Tag: "Artificial Intelligence"

John McCarthy, AI pioneer, dies at 84

It might be a stretch to suggest that there’d be no AI without John McCarthy, but at the very least, we’d likely be discussing the concept much differently. The computer scientist, who died on Sunday at 84, is credited with coining the term “Artificial Intelligence” as part of a proposal for a Dartmouth conference on the subject. The event, held in 1956, is regarded as a watershed moment for the subject. Early the following decade, McCarthy pioneered LISP, a highly popular programming language amongst the AI development community. In 1971, he won a Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery and 20 years later was awarded National Medal of Science. A more complete obituary for McCarthy can be found in the source link below.

Oct 26, 2011 | 0 comments | View Post

Switched On: As Siri gets serious

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Oct 17, 2011 | 0 comments | View Post

IBM’s Watson set to tackle health insurance, takes ‘Diagnosis for $1,000′

After tackling your tech support woes, the famed Watson is moving on to mop up the health insurance industry. That’s right, the IBM showstopper we all know and love for trouncing trivia kings on Jeopardy has been hired by one of the largest health insurance company’s in the US. WellPoint Inc. will make use of the system’s breakneck speed and healthcare database alongside patient records — allowing the supercomputer to guide treatment options and prescribe medicines. Once implemented, data will be combined from three sources in a matter of seconds: a patient’s chart / records from a doctor, the insurance company’s patient history and the medical knowledge that Watson already possesses. A pilot program will roll out next year to a number of cancer facilities, academic medical centers and oncology practices. No word yet on when The Watson School of Medicine will start accepting applications.

IBM’s Watson set to tackle health insurance, takes ‘Diagnosis for $1,000′ originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Sep 12, 2011 | 0 comments | View Post

When two chatbots have a conversation, everyone wins (video)

What did one chatbot say to the other chatbot? Quite a lot, actually — but good luck making any sense out of it. That’s what researchers from Cornell’s Creative Machines Lab recently discovered, after pitting two bots against one another for a good ol’ fashioned talk-off. It’s all part of the lab’s submission to this year’s Loebner Prize Competition in Artificial Intelligence — an event that awards $100,000 to the team whose computer programs can conduct the most human-like conversations. Unfortunately for Cornell’s squad, their chatbots still have a long way to go before achieving conversational coherence, though they could easily get hired as anchors on most cable news networks. Throughout the course of their frenetic (and often snippy) discussion, one bot raised heady questions about God and existence, while the other boldly claimed to be a unicorn. Basically, they had the exact same conversation we used to have in our dorm rooms every night, at around 4 am. Watch it for yourself after the break. It’s nothing short of sublime.

Continue reading When two chatbots have a conversation, everyone wins (video)

Aug 29, 2011 | 0 comments | View Post

Seth Shostak: Will We Ever Figure It Out?

The Astronomer Royal of Britain, Sir Martin Rees, stood before the crowd to make a deceptively straightforward point about modern research: “Chimpanzees cannot appreciate the issues in a field such as quantum mechanics, much less solve them,” he said.

Aug 22, 2011 | 0 comments | View Post