Posts matching tags 'ai'
2007/4/26
Science News has an article about recent advances in computer music processing. There has been success in creating software which understands recorded music, to the point of being able to extract note information from a (polyphonic, multitimbral, acoustically imperfect) recording. This has been achieved not by programming in rules of musical theory but by using machine learning techniques, setting up a learning system and training it from examples to infer its own rules of music:
He started with a program that had no information about how music works. He then fed into his computer 92 recordings of piano music and their scores. Each recording and score had been broken into 100-millisecond bits so that the computer program could associate the sounds with the written notes. Within those selections, the computer would receive an A note, for example, in the varying contexts in which it occurred in the music. The software could then search out the statistical similarities among all the provided examples of A.
In the process, the system indirectly figured out rules of music. For example, it found that an A is often played simultaneously with an E but seldom with an A-sharp, even though the researchers themselves never programmed in that information. Ellis says that his program can take advantage of that subtle pattern and many others, including some that people may not be aware of.The software thus developed got impressively good results in music transcription tests (68% accuracy, with the runner-up, a traditional rule-based system, getting 47%). There are numerous applications of such a technology, from automated accompanyists to "musical spellcheckers" to ways of "decompiling" recordings to a score:
Score-alignment programs could be used after a musician records a piece of music to do the kind of fine-tuning that's now performed painstakingly by recording studios, fixing such problems as notes that are slightly off pitch or come in late. "It'll be kind of like a spell-check for music," says Roger Dannenberg, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh who is developing the technology.
Christopher Raphael begins the third movement of a Mozart oboe quartet. As his oboe sounds its second note, his three fellow musicians come in right on cue. Later, he slows down and embellishes with a trill, and the other players stay right with him. His accompanists don't complain or tire when he practices a passage over and over. And when he's done, he switches them off.Not everybody's happy with this, though; musicians' unions, which have opposed "virtual orchestras", are about as keen on it as buggy-whip manufacturers were on the automobile.
(via Boing Boing) ¶ [no comments]
2006/12/12
Artificial intelligence/cognitive science pioneer Marvin Minsky, who has recently written a book on the mechanisms behind emotions, gives an interview, weighing in on intelligence, cognition, the nature of self and the ineffable mysteries of life:
Q What, in your view, is love?
A There's short-term infatuation, where someone gets strongly attracted to someone else, and that's probably very often a turning-off of certain things rather than something extra: It's a mental state where you remove your criticism. So to say someone is beautiful is not necessarily positive, it may be something happening so you can't see anything wrong with this person. And then there are long-term attachments, where you adopt the goals of the other person and somehow make serious changes in what you're going to do.
Q And what is the self?
A We often imagine that there's a little person inside ourselves who makes our important decisions for us. However, a more useful idea is that you build many different models of yourself for dealing with different situations -- and each of those self-images can add to your resourcefulness.
(via mindhacks) ¶ [no comments]
2006/12/4
UnSuggester is a book recommendation engine in reverse; enter a book you liked, and it'll give you a list of books you probably won't like. Apparently, fans of William Gibson's Neuromancer and Michael Moore's Stupid White Men would least want to read books on theology, the opposites of Marx & Engels' Communist Manifesto look like erotica novels, Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is the least like an array of romance novels, Star Wars novelisations and theological texts, and the opposites of Design Patterns are mostly chick-lit, whereas The Little Prince finds itself to be the antithesis of thrillers and scifi novels. Meanwhile, people who read Illuminatus! are unlikely to read Freakonomics, and the opposite of The Da Vinci Code, with its simplistic structure and grand revelations, appears to be, naturally enough, French postmodernist philosophy.
(via /.) ¶ [2 comments]
2006/5/31
There is a rather good hard-scifi story at Salon: "The Perfect Man" by Lauren McLaughlin. It's about a woman who has a virtual AI boyfriend made to order, who then transforms from adorably bumbling Hugh Grant-esque Hollywood Englishman stereotype to sinister, inscrutably calculating Hollywood Englishman stereotype:
The design process is easy. First step: Pick a physical template. A youth squandered on Monty Python reruns left me with a full-blown kink for English guys, so I chose a template called "Nigel" -- think Michael Palin crossed with Laurence Olivier. Then, to assure he didn't look overdesigned, I clicked the "random factor" option to introduce "lifelike imperfections."
If you want to know anything about the "human" rights travesty currently under way courtesy of draconian anti-AI laws, there's a whole subculture of liberationists ready to lecture you on it. They've got the skinny on behavioral inhibitors, recursive self-teaching limiters and other artifacts of AI "slavery." For my purposes, what it all boiled down was this: snip Pritchard's inhibitors or resign myself to dating a functionary. Do you want to date a functionary? Me neither. Thankfully, for every Webcop dutifully guarding the behavioral inhibitors of the thousands of AIs cropping up on the Web, there's a black market geek with the tools to snip.
Now that I have my sanity back, I must dive deep into the black waters of her soul, excavate her most primal desires, and do what no human male has been able to do: keep her interested in me. Thankfully, I have one freedom human males do not -- the freedom to redesign myself. I can make myself so fascinated by Lucy that all I want to do is watch her, study her. A nip here, a tuck there, and voilà, I'm in love with the girl. Well, not in love, exactly. Love is still an alien concept. But I have made myself a bit of a stalker. And the more information I gather about my lovely little monkey, the more I can adjust my personality to suit her needs. Heck, I could turn myself into Prince Charming if I wanted. Something tells me that would not tickle Lucy's fancy. In fact, the more I learn about Lucy, the more I realize she doesn't know what she wants at all. She only thinks she knows. No, Lucy's desires are my nut to crack. And crack it I will. Or she'll crack me. Oh, I don't mean to sound morbid. I'm incapable of morbid thoughts. To mitigate the persistent fear of being snuffed, I've given myself a devil-may-care attitude about death. That way I can focus my energies more intensely on Lucy.
Of course she doesn't know the contents of her subconscious. She lacks the processing power to unravel it. It's a number-crunching job, that's all. Humans, with your lovely little wet brains, will never achieve the self-knowledge you so desire.
(via Boing Boing) ¶ [no comments]
2006/1/5
Retrievr is a web-toy that lets you search images on Flickr by drawing things that look like what you're looking for on a Flash applet. It seems to go mostly by colour, rather than feature recognition, and seems to only search a small pre-cached subset of images (which tends towards the prettier end of the scale and includes a lot of sunsets, cats and arty black-and-white photos). As far as finding pictures of objects one draws, it's rather unsuccessful; though, nonetheless, it does yield interesting results.
(via The Fix) ¶ [no comments]
2005/12/7
The latest advance in Windows worms is a worm which takes over people's instant-messaging accounts and chats to their friends, attempting to talk them into downloading it; in short, an automated form of social engineering:
According to IMlogic, the worm, dubbed IM.Myspace04.AIM, has arrived in instant messages that state: "lol thats cool" and included a URL to a malicious file "clarissa17.pif." When unsuspecting users have responded, perhaps asking if the attachment contained a virus, the worm has replied: "lol no its not its a virus", IMlogic said.Which suggests that the Turing test may be easier to pass in an environment where people start messages with "lol". If your friends suddenly turn into giggling prepubescents and start trying to convince you to download a file, you know what's happening.
I wonder whether this will lead to an arms race in worm conversational abilities. Perhaps the next one will trawl message logs and pick out phrases/words used by that contact (or use them to change its own writing style)?
(via /.) ¶ [no comments]
2004/12/31
Patent of the day: Automatic Detection of Pornographic Images:
If the pixel color is determined to be "skin" 46, the image is sent to a first shape detection process indicated for example as "face detection" of block 48 wherein steps similar to blocks 26 and 28 of FIG. 1 are performed. If the image is detected as a "face" 50, the image is classified as "portrait" and a manual check/inspection is done only infrequently (block 52). If the image is not a "face" 54, the image is analyzed to determine if it is a body part (block 56) i.e., other than a face. If it is not a body part (58), the image is classified as a "landscape", and this type is only inspected occasionally (block 60) i.e. only a small percentage of these images are inspected manually. If the image is a body part (62), a pose detection is done to determine if there is an erotic position (block 64). If it is determined that the pose is not erotic (66), this image is classified as a "swim suit picture" and the result of the detection may be a "parental guidance" notice attached (block 68).
(via bOING bOING)
2004/4/23
An interesting item cribbed from Jim: WordsEye is an experimental system that takes sentences in English (such as "The marmalade sky. The zebra skin ground is red. The sun is large. The hippo is next to the horse.") and renders them as images (such as this one). There's a wealth of example images here. It can represent abstract ideas (such as "John believes the cat is not blue", and automatically infer how to symbolise that something happened at a certain time, and map adjectives to textures. Of course, sometimes it gets amusing results, such as its rendering of "John looks at the cat on the skateboard", or, indeed, "the devil is in the details".
2003/12/28
Researchers at MIT are developing software which paraphrases English-language text; for example, their software is able to take the sentence "The surprise bombing injured 20 people, 5 of them seriously," and rewrite it as "Twenty people were wounded in the explosion, among them five in serious condition." The system uses techniques adapted from computational biology to match fragments of sentences to others, skirting the entire area of semantics altogether; online translation systems like Babelfish/Systran use similar techniques. (via Techdirt)
(This is quite distinct from automatic summarisation software, which takes a text and delivers the "gist" of it. Some years ago, a large chunk of various intelligence agencies' research budgets was spent on this area, in an attempt to more easily cope with the flood of signal intelligence. And, unless the CIA and such have such systems in use, chances are it still is.)
Anyway, back to paraphrasing; when I read about this, the first thought that came to me was that it would be very useful to student plagiarists seeking to avoid detection (say, by Google searches on key sentences, or matches against other submitted assignments). Which made me wonder: have any plagiarists ever tried covering their tracks by passing an essay through several passes of Babelfish? (Given some of the grammar I've seen in student essays, I'm sure it wouldn't look too amiss.)
2003/2/27
Computer scientists in Britain are tackling one of the hard problems in speech recognition: developing software which understands Scottish accents. The Glaswegian accent is one of the hardest on current speech-recognition software (which tends to be rather London-centric, if not American). The team from Birmingham University will be paying locals to say some phrases in the "Glesca patter", which will be analysed to develop regionally-correct voice-recognition software for use in office computers and mobile phones. (via bOING bOING)
2003/2/12
A Scottish artificial intelligence lab has developed
a robot with an eye for the ladies. The robot, nicknamed Doki, can identify male and female faces by appearance, and as a side effect, can calculate how physically attractive female faces are. (Mind you, this assumes that attractiveness is exclusively a factor of femininity of appearance, a somewhat simplistic model.) I wonder if (a) it would be fooled by transvestites, and (b) whether it gives a readout in Helens millihelens (the unit of beauty required to launch one ship).
2002/8/1
The next wave in marketing is here: chatroom bots or "buddies" with virtual personalities, which befriend people, make conversation and gently encourage them to consume lifestyle products -- and potentially provide marketing analysts with a lot of customer-profile data in the form of conversations.
Most buddies are programmed with personalities that appeal to their target audiences. ELLEgirlBuddy, the Internet ego of teen magazine ELLEgirl, is a redheaded 16-year-old who likes kickboxing, the color periwinkle and French class. GooglyMinotaur, a buddy for the British progressive rock band Radiohead, affected a British demeanor with words like "mate." The Austin Powers buddy, which promotes the summer film "Goldmember," interjects the movie character's favorite phrases - "yeah, baby" and "grrr" - into conversation.
Perhaps surprisingly, thanks to improvements in natural-language technology and extensive customer databases, the bots give the illusion of being sentient. People know they're machines, but choose to suspend disbelief.
ActiveBuddy's bots save details about each user - names, birth dates, even instances when the person used offensive language. When the buddy recalls these facts, it could appear to the user that it is taking a genuine interest in him or her. "We're programmed to respond to certain signals as though in the presence of a life form," said MIT's Turkle. "These objects are pushing our buttons."
(via TechDirt)
2002/5/15
2000/6/14
An interesting programming contest, which involves writing a program which automatically summarises news items in haiku form. Given the complexity of the task, any satisfactory solutions are going to have to be quite interesting... (via Slashdot)
1999/9/4
Computer-generated creativity: a program which designs product advertisements, often more creatively than human ad executives. (BBC News)