CAIAC is the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association. Formerly known as the Canadian Society for the Computational Studies of Intelligence (or Société canadienne pour l'étude de l'intelligence par ordinateur), CAIAC's mission is to foster excellence and leadership in research, development and education in Canada's artificial intelligence community by facilitating the exchange of knowledge through various media and venues. CAIAC is the official arm of the AAAI in Canada. We are proud to note that Dr. Alan Mackworth, former President of the AAAI, was a founding member of our society. A yearly membership of $30 buys you a significant saving on registration for the annual AI/GI/CRV/IS conference and access to valuable information at this web site such as: Competition Dates and Links, Research Groups and Projects, Recent Doctoral / Masters Theses, Projects looking for Students, Students looking for Projects, Funding Sources, Scholarships and Awards, and Job Opportunities.

Eleven teams, including universities, defense contractors and small companies, are competing in the British Ministry of Defense's Grand Challenge with autonomous information-gathering vehicles that include flying saucers, a mini tank, several mini-helicopters and darts, among other machines. The winner of the competition, which launched Friday, will get a trophy and a potential contract with the Ministry of Defense. The multi-day challenge, the British response to the U.S. DARPA Grand Challenge, is taking place in a facsimile of a deserted German village built during the Cold War. The village serves as a training center for British troops, The Guardian reported. During the competition, the robots have to identify threats such as potential snipers and enemy vehicles and other threats, with minimal human guidance.

The dawn of the 21st century has been called the decade of the drone. Unmanned aerial vehicles, remotely operated by pilots in the United States, rain Hellfire missiles on suspected insurgents in South Asia and the Middle East. Now a small group of scholars is grappling with what some believe could be the next generation of weaponry: lethal autonomous robots. At the center of the debate is Ronald C. Arkin, a Georgia Tech professor who has hypothesized lethal weapons systems that are ethically superior to human soldiers on the battlefield. A professor of robotics and ethics, he has devised algorithms for an "ethical governor" that he says could one day guide an aerial drone or ground robot to either shoot or hold its fire in accordance with internationally agreed-upon rules of war. But some scholars have dismissed Mr. Arkin's ethical governor as "vaporware," arguing that current technology is nowhere near the level of complexity that would be needed for a military robotic system to make life-and-death ethical judgments.

When the world ends, it may not be by fire or ice or an evil robot overlord. Our demise may come at the hands of a superintelligence that just wants more paper clips. So says Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who founded and directs the Future of Humanity Institute, in the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford. He created the "paper-clip maximizer" thought experiment to expose flaws in how we conceive of superintelligence. We anthropomorphize such machines as particularly clever math nerds, says Bostrom, whose book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies was released in Britain in July and arrived stateside this month.

Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, first codified in his 1942 short story "Runaround" (http://bit.ly/1AAkKhW), Robots were never to harm humans, or by inaction allow them to come to harm. Within months of the elucidation of these laws, however, an extremely primitive robot, the Norden bombsight, was being put to lethal use by the U.S. Army Air Corps. The bombsight combined a computer that calculated various factors affecting an aircraft's arrival over a target with an autopilot. Touted for its accuracy from high altitude, the Norden nevertheless tended to miss the aim point by an average of a quarter-mile.

CAMBRIDGE - For all that it's called "Futurity,'' Brooklyn band the Lisps' new rock musical, which will have its world premiere Friday at Oberon, is a look back to the Civil War. Presented by the American Repertory Theater, it's a love story of sorts: Julian Munro meets Ada Lovelace and they find they have a lot in common. Julian is a Union soldier, a member of the Ohio 34th Infantry who, even as he's smashing Confederate railroad ties in Virginia, dreams of becoming an inventor. Ada is an English mathematician who's written about Charles Babbage's mechanical general-purpose computer. Ada might seem an unlikely figment of head Lisp César Alvarez's imagination, but in fact Lord Byron did have a daughter, Augusta Ada, who was a mathematician and who is sometimes considered the world's first computer programmer. What's not historical is Ada's meeting with Julian - partly because Julian is a figment of Alvarez's imagination, partly because Ada never visited America, and partly because she died in 1852, just 36 years old. But "Futurity'' is a science-fiction musical as well as a rock musical, so who's to say that Julian and Ada didn't hook up in a parallel universe?

In his new book, Who Owns The Future?, computer scientist, Jaron Lanier, argues that as technology has become more advanced, so too has our dependency on information tools. Lanier believes that if we continue on our present path, where we think of computers as passive tools, instead of machines that real people create, our myopia will result in less understanding of both computers and human beings, which could cause the demise of democracy, mass unemployment, the erosion of the middle class, and social chaos. Lanier encourages human beings to take back control of their own economic destiny by creating a society that values the work of all industries, and not just those with the fastest networks. By monetizing information, he foresees a more egalitarian society, which can still adhere to the principles of free market capitalism. What will the future economy look like if technology keeps advancing the way it does and we do nothing?

Dawson, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in California, said he happened by chance upon the discovery that voice recognition could be applied to seismic data. A visiting researcher from Spain who specialized in voice recognition needed a desk and the USGS just happened to have a spare that she could use. Dawson and Carmen Benítez got to talking one day and decided to apply her skills to decoding data collected from the Norris Geyser Basin.

Since the dawn of the space age, unmanned spacecraft have flown blind with little or no ability to make autonomous decisions based on the content of the data they collect. The Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment (ASE) is operating onboard the Earth Observing-1 mission since 2003. The ASE software uses onboard continuous planning, robust task and goal-based execution, and onboard machine learning and pattern recognition to radically increase science return by enabling intelligent downlink selection and autonomous retargeting. This software demonstrates the potential for space missions to use onboard decision-making to detect, analyze, and respond to science events, and to downlink only the highest value science data. The onboard science algorithms analyzes the images to extract static features and detect changes relative to previous observations.