Artificial intelligence takes over University of Alberta

Researchers at the Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Edmonton this week envision a day when robots will be a mainstay in our homes and workplaces -- doing daily tasks like cooking, cleaning and even keeping us company. The AI conference, held at the University of Alberta's Lister Centre, is expected to draw hundreds of academics and industry leaders to Edmonton between May 16 and 19. "We want computers to be able to be smarter and to be able to understand [a] question, that's the first step," explained Greg Kondrak, a computer science professor at the the University of Alberta. Upon hearing a question, the smart computer would scan the internet for accurate results and "formulate the answer in a way that we kind of expect from other people." Kondrak's area of expertise is natural language processing.