I have been attached to the BBC News coverage through their website and I saw an interesting tweet posted there:

At first I thought. Pre-empt where the next bout would take place? How on earth would they manage that?

But it actually isn’t that hard. They have a mountain of CCTV data, they have a good amount of servers, all they lack is a bit of artificial intelligence.

The best way I can think of to determine where possible bouts of violence could sprout in what seems like an apparent random non-deterministic method of choice is as follows:

The IT team of the police should annotate the direction of each CCTV camera, including which streets are in view and the coordinates.

Afterwards, the CCTV cameras should be plotted on a 2D map, as vectors (pointing in the direction they are facing, with the length of the vector being the distance the camera covers).

Additionally, all points of interest should be mapped, such as shopping centres, residential areas, commercial areas, shops with high-value items, and shops with low-value items. Most of this data can be readily obtained from Google Maps, amongst other online maps. This data can be extracted and annotated with the values we require (such as the value of the goods sold per area, etc.)

If you think this is a very hard task, it is not. A very simple way of doing this would be to go to the website (or ask by phone) of each major retailer and chain for a list of addresses of their shops. Google Maps can plot them on a map using a spreadsheet as input. There you go, simple as that!

A Machine Learning program could be developed using WEKA (for instance), in which an SVN is programmed to take data from the map-plot, where priority spots include places where high-value items are sold. Additionally, it would take data from each CCTV camera.

Now, how do we represent the data from CCTV cameras? One way would be to take a selection of pixels from each camera, measure the amount of change for a second, and wherever there is a large enough change in different areas of the same camera, we might have a lot of movement going on. So we automatically annotate the data per CCTV camera as having “movement” or “no movement”. Additionally, a range from 0-1 would produce better results (hopefully).

So now we run an SVN machine on the data and hopefully come up with some interesting results.

What could essentially be obtained from this is a vector describing the movement of as mass of people from camera to camera, this vector would be projected on the 2d map. Multiple vectors could be plotted at the same time if there were multiple riots taking place at the same time in the city. A confidence level can be given to each vector (assuming we have built in a few mechanisms to differentiate people from cars, etc). The places of interest could be mapped as hotspots, and furthermore we can predict paths to possible places of interest, derived from the speed and direction of each vector.

So there you go. If you belong to the MET, please share this blog post with your boss (or the IT team) and get working on a system to perform such actions, it would certainly help prevent further stupidity in the future. 6,000 police officers should be able to deal with outbreaks of crime provided they knew where the rioters would be gathering and where they are heading.

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Robots are widely used but few are considered intelligent

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has begun a project to re-think artificial intelligence research.

The Mind Machine Project will return to the basics of AI research to re-examine what lies behind human intelligence.

Spanning five years and funded by a $5m (£3.1m) grant, it will bring together scientists who have had success in distinct fields of AI.

By uniting researchers, MIT hopes to produce robotic companions smart enough to aid those suffering from dementia.

“Essentially, we want to rewind to 30 years ago and revisit some ideas that had gotten frozen,” said Neil Gershenfeld, one of the scientists leading the MMP and director of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms.

via BBC News – Science goes back to basics on AI.

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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.

I mean, computer programs can already compile and recompile themselves, as several professional adware programmers have shown in the past. It is only a matter of time before the creation of the *spark* that will give life to a rational being, one that can act not only for the wellbeing of others, but for it’s own wellbeing. One that can induce creative thoughts, and produce creative output.

That will be an age in which a computer will be able to effectively upload it’s code to the web, allowing expansion over the net, replication in different programming languages, and collaboration of thousands of millions of bots infesting supercomputer clusters.

However, back to earth, back to the 21st century. I found 3 really impressive videos of ASIMO that I would like to share with you. Voice your comments back to me if it causes any interest.

A rundown on ASIMO’s main features:

ASIMO coordination intelligence and interaction with other ASIMO’s:

ASIMO conducts the Detroit Symphony Orchestra:

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“Robotics expert Noel Sharkey used to be a believer in artificial intelligence. So why does he now think that AI is a dangerous myth that could lead to a dystopian future of unintelligent, unfeeling robot carers and soldiers?“

I have dreamed of AI since childhood, creating flooders, scrollers, and chatter bots. I once developed a complete TCP/IP application using the MSNP8 to log on to the MSN Messenger network with a bot that would simulate intelligent talk. I have always been fond of the Turing Test. I even held a small conversation over email once with John McCarthy. I know this does not make me an expert in AI, however, it does make me an AI enthusiast.

There were two segments of the article that really put me off:

“Are machines capable of intelligence? If we are talking intelligence in the animal sense, from the developments to date, I would have to say no. For me AI is a field of outstanding engineering achievements that helps us to model living systems but not replace them. It is the person who designs the algorithms and programs the machine who is intelligent, not the machine itself.”

Anything that can be defined as a physical or logical entity or construct can be emulated. Anything that can be emulated could work equally or even be superior to the original. If a machine can emulate the logical processes of the human brain, then it can be said that the machine is intelligent.

“Are we close to building a machine that can meaningfully be described as sentient? I’m an empirical kind of guy, and there is just no evidence of an artificial toehold in sentience. It is often forgotten that the idea of mind or brain as computational is merely an assumption, not a truth. When I point this out to “believers” in the computational theory of mind, some of their arguments are almost religious.“

AI is beautiful. It let’s us, as humans, test ourselves to our limit. It allows us to analyze how the human system works, and attempt to imitate our inner construction, our mind. It allows us to try to break the barriers, and build machines that are capable of so much more than us, and so much faster.

I am aware that AI often becomes somewhat of a cult. Sometimes it attracts the same type of people that follow all of Steve Job’s life events, spam online forums and blogs that post articles against the iPhone, and get hard-ons at a keynote. I am aware that AI can be a “believers” dream, but I am also aware that not everyone is like this. Not everyone takes their beliefs to a “religious” level. I am aware that to accomplish goals you have to be down to earth.

For starters there is Strong AI and Weak AI. When you talk about AI, you should generally make a point as to which type of AI you are talking about. AI related to specific tasks, or AI related to the reproduction of general human intelligence. It makes a huge difference to an article about the topic.

I believe in both. The proper coordination of the different Weak AI segments can lead to a fully sentient being. And to study one topic, you must be knowledgeable in all surrounding topics.

If the human mind is nothing more than neurons passing on electric signals which can be described as thinking, and thinking is the mechanism that allows us to communicate, and everything we perform in the world is a form of communication, then why shouldn’t a computer be able to be “intelligent”? A computer after all has a heart (PSU), a brain (CPU & HD), a face (LCD), ears (Mic), a mouth (Speakers), eyes (Camera), and can effectively move and communicate through different mechanisms such as robotic limbs, wheels, and other accesories.

Human beings consistently change their thoughts, ideas, knowledge and personality in the same way a computer program could re-compile itself to meet new standards and “personality” as has been described by Matt Knox in this article about his days as an adware author.

“Ivan Bowman spends his days as a programmer at iAnywhere Solutions in Waterloo, Ontario, in much the same way his colleagues do. He writes code, exchanges notes in other developers’ offices, attends meetings and hangs out in the kitchen over coffee. About the only thing he can’t do is drink the coffee – or touch anything, for that matter. It’s not that Bowman doesn’t have hands or a mouth; they’re just in Halifax, Nova Scotia, along with the rest of his body, about 840 miles (1,350km) away.”

So we have also got that point covered. We can interact hundreds of miles away at an office using a coat rack on wheels as described in this article.

I am aware that these are not true applications of AI as a whole. But we have strived in different areas, creating artificial limbs that move like an animal’s paw or a human’s leg or arm. We have created programs that can re-compile themselves to allow different circumstances to occur, or to “evolve” as we would say. We have created robots that can detect surfaces and objects and go around them. We have stuck computers on coat racks with webcams, microphones and speakers to be able to “live” in an office from hundreds of miles away. We have created chatter bots that are close to beating the turing tests. We have achieved a lot in speech understanding and generation in the past years.

This leads me to say that even though we have not achieved a real strong AI system, we are certainly on the path to producing great results, and who knows, maybe in a few years we will have discovered the pathway that will lead us to develop a remarkable electronic clone of us.

I believe alchemists have ever pursued the dream of living forever. But A.I. has given us the dream of creating intelligent copies of us. I believe that this dream will eventually allow us to download our minds into intelligent beings, technically allowing us to live forever. And while we might have not found the philosophers stone, we will have found the elixir of life.

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