Tag: Applications

JPO and the EPO agree on cooperation in the field of machine translation
See also6 February 2012 In a landmark step towards increased use of worldwide patent information on the internet, the Commissioner of the Japan Patent Office (JPO), Yoshiyuki Iwai, and the President of the European Patent Office (EPO), Benot Battistelli, have signed an agreement which will provide users of the patent system with better machine translations of patents from Japanese into English and then into German and French. In other words, the patent documents are very important not only for patent offices and applicants but also the public in the world and can contribute to global development of industry and economics. The significance of patent information has grown steadily with the creation of a global technology market reflected in a new record of 1.8 million patent filings worldwide in 2010. (more)

QTranslate, Versatile Desktop Translator For Windows
Often your only option to make sense of the text is to use a machine translation service like Google Translate or Microsoft Translate. QTranslate registers several global hotkeys that let you translate text from any open program window. The two most important hotkeys are Ctrl-q, which displays a translation of the highlighted text in a popup window, or Ctrl-Ctrl which sends the highlighted text to the program window where it is then translated. The keyboard shortcut Ctrl-e furthermore uses text to speech synthesis to read the text out loud. (more)

Using Color in Machine-Vision Applications
Areas of focus include: Color cameras and how to obtain a color image from an RGB-based camera Bayer interpolation and how it is performed, showing the different methods and results Camera calibration including the effects of different lighting conditions on color images The primary color models used in machine vision: RGB, HSI, CIE 1931 XYZ color space, and its derivatives such as CIELUV, CIEUVW, and CIELAB Which color models are best for which types of application Established in 1976, Matrox Imaging is a leading developer of component-level solutions for machine vision, image analysis, medical imaging, and video surveillance. This drive for innovation has led to many industry firsts, including the worlds first and smallest 1394b digital camera, the smallest GigE camera and the first and first USB 3.0 machine vision camera to market....... (more)

Potato industry reaps benefits of computer vision
Social Media Tools A prototype computer vision system that can identify sub-standard potatoes has been developed by computer scientists from the University of Lincoln (Lincoln, UK). Now, working with the UK Potato Council, the University of Lincoln team from the Centre for Vision and Robotics Research has produced a low-cost system that uses off-the-shelf hardware and bespoke software to detect, identify and quantify common defects affecting potatoes. Director of the Centre for Vision and Robotics Research Dr. Tom Duckett says, The system relies on initial input by an expert, identifying blemishes, diseases, as well as good specimens, from sample batches of potatoes. However, for white potato varieties, greening tends to look green, whereas for red potato varieties, greening tends to look more black than green. (more)

The problem with investing based on pattern recognition
A famous story in artificial intelligence is how the US military developed algorithms to determine whether an image had a tank in it. They used a standard machine learning method: feed the computer a training set of photos, some of which had tanks in them and some of which didnt, and let algorithms identify which features in the photos correlated to tanks being shown. Since the features the computer identified were embedded in complicated mathematical equations, no one could figure out what it was really doing and therefore why it stopped working.Eventually someone realized that in the training set, all of the images with tanks were taken on a cloudy day, and all the images without tanks were taken on a sunny day. In the context of markets, it can cause companies and sectors with the right patterns to be overvalued, and ones with the wrong patterns to be undervalued. (more)

Controlling neuroprosthetics with your mind
Neuroscientists have found that the brain is more flexible and trainable than previously thought, opening the door to development of thought-controlled prosthetic devices to help people with spinal cord injuries, amputations and other impairments. The study advances work by researchers who have been studying the brain circuits used in natural movement, to mimic them for the development of prosthetic devices. The insights suggest that learning to control a BMI (brain-machine interface), which is inherently unnatural, may feel completely normal to a person, because this learning is using the brains existing built-in circuits for natural motor control. The rats were fitted with a brain-machine interface that converted EEG brain waves into auditory tones. (more)

Lifebrowser: Data mining gets (really) personal at Microsoft
Lifebrowser: Data mining gets (really) personal at Microsoft (PhysOrg.com) -- Microsoft Research is doing research on software that could bring you your own personal data mining center with a touch of Proust for returns. The software uses machine learning to help a user place life events, which may span months or years, to be expanded or contracted selectively, in better context. Lifebrowser's timeline shows items that the user can associate with "landmark" events with the use of artificial intelligence algorithms. By associating an email with a relevant calendar date with a relevant document and photos, significance is gleaned from personal life events. (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)

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)

Are You Siri-us About Speech Recognition?
One of Apple 's ( Nasdaq: AAPL ) iPad upgrades includes voice dictation, which is not the same as Siri, the speech-activated intelligent assistant found in the iPhone 4S. Survey says A Loopt survey of 4S first adopters found that those waiting to buy (this was just prior to launch) most wanted to play with Siri, beating out the upgraded camera 2-to-1. A November survey of iPhone 4S users found that Siri was the single best-liked feature in the smartphone, beating out iOS' ease of use and the upgraded camera. Microsoft ( Nasdaq: MSFT ) is bundling voice control into its push for Xbox living room dominance. (more)

Software Translates Your Voice into Another Language
Researchers at Microsoft have made software that can learn the sound of your voice, and then use it to speak a language that you don't. In a demonstration at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, campus on Tuesday, Microsoft research scientist Frank Soong showed how his software could read out text in Spanish using the voice of his boss, Rick Rashid, who leads Microsoft's research efforts. Hear Rick Rashid's voice in his native language and then translated into several other languages: In English, a synthetic version of Mundie's voice welcomed the audience to an open day held by Microsoft Research, concluding, "With the help of this system, now I can speak Mandarin. " Individual sounds used by the first model to build up words using a person's voice in his or her own language are carefully tweaked to give the new text-to-speech model a full ability to sound out phrases in the second language. (more)

Nuance Buys Transcription And Speech Editing Company Transcend For $300M In Cash
Learn More Nuance has just announced that it is acquiring Transcend, a company that provides medical transcription and speech editing services, for approximately $300 million in cash, or $29.50 per Transcend share. Transcend utilizes a combination of its proprietary Internet-based voice and data distribution technology, customer based technology, and home-based medical language specialists to convert physicians voice recordings into electronic documents. The companys solutions are used every day by people and businesses for tasks and services, such as requesting account information from a phone-based self-service solution, dictating records, searching the mobile Web by voice, entering a destination into a navigation system, or working with PDF documents. (more)

Natural Language Processing Takes Center Stage In EHRs
All of these companies are applying voice recognition coupled with NLP to their ambulatory-care EHRs, and Allscripts is doing the same with its Sunrise acute-care products, including Sunrise Mobile MD II. ) The company has already integrated M*Modal's NLP software into its Sunrise EHR, and the two companies are developing the application on the ambulatory care side. Vern Davenport, chairman and CEO of M*Modal, told InformationWeek Healthcare that his company's product can convert voice to text and do "context enablement" to create discrete data elements that go into EHR templates. (Because of the limitations of iPad keyboards, NLP will be needed to aid this process. (more)

Humanity Must 'Jail' Dangerous AI to Avoid Doom, Expert Says
Keeping the artificial intelligence (AI) genie trapped in the proverbial bottle could turn an apocalyptic threat into a powerful oracle that solves humanity's problems, said Roman Yampolskiy, a computer scientist at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. One starting solution might trap the AI inside a "virtual machine" running inside a computer's typical operating system an existing process that adds security by limiting the AI's access to its host computer's software and hardware. If all else fails, researchers could always slow down the AI's "thinking" by throttling back computer processing speeds, regularly hit the "reset" button or shut down the computer's power supply to keep an AI in check. "The Catch-22 is that until we have fully developed superintelligent AI we can't fully test our ideas, but in order to safely develop such AI we need to have working security measures," Yampolskiy told InnovationNewsDaily. (more)

Let's hand over the analogue TV airways to machines (Wired UK)
This is a guest post by Luke D'Arcy, Vice President of Marketing at mobile wireless data service provider Neul The ideas surrounding machines "taking over" has long been a popular topic both for writers and scientists. Over the last few years society has become increasingly used to seeing machines talking to other machines. In the home machines will monitor and communicate, ensuring your heating is set to the right temperature and your supermarket delivery service is notified when you run out of milk. A world of machines communicating with each other will see devices capable of productivity and customer service unachievable by humans as machines keep a constant watch, refuelling, restocking and repairing as needed. (more)

What Jobs Are Available For Software Engineers Who Want To Advance Medical ...
1,124 views Without going into the specifics of your situationjust yet, here are the ways a computer engineer could contribute to medical research, with increasing edginess: 1. Work foran established medical tech firm, such as Medtronic, Intuitive Surgical ,or Boston Scientific to name a few game changers, and of course the big boys likeGE Healthcare, Philips or Siemens Medical. The medical clientele are among the most difficult in engineering, but the work is incredibly rewarding. Note however, that you will mostly likely NOT be advancing medical research. (more)

New Computers Respond To Emotions, Boredom
Emotion-sensing computer software that models and responds to students cognitive and emotional states including frustration and boredom has been developed by University of Notre Dame Assistant Professor of Psychology Sidney DMello and colleagues from the University of Memphis and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. AutoTutor and Affective AutoTutor can gauge the students level of knowledge by asking probing questions, analyzing the students responses to those questions; and even sensing a students frustration or boredom through facial expression and body posture and dynamically changing its strategies to help the student conquer those negative emotions. AutoTutor is an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) that helps students learn complex technical content in Newtonian physics, computer literacy, and critical thinking by holding a conversation in natural language; using its student model to dynamically tailor the interaction to individual students; (more)

Studio Ousia Releases Phroni, Technology to Enhance Browsing on Smartphones
Featured Company Featured Company Featured Company Featured Company Keywords that users might find interesting are automatically extracted and converted into links through the use of machine learning technology. Phroni also proudly won the award at the international conference, Extended Semantic Web Conference 2010, and has been selected as the finalist at multiple international events, including the Plug and Play Winter EXPO in Silicon Valley and Startup Asia in Singapore. Phroni simplifies this process significantly by employing a proprietary machine-learning engine to analyze the text and automatically extract relevant keywords, turning them into tappable links. Users can perform a keyword search on their desired web sources by just tapping the keyword. (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)

Code of conduct: The relentless march of the algorithm
Last October a tiny tech start-up from Australia called Kaggle raised $11m from a trio of venture capitalists. What Kaggle and Palantir have in common, aside from flush bank accounts, is their interest in algorithms the mathematical equations that, when coded into computers, are influencing every area of our lives, from the stock market to the supermarket. But, at a deeper level, as algorithms rapidly reshape business, finance, culture and even war, they raise profound ethical questions about the controls and responsibilities we cede to machines. Some of the competitions hosted by Kaggle over the past year included one to predict whether a used car is a lemon (prize pot of $10,000), another by Nasa and the Royal Astronomical Society to map the universe's dark matter more effectively (prize $3,000), and the Heritage Health Prize ($3m), to predict patients who will be admitted to hospital within the year, using historical claims data. (more)

The disruptive power of gesture and voice recognition
Similarly, Apple's Siri virtual assistant has taught manufacturers and software developers that voice recognition has moved beyond recognition and into comprehension. And that's happening largely as a consequence of the rapid increase in microchip processing power, said Aviad Maizels, founder and president of PrimeSense, which designed the Kinect's chips. They've since crossed that threshold, and continued improvements in processing power are enabling more sophisticated gesture recognition tools. The increase in processing power has also helped improve speech-recognition software, said Richard H. The next wave, represented by Nuance's Dragon TV and the forthcoming Vlingo TV app, will help people search through program guides, answer questions about shows and exchange messages with friends while they watch TV. (more)

Honors and Other Things
Educator of the Year: Dr. Apisarnthanarax Dr. Smith Apisarnthanarax, assistant professor and associate residency program director, department of radiation oncology in the Perelman School of Medicine, was named Educator of the Year by the Association of Residents in Radiation Oncology (ARRO), in partnership with the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO). Senior Scholar: Dr. Eberwine Dr. James Eberwine, professor of pharmacology at the Perelman School of Medicine, received a Senior Scholar Award from the Ellison Medical Foundation. Kaufman, assistant professor in the department of animal biology at School of Veterinary Medicine, a $120,000 grant to study the role that mtDNA copy number control plays in the development of disease. Chair of AHA Section: Dr. Ludmir Dr. Jack Ludmir, professor and chair of obstetrics and gynecology at Pennsylvania Hospital, was appointed the 2011 chair of the Section for Maternal and Child Health of the American Hospital Association (AHA). (more)

It's Time to Start 3D Scanning the World
When Microsoft was developing its Kinect 3D sensor, a critical task was to calibrate its algorithms to rapidly and accurately recognize parts of the human body, especially hands, to make sure the device would work in any home, with any age group, any clothing, and any kind of background object. Using a computer-based approach to do the calibration had limitations, because computers would sometimes fail to identify a human hand in a Kinect-generated image, or would see a hand where none existed. Imagine if a robot could promptly recognize any object in a home or office or factory: Anything that the robot sees or picks up it would instantly know what it is. This type of data collection presents a chicken-and-egg problem: If you have a data set with objects properly tagged, you can start to build applications that rely on the knowledge stored in that set, and these applications in turn can generate more data and you can refine the knowledge further. (more)

Sequencing a human genome in one day for $1,000
Life Technologies Corporation announced Tuesday that it is taking orders for its new benchtop Ion Proton Sequencer, designed to sequence the entire human genome in a day for $1,000. The Ion Proton Sequencer is ideal for sequencing both exomes regions in the DNA that code for protein and human genomes. The Ion Proton II Chip, ideal for sequencing whole human genomes, will be available about six months later. The company s Ion PGM Sequencer is ideal for sequencing genes, small genomes, panels of genes, or performing gene expression profiling, for as little as $99 a chip. (more)

Start-up hopes to help UAE businesses lost in translation
Some of the Qordoba innovations can now be integrated into a client's office for easier translation in-house, although the company's goal was to create a suite of solutions. "That way, no matter who is working on your translation - it could be a translator in the UK, an editor sitting in Damascus or someone in Dubai - they're going to see the client's style preference," says May Habib, the founder and chief executive of Qordoba. Globally, the sales of language translation software reached US$575.5 million (Dh2.11 billion) in 2010 and is forecast to grow to $3bn within the next five years, according to market data released last year by WinterGreen Research. Qordoba has taken a high-tech approach with some its translation features, although it relies on an online network of more than 400 human translators and editors in about 30 countries and 15 time zones. (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)

Viewpoint: AI will change our relationship with tech
It seems likely that in 2012 a computer will pass the Turing Test - which might get us closer to a digital machine with true artificial intelligence (AI). Because right now the digital devices in our lives are quite insecure - they require constant reassurances: "yes, I do want you to delete that file"; Attention seeking A machine passes Alan Turing's test if you cannot tell from its responses if it is human or computer I sometimes think if our devices were people, we would describe them as high maintenance and would wonder quietly to ourselves if it was time to break up with them. cameras that know how to make you look your best, smart devices that actually learn about your likes and dislikes and make better choices to delight and surprise you. Creativity I think this means we can look forward to our interactions with digital devices maturing into something more like a relationship, and a little less like a lot of hard work. (more)

Ask Ziggy for Windows Phone to Rival Apple's Siri
Ask Ziggy for Windows Phone to Rival Apples Siri An independent Windows Phone developer has created an app for Microsofts mobile platform that will attempt to outmatch Apples intelligent voice-controlled assistant Siri. Ask Ziggy uses Speech Recognition to translate human speech into transcribed text, which is displayed in a speech bubble. The Nuance-based voice recognition part of the software allows Ask Ziggy to translate speech to text and just like Apples Siri, the Windows Phone app can accept queries, solve math problems, perform other tasks, and talk back to the user. Ask Ziggy is still under development as Leib plans to add multilingual support, language translations and expand speech grammar before submitting the app to the Windows Marketplace. (more)

Nuance Aims iPhone Siri-Type Speech At TVs, Cars
You may update your e IBD preferences at any time by going into My IBD and selecting Update Your e IBD Preferences. Ricci says much improved voice recognition technology is on the way soon, though he says it's too early to throw away those computer keyboards and TV remotes. In an interview with IBD, Ricci talks about the potential of speech recognition in living rooms, cars, health care and social media applications. IBD: How long until voice commands or voice recognition technology become ubiquitous in smart phones, TVs and other products? (more)

Announcing ArchiveBMT: BMT Centers Can Now Analyze Decades of Historical Data ...
SALT LAKE CITY, Jan. 27, 2012 -- /PRNewswire/ --Recognizing the need of BMT centers to access and analyze historical data on transplant outcomes, RemedyMD, the leading provider of registries for Life Science Research, has developed ArchiveBMT, a software application designed to import legacy data submitted by BMT centers to the former IBMTR. BMT centers are now able to import their historical data into ComprehensiveBMT and analyze the data with powerful pattern recognition tools to identify underlying trends. Due to the flexibility of the ComprehensiveBMT data model BMT researchers can track and study data far beyond what is reported to CIBMTR. CIBMTR's efforts to migrate data from legacy databases to the CIBMTR observational database hasprogressed to the point where BMT centers can now access TED-level historical data that was submitted prior to the creation of FormsNet2. (more)

Finer points lost in Google translation
A couple of weeks ago I happened to read a column on the TSN website about the Montreal Canadiens. It was a machine translation, made by Google, of a column by Mario Tremblay that had appeared on the website of RDS, the network's sister site, in French. "The Director General of the Canadian, Pierre Gauthier, seller is present: " that's how the column began. (The general manager of the Canadiens, Pierre Gauthier, is now ready to sell. (more)

Is This Code Part of Majel, Android's Future Personal Assistant?
Someone tried to mess around with the FaceUnlock application code from the Android SDK, and stumbled upon this code, which seems to include answers, as if given by a personal assistant or such. Weve heard some rumors a few months back that Google may be working on a personal assistant as part of their Google X projects, and theyve been doing this for years. These rumors came from someone who claimed he was involved with Google X, and he wanted to give a hint about what theyve been working on: This is in total violation of the NDA, but I dont care anymore. The central focus of Google X for the past few years has been a highly advanced artificial intelligence robot that leverages the underlying technology of many popular Google programs. (more)

Welcome to the desktop degree
Once upon a time, a very long time ago, in 1995 to be precise, a scholar named Eli Noam published an article in the prestigious journal Science under the title "Electronics and the Dim Future of the University". But, different though these responses were, all universities were agreed on one thing: in the end, students would have to come to them because only universities could give them the appropriate credentials. In behaving thus, universities put themselves in the role of the mythical frog in a saucepan of water that is being slowly heated on a hob. Some things have happened recently that make one think that perhaps the water might be reaching boiling point for traditional universities. (more)

Robots Learn How to Play Catch With Soulless, Mechanical Precision
Last year, the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German Aerospace Center created the "Rollin' Justin" robot, a technical marvel that could catch a ball through a mix of precision, user input, and motion sensors. Huffington Post relayed video footage of the two robots in action, as each unit showed off their respective skills in a short game of catch. Luckily, Justin and Justin aren't equipped with any degree of artificial intelligence, because they could easily be throwing lethal objects through the air at unsuspecting humans. Either way, it seems like the next logical step will be a third "Justin" robot that can pitch catch a ball in one fluid motion. (more)

Artificial intelligence: Getting better at the age guessing game
The active learning algorithm is faster and more accurate in guessing the age of an individual than conventional algorithms. They have, for example, developed computer algorithms for facial age classification -- the automated assignment of individuals to predefined age groups based on their facial features as seen on video captures or still images. A person can teach a computer to make better guesses by running its algorithm through a large database of facial images of which the age is known using sets of labeled images, but acquiring such a database can be both time-consuming and expensive. The technology could find use, for example, in digital signage where the machine determines the age group of the viewer and displays targeted advertisements designed for those age groups, or in interactive games where the machine automatically presents different games based on the players' age range. (more)

Stanford Takes Online Schooling To The Next Academic Level
knowitvideos/vie YouTube Stanford Engineering's Online Introduction To Artificial Intelligence is made up of videos that teach lessons by drawing them out with pen and paper. Last year, Stanford University computer science professor Sebastian Thrun also known as the fellow who helped build Google's self-driving car got together with a small group of Stanford colleagues and they impulsively decided to open their classes to the world. You can only imagine what those meetings must have been like, with professors telling the school they wanted to teach free, graded online classes for which students could receive a certificate of completion. Thrun's colleague Andrew Ng taught a free, online machine learning class that ultimately attracted more than 100,000 students. (more)

Brain Stimulation And Ethics
Transcranial direct current stimulation (or TDCS), is a type of non-invasive brain stimulation in which weak electrical currents are applied to the head via electrodes for a short time (about 20 minutes). Most research has focused on using this type of stimulation as a means to improve the cognitive capacities of people with certain psychological or cognitive disabilities. But recent research has shown that TDCS may also improve the cognitive capacities of those without such disabilities. Next, they focus on two issues in particular: premature use of TDCS and using it on the developing brain. (more)

Semi-Autonomous Road Train Trial Is a Success
A semi-autonomous, four-vehicle road train has been successfully demonstrated at Volvos test track in Hllered, Sweden, paving the way for on-road trials. In a road train, cars and trucks with the same destination are grouped together, and control is handed over to a lead vehicle thats under the command of a professional driver. I have to admit that in the beginning it feels really unusual, when youre kind of prepared to take over at any moment, said Erik Coelingh, technical project manager at Volvo, who enjoyed some relaxing time behind the wheel during a road train trial. Road trains are ideal for rush hour traffic, where cars and trucks follow similar patterns each day. (more)

UTP strikes gold at Innova expo in Brussels
His second invention, the BOS-Flame Temp Measure employs the BOS technique to measure the temperature field of a methane flame while the Gas Conc Measure which bagged Silver applies BOS to measure the concentration field of an AXIS-SYMMETRIC injected gaseous fuel. Dr Hussain Al-Kayeim also bagged the Prize of the Association of Polish Inventor and Rationalisers for his invention's ability to implement artificial intelligent code for diagnosis of six different types of steam boiler trips which helps in early detection of trips occurrence that can help avoid disasters or accidents. The duo's ICA Gasification System is able to convert oil palm wastes into enriched hydrogen gas with minimal carbon dioxide emission using pure steam, catalyst and calcium dioxide which also won them the Special Award (Sustainable Development) Innova 2011 and World Intellectual Property Organisations' prize for the best invention presented by women inventors...... (more)

Micromax's Superfone A50 Ninja enters India with AISHA voice assistant ...
Hoping to compete with the Siris of the world, Micromax has announced its new Superfone A50 Ninja alongside a novel feature dubbed AISHA -- which is short for Artificial Intelligence Speech Handset Assistant. Show full PR text Micromax Informatics Limited ("Micromax"), the 12th largest handset manufacturer in the World (According to Global Handset Vendor Market share report from Strategy Analytics) today announced the launch of A50 Ninja, which comes with an Artificial Intelligence Speech Handset Assistant, "AISHA". In succession to A85, A75, A73 and A78, Micromax intensifies its Superfone portfolio by introducing A50 and thus offering handsets ranging from Rs. However, with A50 Micromax offers a new innovation to the user in form of AISHA. (more)

Rational Retention Announces Rational Intelligence Partnership to Improve ...
Rational Retention (RR), a leading developer of retention and e-discovery software, announces today that it has partnered with the academic team of New York Universitys Center for Health Informatics and Bioinformatics and with Discovery Holdings LLC (a technology holding company specializing in Markov Boundary, Causal Graph, Kernel Ridge Regression, Support Vector Machines, and other cutting-edge high-dimensional data classification methods) to dramatically expand and enhance its predictive coding and auto-classification platform in the e-discovery space. Rational Retention and the NYU team of experts will collaborate to deploy Discovery Holdings proprietary, best-in-class machine learning algorithms and analytic protocols to intelligently and automatically code documents in the context of litigation. Last year, Rational Retention announced the release of their hosted review platform, Rational eDiscovery (ReD), which aims to provide the most powerful and cost-effective e-discovery repository in the marketplace. (more)

Do-It-Yourself Cat Door Recognizes Your Feline
The ideal cat door would let the cat in most of the time, but lock the door when kitty is carrying prey or when another animal, such as a raccoon, approaches the door.Wikimedia Commons What does it take for a computer program to recognize your cat? At the time, the door connected to a desktop computer that ran the program that snapped pictures of Flo and analyzed them as she approached the door. Now, Forster is determined to build Flo's door for Timothy on weekends, in between his usual consulting work in Simi Valley, Calif. But because computer vision is still difficult, even for scientists, people who are looking for guaranteed results, rather than the fun of putting the door together, should probably stay away from a do-it-yourself door for now. (more)

Watchers, carers, and administrators: the smart homes of tomorrow
These technologies are almost synonymous with the smart home and so-called intelligent buildings in general, but there's little or no intelligence to them. For a home to be considered smart, it must in a sense become a robota machine capable of, if not true intelligence (and certainly not sentience), sensing data, processing it, drawing conclusions of its own accord, and then acting upon those conclusions. Pervasive computing goes beyond the idea of a personal computer in every home, or even in every pocketit's to do with chips and sensors in everyday objects and the Internet of Things. When computers are everywhere, ambient intelligence is what followsat least in theory: a soft network of computers and devices (sometimes visible and recognizable, sometimes not) watching, thinking, and communicating for the betterment of humankind. (more)

AT&T Spills Details Of New Watson Speech Recognition App Platform
In June, we plan to launch several AT&T Watson SM Speech application programming interfaces (APIs) that developers can access to quickly create great new apps and services with voice recognition and transcription capabilities, wrote John Donovan, an AT&T senior VP of technology and network operations, in a blog post. Watson, which was developed by AT&T Labs, the telecom giants research arm, is already live in its automated customer service phone banks and AT&T Translator and Yellow Pages mobile ( YPMobile ) iPhone apps. Following AT&Ts announcement, some key questions remained, such as: How much the program will cost developers, whether AT&T will take a cut of sales, and just which specific languages the technology will support. Regarding the cost, there is a registration charge of $99, which will allow developers to use all AT&T APIs, including speech, without a per transaction charge through 2012, AT&Ts spokesperson told TPM. (more)

Breaking down the language barriersix years in
It used what was then state-of-the-art commercial machine translation (MT), but the translation quality wasnt very good, and it didnt improve much in those first few years. In 2003, a few Google engineers decided to ramp up the translation quality and tackle more languages. I joined Google, and we started to retool our translation system toward competing in the NIST Machine Translation Evaluation, a bake-off among research institutions and companies to build better machine translation. We announced our statistical MT approach on April 28, 2006, and in the six years since then weve focused primarily on core translation quality and language coverage. (more)

Robots fighting wars could be blamed for mistakes on the battlefield
If a robot in combat has a hardware malfunction or programming glitch that causes it to kill civilians, do we blame the robot, or the humans who created and deployed it? The researchers' latest results show that humans apply a moderate amount of morality and other human characteristics to robots that are equipped with social capabilities and are capable of harming humans. This suggests that as robots gain capabilities in language and social interactions, it is likely that many people will hold a humanoid robot as partially accountable for a harm that it causes, the researchers wrote. They argue that as militaries transform from human to robotic warfare, the chain of command that controls robots and the moral accountability of robotic warriors should be factored into jurisprudence and the Laws of Armed Conflict for cases when the robots hurt humans. (more)

Coursera Plans to Announce University Partners for Online Classes
Published: April 18, 2012 SAN FRANCISCO An interactive online learning system created by two Stanford computer scientists plans to announce Wednesday that it has secured $16 million in venture capital and partnerships with five major universities. The scientists, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, taught free Web-based courses through Stanford last year that reached more than 100,000 students. Besides Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, where the venture has already been offering courses, the university partners include the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton. Although computer-assisted learning was pioneered at Stanford during the 1960s, and for-profit online schools like the University of Phoenix have been around for several decades, a new wave of interest in online education is taking shape. (more)

Gogobot hires SRI scientist to add artificial intelligence to its travel apps ...
Katz, while working for MySpace in London a few years ago, spent so much time researching and planning European trips that he wound up missing many of the actual trips. To take the company to the next level, Gogobot recently hired former SRI senior scientist, Osher Yadgar, who helped work on virtual personal assistant technology related to Siri, the voice- and artificial intelligence-powered assistant now built into the iPhone 4S. Yadgar will help Gogobot use artificial intelligence to plan your trips. When you plan a trip, its a huge problem, Yadgar said in an interview with VentureBeat. (more)

Machine Learning in Action
Machine learning is a hot topic and a book that promises to put it in action has a lot to accomplish. The big problem with machine learning books is that there is no clear cut definition of what the subject is all about. Classical stats is a prerequisite for studying machine learning, and it is often useful in tackling the same problems, but to qualify for inclusion in the machine learning circle a book needs to do more than discuss traditional statistical methods. This particular book gets a good balance between advanced topics and practical application. (more)

What it takes to build great machine learning products
Machine learning (ML) is all the rage, riding tight on the coattails of the "big data" wave. The challenge in building great products with ML lies not in just understanding basic ML theory, but in understanding the domain and problem sufficiently to operationalize intuitions into model design. Progress in important ML application areas, like NLP, come from insights specific to these problems, rather than generic ML machinery. The goal of this essay is not to discourage people from building amazing products with ML at their cores, but to be clear about where I think the difficulty lies. (more)

Ford is ready for the autonomous car. Are drivers?
Ford is ready for the autonomous car. There is no technology barrier from going where we are now to the autonomous car, said Jim McBride, a Ford Research and Innovation technical expert who specializes in autonomous vehicle technologies. McBride said Ford has already built research vehicles with high-resolution omnidirectional cameras that can see the road and the cars surroundings far better than any driver with a few mirrors. But while Ford may be ready to take that technological jump, drivers arent quite prepared to take the leap of faith necessary to forfeit complete control of their vehicles to an onboard computer or larger network intelligence, said Mike Kane, the Ford vehicle engineering supervisor for driver assistance technologies.Its not that drivers are adamantly opposed to the concept of a driverless car, Kane said; Ford believes that through the gradual introduction of more automation, drivers will come around to the idea of a car that drives itself. (more)

ABC Language Solutions Launches Social Media Translation Service for ...
Learn how translation and localization of your company's social media profile can increase profits and the ROI of your marketing efforts. Even the best automatic translation systems have difficulty accurately translating the context in which language is used and generally machine translation does not deal well with slang and the sort of abbreviations or text-speak often used in social media. CEO Andrey Bondarenko said the following about this new social media service: "Although machine translation can be good to get a basic understanding of what is being said in another language it is inadequate for the marketing needs of companies doing business globally. Although a business would not need this social media service for every Tweet or Facebook comment they post the service is ideal to help identify the right social platforms, set up the right services in the target language and build an accurate company profile to create long-term relationships and increase trust in a company's products and services in the countries where they do business. (more)

Google Adds Lexus RX450h to Autonomous Testing Fleet
Published April 19, 2012 By Huw Evans Weve already heard about Googles somewhat controversial autonomous vehicle test program which began two years ago using Toyota Prii and other vehicles. The sighting comes just days after the California Senate passed Bill 1298, which enables the California Highway Patrol to set standards and performance requirements relating to autonomous vehicle testing. Speaking with Wired, a spokesperson for Google said, in the course of our work, we experiment with testing our algorithms on various vehicles to help improve our technology. Overseen by Dr. Sebastian Thurn, the director of Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Google engineer who co-created the companys Street Mapping Service, the autonomous vehicle program was initially clouded in great secrecy, though Google went public with it in 2010. (more)

IIT's copycat robot
IITs copycat robot What we have seen in movies such as iRobot, Terminator and Endhiran is something we may have to live with in the near future. The RISE Group of Reconfigurable Robotics Laboratory at IIT-Madras has developed an ingenious framework that lets a robot learn chores by observing natural movements and gestures of a human being. The group headed by Pradyot KVN, a masters student, comprises Manimaran and Prahasaran, as well as internees Anshul and Abhishek. Pradyot has also showcased his research at the European Workshop in Reinforcement Learning held at Greece, and was one of 30 students from all over the world selected to attend the Asia-Pacific Student Entrepreneurship Summit at Stanford University. (more)

Health Discovery Corporation's Popular MelApp Featured in Men's Health Magazine
First launched last summer for iPhone, MelApp uses highly sophisticated patent protected mathematical algorithms and image based pattern recognition technology to analyze an uploaded image. In addition, MelApp can use the smartphones GPS to refer users to physicians specializing in the diagnosis and treatment of melanoma for proper medical diagnosis and treatment. We are very proud of the fact that we continue to hear from people who have used MelApp and as a result they have made appointments with their physicians to have a proper medical examination and biopsy which led to a diagnosis of early melanoma still in the curable stage. About Health Discovery Corporation Health Discovery Corporation is a molecular diagnostics company that uses advanced mathematical techniques to analyze large amounts of data to uncover patterns that might otherwise be undetectable. (more)

Google's self-driving car gets green light in Nevada
The first fully licensed self-driven car a modified Toyota Prius won a special permit on Tuesday, the first of three applied for by Google, which allows it to be used on the state's roads, including the famous Las Vegas strip. Autonomous vehicles are the "car of the future," said Bruce Breslow, the director of Nevada's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), in a statement. He also thought that self-driving cars whose brakes and accelerators are connected to computers, and which are fitted with GPS, a substantial database, artificial intelligence systems, and a laser radar (Lidar) which can detect obstacles such as people, cyclists and other cars on or around the road could be substantially safer than human drivers. The cars in Nevada will have a special licence plate with an infinity sign to indicate that they are not necessarily being driven by a human...... (more)

Video Friday: Talking Vacuums, Robotic Buttocks, and How Not to Fly a Spacecraft
Via [ Kokatu ] Plastic Pals found this incredible video of a transforming robot that actually transforms from a (fully operational) car to a (fully operational) humanoid and back again: If you ve ever wanted to see a PR2 embarrass itself, here s your chance: Don t miss Another One Bytes the Dust, either. Via [ Willow Garage ] Cocorobo is yet another very expensive and suspiciously Roomba-looking vacuum from Asia, with yet another suite of, uh, unique features thrown in, including remote control, voice recognition, and something about emotions: Apparently, if you talk to this vacuum every day, that puts it in a good mood, which is expressed by changes in movement. Via [ DigInfo ] This may be a video on how not to fly a robotic spacecraft, but as far as testing a robotic spacecraft goes, this is (sort of) exactly what you want to have happen: [ Project Morpheus ]...... (more)

Open Source Robotics Foundation Officially Announced
Last month, we broke the news that DARPA had decided to award the contract to produce a standard simulation environment for its Humanoid Challenge to the Open Source Robotics Foundation, which nobody had really ever heard of. She s also the president of the Robotics Technology Consortium (RTC), a non-profit organization established to speed the creation and deployment of ground robotics technology, which seems like it would dovetail pretty well with the OSRF. He s the executive vice president of Yujin Robot, a South Korean company best known for their home and entertainment robots. As one of of South Korea s first generation of service robotics companies, Park is in a good position to promote the OSRF in Asia. (more)

Robot reveals the inner workings of brain cells: Automated way to record electrical activity inside neurons in the living brain
Gaining access to the inner workings of a neuron in the living brain offers a wealth of useful information: its patterns of electrical activity, its shape, even a profile of which genes are turned on at a given moment. Using this technique, scientists could classify the thousands of different types of cells in the brain, map how they connect to each other, and figure out how diseased cells differ from normal cells. In all these cases, a molecular description of a cell that is integrated with [its] electrical and circuit properties has remained elusive, says Boyden, who is a member of MIT's Media Lab and McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Kodandaramaiah, Boyden and Forest set out to automate a 30-year-old technique known as whole-cell patch clamping, which involves bringing a tiny hollow glass pipette in contact with the cell membrane of a neuron, then opening up a small pore in the membrane to record the electrical activity within the cell. (more)

AVRS Responds to Questions Regarding Its Patent Position
AVRS announced today that it has received numerous calls regarding the AVRS press release of May 2, 2012 concerning the April 27, 2012 decision of the Board of Patent Appeals and Interference ("BPAI"). Mr. Geldenhuys explained, "If the results of the Interference had favored AVRS, it would have resulted in a fifth patent for AVRS. FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS Note: This news release and the Company's web site referenced in this news release contain "forward looking statements" within the meaning of the federal securities laws regarding the future plans and expected performance of AVRS that are based on assumptions that AVRS considers reasonable. AVRS undertakes no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements to reflect new information, events or circumstances after the date of this release or to reflect any change in the expectations of AVRS with respect to these forward-looking statements. (more)

Hey Graduates: Forget Plastics
For the first time, I began to think through the practical implications of what the advent of the information explosion (now commonly referred to as Big Data) really meant to both individuals and corporations. That spark nearly five years ago led to an investment thesis here at Flybridge, where we have looked to invest behind Big Data applications and uses across a number of vertical industries. Fortunately, we have been able to find some extraordinarily talented entrepreneurs who have thought deeply about this issue of Big Datas impact on vertical industries. The company uses abig data approach to determine what the particular advertisement should be for the particular user at that particular moment across all digital channels - display, mobile, video and social. (more)

Remedy Informatics to Debut SpecimenTrack, Next-Generation Biorepository ...
There is vast potential in both high quality biospecimens and metadata currently locked up in biorepositories around the world that, if properly integrated, can drive benchside research, drug discovery, and clinical outcomes," said Hank Wu, Director of Translational Informatics for Remedy Informatics. "The dual informatics challenges of Translational Research 2.0 are to connect and harmonize traditionally separate data sets and disciplines from the lab, clinic, and biobank, and to enable researchers to conduct deep interpretation of the data with powerful pattern recognition tools. SpecimenTrack coupled with Investigate represents a significant leap forward for biobanks and translational research institutions by giving them powerful tools to maximize the research potential of biospecimens. " Built on the powerful Mosaic Platform, SpecimenTrack and Investigate are highly configurable research management software that enable researchers to customize data capture forms, workflows, visual queries, dashboards, and data models to their specific needs...... (more)

Building machines that see: Finding edges in images
Eric Gregori, BDTI 5/9/2012 4:11 PM EDT With the emergence of increasingly capable low-cost processors and image sensors, its becoming practical to incorporate computer vision capabilities into a wide range of embedded systems, enabling them to analyze their environments via image and video inputs. Then, after explaining edge detection from an algorithmic perspective, we show how to use OpenCV, a free open-source computer vision software component library, to quickly implement application software incorporating edge detection. If you graph the values of a single row of pixels containing an edge, the strength of the edge is shown by slope of the line in the graph. Grayscale soft edge Figure 2 above and Figure 3 below represent eight pixels from two different parts of a grayscale image. (more)

Chuck Akre is Bullish on Mastercard
Good investor: Animated by controlled greed, passionate about investment, self confident but not head strong, flexible in businesses you would buy and never pay more than it is worth. Idea: Mastercard Inc(NYSE:MA) 1) Payment network (global GDP is the summation of payment transactions), Royalty business (growth of consumer spending world wide), Good returns on capital (45% FCF return over the last 5 years), Pricing power keeping up with inflation, 2) CEO is new and strong and 3) Reinvestment (e-commerce and mobile payment global war on cash). We bought in early 2010 on bad news (quarterly results and Durbin) buying at 15x 2010 FCF and 11 x 2011 FCF. (more)

US military embraces robots with greater autonomy
U.S. military embraces robots with greater autonomy PENN HILLS, Pennsylvania (Reuters) - The unattended steering wheel on the 15-ton military truck jerked sharply back and forth as the vehicle's huge tires bounced down a rain-scarred ravine through mounds of mine rubble on a rugged hillside near Pittsburgh. Of more than 6,000 robots deployed, about 750 have been destroyed in action, saving at least that many human lives, the Pentagon 's Robotics Systems Joint Program Office estimates. "The ground domain is much, much tougher than the air domain because it's so dynamic," said Myron Mills, who has worked on both aerial and ground robotic systems and now manages an autonomous vehicle program for Maryland-headquartered Lockheed Martin Corp. Enough progress has been made that Lockheed's Squad Mission Support System, a 5,000-pound (2,268 kg) vehicle designed to carry backpacks and other gear for overloaded foot soldiers, is now being tested in Afghanistan. (more)

Daniela Witten: Using artificial intelligence to study genomes
Daniela Witten, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington in Seattle, is developing artificial intelligence programs to sort the slurry, helping researchers develop more personalized and effective treatments for cancer and other diseases. Witten is using statistical machine learning to discover the nuggets of gold in the ore of biological research. A statistical analysis of the 3 billion base pairs of DNA making up a cancer cell may be able to identify the pairs or combination of pairs responsible for certain characteristics of the cancer. Before I got to college, I was planning to study foreign languages, Witten said in an interview with the blog Simply Statistics. (more)

Tempering the Rise of the Machines
But to make this revolution work for students, academic leaders at those traditional institutions will need to broker a peace between artificially intelligent teaching programs and their human counterparts, according to a new report written by the former presidents of two prominent traditional universities on behalf of the nonprofit Ithaka S+R. Technology designed to usher students through new material is thought likely to play a significant role in the future of higher education, although critics have worried that relying too heavily on such technology could harm learning. The hope is that these systems will not only help teach students new concepts but also will aid their human instructors by collecting data on how students interact with those ideas and help identify, on a student-by-student basis, what sort of human intervention might be helpful...... (more)

Can Automated Deep Natural-language Analysis...
13:43 GMT, May 4, 2012 Program to assist warfighters with planning and decision-making by inferring implicit information in text, filtering redundancy and connecting like documents Making sense of large amounts of data is a challenge for military operations officers and intelligence analysts whose window for processing that data is often small. In reviewing captured documents, intelligence reports, news articles and related information, conservative estimates indicate that these personnel are unable to explore as much as 90% of the information available to them due to mission, time and resource constraints. Automated, deep natural-language understanding technology may hold a solution for more efficiently processing text information. If successful, DEFT will allow analysts to move from limited, linear processing of insurmountable quantities of data to a nuanced, strategic exploration of available information. (more)

Voice Recognition Saves The Day!
The ability to type has become somewhat paramount in our digital world, and for those who spend their days in front of a computer, being able to use both hands on the keyboard is practically a necessity. The hunt and peck method of typing has never worked for me, and perhaps because I spent so much time in front of my keyboard I can envision the QWERTY layout when I close my eyes. While many students taking their first typing class may bemoan the layout, I am one who says kudos to Christopher Latham Sholes the newspaperman who came up with the idea of a multi-row keyboard. I am now continuing to do my job as a writer, both by typing one-handed and with the help of voice recognition software. (more)

Siri's Voice Can Be Heard In Nuance's Guidance
The brightest light in Apple's ( AAPL ) quarterly earnings report came from sales of its iPhone 4S, whose most defining feature is the voice recognition assistant Siri. The phone's eye popping growth, particularly in Asia where it launched in January, was likely behind Nuance's ( NUAN ) upside guidance issued on April 26th. The engine behind Siri And, while suppliers like Nuance can't refer directly to Apple, the company was born out of DARPA funding to SRI International, just like Siri. In it SRI writes, "Siri has also partnered with Nuance Communications to power its robust speech recognition capabilities - the same technology behind the successful Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search and Apps for iPhone". (more)

Scribe Healthcare Interactive Includes Customizable Cloud Features for Greater ...
Healthcare Technology Featured Article Scribe Healthcare Technologies Inc. Since physicians and healthcare personnel need to be adaptable to cost efficient ways of practicing healthcare, Scribe Interactive is one tool that can immediately generate transcription layout from a dictation. With Scribe Interactive, the built in Scribes M*Modals Speech Recognition Engine leverages existing voice profiles to accomplish this. Even without a recognized voice profile, Scribe Interactive allows users to create verbal snippets for efficiency. (more)

'Smart' Homes Prevent Illness, Run The Dryer
Smarty-pants, tattle-tale homes may be just around the corner, predicts Diane Cook, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Washington State University. "In the home, the idea is that computer software, playing the role of an intelligent agent, perceives the state of the physical environment, reasons about this state using artificial intelligence, and then takes actions to achieve specified goals, such as maximizing comfort of the residents and maintaining health and safety," Cook writes. Present home-management systems must be pre-programmed by home owners: You need to tell your system when to turn your heat on or off. So far, in fact, may autonomous intelligence advance that tomorrow's homes may need to incorporate software that provides for occupants "to retain ultimate authority to resent the system and to impose restraints that prevent the home from taking undesired or harmful actions. (more)

Assistive Technology Computer Products for Low Vision Designed by Ai Squared ...
The products from Ai Squared are available in 20 languages and are sold in 45 countries throughout the world. Their state-of-the-art products include ZoomText, ZoomText USB, the ZoomText Large-Print Keyboard and ZoomText Express. They introduced their flagship product, ZoomText, in 1988 and as the popularity of this product grew, the company shifted its focus to the exclusive development and marketing of software for the visually impaired. Their state-of-the-art products include ZoomText, ZoomText USB, the ZoomText Large-Print Keyboard and ZoomText Express. (more)

Argentine company developing leading machine translator
Just when Argentina devalued its peso, New Zealander Charles Campbell and a group of local language teachers didnt hesitate in leaving their academies behind to begin a translation serviceand their bet paid off. Brizuela hopes to have the machine begin performing English to Spanish and Spanish to English translation this year as that is 85% of TBOs business. For the last five years, as there has been a great increase in processing availability, statistical learning has become a reality in the market with work being reduced by months on top of using smaller groups, said Laura Alonso Alemany, a linguist with the Natural Language Processing Group at the National University of Cordoba which supported TBO. The brains behind TBOs machines is Moses, a GPLed translation platform supported by a number of universities and organizations including MIT, Edinburg and DARPA, among others. (more)

Continental Develops Semi-Autonomous Car Technology
Companies like Audi are even developing an all-round system that drives the car in traffic jams. An "Emergency Steer Assist" system helps drivers swerve to avoid hazards, and a force-feedback accelerator pedal to encourage more efficient driving. Continental considers it "driver assist" technology, rather than something to take over driving entirely, but in testing the car has operated well on the highway, slowing with traffic, avoiding construction cones and edging along with stop-and-go traffic. While many are uneasy over the though of their cars driving for them, autonomous cars are getting closer and closer to production reality, and some states--such as Nevada--have already given the technology the green light....... (more)

Ancestry.com Preps for Flood of Census Queries
The government's release of the 1940 census will give researchers access to 130 million records. Ancestry.com has been preparing for the expected spike in traffic at its website, while applying artificial intelligence to help people find ancestors in its giant databases. CIO For Ancestry.com, big data is about to get even bigger. The subscription-based website for finding long-lost relatives already has 6.7 billion historical records and 4.8 billion people named in family trees on its website. (more)

Be afraid: Robot experts say machines are catching up
The idea of a robot coup d'etat is based on the sci-fi notion of "technological singularity" -- the point where machines become powerful enough to improve their own instruction sets and capabilities without human intervention, leading to a runaway chain of self-upgrades that surpasses human comprehension. Smart machines like IBM's Watson supercomputer aren't the product of some magical breakthrough, but of a lot of separate research efforts that solved individual problems. The rapidly advancing power of microchips means that machines with far fewer chips will be able to perform Watson-like feats. Smart machines are already designing the chips that are paving the way for ever smarter machines. (more)

Scientists tap the cognitive genius of tots to make computers smarter
People often wonder if computers make children smarter. Imagine if computers could learn as much and as quickly as they do, said Alison Gopnik a developmental psychologist at UC Berkeley and author of The Scientist in the Crib and The Philosophical Baby. Young children are capable of solving problems that still pose a challenge for computers, such as learning languages and figuring out causal relationships, said Tom Griffiths, director of UC Berkeley's Computational Cognitive Science Lab. This spring, to consolidate their growing body of work on infant, toddler and preschooler cognition, Gopnik, Griffiths and other UC Berkeley psychologists, computer scientists and philosophers will launch a multidisciplinary center at the campus's Institute of Human Development to pursue this line of research. (more)

The Need for Autonomous Vehicle Law
Advertisement Related What happens if you get into a collision with an autonomous car? The development of autonomous cars is accompanied by numerous legal uncertainties that, if left unresolved, may discourage companies from investing in the development of such technologies, despite their great promise for reducing the number of deaths and injuries on our highways. What if you could make your car follow the car in front of it perfectly would the driver be responsible then? Nevada has updated their laws to allow texting while driving a licensed autonomous car, but Nevada has prohibited being intoxicated in the same autonomous vehicle. (more)

On Text Analytics vs Machine Translation
About Ken Hu: Thinkudo Labs Currently, Ken is founding the text mining company Thinkudo Labs. Personally, I would claim that Text Analytics covers topics which extract and normalize text into measurable data. Instead of extracting information from the text, it transforms the text into another form. This may lead to misinterpretation that English text is a requirement for Text Analytics problems.However, that is just not true. (more)

IAI`s military robot acts like barber in charity role
IAIs military robot acts like barber in charity role (PhysOrg.com) -- In robotics, three hands are better than one, in the form of a device that has been developed by Intelligent Automation Inc (IAI) for use as troop support. The three-armed robot can protect troops by lending its handling skills to carry out backback inspections for explosive devices, for example, and, to use the military term, "disarm" Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). Paul Bosscher, a robotics engineer at Harris, described the impressive features of its device to ABC News at the time. "The robot can cut wires, pull blasting caps, surgically defeat the explosive device and in the process save all of this forensic evidence that they use to ID who the bombmakers are what their bomb-making methods are," Bosscher said. (more)

The beauty of machine learning? It never stops learning
The beauty of machine learning? Machine learning makes it scalable and cost-effective to connect them in a world of unstructured data across millions of sites and products. While this machine learning sounds like a magical solution, its not bulletproof because it depends on human observation that varies from inputs.Amarnath Thombre, SVP, Strategy and Analytics at Match.com believes strongly that successful businesses will be those that observe their customers. Every organization will need to do machine learning to augment human decisions As data grows and machine learning improves, however, that will require more computing horsepower and multiple iterations of data interpretation. (more)

Future of voice recognition: Assistants that learn from you
Voice-activated assistants are playing an increasingly prominent role in the technology world, with Apple's introduction of Siri for the iPhone 4S and Google's ( rumored ) work on a Siri competitor for Android phones. Siri is taking steps toward providing a natural, conversation-like experience with voice-activated assistants, as Jacqui Cheng noted in the Ars iPhone 4S review. "When given direct and clear tasks, Siri performs well, and it's nice not having to memorize a strict list of commands," Cheng wrote. "The best part about Siri is the fact that you can (or should be able to, anyway) speak to it like you would speak to a person without having to conform to a special speaking syntaxthe number one turn-off for 'regular' people using voice control features. (more)

Psychology: Our mind plays 'tricks' on us all the time
Psychology has come a long way since its early days in the understanding of how the human mind works. The reason being that when they were paid more, they felt they were being rewarded adequately and so the degree of interest in the material was less important to them, but when paid less, there would be no logical reason to engage in such a boring task, so the mind had to justify the experience and made it seem more interesting. In another example, if two groups of people are given the same type of microwave quality food, the group that pays more money for it will perceive it as tasting better because, according to CD, their minds could not tolerate paying a high price for bad food. The mind is capable of automatically altering its perceptions in order to reduce the possibility of dissonance, seemingly without the awareness of the individual...... (more)

Smarter Voice Capabilities Will Transform Medical Documentation
In simple terms, that's one on the dilemmas that persist when clinicians interact with clinical information systems. Most provider organizations are familiar with Nuance's Dragon Medical, for instance, which lets clinicians dictate their notes directly into an EHR instead of sending them to first be transcribed into text. The major problem with this approach has been that it provides a huge repository of free text narrative that can't populate all the structured components of a hospital's clinical information system, leaving a potential treasure chest of valuable insights and facts in limbo. According to Chris Spring, MModal's VP of health IT, the platform "listens" to a clinician's dictation in real time and tells her if she's missing any vital information already in the patient's chart. (more)

What the Voice-Recognition Industry Needs Most
I'm a big believer that voice-recognition technology will play an increasingly prominent role in how we interact with technology -- so much that I've made a bet on Nuance Communications ( NAS: NUAN ) accordingly as the clear technological leader in the field. Datria is a small private player with about 50 employees, and it resells Nuance's speech engine while also counting software giant SAP ( NYS: SAP ) as an investor. That being said, Datria uses a plug-and-play model, so it could theoretically swap out the engine if needed, but Datria has been reselling Nuance's engine for 14 years. Many of those companies license Nuance's engine, and the recognition side works great, but if the application (which is frequently built in-house) isn't programmed to interpret all the ways you can say "yes," then it might not realize that "absolutely" means the same thing. (more)

We need to talk about speech recognition
Look under the skin of the Siri software and you will find that the speech recognition is provided by industry stalwart Nuance Communications. I've just tried it on my Windows 7 machine and it was quite fun, except for having to spell out and correct Nuance and Google spelling, then sorting out capitalisation, and now I've given up already, back to typing! Controlling some functions of your 2012 Ford Explorer by voice I think Siri has shown us that the voice-recognition technology isn't the most important thing here but the application software layer that the users go through to use the speech recognition. But the application built to use the Nuance speech recognition isn't programmed to interpret all the ways you might say, for example, "No, thank you". (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)

Devangshu Datta: Man and machines
The most obvious example of defence research translating into normal civilian use is the Internet, which was launched as a project to develop communications protocols to survive wartime network disruptions. The payoffs for autonomous driverless cars, or roadbots as they are sometimes known, would be large. The early roadbot trials started with the Eureka project between 1987 and 1995. These could negotiate multi-lane highway traffic without much intervention. (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)

TCS Associates Expands Speech Recognition Solutions for Disabled To Include ...
TCS Associates has a solid and successful history of providing voice recognition products and services to persons with disabilities, so it seemed a natural move to offer those same cutting edge technologies to medical professionals through products like Dragon Medical Practice Edition. TCS Associates is now helping physicians (in addition to lawyers, social workers and other professionals) and medical practices realize the significant time and cost savings of transitioning from manual to voice entry of data with the use of Dragon Medical Practice Edition. Dragon Medical Practice Edition is a powerful and configurable voice recognition solution for small practices with 24 physicians or less, and greatly facilitates the entry of patient notes, coding or prescription information into a practices Electronic Health Record (EHR) software. For medical practices that already have an Electronic Health Record system in place, TCS supports the integration and customization of programs such as Dragon Medical Practice Edition into their existing office IT infrastructure. (more)

There are two ways to make large datasets useful
Ive spent the majority of my career building technologies that try to do useful things with large datasets. * One of the most important lessons Ive learned is that there are only two ways to make useful products out of large data sets. Trading systems that hedge funds use are also often fault tolerant: if you make money 80% of the time and lose it 20% of the time, you can still usually have a profitable system. Because we knew automation would only get us 80-90% accuracy, we built 1) systems to estimate confidence levels in our ratings so we would know what to manually review, and 2) a workflow system so that our staff, an offshore team we hired, and users could flag or fixinaccuracies. (more)

Online Tool for Faster Autism Diagnosis
Making a diagnosis of autism is typically a difficult and time-consuming exercise. Experts believe the procedure could reduce the time for autism diagnosis by nearly 95 percent, from hours to minutes, and could be easily integrated into routine child screening practices to enable a dramatic increase in reach to the population at risk. Professionals administer the Autism Diagnostic Interview, Revised, known as the ADI-R, a 93-question questionnaire, and/or the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, known as the ADOS exam, which measures several behaviors in children and adults. Using machine learning techniques, an artificial intelligence method where machines are trained to make decisions, Wall and his team studied results of the ADI-R from the Autism Genetic Research Exchange for more than 800 individuals diagnosed with autism to find redundancies across the exam. (more)

DARPA grant to support research into auto-translation of Chinese
While emerging technologies such as Google Translate have shown promise, much work must be done to improve the language translation applications that America will need as one of its most important 21st century relationships develops. To move the technology forward, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded a $13.7 million grant, called Linguistic Resources for Multilingual, Genre-Independent Language Technologies via its Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT) Program to the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania to develop linguistic resources. Xue has been involved in this research program for years, beginning with Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization (TIDES) then Global Autonomous Language Exploitation ( GALE ), a five-year program that he worked on while at the University of Colorado. According to DARPA, BOLT is part of a broader effort to provide language translation in support of defense and national security requirements, ranging from phrase translation to scanning and translation of large data sets...... (more)

What Will Siri's Kids be Like? Chatty and Much Smarter
Siri may be able to tell you the capital of Kazakhstan and show you the citys weather forecast -- but her descendents will be able to book the flight that gets you there. Virtual assistant robots -- like Apples ( AAPL ) Siri, GoArmy.coms Sergeant Star or Jenn on alaskaair.com -- may soon be able to recognize and retain the tastes and preferences of users and extract context from conversations, emulating more of a two-sided dialogue. Siri may not be the first with this type of technology, but Apple raised peoples attention to artificial intelligence last year when it integrated Siri into the iPhone 4S. IBM ( IBM ) supercomputer Wilson, who beat former Jeopardy champions on live television last year, also contributed to the growing interest. (more)

The Human Voice, as Game Changer
Here, Mr. Sejnoha, the companys chief technology officer, and other executives are plotting a voice-enabled future where human speech brings responses from not only smartphones and televisions, cars and computers, but also coffee makers, refrigerators, thermostats, alarm systems and other smart devices and appliances. Today, voice technology is a fixture of many companies customer-service operations, albeit an occasionally maddening one. But now the race is on to make the voice the sought-after new interface between us and our technology. No player is bigger in voice technology than Nuance, of Burlington, Mass., an industry pioneer that has acquired more than 40 companies in the field and today employs 7,300 people. (more)

Design and print your own robot
MIT is leading an ambitious new project to reinvent how robots are designed and produced. Funded by a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the project will aim to develop a desktop technology that would make it possible for the average person to design, customize and print a specialized robot in a matter of hours. This research envisions a whole new way of thinking about the design and manufacturing of robots, and could have a profound impact on society, says MIT Professor Daniela Rus, leader of the project and a principal investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). It currently takes years to produce, program and design a functioning robot, and is an extremely expensive process, involving hardware and software design, machine learning and vision, and advanced programming techniques. (more)

IU Bloomington undergraduates honored for outstanding research, creative activity
-- Six undergraduate students at Indiana University Bloomington have been recognized for projects that include developing a computer vision program for identifying birds; Created in 2010, the Provost's Award for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity is sponsored by the offices of the provost, the vice provost for undergraduate education, and the vice provost for faculty and academic affairs. But, working with Crandall and IU biologists, he was able eventually to develop an algorithm that could consistently identify bird species. Karissa McKelvey, a senior in the School of Informatics and Computing from Santa Rosa, Calif., worked under the supervision of professor Filippo Menczer on the Truthy project, which analyzes and makes accessible the massive stream of data disseminated through social media. She recently presented her work in a peer-reviewed paper for the 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Seattle...... (more)

Video Friday: Happy Easter, With Robots
Robots, I guess, are really big on Easter. I think the TurtleBots at Clearpath Robotics need to have their dates reset, cause they re a wee bit early on the Easter egg hunt: Unknown to the human employees at Clearpath, our robots decided it was high time they partook in the fun of Easter celebrations. Imagine our surprise when we arrived at work to find all available surfaces covered in eggs and an Easter egg hunt in full swing. In a characteristically cheeky move, one of our more personable TurtleBots took it upon itself to play Easter Bunny and hide eggs around the office for the other TurtleBots to find. (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)

Is Machine Learning v Domain Expertise the wrong question?
About James Taylor: CEO Decision Management Solutions James Taylor is CEO and Principal Consultant at Decision Management Solutions and one of the leading experts in decision management and decisioning technologies. Some decisions are heavily influenced by policy and regulation (deciding if a claim is complete and valid for instance) while others are more heavily influenced by the kind of machine learning insight common in analytics (deciding if the claim is fraudulent might be largely driven by a Neural Network that determines how normal the claim seems to be). We could also ask if there are really any decisions where machine learning or analytics cannot help at all (probably but only because the decision-makers dont have access to data that would help or because they are obliged to follow a precise set of regulations/policies). Or we could ask if there were any decisions that only required know-how that can be derived automatically using machine-learning (probably not, most business decisions involved some policy and regulations that are fixed even if we can replace experience with machine learning). (more)

iOS 5 Voice Assistant To Be 'World Changing'
One of the big surprises to come from iOS 5's debut at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference back in June was the lack of any news about voice actions or voice controls. Apple purchased a company called Siri in April 2010, and many had assumed that Apple was building Siri's voice action technology into iOS. Speculation that voice controls would be introduced into iOS 5 began to rise again several weeks ago when traces of it were spotted in one of the iOS 5 betas . The other big clue is that Apple has yet to issue a Gold Master for iOS 5, meaning the features of the platform aren't 100% complete and still under development. (more)

Spin-based magnetologic gate to replace silicon chips
The University of California, Riverside has received a $1.85 million National Science Foundation grant to develop a new way of electron-spin-based computing beyond the scope of conventional silicon electronics. For spin-based computing, data is held in the spin state of the electron. This involves developing a new type of building-block device known as a magnetologic gate that will serve as the engine for this technology similar to the role of the transistor in conventional electronics. For the logic operations, electrons move through the graphene and use its spin state to compare the information held in the individual magnetic electrodes. (more)

Pollen research not to be sniffed at
POLLEN may annoy allergy sufferers in springtime but, viewed under the microscope, a pollen grain is a thing of beauty. The exhibition Pollen Under the Microscope celebrates the purchase of cutting-edge microscope technology to identify pollen grains and speed up our understanding of nature. Some of the smallest images come from the new microscope technology, the Pollen Classifynder system, developed by Massey University in New Zealand. CSIRO and the Atlas of Living Australia purchased the microscope and automated image detection system to rapidly identify pollen - the tiny DNA-carrying grains so vital to agriculture and biodiversity. (more)

Vision-guided robot automates vegetation analysis
After two sets of images are captured by the system under different stages of plant growth and illumination conditions, each image is processed using algorithms provided by MATLAB from The MathWorks (Natick, MA, USA). Each RGB image is captured, then converted to a normalized excessive green (NEG) channel, represented by NEG = 2.8 ( g/r + g + b ) ( r/r + g + b ) ( b/r + g + b ) to emphasize the green channel. Before training, these images were pre-processed to measure specific morphological features of the plants within the images. After the plant perimeter, inner area, width, and height of a plant were measured, the features converted to five normalized featuresheight/width, height/perimeter, perimeter/area, width/area, and height/areato minimize the influences of the image size of each plant. (more)

Software to prevent abuse at the click of a mouse
Teaming up with investigators from the State Office of Criminal Investigation in Berlin, Fraunhofer researchers have come up with an automated assistance system for image and video evaluation that can detect child-pornographic images from among even large volumes of data. Many are avid data collectors: when suspects data media are confiscated, detectives must often click their way through hundreds of thousands of files to find the illegal images they seek. The algorithms use up to several thousand characteristics that describe properties such as color, texture and contours in order to analyze whether an image depicts child abuse. If the system is run on a standard PC, it classifies up to ten images per second, drastically accelerating detectives investigations. (more)

11 Unusual Ways Steve Jobs Made Apple The World's Most Admired Tech Company
The human brain is divided into two hemispheres: left and right. It's faster, mostly gray matter and is optimized to perform linear-sequential processing. That means the left hemisphere is best at processing information in a single-dimension, one sequential item after another. The left hemisphere stores words. (more)

How the Yahoo! homepage predicts your clicks
In the summer of 2008, at an artificial intelligence confab deep in Silicon Valley, Yahoo! senior research scientist Deepak Agarwal revealed that the web giant was using automated algorithms to select news stories on its famous front page. This week, Raghu Ramakrishnan Yahoo! With this system, Deepak Agarwal said at the time, human editors still chose the pool of stories that were eligible for the Today module, but then automated algorithms decided which stories got placed where and for how long. (more)

Searching for New Ideas
Web Searching for New Ideas If anyone can preview the future of computing, it should be Alfred Spector , Google's director of research. Spector's team focuses on the most challenging areas of computer science research with the intention of shaping Google's future technology. Another example is Fusion Tables , which is now part of Google Docs [the company's online office suite]. [During the recent hurricane Irene, New York public radio station WNYC used Fusion Tables to create an interactive guide to evacuation zones in the city. (more)

Speech Recognition Tool Comes Up 'Speechless'
Videos The breast-imaging reports, which were reviewed from January 2009 to April 2010, were almost evenly divided into two categories. In one, 307 reports used conventional dictation transcription in which the radiologist dictates the report and a team transcribes and reviews the report. The other 308 reports used automatic speech recognition (ASR) in which the radiologist dictates the report and software immediately transcribes the report onto a computer screen. Dictation was conducted using a handheld speech microphone, the Pro-Plus LFH5276 from Philips Healthcare. (more)

Computational biomarkers can identify at-risk heart attack victims
Subtle markers of heart damage hidden in plain sight among hours of EKG recordings could help doctors identify which heart attack patients are at high risk of dying soon, researchers from the University of Michigan, MIT, Harvard Medical School, and Brigham and Women s Hospital in Boston have discovered, The findings could help match tens of thousands of cardiac patients with life-saving treatment in time. Missing 70 percent of high-risk patients Today s methods for determining which heart attack victims need the most aggressive treatments can identify some groups of patients at a high risk of complications. Using data mining and machine learning techniques, the researchers sifted through 24-hour continuous electrocardiograms (EKGs or ECGs) from 4,557 heart attack patients. These could be prevented with medication or implantable defibrillators, which can shock the heart back into rhythm. (more)

Tiny Robot Makes Big Jumps with Explosive Microrockets
We've seen all kinds of crazy jumping robots, from humanoids to grasshoppers to soft and flexible spheres. But when you start making small robots, like seriously small robots (on the millimeter scale), you have to find new ways to get them to jump, and the Army Research Laboratory has teamed up with the University of Maryland to develop a couple clever ideas. To move, it relies on on the rapid conversion of stored chemical energy to gas in a chemical reaction, which is just a fancy way of saying either rocket motor or controlled explosion. First Leaps Toward Jumping Microrobots by Wayne A. Churaman, Aaron P. Gerratt, and Sarah Bergbreiter from the Army Research Laboratory and the University of Maryland Microrobotics Lab was presented this week at the 2011 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. (more)

Boston Dynamics' Bigger BigDog Robot Is Alive
UPDATE 9/30 4:05 a.m.: Video of Boston Dynamics' new, bigger quadruped, called AlphaDog, is here. Boston Dynamics, the company that brought the world the beloved BigDog quadruped robot, is now showing off its newest beast. The official name is LS3 (Legged Squad Support System), but it seems that the Boston Dynamics guys are calling it BullDog instead. Marc Raibert, the flower-patterned-shirt-wearing founder and president of Boston Dynamics, discussed the LS3 project in a keynote talk today at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. (more)

Asimo shows off dance moves
Honda's humanoid robot, Asimo, was demonstrating its latest abilities at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems recently held in San Francisco. Victor Ng-Thow-Hing, Behzad Dariush, and colleagues were at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems recently held in San Francisco where Spectrum captured this video demonstrating two recent advances. Later, the scientists explain how they're using gestures to improve Asimo's communication skills. China's equivalent of Google, Baidu, plans to release a mobile operating system, Baidu-Yi, based on a customised version of Android and with a marketplace for apps such as games, maps and other [...]... (more)

The Rise of Artificial Intelligence Personal Assistant
There's a rising number of impressive AI assistants that are beginning to be able to truly help us deal with tasks like managing diaries, booking restaurants or taxis, and even helping us writing our latest blog posts. And some, like Guile 3D Studio and Creative Virtual, are even managing to generate revenue. Guile 3D Studio is a Brazilian company founded in 2001 by Guile Lindroth, a system analyst, artificial intelligence specialist and 3D graphic artist. The result is an amazing AI assistant called Denise. (more)

Red Lambda eyes way to crack cloud provider complexity
Red Lambda eyes way to crack cloud provider complexity New IT security and monitoring software platform is designed to manage cloud services data Software firm Red Lambda has today announced an early release programme for its new MetaGrid security and operational intelligence software platform. Powered by the companys AppIron grid computing platform, MetaGrid is designed to unify operational silos and situational awareness, visualise and analyse network security and operational anomalies, and automate IT operations across so-called 'Big Data' environments, like those of cloud services providers. The company said MetaGrid's first four (unnamed) customers currently deployed under the early release programme work in network and cloud infrastructure, social web, and government contractor arenas. Although these early adopters operate in different industries, they all face the same challenge of handling and making sense of unprecedented data volumes and mitigating increased security risks the faster the data grows. (more)

Embedded Vision Alliance debuts
Embedded Vision Alliance debuts Founded in May 2011, the Embedded Vision Alliance now has 17 member companies. Founded in May 2011 by BDTI (Berkeley Design Technology Inc.), an independent technology-analysis and engineering-services firm, the Embedded Vision Alliance now has 17 member companies, said Jeff Bier, BDTI president. This will create new markets and high-growth opportunities for suppliers of electronic vision equipment and components, Bier said. Industrial machine-vision suppliers that are currently vertically integrated may want to consider broader-sourced business models and explore opportunities in other vision markets. (more)

Digital Image Processing and Analysis (2e)
In fact it is a fairly traditional account of mostly linear approaches to image processing. It makes use of CVIPtools - the Computer Vision and Image Processing Algorithm Test and Analysis Tool (CVIP-ATAT) and the CVIP Feature Extraction and Pattern Classification Tool (CVIP-FEPC), which I have to admit I hadn't encountered before reading this book. The book starts off with two chapters covering the obligatory look at computer imaging systems - mostly it is about the CVIPtools but it also covers file formats. Section II is where the real work starts. (more)

UB's Srihari Wins Major International Computer Science Award
His speech, entitled "Probabilistic Graphical Models in Machine Learning," focused on the design of computer programs that learn and are able to modify their behavior in an environment of constantly changing information. Machine learning is crucial in fields such as document analysis and recognition due to the difficulty of expressing perceptual images, such as handwriting, in algorithms that computers can understand. Many second-generation machine learning programs were enabled by postal data collected at the Buffalo post office by UB CEDAR students. " Research by Srihari, his colleagues and students at CEDAR that allowed machines to recognize and understand handwriting was at the core of the first handwritten address-interpretation system used by the U.S. (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)

Robot vision lags behind human sight
Related articles NEW YORK: By pitting human vision against that of machines for the first time, computer scientists have shown that machines still struggle with interpreting visual patterns, compared to their human counterparts. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today, implies that computer vision research still has a long way to go before machines have visual perception rivalling that of humans. Humans recollect, robots forget The fact that humans are better than machines at understanding visual patterns did not come as a surprise to scientists. For machines to achieve a higher level of visual understanding, artificial intelligence researchers are teaching them to recognise individual parts of an object and combine their relative positions into a recognisable whole object. (more)

Image search will shape the future
But Peter Linseley, product manager of Google image search, says Google could come to the rescue again. Instead of typing text, simply take a picture from your mobile phone, do a search by image and the contents --the menu or the street signs or whatever text is in it -- will be translated for you. And as we increasingly replace traditional text with images, 3-D images and real time video in the next few years, it is hard to think of something which the humble field of image processing will not alchemise with its Midas touch. Simply put, image processing is a technical analysis of the complex aspects of an image, deploying algorithms. (more)

Blogging the Stanford Machine Learning Class
A few months ago, Stanford University announced that it would make three of its most popular computer science classes available online: one on artificial intelligence, one on machine learning, and one on database software. Machine learning is an enormously import area of research, and something I think anyone can understand without getting mixed up in batch gradient descent algorithms and double-variable linear regressions. Among the various working definitions of machine learning, which like most disciplines has no agreed-upon description, is this: A field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Stanford is doing a great service by offering this class online, and part of my goal is to see how feasible this massively distributed learning format is. (more)

Unlocking the key to human intelligence
For Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) Professor Patrick Winston, the Ford Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science and leader of the Genesis Group at CSAIL, uncovering the true nature of human intelligence is the next grand challenge.To solve the puzzle of how humans think, Winston is employing classic engineering methodology to build systems that think and comprehend as people do using computational methods.Motivated by a desire to advance artificial intelligence and create systems that operate in a manner consistent with high-level human thinking, Winston feels there is a substantial difference between machines that actually display human-like intelligence and those that possess superb computational powers such as IBMs Watson system. By outfitting machines with language-enabled characteristics the ability to direct our perceptual apparatus to solve problems, to describe events, and to teach through the sharing of stories Winston feels scientists will be able to develop systems that not only can sift through vast amounts of information, but also can deploy human-like precedent-based judgment to help solve complex problems and deal with complex situations.Winston and his students focus on creating systems that use previously acquired common sense knowledge and knowledge of plot patterns when tasked with story-understanding problems, just like humans do. (more)

How Google's Self-Driving Car Works
Once a secret project, Google's autonomous vehicles are now out in the open, quite literally, with the company test-driving them on public roads and, on one occasion, even inviting people to ride inside one of the robot cars as it raced around a closed course . Thrun and Urmson explained how the car works and showed videos of the road tests, including footage of what the on-board computer "sees" [image below] and how it detects other vehicles, pedestrians, and traffic lights. The car then combines the laser measurements with high-resolution maps of the world, producing different types of data models that allow it to drive itself while avoiding obstacles and respecting traffic laws. The vehicle also carries other sensors, which include: four radars, mounted on the front and rear bumpers, that allow the car to "see" far enough to be able to deal with fast traffic on freeways; The second thing is that, before sending the self-driving car on a road test, Google engineers drive along the route one or more times to gather data about the environment. (more)

The future of artificial intelligence
I believe as artificial intelligence advances, a new model "software as collaborator" - will become possible, with tremendous potential benefits. Software collaborators could be designed to be enough like people that this mutual adaptation is possible, and that we can understand and trust their contributions. Software collaborators that do not share these frailties could become valuable complements to individuals and to teams. We are still a long way from being able to build software collaborators, but there is important progress being made in many fronts in artificial intelligence. (more)

Do Androids Dream of Electric Authors?
By PAGAN KENNEDY Published: October 14, 2011 One day, I stumbled across a book on Amazon called Saltine Cracker. The book was co-edited by someone called Lambert M. These books, or booklike products, lie in wait for the distracted shopper, someone who might think, Oh good, I really need a tome on Spearmans law of diminishing returns, so Ill just go ahead and pay $84. And with one overhasty click on the Place your order button, the shopper can pay a lot of money for a book that turns out to be warmed-over Wikipedia. VDM Publishing puts a notice on the cover of its books, boasting high-quality content by Wikipedia articles! (more)

This Week In Bots: Thinking, Charming, Walking, And Life-Saving Droids
Meka is intended to design a robot that builds emotional links between humans and the machines themselves, and at the recent Intelligent Robots and Systems event, Professor Sentis of the University of Texas showed off Meka's most recent iteration. He's created a system called Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Network, SOINN, which means instead of mutely and un-intelligently following pre-programmed tasks, his Kawada Industrie's robot called Hiro can actually perceive and interpret information about the real world environment around it, and process existing knowledge, to complete an assigned task. For example, by training an inquisitive robot like Hiro to do a number of tasks--with the robot querying for help when it's not sure about something--he thinks it'll ultimately be possible to ask Hiro to make a cup of tea, and have it share knowledge with a robot in England about how to complete the task (something this robot has learned itself). (more)

Automation: Leading the way
Australia 's rapidly expanding multi-billion dollar mining technology and services industry is leading the drive for innovations to boost productivity and efficiency. As Australian mining exports increase, mining companies are investing significant resources into the development and implementation of remote automation and unmanned machinery to meet this demand. The isolated geographical locations of many Australian mines, in addition to safety considerations, make remote automation and unmanned machinery an attractive option for mining companies. While traditional automation and robotic technology in the mining industry has comprised standalone autonomous equipment managing a selected process, today it is possible to connect these discrete processes resulting in an integrated, productive mining environment. (more)

Atelka Announces Strategic Partnership with SATMAP
News ReleasesCanadian call center company Atelka Inc. Using neural networks and artificial intelligence technology, SATMAP matches customers with call center agents and delivers enhanced sales and reduced costs as a result. Their forward thinking management immediately recognized the benefits that our technology will afford their clients, and they have been vocal in their conviction that SATMAP is the only truly innovative technology in the call center space, said Orlando Hampton, SATMAPs Executive Vice President, Client and Partner Services. About SATMAP SATMAP is the worlds leading provider of neural-network and artificial intelligence based real-time personality matching technology for call centers. (more)

Don't parlez-vous? Google enhances Translate app
Google enhances Translate app The inclusion of Siri on the iPhone 4S has brought a lot of attention generally to the topic of voice recognition on mobile devices. Now, Google is updating a feature in its Translate app for Android devices that can handle speech-to-speech translation among 14 languages. In all, Google is adding a dozen languages to English and Spanish, which were the two languages initially featured in the app. In a company blog post, Google explains how it works: You speak into your phone's microphone, and the Translate app will translate what you've said and read it aloud. (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)

Artificial Intelligence Gets Some Help From Football Players
Or maybe computer scientists are simply letting football players think they matter, and they are really just data. As it turns out, football is very complex, and computers struggle to see and understand plays a coach or even an average fan would find routine, just like a 4-year-old could see a cartoon drawing of a chicken and say "that's a chicken" while a computer could not. Graphic courtesy of Oregon State University Football actually makes a pretty good test bed, because its much more complicated that you might think both visually and strategically, but also takes place in a structured setting, saidAlan Fern, an associate professor of computer science at Oregon State University. An OSU Beavers passing play, which is very fast-paced, designed to confuse the opponent, and based on complex rules; the ball could be thrown to any of several receivers and it still only works about half the time. (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)

Factory robot-arm inventor dies at 99
The Unimate, as the product became known, was designed to perform jobs that were dangerous or costly for human workers. In 2006, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers estimated more than 950,000 industrial robots were in operation worldwide. Devols business partner was engineer Joseph Engelberger. Today 3:00 am The Interior Department announced Friday that it would hold the first oil and gas lease sale for the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill last year. (more)

Formspring open to bullying, says anti-bullying charity
Anti-bullying charities say they are worried about anonymous messaging facilities on the social networking site Formspring. Natalie is 15 and is one of those young people who have had problems. Abuse It turned bad, she admitted. I think the problem with Formspring is that there's no recourse for the victim I get more abuse in person, so I was kind of used to it, she said. (more)

Military Robots Take Off Photos:Drone Time
The brawny combat robot, made by QinetiQ North America, a unit of the U.K.'sQinetiQ GroupPLC, rolls on tank-like treads. Military robots are a deadly serious business, and the gadgetry on display at the Unmanned Systems North America exhibition here underscores the shift by defense companies to selling combat by remote control. Over Japan, pilotless military surveillance planes recently inspected the damage from a nuclear disaster. The former Navy admiral said military researchers are starting to see the potential of unmanned underwater vehicles, or UUVs, to hunt for mines or other threats, much as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan accelerated the demand for bomb-disposal robots to search for suspected roadside bombs. (more)

Diffbot Sees The Web Like People Do, Now Free For Developers
Today, Diffbot is releasing its first set of APIs, now open to all developers for free. The launch has the potential to dramatically impact the types of applications developers can build, and for consumers, it means a whole host of intelligent applications are about to emerge. The New APIs: On-Demand & Follow With the two APIs available now, developers can build apps that automatically extract meaning from pages, apps that understand whats trending and whos talking about it, apps that provide RSS feeds where none were available before and apps that read just the relevant parts of webpages aloud, ignoring ads, header and footer copy. Or FeedBeater , which makes it easy to turn any URL into an RSS feed automatically ( one of Diffbots first creations ). (more)

SAIC Aims to Change Language Services Landscape with Hybrid Chat Translation ...
Chat Translation Featured Articles. In response to this ever-growing need for language service providers and users of translation services to operate more efficiently, Science Applications International Corp. ( SAIC( News - Alert ) ) has unveiled the industrys first-ever machine chat translation solution. Designed to enable tailored and adaptive contextual translation, this new integrated offering is meant for anyone that has to interact with another individual who speaks the same language or a different language, SAIC shared with TMC at the recent SpeechTEK( News - Alert ) 2011 in New York City, where SAIC debuted the solution. Weve brought a single platform that does both text and speech and combined it with hybrid machine translation, Hassan Sawaf, chief scientist for SAIC, told TMC( News - Alert ) during an interview at SpeechTEK. (more)

Local academics recognised for brain computer interface work
It may sound like something straight from a science-fiction novel but Dr Damien Coyle and Dr Kongfatt Wong-Linn have been hailed by peers for their pioneering work in brain computer interface technology which allows people interact with computers using their brainwaves. Dr Coyle, a lecturer in the School of Computing and Intelligent Systems, was awarded the International Neural Network Societys Young Investigator of the Year 2011 award for his outstanding contributions in the field of neural networks at the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) in San Jose while his colleague, Research Fellow Dr Wong-Lin, picked up the award for Best Paper at the same conference. Both the International Neural Network Society and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society are the leading societies in the field so it is a humbling experience to have now received prestigious awards from both societies. He explains: Neurons in a brain region called the dorsal raphe nucleus emit an important brain chemical, serotonin, throughout various parts of the brain, modulating their neuronal activities and network functions, and also regulating mood, cognition and behaviour. (more)

HPCwire: The Rise of the Thinking Machine
Watson's vanquishing of Jeopardy champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings in February set the stage for the year. BrainScaleS has links to Henry Markram's famous Blue Brain work. A lot of this is centered around how such technology will impact the human condition, particular how intelligent computers will displace human labor. Next year, two DOE labs are slated to boot up the most powerful Blue Gene systems ever deployed: the 10-petaflop "Mira" system at Argonne National Lab, and the 20-petaflop "Sequoia" super at Lawrence Livermore. (more)

Matternet and the other Newest Singularity University Startups
In the first phase, it utilizes small-scale electric vehicles deployed with vertical take-off and landing capability, limited payload-bearing capacity and range. Exponential Technologies Exponentially advancing technologies in the following convergent fields of energy storage, nanotechnology, 3D printing, sensors and artificial intelligence will make possible a rapid development of AAV technology and the Matternet. Other Singularity University Companies One of the new companies was doing focused on girls. Our solution is based on: * Needs collection: from patient communities, medical institutes, insurance companies, global health organizations and social media resources * Technology: providing a technology stack, including hardware boards, communication modules, software libraries, software development tools, analytics and cloud-based infrastructure * Engaged developers community: collaborating to share best practices and collaborate on open source software Clarence Tan (who had a mobile communications company before joining Singularity University) said that his goal was to attack the problem of corruption that drains as much as $1 trillion from economies around the world. (more)

Google Translate in the Office
Business Google Translate in the Office The potential usefulness of automatic computerized translation was recognized by the very first AI researchers in the 1950s. The poster child for computer translation is Google Translate, the easy-to-use, general purpose Web-based translation engine that can handle nearly 60 languages. " In part because of Google Translate's growing popularity, the office of the future is getting a verb of the future: "gist. Whilst it's a fascinating area of research, MT is still highly experimental and only suited to certain narrow purposes. (more)

Speech Recognition Leaps Forward
Speech Recognition Leaps Forward During Interspeech 2011 , the 12th annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association being held in Florence, Italy, from Aug. 28 to 31, researchers from Microsoft Research will present work that dramatically improves the potential of real-time, speaker-independent, automatic speech recognition. Dong Yu , researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond , and Frank Seide , senior researcher and research manager with Microsoft Research Asia , have been spearheading this work, and their teams have collaborated on what has developed into a research breakthrough in the use of artificial neural networks for large-vocabulary speech recognition. The notion of using ANNs to improve speech-recognition performance has been around since the 1980s, and a model known as the ANN-Hidden Markov Model (ANN-HMM) showed promise for large-vocabulary speech recognition. The new project applied CD-DNN-HMM models to speech-to-text transcription and was tested against Switchboard, a highly challenging phone-call transcription benchmark recognized by the speech-recognition research community. (more)

Fukushima Robot Operator Writes Tell-All Blog
An anonymous worker at Japans Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant has written dozens of blog posts describing the ups and downs of his experience as one of the lead robot operators at the crippled facility. His blog provides a window into the complex and dangerous work environment faced by the operators, a small group of young technicians who, like other front-line personnel, must approach areas of high radiation, deploying remote-controlled robots to assist with efforts to further stabilize and shut down the plants four troubled reactors . The robots, two PackBots and two Warriors , known for their explosive-disposal work in Iraq and Afghanistan, have performed remarkably well at Fukushima, even after repeated jobs in high-radiation environments, which damage electronics . published on his blog, titled " ," or "Say Whatever IWant *Do Whatever I Want," covering a period from late April to early July 2011 [right, screenshot of a post]. (more)

Professor awarded nearly $1 million grant to study use of social networks
Professor awarded nearly $1 million grant to study use of social networks University of Hawaii at Mnoa Information and Computer Sciences Associate Professor Scott Robertson has been awarded a four-year, $948,537 grant from the National Science Foundation to study the use of social networks and new media in political deliberation, voter decision-making, and civic participation. Use of the Internet and social networking sites to get information about politics is increasing dramatically, especially among young people. This project examines a fast growing, but little understood new type of political participation: online information seeking, deliberation and decision making in the context of Web 2.0 technologies. Robertson serves as the director of the HawaiiComputer-HumanInteractionLab at UH Mnoa. (more)

Computers will be able to tell social traits from human faces, researchers predict
Researchers have developed new computational tools that help computers determine whether faces fall into categories like attractive or threatening, according to a recent paper published in the journal PLoS ONE. Mario Rojas and other researchers at the Computer Vision Center in the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain, in cooperation with researchers from the Department of Psychology of Princeton University, developed software that is able to predict those traits in some cases with accuracies beyond 90%. Facial characteristics play a central role in our everyday assessments of other people. Specifically, the task was formulated with the intention of predicting 9 facial trait judgments (attractive, competent, trustworthy, dominant, mean, frightening, extroverted, threatening, and likable) using Machine learning techniques (a branch of artificial intelligence that uses examples to teach a program how to work). (more)

LifeNews.com -> http://www.lifenews.com/2011/08/29/the-transhumanism-trap-using-technology-to-perfect-the-human-race/?
The Transhumanism Trap: Using Technology to Perfect the Human Race The Transhumanism Trap is out there. Transhumanists hunger for technology that will take an otherwise healthy individual and enhance him or her beyond normal human ability. Anyone who has seen any science fiction film like Surrogates, Limitless,or Splice has seen transhumanism in action. In a post by Joseph Farrah on the dangers of transhumanism at World Net Daily , a commenter wrote the following: So does Farah now believe that former VP Cheney should have the implanted defibrillator (thats been keeping him alive for the last decade) removed? (more)