AI in the news
JULY 2008
July 31, 2008: Discovering How Greeks Computed in 100 B.C. "After a closer examination of a surviving marvel of ancient Greek technology known as the Antikythera Mechanism, scientists have found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games." (info) 
July 31, 2008: Robots that climb walls. "US scientists have developed robots using the same principles of electro-magnetics that make balloons stick to ceilings after being rubbed. The robots, developed by a team in SRI's Mobile Robotics and Transducers Programme, are around the size of a remote-controlled car and have caterpillar tracks similar to those on toy tanks. The technology could be used to enable robots to work in areas that are difficult for humans to go, such as tunnels or outside large buildings." (info)
July 31, 2008: 'Oldest' computer music unveiled. "A scratchy recording of Baa Baa Black Sheep and a truncated version of In the Mood are thought to be the oldest known recordings of computer generated music. The songs were captured by the BBC in the Autumn of 1951 during a visit to the University of Manchester. The recording has been unveiled as part of the 60th Anniversary of "Baby", the forerunner of all modern computers." (info)
July 31, 2008: Have you hugged a robot today? "Mechanical creatures that respond to humans are cute, but are also a step on the way to improving our relationship with machines. ... to [Steve] Bannerman, a former Apple staffer who set up Quicktime TV (which became the iTunes Store), Pleo, as the dinosaur is called, might just be the future of human-machine interaction. Pleo, made by a company called Ugobe, coos and even sings. Rub its neck and stomach and it blinks its baby-like eyes and turns towards you and writhes happily. ... Pleo fascinated him: "I fell in love with this dinosaur," he says. "I loved the artificial intelligence component." (info)
July 31, 2008: Robo-relationships are virtually assured: British experts. Both Heart Robot and iC Hexapod are "emotibots" -- robots programmed to react to human emotions -- on display this week at the Antenna Gallery at London's Science Museum. For McGoran and iC Hexapod's inventor, Matt Denton, creating robots that recognise and respond to basic human emotions is a logical step as people's daily lives become increasingly dependent on technology. "People know about artificial intelligence but the perception is that robots are cold and calculating industrial automatons," McGoran, who is studying robotics at the University of the West of England, told AFP. "But over the last decade, there has been a new field where robots have become the opposite of that." (info)
July 29, 2008: Teaching the public about nanotech increases their concerns. Educating the public about nanotechnology and other complex but emerging technologies causes people to become more "worried and cautious" about the new technologies' prospective benefits, according to a recent study by researchers at North Carolina State University. A new study by researchers at North Carolina State University on public attitudes towards nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies shows that educating people about the new technologies results in those people becoming more concerned about the potential impact of the technologies. (info)
July 29, 2008: Complex classic meets robotic complexity. Robotics and a rose garden are two seemingly disparate elements that Quantum Theatre will use to bring William Shakespeare's "Cymbeline" to life. A collaboration between Quantum Theatre and The Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, "Cymbeline" will begin performances Thursday in the Rose Garden of Mellon Park. Using 21st-century technology and an outdoor setting are not just gimmicks to get attention, says Quantum Theatre's artistic director Karla Boos. "It maximizes how to facilitate what I want to experiment with and serves the exploration of the play," she says. Don't come expecting to see R2-D2 or Robbie the Robot substituting for actors. "This is something far different from a walking, talking android," says Illah Nourbaksh, an associate professor at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University who has been working with Boos and her design team on the production. Instead, Boos hints, the production will employ elements of robotic technology in more symbolic ways that may surprise and involve the audience. (info)
July 29, 2008: Search site aims to rival Google. Called Cuil, from the Gaelic for knowledge and hazel, its founders claim it does a better and more comprehensive job of indexing information online. The technology it uses to index the web can understand the context surrounding each page and the concepts driving search requests, say the founders... Instead of just looking at the number and quality of links to and from a webpage as Google's technology does, Cuil attempts to understand more about the information on a page and the terms people use to search. (info)
July 29, 2008: Robot Teachers (w/embedded video). A third year computer science graduate student, Whitehill and his colleagues are working to make a new generation of robots that would be effective and responsive teachers. They believe the key is to train them to recognize and respond to facial expressions, the way humans do naturally. Whitehill described the demonstration, part of his research at the University of California, San Diego's Machine Perception Laboratory, as "almost like having a remote control built into your face." The research falls under the umbrella of artificial intelligence -- the creation of machines that can behave like humans -- and Whitehill envisions a not-so-far-away future when robots will replace people as teachers, at least in areas that require a lot of repetition, such as foreign language and math drills. He doesn't, however, foresee them ever replacing philosophy teachers, for example. (info)
July 29, 2008: Celebrating the UK's Computer Pioneers. The computer seems the very essence of the modern world, especially as the gadgets we sit before and carry around shrink as fast as they become more powerful. But if truth be told the computer has had a long and honourable history that stretches back to the closing years of the World War II. And, say conservations and computer history enthusiasts, Britain played a big part in the development of the modern computer... [Alan] Turing established the conceptual and philosophical basis for the rise of computers in a seminal 1936 paper called "On Computable Numbers". (info)
July 18, 2008:
Giving Learning a Personal Touch.
ICT Results, 18 July 2008. "
A learning system that adapts to the abilities and needs of students opens the way to a more personalised approach in delivering education electronically. ... The learning platform developed by the ELeGI team can automatically be tailored to the different needs of students, and can also adapt rapidly in the way it can access teaching resources through a ‘grid’ of networked computers.
If a teacher decides that the students would benefit by collaborative working, the ELeGI platform can find suitable software, perhaps a wiki, locate a machine to run it on, set it up for the group of students and set them to work in an automatic and transparent way.
The ELeGI software can group students who share similar learning styles. It can also recognise when a student is having difficulty and can offer a ‘mini-course’ of remedial work, generated according to the student’s profile and preferences.
...
Insights gained through ELeGI, particularly in formal learning, have been incorporated into Intelligent Web Teacher (IWT), a software platform for distance learning that has been developed over many years with support from several other EU-funded projects. "
July 17, 2008:
Say Goodbye the the Computer Mouse. BBC News, Thursday July 17, 2008. "A Gartner analyst predicts the demise of the computer mouse in the next three to five years.
Taking over will be so called gestural computer mechanisms like touch screens and facial recognition devices.
"The mouse works fine in the desktop environment but for home entertainment or working on a notebook it's over," declared analyst Steve Prentice. He told BBC News that his prediction is driven by the efforts of consumer electronics firm which are making products with new interactive interfaces inspired by the world of gaming . ... "
July 07, 2008;
Combating Computer Rage. The Buffalo News, Monday, 07 July, 2008. "Like a river with no end, the e-mails keep flowing and flowing, threatening to drown us all," notes Reilly in his new primer "Uniting the Virtual Workforce," penned with Karen Sobel Lojeski, an expert on the virtual workforce. Lojeski points to a movement afoot to deem specific days 'e-mail free,' adding that the underwater metaphor represents 'our general inability to separate really important messages from those less important or completely irrelevant to our work or lives.' She notes that some organizations now 'use artificial intelligence to interpret messages and decide whether they're important enough to read and answer.'"
July 06, 2008;
Architect to offer homes for £40,000. Scotsman.com Business, Sunday, 04 July, 2008. "Anabo is one of the companies exhibiting at the EPIS Tech Expo at the University of Edinburgh on Thursday, which is intended to attract investment for start-ups.
... Mysnocat.com founder Simon Montford is working with programmers and artificial intelligence experts at the University of Edinburgh on a tool that can be plugged into e-commerce sites, such as eBay, to make it easier for users to sell goods online. It will also act as a networking site for collectors who trade online."
July 04, 2008:
Punk-loving robots pogo for science [with embedded video]'.BBC News, Friday, 04 July, 2008. "Despite the chaos and carnage of three nights of live punk at the Institute of Contemporary Arts punters would still be hard pressed to miss the three pogo-dancing robots in their midst.
The machines, which have been created by a collaboration of artists and scientists, have been designed to fall in love with punk music and show their appreciation through dance.
...
The robots use neural networks, a collection of computer processors that function in a similar way to a simple animal brain.
Neural networks are popular in the field of artificial intelligence because of their ability to recognise patterns from the sensory input of external sources, much like a human brain.
The robots have been trained to like punk, explained Professor McOwan."
July 04, 2008;
Spore: make yourself a little monster. Times Online, Friday, 04 July, 2008. "The Creature Creator, the first part of an epic new God game, is a cracking piece of software that puts a new spin on the idea of intelligent design
... The deceptive simplicity of the interface masks cunning artificial intelligence that takes whatever you create and animates it with humour and style. ...
July 03, 2008:
Hands-Free Driving Likely To Spur More Voice Recognition. W. David Gardner, Thursday, 03 July, 2008. "New rules in California and Washington make the market ripe for improved speech-enabled cell phone applications, a Nuance study suggests.
This week's inauguration of "hands-free" cell phone use for drivers in California and Washington focuses attention on the spread of voice recognition technology for mobile phones.
With Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) preparing to add voice-enabled search to its mobile platform this summer and with more voice recognition features offered all the time for individual cell phone owners, drivers are increasingly being offered a broad array of new speech recognition features."July 3, 2008. (more)
July 01, 2008:
4 Real-Life WALL*E Robots Cleaning Up After Nuke Waste
Michael Milstein, July 1, 2008, Popular Mechanics.
"At the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, there are some amazing little robots cleaning up the mess left behind by the production of plutonium for the Cold War. These small robots may be expensive and small, but they pack a punch that is capable of washing the radioactive sludge off of the walls of the inside of the large containment tanks. another of these robots checks the outside surface for cracks or imperfections in the metal tank keeping the deadly chemicals at bay. ... A remote driver directs the robot as it uses a dozer blade to push the waste toward a pump for transfer to safer, double-shelled tanks. Once its job is done, the $500,000 robot is sealed, forever, in the empty tank. "
July 01, 2008:
Robots aim to mimic humans. Andrew Wilson, Tuesday, 01 July, 2008. "Over the last few years, research into the fields of vision, speech recognition, artificial intelligence, and robotics has become fragmented. This has limited the ability of researchers to develop cognitive robots that require the incorporation of many developments in each one of these disciplines.
Now a consortium of universities under the auspices of the EU-funded Cognitive Systems for Cognitive Assistants (CoSy; www.cognitivesystems.org) project aims to merge ideas from several relevant disciplines to develop a cognitive robot capable of emulating the abilities of a young child. The project has already led to the development of interactive robots that understand human speech and objects and react to their environment."
(more)
June 26, 2008;
Robots ready to support soldiers on the battlefield. James Bloom, Thursday, 26 June, 2008. "Intelligent armed vehicles that use GPS, laser and heat-recognition technology are close to being deployed in hotspots."
June 26, 2008:
The Real WALL-E. ScienCentral, Inc. Thursday, 26 June, 2008. "The new Disney movie WALL-E features robots of the future actively helping humans. But the future is now. This ScienCentral News video reports on a real robot that could help us take care of elderly relatives from miles away.
Interviewee: Rod Grupen, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Length: 1 min 44 sec
Produced by Sunita Reed and James Eagan
Edited by Sunita Reed and James Eagan
Copyright © ScienCentral, Inc., with additional footage courtesy
Walt Disney Pictures.
"Couldn't you just give us a little robot?"
Imagine you're an aging person who doesn't move around so well, and you've misplaced your reading glasses. Sound like a job for a personal robot? That's what University of Massachusetts Amherst roboticist Rod Grupen and his collaborators have concluded, based on focus groups and research. And that's why uBot was born.""
June 25, 2008:
Translation Systems Speak Up. Wednesday, 25 June, 2008. "A number of two-way translating devices have been under development as part of the Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use (TRANSTAC) programme run by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA. There are three main participants: IBM, BBN Technologies and SRI International. ... SRI's Iraqcomm program operates on Windows XP and will work on some of the toughened-up notebook computers carried by soldiers and by foreign civilians. Like many language systems it uses statistical models to recognise speech patterns and sounds, in part to filter out sounds that are not speech and to predict the next word in a sentence. SRI also uses a database of known phrases to predict what people may say.
Such speech models are built by studying how people use language and how different people translate the same phrases. Once speech is "recognised", the Iraqcomm program uses several methods to try to translate it properly, applying logical rules to what has been said and checking phrases."
June 24, 2008:
Robots battle for MoD prize. BBC News, Tuesday, 24 June, 2008. "A look at a prototype robot taking part in a Ministry of Defence competition to find new technology to help ground troops in urban areas."
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