AI in the news
ANNOUNCEMENT -- Student Internship for Summer 2010
We are seeking a serious CS student to work with us on the AITopics News Spider -- a web crawler that will gather current news stories from the web and use AI to rank them by relevance. This is a paid position. Please send a one-page letter of interest, with summary of qualifications and the name (& email) of a faculty member who knows you, to: BUCHANAN <at> CS<dot>PITT<dot>EDU with subject = AITOPICS NEWS
"SOME RECENT STORIES"
September 23, 2009: (info) 
February 11, 2009: 1000 novels everyone must read: Science Fiction & Fantasy (part two). Continuation of list in part one. (info)
February 11, 2009: 1000 novels everyone must read: Science Fiction & Fantasy (part one). The Guardian editors' choices of best science fiction. Part two (info)
February 11, 2009: Get in touch with nature with SimAnimals. SimAnimals, a new simulation game for the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS, puts nature in your hands, literally. You play as an animated hand as you tinker with the different forest environments by interacting with the creatures and plants found there. ... There are many things that make this game compelling, including the outstanding graphics, music and artificial intelligence, but the most attractive feature is that the game lets you explore the delicate balances found in (info)
February 10, 2009: British Scientist Warns We Must Protect The Vulnerable From Robots. Top robotics expert Professor Noel Sharkey, of the University of Sheffield, has called for international guidelines to be set for the ethical and safe application of robots before it is too late. Professor Sharkey, writing in the prestigious Science journal, believes that as the use of robots increases, decisions about their application will be left to the military, industry and busy parents instead of international legislative bodies. ...elder-care robots... can help the elderly to maintain independence in their own homes, but their presence could lead to the risk of leaving the elderly in the exclusive care of machines without sufficient human contact." (info)
February 10, 2009: Robots Designed To Save Lives Of Construction Workers. The Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa) of the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech won the grand prize at the 2008 International Capstone Design Fair with a trio of pole-climbing serpentine robots designed to take the place of construction workers tasked with dangerous jobs such as inspecting high-rises or underwater bridge piers. The autonomous robots are designed to climb scaffolding and buildings by wrapping around a poll or beam and then rolling upward via an oscillating joint motion. Using built-in sensors and cameras, the robots would then inspect the structures or handle other dangerous tasks now done by humans, said Dennis Hong, director of Virginia Tech’s Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory and the faculty adviser on the project. (info)
February 8, 2009: New Insight Into How Bees See Could Improve Artificial Intelligence Systems. New research from Monash University bee researcher Adrian Dyer could lead to improved artificial intelligence systems and computer programs for facial recognition. ... Dr Dyer said the research could be applied in the areas of new technology, particularly the development of imaging systems. "What we have shown is that the bee brain, which contains less than 1 million neurons, is actually very good at learning to master complex tasks. Computer and imaging technology programmers who are working on solving complex visual recognition tasks using minimal hardware resources will find this research useful," Dr Dyer said. "Most current artificial intelligence (AI) recognition systems perform poorly at reliably recognising faces from different viewpoints. However the bees have shown they can recognise novel views of rotated faces using a mechanism of interpolating or image averaging previously learnt views." (info)
February 8, 2009: Cognitive Computing: Building A Machine That Can Learn From Experience. Scientists are studying complex wiring of the brain to build the computer of the future, one that combines the brain's abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition and its low power consumption and compact size. Understanding the process behind these seemingly effortless feats of the human brain and creating a computational theory based on it remains one of the biggest challenges for computer scientists. University of Wisconsin-Madison research psychiatrist Giulio Tononi ... says the goal of building a computer as quick and flexible as a small mammalian brain is more daunting than it sounds. Tononi, professor of psychiatry at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health and an internationally known expert on consciousness, is part of a team of collaborators from top institutions who have been awarded a $4.9 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the first phase of DARPA's Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE). (info)
February 8, 2009: Who's Messing with Wikipedia?. ...as Wikipedia's popularity has grown, so has the debate over its trustworthiness. One of the most serious concerns remains the fact that its articles are written and edited by a hidden army of people with unknown interests and biases. Ed Chi, a senior research scientist for augmented social cognition at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and his colleagues have now created a tool, called WikiDashboard, that aims to reveal much of the normally hidden back-and-forth behind Wikipedia's most controversial pages in order to help readers judge for themselves how suspect its contents might be. (info)
February 8, 2009: Semantic Sense for the Desktop . ...enabling computers to grasp ...[meaningful relations between files] has been the subject of long-standing research. Recently, this has focused on the Semantic Web, but a European endeavor called the Nepomuk Project will soon see the effort take new steps onto the PC in the form of a "semantic desktop." Those working on the project, coordinated by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), have been toiling for three years to create software that can spot meaningful connections between the files on a computer. Nepomuk's software is available for several computer platforms and now comes as a standard component of the K Desktop Environment (KDE), a popular graphical interface for the Linux operating system. (info)
February 8, 2009: A Robomedic for the Battlefield. ... researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) are developing technology to give battlefield medics a helping hand--literally. Howie Choset, an associate professor of robotics at CMU, has engineered a snakelike robotic arm equipped with various sensors that can monitor a soldier's condition. The robot can be wirelessly controlled via a joystick, so that a doctor at a remote clinic may move the robot to any point on a soldier's body to assess his injuries as he's being carried to a safe location. (info)
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