Wheelchairs that listen

from Boston.com:

Seeking greater independence, patients help MIT researchers design a voice-driven device

“They can know more about the environment — weather, scheduled events, menus — and exploit that knowledge to make more meaningful choices about how they wish to spend their time,’’ said Teller, a member of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

The prototype, under development since 2005, can cruise the halls of MIT’s computer science lab, often without a passenger. When one of the students working on the device tells it to “Go to the kitchen,’’ a computer-generated voice responds: “Do you want to go to the kitchen?’’

• Video
• Intelligent wheelchairs will navigate on their own

Text 2.0: Does this headline know you’re reading it?

from h+ Magazine:

Ralf Biedert and colleagues at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) are using eye-trackers from Tobii Technology of Sweden along with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create a reading enhancement technology called Text 2.0.

This is not simply a case of using infrared light, a camera, and eye movement to move a cursor and click buttons: Text 2.0 infers user intentions and enhances the reading experience in far more complex ways.

Reading certain words, phrases, or names can trigger the appearance of footnotes, translations, definitions, biographies, even sound effects or animations. Ask how a word is pronounced and you get a verbal answer.

If you begin skimming the text, it fades out the less important words. If you glance away, a bookmark automatically appears, pointing to where you stopped reading.

D-Wave Systems’ 128-qubit quantum computer aims at human-level Artificial Intelligence

from h+ Magazine:

Unlike a conventional computer that works in a binary process of rapidly switching circuits on and off, a quantum computer uses subatomic phenomena to create logical circuits called qubits that are on and off at the same time.

Qubits can be a 1, a 0, or a quantum superposition of both. Put a pair of qubits together and they can be in a superposition of four states. With three qubits you can have eight states, and so on exponentially. D-Wave Systems intends to push the field further than ever before with the world’s first 128-qubit computer, running on superconducting circuits.

• EOT Quantum archive

Stanford AI software to comprehend what humans write

from MachinesLikeUs:

“The problem of the age is information overload,” said Manning. “The fundamental challenge I’m going to talk about is how we can get computers to actually understand at least a reasonable amount of what they read.”

As computers make more sense of what’s online, they will deliver more relevant search results and will help summarize, structure and act on information that individuals care about, much like a personal assistant.

Experts asked “How long till human-level AI?”

from h+ Magazine:

We asked the experts when they estimated AI would reach each of four milestones:

• passing the Turing test by carrying on a conversation well enough to pass as a human
• solving problems as well as a third grade elementary school student
• performing Nobel-quality scientific work
• going beyond the human level to superhuman intelligence

We also asked how the timing of achieving these milestones would be affected by massive funding of $100 billion/year going into AGI R&D.