Software / A.I.

Chatbots can reduce the workload of humans, where it can deal with uncomplicated matters in an autonomous manner, by responding to real questions from humans. Many have been used so far especially on the web, such as FAQ sections of websites. The new Pandorabots Spellbinder service, by Pandorabots Inc. is able to create such chatbot characters automatically and very fast, just by “listening” to transcripts of TV and radio shows, movies, chat logs, interviews etc… The regular chatbot creation time is much longer, which is done manually to incorporate thousands of sentences into a working bot. The system can be used on many platforms such as instant messaging, games, cell […] Read More

Although not particularly for robotics software, but for all types of software in general, a news worth noting appeared last week in Technology Review, which reported a recent project done by MIT Computer Scientists. In short, the team developed a software that can find certain type of software bugs and fix them. The new software called clearview, speeds up the bug fixing process to within minutes, in a totally autonomous manner, in comparison to the fixes done by human engineers thattakes weeks to do. The software works without access to a program’s source code, but works by analysing the results the program executes. The program not only detecs but also […] Read More

A new feature that has been introduced in certain recent Ford models, which enables the car to park itself. It does so first by scanning both sides of the road and determines the available spots. Then by using its ultrasonic sensors, it continuously measures the distance, at the same time moving the car back and forwards, at the same time managing the steering. This looks like one step closer to self driving cars. That technology actually has been tested in the recent years, by DARPA grand challenge competitions, and is slowly moving out of testing cars and research facilities. In the last competition, the moving car had been able to […] Read More

To develop some kind of common sense for AI has always been the ultimate goal of AI research, ever since the first computers appeared about 60 years ago. Recently the increase in computing power reaching to sufficient levels, along with a greater number of new research projects on the subject are paving the way for such goals to be achieved. One such project has recently started in University of Illinois at Chicago. The researchers were awarded a $500,000 project by National Science Foundation. The goal of the project is to create mathematical foundations and develop algorithms for building commonsense knowledge bases for AI that can evolve by itself. In other […] Read More

One of the biggest challenges in building autonomous cars is the safety issue which need to be resolved completely before a single autonomous car hits the road. Events such as DARPA grand challenge are designed to improve the capabilities of such vehicles. A recent story in cnet.com talks about designing safe autonomous cars, which have collision avoidance capabilities incorporated into them. The inspiration came from the mother nature again, this time the movement basics of a large group of fish. Visit Cnet website for more. Read More

According to a report published in Current Biology, scientists are able to tell what number or how many dots a person has just seen, by measuring the brain activity with fMRI. The study may also help to discover how the brain makes more sophisticated calculations, according to the researchers. Reference: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090924123306.htm Read More

Willow Garage, a robotics company in Palo Alto California, have created a robot that asks for human help for the objects that it can not recognize by itself. As far as developing the AI, it may look like getting around the real problem a little, instead of solving it, however as far as the end result it seems that it will function in a pretty satisfactory manner. If you also consider the fact that the robot will do so by connecting with Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” database, where thousands of human users efficiently work together on an online platform to do things which are very easy for a human but might […] Read More

The humanoid robot called I-Cub is a project based in several research institutions in europe, which aims to study human intelligence at the level of a baby child. Through realistic interaction with its environment, the researchers aim to develop algorithms that will enable autonomous intelligent reasoning abilities. One of the goals of the project is not just to study AI, but also to learn about the development of cognition in humans. This is a five year project suported by the european commission and it is open source, enabling collaborations with many laboratories around the world. If you have not heard about i-cub before, here is a good introductory video. Read More

The video surveillance system developed by BRS Labs, called Behavioral Analytics, is able to perform cognitive reasoning similar to human brain and learn autonomously with fewer errors than a usual object classification and video motion based software. The system analyzes and learns human behaviour patterns in a totally autonomous manner, including the surrounding scenes without needing any human calibration or programming. It does this by building memories of its own. The product, which is called “AI Sight Cognitive Video Analytics Software”, is currently installed by various hotels, ports, banks, airports and so on… The software differs from a rules based video analytics software in the sense that it can identify […] Read More

IBM has received a grant for a research project known as SYNAPSE, which stands for “Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics”, from DARPA. The goal of the project accordig to DARPA is to create intelligent machines, which will have the capability of analysing vast amount of data in a very short duration, and improve military’s decision making ability for a particular situation. Current machine computation, though millions of times faster than biological human processing, is extremely inefficient in comparison to human thinking architecture. The project aims to narrow this gap and give machines ability to make more autonomous decisions, by coming up with a different working mechanism. It will […] Read More