Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation thinks religion is just a part of evolution. How totally fitting is it that those least likely to believe the theory of evolution because of religious beliefs do so because of evolution?

The reason this is here on the AI blog is because this was tested using sims. The code is open source. You can download a copy of “Evogod” and read the papers ‘Is Religion an Evolutionary Adaptation? for yourself.

If you are interesting in building sim worlds this this is a great place to start.

Path Intelligence has developed software to track pedestrians by analyzing their mobile phone signals. Monitoring units can be placed about a mall or store and the units fetch a unique signal from shoppers phones and track the shopper’s path.

Stores are provided with easy to use interfaces for the data, weather information, and SMS notification of trouble ( people in unauthorized areas or left packages ) to security personal.

Customers in shopping centres are having their every move tracked by a new type of surveillance that listens in on the whisperings of their mobile phones.

The technology can tell when people enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there, and what route they take as they walked around.

The device cannot access personal details about a person’s identity or contacts, but privacy campaigners expressed concern about potential intrusion should the data fall into the wrong hands.

The surveillance mechanism works by monitoring the signals produced by mobile handsets and then locating the phone by triangulation – measuring the phone’s distance from three receivers.
Related Links

It has already been installed in two shopping centres, including Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth, and three more centres will begin using it next month, Times Online has learnt. [ read more

See also:
Simulation to track 3D location in GSM through simulation and real life
Data retention effectively changes the behavior of citizens in Germany

Of all the companies watching me I can’t imagine one that thrills me less than Comcast. They have already been filtering and throttling our net traffic. Not content with collecting your packets they now plan to watch you in your living room. All for your own benefit of course.

If you have some tinfoil handy, now might be a good time to fashion a hat. At the Digital Living Room conference today, Gerard Kunkel, Comcast’s senior VP of user experience, told me the cable company is experimenting with different camera technologies built into devices so it can know who’s in your living room.

The idea being that if you turn on your cable box, it recognizes you and pulls up shows already in your profile or makes recommendations. If parents are watching TV with their children, for example, parental controls could appear to block certain content from appearing on the screen. Kunkel also said this type of monitoring is the “holy grail” because it could help serve up specifically tailored ads. Yikes. . . . [read more Comcast cameras to start watching you?
]

See also:
ATT Big brother or savior?

Swarm stuff may seem like the newest bleeding edge in artificial intelligence, but long before the replicators appeared, Brooks and Flynn were already planning in 1989 to invade celestial bodies with swarms of bots.

Complex systems and complex missions take years of planning and force launches to become incredibly expensive. The longer the planning and the more expensive the mission, the more catastrophic if it fails. The solution has always been to plan better, add redundancy, test thoroughly and use high quality components. Based on our experience in building ground based mobile robots (legged and wheeled) we argue here for cheap, fast missions using large numbers of mass produced simple autonomous robots that are small by today’s standards (1 to 2 Kg). We argue that the time between mission conception and implementation can be radically reduced, that launch mass can be slashed, that totally autonomous robots can be more reliable than ground controlled robots, and that large numbers of robots can change the tradeoff between reliability of individual components and overall mission success. Lastly, we suggest that within a few years it will be possible at modest cost to invade a planet with millions of tiny robots. [ read more Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System ]

Papers:
Heterogeneous Multi Robot Cooperation ( pdf )
Today the earwig, tomorrow the man
Intelligence with out reason ( pdf )

More Information:
MIT AI Lab: Mobot Group
Kevin Kelly: Machines with Attitude
Retired Robots – Hannibal and Attila
Attila: A Six Legged Autonomous Walking Robot

See also:
Google will pay you 20 million to send your robot to the moon

You realize that that ‘every click you make, every link you take’ they are watching you. How many times have you Googled ‘cars’ and had nothing but auto ads show up on every site you visit for a month?

Not content to track your clicks and websites neuromarketers are taking things to a whole new level and tracking the firing neurons in your brain.

Neuroscience and marketing had a love child a few years back. Its name – big surprise – is neuromarketing, and the ugly little fellow is growing up. Corporate pitchmen have always wanted to get inside our skulls. The more accurately they can predict how we’ll react to stimuli in the marketplace, from prices to packages to adverts, the more money they can pull from our pockets and transfer to their employers’ coffers.

. . .

But thanks to recent breakthroughs in brain science, companies can now actually see what goes on inside our minds when we shop. Teams of academic and corporate neuromarketers have begun to hook people up to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines to map how their neurons respond to products and pitches. . . . [ read more Neuromarketing could make mind reading the ad-man's ultimate tool ]

fMRI’s got off to a rough start in the mind reading business. While each individual could be mapped, we’re all different. The neuron that lights up in my brain when I see a chair is not the neuron that lights up in your brain when you see a chair. Lucky for us or we’d all have to take fMRIs to get on airplanes.

But when it comes to brain patterns for anticipation, happiness, etc patterns in brains are easily picked out by fMRIs and tend to be the same across us all.

Subliminal advertising is illegal in the UK. But it still legal in the US and despite many reports it has no effect on us, recent studies show it does effect us. So should neuromarketing be legal? If it is not legal how do we prevent its use? And if it works well for soda manufacturers how long before the government starts using it?

Papers:
Neural Predictors of Purchases ( pdf)

More information:
Neuromarketing blog
Marketing to your mind ( TIME )