Posted on 07/12/2006 6:35:37 PM PDT by annie laurie
US advanced technology solutions firm BBN Technologies has been awarded $5.5 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the first phase of the Integrated Learning Program.
Over the next four years BBN will develop an artificial intelligence capability called “Integrated Learner” that will learn plans or processes after being shown a single example. The total value of the project, if all four years of the development programme are completed, could be up to $24 million.
The goal is to combine specialised domain knowledge with common sense knowledge to create a reasoning system that learns as well as a person and can be applied to a variety of complex tasks. Such a system will significantly expand the kinds of tasks that a computer can learn.
Under the contract, administered by the US Air Force Research Laboratory, BBN’s first year research will focus on military medical logistics planning. The specific goal is completion of a simulation which involves evacuating wounded military personnel and civilians from Fallujah, Iraq to hospitals in Germany and Kuwait.
Successful demonstration of this system will have implications beyond the ability to automate the medical evacuation planning process, by providing the groundwork for automated systems capable of learning other tasks of similar complexity. This will enable a capacity to develop more effective military decision/planning support systems at lower costs and that require less training for human users.
“This programme attacks one of the biggest problems in AI,” said Mark Berman, vice president, BBN Technologies, “The Integrated Learner will combine traditional machine learning techniques with an AI reasoning system capable of understanding behaviour it observes only once. This ambitious goal is necessary because, for many of the current and future complex military tasks that could benefit from automation, there simply are not many examples in existence. Although there has been some research into this area, this will be the first deployed system with the capacity to apply general knowledge and reasoning to a task.”
BBN Technologies is best known for pioneering the development of the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet.
Ping
Skynet!
That might be of use to humans at some point.
That was the first thing that popped in my head too.
WOW! Computers ace alot of humans, most of whom belong to the Demonrat party. :o)
In four years, you'll have to dig deep, deep into the archives of the scientific literature to find out what happened to this project, and why it failed totally.
Oh, and the $24 mil? That'll be looking fine, in the form of wine cellars and indoor swimming pools for all the earnest BBN managers, located in the most upscale, most liberal suburbs of Beantown USA.
The Japanese sank about 10 billon into a "Fifth Generation" language project that was suppose to be the end of programming.
I remember that. Late '80's, right. That and their robot that could paint pictures from video images of live subjects.
All bogus. AI has been living on its promises for nearly 40 years.
(steely)
Skynet is not here yet. But this is the next step in that direction.
phreakinpsycho wrote:
If this works, maybe we can run them for the Senate or put them on the Supreme Court.
---Only if we get to program them first ;)
we're going to rely on people who can't use commonsense on a daily basis to train machines to use it in clutch situations? Good Luck! This should be a complete disaster!
I kind of figured that skynet wasnt here yet, afterall it is fiction.
Yeah, right.
If they managed to imbue a computer system with common sense, then they've already surpassed the human mind.
< }B^)
AI has some fundamental problems including:
-- In order to understand a little about something, you have to know a lot about everything
-- Computers have no good mechanism to integrate new information in its proper context the first time
-- Computers might be able to eventually recognize context, but it would involve a lot of failure (which people tend to put up with from other people, but not from computers)
-- And (last but not least), no one really understands how the human brain represents, stores, and retrieves information and creates usable knowlege.
Until you solve the above problems, AI will go nowhere fast. I always get a chuckle when so called "scholars" say that AI is just a matter of adding processing power. Its all about information organization and management.
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how refreshing to hear a fact-based, thoroughly accurate technical discussion here. AI is a field that has struggled to little avail, making only incremental progress over the years. Not that people shouldn't keep trying...
I'm all in favor of darpa but the current head (Tony Tether) knows nothing about AI and up til now has been extremely reluctant to fund anything like this whatsoever--good judgement up to this point. Not sure what changed, though there's been all sorts of darpa programs for advanced AI development during his tenure that never even got funded in the last several years. Tether has a cold-war mindset and micromanages darpa; most program managers dislike him for it, but as far as AI goes, he's probably doing taxpayers a favor.
I agree w/Steely Tom: this project will go the way of so many that came before it--utter obscurity. Shame.
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