A Computer Passed the Turing Test

A computer has finally passed the Turing Test. You may now commence the global panic.

Two years ago, Eugene Goostman, the artificial intelligence computer program that masquerades as a wise-cracking 13-year old boy, won the Turing Test contest, fooling the judges into believing the all-digital Eugene is a flesh and blood person 29% of the times they spoke to him.

In the latest contest, held this weekend, the Goostman program managed to accomplish the feat 33% of the time — not only winning the competition, but passing the official Turing Test threshold for the first time.

Back in 1950, famed computer scientist, mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing posited in a now famous paper entitled Computing Machinery and Intelligence that by the year 2000 it would be possible for a computer to play what's known as "the imitation game" well enough that "an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning."

In other words, Turing predicted that a computer could answer text-based questions in such a way that it could, roughly one third of the time, be mistaken for a human interlocutor.

Eugene Goostman is Turing Test-beating, super-computer-driven digital 13-year-old.

Goostman notched that achievement during Turing Test 2014, held on Saturday at the Royal Society in London. It competed against four other supercomputers. All of them were required to hold a five-minute, keyboard-based conversation with the judges. According to the University of Reading, none of the programmers were given topics or questions in advance.

But Goostman is not designed to know the answer to every question. Developer Vladimir Veselov explained his programming philosophy: "He can claim that he knows anything, but his age also makes it perfectly reasonable that he doesn't know everything. We spent a lot of time developing a character with a believable personality."

The team worked on Goostman's "dialog controller" to achieve more conversational responses. "Going forward," said Veselov, "we plan to make Eugene smarter and continue working on improving what we refer to as 'conversation logic'."

The key to believability may be that fallibility. Since people tend to believe computers are unlikely to get anything wrong, programmers competing in Turning Test typically introduce errors. As Turing noted in 1950, "If it is rigged up to give answers to questions as in the imitation game, there will be some questions to which it will either give a wrong answer, or fail to give an answer at all however much time is allowed for a reply."

Doubters

Not everyone is buying this as a tipping point for artificial intelligence. "It doesn’t make a dammed bit of difference to robotics or AI,” said Rodney Brooks Professor of Robotics (emeritus) at MIT and founder, Chairman and CTO of Rethink Robotics. Brooks told Mashablethat Turing was, in 1950, posing a rhetorical question.

In fact, the "imitate game" was originally designed to see if a man or women could fool an interviewer into inaccurately guessing their gender. "People spend so much energy on a rhetorical question ... [Turing] wasn’t saying that [the test] was the definition of intelligence and then we’d be off to the races."

Computers listening and responding to our questions in seemingly human ways is not new. In the 1960s a so-called "chatbot" named ELIZA fooled some of its interlocutors. You can check out a version of ELIZA here.

These days, many of us are already carrying around intelligent voice assistants in our pockets. Apple's Siri for example can answer a variety of natural language queries, like "How do I look?" with "I don't know. But I guess you look pretty good," and Windows Phone's Cortana can answer, "What are you doing today?" with this cheeky response, a dig at the iPhone: "multitasking."

Neither voice assistant is equipped to carry on five minutes of uninterrupted conversation, however. You'll notice that when Siri doesn't have the answer, it sends you to search.

And if you're frightened by the notion of a computer that can at least appear to think? Turing's advice in 1950 was the equivalent of "get over it."

We like to believe that Man is in some subtle way superior to the rest of creation. It is best if he can be shown to be necessarily superior, for then there is no danger of him losing his commanding position ... I do not think that this argument is sufficiently substantial to require refutation. Consolation would be more appropriate: perhaps this should be sought in the transmigration of souls.

You can try an online version of Eugene Goostman right here. Don’t be surprised if he fools you too.

2013 ACM Turing Award Goes to Pioneer Who Advanced Reliability and Consistency of Computing Systems

Leslie Lamport Contributed to Theory and Practice of Building Distributed Computing Systems that Work as Intended

Leslie Lamport (photo courtesy of Microsoft Research)

Award Citation

For fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent systems, notably the invention of concepts such as causality and logical clocks, safety and liveness, replicated state machines, and sequential consistency.

Longer CitationLeslie Lamport originated many of the key concepts of distributed and concurrent computing, including causality and logical clocks, replicated state machines, and sequential consistency. Along with others, he invented the notion of Byzantine failure and algorithms for reaching agreement despite such failures. He contributed to the development and understanding of proof methods for concurrent systems, notably by introducing the notions of safety and liveness as the proper generalizations of partial correctness and termination to the concurrent setting. In addition, he devised important distributed algorithms and developed a substantial collection of formal modeling and verification methods and tools that have been used to improve the quality of real distributed systems. His contributions share a common theme: to impose clear and well-defined coherence on the seemingly chaotic behavior of a collection of distributed processes. They make it substantially easier for algorithm designers to design distributed algorithms, and for programmers to write distributed programs.

Background

Leslie Lamport is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. He received the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award for his contributions to the theory and practice of concurrent programming and fault-tolerant computing.  He was also awarded the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing for his paper “Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults.” He won the IEEE John von Neumann Medal and was also elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Prior to his current position, his career included extended tenures at SRI International and Digital Equipment Corporation (later Compaq Corporation). The author or co-author of nearly 150 publications on concurrent and distributed computing and their applications, he holds a B.S. degree in mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from Brandeis University.

ACM will present the 2013 A.M. Turing Award at its annual Awards Banquet on June 21 in San Francisco, California.

soft robotic fish moves like the real thing

A new robotic fish can change direction almost as rapidly as a real fish

Soft robots — which don’t just have soft exteriors but are also powered by fluid flowing through flexible channels — have become a sufficiently popular research topic that they now have their own journal, Soft Robotics. In the first issue of that journal, out this month, MIT researchers report the first self-contained autonomous soft robot capable of rapid body motion: a “fish” that can execute an escape maneuver, convulsing its body to change direction in just a fraction of a second, or almost as quickly as a real fish can.

Andrew Marchese, doctoral candidate in EECS at MIT (right), and Dr. Daniela Rus, professor in EECS and Director of CSAIL, hold a soft robotic fish developed by the Distributed Robotics Laboratory. 

“We’re excited about soft robots for a variety of reasons,” says Daniela Rus, a professor of computer science and engineering, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and one of the researchers who designed and built the fish. “As robots penetrate the physical world and start interacting with people more and more, it’s much easier to make robots safe if their bodies are so wonderfully soft that there’s no danger if they whack you.”

Another reason to study soft robots, Rus says, is that “with soft machines, the whole robotic planning problem changes.” In most robotic motion-planning systems, avoiding collisions with the environment is the highest priority. That frequently leads to inefficient motion, because the robot has to settle for collision-free trajectories that it can find quickly.

With soft robots, collision poses little danger to either the robot or the environment. “In some cases, it is actually advantageous for these robots to bump into the environment, because they can use these points of contact as means of getting to the destination faster,” Rus says.

But the new robotic fish was designed to explore yet a third advantage of soft robots: “The fact that the body deforms continuously gives these machines an infinite range of configurations, and this is not achievable with machines that are hinged,” Rus says. The continuous curvature of the fish’s body when it flexes is what allows it to change direction so quickly. “A rigid-body robot could not do continuous bending,” she says.

Escape velocity

The robotic fish was built by Andrew Marchese, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and lead author on the new paper, where he’s joined by Rus and postdoc Cagdas D. Onal. Each side of the fish’s tail is bored through with a long, tightly undulating channel. Carbon dioxide released from a canister in the fish’s abdomen causes the channel to inflate, bending the tail in the opposite direction.

Each half of the fish tail has just two control parameters: the diameter of the nozzle that releases gas into the channel and the amount of time it’s left open. In experiments, Marchese found that the angle at which the fish changes direction — which can be as extreme as 100 degrees — is almost entirely determined by the duration of inflation, while its speed is almost entirely determined by the nozzle diameter. That “decoupling” of the two parameters, he says, is something that biologists had observed in real fish.

“To be honest, that’s not something I designed for,” Marchese says. “I designed for it to look like a fish, but we got the same inherent parameter decoupling that real fish have.”

That points to yet another possible application of soft robotics, Rus says, in biomechanics. “If you build an artificial creature with a particular bio-inspired behavior, perhaps the solution for the engineered behavior could serve as a hypothesis for understanding whether nature might do it in the same way,” she says.

Marchese built the fish in Rus’ lab, where other researchers are working on printable robotics. He used the lab’s 3-D printer to build the mold in which he cast the fish’s tail and head from silicone rubber and the polymer ring that protects the electronics in the fish’s guts.

The long haul

The fish can perform 20 or 30 escape maneuvers, depending on their velocity and angle, before it exhausts its carbon dioxide canister. But the comparatively simple maneuver of swimming back and forth across a tank drains the canister quickly. “The fish was designed to explore performance capabilities, not long-term operation,” Marchese says. “Next steps for future research are taking that system and building something that’s compromised on performance a little bit but increases longevity.”

A new version of the fish that should be able to swim continuously for around 30 minutes will use pumped water instead of carbon dioxide to inflate the channels, but otherwise, it will use the same body design, Marchese says. Rus envisions that such a robot could infiltrate schools of real fish to gather detailed information about their behavior in the natural habitat.

“All of our algorithms and control theory are pretty much designed with the idea that we’ve got rigid systems with defined joints,” says Barry Trimmer, a biology professor at Tufts University who specializes in biomimetic soft robots. “That works really, really well as long as the world is pretty predictable. If you’re in a world that is not — which, to be honest, is everywhere outside a factory situation — then you start to lose some of your advantage.”

The premise of soft robotics, Trimmer says, is that “if we learn how to incorporate all these other sorts of materials whose response you can’t predict exactly, if we can learn to engineer that to deal with the uncertainty and still be able to control the machines, then we’re going to have much better machines.”

The MIT researchers’ robot fish “is a great demonstration of that principle,” Trimmer says. “It’s an early stage of saying, ‘We know the actuator isn’t giving us all the control we’d like, but can we actually still exploit it to get the performance we want?’ And they’re able to show that yes, they can.”

International Google Workshop with 19 nationals and 3 Indian GSA(s)

During my 3 month(August-October) training on "Specialized Web Applications Development on Open Source tools" @ CDAC Noida-India,i decided to organize a workshop on Google apps for my classmates  who are IT professionals working for their governments from 19 countries as explained below;

Agenda :

The overall theme of the event was on how efficiently and collaboratively we as civil servants can be in our daily our jobs using Google Apps. 29 civil servants from 19 different countries were trained on specific Google Apps (Drive, Docs, Google+ , Google Hangouts ) that serves these purposes.

Target Audience:

29 international civil servants from 19 countries:

Tanzania,Nigeria, Mauritius, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Tajikistan, Libya, Mongolia, Bhutan, Uganda, Cuba, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Uzbekistan,Ivory Coast

Venue: CDAC-Noida

Date: October 15^th ,2013

About the Workshop:

It was a very interactive session with such a nice audience . I started the session by introducing myself and then the 3 Indian Google Student Ambassadors(GSA) whom i invited to workshop.Then Manoj Bingi(GSA-IIT Delhi) started the session with  Google Docs and then ended with a Hand-on Session (Demonstration) .

The Hand-On session was the best part as all  people practiced what they have been presented before on their PCs.They were excited,very excited.We were moving around their desks to provide any assistance they need.

A brief presentation about Google Drive was the 2nd session and was done by Pranshoo Srivastava (GSA-IEC College of Engineering and Technology) which was accompanied by an awesome and interactive hands-on session.

At the End of session when we asked “What is Google? Is it only a search Engine?” then we got such nice answers: “Google is everything”, “1..2…3…Google” , “Google is Everywhere” 

As we moved more closer to our last part of Google Hangout which were handled by Pranshoo Srivastava and Jas Singh Bhasin(GSA-Amity University) ,we've noticed that the audience were more interested on demo session of Hangout when at the same time all 4 of us done a Hangout in class with some Audience by inviting them also to have Experience the Hangout.

Many questions were asked by the audience and we also tried to give them best answers we had. It was a very healthy session with such a nice audience from different parts of the world.I learned alot  from this international community and also from newly met friends whom we made a great team with a such a short time,i am talking about these 3 Indian GSAs.

Thanks to:

Obum Okeke-University Programs Lead-Google Sub Saharan Africa
Deepak Sridhar-University Programs Lead-Google India
Pranshu Srivastava(GSA-IEC College of Engineering and Technology);

Manoj Bingi(Google Student Ambassador(GSA)-IIT Delhi);

Jas Singh Bhasin(GSA-Amity University);

more pictures

Thank You

GOLDWASSER AND MICALI WIN TURING AWARD

Professors Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali

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MIT professors Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali have won the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) A.M. Turing Award for their pioneering work in the fields of cryptography and complexity theory. The two developed new mechanisms for how information is encrypted and secured, work that is widely applicable today in communications protocols, Internet transactions and cloud computing. They also made fundamental advances in the theory of computational complexity, an area that focuses on classifying computational problems according to their inherent difficulty. 

Goldwasser and Micali were credited for “revolutionizing the science of cryptography” and developing the gold standard for enabling secure Internet transactions. The Turing Award, which is presented annually by the ACM, is often described as the “Nobel Prize in computing” and comes with a $250,000 prize.

“For three decades Shafi and Silvio have been leading the field of cryptography by asking fundamental questions about how we share and receive information. I am thrilled that they have been honored for their pioneering work, and particularly excited that they have been recognized for their achievements as a team,” says Professor Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). “We are honored and privileged to have this tremendous duo here at CSAIL.”

Goldwasser is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a professor of computer science and applied mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. She leads the Theory of Computation Group at CSAIL. Micali is the Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT and leads the Information and Computer Security Group at CSAIL, along with Goldwasser and Professor Ronald L. Rivest.

“I am delighted that Professors Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali have been recognized and honored with the prestigious ACM Turing Award for their fundamental contributions to the field of provable security. Their work has had a major impact on a broad spectrum of applications touching everyday lives and has opened exciting new research opportunities,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, head of MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). “This is a tremendous honor for the EECS department and inspiring for the large number of students and faculty who have benefited from interactions with Shafi and Silvio.”

Goldwasser and Micali began collaborating as graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley in 1980. While toying around with the idea of how to securely play a game of poker over the phone, they devised a scheme for encrypting and ensuring the security of single bits of data. From there, Goldwasser and Micali proved that their scheme could be scaled up to tackle much more complex problems, such as communications protocols and Internet transactions.

Based on their work, Goldwasser and Micali published a paper in 1982, titled “Probabilistic Encryption,” which laid the framework for modern cryptography. In the paper they introduced formal security definitions, which remain the gold standard for security to this day, and pioneered randomized methods for encryption. Goldwasser and Micali proved that encryption schemes must be randomized rather than deterministic, with many possible encrypted texts corresponding to each message, a development that revolutionized the study of cryptography and laid the foundation for the theory of cryptographic security.

They also introduced the simulation paradigm, which demonstrates a system’s security by showing that an enemy could have simulated all the information he obtained during the employment of a cryptographic system, proving that the cryptographic system poses no risk. The simulation paradigm has become the most widely used method for enabling security in cryptography, going beyond privacy to address problems in authentication and integrity of data, software protection and protocols that involve many participants, such as electronic elections and auctions.

One of Goldwasser and Micali’s most significant contributions is their 1985 paper, with Charles Rackoff, titled “The Knowledge Complexity of Interactive Proof Systems.” It introduced knowledge complexity, a concept that deals with hiding information from an adversary, and is a quantifiable measure of how much “useful information” could be extracted. The paper initiated the idea of “zero-knowledge” proofs, in which interaction (the ability of provers and verifiers to send each other messages back and forth) and probabilism (the ability to toss coins to decide which messages to send) enable the establishment of a fact via a statistical argument without providing any additional information as to why it is true. 

Zero-knowledge proofs were a striking new philosophical idea that provided the essential language for speaking about security of cryptographic protocols by controlling the leakage of knowledge. Subsequent works by Oded Goldreich, Micali and Avi Wigderson, and by Michael Benor, Goldwasser and Wigderson, showed that every multiparty computation could be carried out securely, revealing to the players no more knowledge than prescribed by the desired outcome. These papers exhibited the power and utility of zero-knowledge protocols, and demonstrated their ubiquitous and omnipotent character.

The paper identified interactive proofs as a new method to verify correctness in the exchange of information. Beyond cryptography, interactive proofs can be verified much faster than classical proofs, and can be used in practice to guarantee correctness in a variety of applications such as cloud computing. In a series of works by Goldwasser, Micali and other collaborators, interactive proofs have been extended in several new directions. One direction was to include interactions between a single verifier and multiple provers, which has led to a new way to define and prove NP completeness for approximation problems (an area of active research). Another led to the development of computationally sound proofs, which can be easily compacted and verified, allowing for expedient accuracy checks.

“I am very proud to have won the Turing Award,” Goldwasser says. “Our work was very unconventional at the time. We were graduate students and let our imagination run free, from using randomized methods to encrypt single bits to enlarging the classical definition of a proof to allow a small error to setting new goals for security. Winning the award is further testimony to the fact that the cryptographic and complexity theoretic community embraced these ideas in the last 30 years.”

“I am honored by this recognition and thankful to the computer science community,” Micali adds. “As graduate students, we took some serious risks and faced a few rejections, but also received precious encouragement from exceptional mentors. I am also proud to see how far others have advanced our initial work.”

Past recipients of the Turing Award from MIT include: Manuel Blum, Fernando Corbato, Butler Lampson, Barbara Liskov, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Alan J. Perlis, Ronald L. Rivest, and Ivan Sutherland.

The Turing Award is given annually by the ACM and is named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing, who invented the idea of the computer and who helped the Allies crack the Nazi Enigma cipher during World War II. Goldwasser and Micali will formally receive the award during the ACM’s annual Awards Banquet on June 15 in San Francisco.

This article was originally written by Abby Abazorius of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory,MIT

Dar es Salaam Insitute of Technology Principal honored DIT Google Team “The google geeks”

As the institute's culture,DIT awards the students who have toped their class for each academic year.

Normally the awards are presented to these students during the best students ceremony which is always conducted one week prior to the institute's graduation ceremony.

This year the ceremony was conducted at the institute function hall “ASA LOUNGE” on January 18^th ,2013 in which the guest of honor were Mrs Christine Kilindu who is the Director of  Confederation of Tanzania Industries.

During the ceremony the guest of honor together with the principal awarded the best students and also issued a special statement to honor the Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology Google Team,”The Google Geeks”.The Principal honored the team for their exceptional contribution in making DIT community active in terms of technology and urge the team to continue with the energy they have shown so far.

Mr Ashery Mbilinyi who is the Google Student Ambassador for DIT and the founder and leader of the team,praised the recognition they have received by the principal and promised to put much more energy.

“We are very happy for the recognition we have received .We cant real say we have done a lot so far as most of our goals are not yet accomplished. We have mapped the whole university campus during Africa Map Up week and held 7^th position between 65 African Sub Saharan Africa Universities and held small trainings to our fellow students about Google Apps and Google's APIs. We have also created google groups for each class in computer studies department as a start and deployed Google Apps for Education with Students Organization (DITSO) domain www.ditso.ac.tz.Currently we are working on registering students to start using firstname.lastname@ditso.ac.tz email address which is g mail in back end. A DIT where students will practice and live technology everyday is our dream” Ashery said

Currently the team have 8 members who are Ashery Mbilinyi BEng10 Computer Engineering,Emmanuel Mboso BEng10 Computer Engineering,Abdul Bashiru,Elibariki Augustino,Joseph Luvanda and Steve Mgaya who are both BEng11 Computer Engineering,Michael Mjata BEng11 Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering and John Mwangulangu BEng12 Computer Engineering but is open for any DIT student passionate with tech who will want to join.

For more information please visit:http://goo.gl/pLH2v

The DIT Principal introducing the Google Geeks to DIT Community during Best Students Ceremony

DIT Google Geeks pose for a picture with Principal,Guest of Honor and other college administration officials.

Harvard Top Computer Science Students To Apply Computer Science Skills in Tanzania

Four Harvard students are spending their winter break in Tanzania applying their computer science skills to help improve health infrastructure for clinics and hospitals.

The project is the pilot program for Tech in the World, a newly created student organization that seeks to send top computer science students to work on coding projects in developing countries. From Dec. 22 to Jan. 19, Brandon Liu ’14, Joshua K. Lee ’14, Salvatore R. Rinchiera ’14, and Christian C. Anderson ’13 will live in Dar es Salaam creating a solution to better the current management system of electronic medical records for maternal health care.

Liu, co-founder of Tech in the World, said he got the idea for the organization this summer after reading “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” a book focused on University Professor Paul E. Farmer’s work at hospitals in Haiti.

“As I was reading it, I was thinking that I really wanted to see how I could contribute to his work,” Liu said. “I started to talk to people in global health who said that they wanted more computer science people to get involved.”

The team plans to collaborate with students from Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology and a local Tanzanian entrepreneurship group in order to share their knowledge and ensure the long-term value of their projects.

“A lot of trips like these can be branded as volunteerism  where you are ostensibly providing value but, in reality, are really just a burden to whoever’s hosting you,” Liu said. “Pairing with someone locally tries to offset that to train people and have something sustainable.”

The group is also partnering with the Bienmoyo Foundation, an organization that matches volunteers with global health projects, and the Association of Private Health Facilities in Tanzania, an umbrella organization for all private health facilities in the country.

The four students will be joined by Mateus C. Falci ’14, a visual and environmental studies concentrator who will make a documentary of the experience.

The students plan to return to Dar es Salaam for the next few years to continue their service work.

“It’s good to have that continuity, to develop the relationship and build on prior work,” Liu said.

Though Tech in the World did not have a formal application process this year, Liu and his co-founder Lee hope to expand the team in the future to include strong computer science students from other schools, including Brown University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“We definitely want people to be comfortable in the environment and, from day one, to be able to start coding,” Lee said.

You can learn more about Tech in the World through http://www.techintheworld.org/

This article has been quoted from http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/12/12/students-tanzania-computer-science/ and it is written by CHRISTINE Y. CAHAILL WHO IS A CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

—Staff writer Christine Y. Cahill can be reached at christinecahill@college.harvard.edu.

                                            Liu with DIT Computer Engineering Students

Liu with Ashery Mbilinyi,DIT Google Student Ambassador