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Specialized Software, Open Source Projects & Hardware for AIAITopics > Resources | Robots > Specialized Software, Open Source Projects & Hardware for AI  Using Software: A Guide to the Ethical and Legal Use of Software for Members of the Academic Community from The Pennsylvania State University computer-related policies, guidelines, and laws. Computer Software and Intellectual Property Law from the Office of Laboratory Counsel, Patent Department, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "This web site was written specifically for any LBNL employee who writes computer programs at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It is intended to provide basic information on how the law of copyright applies to computer software. It is not intended to be a legal reference for copyright attorneys, but an accessible reference for the people whose creative efforts result in software others want to use." - from the Introduction.
Interactive Learning ToolsInteractive Learning Tools from the University of British Columbia designed to teach basic concepts in AI. Some Omnibus Collections AI Software Packages from the CMU Artificial Intelligence Repository. You'll find software for more than 30 topics here, with some examples being:
AI FAQs. Maintained by Ric Crabbe and Amit Dubey. Here's a sample of what you can find:
Online Code Repository. Part of the web site for Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Second Edition), by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig. "The goal is to have working code for all the algorithms in the book in a variety of languages. So far, we have Lisp and Python versions of most of the algorithms, and a smaller subset of algorithms in Java. There is also some old code in C++ and Prolog, but these are not being maintained. We also have a directory full of data files."  Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems software collection from the Open Channel Foundation includes:
Artificial Intelligence Software from The Staffordshire University. Covers lots of topics from A-Life to XpertRule. Artificial Intelligence programs from the Chicago Sun-Times. Algorithms and Data Structures which have Links to Implementations. "This is the web page of terms with definitions that have links to implementations with source code. The language is in parentheses. We also list all entries by type, for instance, whether it is an algorithm, a definition, a problem, or a data structure, and entries by area, for instance, graphs, trees, sorting, etc. Don't use this site to cheat. Teachers, contact me if I can help." This page is part of the Dictionary of Algorithms, Data Structures, and Problems, created by Paul E. Black at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. ISI Software from The University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (ISI) is where you'll find programs such as:
Linux Software from SAL (Scientific Applications on Linux) ."In this section, you will find some software that work on Linux in the field of AI. For example, you will find some programs of artificial life simulation, cellular automata, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, neural networks, pattern recognition, .... " Machine Learning and Inference Software from George Mason University's Machine Learning and Inference Laboratory include "programs for machine learning, data mining and knowledge discovery, machine inference, knowledge visualization and related tasks. Among its major programs are: ABACUS, AQ11, AQ15c, AQ16 (POSEIDON), AQ17-DCI, AQ18, AQ19, AQ21, CLUSTER, EMERALD-AQ, EMERALD-SUN, iAQ, INDUCE1..4, INLEN, VINLEN, KV1 and KV2, LEM1, LEM2, LEM3, RT, SPARC/E and SPARC/G. ... Some programs have already been arranged to be directly downloadable from this website." Software Archive at The Internet Archive. "The Software Archive is designed to preserve and provide access to all kinds of rare or difficult to find, legally downloadable software titles and background information on those titles." "[C]omplexity of programs or of their outputs is not a measure of their 'intelligence'. Given very complex tasks, complex algorithms may be a necessity, but they are clearly not a virtue. A critical lesson of artificial intelligence, and of computing in general, is that if a task domain has strong structure and if sufficient domain information can be obtained, either a priori or in the course of computation, then rather simple programs may suffice." - excerpt from Editorial: Scientific Discovery and Simplicity of Method, by Herbert A. Simon, Raul E. Valdes-Perez and Derek H. Sleeman. (1997). Artificial Intelligence, 91(2):177-181. Programs [a mere sampling of what's available on the Web] "The ADIOS (Automatic DIstillation of Structure) algorithm relies on a statistical method for pattern extraction (The MEX algorithm) and on structured generalization, two processes that have been implicated in language acquisition. It has been evaluated on artificial context-free grammars with thousands of rules, on natural languages as diverse as English and Chinese, on coding regions in DNA sequences, and on protein data correlating sequence with function. This is the first time an unsupervised algorithm is shown capable of learning complex syntax, generating grammatical novel sentences, scoring well in standard language proficiency tests, and proving useful in other fields that call for structure discovery from raw data, such as bioinformatics."Developed by Zach Solan, David Horn, Eytan Ruppin and Shimon Edelman, the software can be downloaded from the Algorithm page. AIED Software from the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education (IJAIED). "Agent Construction Tools. This page provides a survey of agent construction tools. The tools are categorized as either commercially available products or academic and research projects." From AgentBuilder. Agent Software and Educational Software from AgentLink, the European Network of Excellence for Agent Based Computing. Automated Reasoning Tools from CoLogNet, the Network of Excellence in Computational Logic. Bayesian Network Software Packages. Maintained by Kevin Murphy at U. C. Berkeley. Cascade Neural Network Simulator: "a public domain C program that gives the user a choice of four learning algorithms: Cascade-Correlation, Recurrent Cascade Correlation, Cascade 2, and Recurrent Cascade 2. This program was written by Matt White, based on Scott Fahlman’s original code in Common Lisp." Made available by Scott E. Fahlman,Research Professor of Computer Science,Carnegie Mellon University. CellTracker software for image browsing, processing and cell tracking. Hailin Shen of the Bioanalytical Sciences Group, University of Manchester, is the lead developer. CmapTools knowledge construction program from the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC). "The CmapTools program empowers users to construct, navigate, share and criticize knowledge models represented as concept maps. It allows users to, among many other features, construct their Cmaps in their personal computer, share them on servers (CmapServers) anywhere on the Internet, link their Cmaps to other Cmaps on servers, automatically create web pages of their concept maps on servers, edit their maps synchronously (at the same time) with other users on the Internet, and search the web for information relevant to a concept map. The CmapTools client is free for use by anybody, whether its use is commercial or non-commercial. In particular, schools and universities are encouraged to download it and install it in as many computers as desired, and students and teachers may make copies of it and install it at home." Computer Vision Source Code from Computer Vision, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University. "ConceptNet is a freely available commonsense knowledgebase and natural-language-processing toolkit which supports many practical textual-reasoning tasks over real-world documents right out-of-the-box (without additional statistical training)." From the development team of Hugo Liu, Push Singh and Ian Eslick at the MIT Media Laboratory. Emerald (SUN version) - An Integrated Large-Scale Learning and Discovery System for Education and Research in Machine Learning. From George Mason University's Machine Learning and Inference Laboratory's collection. [NOTE: "An earlier version of this system, called ILLIAN, was presented at eight major U.S. Museums of Science."] "Festival offers a general framework for building speech synthesis systems as well as including examples of various modules. As a whole it offers full text to speech through a number APIs: from shell level, though a Scheme command interpreter, as a C++ library, and an Emacs interface. Festival is multi-lingual (currently English, Welsh and Spanish) though English is the most advanced. The system is written in C++ and uses the Edinburgh Speech Tools Library for low level architecture and has a Scheme (SIOD) based command interpreter for control. Documentation is given in the FSF texinfo format which can generate, a printed manual, info files and HTML." "FreeTTS [text-to-speech] is a speech synthesis system written entirely in the Java™ programming language [and built by the Speech Integration Group of Sun Microsystems Laboratories]. It is based upon Flite: a small run-time speech synthesis engine developed at Carnegie Mellon University. Flite is derived from the Festival Speech Synthesis System from the University of Edinburgh and the FestVox project from Carnegie Mellon University." FRIL - the Fuzzy Relational Inference Language. From the Artificial Intelligence Group at the University of Bristol. "Fril is an uncertainty logic programming language which includes Prolog as a subset of the language, but which also allows probabilistic uncertainties and fuzzy sets to be included. This generalisation of logic programming provides a powerful and flexible environment for modelling and implementing Artificial Intelligence applications, and extends the semantics of Prolog by embodying open worlds and true logic negation." FuzzyCLIPS: "[A]n extension of the CLIPS (C Language Integrated Production System) expert system shell from NASA. It was developed by the Integrated Reasoning Group of the Institute for Information Technology of the National Research Council of Canada and has been widely distributed for a number of years. It enhances CLIPS by providing a fuzzy reasoning capability that is fully integrated with CLIPS facts and inference engine allowing one to represent and manipulate fuzzy facts and rules." Fuzzy Logic Control with the Intel 8XC196 Embedded Microcontroller. From Intel. "The Genetic Algorithms Archive is a repository for information related to research in genetic algorithms and other forms of evolutionary computation. Available from this site are past issues of the GA-List digest, source code for many GA implementations, and announcements about GA-related conferences. Also, links are given to many interesting sites around the World with material related to evolutionary computation. This archive is maintained by Alan C. Schultz at The Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence."  GAlib - A C++ Library of Genetic Algorithm Components. Massachusetts Institute of Technology & Matthew Wall. "GAlib contains a set of C++ genetic algorithm objects. The library includes tools for using genetic algorithms to do optimization in any C++ program using any representation and genetic operators. The documentation includes an extensive overview of how to implement a genetic algorithm as well as examples illustrating customizations to the GAlib classes." "Here's all the online game learning software I know of which isn't mentioned elsewhere on the web site. I've also included non-learning programs which may be useful starting points." From Jay Scott's Machine Learning in Games web site. GeNIe & SMILE. From the Decision Systems Laboratory, part of the Department of Information Science and Telecommunications and the Intelligent Systems Program, University of Pittsburgh. "GeNIe and SMILE implement a sensitivity analysis algorithm for Bayesian networks. Given a set of target variables, the algorithm determines the sensitivity of the marginal posterior probability distributions over the target variables to every parameter in the network. An interactive interface allows for an orderly examination of the entire network." "The Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK) is a portable toolkit for building and manipulating hidden Markov models. HTK is primarily used for speech recognition research although it has been used for numerous other applications including research into speech synthesis, character recognition and DNA sequencing. HTK is in use at hundreds of sites worldwide." Provided by the Cambridge University Engineering Department (CUED). "iAQ program demonstrates Natural Induction, that is, an ability of a computer program to learn knowledge from data in forms natural to people, and by that easy to understand and interpret." From George Mason University's Machine Learning and Inference Laboratory's collection. Image. Developed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). "Image can be used to measure area, mean, centroid, perimeter, etc. of user defined regions of interest. It also performs automated particle analysis and provides tools for measuring path lengths and angles." Incremental Decision Tree Induction. Developed by the UMass Machine Learning Laboratory. "ITI (Incremental Tree Inducer) is a program that constructs decision trees automatically from labeled examples. Although the program is called ITI, it includes both the ITI and DMTI (Direct Metric Tree Induction) algorithms. One runs the ITI program, but with certain command options invokes the DMTI algorithm within." "Jess [Java Expert System Shell] is a rule engine and scripting environment written entirely in Sun's JavaTM language by Ernest Friedman-Hill at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, CA. Jess was originally inspired by the CLIPS expert system shell, but has grown into a complete, distinct, dynamic environment of its own. Using Jess, you can build Java software that has the capacity to 'reason' using knowledge you supply in the form of declarative rules. Jess is small, light, and one of the fastest rule engines available." Linguistic Annotation: "This page describes tools and formats for creating and managing linguistic annotations. `Linguistic annotation' covers any descriptive or analytic notations applied to raw language data. The basic data may be in the form of time functions -- audio, video and/or physiological recordings -- or it may be textual. ... Related pages: Open Language Archives Community, Linguistic Exploration, Gesture Annotation, Italian version of this page by Piero Cosi, Speech Annotation and Corpus Tools." Maintained by Steven Bird, Mark Liberman, LDC [The Linguistic Data Consortium]. "The Link Grammar Parser is a syntactic parser of English, based on link grammar, an original theory of English syntax. Given a sentence, the system assigns to it a syntactic structure, which consists of a set of labeled links connecting pairs of words. The parser also produces a 'constituent' representation of a sentence (showing noun phrases, verb phrases, etc.)." From Davy Temperley, Daniel Sleator, and John Lafferty, School of Computer Science, at Carnegie Mellon University.  "MLC++ is a library of C++ classes for supervised machine learning. The MLC++ utilities were created using the library. MLC++ (up to version 1.3.X) was developed at Stanford University and was public domain; that version is still distributed as such by SGI. SGI MLC++ (V2.0 and higher) includes improvements to MLC++. These improvements are research domain only and are available in both source and object code formats through this web site." Multi-agent system software from the Teamcore Research Group, part of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. "The Natural Language Software Registry (NLSR) [fourth edition] is a concise summary of the capabilities and sources of a large amount of natural language processing (NLP) software available to the NLP community. It comprises academic, commercial and proprietary software with specifications and terms on which it can be acquired clearly indicated." From the Language Technology Lab of the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH). Neural Networks for Face Recognition. "This web page provides an implementation of the Backpropagation algorithm described in Chapter 4 of [Tom Mitchell's] textbook Machine Learning. It also includes the dataset discussed in Section 4.7 of the book, containing over 600 face images." Neuromorphic Vision C++ Toolkit from the iLab at the University of Southern California: "a comprehensive set of C++ classes for the development of neuromorphic models of vision. Neuromorphic models are computational neuroscience algorithms whose architecture and function is closely inspired from biological brains. The iLab Neuromorphic Vision C++ Toolkit comprises not only base classes for images, neurons, and brain areas, but also fully-developed models such as our model of bottom-up visual attention and of Bayesian surprise." The Open Agent Architecture™</sup>: A framework for integrating a community of heterogeneous software agents in a distributed environment. From SRI's AI Center. ORTS - a free software Real-Time-Strategy Game Engine. From the University of AlbertaDepartment of Computing Science.  Otter. "Our current automated deduction system Otter is designed to prove theorems stated in first-order logic with equality. Otter's inference rules are based on resolution and paramodulation, and it includes facilities for term rewriting, term orderings, Knuth-Bendix completion, weighting, and strategies for directing and restricting searches for proofs. Otter can also be used as a symbolic calculator and has an embedded equational programming system.the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory." Software and Hardware for Pattern Recognition and Image Processing Research. Maintained by Bob Duin at the Delft University of Technology. Scratch: "a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, games, music, and animations -- and share your creations on the Web. Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design. Scratch is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab, with financial support from the National Science Foundation and the Intel Foundation. The software is available free of charge from http://scratch.mit.edu." Shogi software from Shogi.Net "The SimAgent toolkit provides a range of resources for research and teaching related to the development of interacting agents in environments of various degrees and kinds of complexity. It can be run as a pure simulation tool, or installed in a robot with a sufficiently powerful on-board computer, e.g. running linux. It was originally developed to support research on intelligent agents, but has also been used successfully for student projects developing a variety of interactive games and simulations. The toolkit was developed within the Cognition and Affect project, at the University of Birmingham, partly in collaboration with users at DERA Malvern ... The toolkit uses the Pop-11 language in the Poplog software development environment ... now available, free of charge, with full sources...."
SLIPPER Rule Learning System. "Formally, it is based on confidence-rated boosting, a variant of AdaBoost developed by Rob Schapire and Yoram Singer in 1999. The code is based on William Cohen's widely-used RIPPER learning system. ... Like RIPPER, SLIPPER supports set-valued features, which makes it useful for text categorization using a 'bag of words' representation of text. ... A version of SLIPPER suitable for academic and research use can be downloaded from Rutgers University." See William Cohen's homepage at Carnegie Mellon University for additional software systems. Soar Software Downloads from the Soar Group at the University of Michigan, Speech at CMU contains Open Source Speech Software from Carnegie Mellon University as well as links to speech processing projects at CMU. "Swarm is a software package for multi-agent simulation of complex systems, originally developed at the Santa Fe Institute. Swarm is intended to be a useful tool for researchers in a variety of disciplines. The basic architecture of Swarm is the simulation of collections of concurrently interacting agents: with this architecture, we can implement a large variety of agent based models." TIELT - Testbed for Integrating and Evaluating Learning Techniques. "TIELT is a software tool that is designed to faciliate the evaluation of decision systems in simulators. Our initial focus is on decision systems that include machine learning components, and on simulators for several types of game engines (e.g., real-time strategy, discrete strategy, role playing, team sports, first-person shooter), with emphasis on those related to military simulators of Computer Generated Forces (CGF). However, TIELT can be used with decision systems other than those that have learning (or learned) components, and can be used with non-gaming simulators. ... TIELT's development is sponsored by DARPA's Information Processing Technology Office." - excerpt from "About" TeamBots 2.0 "TeamBots is a Java-based collection of application programs and Java packages for multiagent mobile robotics research. The TeamBots distribution is a full source-code release." VFML (Very Fast Machine Learning) toolkit for mining high-speed data streams and very large data sets.. From the University of Washington Artificial Intelligence Research Group. " VFML provides code to help read and process training data, to gather sufficient statistics from it, ADTs for several important machine learning structures, and various helper code. You can get an overview of what is provided by visiting the Core APIs and Utility APIs sections of the documentation. VFML contains a series of tools for working with data sets: cleaning them, sampling them, splitting them into train/test sets. It also has tools to help you experiment with learning algorithms." Open Source ProjectsAI Foundry -- an internet portal for open source projects. Maintained by Alex J. Champandard at the AI Depot. "The AI Foundry is a collection of Open Source projects relating to Artificial Intelligence. It is intended as a hub for the developer community, allowing them to inform themselves about projects and get involved. ... The foundry is not only here to promote individual projects, but also to provide a common initiative. We interact together via the following media: Message Board ... Mailing List." CougaarForge - "the Cognitive Agent Architecture (Cougaar) Open Source Project site. Cougaar is a Java-based architecture for the construction of large-scale distributed agent-based applications. It is the product of a multi-year DARPA research project into large scale agent systems and includes not only the core architecture but also a variety of demonstration, visualization and management components to simplify the development of complex, distributed applications." Alice and Panda3D. From CMU's Entertainment Technology Center. "Students everywhere want to build interactive, 3D virtual worlds, but most tools for doing so are too complex, and take too long to learn. As a public service, we distribute two open-source authoring tools, and we suspect that one of them is right for you, no matter who you are!" The European Robotics Research Network (EURON) collection of open source software. jMarkets, from the Caltech Social Science Experimental Laboratories, "is meant to provide the infrastructure for running large-scale experiments. It is built around a specific theoretical framework, namely, General Equilibrium Theory (GE). This is the branch of Economics that studies large, competitive, interdependent systems. jMarkets is an open-source, pure-Java and J2EE compliant project. The goal is to make the software fast, flexible, robust, easy to port, and suitable for use through the World-Wide-Web. These features make the software accessible across disciplines, usable in a variety of locations and populations, and a tool to which many research groups will have easy access and to which they will be able to contribute." JADE (Java Agent DEvelopment Framework), distributed in open source software by the copyright holder, Telecom Italia, "is a software Framework fully implemented in Java language. It simplifies the implementation of multi-agent systems through a middle-ware that complies with the FIPA specifications and through a set of graphical tools that supports the debugging and deployment phases." Microsoft Computational Biology Tools: "Computational biology tools from Microsoft Research's Machine Learning and Applied Statistics group: PhyloD (Phylogeny-Based Association Analysis), Epitope Prediction, HLA Assignment, HLA Completion." Available from CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting web site.
NASA Open Source Software:
ocropus - open source document analysis and OCR system. Available from Google Code."OCRopus is a state-of-the-art document analysis and OCR system, featuring pluggable layout analysis, pluggable character recognition, statistical natural language modeling, and multi-lingual capabilities." Open Channel Foundation collection of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems software includes:
OpenCyc: "The Project OpenCyc is the open source version of the Cyc technology, the world's largest and most complete general knowledge base and commonsense reasoning engine." OpenLogos Machine Translation. Available from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). "The LOGOS system had been developed over 30 years to its present form. It requires enormous efforts and resources to develop such a system and extend it, e.g. to new languages. This has the effect that translation systems for smaller languages are commercially less attractive and therefore often are neglected. The availability of the LOGOS system as open source can change this situation...." Open Source Computer Vision Library. Maintained by Intel.
Open Source Initiative (OSI): "a non-profit corporation dedicated to managing and promoting the Open Source Definition for the good of the community, specifically through the OSI Certified Open Source Software certification mark and program. You can read about successful software products that have these properties, and about our certification mark and program, which allow you to be confident that software really is "Open Source." We also make copies of approved open source licenses here." Open Source Rule Engines Written In Java. From Carlos E. Perez's Manageability site. RODS Open Source Project: "Real-time Outbreak and Disease Surveillance (RODS) is open-source public health surveillance software. RODS collects and analyzes disease surveillance data in real time and has been in development since 1999 by the RODS Laboratory--a collaboration of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. In 2002, the Utah Department of Health used the software for monitoring during the Winter Olympics Games." Second Life: a 3-D virtual world. Available from Linden Research, Inc.
"SourceForge.net is the world's largest Open Source software development website, with the largest repository of Open Source code and applications available on the Internet. SourceForge.net provides free services to Open Source developers." Here's a sample of what you'll find there:
The CMU Sphinx Group Open Source Speech Recognition Engines. "The Sphinx Group at Carnegie Mellon University is committed to releasing the long-time, DARPA-funded Sphinx projects widely, in order to stimulate the creation of speech-using tools and applications, and to advance the state of the art both directly in speech recognition, as well as in related areas including dialog systems and speech synthesis. ... The packages that the CMU Sphinx Group is releasing are a set of reasonably mature, world-class speech components that provide a basic level of technology to anyone interested in creating speech-using applications without the once-prohibitive initial investment cost in research and development; the same components are open to peer review by all researchers in the field, and are used for linguistic research as well." TeRK (Telepresence Robot Kit): Educational Robotics - Vehicles for Teaching and Learning from the Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. As stated in the overview: "Our aim with TeRK is to make educational robotics fun, affordable, and accessible to a diverse community of college students, pre-college students, and all individuals interested in robotics." Resources include Robot Recipes, Software, and Curricula for Instructors."
Tekkotsu Development Framework for AIBO Robots. "An open source project created and maintained at Carnegie Mellon University. ... Tekkotsu is an application framework for robotic platforms. An application framework is code which handles the low level or routine tasks for you, so that you can concentrate on whatever is unique to your application. If you are looking to program your Aibo to do new things, and are comfortable with C++, this may be for you." Vélaldin, created by Hrafn Thorri Thórisson at Reykjavík University's A.I. Lab, The Center for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents (CADIA): "is an open-source engine for developing structures with emergent properties. Based on the basic concept of cellular automata, Vélaldin offers a new approach to emergence research through an abstract representation of cells -- leaving it up to the developer to determine the features, rules and states of cells in whatever way is required." Related articles
Robots and More
Hardware(excluding Robot kits, etc.) Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust. By John Markoff. The New York Times (December 17, 2007). "To accelerate its parallel computing efforts, Microsoft has hired some of the best minds in the field and has set up teams to explore approaches to rewriting the company’s software. If it succeeds, the effort could begin to change consumer computing in roughly three years. The most aggressive of the Microsoft planners believe that the new software, designed to take advantage of microprocessors now being refined by companies like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, could bring as much as a hundredfold computing speed-up in solving some problems. Microsoft executives argue that such an advance would herald the advent of a class of consumer and office-oriented programs that could end the keyboard-and-mouse computing era by allowing even hand-held devices to see, listen, speak and make complex real-world decisions -- in the process, transforming computers from tools into companions. ... In the future, Mr. [Craig] Mundie said, parallel software will take on tasks that make the computer increasingly act as an intelligent personal assistant." Chemical computing- Silicon electronics has been the staple of the computing industry for more than half a century, but increasingly researchers are looking at other methods of computing to deliver increased computational power or allow specialist applications. BBC News (November 13, 2007). "Chemical computing is an unconventional approach to computation that uses a 'soup' where data is represented by different concentrations of chemicals. Chemical computers can exploit several different kinds of reaction to carry out the computation. ... Dr Andrew Adamatzky of the University of West England works on another type. 'I am dealing only with reaction-diffusion computing,' he explains. This type of computation exploits waves travelling through a beaker of chemicals to carry out useful calculations. ... Although slower than silicon, its key advantage is that it is cheap to produce and incredibly robust. Working with chemist Ben De Lacy Costello, Dr Adamatzky has already produced logic gates using the technique that can be used to make chemical 'circuitry'. 'Ultimately, we will produce a general purpose chemical chip,' he said. The chip would be capable of mathematical operations such as adding and multiplying numbers, he said. However, he believes he can take the research even further to create intelligent, amorphous robots." Vintage Computer Festival [video] - The rare, historic, and bizarre. Reported by Kara Tsuboi. CNET News.com (November 6, 2007). "Blow off the dust and get ready to dig through boxes. News.com’s Kara Tsuboi takes a tour of the biggest garage sale for antique computers, vintage video games, and discarded gadgets--the Vintage Computer Festival at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. And for the first time in decades, the 45-year-old LINC personal computer lights up." Intel Prototype May Herald a New Age of Processing. By John Markoff. The New York Times (February 12, 2007). "Intel will demonstrate on Monday an experimental computer chip with 80 separate processing engines, or cores, that company executives say provides a model for commercial chips that will be used widely in standard desktop, laptop and server computers within five years. ... In a white paper published last December, the [a group of Berkeley computer scientists] said that without a software breakthrough to take advantage of hundreds of cores, the industry, which is now pursuing a more incremental approach of increasing the number of cores on a computer chip, is likely to hit a wall of diminishing returns -- where adding more cores does not offer a significant increase in performance. During the briefing last week Mr. [Justin R.] Rattner essentially endorsed the Berkeley view, saying that the company believed that its Teraflop chip was the best way to solve a set of computing problems he described as 'recognition, mining and synthesis,' computing techniques that use artificial intelligence." High-speed speech calls for hardware. By David Templeton. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (September 20, 2006). "Imagine a computer understanding everything you say, regardless of how fast you speak or the words you use. And while you're talking to that computer, it's also turning your words immediately into type. Then imagine technology that can do this a thousand times faster than real time as a means of processing thousands of hours of recorded speech in a fraction of the time. These are the goals of Rob A. Rutenbar, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the national MARCO Focus Center for Circuit System Solutions. ... Rather than rely on software, he's creating better hardware. His goal is to create a specialized computer chip that understands speech and processes it more quickly than current software is capable of doing. ... 'I think it's phenomenal,' [Teresa Meng] said. 'He's put grammar and structure in the chip in a multistep recognition process to cast a fairly wealthy set of thinking into hardware.'" Bits & PiecesInvention kit takes tech design to kids - PicoCricket Kit lets tomorrow's young inventors fuse engineering with art, music and other creative fields. By Caroline McCarthy, CNET News.com (August 28, 2006). "Playful Invention Co., a child-oriented tech start-up, was warned that 'gender-neutral robotics set' was an oxymoron--but the company is hoping to challenge that notion with its new PicoCricket Kit. The PicoCricket Kit centers on a small device, appropriately called the PicoCricket. The tiny computer can be attached to all sorts of building blocks, sensors, motors and lights; connected via USB or serial cable to a Mac or PC; and programmed with a piece of software called PicoBlocks. Playful Invention Co. (Pico) is promoting the new toy as a way for children--the intended audience is 9 and older--to use technology to explore art, music and other creative fields. Kids can design light-up lamps, motorized toys, stuffed animals that make noise when patted, and other inventions. ... [A]s [Mitchel] Resnick insisted, the PicoCricket Kit isn't meant to be just a girl thing. Instead, it's designed for both girls and boys who could be interested in computers and electronics, but just don't know it yet." Gates puts on the charm in visit. By Dean Takahashi. The Mercury News (October 2, 2004). "Bill Gates came in peace to Silicon Valley on Friday, charming his audiences with stories that when he was a boy, he would dive into dumpsters to see if he could find a clean printout of the source code for the PDP-11 minicomputer made by Digital Equipment. With that code, he and his buddy Paul Allen could crash the system. Decades after his boyhood dumpster prank, Gates is on the other side, deciding how much of Microsoft's software source code others should have. ... Gates also told the Berkeley students that, in the next 10 or 20 years, the problems of computer science will be far more interesting than in the past. He expects software to understand speech and artificial intelligence to provide real fruits in the form of aids for people." Recycling law boosts hi-tech transfer. BBC (June 4, 2003). "Every year, 1.5 million old, but working, computers are buried in landfill sites. Now, an impending EU directive could mean these discarded machines, and many others, enjoy a more useful life. ... Computer Aid is shipping computers to projects in South Africa, Uganda, Kenya and Nigeria and many of the machines are going in to schools. Mr [Tony] Roberts estimated that 99% of schoolchildren in developing countries left school without touching or seeing a computer in the classroom." "The personal computer industry began less than three decades ago, but already some of the early software programs that defined the era are an endangered species, the potential victims of 'bit rot,' according to a prominent digital archivist. ... The Internet Archive is working with Stanford University librarians to try to preserve several large collections of early personal computer software, [Brewster Kahle] said. The software publisher Macromedia recently made available a collection of 10,000 CD-ROM's for preservation by the Stanford archivists. Special exemptions need to be made to the law, said Mr. Kahle, who asked copyright officials to seek changes in the 1998 law so that archivists can bypass software copy-protection controls for historical preservation purposes." Threat Is Seen to Heirloom Software. By John Markoff. The New York Times (May 19, 2003; no fee reg. req'd). "The explosion in storage capacity is adding urgency to the research. Currently, a terabyte of disk space costs about $1,600. In two to three years, it will only cost $400 and, consequently, become increasingly common. A terabyte...can hold one person's entire conversations from a lifetime, or all the video if someone kept a camera in his or her head for six months. More stored data and a vaster storage space makes finding something all the more difficult." - Microsoft Research seeks better search. By Michael Kanellos. CNET News (April 17, 2003). |
