A team from MIT Lincoln Laboratory's Bioengineering Systems and Technologies Group was named a first-place subchallenge winner at the 2014 Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop (AVEC 2014), the fourth annual competition that invites participants to use multimedia processing and machine learning to analyze subjects' emotional states or estimate subjects' level of depression. Held at the annual Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Conference on Multimedia, the challenge gauges the success of entrants' approaches to automated emotion detection on a set of common benchmarks. In 2014, two subchallenges were presented: continuously distinguishing emotions and estimating the level of subjects' depression from audio and visual data. Of the 14 groups competing in the 2014 depression assessment subchallenge, Lincoln Laboratory's team was the most successful in predicting a depression score. Participants in this subchallenge estimate the severity of subjects' depression from either vocal characteristics detected in audio or facial signs identified in video recordings, or both.

Researchers in Indiana University's Knowledge Acquisition and Projection Lab -- part of Pervasive Technology Labs -- along with computer scientists from the IU School of Informatics, have completed a project for the U.S. Navy in which they developed key components of the Navy's maintenance Knowledge Projection System. This project, a three-year joint undertaking with Crane Naval Surface Warfare Division and Purdue University, was aimed at developing next-generation diagnostics and maintenance capabilities for shipboard systems. "The need for tele-maintenance and distance support technologies for today's battleships, aircraft carriers and submarines is compelling," said Donald F. (Rick) McMullen, director of the Knowledge Acquisition and Projection Lab (KAPLab). McMullen, along with IU Professor of Computer Science David Leake, served as principal investigator for the KPS project. "The current generation of naval vessels is more complex than ever, and correcting problems with shipboard systems is frequently a team effort involving both ship- and shore-based personnel. In the current environment, distance support is critical to maintaining operational preparedness," McMullen said.

Robert Wilensky, professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the campus's first faculty members in artificial intelligence when the field was just taking off, has died at age 61. He died at the Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland on Friday, March 15, of a bacterial infection. Wilensky's career at UC Berkeley spanned nearly 30 years, beginning in 1978 when he joined the faculty in computer science. He later was appointed a professor at the School of Information and Management Sciences (now the School of Information, or I School), which he helped form. His many research interests included the role of memory processes in natural language processing, language analysis and production and artificial intelligence in programming languages.

The Turing Test, developed by mathematician and legendary wartime codebreaker Alan Turing to test a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour, is the subject of an opera by Scottish composer Julian Wagstaff, which will embark on a UK tour in October 2012. The Turing Test is set in the near future and tells the fictional story of a brilliant young PhD student named Stephanie, who is trapped in a bitter battle between two rival scientists racing to build the world's first truly intelligent computer. The opera, which received critical acclaim at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2007, is one hour long, and is scored for six voices and a small orchestra. It is sung in English, with one of the six singers playing the part of the computer. The tour marks the hundredth anniversary year of the birth of Alan Turing (1912–1954), who is widely considered to be the father of modern computing. The concept of a computer being able to imitate a human being was first expressed in a paper by Turing entitled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", published in 1950 in the journal Mind.

Stanford University will lead a 100-year effort to study the long-term implications of artificial intelligence in all aspects of life. Russ Altman, a professor of bioengineering and of computer science at Stanford, will serve as faculty director of the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence. Stanford University has invited leading thinkers from several institutions to begin a 100-year effort to study and anticipate how the effects of artificial intelligence will ripple through every aspect of how people work, live and play. This effort, called the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, or AI100, is the brainchild of computer scientist and Stanford alumnus Eric Horvitz, who, among other credits, is a former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. In that capacity, Horvitz convened a conference in 2009 at which top researchers considered advances in artificial intelligence and its influences on people and society, a discussion that illuminated the need for continuing study of AI's long-term implications.

Computer scientist and AI pioneer EDWARD A. FEIGENBAUM has partnered with Stanford Libraries to make his personal papers available online, including more than 16,500 notes, scientific development documents, correspondence, Artificial Intelligence Lab memos, audio tapes and videos. Starting with the dawn of artificial intelligence research and computer science in 1956, the Edward A. Feigenbaum Papers allows users to explore a pivotal time in AI history by accessing documents from Feigenbaum's distinguished career as a scientist, book author, department chairman, government adviser and chief scientist of the U.S. Air Force. Feigenbaum joined the Stanford computer science faculty in 1965 as one of its founding members. That same year, he and Professor JOSHUA LEDERBERG, who had won a Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology in 1958, before coming to Stanford, started the DENDRAL project, the world's first expert system. DENDRAL's groundbreaking work moved artificial intelligence out of the laboratory and into the structure of countless software applications.

"About 6,000 languages are currently spoken in the world today," says Elizabeth Salesky of MIT Lincoln Laboratory's Human Language Technology (HLT) Group. "Within the law enforcement community, there are not enough multilingual analysts who possess the necessary level of proficiency to understand and analyze content across these languages," she continues. This problem of too many languages and too few specialized analysts is one Salesky and her colleagues are now working to solve for law enforcement agencies, but their work has potential application for the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community. The research team is taking advantage of major advances in language recognition, speaker recognition, speech recognition, machine translation, and information retrieval to automate language processing tasks so that the limited number of linguists available for analyzing text and spoken foreign languages can be used more efficiently. "With HLT, an equivalent of 20 times more foreign language analysts are at your disposal," says Salesky.

NASA announced today that MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is one of two university research groups nationwide that will receive a 6-foot, 290-pound humanoid robot to test and develop for future space missions to Mars and beyond. A group led by CSAIL principal investigator Russ Tedrake will develop algorithms for the robot, known as "Valkyrie" or "R5," as part of NASA's upcoming Space Robotics Challenge, which aims to create more dexterous autonomous robots that can help or even take the place of humans "extreme space" missions. Tedrake's team, which was selected from groups that were entered in this year's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Robotics Challenge, will receive as much as $250,000 a year for two years from NASA's Space Technology Mission Directive. NASA says it is interested in humanoid robots because they can help or even replace astronauts working in extreme space environments. Robots like R5 could be used in future missions either as precursor robots performing mission tasks before humans arrive or as human-assistive robots collaborating with the human crew.

To that end, the Department of Defense wants to seed the oceans with robotic vehicles, leaving them on the seafloor until they're needed. In a time of crisis, a military commander would transmit a signal to the underwater vehicles, which would then float to the surface and either monitor the area, or launch a separate unmanned vehicle into the air to gather intelligence. At the end of the mission the vehicle could be picked up by a submarine or support ship. The system of robotic vehicles and their UAVs would be called Upward Falling Payload. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is asking private companies to come up with designs for the communications systems, the "risers" that will float the UAVs to the surface, the UAVs themselves and the equipment they would carry.

Three of the contenders, from left to right: Virginia Tech's THOR, DARPA's test platform robot made by Boston Dynamics and Raytheon's Guardian. Scientists have invented a machine that imitates the way the human brain learns new information, a step forward for artificial intelligence, researchers reported. The system described in the journal Science is a computer model "that captures humans' unique ability to learn new concepts from a single example," the study said. "Though the model is only capable of learning handwritten characters from alphabets, the approach underlying it could be broadened to have applications for other symbol-based systems, like gestures, dance moves, and the words of spoken and signed languages." Joshua Tenenbaum, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT), said he wanted to build a machine that could mimic the mental abilities of young children.