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If you have a knack for knowing just the right move to make — in a board game or in other walks of life — it might be because your brain has built up a special kind of connection.

Researchers at Japan's RIKEN Brain Science Institute report evidence that the professional players of a chesslike board game from Japan, known as shogi, have brains that crackle with activity in two areas that are less active in amateurs. Their findings are published in this week's issue of the journal Science.

While computer systems are now very capable of recognizing vocal input, they offer minimal interactive feedback. A team of Cambridge University researchers have now developed a system that can not only detect a user's emotional state, but can also make expressive responses of its own. Using a robotic likeness of the godfather of the programmable computer, Charles Babbage, the team has hooked the system up to a driving simulator and created a computerized driving companion and navigator that reacts to the driver in much the same way as a human passenger.

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"You are the controller." If you've been following the buzz surrounding Kinect, you've probably heard this phrase tossed around. From plugging leaks with your hands and feet inKinect Adventures! to changing songs with the flick of a wrist in Zune, Kinect opens up a new way to naturally experience your entertainment.

But once you get over the magic of opening the disc tray with the wave of a hand like you're a Jedi, you might start to wonder how it all works under the hood. In this blog post, I'll focus on the secret sauce behind the human tracking system and how it allows game developers to produce Kinect-enabled experiences. Then Arjun Dayal, a program manager on the team, will show you how Kinect enables a gesture-based approach to navigating the Xbox Dashboard and Kinect Hub. But before we get into any of that, let’s start with the conceptual principles that guided Kinect’s development.

The ACL has created a new wiki specifically for Computational Linguistics: http://aclweb.org/aclwiki The purpose of this wiki is to facilitate the sharing of information on all aspects of Computational Linguistics. Wikipedia contains some excellent articles on Computational Linguistics, but the mandate of Wikipedia is to be an encyclopedia. This means that Wikipedia articles must be written for a general audience, not for specialists. It also means that content such as job ads and course outlines is not suitable for Wikipedia. Therefore this new wiki was created to fill a role that Wikipedia cannot fill.

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The cities of the future will be huge and super-dense — but will they also be alive? Could the increasingly complex systems needed to manage the next generation of megacities become our first true artificial intelligence? People have speculated before about the idea that the Internet might become self-aware and turn into the first "real" A.I., but could it be more likely to happen to cities, in which humans actually live and work and navigate, generating an even more chaotic system?

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"Canadian scientists have developed a microchip capable of monitoring the electrical and chemical communication channels between individual neurons. This is the first time scientists have been able to monitor the interaction between brain cells on such a precise and subtle level. In addition to providing the ability to see more easily the impact of drugs on various mental disorders during testing, this provides one of the first fundamental steps towards real mind-machine interface."

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Led by Professor Victor Maojo, a team of researchers from the GIB (including Guillermo de la Calle, Miguel Garcia-Remesal, Diana de la Iglesia, and Stefano Chiesa) have developed an innovative methodology designed to discover, retrieve, and automatically classify bioinformatic resources from specialized scientific literature. The developed index of resources is freely available via the web application BioInformatics Resource Inventory (BIRI).

The methodology is based on natural language processing and artificial intelligence techniques used to retrieve and automatically classify key information contained in scientific articles — primarily abstracts. Each article is analyzed morphologically, syntactically, and semantically in search of a series of set patterns that are able to automatically identify the names, functionality, access URL, and in some cases, the resource inputs and outputs without user intervention.

The Prediction API enables access to Google's machine learning algorithms to analyze your historic data and predict likely future outcomes. Upload your data to Google Storage for Developers, then use the Prediction API to make real-time decisions in your applications. The Prediction API implements supervised learning algorithms as a RESTful web service to let you leverage patterns in your data, providing more relevant information to your users. Run your predictions on Google's infrastructure and scale effortlessly as your data grows in size and complexity.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence is pleased to present the 2010 Fall Symposium Series, to be held Thursday through Saturday, November 11–13, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the eight symposia are as follows

* Cognitive and Metacognitive Educational Systems
* Commonsense Knowledge
* Complex Adaptive Systems: Resilience, Robustness, and Evolvability
* Computational Models of Narrative
* Dialog with Robots
* Manifold Learning and Its Applications
* Proactive Assistant Agents
* Quantum Informatics for Cognitive, Social, and Semantic Processes

Microsoft released a video showing off its 'virtual human' technology, named Milo, designed for the company's hands-free Xbox 360 motion controller called Kinect at TED Global in Oxford. Milo is built to react to people's emotions, body movements, and voice, allowing players to interact with the virtual character. It was built using artificial intelligence developed by Lionhead studios, along with undisclosed technology from Microsoft. According to games designer Peter Molyneux, the game exploits psychological techniques to make a person feel that Milo is real. Each Milo character will be unique because every player's interaction with the virtual character will sculpt the type of virtual person Milo will evolve to become.