Here is a New York Times story on artificial intelligence research that has many implications for blind persons and products that might be available to us in the future.
Dave
From: "Michael Bullis" <mabullis@hotmail.com>
To: "'NFBnet NFBCS Mailing List'" <nfbcs@nfbnet.org>,
<mbullis@bism.org>
Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2006 22:27:11 -0400
Thread-Index: AcarpAEetjv4iEA3TbCCUx9+7ZIhDA==
Subject: [nfbcs] Artificial Intelligence
This article summarizes research that has implications for us in several
directions--blind driving, print reading machines, access to appliances,
Etc. It is reprinted from the NY Times Science Section for Tuesday, July 18.
Mike Bullis
Brainy Robots Start Stepping Into Daily Life
By [4]JOHN MARKOFF
Robot cars drive themselves across the desert, electronic eyes perform
lifeguard duty in swimming pools and virtual enemies with humanlike
behavior battle video game players.
These are some fruits of the research field known as artificial
intelligence, where reality is finally catching up to the
science-fiction hype. A half-century after the term was coined, both
scientists and engineers say they are making rapid progress in
simulating the human brain, and their work is finding its way into a
new wave of real-world products.
The advances can also be seen in the emergence of bold new projects
intended to create more ambitious machines that can improve safety and
security, entertain and inform, or just handle everyday tasks. At
[5]Stanford University, for instance, computer scientists are
developing a robot that can use a hammer and a screwdriver to assemble
an Ikea bookcase (a project beyond the reach of many humans) as well
as tidy up after a party, load a dishwasher or take out the trash.
One pioneer in the field is building an electronic butler that could
hold a conversation with its master á la HAL in the movie 2001: A
Space Odyssey or order more pet food.
Though most of the truly futuristic projects are probably years from
the commercial market, scientists say that after a lull, artificial
intelligence has rapidly grown far more sophisticated. Today some
scientists are beginning to use the term cognitive computing, to
distinguish their research from an earlier generation of artificial
intelligence work. What sets the new researchers apart is a wealth of
new biological data on how the human brain functions.
Theres definitely been a palpable upswing in methods, competence and
boldness, said Eric Horvitz, a [6]Microsoft researcher who is
president-elect of the American Association for Artificial
Intelligence. At conferences you are hearing the phrase human-level
A.I., and people are saying that without blushing.
Cognitive computing is still more of a research discipline than an
industry that can be measured in revenue or profits. It is pursued in
various pockets of academia and the business world. And despite some
of the more startling achievements, improvements in the field are
measured largely in increments: voice recognition systems with
decreasing failure rates, or computerized cameras that can recognize
more faces and objects than before.
Still, there have been rapid innovations in many areas: voice control
systems are now standard features in midpriced automobiles, and
advanced artificial reason techniques are now routinely used in
inexpensive video games to make the characters actions more lifelike.
A French company, Poseidon Technologies, sells underwater vision
systems for swimming pools that function as lifeguard assistants,
issuing alerts when people are drowning, and the system has saved
lives in Europe.
Last October, a robot car designed by a team of Stanford engineers
covered 132 miles of desert road without human intervention to capture
a $2 million prize offered by the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, part of the Pentagon. The feat was particularly striking
because 18 months earlier, during the first such competition, the best
vehicle got no farther than seven miles, becoming stuck after driving
off a mountain road.
Now the Pentagon agency has upped the ante: Next year the robots will
be back on the road, this time in a simulated traffic setting. It is
being called the urban challenge.
At Microsoft, researchers are working on the idea of predestination.
They envision a software program that guesses where you are traveling
based on previous trips, and then offers information that might be
useful based on where the software thinks you are going.
Tellme Networks, a company in Mountain View, Calif., that provides
voice recognition services for both customer service and telephone
directory applications, is a good indicator of the progress that is
being made in relatively constrained situations, like looking up a
phone number or transferring a call.
Tellme supplies the system that automates directory information for
toll-free business listings. When the service was first introduced in
2001, it could correctly answer fewer than 37 percent of phone calls
without a human operators help. As the system has been constantly
refined, the figure has now risen to 74 percent.
More striking advances are likely to come from new biological models
of the brain. Researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de
Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland, are building large-scale computer
models to study how the brain works; they have used an [7]I.B.M.
parallel supercomputer to create the most detailed three-dimensional
model to date of a column of 10,000 neurons in the neocortex.
The goal of my lab in the past 10 to 12 years has been to go inside
these little columns and try to figure out how they are built with
exquisite detail, said Henry Markram, a research scientist who is head
of the Blue Brain project. You can really now zoom in on single cells
and watch the electrical activity emerging.
Blue Brain researchers say they believe the simulation will provide
fundamental insights that can be applied by scientists who are trying
to simulate brain functions.
Another well-known researcher is Robert Hecht-Nielsen, who is seeking
to build an electronic butler called Chancellor that would be able to
listen, speak and provide in-home concierge services. He contends that
with adequate resources, he could create such a machine within five
years.
Although some people are skeptical that Mr. Hecht-Nielsen can achieve
what he describes, he does have one successful artificial intelligence
business under his belt. In 1986, he founded HNC Software, which sold
systems to detect credit card fraud using neural network technology
designed to mimic biological circuits in the brain. HNC was sold in
2002 to the Fair Isaac Corporation, where Mr. Hecht-Nielsen is a vice
president and leads a small research group.
Last year he began speaking publicly about his theory of
confabulation, a hypothesis about the way the brain makes decisions.
At a recent I.B.M. symposium, Mr. Hecht-Nielsen showed off a model of
confabulation, demonstrating how his software program could read two
sentences from The Detroit Free Press and create a third sentence that
both made sense and was a natural extension of the previous text.
For example, the program read: He started his goodbyes with a morning
audience with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace, sharing coffee,
tea, cookies and his desire for a golf rematch with her son, Prince
Andrew. The visit came after Clinton made the rounds through Ireland
and Northern Ireland to offer support for the flagging peace process
there.
The program then generated a sentence that read: The two leaders also
discussed bilateral cooperation in various fields.
Artificial intelligence had its origins in 1950, when the
mathematician Alan Turing proposed a test to determine whether or not
a machine could think or be conscious. The test involved having a
person face two teleprinter machines, only one of which had a human
behind it. If the human judge could not tell which terminal was
controlled by the human, the machine could be said to be intelligent.
In the late 1950s a field of study emerged that tried to build systems
that replicated human abilities like speech, hearing, manual tasks and
reasoning.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the original artificial intelligence
researchers began designing computer software programs they called
expert systems, which were essentially databases accompanied by a set
of logical rules. They were handicapped both by underpowered computers
and by the absence of the wealth of data that todays researchers have
amassed about the actual structure and function of the biological
brain.
Those shortcomings led to the failure of a first generation of
artificial intelligence companies in the 1980s, which became known as
the A.I. Winter. Recently, however, researchers have begun to speak of
an A.I. Spring emerging as scientists develop theories on the workings
of the human mind. They are being aided by the exponential increase in
processing power, which has created computers with millions of times
the power of those available to researchers in the 1960s at consumer
prices.
There is a new synthesis of four fields, including mathematics,
neuroscience, computer science and psychology, said Dharmendra S.
Modha, an I.B.M. computer scientist. The implication of this is
amazing. What you are seeing is that cognitive computing is at a cusp
where its knocking on the door of potentially mainstream applications.
At Stanford, researchers are hoping to make fundamental progress in
mobile robotics, building machines that can carry out tasks around the
home, like the current generation of robotic floor vacuums, only more
advanced. The field has recently been dominated by Japan and South
Korea, but the Stanford researchers have sketched out a three-year
plan to bring the United States to parity.
At the moment, the Stanford team is working on the first steps
necessary to make the robot they are building function well in an
American household. The team is focusing on systems that will
consistently recognize standard doorknobs and is building robot hands
to open doors.
Its time to build an A.I. robot, said Andrew Ng, a Stanford computer
scientist and a leader of the project, called Stanford Artificial
Intelligence Robot, or Stair. The dream is to put a robot in every
home.
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