Tag: Reasoning

Commentary: Will crosswords cross up computers?
Dr. Fill is the creation of Matt Ginsberg, an artificial intelligence scientist and cruciverbalist, what you should fill in if you're ever starting at the clue: "a creator of crossword puzzles. " He set off on the project a little more than a year ago, in part because he felt Watson left the public with a false impression about the nature of artificial intelligence. That, plus improving artificial intelligence, lets us harness computers to solve increasingly complex problems. (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)

DARPA Shredder Challenge
DARPA has just released five puzzles in a contest that involves extracting information from shredded documents. The background for its Shredder Challenge is that troops often confiscate the remnants of destroyed documents in war zones, but reconstructing them is difficult - and it is a problem that computer science and artificial intelligence could be expected to help with. The ability to reconstruct shredded documents will potentially yield information that may save lives or offer critical information about an adversarys plans, said Dan Kaufman, Director of DARPAs Information Innovation Office. The Shredder Challenge is composed of five separate problems in which the number of documents, subject matter and the method of shredding is varied to present challenges of increasing difficulty. (more)

CSE Colloquia - 2005: Learning, Logic, and Probability - A Unified View.
"Artificial intelligence systems must be able to learn, reason logically, and handle uncertainty. Research has focused on each of these goals individually, and only recently have attempts been made to achieve all three at once. In this colloquium, Pedro Domingos, UW Computer Science & Engineering, describes Markov logic: a representation that combines the full power of first-order logic and probabilistic graphical models, and algorithms for learning and inference in it. Experiments in a real-world university domain." November 2, 2004. (more)

CSE Colloquia - 2006: Turing’s Dream and the Knowledge Challenge.
In this Turing Center distinguished lecture, Lenhart Schubert [University of Rochester] explains that there is a set of clear-cut challenges for artificial intelligence, all centering around knowledge. The solution to those challenges could realize Alan M. Turing's dream - the dream of a machine capable of intelligent human-like response and interaction. Schubert presents preliminary results of recent efforts to extract 'shallow' general knowledge about the world from large text corpora. November 10, 2005. (more)

CSE Colloquia 2001 - Reasoning with Cause and Effect. Speaker: Judea Pearl, University of California, Los Angeles..
"This talk [given by Judea Pearl, University of California, Los Angeles] summarizes concepts, principles, and inference tools that are useful in modeling aspects of causal reasoning. The principles are based on structural-model semantics, in which modifiable functional relationships, representing autonomous physical processes are the fundamental building blocks." Questions from the audience follow the talk. October 4, 2001. (more)

Computer Chronicles: Computers and the Pentagon - Part One (1986).
"The world's biggest computer user is the U.S. government and the military in particular. This program reviews the military uses of computer technology. Shot on location at various research centers around the country. Featured are the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Advanced Decision Systems in Mountain View, California. Demonstrations include the Pilot's Assistant and the Battlefield Commander's Assistant. Also flight and battle simulators from Singer Link." 1986. (more)

Computer Chronicles: Neural Networks.
"Neural networks are artificial intelligence systems modeled after the human brain. This program looks at several examples and applications. Included are Braincel 1.1 from Promised Land Technologies [demonstrated by Murray Ruggiero], BrainMaker Professional 2.0 from California Scientific Software [demonstrated by Mark Lawrence], MacBrain 3.0 from Neurix [demonstrated by Matt Jensen], NeuroSMARTS from Cognition Technology [demonstrated by Richard Mansfield], and ExploreNet from HNC. Also includes visits to NASA [Max Reid describes HONN: Higher Order Neural Network] and Intel [Mark Holler describes ETANN: Electronically Trainable Analog Neural Network] to see the work they're doing on neural networks." Also appearing on the show is Tom J. Schwartz (The Schwartz Assoc.). Hosted by Stewart Cheifet and Jan Lewis. May 15, 1991. (more)

Computers versus Common Sense.
From Google TechTalks. Dr. Douglas Lenat, President and CEO of Cycorp, talks about common sense: "It's way past 2001 now, where the heck is HAL? ... What's been holding AI up? The short answer is that while computers make fine idiot savants, they lack common sense: the millions of pieces of general knowledge we all share, and fall back on as needed, to cope with the rough edges of the real world. I will talk about how that situation is changing, finally, and what the timetable -- and the path -- realistically are on achieving Artificial Intelligence." May 30, 2006. (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)

Imitating a RoboCup Soccer Player Using Case-Based Reasoning.
This video shows how case-based reasoning can be used to imitate a RoboCup soccer agent. We describe how the imitating agent learns through observation and how it imitates. Also, the video shows the behaviour of the imitating agent at various stages in the learning process. July 14, 2008. (more)

Overview Talk on Informatics by Edward "Ted" H. Shortliffe, MD, PhD., presented at the Biomedical Informatics @ Arizona State University Symposium 2006.
An overview of the field, from inception to current trends, and suggestions for how to establish a new Biomedical Informatics academic program. January 19, 2006. (more)

Tower of Hanoi: excerpt from A Conversation with Herbert Simon – A Video Tribute by Julia Love.
Herbert A. Simon uses the Tower of Hanoi puzzle to illustrate how human problem solving is studied. (more)

UBC's Dynamo Project: The World's First Soccer Playing Robots. A collection of 4 videos from the University of British Columbia's Laboratory for Computational Intelligence.
"Alan Mackworth and his group [at the Laboratory for Computational Intelligence, Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia] proposed and built the world’s first soccer-playing robots, which led to the development of robot soccer as the premier global platform for multi-agent robotic research through the International RoboCup Foundation, where he has been honoured as 'The Founding Father'." This early work by The Dynamo Project is shown in the four videos, and explained in the first (the only one with a soundtrack). 1992 - 1993. (more)