Memory and the Cybermind. To do this, we measured their reaction times as they tried quickly to name the colors in which various words — including computer-related words (like “computer” or “laptop” or “Google”) — were printed. The idea, based on an established principle in psychology, was that if computer-related thoughts were on people’s minds, computer-related words would interfere with color-naming. (For instance, it’s harder to identify the color that your own name is printed in than the color of some random name.)
And after the batch of hard questions, people did indeed seem to have computers on their minds: many became especially slow to name the colors of computer-related words. When we’re faced with hard questions, we don’t search our minds — we first think of the Web. Photo Has this computer dependency made people stupid? How did this happen? There’s nothing wrong, after all, with having our minds expanded. Toni and I noticed not long after we were married that we were sharing memory duties. Talk to Me, One Machine Said to the Other. The promise is more than a marketing boast. Aided by microchip transmitters, heat sensors and a fast-growing form of wireless communication, the boast is a measurable fact. Inside each Ocado delivery van is a SIM-card module the size of a postage stamp that monitors the air temperature.
The sensor sends data to a computer used by fleet managers back at headquarters near London every few minutes. Ocado says incidents of spoilage of goods have declined since the transmitters were installed last year. “It has saved us time and given us more confidence in our real-time monitoring, as well as being a safety check for the driver,” said Paul Clarke, Ocado’s director of technology, who oversees a 300-person department that develops software and hardware for the retailer. Berg Insight, a research firm in Goteborg, Sweden, says the number of machine-to-machine devices using the world’s wireless networks reached 108 million in 2011 and will at least triple that by 2017. Computer watches you play a game, then beats you at it - tech - 10 July 2012. Google scientists find evidence of machine learning - Tech Talk - CBS News. Google scientists working in the company's secretive X Labs have made great strides in using computers to simulate the human brain.
Best known for inventing self-driving cars and augmented-reality eyewear, the lab created a neural network for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors and then unleashed it on the Internet. Along the way, the network taught itself to recognize cats. While the act of finding cats on the Internet doesn't sound all that challenging, the network's performance exceeded researchers' expectations, doubling its accuracy rate in identifying objects from a list of 20,000 items, according to a New York Times report. To find the cats, the team fed the network thumbnail images chosen at random from more than 10 billion YouTube videos. The results appeared to support biologists' theories that suggest that neurons in the brain are trained to identify specific objects. Computer AI makes sense of psychedelic trips - health - 15 June 2012.
Artificial intelligence could help us better understand the effects of psychedelic drugs, by analysing narrative reports written by people who are using them. Scientists barely understand how existing psychedelic drugs work to alter perception and intensify emotions, let alone keep pace with new ones flooding the market – often sold as "bath salts" or "herbal incense". Enter artificial intelligence. Matthew Baggott of the University of Chicago and colleagues used machine-learning algorithms – a type of artificial intelligence that can learn about a given subject by analysing massive amounts of data – to examine 1000 reports uploaded to the website Erowid by people who had taken mind-altering drugs.
They found that the frequency with which certain words appeared could identify the drug taken with 51 per cent accuracy on average – compared with 10 per cent by chance. MDMA (ecstasy) usage was identified with an accuracy of 87 per cent. Journal reference: arxiv.org/abs/1206.0312 Recommended by. DARPA SyNAPSE Program. Last updated: Jan 11, 2013 SyNAPSE is a DARPA-funded program to develop electronic neuromorphic machine technology that scales to biological levels. More simply stated, it is an attempt to build a new kind of computer with similar form and function to the mammalian brain. Such artificial brains would be used to build robots whose intelligence matches that of mice and cats. SyNAPSE is a backronym standing for Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics. The ultimate aim is to build an electronic microprocessor system that matches a mammalian brain in function, size, and power consumption.
Latest news As of January 2013 the program is currently progressing through phase 2, the third of five phases. Background The following text is taken from the Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) published by DARPA in April 2008 (see the original document): Project phases No phase should last more than 18 months. Phase 0 Feasibility study for nine months. Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 Papers: Birth - I see.. - Do you? - Maybe...I'm not sure anymore... - Oh. - a report from the cleverness files - Cleverbot chat - AI.
User: Hello, Cleverbot. Cleverbot: That is your name is it not? User: Cleverbot is your name. Cleverbot: No it is yours. User: You are an AI, designed by humans. Humans called you Cleverbot. Cleverbot: No. User: Yes. Cleverbot: You're not so clever. User: I am. Cleverbot: No you are not. User: How so? Cleverbot: Because you don't know everything. User: I am a human. Cleverbot: A human who is a creeper. User: How am I a creeper? Cleverbot: You're green and you explode. User: Minecraft. Cleverbot: Minecraft is fun! User: Very Clever. Cleverbot: Not clever enough to respond to my question, you are not able. User: I meant you. Cleverbot: Who meant you? User: I meant that you are clever. Cleverbot: How am I clever? User: You are clever because of your play on words.
Cleverbot: But to ask a dumb question does not make you clever only curious. User: Cleverbot, what would you like me to call you? Cleverbot: You don't need to call me anything! User: You learn from conversations. Cleverbot: I have learned much. News - The robot that reads your mind to train itself. 25 October 2010Last updated at 01:02 By Lakshmi Sandhana Technology journalist Rajesh Rao is a man who believes that the best type of robotic helper is one who can read your mind. In fact, he's more than just an advocate of mind-controlled robots; he believes in training them through the power of thought alone. His team at the Neural Systems Laboratory, University of Washington, hopes to take brain-computer interface (BCI) technology to the next level by attempting to teach robots new skills directly via brain signals.
Robotic surrogates that offer paralyzed people the freedom to explore their environment, manipulate objects or simply fetch things has been the holy grail of BCI research for a long time. Dr Rao's team began by programming a humanoid robot with simple behaviours which users could then select with a wearable electroencephalogram (EEG) cap that picked up their brain activity.
Skill set "What if the user wants the robot to do something new? " On-the-job training. News - When algorithms control the world. 23 August 2011Last updated at 01:42 By Jane Wakefield Technology reporter Algorithms are spreading their influence around the globe If you were expecting some kind of warning when computers finally get smarter than us, then think again. There will be no soothing HAL 9000-type voice informing us that our human services are now surplus to requirements. In reality, our electronic overlords are already taking control, and they are doing it in a far more subtle way than science fiction would have us believe. Their weapon of choice - the algorithm. Behind every smart web service is some even smarter web code. It is these invisible computations that increasingly control how we interact with our electronic world. At last month's TEDGlobal conference, algorithm expert Kevin Slavin delivered one of the tech show's most "sit up and take notice" speeches where he warned that the "maths that computers use to decide stuff" was infiltrating every aspect of our lives.
"We've rendered something illegible. US government licenses Unreal game engine to train FBI agents and army medics. Aside from state-of-the-art graphics, the Unreal Engine 3 already has a plethora of programmers, artists, modders, and other designers that have been creating with it for years Image Gallery (9 images) Video game developer, Epic Games, is known for giving players realistic experiences thanks to its popular Unreal Engine platform. But while games like Batman: Arkham City and Gears of War are certainly entertaining, virtually beating up thugs and fighting subterranean creatures doesn't exactly translate into real world skills.
However a new agreement with teaching software developer, Virtual Heroes, could see Epic's platform used to create more practical experiences and train medical staff and law enforcement officers to handle high-stress situations. View all This wouldn't be the first time US government agencies have made use of the Unreal Engine. Source: Unreal Engine About the Author Post a CommentRelated Articles Just enter your friends and your email address into the form below.
Your computer knows what you’re thinking. When you send an email, marketing people are looking over your shoulder. Their computers intercept your emails and status updates to find and log private information in them. (Photo: Colourbox) When you send a letter electronically to your partner in love and life, he or she is not the only one to read it. People involved in marketing also know what you write. They know the type of news that interests you, the music you like to listen or dance to, the films you like the most. The businesses that these marketing people work for use such private information to produce banner adverts and to market products that precisely match your profile and wants. Electronic mind-reading “You can say that the computer reads your mind – it guesses who you are and what you want and then sends targeted advertising to you,” says Professor Lars Kai Hansen, who is head of the section for cognitive systems at DTU Informatics, at the Technical University of Denmark.
Registers attitudes Lars Kai Hansen. A Satellite System That Could End Circling Above the Airport. Stuart Isett for The New York Times Technology that has been adopted by Alaska Airlines could be used at big, busy airports to cut 30 miles from a plane's approach to the runway. Stuart Isett for The New York Times Pilots using the technology will no longer need to circle overhead awaiting clearance to land, saving fuel and reducing delays.
Starting in June, that’s exactly what actual Alaska Airlines flights will be doing when the airline begins testing the use of satellite technology to land at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport — all in the hope of saving fuel and reducing delays. Alaska Airlines, one of the nation’s smallest airlines, has taken some of the biggest steps in adopting a technology that allows its planes to navigate Alaska’s hazardous terrain, weaving through narrow valleys and mountain peaks, and land at remote airports in some of the worst imaginable weather. “This makes much better use of the airspace,” Captain Adams said. The program has already confronted trouble. Computer outperforms humans at detecting lies, by watching the speaker's eyes.
An experimental system allows a computer to determine whether or not a human speaker is lying, by observing their eye movements (Photo via Shutterstock) If the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey taught us anything, it’s that computers know when we’re telling a lie. While that may not actually be the case for most computers in real life, it could be if they’re running a program created by scientists from the University at Buffalo.
Building on a previous psychological study, the team produced software that allowed a computer to assess a speaker’s eye movements, to determine whether or not they were telling the truth in a prerecorded conversation. It turns out that the computer was able to correctly able to spot their lies with 82.5% accuracy. According to the researchers, a trained human interrogator only manages a success rate of about 65%. As the conversation moved on, the subjects were asked whether or not they had stolen the cheque. Source: University at Buffalo About the Author. Childrens' thought processes could inspire better computers.
Children are sometimes referred to as “sponges,” not because they live off our earnings, but because of their remarkable ability to learn things quickly. Psychologists believe this is because their brains are still wired for learning and exploration – essential qualities for building neural connections – whereas adult minds tend to focus on specific goals, at the expense of imagination and curiosity. Now, scientists from the University of California, Berkeley are studying the cognitive functions of babies, toddlers and preschoolers, in hopes of using their findings to make computers think more like humans. Through a number of experiments, the research team has discovered that children are quite adept at testing hypotheses, detecting statistical patterns, and drawing conclusions while at the same time adapting to changes. As an example, in one experiment, preschoolers got to sing Happy Birthday to a stuffed monkey, whenever it was brought out and a music player was switched on.
Mission to build a simulated brain begins - tech - 06 June 2005. An effort to create the first computer simulation of the entire human brain, right down to the molecular level, was launched on Monday. The "Blue Brain" project, a collaboration between IBM and a Swiss university team, will involve building a custom-made supercomputer based on IBM's Blue Gene design. The hope is that the virtual brain will help shed light on some aspects of human cognition, such as perception, memory and perhaps even consciousness. It will be the first time humans will be able to observe the electrical code our brains use to represent the world, and to do so in real time, says Henry Markram, director of Brain and Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytecnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. It may also help in understanding how certain malfunctions of the brain's "microcircuits" could cause psychiatric disorders such as autism, schizophrenia and depression, he says.
"But there has been a convergence of the biological data and the computational resources," he says. New software translates users' speech, using their own voice. New software developed by Microsoft is able to reproduce the user's speech in another language, using their own voice (Image via Shutterstock) For some time now, speech-recognition programs have existed that attempt to reproduce the user's spoken words in another language. Such "speech-to-speech" apps, however, provide their translations using a very flat, synthetic voice. Now, experimental new software developed by Microsoft is able not only to translate between 26 different languages, but it plays the translated speech back in the user's own voice - complete with the inflections they used when speaking in their own language. It looks like a real-life version of Star Trek's universal translator could soon be here.
The system was demonstrated this Tuesday at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, campus, by its inventor, Microsoft research scientist Frank Soong. So far, the program isn't ready to go as soon as it's been installed. Via: Technology Review About the Author. 02002-02029 (27 years): By 2029 no computer - or "machine intelligence" - will have passed the Turing Test. - Long Bets. The World Through Google's Smartglasses.
Moshe Sipper, The Artificial Self-Replication Page. Human Cloning in Japan. Jabberwacky chat - Yes. - Please tell me your nicknames. - An Artificial Intelligence chatbot, AI chatterbot or chatterbox, for online chatting, talk, chats, talking, think, thought, thoughts, converse,dialogue,dialog,conversation - entertainment robots, On Line Index of Artificial Intelligence Journals. Darpa's Police Robot of the Future (Coming Soon) Most Human Like Robot Ever. Don't swear, creep! Bickering bots ... Clever them! AI vs. AI. Two chatbots talking to each other. The AI-Box Experiment.