ASIMO: The future?

You may have heard of (or seen) HONDA’s humanoid robot ASIMO before. ASIMO stands for “Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility” although many would argue that it is in reverence to Isaac Asimov. Currently over 100 units exist, and each costs about 1 million USD.

It has been featured in many different shows, including CES, amongst others. Many believe ASIMO to be a step forward in the progress of true AI. I have read comments on forums and on the videos themselves of people who are alarmed that they would one day take over the world. There are concerned people voicing their thoughts on humans playing god.

All of this has been going on for decades. Some of us look for answers to our creation, wanting to explore the duplication of our processes, and genuinely believing that our mind is composed of algorithms that can be replicated into a machine that can be said to be intelligent. Some of us hate the fact that we are trying to recreate life, and composed others based on our intelligence, stating that it is immoral.

Well, for those of you who are scared about your safety: Robots won’t take over the earth, nor will they turn evil as pictured in the film “I, Robot”. However I do believe the age is coming in which the creations of the imagination and creativity of science fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov’s are turning into real life events. And I do believe that some day it might be possible that they could in turn right their own viruses, spyware, spam the whole internet, conduct highly specialised cracking attacks, amongst other things.

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Spoken Word – The Fireplace

Behold as we engage into a new AI era!

Toyota’s robot can speed-walk. OK, maybe this is not related directly to AI but more with Robotics, however AI is required to judge starting, running, where to stop, how to stop, and how to recover balance from a slight push. Hence my reason to post this here.

Integrate this with camera’s, inflared sensors, stereo microphones, speakers, motion detectors, and give it a little spark of memory, a sense of direction, and a wireless internet connection. This could be unstoppable. We’re definitively getting there, slowly, but marching on.

AI Tools for Students and Researchers

I came across with an interesting video today that displays experimental use of a bunch of tools this organisation has developed, which aid students and researchers with AI studies and experiments. The website is aispace.org, check out the video below:

Trying to Understand Language

Language is beautiful. It is one of the easiest methods of communicating something lengthy. As one may know, images express a thousand words, film may even express more, but both are ineffective when it comes to communicating something fast and immediately to someone (unless you have a polaroid of course).

English, particularly, is much more complex than I thought. As you may already know, I am rather into AI. One of the fields of AI is Natural Language Processing which involves speech recognition, syntactic and semantic organisation, separating words into parts of speech, language understanding, and finally speech generation, amongst others.

I genuinely used to believe there were only 8 parts of speech in English: Verbs, Adverbs, Nouns, Pronouns, Adjectives, Preopsitions, Conjunctions and Interjections. I stand corrected by Wikipedia. There are about 17 different types if we classify them correctly.

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