The Integrated Course of Action Critiquing and Elaboration System (ICCES) integrated several available technologies based largely on AI techniques, ranging from machine-understandable course-of-action representations entered via sketching and constrained natural language to interleaved adversarial planning and scheduling. The experiment involved comparing processes and products of military decision making with and without the decision aids. The results alleviated concerns about potential negative impacts of such tools on the creative aspects of the art of war, showed potential for dramatic time savings during MDMP, and confirmed the technologies' maturity and suitability for near-future deployment.

Built by Westinghouse, the seven-foot-tall walking machine"spoke" more than 700 words stored on 78-rpm records to simulate conversation. He can remotely operate doors, an artificial hand, and an electronic wheelchair. Robotics expert Henrik Christensen predicts humans will be having sex with robots within four years. "They could replace us in every essential task and, in principle,operate our society increasingly well without us," he concludes, oddly cheery.

Few concepts capture the human imagination more than robots, undoubtedly because they are often designed to mimic us. Even their technological development seems to parallel our advances. We can judge the progress of our ability to harness scientific achievement simply by looking at a robot and asking this question: Exactly how much is this machine like a human? Or as Matt Mason, head of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, says, "In studying robotics we're really just studying ourselves." To take a measure of our progress, Discover offers a look in that mirror as we analyze the 25 greatest stepping-stones in robotics, points in time where science fiction meshes with science fact.

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?