Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) trained a neural network to recognize materials (e.g., metal grate, plants, concrete sidewalk) being hit with a drumstick, and synthesize sounds to accompany the actions. It did well enough to fool humans into thinking the sounds were real. Objects make distinctive sounds when they are hit or scratched. These sounds reveal aspects of an object's material properties, as well as the actions that produced them. In this paper, we propose the task of predicting what sound an object makes when struck as a way of studying physical interactions within a visual scene.

For a generation that has been exposed to the Terminator movies, visions of a robot uprising come to mind whenever news about advancements in artificial intelligence surface. Great minds such as Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak have previously expressed their concern on the possibility of a robot apocalypse. It would seem that Google, one of the companies at the forefront of artificial intelligence development, is now sharing some of these concerns, as its DeepMind unit has published a study that seeks to implement safety measures on the technology. The paper, published as a collaboration between DeepMind and the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University, discusses a "big red button" that will allow humans to turn off artificial intelligence in a robot and take control of it in case the robot is misbehaving or malfunctioning. And just so it is clear, the Future of Humanity Institute is named as such as it wants humanity to have a future, with Nick Bostrom, its founding director, being one of the more vocal opponents of artificial intelligence.

In this article we present DrillEdge -- a commercial and award winning software system that monitors oil-well drilling operations in order to reduce non-productive time (NPT). DrillEdge utilizes case-based reasoning with temporal representations on streaming real-time data, pattern matching and agent systems to predict problems and give advice on how to mitigate the problems. The methods utilized, the architecture, the GUI and development cost in addition to two case studies are documented.

Inherent batch-to-batch variability, aging, and contamination are major factors contributing to variability in oil-field cement-slurry performance. Such variability imposes a heavy burden on performance testing and is often a major factor in operational failure. Our approach involves predicting cement compositions, particle-size distributions, and thickening-time curves from the diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform spectrum of neat cement powders. Our research shows that many key cement properties are captured within the Fourier transform infrared spectra of cement powders and can be predicted from these spectra using suitable neural network techniques.

A common difficulty in diagnosing failures within Pratt & Whitney's F100-PW-100/200 gas turbine engine occurs when a fault in one part of a system -- comprising an engine, an airframe, a test cell, and automated ground engine test set (AGETS) equipment -- is manifested as an out-of-bound parameter elsewhere in the system. However, because the self-diagnostics only test the specified local parameter, it will pass, leaving only the operators' experience and traditional fault-isolation manuals to locate the source of the problem in another part of the system. This article describes a diagnostic tool (that is, AGETS MBR), designed to overcome this problem by isolating failures using an overall system troubleshooting approach. AGETS MBR was developed jointly by personnel at Pratt & Whitney and United Technologies Research Center using an AI tool called the qualitative reasoning system (QRS).

The fifth Distributed Artificial Intelligence Workshop was held at the Schlumberger-Doll Research Laboratory from October 14 to 17, 1984. It was attended by 20 participants from academic and industrial institutions. It included brief research reports from individual groups along with general discussion of questions of common interest. This report summarizes the general discussion and contains summaries of group presentations that have been contributed by individual speakers.

Schlumberger is a large, multinational corporation concerned primarily with the measurement, collection, and interpretation of data. For the past fifty years, most of the activities have been related to hydrocarbon exploration. The efficient location and production of hydrocarbons from an underground formation requires a great deal of knowledge about the formation, ranging in scale from the size and shape of the rock's pore spaces to the size and shape of the entire reservoir. Schlumberger provides its clients with two types of information: measurements, called logs, of the petrophysical properties of the rock around the borehole, such as its electrical, acoustical, and radioactive characteristics; and in terpretations of these logs in terms of geophysical properties such as porosity and mineral composition.

We use our experience with the Dipmeter Advisor system for well-log interpretation as a case study to examine the development of commercial expert system. We argue that the tools and ideas of rapid prototyping and successive refinement accelerate the development process. We note that different types of people are required at different stages of expert system development: Those who are primarily knowledgeable in the domain, but who can use the framework to expand the domain knowledge; and those who can actually design and build expert systems. Finally, we discuss the problem of technology transfer and compare our experience with some of the traditional wisdom of expert system development.

Most work in automatic programming has focused primarily on the roles of deduction and programming knowledge. However, the role played by knowledge of the task domain seems to be at least as important, both for the usability of an automatic programming system and for the feasibility of building one which works on non-trivial problems. This perspective has evolved during the course of a variety of studies over the last several years, including detailed examination of existing software for a particular domain (quantitative interpretation of oil well logs) and the implementation of an experimental automatic programming system for that domain. The importance of domain knowledge has two important implications: a primary goal of automatic programming research should be to characterize the programming process for specific domains; and a crucial issue to be addressed in these characterizations is the interaction of domain and programming knowledge during program synthesis.