On-line Resources for CSC 290

These items are in no particular order.

Prof. Michael Scott's reserve list for CSC 200 provides some interesting texts tangentially relevant to CSC 290, for instance Sara Baase's book on social implications of computers (though this doesn't mention AI!), and the Turing award lectures:
http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~scott/200/reserves.shtml

An interesting new AI course at U. Washington by Henry Kautz entitled "Modeling Human Intelligence" is currently under way, covering discourse understanding, behavior recognition (esp. Markov models) and creativity. You can find some very good technical references there.
http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse574/04wi/

A philosophy seminar course at Cornell by Mark Andrews was entitled "The Prospects for Artificial Intelligence: Spring 2002". The bibliography includes interesting philosophical books by Churchland, Dennett, Dreyfus, Haugeland, and Searle (as well as some by computer & cognitive scientists). There are also links to two commentaries on the movie "AI".
http://www2.psych.cornell.edu/andrews/fws02/

A somewhat similar course at U. Leeds by Tralvex Yeap was entitled "Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy III & Future of AI". Again in comparison with CSC 290 the emphasis is on philosophical themes -- consciousness, Searle's Chinese room, & such.
http://216.239.37.104/search?q=cache:44OIUOVn0VEJ:pub.ufasta.edu.ar/ohcop/lect14.ppt+%22future+of+AI%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
powerpoint original: http://pub.ufasta.edu.ar/ohcop/lect14.ppt.

Latest Loebner competition results (Nov. 1, 2003). A supposed restricted Turing Test, but because it allows frivolous responses, really a battle of chatbots.
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/dwrc/loebner/
You can try the winner, Jabberwock, at
http://www.abenteuermedien.de/jabberwock/index.php
. A news article is at
http://helga.simblogg.is/archives/001778.html

"Highway to HAL", Some online stuff about the future of AI; links to interesting books and articles.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/bernie/hal/links.htm

Stuart Russell & Peter Norvig (authors of the bestselling AI text) have compiled an "AI on the Web" directory.
See http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ai.html for many interesting pointers.

Aaron Sloman has hundreds of his and his collaborators' papers listed at the site below, and many are concerned with things like, ``what would it take to build a human-like mind?", ``Can a goldfish miss its mother?", "Can a machine love?", etc.:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/0-INDEX.html#contents

Spiritual Robots: Audience Q&A (with Kurzweil, Moravec, etc. on podium)
http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_play_stream.html?stream_id=273

The 10-part series as a whole is described at
http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_program.html?program_id=82

Representing the fringe of AI, Ben Goertzel & Stephan Vladimir Bugaj write on "The Internet Supermind and Beyond". An enthusiastic article about long-term possibilities, including the "Webmind system" -- which they say they are busy creating at Intelligenesis Corp. They refer to several of the major prophetic authors, like Kurzweil, Bill Joy, Drexler, etc. In the meantime, Intelligenesis seems to have gone belly-up after burning through $20 million. Goertzel cites affiliation with Psych. Department, Univ. of Western Australia, but I find they have a School (rather than Dept.) of Psychology, and Goertzel seems not to be on their staff at present.
http://www.goertzel.org/benzine/AIManifesto.htm

Chang Yuchin, "Future of Artificial Intelligence". Look under "Human Computer Interaction & AI". It's a pretty site with several pictures, and has subsections on weak AI, expert systems, education, virtual reality, and an inventory of current topics (but lacking NLU/dialog, except for "speech"!) He approvingly quotes Mark Humphry's view that "AI won't happen"; we'll just have machines that help us do complex things. Lack of imagination!
http://www.du.edu/~jdzwigal/hci/future.html

"Future of AI Office": Miscellaneous posts on the future of AI, including links to newspaper articles, news about books, conferences, presentations, and various personal opinions emailed in... Of course, many of the links to news items are dead already.
http://artificialintelligence.ai-depot.com/Future/

Jacqueline S. Mitchell, "The Future of A.I.", Scientific American Frontiers. May 21, 2002. With Alan Alda. Refers to HAL, current robots, robocup, Deep Blue, etc.
http://www.pbs.org/saf/1208/features/AI.htm.

Bruce Bower, "Mind-expanding machines", Science News Online, vol. 164(9), Aug 30, 2003. An article based on an interview with, or talk by, Ken Ford (IHMC, Univ. of West Florida). Press summary: "Kenneth Ford speaks out on his views of the future of AI, in this Science News Online article. He doesn't predict a world takeover, or even conscious machines; rather, Ford predicts cognitive prostheses." The article refers to Ford's rejection of the Turing Test (because of its reliance on human judges' subjective opinions) and to IHMC projects such as a smart cockpit and concept mapping.
http://www.sciencenews.org/20030830/bob9.asp,
http://cognews.com/1062309389/index_html.

aiexplained.com, "Controversial Issues in AI". They have a quick intro to AI, a brief history and timeline, with nice pictures, incl. of Turing, applications, techniques, future directions, controversial issues, and links to other sources. aiexplained.com seems to be a pseudocompany, created by the "YellowBear Group" to showcase their webpage design skills.
http://www.aiexplained.com/intro/issues.html.
Home page http://www.aiexplained.com/

Ray Cafolla's class pages (at "Cyberlearn", Florida Atlantic U., EME 6051 (Models of Learning and Instruction), "Future of AI",
http://cyberlearn.fau.edu/cafolla/courses/eme6051/aiMon2.htm,
Based on interviews with Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks and Colin Angle, CEO of the company iRobot. Can computers think and feel, will they rule the Earth, etc. Cafolla provides the following link, where an interesting 40-minute web cast can be found:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2001/artificial_intelligence/1555742.stm

"Vexen Future", "Future of Artificial Intelligence." Far-our speculation about an intelligent computer virus evolving on the internet. Cf., George Dyson, Darwin Among the Machines.
http://www.vexen.co.uk/4/fu.html.

Another robot timeline (with lots of interesting historical tidbits):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2001/artificial_intelligence/1531432.stm

Use of AI in Games. Doesn't say much.
http://www.aiexplained.com/apps/games.html

"The Future of AI"; "Genetic Algorithms Push the AI Envelope"; "Inference Engines for the Semantic Web"; "AI Will Compete With Humans Someday (Soon)"; etc. Intelligence Technologies Journal, vol 2(15), webNews.com. They seem to have some interesting stories, but one has to subscribe to see them.
http://www.webnews.com/itj/2/15/

A Minsky Bibliography. A big collection of downloadable papers by Minsky. He's not always right, but always fun!
http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/abstracts.html

Eric Roberts, Swarthmore, course on Computers, Ethics, and Social Responsibility. (He's also a Stanford prof.) An AI & Ethics course very critical of AI, e.g., lambasting the field for its hype, and for "regarding hypotheses as correct until thoroughly disproven", e.g., the symbolist hypothesis. This is unfair on two counts: the symbolist hypothesis is a methodological assumption (like Edison's assumption, in his long quest to invent a workable light bulb, that some type of filament could be found that wouldn't burn out at once); after all, AI's goal is largely a synthetic one; and the hypothesis is not disproved, let alone thoroughly; it's just that the pendulum is swinging another way right now.
http://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~eroberts/cs91/projects/ethics-of-ai/sec5.html

Karl Tiedemann, "The once and future AI", Oct 7/03. A not too serious little screed, saying that neural nets as practiced in the past fail for 3 major reasons; and proclaims that the solution is genetically evolved neural nets.
http://www.karlt.com/blog_archives/000018.html

SITEPAL Animated heads, $16/month. Fun if one is trying to build a "talking head"!
http://vhost.oddcast.com/vhost_minisite/index.php?email=1&affId=15630

"Get Smart: An introduction to artificial intelligence," offered by the UBC library/archiving/information systems school.
http://www.slais.ubc.ca/courses/libr500/2000-2001-wt1/www/k_munro/aidevelop.htm
They have a kind of cute, smart-alecky overview; but what most worthwhile is the bibliography (everything from Hogan to Kurzweil to Kaczynski -- yikes!, "What is AI" by McCarthy (2000), etc, etc.:
http://www.slais.ubc.ca/courses/libr500/2000-2001-wt1/www/k_munro/bibliography.htm

Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Inc. (!!), "SIAI Guidelines on Friendly AI". I rather like the spirit of the effort -- setting up guidelines around which efforts to create beneficial AI could accrete. But founder E. Yudkowsky seems like a far-out fringe figure -- see articles.
http://www.singinst.org/friendly/guidelines.html

Arthur C. Clarke interview (lengthy),
http://www.spikemagazine.com/0198clar.htm


Last Change: 04 March 2004 / schubert@cs.rochester.edu