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Artificial Intelligence - A ZDNET UK News Special Report. (January 23, 2001) Seven fascinating and lively articles about AI that will take you right to the edge of where the science is today and then offer a glimpse over the horizon, and in the process address some important philosophical issues. The Essence of Artificial Intelligence. By Alison Cawsey, Alison (1998). Essence of Computing Series. London: Prentice Hall Europe. This book emphasizes practical aspects and main techniques. Link to the author's website for an overview of the book, sample Prolog programs and tutorials. Artificial Intelligence, Spring 2003. Professors Tomás Lozano-Pérez & Leslie Kaelbling. Available from MIT OpenCourseWare. "The site features a full set of course notes, in addition to other materials used in the course. [The course] introduces representations, techniques, and architectures used to build applied systems and to account for intelligence from a computational point of view." Artificial Intelligence Repository. Carnegie Mellon University. Primarily for researchers and students, this site makes available technical reports, programming software, newsgroup archives, and links to other resources. Biblio Query. By OMFAI/IMKAI. A searchable bibliography on artificial intelligence by the Dept. of Medical Cybernetics and AI at the University of Vienna and the Austrian Research Institute for AI. Red Herring Magazine. AI Knows It’s Out There. August 22, 2005. "Many people think of artificial intelligence (AI) as a high-flying 1980s tech concept that crashed and burned back in the early 1990s after a good deal of hype. The fact is, AI technology has become pervasive in much of the software we use today. Take the word processor. Start to write a memo, and your word processor will try to decide which words you really mean to type, and which icons to hide because you rarely use them. Or do an online search, and notice the ads that the search engine displays based on the topics it decides must interest you. 'The big picture is that AI is almost everywhere, but we don't call it such,' says Alex Linden, vice president in the Frankfurt office of research firm Gartner. Turn up your nose at AI and you’ll be ignoring some of the latest technologies and business opportunities. AI experts point to exciting innovations in fields such as machine vision, data mining, and the semantic web, while old-school AI technologies like neural networking and expert systems still soldier on." AgentsIntelligent Agents and Multi-Agents. From ASAP, the Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning group, School of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Nottingham. "Agent theory concerns the definition of agents and Multi-agent systems, properties, architectures, communication, cooperation and coordination capabilities. The practical side concerns the agent languages and platforms for programming and experimenting with agents. ... Several researchers have proposed formal definitions for agents and multi-agent systems, we retain the following...." Agents & Creativity. By Margaret A. Boden. "Published in the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, special issue on Agents (ed. D. Riecken), Summer 1994."  AI think, therefore I am. Virtual agents feature - Computerised characters that look, sound, move and seemingly think like real people are emerging from the realms of science fiction into everyday life. Superguide by David Braue. apcmag.com (December 16, 2003). "Making computers human is an idea as old as computers themselves, and what was initially a wild science fiction fantasy is gradually turning into fact. From the chilling 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000 to robotic newsreader Ananova and Jar Jar Binks, virtual creatures have become part of our collective culture. Much more than entertainment is at stake, of course. The potential of computerised agents or entities that are autonomous, self-directed, reactive and social -- just like humans -- can be estimated only in the realm of the imagination. Already, such agents have been built to present the weather on mobile phones, drive trucks, monitor environments designed to support life on other planets and perform many other sophisticated tasks. Computers are good at doing what they're told, but in this field they're required to reach their own conclusions. The complex computer code beneath their 'skins' is designed to make them react to situations like real people do -- unpredictably. Just how far we have come was evident in Melbourne earlier this year when more than 450 researchers from 29 countries attended the second annual Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems conference." Autonomous Interface Agents. By Henry Lieberman, Media Laboratory Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computers and Human Interface, CHI-97, Atlanta, Georgia, March 1997."Two branches of the trend towards 'agents' that are gaining currency are interface agents, software that actively assists a user in operating an interactive interface, and autonomous agents, software that takes action without user intervention and operates concurrently, either while the user is idle or taking other actions." "The MavHome Smart Home project is a multi-disciplinary research project at the University of Texas at Arlington focused on the creation of an intelligent home environment. Our approach is to view the smart home as an intelligent agent that perceives its environment through the use of sensors, and can act upon the environment through the use of actuators." Software Agents Group. MIT Media Laboratory. Meet various agents via fascinating descriptions of research projects. Applicationsand Yahoo! Podcasts. The return of artificial intelligence. By Corey Booth and Shashi Buluswar. The McKinsey Quarterly, 2002 Number 2 Web exclusive (no-fee reg. req'd). "[T]he AI-development community has generated techniques that are beginning to show promise for solving real business problems involving complex data in dynamic environments -- problems such as detecting fraud and automating work flows within and across organizations. ... Is artificial intelligence right for your business? The technology isn't appropriate for all information problems -- but it does solve some of them very well indeed. This article suggests a three-step process for determining whether AI can help your company." Know your imitations - From cameras and fridges to business solutions, artificial intelligence is at work. By Mary Branscombe. The Guardian (February 19, 2004). "Computers like things precise: on or off, one or zero, yes or no. The real world is rarely precise or exact; information is partial and uncertain and people make judgment calls. Artificial intelligence is about making computers act more like humans and you might be surprised at how many places it's showing up - from cameras and fridges to spam filters and Microsoft's forthcoming BizTalk Server 2004. If AI makes you think of robots and artificial brains, think again. Researchers are still arguing about whether a computer could actually think or just respond as if it can, but the results of their research are too useful to stay in the lab. Software can act in ways we think of as intelligent, can deliver results we'd only expect from a human, and can let us work in ways that feel more natural." Spring comes to AI winter. By Heather Havenstein. Computerworld & IDG - Sweden (February 10, 2005). "For many people, artificial intelligence evokes the menacing computer Hal from '2001: A Space Odyssey,' a machine so intelligent that it could function independently of humans. Those inflated notions spawned by science fiction writers about the convergence of humans and machines tarnished the image of AI in the 1980s because AI was perceived as failing to live up to its potential. Still, the field has quietly produced advanced applications such as Google Inc.'s search engine, systems that trade stocks and commodities without human intervention, and software that detects credit card fraud. There's no precise definition of AI, but broadly, it's a field that attempts to provide machines with humanlike reasoning and language-processing capabilities. Researchers now are emerging from what has been called an 'AI winter' with renewed interest in the biology of the brain and research honed to practical applications in medicine, customer service, manufacturing, education and other areas." Intelligent Systems Technologies. From Precarn Incorporated, "a national, member-owned industrial consortium supporting the development of intelligent systems technologies through its extensive network of corporations, research institutes and government partners." "In the broadest sense, Intelligent Systems are systems that emulate and actively employ some aspect of human intelligence in performing a task. In the context of the Precarn mandate, this description is focused on what are generally referred to as 'high-end' systems, namely - those that demand some combination of sensing, reasoning, activity and human interaction. Intelligent Systems-comprised of sensors, software and computers, embedded in machines and other devices-are the tools that bring the power of computing technology into our daily lives and business practices. Together, these technologies emulate, and even enhance, the human ability to perceive, reason, and act. To put this into context, an archetypal intelligent system would allow a machine to autonomously interact with environments that are complex, foreign, hazardous or unpredictable. For the purpose of assisting proponents, examples of Intelligent Systems technologies are given below. This list, however, is not meant to be exclusive."
Intelligent System examples from Precarn Incorporated. BBN Technologies offers "advanced technology solutions" for Data Indexing & Mining, Intelligent Systems, Natural Language Processing, Speech Recognition, and more. research groups and research projects. "Companies that provide and practice Intelligent Systems, A.I., HCI, and related fields of interests and services." From the A.I. Honor Society at The George Washington University. Projects - real world business applications of artificial intelligence from Applied Intelligence. National Coordination Office for Information Technology Research and Development: Blue Books. "The Annual Supplement to the President's Budget (commonly referred to as the Blue Book), which is required by law, summarizes the goals and objectives of the IT R&D Program and highlights many of the Program's accomplishments and plans." Cognitive ScienceCognitive Science Dictionary. Maintained by Michael R. W. Dawson and David A. Medlar of the University of Alberta. Cognitive Psychology. An overview from Humboldt State University. "In studying the design of computers that learn, we have gained much knowledge about the cognitive processes within us. Newell and Simon conrtibuted much in educating cognitive psychologists on the implications of artificial intelligence, and in educating the artificial intelligence people on the implications of cognitive psychology. A host of concepts, such as informatin processing, short-term memory, long-term memory, etc., has been taken from computer science and used in cognitive psychological theories." FIXED: , bgb , 7/24/08
Brain learns like a robot - Scan shows how we form opinions. By Tanguy Chouard. Nature Science Update (June 10, 2004). "Researchers may have pinpointed the brain regions that help us work out good from bad. And their results suggest that humans and robots are more alike than we may care to admit, as both use similar strategies to make value judgements. ... The team also plotted brain activity on a graph to give a mathematical description of processes that underlie the formation of value judgements. The patterns they saw resembled those made by robots as they learn from experience. 'The results were astounding,' says study co-author Peter Dayan. 'There was an almost perfect match between the brain signals and the numerical functions used in machine learning,' he says. This suggests that our brains are following the laws of artificial intelligence." ... read about their 5 strategic initiatives (Theoretical Work on Brain Function, Complex Systems, Theoretical and Experimental Program, Consciousness, and Learning Machines) Sex Differences in the Brain. By Doreen Kimura. (Scientific American, May 13, 2002). "Men and women display patterns of behavioral and cognitive differences that reflect varying hormonal influences on brain development."
The Power and Limits of Problem Solving: Status and Future Prospects of AI Applications. A June 1995 keynote address given by Herbert Simon. (synopsis by Dr. Michael McNeese). Gateway IX(2): 9-11 (1998). "The study of cognition, human and machine, is increasingly revealing to us the nature of intelligence and the workings of the mind." Academic Programs in Cognitive Science collection from the Cognitive Science Society. IRCS, the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, site of the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center for Research in Cognitive Science. The 100 Most Influential Works in Cognitive Science from the 20th Century as selected by a panel of judges who are both faculty of the University of Minnesota and members of its Center for Cognitive Sciences. FIXED: , bgb , 7/24/08 EducationGrand challenges free researchers to explore what can be imagined. By John Jernery. The Daily Yomiuri Online (February 20, 2007). "By design, grand challenges are dreamed up to push the envelope, to break through barriers, and to ignore limits. ... In the previous 'Report from Silicon Valley,' we began looking at some of the grand challenges currently under way in Britain under the auspices of the U.K. Computing Research Committee (www.ukcrc.org.uk). ... We continue here with some of the other grand challenges that the British are exploring. ... Learning for Life: Computer tutoring, e-learning, and distance learning are fast becoming a common ingredient in education-and not just for children. Learning today is a lifetime endeavor and the Learning for Life grand challenge seeks to discover what that means in the coming age of ubiquitous, possibly intelligent machines." What We Know About Learning. By Herbert A. Simon, Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University. (Speech presented at the 1997 Frontiers in Education Conference.) "What we must avoid above all is designing technologically sophisticated hammers and then wandering around to find nails that we can hit with them. That is a great temptation for all of us who are involved with computer technology; for computers can do really fascinating things when they are not being stubborn; and we would like to see how we can use those potentialities in education. But I submit that we are not going to succeed in that unless we really turn the problem the other way around and first specify the kinds of things students ought to be doing: what are the cost-effective and time-effective ways by which students can proceed to learn. We need to carry out the analysis that is required to understand what they have to do - what activities will produce the learning - and then ask ourselves how the technology can help us do that." FIXED: , bgb , 7/24/08 The Roles of Artificial Intelligence in Education: Current Progress and Future Prospects. David McArthur, Matthew Lewis, and Miriam Bishay. (1993) RAND DRU-472-NSF. A very good overview that will give you a solid foundation for your exploration of the exciting intersection of these two fields. Speech in Education. By Phillip Britt. Speech Technology Magazine (June / July 2005). "Speech-enabled applications and hardware are increasingly finding their way into the classroom and into the offices of educators at all levels of education, but educational applications still represent a small, though growing, segment of the speech technology market, according to industry analysts." Artificial Intelligence in Education. Volume 50 in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications. Edited by S.P.Lajoie and M. Vivet. 1999. 820 pp., hardcover. ISBN: 90 5199 452 4. "This volume contains the proceedings for the 9th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AI-ED 1999). This is one of a series of international conferences in this area and it is designed to report on state of the art research in the field of AI in Education." "The Computer Based Learning Unit has the general research aim of using computer based technology to examine processes of cognition, decision-making and problem-solving, and hence to support innovative teaching and learning applications. CBLU was established in 1970 and now numbers about 40 people, including about 25 research students. It is administratively part of the School of Education at the University of Leeds and has strong links to the School of Computer Studies and the Department of Psychology." Education and Artificial Intelligence. Prepared by Deva Brown, Graduate Student of Library and Information Science, The University of Texas at Austin (1998). Contains sections addressing background and philosophy, recent applications and related web sites. Education Resources from the National Engineering Information Center. Be sure to see the links collected under the heading "Artificial Intelligence in Education." "The EduTech Institute [at the Georgia Institute of Technology] is a multi-disciplinary research organization committed to enhancing science, math, and design education through innovative uses of technology." Interactive Learning Toolshttp://www.aispace.org/index.shtml AI Space: Interactive Tools for Learning Artificial Intelligence. A collection of Java applets that are designed as tools for learning and exploring concepts in Artificial Intelligence. Developed and maintained at the University of British Columbia. FIXED: , bgb , 7/17/08 Ethical & Social
Reinventing Technology, Rediscovering Community: Critical Studies in Computing as a Social Practice. Philip E. Agre, Douglas Schuler, New York: Ablex, et al., editors (1997). Norwood, NJ: Alex. Linking takes you to an in-depth summary of the book, and the authors' home pages which provide generous collections of online articles and papers. Make Robots Not War. Some Scientists Refuse to Get Paid for Killer Ideas. By Erik Baard. The Village Voice (September 10 - 16, 2003). "As American warfare has shifted from draftees to drones, science and the military in the United States have become inseparable. But some scientists are refusing to let their robots grow up to be killers." The Future of Computing. By Michael L. Dertouzos. Scientific American (August 1999) "The final way in which new technologies can enable people to do more by doing less is by including everyone in the word 'people.' With some 100 million machines interconnected today, we feel pretty smug. Yet that figure represents only 1.6 percent of the world's population . . . the information revolution, left to its own devices, will increase the gap between rich and poor, simply because the rich will use their machines to become more productive, hence richer, while the poor stand still... We cannot let this happen...." / also available from The Detroit News (Japan embraces new generation of robots; March 12, 2005) We'll All Be Under Surveillance - Computers Will Say What We Are. By Nat Hentoff. The Village Voice (December 6, 2002). "Orwell died in 1950. Prophetic as he was in 1984, however, he could not have imagined how advanced surveillance technology would become. ... As Georgetown University law professor Jonathan Turley pointed out in the November 17 Los Angeles Times: 'For more than 200 years, our liberties have been protected primarily by practical barriers rather than constitutional barriers to government abuse. Because of the sheer size of the nation and its population, the government could not practically abuse a great number of citizens at any given time. In the last decade, however, these practical barriers have fallen to technology.'" Our Concept of Ourselves. By Raymond Kurzweil (1990). From The Age of Intelligent Machines, ed. Kurzweil, R., 447-449. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. "What will happen when all these artificially intelligent computers and robots leave us with nothing to do? What will be the point of living?"
A Little Privacy, Please - Computer scientist Latanya Sweeney helps to save confidentiality with "anonymizing" programs, "deidentifiers" and other clever algorithms. Whether they are enough, however, is another question. By Chip Walter. Scientific American (July 2007). "Certainly privacy is under siege, and that, [Latanya Sweeney] says, is bad. Debates rage over the Patriot Act and data mining at the federal level, and states have a hodgepodge of reactive laws that swing between ensuring privacy and increasing security. Although identity theft began a slow decline in 2002, one recent study revealed that 8.4 million U.S. adults still suffered some form of identity fraud in 2006. ... All this has kept Sweeney and her team [at Carnegie Mellon University's Laboratory for International Data Privacy] busy the past six years wrestling some of today’s thorniest confidentiality issues to the mat -- identity theft, medical privacy and the rapid expansion of camera surveillance among them. ... Another program 'anonymizes' identities. It was originally developed for the Department of Defense after the 9/11 attacks to help locate potential terrorists while still protecting the privacy of innocent citizens. The program prevents surveillance cameras from revealing an identity until authorities show they need the images to prosecute a crime. ... The clever algorithms at the heart of Sweeney’s lab go back to her days growing up in Nashville, when she would daydream about ways to create an artificially intelligent black box that she could talk to. ... Sweeney wrote a program called Scrub System that tapped her expertise in artificial intelligence to ingeniously search patient records, treatment notes and letters between physicians. Standard search-and-replace software had generally found 30 to 60 percent of personal, identifying information. Scrub System 'understands' what constitutes a name, address or phone number and eliminates 99 to 100 percent of the revealing data."
Laboratory for International Data Privacy. "The overall mission of the Laboratory for International Data Privacy (also known as the 'Data Privacy Lab') at Carnegie Mellon University is to provide intellectual leadership to society in shaping the evolving relationship between technology and the legal right to or public expectation of privacy in the collection and sharing of data. The Data Privacy Lab is an interdisciplinary research group dedicated to exploring, assessing and creating technology that provides scientific assurrances of anonymity in data."
"The Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science [at Case Western Reserve University] was established in the fall of 1995 under a grant ... from the National Science Foundation and is currently operating under a renewal grant... .The mission of the Ethics Center is to provide engineers, scientists and science and engineering students with resources useful for understanding and addressing ethically significant problems that arise in their work life. The Center is also intended to serve teachers of engineering and science students who want to include discussion of ethical problems closely related to technical subjects as a part of science and engineering courses, or in free-standing subjects in professional ethics or in research ethics for such students." Be sure to see the Computers and Software section and their Glossary of Ethical Terms. FIXED: , bgb , 7/24/08
Kirsner, Scott. Getting smart about predictive intelligence. The Boston Globe (December 30, 2002; page C1). "If you want to get ready for the biggest technology debate of 2003, you should spend a few hours this week with Tom Cruise. ... The movie to rent is 'Minority Report,' directed by Steven Spielberg and based on a short story by Philip K. Dick.... The technology world's big debate for 2003 will center on just this kind of predictive intelligence: the ability to use software running on powerful computers to analyze information about your prior behavior, like where you've traveled and what you've bought, to guess about what you might do next. Are you more likely to purchase a plasma screen TV next year, or attempt to blow up a nuclear power plant? In real-world Washington, retired Navy Admiral John Poindexter is constructing a system called Total Information Awareness, with the hopes of being able to identify terrorists before they commit acts of terrorism, based on a series of suspicious transactions. In the private sector, companies are already using predictive intelligence to analyze your data profile and solve more mundane business problems.... You may think that attempts at divining crimes before they're committed need more congressional oversight than they've been receiving - or that we shouldn't try at all. But whatever you do, give it some thought. Because defining the limits of how predictive intelligence can be used, by government and the private sector, is going to be the major technology debate of the coming year." Expert SystemsArtificial Intelligence in Albuquerque? Local Company Leads the Way for Businesses Worldwide. New Mexico Business Journal (30(7); July 2006). "When artificial intelligence, AI, is discussed, it’s usually in relation to HAL from the movie '2001: A Space Odyssey,' NASA’s Mars exploration 'rover' or even marveling at iRoomba as it vacuums a home automatically. Few would consider that the center of the AI universe is here in Albuquerque. Exsys Inc., founded in Albuquerque in 1983, provides 'expert' system software that enables Web sites to deliver high-level problem-solving knowledge via an interactive online interface. Expert systems started in the early 1980s as a subset of artificial intelligence. Exsys’ expert systems are used by many Fortune 100 companies, the government and the military. ... Alex Linden, vice president, Gartner Research, says, 'The big picture is that AI is almost everywhere, but we don’t call it such.' While sometimes referenced as 'business rules' or 'business process management,' the difference with expert systems is a realistic approach, ability to handle complex logic and affordability." http://nifm.ujf-grenoble.fr/~dojatm/papers/jamia01.pdf A UMLS-based Knowledge Acquisition Tool for Rule-based Clinical Decision Support System Development. By Soumeya L. Achour, MS, DVM, Michel Dojat, Eng, PhD, Claire Rieux, MD, Philippe Bierling, MD, PhD, and Eric Lepage, MD, PhD. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 8 (4): 351360. July 2001. Abstract: "Decision support systems in the medical field have to be easily modified by medical experts themselves. The authors have designed a knowledge acquisition tool to facilitate the creation and maintenance of a knowledge base by the domain expert and its sharing and reuse by other institutions. The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) contains the domain entities and constitutes the relations repository from which the expert builds, through a specific browser, the explicit domain ontology. The expert is then guided in creating the knowledge base according to the pre-established domain ontology and conditionaction rule templates that are well adapted to several clinical decision-making processes. Corresponding medical logic modules are eventually generated. The application of this knowledge acquisition tool to the construction of a decision support system in blood transfusion demonstrates the value of such a pragmatic methodology for the design of rule-based clinical systems that rely on the highly progressive knowledge embedded in hospital information systems." FIXED: , bgb , 7/24/08 Bruce Buchanan Retires. Interview by John Aronis for Links, the newsletter of The Department of Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh (Spring 2003; pages 2 - 4). "While working in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Bruce and his collaborators made important contributions to artificial intelligence. Their assertion -- obvious in retrospect like most great ideas -- was that knowledge is important for intelligent behavior. They drove this point home with a series of programs that embodied the knowledge of scientific and medical experts -- sometimes rivaling or surpassing their abilities -- and the creation of an industry centered around expert systems."
FCW Time Machine: 1988 Kick-starting artificial intelligence. FCW.com (February 12, 2007). "The director of the Army's Artificial Intelligence Center, Lt. Col. Anthony Anconetani, was thrilled in June 1988 to be developing expert systems using computers based on Intel's powerful new 80386 processor. The center had at least four artificial intelligence projects under way when Federal Computer Week reporter Fred Reed talked to Anconetani. Here is how Reed described them. * Document Designer ... * OT War ... * Force Alignment Planner, a knowledge-based program, relates force structure to the pool of military personnel with an eye to maintaining career paths that will keep people in the Army. ... * The Physical Disability Rating Adviser is an expert system that recommends the percentage of disability that should be assigned to patients. ..." Eliciting Knowledge and Transferring it Effectively to a Knowledge-Based System. Brian R. Gaines and Mildred L. G. Shaw, Knowledge Science Institute, University of Calgary. "[T]he elicitation of expert knowledge and its effective transfer to a useful knowledg--based system is complex and involves a diversity of activities. This paper illustrates the complete development of a decision support system using knowledge acquisition tools. The example is simple enough to be completely analyzed but exhibits enough real-world characteristics to give significant insights into the processes and problems of knowledge engineering." Doctors' Orders - As expert systems become more expert, physicians see the advantages of taking on CPOE. By Mark Hagland. Healthcare Informatics (January 2003). "If the future is a clinically driven, elegantly managed, intelligent system--one that helps physicians optimize patient care and helps hospitals and medical groups constantly improve care delivery--then the folks at Ohio State University (OSU) Health System, Columbus, have at least glimpsed the future. They're in the vanguard of patient care organizations using computerized physician order entry (CPOE) systems which, authorities say, best represent the legacy of years of expert-systems development work in healthcare."
Expert Systems in Agriculture. Science Tech Entrepreneur (May 2002). "The application of expert system technology to agriculture seems natural, considering the widespread use of extension agents in the field. Aid from experts, who have encoded their knowledge in computer programs, may help alleviate some of the problems in agriculture. These software programs typically fit into the category of decision support tools. ... Although there is no general standard for expert systems, most include : * a knowledge base of domain facts and associated heuristics * an inference procedure or control structure for utilizing the knowledge base * a natural language user interface. ... The expert system is designed to answer questions typed at a keyboard attached to a computer on such diversified topics, for example, in pest control, the need to spray, selection of a chemical to spray, mixing and application, optimal machinery management practices, weather damage recovery such as freeze, frost or drought, etc." Several expert systems (including Grain Marketing Advisor, POMME, and SOYEX) are described. Expert System in Real World Applications. By Kiong Siew Wai, Abd. Latif B. Abdul Rahman, Mohd Fairuz Zaiyadi, Azwan Abd Aziz. Available from generation 5 (2005). "In this article we will review about agriculture, education, environment and medicine expert system. These four applications widely use among the practitioners due to the maturity of the field by revealing the acceptance of the technology by the commercial sectors." CLIPS. Maintained by Gary Riley. "One of the results of research in the area of artificial intelligence has been the development of techniques which allow the modeling of information at higher levels of abstraction. These techniques are embodied in languages or tools which allow programs to be built that closely resemble human logic in their implementation and are therefore easier to develop and maintain. These programs, which emulate human expertise in well defined problem domains, are called expert systems. The availability of expert system tools, such as CLIPS, has greatly reduced the effort and cost involved in developing an expert system. Rule-based programming is one of the most commonly used techniques for developing expert systems. In this programming paradigm, rules are used to represent heuristics, or 'rules of thumb,' which specify a set of actions to be performed for a given situation. A rule is composed of an if portion and a then portion. ... The origins of the C Language Integrated Production System (CLIPS) date back to 1984 at NASA's Johnson Space Center. ... CLIPS is now maintained independently from NASA as public domain software." - excerpt from, What is CLIPS? FIXED: , bgb , 7/24/08 A free trial download is available.
Games and Puzzles Do not pass Go. Computers can beat the world's best chess players but have yet to master other classic games like Go. By David Levy. The Guardian (October 24, 2002). "Ever since Garry Kasparov's sensational 1997 loss to the IBM chess monster Deep Blue, the chess world has thirsted for revenge. But the first opportunity ended in failure in Bahrain on Saturday, when Kasparov's former pupil and successor as World Champion, Vladimir Kramnik, could only draw an 8-game match against one of the world's leading chess engines, Fritz. But this was just the latest in a long series of human versus computer encounters that illustrate the inexorable march of artificial intelligence (AI). It's a story that began at a Dartmouth University conference in 1956, when several of the founding fathers of AI defined the goals of that infant science. One of them was to create a computer program that could defeat the world chess champion. Success would, those scientists believed, reach to the very core of human intellectual endeavour. By the early 1990s, due in no small part to the successes achieved in computer chess, the interest of the AI community had spread to many other games of skill, including backgammon, bridge, Go and Scrabble. Where exactly are we now in this fascinating struggle? ... Two games proving even tougher to crack than chess are bridge and Go." Computers, Games and the Real World. By Matthew L. Ginsberg. Scientific American (special issue: Exploring Intelligence - Winter 1998). "More than just competing with people, game-playing machines complement human thinking by offering alternative methods to solving problems." Games lecture slides and accompanying transcripts from Professors Tomás
HistoryFIXED: , bgb , 7/24/08 from the Oral History Collection, and
The Grill - ARPA Pioneer Charles M. Herzfeld on the Hot Seat - The 'godfather' of ARPA talks about the days of funding crazy ideas like computer networks, today's lack of effective leadership in government research and the price we may pay. By Gary Anthes. Computerworld (October 1, 2007). "Charles M. Herzfeld is currently a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Arlington, Va. He was hired by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as ARPA, in 1961 to head up research in ballistic missile defense, and he became ARPA’s fifth director in 1965. (ARPA was later known as DARPA, after the word 'defense' was added to the agency’s name.) He also served as director of Defense Research & Engineering, to which ARPA reports, from 1990 to 1991. [Q] What was your introduction to computing? [A] When I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, in 1948 or so, John von Neumann came and gave three seminars on electronic computing. He was instrumental in getting the ENIAC built, and he came to tell us about it. It was hugely important stuff, and it changed my life absolutely. ... [Q] What else did IPTO [Information Processing Techniques Office] do in those early times? [A] We created the whole artificial intelligence community and funded it. And we created the computer science world. When we started [IPTO], there were no computer science departments or computer science professionals in the world. None."
Claude E. Shannon: Founder of Information Theory. By Graham P. Collins. Scientific American Explore (October 14, 2002). "Shannon's M.I.T. master's thesis in electrical engineering has been called the most important of the 20th century: in it the 22-year-old Shannon showed how the logical algebra of 19th-century mathematician George Boole could be implemented using electronic circuits of relays and switches. This most fundamental feature of digital computers' design -- the representation of 'true' and 'false' and '0' and '1' as open or closed switches, and the use of electronic logic gates to make decisions and to carry out arithmetic -- can be traced back to the insights in Shannon's thesis." http://richarddawkins.net/article,392,In-Search-of-Lost-Time,Jo-Marchant--Nature In search of lost time - The ancient Antikythera Mechanism doesn't just challenge our assumptions about technology transfer over the ages -- it gives us fresh insights into history itself. By Jo Marchant. news@nature.com (November 29, 2006). "This thing spent 2,000 years at the bottom of the sea before making it to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, and it shows. ... This is the Antikythera Mechanism. These fragments contain at least 30 interlocking gear-wheels, along with copious astronomical inscriptions. Before its sojourn on the sea bed, it computed and displayed the movement of the Sun, the Moon and possibly the planets around Earth, and predicted the dates of future eclipses. It's one of the most stunning artefacts we have from classical antiquity. ... 'It's the same way that we would do things today, it's like modern technology,' says [Yanis] Bitsakis. 'That's why it fascinates people.' What fascinates me is that where we see the potential of that technology to measure time accurately and make machines do work, the Greeks saw a way to demonstrate the beauty of the heavens and get closer to the gods." FIXED: , bgb , 7/24/08
AI: the story so far. [ Parts 1 and 2 ] By Graeme Wearden. ZDNet UK. (January 23, 2001). "The term artificial intelligence, or AI, was coined at the ground-breaking Dartmouth conference of 1956. But man's interest in the notion that a machine could be given the ability to think can be traced back to the myths and stories of the ancient world." InterfacesConsiderate 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 (January 2005; subscription required.). "'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."
Minding Your Business - Humanizing gadgetry to tame the flood of information. By Peter Weiss. Science News (May 3, 2003; Vol. 163, No. 18 ). "Such interactions between [Roel] Vertegaal, director of the human media lab at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and the gadget, known as eyePROXY, are an experiment in a new style of human-machine interactions. Known as attentive-user interfaces, these combos of gadgetry and software are designed to make our growing staff of machines accommodate human behaviors. The goal is to render that entourage of technology more helpful and less annoying. ... Rather than adding people-reading senses to machines, Microsoft Research's [Eric] Horvitz and his colleagues favor developing sophisticated software tools to analyze the continuous stream of personal information that's already flowing through the computers and other digital equipment that people routinely use. This software sifts out signs of what the user is doing or might want to do in the near future." Intelligent User Interface Lab at DFKI, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. "A central vision of the research department Intelligent User Interfaces is the development of personal information assistants which facilitate user access to the global information highways." Sketch Understanding. From the Smart Tools Lab @ Mechanical Engineering Department, Carnegie Mellon University. "In our sketch understanding project, we are developing techniques to enable natural, sketch-based user interfaces. The goal is to create software that is as easy to use as a paper and pencil! Imagine creating a viewgraph by simply sketching the desired graphics, without having to navigate through menus and dialog boxes. Imagine creating a dynamic simulation of a mechanical linkage by drawing a simple sketch, without having to learn complicated commands. The Visual Language and Information Design Project. Stanford University. Wearable Computing Web Page. From MIT. "Wearable computing hopes to shatter this myth of how a computer should be used. A person's computer should be worn, much as eyeglasses or clothing are worn, and interact with the user based on the context of the situation. With heads-up displays, unobtrusive input devices, personal wireless local area networks, and a host of other context sensing and communication tools, the wearable computer can act as an intelligent assistant, whether it be through a Remembrance Agent, augmented reality, or intellectual collectives." Machine LearningMachine Learning lecture slides and accompanying transcripts.
Bookish Math - Statistical tests are unraveling knotty literary mysteries. By Erica Klarreich. Science News (December 20, 2003; Vol. 164, No. 25). "Stylometry ['the science of measuring literary style'] is now entering a golden era. In the past 15 years, researchers have developed an arsenal of mathematical tools, from statistical tests to artificial intelligence techniques, for use in determining authorship. ... For decades, computers have supported the work of experts in stylometry. Now, computers are becoming experts in their own right, as some researchers apply artificial intelligence techniques to the question of authorship. ... In 1993, Robert Matthews of Aston University in England and Thomas Merriam, an independent Shakespearean scholar in England, created a neural network that could distinguish between the plays of Shakespeare and of his contemporary Christopher Marlowe. A neural network is a computer architecture modeled on the human brain, consisting of nodes connected to each other by links of differing strengths. ... A couple of years later, Holmes and Richard Forsyth of the University of Luton in England used the Federalist Papers to test another artificial intelligence technique. They applied genetic algorithms, which use Darwinian principles of natural selection. The idea is to create a set of rules for determining authorship and then let the most useful, or fit, rules survive. ... Yet another analysis of the Federalist Papers was presented at a computer science conference in October. Glenn Fung of Siemens Medical Solutions in Malvern, Pa., used one of artificial intelligence's newest tools, a pattern-recognition technique called support-vector machines."
Machine Learning and Data Mining Group at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (ÖFAI). Projects, publications, and more.
The Machine Learning Systems (MLS) Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. Read about projects such as OASIS, the Onboard Autonomous Science Investigation System: "Rover traverse distances are increasing at a faster rate than downlink capacity is increasing. As this trend continues, the quantity of data that can be returned to Earth per meter traversed is reduced. The capacity of the rover to collect data, however, remains high. This circumstance leads to an opportunity to increase mission science return by carefully selecting the data with the highest science interest for downlink. We have developed an onboard science analysis technology for increasing science return from missions." "Sodarace [a joint venture between: soda and queen mary, university of london] is the online olympics pitting human creativity against machine learning in a competition to construct virtual racing robots. ... Sodarace is not just for fun. It is a shared competition for Artificial Intelligence researchers to test their learning algorithms while also being a play space in which to communicate the benefits of Artificial Intelligence research with a wide audience and promote a creative exploration of physics and engineering." UCI Machine Learning. University of California, Irvine:
that are used by the machine learning community for the empirical analysis of machine learning algorithms.
is acquired through experience. ... Our research involves the development and analysis of algorithms that identify patterns in observed data inorder to make predictions about unseen data. New learning algorithms often result from research into the effect of problem properties on the accuracy and run-time of existing algorithms." Natural LanguageNLP Tutorials. From Dave Inman, School of Computing, South Bank University, London. The topics covered include: Can computers understand language?; What kinds of ambiguity exist and why does ambiguity hinder NLP?; and A simple Prolog parser to analyse the structure of language. Natural Language Processing. Lecture Notes from Associate Professor John Batali's course in Artificial Intelligence Modeling at the University of California at San Diego's Department of Cognitive Science.
Natural Language Processing: She Needs Something Old & Something New (maybe something borrowed and something blue, too.) Karen Sparck Jones, University of Cambridge, UK. Her 1994 Presidential Address to the Assn. for Computational Linguistics (ACL). "I want to assess where we are now, in computational linguistics and natural language processing, compared with where we started, and to put my view of what we need to do next. ... Computational linguistics, or natural language processing (NLP), is nearly as old as serious computing. Work began more than forty years ago, and one can see it going through successive phases...."
A Short Introduction to Text-to-Speech Synthesis. By Thierry Dutoit. The Circuit Theory and Signal Processing Lab of the Faculte Polytechnique de Mons. "I try to give here a short but comprehensive introduction to state-of-the-art Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis by highlighting its Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) components." Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Representation: Language for Knowledge and Knowledge for Language. Edited by Lucja M. Iwanska and Stuart C. Shapiro. AAAI Press. The following excerpt is from the Preface which is available online: "The research direction of natural language-based knowledge representation and reasoning systems constitutes a tremendous change in how we view the role of natural language in an intelligent computer system. The traditional view, widely held within the artificial intelligence and computational linguistics communities, considers natural language as an interface or front end to a system such as an expert system or knowledge base. In this view, inferencing and other interesting information and knowledge processing tasks are not part of natural language processing. By contrast, the computational models of natural language presented in this book view natural language as a knowledge representation and reasoning system with its own unique, computationally attractive representational and inferential machinery. This new perspective sheds some light on the actual, still largely unknown, relationship between natural language and the human mind. Taken to an extreme, such approaches speculate that the structure of the human mind is close to natural language. In other words, natural language is essentially the language of human thought." Natural Language Lecture Slides & Accompanying Transcripts from Professors Tomás Lozano-Pérez & Leslie Kaelbling's Spring 2003 course:
And be sure to see the illustration in the article: Inside a Conversational Computer.
Be sure to see What It's All About: "Natural Language Processing (or Human Language Technology, or Computational Linguistics) is about the treatment of human languages by computer dating since the early 1950s. NLP has experienced unprecedented growth over the past few years. ..." http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/nl-acq/ Natural Language Learning at UT Austin. "Natural language processing systems are difficult to build, and machine learning methods can help automate their construction significantly. Our research in learning for natural language mainly involves applying inductive logic programming and other relational learning techniques to constructing database interfaces and information extraction systems from supervised examples. However, we have also conducted research in learning for syntactic parsing, machine translation, word-sense disambiguation, and morphology (past tense generation)." Check out the 3 demos of learning natural-language interfaces: Geoquery; RestaurantQuery; and JobQuery. FIXED: , bgb , 7/24/0 Natural Language Processing Course Listing, part of the 2004 NLP Course Survey conducted by ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics). Natural Language Processing Resource Sites. from Mary D. Taffet. "Please note: This webpage was created primarily for the use of the students in the Natural Language Processing course taught by Elizabeth Liddy at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies. Students of other NLP or Computational Linguistics courses are more than welcome to make use of this page as well. The primary purpose of this page is to point to: 1.NLP-related demos that are available online ... 2.Resources relevant to the various levels of language processing 3.Other useful links for NLP students, relating to any aspect of Natural Language Processing that might be encountered in an academic course, from the lowest levels of language processing to the highest levels."
PhilosophyWhat is Consciousness? Defining it is hard enough--giving it to a computer is even harder. Interviews with Christof Koch, Terry Winograd and Hans Moravec. Discover 13(11): November 1992. "DISCOVER: Given that limitation, can we ever build computers that are intelligent or conscious? WINOGRAD: That is, of course, a very difficult question to answer, because first of all, we don’t know what we mean by intelligence, and second of all, we don’t know what we mean by computer. If by computer what you mean is a device that could be built by people, then, of course, it’s a very open-ended question. What if you could actually reproduce a nervous system, essentially neuron by neuron, but build it out of silicon instead of protoplasm? Would it think? Would it be conscious? Well, I’m ultimately a materialist, so I would say of course. If you really could duplicate it piece by piece, it would be all the same pieces; there’s no ethereal soul that makes me have consciousness--it is in the physical properties of my brain and my nervous system. So if you take that very broad notion of computer, then it becomes a matter of whether you’re a materialist or not. Now, this is a very different question from asking whether it could be done with something like the kinds of computers we now understand and know how to build. People have made a leap, I think, implicitly--and this is what you find when you talk to artificial-intelligence people--that those two are the same question. The real question is: What is the actual nature of the thing you would have to build in order to have consciousness or intelligence or whatever it is? ..."
Quantum Consciousness - Nothing in science is as mysterious as quantum mechanics--except, perhaps, the mechanics of the mind. Now genius-of-all-trades Roger Penrose says the two are intimately connected. By David H. Freedman. Discover 15(6) June 1994. Do Artificial Intelligence Systems Incorporate Intrinsic Meaning? Review by Kendrick Kay. The Harvard Brain (Volume 8; Spring 2001). "Current computer systems can perform seemingly intelligent tasks (e.g., solve problems, play games), but whether these systems possess 'true' intelligence is debatable. Fred Drestke, in his essay 'Machines and the Mental,' argues that because the semantics of the symbols manipulated by machines are defined by humans and can change irrespective of the machine, there is no ‘meaning to the machine’. Thus, machines are not mental and do not have 'true' intelligence. In light of this, however, Dretske posits specific requirements, the fulfillment of which would justify us in attributing intelligence to a system." Alert to alarmed robots. By Luke Slattery. The Weekend Australian (August 7, 2004; subscription req'd.). "[I, Robot] may be loosely indebted to Isaac Asimov's short story cycle of the same name, with a few obvious bows and scrapes to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but it is primarily skirting around a very lively contemporary controversy in the philosophy of the mind. Can consciousness be simulated through artificial intelligence or is it a distinctively biological process? The two most vocal antagonists in the debate are the director of the Centre for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, Daniel C. Dennett, author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea and Consciousness Explained; and John R.Searle, professor of philosophy at the University of California, author of The Rediscovery of the Mind and The Construction of Social Reality.Dennett believes, in essence, that in the foreseeable future computer engineers will fashion robots able to feel pain and experience emotions. They might legitimately claim the same civic rights as those of us with a mortal casing. What's more, in essence we are sophisticated robots, or zombies. ... Searle has attacked Dennett vigorously, describing his view as a form of 'intellectual pathology' because it denies the existence of consciousness; consciousness for Searle is a state of sentience and awareness resulting from neurobiological process -- it cannot be artificially engineered. ... I, Robot groans somewhat under the load but it ultimately delivers a timely and relevant pop cultural expression of an argument that occupies some of the best minds in science and philosophy. The I, Robot story, briefly, concerns a new generation of household super-robots that run amok; they not only refuse to yield to human authority, they covet power. They give all the appearance, in other words, of exercising free will. ... Unanticipated, these free radicals engender questions of free will, creativity and even the nature of what we might call the soul." A Mind for Consciousness. "Somewhere in the brain, Christof Koch believes, there are certain clusters of neurons that will explain why you're you and not someone else." By Julie Wakefield. Scientific American (July 2001). Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Resources include the PhilSci Archive and a collection of links to related sites. Models of Consciousness Workshop - In Search for a Unified Theory. September 1-3, 2003. Organized by Ricardo Sanz (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain), Aaron Sloman (University of Birmingham, U.K.), and Ron Chrisley (University of Sussex, U.K.). "Objectives: The Context for the Workshop - The objective of building conscious machines was already a research topic in the early years of artificial intelligence, but the extreme difficulties encountered at that time in developing implementable models of even the simplest features of human intelligence halted the research and put machine consciousness into the bin of Utopian research topics (more or less like time-travel, immortality or hair-restoring). But the case for consciousness is a little bit different because consciousness does exist now. Consequently, we know a priori that the construction of a conscious entity is possible. Research in artificial consciousness is not any longer Utopian research...." Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers. Online articles from the most recent issue of this newsletter, published by the American Philosophical Association. 2004 | Philosophy in Cyberspace: Philosophy of Mind, AI, and Cognitive Science. Maintained by Dey Alexander, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Extensive and annotated list of links to established web sites. Pinsker, Steven. Can a computer be conscious? U.S.News & World Report (August 18, 1997). Reasoning
Diagrammatic Reasoning: Cognitive and Computational Perspectives. Edited by Janice Glasgow, N. Hari Narayanan, and B. Chandrasekaran. AAAI Press. The following excerpt is from the Foreword by Herbert Simon which is available onlone: "That reasoning using language and using diagrams were different, at least in important respects, was brought home by the Pythagorean discovery of irrational numbers. ... Words, equations, and diagrams are not just a machinery to guarantee that our conclusions follow from their premises. In their everyday use, their real importance lies in the aid they give us in reaching the conclusions in the first place." CoLogNET's Decision-Making in AI : A Hierarchical Overview. An evolving survey from Vadim Bulitko of the University of Alberta Department of Computing Science. Be sure to see the section about meta-level reasoning (a subtopic of "Issues/Challenges"): "Most policies reason on the action the agent is to take prior to taking the action. That is often referred to as domain-level (or simply domain) reasoning. Meta-level reasoning (or reasoning about reasoning) is an application of this idea to reasoning. A meta-reasoning system reasons about its domain reasoning prior to commencing it." Also don't miss the section about NCC, non-conventional computing (another subtopic of "Issues/Challenges"). Representationhttp://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-semantic-web&ref=sciam The Semantic Web. By Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila. Scientific American (May 2001). "Traditional knowledge-representation systems typically have been centralized, requiring everyone to share exactly the same definition of common concepts such as 'parent' or 'vehicle.' But central control is stifling, and increasing the size and scope of such a system rapidly becomes unmanageable." FIXED: , bgb , 7/25/08 X-Net Knowledge Bases Project at Commonsense Computing @ Media [the MIT Media Lab]. "What are good ways to represent and organize commonsense knowledge? Rather than building a single monolithic commonsense knowledge base we are exploring different ways to 'slice' the problem into more specific but still broad-spectrum knowledge bases. For example, we are developing separate knowledge bases that represent knowledge in the form of semantic networks, probabilistic graphical models, and story scripts." Koller, Daphne and Brian Milch. Multi-Agent Influence Diagrams for Representing and Solving Games. In Proceedings of the 17th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2001. Abstract: "The traditional representations of games using the extensive form or the strategic (normal) form obscure much of the structure that is present in real-world games. In this paper, we propose a new representation language for general multi-player games --- multi-agent influence diagrams (MAIDs). This representation extends graphical models for probability distributions to a multi-agent decision-making context. MAIDs explicitly encode structure involving the dependence relationships among variables. As a consequence, we can define a notion of strategic relevance of one decision variable to another: D' is strategically relevant to D if, to optimize the decision rule at D, the decision maker needs to take into consideration the decision rule at D'. ..." RobotsA Robot in Every Home - The leader of the PC revolution predicts that the next hot field will be robotics. By Bill Gates. Scientific American (January 2007). "[T]he emergence of the robotics industry, which is developing in much the same way that the computer business did 30 years ago. ... Meanwhile some of the world's best minds are trying to solve the toughest problems of robotics, such as visual recognition, navigation and machine learning. And they are succeeding. ... I can envision a future in which robotic devices will become a nearly ubiquitous part of our day-to-day lives. I believe that technologies such as distributed computing, voice and visual recognition, and wireless broadband connectivity will open the door to a new generation of autonomous devices that enable computers to perform tasks in the physical world on our behalf. We may be on the verge of a new era, when the PC will get up off the desktop and allow us to see, hear, touch and manipulate objects in places where we are not physically present. ... Because the new machines will be so specialized and ubiquitous--and look so little like the two-legged automatons of science fiction--we probably will not even call them robots." FAQ - Keeping pace with robots. By Jonathan Skillings, with Michael Kanellos contributing. CNET News.com (October 5, 2005). "FAQ The robots are among us, but they're not exactly the stuff of science fiction. At least, not yet. Every week seems to bring a new report of a robot taking up a human task: cleaning floors, riding camels, babysitting the kids, firing machine guns. ... To help set the record straight on where we stand now, here's a rundown of what robots are up to these days. What exactly is a robot? ... What's the difference between a robot and an android? ... Can a computer be considered a robot? It has silicon based intelligence of a sort, and performs specific tasks. ... What have they done for us lately? ... Who's leading the charge to get robots into real world settings? ... Where will Robot Valley sprout? ... When will there be a robot for every household? ... Is one robot better than another? ... Can robots reproduce? ... How smart are they? ... Is it ethical to send a robot to do a human's dirty work? ... When will robots become like human beings?" Robots | New Scientist Special Reports On Key Topics In Science And Technology: Robots As stated in Duncan Graham-Rowe’s Instant Expert: Robots (September 4, 2006): "Today, over one million household robots, and a further 1.1 million industrial robots, are operating worldwide. Robots are used to perform tasks that require great levels of precision or are simply repetitive and boring. Many also do jobs that are hazardous to people, such as exploring shipwrecks, helping out after disasters, studying other planets and defusing bombs or mines. Robots are increasingly marching into our lives. In the future, robots will act as carers, medics, bionic enhancements, companions, entertainers, security guards, traffic police and even soldiers." There’s much, much more to learn about robots in the dozens of resources collected for this report, including John Pickrell's list of the where you can get a preview of Robonaut (an advanced humanoid system), Be sure to meet Huggable, Leonardo and others. http://discovermagazine.com/2005/dec/robot-robot
FIXED: , bgb , 7/25/08 video gallery as well as their
Medicine & Machines - Robot makes history as surgical technology evolves. By David Cho. Palm Beach Daily News & Cox News Service (August 21, 2005). "Penelope is a robot, a machine that recently made medical history by becoming the first to act as an independent surgical aide during an operation. During a June procedure at New York-Presbyterian Hospital to remove a benign tumor from a patient's forearm, Penelope responded to voice commands from a surgeon, handing over clamps, forceps and other instruments with her magnetized mechanical arm. Watching with digital cameras, the robot retrieved the instruments when the surgeon placed them down. Inside her computer brain, artificial intelligence software kept track of the implements to ensure none were misplaced and made predictions about what tool the surgeon would ask for next. 'Penelope is just the first step,' said Dr. Michael Treat, a surgeon, physicist and lifelong robotics fan who founded the company that developed Penelope. ... The robot, named for the resourceful wife of Odysseus in Homer's epic poems, weighs about 60 pounds and has a lightweight arm made of carbon fiber mounted on a stainless steel frame." The Future of Humanoid Robots: a panel discussion produced by Discover in partnership with The Disney Institute. Discover 21(3): March 2000. Panelists -- Charles Petit, Eric C. Haseltine, Joe Engelberger, Kazuhiko Kawamura, Sebastian Thrun, Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Joe Herkert, and Alan C. Schultz -- address the question: How human should a humanoid robot be? The Courage to Doubt: How to Build Android Robots as a Theologian. Anne Foerst's talk presented at Harvard Divinity School, November 27, 1995.
How Robots Work. By Tom Harris. HowStuffWorks. "Artificial intelligence (AI) is arguably the most exciting field in robotics. It's certainly the most controversial: Everybody agrees that a robot can work in an assembly line, but there's no consensus on whether a robot can ever be intelligent. Like the term 'robot' itself, artificial intelligence is hard to define. Ultimate AI would be a recreation of the human thought process -- a man-made machine with our intellectual abilities. This would include the ability to learn just about anything, the ability to reason, the ability to use language and the ability to formulate original ideas. Roboticists are nowhere near achieving this level of artificial intelligence, but they have had made a lot of progress with more limited AI. Today's AI machines can replicate some specific elements of intellectual ability." Rise of the Robots. By Hans Moravec. Scientific American. December 1999; pp.124-135. "By 2050 robot 'brains' based on computers that execute 100 trillion instructions per second will start rivaling human intelligence." Human-Free Kick At Robocup 2002 - humanoids battle it out in soccer. By Dennis Normile. Scientific American Explore (September 23, 2002). "'The goal of RoboCup is to develop a team of robots that can beat the human World Cup champions by 2050,' says Hiroaki Kitano, a Sony artificial-intelligence specialist who is also president of the RoboCup Federation." has a special portal for students of all ages with exciting projects, education & career information, a variety of challenges & competitions, a collection of FAQs about many topics, and the opportunity to ask Dr. Robot a technical question! Walking with Robots: "What is a Robot? What do we want robots to do in the future? What can they do now? Can robots have personalities? Can a fully-functional conscious robot be developed? If so, would it be human? And should it have rights? Walking with Robots is a three-year programme of public events funded by the EPSRC [Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, an UK government agency] that aims to address these questions and more. ... Our intention is to increase awareness, especially amongst the young, of where robotics research is heading and how they can themselves contribute, either as engineers or as informed citizens making choices about the world they wish to live in." Hook, Dave. Robot Dreams -Build Your Own R2D2. Library Journal (November 1, 2002). "Collection Development: Building a robot involves knowledge of several fields such as electronics, motors, wiring, computers, programming, control systems, power systems, power transmission, mechanics, and fabricating. In creating a robotics collection, librarians need to consider their users' skill levels in these areas. Beginning enthusiasts may want to know where to start and how to go about building their first robot. The more experienced hobbyists will be more interested in where to find parts or code for programming their controller. ... Most of the titles listed here are for beginners and assume little previous knowledge, although there are also a few manuals for the more advanced hobbyist." Murphy, Robin R. 2000. Introduction to AI Robotics. The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-13383-0. FIXED: , bgb , 7/26/08 Science FictionOne pill makes you smarter. By Loey Lockerby. Kansas City Star (May 2, 2003). "Fantasy stories (including science fiction, fantasy-adventure and horror) usually rely on metaphor to make their points, allowing them to come at their subjects in more indirect ways. ... For instance, 'X-Men' isn't just about hyper-evolved mutants fighting for acceptance. It isn't even about the specter of another Holocaust. It's about any minority group, in any society, that has ever faced hostility and discrimination. ... More recently the issue of artificial intelligence has taken on resonance, leading to scenarios like those in the 'Terminator' and 'Matrix' franchises, which continue their sagas this summer. In both series, highly sophisticated computer programs become sentient and enslave or destroy humans, even finding ways to masquerade as their prey. Not only do our machines try to kill us, they take our identities as well. These are unlikely scenarios, but anyone who has ever had a computer beat them at chess can relate to the concern that the things we create might overpower us someday. It's a concept that goes back at least as far as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which also doubled as a post-Enlightenment philosophical treatise." Films Such as 'I, Robot' Affirm Human Superiority. Duke News & Communications (July 14, 2004). "'I, Robot,' which opens Friday, revisits one of science fiction's common themes: A creation that develops a will of its own and turns against its creator. But why is that idea so appealing? It speaks to our society's deep fears that, as robots become m |
