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Turing Test opera to embark on UK tour
Account members can also comment on articles and access best practices guides.An opera hinging on Alan Turing's quest for artificial intelligence will begin touring in October The Turing Test, developed by mathematician and legendary wartime codebreaker Alan Turing to test a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour, is the subject of an opera by Scottish composer Julian Wagstaff, which will embark on a UK tour in October 2012. The Turing Test is set in the near future and tells the fictional story of a brilliant young PhD student named Stephanie, who is trapped in a bitter battle between two rival scientists racing to build the world's first truly intelligent computer. Turing suggested that if you are having an online chat via two separate computer terminals, one of which is linked to a human correspondent and the other to a computerised chat program, and if you cannot tell the difference between the computer and the human after chatting for an extended period of time, then the computer has passed the test and can legitimately be said to be intelligent. (more)

Nevada DMV Approves Regulations for Testing Driverless Vehicles
Nevadas Legislative Commission of the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) approved regulations allowing the testing of driverless a.k.a. Nevada DMV Director Bruce Breslow said the state is the first in the U.S. to adopt this type of regulation requirements, and that an application package for companies that want to apply to test their autonomous vehicles in Nevada will be available on March 1. The law was passed in July 2011 and defines autonomous vehicles as a motor vehicle that uses artificial intelligence, sensors and global positioning system coordinates to drive itself without the active intervention of a human operator. Breslow said the state is currently developing licensing procedures for companies that want to test their autonomous vehicle technology, and is requiring certification before an autonomous vehicle can be registered in the state. (more)

Why we'll accept computers as human
Austin, Texas (CNN)-- Any author or filmmaker seeking ideas for a sci-fi yarn about the implications of artificial intelligence -- good or bad -- would be smart to talk to Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil, the acclaimed inventor and futurist, believes that humans and technology are blurring -- note the smartphone appendages in almost everyone's hand -- and will eventually merge. Asked by interviewer Lev Grossman whether artificial intelligence will lead to malevolent machines that will come to dominate humans, he said he was more concerned about what humans will do to themselves. us. (more)

'Artificial Intelligence systems will sooner or later beat any human expert ...
systems permanently replace the current rule-based systems, says Gerd. systems will play a bigger role in the years to come, he believes people will probably continue to trade manually, because they are interested in markets and they want to apply their own intelligence and knowledge. High Frequency and its impact on volatility, the effectiveness of automated systems in case of crisis situations and in the new economic environment or the interpretation of psychological factors by computers are other topics that Gerd covers with us in the last interview of our Visionaries series. For that time and in terms of computing power, these systems were superior to conventional microprocessors that existed up to that point. (more)

Computerized language translation started 58 years ago with IBM and Georgetown ...
Hard to imagine but it has been 58 years since IBM and Georgetown University teamed up to run what they said was at the time the first English-to-Russian language computer translation program. "Although IBM emphasized that it is not yet possible 'to insert a Russian book at one end and come out with an English book at the other,' [IBM] predicted that 'five, perhaps three years hence, interlingual meaning conversion by electronic process in important functional areas of several languages may well be an accomplished fact. '" Interestingly, that sort of programming translation, while a hot topic during this period of time, proved difficult, expensive and ultimately controversial. The 1966 ALPAC report, " Language and Machines: Computers in Translation and Linguistics ," according to a Wikipedia entry, "was highly critical of the existing efforts, demonstrating that the systems were no faster than human translations, while also demonstrating that the supposed lack of translators was in fact a surplus, and as a result of supply and demand issues, human translation was relatively inexpensive -- about $6 per 1,000 words. (more)

The Future of Moral Machines
The fictional theme of robots turning against humans is older than the word itself, which first appeared in the title of Karel apeks 1920 play about artificial factory workers rising against their human overlords. Just 22 years later, Isaac Asimov invented the Three Laws of Robotics to serve as a hierarchical ethical code for the robots in his stories: first, never harm a human being through action or inaction; Machines are increasingly operating with minimal human oversight in the same physical spaces as we do. The prospect of machines capable of following moral principles, let alone understanding them, seems as remote today as the word robot is old. The techno-optimists among them also believe that such machines will be essentially friendly to human beings. (more)

Blurred Lines: Art, architecture and the cognitive sciences explored at next ...
nowski Forum By Ron Newby Architect/artist Jennifer Luce and cognitive scientist David Kirsh will examine the art and architecture experience from their professional perspectives at the Bronowski Art & Science Forum, 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 2 in the auditorium of The Neurosciences Institute, 10640 John Jay Hopkins Drive. Jennifer Luce and David Kirsh Topics of conversation may include the process of design, the concept of elegance, the poetic and the balance of design, and the emotional responsiveness toward and the value of the unanticipated experience. She received her bachelors degree at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, and her Master of Design Studies degree from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. The studio has received 21 AIA design awards and was named Design Vanguard by Architectural Record in 2005 as one of the top 10 emerging firms in the world. (more)

Judea Pearl, a Big Brain Behind Artificial Intelligence, Wins Turing Award
Judea Pearl, a longtime UCLA professor whose work on artificial intelligence laid the foundation for such inventions as the iPhone's Siri speech recognition technology and Google's driverless cars, has been named the 2011 ACM Turing Award winner. Turing Award, sometimes called the "Nobel Prize in Computing," recognizes Pearl for his advances in probabilistic and causal reasoning. He has conducted research in recent years on computers and morality, an issue that becomes more relevant as interaction between humans and robots becomes more real (See "Georgia Tech researchers talking the talk with robots. ") Pearl joined UCLA in 1970, having worked previously for RCA Research Laboratories and at Electronic Memories, Inc. Pearl has also been a public figure in recent years as president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, formed after his son Daniel was killed by terrorists in 2002 while working for the Wall Street Journal as a journalist. (more)

Alan Turing: Founding father of computing
WHEN one speaks about computer, the big names that come to mind are Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, what with the computers and gadgets they have created that are currently making peoples lives more enjoyable, and the world smaller. Without Alan Turings groundbreaking work, we might never have heard of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, said British Ambassador to the Philippines Stephen Lillie about his compatriot at the recent conference titled Turing 2012: International Conference on Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, hosted by the De La Salle University (DLSU) Department of Philosophy in Manila. The IET said that while he was a fellow at Cambridge, Turing developed what are now known as Turing machinesthe basic abstract symbol-manipulating devices which, despite their simplicity, can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer algorithm. (more)

Talk on supercomputers and machine vision
St Martins Institute of IT is organising a talk by two prominent academic researchers and a number of readers in the field of supercomputers and brain-inspired machine vision. His current research is in image processing, computer vision and pattern recognition, and includes computer simulations of the visual system of the brain, computer applications in health care and life sciences and creating computer programs for artistic expression. thesis in theoretical physics at Wuppertal University on simulations of lattice quantum chromodynamics, and at Groningen University in the field of parallel computing with systolic algorithms. His research interests include lattice gauge theories, quantum computing, numerical and parallel algorithms, and cluster computing. (more)

The Future of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Is Open
In 2006, Netflix announced the Netflix Prize, a competition to develop better collaborative filtering algorithms. Today, the Apache Project Mahout, created as a result of the Netflix Prize, is an open source collection of machine learning libraries. By solving basic problems and making the solutions available for reuse as a platform, we enable newcomers to stand on the shoulders of giants and innovate at a higher scale. The business of Encyclopedia Britannica suffered as a result of Wikipedia, but the entire world has benefited from open, free access to an even greater wealth of knowledge. (more)

Artificial Intelligence Could Be on Brink of Passing Turing Test
wpautop enabled One hundred years after Alan Turing was born, his eponymous test remains an elusive benchmark for artificial intelligence. His test, described in a seminal dawn-of-the-computer-age paper, was deceptively simple: If a machine could pass for human in conversation, the machine could be considered intelligent. Two revolutionary advances in information technology may bring the Turing test out of retirement, wrote Robert French, a cognitive scientist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, in an Apr. 12 Science essay. (more)

DARPA Robotics Challenge: Here Are the Official Details
Illustration of a disaster response scenario part of the DARPA Robotics Challenge: The robot on the right uses a power tool to break through a wall, and the one on the left turns a valve to close a leaking pipe. Image: DARPA DARPA to the robotics community: the challenge is on. The DARPA Robotics Challenge is offering tens of million of dollars in funding to teams from anywhere in the world to build robots capable of performing complex mobility and manipulation tasks such as walking over rubble and operating power tools. It s all about adaptability what s the most adaptable system that can be used during that first day or two of the disaster when you have a chance to reduce the scope of the disaster by taking action, Dr. Gill Pratt, the DARPA program manager who s organizing the challenge, told IEEE Spectrum. (more)

Female Game-Changers Wanted For Singularity University (Deadline To Apply For ...
Singularity University (SU), a Silicon Valley organization located at NASA Research Park in California seeks next-generation rock-stars to join this summers Graduate Studies Program 2012 (GSP12) this June 16 to August 26, 2012 in Mountain View, California. Every summer, SU selects 80 top students from around the world to join the GSP class. Our students comprise a diverse set of forward-thinking minds with entrepreneurial experience and a passion for solving the biggest challenges. The SU atmosphere of innovation, ideation and intellectual exploration created by a diverse and talented student and faculty body is key to team project success. (more)

Here's the thing about science: a lot of it is boring and hard to understand. That's why I admire the piece that Brian Christian wrote for The Atlantic last March. The article ventures into complex areas of AI research, but Christian eases his readers through this terrain using a personal journey. Christian's piece is doubly impressive because it's also about philosophy, another topic that is frequently boring and hard to understand. (more)

Interesting SXSW talks on Tuesday
Wall-E or Terminator: Predicting the Rise of AI Tuesday, March 13, 9:30AM -10:30AM, by Chris Robson, Daniel Wilson, and William Hertling. Augmented Reality = ARPAs Original Vision of Web Tuesday, March 13, 9:30AM -10:30AM, by Chris Grayson. Heidi Hysell will provide the technical explanation for many milestones in the evolution of the Internet, making the case that the human interface to the network has historically been limited by the available technology, and with Augmented Reality, we are now entering an era that truly begins to deliver on the original vision. Human Language Technology and Where It s Headed Tuesday, March 13, 9:30AM -10:30AM, by Jason Baldridge. (more)

The story of artificial intelligence
In his lectures and books, Turing put forward his theory of what could be defined as an 'intelligent computer' - now commonly known as the 'Turing test' which posited that, if a machine could communicate convincingly enough to fool a casual observer (over a teletype machine in the mid-20th century, and via, say, Skype today), then it could be considered artificially intelligent. Alan Turing With computer science still in its infancy, Turing recognised that the possibility of a machine capable of conversation was still decades away. Lacking a sufficiently powerful computer, Turing wrote the program by hand. This apparently trivial pursuit actually had a useful purpose: by 'teaching' a computer to play a simple strategy game like chequers, he hoped to create a program which could be used to solve other, more complex problems. (more)

It's Only A Matter Of Time Before Siri Passes The Turing Test
So as this database grows by orders of magnitude and the logic is refined accordingly, if a Turing Test is fashioned to distinguish a computer from a person in the day-to-day tasks of working with a personal assistant in one room is hidden an iPhone, in another room a person, you interact with them as you would an executive assistant over the course of the day, and then at the end of the day you choose which one you think is the person it is only a matter of time before the iPhone becomes indistinguishable from the human. There already is an annual Turing Test underway, the Loebner competition, where a set of judges spend a few minutes conversing (via keyboard) with computers and with people, and then have to decide which is which. A more reasonable Turing Test would be to invite a computer into a round of dinner conversations where the human subjects are not made aware that this is occurring. (more)

Virtual and Artificial, but 58000 Want Course
Virtual and Artificial, but 58,000 Want Course Published: August 15, 2011 PALO ALTO, Calif. A free online course at Stanford University on artificial intelligence, to be taught this fall by two leading experts from Silicon Valley, has attracted more than 58,000 students around the globe a class nearly four times the size of Stanfords entire student body. The instructors are Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, two of the worlds best-known artificial intelligence experts. Dr. Norvig is a former NASA scientist who is now Googles director of research and the author of a leading textbook on artificial intelligence. The two additional courses will be an introductory course on database software, taught by Jennifer Widom, chairwoman of the computer science department, and an introduction to machine learning, taught by Andrew Ng. (more)

Foreign Policy: A Predictable Future For Technology
Ayesha and Parag Khanna are co-directors of the Hybrid Reality Institute. Just before sunset on a hot August day in Los Angeles, we sat in a nearly empty hotel restaurant awaiting the arrival of one of the most influential husband-and-wife intellectual teams in history: Alvin and Heidi Toffler. Growing up in post-Depression America, they abandoned New York City and moved to the heartland, working for years as welders and union stewards at aluminum foundries and mills, experiencing all the hardship of industrialism at its peak. Five characteristics differentiate this Hybrid age from those that came before it: the ubiquitous presence of technology, its growing intelligence, its increasingly social dimensions, its ability to integrate and combine in new forms, and its growing power to disrupt, faster and on a larger scale than ever before in human history. (more)

The Grand Frontier of Artificial Intelligence
Search Technology Stephen Wolfram has developed a radical new search engine, which, unlike search engines like Google or Bing, actually computes new knowledge rather than searching through previously published material. Nanorobots in our bloodstream. Cyborgization If technological progress continues at its current pace, humanity's endgame may be summarized this way: will the machines dominate, or will humans become cyborgs? A string of calculations can be memorized by a child without having any cognizance of meaning, and as long as the super computer has no cognizance it will remain a calculator. (more)

How the Cleverbot computer chats like a human
Maya doomsday date corrected MSNBC file The El Castillo pyramid at Chichen Itza in Mexico is one of the monuments left behind by the Maya. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Giant storks may have fed on hobbits Inge van Noortwijk The extinct giant stork Leptoptilos robustus would have dwarfed the "hobbit" Homo floresiensis living on the Indonesian island of Flores. The left image shows slime mold growing out to connect food sources laid out like a map of rail stations. (more)

Unless you're enrolled as a student at Stanford, you won't get college credit but you will get a statement of accomplishment signed by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig - the two professors - upon completion. For those who aren't looking for something too strenuous (well, I should say MORE strenuous), there's a basic track with includes the lectures and basic quizzes. Stanford Computer Science professor Sebastian Thrun along with Google's Eric Schmidt had involved into crimes which had endangered human lives. Schmidt and Thrun's side had murdered Stanford student May Zhou < http://www.mayzhou.com > and they had plotted a murder on me as well, during their fight with Stanford to threaten me and to terrorize Stanford people. (more)

Open the pod bay doors, Hal
SOME years ago I injured my neck in judo and convalesced by computer. As American science writer and poet Brian Christian argues in The Most Human Human, computers challenge our basic ideas of humankind. The Loebner takes top artificial intelligence computer programs and four humans (called confederates) and gets them chatting online to the judges. "You can't go in search of the mot juste or bon mot," Christian writes. (more)

Remembering John McCarthy
A tribute to the man who made Lisp This past October saw the death of John McCarthy, one of the pioneers of computer science and a founder of the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a phrase he is credited with inventing. John McCarthy was also an academic, writing dozens of papers in computer science and more than a few in mathematics, all the while overseeing computer science dissertations. One of John's students, Ramanathan Guha, a former principal scientist at Apple who currently works at Google, had this to say about his thesis advisor when I spoke with him for my weekly IEEE Spectrum podcast "Techwise Conversations": "The set of new things that Lisp introduced into the world of programming is so large that it's almost impossible to think of programming languages without the contributions of Lisp. Everything from conditionals, to recursion, to the idea of mutable data structuresyes, before McCarthy introduced them, programming languages did not even have the 'if..., then...' statement. (more)

Google and Microsoft Talk Artificial Intelligence
Technology Review : You both spoke on stage of how AI has been advanced in recent years through the use of machine-learning techniques that take in large volumes of data and figure out things like how to translate text or transcribe speech. What about the areas we want AI to help where there isn't lots of data to learn from? Eric Horvitz: I've often thought that if you had a cloud service in the sky that recorded every speech request and what happened nextevery conversation in every taxi in Beijing, for exampleit could be possible to have AI learn how to do everything. Isn't it difficult to use machine learning if the training data isn't already labeled and explained, to give the AI a "truth" to get started from? (more)

Creating Artificial Intelligence Based on the Real Thing
Published: December 5, 2011 Ever since the early days of modern computing in the 1940s, the biological metaphor has been irresistible. The first computers room-size behemoths were referred to as giant brains or electronic brains, in headlines and everyday speech. As computers improved and became capable of some tasks familiar to humans, like playing chess, the term used was artificial intelligence. Yet the principles of biology are gaining ground as a tool in computing. (more)

Blogging the Stanford Machine Learning Class
Machines can learn to recognize text and faces, but can they do more? After a semester in Stanfords online machine learning class, I find the discipline messy and elusive, if not easy, when I expected it to be more elegant and theoretical. In the final lectures of this class, which ended last week, we saw examples of how machines can learn to decipher text and faces in photos with surprising accuracy. Im glad that very smart researchers are working on these problems, and Im relieved Im not one of them. (more)

2011 review: The year in technology
Electric vehicles herald rise of the in-car appThe emergence of the electric car is leading to a suite of smartphone add-ons Crowdsourced translations get the word out from LibyaWith the Arab spring under way early this year, we wrote about techniques that blended machine translation and human crowdsourcing to help dissidents get their message out from behind the communications blackout imposed by the Gaddafi regime Shock wave puts hybrid engines in a spinA prototype engine that relies on shock waves could allow hybrid cars to boost their efficiency even further Robot-only internet helps machines share secretsThe advent of a world wide web for robots will let automatons learn from each other's experiences a first step towards them working in the real world 3D printing: The world's first printed planeThe promise of 3D printing has finally taken off with the development of a drone that takes just a week to create The cyberweapon that could take down the internetA new form of attack would turn the internet against itself and would be extremely hard to repel Better than human? (more)

The Irish Times
iRobot TELL ME a joke Siri. If you converse with someone behind a computer screen and you cant tell if this is a person or a machine, then the machine has truly demonstrated artificial intelligence, he concluded. Each year the Loebner Prize competition gathers a panel of expert judges to see if they can be tricked by AI (artificial intelligence) software known as chatbots, which are programmed to mimic human conversation. Despite his seemingly playful nature Do-Much-More hasnt spotted that in this context the judge was talking about a band, and the brave chatbot doesnt even consider admitting to the judge that it doesnt understand. (more)

Father Of Artificial Intelligence Dies In Calif.
(AP) John McCarthy, a pioneer in artificial intelligence technology and creator of the computer programming language often used in that field, has died. Stanford University, where McCarthy was a professor for four decades, announced McCarthy's death Monday. McCarthy was a leader in the artificial intelligence field, coining the term in a 1955 research proposal. In 1958, McCarthy invented the programming language Lisp, which paved the way for voice recognition technology, including Siri, the personal assistant application on the newest iPhone. (more)

Androids and angels
Search smh: Search in:Nick Miller November 6, 2011 Illustration: Michael Connolly Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil believes humans will soon be able to live forever with the help of computers. and the handsome stranger, a network of hyper-intelligent computers that will take over the world. Photo: Trevor Collens It is hard not to think Arnold Schwarzenegger while talking to futurist Ray Kurzweil. He says that in the first half of this century there will be a Singularity, a period of incredibly rapid technological change, triggered by the moment that computers become smart enough to improve themselves without human intervention. (more)

AAAS 2007 Annual Meeting Plenary Lecture by Larry Page, Co-Founder and President, Products, Google Inc.
Larry Page shares his views about science/technology education, opportunities for changing the world, AI research at Google, access to information, and much more. February 16, 2007. (more)

AGI-08 promotional video.
Promotional video for The First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-08). FedEx Institute of Technology, University of Memphis. In cooperation with AAAI. March 1-3, 2008. The video answers the question: What is AGI?. December 2007. (more)

AGIRI 2006 Workshop: A Practical Architecture for Artificial General Intelligence - Introduction to Artificial General Intelligence.
Dr. Ben Goertzel, founder of and CEO of Novamente LLC, gave this talk at the first workshop held by the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute [AGIRI]. The talk is divided into 3 videos, with this Introduction being the first. May 20, 2006. (more)

ArsDigita University Curriculum - Artificial Intelligence course taught by Patrick Winston. Lecture #1 (of 4): AI Overview, Rule-Based Expert Systems and Knowledge Engineering.
ArsDigita University Curriculum: "The curriculum was modeled on the undergraduate CS program at MIT. Several of the courses were straightforward adoptions of MIT courses. A few were specifically designed for the program, which was roughly in line with the ACM's 2001 Model Curricula for Computing." June 4, 2001. (more)

Computer Chronicles: Artificial Intelligence (1986).
What is Artificial Intelligence? Does AI even exist? These are just two of the questions addressed in this episode. Topics covered include expert systems, machine vision, decision support software, natural languageprocessing, and speech recognition systems. Hosted by Stuart Cheifet and Gary Kildall, with commentary from George Morrow. Guests: Hubert Dreyfus, UC Berkeley; Gary Hendrix, Symantec; S. Jerrold Kaplan, Lotus Development; Harry Tennant, Texas Instruments; and Terry Winograd, Stanford University. January 2, 1986. (more)

Lighthill Controversy Debate at the Royal Institution with Professor Sir James Lighthill, Professor Donald Michie, Professor Richard Gregory and Professor John McCarthy.
Professors Donald Michie [Edinburgh], Richard Gregory [Bristol] and John McCarthy [Stanford] challenge the pessimistic findings & views of Professor Sir James Lighthill [Cambridge], author of "The Lighthill Report" [Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey, in Artificial Intelligence: a paper symposium, Science Research Council (1973)]. June 1973. (more)

Recollections of early AI in Britain: 1942 - 1965. An interview with Professor Donald Michie.
Video for the BCS Computer Conservation Society's October 2002 Conference on the history of AI in Britain. a/k/a Recollections of the Pioneers. "Q: What was your earliest contact with the idea of intelligent machinery? A: Arriving at Bletchley Park in 1942 I formed a friendship with Alan Turing, and in April 1943 with Jack Good. The three of us formed a sort of discussion club focused around Turing's astonishing 'child machine' concept. Hisproposal was to use our knowledge of how the brain acquires its intelligence as a model for designing a teachable intelligent machine." September, 2002. (more)

The Age of Intelligent Machines: The Film. By Raymond Kurzweil.
From the original video notes: A survey of Artificial Intelligence showing AI at work and under development. The paradoxes, promise and challenges of advanced computer science, with authorities Marvin Minsky, Roger Schank, Raj Reddy and other leaders in the field. 1987. (more)

The Next Big Thing (Series Two): Machines with Minds.
Real moving, interacting robots is one promising direction in artificial intelligence. But what about the original hope of matching human performance, and what has A.I. told us about the human brain? When science of artificial intelligence was launched in the 50s, its goal was to match the intellectual achievements of human beings. Why isn't machine intelligence already far superior to that of people? Chaired by Colin Blakemore [Oxford University], the panel consists of Professor Aaron Sloman (University of Birmingham), Dr Amanda Sharkey (University of Sheffield), and Professor Igor Aleksander (Imperial College). 2002. (more)