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AITopics/AIOverviewDevelopments in Artificial Intelligence, Chapter 9 of Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Committee on Innovations in Computing and Communications: Lessons from History, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications, National Research Council. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999. "Artificial intelligence (AI) has been one of the most controversial domains of inquiry in computer science since it was first proposed in the 1950s. Defined as the part of computer science concerned with designing systems that exhibit the characteristics associated with human intelligence--understanding language, learning, reasoning, solving problems, and so on (Barr and Feigenbaum, 1981)--the field has attracted researchers because of its ambitious goals and enormous underlying intellectual challenges. The field has been controversial because of its social, ethical, and philosophical implications. Such controversy has affected the funding environment for AI and the objectives of many research programs." Cawsey, Alison. 1998. The Essence of Artificial Intelligence. 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. AITopics/AgentsI Think, Therefore I Am -- Sorta. The belief system of a virtual mind. Quark Soup column by Margaret Wertheim. LA Weekly (July 22 -28, 2005). "Far more than mere cartoons, these virtual people have each been endowed with a virtual mind complete with its own internal 'desires' and 'goals.' Technically known as 'agents,' they are driven by a revolutionary software system known as PsychSim that enables programmers to simulate the cognitive faculties of human minds. Dr. Stacy Marsella, a leading agent researcher and one of the primary architects of PyschSim, declares that agents actually 'think for themselves.' Indeed, the ultimate goal of agent research is to create autonomous self-determining minds capable of a full spectrum of human behavior. A small, dark-haired man with a doctorate in artificial intelligence, Marsella is a project leader at USC’s Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey, one of the world’s top centers for agent research."
AITopics/ApplicationsAI 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). 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." AITopics/Art
ACE - Building a World Between Arts and Sciences. By Genevieve Ernst. New University Newspaper (November 1, 2005). "Arts Computation Engineering is an interdisciplinary graduate program at UC Irvine that incorporates those three fields -- the arts, computer science and engineering. Student projects from the first graduating class included a robot controlled by a Madagascar cockroach by Garnet Hertz -- a commentary on artificial intelligence and robotics – and 'Infinicity,' Adrien Herbertz's application that allows for the algorithmic generation of an infinite three-dimensional digital space by gradual variation of objects that are loaded into a computerized world navigated by a user on a 'Dance Dance Revolution'-style foot pad with a large screen in front of them. 'Part of the idea is that there’s value to be gained from an interdisciplinary approach, to knowledge in a general sense,' said Robert Nideffer, co-director of ACE and an associate professor in studio art and informatics. '[ACE] trains students to think about a lot of issues not only central to the arts, but central to engineering and computer science to really allow people to be competent in these fields. The goal is to be working at a deep level in the media arts.'" High Performance Computing in the Arts. By the Scientific Computing and Visualization Group, Boston University. AITopics/CognitiveScienceCognitive Science Dictionary. Maintained by Michael R. W. Dawson and David A. Medlar, University of Alberta. AITopics/Ethics
Scientific American Staff Editor. September 2004. SA Perspectives: Einstein = Man of Conscience2. Scientific American, page 10 (subscription req'd. for online access.). "[C]ritics sometimes suggest that science and politics should not mix. But Einstein knew that scientists have a moral responsibility to explain their work, including its political implications. To argue otherwise is to say that science does not matter." AITopics/ExpertSystemsKnowledge-Based Systems Defined - In addition to other benefits, knowledge-based/expert and artificial intelligence systems capture and retain knowledge for reuse and are constructed to input, manipulate, edit, store and eventually execute or react to existing data. Insurance Networking News (October 1, 2006). "Insurance Networking News asked James Bisker, global insurance industry leader, IBM Institute for Business Value, to define knowledge-based, expert and artificial intelligence systems and provide insight into how they can benefit insurance industry operations. INN: There has been some confusion in the marketplace about knowledge-based/expert and artificial intelligence systems. Can you clarify? JB: It's important to recognize that some of the terms that are used interchangeably when discussing this topic really refer to different things. For example, artificial intelligence (AI) is an academic discipline comprised of a set of sub-disciplines. The most common of these is knowledge-based systems (KBS) that work to make the existing components of knowledge in a particular area (called a 'domain' in AI lingo) available in a consistent and reusable form. A term I like to use when referring to the use of AI in business situations is 'intelligent systems.' The type of KBS that is often referred to as an 'expert system' is technically known as a rule-based system. ... In the insurance industry for example, for almost two decades the problem of consistently underwriting a large volume of straightforward cases has been increasingly managed by 'expert underwriting' systems. ... INN: What are some organizational implications of using KBSs? ... " Expert Systems. Section 1.2.3 of Chapter One (available online) of George F. Luger's textbook, Artificial Intelligence: Structures and Strategies for Complex Problem Solving, 5th Edition (Addison-Wesley; 2005). "One major insight gained from early work in problem solving was the importance of domain-specific knowledge. ... Expert knowledge is a combination of a theoretical understanding of the problem and a collection of heuristic problem-solving rules that experience has shown to be effective in the domain. Expert systems are constructed by obtaining this knowledge from a human expert and coding it into a form that a computer may apply to similar problems. This reliance on the knowledge of a human domain expert for the system's problem solving strategies is a major feature of expert systems. Although some programs are written in which the designer is also the source of the domain knowledge, it is far more typical to see such programs growing out of a collaboration between a domain expert such as a doctor, chemist, geologist, or engineer and a separate artificial intelligence specialist." AITopics/GamesLozano-Pérez & Leslie Kaelbling's Spring 2003 course, Artificial Intelligence. Available from MIT OpenCourseWare. "The key idea that underlies game playing programs (presented in Shannon's 1949 paper) is that of limited look-ahead combined with the Min-Max algorithm." [Slide 3.4.7] General Game Playing Competition. "The AAAI General Game Playing Competition is designed to test the abilities of general game playing systems by comparing their performance on a variety of games. ... In the qualification round, entrants will play several different types of games, including single player games (such as Maze search), competitive games (such as Tic-tac-toe or some variant of Chess), games with both competitors and cooperators. In some cases, complete information of the board will be available (as in Chess or Tic-tac-toe); in others, only partial info will be available (as in Battleship). In some cases, the game will be exhaustively searchable (as in Tic-tac-toe); in other cases, this will not be possible (as in Chess). Players will have to handle all of these possibilities. Entrants will be evaluated on the basis of consistent legal play, ability to attain winning positions, and overall time; and the best will advance to the second round." [Also see related articles and links elsewhere on this page.] AITopics/HistoryA History of A.I.. By Paula Lemyre (June 22, 2001). Part of Discovery Channel Canada's AI mini-site. "Since long before the Industrial Revolution, we have dreamed of building machines that think. Well before computers even existed, the lure of creating artificial intelligence (A.I.) captured the imaginations of scientists and engineers, and writers alike." A Conversation with Herbert Simon. By Reuben L. Hann. Gateway IX(2): 12-13 (1998). "CSERIAC: You and your colleagues were the fathers of Artificial Intelligence. Dr. Simon: We have been accused of that. At the time we called it 'complex information processing.'"
Turing Digital Archive. "This digital archive contains mainly unpublished personal papers and photographs of Alan Turing from 1923-1972. The originals are in the Turing archive in King's College Cambridge. This material is presented in an archival format without much editorial comment, although there is a search engine. The Turing Bibliography gives pointers to all the scientific papers." AITopics/InterfacesIntroduction to Intelligent Interfaces. By Henry Lieberman of the MIT Media Laboratory. This outline provides a good, concise overview and addresses questions such as Why do we need intelligent interfaces? and What makes an interface "intelligent"?
"The TaskTracer project at Oregon State University has been developing fully-functional prototypes of new task-oriented personal computer environments that track a user's interactions with all applications, automatically organize the user's information naturally according to tasks, and intelligently leverage the collected data to make desktop applications more task-aware." AITopics/MachineLearningAI and the Impending Revolution in Brain Sciences. Powerpoint slides of "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." AITopics/NaturalLanguage
Natural Language Processing, one of BBN Technologies' "advanced technology solutions." AITopics/PhilosophyBeing Real. By Judith S. Donath, MIT Media Lab. [To appear in Goldberg, K. (ed.) The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet, MIT Press.] "This essay approaches these issues by focusing on a question with special resonance for both technologists and philosophers: can one tell if the person at the other end of an online discussion is indeed a person? The problem of "other minds", while of perennial philosophical interest, is not one that normally intrudes upon everyday life. One concludes either that others do indeed have minds (the pragmatic approach) or that the state of others' minds is unknowable (the skeptical approach) and then goes about one's daily business. The advent of computer-mediated communication - and, particularly, the advent of communication between man and machine- has changed this dramatically. Suddenly the question of other minds, as in "is the being with whom I am speaking in any way conscious or intelligent?" is no longer a rhetorical question asked only in ironic exasperation, but a pressing problem addressed with increasing frequency by ordinary people (i.e. non-philosophers)." Tolson, Jay. 2000. Who am I? U.S.News & World Report (June 12, 2000). "Introspective scientists are probing the mystery of human consciousness." Minsky, Marvin. 1987. The Society of Mind. Simon and Schuster. A 1996 CD-ROM version is now available. AITopics/ReasoningA Framework for Representing Knowledge. By Marvin Minsky. MIT-AI Laboratory Memo 306, June, 1974. (Reprinted in The Psychology of Computer Vision, P. Winston (Ed.), McGraw-Hill, 1975. Shorter versions in J. Haugeland, Ed., Mind Design, MIT Press, 1981, and in Cognitive Science, Collins, Allan and Edward E. Smith (eds.) Morgan-Kaufmann, 1992 .) "FRAMES: It seems to me that the ingredients of most theories both in Artificial Intelligence and in Psychology have been on the whole too minute, local, and unstructured to account–either practically or phenomenologically–for the effectiveness of common-sense thought. The 'chunks' of reasoning, language, memory, and 'perception' ought to be larger and more structured; their factual and procedural contents must be more intimately connected in order to explain the apparent power and speed of mental activities. Similar feelings seem to be emerging in several centers working on theories of intelligence. They take one form in the proposal of Papert and myself (1972) to sub-structure knowledge into 'micro-worlds'; another form in the 'Problem-spaces' of Newell and Simon (1972); and yet another in new, large structures that theorists like Schank (1974), Abelson (1974), and Norman (1972) assign to linguistic objects. I see all these as moving away from the traditional attempts both by behavioristic psychologists and by logic-oriented students of Artificial Intelligence in trying to represent knowledge as collections of separate, simple fragments. I try here to bring together several of these issues by pretending to have a unified, coherent theory. The paper raises more questions than it answers, and I have tried to note the theory's deficiencies. Here is the essence of the theory: ..." NOT BROKEN: , bgb , 10/16/08 AITopics/RepresentationUnderstanding Musical Activities. A 1991 interview with Marvin Minsky, edited by Otto Laske. "I want AI researchers to appreciate that there is no one 'best' way to represent knowledge. Each kind of problem requires appropriate types of thinking and reasoning -- and appropriate kind of representations."
AITopics/RobotsThinking Machines, part of Discovery Channel Canada's AI mini-site. Resources include:
AITopics/ScienceFictionHollywood vs. Reality, part of Discovery Channel Canada's AI mini-site (2001). Articles, videos, and more! AITopics/SpeechSpeech 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." 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. As a matter of fact, since very few people associate a good knowledge of DSP with a comprehensive insight into NLP, synthesis mostly remains unclear, even for people working in either research area."
Be sure to see the illustration in the article: Inside a Conversational Computer. Is There a Future for Speech in Vehicles? By Kenneth White, Harvey Ruback and Roberto Sicconi. Speech Technology Magazine (November / December 2004). "Today, speech recognition technology is becoming an important component in how people are using and interacting with their cars. ... Many people associate speech in cars with science fiction movies and television shows where the cars act like R2D2 robots on wheels. In today’s world the main reason for using speech is less Hollywood and more pragmatic. In fact, it usually boils down to safety. ... The car represents a very challenging environment for voice technologies. The challenges range from creating optimal operation in an unpredictable and noisy environment to dealing with very limited system resources, such as memory/CPU." Speech Recognition, one of BBN Technologies' "advanced technology solutions." AITopics/SystemsThe Future of Computing. By Michael L. Dertouzos. Scientific American (August 1999). "Oxygen, then, is an integrated collection of eight new technologies: handhelds, wall and trunk computers, a novel net, built-in speech understanding, knowledge access, collaboration, automation and customization. The power of Oxygen lies not in any one piece but in the totality of these human-oriented technologies together." Common Lisp Reference Materials: Links to many pages describing the language, ANSI standards, and books. AITopics/FutureThe Future - a Special Report. Forbes.com (October 15, 2007): "What happened to the future? Weren't things supposed to be cooler by now, smarter, safer? Raised on a steady diet of science fiction, overzealous politicians and corporate hype, Americans expected to be living in The Jetsons -- but instead find themselves stuck in a scarier version of The Waltons.The truth is that people simply aren't very good at predicting the future. It was only two centuries ago that we began to think we could do it at all, and we're still learning. Hindsight may be 20/20, but foresight remains largely blind.In our new special report on The Future, Forbes.com takes a look at everything from prediction markets to the disastrous history of the video phone. We also feature new fiction from writers including Cory Doctorow and Max Barry, and provide a cool application that allows you to see how well you can predict the future."
April 3, 2007: Expert says the future is bright. By Eric Berger. Houston Chronicle. "Before speaking Wednesday night at the University of Houston, [Ray] Kurzweil chatted with science writer Eric Berger. ... Q: So are the machines going to take over? A: I don't see the advent of artificial intelligence at the level of humans and beyond as some kind of alien invasion to compete and displace us. I see it, really, as an expansion of our own civilization. This is already a human-machine civilization. Our machines are part of our world, and they already extend our intelligence. Every time you use a search engine you're expanding human intelligence, and very little science can be done today without computers. And as computers become more intelligent and more powerful, we're expanding our horizons. In my mind, that's really what it means to be human. Human beings are the species that goes beyond its limitations. And no other species does that."
August 23, 2006: Fair of the future - Future Visions of the Minnesota State Fair 2006-2056. By Arthur M. Harkins, PhD and John W. Moravec, MIM. StarTribune.com. "Our futures envisioned for the Minnesota State Fair were considered within the frameworks of technological and other changes projected over the next 50 years. The core changes driving these projections were related to vastly smaller, faster, and more versatile technologies, including artificial intelligence, bioengineering, networks, and improved or completely new capabilities at the most basic levels of matter, energy, design, invention, and innovation. The effects of these technologies on human choices, including whether to evolve new forms of humanity and other organisms, to develop artificial intelligence, and to colonize nearby planets and star systems are open choices at this time. ... We hope that readers will be able to contribute to future conceptions of the Minnesota State Fair, and to this end, in the spirit of opening the 'futuring' of the fair to all Minnesotans (My Minnesota State Fair), we invite readers of the Star Tribune to submit their futures for the Fair features listed below and for new features that may become part of the Fair in future. ... Kidway ... 30-year future: Kidway and Youthway have created a new service, Intelliway, which opens limited membership to the most advanced new artificial intelligence programs and devices, many of whom behave like children and youth. ... Education ... 30-year future: First artificial teacher to pass the Turing test and provide high quality instruction is unveiled by the University of Minnesota. ..." April 13, 2006: Singularity Summit At Stanford Explores Future Of 'Superintelligence.' Business Wire / available from Forbes.com. "The Stanford University Symbolic Systems Program and the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence announced today the Singularity Summit at Stanford, a one-day event free to the public, to be held Saturday, May 13, 2006 at Stanford Memorial Auditorium, Stanford, California. The event will bring together leading futurists and others to examine the implications of the 'Singularity' -- a hypothesized creation of superintelligence as technology accelerates over the coming decades -- to address the profound implications of this radical and controversial scenario. ... 'The conference will bring together a range of thinkers about AI, nanotechnology, cognitive science, and related areas for a public discussion of these important questions about our future,' [said Todd Davies, associate director of Stanford's Symbolic Systems Program]." February 3, 2006: March of the Machines. By Duncan McLeod. Financial Mail. "Robotics is set to change the way people work, live and play in the next few decades. Robots will make many middle management and clerical jobs redundant and make people's lives easier by doing menial tasks. They will also become companions. This is the prediction of futurist David Smith, who heads the Unisys-sponsored Global Future Forum, a network of future-thinkers. Smith says rapid advances in technology will deliver a world of 'intelligent' robots far faster than is often suggested. ... Japan's ageing population - more than 40% of the society is expected to be 60 years or older by 2050 - will drive demand for robots, he says. The machines will take care of the frail and elderly. ... 'Children will buy robots to look after their parents,' Smith predicts. ... Artificial intelligence is already being built into some business software, though Smith says this is still 'crude' compared with what's coming. 'In some societies, a lot of jobs will disappear,' he says. It's not yet clear what the impact of this might be." AITopics/GrandChallengesFebruary 20, 2007: Grand challenges free researchers to explore what can be imagined. By John Jernery. The Daily Yomiuri Online. "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. The Architecture of Brain & Mind: Cognitive science, artificial intelligence (AI), and robotics, while related, have traditionally followed distinct trajectories. Cognitive science is primarily concerned with understanding the human mind, while artificial intelligence would be happy to create any type of intelligent system, humanlike or not. Robotics brings programmed action, intelligent or otherwise, into the realm of the physical. In the true spirit of a grand challenge, the Architecture of Brain & Mind project aims to bring these three disciplines together in a single demonstrable system. ... 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." [Also see this info-block below.] October 2, 2006: Robots to race through traffic for Pentagon prize. By Alicia Chang. The Associated Press / available from CNN.com / also available from The Ithaca Journal (Cornell University chosen to compete in DARPA robot challenge; October 3, 2006). "The winners of last year's Pentagon-sponsored robot race are back to take on another challenge -- this time to develop a vehicle that can drive through congested city traffic all by itself. Stanford University, whose unmanned Volkswagen dubbed Stanley won last year's desert race, was among 11 teams selected Monday to receive government money to participate in a contest requiring robots to carry out a simulated military supply mission. ... The winners of last year's Pentagon-sponsored robot race are back to take on another challenge -- this time to develop a vehicle that can drive through congested city traffic all by itself. Stanford University, whose unmanned Volkswagen dubbed Stanley won last year's desert race, was among 11 teams selected Monday to receive government money to participate in a contest requiring robots to carry out a simulated military supply mission. ... Later this month, DARPA will choose an undisclosed number of teams that will not be subsidized by the agency but can compete for a spot in the finals." May 19, 2006: Tech sector set to score at World Cup. By Maxim Kelly. ElectricNews.net. "Since 1993 the RoboCup Federation has used soccer to promote scientific progress in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence. At the junior RoboCup qualifiers in Dublin last week, Dr Ashley Green of the European Space Agency told ENN that since IBM's Deep Blue computer beat Kasparov in 1996, 'soccer is the new grand challenge to replace chess'. However, the ultimate aim of these robotics experts is to construct a team of completely autonomous humanoid robots capable of beating the Fifa World Cup champions by 2050. Remote controls are strictly forbidden." January 7, 2004: The ultimate global network - Within 20 years computers will be everywhere, and they'll all be talking to each other. Daunting? Not if we're prepared, says a group of British scientists. By Richard Sarson. The Independent. "To ward off these evils and prepare for the future, [Tony] Hoare and [Robin] Milner are launching a series of 'Grand Challenges' to the UK's computer scientists. The seven challenges spin off in different directions from a single big idea: that all the computers in the world will become part of one Global Ubiquitous Computer. Hoare wants 'to understand these enormous artefacts, which have rather escaped the control of their original designers. At one time, the complexity may have been artificial, but now it is almost natural, rather like the complexity of organic chemistry.' ... The final challenge moves from basic biology to 'the architecture of brain and mind'. This will bring together biologists, brain physiologists, nerve scientists, psychologists, linguists, social scientists and philosophers to work out how the grey and white mush of our brain can constitute the most powerful and complicated computer on the planet: our mind. Scientists have been trying to create intelligent robots for years, with little success. This grand challenge is having another go at understanding how to do this. ... The challenges will not end up as instant software tools to run the world. That, says Hoare, is the 'job of the entrepreneur'. But the scientists can provide the theory behind those tools.
AITopics/MultiAgentSystemsIntelligent 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...." Multiagent Systems: A Modern Approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence. Reviewed by Julie A. Adams. AI Magazine 22(2): 105-108 (Summer 2001). " As the title indicates, Multiagent Systems: A Modern Approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence covers the design and development of multiagent and distributed AI systems. The purpose of this book is to provide a comprehensive overview of the field. It is an excellent collection of closely related papers that provides a wonderful introduction to multiagent systems and distributed AI." Distributed Artificial Intelligence links from the Department of Sociology, University of Surrey. Learning in Multi-Agent Systems: Webliography. By M. V. Nagendra Prasad (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Thomas Haynes (University of Tulsa), Links to research sites, projects, conferences, journals and more. "The Research Center for Team-Based Agents [School of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University] aims to develop agents with 'team intelligence', which enables them to support and enhance collaborative activities of teams, which may include both human users and software agents. The center's research will build on the findings and theories about effective human team behaviors and incorporate them into intelligent agent technologies." AITopics/WebSearchingAgents
Spinning a smarter Web - The Semantic Web promises to make information more meaningful. By Sue Bowness. Information Highways (March/April 2004). "Besides the development of a shared system that will help computers to understand the relationships between databases and documents, the second aspect of the Semantic Web is to help computers develop reasoning and communication. Artificial intelligence researchers like Sheila McIlraith are all over this concept, developing applications called 'agents' that would interact with each other and be able to carry out research commands on the user's behalf. ... While the development of Semantic Web languages and agents are already a rudimentary reality, some aspects of the Semantic Web are almost entirely theoretical at the present time. For instance, what if an agent is confronted with conflicting information, how will it know which statement is true? This is where proof-checking mechanisms will be a necessary addition to the process. Through digital signatures, applications on the Semantic Web would learn to trust certain data based on its author, and allow transactions based on that shared context." Robots Invade the Net. By Mike Wooldridge. CNET (March 16, 1998). "As you read these words, thousands of nonhuman entities are also using the Web, harvesting text, submitting search queries, even posing as people. They carry out their missions without a hint of compassion--which sounds bad unless they happen to be on a mission for you. They are bots (short for 'software robots'), software programs that run all by themselves on the Web, sifting through data and making their own decisions. In many ways, they hold the key to making the Web a more valuable tool." And this very easy to read series of articles makes a great place to begin to understand just what it is they do and what they can do for you. WebFountain. "IBM Research developed WebFountain, which can transform passive, reactive organizations and processes into more proactive and agile businesses that can sense and respond to real-time internal and external events, issues, and marketplace changes. ... WebFountain is comprised of three primary components: 1. The Platform: ... It has integrated miners, crawlers and applications which focus on specific or global tasks. ... 3. Multi-Disciplinary Text Analytics: WebFountain provides an integrated platform for multi-disciplinary text analytic approaches. This includes natural language processing, statistics, probabilities, machine learning, pattern recognition and artificial intelligence." AITopics/AbductionScientists Develop Experimenting Robot. By Alex Dominguez. Associated Press / available from the Star-Telegram (January 14, 2004). "'It's like if you have a machine which is broken, the system can automatically reason to find all the possible ways it can be broken,' said Ross King of the University of Wales-Aberystwyth. 'Some philosophers have thought this is impossible for computers because that's the imaginative leap.' The robot scientist uses a type of reasoning called abduction. King said it is the kind of reasoning police use to reconcile clues when investigating a crime. "If this person committed the crime, all the clues make sense," King said." Also see: AITopics/AIEffectMachines are catching up to human intelligence. By Robert S. Boyd. Knight Ridder Washington Bureau (October 24, 2005). "Some AI systems are famous, such as Deep Blue, the computer that beat the world chess champion Garry Kasparov, or Predators, the unmanned spy planes hovering over Afghanistan. But the machine intelligence that underlies most such systems is largely invisible, so people take their cleverness for granted. AI experts grouse that once one of their projects succeeds, people no longer consider it to be AI. According to Rodney Brooks, the director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 'AI is everywhere around you every second of the day. People just don't notice it.'" Will AI Reach the Mainstream? Artificial intelligence has so far carried high expectations and little reality, but research slowly carrying through to the business marketplace, says analyst firm. By Jim Ericson. Line56.com.(September 14, 2004). "Computers and software can now perform tasks that were impossible five years ago, so it pays to keep an open mind, according to Amreetha Vijayakumar, Frost & Sullivan Technical Insights research analyst. 'AI is slowly starting to propagate in the normal business case, especially in applications risk assessment, CRM, data mining, these applications are starting to reach users.' ... In some cases she says, AI goes unnoticed because developers don't accept that AI is used in their products." An apple for the computer - Machines are so sophisticated they can be used to grade essays. But in some ways, artificial intelligence still lacks common sense. By Faye Flam. Philadelphia Inquirer (August 30, 2004). "[Henry] Lieberman and other artificial intelligence researchers say computers could become dramatically smarter and more humanlike in the future. The brain is just a physical machine, albeit a complicated one we don't yet understand, they argue. 'People have this illusion that what we do is magic and it will never be automated,' said University of Pennsylvania computer science professor Lyle Ungar. When he first started studying artificial intelligence, he said, no one thought a computer could play chess well enough to beat the masters. Today, computers can beat everyone at chess, he said, and we're no longer impressed." What tomorrow may bring - Government challenges industry to develop software to help predict terrorist actions. By Alan Joch. Homeland Security Special Supplement to Federal Computer Week (February 23, 2004). "'Pattern recognition is linked to [artificial intelligence], which was very hyped in the '70s and '80s, and that was very detrimental,' said Sameer Samat, chief technology officer at Kofax Image Products Inc., which bought pattern-recognition software maker Mohomine Inc. last year. 'For a time, if you mentioned pattern recognition, people just hung up the phone.' But new interest, based on security necessities arising after the 2001 terrorist attacks, may bring more popularity to pattern recognition." Machine visionary - Author and inventor Ray Kurzweil is an authority on artificial intelligence. Interviewed by Hamish Mackintosh. The Guardian (February 6, 2003). Here's a sample of what you'll find: "[Q:] 'Is AI experiencing a renaissance?' [A:] 'We're in an era of what I'd call 'narrow AI', where systems are performing intelligent functions that used to require human intelligence. Intelligent systems can fly and land airplanes or make financial investment decisions. These were research projects 10 years ago and are now in widespread practical application and have become integrated into our information infrastructure. Every time an application works, it's no longer called AI - it becomes a separate field. It's speech recognition, character recognition, robotics, machine vision, etc.'" AI Center brings hi-tech degrees to University [of Georgia]. By Steve Saussy. Red and Black (September 18, 2002). "'Most people don't realize there is lots of artificial intelligence in, for example, Microsoft Windows,' [Michael] Covington said. Many people only think of robots when artificial intelligence is brought up, he said, but most of the current software available today use artificial intelligence." The return of artificial intelligence. By Corey Booth and Shashi Buluswar. The McKinsey Quarterly, 2002 Number 2 Web exclusive (no-fee reg. req'd). "Artificial intelligence (AI) has come in and out of vogue more times than Madonna in the past 20 years: it has been hyped and then, having failed to live up to the hype, been discredited until being revived again. In the late 1990s, an observer at a World Wide Web technology conference reported that most of the proposals there had been floated, several years earlier, under the AI moniker and were now being recycled - good technology solutions looking for real business problems to solve." Computers try to outthink terrorists. By Bruce V. Bigelow. The San Diego Union-Tribune (January 13, 2002). Also available from UC San Diego. "Once known as 'artificial intelligence' -- a term that many computer scientists disdain -- such technology now is used to detect fraudulent financial transactions, such as money laundering, and to monitor industrial processes for irregularities." On the bleeding edge? Call 911, or a VAD. An editorial by Alison Eastwood. CBiz Magazine (Channel Business, formerly Canadian Computer Reseller; May 26, 1999). "I asked a woman at a systems management software development firm whether her company's solution used AI to diagnose problems. [Pause.] 'We don't like to use the words 'artificial intelligence,'' she said brightly. Oh? Well, how about the words 'neural networks'? 'Uh, no. Because it means so many different things, and then we get all these technical people asking us what algorithms we use.'" - Editorial: AITopics/Agriculture
Center's screen saver provides predictions about the Earth. By Justin Henning. The Kansan (November 7, 2002). "The Informatics Biodiversity Center at the University of Kansas developed this screen saver, called Lifemapper. Lifemapper uses an artificial intelligence algorithm, called GARP for short. The Genetic Algorithm for Rule-set Production examines and compares similarities between a species and the area and climate it is found in. It can then predict the likelihood of finding a specific plant or animal in an area. ... 'This will help researchers address global research, management and policy issues in environmental biology,' said William Michener, director of the Long-Term Ecological Research Network at the University of New Mexico in a press release, 'Increasingly, these issues require efficient, automated access to diverse and widespread data.'" 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. Autonomous Agricultural Productionat the University of Illinois Agricultural Engineering Department. "Dr. Qin Zhang, Adjunct Professor John F. Reid and Adjunct Professor Noboru Noguchi and their industry sponsors have an international collaboration towards the advancement and development of automation for agricultural production. This has led to the development of several automated and autonomous systems for production agriculture. Check on these links to see examples of these machines including: Autonomous planting of a crop; Automatic guidance based on machine vision sensing."
Smart Controller Makes Clean Decisions. Argonne National Laboratory. "The intelligent controller learns the power plant behavior using artificial intelligence methods, such as neural networks and fuzzy logic. Neural networks learn like a human does, by trial and error. The controller learned to mimic the complex plant processes in the boiler by analyzing performance data collected from a ComEd power plant. ... Intelligent controller 'learns' to make cleanest emissions decision for power plants." SlugBot - Enemy of Slugs. By Louise Knapp. Wired News (October 8, 2001)." A prototype robot capable of hunting down over 100 slugs an hour and using their rotting bodies to generate electricity is being developed by engineers at the University of West England's Intelligent Autonomous Systems Laboratory. ... 'The robots will share a map between them showing where the greater density of slugs are and allowing them to coordinate so they don't get into each other's way and so they don't go back to the same area two days in a row,' [Ian] Kelly said."
The UC Davis Biological and Agricultural Engineering Sensors and Instrumentation Lab. "Our goal is to apply advanced technologies to biological systems including the use of robotics, automation, machine vision, neural networks, and microbial biosensors."
The Central Laboratory For Agricultural Expert Systems. "In 1987, officials at the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture and land reclamation, recognized expert systems as an appropriate technology for speeding development in the agricultural sector. To realize this technology, in 1989, the ministry initiated the Expert Systems for Improved Crop Management Project (ESICM) in conjunction with the Food and Agriculture Organization of The United Nations (FAO) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).The project began in mid 1989 and CLAES joined theAgricultural Research Center(ARC) in 1991. The Central Lab for Agricultural Expert systems (CLAES),established in 1991, was a natural growth of the ESICM. Through the development, implementation and evaluation of knowledge based decision support systems, the Central Laboratory for Agricultural expert Systems is helping farmers through out Egypt optimize the use of resources and maximize food production." FIXED: , bgb , 10/16/08
Forest Project. "Home Page of the Artificial Intelligence Center at University of Georgia. We are in the midst of developing projects funded by USDA Forest Service. These projects involve developing tools for both KBS development and specific applications. This page provides information about and download links to them." Douglas-Fir Cone and Seed Insects Expert System Demo. Developed by Acquired Intelligence Inc. in cooperation with B.C. Ministry of Forests, Canadian Forest Service and Agriculture Canada. "This diagnostic system is intended to assist seed orchard managers and cone and seed collectors, dealers and researchers in the identification of insects associated with Douglas fir cones. The system applies available research, operational knowledge and a diverse literature to provide a diagnostic tool." Robotic milking making inroads into farms. By Marc Levy. Associated Press / available from the GazetteExtra (February 26, 2002) / also available from CNN (3/1/02) and USA Today (3/1/02). "With the help of robots and a little training, 150 cows on the H.E. Heindel & Sons dairy farm in Brogue, Pa., are practically milking themselves. One of seven farms in the United States, including three in Wisconsin, that are experimenting with robotic milking systems, Heindel & Sons has trained most of its cows to walk up to the milking station and spend a few minutes munching grain while the robot's quietly moving parts prod at the animal's udder. ... The technology is billed as a tool for the salvation of small, family owned dairy farms.... The robot, conversely, guides itself, largely cleans itself, and notifies a farmhand's cell phone if it detects a mechanical problem." Use of Artificial Neural Networks and Fuzzy Logic for Integrated Water Management. IHE-STOWA joint research project. Electronic/Artificial Noses (Technology Brief). "The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is exploring the technologies required to perform environmental restoration and waste management in a cost effective manner. This effort includes the development of portable, inexpensive systems capable of real-time identification of contaminants in the field. As part of this effort, ANNs [artificial neural networks] are being combined with chemical sensor arrays and spectrometers for use in prototype electronic noses."
4th IFAC/CIGR International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture-AIA 2001. Budapest: 6-8/06/01 The application of machine learning techniques to erosion modelling. By Fiona Ellis, PhD Student, School of Resource and Environmental Management, Australian National University. "In contrast to many currently available process-based erosion models, these AI techniques successfully use minimal, low cost data sets. DTA [Decision Tree Analysis] allows, through the production of a rule set, a model which is easy to interpret and leads to hypotheses that may explain observed erosion phenomena and guide further investigation." "AI Applications [was] a scientific, peer-reviewed journal devoted to the application of expert systems to natural resources, agriculture, and environmental science." Table of Contents available for the years 1987 - 1998 are available online. "From the 1999 publication year, the title is being transferred to Elsevier Science and will be incorporated in the journal Computers and Electronics in Agriculture (COMPAG)." Robots Seen in Future of Citrus - The Citrus Department is paying for a study on the feasibility of robotic harvesting. By Kevin Bouffard. The Ledger (July 18, 2002). "The Florida Citrus Commission on Wednesday hired the University of Florida to conduct a $268,000 study on the feasibility of robotic harvesting in the state's citrus groves. ... The technology already exists to build a robotic harvester, [Galen] Brown said. The question remains whether that technology can harvest citrus productively and economically. ... Early robotic harvesters took several minutes to perform those tasks, he said. By the late 1990s, a European company had developed a robotic harvester that took about 3.5 seconds to recognize, pick and handle a single piece of fruit. That's still too slow to make a robotic harvester cheaper than manual labor, Brown said. But technology has advanced to the point it may be possible to build a machine that would pick one fruit per second." AITopics/AnalogyStructure-Mapping. From the Qualitative Reasoning Group at Northwestern University's Institute for the Learning Sciences. "The basic idea of Gentner's structure-mapping theory is that an analogy is a mapping of knowledge from one domain (the base) into another (the target) which conveys that a system of relations which holds among the base objects also holds among the target objects. Thus an analogy is a way of noticing relational commonalties independently of the objects in which those relations are embedded. ... We view structure-mapping as the mechanism by which much of experiential learning takes place. We conjecture that much of experiential learning is driven by implicit comparisons among a person's knowledge structures at a given time. Analogy is also crucial in learning from instruction and in aligning experiential knowledge with knowledge gained via instruction." T. G. Evans 'I.Q. test' solver: ANALOGY. From Professor S. Simon Ben-Avi. "Varieties of analogical thinking depend on the intelligent comparison of descriptions of the things between which an analogy is perceived. This point was first clearly made within the artificial intelligence literature by T. G. Evans, whose ANALOGY program could appreciate structural likenesses between geometrical patterns of the type commonly included in IQ tests. Presented with a set of items such as those shown in Figure 1, Evans's program uses descriptions, and descriptions of descriptions , to search for deeper similarities underlying surface disparities. For example, ANALOGY concludes in answer to this particular test problem that 'A is to B as C is to 2.'" "Reuse of OO Specifications through Analogy. The ROSA project at the Department of Information Science [University of Bergen, Norway], focuses on themes from information systems development, object-orientation, and artificial intelligence. The purpose of the project is to investigate how one could us analogical reasoning as a method to support systems development. That is, we try to facilitate reuse in the analysis phase of the software engineering process by establishing analogies from a present case to finished analysis models." Legal Principles and Analogical Reasoning. By Michael Aikenhead (1997). Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law: Poster Proceedings, 1-10. Excerpt from the extended abstract: "Any complete model of legal reasoning and legal analogizing must simulate the manner in which principles influence the creation of analogies and the way in which principles are themselves tested and refined on a case by case basis. The influence of principles on the construction of analogies, not only the influence of principles on the justification of analogies needs to be incorporated into simulations of legal analogizing." Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind: Analogy. Chris Eliasmith, editor. Analogy and Conceptual Change, or You can't step into the same mind twice. By Eric Dietrich - Program in Philosophy, Computers, and Cognitive Science, Binghamton University. In Cognitive Dynamics: Conceptual and Representational Change In Humans and Machines. E. Dietrich and A. Markman, eds., Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000, pp. 265-294. The Metaphor Home Page. "This site is the home of all things good and bad concerning the computational treatment of Metaphor Interpretation, Generation and Analogical Reasoning." Maintained by Tony Veale. Redefining what artificial intelligence is all about. Alexandre Linhares' review (February 17, 2000) of Melanie Mitchell's book "Analogy-making As Perception." "It documents an artificial intelligence project known as Copycat, which was implemented as the author's PhD project under Douglas Hofstadter." AITopics/ArchitectureAndDesignFrom AI in the news: Blueprint for the Future - How Science and Technology Will Change Architecture. By Jacob Dalton. TechTV / available from ABC News (February 4, 2003). " A decade ago, one might have considered Neil Spiller a fanatic, an architect whose concepts were more suited for a science-fiction novel than a world based in reality. ... To hear Spiller tell it, we're literally living in the past. The acclaimed instructor at London's Bartlett School of Architecture says that traditional theories of architecture are out of date. ... Spiller says the traditional notion of building is obsolete. Instead, architecture must marry its time-tested concepts with scientific theories and cutting-edge technologies. Spiller's concepts are theoretical, and some are as abstract as a Salvador Dali painting. However, he points out some existing technologies that could be a boon for architects. Besides software programming and knowledge of complex algorithms, Spiller says new-fangled sciences such as genetic engineering, artificial intelligence (AI), cloning, and nanotechnology are the future of architecture." - Design, Analogy, and Creativity
Virtual Vroom - Putting the pretend pedal to the make-believe metal in pursuit of expedited engine excellence. By Frank Markus. Car and Driver Magazine (May 2003). "Today, untold zillions of molecules of iron, aluminum, and plastic composites awoke at the flick of a human wrist on an ignition key. They were compressed or stretched by the forces of combustion, they transferred heat from cylinder walls to coolant, they transformed vibrations into noise, and they were lubricated against the forces of friction. But before these molecules were crafted into modern engines, virtual facsimiles of them were subjected to vivid, lifelike simulations of these actions, the whole shebang conjured by an artificial intelligence as sophisticated as anything conceived of in The Matrix." Design & Manufacturing Support from SHAI (Stottler Henke Associates, Inc.). Read about the fascinating applications developed by this company. Smart Tools Lab. "Our sketch understanding work is aimed at creating a more natural interface between people and computers. Our work aims to bring the flexibility and convenience of paper-and-pencil sketches to a variety of applications such as sketch based CAD systems, drawing software, and presentation software. Our techniques are ideally suited to pen-based computers and PDA's. Our work includes low level pen processing, recognition, and high level interpretation. Our work in CAD focuses on capturing design knowledge and automatically channeling it to those who need it." AITopics/ArtificialNoses
Smart Robot Pet Tricks - Tap into a mechanical dog’s brain and give it whatever personality you like. By Steven Johnson. Discover (February 2004; Vol. 25 No. 02). "Not all of the personality swapping is frivolous. One of Sony’s goals in providing programmers with the tools to modify AIBO was to encourage academic institutions exploring artificial intelligence and robotics to use the 'dog' as a research platform. Last spring Carnegie Mellon hosted the first annual RoboCup American Open, in which teams composed of four AIBOs competed in a canine version of soccer, kicking their beloved pink ball across an Astroturf table outfitted with goals at either end. ... AIBOs playing soccer is just the beginning. Natalie Jeremijenko, a design engineer, wants to go one step further and release computerized canines into the wild. In her Feral Robots project, Jeremijenko and a research team from Yale ... equipped them with customized processors and sensors that detect contamination levels in reclaimed landfills, urban parks, and various other public spaces. In addition, the sniffer dogs follow special 'pack behavior' rules as they explore these spaces.... Jeremijenko describes her approach as being closer to sociology than to the psychological model that governs most artificial intelligence research."
Sensing danger - Artificial eyes, ears, and noses for stronger, safer troops. By Kenneth Terrell. US News & World Report (September 30, 2002). "The nose doesn't have a specific receptor for the smell of roses; instead it detects a particular mixture of sweet, sour, and floral, which the brain recognizes as a rose. Similarly, the Tufts artificial nose has 16 fluorescent sensor strips, each sensitive to a different range of molecules, and a computer that interprets their response pattern to determine whether or not they have sniffed a mine. While this method can be better at filtering out false alarms than the Fido approach, it may not be quite as sensitive to explosives-related chemicals." Researchers smell success in developing 'robo-noses'. By Usha Lee McFarling. Knight Ridder Newspapers. Available from The Seattle Times. March 9, 1999. "With the help of a squadron of crawling robots and electrical engineer Rodney Goodman, Lewis is now taking the nose, literally, a few steps further. The new robots are learning to detect wind: When Goodman leans over and blows air at one of his creations, it obediently turns toward him. Once Goodman marries these wind-detecting robots to artificial noses, he says, they'll be able to crawl toward hidden objects and follow wafting scents by zigzagging back and forth like bloodhounds." Electronic/Artificial Noses. A technology brief from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. "An electronic nose is generally composed of a chemical sensing system (e.g., sensor array or spectrometer) and a pattern recognition system (e.g., artificial neural network). At Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, we are developing electronic noses based on artificial neural network technology for the automated identification of volatile chemicals for environmental and medical applications. ... Currently, the biggest market for electronic noses is the food industry." Building Bionic Noses Researchers Develop Super-Sensitive Sensors to Sniff Out Explosives. By Paul Eng. ABCNEWS.com (November 16, 2001). Electronic Nose. "The University of Warwick has been actively involved in the research and development of electronic nose instrumentation since the early 1980s. Current research is undertaken by an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Sensors Research Laboratory led by Prof. Julian Gardner in the Centre for Nanotechnology & Microengineering and the Electrochemical Group led by Prof. Philip Bartlett at the University of Southampton."
Electronic Noses Sniffing Out Wine Niche: Perfecting Sensory Evaluation of Smells by Imitating Canine "Noses With Legs". By Abby Sawyer. Wine Business Monthly, July 1997. "Just as a police dog comes to recognize cocaine by repeated exposure to that smell, an electronic nose must be 'trained' to recognize an odor abnormality. Electronic noses combined with artificial neural network (ANN) technology allow these instruments to be trained. ANNs are artificial intelligence networks which, like humans, can "learn" through exposure to stimuli." For Insight Into Finding Land Mines, Scientists Have Gone to the Dogs. By Peter N. Spotts. The Christian Science Monitor (September 23, 1997). "Designing sensors that approximate a dog's ability to smell explosives is one of several approaches researchers in the United States are pursuing to help uncover what the International Red Cross estimates to be 120 million mines worldwide. ... The Defense Advance Research Projects Agency alone reportedly is spending $25 million over three years to advance the sensor and computing technologies needed to mimic a dog's sense of smell. The Defense Department's Humanitarian Demining Technology Development Pro- gram is spending nearly $15 million this year on new technology and on finding ways to apply existing technologies to demining." NOSE II - 2nd Network on artificial Olfactory Sensing. Project co-ordinators: Mika Harberk & Udo Weimar, University of Tuebingen. "For ages, the human nose has been an important tool in assessing the quality of many products, food products being good examples. While all others parts of production processes, including these of the food industry, were getting more and more automated, there was still no 'objective' means for using the 'subjective' information confined in the smell of products. This changed in 1982, when Persaud and Dodd introduced the concept of an electronic nose. They proposed a system, comprising an array of essentially non-selective sensors and an appropriate pattern recognition system. Much research was done in order to find new and more diverse sensors, and to date there are several companies offering ready-to-use electronic noses. You can accessthe review on R&D efforts and commercial availability." AITopics/Astronomy
This NASA site offers many links for you to explore, including one to How It Works.
AI in Space. From Discovery Channel Canada's Artificial Intelligence mini-site (2001). Trip to Mars requires intelligence. By Randall Edwards. Federal Computer Week (January 26, 2004). "At the urging of President Bush, American astronauts may one day set foot on Mars. However, such an ambitious feat won't be possible without the aid of improved artificial intelligence, according to technology experts. ... [A]dvanced artificial intelligence systems must be present on the mission, according to David Kortenkamp, a senior scientist with Metrica Inc., a contractor at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. Artificial intelligence is the science of making computers behave like humans. 'It's not only feasible, it's necessary to make that happen,' Kortenkamp said. 'In Bush's vision, we see the need for robots, computers and humans to work very closely together to accomplish the tasks.' He expects artificial intelligence to improve dramatically during Bush's timeframe for manned expeditions. ... Autonomous computer systems, those that can operate independent of human control, have been used successfully in previous space missions, though at a smaller scale than would be necessary for a Mars trip. ... 'I think by 2020 we're really going to be pretty excited about the robots and the AI systems that we can field for the astronauts,' [Barney] Pell said." The Machine Learning Systems (MLS) Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. Read about projects such as Onboard Science Analysis - Autonomous Serendipitous Science Acquisition for Planets: "The main driver for sending spacecraft into the solar system is scientific investigation. The desire by JPL and NASA to develop a new generation of small,autonomous, capable spacecraft, that are operable with low requirements for bandwidth, communications, and operations leaves little choice but to move capabilities for science data analysis onboard the spacecraft. Capabilities such as autonomous recognition and acquisition of science targets are essential if one is to achieve the strong requirments of reduced downlink bandwidth as well as reduced operations and sequencing from the ground." AITopics/AssistiveTechnologies
Engineer's focus: accessible technology for all. By K. Oanh Ha. The Mercury News / available from Bayarea.com (July 2, 2003). "T.V. Raman is grateful that he didn't completely lose his eyesight until he was 13. Because of that, he says, he didn't get used to always receiving 'special' treatment. ... That's the same attitude Raman brings to his research in speech technology. While Raman, a software engineer, is a fervent proponent of making the Web and other technology accessible to the disabled community, he chooses not to work in the assistive technology field where products are designed specifically for people who are physically impaired. Instead, he works in developing mainstream products, such as cell phones and personal digital assistants that can be used with equal ease by people with disabilities and those without. ... In 1994, Raman wrote a program, emacspeak, that allows his computer desktop to be completely audio-enabled. A computer voice reads to him what's displayed on his screen as he navigates e-mail, surfs the Web and accesses programs. Raman's software is distributed free on the Web and IBM will package it soon as part of a suite of server software. It's also distributed on Sun's operating system, Solaris." Artificial Intelligence ... Real results. By Dena Levitz. The Red & Black (April 25, 2003). "When she came to the Classic City, Julia Lundy, like many other new University students, wanted one thing: independence. But, unlike other freshmen, Lundy prepared for this goal by purchasing a motorized wheelchair for trekking around campus. The 18-year-old is handicapped, blind and suffers from several neurological disorders. ... Bumping into people and property, almost rolling down flights of stairs and having difficulty backing up are some of the problems she faces each day. But cutting-edge work being done by a group of students and a professor within the University's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Center may change all that. Don Potter, the graduate coordinator of the AI Center, and three students are working with autonomous robots to develop a system for Lundy's wheelchair in which sensors would vibrate when the wheelchair was about to hit something. Lundy approached Potter in mid-fall, simply, she said, to see what the institute could do to help her. Since then, the project has branched off into several separate initiatives toward ultimately increasing Lundy's safety."
I See What You Are Saying. By Dr. Judith Markowitz. Speech Technology Magazine (September/October 2003). "There's no doubt that speech recognition is an assistive technology. Most of us are familiar with the use of dictation and voice-controlled desktop navigation tools by people with repetitive stress injuries (RSI). ... Now the American Sign Language project at DePaul University’s School of Computer Science, Telecommunications and Information Systems is building a system that will guide deaf people through auditory minefields. ... The goal of the DePaul researchers is to capture spoken instructions and convert them into the fourth most widely-used language in the United States -- American Sign Language (ASL). 'This involves transforming verbal communication into an animated visual format,' says graduate student Sunny Srinirasan. 'It's really a machine-translation project where the translation is from sounds to hand movements and positions.'" Intelligent Wheelchair Moving among People Based on Their Observations. By Yoshifumi Murakami, Yoshinori Kuno, Nobutaka Shimada and Yoshiaki Shirai. Department of Computer-Controlled Mechanical Systems, Osaka University. "With the increase in the number of senior citizens, there is a growing demand for human-friendly wheelchairs as mobility aids. One of the main issues in the robotic wheelchair research is autonomous obstacle avoidance for safety. However, this is difficult because most of moving obstacles in the real world are human beings. They sometimes change their motion abruptly. This paper presents an intelligent wheelchair that can avoid collision with such human pedestrians safely and comfortably for each other." Virtual helper makes independence a reality. By Deborah L. Shelton. St. Louis Post-Dispatch (July 12, 2003). "Open the drapes. Brew the coffee. Prepare the shower. Ralph's routine is ordinary enough. But Ralph has an impressive work ethic, laboring 24 hours a day, seven days a week - year in, year out. Ralph moved in with Don Holbert, of Sedalia, Mo., over a year ago. Holbert, 59, contracted polio when he was 5. Though paralyzed below the waist, Holbert was able to manage for himself until his wife, Barbara, died in May 2001. Without her, even some of the simplest tasks around the home, like opening the blinds, became impossible. That's where Ralph comes in. Ralph now adjusts the thermostat, turns lights on and off and reads stories from the newspaper. Ralph is a helper. A housemate. A talkative companion. Ralph is a computer. To be more precise, Ralph is a voice-operated computer and home automation system, programmed to function using artificial intelligence. Ralph was named after a friend of Holbert's, Ralph Biele, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Missouri Highway Patrol. It also is an acronym for Real Assisted Living for the Physically Handicapped." AI in Eldercare, the Fall 2005 AAAI Fall Symposium on Caring Machines: "The goal of this symposium is to bring together researchers in AI -- including computational linguistics, planning, user modeling, social agents, robotics, intelligent sensing and machine learning -- with researchers in gerontology, health communication, public health, geriatrics and other medical sciences. The overall focus will be the design, implementation and evaluation of integrated intelligent support systems for older adults, and cover topics such as ...."
AbilityHub - "adaptive equipment and alternative methods available for accessing computers." Created and maintained by Mr. Dan J. Gilman. Practical information about the technology as well as various products on the market. The section about Speech Recognition is an interesting place to begin.
Intelligent Home Services from Accenture Technology Labs - Introducing New Technologies for Independent Living:
ORCATECH (Oregon Roybal Center for Translational Research on Aging, Oregon Health & Science University): "Three issues dominate the current health care landscape for our aging society: the demographic pressure of the baby boom generation, the lack of suitable environments and systems that will ensure independence, and the need to leverage new knowledge and technology to optimize health and quality of life. The common goal that connects these pressing issues is the desire to remain independent and at home until the end of life. We are at a point in time where the tools exist to make this a reality. The objective of our work is to use emerging technologies to monitor a range of key functions in the home or related settings to help determine how people age in place in real time and interact with their community."
AITopics/AutonomousVehicles
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