While tech giants across the world work on materializing the idea of having a generative artificial intelligence (AI) to aid humans in their daily lives, the risk of the nascent technology going rogue remains imminent. Considering this possibility, Tesla and Twitter chief Elon Musk reminded the people of AI's potential to destroy civilization. On March 15, Musk's plan of creating a new AI startup surfaced after the entrepreneur was reportedly assembling a team of AI researchers and engineers. However, Musk continues to highlight the destructive potential of AI -- just like any other technology -- if it goes into the wrong hands or is being developed with ill intentions. According to Musk, AI can be dangerous. In a FOX interview, he said that AI can be more dangerous than mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance, for example.

A robot-building lab and contest was held at the Eleventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Teams of three worked day and night for 72 hours to build tabletop autonomous robots of legos, a small microcontroller board, and sensors. The robots then competed head to head in two events. The contest was a chance to learn about building machines that operate in the real world. The lab was in a roped-off area of the main exhibition area.

In this episode, Jack Rasiel speaks with Kostas Daniilidis, Professor of Computer and Information at the University of Pennsylvania, about new developments in computer vision and robotics. Daniilidis' research team is pioneering new approaches to understanding the 3D structure of the world from simple and ubiquitous 2D images. They are also investigating how these techniques can be used to improve robots' ability to understand and manipulate objects in their environment. Daniilidis puts this in the context of current trends in robot learning and perception, and speculates how it will help bring more robots from the lab to the "real world". How does bleeding edge research become a viable product? Daniilidis speaks to this from personal experience, as an advisor to startups spun out from the GRASP Lab and Penn's Pennovation incubator. Kostas Daniilidis is the Ruth Yalom Stone Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania where he has been faculty since 1998.

To use language one must be able to make inferences about the information which language conveys. This is apparent in many ways. For one thing, many of the processes which we typically consider "linguistic" require inference making. For example, structural disambiguation: (1) Waiter, I would like spaghetti with meat sauce and wine. You would not expect to be served a bowl of spaghetti floating in meat sauce and wine. That is, you would expect the meal represented by structure (2) rather than that represented by (3).

Plan recognition does not work the same way in stories and in "real life" (people tend to jump to conclusions more in stories). We present a theory of this, for the particular case of how objects in stories (or in life) influence plan recognition decisions. We provide a Bayesian network formalization of a simple first-order theory of plans, and show how a particular network parameter seems to govern the difference between "life-like" and "story-like" response. We then show why this parameter would be influenced (in the desired way) by a model of speaker (or author) topic selection which assumes that facts in stories are typically "relevant".

A robot-building lab and contest was held at the Eleventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Teams of three worked day and night for 72 hours to build tabletop autonomous robots of legos, a small microcontroller board, and sensors. The robots then competed head to head in two events. I was one of the developers of JACK, the second-place finisher in the Coffeepot event. This article contains my personal recollections of the lab and contest.

Discourse Processes, vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 1-32.

In E. W. Elcock and D. Michie (Eds.), Machine intelligence 8. New York: Wiley.