Jun 26, 2007
When working on any software system there are various challenges. When a system is entirely new, there’s a ton. Here’s a short and generalized description of what’s involved in the process. In the interest of keeping this non-technical, let’s use some analogies of adventure and countryside (that we’re ruining with dams to power our systems, ironically). A system is a specific place that you want to go to, like Grandma’s Secret Hillside Bakery. The path that that leads to it are parts of the program you have to create.
Jun 23, 2007
What’s cheaper than a miniaturized, flying insect-like robot controlled by artificial intelligence? A miniaturized computer chip embedded as a control device in a natural organism. One of DARPAs projects involves injecting a chip into a Moth during the larva stage, the larva effectively adapting to the chip as part of its body. Once the moth hatches, machine learning is used to control it — to translate the signals and responses from the moth’s organic body — and effectively making it a mechorganic hybrid spy device; a cyborg moth.
Jun 12, 2007
It doesn’t seem too long until humanoid robots for the home become as advanced as Sony’s late QRIO, judging by the humanoid robot RoGun from the Korean company KornTech. This impressive robot is one of the latest models from Korea, and needless to say, sports some of the latest of technological innovations in the fields of robotics and A.I. I talked with the company’s marketing director, Lee Jea-Hyun, to provide you with an in-depth article on this new and very impressive humanoid.
Jun 6, 2007
Just when you think Hiroshi Ishiguro is busy amplifying the uncanny valley effect of one of his previous androids, he rolls out a new model. This time, it’s a gigantic bionic baby. Boasting about 200 sensors (optical, auditory and tactile) and 51 air actuators — the 1.3 meter tall robot is designed to mimic the physical motions of a two year old.
Jun 3, 2007
For some reason I’ve always had a special fear towards HIV of all diseases. Perhaps I was subjected to a wave of contraception propaganda run amok in my younger years, or heard one too many news of lunatics placing infected needles in theatre seats. In any case, I’m glad (albeit not surprised) to hear expectations for my chosen field of study to contribute significantly to AIDS research in the coming years.
May 30, 2007
Now we know. Cross a genetic algorithm with your favorite toy from childhood (Lego!) and you get intelligent, biologically reminiscent structures. Dr. Pablo Funes and his team at the Dynamical & Evolutionary Machine Organization devised a very cool simulator that can be told to create Lego structures of various kinds, such as bridges, using evolutionary algorithms. The creative aspect provides interesting food for thought: the system is given a goal and the solution design is entirely dependant on the machine.
May 28, 2007
I just put together a YouTube Think Artificial Channel as an experiment. For those unfamiliar Channels, they are a user’s collection of videos (neatly categorized) that others can view and subscribe to. Up until this point I hadn’t used YouTube channels, but seeing as I often post YouTube videos, I thought it might as well be good to actually keep a collection of them all in one place — along with the various videos I like but don’t get around blogging about.
May 28, 2007
There are so many venues for artificial creativity, in fact, as many as we can imagine using our own creativity. Generating stories is one of them and a popular one at that, as many open-source lexical databases have become available in the past few years.
MakeBelieve is one of these creative system. In short, MakeBelieve uses ConceptNet, an open-source common sense database to generate short stories of various sorts. Created in 2002 by Hugo Liu of the MIT Media Lab, the system works interactively: The user initially writes a short sentence and MakeBelieve attempts to write a following story.
May 10, 2007
It’s hard to imagine what on Earth bird’s nests have in common with artificial intelligence. Yet, I found myself today calling half of Reykjavik looking for someone who owns or has access to one.
