TechViewsArtificial Intelligence
The way forward
A humanoid robot newly acquired by Imperial College London will lead to a deeper understanding of human intelligence, top, researchers at Cornell adjust a double pendulum, left, and 'Adam' at Aberstwyth University at work.
Whenever we hear about Artificial Intelligence (AI), many of us tend to think about a world where Robots would take over the entire world, or at least try to do so, as portrayed by sci-fi novels of Isaac Asimov or Hollywood blockbusters like Terminator-2 or i-Robot! Whether robots can ever be developed to that stage where it/they might plan to 'take over the world' is a completely different question, but some recent discoveries in the field of AI, has indeed left us flabbergasted, to say the least! Imperial College London, UKThe College's Departments of Computing and Electrical and Electronic Engineering believe that iCub, a humanoid robot the size of a three year old child, will further their research into cognition, the process of knowing that includes awareness, perception, reasoning and judgement. Researchers want to learn more about how humans use cognition to interact with their world. They believe iCub's human-like body will help them to understand how this is done. The iCub has mechanical joints that enable it to move its head, arms, fingers, eyes and legs similarly to the way that humans do. Professor Murray Shanahan, of the Department of Computing, says this is important because cognition is very much tied up with the way we interact with the world. "Nature developed cognition for us in order to make us better at interacting with the physical and social world," he explains. "If we want to understand the nature of cognition better then we really need to understand it in the context of something that moves or interacts with objects. That is where iCub can help us." The team will test their theories about cognition by creating a computer simulation of a brain, which will replicate how neurons in real brains communicate through short bursts of electrical energy. In people, this process helps us to interact with the physical world. For instance, the electrical signals sent by neurons control muscles that enable people to lift a cup to the mouth to sip on a drink. The research team at Imperial will also link the computer simulation of a brain to iCub so that it can process information about its environment and send bursts of electrical energy to its motors to allow it to move its arms, head, eyes and fingers to carry out very simple tasks such as lifting a ball and moving it from one place to another. If the researchers are successful, they will have made an important step in reproducing the way that humans use cognition to interact in their world. In the long term, they believe their research could help develop a new generation of intelligent factory robots that have much more versatility and do a wider variety of jobs. Cornell University, USA
If Isaac Newton had had access to a supercomputer, he'd have had it watch apples fall and let it figure out what that meant. But the computer would have needed to run an algorithm developed by Cornell researchers that can derive natural laws from observed data. The researchers have taught a computer to find regularities in the natural world that represent natural laws -- without any prior scientific knowledge on the part of the computer. The research is described in the April 3 issue of the journal Science by Hod Lipson, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and graduate student Michael Schmidt, a specialist in computational biology. Their process begins by taking the derivatives of every variable observed with respect to every other -- a mathematical way of measuring how one quantity change as another changes. Then the computer creates equations at random using various constants and variables from the data. It tests these against the known derivatives, keeps the equations that come closest to predicting correctly, modifies them at random and tests again, repeating until it literally evolves a set of equations that accurately describe the behaviour of the real system. Technically, the computer does not output equations, but finds "invariants" -- mathematical expressions that remain true all the time, from which human insights can derive equations. Once the invariants are found, potentially all equations describing the system are available: "All equations regarding a system must fit into and satisfy the invariants," Schmidt said. "But of course we still need a human interpreter to take this step." Computers will not make scientists obsolete, the researchers conclude. Rather, they said, the computer can take over the grunt work, helping scientists focus quickly on the interesting phenomena and interpret their meaning. Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK
The discovery of 12 new functions for genes in one of the most studied organisms in the world wouldn't be news, except that scientists didn't discover them. A robot named Adam designed, carried out and discovered the new gene functions. "Our goal is to make science more efficient," said Ross King, a professor of biology and computer science at the University of Wales and author of a new paper in this week's issue of Science detailing Adam's work. "If we had computers designing and carrying out experiments we could get through many more experiments than we currently can," said King, adding "robots don't need to take holidays." The 10-year-old Adam, which is housed at Aberystwyth University in the U.K., might replace humans eventually, but it doesn't look like one. From the outside Adam is 45 cubic meters of elongated white plastic instruments. Inside Adam sits a biological library of more than 12,000 chilled petri dishes. Each dish contains a different yeast strain with various genes removed from them. With its various mechanical tools, Adam can grab the petri dishes, remove a sample of yeast, grow it, clean it and analyze the results of the experiment. Adam actually discovered more than 12 new gene functions. When King and his colleagues compared the functions of all the genes Adam found, they realized that some of them had previously been described. So Adam had independently confirmed those results. Adam is still a prototype, but King's team hopes their next robot, Eve, will help boost the search for new drugs to combat diseases such as malaria. "This system is still a prototype," explained King. "The first car wasn't as efficient as a horse." Adam and Eve not only have the hardware to physically manipulate objects, they also have advanced artificial intelligence systems that let them make their own decisions and then act on those decisions, without help from their human creators. Information Source: Imperial College London Website, Cornell Chronicle and Discovery News
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