Sleepiness and stress are perennial risks for the long distance lorry driver, and accidents are sadly too frequent. However, a radical new driverless truck being trialled by Daimler may offer a solution. Earlier this month, the automotive giant was granted the first licence ever to test such a vehicle on a public highway by the US state of Nevada. Using a combination of GPS, radar and video cameras, the Freightliner Inspiration can drive by itself on open stretches of road, freeing a driver to take breaks, check his emails and even watch DVDs. The catch is that a qualified person must remain in front of the wheel at all times so they can take control if something goes wrong.

EXPERT SYSTEMS Computers as sages by Howard Rheingold Howard Rheingold is the author of Software Odyssey and co-author of Higher Creativity. Should you ever want to drill for oil, diagnose a disease or synthesize a new molecule, you can ask Prospector, MYCIN or Dendral for some sage advice. They are certified experts in their respective fields. They are also computer programs. We all depend on expert assistance-from doctors, attorneys, automobile mechanics, computer repairmen.

Unmanned drones providing sustained surveillance, swift precise attacks on high-value targets and small robots are used for missions to counter improvised explosive devices. The systems are generally remotely piloted and rely on near-continuous control by a human operator. Researchers from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory Human Research and Engineering Directorate, or HRED, are developing robot intelligence that will enable robots to successfully navigate (move around) in their environment when given a voice command (instruction) by a human. Army researchers say the future for unmanned systems lies in the development of highly capable systems with "a set of intelligence-based capabilities sufficient to enable the teaming of autonomous systems with Soldiers." To act as teammates, robotic systems will need to reason about their missions, move through the world in a tactically correct way, observe salient events in the world around them, communicate efficiently with Soldiers and other autonomous systems and effectively perform a variety of mission tasks. The Symbolic and Sub-Symbolic Robotics Intelligence Control System, or SS-RICS, which was developed by HRED in cooperation with Towson State University in 2004, combines symbolic and sub-symbolic representations of knowledge into a unified control structure.

The United States and 70 other nations are investing in voice recognition databases that will allow governments to identify criminals or suspects based on brief recordings. A leader in the development of "voice-prints" storage is Russia's Speech Technology Center, known as SpeechPro in the U.S. The company has developed the capability to tuck away millions of recorded voices that governments can later use to identify persons of interests. The system, called "VoiceGrid Nation," can match a recording to a database entry in only five seconds (based on a scan of 10,000 voices), with an accuracy of 90%. Dozens of countries have invested in the company's biometric technology, with the biggest markets in the Western Hemisphere, Europe and Asia. These include dictatorships, such as those of Belarus and Uzbekistan.

Subcontracted by British Aerospace, AIAI were involved in part of a larger project for EUMETSAT, the European agency responsible for meteorological satellites. Our role was helping in the specification and prototyping of the scheduling component. After an initial feasibility study it was decided to prototype the system using PECOS, an object-oriented constraint programming tool. This approach allowed rapid development while retaining the flexibility to make changes as the problem specification evolved. A typical problem that the EUMETSAT scheduler has to deal with consists of some 1300 activities over a 14 day period. Activities to be scheduled include regular fixed activities (e.g.

Optional modules in Gemini provide robustness through a novel technique for detecting and correcting speech repairs, and by heuristically combining interpretations of grammatical fragments into an overall interpretation for the utterance, in cases where the Gemini grammar and lexicon do not provide a single complete analysis. Gemini has also been used as part of a language model to increase speech recognition accuracy. Recently we have developed software to compile Gemini grammars into context-free grammars that can be directly used as language models in the Nuance speech recognizer (a commercially available system based on SRI-developed technology).

Audit sampling is selecting a group of items such as invoices for investigation to draw inferences about an account balance. Ratio analysis involves comparisons between two financial statement accounts such as current ratios and gross profit percentage. Reasonable tests involve using financial and nonfinancial data to estimate an account balance. An example would be multiplying items sold by price to determine expected revenue. However, there are audit engagement risks with current auditing techniques.

The National Information Infrastructure (NII) will have profound effects on the lives of every citizen. It promises to deliver to people in their homes and offices a vast array of information in many forms, changing the ways in which business is conducted, offering new educational opportunities, bringing geographically dispersed library resources and entertainment materials to everyone's doorstep. It will connect people to people, and help them with their jobs and tasks. For the NII to be useful, however, people will need easy and efficient access to its resources. Today's computers are complex and difficult to use, even for experts. The NII will be orders of magnitude more complex than current systems; it could easily become a labyrinth of databases and services that is inconvenient for experts and inaccessible to many Americans. The field of artificial intelligence (AI) can play a pivotal role in meeting major challenges of the NII. AI uses the theoretical and experimental tools of ...

The Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS) was founded in 1987 to promote and advance artificial intelligence research within the state of Florida, fostering interaction between researchers at colleges, universities, and industry. From its inception, one major goal of the society has been to promote the advancement of AI through a yearly conference. During the first two years of the conference, participation was limited to Florida residents. Since 1990, the conference has been open to all and has logged a dramatic increase in participation from around the world, due in part to the warm climate offered by this conference location, but also due to the increase in research quality.

The Artificial Intelligence Group performs basic research in the areas of Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling, with applications to science analysis, spacecraft commanding, deep space network operations, and space transportation systems.