Tag: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Artificial intelligence may have made leaps and bounds in recent years, but roboticists still have a long way to go in mapping and replicating the type of emotional intelligence that informs much of human interaction. It's no easy task. The trick is that even while scientists make progress on one front (take the emotionally mature Nexi), human interactions are so complex that even small issues ...

First Watson, now Rock-Paper-Scissors? Can't our flawed, spontaneous and nonsensical brains catch a break? The New York Times hosts a rock-paper-scissors computer that attempts to use patterns and frequent tendencies to beat its human foe. We tried reasoning our way through the game like we would with a human, but the results were crushing. Once we started clicking randomly, though, our ...

Remember that scene in 'Avatar' when the crippled marine runs for the first time in his new body? We know it brought a tear to your eye. Well, a group of scientists and engineers (think of them as a nerdy version of the Justice League of America) recently gathered at M.I.T. to discuss bringing this concept from the big screen to real life. According to Singularity Hub, these guys want to ...

Automated test scoring is nothing new. Most of us are quite familiar with the act of filling in little #2 pencil marks on a Scantron, and having it fed through a machine that puts a depressing little red dash next to each wrong answer. That's all well and good for tests with simple multiple choice answers, but what about tests with written answers and essay questions, like an English test? Well, ...

Fixed-price shopping is for the birds, especially on the Internet. How do you know if you're really getting the best deal possible? Well, a new Web service hopes to take care of those worries. Aroxo, a shopping site, will debut a program called 'Negotiating Ninjas' this Fall, BBC News reports. Designed by researchers at Southampton University, the 'Ninjas,' which will be fully operational by ...

Scenes of robots running amok, killing indiscriminately and taking over computer systems have been portrayed in countless films and books. Now, some scientists say these fictional situations could become a reality if limits aren't placed on advances in artificial intelligence (A.I.). The New York Times reports that a group of computer scientists, organized by the Association for the Advancement ...

Currently all battlefield robots have humans at the controls -- be they 100 yards away, or across the globe. But military machines are becoming more advanced and soon could be making decisions on when to fire and where to bomb, without human input. In anticipation of that day, Professor Ronald Arkin, a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, is developing software to govern the behavior ...

Does the name Francis Heylighen ring a bell? Didn't think so. But the research professor at the Free University of Brussels has some interesting things to say about artificial intelligence and consciousness in regards to the Internet. Speaking with New Scientist, Heylighen says that "adding consciousness is more a matter of fine-tuning and increasing control... than [it is] a jump to a wholly ...

Years after building a computer called Deep Blue that gave chess champion Garry Kasparov a run for his money, IBM is now taking aim at another human-only intellectual pursuit -- 'Jeopardy!' IBM is developing a supercomputer, along with an accompanying program called Watson, to compete on the popular game show, and may even face off against the painfully brilliant Ken Jennings, who holds the ...

Victory! We can still claim superiority over the machines! And as long as we continue to be better at picking winners during the NCAA's March Madness, we should be safe from the emergence of Skynet. Computer scientists have been using statistics, databases, and computer models for years to try and predict the outcome of sports tournaments. Of particular interest is the NCAA's basketball ...

Researchers at Aberystwyth University in Wales have developed a robot that is being heralded as the first machine to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of a human operator. Named Adam, the device has already identified the role of several genes in yeast cells, and has the ability to plan further experiments to test its own hypotheses. Ross King, from the university's computer ...

You know, when armchair futurists (and jive talkin' bloggists) make note of some of the scary new tech making the rounds in defense circles these days it's one thing, but when the Doomsday Scenarios come from official channels, that's when we start to get nervous. According to a report published by the California State Polytechnic University (with data made available by the U.S. Navy's Office ...

Chances are you've looked in the mirror before and spotted something on your face you wouldn't mind tweaking, whether it be a simple blemish or something a little more serious such as an uneven eye or a nose that didn't make it through your youth without getting a little crooked. Such facial issues can be addressed by doctors and surgeons, to some degree (if you've got the money). But if seeing ...