Artificial Intelligence

Global Workspace theories have been popular ever since Bernard Baars put forward the idea back in the eighties; in ‘Applying global workspace theory to the frame problem’*, Murray Shanahan and Baars suggest that among its other virtues, the global workspace provides a convenient solution to that old bugbear, the frame problem.

I this paper, Paul Almond examines how minds may work and how similar systems could be implemented in computers.

Can machines think about themselves? One of the most unique and fascinating aspects of intelligent living systems is their ability to self-reflect: To reconstruct models of their own morphology and of their own behavior. In this talk Hod Lipson demonstrates a number of experiments in self reflecting robotic systems, and argues that reflective processes are essential in achieving meta-cognitive capacities.

Where has AI (or perhaps we should talk about AGI) got to now? h+ magazine reports remarkably buoyant optimism in the AI community about the achievement of Artificial General Intelligence AGI at a human level, and even beyond.

The focus of artificial intelligence (AI) research has undergone a shift – from trying to simulate human thinking, to specific “intelligent” functions, like data mining and statistical learning theory.

For people who despair that there is too much information online, Chris Manning has a response: Technology is not the problem. In fact, technology may understand what you're trying to say.

A University of Exeter PhD student has used artificial intelligence to shed new light on the behaviour of bumble bees.

Henry Markram is attempting to reverse engineer an entire human brain, one neuron at a time. This piece is an introduction to director Noah Hutton's 10-year film-in-the-making that will chronicle the development of The Blue Brain Project, a landmark endeavor in modern neuroscience.

This is the first in a series of articles that will attempt to give an overview of how minds may work and how similar systems could be implemented in computers.

"People have to be able to make money off their brains and their hearts," Jaron Lanier was telling me. "Or else we're all going to starve, and it's the machines that'll get good."

Kevin Warwick, professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, discusses what he believes might happen once we pass through The Singularity, a theoretical tipping point where machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence.

Literally hundreds of people are hurrying through the long airport corridor between Terminals A and B. Among them are two terrorists, who've hidden themselves in the crowd. They're carrying small containers of chemicals in their jacket pockets, individual components for an explosive. But there's something the criminals don't know. As well as being observed by security cameras, they're also being "sniffed out" by chemical noses hidden in the corridor wall.

Kenneth Rogoff is putting his money on AI to be the new source of economic growth, and he seems to think the Turing Test is pretty much there for the taking.

Ray Solomonoff, a physicist who was one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence, died on Dec. 7 in Boston. He was 83 and had homes in New Ipswich, N.H., and Cambridge, Mass.

CSIRO is using automated expression recognition technology to tell whether someone is in pain.