Ben, Everything you say may be true, but I think any AI project running on 400 blade processors and attempting to model and learn from experience natural language and the grounding of concepts such as in what observed social situations it is appropriate to say "thank you" is a step in the right direction. It may not be AGI, but I think it may well make advances that are applicable to AGI.
Edward W. Porter Porter & Associates 24 String Bridge S12 Exeter, NH 03833 (617) 494-1722 Fax (617) 494-1822 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: Benjamin Goertzel [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2007 11:05 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [agi] Minsky and the AI emergency I love Deb Roy and think his work is wonderful, but one thing he does NOT have is a coherent design for an AGI ... As I understand it, what he's doing now is aimed at gathering loads of speech data, for later analysis... His prior work on robotics and symbol grounding was also really cool, but seemed to be restricted to stuff like grounding the word "apple" in sets of robot-vision-inputs corresponding to pictures of apples.... He wasn't dealing with grounding of abstract relationships, prepositional relationships, etc. Which IMO is an illustration of the point that dealing with robotics can be a huge hassle in itself, even if the AI issues one is investigating are pretty simple.... (Although the rewards of dealing with real robots are also obvious ...) -- Ben G On Oct 30, 2007 10:33 AM, Edward W. Porter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Deb Roy at the MIT media lab, and his The Human Speechome Project , are supposed to have garnered the following resources for a major AI task. Deb Roy is a very, repeat very, bright guy, at this point in time probably much brighter than Minsky. more than 3,000 Seagate SATA drives, more than 300 Hammer Z-Rack storage enclosures, more than 100 Marvell-based 10G/GbE switches, and about 400 blade processors . High-performance storage I/O anticipates the processing of 700 terabytes of data during each 12-hour overnight analytical run The following blurbs give some idea of what this hardware is to be used for The Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is developing what the university claims is one of the world's largest data storage arrays . The storage array is being constructed for the Media Lab's ambitious Human Speechome Project. The array will be used to collect and analyze video and audio data for a research project designed to better understand early childhood cognitive development, according to MIT. This project focuses on the acquisition and analysis of massive audio-video recordings of human activity in home situations . We are creating a unique infrastructure for efficiently storing and managing millions of hours of audio and video, semi-automated meta-data creation, and statistical machine learning of cross-modal patterns. Applications include computational modeling of situated language acquisition and other social/behavioral activities, personal memory augmentation, audio/video content management, and audio/video analysis for security . The goal of the Cognitive Machines group is to create systems that engage in fluid, situated, meaningful communication with human partners . We seek to understand and model the processes by which words are grounded in the physical world as a result of embodied perception, action, and learning. These models are applied to create situated human-machine interfaces. We also use our computational models as a source of predictions and possible accounts for a number of cognitive phenomena including aspects of children's language acquisition, concept formation, and attention . Edward W. Porter Porter & Associates 24 String Bridge S12 Exeter, NH 03833 (617) 494-1722 Fax (617) 494-1822 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: Richard Loosemore [ <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ] Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2007 8:58 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [agi] Minsky and the AI emergency Joshua Fox wrote: > Surely Marvin Minsky -- a top MIT professor, with a world-beating > reputation in multiple fields -- can snap his fingers and get all the > required funding, whether commercial or non-profit, for AGI projects > which he initiates or supports? > > Joshua No: he was outflanked by the arrival of the "Neat" AI crowd some 15-20 years ago. Essentially, the type of AI he is interested in was declared to be a thing of the past (aka "Scruffy") and not "scientific", and therefore that kind of stuff became sidelined. You could say he was Drexlered. He also has a reputation for being inspirational, but vague. Richard Loosemore > > 2007/10/28, Bob Mottram <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > < <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >>: > > This recent talk by Marvin Minsky may be of interest. > > <http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/484> http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/484 > > I know some folks on this list have talked about ways of evangelizing > the AGI effort. The idea that we really need to build smarter > machines to maintain our standards of living in the face of > demographic change and increasing longevity may be a good way of > popularizing the topic in a public arena and injecting some sense of > urgency. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: <http://www.agiri.org/email> http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: <http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&;> http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&; _____ This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/? <http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&;> & _____ This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/? <http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&; > & ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=59120814-5dbf8e
