extra stimulation, he gets a robot to dabble its metal fingers in it. Adamatzky is a computer scientist at the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK, and his prototype brain is a dish of chemicals sitting on a lab bench. Its 'thoughts' are waves of ions that form spontaneously and diffuse through the mix." March 23 / 30, 2005: Tool turns English to code. By Kimberly Patch, Technology Research News. "Writing software has been relatively difficult since people began programming computers in the mid-1900s. Although programming a computer is eminently useful -- it gives you fine control of a powerful tool -- it requires learning a programming language. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are aiming to remove this requirement. They have taken a step toward that goal with a language-to-code visualizer dubbed Metafor. The visualizer uses natural language instructions to sketch the outlines of a program. It can be used as a programming learning tool and to provide rough drafts of programming projects, and could lead to more complete programming-by-natural-language methods. ... While the logic of the researchers' interpreter tackles only about 20 percent of the problem of full natural language programming, it achieves about 80 percent of the perceived rewards, said [Hugo] Liu." March 23, 2005: New BITS for Old - Researchers working on next generation quantum computers. Editorial. The Times of India. "[S]ince the early 1980s, cybernetic scientists have been toying with the next logical step of building a new generation of machines called quantum computers. ... Earlier this month, a major glitch concerning the reliability of such computers was finally overcome, according to the journal Nature. This means that within most of our lifetimes we might witness the advent of computers whose processing power could be a staggering billion times faster than today's fastest supercomputers. ... Ultimately, if quantum computers are able to model every known process, they should be capable of simulating conscious rational thought also. They may hold the key to achieving true artificial intelligence." March 11, 2005: Where do i begin? By Stephen Pincock. The Financial Times. "Cyborgs are all around us. ... The dictionary definition of a cyborg is 'an integrated man-machine system'. They turn up in movies as flesh and metal characters such as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, Darth Vader from Star Wars or, for those of an older vintage, Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man. The term emerged in the 1960s, coined by researchers interested in how humans could adapt to space travel. ... Instead, I want to focus on a definition of cyborg that relates to our use of technology in a more general way. It is a definition that has sprung from a scientific view of the way our mind works and how its functions extend beyond our brains. ... The man I most wanted to contact was a philosopher of cognitive science, Andy Clark, professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, and a leading proponent of the idea of the extended mind. Two years ago, Clark published a book entitled Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence, which explored the way that human minds interact with technology - from the pencil to web-enabled mobile phones. ... Clark argues that there is little significant conceptual difference between a highly accessible computer outside our body, and one implanted into our body. ... He urges us to give up the idea that the only things that matter about our minds are what goes on inside 'the ancient fortress of skin and skull'. Instead, technologies such as the internet should be seen as integral parts of the systems that constitute human intelligence." March 8, 2005: Wearable Computers You Can Slip Into. By Olga Kharif. BusinessWeek Online. "Gauri Nanda sees a wearable computer as a...handbag -- one that's built out of four-inch squares and triangles of fabric, with tiny computer chips embedded in it. ... This bag can wirelessly keep tabs on your belongings and remind you, just as you're about to leave the house, to take your wallet. It can review the weather report and suggest that you grab an umbrella -- or your sunshades. ... Sure, a computing purse and scarf set may seem like the stuff of science fiction. But these devices, part of next generation of wearable computers, could become commonplace within a few years. Unit shipments of such wearable computers -- purses, watches, shirts -- should rise from 261,000 last year to 1.39 million in 2008, according to the tech research firm IDC. ... Powering this market are advancements in design and in fabric-embedded electronics." March 7, 2005: Ants - learning from the collective. By Peter Everett. BBC News. "The question that continues to fascinate myrmecologists (ant experts) is how ants manage to achieve such complicated results - elaborate nests, efficient food-supply, waste-disposal and so on - without having anyone in charge. ... When our present technology-driven society considers the ant, the aim is not to find moral guidance or to admire a perfect political system, but to gather clues that will help us to solve technical problems. In the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Laboratory at the University of the West of England, Dr Chris Melhuish presides over a fleet of 'U-bots'. A U-bot is a foot-high robot which glides around an arena on castors, carrying a U-shaped scoop in front of it. It is a very stupid robot, because it carries only three instructions:.... Following only those instructions, Dr Melhuish's robots, given enough time, can gather together a randomly distributed collection of frisbees and assemble them in a pile in the centre of their arena. ... Why would anyone want to design stupid robots that can do clever things? Dr Melhuish explains: 'If we want to build very small robots, there will be problems in getting computation on board, and sensing and communication. ... It would be nice to think that we could use nano-robots to carry out repair work inside the human body, but it's early days.' ... Myrmecologist Professor Nigel Franks, of the University of Bristol, has introduced the phrase 'collective intelligence' to describe ant behaviour. March 4, 2005: The Bleeding Edge of Computing. By Pam Baker NewsFactor Network. "Just when you think computing is an established industry where at least some things will remain the same, the earth starts moving. Here’s a peek at tomorrow’s computing landscape: ... A mini-helicopter that thinks for itself is ready for action in Iraq. GT Max, the first rotary wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), is able to learn as it flies, maneuver aggressively, and automatically plan a route through obstacles using an Open Control Platform (OCP) system. ... For artificial intelligence, or AI, to be of maximum assistance to everyday people, computers must learn from human environments. 'Suddenly, for the first time, our computers have the ability to see and hear the world from our perspective through microphones and cameras on wearable eyepieces and headsets. Soon, our computers might be able to observe what we do all day, understand what is important to us, and act as a virtual assistant who helps us on a second-by-second basis,' says Starner." February 13, 2005: Coming Soon: Immortality? By Jay Lindsay. Associated Press / available from CBS news; also available from The Seattle Times (Inventor believes humans eventually will be immortal). "Ray Kurzweil doesn't tailgate. A man who plans to live forever doesn't take chances with his health on the highway, or anywhere else. ... The famed inventor and computer scientist is serious about his health because if it fails him he might not live long enough to see humanity achieve immortality, a seismic development he predicts in his new book is no more than 20 years away. ... Kurzweil writes of millions of blood cell-sized robots, which he calls 'nanobots,' that will keep us forever young by swarming through the body, repairing bones, muscles, arteries and brain cells. Improvements to our genetic coding will be downloaded via the Internet. We won't even need a heart. ... In his latest book, Kurzweil defines what he calls his three bridges to immortality. ... The 'Third Bridge' is the nanotechnology and artificial intelligence revolution, which Kurzweil predicts will deliver the nanobots that work like repaving crews in our bloodstreams and brains. These intelligent machines will destroy disease, rebuild organs and obliterate known limits on human intelligence, he believes." February 8, 2005: Robot wars - Technology guru Ray Kurzweil offers a vision of future fighting machines. By Philip Ball. news @ nature.com. "BALL: How will warfare change in the next 50 years? KURZWEIL: ... Already, our abilities benefit from close collaboration with machines. Within 50 years, the non-biological portion of the intelligence of our civilization will predominate. Applying non-biological intelligence to areas such as strategy, decision-making and intelligent weapons will characterize military power. ... BALL: Where will the future battlefields be? Will they include cyberspace? KURZWEIL: One major development will be swarms of nano-engineered devices. Already, the US Department of Defense's Smart Dust project has prototypes that can reconnoitre. ..." January 24, 2005: Machine learns games 'like a human.' By Will Knight. New Scientist News. "A computer that learns to play a 'scissors, paper, stone' by observing and mimicking human players could lead to machines that automatically learn how to spot an intruder or perform vital maintenance work, say UK researchers. CogVis, developed by scientists at the University of Leeds in Yorkshire, UK, teaches itself how to play the children's game by searching for patterns in video and audio of human players and then building its own 'hypotheses' about the game's rules. In contrast to older artificial intelligence (AI) programs that mimic human behaviour using hard-coded rules, CogVis takes a more human approach, learning through observation and mimicry, the researchers say. ... 'A system that can observe events in an unknown scenario, learn and participate just as a child would is almost the Holy Grail of AI,' says Derek Magee from the University of Leeds." January 17, 2005: Micromachine grows its own muscles. By Will Knight. New Scientist News. "A micromachine that walks using muscles that it grew for itself has been developed in a US laboratory. The remarkable device could eventually lead to muscle-based nerve stimulators that let paralysed patients breathe without a ventilator, or to nanobots that clear away plaque from inside the walls of a human coronary artery. ... And more fantastic ideas have been proposed by NASA, which has provided funding for the project. The US space agency hopes that swarms of muscle-powered microbots could one day repair damage to remote spacecraft automatically." January 14, 2005: Hi-tech strategist. By Helen Knight. The Engineer. "Dstl's [Defence Science and Technology Laboratory] researchers aim to determine how best to harness various technologies to ensure that military commanders have the information at their disposal to make the best operational decisions. They are concentrating on a number of areas of growing importance to the MoD [Ministry of Defence], such as Network Enabled Capability (NEC), where they are investigating advances in sensors, information technology, artificial intelligence and neural networks. 'Whereas in the past we might have carried out research into something like an infrared detector, we're now working more at the systems level --- on how you might use an infrared sensor to gather information and present it to a commander or someone in the field,' said [Dr Frances] Saunders." January 11, 2005: Face to face in the technology age. Column by Kate Heartfield. Ottawa Citizen (subscription req'd.). "The course is informally called TechnoRico, and formally called 'Building Better Humans? Legal and Ethical Issues at the Human-Machine Merger.' Mr. [Ian] Kerr, a law professor at the U of O, began teaching a special course in Puerto Rico in January 2000. This is the first year TechnoRico has taken place in Ottawa as well as Puerto Rico. Much of the discussion is about artificial intelligence and transhumanism (a philosophy that sees technology as a way to expand human capacity, often through its interaction with the human body). In other words, robots and cyborgs." January 6, 2005: S Korean android learns faces, shakes hands. Asia Pulse & Yonhap / available from Asia Times Online. "A team of South Korean scientists unveiled a bipedal robot equipped with wireless networking capabilities Thursday, which they claim is the first such android ever developed. ... 'Through the wireless networking ability, NBH-1 can recognize people using facial recognition technology,' said Yoo [Beom-jae], a professor at the state-run Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST). It has enough in-built artificial intelligence to be able to recognize voices and motions as well, Yoo said." January 2005: Ethics for the Robot Age - Should bots carry weapons? Should they win patents? Questions we must answer as automation advances. View by Jordan Pollack. Wired Magazine (Issue 13.01). "While our hopes for and fears of robots may be overblown, there is plenty to worry about as automation progresses. The future will have many more robots, and they'll most certainly be much more advanced. This raises important ethical questions that we must begin to confront. 1. Should robots be humanoid? ... 2. Should humans become robots? ... 4. Should robots eat? ... 6. Should robots carry weapons? ... " January 2005: What We Can Learn from Robots. By Gregory T. Huang. Technology Review. "On a crisp october day last year, Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute kicked off its 25th-anniversary celebration.... On the third day, it was Mitsuo Kawato’s turn to speak. The lights went down, and the director of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, made his way to the stage to the beat of rock music. ... [T] here is a difference between him and other attendees. Kawato loves robots not because they are cool, but because he believes they can teach him how the human brain works. 'Only when we try to reproduce brain functions in artificial machines can we understand the information processing of the brain,' he says. It’s what he calls 'understanding the brain by creating the brain.' By programming a robot to reach out and grasp an object, for instance, Kawato hopes to learn the patterns in which electrical signals flow among neurons in the brain to control a human arm. ... 'This is very different from the usual justification for building humanoid robots --- that they are economically useful or will help take care of the elderly,' says Christopher Atkeson, a robotics expert at Carnegie Mellon. ... The evolution of robots into something more humanlike is probably inevitable. Experts agree there is nothing magical about how the brain works, nothing that is too inherently complex to figure out and copy. As Kawato is learning in his lab, the ultimate value in closing the gap between humans and machines might lie in what new generations of robots can teach us about ourselves." January 2005: Considerate Computing- Digital gadgets demand ever more of our attention with their rude and thoughtless interruptions. Engineers are now testing computers, phones and cars that sense when you're busy and spare you from distraction. By W. Wayt Gibbs. Scientific American (subscription req'd.). "'If we could just give our computers and phones some understanding of the limits of human attention and memory, it would make them seem a lot more thoughtful and courteous,' says Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research. Horvitz, [Roel] Vertegaal, [Ted] Selker and [Rosalind] Picard are among a small but growing number of researchers trying to teach computers, phones, cars and other gadgets to behave less like egocentric oafs and more like considerate colleagues. To do this, the machines need new skills of three kinds: sensing, reasoning and communicating. First a system must sense or infer where its owner is and what he or she is doing. Next it must weigh the value of the messages it wants to convey against the cost of the disruption. Then it has to choose the best mode and time to interject. Each of these pushes the limits of computer science and raises issues of privacy, complexity or reliability."
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