The future is bright

Just a quick post to say thanks to everyone who helped make this conference an especially fascinating and enjoyable experience for me. I feel I have a broader outlook on the academic community in general, as well as a great deal of excitement about the future of both human and artificial intelligence. I think this blog was a great idea for the conference and I feel honoured to have been a participant. It was also great to see how there is an interest from a diverse range of people and organizations in the broad field of Artificial Intelligence. I believe Dr. Minsky (or someone else?) said that AI is solving problems that have not been solved yet, or making computers do things which only humans could do in the past. Either of these goals is worthwhile, but I think we have to just go about our work with a great deal of respect for the past, for institutions, for experts, and for leaders. The future is a bright one, and we just need to remember "respect". (Sounds like a football mantra or something, but it could also apply to AI researchers and theorists too.)

Churches and Cathedrals

What a week! After the Demo on Tuesday my whole team was pretty tapped. We went to the Church Brew Works to recover... What better way than enjoying a beer at church : ) After the couple talks on Wednesday we met up with professor Yang Cai at his lab at CMU. One of his students showed us around the campus (very nice!). The buildings were extremely old and well kept, and the receptionist in the CS building was a roboceptionist, a good mix of old and new. We got to play with the lab's eye tracking system (see the picture in Flckr). If you look at a spot on the screen for 5 seconds or longer, that spot gets selected. We headed over to the Cathedral of Learning to find 42 stories of classrooms and lounges for students to study in etc. After spending some time taking pictures of the main entrance, we headed inside to find a gorgeous foyer that required more photo-taking time (thank God for digital). We finally headed up the network of elevators that you have to take to get to the top, each one only went up 10 floors or so. Once at the top we stumbled into a group of U Pitt students in what must have been a student lounge. I overheard them talking about their experiences interning at the hospital and noticed that one of the guys had his shirt off... "Very odd" I thought, "Where's the gym?" I didn't ask of course, but after checking out the view from the top of Pittsburgh, we headed down and met a nice woman in the elevator that explained the shirtless guy... he had climbed the 42 stories of stairs for exercise. Looking back at the week, I couldn't have asked for a better first AAAI. I met a whole community of people with similar interests and got to see a glimpse of a beautiful city and two universities. Thanks to everyone who helped make AAAI a success!

AAAI robot movies

For those of you who were not present at the conference and thus did not get to see some of the cool robots in action, here is your chance: robot1 & robot2

[Note: You may have to tilt your head slightly (where slightly = by 90 deg) to watch the second video]

Jim Hendler: knowledge is power

Jim Hendler’s presentation on the semantic web is fully attended as the “Web 2.0” talk given by Tanenbaum. He used lots of demos, e.g. RDF in PDF, swoop, and swoogle, to justify the practical aspect of the semantic web -- “You are here”. The simple semantic web is less expressive than any existing KR languages; however it does have significant amount of knowledge (million of documents and thousands of ontologies).

Participating in an experiment

The "hall of robots" is a fun aspect of the conference. Whether or not they do interesting things or represent scientific advancement is beside the point, The point is that the hall is filled with beeping, twitching pieces of machinery covered with blinking lights, raising the chaos and geek-joy levels all around. Back in one corner, however, there was something special going on, however: a joint NRL/Missouri team who were actually gathering experimental data right here at the conference. I signed up to play with their robots, and got to give them some data as well: during the experiment, you drive the robots through a sketch interface from inside a booth where you can't see them, and outside the passerby can watch them surging about doing the tasks you're assigning them. I thought this was a really neat idea: on the one hand, they get real data gathered --- on the other hand, they have an excellent, changing attraction to attract people's attention.

Google's conference break game

Google had played an interesting game for collecting people during conference break: they handed out numbered tags to people around without tell them what will happen then. Very soon, several tens of people stopped and clustered in front of Google's table. About 50 people had got tags, including me. Finally, there are around 100 people squeezed in a small area waiting for the final result, which turned out to be a lottery of some fun stuff. This game, even after it ended, made people around talking the popular word “google”. FYI: The American Dialect Society chose the verb to google as the "most useful word of 2002." (source: Wikipedia)

A Little Story

Yesterday I blogged that the Sherbrooke robot Spartacus needed to use the elevators in the hotel to move between floors, as part of the Robot Challenge. While I haven't heard how that part of the Challenge went, I had a rather didactic experience myself with the elevator today that lead me into some thinking regarding robot (and human) elevator conversation etiquette. (Please note that I haven't actually studied this area nor have reviewed existing works.) In my short life I have lived in various single family homes and university dorms, which did not have elevators - only stairs - and thus I am quite experienced with stairwell conversation etiquette. However, stairwell etiquette does not transfer very well to elevator etiquette for several reasons. The most obvious differences (to me) are the types of activity involved and spatial considerations (stairs: walking in front of, or behind, the conversation partner, and speaking while stepping, and elevator: standing in a small enclosed space facing the conversation partner, maintaining an appropriate distance from the other elevator occupants). But the other, more interesting differences arise from the temporal constraints (or lack thereof) and their impact on the conversation duration and content.

I'll give a personal example to illustrate. Late Monday evening I was playing some jazz improvisations on the Westin hotel's lovely concert grand piano. After I finished, I had a chance to meet with one of the AAAI invited speakers who shared his interest in jazz performance and we briefly discussed some of our music related research and projects. All went well and I felt energized after such a stimulating day of conversations with such fascinating people. I meandered up to the next floor using the escalator and then realized that I needed to take the elevator to return to my hotel room. I pushed the elevator call button and when the door opened, discovered that the same invited speaker was already in the elevator. Now, this is where my brain's attempt to use a stairwell (or perhaps a hallway) conversation rule failed rather spectacularly (at least in terms of the conversation's success).

Fortunately it was a temporal, not a spatial rule which was used incorrectly. Basically, what happened was that I didn't take into account the sharply defined time constraint imposed by the elevator itself, and when the invited speaker politely mentioned one of my projects, I launched into a series of statements about the project, probably due to my excitement about the subject. Unfortunately for me, the elevator abruptly "dinged", door opened, and speaker exited, saying a terse "good night", leaving me in a rather awkward state. Some questions: If the main actor was a robot, would it detect this conversation failure? Could it learn from the mistake? (I hope I myself will!) Could a robot create a blog, or a narrative describing an incident that it experienced? What would an intelligent robot do if it entered an elevator with two invited speakers, one speaker a robot and the other human (and presumably the conversation rules / protocol would be different for each?) For example, if it decided to converse with the robot speaker, would it use natural language so as not to alienate the human speaker? Or maybe it would have a wireless, data based conversation with the robot and a simultaneous natural language conversation with the human speaker. (But the time constraint might not apply to the wireless mode and perhaps the two robots would not determine their conversation patterns by locality: robots might be connected to an intra robot communications network which determines conversation patterns in other ways - I mentioned this to Caroline and it made her think of something from Jungian psychology.)

Anyways, enough rambling for now!

So, What's AI Research, Anyways?

Hi everyone, I am Priyang Rathod. I am a PhD student at UMBC, working with Marie desJardins. I have been meaning to blog since the day of my arrival here, but could not, because I am staying at the student housing at Duquesne University :(.

On the opening day of ASAMAS, Gal Kaminka of Bar Ilan University gave an Introduction to Agents and Multiagent Systems. At the beginning of his speech, he mentioned an incident when his paper was rejected at an Agents conference because one of the reviewers thought that the research presented was not related to Agents. Gal was quite annoyed about that for a couple of weeks. That's quite expected; anyone would be annoyed if a peer-reviewer decides that you are not doing what you think you are doing. But then later Gal also talked about meeting a researcher at Bar Ilan who makes the best batteries and how according to him the battery maker was also a robotics researcher.

That got me thinking: Where is the line between AI Research and Non-AI Research? Does Machine Vision or Robotic Arm Design count as AI research?? Well, I think many would say so. But then what about the batteries and motors used in robots?? Is that AI research? If it is, then what about the chemicals used in batteries, which can be used in a robot? Is THAT AI research? How far do we go? Where do we draw the line?