Tag: History

Bing Translation Learns Hmong Language
Microsoft has added Hmong to the list of languages supported by Bing Translator. This was achieved using new features of Microsoft Translator to train a new translation engine using parallel documents. The Hmong community, which was instrumental in getting this language added to Bing, is concerned with the long-term preservation of the language and sees an important role for online machine translation in this context. Deploying a system that reaches a certain level of quality allows seamless use with the standard Microsoft Translator APIs, and many scenarios powered by the API, like the web translation widget. (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)

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)

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

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

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)

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)

Artificial intelligence: how close is it to passing the test?
TagsThe iCub robot tries to catch a ball during the Innorobo European summit, March 2012 Image: Laurent Cipriani/AP/Press Association Images THE QUEST FOR artificial intelligence (AI) began long ago in human history even earlier than you might think. Recently, scientists have said to we could be closer than ever to passing the Turing Test a method of monitoring the human perception of intelligence in a machine, developed by British mathematician Alan Turing. In practice, the test involves a panel of human judges who read typed answers to questions addressed to both a computer and a human. Turing reasoned that if a computer could impersonate a human being so well as to be indistinguishableas a machine, it could be said that computer is at least as intelligent as a person. (more)

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

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

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)

Science council moves to safeguard South Africa's robotics prowess
We suggest that you upgrade to the latest version of any of the following browsers: close notification Since Czech playwright Karel Capek popularised and, indeed, named the concept of the robot in his 1920 science-fiction play, RUR (Rossums Universal Robots) the word is derived from the Czech word robota, which means labour it has exerted a fascination on both the popular and the scientific, and on engineering and technological minds. This was Unimate, developed by the Unimation (Universal Automation) company in the US, which was specifically founded to manufacture robots for industry. (Unimation was later bought by Westinghouse and subsequently sold to the Franco-Swiss Stubli group, which incorporated it into its robotics division; the name Unimation is no longer used. Some have limited learning ability, explains Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) mining robotics project manager Liam Candy . (more)

Google Translate
It already speaks 57 languages as well as a 10-year-old. Newer methodsdominated by Googleturn the problem around: Using data, statistics, and brute force, they succeed in part by their refusal to "deconstruct" language and teach meaning to computers in the traditional way. Google is grossly outperforming the rule-based methods that have historically been used to teach language to computers. These classic methods work on the principle that language can be decoded, stripped to its purest component parts of "meaning," and built back up again into another language. (more)

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

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

A panel discussion about Artificial Intelligence.
The Charlie Rose Show television broadcast: A panel discussion about the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence with Rodney Brooks of MIT, Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research and Ron Brachman of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. December 21, 2004. (more)

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

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

DaVinci's Walking Lion (1515).
The mechanism of Leonardo DaVinci's walking lion is shown in this video. Links to videos of other DaVinci inventions. 2008. (more)

ENIAC inventor John Mauchly tells all.
"Mauchly, co-inventor of the ENIAC, first unveiled the ENIAC at University of Pennsylvania in 1946. Here are excerpts from Blastoffmedia's 98-minute documentary, 'The Computer and the Skateboard.'" Clips feature John Mauchly, Kay Mauchly, Mitchell Marcus, Evan Snyder, Joe Chapline, and James Reed. 2000. (more)

Endgame: Challenging the Masters.
Brief look at the deciding game of the chess match between Gary Kasparov and Deep Blue, May 11, 1997. 2005. (more)

History of Computer Chess.
Panel Discussion with John McCarthy, David Levy, Murray Campbell and Edward Feigenbaum. Moderated by Monty Newborn. Computer Museum. This panel, comprising seminal contributors to the solution of this challenge -- including two of AI's leading pioneers -- discusses the origin and development of computer chess and what it tells us about ourselves and the machines we build. Sept. 8, 2005. (more)

How Does the Brain Work? (Ch.2 of 4).
Another professional PBS show on AI. Much of the focus is on the Watson program. Nice historical footage of Art Samuel. 02/02/2011. (more)

IWSC / ASWC 2007 Invited Speaker: Chris Welty (IBM T J Watson Research Center) - How I was right even when I was wrong.
"For the past several years I have warned people not to ask me to predict the future, because my predictions are usually wrong. Undaunted by failure, in this talk I will try to predict the future of the semantic web based on a very personal view of its history, the history of the internet, web, semantic web, and AI, and the mistakes I've made predicting where and how they would be valuable." November 15, 2007. (more)

Interview with Joshua Lederberg (An uplifting talk).
Dr. Lederberg gives an uplifting talk on what it is like to be a scientistFrom an oral history conducted by Barbara Hyde with Dr. Lederberg.. March 22, 1996. (more)

Interview with Joshua Lederberg (Early interest in science).
Dr. Lederberg talks about his early interest in science. From an oral history conducted by Barbara Hyde with Dr. Lederberg.. March 22, 1996. (more)

Japan Displays Robo History.
A new exhibition celebrates Japan's long history in the field of robotics. Demos from prototypes. October 2007. (more)

Leonardo Da Vinci's world first Human Robot
Description of Da Vinci's mechanical man. Sidebar links to many other videos showing Da Vinci's inventions. Unk.. (more)

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

NLS Demo.
On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco. This site links to 35 segments,reformatted as RealVideo streaming video clips, with descriptions of each clip. December 9, 1968. (more)

Perspectives on Watson - Witness to History
Interviews with Ray Mooney, Jerry Hobbes, and other AI scientists about the Watson program designed at IBM to compete in the game of Jeopardy. December 13, 2010. (more)

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

Surgical Robotics: Is R2D2 in Your Future?.
"Surgical Robots are here now; they have their roots in Stanford-based research and Silicon Valley development. How do they work? What can they do? Thomas Krummel, MD, [Emile Holman Professor and chair, Department of Surgery, Stanford University School of Medicine] addresses the current uses of surgical robotics, the reasons for using them and their role in future medical treatments." Questions from the audience follow the talk. March 23, 2006. (more)

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

The Antikythera Mechanism (Part 2)
Description of the mechanism, with some recent findings. Shows the working model. 2008. (more)

The ENIAC and its makers: Eighteen-thousand vacuum tubes and a box of light bulbs.
On Valentine's Day sixty years ago, the world read the first newspaper accounts of a mysterious, new computing machine in Philadelphia. It wasn't the first computer ever made, but on that day, public awareness of modern technology took its first great post-war jump forward." Featuring Presper Eckert, John Mauchly, and ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. 1946. (more)

The Founders' Forum.
Moderator: Nils Nilsson. Panelists: Edward Feigenbaum, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Oliver Selfridge, Karen Spark-Jones, Nils Nilsson. Panel #3. July 16, 2006. (more)

University Video Communications Distinguished Lecture Series: Daniel G. Bobrow - Common LISP Object Standard (CLOS).
Daniel Bobrow, Chairman of the Common LISP Object Specification Committee, characterized this lecture as "a snapshot of history in action." After discussing the history of object systems and the current state of the art, he explores the process of developing this new standard. . October 27, 1987. (more)

Video of First Computer with a CPU and ERNST ARM Robotic Arm.
Film switches between clips of Ernst arm moving through picking up and stacking blocks and between shots of the TX-0 Computer. 1955?. (more)

Visions of AI from the First Round of Graduate Students.
Moderator: Raj Reddy. Panelists: Danny Bobrow, Don Loveland, Robert Kahn, Nils Nilsson, Raj Reddy. Panel #1. July 15, 2006. (more)

Washburn Lecture Series at the Museum of Science, Boston: "2001: A Space Odyssey. Are we there yet?" Lecture one (of three) - Human/Computer Conversation: HAL and Beyond, with Justine Cassell, Ph.D..
Justine Cassell's lecture, "Human/Computer Conversation: HAL and Beyond," was the first in the three speaker lecture series: "2001: A Space Odyssey. Are we there yet?" November 6, 2001. (more)

Women in the History of Computer Science: a panel discussion at the 1997 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference.
"A panel of pioneers of the 1940s and 1950s discusses their experiences which range from programming the world's first computing machines to developing biomedical and graphical applications for computers. This video provides an opportunity to hear and learn the hidden history of the period and confirm that Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper were not the only female contributors to the rich history of computing! These pioneers remain role models for women in computing today." September 1997. (more)