IBM hosted a collaborative event at their Almaden Research Center called "The New AI: New Paradigms for Using Computers Workshop".
Oren Etzioni, director of the Turing Center at the University of Washington said AI will change the dynamics of search. He stated that semantic advances are showing that simple sentences can be understood.
However, Etzioni is concerned about the weakness in AI’s use of Natural language for avatars as they need to be reliable.
As previously reported the AI Winters (refer to blog reference 10) the term artificial intelligence had been out of favour for 20 years but Stefan Nusser, IBM said that AI "re-emergence” is now underway.
The major AI projects covered at this event included:
1. Using AI to Identify Interesting Assertions. With this University of Washington project, machine learning is combined with human computation to identify which assertions extracted from the Internet are more interesting. TextRunner is used in this project as well as content creation sites like Wikipedia.
2. Data Visualizations and Continuous Interfaces. This Yahoo effort features various applications offering advanced visualizations of data, such as FAA flight paths.
3. Towards PR2: A Personalized Robot Platform. This Willow Garage effort features a hardware and software platform for robots that do tasks for humans in human environments. In collaboration with Stanford University, an open-source robot operating system is being developed as well.
4. SparTag.us: A Low Cost Tagging System for Foraging of Web Content. This Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) project features a new tagging system with a "Clik2Tag" technique to provide low-cost tagging of Web content. Users can highlight text snippets and collect tagged or highlighted paragraphs into a system-created notebook that can be browsed and searched.
5. AALIM: Diagnostic Decision Support for Cardiologists. This is an IBM-developed decision support system to identify similar patient records and aid in diagnostic decision support.
6. CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) Express. This is a Windows-based version of SRI International's CALO project to build an intelligent personal assistant. For example, it can figure out RSS feeds and suggest new feeds for the user.
