Grand Challenges

(a subtopic of Overview)

What constitues an AI Grand Challenge? Here's what Ron Brachman proposed in his July 2005 AAAI Presidential Address: (AA)AI - More than the Sum of its Parts (AI Magazine 27(4): Winter 2006, 19-34): Grand Challenge Criteria [slide #41] Clear and compelling demonstration of cognition Non-gameable proxy for a range of problems requiring cognitive capabilities Clear and simple measurement Success is well-defined Decomposable and diagnostic Partial results; failure should point to way to needed improvement Ambitious and visionary, but not unrealistic Faith in success in 10 - 20 years Compelling to the general public Motivating for the research community

Note: This collection of articles & resources is meant to be thought provoking and illustrative, rather than definitive and exhaustive.

General Readings

October 18, 2007: Newsmaker - DARPA sees inspiration as trophy of robot race. By Stefanie Olsen. CNET News.com. "For Tony Tether, an upcoming race of robot cars isn't just about saving lives in the military. It's also designed to inspire a generation of technologists. As director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. government's military research and development arm, Tether pioneered a series of driverless challenges that have wowed the public and four-star generals alike. ... He was appointed director of DARPA in 2001. CNET News.com talked to Tether ahead of the Urban Challenge, the third in DARPA's series of robot races, which will award $2 million to the winner. The finals will take place November 3 in Victorville, Calif. Q: We're getting close to the Urban Challenge, and you've witnessed all of the others. So how do you suspect this one will vary from the others? ... What will be the hardest thing about the course, without giving anything away? ... So what do you think has been accomplished between the second and now? Tether: I think the thing that's really been accomplished is that these vehicles have learned to recognize not only fixed obstacles, but obstacles that are moving. ... Can you tell us how this challenge came about? [Tether:] The autonomous vehicle really came about for two reasons. One was that it's a serious mission for the military and that if we can reduce the number of people who are driving convoys in a place like Iraq or Afghanistan, we would definitely reduce the infrastructure to take care of those people. The second reason is that we are worried here at DARPA about the food stock: that the kids today in the United States don't seem to be going into engineering and science like they used to. ... "

September 13, 2007: Google puts $30 million behind lunar robot. By Stefanie Olsen. CNET News.com. "Google on Thursday announced it has sponsored the Google Lunar X Prize, a robotic race to the moon with a purse of $30 million. The contest invites private teams from around the world to build a robotic rover capable of roaming the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and then sending video, images and data back to Earth, among other feats. The idea behind the challenge is to urge private industry to develop new robotic and virtual-presence technology to reduce the cost of space exploration. ... The contest comes at a time when NASA is working on new spacecraft and technology to take man back to the moon within the next 12 years. At a recent artificial-intelligence conference, Peter Norvig, the former head of computation at NASA's Ames facility who is now Google's director of research, suggested that the space agency is taking the more expensive approach in trying to send astronauts to the moon and that it should focus on robotics."

• Watch the Moon 2.0 Rollout Video, on YouTube and visit the Google Lunar X Prize homepage.
• Also see:
  • $25 Million in Prizes Is Offered for Trip to Moon. By John Schwartz. The New York Times (September 14, 2007). "The X Prize Foundation saw the new contest as one of 'the grand challenges of our time that we can use to move people forward,' said Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, chairman and C.E.O. of the foundation. The prize for reaching the moon and completing the basic tasks of roving and sending video and data will bring the winner $20 million, according to the contest rules. An additional $5 million would be awarded for other tasks that include roving more than 5,500 yards or sending back images of artifacts like lunar landers from the Apollo program. Carnegie Mellon University immediately announced that a roboticist on its faculty, William L. Whittaker, would be pulling together a team to seek the prize."
  • Google to sponsor space race to moon. By Jessica Guynn. Los Angeles Times (September 14, 2007). "'Our hope is that the technology coming out of this will really spark a commercial revolution that will see new types of companies and new types of robotics used to explore the moon, asteroids and beyond,' said [Peter] Diamandis, whose foundation also offers prizes for feats in automobile design, genomics and other fields."

July 31, 2007: Robots battle for military prize. By Jonathan Fildes. BBC News. "For two weeks during the summer of 2008, an army of autonomous robots will march across the Wiltshire countryside. The machines will compete in the UK Ministry of Defence Grand Challenge, a competition to find new technology to support ground troops in urban areas. Fourteen teams have now been picked as finalists to go head to head in a range of trials next year. Winning designs include a swarm of miniature helicopters and a host of sensor-laden unmanned aerial vehicles. ... The competition, carried out in August 2008, will focus on the urban environment and will be carried out at Copehill Down, an army training centre on Salisbury Plain."

• Visit the MOD Grand Challenge site.

May 30, 2007: Better Face Recognition Software - Computers outperform humans at recognizing faces in recent tests. By Mark Williams. Technology Review. "For scientists and engineers involved with face-recognition technology, the recently released results of the Face Recognition Grand Challenge--more fully, the Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) 2006 and the Iris Challenge Evaluation (ICE) 2006--have been a quiet triumph. Sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the match up of face-recognition algorithms showed that machine recognition of human individuals has improved tenfold since 2002 and a hundredfold since 1995."

• Overview of the FRGC [The Face Recognition Grand Challenge]: "Not since the mid 1990s has there been such a renewed interest in developing new methods for automatic face recognition. This renewed interest has been fueled by advances in computer vision techniques, computer design, sensor design, and interest in fielding face recognition systems. These techniques hold the promise of reducing the error rate in face recognition systems by an order of magnitude over the Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) 2002 results. The Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC) was conducted in an effort to fulfill the promise of these new techniques. ... FRGC ran from May 2004 to March 2006."

April 3, 2007: That face! Those eyes! How recognizable? Technology for computerized facial recognition is improving, according to a recent NIST report. By Wilson P. Dizard III. GCN. "Technology for computerized facial recognition is ten times more accurate now than it was four years ago, and the best of the systems outperform humans, the National Institute of Standards said. The federal government has pressed the private sector to improve facial and iris recognition technology dramatically so as to pave the way for improved biometric systems.... The dramatic performance improvement was one of the goals of the government’s Face Recognition Grand Challenge. 'In an experiment comparing human and algorithm [system] performance, the best-performing face recognition algorithms were more accurate than humans,' NIST reported."

• Visit NIST's Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC) homepage.

March 23, 2007: Autonomous driving systems aim to drive dirty.By Matthew Sparkes. NewScientist.com news service. "Autonomous model cars will race against one another in a contest designed to test different software approaches. The contest is being organised by researchers at the University of Essex in the UK, who are creating an affordable and standardised autonomous vehicle kit to encourage others to get involved. ... Simon Lucas of Essex University says the competition will be similar to the DARPA Grand Challenge (see Desert racers – drivers not included), which involves full-sized vehicles, but will be far less prohibitive. 'The challenges are the same for a full-size or model autonomous car, but you need pots of money,' Lucus told New Scientist. 'Our prototype hardware costs only £1000 ($2000).'"

December 8, 2006: DARPA raises stakes for urban robot race. By Stefanie Olsen. CNET News.com. "DARPA has granted prize money of $3.5 million for its milestone urban robotics race next November, a far cry from its previously planned trophies. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has approved prize money for the first three finalists of its 2007 Urban Challenge after a confusing twist in the government agency's right to grant monetary awards, organizers said Friday. DARPA will now grant $2 million for first place, $1 million for second and $500,000 for third. ... Despite the prize money, the teams will undoubtedly have a hard time finishing the 2007 Urban Challenge, the first race of its kind."

November 23, 2006: The quest for AI opens path to new age. By Sandra Rossi. Techworld.nl. "Will robots and computers one day ask the question, Am I a real boy? That was the question posed by artificial intelligence (AI) researcher Professor May-Anne Williams on Wednesday in a presentation at the University of Technology in Sydney. Professor Williams said the quest for AI is revealing much about how the human mind works and is opening the path to a new technological age. ... Professor Williams, who is team leader of the champion UTS robot soccer team UTS Unleashed!, said the Robot Soccer World Cup (RoboCup) competition could be the catalyst for the all-important AI breakthroughs, since it focuses international research effort in a potentially lucrative strategic direction. The game of soccer encompasses both the physical and mental skills that scientists must reproduce to create autonomous robots."

• Also see: Robot cars will race in real traffic. By Will Knight. NewScientist.com news (October 3, 2006). "The first 11 teams for a race in which robot cars will jostle with real ones along mocked-up city streets have been announced. The teams must construct autonomous vehicles to navigate an unfamiliar urban environment in the shortest time possible. The robot racers will face a 'simulated' urban course 96 kilometres (60 miles) in length in November 2007. The course will feature urban obstacles, such as trees and buildings, traffic signs and other moving vehicles. Its location is yet to be disclosed. The contestants must obey traffic regulations. ... The event is called the Urban Grand Challenge and organised by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It is the follow-up its original Grand Challenge, a robotic race across a 212 km desert course, which was successfully completed in October 2005...."

August 20 - 23, 2006: Is There a Grand Challenge or X-Prize for Data Mining? KDD 2006 panel with Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, Robert Grossman, Chabane Djeraba, Ronen Feldman, Lise Getoor, and Mohammed Zaki. "Summary: This panel will discuss possible exciting and motivating Grand Challenge problems for Data Mining, focusing on bioinformatics, multimedia mining, link mining, text mining, and web mining."

• See the panel's report: What Are The Grand Challenges for Data Mining? ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, December 2006 (Volume 8 , Issue 2, pages: 70 - 77).

July - August 2006: Computers Play Chess; Humans Play Go. James Hendler's Letter from the Editor. IEEE Intelligent Systems 21(4): July/August 2006, 2-3. "The future of AI must involve exploring and understanding the parts of human intelligence we haven’t been looking at that much -- the stuff at the heart of human thought. To do this, we need to stop looking for new ways to solve well-defined problems and start looking for ways to combine the things we know how to do, and then see if this helps us explore problems with more diversity and scope. In fact, I’m encouraged to see a few developments that are taking us in the right direction. Ron Brachman, in his AAAI 2005 presidential address and in his role as a DARPAoffice director (see 'Systems That Know What They’re Doing,' Nov./Dec. 2002,pp. 67–71), advocated large AI projects that would force people from different parts of AI to work together to achieve, in consortium, what no approach could achieve alone."

May 2, 2006: Another Robot Vehicle Contest Is Planned. The New York Times. "The Pentagon said Monday that a third Grand Challenge competition would be held to foster research and development into advanced robot vehicles. In contrast to the previous contest, which took place in the desert on the border between California and Nevada, the new competition will be carried out in a mock urban area. Robots will be required to obey traffic laws while merging into traffic, as well as negotiating traffic circles, busy intersections and obstacles. The event is scheduled for Nov. 3, 2007."

• Also see: Autonomous vehicles to drive in traffic for $2 million. By Alicia Chang. The Associated Press / available from SignOnSanDiego.com (May 2, 2006). "Seven months after an unmanned Volkswagen successfully drove itself over the rugged desert, the Pentagon is sponsoring another challenge for self-driving vehicles that can weave through congested city traffic without causing an accident. The contest, to be held in November 2007, will test the vehicles' ability to independently carry out a simulated military supply mission in an urban setting in less than six hours. ... Stanford University computer scientist Sebastian Thrun, who won last year's race, said he was excited to see DARPA take the challenge to the next level. Thrun said the artificial intelligence knowledge gained from the contest could also benefit society by pushing the development of 'smart cars' that can self-navigate on highways and potentially reduce accidents."

April 14, 2006: Europe's Robotic Challenge - Next month, Germany will host Europe's version of DARPA's Grand Challenge -- but don't expect desert-busting autonomous SUVs. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. Technology Review. "Roboticists from 47 teams are preparing to take part in Europe's answer to the U.S. Department of Defense's Grand Challenge (last year's robotic car race aimed at encouraging research into autonomous cars). This first European Land-Robot Trial, to take place in Germany on May 15, will pit against each other teams from nine countries, representing both academia and industry. Unlike the U.S. Grand Challenge, organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is a single 132-mile race in the desert, the European version will consist of three different events, putting robots to the test in urban, non-urban, and landmine detection and removal scenarios. Despite the obvious comparisons with the Grand Challenge, the European organizers stress that their event is not so much a competition as an evaluation of existing technology."

April 5, 2006: Like to Tinker? NASA's Looking for You. By Noah Shactman. The New York Times & nytimes.com. "[W]ith budgets tightening and the obstacles to human space exploration looking more daunting, NASA is enlisting the expertise of outsiders. For example, the agency is offering 13 contests, which it calls Centennial Challenges, that anyone can enter. The prizes range from $200,000 to more than $5 million, for building gear as diverse as solar sails, lunar excavators and the tiny elevators. But more important than the cash prizes, contestants and administrators say, is the opportunity to sidestep the traditional ways NASA has done business and bring some fresh faces to its ranks. ... Many of NASA's contests also center on robotics. The Telerobotic Construction Challenge, scheduled for August 2007, requires a team of machines to assemble items with minimal human supervision. ... In the Regolith Excavation Challenge, set for May 2007, an autonomous machine will have to dig through 24 square meters of simulated moon rock. ... Some contests will be held annually; others will be one-time events. NASA funds robotics research through conventional contracts too, and it uses Small Business Innovation Research grants to back companies outside the industry's mainstream. But the paperwork involved in the innovation research grants, called S.B.I.R.'s, can be intimidating. ... The competitions offer economic benefits to NASA as well. The contestants, not the space agency, pay for the development."

March 2006: 2006 Grand Challenges Conference. "How computing will evolve over the next 15 years was the subject of discussions at the Grand Challenges Conference 2006 attended by leading members of the UK's academic community." Various reports are available from the BCS [British Computer Society] site.

January 12, 2006: 'Grand challenges' spur grand results - Private groups are offering big cash prizes to anyone who can solve a range of daunting problems. By Gregory M. Lamb. The Christian Science Monitor & csmonitor.com. "In October 2004 SpaceShipOne roared into space (twice) - the first privately funded spacecraft ever to reach suborbit, nearly 70 miles above Earth. A year later, 'Stanley,' a Volkswagen Touareg modified by Stanford University students, rumbled across some 130 miles of desert without a human driver, navigating the rough terrain guided by computer programs and sensors. ... Using 'grand challenges' to stimulate scientific progress isn't new. In 1714 the British government offered the equivalent of about $12 million to answer a vexing question: How could His Majesty's ships calculate their longitude - how far they were east or west of home - to avoid shipwrecks and other disasters? ... The cluster of challenges may be the result of both bad and good news facing science today, says Gilbert Omenn, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, D.C. ... 'Prizes change the public perception about an issue,' says Peter Diamandis, founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation in Santa Monica, Calif. ... [A] successful grand challenge involves more than money, Omenn says. It needs to be clearly stated, socially worthy, and difficult but not impossible to achieve."

October 18, 2005: Eyes on the Prize. By Dylan Tweney. TechnologyReview.com. " When Stanford University's robotic Volkswagen Touareg, 'Stanley,' won the Grand Challenge last week, robot enthusiasts everywhere cheered. By completing a 210-kilometer course over difficult desert terrain in just under seven hours, Stanley set an unprecedented milestone for autonomous vehicles. Even more amazingly, four other teams' vehicles also completed the course, with slightly slower times. 'It's kind of like if you had challenged people to fly across the Atlantic, and instead of one guy [making it], just Lindbergh, you had five guys flying across at the same time,' says Sebastian Thrun, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford and the leader of the Stanford team. ... The Grand Challenge is just the latest example of how prize money can be an effective -- and extremely efficient -- way to stimulate rapid technological development. ... That's exactly how this year's Grand Challenge played out, with 195 teams entering the competition, five teams successfully completing the course -- and a whole new crop of inventors, engineers, computer scientists, entrepreneurs, and even high-school students stimulated to enter the field of autonomous vehicles. ... 'The prize approach is particularly useful in energizing a community and giving people an incentive to become involved in researching a technology area of interest to DOD,' says Jan Walker, a spokesman for DARPA. In fact, DARPA officials are so pleased with the results, says Walker, that they plan to sponsor another Grand Challenge in the future, in a yet-to-be-named field."

October 18, 2005: Stanley is king of bots. Bruce McCabe's The Scrutineer column. Australian IT. "When the Grand Challenge was first held last year, the best of the robots could only manage 11km before coming unstuck. A year later, four robots completed the entire 212km course faultlessly and inside the 10-hour deadline, with a fifth following soon after. That difference represents an enormous amount of progress in artificial intelligence, sensor technologies and computer engineering, and all in a practical, real-world context. A long list of heavyweight companies was inspired to become involved as financial backers or active participants in research and development. ... The event served as a catalyst for new industry tie-ups and boosted the skills of hundreds of staff and students. Although all of that will produce real, tangible economic value, it is the competition that counts because nothing gets the blood boiling more than a race. The race drew together people from universities and industry, inspiring them to work weekends, nights and holidays and by all accounts it would be hard to find a participant who did not think life was richer for having been part of it."

October 9, 2005: In a Grueling Desert Race, a Winner, but Not a Driver. By John Markoff. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "The Stanford scientists who led the 18-month effort to build Stanley said they saw their victory as a significant leap forward in the field of artificial intelligence, a discipline that has long suffered from big promises that did not pan out. 'This is for people who say, "Cars can't drive themselves,"' said Sebastian Thrun, the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-leader of the Stanford team. 'These are the same people who said the Wright brothers wouldn't fly.' ... 'The Grand Challenge has been conquered,' Dr. [Anthony J.] Tether said. ... Mr. Thrun, of the Stanford team, said advances in the field of self-driving vehicles would start to come more quickly. 'Extrapolate two, three or four years out, and then let your imagination play,' he said."

September 20, 2005: NASA Announces Prize for Digging Moon Dirt. SPACE.com. "NASA announced Tuesday a $250,000 prize for the team that can win a lunar dirt-digging contest that will take place here on Earth. The competition will pit robots to see which can excavate the most lunar regolith (a fancy word for soil) and deliver it to a collector. The challenge will be held in late 2006 or early 2007. ... 'This challenge continues NASA's efforts to broaden interest in innovative concepts,' said Brant Sponberg, NASA's Centennial Challenges program manager."

July 1, 2005: 125 Big Questions. Science (Vol 309, Issue 5731, 79). "In a special collection of articles published beginning 1 July 2005, Science Magazine and its online companion sites celebrate the journal's 125th anniversary with a look forward -- at the most compelling puzzles and questions facing scientists today. A special, free news feature in Science explores 125 big questions that face scientific inquiry over the next quarter-century; accompanying the feature are several online extras including a reader's forum on the big questions." Start with the editorial, 125, by Donald Kennedy, Editor-in-Chief, and then explore questions such as:

• What Is the Biological Basis of Consciousness? By Greg Miller. "For centuries, debating the nature of consciousness was the exclusive purview of philosophers. But if the recent torrent of books on the topic is any indication, a shift has taken place: Scientists are getting into the game. Has the nature of consciousness finally shifted from a philosophical question to a scientific one that can be solved by doing experiments? ... The discourse on consciousness has been hugely influenced by René Descartes, the French philosopher who in the mid-17th century declared that body and mind are made of different stuff entirely. It must be so, Descartes concluded, because the body exists in both time and space, whereas the mind has no spatial dimension. Recent scientifically oriented accounts of consciousness generally reject Descartes's solution; most prefer to treat body and mind as different aspects of the same thing. In this view, consciousness emerges from the properties and organization of neurons in the brain."
• What Are the Limits of Conventional Computing? By Charles Seife. "In the 1940s, Bell Labs scientist Claude Shannon showed that bits are not just for computers; they are the fundamental units of describing the information that flows from one object to another. There are physical laws that govern how fast a bit can move from place to place, how much information can be transferred back and forth over a given communications channel, and how much energy it takes to erase a bit from memory. All classical information-processing machines are subject to these laws--and because information seems to be rattling back and forth in our brains, do the laws of information mean that our thoughts are reducible to bits and bytes? Are we merely computers? It's an unsettling thought. But there is a realm beyond the classical computer: the quantum. The probabilistic nature of quantum theory allows atoms and other quantum objects to store information that's not restricted to only the binary 0 or 1 of information theory, but can also be 0 and 1 at the same time."
• What are the limits of learning by machines? Computers can already beat the world's best chess players, and they have a wealth of information on the Web to draw on. But abstract reasoning is still beyond any machine."

February 22, 2005: Grand ambitions. By Beverley Head. The Sydney Morning Herald. "Hugh Durrant-Whyte is building a world where one day he will control the Hunter Valley's mines and robotic expeditionary forces in remote areas from the PC in his Sydney office. Professor Durrant-Whyte and his team at the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems are tackling a 'Grand Challenge' of IT research - the fusion of machines, computing, sensing and software to create intelligent systems that interact with the complex real world. ... The future promised from his grand challenge research into intelligent autonomous systems is one where data is collected from anywhere at any time and relayed wirelessly to massive high-performance computing networks. The data will be intensively analysed and turned into knowledge used to better direct autonomous systems or humans. ... Monash University, which boasts Australia's largest IT faculty, recently held a workshop organised by Professor David Green to identify the grand challenges facing the nation. Distributed computing and information ... Computing that mimics nature [these are just 2 of the 6 grand challenges listed]... Next Speak - Grand Challenge: Complex science and engineering problems with broad societal impacts whose solutions are advanced only through the use of high-performance computing."

January 4, 2005: Welcome to the next generation of robots - Will machines soon be taking over the world? Doubtful, but they could be doing your chores for you. By Chris Arnot. The Guardian. "Robot dogs don't chew the hearth rug and demand to be taken for a walk at inconvenient times. Computerised vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers carry out the tasks that some of us find a bore, others a strain. 'All very limited,' says Professor Aaron Sloman, from Birmingham University's School of Computer Science. 'They can do specific things but none can say why they do it.' Sloman and fellow researchers around Europe are primed to take the next step in the ongoing search for more intelligent robots, thanks to a grant of €6.25m (£4.3m) from the European Union. One of his colleagues in Birmingham, Dr Jeremy Wyatt, explains: 'We think experiments so far have had limited objectives. What has not been done is to put together, in a working robot, the things that humans can do - seeing, manipulating, hearing, learning and answering questions.'"

December 19, 2004: Network Robot Project Gets Boost- Carnegie Mellon’s Raj Reddy Manifests Much-Touted 80/20 Rule. By Kim Tae-gyu. The Korea Times. "South Korea's scheme of launching network-based robots gained a boost after a world-famous artificial intelligence (AI) expert confirmed Korea is heading in the right direction. Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor Raj Reddy, one of the most respected scholars in the promising AI field, made the point in an e-mail interview with The Korea Times. ... On the development path of robots and AI, Reddy has provided an uncanny insight to the world, clearly manifest in the much-touted 80/20 rule. It refers to the concept of making the computer perform 80 percent of the task while leaving the other 20 percent to the human being. .... KT: In your own career, you started and continued emphasis on robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), even though many left these fields for greener pastures. Why did you maintain your emphasis on these fields? Reddy: I continue to work in AI and Robotics as my primary intellectual activity and scientific activity. In doing so, I followed examples of Carnegie Mellon's thought leaders, the intellectual giants such as Perlis, Newell and Simon. They encouraged young faculty to explore further development of the applications of computer science as a set of great challenges. Many other activities are related to societal issues and public policy. They are equally important and need to be pursued by scientists, engineers, executives, and everyone who can contribute to such endeavor. KT: What are the promises and challenges of artificial intelligence? Reddy: We will have super human capability to improve our capability. The challenge is to build systems that can learn from experience, and operate in human real time."

December 2004: Grand Challenge 5: Architecture of Brain and Mind. Audio of Aaron Sloman interviewed by Anders Nissen for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. "Question 1.Why formulate a grand challenge? What is the mission behind the grand challenges? ..."

October 9, 2004: Carnegie Mellon institute celebrates 25 years of robot research. Associated Press / available from The Herald Standard. "The researchers who developed robotics systems that play soccer, explored Antarctica and gave football fans a 360-degree view of Super Bowl XXXV are pausing to celebrate their 25th anniversary - and contemplate where robotics will take the world in the next 25 years. The four-day celebration at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute begins Monday with the second annual inductions into the school's Robot Hall of Fame. C-3PO, the droll droid of 'Star Wars' fame, and Robby the Robot from the 1956 cult flick 'Forbidden Planet' are among the honorees. ... The anniversary's theme is 'Robots and Thought' - and the founders' expectations about advances in artificial intelligence are tame compared to those of some experts who will address the grand challenges facing robotics in a series of lectures on Wednesday. ... The next great frontier for robotics, [Raj] Reddy says, is a conundrum: teaching computers to learn. 'The biggest barrier is (developing) computers that learn with experience and exhibit goal-directed behavior. If you can't build a system that can learn with experience, you might as well forget everything else,' Reddy said."

October 8, 2004: X Prize group plans new series of contests. By Alorie Gilbert. CNET News. "The group that awarded $10 million this week to the winner of an outer-space travel contest is gearing up to offer cash prizes for technology breakthroughs in medicine, computer science, transportation and a number of other arenas. ... The competitions will be aimed at people 'seeking to meet the greatest challenges facing humanity in the 21st century,' according to the WTN X Prize Web site. Those challenges could include finding a cure for cancer, AIDS or other major diseases; alleviating famine and environmental degradation; or making advances in artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, according to the Web site. The groups are soliciting suggestions for determining the rules and goals of the next contests from potential competitors and sponsors...."

September 27, 2004: The Grand Challenges of IT - Researchers are inventing new ways to tackle old problems. Emerging Technology by Thomas Hoffman. Computerworld. "Fundamental research on how to make computer hardware more powerful and software smarter goes back 50 years or more, but many of the traditional methods have nearly reached their limits. Now, researchers moving in bold new directions may be setting the course of IT for decades to come. There are literally dozens of grand challenges that scientists and economists are attacking, ranging from societal issues to technical advances. Here, we take a look at the challenges in three key areas of IT research: processor performance, chip miniaturization and artificial intelligence. ... AI, very broadly defined, comprises three primary disciplines: natural-language processing, machine-based learning and robotics. Recent advances in these areas have led to commercial technologies ranging from a robotic vacuum cleaner called Roomba, made by Burlington, Mass.-based iRobot Corp., to customer-service-oriented speech recognition systems from vendors such as Peabody, Mass.-based ScanSoft Inc. But despite these inroads, computer systems continue to have a tough time handling reasoning. 'The biggest challenges are figuring out how to organize computer programs to have more common sense,' says Tom Mitchell, the Fredkin professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. ... The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is funding research to develop a computer-based 'executive assistant' that could handle administrative tasks like prioritizing e-mail requests for a military commander or a business executive. ... Using a grading scale of A to F, 'we would be thrilled if these systems could give us C-level performance over the next three to four years,' says Ron Brachman, director of the information processing technology office at DARPA. Computers also have trouble understanding context like humans do.... Systems that can handle more complicated human-to-computer interactions, like processing a request for movie tickets at a particular theatre via speech recognition, should be in use within five to 10 years, says Victor Zue, co-director of the MIT computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory."

July 27, 2004: What Are the Grand Questions of Science? This video program is part of the USC Presents...Closer To Truth series available from the ResearchChannel ("a non-profit organization founded in 1996 by a consortium of leading research universities, institutions and corporate research centers dedicated to creating a widely accessible voice for research through video and Internet channels"). Program abstract: "Science seems on the brink of several mega-revolutions, including biotechnology and genetic engineering, broadband communications and artificial intelligence, a search for a 'Theory of Everything,' cosmology of the early universe, and nanotechnology, the building of extremely small machines. The panelists enumerate and evaluate the 'Big Questions' and rank them in order of importance."

June 14, 2004: Computing needs a Grand Challenge. By Lucy Sherriff. The Register. "Sir Tony Hoare - British computing pioneer and senior scientist at Microsoft Research - believes the computer industry needs a 'grand challenge' to inspire it. In the same way that the lunar challenge in the 1960s sparked a decade of collaborative innovation and development in engineering and space technology, or the human genome project united biologists around the globe, so too must computer scientists pull together on such a scale to take their industry to its next major milestone. ... One of the grand challenges, then, is to re-write the basic foundations of the science, to find a theory of computation that is 'more realistic than the Turing model, and can take into account the discoveries of biology, and the promise of the quantum computer'.... 'An ultimate joint challenge for the biological and the computational sciences is the understanding of the mechanisms of the human brain, and its relationship with the human mind,' he says. '... This challenge is one that has inspired Computer Science since its very origins, when Alan Turing himself first proposed the Turing Test as a still unmet challenge for artificial intelligence.'"

Spring 2004: Language Learning - An Interdisciplinary Perspective.Papers from 2004 AAAI Spring Symposium. "Language learning is a grand challenge problem for Artificial Intelligence because it encompasses concept development and perceptual development, social learning and imitation, as well as learning the lexicon, the grammar, and other aspects of language; because it drives new technologies that apply widely to other kinds of sequential data; and because most of the world's knowledge is represented linguistically, so machines are limited by their inability to understand language.The symposium brought together representatives of several communities — the corpus-based and grounded language learning communities, and the developmental psycholinguistics and language education communities — to assess progress in machine language learning and how what we know about human linguistic development might speed that progress."

March 15, 2004: Desert challenge too tough for robot racers. By Celeste Biever. New Scientist News. "It was organised by US government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and spokesperson Jan Walker said she was overjoyed at the range of new technologies exhibited: 'If DARPA had not set the bar high, we would not have seen such innovation.' ... DARPA will stage a repeat Grand Challenge in 18 months when they will increase the bounty to $2 million. Meanwhile a race called the Open Challenge is already scheduled for October, to be organised by the non-governmental International Robot Racing Federation."

February 18, 2004: This Humvee Is Car and Driver. By Lore Sjöberg. Wired News. "The image on the screen at the Intel Developer Forum keynote presentation looks a lot like a standard television ad for an SUV. A vehicle drives through the wilderness, no other sign of civilization in sight, trundling over hills and through the brush while a voiceover extols its virtues. There are, however, two major differences. The first is that the SUV in question looks like the result of genetic experimentation involving an ice cream truck, a Flash Gordon prop and a Humvee. The second is that the car is driving itself. There's nobody inside, nobody controlling it remotely. The vehicle is called Sandstorm, and it's at its own wheel. ... Sandstorm isn't here to entertain or imitate humanity; it's here to solve a real-world challenge. The challenge is posed by Darpa: navigate over 200 miles of obstacle-strewn desert, making decisions and plotting a course with absolutely no human intervention. When Darpa's Grand Challenge begins March 13, Sandstorm will be fed coordinates, then released into the wild to find its way to the finish line -- or fail -- on its own. ... [F]or Red Team leader, professor William 'Red' Whittaker, the competition is not at all about the money. It's about advancing the technology -- bringing together disciplines like artificial-intelligence design, advanced storage development and gigapixel imaging -- and educating the public about the real-world applications of robotics."

January 2003: Some challenges and grand challenges for computational intelligence. By Edward A. Feigenbaum. Journal of the ACM (JACM), Volume 50 , Issue 1, Pages: 32 - 40 (January 2003). Available from ACM and KurzweilAI.net. "The Turing Test is a very ambitious Grand Challenge. The 'Feigenbaum Test' is more manageable: focus on natural science, engineering, or medicine with conversation in the jargonized and stylized language of these disciplines."

September 23, 2002: Human-Free Kick At Robocup 2002 - humanoids battle it out in soccer. By Dennis Normile. Scientific American Explore. "'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. The notion of robots taking on Brazil would be laughable if roboticists around the world were not so enthusiastically answering the call. Kitano and his collaborators started RoboCup in 1997 with hopes that a grand challenge would spur advances in robotics and artificial intelligence. The first year only a couple dozen groups competed with wheeled robots and simulations... This year there were almost 200 teams."

• Historical note: "The idea of robots playing soccer was first mentioned by Professor Alan Mackworth (University of British Columbia, Canada) in a paper entitled 'On Seeing Robots' presented at VI-92, 1992. and later published in a book Computer Vision: System, Theory, and Applications, pages 1-13, World Scientific Press, Singapore, 1993. A series of papers on the Dynamo robot soccer project was published by his group. Independently, a group of Japanese researchers organized a Workshop on Grand Challenges in Artificial Intelligence in October, 1992 in Tokyo, discussing possible grand challenge problems. This workshop led to a serious discussions of using the game of soccer for promoting science and technology." - from A Brief History of RoboCup

June 23-26, 2002: Computing Research Association Conference on "Grand Research Challenges" in Computer Science and Engineering. "Some people say that computer science and engineering research has become 'incremental.' That is wrong! Deep and exciting challenges remain. But those challenges are not articulated in a compelling way. The Computing Research Association sponsored a conference to ask: What are the 'grand research challenges' in computer science and engineering? By articulating them clearly and addressing them in a focused way, the field can continue to make revolutionary progress."

• "The organizing committee solicited one- page position papers, each expressing one or more challenging problems. The committee then invited about 70 participants." These Grand Challenge Statements can be found here.

Spring 2001: RoboCup Rescue: A Grand Challenge for Multiagent and Intelligent Systems. By Hiroaki Kitano and Satoshi Tadokoro. AI Magazine 22(1): Spring 2001, 39-52. "Disaster rescue is one of the most serious social issues that involves very large numbers of heterogeneous agents in the hostile environment. The intention of the RoboCup Rescue project is to promote research and development in this socially significant domain at various levels, involving multiagent teamwork coordination, physical agents for search and rescue, information infrastructures, personal digital assistants, a standard simulator and decision-support systems, evaluation benchmarks for rescue strategies, and robotic systems that are all integrated into a comprehensive system in the future. ... In this article, we present a detailed analysis of the task domain and elucidate characteristics necessary for multiagent and intelligent systems for this domain. Then, we present an overview of the RoboCup Rescue project."

August 1996. Challenge Problems for Artificial Intelligence. By Bart Selman, ModeratorAT&T; Rodney A. Brooks, MIT; Thomas Dean, Brown University; Eric Horvitz, Microsoft Research; Tom M. Mitchell, CMU; Nils J. Nilsson, Stanford University. In Proceedings of theThirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1340 - 1345. Menlo Park, California: AAAI Press. Excerpt from Bart Selman's Introduction: "AI textbooks and papers often discuss the big questions, such as 'how to reason with uncertainty,' 'how to reason efficiently', or 'how to improve performance through learning.' It is more difficult, however, to find descriptions of concrete problems or challenges that are still ambitious and interesting, yet not so open-ended. The goal of this panel is to formulate a set of such challenge problems for the field. Each panelist was asked to formulate one or more challenges. The emphasis is on problems for which there is a good chance that they will be resolved within the next five to ten years."

• The text is available from CiteSeer (here) and Eric Horvitz (here).

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