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[nlpatumd] AAAI AI ALERT Full-Text 29 April 2005 (fwd)

ted pedersen
Fri, 29 Apr 2005 19:32:26 -0700

I enjoy these sorts of collections of articles.

--
Ted Pedersen
http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 12:18:34 -0700
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: undisclosed-recipients:  ;
Subject: AAAI AI ALERT Full-Text  29 April 2005

The AI ALERT is a semimonthly service from The American Association for 
Artificial Intelligence providing an eclectic subset from the "AI in the news" 
page in AI TOPICS, the AAAI sponsored pathfinder web site. For the entire 
collection of headlines, articles, excerpts, and pointers to related pages 
within AI TOPICS, please visit our page of current news at
http://www.aaai.org/aitopics/html/current.html

An HTML version of this ALERT has been posted at
http://www.aaai.org/aitopics/assets/AIalerts/alert.4.29.05.html

Back issues can be found at
http://www.aaai.org/aitopics/articles&columns/aialerts.html

The AI ALERT is intended to keep you informed of news articles published by 
third parties. The mere fact that a particular item is selected for inclusion 
does NOT imply that AAAI or AI TOPICS has verified the information or that 
there is endorsement of any kind. And because the excerpt may not reflect the 
overall tenor of the article, nor contain all of the relevant information, you 
are encouraged to access the entire article.

=======================================

Articles in this issue:
* Automated mining still a dream - Sudbury Star
* IST project to grow first computer-based society - CORDIS News
* Gordon Moore Looks Back -- And Forward - PCWorld (plus one related article)
* Charlotte Mooers; helped users navigate early e-mail systems (obituary) - The 
Boston Globe
* Qatar to use robots as camel riders - Associated Press (plus related photos 
and a cartoon)
* Summarizer ranks sentences - Technology Research News
* Students rah, rah, rah their 'bot - Denver Post
* 'Dormouse' Retells Silicon Valley History (book review) - eWeek (plus two 
related articles)
* Whatever happened to machines that think? - New Scientist (plus one related 
article)
* Selling a software Holy Grail - Baltimore Sun
* AI's Next Brain Wave - InformationWeek
* Thought control - Edmonton Sun (plus one related article)
* Lecture sings praises of nanotech - BBC News
* What's next jump in pet craze -- fleabots? - Washington Post
* "Everything is going well" - EverestNews.com
* The Next Wave of Disruptive Technologies - Managing Automation Magazine (plus 
two related articles)

=======================================

April 15, 2005: Automated mining still a dream. By Denis St. Pierre. Sudbury 
Star / available from CANOE.
"The use of artificial intelligence to create truly-automated machines remains 
decades away, an expert on the subject told a mining conference Monday. 'Why 
can't we make a machine that's a miner?' Marvin Minsky said in his address to 
the International Symposium on Mine Mechanization and Automation and Telemin 1 
Conference at Laurentian University. 'We can make these big, powerful 
machines...but we cannot get the complete automation we'd like to get,' said 
Minsky. New approaches and greater resources are needed to develop computerized 
machines that can mimic the human capacity for common sense reasoning, he said. 
... Increased automation will allow Inco to develop deeper ore bodies and 
possibly lower-grade ore that currently cannot be mined economically, [Peter] 
Jones said."
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/TechNews/Other/2005/04/14/997231.html

April 15, 2005: IST project to grow first computer-based society. CORDIS News.
"The field of social simulation - which uses computer programmes to experiment 
on social systems - has grown steadily since its birth in the early 1990s. Due 
to computing constraints, however, research has until now focused on the 
development of simple social systems. But an international collaboration funded 
by the EU's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) is about to change that. The NEW 
TIES project (new and emergent world models through individual, evolutionary 
and social learning) aims to grow the worlds first full-blown society based on 
artificial computer-based individuals. The consortium includes leading 
researchers in artificial intelligence, language evolution, agent-based 
simulation and evolutionary computing, drawn from universities in the 
Netherlands, the UK and Hungary."
http://dbs.cordis.lu/cgi-bin/srchidadb?CALLER=NHP_EN_NEWS&ACTION=D&SESSION=&RCN=EN_RCN_ID:23684

April 18, 2005: Gordon Moore Looks Back -- And Forward. Intel co-founder coined 
computing's famous "Moore's Law" 40 years ago. James Niccolai, IDG News Service 
& PCWorld.com.
"Forty years after he coined the most famous law in computing, Gordon Moore 
still has a few words of advice for the industry. For software developers: 
Simplify! Your interfaces are getting worse. Nanotechnology? Don't believe the 
hype; silicon chips are here to stay. Artificial intelligence? Try again, 
folks! You're barking up the wrong tree. ... Asked about artificial 
intelligence, he said computers as they are built today will not come close to 
replicating the human mind because they were designed from the outset to handle 
information in a different way. Scientists need to figure out more clearly how 
the mind works, and then build a computer from scratch to mimic it.
... Still, they may mimic parts of human intelligence, such as the ability to 
recognize language and distinguish, for example, between when a person is 
saying 'two' or 'too.' 'I think when it recognizes language that well, then you 
can start to have an intelligent conversation with your computer and that will 
change the way you use computers dramatically,' he said."
http://www.pcworld.com/resource/article/0,aid,120429,pg,1,RSS,RSS,00.asp
>> RELATED ARTICLE >>
Moore's Law original issue found. BBC News (April 22, 2005).
"David Clark had kept copies of the magazine for years, despite pleas from his 
wife to throw them away. Now the couple are celebrating after collecting the 
$10,000 (£5,281) reward which was offered by chip maker Intel. ... 'We're 
delighted to at last have an original copy of the April 1965 edition of 
Electronics Magazine,' said an Intel spokesperson. ... Mr Clark, who admits he 
is 'a bit of a hoarder', collected the Electronics magazine issues, as well as 
others, after the Philips Central Library in the UK - now closed - started to 
clean them out. 'In the 70s, they started throwing out large quantities of 
these magazines,' he said. 'I was in my 20s at the time and thought you 
shouldn't throw them out because they are recording the golden age of 
electronics.'"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4472549.stm

April 18, 2005: Charlotte Mooers; helped users navigate early e-mail systems. 
By Nathan Hurst. The Boston Globe & Boston.com.
"Mrs. Mooers, a retired Cambridge science writer who was considered an expert 
on two of the earliest e-mail systems in the 1970s, died at the Courtyard 
Nursing Care Center in Medford on March 17 from complications of dementia. She 
was 80. ... Following her graduation in 1948 from Simmons College, Mrs. Mooers 
worked as a technical writer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and 
for her husband's firm, the now defunct Rockford Research in Cambridge, which 
performed some of the earliest studies on artificial intelligence and computer 
science. 'She was very involved with the Cambridge science community and AI 
[artificial intelligence] scene,' said her daughter Edith A. Mooers, of 
Melrose."
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/obituaries/articles/2005/04/18/charlotte_mooers_helped_users_navigate_early_e_mail_systems/

April 19, 2005: Qatar to use robots as camel riders. By Tarek Al-Issawi. 
Associated Press / available from USA Today.
"With the reins in one hand and a whip in the other, the purple-jerseyed rider 
prodded a camel around the track Tuesday at a fast lope. But this boyish jockey 
attracted none of the ire heaped on camel owners whose beasts are piloted by 
underfed boys. The jockey was a robot. By 2007, rulers of this energy-rich 
emirate say all camel racers will be mechanical. ... Rights groups have called 
on Gulf states like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to ban children from the 
races. The countries have responded with laws that have thus far failed to 
fully uproot child jockeys from the sport. In Qatar, ruling sheiks have seized 
on robots as the best solution."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/robotics/2005-04-19-qatar-camalbots_x.htm
>> ALSO SEE >>
> this related cartoon: The universal language of sport. Cartoon by Kurt 
> Snibbe. ESPN.com. April 18, 2005
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=sportoon/050418
> and these photos: Robots mount up for camel races; CNET News.com
http://news.com.com/Photos+Robots+mount+up+for+camel+races/2009-1041_3-5677896.html

April 20 / 27, 2005: Summarizer ranks sentences. By Kimberly Patch. Technology 
Research News.
"Because computers don't understand the meanings of words and sentences, 
automating the seemingly simple task of summarizing a news story using several 
sources is a major computer science challenge. Key to meeting the challenge is 
finding a way to identify the most important sentences from a set of documents 
on the same subject. Researchers from the University of Michigan have developed 
a multi-document summarization technique that compares sentences and has the 
effect of sentences voting for the most important among them. The method, 
dubbed LexRank, combines the content-sorting concepts of prestige and lexical 
similarity to find the most important sentences in a group of documents on the 
same subject. ... The researchers are planning to incorporate the method into 
their NewsInEssence Web site, which crawls the Web for news stories, clusters 
them into topical groups, and summarizes each group."
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2005/042005/Summarizer_ranks_sentences_042005.html

April 20, 2005: Students rah, rah, rah their 'bot - Proud and of good cheer, 
young robot engineers gear up for world competition. By Katy Human. 
DenverPost.com.
"The group of nine, aged 10 to 14, unexpectedly won a state robot competition 
in January. Later this week, they will represent Colorado at an international 
contest of about 75 teams in Georgia. ... In middle-school robot competitions 
directed by FIRST - a science and technology education program established by 
Segway inventer Dean Kamen - it's not just robot performance that counts, said 
communications manager Marian Murphy. ... Also, teams had to write a research 
report, and that's where Reed's group really shined, team members boasted. 'We 
proposed this device that would help a person who is blind get across an 
intersection,' said Katrina Atkinson, 13. ... So the team wrote about building 
a small computer that would snap a picture of the 'Walk' or 'Don't walk' 
symbol, compare it with images stored in memory and indicate to its user 
whether it was safe to walk."
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%7E53%7E2823285,00.html

April 20, 2005: 'Dormouse' Retells Silicon Valley History. Book review by Chris 
Nolan. eWeek.
"A new book chronicles the development of computer culture in political terms, 
showing that computer programmers were always aware of the world outside the 
office -- or the Valley. ... [John] Markoff's What the Dormouse Said: How the 
60s Counterculture Shaped the Computer Industry -- the title's from Jefferson 
Airplane's 'White Rabbit,' a paean to pills and other substances -- details the 
valley's early history, which involves computers, LSD, some marijuana and a lot 
of time in hot tubs and saunas, not to mention the occasional acts of civil 
disobedience and arrests for protesting against the Vietnam War. ... In this 
book they attend raucous parties, do a fair amount of LSD, smoke a goodly 
amount of marijuana and generally rabble-rouse, not just with machines but with 
household names from the era like Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead.
'If you were inside someplace like SAIL (the Stanford Artificial Intelligence 
Lab) it's a very social world,' says Markoff of one of the institutions that 
fostered these men and their work. 'It's a different kind of sociability.' ... 
All them share a few common understandings, primary among them that technology 
can -- and should -- make a difference in people's lives. Accompanying that 
belief is the conviction that technology will almost always change people's 
lives for the better."
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1788380,00.asp
>> TWO RELATED ARTICLES >>
> Dropping Out and Booting Up. Perspective (opinion) article by John Markoff. 
> The Mercury News (registration req'd.). April 24, 2005.
"It often is said that the technologies that directly led to the personal 
computer were synthesized at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s. 
However, before PARC, many of the ideas and underlying technologies were 
pursued in laboratories located on opposite sides of Stanford University: one 
at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, now SRI International, and the 
other at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). During the 
'60s and early '70s, SAIL would contribute many of the best computer 
researchers and spin off almost as many companies as PARC. John McCarthy, who 
founded SAIL in the mid-1960s, was a pioneer in time-shared computing and 
invented the Lisp programming language."
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/editorial/11476923.htm
> Turn on, tune in, log on - The PC and the Internet sprang from pot-smoking, 
> acid-dropping California dreamers. Book review by Ian Garrick . San Francisco 
> Chronicle & SFGate.com. April 24, 2005.
"John Markoff, a San Francisco technology writer for the New York Times, 
extends this visionary-centered narrative even deeper into the history of 
personal computing and the Internet. 'What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s 
Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry' is an enthusiastic 
argument in favor of the idea that it was the uniquely Californian scene that 
brought forth the technologies we depend on so much today -- that the PC and 
the Internet sprang as much from a cultural environment of back-to-nature 
independence, personal freedom and psychedelic drugs as they did from 
engineering diagrams. ... Surprisingly, many of the basic technologies behind 
personal computing were products of artificial-intelligence research."
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/04/24/RVGSIC93AT1.DTL&type=books

April 23, 2005: Whatever happened to machines that think? By Justin Mullins. 
New Scientist (Issue 2496; pages 32 - 37).
"The first chatbot appeared in the 1960s. Back then, the very idea of chatting 
to a computer astounded people. Today, a conversation with a computer is viewed 
more on the level of talking to your pet pooch - cute, but ultimately 
meaningless. The problem with chatbots is a symptom of a deeper malaise in the 
field of artificial intelligence (AI). For years researchers have been 
promising to deliver technology that will make computers we can chat to like 
friends, robots that function as autonomous servants, and one day, for better 
or worse, even produce conscious machines. Yet we appear to be as far away as 
ever from any of these goals. But that could soon change. In the next few 
months, after being patiently nurtured for 22 years, an artificial brain called 
Cyc (pronounced 'psych') will be put online for the world to interact with. And 
it's only going to get cleverer.
Opening Cyc up to the masses is expected to accelerate the rate at which it 
learns, giving it access to the combined knowledge of millions of people around 
the globe as it hoovers up new facts from web pages, webcams and data entered 
manually by anyone who wants to contribute. ... [Doug] Lenat's optimism about 
Cyc is mirrored by a reawakening of interest in AI the world over. In Japan, 
Europe and the US, big, well-funded AI projects with lofty goals and grand 
visions for the future are once again gaining popularity. The renewed 
confidence stems from a new breed of systems that can deal with uncertainty - 
something humans have little trouble with, but which has till now brought 
computer programs grinding to a halt. ... Where could the secret to 
intelligence lie? According to [Tom] Mitchell, the human brain is the place to 
look."
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/info-tech/mg18624961.700
>> ALSO FROM THIS ISSUE >>
> Editorial - Time to think about artificial intelligence. New Scientist (Issue 
> 2496; page 5. Subscription req'd.). April 23, 2005.
"AI pervades our world and may soon start evolving faster than humans can track 
it - in whose hands should this awesome power reside? When it comes to emerging 
technologies, we know what we're afraid of, even though we may not know why. 
There is no shortage of public debate about genetically modified crops, 
nanotechnology and cloning. And policy makers have responded: many countries 
have laws that restrict the way these technologies can be used. So why the 
deafening silence about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence? Here 
is a technology that is already changing the world: AI is used in everything 
from guided missiles to air-traffic control. It is not yet 'intelligent' in the 
human sense, but that looks likely to change."
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg18624963.400

April 24, 2005: Selling a software Holy Grail - The Sun last fall began 
tracking a Columbia startup, exploring the idea that launched the business. 
This installment focuses on the company's subsequent challenge: figuring out 
how to make money. Second in a series of occasional articles by Tricia Bishop. 
The Baltimore Sun.
"Sonum has developed an artificial intelligence that its staff believes could 
replace the mouse and keyboard of computers. The technology, they say, could 
drive computers in a way no one has yet been able to do -- by using normal 
speech. It has applications for the health care industry, operating systems 
suppliers, homeland defense and automated telephone interaction, they say. But 
convincing the marketplace, numbed by tech busts and unrealized promises, is a 
daunting project. For that, [Matt] Hitt knew changes would have to be made and 
a plan -- a solid, clear business plan -- put in place. ... The technology is 
based on work [W. Randolph 'Randy'] Ford completed while he was still in 
school. In the early 1980s, he had just finished work on his doctoral 
dissertation in artificial intelligence at the Johns Hopkins University: 
'Natural Language Processing by Computer: A New Approach.'
... Would-be entrepreneurs, particularly those in the technology sector, have 
long made the mistake of falling under the spell of their own inventions. 
Believing creativity is enough to carry a company, too many executives neglect 
the design, discipline and strategies needed to transform ideas into bankable 
products. ... After shelving his work for two decades, Ford decided the time 
was right to resurrect the natural language processor in 2002. He incorporated 
a new company, first under the sanguine name Holy Grail Technologies. After a 
consultant complained about possible Monty Python associations, he settled on 
Sonum, Latin for sound. More important than the name choice was one decision 
that has made a world of difference: Ford didn't try to go it alone at the top. 
He brought on a businessman partner and co-founder: Hitt."
http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/bal-bz.sonum24apr24,1,28774.story
>> NOTE -> The first installment was featured in the 17 November 2004 AI ALERT.
http://www.aaai.org/aitopics/assets/AIalerts/alert.11.17.04.html#nov7d

April 25, 2005: AI's Next Brain Wave. New research in artificial intelligence 
could lay the groundwork for computer systems that learn from their users and 
the world around them. Part four in The Future Of Software series. By Aaron 
Ricadela. InformationWeek.
"Artificial intelligence, a field that has tantalized social scientists and 
high-tech researchers since the dawn of the computer industry, had lost its sex 
appeal by the start of the last decade. ... Now a new generation of researchers 
hopes to rekindle interest in AI. Faster and cheaper computer processing power, 
memory, and storage, and the rise of statistical techniques for analyzing 
speech, handwriting, and the structure of written texts, are helping spur new 
developments, as is the willingness of today's practitioners to trade 
perfection for practical solutions to everyday problems. ... Several industry 
trends also are helping move AI up on labs' agendas. The emerging field of 
wireless sensor networks, which have the potential to collect vast amounts of 
data about industrial operations, the ecosystem, or conditions in a building or 
home, could benefit from the use of AI techniques to interpret their data.
... InformationWeek took a look at four research labs working in artificial 
intelligence, at IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Xerox subsidiary Palo Alto Research 
Center. Instead of leading to another round of outsize expectations, this 
generation of research likely could lay the groundwork for a new breed of 
computer systems that learn from their users and the world around them."
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=161501161&tid=5979

April 25, 2005: Thought control. By Doug Beazley. Edmonton Sun & CANOE.
"Canadian scientists are hard at work on mechanical limbs that are going to be 
a lot more like the real thing - maybe even better than the real thing. Further 
out, researchers forsee mind-machine 'interfaces' that could allow us to link 
up directly with computers. ... Most prostheses are passive machines, working 
on springs or electric motors and manipulated by the user like any tool. 
Victhom's bionic leg has both an electric motor and a built-in artificial 
intelligence computer. The AI gathers nerve data from sensors in the user's 
stump and from the natural leg, and moves the bionic leg by anticipating the 
user's intended movements. Instead of trying to interpret a signal from the 
brain, this leg does some of the user's thinking for him."
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/EdmontonSun/News/2005/04/25/1011848-sun.html
>> RELATED ARTICLE >>
> Wired for the Furture. By Doug Beazley. Edmonton Sun & CANOE. April 25, 2005.
"It could be the new 'ism' of the 21st century: cyborgism, discrimination 
against the machine-enhanced.In their wilder moments, transhumanists see 
humanity transcending biology by uploading consciousness into a computer and 
becoming both 'virtual' and immortal - the sort of idea that gives nervous fits 
to traditionalists. Political economist Francis Fukuyama, a member of the U.S. 
President's Council on Bioethics, recently damned transhumanism as the 'world's 
most dangerous idea.'
... Transhumanists counter by saying the new technologies can only benefit 
mankind if they're made available to everyone. But as computer science 
accelerates, [James] Hughes argues, people may have no choice but to augment 
their brains just to compete: we can't beat 'em, so we'll have to join 'em. 'If 
you consider the possibility of a self-aware machine intelligence able to 
modify itself, you could be looking at a Terminator-type scenario,' he said. 
'We may be forced to augment ourselves just to cope with what's coming.'"
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/EdmontonSun/News/2005/04/25/1011850-sun.html

April 27, 2005: Lecture sings praises of nanotech - The president of the Royal 
Academy of Engineering has added his voice to the debate about nanotechnology. 
In the fourth of his BBC Reith lectures Lord Broers debunks the myth that 
nanomachines could turn the planet into grey goo. BBC News.
"While some aspects of nanotech may need careful monitoring, other parts have 
been unfairly demonised, says Lord Broers. The idea of tiny machines 
self-replicating and breaking down biological material was first muted by Dr 
Eric Drexler, regarded by many as the father of nanotechnology. He has since 
refuted these claims. Lord Broers has added his voice to general scepticism 
that such machines could even be built let alone replicate. 'Our experience 
with chemistry and physics teaches us that we do not have any idea how to make 
an autonomous self-replicating machine at any scale,' he says."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4486689.stm

April 27, 2005: What's next jump in pet craze -- fleabots? Robotic pets, 
cloning, biological tinkering: We're a long way from Roy Rogers having Trigger 
stuffed. By Linton Weeks. The Washington Post / available from the Orlando 
Sentinel.
"Self-described robo-therapists and affiliated faculty members at Georgetown 
University, the Libins believe in the restorative value of animal companions. 
The catbot, they say, is easier for many people -- such as the elderly or 
allergy-prone -- to relate to than a real cat. Developed by Omron Corp. of 
Japan, the mecho-pets are not available in the United States, Libin says. They 
do not have to be fed or cleaned up. Variations of a teddy bear and a baby seal 
are being developed. ... Sherry Turkle, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
professor and author of The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, says 
there is a huge future for robotic pets. She is convinced that people are 
responding to the new generation of robo-pets because people are basically 
lonely and vulnerable."
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/lifestyle/orl-livpetbots27042705apr27,0,6504362.story?coll=orl-home-entlife

April 29, 2005: "Everything is going well." Update from Sue (Harper) Todd to 
EverestNews.com.
"Everything is going well. It seems like a fairly average season up until now. 
... It's very windy today, the weather has been in a pattern of sunny mornings, 
precipitation in the afternoons, so we're waiting for it to settle down a bit. 
Best Wishes, Sue ... Background: Henry Todd is returning to Mt Everest again in 
Spring 2005 to lead the Himalayan Guides 2005 Everest Expedition. ... Rob Milne 
is one of his climbers.... . Computer technology being developed at the 
University of Edinburgh will allow climber Rob Milne to respond rapidly to 
changing conditions and inform family and friends back home of his progress and 
any alterations to his plans. Dr Milne, a leading software engineer and 
entrepreneur, hopes to climb Everest in May and so join the elite group of 
mountaineers to have climbed the highest peak on each of the seven continents.
... The technology, developed at the Artificial Intelligence Applications 
Institute in the University of EdinburghÕs School of Informatics, has been 
designed to provide computer support to people and teams performing a range of 
tasks Ð not just expedition teams operating in extreme conditions, but also key 
personnel involved in planning and rescue services responding rapidly to 
emergencies."
http://www.everestnews.com/everestupdatessouth2005/toddeverest2005u04292005.htm
>> You can find Rob's reports at AIAI's I-Ex Everest Expedition Blog.
http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/everest/blog/weblog.pl

May 2005: The Next Wave of Disruptive Technologies. Cover story by Jeff Moad. 
Managing Automation Magazine.
"Today, progressive manufacturers have an opportunity to change the course of 
their businesses by seizing emerging technologies, much like Henry Ford did 
when his company introduced the Model T in 1908. But which technologies have 
potentially game-changing power? This issue of Managing Automation answers that 
question by focusing on several emerging technologies and how manufacturers can 
use them to get ahead of the competition."
http://www.managingautomation.com/maonline/magazine/read.jspx?id=3571722
>> TWO RELATED ARTICLES FROM THIS ISSUE >>
> Disruptive Technologies: Semantic Web. By Alan Alper. "'We're just now 
> starting to see early success stories,' says Dr. James Hendler, a computer 
> sciences professor at the University of Maryland (College Park, MD), the 
> third co-author of the influential Scientific American article. He points to 
> pilot projects at government agencies such as NASA and the Defense Advanced 
> Research Projects Agency (DARPA) where the Semantic Web's constructs are 
> being tested. The real win, he says, will come when enterprises begin to use 
> the technologies to enhance interoperability among company applications. So 
> far, however, few are charging forward. 'It's like the guy with the first 
> telephone; he's not happy until someone else has one,' Hendler says. 'We're 
> just getting past that chicken and egg problem -- but at least we have a few 
> chickens and a few eggs out there.'"
http://www.managingautomation.com/maonline/magazine/read.jspx?id=3571723
> Disruptive Technologies: Automation Platforms. By Stephanie Neil. "A more 
> attractive term for the technology is 'autonomous agents,' a type of software 
> that incorporates information and artificial intelligence rules. These 
> software agents are intended to be spread around various devices on a network 
> where they can assess what's really going on outside of an operator's view 
> and even negotiate how devices should interact based on the conditions they 
> detect. Once they become low cost and ubiquitous, autonomous agents, in 
> combination with secure industrial wireless mesh networks, new 
> energy-reducing technologies and predictive diagnostic algorithms, will 
> change the way manufacturers operate everything from the assembly line to 
> recipe management. ... 'We have to make machines that learn and self-predict. 
> I believe deeply that is the future of manufacturing,' [Jay] Lee says."
http://www.managingautomation.com/maonline/magazine/read.jspx?id=3571725

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  • [nlpatumd] AAAI AI ALERT Full-Text 29 April 2005 (fwd) ted pedersen