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Next
Event
Friday, August 22, 2008, 07:00 PM: Simulations of Society with Loren Cobb
Loren Cobb will present his peculiar 15-year journey into sociological model-making for various military entities, including US Southern Command, the Swedish Ministry of Defence, the British Ministry of Defence, the United Nations, and a miscellany of Latin American countries (Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, ...).
More...
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Artificial Intelligence
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Those entering online dating forums risk having more than their hearts stolen.
A program that can mimic online flirtation and then extract personal information from its unsuspecting conversation partners is making the rounds in Russian chat forums.
The artificial intelligence of CyberLover's automated chats is good enough that victims have a tough time distinguishing the "bot" from a real potential suitor, PC Tools said. The software can work quickly too, establishing up to 10 relationships in 30 minutes, PC Tools said. It compiles a report on every person it meets complete with name, contact information, and photos.
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Computers outperform humans at recognizing faces in recent tests.
For scientists and engineers involved with face-recognition technology, the recently released results of the Face Recognition Grand Challenge have been a quiet triumph. The match up of face-recognition algorithms showed that machine recognition of human individuals has improved tenfold since 2002 and a hundredfold since 1995. Indeed, the best face-recognition algorithms now perform more accurately than most humans can manage.
The necessary in error rate was due in large measure to the development of high-resolution still-images and 3-D face-recognition algorithms. "For the FRVT 2006 and the ICE 2006, sets of high-resolution face images, 3-D face scans, and iris images were collected of the same people." 3-D face recognition has come into its own in the last few years because 3-D sensors for face recognition have become available only recently."
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Humanity was dealt a decisive blow by a poker-playing artificial intelligence program called Polaris during the Man-Machine Poker Competition in Las Vegas.
"There are two really big changes in Polaris over last year. First of all, our poker model is much expanded over last year. And secondly, we have added an element of learning, where Polaris identifies which common poker stratagy a human is using and switches its own strategy to counter."
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DARPA just announced the 36 teams that will advance to the next stage
of the competition. The next stage of the competition will be October
26-31, 2007.
The final competition will be November 3rd, in Victorville,
California at what used to be George Air Force Base.
The vehicles will have to
conduct military supply missions in a mock urban area filled with
traffic.
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Checkers computer becomes invincible. An invincible checkers-playing program named Chinook has solved a game whose origins date back several millennia, scientists reported Thursday on the journal Science's Web site. By playing out every possible move — about 500 billion billion in all — the computer proved it can never be beaten. Even if its opponent also played flawlessly, the outcome would be a draw.
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On Nov. 3, when robot vehicles raced through Darpatown, a simulated suburbia created in an abandoned Air Force Base in Victorville, Calif., each machine appeared to show its own distinct personality.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, robot personality quirks can mirror the individual styles of their human designers. And in this third annual race, sponsored by the Pentagon and now called the Darpa Urban Challenge, the leading machines also reflected a very human rivalry between two leading computer science and engineering schools.
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After just a couple years of practice, Google can claim to produce the best computer-generated language translations in the world - in languages their boffin creators don't even understand.
Last summer, Google took top honors at a bake-off competition sponsored by the American agency NIST between machine-translation engines, besting IBM in English-Arabic and English-Chinese. The crazy part is that no one on the Google team even understands those languages.... the automatic-translation engines they constructed triumphed by sheer brute-force statistical extrapolation rather than "understanding".
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Highlights of the quarter final Darmstadt Dribblers vs. Team Nimbro at RoboCup 2007 in Atlanta. This was a very exciting game, with a score of 4:2 for DD after the first halftime, 5:5 after the second, and finally 6:8 after extended playtime.
Video, 4 min 55 sec
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You don't necessarily need to know much about poker to create a computer program that can play a winning hand of Texas Hold'Em. A knowledge of game theory is at the heart of the new poker robot called GS1.
GS1 is not yet equal to the best human players. It outperformed two leading "pokerbots" in playing Texas Hold'Em in tests. Both of GS1's opponents were commercially available programs that incorporate the expertise of human poker players. GS1, by contrast, develops its strategy after performing an automated analysis of poker rules.
An improved version, GS2, will compete in the American Association for Artificial Intelligence's first Computer Poker Competition.
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A computer program that learns to decode sounds from different languages in the same way that a baby does helps to shed new light on how people learn to talk.
The finding casts doubt on theories that babies are born knowing all the possible sounds in all of the world's languages.
"The debate in language acquisition is around the question of how much specific information about language is hard-wired into the brain of the infant and how much of the knowledge that infants acquire about language is something that can be explained by relatively general purpose learning systems."
The computer program supports the theory that babies systematically sort through sounds until they understand the structure of a language.
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 A system pulls answers from online conversations by identifying the alpha chatterers.
The system was developed to analyze technical conversations in which an objectively correct answer exists.
Online communities are now firmly established in domains ranging from high school gossip to professional open-source software design discussions, generating huge repositories of records of human knowledge processing, pre-converted to digital form.
"For study of online natural language interaction, it's the mother lode."
The fact that human conversation has an inherent structure, including temporal ordering, references to previous statements, labeled sourcing and other clues opens the door to much deeper machine-generated understanding.
To make use of the structure, the team used a graph-based algorithm called HITS (Hypertext Induced Topic Selection).
The interactions used in the study were threaded discussions from three semesters of an undergraduate course in computer science, including 2214 messages in 640 threads, all discussing class material and posing questions about problems.
The implementation integrates three separate elements--speech act analysis, lexical similarity, and poster trustworthiness--to create links for interpretation for individual conversation participants.
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MusicStrands uses artificial intelligence techniques to provide internet users with music recommendations.
Users of the MusicStrands website have access to a directory of 3.7 million songs. They can search the collection and receive music recommendations according to their own tastes in music.
The artificial intelligence techniques used for the recommender systems are based on statistical learning, Bayesian estimation, probabilistic reasoning and visualisation techniques.
The rest of the article will not tell you a single more thing about the system, but it will tell you how prestigious the people who developed it are.
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Researchers are working on a computerised property valuation system which, by means of artificial intelligence techniques, tries to emulate the behaviour of a property valuer and thus offer the market price of a property in any city in the world, although the trials, for the moment, are being carried out in the housing market of Pamplona.
There currently exist applications that offer a valuation of a property by means of statistics, using the surface area in square metres of the dwelling, if it has a lift, the location, if alterations or refurbishments have taken place, selling prices over the past few years, and so on.
In this project the computer is taught the meaning of expressions like, "the house is a disaster" which could mean that "the original construction was very bad, the orientation is awful, the distribution of the rooms impossible or it is a ruin". They system is based on neural networks.
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Google recently released an option to show faces only in their image search results. Via instant messenger, I talked to face recognition software expert Sébastien Marcel about this subject and more.
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Lego robots
Video, 2 min 23 sec
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 When the AI field was founded over 50 years ago, it was squarely focused on the grand dream of creating software displaying general intelligence at the human level or beyond. Since that time the field has drifted in a direction Ray Kurzweil has called "Narrow AI": the creation of intelligent software applications carrying out highly particular functions. The relationship between this sort of narrow AI and "artificial general intelligence" (AGI) as in the original dreams of the AI field, is an issue of dispute among experts. Some researchers believe powerful AGI will result eventually from the development and combination of narrow AI products -- such as, for example, data mining software as is commonly used in the finance industry; auto navigation software like the kind used in the DARPA Grand Challenge; and last but not least, sophisticated search engines like Google. Other researchers believe that AGI will only come about via emulation of the human brain, once brain mapping technology has advanced further. On the other hand, an increasing minority of researchers believes that AGI is most likely to be achieved via computer science researchers explicitly attempting to create AGI software programs, divorced from any particular narrow application area. In this talk I will briefly overview this emerging subdiscipline of "AGI", including the work of various researchers such as Stan Franklin, Pei Wang and Stuart Shapiro. I will then discuss my own work on the Novamente Cognition Engine, an AGI project based on combining a number of knowledge representations and reasoning and learning techniques into an integrative architecture motivated by complex systems theory, and initially oriented at the control of virtual agents in 3D simulation worlds such as Second Life. Google Tech Talks May 30, 2007.
Video, 52:23
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A conscious mind will never be built out of software, argues a Yale University professor. I believe it is hugely unlikely, though not impossible, that a conscious mind will ever be built out of software. Even if it could be, the result (I will argue) would be fairly useless in itself. But an unconscious simulated intelligence certainly could be built out of software--and might be useful. Unfortunately, AI, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind are nowhere near knowing how to build one. They are missing the most important fact about thought: the "cognitive continuum" that connects the seemingly unconnected puzzle pieces of thinking (for example analytical thought, common sense, analogical thought, free association, creativity, hallucination). The cognitive continuum explains how all these reflect different values of one quantity or parameter that I will call "mental focus" or "concentration"--which changes over the course of a day and a lifetime.
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People resist the idea of applying evolutionary thinking to -- thinking.
Here's one of those talks that can change your view of the world forever. Starting with the deceptively simple story of an ant, Dan Dennett unleashes a dazzling sequence of ideas, making a powerful case for the existence of "memes" -- a term coined by Richard Dawkins for mental concepts that are literally alive and capable of spreading from brain to brain. On the way, look out for: a powerful one-sentence secret of happiness, a compelling insight into terrorists' motivation, a chilling view of Islam, And just when you think you know where the talk's heading, it dramatically shifts direction and questions some of western culture's fundamental assumptions.
Video, 15 min 39 sec
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 I was introduced to my first sociable robot on a sunny afternoon in June. The robot, developed by graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was named Mertz. It had camera sensors behind its eyes, which were programmed to detect faces; when it found mine, the robot was supposed to gaze at me directly to initiate a kind of conversation. But Mertz was on the fritz that day, and one of its designers, a dark-haired young woman named Lijin Aryananda, was trying to figure out what was wrong with it. Mertz was getting fidgety, Aryananda was getting frustrated and I was starting to feel as if I were peeking behind the curtain of the Wizard of Oz.
Mertz consists of a metal head on a flexible neck. It has a childish computer-generated voice and expressive brows above its Ping-Pong-ball eyes — features designed to make a human feel kindly toward the robot and enjoy talking to it. But when something is off in the computer code, Mertz starts to babble like Chatty Cathy on speed, and it becomes clear that behind those big black eyes there's truly nobody home.
In a video of Aryananda and Mertz in happier times, Aryananda can be seen leaning in, trying to get the robot's attention by saying, "I’m your mother." She didn't seem particularly maternal on that June day, and Mertz didn’t seem too happy, either. It directed a stream of sentences at me in apparently random order: "You are too far away." "Please teach me some colors." "You are too far away."
Maybe something was wrong with its camera sensor, Aryananda said. Maybe that was why it kept looking up at the ceiling and complaining. As she fiddled with the computer that runs the robot, I smiled politely — almost as much for the robot’s sake, I realized, as for the robot maker’s — I thought, if this thing wails "You are too far away" one more time, I'm going to throttle it.
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The small-size robots
Video, 3:08
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