HURSLEY, UK--(Marketwire - September 13, 2007) - IBM (NYSE: IBM) has developed an ingenious system called SiSi (Say It Sign It) that automatically converts the spoken word into British Sign Language (BSL) which is then signed by an animated digital character or avatar. SiSi brings together a number of computer technologies. A speech recognition module converts the spoken word into text, which SiSi then interprets into gestures, that are used to animate an avatar which signs in BSL. Upon development this system would see a signing avatar'pop up' in the corner of the display screen in use -- whether that be a laptop, personal computer, TV, meeting-room display or auditorium screen. Users would be able select the size and appearance of the avatar.

Seminar papers and short presentations: Students will be asked to write a fifteen-to-twenty page paper on a topic of their choice approved by the instructor. A non-exhaustive listing of possible paper topics may be found at sampletopics07.htm. Students should contact the instructor early in the term to discuss appropriate paper topics. This is especially true for those who intend the paper to satisfy their law school writing requirement. Whatever paper topic a student chooses, a student should plan to develop an extended specific example to illustrate his/her point.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation. Nancy J. Nersessian's research is driven by the question "How do scientists think?" Nersessian's research focuses on how the cognitive and learning practices of scientists and engineers lead to creative and innovative outcomes. She is a Regents' Professor of Cognitive Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology with joint appointments in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts School of Public Policy and the College of Computing School of Interactive Computing. Her research supports the insight that scientists think not only with ideas, but also with the artifacts they create to investigate nature.

The Planetary Society's LightSail, funded in part by a Kickstarter campaign, will aim to demonstrate that controlled solar sailing is possible. The Planetary Society's LightSail, funded in part by a Kickstarter campaign, will aim to demonstrate that controlled solar sailing is possible. The Planetary Society's LightSail, funded in part by a Kickstarter campaign, will aim to demonstrate that controlled solar sailing is possible. When it comes to incredible science, 2015 will be hard to top. Among a number of notable events, we got our first, thrilling look at Pluto, found evidence that liquid water still flows on Mars and began facing the reality that human gene editing is closer than ever thanks to the CRISPR system.

COASTLINE Community College was a higher-education pioneer in the late 1970s when it started developing television-based courses that students could take from anywhere as long as they had another innovation of the time, a video player. Today the Fountain Valley-based school remains a trendsetter, producing college classes whose lectures and study materials can be viewed on iPods, personal digital assistants and cellphones. But these days Coastline has plenty of company. Though long known for their adherence to tradition, colleges in California and elsewhere increasingly are embracing a variety of higher-tech approaches to teaching and learning. And new gizmos, including gear with cutting-edge videogame or artificial intelligence technology, are on the way to provide more individualized instruction.

This fun and thought provoking session will look at fundamental issues about the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). When is human-level AI likely to emerge? When it does emerge will it be more likely to be friendly, hostile, or indifferent to humanity? What, if anything, can we do to influence these outcomes? Panelists will draw on their expert knowledge in the field as well as look at science fiction for inspiration.

With the help of human instructors, a robot has learned to talk like a human infant, learning the names of simple shapes and colors, reports Wired Science. "Our work focuses on early stages analogous to some characteristics of a human child of about 6 to 14 months, the transition from babbling to first word forms," wrote computer scientists led by Caroline Lyon of the University of Hertfordshire. Named DeeChee, the robot is an iCub, a three-foot-tall open source humanoid machine designed to resemble a baby. The similarity isn't merely aesthetic, but has a functional purpose: many researchers think certain cognitive processes are shaped by the bodies in which they occur. A brain in a vat would think and learn very differently than a brain in a body.

Soon they will be sophisticated enough to fill certain faculty roles at traditional universities. But to make this revolution work for students, academic leaders at those traditional institutions will need to broker a peace between artificially intelligent teaching programs and their human counterparts, according to a new report written by the former presidents of two prominent traditional universities on behalf of the nonprofit Ithaka S R. Online education has enabled many colleges to transition into the prevailing modern medium while adding new sources of revenue in times of scarcity, according to the Ithaka report. However, these innovative colleges have shown less interest in using the novel medium to curb tuition charges and measure learning outcomes. The report, called "Barriers to Adoption of Online Learning Systems in U.S. Higher Education," was co-written by Lawrence S. Bacow and William G. Bowen, the former presidents of Tufts and Princeton Universities, respectively, along with several Ithaka analysts. It was bankrolled by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) is the premier forum for researchers and practitioners in planning and scheduling - two technologies that are critical to manufacturing, space systems, software engineering, robotics, education, and entertainment. The ICAPS conference resulted from merging two bi-annual conferences, namely the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS) and the European Conference on Planning (ECP). The primary objectives of ICAPS are to further the field of automated planning and scheduling through the organization of technical meetings, including the annual ICAPS conference, through the organization of summer schools, tutorials and training activities at various events, through the organization of planning and scheduling competitions, benchmarking and other means of advancing and assessing the state of the art in the field, by promoting the involvement of young scientists in the field through scholarships and other means, and by promoting and disseminating publications, planning and scheduling systems, domains, simulators, software tools and technical material. The ICAPS 2016 conference was held from June 12-17, 2016 in London, UK. Conference chairs are Andrew Coles and Daniele Magazzeni.

In his 10-week course Ng takes a an engineering-oriented approach to Machine Learning that concentrates on statistical models. If you are looking for an alternative Coursera also has Neural Networks for Machine Learning, a class taught by University of Toronto professor, Geoffry Hinton who is a leading proponent in the field from a cognitive science perspective. His eight-week course sets out to teach students artificial neural networks and how they're being used for machine learning, as applied to speech and object recognition, image segmentation, modeling language and human motion. Its prerequisites are programming proficiency in Matlab, Octave or Python, plus knowledge of calculus, linear algebra and probability theory.