Before making the jump to Wall Street, IBM’s Watson has already been busy working for health care organizations, putting its natural language interpretation skills to good use. With the new job at Citigroup, Watson will work primarily with risk management, helping to “analyze customer needs and process financial, economic and client data to advance and personalize digital banking.”

To get Watson ready for the job, Citigroup is training our robot overlord about regulatory practices and financial jargon. Presumably, Watson will be a little more ethical than some of the not-so-nice people on Wall Street, sticking to the facts and minimizing the shady practices. Then again, Watson can only be as ethical as its employers that program it.

There are already plenty of people who use computer programs to pick their stocks, make their trades, and otherwise guide their financial decisions. This is just the next logical step.

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Developed by the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception Lab (GRASP), these nano quadrocopters (or quadrotors, if you prefer) are able to fly in various complex formations, navigating through the environment with complex “autonomous swarm behavior.” The very sound of the swarm in the video below gives me chills.

I’m instantly reminded of Michael Crichton’s Prey. The thing with a swarm is that they have a “collective intelligence” of sorts, so it doesn’t matter if you take out one or two units from the group. They operate as a collective, making them virtually unstoppable. Where’s John Connor when you need him?

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The rapid improvements in Artificial Intelligence in the past decade have manifested themselves most recently in Watson, IBM’s supercomputer that obliterated the human competition in Jeopardy, and from Taiwan, an anthropomorphic robot head that uses cameras built into its eyes to read sheet music and sing while making twitchy facial expressions. With AI becoming more and more complex, it begs a very old question; do androids dream of electric sheep? Visual artist Benjamin Grosser asks us more philosophical questions, “As these systems grow in complexity, or intelligence, how does that intelligence change what passes through them? Further, how does that intelligence evolve to make its own work for its own needs?” Could a machine be original or creative? To deal with all these existential musings, Grosser has created an Interactive Robotic Painting Machine that uses sounds from the environment to inspire its art. According to Grosser, the machine even responds to criticism. Check out the painting robot in the video.

Interactive Robotic Painting Machine (2011) from benjamin grosser on Vimeo.

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“The factory of the future will have two employees: A man and a dog. The man’s job will be to feed the dog. The dog’s job will be to prevent the man from touching any of the automated equipment.”

This famous Warren Bennis prediction has been coming closer and closer to reality with each passing year, but new technologies are suggesting Artificial Intelligence may not be contained to the manufacturing industries forever. In fact, it might not be long before human customer service workers and receptionists are a thing of the past.

Earlier this year, tech enthusiasts and old folks’ homes around the world watched as IBM’s Watson robot destroyed its competition on Jeopardy. As Watson was an AI-focussed creation — a synthetic human-like “mind” encased in a mass of computer equipment — it was the perfect candidate to someday put millions of specialized call-centre staffers around the globe out of work. IBM is also working to develop a Watson system that will be able to help diagnose patients in hospitals to help with tricky symptoms and, hopefully, cut down on hospital wait times.

But with its huge physical size and no in-person interaction or interface, Watson is bound to virtual applications for the time being. So what about the receptionists I mentioned? Don’t worry: Chyi-Yeu Lin and colleagues at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology have built a singing, disembodied animatronic robot head that will someday put every last unskilled desk clerk and Walmart greeter in the unemployment line once and for all.

So far, the anthropomorphic robot can use the cameras built into its eyes to read sheet music — including lyrics in 40 different languages, calculate pitch, tempo, rhythm and even emotion – and sing the song back while making facial expressions to match (see video below). So far, this is a neat parlour trick and, with its remarkably creepy face and jerky jaw movements, it might be a good fit for Chucky Cheese’s animatronic kiddie-concert line-up. But with a bit more development, the implications are huge.

With cameras in the eyes and such advanced optical recognition software, this thing could do away with almost the entire front-end staff at a pub: The bouncer (checking IDs at the door), the bar clerk (taking drink and food orders for the bartender and kitchen staff, keeping track of tabs, charging customers, etc); not to mention the entertainment (songs by request, karaoke duet partner for those with no friends).

That said, trying to interact with this thing in person in its current state — especially while getting smashed — might make it hard to keep your drinks down.

As mentioned by Leslie Katz of Cnet’s Crave blog, humans have a psychological defense mechanism that makes things like Taiwan’s robot head look absolutely repulsive: The “Uncanny Valley” theory, which shows humans are disproportionately disgusted and unempathetic towards things which look almost human but have subtle, noticeable differences. It’s the point at which our minds stop seeing a robot doing a good job of acting human, and start seeing a human who’s either heavily diseased or just doing a terrible job of acting normal.

There are some obvious fixes for this problem. For one, let the robotics specialists do their thing, but source out the “skin and hair” work to the guys who made Mission Impossible 2. Some help with the jaw animatronics wouldn’t hurt, either, especially to overcome that ridiculous, confused-looking gape the robot head has while reading.

But since this Uncanny Valley response seems to be strongest to the things that resemble humans, why not have some fun with this thing? Rather than the Mission Impossible guys, why not hire Tim Burton’s crew? We have the chance here to make our receptionists and greeters look like whatever we want them to look like. They could resemble the mascot of the business where they’re installed. They could look like Predator. This is our chance to make a whole faux-species of customer service workers, and if it’s going to make global unemployment numbers spike, we might as well milk some amusement out of it.

But if this robotic head is being trained to interface with humans for service jobs with very little knowledge after that, and Watson is being trained to become the most helpful database of knowledge for professional applications but lacks any sort of personal human-to-humanoid interface, the real question becomes “how and when will the two be combined?”

Feel free to share your insights and predictions in the comment section below.

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If you thought that robots are nothing more than humanoid thoughtless piles of iron that are controlled by real humans, well, you’re wrong. Future robots could be even smarter than some of us. And who else could create such a robot if its not Skynet? The Japanese! The Hasegawa Group at the Tokyo Institute of Technology to be precise, they are developing a robot that can think, learn and act, all by itself, thanks to the all mighty power of Artificial Intelligence (AI). By using a technology called SOINN (Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Network) the robot can think as humans do, even when taking on a task it has never done before, based on its past experience and knowledge.

The robot was subjected to a series of experiments involving problem solving and making movements in the correct order. It was told to pour a glass of water, make it cold and give it to someone. Being aware of the surroundings and the situation, it performed the action step by step: it poured water into a glass, and then it realized that in order to make it cold it should put ice in it. Since its hands were full, it put the bottle down and then took the ice and put it in the glass.

It is also well educated. If it doesn’t know how to do something, it stops and says “I can’t do this because I don’t know how.” So there you have it, our future is doomed by ice fetching robots.

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Do you remember Tamagotchi? Those little keychain things that acted as virtual pets, forcing you to feed them and play with them, otherwise they’d die return to their home planet? Well, Grandroids are kind of similar, but not really.

You could even say that Steve Grand’s project goes a fair bit beyond something like Nintendogs. The idea is that he’s hoping to create a game wherein you have “real alien life forms who can live in a virtual world on your computer.” The kicker is that they are supposed to have real artificial intelligence, complete with the ability to learn.

He says that they have “real” virtual biochemical reactions and genes, as well as complex networks of virtual brain cells. Given the advances in AI in video games, this doesn’t seem like that far ahead of curve. I could be wrong.

Either way, you can peek the weird video below and choose whether or not you want to back Grand’s grand project. He’s looking for money on Kickstarter and, as of this writing, he’s less than $500 from his funding goal of $27,000. Who needs Dragon’s Den?

[KickStarter]

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A high-powered artificial intelligence computer – capable of human logic, linguistics, deciphering puns and instantly searching millions of pages of reference material and encyclopedias for information asked for indirectly – to be tested amongst the smartest contenders in a televised game show.

What is Jeopardy? Alex.

Alex Trebek will be hosting the show next month as IBM’s 2,880-core Linux-based AI supercomputer, Watson, will be taking on two of Jeopardy’s former champions in a full-length episode. The opponents will be Ken Jennings, who holds a world record for most consecutive wins on the show after 74 appearances, as well as Brad Rutter, who holds the record for the largest amount of money won on Jeopardy – $3.25 million.

Only the computer’s screen will be visible at the pedestal, but the rest of the computer will actually remain in the studio’s basement. It will have no internet connection during the game. Rather, all of its answers will be the result of four years of logic programming and 200 million pages of data holding thousands of years of human knowledge condensed into its servers.

Watson’s thought process has been programmed into a multitude of information-processing algorithms. When Trebek asks a question, it starts be interpreting that question, searching for data, grouping the data by word associations; it decides on an answer (which it words as a question, as this is Jeopardy). And it actually calculates how sure it is about its answer, with an 85 per cent accuracy rate. If it’s feeling sure about its answer, Watson calculates a wager and hits the buzzer before answering.

At the end of a practice round yesterday, Watson was in the lead by $1000 to Jennings and Rutter. He even correctly answered questions from the category researchers were worried about: Before and After. To the clue “Snoopy’s owner who’s one of the most poisonous spiders in the United States,” Watson gave the right “Who is Charlie Brown Recluse?” answer.

“We’ve created a system that can interact in a very, very special way,” said IBM research director John E. Kelly III in one interview. In artificial intelligence, “People spend their lifetimes trying to advance that science inches. What Watson does, and has demonstrated, is the ability to advance the field of art intelligence by miles. People who are experts in this area who have seen Watson privately said, ‘I never thought I would have seen this in my lifetime.’”

It seems Watson’s a lady-charmer, too. He took nearly every answer in a category dubbed “Chicks Dig Me.”

Is there anything this computer can’t do? Yes.

Watson doesn’t understand human speech. But Kelly says the type of technology powering Watson tends to double every 18 to 24 months, and believes it’s only a matter of time before it catches up with human capabilities.

Once it does, IBM hopes to bring Watson-type AI to health care. With its ability to instantly sort through millions of pages of medical information based on the same information doctors typically collect – symptoms, environmental changes and influences, etc – it could aid doctors in giving more accurate diagnoses.

Other potential applications may be call centres and help desks, among other things. But the most profitable application of the technology, says the Globe and Mail, would be in the field of business analytics (which, on a personal note, would put about half of my friends in Argentina out of a job).

“Thanks to the digital revolution, large companies routinely collect far more data than they can effectively analyze – everything from customer information to buying habits to website metrics,” writes Omar El Akkad, tech reporter with the Globe and Mail. Some of the biggest tech firms in the world are racing to develop solutions that can not only sort through the massive influx of information, but make the best possible business decisions based on that data. With Watson, IBM may have a tool that searches with the speed of a supercomputer, but thinks with something approximating a human mind.

The project’s lead researcher, David Ferrucci, says the computer even has the ability to recognize the areas in which it lacks a proper understanding – a concept that has been the premise of many sci-fi/horrors. But when asked about the possibility of the advanced AI potentially turning against the people it was created to help, Ferrucci gave only an ominous “That’s science fiction…We’re not even close to that.”

Watson is set to redefine what we know of “User Interface,” and once the technology shrinks down a bit, may be a huge step towards (everyone’s thinking it, I’m just saying it) intelligent robots, just like in the movies.

The human vs. machine Jeopardy match will be airing Feb. 14 to 16; we’ll remind you beforehand.

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