AI in the news

PLEASE NOTE: The >>> symbol after each excerpt points to some of the pages within AI TOPICS on which you can find resources related to the subject matter of the article. Also, be aware that an excerpt may not reflect the overall tenor of the article from which it was harvested. And please remember that the news is offered "as is" and the fact that an article is included does not imply any endorsement whatsoever. Finally, be advised that the illustrations, photos and other graphics that appear do not relate to any specific article(s).

DECEMBER 2002:

December 23, 2002 [issue date]: The Dream of Mechanical Life - Man and automata. By Hugh Ormsby-Lennon. The Weekly Standard (Volume 008, Issue 15). "A spate of new books [editor's note: 13 to be exact] addresses eighteenth-century automata, ventriloquists' dummies, and puppets--together with more recent avatars of chess computers, artificial intelligence, androids, robots, and cyborgs. Does 'computerization' challenge human identity as ominously as 'mechanization' previously seemed to? ... So, does artificial intelligence transcend Freudian nightmare now that it has come to suggest not itinerant showmen or tinkerers with clockwork but university scientists, computer moguls, and global corporations? Or does a scientist with an uncanny puppet always remain mad or charlatanical?"
>>> Robots, SciFi, History
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December 20, 2002: Charles Rosen -- expert on robots, co-founder of winery. By Wyatt Buchanan. San Francisco Chronicle. "Charles Rosen, who pioneered artificial intelligence in the 1960s and 1970s and helped found one of California's best known wineries, died in Atherton on Dec. 8, one day after his 85th birthday. ... Mr. Rosen did his groundbreaking artificial intelligence work while at Stanford Research Institute, known now as SRI International, a Menlo Park nonprofit research and development organization. His success came from his ability to find the edge of creative thought and innovation in his discipline and to push past the known limits, friends and colleagues say, developing things like neural networks in machines and Shakey, the first robot to see and learn on its own."
>>> Tributes, Robots, History
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December 20, 2002: When the web starts thinking for itself. By David Green. vnunet's Ebusinessadvisor. "The so-called semantic web is an extension of the current web in which data is given meaning through the use of a series of technologies. ... Ontologies provide a deeper level of meaning by providing equivalence relations between terms (i.e. term A on my web page is expressing the same concept as term B on your web page). An ontology is a file that formally defines relations among terms, for example, a taxonomy and set of inference rules. By providing such 'dictionaries of meaning' (in philosophy ontology means 'nature of existence') ontologies can improve the accuracy of web searches by allowing a search program to seek out pages that refer to a specific concept rather than just a particular term as they do now. While XML, RDF and ontologies provide the basic infrastructure of the semantic web, it is intelligent agents that will realise its power. An intelligent agent can best be described as a piece of adaptive computer coding that is capable of reasoning and that learns from our behaviour and preferences, thus delivering what is called 'proactive personalisation'. There are many thousands of different agents (or bots as they are also known), each performing specific, specialised tasks, for example search bots, chatter bots and shopping bots). An important aspect of agents is that they are sociable and can interact and communicate with humans and other agents. ... When broken down into a series of explicit search statements and appropriate content sources to search, a simple user information request is revealed to be a complex task. Automating such tasks will result in an ever-larger role for artificial intelligence technologies such as agents. One key concern about the brave new world of bots is that, by increasing their autonomy, their accountability will be lost. ... There is a need to construct boundaries, such as user-determined privacy settings, to safely contain such interactions."
>>> Ontologies, Web-Searching Agents, Ethical & Social Implications, Agents, Information Retrieval, Representation
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December 19, 2002: Artificial intelligence pioneer Saul Amarel of Rutgers dies at 74. Associated Press / available from Newsday / also available from CBS 2. "Saul Amarel, a pioneer in artificial intelligence and founder of the computer science department at Rutgers University, has died of cancer. ... He was known internationally for his work in computer simulation methods, network synthesis and 'hypercomputing,' and for organizing collaborations of scientists to use artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence joins science and engineering to understand how humans and machines process information, then applies that knowledge in designing machines smart enough to do human tasks and ones beyond human intelligence. ... [H]e also ran the National Institutes of Health's first project on use of computers in such diverse fields as biomedicine, engineering design and ecology.... Amarel served as director of the Information Sciences and Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Projects Agency from 1985 to 1988."
>>> Tributes, Applications, History
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December 19, 2002: Art Gallery Features 'Fantasy Underfoot.' By Carl Hartman. Associated Press / available from The Herald Tribune. "Ken Feingold represents the newest of media. His two silicone heads lie in a cardboard box filled with plastic packing foam, looking as if they came from a robot factory of the future. The mouth of each is placed close to an ear of the other. 'Through a rambling conversation driven by their rudimentary artificial intelligence, they now attempt to understand their predicament in a futile but dogged manner,' Matthew Biro, a University of Michigan contemporary art instructor, wrote in the show's catalog."
>>> Natural Language, Robots, Art
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December 19, 2002: The end of history, tech version? - Some tech prophets see humans made irrelevant by machines. But there's a choice. By Kenneth James. The Business Times. "Seated across the table, they posed their questions earnestly: Do you think machines will become more intelligent than people in the next 100 years? Won't that present a danger to humankind? What can be done to keep that from happening? Disturbing questions, these. And the two final-year business school undergrads were clearly anticipating disturbing answers. The interview was one of several they were conducting for a project, and the research topic pretty much spelt out where they were coming from: 'Chaos from technology: Where is the future taking us?'. Even more telling were the authorities they cited: Moravec, Kurzweil, Joy, among others. ... But are we really careening towards a future where our destiny is determined by super-intelligent machines? Is it foolish to expect that humans will continue to be in control even when machines are demonstrably more intelligent in every way?"
>>> Ethical & Social Implications, AI Overview, History
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December 18, 2002: This holiday's a bust for tech toys, but next year could be hot - Let's talk about hot technology gifts for NEXT Christmas. Column by Kevin Maney. USA Today. "But by next holiday season, you might be gift-wrapping amazing new stuff: Trophy Wife Barbie. This comes at the convergence of a couple of ripening technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and radio frequency identification tags (RFID). Great strides in AI software plus ever more powerful computer chips are making it possible to give small things limited decision-making capabilities. RFID uses radio sensors on tiny tags to allow objects to communicate with each other or with a wireless computer network. Thus we get a doll who can shop -- on her own. ... Personal robots. First, you have to shake the idea that a robot is going to be like Rosie on The Jetsons or that hot water heater on tracks that passed for a robot in Lost in Space. It's probably going to be small and more about smarts than mechanics --something like R2D2. Early signs are here. Sony has sold more than 50,000 Aibo electronic dogs since introducing them in 1999. But this year, Aibo made a giant evolutionary leap, acquiring software that lets it recognize its owner's face well enough to find him in a crowd. One popular curiosity this year is Roomba, a robot vacuum cleaner from iRobot. Another little company, Evolution Robotics, has developed a robot that looks like a laptop on wheels, and can 'see' where it's going by taking three photos a second and analyzing them."
>>> Toys & Robotic Pets, Smart Homes, Robots, Image Understanding, Vision, Applications, SciFi, Industry Statistics
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December 17, 2002: A Massive undertaking. By Peter McMahon. EXN [Discovery Channel Canada]. " EXN producer Peter McMahon talked to Weta Digital's Stephen Regelous, who created Massive, the artificial-intelligence-powered software that's responsible for the vast swarms of battling orcs, humans and elves in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. Massive was originally developed to allow large crowds of computer-generated movie characters to interact as if they each had minds of their own. Now, Regulous says the software could even be reverse-engineered to use simulated A.I. in controlling large groups of real-life robots on missions where it's useful for them to be able to think for themselves."
>>>Multi-Agent Systems, Drama, Agents, Applications, Robots, Interviews
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December 17, 2002: A.I. Cop on the Beat. By Alexandra Robbins. PC Magazine. "Coplink, an artificial-intelligence–driven search engine for crime characteristics, scans multiple databases for connections among names, vehicles, physical descriptions, and other aspects of a crime or criminal. Developed by Hsinchun Chen, director of the University of Arizona Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Coplink began in 1997. Five years later, Chen has deployed Coplink at six agencies and is developing an information-sharing and analysis program with the CIA."
>>> Law Enforcement, Applications
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December 17, 2002: Building the Sensitive Robot. Stories of modern science by Ellen Beck. United Press International. "Vanderbilt researchers Nilanjan Sarkar and Craig Smith are working on a robot that can sense human emotion. 'Psychological research shows that a lot of our communications, human to human, are implicit,' Sarkar says. ... The key to the project is determining whether a robot can sense the psychological state of a human."
>>> Robots, Cognitive Science, also see the following articles
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December 17, 2002: Research seeks emotion-sensing robot. By Scott R. Burnell. UPI /available from The Washington Times. "'We are not trying to give a robot emotions,' Smith said. 'We are trying to make robots that are sensitive to our emotions.'As the project develops, the team hopes to integrate other inputs, such as voice- and face-recognition software, to refine the rules, Sarkar told UPI. ... Research has shown students learn most effectively in an optimal challenge level that avoids both frustration and boredom, Sarkar said. Accurate monitoring of physiological data would help a computer alter a task's difficulty to maintain that optimal state. ... The research is right on target in terms of helping robots and humans interact more effectively, said Robin Murphy, a professor of computer engineering at the University of South Florida in Tampa and director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue.
>>> Robots, Cognitive Science, Speech, Interfaces, Education, Vision, Natural Language, Image Understanding, Hazards & Disasters, also see the previous and following articles
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December 17, 2002: Robot Says: I Shrink I Am, I Shrink I Am - Scientists trying to create robots that sense human emotions. By Robert Preidt. HealthScout. "Vanderbilt University researchers are trying to create a robot that can sense your emotions and respond appropriately. In an article in the December issue of Robotica, the researchers report they've taken the first steps towards creating a touchy-feely robot that can sense your psychological state. There are two parts to this project. The first is to develop a system that accurately detects a person's psychological state by analyzing information from number of physiological sensors -- for example, one would measure heart rate. The second part is to have a robot process this information as soon as it's collected, and convert it into a form that can be processed by a computer."
>>> Robots, Cognitive Science, also see the previous articles
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December 17, 2002: Library technology developments. News Analysis by Gryphon. IT-Director.com. "Other technologies on the horizon for library and information services include artificial intelligence within library web sites and web based open source work. All these development herald much greater automation and the ability to derive much more information from library and research services with greater ease and on a more timely basis."
>>> Libraries, Applications
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December 16, 2002: Exploring space will require new robots. By Carole Rutland. Ledger-Enquirer. "Disguised as futuristic ants, newly designed artificial intelligence will be able to venture into the nooks and crannies of space as never before possible. They're tiny and weigh in at about 2.2 pounds, but they could fan among the hundreds of thousands of asteroids and begin to explore. They're called ANTS -- it's an acronym for Autonomous Nano Technology Swarm, a fleet of tiny insect-like spacecraft which could cruise all by themselves to the asteroid belt."
>>> Autonomous Vehicles, Robots, Space Exploration, Applications
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December 16, 2002: Going for the high hanging fruits of IT. By Ladi Ogunneye. The Daily Times of Nigeria. "The Nigerian Information Technology professional as well as the companies needs to be challenged. Government action relating to certain Information technology projects seems to suggest lack of confidence in the professionals and/or companies. ... United States of America provides a good example of this. In 1957 the erstwhile USSR launched Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite. This was during the cold war period. Shortly thereafter, President Sweight D. Eisenhower [sic] set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which later became DARPA, and challenged it to establish the United States lead in Science and Technology (at that time, applicable to the military). That challenge produced what has today become one of the scientific wonders of our time, the Internet. This is not all, a look at the technical literature reveals that there has been immense contributions of this body in such areas as reduced instruction set processors, specialised graphics engines, RAID disks, robotics and artificial intelligence tools. DARPA has lived up to the challenge of maintaining the US superiority in high-performance computing and communication devices, networking and information assurance, embedded software (i.e. software which operates in close coupling with complex and sometimes distributed dynamical systems, seamless user interfaces for the warfighter and ubiquitous computing and communication resources). ... The above list of contributions of DARPA is no doubt laden with research and development (R&D) content. This suggests the need for investment in R&D. The nation’s hope to be globally competitive is meaningless if its offerings add no value."
>>> History, AI Overview
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December 16, 2002: Ngee Ann lecturers find way to make computers think like a human brain. By Ca-Mie De Souza. Channel NewsAsia. "Two lecturers at Ngee Ann Polytechnic said they had discovered a way to make computers think like a human brain. ... Like a library which arranges its books in categories, the team said the brain's grey matter functioned in much the same way. So they designed the 'Digital Gray Matter' technology, which allows computers to store and classify information. ... Dr Alexei Mikhailov, Lecturer at Ngee Ann Polytechnic, said: 'I believe now we can significantly improve artificial intelligence tools. They will become cheaper, they will become more intelligent and it will not just improve the quality of life, but it could also save our lives.' ... At the moment, artificial intelligence is already used in robots - in a US$1 billion market that's growing at 45 percent a year. Dr Pok Yang Ming, Lecturer at Ngee Ann Polytechnic, said: 'Artificial intelligence has been in place over the last 20 to 30 years. All these are discovered outside Singapore. But neural cortex or the Digital Gray Matter is discovered in Singapore.'"
>>> Cognitive Science, Applications, Machine Learning, Industry Statistics
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December 16, 2002: The World According to Google. By Steven Levy. Newsweek / available from MSNBC. "By a winning combination of smart algorithms, hyperactive Web crawlers and 10,000 silicon-churning computer servers, Google has become a high-tech version of the Oracle of Delphi, positioning everyone a mouseclick away from the answers to the most arcane questions—and delivering simple answers so efficiently that the process becomes addictive. ... Google’s uses are limited only by the imaginations of those who punch in 150 million searches a day. ... By empowering the masses to make use of the multi-terabit glory of the Web, Google has made supersleuths of us all. Privacy advocates are going crazy at the Pentagon’s plan to track citizens’ purchases, Web-site visits and phone calls. But as my search for the eBay seller indicates, with Google everybody is Big Brother. ... From the office [Sergey] Brin and [Larry] Page share ... the cofounders dream up even wilder plans. 'The ultimate search engine would be smart; it would understand everything in the world,' says Page."
>>> Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, Applications, Ethical & Social Implications, Libraries, Machine Translation
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December 16, 2002: The ghost hunters - Scientists and novelists share insights into the enduring mystery of human consciousness. By Jay Tolson. U.S. News & World Report. "Consciousness, though long an indirect concern of fiction, has recently become the explicit preoccupation of many literary novelists–at the same time that scientists in many fields have taken a renewed interest in the subject. This is more than a coincidence, [David] Lodge says. ... On the science side, Lodge points to a confluence of new approaches, theories, and technologies. These include advances in computer science that give promise of constructing artificial intelligence and even consciousness itself; a new understanding of the neurochemistry behind different mental states and moods; and a host of brain-scanning and brain-imaging techniques. All have boosted confidence that close scrutiny of the brain (the hardware) will eventually explain mind and consciousness (the software), thus dissolving the mystery of the 'ghost in the machine.'The various expressions of this new confidence have themselves attracted the attention of many first-rate novelists. Jonathan Franzen's bestselling novel, The Corrections, for example...."
>>> Philosophy, SciFi, Neural Networks
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December 15, 2002: Robotic Warfare - part of The 2nd Annual Year in Ideas. By William Speed Weed. The New York Times Magazine (no fee reg. req'd). "This year at Edwards Air Force Base in California, the biggest advance yet in robotic warfare took its first flight: the UCAV, or Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle. Like the Predator, the UCAV has no human on board. Unlike the Predator, the kite-shaped UCAV is an autonomous plane that flies itself without constant direction from any human being. Its ground-based controller (notably not called a pilot) programs missions with a computer, but he does not direct the aircraft moment by moment. ... The Army is developing the Unmanned Ground Combat Vehicle, a tank that can autonomously negotiate landscapes and fire weapons. And the Navy plans to build a robotic killer submarine. ... Beyond the obvious advantage of keeping Americans out of harm's way, robotic systems have other advantages. Robotic planes and subs don't have to accommodate human safety needs, so they're cheaper to build. Not only can computers think faster than humans, they'll also never suffer from the emotional stress of battle. Moreover, computers can communicate with each other at lightning speed. ... The Air Force's [ Col. Michael] Leahy insists that, though total autonomy is technologically feasible, it is not morally allowable. 'A human must always be in the loop to authorize weapons release,' he says."
>>> Robots, Military, Autonomous Vehicles, Ethical & Social Implications, AI Overview, Applications, also see the next article ->
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December 15, 2002: RoboVac - part of The 2nd Annual Year in Ideas. By Virginia Heffernan. The New York Times Magazine (no fee reg. req'd). "Of all the works of prophecy of the last century -- '1984,' 'Brave New World,' 'Atlas Shrugged' -- the one that appears to have generated the most hope about the future is 'The Jetsons,' the cartoon series that had its premiere in 1962. On that show, the chipper Jetson family boasted, in addition to a Zippo-size encyclopedia and a telephone with a video screen, a robot named Rosie who took care of household chores. So many other utopian dreams were dashed long ago, but the fantasy of a happy, chore-loving robot has remained vital into the 21st century, and this year a Massachusetts company called iRobot offered Roomba, America's first affordable robot vacuum cleaner."
>>> Robots, Applications, Smart Houses, History, SciFi, also see the previous article
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December 15, 2002: At last ... a robot that really can think. By Eva Langlands. Sunday Herald. "It cooks, cleans and washes your windows at the touch of a button -- and even matures with age. Thinking robots that evolve like humans could soon be fact rather than fiction, thanks to a group of Scottish scientists set to develop the world's first real-life R2-D2. Until now, scientists have attempted to create thinking robots by installing a complex processing network but the systems have failed to operate autonomously in advanced tasks. The new technique, however, allows the robot to evolve in a developing environment, enabling it to become more complex and sophisticated over time, like humans. ... Current models can wash windows, mow the lawn, or even operate as artificial limbs. They could also replace humans in the event of an earthquake or dangerous levels of radiation, and perform exploratory tasks underwater. ... 'We are on the cusp of a huge tidal wave of artificial intelligence. It could be about to take off in the same way as the internet did a few years ago.'"
>>> Robots, Applications, Neural Networks, Ethical & Social Implications, Smart Houses, Hazards & Disasters, Machine Learning
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December 14, 2002: Radical robot squad joins the rescue team. By Deborah Smith. The Sydney Morning Herald. "This week the team received a $10 million funding boost from the Federal Government to set up a new robotics centre with the University of NSW and University of Technology, Sydney. The think tank, called the Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems, will be headed by Field Robotics' director, Professor Hugh Durrant-Whyte. .Mr[Frederic] Bourgault says autonomous systems are a fusion of machines, computers, sensing systems and software. They are designed to operate in 'dirty, dangerous and difficult places such as mines shafts or earthquake sites.' Members of the Sydney team had a breakthrough in finding a way to allow a robot dropped in a new location to move around and map its surroundings while keeping a track of its own position. Previously robots have been unable to do both tasks at once. The new mapping system does not rely on the robot using independent information such as global positioning system satellites...."
>>> Hazards & Disasters, Autonomous Vehicles, Robots, Applications, Multi-Agent Systems, Agents
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December 13, 2002: Will technology ever be as intelligent as us? By Liz Simpson. Computing /vnunet.com. "Ask any stranger, 'Do you have the time?' and they look at their watch. Not many of us would be fazed by that request, or the reply 'Time for what?' Our brains cope with understanding and responding to such ambiguities of communication, while computers, so far, do not. But one day they will, thanks to artificial intelligence pioneer Doug Lenat. At the Austin, Texas offices of Cycorp, Lenat and his team have been working on machines that are smart, in the way that humans using common sense are smart. ... artificial intelligence provided the perfect platform for a man who once said: 'How many people have in their lives a two to 10 per cent chance of dramatically affecting the way the world works? When one of those chances comes along, you should take it.'Lenat's contribution to the world is a program called Cyc (as in 'en-cyc-lopaedia'), said to be the world's largest extra-sentient body of common sense and perhaps, one day, this planet's first digital consciousness."
>>> Commonsense, Ontologies, Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students), Reasoning, Representation
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December 13, 2002: New Blood Test Spots Cancer - Could Be Available as Early as 2004. By Charlene Laino. WebMD Medical News. "In what's being called one of the biggest advances in cancer research in years, scientists have developed a blood test that can detect cancer with a greater than 90% accuracy. This artificial intelligence -- already tested for cancers of the breast, ovary, and lung -- could one day be used to detect many types of cancer. ... 'All that's needed [for the quick fingerstick test] is a single drop of blood,' [Emanuel] Petricoin says. 'The computer does the rest.' ... In tests on several hundred blood samples, some taken from women with ovarian cancer and others from healthy women, the test proved 'an astonishing' 100% accurate in detecting cancer, even at the earliest stages, Petricoin said."
>>> Medicine, Applications
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December 13, 2002: Gift ideas for the serious gamer on your list - Play a realistic round of video golf with Tiger & Sergio. By Steve Makris. The Edmonton Journal / available from Canada.com. "For every season there is a sport, but in computer and video gaming any sport is just a click away, year round. Today's computer sports games have taken on a life of their own. Their AI (artificial intelligence) has human-like quality and the graphics and multi-speaker sounds resemble that of real TV events."
>>> Video Games, Applications
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December 13, 2002: Revving up the rovers. By Molly Bentley. BBC. "With launch dates just six months away, Nasa's science team is making final preparations to send two rovers into space in an effort to understand the past environment of Mars. ... [T]he twin rovers will cover more ground in a day - 100 meters - than Sojourner did in its entire mission. And the rovers are designed with autonomous capabilities. Once Earth transmits their daily assignments, they fulfil them on their own."
>>> Autonomous Vehicles, Robots, Space Exploration, Applications
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December 13, 2002: Tech, and the Future of Finance - Futurist James Canton offers predictions on how technology will impact CFOs in 2003 and beyond. By Marie Leone. CFO.com. "CFO.com: Which transformational technology will CFOs test-drive first? Canton: CFOs will gain the most from building financial systems that have complete financial knowledge transparency. In practical terms, financial managers will close the books, get an accurate cash picture, and identify and locate assets all in real-time. In addition, CFOs will use artificial intelligence (AI) for decision-support once the technology is embedded in back-end software. AI agents will retrieve internal and external data on a daily basis, to send, for example, automatic messages to notify the CFO if a particular budget is incomplete, or if too much cash is being is moved from a particular account. CFO.com: Will these back-end systems be smart enough to sniff out accounting fraud? Canton: If we program them that way. The software robots -- fraud agents -- will identify irregular accounting patterns. Whether the irregularity turns is intentional or just a mistake, is another matter. As more financial systems become connected in data warehouses, the use of agents will increase. ... CFO.com: When will AI-based decision support systems hit the mainstream? Canton: Within five years we'll witness the rise of the neural net, genetic algorithm, and expert systems that provide advice for CFOs and treasurers -- such as what is the best play to make for an overnight investment. The systems will create 'expert behavior' rules from massive databases that are filled with previous transaction data and outcomes. Eventually CFOs will use financial software agents to 'clone' their expertise for true multi-tasking."
>>> Finance, Fraud Detection & Prevention, Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms, Expert Systems, Machine Learning, Applications, Knowledge Management
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December 13, 2002: Digital Actors in Rings Can Think. By Courtney Macavinta. Wired News. "[Stephen] Regelous created Massive, the special-effects program behind the colossal battles in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Using Massive, the Oscar-winning Weta Digital team pulled off anticipated scenes for the latest installment, The Two Towers -- such as the battle at Helm's Deep -- by digitally generating smart crowds to supplement the live action. The computer-generated characters, called agents, have minds of their own. 'Every agent has its own choices and a complete brain,' Regelous said. 'The most important thing about making realistic crowds is making realistic individuals.' ... Agents aren't robots, though. Each makes subtle responses to its surroundings with fuzzy logic rather than yes-no, on-off decisions. ... For inspiration, Regelous didn't watch war movies as you might expect. Instead he experimented with artificial intelligence by growing digital plants, and studied how people avoided each other on crowded streets."
>>>Multi-Agent Systems, Drama, Fuzzy Logic, Agents, Applications, Reasoning
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December 12, 2002: The race to computerise biology. The Economist Technology Quarterly. "It is in data mining, however, where bioinformatics hopes for its biggest pay-off. First applied in banking, data mining uses a variety of algorithms to sift through storehouses of data in search of 'noisy' patterns and relationships among the different silos of information. The promise for bioinformatics is that public genome data, mixed with proprietary sequence data, clinical data from previous drug efforts and other stores of information, could unearth clues about possible candidates for future drugs."
>>> Bioinformatics, Data Mining, Applications, Machine Learning, Banking
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December 12, 2002: Fire guts Edinburgh's AI library. By Tim Richardson. The Register. "In a statement the university said: 'We have also lost the Artificial Intelligence Library - a collection of AI literature unique in the world, an irreplaceable archive accumulated over the 40 years of Edinburgh's leadership in the field, since its beginning in the 1960s. Although we have lost this archival collection, and many researchers have lost their personal archives, most of our current research data is stored electronically. We have recently rolled out a state of the art distributed computing environment, and, in this respect at least, we are well placed for disaster recovery,' it said. ... Informatics at Edinburgh brings together Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, and Cognitive Science."
>>> History, Academic Departments (@Resources for Students), also see related articles on this page
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December 12, 2002: Pacifist Leonardo may have made mistakes to foil warlords. By Tom Leonard. The Telegraph / available from The Sydney Morning Herald. "Leonardo da Vinci inserted a series of deliberate flaws into his inventions, perhaps to prevent them being put to military use, a new television series says. ... Five designs - for a tank, glider, parachute, diving suit and robot - were built for the series by enthusiasts and tested by experts. ... Mr [Michael] Mosley believes the clue lies in one of the notes Leonardo made beside his aqualung design. It reads: 'Knowing the evil in men's hearts they will learn how to kill men on the seabed.'"
>>> Robots, History, Ethical & Social Implications
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December 11, 2002: Europe - Are robots after your job? After the hype, a new generation of artificial intelligence systems shows promise for solving real business problems, says Business Europe. Available from ebusinessforum.com. "The hype surrounding AI in the 1980s prompted developers to make extravagant claims for the sophistication of their products, only for these to be discredited and business interest to wane. However, today's fully fledged web-enabled infrastructure, coupled with the explosion in personal computing of recent years, has revived business interest in AI solutions. ... John Kingston, senior research fellow at the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute in Edinburgh, says this shift in focus is symptomatic of the AI industry's attempt to shake off the old hype for more practical solutions. 'In the past, the principal benefit of AI was always seen to be that it would save money through increasing staff productivity. At present, however, AI is better at supporting accurate decision-making. Amid huge quantities of data, an AI system can support its decision well and trace the path that led it to that point.' This practical business focus is not the only reason AI is undergoing a renaissance. 'Today companies prefer to avoid the AI moniker,' said Shashi Buluswar, co-author of the McKinsey report. 'Now that the technology can demonstrate its applicability to real business issues where in the past its appeal was more conceptual, the term 'business intelligence' is preferred.' ... As yet, roll-out of AI business systems remains largely limited to the US and Japan, but the academic exchange between these countries and Europe is beginning to filter down to the business level. While the lack of standardisation remains an obstacle, Mr Buluswar said this too will soon be overcome."
>>> AI Overview, Applications, The AI Effect
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December 11, 2002: Turning ideas into assets. Opinion by ND Batra. The Statesman. "Consider, for example, Cognitive Science, a multidisciplinary area that includes psychology, euroscience, sociology, and computer science. At the highest level, it is associated with the study of artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, but at the mundane level its ideas are being increasingly used to study 'the psychology of acquisition and the science of material desire', for better marketing and placement of products -- anything from toys and cereals to jeans. What’s wrong with that, ask some professors who make a lot of money in consultations. Many of us do have qualms about turning the academia into a handmaid of the marketplace (imagine Victoria’s Secret and Heinz EZ Squirt Ketchup Boxer Shorts) but in America various fields of intellectual endeavour are not hermetically sealed. Ideas flow from one field to another and flourish wherever they find the best applications, whether it is the shopping cart or fighting terrorism. "
>>> Cognitive Science, Applications, Ethical & Social Implications, also see a related article
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December 11, 2002: Software gambler takes on the tipsters. By Paul Marks. New Scientist. "Alan McCabe, an IT researcher at James Cook University in northern Queensland, has developed a software-based results tipster for Australian Rugby League - although it could just as easily be adapted for soccer, baseball or cricket. The program outperforms the best human tipsters. McCabe unveiled his Artificially Intelligent Tipster - MAIT for short - at AI 02, an artificial intelligence conference in Canberra last week. The project is a spin-off from research into handwriting recognition. ... Across the season, MAIT is outperforming human tipsters and getting its predictions right more than 66 per cent of the time."
>>> Sports, Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Pattern Recognition
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December 11, 2002: Honda Shows Off Upgraded Walking Robot. By Yuri Kageyama. The Associated Press / available from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "Honda Motor Co. may have come up with the most attentive and perhaps honest car dealer ever in its child-size walking robot Asimo. The four-foot-tall machine, shown to reporters Wednesday, already knew how to walk, climb stairs and recognize voices. An upgraded version now also understands human gestures and movement. ... Asimo uses the visual information taken by a camera in its head to recognize 10 different preprogrammed faces and will call out that person's name. ... In a demonstration at Honda headquarters in Tokyo, the new robot understood where a person is pointing and moved in that direction. ... Asimo -a name based on the Japanese word for 'legs'...."
>>> Robots, Vision, Speech, Natural Language, Namesakes
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December 10, 2002: Tech's best - This is the 'wow' stuff. CyberSpeak column by Edward C. Baig. USA Today. "The common theme uniting Vonage DigitalVoice, XM Satellite Radio, Roomba and most of the other products and services that captured my fancy these past 12 months: Each earned kudos by shattering conventions and pushing the state of the art. ... Roomba may be my favorite new product of the year, if only because the efficient sucker relieves me of at least one unpleasant household chore. The robotic vacuum cleaner costs just $200 (a genuine breakthrough) and is shaped like a flying saucer."
>>> Robots, Applications, Smart Homes, and see related articles from the past few months in the News Archive
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December 10, 2002: Enterprise technology -- the twenty year leap. By Rupert Goodwins. ZDNet UK. "The average worker of 2002 has more technology at their fingertips than many entire organisations would have commanded in the early 1980s. ... ome other traditional 'office of the future' ideas will at last become common. As workplaces become stuffed with more wirelessly networked devices -- including fabric components like lighting, heating, security and fire sensors -- and voice recognition finally gets good rather than acceptable, you'll be able to ask questions of your systems wherever you are. ... A lot of artificial intelligence research, currently of academic interest, will mean data doesn't just sit there as patterns of bits on a disk, but will carry with it a whole skein of links to related concepts.
>>> Speech, Natural Language, Applications, Machine Learning, Knowledge Management
-> back to headlines

December 10, 2002: Biotech boom is big business for IT. By Graeme Philipson. The Sydney Morning Herald. "Interesting things will still happen in computers, but the excitement will be elsewhere as IT is used to facilitate advances in other fields. A good example of this is biotechnology, where the crossover with IT is called bioinformatics. Bioinformatics is a term for the use of IT in biotechnology. ... Computers are particularly suited to genomics (the study of an organism's genes), and proteomics (the study of similarly large groups of proteins). Workers in both fields generate vast amounts of data. So do many other biotechnological activities, such as high-throughput testing and various types of scanning. ... There is no doubt that biotechnology will be an enormous area. It may even be the future of computing, as computational biology and 'in-silico' experimentation merge with robotics and artificial intelligence. I have written about how German scientists now have cells and chips communicating directly with each other. Perhaps we are headed for hybridisation with computers. Computers can model our bodies and model our minds. They can plug into our organs, and maybe soon our brains. The future may be much closer than we think."
>>> Bioinformatics, Scientific Discovery, Robots, Applications
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December 10, 2002: Darpa puts thought into cognitive computing. By R. Colin Johnson. EE Times. "A program that may push cognitive technology to a new level is being launched by the Department of Defense. The DOD, a longtime supporter and user of artificial-intelligence systems, aims to build what it is calling an 'enduring personalized cognitive assistant,' or Epca. The system will be able to 'reason, use represented knowledge, learn from experience, accumulate knowledge, explain itself, accept direction, be aware of its own behavior and capabilities as well as respond in a robust manner to surprises,' according to a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) Broad Agency Announcement. ... 'What we are really after with the enduring personalized cognitive assistant is to get people working on a multiyear path to bring all the pieces together,' said director Ronald Brachman, who will co-head the initiative along with deputy director Zachary Lemnios. ... 'People say that neural networks and AI were not successful because we don't have humanoid robots walking around, but they don't realize that there are hundreds of applications of this technology that we use every day without thinking,' Brachman said. 'Machine-learning techniques are now built into a variety of commercial systems, finding credit card fraud, evaluating mortgage applications, detecting illegal telephone calls and recognizing speech.' He maintained that 'AI planning algorithms were successful in Desert Storm and are being used every day by the military in complicated logistic situations.'"
>>> AI Overview, Applications, The AI Effect, Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Fraud Detection & Prevention, Military, Banking, Speech, Natural Language, Chess, Cognitive Science, Reasoning, Representation, Vision, Interfaces, Robots
-> back to headlines

December 10, 2002: Human or Computer? Take This Test. By Sara Robinson. The New York Times (no-fee reg. req'd). "As chief scientist of the Internet portal Yahoo, Dr. Udi Manber had a profound problem: how to differentiate human intelligence from that of a machine. His concern was more than academic. Rogue computer programs masquerading as teenagers were infiltrating Yahoo chat rooms, collecting personal information or posting links to Web sites promoting company products. ... The roots of Dr. Manber's philosophical conundrum lay in a paper written 50 years earlier by the mathematician Dr. Alan Turing, who imagined a game in which a human interrogator was connected electronically to a human and a computer in the next room. The interrogator's task was to pose a series of questions that determined which of the other participants was the human. ... Dr. Manuel Blum, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon who took part in the Yahoo conference, realized that the failures of artificial intelligence might provide exactly the solution Yahoo needed. Why not devise a new sort of Turing test, he suggested, that would be simple for humans but would baffle sophisticated computer programs. Dr. Manber liked the idea, so with his Ph.D. student Luis von Ahn and others Dr. Blum devised a collection of cognitive puzzles based on the challenging problems of artificial intelligence. The puzzles have the property that computers can generate and grade the tests even though they cannot pass them. The researchers decided to call their puzzles Captchas, an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart (on the Web at www.captcha.net)."
>>> Turing Test, Natural Language, Cognitive Science
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December 10, 2002: Berkeley student bound for Oxford as Rhodes scholar - Son of immigrants preaches 'cycle of goodness'; aspires to start program for Indians. By William Brand. The Oakland Tribune. "A University of California, Berkeley, senior who wants to use breakthroughs in artificial intelligence to help create a better world is among 32 Rhodes scholars chosen this year by a national selection committee. ... The scholar, 21-year-old Ankur Luthra, is pursuing a double major in electrical engineering/computer science and business administration. ... His fascination with computers and artificial intelligence -- writing software to give machines human abilities -- began in childhood, he said. 'The idea of being able to sit down with nothing but a blank sheet of paper and making something out of nothing captured my imagination,' he said."
>>> Resources for Students, AI Overview
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December 10, 2002: Buildings in Old Town to be razed. By Kirsty Scott. The Guardian. "Most of the historic buildings ravaged by a fire in the heart of Edinburgh's Old Town at the weekend are to be demolished. ... Edinburgh University, whose renowned school of informatics was damaged, said about £500,000 worth of equipment had been lost and a library on artificial intelligence had been destroyed. 'It is world-class research that has been damaged,' a university spokeswoman said. 'A lot of the computer work is backed up at other sites, but there has been the total destruction of the AI library.'"
>>> History, Academic Departments (@Resources for Students), also see related articles on this page
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December 10, 2002: Park plugged in to Singaporean skills. New Zealand Herald. "AUT Technology Park chief executive Jonathan Kirkpatrick relishes a point of difference between the incubator that he runs and other Auckland incubators. This difference is that his group has links with a Government-sponsored business incubator in Singapore. ... Technology Park enables entrepreneurs and researchers to investigate and realise the commercial potential of their ideas in fields such as robotics, artificial intelligence, neural computing, mobile, bio-medical and educational technologies."
>>> Applications
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December 9, 2002: Making his mark on the Internet map - Tim Bray's inventions have catapulted him to an elite class of geeks with clout. By Pauline Tam. Ottawa Citizen / available from Canada.com. "Plug in the wrong keywords, and the wrong results come out.And that's the problem, according to Bray. Most of the information on the Web is designed to be read. But what if computer programs could do much of that reading for us? What if, instead of search engines, software agents could roam from page to page, automatically translating information into easy-to-use maps? Bray, who's 47, has spent much of his career improving ways to search, and he has found no better tool than an old-fashioned map. He believes with pictures to prompt us instead of lists of text, surfing the Web would feel like a guided walk rather than the chaotic wandering it is now.
>>> Web-Searching Agents, Information Retrieval, Interfaces, Agents, Applications
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December 9, 2002: In the Future, We'll All Be Harry Potter. Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox. " By saying that we'll one day be like Harry Potter, I don't mean that we'll fly around on broomsticks or play three-dimensional ballgames (though virtual reality will let enthusiasts play Quidditch matches). What I do mean is that we're about to experience a world where spirit inhabits formerly inanimate objects. Much of the Harry Potter books' charm comes from the quirky magic objects that surround Harry and his friends. Rather than being solid and static, these objects embody initiative and activity. This is precisely the shift we'll experience as computational power moves beyond the desktop into everyday objects."
>>> Applications, Robotic Pets, Philosophy, SciFi, Expert Systems
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December 9, 2002: Teen Wins $100,000 Science Scholarship - Mass. High Schooler Steven Byrnes Wins $100,000 Scholarship for Work on Elusive Math Theorem. The Associated Press / available from ABC News. "A high school senior who developed a theorem that could potentially apply to code-cracking and artificial intelligence won a $100,000 scholarship on Monday. ... Organizers said it represented a breakthrough in a famous poset game called Chomp that was invented in the 1970s. Two-player poset, or partially ordered set, games are important to the growing field of discrete mathematics for their potential use in artificial intelligence and secure codes on computer networks."
>>> AI Overview, Competitions (@Resources for Students), Games & Puzzles
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December 9, 2002: More products arising to fight flood of spam - Perfect solution to junk e-mail yet to be found. By Francine Brevetti. San Mateo County Times. "If you think the spam has piled up in your e-mail's inbox recently, consider that this unwanted communication actually might be good for the economy. In the last year more than two dozen new companies offering spam-fighting technology -- especially aimed at businesses -- have come to the market, according to analysts. Several of them originate in the Bay Area. ... [Joyce] Graff said her corporate clients calculate the amount of spam they get on their networks represents between 30 and 50 percent of their e-mail. ... Jeff Ready, Corvigo's chief executive officer, said Corvigo uses natural language; its technology reads a message in context, it does not merely scan for certain words. 'We deploy our artificial intelligence on our hardware,' he said. 'It sits between their firewall and their mail server, traffic comes in and our box filters the messages.'"
>>> Natural Language, Discourse Analysis, Filtering, Applications, Industry Statistics
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December 9, 2002: Too Much Information. Comment by Hendrik Hertzberg. The New Yorker. "When it comes to concocting fevered visions of the future as a way of illuminating the present ... no literary divinator gets it righter than the sci-fi pulp master Philip K. Dick, author of 'Clans of the Alphane Moon' and dozens of other books, and inspirer of some of Hollywood's spookiest dystopias, including 'Blade Runner,' 'Total Recall,' and 'Minority Report.' And this is odd, given that he has been dead for twenty years. Too bad he's not still around. It would be interesting to get his take on the Information Awareness Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense. ... The 'example technologies' which the Office intends to develop include 'entity extraction from natural language text,' 'biologically inspired algorithms for agent control,' and 'truth maintenance.' One of the Office's thirteen subdivisions, the Human Identification at a Distance (HumanID) program, is letting contracts not only for 'Face Recognition' and 'Iris Recognition' but also for 'Gait Recognition.' ... The Information Awareness Office is working on some really cool stuff that will eventually turn up at Brookstone and the Sharper Image, like a Palm Pilot-size PDA that does instantaneous English-Arabic and English-Chinese translations. ... But the Office's main assignment is, basically, to turn everything in cyberspace about everybody ... into a single, humongous, multi-googolplexibyte database that electronic robots will mine for patterns of information suggestive of terrorist activity. Dr. Strangelove's vision—'a chikentic gomplex of gumbyuders'—is at last coming into its own. It's easy to ridicule this—fun, too, and fun is something the war on terrorism doesn't offer a lot of—but it's not so easy to dismiss the possibility that the project, nutty as it sounds, might actually be of significant help in uncovering terrorist networks. The problem is that it would also be of significant help in uncovering just about everything, including the last vestiges of individual and family privacy."
>>> Machine Translation, Biometrics (@ Image Understanding), Law Enforcement, Ethical & Social Implications, SciFi, Data Mining, Machine Learning,Vision, Applications, also see the Fall 2002 AI in the news column
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December 9, 2002: They, Robots. Book Currents column by Mark Rozzo. The New Yorker. (Printer friendly version available here.) "In 1739, the French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson unveiled his latest startling creation: an anatomically convincing, yet wholly mechanical, duck—one that quacked, ate grain, and, most impressively, excreted. Vaucanson's mechanical duck was a sensation, and, as Rodney A. Brooks relates in his engaging FLESH AND MACHINES: HOW ROBOTS WILL CHANGE US (Pantheon), one of the celebrated early attempts to replicate—or, at least, imitate—life. Brooks ... tells the odd history—from that Enlightenment duck to Deep Blue, a computer program that famously beat Garry Kasparov at chess—of what he calls 'mankind's centuries-long quest to build artificial creatures.' ... [I]n BUILDING BOTS (Chicago Review) ... [William] Gurstelle examines the growing popularity of 'combat robotics,' a sport that he predicts could soon 'grow into another NASCAR.'"
>>> History, Robots, Robot Kits (@ Software & Hardware)
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December 9, 2002: A Few Good Toys. By Dyan Machan. Forbes. "As the U.S. Army prepares for war in Iraq (and beyond), it has been moving fast to transform itself from a Cold War relic into a deadly, rapidly deployable force. ... Technology will play a big role in this evolution, and that is the purview of A. Michael Andrews , the Army's 56-year-old deputy assistant secretary for research and technology. Andrews, a civilian electrical engineer with the rank of a two-star general, oversees 21 labs, 8,600 scientists and engineers and a $1.5 billion-a-year budget. ... Andrews gets his inspiration from science fiction like Star Trek and the books of Arthur C. Clarke, as well as nonfiction.... Show Time: A young recruit stands before a 150-degree wraparound movie screen, studying a military drama created by computer-graphics artists. ... When the recruit heads for the field, abandoning the child, the mother goes ballistic as the news cameras roll. "This is crisis decision making," says Richard Lindheim, executive director of the Institute for Creative Technologies in Marina del Rey, Calif. The Army granted the institute an initial $45 million a year to create simulations using Hollywood talent. ... Attack of the Drones: he Predator, the unmanned airplane that incinerated a carload of al Qaeda suspects in Yemen last month, is on its way to becoming the size of a sparrow ... future versions will fly themselves via delicate image sensors and global positioning system data. Commercial uses: Farmers could send out a flock of drones to monitor crops...."
>>> Military, Applications, Video Games, SciFi, Autonomous Vehicles; also see a related article
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December 9, 2002: Fire destroys librarian's work. BBC. "Olga Franks is employed by the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and has helped collate the department's artificial intelligence collection for two decades. Books, journals and research papers, which were housed at 80 South Bridge, were completely destroyed when fire swept through Scotland's capital on Saturday night. Ms Franks said: 'I feel simply desperate. I was one of the original librarians in the department and I saw this work grow from the size of a cupboard to an immense library. ... The artificial intelligence collection was divided into three sections and contained some 5,000 books, 800 journals and 35,000 research papers published by the department. The library, which charted a 40-year history of the subject, became housed in 80 South Bridge in 1985."
>>> History, also see related articles above and below
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December 9, 2002: Edinburgh fire - Demolition threat. CNN Europe. "More than 80 firefighters were still tackling the blaze on Sunday afternoon, and fire crews from areas around the city were drafted in to help. Research work on artificial intelligence was destroyed at one of the university's bases for its School of Infomatics, an internationally acclaimed centre for research and teaching."
ALSO SEE: Fire devastates Edinburgh's Old Town, by Gerard Seenan,The Guardian.
>>> History
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December 8, 2002: Fire tears through Edinburgh. The Associated Press / available from The Globe & Mail / also available from The Austin American-Statesman. "A fire tore through Edinburgh's medieval Old Town, destroying 13 buildings, and firefighters working to control the blaze in the neighborhood's narrow cobblestone alleys said Sunday it would likely take two more days to put it out completely. ... Edinburgh University said research work on artificial intelligence was destroyed when one of its buildings was damaged. A spokesman said researchers would have back up records, however."
ALSO SEE: Edinburgh blaze 'like the sun rising'. BBC
>>> History
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December 7, 2002: Sci-Fi Tales Propel Space Tech. By Kendra Mayfield. Wired News. "Now, the European Space Agency hopes to recognize young writers and inspire future astrophysicists and astronauts by sponsoring a science-fiction writing contest. The Clarke-Bradbury International Science Fiction Competition for 2003 is open to writers ages 15 to 30. Contestants can submit short (2,500 words maximum) stories about space travel, exploration or settlement. The deadline for entries is Feb. 28. ... Last year, the ESA conducted a detailed survey of early sci-fi writing, artwork and film to determine whether any of the concepts and technologies envisioned could be used as inspiration for current and future spacecraft and missions. The agency collected more than 250 concepts from scientists, engineers, science-fiction writers and laypeople. An illustrated brochure [link] showcases these ideas, some of which European space researchers could eventually develop in the real world."
>>> SciFi, Competitions (@Resources for Students), Space Exploration
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December 6, 2002: We'll All Be Under Surveillance - Computers Will Say What We Are. By Nat Hentoff. The Village Voice. "Orwell died in 1950. Prophetic as he was in 1984, however, he could not have imagined how advanced surveillance technology would become. ... Our government's unblinking eyes will try to find suspicious patterns in your credit-card and bank data, medical records, the movies you click for on pay-per-view, passport applications, prescription purchases, e-mail messages, telephone calls, and anything you've done that winds up in court records, like divorces. Almost anything you do will leave a trace for these omnivorous computers, which will now contain records of your library book withdrawals, your loans and debts, and whatever you order by mail or on the Web. As Georgetown University law professor Jonathan Turley pointed out in the November 17 Los Angeles Times: 'For more than 200 years, our liberties have been protected primarily by practical barriers rather than constitutional barriers to government abuse. Because of the sheer size of the nation and its population, the government could not practically abuse a great number of citizens at any given time. In the last decade, however, these practical barriers have fallen to technology.'"
>>> Ethical & Social Implications, Law Enforcement, Applications, Biometrics (@Image Understanding), SciFi
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December 6, 2002: 'The Two Towers' - The Movie You're Not Gonna Miss. Movie review by Kurt Loder. MTV News. "It was the world premiere of 'The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,' the second installment of director Peter Jackson's monumental visualization of the J.R.R. Tolkien fantasy classic. ... This new generation of computer technology, deployed with consummate artistry, is at the heart of the film's extraordinary visceral impact. Never before have live action, scale-modeling and digital animation been so seamlessly interwoven: Some of 'The Two Towers' battle scenes clamor with an almost documentary realism. ... In the astonishing 20-minute sequence in which an army of 10,000 hideous Uruk-hai warriors storm the bastion of Helm's Deep, each figure, seen from above, appears to move in its own distinct ambit. This effect was accomplished through the use of something called MASSIVE, a proprietary software program developed by the New Zealand effects company WETA Digital. As explained in the movie's copious production notes, MASSIVE is a venture into the area of artificial-intelligence technology, allowing the creation of vast numbers of digitized characters -- or 'agents' -- each of which is able to draw randomly from a set of programmed responses in any given situation. In short, they can effectively make their own decisions."
>>> Multi-Agent Systems, SciFi, Agents, Drama, Applications
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December 6, 2002: Real love from fake dogs? Cosmic Log by Alan Boyle. MSNBC. "We know that real pets can make a positive impact on the health of senior citizens — but could robot pets have the same effect? That’s what Purdue University’s Center for the Human-Animal Bond plans to find out, in cooperation with the University of Washington. ... In another facet of the investigation, the researchers found that some Aibo owners formed a strangely organic relationship with their inorganic pets. University of Washington psychology professor Peter Kahn said one owner reported that when he got dressed in the morning, he turned his Aibo in another direction for modesty’s sake. ... There’s nothing wrong per se with the no-muss, no-fuss robotic interaction, Kahn said, but there is a nagging worry: 'Our concern is that it’s replacing interaction with real animals,' he said. Would children raised with robotic pets develop the same sense of responsibility for their fellow creatures? That’s giving psychologists like Kahn something to think about. ... Can a robo-companion serve as a comforter? Or does this trend serve as a somewhat sad social commentary?"
>>> Robotic Pets, Robots, Assistive Technologies, Applications, Ethical & Social Implications, also see the 2 related articles that follow ->
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December 5, 2002: Full Analysis - PolyAnalyst mines data and text, and its engines run the algorithmic gamut. Product review by Greg James. Intelligent Enterprise. "Megaputer Intelligence Inc., the U.S.-based corporation behind PolyAnalyst, traces its roots back to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research and Development group at Moscow State University. PolyAnalyst made its debut in 1994, with continual enhancements ever since. Version 4.5 adds decision forests, transactional market basket analysis, and link analysis to the base product. Notably, it's also the first of several commercial packages to offer integrated text mining within the same system as numeric data mining. Until recently, text and numeric mining were separate endeavors. ... A classic application of this brand of text mining is the analysis of customer feedback in call center logs. PolyAnalyst can scan through these comment fields, extract the important concepts and terms, and turn these results into numeric values that data miners can further analyze with Link Analysis, Classification, Clustering, and so on. PolyAnalyst's Text Mining exploration engine provides both directed and undirected modeling."
>>> Data Mining, Business, Machine Learning, Applications, Knowledge Management, Customer Relations
-> back to headlines

December 5, 2002: Research examines robot-assisted therapy. United Press International. "Computerized 'pets,' such as those coming from Japanese electronics makers, could approach their flesh-and-blood counterparts in providing people with social interaction stimuli, scientists said Thursday. Purdue University is running a year-long study that puts an 'AIBO' robot dog for six weeks in the homes of people 65 years and older who live alone, said Alan Beck, director of the Center for the Human-Animal Bond in Purdue's School of Veterinary Medicine. Cats and dogs have the well-documented ability to improve patients' stress levels, blood pressure and other factors. Using robots could do the same while alleviating a medical staff's worries about possible animal drawbacks, such as the need for feeding and exercise, Beck said. ... Japanese researchers have done similar studies with Paro, a fairly simple, 'baby seal' creation with a few novel twists to appear more true-to-life."
>>> Robotic Pets, Robots, Assistive Technologies, Applications, also see the related article above and the one below
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December 5, 2002: Building a Better Cat. By Saul Hansell. The New York Times (no-fee reg. req'd). "[T]he development of the FurReal cat may also suggest that the electronic toy industry is beginning to grow up, subordinating the gadgetry to classic, open-ended modes of play. 'You don't want the technology in a toy to be visible,' said Judy Ellis, the chairwoman of the toy design department at the Fashion Institute of Technology. 'The first robot pets were very cool-looking, but a child doesn't relate to a shiny surface. A child can relate to a furry cat.' Indeed, Mr. [Leif] Askeland passed up some of the technological features used in other robotic pets like infrared sensors so more money could go into the feel of the cat's fur and the look of its eyes. 'You can make tricks that you would do one time,' Mr. Askeland said. 'We preferred to focus on the emotional aspects of play. Nurturing and friendship are things that stay with you for a lifetime.' ... Hasbro said that the cat, whose target audience is 6- to-12-year-old girls, has found a second one: people in nursing homes who want the companionship of a cat without the litter box."
>>> Robotic Pets, Robots, Assistive Technologies, Applications, also see the two articles above
-> back to headlines

December 4, 2002: The World Is My Cubicle - Welcome to the future. Opinion by Alan Thwaits. Canada Computes. "Cyberpunk offers readers a whole host of guilty pleasures. ... Best of all, though, cyberpunk is writing that's all about technology -- and about how human beings deal with the consequences of the technology they've developed. The best of [William] Gibson's work, in my not-so-humble opinion, is contained in his so-called 'Sprawl' trilogy, which comprises the novels titled Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. In Neuromancer, which was first published in 1984, Gibson coined the term 'cyberspace,' essentially inventing the concept. ... Case, the main character of Neuromancer ('hero' is definitely the wrong word), is a cowboy, a console jockey, who makes his living by jacking into cyberspace, the 'consensual hallucination that was the matrix,' in order to steal data for his employers. ... The story is about his chance to get back in the action in a big way. Along the way, he gets involved in economic espionage, a family business made up of generations of clones, and a leap in the evolution process of artificial intelligence, which has immense implications."
>>> SciFi, Ethical & Social Implications
-> back to headlines

December 4, 2002: Will Smith Set to Get Robotic Costars. By Stephen M. Silverman. People. "Will Smith has never been accused of being a mechanical actor, but that label may apply to his next role. Variety reports that the 'Men in Black' star, 34, is set to star in the futuristic sci-fi thriller 'I, Robot,' based on an Isaac Asimov short-story collection from the 1940s that is credited for setting the groundwork for such films as 'The Terminator' and 'A.I. Artificial Intelligence.' ... Asimov's source material consisted of nine short stories that all contained the same three laws of robotics, notes Variety. Those laws are, 'A robot may not injure a human or, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm; a robot must obey orders given to it by a human, except where it would conflict with the first law; and a robot must protect itself, as long as that protection doesn't violate either the first or second law.'"
>>> SciFi, Robots, Ethical & Social Implications
-> back to headlines

December 4, 2002: Lego robot challenge aids learning. By Jane Wakefield. BBC. "Playing with Lego was once limited to building a tower of brightly coloured bricks but that was far from the case during a day of robot building at BT's research lab in Ipswich. Teams from 22 schools in East Anglia were set the task of designing, building and programming robots out of smart Lego. ... Unlike the more war-like robots of Robot Wars, these creatures were designed with a rather more constructive purpose as the theme of the day was how robots could help in cities with environmental problems. The children came up with ideas such as a robot that could clean up the streets of London by picking up litter. Or a giant robot with long legs to stride over the traffic-bound streets of New York to provide emergency aid in the event of crashes. The day was sponsored by the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI), a transatlantic partnership between BT's research arm BTexact and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, US. ... The project is designed to change the geeky image of technology and show how it can be both educational and fun."
>>> Robots, Resources, Education
-> back to headlines

December 3, 2002: Mars rover inspires toy robot. BBC. " Drawing inspiration from the US space agency's Mars rover, scientists in the US are working on creating a robot that can teach children about science. Researchers at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have already created a simple version of the rover, called a Trikebot. ... The CMU team says that although the rover is intended as a toy for children, there is a serious side to its work. The team hopes children will learn about the abilities and limitations of robots."
>>> Robots, Resources for Students, Resources for Educators, Resources, Education; also see related articles below
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December 3, 2002: Making 'bots pulls students in. National contest hopes to battle trend and draw more teens to engineering field. By Cathy Kightlinger. The Indianapolis Star. "With enrollment in engineering-related college courses dipping across the country, educators hope that growing participation in middle and high school-level robot-building competitions will spark renewed interest in those fields. In one such competition, called FIRST Robotics, students build robots out of metal, small motors, electrical wiring and, in some cases, colorful Legos. Unlike Comedy Central's "Battlebots," these robots are built to perform tasks -- not annihilate each other. ... Across the country in 1983, more than 441,000 students were enrolled in undergraduate engineering and technology programs. By 1999, that number had dipped by nearly 80,000, according to the National Science Board. ... Perry Meridian senior John Prather changed his career plans after participating on the Far-Southside school's FIRST team. The senior had considered becoming an accountant until about two years ago, when he joined the team. Now he wants to become a computer or electrical engineer. 'Starting from the first year I got on it, I thought it was going to be something fun to do,' he said. 'Then I started learning things I never expected to learn.' ... 'We're kicking the kids out at 11 p.m. on a Friday night. We have to push them out.' The FIRST Robotics program began in 1992 as the brainchild of scientist and inventor Dean Kamen, the man behind the portable dialysis machine and the stair-climbing wheelchair."
>>> Robots, Competitions (@ Resources for Students) Resources for Educators; also see related articles above & below
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December 3, 2002: LEGO team performs at preschool. The Baxter Bulletin. "Pinkston Middle School's FIRST LEGO Team, The Manic Mechanics, recently demonstrated its 2002 Challenge "City Sights" to preschoolers at Noah's Ark Preschool. ... They hope their effort will spark the interest of younger children and get them excited about being on a FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) LEGO team when they are older, according to a recent press release. ... This year's task is to build a robot to help in urban development and repair. Teams learn to become innovative and original in their construction of these robots. The teams also have research projects pertaining to the challenge each year, the release said."
>>> Robots, Competitions (@ Resources for Students) Resources for Educators; also see related articles above
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December 3, 2002: Bioterror monitoring software offered free to aid health groups. By Christopher Snowbeck. Post-Gazette. "Experimental software developed in Pittsburgh to detect evidence of a bioterror attack by monitoring activity in hospital emergency rooms is now being made available free to public health organizations across the country. ... The computer program, called the Real-time Outbreak Disease Surveillance System [RODS], was developed at the BioMedical Security Institute, a collaboration between Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University."
>>> Public Health, Machine Learning, Applications, Medicine
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December 2, 2002: Futuristic Prostate Screening. By Rebecca Somach. WHOI News. "Using artificial intelligence technology, researchers at Eastern Virginia Medical School are teaching computers to recognize the genetic patterns associated with prostate cancer. Using blood samples collected and stored from hundreds of men in Virginia, the program was able to predict prostate cancers with a 96 percent accuracy rate. Currently, the program is being validated at seven institutions across the U.S."
>>> Bioinformatics, Applications, Machine Learning, Medicine
-> back to headlines

December 2, 2002: Networking stops working. By Scott Kirsner. The Boston Globe (page C1). "The inventor, author, and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil, who also occasionally performs live music as the digitally rendered songstress Ramona, will undertake a new venture next year: publishing a subscription e-mail newsletter. He's busy with two other projects as well. ... Kurzweil predicts that an event he calls 'the singularity' - the merger of human and computer intelligence - will occur before the end of this century. Kurzweil's latest book, titled 'The Singularity is Near,' will be out in late 2003. ('Unless,'' he writes via e-mail, ''I can find some time-warping or mental cloning technology which might speed things up.') Kurzweil is a recipient of the National Medal of Technology, the inventor of the first text-to-speech reading machine for the blind, and the president of several Wellesley-based technology start-ups."
>>> Philosophy, AI Overview, Customer Relations, Interfaces
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December 1, 2002: Fed info 'tool for tyrants' - Information database would track all citizens. By Bob Keefe. Cox News Service / available from York Sunday News. "Deep within the Defense Department, government scientists are hard at work trying to build a massive database of personal information about everyone in the United States -- including details on everything from credit card transactions to medical records and travel reservations -- in an attempt to weed out terrorists. ... The Pentagon wants the controversial system to not just store and retrieve data, but also use artificial intelligence to automatically analyze each and every piece of it and generate its own ideas about potential clues to terrorism. And the TIA computers must quickly analyze data in any form -- in foreign language documents, in fingerprints, pictures or even sounds. That's the sort of job that requires countless hours by teams of analysts at the FBI and CIA today."
>>> Law Enforcement, Ethical & Social Implications, Machine Learning, Applications, also see the related article above
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December 1, 2002: In UT program, 'citizen-scholars' put knowledge to work. By Rich Cherwitz, Sarah Rodriguez and Julie Sievers. The Austin American-Statesman. "Ask computer science doctoral candidate Harold Chaput what artificial intelligence and digital technology, the subject of his dissertation, have to do with the lives of people, and you'll see the passion driving his research. 'Technology,' said Chaput, 'is a tool for doing important, fascinating, powerful, beautiful things.' Chaput founded the Austin Museum of Digital Art, the first museum in the world to focus exclusively on digital art. It holds monthly art events, annual exhibitions, and gives local youth organizations access to digital art and technology. Work with AMODA introduced Chaput to the Griffin School, a private school for at-risk youths. In addition to joining the advisory board, Chaput teaches classes in computer programming and Web design. Not content with laboratory research, Chaput is using his intellectual resources to make a difference in the lives of Austin residents. He is one example of how graduate students are 'citizen-scholars.'"
>>> Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students), Art
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December 1, 2002: Big disaster, teeny packages. By James N. Gardner. The Oregonian. "Michael Crichton is the undisputed master of the techno-thriller genre. ... The underlying scientific developments in "Prey" are nanotechnology (precision engineering at the molecular level) and artificial life (the younger, scarier cousin of artificial intelligence). These fields of research have generated dire warnings from the likes of Bill Joy, the chief science officer at Sun Microsystems, and Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal of England. Joy, for instance, cautions that self-replicating nanodevices, only a few molecules in volume, could conceivably infect and fatally degrade our technological infrastructure -- and that no power on Earth would be able to stop the tiny machines once they began reproducing. In Crichton's hands, this horrifying possibility comes to life. ... Computer guru Ray Kurzweil has predicted that before the 21st century ends, thinking machines will have raced far ahead of humanity in terms of sheer mental ability. ... This is the disquieting specter of artificial intelligence research succeeding beyond our wildest dreams or nightmares. But as Crichton chillingly demonstrates, fast-moving research in nanotechnology and artificial life technologies, some of it funded by the military, raises an even creepier possibility...."
>>> Ethical & Social Implications, SciFi, Artificial Life, AI Overview, Multi-Agent Systems
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December 2002/January 2003: Gentlemen, Start Your Robots. Self-reliant roadsters will race for a hefty Pentagon prize. By David Talbot. Technology Review. "Sometime in 2004, robots will drive the roughly 400 kilometers from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Competing in a combined on- and off-road race across deserts and mountains, they’ll be advancing the technology of autonomous vehicles and vying to clinch a $1 million cash prize."
>>> Autonomous Vehicles, Competitions (@ Resources for Students), Robots
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December 2002/January 2003: Immobots Take Control. By Wade Roush. Technology Review. "From photocopiers to space probes, machines injected with robotic self-awareness are reliable problem solvers. ... But Deep Space One had something Mars Polar Lander lacked: an onboard robot able to think autonomously and handle the unexpected. Using its engineering knowledge, the robot tried to repair the switch by toggling it on and off. When this failed, it devised a successful plan to complete the navigation maneuver, and the craft proceeded unharmed. The robot that saved Deep Space One was in the vanguard of a new breed of machines poised to have a big impact in space and here on Earth. Quite unlike the metallic contraptions that march stiffly through sci-fi movies or the mindless, stripped-down devices that heft parts on our assembly lines, the new robots have more brain than brawn. Each possesses a detailed picture of its own inner workings—encoded in software-based models—that gives it the ability to respond in novel ways to events its programmers might not have anticipated. Because many of these inward-focused, self-reconfiguring machines don’t move, some computer scientists call them immobile robots, or 'immobots.' ... A deep-space probe obviously requires much more autonomy than, say, a photocopier. But heavily used office machines must meet a similar demand for reliability and efficiency... 'This distinction between telling a system how to do its job and telling the system the end result you want is very fundamental,' says Robert Morris, director of IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. IBM is working to build what it calls 'autonomic' characteristics -- model-based features, as well as others that employ classic heuristic programming -- into products such as Web servers and storage networks. These features will allow the products to reconfigure themselves for optimal performance, depending on what’s being asked of them."
>>>Reasoning, Space Exploration, Qualitative Reasoning, Engineering, Autonomous Vehicles, Commonsense, Applications, Networks, Transportation
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December 2002: Playing to Win - Computer and video games are a bigger business than the movies, and the biggest force in games is Electronic Arts...." By Chuck Salter. FastCompany (Issue 65, page 80). "Welcome to the entertainment industry of the 21st century, where video games are serious business. Last year, U.S. computer- and video-game revenue surpassed domestic box-office receipts, and this year, the game industry is expected to widen that gap with more than $10 billion in sales. ... [Bruce] McMillan was playing FIFA [Soccer] at the game's highest level, where the artificial intelligence is at its best. 'It studies your tactics and looks for play patterns,' he says. 'The move you used to score the first time won't work the next time you try it.' After taking a 1-0 lead, he was stymied in the second half, unable to penetrate, and he tried in vain to fend off the computer's attacks on his goal."
>>> Video Games, Industry Statistics, Games & Puzzles
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December 2002: God Is the Machine. In the beginning there was 0. and then there was 1. A mind-bending meditation on the transcendent power of digital computation. By Kevin Kelly. Wired Magazine. "From this perspective, computation seems almost a theological process. It takes as its fodder the primeval choice between yes or no, the fundamental state of 1 or 0. After stripping away all externalities, all material embellishments, what remains is the purest state of existence: here/not here. Am/not am. ... All creation, from this perch, is made from this irreducible foundation. Every mountain, every star, the smallest salamander or woodland tick, each thought in our mind, each flight of a ball is but a web of elemental yes/nos woven together. If the theory of digital physics holds up, movement (f = ma), energy (E = mc2), gravity, dark matter, and antimatter can all be explained by elaborate programs of 1/0 decisions. ... Our awakening to the true power of computation rests on two suspicions. The first is that computation can describe all things. To date, computer scientists have been able to encapsulate every logical argument, scientific equation, and literary work that we know about into the basic notation of computation. Now, with the advent of digital signal processing, we can capture video, music, and art in the same form. Even emotion is not immune. Researchers Cynthia Breazeal at MIT and Charles Guerin and Albert Mehrabian in Quebec have built Kismet and EMIR (Emotional Model for Intelligent Response), two systems that exhibit primitive feelings. ... A third postulate ties the first two together into a remarkable new view: All computation is one. In 1937, Alan Turing, Alonso Church, and Emil Post worked out the logical underpinnings of useful computers. They called the most basic loop --which has become the foundation of all working computers -- a finite-state machine. ... When John von Neumann and others jump-started the first electronic computers in the 1950s, they immediately began extending the laws of computation away from math proofs and into the natural world. They tentatively applied the laws of loops and cybernetics to ecology, culture, families, weather, and biological systems. Evolution and learning, they declared, were types of computation. Nature computed. If nature computed, why not the entire universe?"
>>> Philosophy, Systems & Languages
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December 2002: A Smarter Way to Sell Ketchup - This is your brain. This is your brain in the marketing department. Any questions? By Alissa Quart. Wired Magazine. "Cognitive science, which draws on psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and computer science, has an illustrious history. The discipline has brought us innovations in artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and neural networking. But increasingly, it's about ketchup. Cognitive science isn't just being put to work for better marketing - it's also helping to make more sophisticated products. There's cog-sci fieldwork behind cereal ads, and lab experiments support the marketing of jeans. Cognitive scientists are investigating why kids might feel positive about, say, Coke but hate Pepsi; or why Zoog is a catchy add-on to the Disney brand."
>>> Cognitive Science, also see a related article
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December 1, 2002 [issue date]: The Robot Evolution - MIT's Rodney A. Brooks is among researchers leading the charge to develop a smarter and more useful artificial creature. By Jill Jusko. Industry Week. "The manufacturing industry is no stranger to robots. Huge robot arms are commonplace in several industrial settings -- particularly automotive -- and primarily engage in long-run, repetitive tasks such as welding and assembly. ... Then there are the intelligent robots of science-fiction movies and books, such as C3PO and R2D2 from the Star Wars movies, which seem almost human in their ability to reason and feel and interact with human beings. In his latest book, 'Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us' (2002, Pantheon Books), Rodney A. Brooks, director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, suggests that the 'science fiction fantasy,' as he calls it, is not so far off. ... But what could increasingly intelligent robots mean to manufacturing?"
>>> Robots, SciFi, Manufacturing, Applications, Industry Statistics - Robotics
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