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Good Starting PlacesIf Not Turing’s Test, Then What? By Paul R. Cohen. AI Magazine 26(4): Winter 2005, 61–67. "In answer to the question, 'if not the Turing Test, then what,' AI researchers haven’t been sitting around waiting for something better; they have been very inventive. There are challenge problems in planning, e-commerce, knowledge discovery from databases, robotics, game playing, and numerous competitions in aspects of natural language. Some are more successful or engaging than others, and I have discussed some attributes of problems that might explain these differences. My goal has been to identify attributes of good challenge problems so that we can have more." April 5, 2006: Like to Tinker? NASA's Looking for You. By Noah Shactman. The New York Times & nytimes.com. "[W]ith budgets tightening and the obstacles to human space exploration looking more daunting, NASA is enlisting the expertise of outsiders. For example, the agency is offering 13 contests, which it calls Centennial Challenges, that anyone can enter. The prizes range from $200,000 to more than $5 million, for building gear as diverse as solar sails, lunar excavators and the tiny elevators. But more important than the cash prizes, contestants and administrators say, is the opportunity to sidestep the traditional ways NASA has done business and bring some fresh faces to its ranks. ... Many of NASA's contests also center on robotics. The Telerobotic Construction Challenge, scheduled for August 2007, requires a team of machines to assemble items with minimal human supervision. ... In the Regolith Excavation Challenge, set for May 2007, an autonomous machine will have to dig through 24 square meters of simulated moon rock. ... Some contests will be held annually; others will be one-time events. NASA funds robotics research through conventional contracts too, and it uses Small Business Innovation Research grants to back companies outside the industry's mainstream. But the paperwork involved in the innovation research grants, called S.B.I.R.'s, can be intimidating. ... The competitions offer economic benefits to NASA as well. The contestants, not the space agency, pay for the development." March 2006: 2006 Grand Challenges Conference. "How computing will evolve over the next 15 years was the subject of discussions at the Grand Challenges Conference 2006 attended by leading members of the UK's academic community." Various reports are available from the BCS [British Computer Society] site. Specific Challenge ProblemsAugust 1996. Challenge Problems for Artificial Intelligence. By Bart Selman, ModeratorAT&T; Rodney A. Brooks, MIT; Thomas Dean, Brown University; Eric Horvitz, Microsoft Research; Tom M. Mitchell, CMU; Nils J. Nilsson, Stanford University. In Proceedings of theThirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1340 - 1345. Menlo Park, California: AAAI Press. Excerpt from Bart Selman's Introduction: "AI textbooks and papers often discuss the big questions, such as 'how to reason with uncertainty,' 'how to reason efficiently', or 'how to improve performance through learning.' It is more difficult, however, to find descriptions of concrete problems or challenges that are still ambitious and interesting, yet not so open-ended. The goal of this panel is to formulate a set of such challenge problems for the field. Each panelist was asked to formulate one or more challenges. The emphasis is on problems for which there is a good chance that they will be resolved within the next five to ten years." Most of these remain open problems over a decade later. Autonomous VehiclesAerial RoboticsSept. 28, 2011: International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC). The new 6th Mission is an extension of the 5th Mission theme of autonomous indoor flight behavior, however the 6th Mission demands more advanced behaviors than are currently possible in any existing aerial robot. The initial prize award is set at $10,000 and grows by an additional $10,000 for each year that the mission remains uncompleted. Interdisciplinary teams from around the world are encouraged to take on the IARC challenge and make application to the 6th Mission of the AUVSI International Aerial Robotics Competition as it enters its third decade as THE world's PREMIER aerial robotics challenge that time and again has advanced the state of the art in aerial robotic behavior. Gran Prix RacingMay 15, 2010: An X-Prize for Autonomous Gran Prix Racing has been announced by the X-Prize Foundation. "Currently, the foundation is offering up millions of dollars in prize money for the first teams to sequence 100 genomes in 10 days (the $10 million Archon X Prize); to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters and transmit video, data and images back to Earth (the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize); and to produce green, production-ready cars capable of exceeding 100 miles per gallon or its energy equivalent (the $10 million Progressive Automotive X Prize).In addition, it's planning on four other specific X Prizes: ...the Autonomous Automobile X Prize, which will go to a team that designs a car capable of beating a top-seeded driver in a Gran Prix race ... " Lego RobotsThe First Lego League (FLL) proposes annual challenge problems. "Every September, FLL releases a Challenge, which is based on a real-world scientific topic. Each Challenge has two parts: the Robot Game and the Project. Teams of up to ten children, with one adult coach, participate in the Challenge by programming an autonomous robot to score points on a themed playing field (Robot Game) and developing a solution to a problem they have identified (Project). Teams may then choose to attend an official tournament, hosted by one of our Operational Partners. Past Challenges have been based on topics such as nanotechnology, climate, quality of life for the handicapped population, and transportation. By designing our Challenges around such topics, participants are exposed to potential career paths within a chosen Challenge topic, in addition to solidifying the STEM principles that naturally come from participating in a robotics program. Team members also learn valuable life and employment skills which will benefit them no matter which career path they choose." Model CarsMarch 23, 2007: Autonomous driving systems aim to drive dirty.By Matthew Sparkes. NewScientist.com news service. "Autonomous model cars will race against one another in a contest designed to test different software approaches. The contest is being organised by researchers at the University of Essex in the UK, who are creating an affordable and standardised autonomous vehicle kit to encourage others to get involved. ... Simon Lucas of Essex University says the competition will be similar to the DARPA Grand Challenge (see Desert racers – drivers not included), which involves full-sized vehicles, but will be far less prohibitive. 'The challenges are the same for a full-size or model autonomous car, but you need pots of money,' Lucus told New Scientist. 'Our prototype hardware costs only £1000 ($2000).'" SallingSeptember 2010: The MicroTransat Challenge for Robotic Sailing. The Microtransat Challenge is a transatlantic race of fully autonomous sailing boats. The race aims to stimulate the development of autonomous sailing boats through friendly competition.
DARPA Urban ChallengeDecember 8, 2006: DARPA raises stakes for urban robot race. By Stefanie Olsen. CNET News.com. "DARPA has granted prize money of $3.5 million for its milestone urban robotics race next November, a far cry from its previously planned trophies. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has approved prize money for the first three finalists of its 2007 Urban Challenge after a confusing twist in the government agency's right to grant monetary awards, organizers said Friday. DARPA will now grant $2 million for first place, $1 million for second and $500,000 for third. ... Despite the prize money, the teams will undoubtedly have a hard time finishing the 2007 Urban Challenge, the first race of its kind."
October 18, 2007: Newsmaker - DARPA sees inspiration as trophy of robot race. By Stefanie Olsen. CNET News.com. "For Tony Tether, an upcoming race of robot cars isn't just about saving lives in the military. It's also designed to inspire a generation of technologists. As director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. government's military research and development arm, Tether pioneered a series of driverless challenges that have wowed the public and four-star generals alike. ... He was appointed director of DARPA in 2001. CNET News.com talked to Tether ahead of the Urban Challenge, the third in DARPA's series of robot races, which will award $2 million to the winner. The finals will take place November 3 in Victorville, Calif. Q: We're getting close to the Urban Challenge, and you've witnessed all of the others. So how do you suspect this one will vary from the others? ... What will be the hardest thing about the course, without giving anything away? ... So what do you think has been accomplished between the second and now? Tether: I think the thing that's really been accomplished is that these vehicles have learned to recognize not only fixed obstacles, but obstacles that are moving. ... Can you tell us how this challenge came about? [Tether:] The autonomous vehicle really came about for two reasons. One was that it's a serious mission for the military and that if we can reduce the number of people who are driving convoys in a place like Iraq or Afghanistan, we would definitely reduce the infrastructure to take care of those people. The second reason is that we are worried here at DARPA about the food stock: that the kids today in the United States don't seem to be going into engineering and science like they used to. ... " May 2, 2006: Another Robot Vehicle Contest Is Planned. The New York Times. "The Pentagon said Monday that a third Grand Challenge competition would be held to foster research and development into advanced robot vehicles. In contrast to the previous contest, which took place in the desert on the border between California and Nevada, the new competition will be carried out in a mock urban area. Robots will be required to obey traffic laws while merging into traffic, as well as negotiating traffic circles, busy intersections and obstacles. The event is scheduled for Nov. 3, 2007."
October 18, 2005: Eyes on the Prize. By Dylan Tweney. TechnologyReview.com. " When Stanford University's robotic Volkswagen Touareg, 'Stanley,' won the Grand Challenge last week, robot enthusiasts everywhere cheered. By completing a 210-kilometer course over difficult desert terrain in just under seven hours, Stanley set an unprecedented milestone for autonomous vehicles. Even more amazingly, four other teams' vehicles also completed the course, with slightly slower times. 'It's kind of like if you had challenged people to fly across the Atlantic, and instead of one guy [making it], just Lindbergh, you had five guys flying across at the same time,' says Sebastian Thrun, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford and the leader of the Stanford team. ... The Grand Challenge is just the latest example of how prize money can be an effective -- and extremely efficient -- way to stimulate rapid technological development. ... That's exactly how this year's Grand Challenge played out, with 195 teams entering the competition, five teams successfully completing the course -- and a whole new crop of inventors, engineers, computer scientists, entrepreneurs, and even high-school students stimulated to enter the field of autonomous vehicles. ... 'The prize approach is particularly useful in energizing a community and giving people an incentive to become involved in researching a technology area of interest to DOD,' says Jan Walker, a spokesman for DARPA. In fact, DARPA officials are so pleased with the results, says Walker, that they plan to sponsor another Grand Challenge in the future, in a yet-to-be-named field." October 9, 2005: In a Grueling Desert Race, a Winner, but Not a Driver. By John Markoff. The New York Times (registration req'd.). "The Stanford scientists who led the 18-month effort to build Stanley said they saw their victory as a significant leap forward in the field of artificial intelligence, a discipline that has long suffered from big promises that did not pan out. 'This is for people who say, "Cars can't drive themselves,"' said Sebastian Thrun, the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-leader of the Stanford team. 'These are the same people who said the Wright brothers wouldn't fly.' ... 'The Grand Challenge has been conquered,' Dr. [Anthony J.] Tether said. ... Mr. Thrun, of the Stanford team, said advances in the field of self-driving vehicles would start to come more quickly. 'Extrapolate two, three or four years out, and then let your imagination play,' he said." European Land-Robot TrialApril 14, 2006: Europe's Robotic Challenge - Next month, Germany will host Europe's version of DARPA's Grand Challenge -- but don't expect desert-busting autonomous SUVs. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. Technology Review. "Roboticists from 47 teams are preparing to take part in Europe's answer to the U.S. Department of Defense's Grand Challenge (last year's robotic car race aimed at encouraging research into autonomous cars). This first European Land-Robot Trial, to take place in Germany on May 15, will pit against each other teams from nine countries, representing both academia and industry. Unlike the U.S. Grand Challenge, organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is a single 132-mile race in the desert, the European version will consist of three different events, putting robots to the test in urban, non-urban, and landmine detection and removal scenarios. Despite the obvious comparisons with the Grand Challenge, the European organizers stress that their event is not so much a competition as an evaluation of existing technology." Chess (competition ended)Deep Blue Wins. Hosted by IBM. This site is a treasure chest of information and includes commentaries, guest essays, even video clips of the famous rematch won by Deep Blue on May 11th, 1997. Modern Masters of an Ancient Game. By Carol McKenna Hamilton and Sara Hedberg. (1997). AI Magazine 18(4): Winter 1997, 11-12. Describes awarding of the $100,000 Fredkin Prize to the team responsible for Deep Blue, the computer which beat world chess champion Gary Kasparov in the final game of a six-game match on May 11, 1997. Data MiningAugust 20 - 23, 2006: Is There a Grand Challenge or X-Prize for Data Mining? KDD 2006 panel with Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, Robert Grossman, Chabane Djeraba, Ronen Feldman, Lise Getoor, and Mohammed Zaki. "Summary: This panel will discuss possible exciting and motivating Grand Challenge problems for Data Mining, focusing on bioinformatics, multimedia mining, link mining, text mining, and web mining."
Education(June 23-26, 2002) Provide a Teacher for Every Learner. "Tutoring each individual in a tailored, learner-centered format will enable people to more fully realize their potential." One of five grand challenges from the the downloadable PDF report CRA Conference on "Grand Research Challenges" in Computer Science and Engineering. (Conference held on June 23-26, 2002 at Warrenton, Virginia.) Face RecognitionMay 30, 2007: Better Face Recognition Software - Computers outperform humans at recognizing faces in recent tests. By Mark Williams. Technology Review. "For scientists and engineers involved with face-recognition technology, the recently released results of the Face Recognition Grand Challenge--more fully, the Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) 2006 and the Iris Challenge Evaluation (ICE) 2006--have been a quiet triumph. Sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the match up of face-recognition algorithms showed that machine recognition of human individuals has improved tenfold since 2002 and a hundredfold since 1995."
April 3, 2007: That face! Those eyes! How recognizable? Technology for computerized facial recognition is improving, according to a recent NIST report. By Wilson P. Dizard III. GCN. "Technology for computerized facial recognition is ten times more accurate now than it was four years ago, and the best of the systems outperform humans, the National Institute of Standards said. The federal government has pressed the private sector to improve facial and iris recognition technology dramatically so as to pave the way for improved biometric systems.... The dramatic performance improvement was one of the goals of the government’s Face Recognition Grand Challenge. 'In an experiment comparing human and algorithm [system] performance, the best-performing face recognition algorithms were more accurate than humans,' NIST reported."
Games(Also see Chess.) July - August 2006: Computers Play Chess; Humans Play Go. James Hendler's Letter from the Editor. IEEE Intelligent Systems 21(4): July/August 2006, 2-3. "The future of AI must involve exploring and understanding the parts of human intelligence we haven’t been looking at that much -- the stuff at the heart of human thought. To do this, we need to stop looking for new ways to solve well-defined problems and start looking for ways to combine the things we know how to do, and then see if this helps us explore problems with more diversity and scope. In fact, I’m encouraged to see a few developments that are taking us in the right direction. Ron Brachman, in his AAAI 2005 presidential address and in his role as a DARPAoffice director (see 'Systems That Know What They’re Doing,' Nov./Dec. 2002,pp. 67–71), advocated large AI projects that would force people from different parts of AI to work together to achieve, in consortium, what no approach could achieve alone." IBM's Watson system beat two former Jeopardy! game show champions on television February 14-16, 2011. (Competition is over). Language Learning & UnderstandingJune, 2010: Smarter Than You Think: What Is I.B.M.’s Watson?. By CLIVE THOMPSON, NY Times, June 14, 2010. "For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled “Jeopardy!” because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide. " The Loebner Prize for natural dialogue. "The Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence ( AI ) is the first formal instantiation of a Turing Test. ... In 1990 Hugh Loebner agreed with The Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies to underwrite a contest designed to implement the Turing Test. Dr. Loebner pledged a Grand Prize of $100,000 and a Gold Medal (pictured above) for the first computer whose responses were indistinguishable from a human's. Such a computer can be said "to think." Each year an annual prize of $2000 and a bronze medal is awarded to the most human-like computer. The winner of the annual contest is the best entry relative to other entries that year, irrespective of how good it is in an absolute sense." Spring 2004: Language Learning - An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Papers from 2004 AAAI Spring Symposium. "Language learning is a grand challenge problem for Artificial Intelligence because it encompasses concept development and perceptual development, social learning and imitation, as well as learning the lexicon, the grammar, and other aspects of language; because it drives new technologies that apply widely to other kinds of sequential data; and because most of the world's knowledge is represented linguistically, so machines are limited by their inability to understand language.The symposium brought together representatives of several communities — the corpus-based and grounded language learning communities, and the developmental psycholinguistics and language education communities — to assess progress in machine language learning and how what we know about human linguistic development might speed that progress." January 2003: Some challenges and grand challenges for computational intelligence. By Edward A. Feigenbaum. Journal of the ACM (JACM), Volume 50 , Issue 1, Pages: 32 - 40 (January 2003). Available from ACM and KurzweilAI.net. "The Turing Test is a very ambitious Grand Challenge. The 'Feigenbaum Test' is more manageable: focus on natural science, engineering, or medicine with conversation in the jargonized and stylized language of these disciplines." Lunar RobotsSeptember 13, 2007: Google puts $30 million behind lunar robot. By Stefanie Olsen. CNET News.com. "Google on Thursday announced it has sponsored the Google Lunar X Prize, a robotic race to the moon with a purse of $30 million. The contest invites private teams from around the world to build a robotic rover capable of roaming the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and then sending video, images and data back to Earth, among other feats. The idea behind the challenge is to urge private industry to develop new robotic and virtual-presence technology to reduce the cost of space exploration. ... The contest comes at a time when NASA is working on new spacecraft and technology to take man back to the moon within the next 12 years. At a recent artificial-intelligence conference, Peter Norvig, the former head of computation at NASA's Ames facility who is now Google's director of research, suggested that the space agency is taking the more expensive approach in trying to send astronauts to the moon and that it should focus on robotics."
September 20, 2005: NASA Announces Prize for Digging Moon Dirt. SPACE.com. "NASA announced Tuesday a $250,000 prize for the team that can win a lunar dirt-digging contest that will take place here on Earth. The competition will pit robots to see which can excavate the most lunar regolith (a fancy word for soil) and deliver it to a collector. The challenge will be held in late 2006 or early 2007. ... 'This challenge continues NASA's efforts to broaden interest in innovative concepts,' said Brant Sponberg, NASA's Centennial Challenges program manager." Medical DiagnosisMay 15, 2010: An X-Prize for Medical Diagnosis has been announced by the X-Prize Foundation. "Currently, the foundation is offering up millions of dollars in prize money for the first teams to sequence 100 genomes in 10 days (the $10 million Archon X Prize); to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters and transmit video, data and images back to Earth (the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize); and to produce green, production-ready cars capable of exceeding 100 miles per gallon or its energy equivalent (the $10 million Progressive Automotive X Prize). In addition, it's planning on four other specific X Prizes: the AI Physician X Prize, which will be won by the first team to build an artificial intelligence system that can offer a medical diagnosis as good as or better than a diagnosis from a group of 10 board-certified doctors .... " Rescue OperationsSpring 2001: RoboCup Rescue: A Grand Challenge for Multiagent and Intelligent Systems. By Hiroaki Kitano and Satoshi Tadokoro. AI Magazine 22(1): Spring 2001, 39-52. "Disaster rescue is one of the most serious social issues that involves very large numbers of heterogeneous agents in the hostile environment. The intention of the RoboCup Rescue project is to promote research and development in this socially significant domain at various levels, involving multiagent teamwork coordination, physical agents for search and rescue, information infrastructures, personal digital assistants, a standard simulator and decision-support systems, evaluation benchmarks for rescue strategies, and robotic systems that are all integrated into a comprehensive system in the future. ... In this article, we present a detailed analysis of the task domain and elucidate characteristics necessary for multiagent and intelligent systems for this domain. Then, we present an overview of the RoboCup Rescue project." For more, see Robocup-Rescue site. Semantic WebSummer 2011: “Ontologies and Semantic Web technology come of age, how is the Semantic Web changing our experience of the Web?” Moving beyond theoretical frameworks and heading towards a significant impact in end user experience is at the core of OCAS. The overall objective of the challenge is to illustrate how ontologies and SW technologies are delivering novel user experiences. Shredder ChallengeDecember 2011: The DARPA's Shredder Challenge called upon computer scientists, puzzle enthusiasts and anyone else who likes solving complex problems to compete for up to $50,000 by piecing together a series of shredded documents. The goal was to identify and assess potential capabilities that could be used by our warfighters operating in war zones, but might also create vulnerabilities to sensitive information that is protected through our own shredding practices throughout the U.S. national security community. ... The Challenge began on October 27, 2011 and concluded on December 2, 2011 after all five puzzles were successfully solved by "All Your Shreds Are Belong To U.S." Description of the problems and the solution on the DARPA Shredder Challenge page. Announcement at DARPA Shredder Challenge (29 October 2011) i-Programmer, by Alex Arrmstrong "DARPA has just released five puzzles in a contest that involves extracting information from shredded documents. This type of pattern recognition problem is hard to solve - which is why there's up to $50,000 at stake. ...The Shredder Challenge is composed of five separate problems in which the number of documents, subject matter and the method of shredding is varied to present challenges of increasing difficulty. To complete each problem, participants are called upon to provide answers to puzzles embedded in the content of reconstructed documents." See DARPA site for more information. Soccer
May 6, 2010: The RoboCup Federation, a nonprofit organization based in Japan, aims to develop autonomous humanoid robots that are advanced enough to pit themselves against human World Cup champions by 2050. ... Tan Hang Cheong, co-chair of the steering committee for RoboCup 2010, and principal of Singapore Polytechnic, added that "a couple of millions" have been invested to put together this competition. The organizers expect about 4,000 people and more than 500 teams from more than 40 countries to participate in the event happening in Southeast Asia for the first time." November 23, 2006: The quest for AI opens path to new age. By Sandra Rossi. Techworld.nl. "Will robots and computers one day ask the question, Am I a real boy? That was the question posed by artificial intelligence (AI) researcher Professor May-Anne Williams on Wednesday in a presentation at the University of Technology in Sydney. Professor Williams said the quest for AI is revealing much about how the human mind works and is opening the path to a new technological age. ... Professor Williams, who is team leader of the champion UTS robot soccer team UTS Unleashed!, said the Robot Soccer World Cup (RoboCup) competition could be the catalyst for the all-important AI breakthroughs, since it focuses international research effort in a potentially lucrative strategic direction. The game of soccer encompasses both the physical and mental skills that scientists must reproduce to create autonomous robots." Theory of CognitionGC5: The architecture of brain and mind from the British Computer Society. "This challenge is concerned with the attempt to understand and model natural intelligence at various levels of abstraction, demonstrating results of our improved understanding in a succession of working robots." For additional challenges in Computer Science see Current Grand Challenges in Computing - Research from the British Computer Society. June 14, 2004: Computing needs a Grand Challenge. By Lucy Sherriff. The Register. "Sir Tony Hoare - British computing pioneer and senior scientist at Microsoft Research - believes the computer industry needs a 'grand challenge' to inspire it. In the same way that the lunar challenge in the 1960s sparked a decade of collaborative innovation and development in engineering and space technology, or the human genome project united biologists around the globe, so too must computer scientists pull together on such a scale to take their industry to its next major milestone. ... One of the grand challenges, then, is to re-write the basic foundations of the science, to find a theory of computation that is 'more realistic than the Turing model, and can take into account the discoveries of biology, and the promise of the quantum computer'.... 'An ultimate joint challenge for the biological and the computational sciences is the understanding of the mechanisms of the human brain, and its relationship with the human mind,' he says. '... This challenge is one that has inspired Computer Science since its very origins, when Alan Turing himself first proposed the Turing Test as a still unmet challenge for artificial intelligence.'" The UKCRC (UK Computing Research Committee) sponsors the ACM-BCS Visions of Computer Science 2010 Conference (April, 2010). : "We want the whole community to be involved in this debate so please encourage all your colleagues and research students to consider using the discussion forum and attend the meeting. The new challenges will drive the discipline forward this year as well as reviewing the progress of existing grand challenges. Also for the first time we are including discussion of the role computing research plays in the major societal grand challenges.." July 1, 2005: 125 Big Questions. Science (Vol 309, Issue 5731, 79). "In a special collection of articles published beginning 1 July 2005, Science Magazine and its online companion sites celebrate the journal's 125th anniversary with a look forward -- at the most compelling puzzles and questions facing scientists today. A special, free news feature in Science explores 125 big questions that face scientific inquiry over the next quarter-century; accompanying the feature are several online extras including a reader's forum on the big questions." Start with the editorial, 125, by Donald Kennedy, Editor-in-Chief, and then explore questions such as:
December 2004: Grand Challenge 5: Architecture of Brain and Mind. Audio of Aaron Sloman interviewed by Anders Nissen for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. "Question 1.Why formulate a grand challenge? What is the mission behind the grand challenges? ..." Urban WarfareJuly 31, 2007: Robots battle for military prize. By Jonathan Fildes. BBC News. "For two weeks during the summer of 2008, an army of autonomous robots will march across the Wiltshire countryside. The machines will compete in the UK Ministry of Defence Grand Challenge, a competition to find new technology to support ground troops in urban areas. Fourteen teams have now been picked as finalists to go head to head in a range of trials next year. Winning designs include a swarm of miniature helicopters and a host of sensor-laden unmanned aerial vehicles. ... The competition, carried out in August 2008, will focus on the urban environment and will be carried out at Copehill Down, an army training centre on Salisbury Plain."
OtherJune 23-26, 2002: CRA Grand Research Challenges in Information Systems Final Report. "The purpose of the conference was to provoke "out-of-the-box" thinking. Because the scope of computer science and engineering is broad, the organizing committee selected systems as an overall theme for the focus of the first conference. The conference was a prototype for a series of conferences on grand research challenges." The organizing committee solicited one- page position papers, each expressing one or more challenging problems. The committee then invited about 70 participants. A Different Kind of Challenge -- Perhaps the Greatest Grand Challenge: Improving the Image of Computing. From the Computing Research Association (CRA): "Talented young people are turned off by computing’s image. Between 2000 and 2005, interest in computer science as a major among incoming freshmen fell 70 percent as “image” quickly became a primary concern across academic institutions, corporations, computing associations, and government agencies." Also see the CRA story (May, 2005) Computing, We Have a Problem… about the fact that "the public does not fully understand, and hence does not appreciate, what computing is and why computing and computing research are important. " September 20, 2009: The International Competition on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling is a bi-annual event promoting the development and importance of the use of knowledge engineering methods and techniques within P & S. Two winning programs of the 2009 competition were itSimple 3.0 and Jabbah. January 12, 2006: 'Grand challenges' spur grand results - Private groups are offering big cash prizes to anyone who can solve a range of daunting problems. By Gregory M. Lamb. The Christian Science Monitor & csmonitor.com. "In October 2004 SpaceShipOne roared into space (twice) - the first privately funded spacecraft ever to reach suborbit, nearly 70 miles above Earth. A year later, 'Stanley,' a Volkswagen Touareg modified by Stanford University students, rumbled across some 130 miles of desert without a human driver, navigating the rough terrain guided by computer programs and sensors. ... Using 'grand challenges' to stimulate scientific progress isn't new. In 1714 the British government offered the equivalent of about $12 million to answer a vexing question: How could His Majesty's ships calculate their longitude - how far they were east or west of home - to avoid shipwrecks and other disasters? ... The cluster of challenges may be the result of both bad and good news facing science today, says Gilbert Omenn, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, D.C. ... 'Prizes change the public perception about an issue,' says Peter Diamandis, founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation in Santa Monica, Calif. ... [A] successful grand challenge involves more than money, Omenn says. It needs to be clearly stated, socially worthy, and difficult but not impossible to achieve." February 22, 2005: Grand ambitions. By Beverley Head. The Sydney Morning Herald. "Hugh Durrant-Whyte is building a world where one day he will control the Hunter Valley's mines and robotic expeditionary forces in remote areas from the PC in his Sydney office. Professor Durrant-Whyte and his team at the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems are tackling a 'Grand Challenge' of IT research - the fusion of machines, computing, sensing and software to create intelligent systems that interact with the complex real world. ... The future promised from his grand challenge research into intelligent autonomous systems is one where data is collected from anywhere at any time and relayed wirelessly to massive high-performance computing networks. The data will be intensively analysed and turned into knowledge used to better direct autonomous systems or humans. ... Monash University, which boasts Australia's largest IT faculty, recently held a workshop organised by Professor David Green to identify the grand challenges facing the nation. Distributed computing and information ... Computing that mimics nature [these are just 2 of the 6 grand challenges listed]... Next Speak - Grand Challenge: Complex science and engineering problems with broad societal impacts whose solutions are advanced only through the use of high-performance computing." September 27, 2004: The Grand Challenges of IT - Researchers are inventing new ways to tackle old problems. Emerging Technology by Thomas Hoffman. Computerworld. "Fundamental research on how to make computer hardware more powerful and software smarter goes back 50 years or more, but many of the traditional methods have nearly reached their limits. Now, researchers moving in bold new directions may be setting the course of IT for decades to come. There are literally dozens of grand challenges that scientists and economists are attacking, ranging from societal issues to technical advances. Here, we take a look at the challenges in three key areas of IT research: processor performance, chip miniaturization and artificial intelligence. ... AI, very broadly defined, comprises three primary disciplines: natural-language processing, machine-based learning and robotics. Recent advances in these areas have led to commercial technologies ranging from a robotic vacuum cleaner called Roomba, made by Burlington, Mass.-based iRobot Corp., to customer-service-oriented speech recognition systems from vendors such as Peabody, Mass.-based ScanSoft Inc. But despite these inroads, computer systems continue to have a tough time handling reasoning. 'The biggest challenges are figuring out how to organize computer programs to have more common sense,' says Tom Mitchell, the Fredkin professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. ... The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is funding research to develop a computer-based 'executive assistant' that could handle administrative tasks like prioritizing e-mail requests for a military commander or a business executive. ... Using a grading scale of A to F, 'we would be thrilled if these systems could give us C-level performance over the next three to four years,' says Ron Brachman, director of the information processing technology office at DARPA. Computers also have trouble understanding context like humans do.... Systems that can handle more complicated human-to-computer interactions, like processing a request for movie tickets at a particular theatre via speech recognition, should be in use within five to 10 years, says Victor Zue, co-director of the MIT computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory." July 27, 2004: What Are the Grand Questions of Science? This video program is part of the USC Presents...Closer To Truth series available from the ResearchChannel ("a non-profit organization founded in 1996 by a consortium of leading research universities, institutions and corporate research centers dedicated to creating a widely accessible voice for research through video and Internet channels"). Program abstract: "Science seems on the brink of several mega-revolutions, including biotechnology and genetic engineering, broadband communications and artificial intelligence, a search for a 'Theory of Everything,' cosmology of the early universe, and nanotechnology, the building of extremely small machines. The panelists enumerate and evaluate the 'Big Questions' and rank them in order of importance." Related AITopics Pages |
