LOS ANGELES, June 28, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- MedInformatix, a leading provider of software solutions for the healthcare industry, announced today its EMR solution is the core component of a custom solution produced by specialty eye care center SEECA. MedInformatix built an EMR solution for the practice that is able to effectively determine through computational analysis if a patient is a viable candidate for refractive surgery procedures. The practice is producing a clinical study regarding the accuracy of its artificial intelligence solutions in predicting patient suitability.

The solution takes advantage of the benefits of computational power that cannot be matched by an individual physician. Traditional determination of fitness for refractive surgery requires physicians to review many data points, which have multiple interdependencies. The MedInformatix-built SEECA system is able to take 20-30 clinical data points and risk factors, such as age, corneal thickness, and various keratometer readings, and provide clear color-coded outputs that state a patient's fitness for various procedures. A physician is still required to review the results; however, he or she experiences significant time savings by no longer performing the computational work.

"Judging a patient for refractive surgery requires the physician to blend data with their personal opinions," said Dr. A. J. dela Houssaye (Dr. D), Medical Director at SEECA. "If you ask four physicians their opinion on one optical patient, you might get four differing answers due to individual weighting of varying risk factors. While these doctors are exceedingly accurate, it illustrates the difficulty of expecting the human brain to calculate up to 30 interrelated pieces of data into a conclusion. With MedInformatix's help, our artificial intelligence system uses modern computational power to put a quantifiable grade to each patient."

"We are very excited to see SEECA's new artificial intelligence project in action," said Michele Jones, MedInformatix Chief Marketing officer. "This new solution is truly groundbreaking work that will provide immediate benefits to both physicians and patients. Medical staff at SEECA can now spend more time with patients instead of pouring through data which is now computed using our technology. The benefit for the end patient is they can be doubly sure they are the right candidate for the proper procedure."

"MedInformatix is an ideal partner because they give physician's offices flexible solutions that can be altered to fit specific practice needs," said Dr. D. "They gave us all of the necessary support, but also the autonomy to allow our in-house Information Technologist to build some necessary customizations to the system. They were also very willing to review our modifications and offer recommendations or improvements as necessary. It really is a partnership, with both sides working together collaboratively to result in more efficient and accurate medicine."

Located in Houma, Louisiana, SEECA is a specialty eye care center that offers a variety of corrective and cosmetic procedures. The artificial intelligence system was developed by Dr. D. and Holly Acosta, the practice's Information Technologist who created the required technical customizations. For more information about the practice, visit http://www.SEECA.com.

About MedInformatix:

MedInformatix, Inc. (www.medinformatix.com) is a leading national provider of fully integrated Electronic Health Records. The products have been built around MedInformatix's 25 years of workflow expertise. MedInformatix's suite of products is designed on a single database using Microsoft SQL. Whether the client is a single physician who went live in 1994, a 13-location cardiology practice, the busiest radiology practice in Manhattan, or one of 15 other serviced specialties, MedInformatix accommodates their needs. MedInformatix can turn the dream of a paperless, integrated practice into a reality.

MedInformatix Version 7.5 is now certified to meet 2011-2012 criteria supporting Stage 1 Meaningful Use requirements under the American Recovery and Reinvestment act (ARRA) as a Complete EHR by the Drummond Group.

This Complete EHR is 2011/2012 compliant and has been certified by an ONC-ATCB in accordance with the applicable certification criteria adopted by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. This certification does not represent an endorsement by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services or guarantee the receipt of incentive payments." MedInformatix, October 22, 2010, Version 7.5, 1022201024238, Clinical Quality Measures: NQF0013, NQF0421, NQF0041, NQF0024, NQF0028, NQF0038, NQF0059, NQF0061, NQF0064. Additional software used: TrueCrypt v2.0, email software, spreadsheet software.

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MedInformatix Collaborates With Eye Center SEECA to Develop Artificial Intelligence to Quantify Patient Fitness for ...

The world's first artificial neural network has spent its first days of existence doing the same thing as millions of bored office workers... looking at cats on the internet.The Google research team behind the network - 1000 computers...

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Artificial super-brain hooked on net cats

The search giant unveils a frighteningly smart computer capable of teaching itself how to identify objects. The first thing it trains itself to look for? Cats

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Did Google just give birth to artificial intelligence?

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

As the world celebrates Turings 100th birthday, IPsoft, the leading independent provider of autonomic IT services, looks back on the developments made in artificial intelligence to date, and what the world will look like once humans and machines are equal in intelligence:

Since the birth of computer science, man has been asking that question: Can machines really think? Some noteworthy philosophers have argued that artificial intelligence is impossible (Dreyfus), that it is immoral (Weizenbaum) and that the very concept of it is incoherent (Searle). Yet six decades ago, the father of computer science, Alan Mathison Turing, posed the Turing challenge. It stated that the age of machine intelligence would come when we could not discern between human and machine intelligence.

Since then, the world has wrestled with various cognitive models mimicking human intelligence. In 1966, Weizenbaum created Eliza to replicate the behavior of a Rogerian psychotherapist, which sometimes fooled people into thinking they were talking to a real person, by using rules that transformedusers questions. From the early Eliza and chatterbot modules to the more recent chess-playing Deep Blue, the world has started to wake up to the idea of machine intelligence. Today, we know computers can beat Jeopardy human champions (IBMs Watson), cars can drive themselves (Google) and machines can follow rudimentary commands (Apples Siri). But rather than just domain specific game-playing or office management kinds of tools, the question remains: Can machines graduate to really emulate and rival human intelligence?

Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics and discoverer of DNA helix structures, used to opine that there is a fundamental framework of ideas that are missing to be able to interpret approaches to achieving machine intelligence. One thing is clear: If we are to clone human intelligence in all its generic thinking and problem-solving grandeur, we cannot fake it. We need to sincerely emulate the human brain. We need to study hierarchical temporal memory systems to gain insight into the theoretical neuroscience behind how human brains work.

Too often, we are tempted to take the course of studying a specific body of knowledge and combating combinatorial explosion by throwing computing power to distill copious amounts of knowledge into supercomputers, said Chetan Dube, IPsoft CEO. We ignore a pivotal suggestion from Turing, that the scalable way to make machines think is not to simulate the adult mind, but to simulate a childs brain and then let it rapidly learn about the environment in which it finds itself. Adaptive learning is the key to unlocking the secrets of machine intelligence and fostering its ability to rival human intelligence.

Leveraging theoretical computer science principles including those taught by Turing, we are precipitously close to being the first to sincerely answer the six decade old Turing challenge. The idea would not be to just fake human behavior to win the Loebner prize, but to make a sincere emulation of human brain that is capable of adaptively learning just the way a child learns, and rapidly becoming smarter and smarter by its interactions with humans.

What impact will thinking machines have on modern times?

It is hard to tell all the ramifications of machines starting to learn and think. When a prodigious child is born, it is hard to tell of the impact he will have when he grows up. What we do know is that we are on the precipice of a transformation unlike any before. When microprocessors were invented, they were predominantly developed for calculators and traffic light controllers. Today, the world is a more efficient shrinking village through the use of Internet and mobile communications.

As opposed to any schools of thoughts that preach beware of machines, we believe machine intelligence will lead the optimal form of creative destruction. Take a look at the world today. We are enslaved. The Pareto principle holds. 80% of the time we are caught in the trap of doing the same 20% of canonical, yet mundane, chores. Whether it is vacuuming the floor or driving a car, we are currently slaves to ordinary chores. Machine intelligence will serve as the ultimate liberator. It will liberate mankind to engage in higher forms of creative expression.

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IPsoft CEO Chetan Dube Asks: Can Machines Really Think?

If still alive, Alan Turing turns a century old on June 23rd the computer scientist that breathed life to algorithm and computation or computing. Some five decades ago, he perpetrated the infamous Turing Test which until now is the standard that defines artificial intelligence. But while no one has yet to be successful in passing this trial, there have been countless of innovations around AI that are deemed monumental; Siri being one of the hottest items of today. Other industries have also jumped into the bandwagon, hoping they could pioneer AI technologies.

Siri, Search and Smartphone Market

The undisputed queen of virtual assistance that runs on a sophisticated path of artificial intelligence, Siri has finally arrived in China and speaks Chinese. The Cantonese and Mandarin-speaking Siri was first unveiled during the recent Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Perhaps this move is to appeal to the worlds most populated nation, that somewhat felt neglected for awhile. Aside from adapting to the local language, Apple has also integrated the following Chinese-tailored features into the operating system: microblogging site Sina Weibo, search engine Baidu, video sites Youku and Tudou, easier input for emoticons and Chinese pinyin and spelling Chinese words in Roman letters. However, the freedom of speech lover Siri loathes talking about a rather sensitive topic to the country, the Tinanmen Square. It cant even provide simple directions on how to go to this historic landmark. Twitter screenshots showed the following responses from the virtual assistant:

Do you know about the Tiananmen incident? with the answer: I couldnt find any appointments related to Do you know about Tiananmen. A second try with the question rephrased What happened on June 4, 1989?produced an even stranger response: Im sorry, the person you are looking for is not in your address book.

The growing smartphone and tablet market in the Asian region is staggering. Tim Cook realizes this and the vitality of penetrating the largest of them allthe Chinese Market. Earlier this month, Apple just received a green light in opening two more flagship stores in Shenzhen and Chengdu.

In the United States where the battle for smartphone supremacy heightens, artificial intelligence is expected to drive the market by leaps and bounds. Key observations were noted in this article.

United States Smartphone market is expected to grow at the compounded annual growth rate of 18% in terms of volume for the next five year. It is forecasted that 90% mobile phones sales will be of smartphones by the year 2017 in United States. The factors such as decreasing prices, expanding 4G network, product innovation and increasing competition among carriers will drive growth for this industry, said Mr. Karan Chechi, Research Director with TechSci Research.

It is also believed that Googles acquisition of Motorola will forever change the game. The cornerstone of Apple, Siris popularity has attracted competition from mobile developers and now has several clones. Dulles Airport recently added a virtual assistant named Paige to greet international travellers. Search and mobile biggie Google appears to be challenging the voice assistance capability of Apples iPhone 4s gem. Code-named Majel, is this the long-awaited opponent that can give Siri a run for its money? Well see.

But while Google is busy thinking on how to overtake Siri, the latter shows no sign of retaliation. In fact, Apple together with its new alliances, are marching forward towards challenging Googles kingship on the search business.

Oren Etzioni, a search and artificial intelligence expert at the University of Washingtons computer science department noted a potent observation:Google is very difficult to dislodge on the desktop, he said, but mobile search is a very different beast, and the jury is still out on the question of who the ultimate winner in mobile (search) is.

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AI On The Rise Weekly: Big Data, Surveillance, and Chinese-Speaking Siri

London, June 27 (ANI): A computer that is able to "learn" like a human brain and recognise the picture of a cat, is being touted as a breakthrough in technology by Google scientists.

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Google's artificial intelligence computer can mimic human brain

In the quest for ever-smarter artificial intelligence, it's easy to let hype get ahead of performance.

What Google's neural network looks for in a cat or body. #newaesthetic

What they found was that even without humans training the computers to know certain objects ("This is a cat"), the machines were able to teach themselves the features of a cat face, as you can dimly see above, among many other objects. As one of the researchers told The Times, "[The system] basically invented the concept of a cat" by looking at all those photos and looking for patterns.

It's an impressive feat, but this is a field that moves slower than its hype (even though its achievements are very real and significant). If we look at the Google researchers' paper, we find that if you show their system a random picture from a database of images, its accuracy is about 16 percent. That's a 70 percent improvement over the state of the art, but it's worth considering what that says about the state of the art.

Basically, there are two important curves at play in artificial intelligence today. One is the falling cost of computing, which the Times and most people note. But the other is the falling value of each additional piece of data you feed into the system. Sure, throwing more data at an algorithm makes it better, just like people know more words as they read more books. But as you go, the amount of data you need to make the algorithm better gets larger. To extend the metaphor: you have to read many more words to learn a new one.

Just look at this study: They increased the amount of data fed into the system by 900 percent and got a 70 percent increase in accuracy. (We need a name for this other curve.)

I've learned through the years that it's a terrible idea to bet against Moore's Law, but people expecting massive change due to artificial intelligence need to be aware that there is a major diminishing returns problem inherent in our current techniques.

More From The Atlantic

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The Triumph of Artificial Intelligence! 16,000 Processors Can Identify a Cat in a YouTube Video Sometimes

Remember Google's secretive , a place where Google engineers work on futurist projects in fields such as artificial intelligence and robotics? The New York Times reports on one of those projects -- a neural network built from 1,000 computers that simulates the human brain.

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Google Simulates Human Brain in Search for Cat Videos

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Upstream Commerce today announced the integration of its Retail Intelligence Suite with the leading e-commerce platform, Magento, a division of eBay. For the first time, Magento users will be able to easily track their competitors prices and assortments in real-time to give them a competitive advantage in todays crowded online marketplace.

Upstream Commerces Retail Intelligence Suite includes the recently-announced Assortment Intelligence tool, as well as its flagship automated Pricing Intelligence tool, which currently tracks millions of products and has billions of quality intelligence data points. The Upstream Commerce solution is a sophisticated cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technology that uses advanced artificial intelligence, semantic analysis, data-mining, and image-recognition algorithms. Customers worldwide are using the Upstream Commerce Retail Intelligence Suite in the United States, Europe and Australia, including leading companies on the Internet Retailer 500 list.

As a result of the integration with Magento, Upstream Commerce will automatically extract product, pricing and assortment data directly from the Magento platform and import it into the Upstream Commerce system, matching and comparing it with data collected from competitors. Future capabilities include the ability for retailers to change the prices in their storefront directly from the Upstream Commerce system, as well as competitive intelligence data appearing directly in Magentos admin panel. This will deliver a full actionable cycle where data is automatically extracted from Magento, analyzed in Upstream Commerce's application, and delivered back to Magento.

Upstream Commerce is proud to apply its advanced intelligence gathering technology to the Magento platform users to help retailers compete more effectively," said Upstream Commerce CEO, Amos Peleg. This integration is yet another step toward making real-time automated competitive intelligence capabilities broadly available to the online retail community.

The Upstream Commerce Retail Intelligence Suite is ideally suited for Magento businesses with annual revenues of $1 million and above. For a demo of the solution, please visit: http://upstreamcommerce.com/demo.

About Upstream Commerce

Upstream Commerce was founded in 2010 by seasoned retail technology experts, Amos Peleg and Shai Geva, on the premise that automated retail intelligence capability should simplify and streamline the highly-complicated data-gathering process so retailers can concentrate on optimizing their merchandising and marketing.

Upstream Commerce is dedicated to helping retailers around the world compete more effectively, increase sales, and grow profit margins through the use of advanced automated real-time intelligence gathering and analysis.

To find out more about the Upstream Commerce Retail Intelligence Suite, including the new Magento integration capability, please visit http://www.UpstreamCommerce.com.

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Upstream Commerce Ensures Magento eCommerce Retailers have Access to Real-Time Competitive Intelligence

The computer is based on a neural network of 16,000 processing cores with more than a billion interconnections, each very roughly simulating a connection in a human brain.

A team from Googles cutting-edge research lab, Google X, and Stanford University, fed the system 10 million thumbnail images taken from YouTube as training and then tested whether it was able to recognise 20,000 objects in new images.

It performed more than twice as accurately as any previous neural network, The New York Times reports. Among the objects the system learned to recognise was a cat, one of the most regulars star of viral clips uploaded by YouTube members.

We never told it during the training, This is a cat, said Google fellow Dr Jeff Dean. It basically invented the concept of a cat.

Overall, the neural network achieved 15.8 per cent accuracy. As well as cats faces, it learned the concepts of human faces and bodies, by compiling a ghostly image of their general features.

The research differed from how most artificially intelligent systems are trained, in that it was given no help by human supervisors labelling features.

The idea is that instead of having teams of researchers trying to find out how to find edges, you instead throw a ton of data at the algorithm and you let the data speak and have the software automatically learn from the data, said Andrew Ng of Stanford University.

Neural networks have myriad potential applications, including in speech recognition software and image search, which Google is working to improve.

The firms secretive Google X Lab works on cutting-edge technologies such as self-driving cars and augmented reality.

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Google artificial intelligence 'invents' cat

Linked by Eisel Mazard on 06/14/12 22:01 UTC

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What happened to Turing's thinking machines?

Alan Turing is being honored with a Google doodle this weekend on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the pioneering British computer scientist and father of artificial intelligence.

Turing (June 23, 1912-June 7, 1954) worked as a code breaker during World War II, heading the team tasked with cracking German naval codes at Britain's Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS). Prior to the war while a student at Cambridge, he developed his famous "Turing machine," a variation of which is depicted in Google's animated Turing doodle below.

A Turing machine is not an actual computer but rather a hypothetical one that still serves as a fundamental tool for understanding how algorithms, computer programming, and computing itself works. Turing described his conceptual computer, which he referred to as a Logical Computing Machine, in his 1948 essay "Intelligent Machinery" as having:

"...an unlimited memory capacity obtained in the form of an infinite tape marked out into squares, on each of which a symbol could be printed. At any moment there is one symbol in the machine; it is called the scanned symbol. The machine can alter the scanned symbol and its behavior is in part determined by that symbol, but the symbols on the tape elsewhere do not affect the behavior of the machine. However, the tape can be moved back and forth through the machine, this being one of the elementary operations of the machine. Any symbol on the tape may therefore eventually have an innings."

Turing did help design and build functional computational machines in the 1940s and 50s, including groundbreaking experimental computers like the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) while working at Britain's National Physical Laboratory and the Manchester machines at the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory run by the famous mathematician and code breaker Max Newman at Manchester University.

But he is most famous today for the "Turing test." This proposed method for determining if a machine can "think" is considered the basis of the science of artificial intelligence.

There is actually some controversy over how Turing proposed to test machines for intelligence in his 1950 essay "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." In the essay, Turing describes question-and-answer games that involve a "blind" player interrogating two other players, one a human and one a computer, to try to determine the gender of each. In different versions of the game, the players attempt to either trick or assist the interrogator in making his or her final determination of gender.

Turing proposes that if the interrogator is as often right (or wrong) about the computer's gender as the human's, then the computer can be described as "intelligent." However, Turing tests have evolved into a form used today known as the standard Turing test where the interrogator is attempting to simply determine which of the two players being questioned is a human and which is a computera formulation of the game that some argue Turing intended while others believe he did not.

The annual Loebner Prize competition, initiated in 1990 by the American inventor Hugh Loebner, uses a standard Turing test on computer programs entered in the contest to determine which is the most human-like.

Turing was gay during a time when homosexuality was persecuted under the law in the U.K. He was convicted of illegal homosexual acts in 1952 and forced to undergo chemical castration treatment to avoid a prison term.

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Google Celebrates Alan Turing with a Turing Machine Doodle

Alan Turing would have celebrated his 100th birthday today. Google honors the life and work of a man whose accomplishments were many; a brilliant academic and codebreaker, Turing is also known amongst computer scientists as the father of artificial intelligence.

Little known in life, his work and its significance for computer science has only become notorious in recent decades. Todays Google Doodle is an interactive HTML5 codebreaking game that simulates the Turing Machine.

At first, the Google logo appears in grayscale. Solving a series of codes turns each letter in the logo to its proper color, with the last code the most difficult to break.

"We thought the most fitting way of paying tribute to Turings incredible life and work would be to simulate the theoretical Turing machine he proposed in a mathematical paper, according to a Google blog post. Visit the homepage today we invite you to try your hand at programming it. If you get it the first time, try again... it gets harder!"

Turing was a highly intelligent and troubled eccentric, who missed out on much of the accolades and recognition of his work by cutting his own life short in 1954. In spite of his codebreaking prowess, which resulted in the cracking of encrypted German transmissions in World War II, Turing was persecuted in his native England and eventually convicted in 1952 for gross indecency, after admitting to being in a consensual same-sex relationship.

As punishment, the British government sentenced one of the undisputed geniuses of that time to chemical castration, via regular injections of estrogen. Within two years of his sentencing, Turing committed suicide.

The last two years of Turings life remain shrouded in mystery. In 1952, he had to stop his work with the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). In a series of articles on his life, BBCnotes that in 1953, Turing alluded to some type of crisis in his life and suggests that he seemed to have been under intense surveillance.

He took his 1952 and 1953 vacations to Norway and Greece, away from the watchful eyes of the employers for whom he cracked codes and enabled more intelligent warfare against the Germans. BBC surmises that he was very likely influenced by hearing of the early Scandinavian gay movement.

In former Prime Minister Gordon Browns official 2009 apology to Turing, long since deceased, Brown referred to the cultural icon as, one of Britain's most famous victims of homophobia. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction, Brown wrote. Homosexuality remained a crime in the UK until 1967.

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Alan Turing Google Doodle: Turing Machine Logo Honors Codebreaker, Father of Computer Science

Alan Turing would have celebrated his 100th birthday today. Google honors the life and work of a man whose accomplishments were many; a brilliant academic and codebreaker, Turing is also known amongst computer scientists as the father of artificial intelligence.

Little known in life, his work and its significance for computer science has only become notorious in recent decades. Todays Google Doodle is an interactive HTML5 codebreaking game that simulates the Turing Machine.

At first, the Google logo appears in grayscale. Solving a series of codes turns each letter in the logo to its proper color, with the last code the most difficult to break.

"We thought the most fitting way of paying tribute to Turings incredible life and work would be to simulate the theoretical Turing machine he proposed in a mathematical paper, according to a Google blog post. Visit the homepage today we invite you to try your hand at programming it. If you get it the first time, try again... it gets harder!"

Turing was a highly intelligent and troubled eccentric, who missed out on much of the accolades and recognition of his work by cutting his own life short in 1954. In spite of his codebreaking prowess, which resulted in the cracking of encrypted German transmissions in World War II, Turing was persecuted in his native England and eventually convicted in 1952 for gross indecency, after admitting to being in a consensual same-sex relationship.

As punishment, the British government sentenced one of the undisputed geniuses of that time to chemical castration, via regular injections of estrogen. Within two years of his sentencing, Turing committed suicide.

The last two years of Turings life remain shrouded in mystery. In 1952, he had to stop his work with the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). In a series of articles on his life, BBCnotes that in 1953, Turing alluded to some type of crisis in his life and suggests that he seemed to have been under intense surveillance.

He took his 1952 and 1953 vacations to Norway and Greece, away from the watchful eyes of the employers for whom he cracked codes and enabled more intelligent warfare against the Germans. BBC surmises that he was very likely influenced by hearing of the early Scandinavian gay movement.

In former Prime Minister Gordon Browns official 2009 apology to Turing, long since deceased, Brown referred to the cultural icon as, one of Britain's most famous victims of homophobia. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction, Brown wrote. Homosexuality remained a crime in the UK until 1967.

Read more here:

Alan Turing Google Doodle: Turing Machine Codebreaker Logo Honors Father of Computer Science

Saturday, 23 June will mark 100 years since the birth of Alan Turing, who not only spearheaded Britain's code breaking at Bletchley Park which saw the German Enigma machine cracked, but also researched artificial intelligence and helped to create the world's first commercially sold computer.

Born in Maida Vale, London in 1912, Turing showed signs from a young age that he was a particularly gifted child when it came to mathematics and went on to study the subject at King's College, Cambridge, where he gained a first-class honours degree at the age of 21.

Bletchley Park and Cracking the Enigma

During the Second World War, Turing joined the war effort at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, where he worked with a team of mathematicians to try and crack the German Enigma code using an electromagnet machine called a "bombe".

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The bombe searched for possible correct settings used for an Enigma message and for each possible setting the bombe performed a chain of logical deductions.

Detecting when a contradiction had occurred, the bombe ruled out that setting and moved on to the next.

Most of the possible settings would cause contradictions and be discarded, leaving only a few to be investigated in detail. The first bombe was installed on 18 March 1940, but by the end of the war more than 200 bombes were in use.

Artificial Intelligence and the Turing Test

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Alan Turing - Life and Tragic Death of Enigma and Computing Hero

Charles Darwin and Alan Turing, in their different ways, both homed in on the same idea: the existence of competence without comprehension.

@FakeTV

Some of the greatest, most revolutionary advances in science have been given their initial expression in attractively modest terms, with no fanfare.

Charles Darwin managed to compress his entire theory into a single summary paragraph that a layperson can readily follow.

Francis Crick and James Watson closed their epoch-making paper on the structure of DNA with a single deliciously diffident sentence. ("It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairings we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the replicating unit of life.")

And Alan Turing created a new world of science and technology, setting the stage for solving one of the most baffling puzzles remaining to science, the mind-body problem, with an even shorter declarative sentence in the middle of his 1936 paper on computable numbers:

It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence.

Turing didn't just intuit that this remarkable feat was possible; he showed exactly how to make such a machine. With that demonstration the computer age was born. It is important to remember that there were entities called computers before Turing came up with his idea, but they were people, clerical workers with enough mathematical skill, patience, and pride in their work to generate reliable results of hours and hours of computation, day in and day out. Many of them were women.

Early "computers" at work. (NASA)

Thousands of them were employed in engineering and commerce, and in the armed forces and elsewhere, calculating tables for use in navigation, gunnery and other such technical endeavors. A good way of understanding Turing's revolutionary idea about computation is to put it in juxtaposition with Darwin's about evolution. The pre-darwinian world was held together not by science but by tradition: All things in the universe, from the most exalted ("man") to the most humble (the ant, the pebble, the raindrop) were creations of a still more exalted thing, God, an omnipotent and omniscient intelligent creator -- who bore a striking resemblance to the second-most exalted thing. Call this the trickle-down theory of creation. Darwin replaced it with the bubble-up theory of creation. One of Darwin's nineteenth-century critics, Robert Beverly MacKenzie, put it vividly:

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'A Perfect and Beautiful Machine': What Darwin's Theory of Evolution Reveals About Artificial Intelligence

SUNNYVALE, Calif., June 22, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Acobot, the chatbot using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to assist website visitors 24 hours a day, is now free to nonprofit organizations, education providers, and government entities.

"Nonprofit, education and government organizations need to improve their online results every bit as much as for-profit business enterprises do," explained Acobot LLC founder and CEO Vic Duan. "However, they rarely have the financial and technological resources to apply new web technologies. Acobot can help these worthy organizations achieve their goals and better serve their website visitors."

The Acobot AI chat technology allows websites to interact with visitors automatically. Site owners can set up Acobot in minutes; once the system is up and running, the robot learns more with each visit, making it better able to "talk" to users and answer their questions with repeated use.

Organizations interested in using AI chat technology to assist their website visitors can obtain their own live Acobot robot at Acobot.com by signing up and indicating that their sites are for non-commercial use. Once signed up, an organization immediately receives a fully functional robot hosted by Acobot.com. There is no limit to the Acobot chat sessions, and the robot is permanently free.

While it aims to help nonprofits, education providers and governments optimize their site visitors' online experience without straining strapped budgets, Acobot admits that the arrangement is mutually beneficial. "The more people use the robot, the more linguistic data we'll obtain," Duan said. "The company uses that data to improve the AI live chat software continuously."

Non-commercial websites can learn more about Acobot AI chat technology, try out the robot, and sign up for free at http://acobot.com.

About Acobot LLC

Acobot develops state-of-the-art artificial intelligence technology and helps small to medium-sized businesses and nonprofit organizations improve their online results with AI chat applications.

Contact:

Vic Duan Acobot LLC Tel: (408) 351-6618 info@acosys.com

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Acobot Offers Free Live Chat Robot to Nonprofits, Education and Government

By Ben Rooney

From sister blog Tech Europe:

An artificial intelligence service that automatically resolves consumers disputes and can even engage in negotiations was displayed at Le Webin London on Wednesday.

Cognicor, a spinoff company from the Barcelona Institute of Artificial Intelligence, is aimed at businesses that get a huge volume of low-value complaints that need to be resolved.

Some companies receive tens, even hundreds of thousands of complaints a month, according to Cognicor Chief Executive Sindhu Joseph. At the moment, those complaints must be handled by hand, typically offshore, which is slow, expensive and unsatisfactory for both business and consumer.

A typical complaint might be someone has been on vacation and an airline company mislaid their bags for five days, Ms. Joseph said. The customer wants compensation for this.

Using Cognicor, complaints are submitted via a Web interface. The system checks the validity of the complaint the customer is who they say they are, they traveled on the flight they claim, etc. Having established the bona fides of the complainant, it then looks at a number of factors.

Sentiment analysis of the complaint can determine how severe the complaint is. It also looks for context, and it looks to see who is making the complaint and their social influence, Ms. Joseph said. If you take the example of the lost baggage, it makes a difference if you lose your bags going out on vacation, or coming back. That is what we mean by context.

By influence, Ms. Joseph means either the importance of the customer to the company, or their social influence. Measures for determining social influence are being deveoped but include Facebook and Twitter influence.

By using a corpus of existing complaints and resolutions provided by the company, the system can learn how to automate the process. For example, it could offer you cash back or a voucher to offset against another flight.

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Is Our Definition Of Artificial Intelligence Wrong? "The annual Loebner competition, where participants attempt to show that a machine can pass for a human in conversation, is based on Alan Turing's theory that such a test would be an adequate demonstration of intelligence. But Turing was wrong.

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Wired 06/20/12

21 June 2012 Last updated at 00:00 By Prof Noel Sharkey Artificial Intelligence, University of Sheffield

Computer pioneer and artificial intelligence (AI) theorist Alan Turing would have been 100 years old this Saturday. To mark the anniversary the BBC has commissioned a series of essays. In this, the fourth article, his influence on AI research and the resulting controversy are explored.

Alan Turing was clearly a man ahead of his time. In 1950, at the dawn of computing, he was already grappling with the question: "Can machines think?"

This was at a time when the first general purpose computers had only just been built.

The term artificial intelligence had not even been coined. John McCarthy would come up with the term in 1956, two years after Alan Turing's untimely death.

Yet his ideas proved both to have a profound influence over the new field of AI, and to cause a schism amongst its practitioners.

One of Turing's lasting legacies to AI, and not necessarily a good one, is his approach to the problem of thinking machines.

He wrote: "I have no very convincing arguments of a positive nature to support my views."

Instead, he turned the tables on those who might be sceptical about the idea of machines thinking, unleashing his formidable intellect on a range of possible objections, from religion to consciousness.

With so little known about where computing was heading at this time, the approach made sense. He asserted correctly that "conjectures are of great importance since they suggest useful lines of research".

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How the Turing Test inspired AI