DARPA Contracts For AI Technology

heptapod writes "USA Today is reporting that DARPA has contracted two professors from RPI to develop artificial intelligences that can learn by reading and understanding natural language. Interesting taking DARPA's Grand Challenge into account. Mentioned in the article is Cycorp, Inc. which has been pursuing this goal since 1994!"

CycCorp

[TheKidWho]

What they are doing is very interesting. By compiling the majority of human knowledge into a gian database, it should make AI development much easier to pursue.

darpa.mil Blocked!

[Blaskowicz]

as you know we non americans cannot access darpa.mil
If something is kind enough to give us a mirror to the "Great Challenge", kudos to him :)

Or else I'll go through a US proxy. Not a big task, it's just annoying, I'll do that later.. grab an anonymous US proxy on www.proxy4free.com , enter the crap in your browser and enjoy the slowness. Maybe I'll use switch proxy [nettripper.com] this time :)

And it still doesn't work

[Animats]

Cyc is basically the bad "expert system" idea from the 1980s, with too much funding. The concept of Cyc is straightforward - have a big staff putting in handwritten rules, and it will be able to answer anticipated questions. Like call centers where the staff just reads scripts. No way is it ever going to become "intelligent". On a really good day, given a narrow enough range of questions in an area where good answers have been preloaded, it can sort of fake it some of the time.

It's not just canned questions and answers; it has an inference engine. It can do "if A is B and B is C, then A is C". But only if all the right predicates match perfectly.

Lenat was claming it would somehow become intelligent in a few more years. That was a decade ago. Today, Cyc is regarded as the definitive demonstration that that idea won't work.

Here's a critique of Cyc from 1994. [stanford.edu]

No Killer Robots

[Anonymous Coward]

This is probably a good place to mention the No Evil Robots [cs.sfu.ca] campaign...

And for a glimpse, if somewhat longwinded, of what lengths DARPA will go to to make this happen, check out this article: http://villagevoice.com/news/0337,baard,46901,1.ht ml [villagevoice.com]

Re:darpa.mil Blocked!

[aussie_a]

This comment isn't Informative. It's either mistaken or a liar. That or he's in a country that is actively blocked. UK and Australia can access the site just fine.

Good Luck.

[headkase]

If there's one thing that the last 60+ years of research into artificial or machine intelligence has shown is that there is no clear definition of intelligence. There are different types of intelligence for example muscle control, visual processing, tactile interpretation, olfactory classifying, and so on. With these rough subdivisions great strides has been made in creating successful "modules" for them, but what has eluded and probably will stay elusive for the near future is the general cognitive intelligence that orchestrates the interplay between the rough subdivisions.

84, not 94

[real gumby]

I started working on Cyc in 1985 and can assure you that it did _not_ start in 1994. They already had a year or two under their belt when I showed up.

this is small - check out DARPA ACIP

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone mentioned earlier, this is a pretty small award, only $400k. And for a fairly limited tech area.
If you want to see where DARPA is putting effort for next gen AI, look at the ACIP Program [darpa.mil]. ACIP stands for "Architectures for Cognitive Information Processing". They are funding several teams with BIG bucks to develop a whole new architecture for processors to do "Cognitive" computing. The idea is to put decompose the high level functions that we call 'cognitive' (reasoning, learning, etc) into operations that can be implemented in silicon (or something more exotic). The applications that attempt Cognitive Computing now are big and slow and dont do 'real world' problems well. If DARPA can get a chip to do help do it faster, smaller, then they can start making real smart bombs [moviesonline.ca]

And ACIP is just one of several programs funded by DARPA IPTO [darpa.mil] (Information Processing Technology Office).

Just wait till the Playstation 4 comes out with massively parallel streaming (CELL [blachford.info]) processors for graphics, AND cognitive processors for intelligent characters.

Natural Language Understanding is not a new field

[Anonymous Coward]

Just about every every college or university with a decent Computer Science program has people studying NLP (Natural Language Processing). Government agencies are probably the biggest source of grants for research, so DARPA funding this is nothing new. Additionally, NLP is just a sub-field in AI. AI has somewhat turned into a bunch of sub-fields that all relate to computers doing something "intelligent". Other areas of AI include computer vision, expert system development, machine learning...etc. There's a more "open" version of something like CYC(an Ontology) called WordNethttp://wordnet.princeton.edu/ [princeton.edu], lead by George Miller of Princeton's Psychology Department. You may be familiar with it. It is like a dictionary, but the important part isn't the definitions, it is the subconcept/superconcept(hyponym/hypernym) relationships among senses of words.

Applications for NLP are all over the place. Search engines, for example, use a limited amount. There is a professor at UCF http://www.cs.ucf.edu/ [ucf.edu] who has developed a system to look up answers to questions in an encyclopedia and respond (in sentences). It also crosses over with data mining, and uses machine learning very often. Here is a link to one of the biggest annual conferences on NLP: http://www.aclweb.org/ [aclweb.org]

Re:This is AI?

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

The story (probably exagerrated) is probably referring to one of the early performances of music composed by the computer program called Experiments in Musical Intelligence [ucsc.edu] written by David Cope [ucsc.edu]. Click the links for more info; it's a great starting point if you're interested in computer composition.

The Peace and Love Alternative

[alicebotmaster]

The ALICE AI Foundation http://www.alicebot.org/ [alicebot.org] supports the development and adoption of free AIML software and standards for natural language chat robot technology. The ALICE brain, available freely under the GNU public license, is the three time winner of the prestigious Loebner prize for "most human computer" in a contest based on the Turing Test. One of the most interesting AIML implementations, Program N http://www.aimlpad.com/ [aimlpad.com] by Gary Dubuque with contributions by Kino Coursey, already incorporates OpenCyc and WordNet into the ALICE conversational interface. The Foundation derives income from individual and corporate memberships, bot subscriptions, books, the Foundation directory, consulting, teaching, awards, Google ads, gifts and donations. We have never accepted one dime of DARPA or other government sponsorship.