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Thursday, April 05, 2007

We love... Robots

Robin Turner, Western Mail


ROBOTS have captivated cinema audiences and book readers for decades. There is nothing quite like the clunking, Frankenstein-like walk of a mechanical "human" to send a chill down the spine.

And robots have leapt from the screen and the printed page to play a part in our everyday lives.

Most of our cars have been spray-painted, welded and bolted by robots, "thinking" spy planes brimming with missiles are hunting for Osama bin Laden and robots are used in hospitals to dish up drugs to order.

The word robot was first introduced by Czech writer Karel Capek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) which was written in 1920.

It was an adaptation of the slavic word robota which meant drudgery.
When sci-fi enjoyed a huge boom in the late 1940s and '50s with films, comic characters like Dan Dare and books like i, Robot from Isaac Asimov, robots began to become familiar.

And nothing raised their profile more than the phenomenally successful Star Wars movies which paired the comic R2D2 (Artoo for short, played by Kenny Baker) utility robot with the pretentious golden protocol android C-3PO, probably the most famous robots in cinema history.

It was writer Arthur C Clarke who highlighted the potential dark side of robots with his invention HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic) computer which starred in the film 2001, A Space Odyssey.

HAL was ultra-sophisticated and was even programmed to appreciate fine art.

Unfortunately for the crew of the Discovery, he was also programmed to lip-read.

When the astronauts whisper about shutting down HAL when he makes a mistake, he cottons on and turns murderer, the human side of him failing to accept death.

In the film world, robots tend to be mechanical systems with a primitive "brain", androids are robots which look like humans and cyborgs are a mixture of human and robot.

The cult movie Blade Runner centred on the dilemma faced by robots which become "too human".

Set against a dystopian, acid rain-plagued city of the future, a band of renegade Nexus-6 androids led by Rutger Hauer (said to have played the part like a cross between a Commanche warrior and a Shakespearean hero) hunt down their scientist maker who has given them a limited lifespan.

Their protagonist is the government agent Dekard (Harrison Ford) but there is a nagging feeling Dekard himself could be a "skin job", the art of android making having become so perfected only hours of psychological testing could tell them from humans.

Currently, hundreds of bomb disposal robots such as the iRobot PackBot and the Foster-Miller TALON are being used in Iraq and Afghanistan by the US military to defuse roadside bombs, or improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

Domestic robots are also available which do vacuum cleaning and grass cutting.

Other domestic robots have the aim of providing companionship (social robots) or play partners (ludobots) to people. Examples are Sony's AIBO, a commercially successful robot pet dog, Paro, a robot baby seal intended to soothe nursing home patients, and wakamaru, a humanoid robot intended for elderly and disabled people.

One of the first recorded designs of a humanoid robot was made by Leonardo da Vinci in around 1495.

His notebooks, rediscovered in the 1950s, contain detailed drawings of a mechanical knight able to sit up, wave its arms and move its head and jaw. The designis likely to be based on his anatomical research recorded in the Vitruvian man.

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Wednesday, April 04, 2007

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Robots

Modern robots can respond to emotion and the smell of fine wines.

1 “Robot” comes from the Czech word robota, meaning “drudgery,” and first appeared in the 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). The drama ends badly when the machines rise up and kill their creators, leaving a sole lonely survivor.

2 They say it was an accident. The first known case of robot homicide occurred in 1981, when a robotic arm crushed a Japanese Kawasaki factory worker.

3 More than a million industrial robots are now in use, nearly half of them in Japan.

4 Archytas of Tarentum, a pal of Plato’s, built a mechanical bird driven by a jet of steam or compressed air—arguably history’s first robot—in the fifth century B.C.

5 Leonardo da Vinci drew up plans for an armored humanoid machine in 1495. Engineer Mark Rosheim has created a functional miniature version for NASA to help colonize Mars.

6 Slow but steady: The real Mars robots, Spirit and Opportunity, have logged 10.5 miles trudging across the Red Planet for more than three years. The unstoppable droids were built to last 90 days.

7 The United States’ military corps of 4,000 robots includes reconnaissance Talon bots that scout for roadside bombs in Iraq and PackBots that poked around for Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Afghanistan. Apparently without much success.

8 PackBot’s manufacturer, iRobot, has also sold more than 2 million Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners, with the same environment-sensing technology.

robot-2-150.jpgrobot-3-150.jpg

9 Low tech vs. high tech: Taliban fighters in Afghanistan have reportedly used ladders to flip over and disable the U.S. military robots sent to scout out their caves.

10 Elektro, the world’s first humanoid robot, debuted in 1939. Built by Westinghouse, the seven-foot-tall walking machine “spoke” more than 700 words stored on 78-rpm records to simulate conversation.

11 Life is tough in Tinseltown: Elektro later appeared in the 1960 B movie Sex Kittens Go to College.

12 R2-D2 is the only character that appears unchanged (by aging, say, or a funky black outfit) in all six Star Wars movies.

13 R2’s dark secret: It was played by actor Kenny Baker, who by the end was mostly given the boot and replaced by CGI.

14 Chris Melhuish of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory created robots that use bacteria-filled fuel cells to produce electricity from rotten apples and dead flies. The goal: robots that forage for their own food.

15 Mini Me: Australian researchers are trying to build a microrobot that would mimic the swim stroke used by E. coli bacteria. It would be injected into a patient so it could take a biopsy from the inside.

16 Cybernetics professor Kevin Warwick calls himself the world’s first cyborg, with computer chips implanted in his left arm. He can remotely operate doors, an artificial hand, and an electronic wheelchair.

17 Winebot, built by Japan’s NEC System Technologies and Mie University, can ID scads of different wines, cheeses, and hors d’oeuvres . . . up to a point. It recently mistook a reporter’s hand for prosciutto.

18 MIT’s Media Lab is trying to make robots personal, developing RoCo—a computer with a monitor for a head and neck—and Leonardo, a sort of super-Furby designed to respond to emotional cues.

19 No strings attached! Robotics expert Henrik Christensen predicts humans will be having sex with robots within four years.

20 Hans Moravec, founder of Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, predicts that robots will emerge as their own species by 2040. “They could replace us in every essential task and, in principle, operate our society increasingly well without us,” he concludes, oddly cheery.

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Tuesday, April 03, 2007

First Semantic Search Engine?

By Leah Messinger



Business search company ZoomInfo announced today the launch of what it’s calling the first-ever semantic search engine. But is it really?

The answer depends on whom you ask. ZoomInfo vice president of products and marketing Russell Glass enthuses that it’s “the first example of really disruptive value being created with semantic search and semantic technologies.” He said big search companies return results that are too broad to be helpful, and described traditional business information companies as “dinosaurs,” which rely on time-intensive data gathering.


And marketing and business analysts laud the site’s newly available search functions that can be used to give meaning and structure to wide-ranging information already on the web. They see ZoomInfo as a boon for business-to-business marketers and others seeking detailed company information.



The company’s mission is, after all, offering free detailed information about more than 3 million companies, including essential functions, contact information, and lists of major competitors. Basic searches for people within companies are also free, with a tiered subscription service for more detailed information on as many as 35 million individuals.



The site works by applying tags to information that distinguish between key concepts, such as a person, an industry, or a company name. Semantic search often relies on artificial intelligence and the abilities of computers to learn and understand relationships.



“You don’t have to sift through all of the results that one Web search company, like a Google or Yahoo, will bring back,” explained ZoomInfo’s COO Bryan Burdick.



But search experts say semantic search means different things to different people. They favor all technology that improves search results, but questioned whether any site could claim the title of “first” semantic search engine.



Companies such as Google already use elements of semantic search, say these experts. It’s akin to describing something as “the first energy-efficient automobile,” said Doug Lenat, a semantic search expert who runs Cycorp, another semantic technology company.



Still, some analysts spoke glowingly about ZoomInfo’s semantic search engine.



“It’s the Holy Grail of what B2B marketers are looking for,” said Forrester vice president Laura Ramos.



Sapna Satagopan, an associate analyst with JupiterResearch, said the site is unusually good at looking at relationships within companies, a benefit to both marketers and recruiters that will disrupt the prevailing model of corporate data collection.



“Technology replaces what was once a formerly labor-intensive process,” she added.

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Sunday, April 01, 2007

Learn Like A Human

Why Can't A Computer Be More Like A Brain?

By the age of five, a child can understand spoken language, distinguish a cat from a dog, and play a game of catch. These are three of the many things humans find easy that computers and robots currently cannot do. Despite decades of research, we computer scientists have not figured out how to do basic tasks of perception and robotics with a computer.

Our few successes at building "intelligent" machines are notable equally for what they can and cannot do. Computers, at long last, can play winning chess. But the program that can beat the world champion can't talk about chess, let alone learn backgammon. Today's programs-at best-solve specific problems. Where humans have broad and flexible capabilities, computers do not.

Perhaps we've been going about it in the wrong way. For 50 years, computer scientists have been trying to make computers intelligent while mostly ignoring the one thing that is intelligent: the human brain. Even so-called neural network programming techniques take as their starting point a highly simplistic view of how the brain operates.

In some ways, the task has been wrongly posed right from the start. In 1950, Alan Turing, the computer pioneer behind the British code-breaking effort in World War II, proposed to reframe the problem of defining artificial intelligence as a challenge that has since been dubbed the Turing Test. Put simply, it asked whether a computer, hidden from view, could conduct a conversation in such a way that it would be indistinguishable from a human.

So far, the answer has been a resounding no. Turing's behavioral framing of the problem has led researchers away from the most promising avenue of study: the human brain. It is clear to many people that the brain must work in ways that are very different from digital computers. To build intelligent machines, then, why not understand how the brain works, and then ask how we can replicate it?

My colleagues and I have been pursuing that approach for several years. We've focused on the brain's neocortex, and we have made significant progress in understanding how it works. We call our theory, for reasons that I will explain shortly, Hierarchical Temporal Memory, or HTM. We have created a software platform that allows anyone to build HTMs for experimentation and deployment. You don't program an HTM as you would a computer; rather you configure it with software tools, then train it by exposing it to sensory data. HTMs thus learn in much the same way that children do. HTM is a rich theoretical framework that would be impossible to describe fully in a short article such as this, so I will give only a high level overview of the theory and technology. Details of HTM are available at http://www.numenta.com.

First, I will describe the basics of HTM theory, then I will give an introduction to the tools for building products based on it. It is my hope that some readers will be enticed to learn more and to join us in this work.

We have concentrated our research on the neocortex, because it is responsible for almost all high-level thought and perception, a role that explains its exceptionally large size in humans-about 60 percent of brain volume [see illustration "Goldenrod"]. The neocortex is a thin sheet of cells, folded to form the convolutions that have become a visual synonym for the brain itself. Although individual parts of the sheet handle problems as different as vision, hearing, language, music, and motor control, the neocortical sheet itself is remarkably uniform. Most parts look nearly identical at the macroscopic and microscopic level.

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