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SEPTEMBER 2004 September 30, 2004: Clever cars can read road signs. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist Magazine (Appears on page 25 of the October 2nd issue as: Road signs drivers can't ignore). "The plaintive plea to the traffic cop is the same the world over: 'Sorry officer, I didn’t know I was speeding.' But drivers may soon have to come up with a better excuse. A new electronic driver’s assistant will detect road signs and warn drivers not to ignore them. The Australian invention is part of a global effort to make drivers more aware of road signs, especially those concerned with safety. Eventually, GPS-based systems could entirely replace road signs, but until then, ideas like the new driver assistance system (DAS) developed at the National Information and Communications Technology Australia (NICTA) lab in Canberra may help. DAS uses three cameras.... The software scans the video pictures and detects road signs by recognising their symmetrical shapes: rectangles, diamonds, octagons or circles. Once a sign is detected, the image is compared to a list of signs stored in the computer’s memory. If it recognises a stop sign, the computer checks if the car is slowing down." September 30, 2004: New Company Starts Up a Challenge to Google. By John Markoff. The New York Times (no fee reg. req'd.). "Google executives have long conceded that one of their great fears is to be overtaken by a more advanced Internet search technology. Vivisimo, a company founded by three former Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists, is hoping to prove that Google's worries are well founded. Four-year-old Vivisimo plans to start Clusty, a free, consumer search service based on results from Yahoo's Overture engine, Thursday. ... The service is meant to address the confusion that can be created when search engines return huge lists. Clustering is also intended to help users find related material they may overlook when they employ services that utilize page ranking methods. Such methods employ a variety of software algorithms to rank Web pages by their perceived relevance to a query. ... Vivisimo's co-founder and chief executive, Raul Valdes-Perez, was a protégé of Herbert A. Simon, a Nobel laureate who was a pioneer in artificial intelligence research. Before co-founding Vivisimo, Mr. Valdes-Perez was a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. He professes that the way to deal with information overload is with information 'overlook' - techniques that strip away extraneous information." September 29, 2004: Potted plant offers friendly ear. By Sarah Staples. CanWest News Service / available from The Windsor Star (subscription req'd.). "American and French scientists have created a 'caring' house plant equipped with motion sensors and cameras to gather information, complete with a computerized brain that 'learns' its owner's routines and can tell if they stray from the norm. Equal parts leafy adviser and calming potted friend, the plant -- a prototype at Accenture Technology Labs in Chicago that's expected to be ready for sale within about five years -- uses artificial intelligence to know if its owner is eating properly, experiencing fear, loneliness and pain, or suffering from memory loss." September 29, 2004: Koller honored with MacArthur Fellowship for work using computational methods. By Matthew Early Wright. Stanford Report. "Daphne Koller, associate professor of computer science at Stanford, has been named one of this year's MacArthur Fellows. ... Koller's research tackles questions of how complex information with high levels of uncertainty can be approached using algorithms, probabilistic modeling and other computational methods. These tools strive to represent knowledge and reasoning at the intersection of traditional logic and subjective judgment, and have far-reaching implications in the fields of artificial intelligence and biomedical and genetic data analysis. A significant contribution of Koller's work is the expansion of Bayesian networks-reasoning frameworks that deal with uncertainty-by showing how they can be organized into logical, object-oriented hierarchies. She has advanced this concept by implementing 'probabilistic relational models,' which blend logical and statistical representations in ways that employ standard deductive reasoning." September 28, 2004: Reasons To Be Cheerful ... The Press and Journal & this is north scotland.com. "The Robert Gordon University launched the UK's first degree course in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics." September 28, 2004: Club Meetings. Skagit Valley Herald. "A new robotics society where community members can build robots and learn how they work is free and open to interested participants, including youth and adults. The Bellingham Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Society (BAIRS) provides fun hands-on experience in building smart robots using computer science and engineering." September 28, 2004: Branch 'Bots' Make Banking Better. By Jerry Silva. Bank Systems & Technology. "The next time you walk into a bank branch, look up and smile ... there may be someone (or something) looking back and watching your every move. No, it's not the normal security cameras located over the teller window. These new robot eyes track your every movement, from the moment you come through the doors, walk around the lobby and conduct your business, until you leave. In fact, there may be many such robots in the branch, assisting you and the branch during your visit to ensure that the branch is operating as effectively as possible. ... The word 'robot' was first used in a work of science fiction written by Karel Capek in 1920. The word comes from the Czech noun 'robota,' meaning 'labor.' Modern definitions include devices that run automatically without human intervention that may have artificial intelligence, and that may respond to sensory input. Using these definitions, it is not unreasonable to characterize some of the new branch technologies as robots -- autonomous systems that sense, guide and aid in customer interaction." September 28, 2004: Innovators all - 23 fine MacArthur Fellows. By Rebecca F. Johnson. USA Today. "Lindsey and Martinez are among 23 authors, scientists and others picked by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as this year's MacArthur Fellows for work that shows 'exceptional merit and promise.' The fellowships come with a no-strings-attached $500,000 grant. The awardees are: ... Daphne Koller is a computer scientist who has developed new computational methods for representing knowledge and reasoning at the intersection of traditional logic, probability, uncertainty, and subjective judgment. Her work bridges a longstanding divide in the field of artificial intelligence between efforts to develop an explicit representation of knowledge (for example, in medical diagnosis) and efforts to categorize data based on statistical properties (such as optical character recognition). ... Naomi Ehrich Leonard is an engineer who develops autonomous underwater vehicles. This work synthesizes elements as diverse as fluid mechanics, robotics, computer science, oceanography, and biology." September 28, 2004: The MacArthur Grants - Bay Area Profiles: Boosting IQ of artificial intelligence. By Keay Davidson. San Francisco Chronicle (page A-11) & SFGate.com. "Daphne Koller investigates ways to make computers smarter and more humanlike in their thinking, a field known as artificial intelligence. Koller acknowledges that the study of artificial intelligence has been an uphill struggle for several decades. ... Still, Koller remains hopeful about the future of artificial intelligence. 'People are developing very strong, viable (computing) methods that can make significant dents in aspects of the (artificial intelligence) problem,' she said." September 27, 2004: If Hockey Is Out, Best Thing on Ice May Be a Computer Game. By Tom Zeller. The New York Times (no fee reg. req'd.). "Crestfallen hockey fans worried about filling the hours during the National Hockey League's labor dispute may now have a place to turn. Beginning Oct. 13, the cable channel G4techTV plans to resurrect each of the 1,230 regular-season games listed on the league's defunct 2004-2005 schedule by setting them in motion on a video game console. All 30 teams will face off in 'computer only' mode, meaning that the computer will control both teams, and the resulting scores, stats and highlights will be shown on the network's sports program, 'Sweat.'" 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." September 26, 2004: Have a hobby? Try robotics. By Michael Sun. New Straits Times / New Sunday Times (subscription req'd.). "Schools should encourage students to design and operate simple robots as a hobby, said [Dr Don Faust] a visiting professor from the United States. Since application of sophisticated robotics in industry represents the cutting edge in 21st century technology, he suggested that young Malaysians should first acquire the necessary background through an all- consuming recreational pursuit. ... '[Artificial intelligence]is a multidisciplinary science, synthesising the current results of many fields - biotechnology, computer science, engineering, physics, biology, mathematics, education and psychology,' said Faust, who is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Northern Michigan University in the US. As technology plays an increasing part in 21st century professional life, he suggested that a love and an appreciation for the subjects mentioned earlier should be inculcated in young Malaysians." September 26, 2004: Crick's other goal - Unlocking riddle of the mind. Scientists continuing study of consciousness. By Bruce Lieberman. San Diego Union-Tribune & SignOnSanDiego.com. "Francis Crick focused on looking for an area of the brain that might be critical to human consciousness. As a young scientist in 1940s England, Francis Crick decided to devote his life to unraveling two mysteries: the foundation for all living things and how the brain gives rise to the mind. ... Tomorrow, when the Salk Institute in La Jolla hosts a public memorial for Crick, who died July 28 at 88, that unfinished business will most certainly be talked about. How billions of brain cells interpret sensations, draw on memory and association to make sense of them, and create conscious thoughts about the world is unknown. 'It's inconceivable to us, but somehow it happens,' said Terry Sejnowski, a computational neurobiologist at the Salk Institute who studies how computers can be used to understand the brain. 'Consciousness is elusive,' he said. 'It's hard to pin down.' ... Illuminating how the brain creates consciousness would profoundly change the way humans view themselves, scientists say. ... Engineers could build machines that truly think, bringing artificial intelligence out of science fiction and into the real world. ... [C]onsciousness is really about how all the parts come together to create the thinking mind. 'Being reductionist is a good way to start, but at some point you have to . . . put together the pieces and see how they work together,' Sejnowski said. He calls the effort to assemble the big picture of consciousness 'the Humpty Dumpty project.'" September 26, 2004: Mundane mechanical machinations. By Pavel Ivanov. The Sofia Echo. "For a summer box office banker, 'I, Robot' seems uncommonly un-ambitious for a film boasting the catchy name of a book by the father of 'serious' science fiction, it is bewilderingly shallow. When Isaac Asimov, the actual author of the three laws of robotics, which the film fails to credit to him, started working on the script of the same name some thirty years ago, he was aiming at creating the most thoughtful and intelligent science fiction up to date. ... Asimov fashioned the three laws of robotics, under the overriding precept that a robot under no circumstances should harm a human being. The characters in his books are often robots clever enough to explore and be fascinated by the logical conundrums presented by those laws; the postulates of their being. The robots in the film at hand however, are more into intuitive and violent denial of those laws...." September 26, 2004: 'Synergy' leaves visitors spell-bound. Times of Oman. "The extra energy in the effectiveness of teamwork, mutual cooperation and understanding was resplendent in the annual exhibition (Senior Wing) -- ‘Synergy 2004’ -- at the Indian School Darsait. A floral welcome was extended to S. Sridharan, president of the Indian School Muscat management committee, who inaugurated the exhibition. ... The use of artificial intelligence in computers was a star attraction of the computer department." September 26, 2004: Consumers must be mindful of credit theft - ID thieves ingenious, but card networks are making it tougher to defraud victims. By Paul Gores. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Thieves' booty in the cards; September 27, 2004) / available from IndyStar.com. "[A]lthough illegal card purchases are the most common type of identity-theft crime, they are starting to decline because of increasingly sophisticated computer programs that spot credit-card fraud, she said. So-called 'neural' computer networks know who holds a credit card, the bank that issued it, how much the cardholder normally spends, the categories of things typically purchased, and the locations where the card usually is used. The computer is constantly learning and updating patterns. It also knows where rashes of credit-card fraud are taking place. 'It keeps getting smarter and smarter all the time. It's almost like artificial intelligence,' [Avivah Litan, vice president and research director at Gartner Inc.] said. The network looks for abnormal patterns, huge purchases, rapid purchases, items not normally bought by the cardholder and purchases too far apart geographically -- and too close chronologically -- for one person to have made them." September 25, 2004: Scholarship's future uncertain. By Darren Meritz. El Paso Times Online. "A scholarship program for Chihuahuan students attending the University of Texas at El Paso should be continued because it benefits both the United States and Mexico, officials said Friday at a ceremony at the university to honor outgoing Chihuahua Gov. Patricio Martínez García. Martínez established the Chihuahua Government Scholarship Program with UTEP in 2001 to help pay the tuition of undergraduate and graduate students attending the university. The program has awarded scholarships to 101 Chihuahuan students. The scholarships helped pay for Jaime Barragan's education. He is a graduate electrical engineering student who is attending UTEP specifically because he wants to learn about artificial intelligence." September 24, 2004: Gritty Realism Elevates 'Ghost in the Shell 2.' By Steven Snyder. Internet Broadcasting Systems Network & nbc5i.com. "A fusion of film noir, science-fiction and philosophy, 'Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence' stands as one of the most intriguing movie adventures the year. It also might be one of the year's most obscure. ... In researching 'Innocence,' I discovered that the first 'Ghost in the Shell' (1995) was an intellectual sensation among many circles in the film world, and that its sequel has been highly anticipated. I also read that, for some, this sequel feels like a rather stagnant rehashing of past Oshii techniques. Both films deal with the notion of a future world in which robots have been integrated into society. There are cyborgs, which are human spirits existing within mechanical bodies, and there are dolls, which are robotic entities devoid of any connection to the human species. This distinction is the basis for the film's philosophical arguments, as characters start to question their interactions with these pseudo-humans, and start to debate just what rights these beings have. Can they feel pain? If they seem human, do they start to become human? If they have a soul, but not a body, does that mean they belong to the realm of flesh or metal? Those who have seen Steven Spielberg's 'A.I.' will see a link between that story and this one...." September 24, 2004: Learning science, virtually. By M. Harish Govind. The Hindu. "Thanks to a tie-up with the Centre for Development of Imaging Technology (C-DIT), the Science & Technology Museum at the PMG Junction here has got itself a new 'edutainment' corner, which boasts of a 'Cyberlady' and a virtual laboratory. The main attraction is that the visitor can interact with a computer screen projected on a large screen. ... The 'Cyberlady' is an artificial intelligence tool with audio-visual support. The software is designed to grip the user's attention by making an intelligent analysis of questions posed on a wide variety of topics. As the questions are keyed in, pop come the answers in Malayalam in a pleasing synthesised voice. The responses are strikingly natural, but if the conversation is prolonged, they become less and less intelligent. The software team of C-DIT, however, has designed the 'Cyberlady' to 'learn on her feet', as it were, since each question keyed in by the visitor is stored in the hard disc and new answers developed." September 24, 2004: Can you imagine... By Peng Shaohu. China Daily / Beijing Weekend. "The Olympic Games not only brings fierce competition in sport, but also the latest technology available to deliver the latest results to everyone around the world. 'A digital Olympics will be a major highlight of the 2008 Olympic Games,' said Zhang Yuhang, division chief of the Beijing Municipal Office for National Information Infrastructure. 'It will fully take advantage of modern information technology innovations to create sound information portal and application systems.' Experts and government officials unveiled plans to transform Beijing into an electronic mecca in time for the 2008 Olympics. 'Digital Beijing' is the prime vehicle to deliver the information of the 2008 Olympic Games around the world. ... Artificial intelligence technology will be implemented to remove any language barrier between athletes, staff, and visitors." September 23, 2004: System attackers up the ante - Attacks are not only rising in number, but in speed and sophistication too. By Madeline Bennett. IT Week. "The recent Internet Security Threat Report from security vendor Symantec painted a bleak picture for IT security - both now and into the future. The firm outlined myriad threats, including phishing attacks, spyware programs and the spread of malicious code via peer-to-peer networks and web browsers. ... Bob Jones, managing director of security company Equiinet, warned that the threats are increasing. '[The danger is worse] both in terms of the number of attacks and the time it's taking for each flaw to be exploited,' he said. Jones added that industry is now relying more heavily on artificial intelligence techniques to thwart attacks as early as possible. He cited Bayesian filtering as a useful self-refining technique that firms could add to the more conventional methods of detection and defence." September 23, 2004: A different way to study - Cram101 seeks to help students get better grades in less time. By Shannon Barney. fsunews.com. "Cram101 is an online program designed to help students study more effectively, and in turn, get better grades. This tool gives students the opportunity to view chapter outlines and take practice tests dealing with whatever textbook they are using. Cram101 was officially launched in 2003. Currently, it is offered nationally with 47 university bookstores selling Cram101.com. By January, an additional 768 participants are expected. Online registration is also available. 'Cram101 was designed by studying how students actually study and succeed,' CEO of Academic Internet Publishers Scott Parfitt said. 'Using artificial intelligence and our 25 years experience in educational technologies, we built a more efficient and effective tool for students to help them get better grades in less time.' Cram 101 automatically extracts all testable information from a textbook and arranges it into outline form." September 23, 2004: Catching crooks in virtual Hawaii - Developers predict what types of video games we'll be playing in 20 years. Game Over column by Chris Morris. CNN Money. "When I asked several prominent developers about what the future might hold for game machines, we also discussed software. Would the games of 2025 conform to today's genres? And what sort of advances can gamers expect? ... One big hurdle developers will face is creating a truly lifelike artificial intelligence. In today's games -- even the most sophisticated ones -- your enemies tend to be either overly simplistic or blessed with unbeatable aim and reflexes. Goal one for some developers is to rectify that. 'I think the power of the future systems will be harnessed to make characters in our games seem absolutely real in every respect,' said Greg Zeschuk, joint CEO at Bioware, which created 'Baldur's Gate.' Meanwhile, the evolution of artificial intelligence could give birth to new genres, suggests [Ted Price, CEO of Insomniac Games]. 'Can we really create truly convincing A.I.?," he said. "And will that make our games more fun and immersive? I'll bet that the attempt to answer these questions in our games will give rise to a host of new genres that are much more dependent on believable character interactions than on fast reflexes.'" September 23, 2004: 100 reasons why it's Great Up North. The Journal / available from ic Newcastle. "Studying 'science fiction' - Sunderland University's School of Computing and Technology is an international leader in the future technology that is artificial intelligence." September 23, 2004: A Robotic Research Lab. Workspaces feature by Nancy D. Holt. From The Wall Street Journal Online & CareerJournal.com. "Who: Rodney Brooks, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Where: 32 Vassar St., Cambridge, Mass. What you see: A science project. Like an implausible vision, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory juts out from the fantastic facade of MIT's new Ray and Maria Stata Center. ... What he sees: 'A wonderful experiment. ... What we do in our research is challenge existing notions and try to figure out how the world can be different. The interesting thing here is that people are challenged in their own personal space....'" September 22, 2004: If the NHL is still looking for open ice, it can find it here. By Malcolm Kelly. National Post. "Electronic Arts went into development of NHL 2005 (rated Everyone, for PS2, Xbox, GameCube and PC), already an excellent game as NHL 2004, with one overwhelming goal -- create open ice. ... You can now create open ice by pressing a designated button as you go on offence, which will switch the puck carrier to the artificial intelligence and allow you to play as one of the streaking wingers." September 22, 2004: Eavesdropping call centre computers cut talk time. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist Magazine (September 25th issue; page 22). "Phone a call centre and you are likely to spend ages on hold listening to canned music -- and then find the operator cannot find the information you need. But an artificial intelligence system that hunts down the required information is aiming to slash the time people waste this way. Using a mixture of speech recognition and search engine technology, the system, being developed by IBM, will trawl a call centre’s databanks for the information a customer wants and present it to the operator before the caller has finished explaining what they want. By giving operators rapid access to the right information, calls will be dealt with faster. The system works by listening in to the conversation and identifying keywords spoken by the customer." September 22/29, 2004: Agent model yields leadership. By Kimberly Patch. Technology Research News. "Complicated systems that involve many agents making independent decisions -- like the stock market -- are difficult to predict. ... One way to gain at least a moderate ability to predict is to start in the middle -- construct a system using quantitative representations for agent-level behavior and interactions observed from real life, let the simulation evolve according to a set of rules, then compare the system to qualitative observations from real life to see how close the model has come to representing the behavior of a real system. Researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of Houston, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a quantitative model of software agents competing for limited resources that is representative of more complex systems. The model is a simple, expandable framework that accounts for social behavior in agent-based markets, said Marion Anghel, a technical research staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It could eventually be used to study financial markets, behavioral economics, and quantitative sociology, and to optimize agent communications networks, including robot collectives, said Anghel. The researchers based their system on an existing multi-agent-competition model dubbed the minority game.... The researchers added a network of acquaintances that give advice to each other based on the agents' predictions about the best move in the game at any given moment. ... The researchers are aiming to eventually produce artificial agent systems that perform optimally as a collective, said [Zoltan] Toroczkai." September 22, 2004: Museum home to a new Zone. Edinburgh Evening News. "The Royal Museum of Edinburgh will be the home of a new £1 million exhibition centre featuring 'iconic' science exhibits such as Dolly the sheep and a Ford Formula 1 car. ... Other icons include Freddie the Robot, which was built in Edinburgh in the 1970s and is considered one of the cornerstones of artificial intelligence." September 21, 2004: A little stroke of genius. A one-day symposium explores the link between neuroscience and music. By Arminta Wallace.The Irish Times (subscription req'd.). "Another speaker at the symposium will be Prof Paul Robertson, a musician who has acquired a considerable amount of expertise on the medical front. For many years as leader of the Medici String Quartet, he developed an interest in neuropsychiatry and presented a series called Music and the Mind for Channel 4. 'It was a fantastic opportunity to talk to people who were doing fascinating work - the most fascinating aspect of which was that none of them knew about each other,' he says. 'So, for example, there are people doing work with brain-damaged children using music therapy but there's very little contact between them and the people doing brain mapping. And there's virtually no connection between either of those groups and the people doing artificial intelligence in computing. But it doesn't take a mastermind to see that a huge cross-fertilisation is possible in those areas.'" September 21, 2004: Chicago Moving to 'Smart' Surveillance Cameras. By Stephen Kinzer. The New York Times (no fee reg. req'd.). "A highly advanced system of video surveillance that Chicago officials plan to install by 2006 will make people here some of the most closely observed in the world. Mayor Richard M. Daley says it will also make them much safer. ... Police specialists here can already monitor live footage from about 2,000 surveillance cameras around the city, so the addition of 250 cameras under the mayor's new plan is not a great jump. The way these cameras will be used, however, is an extraordinary technological leap. Sophisticated new computer programs will immediately alert the police whenever anyone viewed by any of the cameras placed at buildings and other structures considered terrorist targets wanders aimlessly in circles, lingers outside a public building, pulls a car onto the shoulder of a highway, or leaves a package and walks away from it. Images of those people will be highlighted in color at the city's central monitoring station, allowing dispatchers to send police officers to the scene immediately. ... Many cities have installed large numbers of surveillance cameras along streets and near important buildings, but as the number of these cameras has grown, it has become impossible to monitor all of them. The software that will be central to Chicago's surveillance system is designed to direct specialists to screens that show anything unusual happening. ... 'With the aggressive way these types of surveillance equipment are being marketed and implemented,' Mr. [Edwin C.] Yohnka said, 'it really does raise questions about what kind of society do we ultimately want, and how intrusive we want law enforcement officials to be in all of our lives.' ... 'The value we gain in public safety far outweighs any perception by the community that this is Big Brother who's watching,' Mr. [Ron] Huberman said. 'The feedback we're getting is that people welcome this. It makes them feel safer.'" September 21, 2004: Education Briefs. The Hartford Courant & ctnow.com. "Ingrid Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of Hartford has received a $99,469 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop ways to teach college students about artificial intelligence. ... Russell is working on the project with Zdravko Markov of the computer science department at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain and Todd Neller of the computer science department at Gettsyburg College." September 21, 2004: Tech ethics - Technology of the not-too-distant future will allow a Gillette razor to tell its manufacturer where it is, when it left the store and who is using it, according to a former Chattanoogan who has helped start or direct several high-tech ventures. By Clint Cooper. Chattanooga Times Free Press (subscription req'd.). "'We have to understand the ethical side of these issues,' said Mr. [Jim] Phillips, who founded the FedEx Institute at the University of Memphis, a center that studies next-generation transportation issues, artificial intelligence and supply chain management. 'But we're not studying that enough. These are important national issues. We probably ought to be building a center of the ethics of technology.'" September 21, 2004: Nothing Robotic About Robo-Art. By Cyrus Fariva. Wired News. "For 18 hours, robots invaded Harlem, but they came in peace. The third annual ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show was held in New York City this past weekend, and it showcased some of the best and most creative applications of modern robotics that make or are themselves art." September 21, 2004: Robot Telescopes Comb the Skies. By Lakshmi Sandhana. Wired News. "British astronomers have just begun to operate RoboNet-1.0, a global network of the world's biggest robotic telescopes, controlled by intelligent software to effectively act as one giant eye that can be focused anywhere in the sky within a minute. It's a dream come true for the astronomers at Liverpool John Moores University who pioneered the development of a fully automated intelligent robotic network. They developed the network to allow astronomers to follow up unpredictable events or appearances of objects in the sky as rapidly as possible, something that isn't ordinarily possible with a single telescope at a fixed position. ... ESTAR, a joint project of Liverpool John Moores University and Exeter University, developed intelligent autonomous software programs, known as agents, that will function as the brains of the network. Acting as 'virtual astronomers,' the agents will collect and analyze data 24 hours a day, alerting their flesh-and-blood counterparts only when they catch sight of something noteworthy." September 20, 2004: High-tech tools help with FCAT - Students can access online tutors and test aids that monitor individual progress. By Beth Kormanik. The Times-Union & Jacksonville.com. "A friendly genie and Merlin the Magician spout instructions on math and reading problems from a computer screen, and brightly colored handheld computers that resemble a combination of an iMac and a GameBoy are the newest tools and toys to help students on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. ... Hip design and kid-friendly software draw students into online tutoring programs offering extra help preparing for the FCAT. Web-based programs have grown in number and popularity, and advances in technology customize lessons for students and pinpoint where they get stuck on math problems or reading comprehension. ... One research-based online program could be headed to Florida. The 'Assistment' tutoring system helps middle-school students prepare for standardized math tests. It quickly predicts a student's score on a standardized test, provides feedback to teachers about how to adapt their lessons to help students and tailors tutoring for each student. The program combines research on artificial intelligence and the psychology of human learning, said Ken Koedinger, professor of human-computer interaction and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, which developed the model. 'The system is smart enough to solve problems in a step-by-step way,' he said. 'If a student gets stuck, it knows where in a problem the student gets stuck.' ... Effective personal tutors can raise student scores by two grade levels, Koedinger said, but the average human tutor helps raise grade level only by one-half. His computer-based system falls in between, raising students' scores by one grade level." September 20, 2004: Are poker ‘bots’ raking online pots? Some suspect computer programs have infiltrated Internet games. By Mike Brunker. MSNBC. "Concern is growing in online chat rooms and news groups devoted to poker that sophisticated card-playing robots -- known as 'bots' in the nomenclature of the Web -- are being used on commercial gambling sites to fleece newcomers, the strategy-impaired and maybe even above-average players. ... But skeptics -- and there are many -- argue the complexities of the game and the changing strategies ensure that creation of a program that can 'read' opponents’ cards using screen scanning techniques and respond in real time is years away at best. ... [Gautam] Rao and his fellow believers have a ready answer: A bot capable of playing against the best humans already exists. The University of Alberta’s Computer Poker Research Group has developed an artificially intelligent automaton known as 'Vex Bot,' capable of playing poker at the master level, though as yet it can only apply its gambling genius to two-player games. Vex Bot has been used by researchers to test the frontiers of artificial intelligence -- and as the basis for a commercial poker tutorial program, Poki’s Poker Academy -- but some fear it may become a blueprint for programmers with more sinister motives. Darse Billings, lead designer of the Vex Bot said he believes the odds are better than 50-50 that other programmers have secretly unleashed bots on commercial poker sites, apart from the commercial bots. But he throws his chips in with the skeptics, saying it is unlikely they would be anywhere near as capable as the Vex Bot -- so named for its ability to frustrate human opponents -- which is the result of more than a decade’s research by the University of Alberta team. ... 'With chess -- I don’t want to trivialize it -- but it’s just a matter of calculation,' he said. 'With poker, you really need to write a program that can think about the game and reason.' The solution, in the case of the Vex Bot, was adding a layer of artificial intelligence over its ability to calculate probabilities. 'It will show you things that no human player has ever shown you before,' Billings said of the latest incarnation of the bot, which also has the ability to model its opponent’s behavior." September 15 - 21, 2004: Refining the Search Engine - The vast amount of information on the Internet is growing every day —-- it's enough to gag a Google search. Researcher Ramesh Jain offers up new strategies for information retrieval. Ubiquity (Volume 5, Issue 29). "[S]earch engines like Google try to find out what the user's intents are, and in some cases the system is doing a good job; for example, on Google I can put in a complete address and it immediately understands that it is an address. And it will take me to Mapquest or a map of that particular area. But one of the examples that I like to use is this: what about if I am trying to understand whether President Bush's popularity is increasing or decreasing; what do I do? There is no way I can find out this information. ... Current search engines like Google do not give me a 'steering wheel' for searching the Internet (the term steering wheel was used by William Woods in one of his articles). ... So far searching has been limited to text but very soon it's going to involve a lot more audio and video. ... Language is a knowledge representation language. ... Actually AskJeeves started going in the natural language direction, but they soon realized that natural language understanding is not ready for this. So they now have a combination of people sitting and analyzing and then trying to put the answer. It's a very interesting combination of natural language understanding with case-based reasoning and human-based organization. ... At one time, information retrieval was not as respected a field as it's slowly becoming." September 20, 2004: Artificial Intelligence heads for the mainstream - AI vendors boost commercial uses of enabling technology. By Robert Jaques. vnunet.com. "Artificial intelligence (AI) is making its way out of the lab and into the mainstream market, industry experts have reported. According to analyst group Frost & Sullivan some technologies, such as case-based reasoning applications, have already created a buzz in fields including drug discovery, medical diagnosis, fraud detection, data mining and knowledge discovery." September 20, 2004: Alice chatbot wins for third time - People can chat with Alice on the web A computer chat program called Alice has won a prestigious prize for human-like conversation for the third time. BBC News. "It was judged to be chattiest bot out of the four finalists in the Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence held in New York on Sunday. British hopeful, Jabberwacky, came second in the annual competition. The event is based on the Turing Test, which suggests computers could be seen as intelligent if their chat was indistinguishable from those of humans." September 19, 2004: Dune … Arrakis … desert planet. By Robert Folsom. The Kansas City Star. "In Fischer's first book in the Julia series [Julia and the Dream Maker], three grad students just want to make a little cash with an artificial-intelligence toy. After that, the future of science, all science, is not what it used to be." September 18, 2004: Say hello to Jabberwacky, our best 'human' computer. By Charles Arthur. The Independent. " A computer program will attempt to pull off the ultimate con trick tomorrow: fooling an adult into believing it is human - and in doing so claim the greatest prize in artificial intelligence. The program in question - called Jabberwacky - started life in 1982 on a Sinclair home computer. Written by Rollo Carpenter, a British computer consultant, it is one of four that have been picked by the millionaire Hugh Loebner to take part in the annual Loebner Prize contest, where computer programs try to pass the 'Turing Test'. That challenge, originally set by the British mathematician Alan Turing in 1950, is straightforward. In a text conversation with no fixed topic a human should be unable to tell whether they are communicating with another person or a computer. If successful, the machine would have passed at least one of the requirements to be described as 'thinking' - though Turing himself said it would be better described as 'imitation'." September 17, 2004: Code created for shape-shifting robots. By Will Knight. New Scientist News. "Robots that change shape and even split into smaller parts to explore unfamiliar terrain could soon be feasible thanks to new algorithms designed to enable such metamorphic tricks. Zack Butler and colleagues at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, US, developed algorithms to control robots made from identical components, each capable of moving on their own but also able to attach to one another. As this is beyond current hardware, they constructed virtual modular bots and used a software simulator to test them. ... Normally a robot has a single central control component. But the researcher's goal was to develop distributed software for each module, so that the robot could split and still carry on with its mission." September 17, 2004: Talking heads spout `wisdom.' By Joanne Silver. BostonHerald.com. "Welcome to the strange world of Ken Feingold. Art and artificial intelligence meet in the haunting installations he creates, three of which are on display through Oct. 23 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Substituting ventriloquist puppets and animatronic heads for actual human beings, the artist designs original computer programming to breathe something akin to life into their rather bloodless souls. 'The conversations that these figures carry on are neither scripted, nor are they random,' Feingold explained. 'Rather, the software gives each a 'personality,' a vocabulary, associativehabits, obsessions and other quirks of personality.' ... In matters ranging from philosophy to sex, the unprogrammed passer-by silently enters the discussion. Artificial intelligence may be fueling the discourse within the galleries, but real intelligence is required to understand any of it." September 16, 2004: Children create new sign language. By Julianna Kettlewell. BBC News. " A new sign language created over the last 30 years by deaf children in Nicaragua has given experts a unique insight into how languages evolve. The language follows many basic rules common to all tongues, even though the children were not taught them. It indicates some language traits are not passed on by culture, but instead arise due to the innate way human beings process language, experts claim. The US-led research is detailed in the latest issue of Science magazine. ... [C]hildren instinctively break information down into small chunks so they can have the flexibility to string them back together, to form sentences with a range of meanings. Interestingly, adults lose this talent, which also suggests there is an innate element to the language learning process." September 16, 2004: Computer browsers - Virtual tourists are helping the Swiss to plan their landscape. The Economist. "Do cows improve the view? That is a question which interests the Swiss government, given that it subsidises farmers heavily to graze their cows in the mountains. One justification for the subsidy is that cows eat young trees, and fewer trees mean better vistas of the sort beloved by tourists. But just how much do cows improve the view and where do they provide most value for money? To help answer these questions, Kai Nagel and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, have developed computer models of the Alps and populated them with virtual tourists (or 'autonomous agents' in computer-speak) that can wander the electronic landscape. The agents are programmed to behave, as far as possible, like real tourists, and to record their impressions as they go." September 16, 2004: Duo-Mining -Combining Data and Text Mining. By Guy Creese. DMReview.com. "As standalone capabilities, the pattern-finding technologies of data mining and text mining have been around for years. However, it is only recently that enterprises have started to use the two in tandem - and have discovered that it is a combination that is worth more than the sum of its parts. First of all, what are data mining and text mining? They are similar in that they both 'mine' large amounts of data, looking for meaningful patterns. However, what they analyze is quite different. ... Collections and recovery departments in banks and credit card companies have used duo-mining to good effect. Using data mining to look at repayment trends, these enterprises have a good idea on who is going to default on a loan, for example. When logs from the collection agents are added to the mix, the understanding gets even better. For example, text mining can understand the difference in intent between, 'I will pay,' 'I won't pay,' 'I paid' and generate a propensity to pay score - which, in turn, can be data mined. To take another example, if a customer says, 'I can't pay because a tree fell on my house;' all of a sudden it is clear that it's not a 'bad' delinquency - but rather a sales opportunity for a home loan." September 16, 2004: A cyberspace odyssey - If you can hardly keep up with today's ever-changing world of IP, just think what tomorrow will bring. Remember HAL? He's closer than you think. By William E. Halal. The Globe and Mail. "Information and communication technologies are rapidly converging to create machines that understand us, do what we tell them to and even anticipate our needs. Two relentless super trends are moving this scenario toward near-term reality: Scientific advances are making it possible for people to talk to smart computers, while more enterprises are exploiting the commercial potential of the Internet. This synthesis of computer intelligence and the Internet is rapidly creating a powerful new global communication system that is convenient, productive and transformative: the Intelligent Internet. ... The TechCast project, a Web-based think tank that pools the knowledge of experts to track the technology revolution, calls it TeleLiving -- a conversational human-machine interface that allows a more comfortable and convenient way to interact. Consider some of the advances in speech recognition, artificial intelligence, powerful chips, virtual environments, and flat-screen wall monitors that are likely to produce this intelligent interface: ... IBM has a Super Human Speech Recognition Program ... MIT is planning to demonstrate the Project Oxygen ... Amtrak, Wells Fargo and many other organizations are replacing keypad-menu call centres with speech-recognition systems because they improve customer service and recover investment in a year or two. Analysts think most companies will make the conversion soon. ... Google and Yahoo operate voice-recognition systems ... General Motors' OnStar driver assistance system relies primarily on voice commands, with live staff for backup. ... Artifical Intelligence is being used to intelligently guide human-action figures in computer games, such as Sims, Metal Gear Solid, Unreal Tournament, and Halo. ... The huge gap between today's depressed IT industry and the vibrant trends noted above signifies that we are poised at the cusp of another major technology transition, much as the 1980s brought the PC and the '90s brought the Internet. ... The main obstacle is a lack of vision among industry leaders, customers, and the public as scars of the dot-com bust block creative thought." September 16, 2004. Got a 'bot? If not, maybe you ought. Opinion by Steve Brewer. Albuquerque Tribune Online. "Experts at a recent American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference in San Jose, Calif., say they've still got a few kinks to iron out, such as giving robots proper vision and a refined sense of touch. ... We aging baby boomers are expected to once again drive the market. As we get older, we'll need 'carebots' to give us medical attention and household 'bots to clean up our spills, or so the experts predict. ... Many of us already are dependent on machines. ... Do we really need walking, talking, artificially intelligent machines in our lives, simply to do little chores? Do we need more machines managing our lives? Isn't this situation fraught with peril?" September 16, 2004: They're Robots? Those Beasts! By Scott Kirsner. The New York Times (no fee reg. req'd.). "Dr. [Joseph] Ayers is one of a handful of robotics researchers who regard animals as their muses. Their field is often referred to as biomimetics, and the researchers who are developing robotic lobsters, flies, dogs, fish, snakes, geckos and cockroaches believe that machines inspired by biology will be able to operate in places where today's generation of robots can't go. 'Animals have adapted to any niche where we'd ever want to operate a robot,' Dr. Ayers said. His RoboLobster, for instance, is being designed to hunt for mines that float in shallow waters or are buried beneath beaches, a harsh environment where live lobsters have no trouble maintaining sure footing. Another researcher, Howie Choset of Carnegie Mellon University, has been testing sinuous segmented robots based on snakes and elephant trunks that may be the perfect machines to search for survivors inside the rubble of structures destroyed by explosions or natural disasters. ... Researchers working on the robotic menagerie aren't thinking only about military uses, although they try to paint dramatic wartime and homeland defense scenarios to attract funds. Robotic whales could one day swim alongside real whales, beaming back data and images to marine biologists studying migration patterns, or to students in a classroom." September 16, 2004: Software Tutors Offer Help and Customized Hints. By Katie Hafner. The New York Times (no fee reg. req'd.). "As she sat at a computer screen, she kept typing 2.8, an incorrect answer. Eventually a hint popped up: 'Think about the sign of your answer.' When Rochelle finally typed the correct sum, -1.8, the computer showed its appreciation by allowing her to move on to a new problem. She smiled at her small triumph. Since January, Middle School 301 in the Bronx, where Rochelle is an eighth grader, has been using a software program called Cognitive Tutor to help students learn math. The software, from Carnegie Learning, a six-year-old company that got its start at Carnegie Mellon University, is designed to give students individualized instruction when personal attention is scarce. Although such intelligent tutoring systems have their share of skeptics, students at schools that use them have not only improved their performance in math but now profess to enjoy a subject they once loathed. ... Broadly defined, an intelligent tutoring system is educational software containing an artificial intelligence component. The software tracks students' work, tailoring feedback and hints along the way. By collecting information on a particular student's performance, the software can make inferences about strengths and weaknesses, and can suggest additional work. When Rochelle, for instance, displayed a weakness when working with negative numbers, the program repeatedly asked her to solve similar problems. ... The artificial intelligence built into the Carnegie Learning program helps set it apart. Not only does the program present drills according to a student's weaknesses, but it watches the work step by step, detecting where the student stumbles, and chimes in when necessary." September 15, 2004: Romancing the phone. By Andrew Brown and others. CNN. "For men seeking true romance there is now a new mating game with an unusual twist -- it is virtual and mobile. A fantasy world in which lovesick men can wine and dine a virtual girlfriend on their 3G phones is about to be rolled out in Asia and Europe. ... Artificial Life, the Nasdaq-listed and Hong Kong-based software company, which created the new virtual girlfriend, has designed her with artificial intelligence. It expects thousands of men to sign up to the service in the coming months. ... These interactive, virtual agents are also known as bots. Technology and marketing firms are now using them to engage and interact with customers. They encompass functions such as purchasing, customer complaints or delivering product information. However, this latest development has some people worried about the psychological implications." September 15, 2004: Better health treatment, cheaper. By Andrew Mayeda. The Ottawa Citizen (subscription req'd.). "While Canada's political elite bickered about how much to spend on health care, a handful of researchers and entrepreneurs showcased technologies that could significantly lower the bill in the first place. To them, 'smart' means intelligent systems, or technologies such as robots and sensors that imitate the human ability to perceive, reason and act. Such technologies have the potential not only to reduce health care costs but also to improve patient care, says Anthony Eyton, president and chief executive of Precarn Inc. ... Take the intelligent eHealth Portal, one of the technologies demonstrated by Precarn. The portal allows doctors and nurses to combine information such as medical histories and treatment updates on a convenient Web-based platform." September 15, 2004: Puppets, popping up everywhere, manipulate the imagination and feed a primal fascination. By John Habich. Newsday.com. "Although puppets will probably never be as common as moonlighting TV and movie stars at New York playhouses, they have moved from the margins of avant-garde and ethnic theater into the mainstream. The eccentric geniuses who create and manipulate puppets credit their growing popularity to a paradox. On one hand (so to speak), puppets embody age-old curiosity about magic and the nature of being. 'It's not an innocence particular to children,' says the acclaimed puppet-artist Basil Twist, 'but a deep part of our souls that sees the life in lifeless things.' On the other hand, puppets feed the contemporary preoccupation with robots and artificial intelligence." September 15, 2004: New start-up breed: Born in USA, made in India. Reuters / available from The Indian Express & Express India. "Multinationals have trimmed the fat for years by shifting low-value work to India. Now, slim Silicon Valley start-ups are leading a new outsourcing wave, moving cutting-edge product development to Bangalore and beyond. The start-ups have their top managers and sales teams in the United States, but design products in India, where high-tech engineers earn a third of their US counterparts.... The revival is funded by venture capitalists, who want more bang for their bucks now that making money on start-ups has become tougher amid sluggish demand for initial public share offerings. India-born entrepreneurs and venture capital (VC) firms are backing a clutch of companies.... New middlemen have sprung up to help the young firms, such as Pari Natarajan, chief executive of Zinnov -- short for 'zeal with innovation' -- a consulting firm that specialises in offshore outsourcing by US start-ups. ... [H]e noted the economic pull was strong, given that it generally costs just $2 million to develop a modest software product in India, against $5 million in the United States. 'The VCs can put that kind of money in three firms and hedge their bets,' he said. Nonetheless, developed countries were likely to keep their edge in high-end areas such as artificial intelligence, he added." September 15, 2004: Artificial Intelligence lab works to hunt terrorists, cure cancer. By Joe Ferguson. Arizona Daily Wildcat. "The director of the UA's Artificial Intelligence Lab, Hsinchun Chen, said the goal of the AI Lab is to provide academics and professionals with a better way to get information in their high-tech worlds. ... COPLINK takes data from various law enforcement databases, based on existing criminal records, and allows law enforcement to coordinate their information using the software. 'It is like Google for cops,' said Chen. "'But it is much better.' ... Catherine Larson, associate director of the AI Lab, said the lab is also active in the war on terror by helping the Department of Homeland Security identify terrorists. By working closely with available data, the AI Lab identifies patterns with the data to discover the true identities of criminals using aliases, Larson said. ... hen said the AI Lab also works closely with the University Medical Center's Cancer Center in informatics, a field that analyzes exiting medical data to find patterns that could help researchers at the Cancer Center find new ways to treat cancer." September 14, 2004: Speech recognition 'on a chip' in three years. By Lucy Sherriff. The Register. "The US National Science Foundation has awarded a $1m grant to researchers in the US who want to put speech recognition on a chip, a move the project's proponents claim will revolutionise the way we communicate. Rob Rutenbar, Jatras professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, will lead the project. The research will be conducted in tandem with scientists from the University of California in Berkeley. Currently, speech recognition takes place at the software level, and its precision varies enormously, depending on what you want the system to do. Matching input to a specific set of expected words is relatively trivial, but capturing the full meaning of a conversation in a noisy room is much, much harder. ... To process arbitrary speech, you need a very powerful and power-hungry processor. ... " And this is where this research project comes in, because to really crack speech recognition, the researchers say, we have to go to dedicated silicon." September 14, 2004: Happy Landing for Pupils After Texas Space Treat. Aberdeen Press and Journal & this is north scotland. "A group of Scots pupils came back down to earth yesterday after the trip of a lifetime to a US space camp. The 25 sixth-year pupils arrived back on home soil having spent the last 10 days taking part in Scottish Space School 2004, during which they touched down at Nasa's Johnson Space Centre, in Houston, Texas. Last night, Stephen Kershaw, 17, of Bridge of Don Academy, said the trip - during which he met astronauts and worked alongside space scientists - had flown by so quickly he could hardly believe it was over. He was delighted his team won a medal for being the best overall in a series of challenges. Stephen is now determined to study a robotics and artificial intelligence at university." September 14, 2004: Coming to a Dashboard Near You. By Alex Salkever. BW Online. "More and more, though, auto makers are focusing on building control systems that don't require a driver to look away from the road to check the dashboard. These new systems will communicate with the driver either through sound or touch. Carmakers believe that this will alleviate existing visual overload and allow drivers to focus on the main task at hand. ... That's why most auto makers are busily enhancing the voice-recognition systems they're building into their luxury models. In early September, Honda announced that it would include new IBM-powered voice recognition in three 2005 models. ... Voice recognition will supposedly allow drivers to ask the car normal questions and give it commands in conversational sentences. ... Carmakers sold about 2 million voice-recognition systems in the U.S. in 2003, according to Telematics Research Group, an auto technology consulting firm. That number is expected to surpass 11 million by 2010 as the cost of voice recognition declines to a fraction of its current $500 to $1,000 per car." September 14, 2004: Massive Founder Receives World Technology Award Nomination - Developer of crowd animation technology recognized by industry peers. Press release available from Creative Mac. "Massive, developer of the premiere 3D animation system for crowd-related visual effects in cinema and television, announced that its founder and product manager Stephen Regelous has been nominated for a World Technology Network Award. Determined by a vote of industry peers, the prestigious accolades are presented by the World Technology Network (WTN) to recognize work that has a high level of innovation and lasting significance in fields including biotechnology, space, energy, ethics, design and entertainment. Winners will be named October 8th at the World Technology Awards in San Francisco. Regelous conceived and developed the artificial intelligence-driven software necessary for producing the epic-scale crowd and battle scenes in 'The Lord of the Rings' film trilogy." September 14, 2004: Will AI Reach the Mainstream? Artificial intelligence has so far carried high expectations and little reality, but research slowly carrying through to the business marketplace, says analyst firm. By Jim Ericson. Line56.com. "'Artificial Intelligence' is a term that has grown old enough to almost be quaint. The prospect of a manmade technology able to simulate human thinking is certainly exciting, but in the absence of products, Spielbergian visions of AI are taken by most as entertainment. There have been moments, like IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer knocking off grand master Garry Kasparov in a chess match, though many believe this was the result of a massive data load and not intellect. ... AI won't soon be a part of everyday life, but that hasn't stopped researchers from working on pattern recognition and its business applications. Computers and software can now perform tasks that were impossible five years ago, so it pays to keep an open mind, according to Amreetha Vijayakumar, Frost & Sullivan Technical Insights research analyst. 'AI is slowly starting to propagate in the normal business case, especially in applications risk assessment, CRM, data mining, these applications are starting to reach users.' ... In some cases she says, AI goes unnoticed because developers don't accept that AI is used in their products." September 14, 2004: Vietnamese students win first prize at Robocon 2004 in Seoul. Viet Nam News. "Viet Nam’s FXR boys won Saturday’s final round at the AsiaPacific Robot 2004 (Robocon), held in the Republic of Korea. ... This year’s competition used the tale The Reunion of the Shepherd and the Weaver as its theme. The story goes that the gods become upset with the laziness of a Shepherd and his Weaver wife and separate them. Annually, the gods take pity on the pair and erect a bridge so they may meet. Each round, teams drove their robots (shepherds) across an area (the bridge) carrying red boxes (gifts for the Weaver). The team that could carry the most items within an allotted amount of time would win the round." September 14, 2004: Show me the money - new grants to shout about in the field of science communication. By Linda Nordling. Guardian Education Weekly. "There is a lot of new funding up for grabs for the talkative researcher. Last week, the Office of Science and Technology announced it is offering up £1.2m for scientists eager to talk about their work. ... To get to the cash, you will have to show a genuine interest in what the public wants from science, and not just the other way around. The OST's Sciencewise scheme will focus on areas of science where there has been, or where there is expected to arise, friction between scientists and the public. Artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and the use of animals in research are some key issues. Climate change and security issues related to the internet are others." September 13, 2004: Let a Thousand Ideas Flower: China Is a New Hotbed of Research. By Chris Buckley. The New York Times (no fee reg. req'd.). "When Microsoft opened its Beijing lab in late 1998, it was among the first multinationals to establish a large research center in China. It hoped investing in research here would help pry open the door to two dazzling prizes: China's large reservoir of skilled but inexpensive scientists, and its consumers, still relatively poor but growing richer and eager for new technology. ... 'There are a lot of really good scientists and engineers coming from Chinese universities,' said Maximilian von Zedtwitz, who teaches management at Qinghua University here. 'Their first choice is to go abroad, but their second choice is to work in China for foreign companies.' ... It is no surprise that Microsoft Research Asia has such popular appeal. It is one of the few labs here spared the pressure of developing products for direct application; its researchers, like those in Microsoft's labs in Redmond, San Francisco and Cambridge in Britain, are given leeway to explore ideas with no immediate commercial payoff. But Microsoft researchers here also said they were conscious of their untested 'outsider' status, which makes them especially eager to find product applications for their theoretical findings. Among other things, researchers are working on computer graphics, speech recognition and text translation." September 13, 2004: Cybertron - The Bulgarian Sensation. By Tanya Gavrilova. Pari Daily (subscription req'd.). "are three 20-year-old boys. They dream of making a human-like robot and say the project design is ready. All they need is financing to complete the prototype. But they believe in success and say there is only one path ahead: to the future. ... The three are the only enthusiasts in Bulgaria developing an artificial intellect. Therefore they remain misunderstood. The more conservative people do not even believe us. ... The innovative approach used for creating Cybertron's intellect helps expand its functions. We simply reject the approaches used so far. We apply a new, revolutionary method, which is based not only on technology but also on human psychology and biology. All robots made so far have been programmed to react in a certain way to certain situations, they cannot think. We use the reverse approach: the robot will not be able to do anything in the beginning, it will develop and learn from experience. Like people do." September 13, 2004: Poly, varsities use software to spot copying from Net - Ngee Ann Poly tries out anti-plagiarism software that dons at 3 varsities are using to spot text students lift from websites. By Lynn Lee. The Straits Times Interactive. "Blithely, the group of undergraduates lifted a chunk of text from the website of a Singapore bank's branch in Thailand and passed it off as their own. ... But their misdeed was exposed swiftly by Turnitin, a software which matches student work against millions of documents on the Internet. ... In the future, artificial intelligence may be used to distinguish one student's essay from others. German academic Joachim Diederich, 46, in Singapore last week to talk about his research on new technologies to fight plagiarism, aims to produce such a software. Professor Diederich, who disclosed his research at the International Conference On Educational Technology, has been conducting his research on the topic since 1999." September 13, 2004: Artificial intelligence helps prevent highway disasters. By Scott Foster. Ottawa Business Journal. " The idea first came to Takashi Gomi after hearing about a fatal landslide in Japan in 1994. A dam had broken near the mountainous border of Niigata and Nagano prefectures, creating a landslide that swept away highway construction workers and their heavy equipment. Days later, 14 bodies were recovered from the rubble. Mr. Gomi, president of Ottawa's Applied AI Systems, Inc., realized intelligent technology could have helped prevent the disaster. ... With more than $2 million in R&D funding, Applied AI has been working with the Japanese government to develop a solution. ... In 1997, the firm proposed installing an 'AI filter' in each of the cameras, so images could be captured automatically and viewed in real-time by a field officer. For example, a falling rock could be a precursor to a larger disaster, says Mr. Gomi. ... Other projects include an intelligent wheelchair that can move autonomously. ... Another project is a robotic assistant for farmers who pick fruit. The machine would move autonomously while the farmer collects the produce, easing the burden of carrying heavy fruit baskets." September 13, 2004: Robots to the fore. By Kamal A. Othman. New Straits Times Computimes. "Over the years, interest in robot technology has grown with the robotic field being taught in schools and universities worldwide. The major focus of this robotic field has been the search for autonomous robots which can think and this drives much development in machine intelligence or artificial intelligence field. Robots entered the mainstream culture with the introduction of Sony’s Aibo in 1999. Since then several Japanese corporations have succeeded in developing humanoid robots. ... Robofest aims to create and stimulate Malaysian interest in robotic and artificial intelligence technology which is becoming even more crucial as the country pushes forward to become a developed nation. Already in its fourth series, the Robofest competition was organised by the Science, Technology and Innovation Ministry (Mosti). ... [Datuk Kong Chong Ha, the Ministry’s Deputy Minister] hopes the competition will become a platform that would spur creativity and innovation among students and the public in the field of robotic and artificial intelligence. ... Some 180 teams were assembled to compete in six categories, namely Survival Robot, RoboClimb, RoboGrab, RoboDance, Partner Robot, Robot Jr. Football League and Robot Drawing Contest." | |||