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When will human-level AIs finally arrive? We don’t mean the narrow-AI software that already runs our trading systems, video games, battlebots and fraud detection systems. Those are great as far as they go, but when will we have really intelligent systems like C3PO, R2D2 and even beyond? When will we have Artificial General Intelligences (AGIs) we can talk to? Ones as smart as we are, or smarter? Well, as Yogi Berra said, “it’s tough to predict, especially about the future.” But what do experts working on human-level AI think? To find out, we surveyed a number of leading specialists at the Artificial General Intelligence conference (AGI-09) in Washington DC in March 2009. These are the experts most involved in working toward the advanced AIs we’re talking about. Of course, on matters like these, even expert judgments are highly uncertain and must be taken with multiple grains of salt — nevertheless, expert opinion is one of the best sources of guidance we have. Their predictions about AGI might not come true, but they have so much relevant expertise that we should give their predictions careful consideration.

Tilikum the killer whale (Orcinus orca) made news recently in the tragic death of his Sea World trainer, Dawn Brancheau. Tilikum pulled Brancheau into the water when he grabbed her floating ponytail — much like a cat might grab yarn attached to a stick. Complex play behavior is a sign of intelligence, but unfortunately little is known of the circuitry of even a cat’s brain, much less the massive brain of an orca — roughly four times the size of a human brain. See Also The Race to Reverse Engineer the Human Brain Ray Kurzweil Interview Brain on a Chip MIT neuroscientists are developing computerized techniques to map the millions of miles of neuronal circuits in the brain that may one day shed some light on the differences between Homo sapiens sapiens and other species, and will likely clarify how those neurons give rise to intelligence, personality, and memory. Developing connectomes (maps of neurons and synapses) may have just as much impact as sequencing the human genome. Here’s a video showing 3D rotating nodes and edges in a small connectome:

Researchers at Purdue University have developed two new techniques for computer-vision technology that mimic how humans perceive three-dimensional shapes.The techniques, heat mapping and heat distribution, apply mathematical methods to enable machines to perceive three-dimensional objects by mimicking how humans perceive three-dimensional shapes by instantly recognizing objects no matter how they are twisted or bent, an advance that could help machines see more like people.

Researchers at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research are working on a new mathematical model to mimic the human brain's ability to identify objects. The model can predict human performance on certain visual-perception tasks suggesting it’s a good indication of what's actually happening in the brain. Researchers are hoping the new findings will make their way into future object-recognition systems for automation, mobile robotics, and other applications.

Can a team of soccer-playing robots beat the human World Cup champions by 2050? That's the ultimate goal of RoboCup, an international tournament where teams of soccer robots compete in various categories, from small wheeled boxes to adult-size humanoids. IEEE Spectrum's Harry Goldstein traveled to Singapore to attend RoboCup 2010 -- and check out how the man vs. machine future of soccer is playing out.

EARL (that would be, Enhanced Automated Robotic Launcher) is a second generation bowling robot. Let me explain to you why a bowling robot is necessary at all: apparently, EARL is “invaluable in the many studies necessary to keep up with the ever-changing bowling ball industry… [EARL is] the future of bowling research.” Hmm. That’s worth pondering for a minute or two. Well, I won’t pretend to understand it, but that doesn’t mean I’m not impressed with the fact that EARL can throw bowling balls at 24 MPH and spin them up at 900 RPM, much faster than a human is capable of, which I guess is why people seemed to assume that the robot would win… Does it say something about the state of robotics, or something about the sport? Either way, bowling seems like a game with an extremely limited amount of random variables, and sooner or later (probably sooner) the only thing worthy of a news story will be a robot arm not bowling a perfect 300.

A fossil that was celebrated last year as a possible "missing link" between humans and early primates is actually a forebearer of modern-day lemurs and lorises, according to two papers by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin, Duke University and the University of Chicago.

In recent years, ‘social’ robots—cleaning robots, nursing-care robots, robot pets and the like—have started to penetrate into people’s everyday lives. Saerbeck and other robotics researchers are now scrambling to develop more sophisticated robotic capabilities that can reduce the ‘strangeness’ of robot interaction. “When robots come to live in a human space, we need to take care of many more things than for manufacturing robots installed on the factory floor,” says Haizhou Li, head of the Human Language Technology Department at the A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research. “Everything from design to the cognitive process needs to be considered.”

Humans aren't the only ones playing soccer right now. In just two days, robots from world-renowned universities will compete in Singapore for RoboCup 2010. This is the other World Cup, where players range from 15-centimeter tall Wall-E-like bots to adult-sized advanced humanoids. The RoboCup, now in its 14th edition, is the world’s largest robotics and artificial intelligence competition with more than 400 teams from dozens of countries. The idea is to use the soccer bots to advance research in machine vision, multi-agent collaboration, real-time reasoning, sensor-fusion, and other areas of robotics and AI. But its participants also aim to develop autonomous soccer playing robots that will one day be able to play against humans. The RoboCup's mission statement:

Ranger, a four legged bi-pedal robot, set an unofficial record at Cornell last month for walking 23 kilometers (14.3 miles), untethered, in 10 hours and 40 minutes. Walking at an average pace of 2.1 km/h (1.3 miles per hour), Ranger circled the indoor track at Cornell’s Barton Hall 108.5 times, taking 65,185  steps before it had to stop and recharge. Ranger walks much like a human, using gravity and momentum to help swing its legs forward, though its looks like a boom box on stilts. Its swinging gait is like a human on crutches since the robot has no knees, and its two exterior legs are connected at the top and its two interior legs are connected at the bottom.

Japanese robotics company HiBot has unveiled a nimble snake bot capable of moving inside air ducts and other narrow places where people can't, or don't want to, go. The ACM-R4H robot, designed for remote inspection and surveillance in confined environments, uses small wheels to move but it can slither and undulate and even raise its head like a cobra. The new robot, which is half a meter long and weighs in at 4.5 kilograms, carries a camera and LEDs on its head for image acquisition and can be fitted with other end-effectors such as mechanical grippers or thermo/infrared vision systems. Despite its seemingly complex motion capabilities, "the control of the robot is quite simple and doesn't require too much training," says robotics engineer and HiBot cofounder Michele Guarnieri.

An innovatice camera system could in future enhance security in public areas and buildings. Smart Eyes works just like the human eye. The system analyzes the recorded data in real time and then immediately flags up salient features and unusual scenes.  »Goal, goal, goal!« fans in the stadium are absolutely ecstatic, the uproar is enormous. So it‘s hardly surprising that the security personnel fail to spot a brawl going on between a few spectators. Separating jubilant fans from scuffling hooligans is virtually impossible in such a situation. Special surveillance cameras that immediately spot anything untoward and identify anything out of the ordinary could provide a solution. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT in Sankt Augustin have now developed such a device as part of the EU project »SEARISE – Smart Eyes: Attending and Recognizing Instances of Salient Events«. The automatic camera system is designed to replicate human-like capabilities in identifying and processing moving images.

You may think that all of those crazy robot competitions that we like to cover are just fun and games, but there’s a serious side. Really, there is. For reals. Mindful of this, ROBO-ONE held the second annual Humanoid Helper Project last weekend, where teleoperated human-sized robots completed (or attempted to complete) three seemingly simple tasks, including pouring liquid from a plastic bottle into a cup, carrying ping-pong balls on a tray, and a 30 minute endurance race. I don’t know about you, but the last two would be a bit of a challenge for me, and they certainly were for the robots:

Remember the last time that something a friend did caught you off guard? Probably—and that's because the human brain is specially tuned to remember things that are out of the ordinary. But just how the brain treats those instances has remained uncertain. Some scientists had hypothesized that an unexpected stimulus would trigger a loop that involved both the hippocampus (responsible in part for long-term memory) and nucleus accumbens (involved in reward and pleasure) to make those memories super sticky. But without peering into these centers, researchers could not know for sure.

At first glance, D-Wave Systems looks like any other well-appointed office, with an open reception area and conventional cubicles. But one glance at the wall beside the receptionist and you know the average IQ here is intimidatingly high — it’s literally covered in plaques from the U.S. patent office featuring 19th century lettering and incongruously describing patents for superconducting qubit-based microchips.

I remember when, a decade ago, Kevin Warwick, a professor at the University of Reading, in the U.K., implanted a radio chip in his own arm. The feat caused quite a stir. The implant allowed him to operate doors, lights, and computers without touching anything. On a second version of the project he could even control an electric wheelchair and produce artificial sensations in his brain using the implanted chip. Warwick had become, in his own words, a cyborg. The idea of a cyborg -- a human-machine hybrid -- is common in science fiction and although the term dates back to the 1960s it still generates a lot of curiosity. I often hear people asking, When will we become cyborgs? When will humans and machines merge? Although some researchers might have specific time frames in mind, I think a better answer is: It's already happening. When we look back at the history of technology, we tend to see distinct periods -- before the PC and after the PC, before the Internet and after the Internet, and so forth -- but in reality most technological advances unfold slowly and gradually. That's particularly true with the technologies that are allowing us to modify and enhance our bodies.

NAMO (Novel Articulated MObile platform)  is a humanoid robot built by The Institute of Field Robotics (FIBO) at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi in Thailand. FIBO is active in the RoboCup scene and have developed a wide range of robot types, including an experimental biped.  NAMO was unveiled on March 29th 2010, serving as FIBO’s mascot as part of the university’s 50 year anniversary celebrations.  NAMO will be used to welcome people to the university and may be deployed at museums.  Given its friendly appearance and functionality, it could be used to research human robot interaction and communication. NAMO is 130cm (4′3″) tall and has 16 degrees of freedom.  It moves on a stable three-wheeled omnidirectional base, and is equipped with a Blackfin camera for its vision system.  It is capable of simple gesture recognition, visually tracks humans or objects of interest automatically, and can speak a few phrases in a child-like voice (in Thai).

A new form of propulsion that could allow microrobots to explore human bodies has been discovered. The technique would be used to power robots and other devices such as microfluidic pumps from a distance. Finding a propulsion mechanism that works on the microscopic scale is one of the key challenges for developing microrobots. Another is to find a way to supply such a device with energy because there is so little room to carry on-board fuel or batteries. Now a team lead by Orlin Velev at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, US, has found that a simple electronic diode could overcome both these problems. Velev and Vesselin Paunov from the University of Hull, UK, floated a diode in a tank of salt water and zapped the set-up with an alternating electric field.

A new form of propulsion that could allow microrobots to explore human bodies has been discovered. The technique would be used to power robots and other devices such as microfluidic pumps from a distance. Finding a propulsion mechanism that works on the microscopic scale is one of the key challenges for developing microrobots. Another is to find a way to supply such a device with energy because there is so little room to carry on-board fuel or batteries. Now a team lead by Orlin Velev at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, US, has found that a simple electronic diode could overcome both these problems. Velev and Vesselin Paunov from the University of Hull, UK, floated a diode in a tank of salt water and zapped the set-up with an alternating electric field.

Justin is a dexterous humanoid robot that can make coffee. Now it's learning to fix satellites. Justin was developed at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, part of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), in Wessling, Germany. The robot has different configurations, including one with wheels. The space version has a head, torso, and arms, but no wheels or legs, because it will be mounted on a spacecraft or satellite. The goal is to use Justin to repair or refuel satellites that need to be serviced. Its creators say that ideally the robot would work autonomously. To replace a module or refuel, for example, you'd just press a button and the robot would do the rest. But that's a long-term goal. For now, the researchers are relying on another approach: robotic telepresence. A human operator controls the robot from Earth, using a head-mounted display and a kind of arm exoskeleton. That way the operator can see what the robot sees and also feel the forces the robot is experiencing.