Industry Watch

last updated 10/20/08

And the winner is…

…Elbot, a chat program designed to fool judges into thinking they are having a conversation with another human being.

The test of “chatbots”, held in October at Reading University, England, was one of the university’s annual Turing Tests of artificial intelligence.  The test was named for computer pioneer Alan Turing, who said that conversation was proof of intelligence. If a computer can carry on a conversation sophisticated enough to fool a person into thinking that it is human, that computer must be intelligent, according to Turing.

In this year’s test, 12 judges evaluated five programs, holding simultaneous conversations, one with a program and one with a person, using a computer split screen. After five minutes of on-screen “talking”, the judges were asked to identify the human and the machine. Elbot was able to fool three of the 12 judges.

Most experts don’t think the Turing Test proves anything other than that computers can be programmed with some clever trick. Philosopher A.C. Grayling of Birkbeck College, University of London has commented the test is misguided. You aren’t really pitting human against machine, but really the human judge against the human computer programmer.  Clearly, AI has a long way to go.

How cool is your computer?

A cool computer is not just the latest model with all the bells and whistles. It’s also a computer that generates less heat.

Keeping computer temps down is the work of University of Virginia researchers Avik Ghosh and Mircea Stan. Their research is trying to disrupt the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a possibility proposed by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1871.  The key seems to be controlling the transfer of energy between two objects, and may be possible by reducing entropy, according to Ghosh. The scientists are also exploring the use of Brownian ratchets to harvest energy from a heat source. How cool is that?

Keeping kids in line

Okay, maybe your computer can’t keep your kids in line, but new software may be able to tell how old they are, just by looking at their faces, and deny them access to cigarettes, bars, and adult websites.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are developing age-estimation software that consists of three modules: face detection, discriminative manifold learning, and multiple linear regression. A photo data base of 1600 faces was used in the development. 

According to Illinois researchers Thomas Huang, the software doesn’t violate anyone’s privacy. However, its potential use for compiling demographic data for targeting advertisements leaves that question open for debate.

The next big thing?

It’s called quantum computing, and Cisco futurologist Dave Evans says it’s the next big thing for the computer world. Some other big things? According to Evans, Internet traffic will reach half a zettabyte by 2012. That’s 250,000 times more than the traffic in 2003. And the cost of data storage will continue to plummet, with 6.3 pentabytes costing about $100 in 20 years. Pretty much everything will be linked to the Internet of the future, and by the year 2050, there will be computers with the processing power of all the human brains on Earth.