by Pavel Simakov, first entry on 2005-12-15
The Context
What you will find below are the numerous clippings about Google’s quest for Artificial Intelligence. When I reread these, I don’t worry about the big brother effect and I don’t get paranoid for the privacy of my searches and the shopping preferences…
What worries me is that no other big player is taking this quest seriously. I hope that the leaders of ecommerce, government research, banking and financial sectors will take a good look at what Google is doing. Are we all just gonna invest in all sorts of short term crap and watch them win without even putting up the fight? Not the fight to stop or prosecute them, but the fight to complete with them, to be on par…
Carnegie Mellon Professor Chosen To Head Google Engineering Office in Pittsburgh, 2005
...Moore and his collaborators have been developing new ways to find patterns in massive amounts of data and building new machine learning systems that have been deployed in many commercial applications, as well as in the fields of medicine and physics...
...Andrew Moore has built his career on the twin challenges of developing techniques to extract patterns from large data sets and applying these machine learning methods to real-life problems… He has shown that machine learning can be applied in diverse ways, ranging from searching for distant asteroids to detecting possible bioterrorism incidents based on patterns of people buying over-the-counter medications. His talents line up well with Google's mission to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful...
TURING'S CATHEDRAL, 2005
...Sorry, but the big news at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year was not about the international sales of your new book. It was about the activities of a new (second year) exhibitor: Google. What is Google doing at the Frankfurt Book Fair? And why has a consortium of publishers filed a lawsuit against them?...
...George Dyson visited Google last week at the invitation of some Google engineers... "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI."...
...Some sincerely believe we are entering a golden age of wonder and Google is leading the way. And I am pleased to add from personal experience that the leading players, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are fine individuals: very serious, highly intelligent, principled. They don't come any better. Still, others believe there are reasons for legitimate fear of a (very near) future world in which the world's knowledge is privatized by one corporation. This could be a problem, a very big problem...
Peter Norvig heads Google Research, 2005
...He has over fifty publications in Computer Science, concentrating on Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Software Engineering, including the books Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (the leading textbook in the field)...
Fancy math takes on je ne sais quoi, 2005
...The latest step comes later this month when the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an arm of the United States government, announces results of its tests of several machine-translation systems. The agency is expected to give top honors, not to the linguistic-savvy programs at universities and elsewhere, but to a newcomer: Internet search company Google...
...Google has improved the algorithms for its MT program, ..., by feeding its computers the equivalent of 1 million books of text, using sources such as parallel translations of United Nations documents...
Image Labeling for Blind Helps Machines 'Think', 2006
...Asking people to label image after image, however, is asking them to become bored quickly. To make it less tedious and more fun, Luis von Ahn, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, has created the ESP Game...
...The promise of von Ahn's research is that it will allow computers to replicate the complex abilities of the brain. "What he's doing is mining the ability of humans," says Manuel Blum, a Carnegie Mellon professor who advised von Ahn's dissertation...Von Ahn says he has one goal: "To be able to use all of this data and to have computers be able to do pretty much everything we can do." The end result is a kind of artificial intelligence that would drive a computer to think and act like a human -- the kind only seen in science fiction movies...
NASA and Google to Bring Space Exploration Down to Earth, 2006
...NASA Ames Research Center and Google have signed a Space Act Agreement that formally establishes a relationship to work together on a variety of challenging technical problems ranging from large-scale data management and massively distributed computing, to human-computer interfaces...
...NASA and Google intend to collaborate in a variety of areas, including incorporating agency data sets in Google Earth, focusing on user studies and cognitive modeling for human computer interaction, and science data search utilizing a variety of Google features and products...
Google hires the cream of the crop, 2006
...Over the last two years, Google has lured some of the best and brightest minds in technology and science to join the search giant's lava lamp and snack-filled offices...If there's a master plan in recruiting all this top talent beyond the obvious benefit of having all that intelligence under the same figurative roof, Google isn't saying..."Some of the hires are already successful and perhaps well-off, and are going to Google because they see it as a place where they can continue to make a mark. When you helped architect the Internet already, what do you do next?" said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch...
Google’s Internal Company Goals, 2006
...Google wants to be the best in search – no surprise here. To reach that goal, Google wants to have the world’s top AI research laboratory...
Google users promised artificial intelligence, 2006
...Speaking at a conference for Google's European partners, entitled Zeitgeist '06, on the outskirts of London last night Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and co-founder Larry Page gave an insight into perhaps the most ambitious project the Californian business is undertaking - artificial intelligence (AI). "The ultimate search engine would understand everything in the world. It would understand everything that you asked it and give you back the exact right thing instantly," Mr Page told an audience of the digerati representing firms from Warner Music and AOL to BSkyB and the BBC. "You could ask 'what should I ask Larry?' and it would tell you."...
Artificial General Intelligence: Now Is the Time, 2007
...The creation of a superhumanly intelligent AI system could be possible within 10 years, with an "AI Manhattan Project," says Ben Goertzel...
Google's Larry Page talks science, 2007
"We have some people at Google (who) are really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale," Page said to a packed Hilton ballroom of scientists. "It's not as far off as people think."
Google AdSense by Genetic algorithm?, 2007
...A user who types “Italy vacation” into a Google search box might see ads about Tuscany or cheap flights to Europe. Were the same user to subsequently search for “weather,” Google will assume there is a link between “Italy vacation” and “weather” and deliver ads tied to local weather conditions in Italy... I wonder, with that massive amount of ads + searches Google has, if there’s some merit in allowing the software to figure it out for itself... evolutionary algorithms, self-learning style...
Google processes over 20 petabytes of data per day, 2008
...Google currently processes over 20 petabytes of data per day through an average of 100,000 MapReduce jobs spread across its massive computing clusters...Twenty petabytes (20,000 terabytes) per day is a tremendous amount of data processing and a key contributor to Google's continued market dominance...It's some fascinating large-scale processing data that makes your head spin and appreciate the years of distributed computing fine-tuning applied to today's large problems...
The Google Data Mine: Are You Using It Or Is It Using You?, 2008
...Google “knows” a lot, actually. Google keeps track of searches, and even keeps a file on your particular searches based on your IP address or Google login... If you could tap into that database, you would be able to construct detailed profiles about individuals — their interests, buying habits, health concerns, family issues, and more. You can uncover signs suggesting whether a company is succeeding or failing, whether it is considering a merger or acquisition, and what product lines it may be expanding into. You can track historical trends in elections, economics, health care, and any number of other areas that have significant social, financial, and political value...
...So far, the Google features that we have seen have been focused primarily on reacting to current market trends. People become interested in something — the new version of the X-Box, finding an electrician online, Super Bowl memorabilia, etc. — and Google is positioned to help people connect with their potential customers. However, with enough information, a company like Google can do more than simply react to the present with lightning speed. It can also see the future, or even create the future. Before you think this is just a paranoid science-fiction daydream, give the issue some consideration...
Machine Learning Summit, 2008
...Machine Learning is a branch of Artificial Intelligence in which, naturally enough, the aim is to get computers to learn: things like improving performance over time, and recognizing general tendencies among a number of specific cases. Machine Learning helps us to estimate what content users like most, what content is even legitimate, and how to match ads to content. It also plays key roles in products such as Google Translate and 1-800-GOOG-411...
Google Enhances Translate Tool with New Tags and Widgets, 2008
...Despite long-time efforts to perfect the art of automatic translation, this field, along with the rest of artificial intelligence, hasn't quite reached the stage where it can understand (or even represent properly) the contexts and semantics that are typical of the human mind...
... One of the most publicized competitions that involve a Turing test is the Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence, in which the best "chat bots", or automated chatting robots, compete against each other attempting to simulate a human chatter to pass the Turing test... According to many experts, even with all the investments Google has been making in the field of making their translation tool smarter than ever, their results won't be satisfactory until they will be able to successfully "parse the meaning" of sentences, something we are currently still very far from achieving from a technological point of view. Today, Google's translator relies on what many consider "the next best thing", extensive language-to-language words and expressions dictionary-like databases and occasional Web searches to provide some basic understanding of the context where needed...
IBM aims to get smart about AI, 2009
...In the coming months, IBM will unveil technology that it believes will vastly improve the way computers access and use data by unifying the different schools of thought surrounding artificial intelligence...
...The theory underlying IBM's Unstructured Information Management Architecture is the Combination Hypothesis, which states that statistical machine learning--the sort of data-ranking intelligence behind search site Google--syntactical artificial intelligence, and other techniques can be married in the relatively near future...