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Google's Self-Driving Wreck: Really Human Error?

When a self-driving car crashes, one just has to wonder about those robots. Are they really all they're cracked up to be? Or might they be just as cracked as...

Director of Mit's Personal Robots Group on Designing Robots that Will Be ­seful in Our Everyday Lives
From ACM Opinion

Director of Mit's Personal Robots Group on Designing Robots that Will Be ­seful in Our Everyday Lives

It's all about human-robot interaction in this more interpersonal sense, like you saw in Star Wars. Until then, the way we reacted with robots was [by] remote...

David Ferrucci, Lead Researcher of Ibm's Watson Project
From ACM News

David Ferrucci, Lead Researcher of Ibm's Watson Project

How do you improve on a computer that beat the world's best Jeopardy! players? Have Watson team up with humanity.

From Gamification to Intelligence Amplification to The Singularity
From ACM Opinion

From Gamification to Intelligence Amplification to The Singularity

I've been thinking about the combination of artificial intelligence and intelligence amplification and specifically the symbiosis of these two things. And the...

Who Needs Humans?
From ACM News

Who Needs Humans?

Amid all the job losses of the Great Recession, there is one category of worker that the economic disruption has been good for: nonhumans.

Minds, Machines Merge to Offer New Hope For Overcoming Impairments
From ACM News

Minds, Machines Merge to Offer New Hope For Overcoming Impairments

Scientists are creating a new generation of artificial body parts to help people with disabilities see, walk, swim, grip and run among other things. Miles O'Brien...

Watson's Lead Developer: 'deep Analysis, Speed, and Results'
From ACM News

Watson's Lead Developer: 'deep Analysis, Speed, and Results'

David Ferrucci’s official title is "IBM Fellow and Leader of the Semantic Analysis and Integration Department at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center." But to the...

Why Talking Is So Much Tougher Than Math
From ACM TechNews

Why Talking Is So Much Tougher Than Math

In a recent interview, University of Toronto artificial intelligence professor Geoffrey Hinton discussed AI's future, including the technology's future opportunities...

Parting Shots from a Mars Rover
From ACM News

Parting Shots from a Mars Rover

NASA is no longer sending commands to the Spirit rover on Mars, but the long-silent robot still has a few more chances to phone home. Not that anyone is expecting...

One on One: Jaron Lanier
From ACM Opinion

One on One: Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier, a partner architect at Microsoft Research, has had a long and varied career in technology. Mr. Lanier popularized the term "virtual reality" in...

One on One: Jaron Lanier
From ACM Opinion

One on One: Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier, a partner architect at Microsoft Research, has had a long and varied career in technology. Mr. Lanier popularized the term "virtual reality" in...

Workplace Robots Need a Better View
From ACM News

Workplace Robots Need a Better View

Robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks says a new generation of industrial robots could be enabled by better machine vision.

Air France 447: How Scientists Found a Needle in a Haystack
From ACM News

Air France 447: How Scientists Found a Needle in a Haystack

Two weekends ago, investigators announced that they had recovered the flight data recorder from the wreckage of Air France 447—a jetliner that crashed in the deep...

An Interview with Steve Furber
From Communications of the ACM

An Interview with Steve Furber

Steve Furber, designer of the seminal BBC Microcomputer System and the widely used ARM microprocessor, reflects on his career.

Are You Following a Bot?
From ACM Opinion

Are You Following a Bot?

How to manipulate social movements by hacking Twitter.

How Google Is Teaching Computers to See
From ACM News

How Google Is Teaching Computers to See

Computers used to be blind, and now they can see.  Thanks to increasingly sophisticated algorithms, computers today can recognize and identify the Eiffel Tower...

Mars Science Laboratory + Curiosity Rover: Interview with Nasa Jpl's Ashwin Vasavada
From ACM Opinion

Mars Science Laboratory + Curiosity Rover: Interview with Nasa Jpl's Ashwin Vasavada

Boing Boing visited NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for a peek inside the clean room where NASA's next Mars rover, Curiosity, and other components of the Mars...

When Will Sci-Fi Tech Become Real? Sooner Than You Think
From ACM Opinion

When Will Sci-Fi Tech Become Real? Sooner Than You Think

Growing up, physicist Michio Kaku had two heroes. The first, predictably enough for the man who co-founded a branch of string theory, was Albert Einstein. "Second...

Another Win For Artificial Intelligence: The Turing Award
From ACM Opinion

Another Win For Artificial Intelligence: The Turing Award

It's been a banner year or so for artificial intelligence, from the recent triumph of I.B.M.'s Jeopardy-winning supercomputer to a wave of news coverage of the...

From ACM Opinion

Google Schools Its Algorithm

To humans, computer intelligence is a puzzle, as if the machines have split personalities. They can be so remarkably smart at times, yet so bafflingly dumb at...
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