Making Cars Smarter Than You

ScienceDaily Making Cars Smarter Than You: "The augmented cognition research team at Sandia National Laboratories is designing cars capable of analyzing human behavior. The car of the future they are developing may, for example, deduce from your driving that you’re become tired, or during critical situations, tell your cell phone to hold an incoming call so you won’t be distracted."

DARPA throws down the challenge on cognitive computing

DARPA throws down the challenge on cognitive computing: "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s research in the field of cognitive computing could progress to the point of a Grand Challenge that would pit alternate methods of building brainlike systems against one another. The agency’s Biologically-Inspired Cognitive Architecture program is pushing artificial intelligence in the direction of building software that mimics human brain functions. BICA relies on recent advances in cognitive psychology and the science of the human brain’s biological structure to build software that comes much closer to human abilities than previous AI. The research agency’s Information Processing Technology Office is leading the BICA research process by funding research teams based mainly at universities."

Artificial Intelligence Is Lost in the Woods

David Gelernter seems to argue that even simulated intelligence would have to exhibit a broad range of cognitive abilites. "Unfortunately, AI, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind are nowhere near knowing how to build [even a simulated intelligence]. 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."

C.f. argument from disability -- a common argument against the feasibility of strong AI.

Higher Games

Technology Review Higher Games: "The verdict that computers are the equal of human beings in chess could hardly be more official, which makes the caviling all the more pathetic. The excuses sometimes take this form: 'Yes, but machines don't play chess the way human beings play chess!' Or sometimes this: 'What the machines do isn't really playing chess at all.' Well, then, what would be really playing chess?"

Toward a General Logicist Methodology for Engineering Ethically Correct Robots

A bit of light reading: Toward a General Logicist Methodology for Engineering Ethically Correct Robots: "It's hard to deny that robots will become increasingly capable and that humans will increasingly exploit these capabilities by deploying them in ethically sensitive environments, such as hospitals, where ethically incorrect robot behavior could have dire consequences for humans. How can we ensure that such robots will always behave in an ethically correct manner? How can we know ahead of time, via rationales expressed clearly in natural language, that their behavior will be constrained specifically by the ethical codes selected by human overseers?"

Save us from the robots!

Economist.com Trust me, I'm a robot: "IN 1981 Kenji Urada, a 37-year-old Japanese factory worker, climbed over a safety fence at a Kawasaki plant to carry out some maintenance work on a robot. In his haste, he failed to switch the robot off properly. Unable to sense him, the robot's powerful hydraulic arm kept on working and accidentally pushed the engineer into a grinding machine. His death made Urada the first recorded victim to die at the hands of a robot."

Eric Horvitz forecasts the future

New Scientist Eric Horvitz forecasts the future: "Within 50 years, lives will be significantly enhanced by automated reasoning systems that people will perceive as 'intelligent'. Although many of these systems will be deployed behind the scenes, others will be in the foreground, serving in an elegant, often collaborative manner to help people do their jobs, to learn and teach, to reflect and remember, to plan and decide, and to create. Translation and interpretation systems will catalyse unprecedented understanding and cooperation between people. At death, people will often leave behind rich computational artefacts that include memories, reflections and life histories, accessible for all time."

Computer discovers more accurate medical test

The Register Brains, cancer and computers: "The race is on to apply machine learning to biology. The starting gun was fired in 2002 when research company Correlogic stunned the medical world with the announcement of a vastly improved test for detecting ovarian cancer. The new test was simple - a few drops of blood are all that's required - yet reliable. What made it truly remarkable was that the test was discovered by machine."

Translation Tools: New Approaches to an Old Discipline

Translation Tools: New Approaches to an Old Discipline: "Language translation software isn’t likely to allow you to lay off your bilingual staffers — at least not right away. But applied with discrimination and lots of preparation, translation tools can be fantastic productivity aids. And researchers say new approaches to this old discipline are greatly improving the performance of the tools."

"Ford Motor Co. began using “machine translation” software in 1998 and has so far translated 5 million automobile assembly instructions into Spanish, German, Portuguese and Mexican Spanish. Assembly manuals are updated in English every day, and their translations — some 5,000 pages a day — are beamed overnight to plants around the world. “It wouldn’t be feasible to do this all manually,” says Nestor Rychtyckyj, a technical specialist in artificial intelligence (AI) at Ford."

LawnBott: a Roomba for your backyard?

csmonitor.com LawnBott: a Roomba for your backyard?: "Don't like to mow during the dog days? The electric LawnBott – a device from Paradise Robotics that looks like the child of R2D2 and a tiny Ferrari – can roam a yard solo, its mulching blades whirring quietly, then dock and recharge until its timer awakens it."

Computers to Reassemble Shredded East German Secret Police Files

FOXNews.com Computers to Reassemble Shredded East German Secret Police Files: "German researchers said Wednesday that they were launching an attempt to reassemble millions of shredded East German secret police files using complicated computerized algorithms."

"Some 16,250 sacks containing pieces of 45 million shredded documents were found and confiscated after the reunification of Germany in 1990. Reconstruction work began 12 years ago but 24 people have been able to reassemble the contents of only 323 sacks."

"Using algorithms developed 15 years ago to help decipher barely legible lists of Nazi concentration camp victims, each individual strip of the shredded Stasi files will be scanned on both sides.

"The data then will be fed into the computer for interpretation using color recognition; texture analysis; shape and pattern recognition; machine and handwriting analysis and the recognition of forged official stamps..."

Vernor Vinge explored a similar idea in his novel Rainbow's End -- see excerpt at technovelgy.

New devices promise touchy-feely computing

New Scientist Tech New devices promise touchy-feely computing: "Is it possible to 'feel' an object while being in another location? This is a question addressed by several technologies on show at the SIGGRAPH 2007 computer conference in San Diego, California, US, earlier this month. Haptic technology, which exploits the sense of touch, could have a range of applications, researchers say, from telesurgery and robotic remote control to more immersive computer games."

Scientists Train Nano-'Building Blocks' to Self Assemble

Medgadget Scientists Train Nano-'Building Blocks' to Self Assemble: "Researchers from the University of Delaware and Washington University in St. Louis have figured out how to train synthetic polymer molecules to behave--to literally 'self-assemble' --and form into long, multicompartment cylinders 1,000 times thinner than a human hair, with potential uses in radiology, signal communication and the delivery of therapeutic drugs in the human body."

Software Identifies Users By Typing Style

ScienceDaily Hey ... You're Not My User! Software Identifies Computer Users By Typing Style: "Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have developed software that is able to identify computer users with high accuracy by their individual, distinct typing styles. This 'behaviometric' technology may one day be part of security systems to prevent unauthorized users from gaining access to computers and sensitive data."

Falling Prey To Machines?

ScienceDaily Falling Prey To Machines?: "It's coming, but when? From Garry Kasparov to Michael Crichton, both fact and fiction are converging on a showdown between man and machine. But what does a leading artificial intelligence expert--the world's first computer science PhD--think about the future of machine intelligence? Will computers ever gain consciousness and take over the world?"

"Comparisons between the brain and electronic hardware are also difficult to draw. For example, the issue of 'fanout' demonstrates the complexity of the brain over even today's most sophisticated computers. Fanout refers to the number of connections an element in a network can have to another element of a network. Today's most complicated computers have a fanout factor of about 10. The human brain, however, has a fanout of 10,000.

'We don't have the faintest idea of what machines with that kind of fanout would be like, so inference from the capabilities of present machines to such machines is feeble at best,' notes Holland. 'As Nobel Laureate physicist Murray Gell-Mann says, three orders of magnitude is a new science.'"

Miniature Implanted Devices Could Treat Epilepsy, Glaucoma

ScienceDaily Miniature Implanted Devices Could Treat Epilepsy, Glaucoma: "Purdue University researchers have developed new miniature devices designed to be implanted in the brain to predict and prevent epileptic seizures and a nanotech sensor for implantation in the eye to treat glaucoma."

"The transmitter consumes 8.8 milliwatts, or about one-third as much power as other implantable transmitters while transmitting 10 times more data. Another key advantage is that the transmitter has the capacity to collect data specifically related to epileptic seizures from 1,000 channels, or locations in the brain"

Also reported on MedGadget

Microsoft Coffee Table

Popular Mechanics Microsoft Surface Video - Touchscreen, Multi Touch Coffee Table: "The software giant has built a new touchscreen computer—a coffee table that will change the world. Go inside its top-secret development with PopularMechanics.com, then forget the keyboard and mouse: The next generation of computer interfaces will be hands-on."

Way cool.

African Bushmen Track Wildlife with PDAs

Discovery Channel :: News - Technology African Bushmen Track Wildlife with PDAs: "In Africa, one might expect to see a lion with a fresh kill, a baboon with a toothy grin, or an elephant with its herd. But a Bushman with a PalmPilot? It's possible.

Expert hunters and gatherers such as the Bushmen, the indigenous people of the Kalahari Desert, are being equipped with smart phones with special software for tracking plants and animals. Called CyberTracker, the free program combines a database of icons of animals and plants with GPS software to allow people who cannot read or write to record complex information."