Extending the frontiers of artificial intelligence

The world of artificial cognitive systems and machine learning is moving at a fast pace and is becoming a major international research challenge. New techniques are being developed in this field that will transform many aspects of our day-to-day lives and work. The SIMBAD project, backed by the EU with EUR 1.6 million in financing, is now looking at some of the ways that this research may be put to use.

SIMBAD aims to fully develop the new technology that is emerging within the pattern recognition and machine learning fields, and is researching the use of 'similarity information' rather than its previous feature-based approach, says the project's scientific coordinator, Professor Marcello Pelillo.Society is increasingly developing complex machines such as robots to carry out many of our everyday needs, he says. Artificial cognitive systems (ACSs) are now becoming a top international research priority and in accordance with this priority the European Commission has made this area one of the seven key research areas that Europe must develop in order to become one of the world leaders in next generation information and communication technologies (ICT).

Fruitful research into this area will lead to the development of many tools that will have a great social and economic impact on the EU, he goes on to say. Vehicle control, control of communication networks, medical diagnostics, and human-machine interaction are just a few of the areas that will benefit. There will also be many economic benefits that will boost European competitiveness.

'In addition to the applications mentioned above, we are devoting a substantial effort towards tackling two large-scale biomedical imaging applications. We are contributing towards providing effective, advanced techniques to assist in the diagnosis of renal cell carcinoma and diagnosis of major psychoses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder,' the Università Ca' Foscari, Venezia researcher explains. 'These sorts of problems are not amenable to being tackled using traditional machine learning techniques due to the difficulty of deriving suitable feature-based descriptions.'

A successful outcome to these research applications would prove that SIMBAD’s approach is highly suitable for use in biomedicine and this would be a good springboard for further research to be carried out in this area, he says. Using pattern recognition techniques in medicine and health services would bring huge improvements to healthcare industries throughout the EU and open up many opportunities for health industry technology.'

A successful outcome of our experimentation would provide evidence as to the practical applicability of our approach in biomedicine, thereby fostering further research along the lines set up by SIMBAD, both at the methodological and at the practical level,' Professor Pelillo remarks. 'This would potentially open (up) new opportunities in health and disease management and bring radical improvements to the quality and efficiency of our healthcare systems,' he notes. 'The field of pattern recognition is concerned with the automatic discovery of regularities in data through the use of computer algorithms, and with the use of these regularities to take actions such as classifying data into different categories, with a view to endow artificial systems with the ability to improve their own performance in the light of new external stimuli.'

Six partners from five European countries (Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Switzerland and the UK) are particpating in SIMBAD — an international consortium that reflects an international field of research.'

The competences needed to achieve our goals cannot be found on a local or national level. The European dimension of the project guarantees a critical mass of researchers with complementary experiences and expertise, thereby boosting the likelihood of success,' Professor Pelillo says. 'Also, the potential impact of this research goes well beyond the national scale and the EU will benefit from presenting itself as an active player on the world scene of artificial cognitive systems, which is largely dominated by the USA.'

Available: [Online] http://ec.europa.eu/research/headlines/news/article_08_11_28_en.html

The Future of the Web

Written by David Tow

By 2020 Web 2.0- The Social Web- will have developed into a complex multimedia interweaving of ideas, knowledge and social commentary, connecting over three billion people on the planet. In combination with the Semantic Web 3.0 it will automatically analyse, interpret and create new forms of layered knowledge beyond the world of today's blogs, wikis, social networks and virtual worlds.

Over the next decade these early trends will continue to evolve at a frenetic pace- social networks will both fragment and unify, catering to special groups, but also overlapping and creating within the next few years a global social network of networks. At the same time, social networks and virtual worlds such as Second Life will converge, along with powerful simulation technology, to create the first realistic virtual realities.

By 2030, Web 3.0- advanced versions of the Semantic Web- will have made many important contributions to new knowledge through network relationships, logical inference and artificial intelligence. It will be powered by a seamless, computational mesh, enveloping and connecting most human life and will encompass all facets of our social and business lives- always on and available to manage every need. It will connect not only most of the 8 billion individuals on the planet, but also link with other biological and artificial life forms, as well as countless everyday electronically controlled objects. The Semantic Web and Intelligent Web will have combined.

By 2040 Web 4.0- the Intelligent Web- will be ubiquitous- able to interact with the repository of almost all available knowledge of human civilisation- past and present, digitally coded and archived for automatic retrieval and analysis. Web 4.0 will mark the beginning of a new intelligent entity- a sentient and cognisant multidimensional network, powered not only by billions of ultra-fast tiny processors and unlimited communications bandwidth, but by the first quantum computers, capable of processing trillions of operations in parallel. Human intelligence will have co-joined with advanced forms of artificial intelligence, creating a higher or meta level of knowledge processing. This will be essential for supporting the complex decision-making and problem solving capacity, required for civilisation's future progress.

By 2050 Web 5.0- The Wise Web- will have emerged, embedding all biological and artificial life within a global cooperative intelligence. All critical decisions affecting our planet and life, including those relating to global warming, sharing vital resources and the ethical resolution of conflict and human rights, will be guided by this global intelligence.

The Wise Web will mark the beginning of a new threshold in human civilisation- a new form of global consciousness- in which all life will be embedded.

Available: [Online] http://www.faxts.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=917:the-future-of-the-web-&catid=92:david-tow&Itemid=101

Computers That Can Think Like Humans

By seeking inspiration from the structure, dynamics, function, and behavior of the brain, the IBM-led cognitive computing research team aims to break the conventional programmable machine paradigm. This team led by Dr. Dharmendra Modha, manager of IBM's cognitive computing initiative, hopes to rival the brain's low power consumption and small size by using nanoscale devices for synapses and neurons. This technology stands to bring about entirely new computing architectures and programming paradigms.

Cognitive computing offers the promise of systems that can integrate and analyze vast amounts of data from many sources in the blink of an eye, allowing businesses or individuals to make rapid decisions in time to have a significant impact. For example, bankers must make split-second decisions based on constantly changing data that flows at an ever-dizzying rate. And in the business of monitoring the world's water supply, a network of sensors and actuators constantly records and reports metrics such as temperature, pressure, wave height, acoustics and ocean tide.

In such cases, making sense of all the input would be a Herculean task for one person, or even for 100. A cognitive computer, acting as a global brain, could quickly and accurately put together the disparate pieces of this complex puzzle and help people make good decisions rapidly. The end result of this research is to ubiquitously deploy computers imbued with a new intelligence that can integrate information from a variety of sensors and sources, deal with ambiguity, respond in a context-dependent way, learn over time and carry out pattern recognition to solve difficult problems based on perception, action and cognition in complex, real-world environments.

Available [Online] http://www.enterpriser.in/India/Know_It/Computers_That_Can_Think_Like_Humans/551-95616-449.html