21/03/2012 - Sam I Am
21/03/2012 - Awareness self-awareness in automatic systems
17/11/2011 - More free Stanford Online classes beginning in Jan.
31/10/2010 - Robot Teach Students in South Korea
An elementary school classroom looks orderly. The students seemed keen to do a task, while the teacher provides instruction. Unlike teachers in schools in general, teachers in these classrooms has a body made of plastic and computer components.
This is not a scene in a science fiction movie but a real place in a school in Masan, South Korea. Engkey, thus the name of the robot in the class room, apparently was teaching English language materials.
Reported by CNN on Monday (25/10/2010), this is part of a pilot program launched by the South Korean government. In this program, second grade elementary school students are taught English by a robot.
Mun-Taek Choi, a senior researcher at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology who developed Engkey mentioned, the results of the evaluation show that educational robot system has proven effective in helping improve student interest and motivate them in learning English.
“As many as 36 robots Engkey been incorporated into 18 primary schools throughout Daegu, Korea until the end of this year,” said Choi.
Robot boned round and orange are controlled remotely by a real teacher outside the classroom. The teacher’s face, appearing on screen in the body Engkey. Well, this robot can connect students with teachers at a location very far away, even overseas.
“Thus, these telepresence robots also help overcome the problem of teaching English in South Korea, due to lack of native-speaker teachers,” said Choi.
22/10/2010 - NASA: Moon may have enough water for human base
08/10/2010 - What does the internet know about you and who is it telling?
02/10/2010 - Optimizing information credibility in smart swarms
02/10/2010 - Survey of datamining paper released
04/08/2010 - Yet another evolving creature claims basic intelligence
02/07/2010 - EMILY robot lifeguard to patrol the beaches
The EMergency Integrated Lifesaving lanYard (E.M.I.L.Y) may not be as cute as a dolphin, but it can save drowning people in much in the same way. Designed by Hydronalix, the robot is like a mini rescue-boat that can reach 28 mph, and locate a person in trouble out in water. It does so by using sonar detection to sense distressing movements in the water, after which it approaches the person, allowing him or her to grasp onto its torso and be ferried back to shore.
As EMILY is remote-control operated for now, lifeguards on the beach can give instructions to the victim through the speakers installed in the robot. In the future, hopes are that it can switch to an autonomous system and dive after swimmers on its own, which will increase response time and hopefully save even more lives.
EMILY won’t be replacing real lifeguards anytime soon, though, as you still need a great deal of human intelligence and practicality when dealing with such crucial matters. It may be faster, but the robot can’t reach down and drag the people out of the water itself. It can’t help unconscious divers much, and lifeguards on jet-skis are still the most effective rescue method.
But with more than 8 hours of endurance, EMILY will still make for a great assistance tool, especially in stormy weather where visibility is bad and lifeguards face a challenge getting to the drowning person. Confidence in its abilities is high, and plans are for the robot to be used at 25 other beaches besides Malibu before the end of the year.
Video of EMILY in action below.
30/06/2010 - Agent Learning Explained
 | Machine-learning Techniques for Agents and Multi-agent Systems By Eduardo Alonso £70.50 30 Jun 2010 Audio-Visual / Multimedia Item John Wiley and Sons Ltd Bridges the gap between two communities that could have an impact on each other if techniques and knowledge were properly shared between them. They are the Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning community and the Software Agent community. |
30/06/2010 - Agent Learning Explained
| Machine-learning Techniques for Agents and Multi-agent Systems By Eduardo Alonso £60.00 30 Jun 2010 Hardback John Wiley and Sons Ltd Bridges the gap between two communities - the Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning community and the Software Agent community - that could have an impact on each other if techniques were properly shared between them. This book provides a tutorial-style reference on how to apply techniques from each discipline to solve common problems. |
30/06/2010 - Complex Systems: Adaptive Hierarchy Cont
| Adaptive Hierarchy Cont By GODBOLE LYGER, OS SASTRY £55.99 30 Jun 2010 Hardback Pearson Education Limited |
25/06/2010 - Agent and Multi-agent Technology for Internet and Enterprise Systems
| By Anne Hakansson, Ronald Hartung, Ngoc Thanh Nguyen £117.00 25 Jun 2010 Hardback Springer-Verlag Berlin and Heidelberg GmbH & Co. KG Research in multi-agent systems offers a promising technology for problems with networks, online trading and negotiations but also social structures and communication. This book focuses on agent and multi-agent technology for internet and enterprise systems. |
08/06/2010 - Robot fish leader
Assistant professor Maurizio Porfiri studied the characteristics of small schools of fish to learn what exactly they look for in a leader, and he designed a palm-sized robot that possesses these traits. By taking command, this leader can be programmed to guide the fish away from danger, but the tricky part is getting the animals to accept the robot as one of their own.
Contrary to popular belief, it’s not the physical appearance that fools other animals, but the behavior and mannerism. The assistant professor’s robot prototype looks very little like the fish it is supposed to be leading, but it makes up for that by mimicking the exact qualities that allow one fish to stand out from the rest. The robot beats its artificial tail faster, circles around the group, and accelerates at a great speed (for a fish), compelling the others to follow it. Besides being designed to be very quiet, to robot was also built from ionic polymers, which produce natural muscle movements when voltage runs through them. For now, the cyberfish has operated on batteries, but in the future it will have to switch to electromagnetic waves for better performance.
The very basic video below shows the robot guiding along a small school of golden shiners in a shallow tank, but everything must have its first step. Each fish species seeks different qualities in a leader, however, so the design will have to be modified when dealing with other animals. Hopes are that one day these robots will be able to save a lot of wildlife, both on land and under the sea.
[source]
01/06/2010 - Advances in Intelligent Information and Database Systems
| By Ngoc Thanh Nguyen, Radoslaw Katarzyniak, Shyi-Ming Chen £117.00 01 Jun 2010 Hardback Springer-Verlag Berlin and Heidelberg GmbH & Co. KG Contains 32 chapters which have been based on selected submissions to the poster session organized during the 2nd Asian Conference on Intelligent Information and Database Systems (24-26 March 2010 in Hue, Vietnam). This book discusses theoretical and practical issues related to integration of artificial intelligence and database technologies. |
01/06/2010 - Introduction to Predictive Learning
| By Vladimir Cherkassky, Yunqian Ma £69.99 01 Jun 2010 Hardback Springer-Verlag New York Inc. Suitable for undergraduate students and practitioners, this book adopts the conceptual framework developed in Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) theory, focusing on the methodological and practical aspects of VC-theory rather than its technical details. |
30/05/2010 - Cuckoo Search Algorithm
28/05/2010 - Audience, Relevance, and Search
| Targeting Web Audiences with Relevant Content By James Mathewson, Frank Donatone, Cynthia Fishel £28.99 28 May 2010 Paperback Pearson Education (US) |
28/05/2010 - Artificial Intelligence
| A Modern Approach By Stuart Russell, Peter Norvig £51.99 28 May 2010 Paperback Pearson Education (US) For one or two-semester, undergraduate or graduate-level courses in Artificial Intelligence. The long-anticipated revision of this best-selling text offers the most comprehensive, up-to-date introduction to the theory and practice of artificial intelligence. View chapters 3 and 4 from the Third Edition. |
19/05/2010 - Robot Fairy marries a Japanese couple
The I-Fairy stands for “Intelligent”, “Information” and “Icon” and is (sort-of) designed like a fairy, with perky movements and a sing-song voice. It is not really the most advanced of robots, but it does its job of repeating pre-recorded or real-time response audio messages. Its gestures come from its movement generating software, which is programmed from a computer. The audio works the same way, except that it can also ad-lib from a person speaking on a microphone backstage.
It’s a performance robot that seeks to engage its audience, who often happen to be children. It’s gestures are also quite expressive, and can show different emotions by the way it moves it head and eyes. Besides performing on stage, it can also greet people and provide audio guidance to visitors.
Marrying people is perhaps not exactly what the developers had in mind when they first designed it, but just goes to show you how adaptive robots can be. The Japanese couple also weren’t chosen at random for an experiment, but specifically wanted a robot to perform the marriage rights, as their love for robotics is what brought them together in the first place.
The video shows the I-Fairy wearing a crown of flowers and literally flashing its eyes with joy. The ceremony looks a bit awkward, and I’m not sure how cool this will look years down the line, but more power to them. Seems like teachers won’t be the only professionals fearing for their jobs.
Wedding video courtesy of AP follows.
15/05/2010 - Nanotechnology and Microelectronics
| Global Diffusion, Economics and Policy By Ndubuisi Ekekwe £136.95 15 May 2010 Hardback IGI Global Presents case studies on the issues surrounding technology transfer and diffusion, trends and developments, and economics and policies as they relate to these technologies. This book is suitable for academics, students, policy-makers and professionals interested in advancing their knowledge of nanotechnology and microelectronics. |
15/05/2010 - Novel Developments in Granular Computing
| Applications for Advanced Human Reasoning and Soft Computation By JingTao Yao £136.95 15 May 2010 Hardback IGI Global Analyzes developments and trends of granular computing, reviewing some of the most influential research and predicting future trends. This book presents a comprehensive summary of existing practices, and enhances understanding on human reasoning. |
06/05/2010 - Perceptual Computing
| Aiding People in Making Subjective Judgments By Jerry M. Mendel, Dongrui Wu £60.50 06 May 2010 Paperback John Wiley and Sons Ltd Explains how to implement CWW for making subjective judgments using the three components of a Perceptual Computer (encoder, CWW engines, and decoder) and provides detailed applications. This book is suitable for researchers and students in AI, fuzzy logic, computer science in general, and psychology. |
