"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us." -- Marshall McLuhan

Latest News Items

Digital Actors in LOTR Can Think -- Massive, the special-effects program behind the colossal battles in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, represents each agent as an autonomous agent. "Every agent has its own choices and a complete brain, The most important thing about making realistic crowds is making realistic individuals." (12/13)

Web services need practical Turing tests -- This NYT article describes CMU research on devising tests to distinguish between humans and software agents. Such tests are being used by Yahoo and other web sites and also offer challenges to AI researchers who try to defeat them. (12/10)

DARPA puts thought into cognitive computing -- "A program that may push cognitive technology to a new level is being launched by the Department of Defense. The DOD, a longtime supporter and user of artificial-intelligence systems, aims to build what it is calling an "enduring personalized cognitive assistant," or Epca. " (12/9)

We'll All Be Harry Potter in the Future, -- The world of magic is a world where inanimate objects come alive; it's as if they had computational power, sensors, awareness, and connectivity. (Alertbox) (12/9)

Robots forced to live and work in sewers -- Sacrificing all for the last mile, special cable laying robots are stringing fiber in the worlds sewers. (12/9)

Latest Directory Additions

UDDIe -- UDDIe is an extension to UDDI which which supports (among other things) the notion of ``blue pages'', to record user defined properties associated with a service -- and to enable discovery of services based on these. (12/15)

Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World -- This book is about rethinking rationality as adaptive thinking: to understand how minds cope with their environments, both ecological and social. Gerd Gigerenzer proposes and illustrates a bold new research program that investigates the psychology of rationality, introducing the concepts of ecological, bounded, and social rationality. (Nibbs newsletter) (12/15)

FIPA Specifications voted to Standard Status -- The FIPA principal members recently voted to promote 23 experimental specifications to standard status. This vote represents a major milestone in FIPA's history and with it FIPA has realized a significant part of its mission. (12/15)

Human-Computer Interfaces: 2003-->2012 -- Human-computer interfaces will rapidly improve during the next decade. The wide availability of cheaper display technologies will be one of the most transformational events in the IT industry. (12/14)

Posthuman Law -- Posthuman Law:Information Policy and the Machinic World by Sandra Braman It has been an unspoken assumption that the law is made by humans for humans. That assumption no longer holds: The subject of information policy is increasingly flows between machines, Machinic rather than social values play ever-more important roles in decision-making, and information policy for human society is being supplemented, supplanted, and superceded by machinic decision-making. (12/12)

DAML+OIL: An Ontology Language for the Semantic Web -- Deborah L. McGuinness, Richard Fikes, James Hendler, and Lynn Andrea Stein, DAML+OIL: An Ontology Language for the Semantic Web, "DAML+OIL's goal is to support the transformation of the Web from being a forum for information presentation to a resource for interoperability, understanding, and reasoning." (12/12)

Jena: A Semantic Web Toolkit -- Brian McBride, Jena: A Semantic Web Toolkit, IEEE Internet Computing, v6n6, Nov/Dec 2002. "HP Labs developed the Jena toolkit to make it easier to develop applications that use the semantic Web information model and languages. Jena is a Java application programming interface that is available as an open-source download." (12/12)

Adaptive Assistants for Customized E-Shopping -- Filippo Menczer, Alvaro E. Monge, and W. Nick Street, Adaptive Assistants for Customized E-Shopping, IEEE Intelligent Systems, v17n6, Nov-Dec 2002. "IntelliShopper learns a shopper's preferences and monitors vendor sites for products matching those preferences. (12/12)

Systems That Know What They're Doing -- Ronald J. Brachman, Systems That Know What They're Doing,, IEEE Intelligent Systems, v17n6, Nov-Dec 2002. "Cognitive computers will not only know what they're doing, they'll be able to tell you why." (12/12)

Practical AI Programming in Java (free book) -- "Practical Artificial Intelligence Programming in Java" is a free web book written by Mark Watson that covers Java implementations (with complete source code) of some common AI techniques including search, NLP parsing, statistical NLP processing, expert systems, genetic algorithms, and neural networks. (12/12)

CodeBaby -- CodeBaby is an Edmonton based company that is developing an intelligent interface for Internet content. "The CodeBaby interface will work with users to learn about their preferences and then recommend information, media, and services that are of likely interest to them." (12/10)

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