The goal of this project is to use Artificial Intelligence methods to study the phenomenon of expressive music performance. The focus of the project is on developing and using machine learning and data mining methods for the analysis of expressive performance data. The goal is to gain a deeper understanding of this complex domain of human competence and to contribute new methods to the (relatively new) branch of musicology that tries to develop quantitative models and theories of musical expression. By musical expression, we mean the variations in tempo, timing, dynamics, articulation, etc. that performers apply when playing and interpreting'' a piece. Our goal is to study real expressive performances with machine learning methods, in order to discover some fundamental patterns or principles that characterize sensible'' musical performances, and to elucidate the relation between structural aspects of the music and typical or musically sensible'' performance patterns.

Robots are composed of several systems working together: the controller is the robot's brain, which controls its movements; the body is the robot's physical appearance related to the job it performs; mobility, or how the robot moves, depends on the job it performs (for example, a robot uses propellers and rudders in the water, and legs or wheels on land); power is used to fuel the robot (electric solar cells are one example, such as the solar-powered robots described here); sensors provide signals to give robots a perceptual understanding of their environment so they can alter their behavior based on that information; and tools are unique to the task the robot performs. Just as robots are made of several systems, the field of AI requires a collaboration of many different disciplines to be successful. Engineering is clearly useful, but I know people who have a background in biology, psychology, physics, and computer science. What's most important is a willingness to learn a lot of new things from a variety of disciplines.

Welcome to the robotic age. Long-term federal investments in fundamental science and engineering research, and the researchers who pursue them, have led to novel machines that safely partner with people in nearly every environment. Soon, helping hands are as likely to be made of metal and plastic as flesh and bone.

The movie, based on the novel by Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, was directed by Ridley Scott and stars a young Harrison Ford. For those of you who hadn't seen it, the story is set in a futuristic Los Angeles, AD 2019, just a few years down the road from us. Many regard it as a cult movie, a "neo-noir" or cyberpunk classic, in spite of its poor box office performance in the U.S. Some critics consider it one of the best movies ever made. Be it as it may, the movie does touch upon some very fundamental issues concerning the meaning of being human, which are well worth taking a closer look. From our 2011 perspective, the first thing we notice is how off the movie is in terms of predictions.

She is the perfect the girl and everyone loves her. Too bad she doesn't exist. In 1994 science fiction author William Gibson published IDORU, a novel about a Japanese Pop star who was actually the holographic creation of a distributed artificial intelligence. Now it seems life has taken a few halting steps towards imitating art. Last week Aimi Eguchi, the newest star of the Japanese band AKB48, was revealed to exist only on the hard drives of her creators.

Computer Trouble: After growing up without his father, Sam (Garrett Hedlund) falls into a digital world, where he finds his dad and meets Quorra (Olivia Wilde). Together, they embark on a dangerous journey of escape. Rated PG for sequences of sci-fi action violence and brief mild language. When Disney announced it was planning to make a sequel to Tron, its 1982 imagining of a dystopia existing in our computers' circuit boards, the news was greeted enthusiastically by that film's small and adoring cult. But for many, the move was a head-scratcher: a $200 million budget handed to a director, Joseph Kosinski, who'd only ever worked in commercials, to make a 28-years-later sequel to a visually groundbreaking (but narratively dull) sci-fi flick that was only a modest success in its original release.

Wall-E fell in love with another robot in the movie named after him. Researchers have yet to create a sentient machine, but a breakthrough could be on the horizon. Peter Remine says he will know it's time to get serious about rights for robots "when a robot knocks on my door asking for some help." Remine, founder of the Seattle-based American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Robots, says the moment will come when a robot in an automobile factory "will become sentient, realize that it doesn't want to do that unfulfilling and dangerous job anymore, and ask for protection under state workers' rights." Bit by bit, we are growing more comfortable with digital devices in our daily lives.

Baseball games have slowed down because, as players' salaries have increased, the value of each pitch and each swing has increased, as well. When a pitcher gets thirty starts in a season, a hundred pitches each, bucking for a twelve-million-dollar contract, each pitch is worth four thousand dollars. "Avengers: Age of Ultron" cost about two hundred and fifty million dollars to make, and Joss Whedon, its writer and director, appears to have taken his time, too--especially with the script. Whedon has done something similar to what he did in "The Avengers"--namely, to make a film that's in tune with the political zeitgeist as he perceives it. There, it was a post-9/11 revenge fantasy set against a backdrop of unpopular foreign wars.

In Leena Krohn's novella "Datura, or A Figment Seen by Everyone," the narrator, who works for a paranormal-news magazine, transcribes the inscrutable fifteenth-century text known as the Voynich manuscript while slowly poisoning herself with the seeds from a datura plant. Datura is known to cause delirium and dissociation, but it may also ease the symptoms of asthma, which the narrator has. Though she is skeptical of supernatural phenomena, the datura slowly undermines that skepticism; each day seems to bring one serendipitous event after another, not to mention mild hallucinations. The narrator describes feeling as though meaning is floating on the surface of things, untethered from their physical reality. "What does the word refer to," she asks, in a deconstructionist turn, "does it really signify anything at all?"

A crossword-solving computer program yesterday triumphed in a competition against humans. Two versions of the program, called WebCrow, finished first and second in a competition that gave bilingual entrants 90 minutes to work on five different crosswords in Italian and English. The competition took place in Riva del Garda, Italy, as part of the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. WebCrow took on 25 human competitors, mostly conference attendees, while more than 50 crossword enthusiasts and AI researchers competed online. Among the five crosswords were two American-style ones from that day's editions of the New York Times and Washington Post.