Toddler Robot Upgrade

Film Documents the First Year of IBM's Bluebrain Project

Bluebrain | Year One from Couple 3 Films on Vimeo.

Princeton Scientists Take a Significant Step Toward Quantum Computing

A major hurdle in the ambitious quest to design and construct a radically new kind of quantum computer has been finding a way to manipulate the single electrons that very likely will constitute the new machines' processing components or qubits."

From PhysOrg.com

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) coming soon?

h+ magazine has an article titled, How Long Till Human-Level AI? The article was written by long-time AGI researcher Ben Goertzel with Seth Baum and Ted Goertzel.

The majority of the experts who participated in our study were optimistic about AGI coming fairly quickly, although a few were more pessimistic about the timing. It is worth noting, however, that all the experts in our study, even the most pessimistic ones, gave at least a 10% chance of some AGI milestones being achieved within a few decades.

IBM Computer Summarizes Boring Conversations

Simon Tucker and colleagues at Sheffield University and Steve Whitter at IBM Research in Almaden, California, have develeloped an automatic speech recognition system called Catchup, which is:

designed to summarise in almost real time what has been said at a business meeting so the latecomers can... well, catch up with what they missed. Catchup is able to identify the important words and phrases in an ASR transcript and edit out the unimportant ones. It does so by using the frequency with which a word appears as an indicator of its importance, having first ruled out a "stop list" of very common words. It leaves the text surrounding the important words in place to put them in context, and removes the rest.

A key feature of Catchup is that it then presents the result in audio form, so the latecomer hears a spoken summary rather than having to plough through a transcript. "It provides a much better user experience," says Tucker.

In tests of Catchup, its developers reported that around 80 per cent of subjects were able to understand the summary, even when it was less than half the length of the original conversation. A similar proportion said that it gave them a better idea of what they had missed than they could glean by trying to infer it from the portion of the meeting they could attend.

Read the full article from NewScientist titled, Boring conversation? Let your computer listen for you.

Pervasive and Autonomous Information Technology (PAIT)

The newly formed PAIT sponsored its first workshop in Cincinnati on March 3-4. This workshop was made possible by a grant from the NSF and Kenneth D. Pimple is the project director. The speakers included:

Fred H. Cate, Distinguished Professor and C. Ben Dutton Professor of Law, IU School of Law, and Director of the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, Indiana University Bloomington.

Helen Nissenbaum, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, and Senior Fellow of the Information Law Institute, New York University.

Noel Sharkey, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Professor of Public Engagement, and EPSRC Senior Media Fellow, University of Sheffield.

For more information go to the PAIT website.

Moral Machines Session at PAC-APA

American Philosophical Association --Pacific Division Conference
Westin St Francis, San Francisco
April 2nd 7:00-10:00 p.m.

Topic: Authors-Meet-Critics: Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen, Moral Machines

Chair: John P. Sullins (Sonoma State University)
Authors: Colin Allen (Indiana University–Bloomington)
Wendell Wallach (Yale University)
Commentators: Mark Coeckelbergh (Universiteit Twente)
James H. Moor (Dartmouth College)
Thomas M. Powers (University of Delaware)
Carson Reynolds (University of Tokyo)
Robin Zebrowski (Beloit College)