Writing basic stats from a sporting event or the latest stock prices can be a tedious assignment for journalists. "Neothetics Inc. (NEOT) on Thursday reported a loss of $6.9 million in its first quarter. The San Diego-based company said it had a loss of 50 cents per share. Neothetics shares have decreased 16 percent since the beginning of the year." This is important information for someone with stock in the pharmaceutical company Neothetics, but not very useful to a mass audience. These basic stories can become a waste of time and resources for news outlets, especially a wire service such as the Associated Press.

"I get lost in your eyes," you say? Researchers are working on ways to find you and save the resulting image for posterity – or for a criminal investigation. Scientists have found that photo portraits of an individual can yield images of the photographer or people standing close to the photographer. These additional images appear as reflections in the eyes of the photo's subject. Even though enhancements of the reflected images appear blurry, they carry enough detail to allow others to identify the people reflected in the subject's eyes.

Little Theater has a tiny orchestra pit, with room for only a handful of players, and a modest budget. So when it mounts a big musical like "Beauty and the Beast," it brings in an electronic ringer. A laptop computer, loaded with a program called OrchEXTRA, serves as a "virtual orchestra," from strings to woodwinds, drums to horns, giving the music such a rich sound that audience members may wonder how a full Broadway orchestra fits into the tiny pit. "As far as sound quality, these things are great," says Dorian Boyd, the sound designer/technician for Little Theater, referring to OrchEXTRA. Virtual orchestras are much better than the early systems of just a few years ago, he says, which could sound like "video game music."

You needn't have taken a philosophy course to see "A.I.," the new Steven Spielberg movie, but you may wish you'd enrolled in Philosophy 101 by the time you exit the cinema. "A.I." (Artificial Intelligence), is a futuristic story in which a robot resembling an 11-year-old boy embarks on a Pinocchio-like quest to become human. Mr. Spielberg's movie posits the idea that machines can develop self-awareness, and even understand love. Is Spielberg's premise as far-fetched as "E.T." flying a bicycle past the moon? Not according to Ray Kurzweil, who is something of a superstar in the AI community, currently made up of hundreds of corporations and universities across the world.

"Tracking Mean Shift Clustered Point Clouds for 3D Surveillance", and "Multiview Fusion for Canonical View Generation based on Homography Constraints" ACM Mulimedia Workshop on Video Surveillance and Sensor Networks, October 2006.

NB: Some of the movies use old formats and may not work on your machine without conversion. All are also now available in the WEBM format, which should work, and s houjld be tried first. All the videos are downloadable, under creative commons 3.0 licences. Anyone interested in obtaining and running the toolkit (including some of the demos'frozen' here) should see The Free Poplog Web site. More examples may be added later. Note on Pre-SimAgent demos: Items 10 and 12 below include demos using our pop11 tools before SimAgent was developed. Experience with those projects helped to show the need for the SimAgent tools and the RCLIB graphical interface. If you would like to explore some pre-cursors to SimAgent take a look at the demos near the end of this file.

The Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition (aka the Fluid Analogies Research Group, or simply FARG) is an interdisciplinary center for research in cognitive science, directed by Douglas Hofstadter. CRCC is affiliated with the Cognitive Science Program at IU, and has close ties with the Computer Science Department. CRCC research focuses mainly on emergent computational models of creative analogical thinking and its subcognitive substrate -- namely, fluid concepts. Several computer programs modeling the interplay between concepts and perception in the course of analogy-making have been developed; these include the Copycat and Tabletop programs. The Letter Spirit project, modeling the perception and creation of style in the world of letterforms, has now resulted in a Letter Spirit program capable of designing and evaluating gridfonts.

Software with increasingly complex algorithms are now writing news stories and financial reports The L.A. Times uses Quakebot to write about tremors, using data from the US Geological Survey. Chicago-based company Narrative Science markets its Quill software to media and financial houses The company's chief scientists believes a computer program could win a Pulitzer Prize within the next 5 years The L.A. Times uses Quakebot to write about tremors, using data from the US Geological Survey. The company's chief scientists believes a computer program could win a Pulitzer Prize within the next 5 years At large news agencies where speed is crucial, template-style stories have long been used for company results, allowing journalists to simply key in the relevant facts and numbers and fire off the dispatch. Often disparagingly referred to as'churnalism,' some of the larger media organisations -- including the L.A. Times and Associated Press -- have now turned to robots to take the grind out of formulaic dispatches. The L.A. Times uses the algorithms in its in-house software -- called Quakebot - to produce reports on local earthquakes, using data provided by the US Geological Survey.

Listen to this three-piece with your eyes closed and it could be any group of musicians plucking a guitar, twinkling on an electric keyboard, or beating a drum. Sure, there's a synthesized quality to the music -- which sweeps from orchestral to experimental rock -- but what band doesn't get a little help from computers these days? Open your eyes and you'll find something very different indeed. For starters, the guitarist is a humanoid looming two-meters-tall, with 78 fingers sweeping across the glowing instrument strapped to its torso. The rocking robot -- called March -- bangs its impressive mane of multi-colored cables in time to the music, albeit a little jerkily.

Internet algorithms tailor the Web -- but they may be removing randomness "People are not forced to think" as widely, says one expert On the other hand, Internet has opened worlds that didn't exist before The flaws are not necessarily in our machines, but in ourselves "People are not forced to think" as widely, says one expert On the other hand, Internet has opened worlds that didn't exist before "I'd say about 95% of the time Amazon suggests a book to me, it's one I already have," he says. This is not due to a lack of interest on the part of Haufe, a professor at Case Western University who specializes in the history and philosophy of science. But Amazon's vaunted algorithm, embodied in the recommendations page of "Your Amazon.com" and the "customers who bought this item also bought" line on each product page, doesn't cast a net wide enough for Haufe's consideration. In that, he sees a bigger concern. Our reliance on computer algorithms, he observes, may be narrowing our choices. "We're losing something vital to the production of knowledge," he says.