A Sampling of IBM Watson News over the Weekend

[Cross-posted on ST-AIRC Blog]

IBM has inked a deal with Nuance to apply Watson's Jeopardy-winning Deep Question Answering technology to health care.

IBM’s Watson Jeopardy Stunt Unleashes a Third Great Cycle in Computing


NY Times' Stanley Fish -- not very impressed with Watson


Stephen Baker, author of “Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything” on the impact of IBM's Watson

TED-cast by Stephen Baker

More Follow-up From Watson

A sampling of four new articles following upon on Watson's victory in Jeopardy!

Professor Oren Etzioni, the director of the UW Turing Center, on the match:

It didn't surprise me that Watson won. In fairness there are some small things in the game that give it an advantage, like the time that it has to process -- it sees the clue instantly, it gets transmitted via text, and then it's told when it can buzz in. So it has a number of these small advantages and particularly last night it was often winning on time.

Watson as the beginning of a new kind of search engine?

Etzioni says he expects natural-language software to make a big dent in search applications over the next five years, although at the moment systems such as Watson aren't ready for 'prime time': he notes that Microsoft bought a natural-language processing company called Powerset in 2008 for US$100 million, "but you don't see Microsoft using it in any visible way". Kautz agrees that systems as broad and powerful as Watson could be available for general use "surprisingly soon. Let's say three to four years."

Ken Jennings on his Watson experience:

I expected Watson's bag of cognitive tricks to be fairly shallow, but I felt an uneasy sense of familiarity as its programmers briefed us before the big match: The computer's techniques for unraveling Jeopardy! clues sounded just like mine. That machine zeroes in on key words in a clue, then combs its memory (in Watson's case, a 15-terabyte data bank of human knowledge) for clusters of associations with those words.

Gary Kasparov on playing chess alongside - rather than against - a computer:

Having a computer partner also meant never having to worry about making a tactical blunder. The computer could project the consequences of each move we considered, pointing out possible outcomes and countermoves we might otherwise have missed. With that taken care of for us, we could concentrate on strategic planning instead of spending so much time on calculations.

Bollywood's Vision of a Robotic Future

[Cross-posted on ABA ST-AIRC Blog]

Last fall, Bollywood (India's version of Hollywood; by some measures (for instance, number of films produced per year, it is larger)) released its most expensive film ever: "Robot" (or "Endhiran"). Great special effects, and -- it appears -- a "Terminator"-type story-line. Here's the official site.

Here's the official trailer:



And here's a compilation of the "best" scenes involving robots, spliced together (overdubbing is believed to be Russian):

Why Does Japan Emphasize Robotic Advances?

[Cross-posted on ABA ST-AIRC Blog]


From the BBC, interesting article about why Japan has taken such an active role in promoting "humanized" robots -- necessity being the mother of invention. And why some of the elderly in Japan prefer the human touch:

No, Robot: Japan's Elderly Fail to Welcome Their Robot Overlords

By Michael Fitzpatrick BBC News, Tokyo

"In Japan robots are friendly helpers not Terminators. So when they join the workforce, as they do often in factories, they are sometimes welcomed on their first day with Shinto religious ceremonies.

But whether the sick and elderly will be as welcoming to robot-like tech in their homes is a question that now vexes a Japanese care industry that is struggling with a massive manpower shortage. Automated help in the home and hospitals, believe some, could be the answer. A rapidly aging first world is also paying close attention to Japan's dalliance with automated care. It wants to know whether it can construct the nursing-care and medical-care needed in a future with fewer younger people to take care of the elderly.

Japan could show us how.

"The country sees it as an imperative to build carer robots and systems that can monitor health in the home. Because without them the nation's health care system won't cope," says carer Yasuko Amahisa.

Not Exactly the Turing Test

[Cross-posted on ABA ST-AIRC Blog]

RoboCup participants are trying to build a robot with a specific purpose: to defeat the 2050 World Cup (human) champions. Here are the latest advances towards that end: Hat tip to BotJunkie:

Data Privacy Day

{Cross-posted from ABA ST-AIRC Website]

Related to the American Bar Association's Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Committee's (AIRC) work is Data Privacy, and today (Jan. 28, 2011) is Data Privacy Day.

For more see this link.

For some thoughts from ABA ST-AIRC co-chair Ryan Calo on Data Privacy, see this link.

MIT's Sherry Turkle on the Impact of Technology on Society

From the January 14, 2011 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Programmed for Love
By Jeffrey R. Young

In a skeptical turn, the MIT ethnographer Sherry Turkle warns of the dangers of social technology "...She has spent some 15 years since that day studying this emerging breed of "sociable robots"—including toys like Furbies and new robotic pets for the elderly—and what she considers their seductive and potentially dangerous powers.

She argues that robotics' growing trend toward creating machines that act as if they were alive could lead people to place machines in roles she thinks only humans should occupy.

Her prediction: Companies will soon sell robots designed to baby-sit children, replace workers in nursing homes, and serve as companions for people with disabilities. All of which to Turkle is demeaning, "transgressive," and "damaging to our collective sense of humanity..."

Warehouse Robots Featured in WSJ

[Cross-posted with ABA ST-AIRC Blog]

Today's WSJ has a featured article on the tradeoffs for warehouses that are primarily staffed by humans, and those primarily staffed by robots. They compare and contrast a Crate & Barrel (robotic) shipment center with one run by Amazon (humans).

Wired Mag: Special Report on AI

[Cross-posted from ABA's ST-AIRC Blog]

The January issue of Wired Magazine features a special report on the use of Artificial Intelligence in various fields, from Wall Street to fraud prevention. The bottom line? "Artificial Intelligence is here. But it's nothing like we expected."

Predator Drones Featured in Wikileaks

[Cross-posted from ABA's ST-AIRC Blog]

Among other tidbits in the Wikileak documents: many countries are asking for the US to sell them Predator drones.

WikiLeaks Reveals Everybody’s Christmas List: The World Wants Drones

By Adam Rawnsley

Only a select few close American allies have the export-restricted Predator B (a.k.a. MQ-9 Reaper) armed drones, but that hasn’t stopped countries from the United Arab Emirates to Turkey from pestering & pleading with America to sell them the shiniest new toy, the WikiLeaks document show...

DoD Studying Flying Snakes

[Cross-posted on ABA's ST-AIRC blog]




Not directly related to robots (yet), but still interesting: the Defense Department is sponsoring studies on flying snakes.

More here.

Recent Writing

A recent article co-authored in the American Bar Association's SciTech Journal.