Online worlds such as Second Life will soon become training grounds for artificial intelligences.
Researchers at US firm Novamente have created software that learns by controlling avatars in virtual worlds.
Initially the AIs will be embodied in pets that will get smarter by interacting with the avatars controlled by their human owners.
Novamente said it eventually aimed to create more sophisticated avatars such as talking parrots and even babies.
The race to create more human-like robots stepped up a gear this week as scientists in Spain set about building an artificial cerebellum.
The end-game of the two-year project is to implant the man-made cerebellum in a robot to make movements and interaction with humans more natural.
The cerebellum is the part of the brain that controls motor functions.
Researchers hope that the work might also yield clues to treat cognitive diseases such as Parkinson’s.
The research, being undertaken at the Department of Architecture and Computing Technology at the University of Granada, is part of a wider European project dubbed Sensopac.
The future of human control is here. United Kingdom’s Merseyside police will be launching a pilotless police “spy drone” next month, with the goals of keeping check and reducing anti-social behavior and public disorder.
The 1-meter wide drone was originally used by the military for scouting. It weighs less than a bag of sugar, according to BBC, and can record images from a height of 500 meters. The hovering spy bots are controlled by remote or pre-programmed GPS navigation system, are extremely quiet and can be fitted with night vision cameras.
In this Discovery Channel documentary, we get a prediction of what life could be like in the year 2025, thanks to technological advancements that are happening today. This 5 part docu-drama delves into wearable computers, immersive telecom, intelligent homes, emotive AI, robots, genetics, clean energy, entertainment, and education.
Imagine having a discussion with Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein on the nature of the universe, where their 3-D, life-sized representations looked you in the eye, examined your body language, considered voice nuances and phraseology of your questions, then answered you in a way that is so real you would swear the images were alive.
This was an opening scene from an episode of the TV show “Star Trek” almost a decade and a half ago. A new research project between the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Central Florida in Orlando may soon make such imaginary conversations a reality.
Technology from computer games, animation and artificial intelligence provide the elements to make this happen. The National Science Foundation has awarded a half-million dollar, three-year grant to UIC and UCF researchers to bring those elements together and create the methodology for making such virtual figures commonplace.
UIC will focus on the computer graphics and interaction while UCF will concentrate on artificial intelligence and natural language processing software.
The government of South Korea is drawing up a code of ethics to prevent human abuse of robots and vice versa.
The Robot Ethics Charter will cover standards for robotics users and manufacturers, as well as guidelines on ethical standards to be programmed into robots.
The document will also deal with legal issues, such as the protection of data acquired by robots and establishing clear identification and traceability of the machines.
A robot is being used by a Franco-Swiss team to investigate how the first land animals on Earth might have walked.
The bot looks a lot like a salamander; and the scientists can change the way it swims, slithers and crawls with commands sent wirelessly from a PC.
The group says it provides new insight into the nervous system changes aquatic lifeforms would have had to acquire to move to a terrestrial existence.
The researchers report their study in the latest edition of Science magazine.
An ethical code to prevent humans abusing robots, and vice versa, is being drawn up by South Korea.
The Robot Ethics Charter will cover standards for users and manufacturers and will be released later in 2007.
It is being put together by a five member team of experts that includes futurists and a science fiction writer.
The South Korean government has identified robotics as a key economic driver and is pumping millions of dollars into research.
“The government plans to set ethical guidelines concerning the roles and functions of robots as robots are expected to develop strong intelligence in the near future,” the ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy said.
Living things communicate all the time. They bark, they glow, they make a stink, they thwack the ground. How their communication evolved is the sort of big question that keeps lots of biologists busy for entire careers. One of the reasons it’s so big is that there are many different things that organisms communicate. A frog may sing to attract mates. A plant may give off a chemical to attract parasitoid wasps to attack the bugs chewing its leaves. An ant may lay down pheromone trails to guide other ants to food. Bacteria emit chemical signals to each other so that they can build biofilms that line our lungs and guts.
Communication may work all very well in these cases, but scientists also want to know how they evolved in the first place. Roughly speaking, their question goes something like this. Say you’re an organism living a solitary life. Sending a signal to another member of your species may cost you more than it might bring back in benefits. If you come across some food and suddenly declare, “My, but those are some tasty grubs,” you may find yourself besieged by other members of your species all coming to have some for themselves. You might even attract the attention of a predator and become a meal yourself. So why not just shut up?
There are many ways to attack this question. You can go out and listen to birds. You can genetically engineer bacteria to tinker with their communication system and see what happens. Or you can build an army of robots.
Laurent Keller, an expert on social evolution at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, chose the latter. Working with robotics experts at Lausanne, he constructed simple robots like the ones shown above. Each robot had a pair of wheeled tracks, a 360-degree light-sensing camera, and an infrared sensor underneath. The robots were controlled by a program with a neural network architecture. In neural networks, inputs come in through various channels and get combined in various combinations, and the combinations then produce outgoing signals. In the case of the Swiss robots, the inputs were the signals from the camera and the infrared sensor, and the output was the control of the tracks.
The scientists then put the robots in a little arena with two glowing red disks. One disk they called the food source. The other was the poison source. The only difference between them was that food source sat on top of a gray piece of paper, and the poison source sat on top of black paper. A robot could tell the difference between the two only once it was close enough to a source to use its infrared sensor to see the paper color.
Then the scientists allowed the robots to evolve. The robots—a thousand of them in each trial of the experiment—started out with neural networks that were wired at random. They were placed in groups of ten in arenas with poison and food, and they all wandered in a haze. If a robot happened to reach the food and detected the gray paper, the scientists awarded it a point. If it ended up by the poison source, it lost a point. The scientists observed each robot over the course of ten minutes and added up all their points during that time. (This part of the experiment was run on a computer simulation to save time and to be able to evolve lots of robots at once.)
Making robots that interact with people emotionally is the goal of a European project led by British scientists.
Feelix Growing is a research project involving six countries, and 25 roboticists, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists.
Co-ordinator Dr Lola Canamero said the aim was to build robots that “learn from humans and respond in a socially and emotionally appropriate manner”.
The 2.3m euros scheme will last for three years.
“The human emotional world is very complex but we respond to simple cues, things we don’t notice or we don’t pay attention to, such as how someone moves,” said Dr Canamero, who is based at the University of Hertfordshire.
Bill Gates envisions a future in which robotic devices will become a nearly ubiquitous part of our day-to-day lives.
“I believe that technologies such as distributed computing, voice and visual recognition, and wireless broadband connectivity will open the door to a new generation of autonomous devices that enable computers to perform tasks in the physical world on our behalf. We may be on the verge of a new era, when the PC will get up off the desktop and allow us to see, hear, touch and manipulate objects in places where we are not physically present.”
A team at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium is embarking on a 42-month research project to build and test a 60-strong swarm of small, autonomous robots—the swarmanoid—capable of collaborating in 3-D environments.
The swarmanoid initiative follows the successful completion of the swarm-bots project, in which the researchers demonstrated the ability of identical robots to work in formations to overcome challenges such as carrying heavy objects and traveling across rough terrain—tasks that a single swarm-bot could not accomplish alone.
The $3.5 million project will feature footbots, handbots and eyebots, said Marco Dorigo, research director at the university’s IRIDIA lab.
The three types of bots will join forces to create a swarmanoid and perform various jobs. The footbots will transport objects on the ground level, while handbots with specialized climbing and grappling features take to the walls. Some eyebots equipped with visual sensors will operate attached to the ceiling, overseeing the action below and feeding information to their robotic colleagues; others will fly.
It looks like a four-armed starfish, but so far it’s unaware of its own shape. After flailing its arms for a while, however, the robot gets a sense of its design and begins to walk. The real feat comes when engineers remove a part of its leg: The robot senses a change in its structure and begins walking in a different way to compensate. The demonstration is the first proof that a robot can generate a conception of itself and then adapt to damage, a handy skill to have in unpredictable environments.
NASA’s EO-1 is a new breed of satellite with AI programming to notice things that change (like the plume of a volcano) and take appropriate action, such as monitoring that specific location.
EO-1 can re-organize its own priorities to study volcanic eruptions, flash floods, forest fires, disintegrating sea-ice, and other unexpected events. It can also use sensors on other satellites or on the ground as a “sensorweb.”
