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In his 2002 book Lost Languages, Andrew Robinson, then the literary editor of the London Times’ higher-education supplement, declared that “successful archaeological decipherment has turned out to require a synthesis of logic and intuition … that computers do not (and presumably cannot) possess.”

Regina Barzilay, an associate professor in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Ben Snyder, a grad student in her lab, and the University of Southern California’s Kevin Knight took that claim personally. At the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Sweden next month, they will present a paper on a new computer system that, in a matter of hours, deciphered much of the ancient Semitic language Ugaritic. In addition to helping archeologists decipher the eight or so ancient languages that have so far resisted their efforts, the work could also help expand the number of languages that automated translation systems

For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords.

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The adult brain, long considered to be fixed in its wiring, is in fact remarkably dynamic. Neuroscientists once thought that the brain's wiring was fixed early in life, during a critical period beyond which changes were impossible. Recent discoveries have challenged that view, and now, research by scientists at Rockefeller University suggests that circuits in the adult brain are continually modified by experience. The researchers, led by Charles D. Gilbert, Arthur and Janet Ross Professor and head of the Laboratory of Neurobiology, observed how neurons responsible for receiving input from a mouse's whiskers shift their relationships with one another after single whiskers are removed. The experiments explain how the circuitry of a region of the mouse brain called the somatosensory cortex, which processes input from the various systems in the body that respond to the sense of touch, can change.

The one thing robots, despite ever-increasing powers, tend not do very well is emote--just think of Asimo's blank face and you'll see what I mean. But here come Noby and M3-Kindy to change that ... and seriously creep you out.

The two bots were revealed today by creators the JST Erato Asada Project--a research team dedicated to investigating how humans and robots can better relate

The ability to predict the stock market is, as any Wall Street quantitative trader (or quant) will tell you, a license to print money. So it should be of no small interest to anyone who likes money that a new system that works in a radically different way than previous automated trading schemes appears to be able to beat Wall Street's best quantitative mutual funds at their own game

This failure to notice what should be very apparent is something we unconsciously experience every day as our brains filter the barrage of visual information which we are flooded with. And apparently it has a name; it is called change blindness.

Scientists at Queen Mary, University of London, have invented a unique spot-the-difference-style computer game in order to study it.

An ancient script that’s defied generations of archaeologists has yielded some of its secrets to artificially intelligent computers. Computational analysis of symbols used 4,000 years ago by a long-lost Indus Valley civilization suggests they represent a spoken language. Some frustrated linguists thought the symbols were merely pretty pictures. “The underlying grammatical structure seems similar to what’s found in many languages,” said University of Washington computer scientist Rajesh Rao. The Indus script, used between 2,600 and 1,900 B.C. in what is now eastern Pakistan and northwest India, belonged to a civilization as sophisticated as its Mesopotamian and Egyptian contemporaries. However, it left fewer linguistic remains.

The Museum Tinguely in Basel and Kunsthaus Graz are co organising an exhibition that addresses the subjects of “Artificial Intelligence” and “Robotics”. The title Robot Dreams is borrowed from a short story of the same name by Isaac Asimov, a biochemist and extraordinarily prolific writer of science fiction, in which Elvex, a robot, has to be destroyed becaus

AAAI is delighted to announce that the Twenty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence will be held at the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, July 11–15, 2010. Please mark your calendars now for AAAI-10, and feel free to contact us at aaai10@aaai.orgwith any inquiries.  Read more here.

GreatMindsWorking.com was created in 2001 as an AI blog with an emphasis on Human Language AI. Entries were made on a fairly regular basis until about 2006 and then dwindled. The site was upgraded from PostNUKE to Drupal in mid 2009, but I never quite got around to configuring Drupal properly or adding much new content.