AI in the news
April 2008
April 30, 2008: It's here... live Halo 3 review now
Vito Pilieci, Ottowa Citizen, April 30, 2008.
". ...simply put the game is incredible. The graphics are light years beyond Halo 2. ... Another thing you notice right away is the artificial intelligence that has been built into the game. The AI is really good. Your allies are actually allies, they will cover you when you leap head first into a group of attackers.
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April 28, 2008:
Barbara Grosz named dean of Radcliffe Institute
Harvard Gazette, April 28, 2008.
".Barbara J. Grosz, Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences in Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has been appointed the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, President Drew Faust announced today (April 28)."
April 26, 2008: Next Step in Robot Development is Child's Play
Science Daily, April 26, 2008.
". The EU-funded RobotCub project, which designed the iCub, will send one each to six European research labs. Each of the labs proposed winning projects to help train the robots to learn about their surroundings – just as a child would. ... The iCub robots are about the size of three-year-old children, with highly dexterous hands and fully articulated heads and eyes. They have hearing and touch capabilities and are designed to be able to crawl on all fours and to sit up.
Humans develop their abilities to understand and interact with the world around them through their experiences. As small children, we learn by doing and we understand the actions of others by comparing their actions to our previous experience.
The developers of iCub want to develop their robots’ cognitive capabilities by mimicking that process.
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April 25, 2008 :Driven to Distraction: Why autonomous cars are still a pipe-dream.
The Economist Newspaper Limited, 2008.
" How much automatic aid should motorists accept from their cars? Most of us might be tempted to think the more the better. ... No question that autonomous vehicles will have an important role to play in minefields or where roadside bombs are an ever-present threat. But, absent such hazards, would a fully autonomous car that could carve its way through traffic without the driver touching the controls be desirable?. ... doubts are beginning to surface about whether even the semi-automated car makes sense. There are fears that combining adaptive control with, say, automated steering would encourage the driver to become too dependent on safety aids for his own good. Automated systems can fail. Their software can crash. ... So far, the automated safety measures incorporated in cars have added assistance to the driver, rather than subtracted control from him. And the motorist still has to decide personally whether to switch the assistance on, or drive manually without it. ... product-liability settlements have cost the motor industry billions. The idea that class actions could ensue from “computer-aided accidents” on the road sends shivers through car companies everywhere.
And that’s why—away from the battlefield or the surface of Mars—the driverless car is likely to remain a non-starter for many more years to come.
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April 25, 2008: The Big Question: Should the human race be worried by the rise of robots?.
Paul Vallely, April 25, 2008.
" A group of scientists raised concerns in a debate at the Science Museum this week about the growing use of autonomous, decision-making robots. These could have malign effects in hospitals, the care of the elderly and, most obviously, in military use, they warned.
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April 25, 2008: Finding the Right Picture: Semantic Video Analysis.
The Economist, Apr. 25, 2008.
" One of the biggest impediments to the web-video revolution has been computers' reluctance to understand images. ...Researchers at Queen Mary, a college of the University of London, and the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence in Saarbrücken are trying to bridge this “semantic gap” between what people can understand and what computers can manage. In the past five years this research has taken a huge leap forward, says Ebroul Izquierdo, the leader of the team at Queen Mary. ...
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April 22, 2008: Computer System Can Carry On Conversations With Humans By Reacting To Voice, Facial Signals.
Science Daily, April 22, 2008.
" Known as SEMAINE, the project will build a Sensitive Artificial Listener (SAL) system, which will perceive a human user's facial expression, gaze, and voice and then engage with the user. When engaging with a human, the SAL will be able to adapt its own performance and pursue different actions, depending on the non-verbal behaviour of the user.
SEMAINE is led by DFKI, the German centre for research on Artificial Intelligence
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April 21, 2008 :Robots Can Provide Elder Care for Aging Baby Boomers.
Science Daily, April 21, 2008.
" Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a robotic assistant that can dial 911 in case of emergencies, remind clients to take their medication, help with grocery shopping and allow a client to talk to loved ones and health care providers.
Concerned family members can access the unit and visit their elderly parents from any Internet connection, including navigating around the home and looking for Mom or Dad, who may not hear the ringing phone or may be in need of assistance. Doctors can perform virtual house calls, reducing the need for travel.
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April 15, 2008:
Falling out of love with robots
Bill Thompson, BBC News, April 15, 2008.
"[ David Levy's] recent book, 'Love + Sex with Robots', has attracted a lot of attention from computer scientists, psychologists and those just interested in the idea of having sex with a machine ... I can't accept Levy's sublimely optimistic view that we will be able to create such artificial intelligences within a 20-50 year time scale. In fact, I'm not sure we'll ever manage it. "
April 14, 2008: He Wrote 200,000 Books (But Computers Did Most of the Work
Noam Cohen, NYTimes, April 14, 2008.
" Philip M. Parker ... has generated more than 200,000 books ... Mr. Parker compares his methods to those of a traditional publisher, but with the computer simply performing some of the scut work. ... The computer is given an assignment — project the latent demand for antipsychotic drugs around the world, based on the sales figures in the United States.
“Using a little bit of artificial intelligence, a computer program has been created that mimics the thought process of someone who would be responsible for doing such a study,” Mr. Parker says. “But rather than taking many months to do the study. the computer accomplishes this in about 13 minutes.”"
April 14, 2008 :The Filter's Mission.
USA Today, April 14, 2008.
" The Filter (thefilter.com) is the latest entry in a growing lineup of online recommendation engines that suggest new music based on your current favorites. … The Filter uses proprietary artificial intelligence to suggest works that are similar to ones already identified as favorites, using a database of more than 4.5 million songs and 330,000 movies.
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April 12, 2008 :Cornell Robot Sets a Record for Distance Walking
Science Daily, April 12, 2008.
" The Cornell Ranger robot just kept going and going April 3 when it set an unofficial world record by walking nonstop for 45 laps -- a little over 9 kilometers or 5.6 miles -- around the Barton Hall running track.
Developed by a team of students working with Andy Ruina, Cornell professor of theoretical and applied mechanics, the robot walked (and walked) until it finally stopped and fell backward, perhaps because its battery ran down
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April 9, 2008:
Meet Nexi, the Media Lab's latest robot and Internet star
David Chandler, MIT News, April 9, 2008,
"Nexi has become something of an Internet celebrity after a preliminary video demonstration of its facial expressions using pre-scripted movements was posted this month on YouTube. ...Created by a group headed by Media Lab's Cynthia Breazeal, known for earlier expressive robots such as Kismet, the new product is known as an MDS (mobile, dextrous, social) robot. Unlike Kismet, which consisted only of a robotic head, the Nexi MDS is a complete mobile manipulator robot augmented with rich expressive abilities. It ... currently uses an additional set of supportive wheels to operate as a statically stable platform in its early stage of development. It has hands to manipulate objects, eyes (video cameras), ears (an array of microphones), and a 3-D infrared camera and laser rangefinder to support real-time tracking of objects, people and voices as well as indoor navigation.
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Date Unspecified:
AI Meets The Metaverse: Teachable AI Agents Living In Virtual Worlds.
Lifeboat Foundation.
" The AI field started out with grand dreams of human-level artificial general intelligence. During the last half-century, enthusiasm for these grand AI dreams — both within the AI profession and in society at large — has risen and fallen repeatedly, each time with a similar pattern of high hopes and media hype followed by overall disappointment. Throughout these fluctuations, though, research and development have steadily advanced on various fronts within AI and allied disciplines.
Recently, in the first years of the 21st century, AI optimism has been on the rise again, both within the AI field and in the science and technology community as a whole. One possibility is that this is just another fluctuation — another instance of excessive enthusiasm and hype to be followed by another round of inevitable disappointment (see McDermott, 2006 for an exposition of this perspective). Another possibility is that AI's time is finally near, and what we are seeing now is the early glimmerings of a rapid growth phase in AI R&D, such as has not been seen in the field's history to date.
I'm placing my bets on the latter, more optimistic possibility. ...My thesis here is that virtual worlds have the potential to serve as the "golden path" to advanced AI, so that the first powerful nonhuman intelligences on Earth are likely to be resident in virtual worlds such as Second Life or its descendants. ...
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April 2008 [issue date]: At the Edge of Life's Code. By Thania Benios. Scientific American (subscription req'd). "Using machine learning, Chris Wiggins hopes to develop models that can predict how all of an organism's genes behave under any circumstance - and thereby explain precisely why some cells become sick or cancerous."
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