News Indexed by Topic

January 25, 2006: Programming Commander Data, Coding the Borg - New Viterbi School Undergraduate Class in Artificial Intelligence Turns to Science Fiction for Problem Sets. University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering News. "Milind Tambe, an associate professor of computer science, will be using science fiction as problem sets in a class on artificial intelligence for undergraduate programmers [CS499] beginning in the fall, 2006 semester. 'Computer science is catching up with the ideas in these stories,' says Tambe. 'We are using science fiction as the spice for the main dish of teaching an important new area of our discipline.' While a number of universities use science fiction to introduce concepts in physics and other fields, Tambe believes his course is the first of its kind in computer science. ... The class will focus not on robots per se, but on their 'minds,' what are called in the field of artificial intelligence 'agents.' These are virtual robots, disembodied machine entities that can create strategies to achieve ends, and even negotiate with each other to cooperate while doing so. 'Science fiction provides three key benefits in this course,' said Tambe. 'First, it is a great motivator and it provides context, generating excitement about artificial intelligence topics in general, and agents and multiagent systems in particular. Second, science fiction also helps provide a perspective on how far we have come in our research, as well as current limitations, and future research challenges. Third, science fiction literature is a great vehicle for understanding the impact on society if agent-based computing truly succeeds.'"
>>> AI Courses (@ Resources for Students), Science Fiction, Agents

January 25, 2006: The Road Ahead - How 'intelligent agents' and mind-mappers are taking our information democracy to the next stage. By Bill Gates. Newsweek / available from MSNBC. "As management guru Tom Davenport once put it, 'Knowledge is information combined with experience, context, interpretation, and reflection.' It's the knowledge derived from information that gives you a competitive edge. ... Researchers at Microsoft and elsewhere are developing technology that can unobtrusively 'watch' you working, then make suggestions about related subjects or ideas. ... Computer scientists are also making progress against a long-held dream of 'intelligent agents' that anticipate your needs and provide just-in-time information that's relevant to the work you're doing. Experimental programs known as reasoning engines can test your ideas against common-sense logic, spotting flaws in hypotheses and acting as 'virtual subject experts' to help guide your thinking. These technologies promote consilience --- literally, the 'jumping together' of knowledge from different disciplines. They help people combine their own ideas with at least some existing knowledge far more efficiently than was previously possible. ... Today's search engines are good at locating tidbits of information in an ocean of data, and even at finding answers to simple questions. The next step is pattern-recognition engines and mental models to help people mine and assess the value of all that information, and technologies that infuse online data with meaning and context...."
>>> Interfaces, Agents, Web-Searching Agents, Reasoning, Machine Learning, Expert Systems, Knowledge Management, Information Retrieval, Applications

January 18, 2006: Where now for agent-based computing? IST Results. "What is the future direction for agent-based systems, one of the most important software R&D areas in recent years? Drawing from a body of some 200 industry and academic organisations, a European project has released a strategic roadmap that hopes to guide evolution of the field over the next decade. AgentLink III, as its name suggests, was the third project in the series and author of the roadmap. ... In essence, an agent is an autonomous software system: a system that can decide for itself what it needs to do. Underpinning many aspects of broader information technology, some of the most compelling developments in IT – the semantic Web, ambient intelligence, the Grid, autonomic systems – require agent technologies or something similar for their realisation. ... Another example, [Michael Luck] says, is that of a shipping company that needed to improve its management of shipping routes for oil tankers. 'By modelling each tanker as an agent, the company was able to develop much better simulations of the operating environment, helping them to react more immediately to changing circumstances.' ... He warns, however, of dangers in the growing ubiquity of agent-based computing. Now that such applications are spreading throughout industry, he believes, we are at risk of losing focus as agent-based applications become embedded into ever-larger, and sometimes proprietary, systems.... 'As agent-based systems become "sucked up" into larger infrastructures, they will no longer be recognised as agent-based technologies. The risk is that we lose the ability to think laterally as ever-larger systems narrow the potential for development.'"
>>> Agents, Applications

January 17, 2006: The computer really does say 'no.' Telegraph & telegraph.co.uk. "Aggrieved NHS patients will be able to complain online using computer software that, its makers claim, could settle 98 per cent of cases. Using the internet, patients will register grievances with a so-called 'robot agent' which will inform the relevant hospital or doctors' surgery and decide how to investigate it. In relatively minor cases, such as criticism of car parking facilities, the 'agent' may even be able to resolve the complaint online without any further human involvement. In more complicated cases, the 'agent' might have to hold meetings between the two sides.... The software [developed by a team at Kingston University, Surrey], known as MeDispute, is designed to speed up the time it takes to resolve complaints and also avoid costly courtroom battles. ... The system has been developed from technology created by a company in France, as part of a £1 million European Union project to find ways of improving industrial arbitration. The original programme has already been piloted at the European Court of Arbitration."
>>> Law, Medicine, Customer Service, Multi-Agent Systems, Agents, Applications

January 15, 2006: Watson presumes - Program developed at Northwestern computer lab emphasizes context. By John Van. Chicago Tribune & chicagotribune.com. "Many viewers were probably impressed when a character on Star Trek asked a computer for a cup of tea and it was produced immediately. Not Kristian Hammond. 'I wondered why he had to ask,' said Hammond, co-director of Northwestern University's intelligent information computer lab. 'A truly intelligent machine would anticipate that its operator wanted tea.' That's the kind of smarts that Hammond and his colleagues put in computers -- machines ready to answer questions you haven't yet formed. To Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, the lab's other co-director, too many scientists working with artificial intelligence have spent too much time on esoteric rather than practical pursuits. 'To be useful, anything you build has to be scalable," Birnbaum said, so that one solution can be applied to many problems. Taking years to build a machine that can do one nifty thing really well just won't cut it.' Northwestern's lab specializes in guiding computers through the mountains of information that reside on the Internet and in other databases, plucking out gems a person might use. The secret is context, letting the machine know its user's immediate interests. ... The goal is for your computers to know enough about you to anticipate your needs but keep that information private as they do your bidding, [Hammond] said."
>>> Interfaces, Agents, Web-Searching Agents, Information Retrieval, Applications, Ethical & Social Implications

January 14, 2006: Covert Crawler Descends on Web. By Quinn Norton. Wired News. "Billy Hoffman, an engineer at Atlanta company SPI Dynamics unveiled a new, smarter web-crawling application that behaves like a person using a browser, rather than a computer program. ... The research adds a new wrinkle in the ongoing war between website operators and spambots. ... To select which links to click on, Hoffman has settled on a solution somewhere between a masterful AI and completely random selection. 'In some ways it's a very simplified Turing test -- you can assign the different threads a personality. This crawler, you're the slow reader, you read the entire page.' Another thread may spend less time on a page before it starts clicking on different links. 'Each individual crawler has its own browser habits,' he added."
>>> Web-Crawling Agents, Information Retrieval, Turing Test, Agents

January 10, 2006: Smart Networks Vs. Smart Gadgets in 2006. By Tiernan Ray. Barron's Online. "Some expect artificial intelligence, or AI, to enjoy a resurgence as gadgets help users tell Google or Yahoo! which TV shows or movies they want. 'More and more, I want my computer to be my assistant, wherever I am,' says David Farber, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. 'You want an intelligent assistant that will go online, find out what TV shows are playing and offer to download them for you,' he says."
>>> Web-Searching Agents, Agents, Applications

December 23, 2005: Scientists predict what you'll think of next- Brain engages in 'mental time travel' when trying to recall memories. By Ker Than. LiveScience / available from MSNBC.com. "'When you have an experience, that experience is represented as a pattern of cortical activity,' explained Sean Polyn, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania and leader of the study. 'The memory system, which we think lives in the hippocampus, forms a sort of summary representation of everything that's going on in your cortex.' The process can be compared to the way web crawlers work to browse and catalogue web pages on the Internet. Web crawlers are automated programs that create copies of all visited pages. Search engines like Google then tag and index the pages. In the same way, as we're trying to remember something, our brains dredge up the memory by first recalling a piece of it, scientists say. ... Scientists think that contextual reinstatement is unique to memories that involve personal experiences, so-called 'episodic' memories, but that similar processes might be at work in other forms of memory. The study was detailed in the Dec. 23 issue of the journal Science."
>>> Cognitive Science, Representation, Web-Searching Agents

December 23, 2005: The future of online search. CNN.com. "John Batelle, who has spent most of his career as a technology journalist trying to find the answer. He has written a book about the rise of online search and spoke to CNN about his observations and predictions for Web search. ... CNN: What would others have to do to be the next Google? JB: First, you have to create an innovation that makes people say, 'I've got to use this, this is better than that.' That is extremely hard. Search is one of the hardest computer science problems in the world, because basically we are trying to create artificial intelligence so that we can speak with our computer, they can understand us and deliver what we are looking for. That is equivalent to turning your computer into a very intelligent research librarian, which of course is the holy grail of computer science, to create artificial intelligence. So it's not easy, you know. And to make a leap beyond Google and create a better mousetrap requires computer science that hasn't been invented yet.... CNN: What is the next big thing on the Web? JB: The idea to create a semantic Web where everything is described not by one researcher and his team but rather by all of us as we root about the Web. ... CNN: Is there anything on the Web that you haven't been able to find? JB: Absolutely. Microsoft did a study about a year and a half ago that claimed that only 50 percent of any search actually completes what people are looking for. ..."
>>> Information Retrieval, Web-Searching Agents, Ontologies, Representation, Applications, Careers in AI (@ Resources for Students), Interviews

December 12, 2005: Tool helps you find stuff that you didn't know you were looking for. Dawn Chmielewski's personal technology column. MercuryNews.com. "[A] little-known company out of Chicago has created a search assistant called Watson that turns the traditional seek-and-ye-shall-find approach to online information on its head. Watson is a downloadable piece of software that sits in the corner of your computer screen, like AOL's Instant Messenger, and looks over your shoulder as you work. Watson could well represent the next step in Web search. By adding intelligence and context to what is now mostly a popularity contest, the search results are clearly more relevant to you, although its desktop omnipresence (like an editor hovering over your words) can sometimes get on your nerves. Instead of entering key words or phrases into a search box, Watson constantly scours the Internet for information related to the PowerPoint presentation you're reviewing, the Word document you're crafting, the e-mail you're reading or the Web site you're browsing. ... This approach is called contextual search. It was the outgrowth of research that co-founders Jay Budzik and his former computer science professor, Kristian Hammond, conducted in Chicago."
>>> Interfaces, Agents, Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Applications

December 6, 2005: Developer keeps computing 'til the cows come home. By Jeanne-Vida Douglas. The Sydney Morning Herald. "Peter Corke wants to strap a computer to every cow in Australia. But he isn't stopping there. The CSIRO's research director for the Autonomous Systems Laboratory wants to sling computers from trees, throw them into rivers, and even partially bury them in soil. He then wants to get these devices to communicate and so create farms without fences, and waterways and pastures that self-regulate by warning livestock away before the land becomes overgrazed and barren. ... The idea of creating a network of tiny autonomous sensor devices harks back to the mid-'90s when the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency backed Kris Pister, a professor of robotics at the University of California Berkeley, to develop so-called smart dust. In theory smart dust would consist of tiny networked sensor devices that were designed to be scattered in the battlefield in order to gather intelligence, monitor borders and track troop movements."
>>> Systems, Multi-Agent Systems, Agriculture, Military, Applications, Agents

December 5, 2005: A motivated room. TRN Reserch News Roundup. "Intelligent rooms aim to track movement, recognize gestures and understand spoken commands in order to control lights, project information on the walls and tell you who called while you were out. ... Intelligent rooms will never be practical if they require a team of technicians to adjust them every time someone moves a camera or behaves in a way the room doesn't expect. ... Researchers from the University of Sydney in Australia have come up with a scheme that uses artificial intelligence software dubbed intrinsically motivated learning agents to make intelligent environments more intelligent."
>>> Smart Houses & Rooms, Agents, Systems, Applications

December 4, 2005: The Wi-Fi Wizard - Soon consumers will carry devices that sense their location and tell them what's available to buy. So says Northwestern expert Kristian Hammond, co-inventor of 'intelligent' software called Watson. By Jon Van. Chicago Tribune. "Q: As consumer products gain more computer intelligence, how will they change? A: Three trends are at work. Wi-Fi connects our portable devices at tremendous speeds. These devices sense where you are, so you get media associated with that location. All products are getting radio frequency ID tags. ... Q: How does computer intelligence come into this? A: It's all about systems anticipating your needs. The location-based capabilities [of the device] act as sensors, figuring out where you are, what you're doing. Artificial intelligence says: given this, what might you need? It gets information to people based on the context of their activity. The Watson software does that with computers. ... Q: So in the near future, we'll carry machines that know more about what we want than we do? ... Q: Does this raise privacy concerns? ..."
>>> Agents, Interfaces, Systems, Telecommunications, Marketing, Applications, Ethical & Social Implications, Interviews

December 2005: Blogging for Dollars - How would you like to survey 20 million consumers in two minutes? By Justin Martin. Forbes Small Business. "[T]o know what the masses are saying about your product, you would have to dig through 350,000 fresh daily postings on a staggering 20 million blogs worldwide.... Enter Umbria, a market research firm in Boulder that designs software to find useful consumer intelligence on the Internet. ... Another big challenge is to decipher what's on a blogger's mind. To figure out whether an opinion is strong or tepid, for example, it helps to know that 'awesome' is a stronger endorsement than 'pretty cool,' and that 'shoddy' is less damning than 'abominable.' Umbria has several employees with Ph.D.s in linguistics and artificial intelligence who are forever tweaking the software to make it better at categorizing opinions. Kaushansky claims his software can even identify sarcasm, a useful skill in the prickly blogosphere. ... The software can also estimate the author's age and gender. ... Automation is the source of Umbria's competitive edge: affordability."
>>> Web-Searching Agents, Natural Language Processing, Discourse Analysis, Marketing, Applications

November 30, 2005: Interview with Dr. Timothy Tuttle, CEO of Video Search Company, Truveo. By Tracy Swedlow. Interactive TV Today [itvt] Bloggit. "Tuttle recently spoke to [itvt]'s Tracy Swedlow about why Truveo believes its technology's ability to crawl dynamic Web sites gives it a crucial advantage in the video search space, about the company's business model, about how its technology attempts to 'look' at Web sites in the same way that a person would, and more. ... Tuttle: ... You see, the big problem with video search--and everyone in the industry knows this--is that while search works great for Web pages, it's a much harder problem to find and index videos on the Web. The reason it's so hard is that it's very difficult for the typical crawling technologies to even see the video on the Web. If they go to a Web site and try to find the video, it's very hard for them to do that. ... [itvt]: How does your technology attempt to 'see' the visual characteristics of a Web page? Tuttle: What we try to look at is the rendered and instantiated version of a functioning Web application. Think of it as similar to looking at the screen buffer. We're looking at a screen shot, as it were, of the rendered page, in order to see if there's a section of that page that may have video playing. And also to look around it, to see if there's any other information that's displayed that relates to that video. ... [itvt]: Is Truveo interested in artificial intelligence technologies that would allow searches of visual content directly--i.e. searches of images themselves? Tuttle: We have a bunch of Ph.D's here who've spent a lot of time either working in research labs or universities on technologies for things like video metadata extraction. There are lots of techniques that are being researched right now. Frankly, people have been working on things like image analysis, object recognition, and scene detection for the past 15 years. I definitely think there is hope that those technologies might be useful in the future for doing automated analysis of images, and then--potentially--video. ... One of the techniques that a lot of the search companies are focused on right now--including us--is using technologies like voice recognition, in order to do a better job of extracting metadata from a video file.
>>> Information Retrieval, Web-Searching Agents, Image Understanding, Speech, Natural Language Processing, Applications, Agents, Vision, Machine Learning, Interviews

November 30, 2005: A model evacuation. The Engineer Online. "[Judith] Holt and Keith Christensen, with Utah State University's Center for Persons with Disabilities, are researching how well accommodations for getting disabled people into buildings work when lots of people are trying to get out. ... 'The main problem with this study is that you can't practice with people,' says Christensen. “You can't put 10,000 people in a stadium, declare an emergency, and then watch what happens. Getting large groups out of a building fast can't be studied in real time with real people.' ... The research uses a method called 'agent-based modelling,' which creates thousands of individual computer people, or agents, each with their own tendencies and behaviours, such as how fast they move, whether they will follow a crowd or not, how they perceive exits, and their aversion to narrow hallways. Some of these agents are programmed with disabilities, and their exits are watched especially closely."
>>> Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, Social Science, Applications

November 29, 2005: It's life, but not as we know it. By Beverley Head. The Sydney Morning Herald. "Ten years ago it took an hour to fly from Melbourne to Sydney. Now it's an hour and a half. 'That's not because the planes got slower, it's because of air-traffic control,' says Professor Peter Lindsay, director of the Australian Research Council's Centre for Complex Systems. He believes that if aircraft can be made to flock, similar to birds, it would drastically improve air-traffic management. Professor Lindsay, who holds the Boeing chair of systems engineering at the University of Queensland, is one of a growing number of computer scientists using the real world as muse and laboratory. They are forming multidisciplinary teams to look into how complex systems such as networks and traffic management are tackled in the real world. It is hoped that industry - which shows little interest in the science - will use the findings to make new computer systems that solve highly complex problems. 'We're looking at how birds flock through swarm analysis,' Professor Lindsay says. 'The artificial-life people have a good idea of how they do it. This will help develop a new model for air-traffic management.' ... A key aspect of these emerging complex IT systems is how much they borrow from nature. ... Complex IT systems are distinguished by their ability to evolve, to almost take on a life of their own. Just as genetic algorithms are modified with each incarnation an improvement over previous generations, neural networks adapt by learning from real-world examples - simple nanobots organise themselves, each following a simple set of rules that combine to generate a complex activity. ... 'Many areas of advanced computing are almost indistinguishable from biology,' says Professor David Green, a Monash University researcher and a chief investigator with the Centre for Complex Systems. 'Nature is so complex and has produced many ways of solving complex problems. We can learn from them,' says Professor Green. ... Professor of IT research at Monash University David Green and his colleague Tania Bransden have used swarm analysis techniques to predict social outcomes."
>>> Artificial Life, Multi-Agent Systems, Machine Learning, Genetic Algorithm, Neural Networks, Transportation, Social Science, Applications, Agents

November 10, 2005: From passive applications to sentient machines. IST Results. "We are close to the point where new types of automated routines and software applications could operate independently of direct human control to carry out prescribed tasks. Helping us arrive, researchers have designed a model that supports the development of applications constructed from mobile sentient objects. Firstly though, developers need to overcome the shortcomings of current architectures and middleware, which are still largely based on sequential programming models. The IST programme's CORTEX project aimed to overcome such obstacles, and to explore the fundamental theoretical and engineering issues involved in supporting the use of 'sentient objects'. 'On the one hand we have classical control systems that are programmed in a strictly sequential manner to respond to a precisely-defined sequence of events,' says project coordinator Paulo Veríssimo of the University of Lisbon. 'On the other, we have the outside world where environments interact and little can be predicted with certainty. If we are to construct highly interactive things like mobile robots, wearable devices that can react intelligently to their environment, augmented-reality systems, etc., we need to know how to programme these applications.' ... The CORTEX participants developed several prototype demonstrators to show off the project results including one that showed how robotic devices could dynamically subscribe and unsubscribe from information resources as either information providers or information users."
>>> Mutli-Agent Systems, Agents, Systems

October 17, 2005: Rescuing missed information - Cutting-edge commercial wares give agencies a whole new outlook on searching for information. By Aliya Sternstein. FCW.com. "The overhaul of the FirstGov Web portal is providing a high-profile example of the potential of new search technologies for government. Therefore, experts believe agencies will follow industry and adopt cutting-edge search technologies such as metasearch, clustering and topic maps. Those techniques promise to dig deeper into the government's online knowledge base, in addition to making search results much easier to use. ... Another priority for vendors is helping users make more sense of search results that can list hundreds and even thousands of hits. 'The ongoing problem is that just about anything you type in [a search form] will lead to an overabundance of information,' said Raul Valdes-Perez, co-founder of Vivisimo, which runs the clustering search site Clusty.com, and an adjunct associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. ... Metasearch, also known as federated search, can eliminate this blind spot. A single search triggers multiple simultaneous queries of selected databases, the Web and site-specific search engines, such as NASA.gov. The metasearch tool then collects and combines the search results, eliminates redundancies and presents the finished product as one list. ... In addition to metasearch capabilities, ToxSeek also uses clustering, another new search technique. With clustering, algorithms sort search results into groups based on textual and linguistic similarities. For example, a ToxSeek user could search for 'cancer' and 'smoking,' and the system would return results categorized by a variety of subheads, including the information's source, topic and type. Clustering lets users see results that would otherwise appear near the end of ranked lists, and they can survey the information landscape before digging in. ... The still-emerging area of topic maps can help educate search engines. Like metasearch, topic map techniques do not replace traditional search tools. They can work in conjunction with them, however, to provide more powerful search navigation. For example, a NASA topic map could be set up so that when a person enters 'Pathfinder' into a search form, the topic map guides the user to related items, such as 'Mars lander' and 'evidence suggesting liquid water was once a stable presence on Mars.' ... Topic map implementation requires more elbow grease than search appliance installation. Unlike traditional search engines, most topic maps require human and artificial intelligence."
>>> Information Retrieval, Interfaces, Web-Searchng Agents, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Applications

October 12, 2005: Stopping a computer revolt - Artificial intelligence may not be ready to rule the world, but a Vancouver researcher works to make it safer. By Dee Anne Finken. The Oregonian & OregonLive.com. "Perhaps because of its unlikely plot, one of Hollywood's latest sci-fi thrillers didn't draw big crowds this summer at the multiplex. After all, how realistic is the premise behind 'Stealth,' a movie about a jet piloted by an artificial-intelligence computer that goes renegade and leads the world to the brink of disaster? But a Washington State University Vancouver researcher knows the idea of artificial intelligence going berserk isn't totally the stuff of fantasy. And he's getting high marks for his insight. At the Fourth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multi Agent Systems, held in the Netherlands, Scott Wallace's research on high-level security controls for artificial intelligence was selected this summer as one of the four best submissions -- out of 531 from around the world. ... Wallace works on ways to improve software that provides security for an artificial-intelligent agent -- whether it's surfing the Internet for a researcher, fielding phone calls or flying a jet fighter -- to keep it from going haywire. Wallace has no contracts, but he envisions his technology someday being applied in simulators for jet pilots. More importantly, 'I hope to make artificial-intelligence technology more acceptable to society,' he said."
>>> Agents, Science Fiction, Ethical & Social Implications, Medicine, Applications

October 5 - 11, 2005: Indus: A New Platform for Ubiquitous Computing. By Kallol Borah. Ubiquity (Volume 6, Issue 36). "Indus is a software agent platform for ubiquitous computing. Ubiquitous computing is a term used to generally refer to computing across software platforms and hardware devices to seamlessly interface human to machine and machine to machine. Work on platforms for ubiquitous computing have been continuing throughout the past decade in academic and industry research organizations. The Indus project was conceptualized in 2002 and prototypes implemented at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore to demonstrate how general purpose object oriented programming languages can be extended to enable ubiquitous computing applications. ... The primary components of the Indus platform comprise of a programming language to implement software agents, libraries to provide services to agents on a distributed network and containers or run time environments to enable deployment of agents on a variety of hardware platforms starting from 8 bit devices onwards. In Indus, software agents represent language abstractions that are autonomic, adapt to existing computing environments and coordinate with other agents to cooperatively execute tasks."
>>> Systems & Languages, Agents, Interfaces

September 22, 2005: Move over, Google Sidebar. By Elinor Mills. CNET News.com. "Watson 2.0, to be launched on Friday by Intellext, is designed to understand the context of the text a computer user is reading or creating and automatically offer relevant news articles, Word documents and other Web- or PC-based information--without the privacy concerns Google's service has raised--and in real time. The context-sensitive Windows search tool is based on technology developed at Northwestern University. ... 'Watson 2.0 uses an artificial-intelligence approach to understand what you are working on and formulate queries,' [Al Wasserberger] said. 'It sends the queries to the online (information) sources and compares the results against the document you are working on and then sorts (the results) according to relevance.'"
>>> Interfaces, Information Retrieval, Web-Searching Agents, Applications

August 22, 2005: CMU's Brad Myers (an email conversation). By Eric Smalley. Technology Research News. "TRN: Tell me about the trends in human-computer interaction. What are the pluses and minuses of these technologies as they exist today? What do you see as the most urgent needs in these areas? Myers: An important area is dealing with information overload. I personally get about 900 spam emails a day, plus about 100 real emails that I have to deal with. There is also all the web pages and newsgroups with interesting information I would like to keep up with. How can computers help with this? ... TRN: What is the RADAR project, and how is it different from the various other attempts at building a digital assistant worthy of the term? Myers: Radar is a large five-year research project in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. The overall goal is to develop a software-based 'cognitive personal assistant' that will help busy military commanders and managers to work more effectively, with less time wasted on routine tasks. I think that Radar is interesting because it is one of the first projects to involve significant collaboration between AI researchers focusing on making the system learn about the user, and HCI researchers focusing on how to make intelligent assistance useful and usable for real people doing real tasks. ... Another area that I think is going to take off is intelligent interfaces, where the system actively tries to be helpful and learns from the user. ... Much of today's spam email filtering is using techniques pioneered in AI labs."
>>> Interfaces, Agents, Filtering, Interviews, Military, Telecommunications, Applications

August 20, 2005: How bots can earn more than you - Software robots can already outperform people on the stock markets, and that is just the beginning. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist article preview (Issue 2513; subscription req'd.). "One morning this month, David Pardoe earned himself $4.7 million without lifting a finger. All the hard work was done by a robot. True, it was a robot without a body - a software robot, in fact - but almost a century after the word 'robot' was coined, the vision of automaton slaves is at last becoming reality. Software robots - also known as bots or software agents - can earn hard cash in the real world. They can even outperform people in some tasks, so it makes sense to let them do all the hard work."
>>> Finance & Investing, Agents, Applications, Competitions (@ Resources for Students)

August 18, 2005: Computer characters mugged in virtual crime spree. By Will Knight. NewScientist.com news. "A man has been arrested in Japan on suspicion carrying out a virtual mugging spree by using software 'bots' to beat up and rob characters in the online computer game Lineage II. The stolen virtual possessions were then exchanged for real cash. The Chinese exchange student was arrested by police in Kagawa prefecture, southern Japan, the Mainichi Daily News reports. ... By performing tasks within a game repetitively or very quickly, bots can easily outplay human-controlled characters, giving unscrupulous players an unfair advantage. Many games firms employ countermeasures to detect this bot activity."
>>> Agents, Video Games, Ethical & Social Implications, Applications

August 17, 2005: Diving Deep Into The Web - Pair's search engine scours 'hidden' sites. By Michael Bazeley. The Mercury News (registration req'd.). "You think the Web is big? In truth, it's far bigger than it appears. The Web is made up of hundreds of billions of Web documents -- far more than the 8 billion to 20 billion claimed by Google or Yahoo. But most of these Web pages are largely unreachable by most search engines because they are stored in databases that cannot be accessed by Web crawlers. Now a San Mateo start-up called Glenbrook Networks -- says it has devised a way to tunnel far into the 'deep web. and extract this previously inaccessible information. ... Komissarchik and her father, Edward Komissarchik, say they have figured out how to analyze the forms on Web pages and understand the type of information the sites are looking for. Then, Glenbrook's Web crawlers use artificial intelligence to walk themselves through sometimes complex Web forms, answering questions, such as the location of their desired job, in the same way a human would."
>>> Web-Searching Agents, Information Retrieval, Agents, Applications

August 11, 2005: Software firm to assist Air Force. By Richard Sine. The News Journal & delawareonline.com. "The folks at Newark-based software firm Quantum Leap Innovations recently heard of a Department of Homeland Security intelligence analyst who had accumulated 115,000 unopened e-mails after just nine months on the job. ... With a $500,000 contract from the Air Force, Quantum Leap is building software that helps provide 'the right information to the right people at the right time,' said Elad, a University of Delaware computer science graduate who cofounded Quantum Leap in 1999. Today's analysts get information from spies, satellites, electronic sensors, cameras, documents, the Internet and other sources, said Donald Steiner, chief technology officer for Quantum Leap. Steiner is developing an intelligent software 'agent' that can continuously search for data and choose which is most important for the analyst to see first."
>>> Agents, Machine Learning, Interfaces, Applications

July 22 - 28, 2005: I Think, Therefore I Am -- Sorta. The belief system of a virtual mind. Quark Soup column by Margaret Wertheim. LA Weekly. "Far more than mere cartoons, these virtual people have each been endowed with a virtual mind complete with its own internal 'desires' and 'goals.' Technically known as 'agents,' they are driven by a revolutionary software system known as PsychSim that enables programmers to simulate the cognitive faculties of human minds. Dr. Stacy Marsella, a leading agent researcher and one of the primary architects of PyschSim, declares that agents actually 'think for themselves.' Indeed, the ultimate goal of agent research is to create autonomous self-determining minds capable of a full spectrum of human behavior. A small, dark-haired man with a doctorate in artificial intelligence, Marsella is a project leader at USC’s Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey, one of the world’s top centers for agent research. ... Last year, Marsella and his colleague Dr. David Pynadath developed an agent-based game [Carmen’s Bright Ideas] in which parents of childhood cancer patients engage in virtual counseling sessions with a virtual therapist. ... But what does it mean to talk about a virtual mind? What, indeed, is a mind of any variety? ... Until very recently, artificial-intelligence researchers believed that modeling the mind was simply a matter of simulating rational cognition, an activity that was seen to be epitomized by strategical games such as chess and go -- but over the past decade, computer scientists have come to understand that a virtual mind needs a virtual psychology. To 'think' requires not just an ability to carry through a chain of logical inferences; it also requires a mental environment, or psychic context, in which such rationalizations can be given meaning. "
>>> Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, Video Games, Education, Military, Chess, Go, Cognitive Science, Representation, Reasoning, Chatbots (@ Natural Language Processing), Applications

July 14, 2005: Simulated society may generate virtual culture. By Will Knight. NewScientist.com news. "Virtual computer characters more accustomed to battling deranged alien monsters are about to take part in a unique social experiment. A society of virtual 'agents' - each with a remarkably realistic personality and the ability to learn and communicate - is being crafted by scientists from five European research institutes who hope to gain insights into the way human societies evolve. The project, known as New and Emergent World models Through Individual, Evolutionary and Social Learning -- or NEW-TIES -- brings together experts in artificial intelligence, linguistics, computer science and sociology. It is backed by a consortium consisting of the University of Surrey and Napier University in the UK, Tilberg and Vrije Universities in the Netherlands and Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary. The experiment will see about 1000 agents live together in a simulated world hosted on a network of 50 computers based at the various institutions involved. Each agent will be capable of various simple tasks, like.... Though simple interaction, the researchers hope to watch these characters create their very own society from scratch."
>>> Agents, Social Science, Machine Learning, Applications, Artificial Life

July 11, 2005: Google is searching for direction in today's changing industry. By Francine Brevetti. Inside Bay Area. "If Burton Group's [Mike] Neuenschwander is correct, this discussion may be moot anyway. "Reliance on Google is about to change. Google is good at locating things we already know about. But most people want to know or find things we don't know about, and this is the area of semantics. Google and many other folks are looking at this area as in artificial intelligence and the creation of bots (software robots that may completely revamp search technology)."
>>> Web-Searching Agents, Information Retrieval, Ontologies, Agents, Applications

July 9, 2005: Webcrawling program completes crossword puzzles. New Scientist (Issue 2507; page 23). "Called WebCrow, the program rephrases clues to make them Google-friendly, runs a search and then mines the results pages for possible solutions. ... WebCrow will be unveiled at the American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference on 9 July."
>>> Crossword Puzzles, Web-Searching Agents, Games & Puzzles, Conferences (@ Resources for Students)

July 2005: AI In Control - Artificial intelligence, expert systems, fuzzy logic, neural nets, and rules-based algorithms for factory control. Although the buzz is quieted, all of it is still around. You just don't notice it. Automotive Manufacturing & Production. "'Real-time rule engines' and 'adaptive control' are two of today's monikers for artificial intelligence (AI), fuzzy logic, and similar information technologies that were so widely touted in the 1980s. ... Toyota Motor Corp. uses Gensym G2 to plan its final assembly line. ... Volkswagen (VW) Group (Madrid, Spain) uses the inference engine from ILOG Inc. for new-car sequencing and production planning at the group's SEAT Martorell and the VW Navarra plants. ... In reality, rules-based technology 'gets embedded in solutions so that the end user doesn't even know there's AI inside,' says [David] Siegel. 'I don't know of many total standalone AI/expert system-type applications. They're almost always a part of the larger picture.' ... The IMS [Intelligent Maintenance Systems] Center has developed a toolbox of algorithms. Of particular interest is the Watchdog Agent. This agent, explains Lee, 'can assess and predict the process or equipment performance based on the inputs from the sensors mounted on it. ... A second IMS project is the Device-to-Business (D2B) platform, basically an autonomous intelligent agent that links factory floor devices directly to a business system, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), thereby circumventing traditional factory supervisory control systems, such as programmable controllers."
>>> Business & Manufacturing, Applications, Fuzzy Logic, Real-Time Reasoning, Expert Systems, Agents, Neural Networks, Reasoning, Machine Learning

June 24, 2005: Sims on steroids - researchers to study society of computer-based agents. By Peter Clarke. EETimes.com. "A team of European academics is set to take the computer simulation of artificial worlds further than it has been taken before and create a world of beings that can interact, evolve and learn. The researchers hope the computer-hosted beings will create their own language and pass it from 'parents' to 'children', even at the risk that the language may not be understood by their academic observers. ... [T]he European Union's NEW-TIES project is expected to have implications for the design of computer systems, for agent-based computer programming, for ambient intelligence systems, and for the study of linguistics and sociology. ... The project is being conducted by a consortium of researchers in artificial intelligence, language evolution, agent-based simulation and evolutionary computing, drawn from universities in the Netherlands, the U.K. and Hungary.... The agent population is being given three types of ability to learn; individual learning, evolutionary learning and social learning."
>>> Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, Genetic Algorithms, Artificial Life, Machine Learning, Cognitive Science

June 13, 2005: Robots putting their heads together. By Peter Key. Philadelphia Business Journal (from the June 10th print edition). " The key to getting robots to perform complex tasks may not be in making them smarter. Instead, it may be in getting a lot of dumb robots to act together. That's the idea behind a project being led by the University of Pennsylvania that recently received a five-year, $5 million grant from the Department of Defense. The purpose of the Scalable Swarms of Autonomous Robots and Sensors project is to create software and tools that enable a person to direct a swarm or swarms of small robots. ... In addition to robotics experts, the Swarms project will involve researchers in the fields of artificial intelligence, control theory, systems engineering and biology."
>>> Robots, Multi-Agent Systems, Artificial Life, Military, Applications

June 6, 2005: Massive Gets Bigger. Digit Online News. "Massive Software has released version 2.0 of its eponymous crowd animation software. Massive uses artificial intelligence to automatically create and animate crowd scenes with animators having to manipulate individual characters, and was originally developed for the huge battle scenes within the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It uses a compositing suite-style node-based interface that's designed so that animators can avoid programming. ... Agents, as Massive calls its characters, have been given a memory - so that they can base their actions on previous events they've taken part in or seen."
>>> Multi-Agent Systems, Automatic Programming, Agents, Applications

June 1, 2005: Pentagon envisions electronic office assistant for busy human bosses. By Robert S. Boyd. Knight Ridder Newspapers / Knight Ridder Washington Bureau. "With a strong push from the Pentagon, computer scientists are trying to create an artificial 'personal office assistant' that's smart enough to handle routine tasks for a human boss, military or civilian. The researchers aim to build an electronic system that understands human language, takes and remembers instructions, learns from its experiences and copes with unexpected situations. ... The office assistant program is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Pentagon unit that pioneered such once blue-sky developments as the Internet, stealth aircraft and microelectronic machines. DARPA Director Anthony Tether told the House Science Committee last month that his agency is moving into the field of 'cognitive computing,' meaning computer systems that 'perceive, reason and learn,' not just crunch numbers and manipulate data. The Pentagon project is called PAL, an acronym for 'personalized assistant that learns.' 'Cognitive systems that learn to adapt to their users could dramatically improve a wide range of military operations,' said Ronald Brachman, the director of DARPA's Information Processing Technology Office. 'They could learn and even improve on their own.'"
>>> Agents, Machine Learning, Interfaces, Natural Language Processing, Reasoning, Military, Applications

June 1, 2005: Linux Powers Airborne Bots. By Kevin Poulsen. Wired News. "British researchers are turning to Linux and embedded processors to build a fleet of tiny, robotic helicopters capable of swarming like angry bees and evaluating their surroundings with a single hive mind. The University of Essex's UltraSwarm project is an experiment in swarm intelligence and wireless cluster computing that might one day spawn military surveillance applications. ... If all goes according to plan, the helicopters will communicate with one another over Bluetooth, allowing them to move as one entity, and even to carry out sophisticated computation-heavy tasks using distributed computing techniques. 'We'll have a flock of helicopters; they will be autonomous individually and as a swarm, and they will be gathering and processing visual data in distributed way,' says Owen Holland, project director and deputy head of the university's computer science department. The team says the concept was inspired by the graceful flow of flocking starlings, and the knowledge that the accumulated brain mass of a flock of 1,000 birds adds up to that of a human brain."
>>> Autonomous Vehicles, Multi-Agent Systems, Artificial Life, Military, Applications, Robots

May 31, 2005: Access all areas. The Engineer. "[N]ow a UK-based research project called MAPPED (Mobilisation and Accessibility Planning for People with Disabilities) is aiming to develop an integrated system to allow the disabled to find out more about access to buildings in their area. The researchers claim the project will also be the UK’s first real example of ambient intelligence technology being put into practice. ... Data is collected and filed by the system for use by the disabled user, covering content including transport, tourism and leisure, work, business and education. The system can adapt itself according to the user’s preferences, habits and the context in which it is being used, said Simon Edwards,senior research associate at the University of Newcastle. 'The system uses intelligent agents which are autonomous pieces of software that can learn from the user and present them with information they didn’t even know they needed.' ... For some time, the concept of ambient intelligent technology has been a computer scientist’s pipe dream, divorced from realistic applications and without the technology behind it to become a practical solution. But MAPPED will put the technology to practical use, and the University of Newcastle’s [Phil] Blyth claimed the project is just the start of the use of ambient intelligence in the UK."
>>> Assistive Technologies, Systems, Agents, Applications

May 30, 2005: Going where no search engine has gone before - Connotate Technologies uses information agents to extract data from Deep Web. By Dibya Sarkar. FCW.com. "Google, one of the most popular search engines, at best can index and search about 4 billion to 5 billion Web pages, representing only 1 percent of the World Wide Web. But officials from Connotate Technologies, a company based in New Brunswick, N.J., said they have developed technology that can mine and extract data from the Deep Web, which contains an estimated 500 billion Web pages, and deliver it in any format and through any delivery mechanism. The Deep Web refers to content in databases that rarely shows up in Web searches. Through the use of intelligence-based software modules called information agents, corporate and government organizations can quickly and easily target specific unstructured data from intranets and password-protected Web sites on a continual basis. 'What the agents do is they automate time-consuming Web interaction,' said Bruce Molloy, the company's chief executive officer. 'So an agent can act on your behalf, type in information, search terms, can click on links, can know your password — but we would keep it protected — can automatically go to sites and bring back information, format and cut and paste results.' ... Connotate was formed in 1999 by three Rutgers University professors, whose Web-mining technology research was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the university. ... 'It's a lot like showing something to a small child for the first time,' said Chris Giarretta, Connotate's customer relationship manager. Essentially, he said, the more you show what a user wants, the better the agent will get at finding it."
>>> Web-Searching Agents, Information Retrieval, Agents, Applications

May 19, 2005: Electronic butlers to facilitate human-to-human interaction. IST Results. "Need information, a translation, a conference recording? Let the butler handle it. The FAME [Facilitating Agents in Multicultural Exchange] butler, however, is no ordinary Jeeves; it is an intelligent agent integrating several key technologies that bridges linguistic, cultural, communication and information barriers. Developed under the European Commission’s IST programme, the FAME information butler breaks new ground in the application of pervasive technologies, creating a system that works alongside users without the need for conscious human-machine interaction. ... Several of the partners are continuing to develop the technology in the follow-on IST project CHIL [Computers In the Human Interaction Loop] amid plans to commercialise components of the system over the coming years."
>>> Interfaces, Agents, Speech, Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, Applications

May 19, 2005: Wayne investor behind eBay on TV technology. By Peter Key. Philadelphia Business Journal. "A company that launched a new technology in Austin, Texas, Thursday has a Philadelphia area venture capital fund to thank for its survival. Plano-based BIAP Systems Inc., which developed the technology behind the eBay on TV service.... Ebay on TV is made possible by a type of artificial intelligence software called an intelligent agent that cable companies deploy over their systems to their customers' digital boxes. Once there, the software accesses the Internet, gets the information it was programmed to get, and displays it on the customers' screens."
>>> Agents, Interfaces, Applications

May 19, 2005: When 'I Robot' becomes 'We Robot.' By Gregory M. Lamb. The Christian Science Monitor. "It sounds like classic sci-fi: Robots, linked by a common network, roam the land. When one unit discovers something, they all know it instantly. They use artificial intelligence to carry out their mission. Soon, such marching orders will be real, carried out by robot groups known as 'swarms' or 'hives.' For example: ... South Korea's Defense Ministry ... iRobot ... The United States Army ... Frontline Robotics ... Robotmakers find inspiration for their programs in nature: the behavior of bee, ant, and wasp colonies, as well as of flocks of birds and schools of fish. ... Military deployment of networked robots will come first, [Helen Greiner] says. For example, 'searching for mines is inherently a parallel task,' since you don't want 'to put all your eggs in one basket' if a single robot gets blown up. Swarms will be an effective tool for reconnaissance, too. In the foreseeable future, a soldier might take a handful of tiny robots out of his pocket and send them into a building to check it out, she says. And in an imaginable future, swarms might do much of the routine housework, Greiner says."
>>> Robots, Multi-Agent Systems, Artificial Life, Military, Hazards & Disasters, Household Appliances, Applications

May 18, 2005: Robot swarms cloud danger. The Engineer Online. "Engineers at the University of Pennsylvania have received a $5 million grant from the US Department of Defense to develop large-scale 'swarms' of robots that could work together to thoroughly search large areas from the ground and sky. The Scalable Swarms of Autonomous Robots and Sensors or the Swarms Project, as it is known takes organisational cues from the natural world where tens or even hundreds of small, independent robots work together to accomplish specific tasks, such as finding a bomb in a crowded city. ... 'Our objective here is to develop the software framework and tools for a new generation of autonomous robots, ultimately to the point where an operator can supervise an immense swarm of small robots through unfamiliar terrain,' said Vijay Kumar, director of the GRASP Lab at Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science and principal investigator of the Swarms Project. ... While the GRASP engineers are not attempting to recreate biology, they are striving to understand what general principals in biological behaviour that might be useful in getting robots to think as a group. Eventually, Kumar and his colleagues will demonstrate their biologically inspired algorithms on practical vehicle platforms, such as the robot blimps, unmanned aerial vehicles and the small 'clodbuster' four-wheeled robots already in use at GRASP."
>>> Artificial Life, Robots, Multi-Agent Systems, Applications, Agents

May 17, 2005: Couple receive grant to develop robots. Associated Press / available from USAToday.com. "A couple who work in the University of Wyoming's Computer Science Department have received a $100,000 National Science Foundation grant to further develop tiny robots that could help clean up oil spills or respond to a terrorist attack. ... [Diana] Spears and her husband, William, envision robots that would communicate with one another, relaying information back to humans or to a larger robot that would take care of the problem. ... The researchers have begun working on technology that will allow the robots to communicate and detect chemicals."
>>> Robots, Multi-Agent Systems, Hazards & Disasters, Applications, Systems, Agents

May 2005: The Next Wave of Disruptive Technologies. Cover story by Jeff Moad. Managing Automation Magazine. "Today, progressive manufacturers have an opportunity to change the course of their businesses by seizing emerging technologies, much like Henry Ford did when his company introduced the Model T in 1908. But which technologies have potentially game-changing power? This issue of Managing Automation answers that question by focusing on several emerging technologies and how manufacturers can use them to get ahead of the competition."

Articles include:
Disruptive Technologies: Semantic Web. By Alan Alper. "In its raw essence, the Semantic Web is an extension of the technologies that brought the World Wide Web to life -- the browser, the Internet Protocol for transport, extensible markup language (XML) and HTTP, which enables the linking of hypertext within Web pages. Throw in some artificial intelligence (rules-based constructs) and agent technology and, the theory goes, businesses can create applications that have the inherent ability to interpret meaning from, or even reason with, one another. To many, the Semantic Web -- conceived by Web progenitor Tim Berners-Lee -- is the next step in the Internet's evolution; one that manufacturers must prepare for or risk getting left behind. Today, a great deal of human interpretation is required to understand much of the information conveyed as hypertext on Web pages such as product description, part numbers, pricing and shipping data. For businesses that want to extract meaning from online catalogs and automate business processes, today's Web presents 'technical challenges [that] are quite staggering,' notes Ora Lassila.... 'We're just now starting to see early success stories,' says Dr. James Hendler, a computer sciences professor at the University of Maryland (College Park, MD), the third co-author of the influential Scientific American article. He points to pilot projects at government agencies such as NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) where the Semantic Web's constructs are being tested. The real win, he says, will come when enterprises begin to use the technologies to enhance interoperability among company applications. So far, however, few are charging forward. 'It's like the guy with the first telephone; he's not happy until someone else has one,' Hendler says. 'We're just getting past that chicken and egg problem -- but at least we have a few chickens and a few eggs out there.'"
Disruptive Technologies: Automation Platforms. By Stephanie Neil. "A more attractive term for the technology is 'autonomous agents,' a type of software that incorporates information and artificial intelligence rules. These software agents are intended to be spread around various devices on a network where they can assess what's really going on outside of an operator's view and even negotiate how devices should interact based on the conditions they detect. Once they become low cost and ubiquitous, autonomous agents, in combination with secure industrial wireless mesh networks, new energy-reducing technologies and predictive diagnostic algorithms, will change the way manufacturers operate everything from the assembly line to recipe management. ... For the last seven years, Rockwell Automation, in conjunction with Cambridge University, has been designing the Manufacturing Agent Simulation Environment. It includes autonomous agents that talk to each other via a software program using technologies such as RFID, Rockwell's ControlLogix and even Web service communication technologies such as XML. Pilot projects are underway at a steel company in Australia using the agents to manage a water spraying process that cools the steel. ... IMS [Intelligent Maintenance Systems] has created a toolbox of algorithms it calls Watchdog Agents to help companies troubleshoot problems before they even happen. ... 'We have to make machines that learn and self-predict. I believe deeply that is the future of manufacturing,' [Jay] Lee says."

>>> Business & Manufacturing, Ontologies, Web-Searching Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, Agents, Representation, Military, Networks, Applications

April 25, 2005: Robotic leader makes for good teamwork - When two robots arrive at a doorway, who should go first? By Philip Ball. news@nature.com. "Robots are terribly polite these days. When two vehicles developed by a Canadian robotics firm arrive at a narrow door at the same time, they have a friendly way to decide who should pass through first. The key is to use a team of robots with an elected leader who makes decisions that are best for the group as a whole. Representatives from the Ottawa-based company Frontline Robotics, who will present their polite robots at the RoboBusiness robotics conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this May, say their software should be ideal for a variety of military and civilian applications. ... Many researchers are seeking to develop robots that work in packs, coordinating their actions in response to one another. This way of working, called distributed intelligence, resembles the way that social insects such as ants or bees collaborate in foraging or nest building. ... Frontline's software, called Robotic Open Control (ROC), operates by first allowing the robots to elect a leader. At potential 'choke' points such as a narrow door, the leader is called upon to make decisions."
>>> Robots, Multi-Agent Systems, Applications, Autonomous Vehicles

April 25, 2005: AI's Next Brain Wave. New research in artificial intelligence could lay the groundwork for computer systems that learn from their users and the world around them. Part four in The Future Of Software series. By Aaron Ricadela. InformationWeek. "Artificial intelligence, a field that has tantalized social scientists and high-tech researchers since the dawn of the computer industry, had lost its sex appeal by the start of the last decade. ... Now a new generation of researchers hopes to rekindle interest in AI. Faster and cheaper computer processing power, memory, and storage, and the rise of statistical techniques for analyzing speech, handwriting, and the structure of written texts, are helping spur new developments, as is the willingness of today's practitioners to trade perfection for practical solutions to everyday problems. ... Several industry trends also are helping move AI up on labs' agendas. The emerging field of wireless sensor networks, which have the potential to collect vast amounts of data about industrial operations, the ecosystem, or conditions in a building or home, could benefit from the use of AI techniques to interpret their data. ... InformationWeek took a look at four research labs working in artificial intelligence, at IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Xerox subsidiary Palo Alto Research Center. Instead of leading to another round of outsize expectations, this generation of research likely could lay the groundwork for a new breed of computer systems that learn from their users and the world around them."
>>> AI Overview, Applications, Systems, Machine Learning, Vision, Interfaces, Agents, Bayes (@ Namesakes)

April 15, 2005: IST project to grow first computer-based society. CORDIS News. "The field of social simulation - which uses computer programmes to experiment on social systems - has grown steadily since its birth in the early 1990s. Due to computing constraints, however, research has until now focused on the development of simple social systems. But an international collaboration funded by the EU's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) is about to change that. The NEW TIES project (new and emergent world models through individual, evolutionary and social learning) aims to grow the worlds first full-blown society based on artificial computer-based individuals. The consortium includes leading researchers in artificial intelligence, language evolution, agent-based simulation and evolutionary computing, drawn from universities in the Netherlands, the UK and Hungary."
>>> Multi-Agent Systems, Social Science, Machine Learning, Agents, Artificial Life, Applications

April 7, 2005: A tiny robot swarm - fiction no longer. By Robert C. Cowen. The Christian Science Monitor. "The cartoon superheroes were frustrated. They confronted a menacing robot that quickly repaired any damage they inflicted. It was made up of a swarm of microscopic robots - so-called nanobots - that could change its function and shape at will. Suddenly the swarm became fluid and flowed away. That cartoon scenario may seem entertaining. But the reality is startling. Engineers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration want to pull off a similar trick. They are testing a robot that they hope to shrink to nanobot size and eventually form what NASA calls 'autonomous nanotechnology swarms' (ANTS). The researchers aim to give ANTS enough artificial intelligence to make smart decisions as well as know intuitively when and how to walk and swarm. ... [E]ven though its major payoffs are decades away, nanotechnology already is a big deal. Worldwide government funding of nanotech research reached $3.6 billion last year with some 40 nations joining in, according to National Science Foundation (NSF) figures."
>>> Space Exploration, Robots, Autonomous Vehicles, Multi-Agent Systems, Applications, Artificial Life, Systems, Ethical & Social Implications, Industry Statistics, The Future; also see these related articles

April 6, 2005: The Evolution Of Web Search. By David M. Ewalt. Forbes.com. "We've become a society of information managers, navigating huge amounts of data with ease and expertly tracking down obscure facts and figures. But as far as we've come, all we've really done is become good at finding needles in haystacks. There's no sophistication, no wisdom involved, and it's largely because our search tools are pretty dumb. ... To solve that problem, we need a search system that doesn't just process and parse our language, but understands it; programs that don't just match your search terms but intuitively recognize context to deliver what you're really looking for. Fortunately, engineers and researchers around the world are already at work to bring about this system, and they call it the semantic Web. Conceived by Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist generally considered the father of the World Wide Web, the semantic Web isn't an entirely new network. It's a vision of a world where 'tags,' or code, is hidden inside Web pages to help computers understand meaning. ... The next step is to agree on how to define the relationships between words. Developers at organizations including the nonprofit World Wide Web Consortium are already working on a new language, called the Resource Description Framework, which will help computers understand that a 'price' can be listed in 'dollars' or 'yen.' After that, they'll need to invent yet another language to express logical concepts, and allow users to query semantically tagged data. "
>>> Web-Searching Agents, Ontologies, Languages & Structures, Information Retrieval, Representation, Applications

March 29, 2005: How universities' intelligent web project unlocks the information that really counts. By John Kavanagh. ComputerWeekly.com. "Imagine clicking on a low point on an oil production graph to launch a web search that threw up only strictly relevant information, including news stories about the Iraq war and reports on everything from international economy to effects on wildlife. This is a far cry from searching for 'oil' and getting hits ranging from car engines to massage services, and it is a reality among researchers developing what is known as the semantic web. The prospects were described by a leading researcher in this area, Nigel Shadbolt, a professor in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University, when he presented the BCS and the Royal Signals Institution annual lecture. Intelligent web searches would not just look for key words but would also understand what a page is about and its relevance to the user, he said."
>>> Information Retrieval, Ontologies, Web-Searching Agents, Representation, Applications

March 23, 2005: Profs study robotic soldiers of the future - Engineering School takes part in military research on behavioral tendencies of robots. By Ko Im. dailypennsylvanian.com. "As military technology continues to improve, more and more robots are being used for surveillance and search and rescue missions. This summer, computer scientists, biologists and engineers from Penn and other schools around the country will collaborate to study a relatively new technology known as biology-inspired swarming behavior in robots. Under the Defense Department's Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative program, the University's General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception Laboratory will receive $5 million from the federal government over the next five years. With Vijay Kumar, director of the GRASP Lab, as principal investigator, the Scalable Swarms of Autonomous Robots and Sensors project will study group coordination of small vehicles. ... 'We're not trying to mimic biology, but understand whether its principals can be formalized and manipulated,' [George] Pappas said."
>>> Military, Robots, Multi-Agent Systems, Artificial Life, Applications, Agents

March 9, 2005: Next big step for the Web--or a detour? By Paul Festa. CNET News.com. "Is the 'Semantic Web' the new Internet, or a complex technology in search of a problem to solve? That's a question that advocates attending the Semantic Technology Conference here this week hope to put to rest. ... Just as the Web encompassed existing Internet technologies while adding its revolutionary system of hyperlinks, so, they claim, will the Semantic Web give birth to vastly more powerful ways of gleaning information from the world's computer network. Such claims are being measured against concerns about personal privacy and technological complexity, and against perceptions that the Semantic Web activity is pie-in-the-sky artificial intelligence research that's distracting the consortium from its mission of maintaining fundamental 'good enough' Web protocols. What's more, some analysts and technologists who follow the W3C's work closely say that even after years of work and the publication of several foundational documents, they still have no idea what the Semantic Web is. ... The Semantic Web protocols aim to let computers distinguish different kinds of data. Armed with those distinctions, applications could more automatically trade information, for example between an online address book and a cell phone. A Web site could automatically reconfigure itself on the fly based on the needs of a particular visitor. Search engines could narrow down results with greater precision. ... They hope that by letting computers digest and exchange information about context and meaning--a word that raises the hackles of artificial intelligence critics--they will allow data to survive the systems where it originated and traverse different applications as easily as browsers traverse the Web's billions of pages today. As that data takes on a virtual life of its own, it could be exploited and combined in unexpected and unexpectedly profitable ways."
>>> Ontologies, Web-Searching Agents, Information Retrieval, Representation, Agents, Applications

March 7, 2005: Intelligent software aims to give users peace of mind. Microsoft Notebook feature by Todd Bishop. Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "Most people wouldn't want a message from work disrupting their day at the beach. But Eric Horvitz was so happy when it happened to him that he took out a camera and captured the moment in a photo. The e-mail message had been singled out and sent to the Microsoft senior researcher's mobile phone by a special program that he and others in his group developed. The program examined the message's contents, determined its importance and decided it warranted interrupting him during a family outing on Whidbey Island. The moment perfectly illustrated Horvitz's long-term vision for technology in the information age -- as something to augment and assist people, not overwhelm them. ... The prototype is one of the ongoing projects in Microsoft Research's Adaptive Systems and Interaction group, which Horvitz manages. The 14-person group is working on software that senses the world around it and learns from experience to adjust to situations and to reason in real time. The projects are examples of artificial intelligence -- using technology to perform tasks that would otherwise require human perception and reasoning. 'I see something very big happening to humanity in terms of a new relationship with technology over the next 100 years,' Horvitz said, predicting a future when 'companion software' works in conjunction with human life in a way that could be considered 'intelligent or humanlike.'"
>>> Interfaces, Agents, Probability, Filtering, The Future, Applications

March 7, 2005: Ants - learning from the collective. By Peter Everett. BBC News. "The question that continues to fascinate myrmecologists (ant experts) is how ants manage to achieve such complicated results - elaborate nests, efficient food-supply, waste-disposal and so on - without having anyone in charge. ... When our present technology-driven society considers the ant, the aim is not to find moral guidance or to admire a perfect political system, but to gather clues that will help us to solve technical problems. In the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Laboratory at the University of the West of England, Dr Chris Melhuish presides over a fleet of 'U-bots'. A U-bot is a foot-high robot which glides around an arena on castors, carrying a U-shaped scoop in front of it. It is a very stupid robot, because it carries only three instructions:.... Following only those instructions, Dr Melhuish's robots, given enough time, can gather together a randomly distributed collection of frisbees and assemble them in a pile in the centre of their arena. ... Why would anyone want to design stupid robots that can do clever things? Dr Melhuish explains: 'If we want to build very small robots, there will be problems in getting computation on board, and sensing and communication. ... It would be nice to think that we could use nano-robots to carry out repair work inside the human body, but it's early days.' ... Myrmecologist Professor Nigel Franks, of the University of Bristol, has introduced the phrase 'collective intelligence' to describe ant behaviour.
>>> Multi-Agent Systems, Nature of Intelligence, Robots, Agents, Systems, Cognitive Science

March 4, 2005: The Bleeding Edge of Computing. By Pam Baker NewsFactor Network. "Just when you think computing is an established industry where at least some things will remain the same, the earth starts moving. Here’s a peek at tomorrow’s computing landscape: ... A mini-helicopter that thinks for itself is ready for action in Iraq. GT Max, the first rotary wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), is able to learn as it flies, maneuver aggressively, and automatically plan a route through obstacles using an Open Control Platform (OCP) system. ... For artificial intelligence, or AI, to be of maximum assistance to everyday people, computers must learn from human environments. 'Suddenly, for the first time, our computers have the ability to see and hear the world from our perspective through microphones and cameras on wearable eyepieces and headsets. Soon, our computers might be able to observe what we do all day, understand what is important to us, and act as a virtual assistant who helps us on a second-by-second basis,' says Starner."
>>> Applications, Systems, Agents, Machine Learning, The Future, AI Overview

March 2005: The Ascent of the Robotic Attack Jet. By David Talbot. Technology Review. "Compared to many aeronautical curiosities that have taken wing at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at California’s Edwards Air Force Base over the years, the latest military test stunts did not appear very remarkable. Last April, a low-slung aircraft, about the size of a sport utility vehicle but with batlike wings similar to those of the B-2 stealth bomber, took off, flew at 10,500 meters and then dropped a 110-kilogram inert precision bomb while zipping along at 700 kilometers per hour. Four months later, a pair of the aircraft took off and flew together. These were modest stunts, to be sure, except for this fact: the jets have no pilots. They are the future of warfare, the first working models of networked autonomous attack jets, and the U.S. Department of Defense would like to start building them by 2010. ... Realizing this vision will require the creation of new airborne communications networks and a host of control systems that will make these jets more autonomous (though always under the ultimate control of a person) than anything built to date. These are the goals of a $4-billion, five-year program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s advanced research arm."
>>> Autonomous Vechicles, Military, Multi-Agent Systems, Interfaces, Robots, Agents, Applications