Research News & Events

Psychologists nowadays are able to measure human intelligence by using various IQ tests. Nevertheless, they still don’t agree on one common definition of human intelligence. What would happen if we apply a similar approach to measuring intelligence of artificial entities, skipping never-ending discussions on AI definition? According to professor Selmer Bringsjord and Bettina Schimanski an answer is contained in Psychometric AI (PAI).

Cara Santa Maria of the Huffington post interviews William Swartout, Director of Technology of USC/ICT about the application of virtual humans. Very funny!

Dr. Roman V. Yampolskiy from University of Louisville says that we should be aware of dangerously self-aware chatbots and he suggests to keep dangerous AI entities in virtual prison for avoiding social-engineering attacks. According to him, we should improve cybersecurity, because one day disobeying virtual agents could threaten humanity’s existence.

Dr. Roman V. Yampolskiy from University of Louisville claims that artificial conversational entities, shopping bots, and intelligent software applications became closer in their abilities and intelligence to human beings. Therefore arised the need to recognize and verify the identity of such entities just like it is necessary to authenticate the identity of people.

New, future oriented field of artimetrics, i.e. artificial biometrics, focuses on recognition, verification, and authentication of virtual agents, robots and other nonbiological entities. As a sub-field of cybersecurity, artimetrics is being developed in Cyber-Security Lab, which prides itself on being the world’s first to conduct this kind of research.

The robot presented on the video can chat with other humanoid robots via the Internet. Moreover, when faced with a new situation, the robot can search the World Wide Web and gather appropriate information in order to fill an identified knowledge gap. Afterwards, it incorporates new knowledge under its own power, and is ready to execute diverse new tasks.

Present chatbots have rather limited reasoning, inflexible behavior and they lack learning abilities. They perform entrusted tasks in strict accordance with programmed procedures. What if chatbot developers equipped new chatbots with an advanced online-learning mechanism applied recently in intelligent humanoid robots?

The idea of a conversational artificial intelligence therapist is as old as ELIZA, the very first chatbot created in 1966, which emulated a client-centered therapy approach. New research on conversational agents revealed their effectiveness as Internet-based intervention tools that treat and even prevent depression.

In a paper called Reading Digits in Natural Images
with Unsupervised Feature Learning researchers from Google and Stanford University reveal a new method of identifying house numbers in Google Street View.

It’s just another attempt to add a bit of AI to Googles ability to understand the world.

As a result however, this algorithm is obviously very useful for Captcha hackers as well, as I’ve announced many times before. Captchas are those annoying characters you have to re-type when you leave a comment on a forum, to get access to certain information or when you register for a website, The purpose of Captchas are to separate computers from real human beings, assuming that humans are better in complex character recogntion than computers. This will soon be something of the past.

The result: computers will be able to create new accounts, register everywhere, spam everywhere. It will also retrieve password, access email boxes and send emails on behalf of real humans. It’s an unstoppable development. The only way to stop this: collaborate worldwide and define a new internet which is suitable for consumer usage. Also, we should get rid of the idea that we should protect privacy on the internet allowing people to stuff around anonymously without the chance of getting caught, and that everything should be available for free. Nothing is for free.

This will be part of a new concept for the future world, which I will refer to as

The Utopia Manifesto

Soon more!