Scientific Research

From: David Andrews (dandrews@visi.com)
Date: Thu Jul 20 2006 - 09:11:50 PDT


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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