MIT Videos

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Recovering MIT's AI Film History - Early Artificial Intelligence Research: Caught on Film. "Here you will find a chronology of some of AI's most influential projects and how they worked. It is intended for both non-scientists and those ready to continue experimentation and research tomorrow. Included is a taste of who the main players have been, concepts they and their projects have explored and how the goals of AI have evolved and changed over time. Many will be surprised that some of what we now consider standard tools like search engines, spell check and spam filters are all outcroppings of AI research."

• Film Index by Date

Video clips of Cog, Kismet, Coco, and others are available from the Humanoid Robotics Group at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

• Alex (Sandy) Pentland, director of the Human Dynamics Group at MIT, describes Reality Mining.
  "Alex (Sandy) Pentland, director of the Human Dynamics Group at MIT, describes a future in which cell phones log data about their owners' behavior. He reasons that this data can be used to strengthen social networks, generate recommendations, help track diseases, and monitor personal health." 2008?. (more)
• Beyond the hype of FlickTwitFaceSpace: Elizabeth Chuchill
  ...there is much we do not understand about how the Internet fits into everyday lives.... I will talk about the research issues and challenges we face in moving from awareness of others online (saying hi, 'friending', sending 'pings' and issuing 'pokes') to deep collaboration, co-planning and the co-production of shared experiences online. Finally, I will discuss how a scientifically grounded, mixed methods approach to human-centered evaluation, grounded ideation and socio-technical innovation both brings value to business and contributes to fundamental research. August, 2009. (more)
• Children using Computers to Learn.
  Seymor Papert trying to show how kids can use computers to learn. Various shots of fourth grade kids giving mathematical orders to a computer in order to control a HP display, or to create songs. 1968-1969? (more)
• Creativity: The Mind, Machines, and Mathematics: Public Debate.
  Rodney Brooks moderates this debate between Ray Kurzweil and David Gelernter. From MIT World. "About the lecture: :Two of the sharpest minds in the computing arena spar gamely, but neither scores a knockdown in one of the oldest debates around: whether machines may someday achieve consciousness. (NB: Viewers may wish to brush up on the work of computer pioneer Alan Turing and philosopher John Searle in preparation for this video.)". November 30, 2006. (more)
• Discussion of and Demonstrations of Learning Programs for Robots.
  The first half of the film is a lecture by Marvin Minsky describing the basic ideas of Patrick Winston's learning program, using examples and "near misses" to refine the program's model of what an "arch" is. The second half of the film is a narration by Dave Waltz describing other robotics research at MIT. He discusses Tim Finin's program that uses Winston-like models to recognize objects that match the model even when parts of the object are obscured. It uses hypotheses about dimensions of the objects that it can not directly observe. 1975??. (more)
• Eric Horvitz with Microsoft Research on “Surprise Modeling”.
  Eric Horvitz, head of the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group at Microsoft Research, talks about surprise modeling. 2008?. (more)
• Technology Review Documentary: Evolutionary Design.
  Computers can provide design variations that no human would have imagined. September 2006. (more)
• Technology Review Documentary: Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web.
  "The inventor of the World Wide Web explains how the Semantic Web works and how it will transform how we use and understand data." March, 2007. (more)
• Technology Review Letter from the Editor: On Science Fiction.
  How [science fiction] influences the imaginations of technologists. March 2007. (more)
• Video of First Computer with a CPU and ERNST ARM Robotic Arm.
  Film switches between clips of Ernst arm moving through picking up and stacking blocks and between shots of the TX-0 Computer. 1955?. (more)
• Video of the Winograd-Demonstration SHRDLU.
  Video showing the commands and queries given to Winograd's SHRDLU system, together with the view of the blocks in SHRDLU's blocks world. Includes examples of explanations given by the program about why & how the program manipulating the blocks performed some actions. (more)