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A Peek Inside DARPA's Current Projects

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Mon Jan 22, 2007 02:46 PM
from the al-gore-unavailable-for-comment dept.
Science Technology
dthomas731 writes to tell us that Computerworld has a brief article on some of DARPA's current projects. From the article: "Later in the program, Holland says, PAL will be able to 'automatically watch a conversation between two people and, using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon.' At that point, perhaps DARPA's PAL could be renamed HAL, for Hearing Assistant That Learns. The original HAL, in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, tells the astronauts how it knows they're plotting to disconnect it: 'Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.'"
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A Peek Inside DARPA's Current Projects 25 Comments More /

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  • The Real Issue (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Atlantic Wall (847508) on Monday January 22 2007, @02:50PM (#17713536)
    The Real issue is some idiot programming a computer to defend against someone just trying to turn it off.A computer should be programmed to know it can make mistakes.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Eagleartoo (849045)

      [HAL] The only mistakes a computer makes is due to human error [/HAL]

      I don't think computers are capable of making mistakes, because they are incapapble of thinking, they can process and store but this does not entail thought. Define for me thought.
      Thought -- 1. to have a conscious mind, to some extent of reasoning, remembering experiences, making rational decisions, etc.
      2. to employ one's mind rationally and objectively in evaluating or dealing with a given situation

      I guess what we're looking for in

      • What does conscious thought have to do with mistakes? Mistakes are when you have some kind of expectation and those expectations fail to be met. If I buy some accounting software, and the figures don't add up correctly, then the software has made a mistake (which in turn is probably caused by a mistake made by a developer). If you make the definition of 'mistake' hinge on concepts like 'conscious mind' and other tricky philosophical ideas then it's a wonder you can get anything done in your day.

        My compute

        • Re:The Real Issue (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Ucklak (755284) on Monday January 22 2007, @04:22PM (#17714776)
          Conscious thought has everything to do with mistakes.

          A machine is mechanical and is incapable of mistakes as it can't set expectations.

          From your quote, "Mistakes are when you have some kind of expectation and those expectations fail to be met.", machines aren't capable of setting expectations, only following a basic 'to do' list.

          If a machine adds 1+1 and returns 3 to the register, then it didn't fail, it added 1+1 in the way it knows how to.

          AI today is nothing more than a bunch of IF..THEN possiblities run on fast processors to make it seem instantaneous and 'alive'.

          You can program a machine to be aware of it's power (Voltage) and you can have a program set to monitor that power with cameras and laser beams and whatever else with commands to shoot laser beams at any device that comes near that power but the machine still isn't aware of what power is.

          Not to get philosophical here but IMO, AI won't ever be real until a machine has a belief system and part of that belief system relies upon it's own ability to get energy, just like animals do.

          It's possible that a program can be written so that a machine is aware of it's own requirements but then we're back to a bunch of IF..THEN statements written by programmers.

      • Re:The Real Issue (Score:4, Insightful)

        by AK Marc (707885) on Monday January 22 2007, @05:41PM (#17715712)
        I don't think computers are capable of making mistakes, because they are incapapble of thinking, they can process and store but this does not entail thought.

        Then they can't make mistakes, but can make errors. What do you call it when a brownout causes a computer to flip a bit and give an incorrect answer to a math problem? How about when it is programmed incorrectly so that it gives 2+2=5? How about when a user intends to add 2 and 3, but types in 2+2? In all cases, the computer outputs a wrong answer. Computers can be wrong and are wrong all the time. The wrong answers are errors. A "mistake" isn't an assigning of blame. I agree that computers can be blameless, but that does not mean that mistakes involving computers can't be made. I think your definition of "mistake" is not the most common, and would be the point of contention in this discussion, not whether computers have ever outputted an erroneous answer.
    • Computers shouldn't be programmed to know they can make mistakes. They should observe themselves making mistakes and learn that they can. Sheesh. Next you'll be suggesting that children should be programmed from birth to believe whatever it's convenient for their parents to have them believe...
    • The only programming that leads to context-rich understanding that could be called "knowledge" in the human sense is self-programming. Like babies. We're all born with a some basic software and a lot of hardware, but it's interaction over time with our environment that we self-program. One might call it learning, but it's more fundamental than just accumulating facts: it's self-creation.

      Dennett calls us self-created selves. Any AI more than superficially like a human would be the same.
  • Except that HAL was paranoid. That the astronauts had a conversation they tried to hide from HAL was more than enough. The actual content of the conversation was immaterial.

    • Re:Paranoid (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Gorm the DBA (581373) on Monday January 22 2007, @03:00PM (#17713724) Journal
      Actually, it was over long before that. HAL was just following it's programming, perfectly.

      HAL was programmed to eliminate any possibile failure points in the mission that he could. Through the spaceflight, HAL observed that the humans in the mission were failable (one of them made a suboptimal chess move, a handful of other mistakes were made). HAL had the ability to complete the mission on it's own. Therefore, HAL made the decision, in line with it's programming, to eliminate the human element.

      It makes sense, really, when you think about it. And truly, if Dave had just gone along with it and died, HAL would have finished the job perfectly fine.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by cnettel (836611)
        It was some years ago, but I think that the book also stresses the problem for HAL in that the full mission was never revealed to the human crew, which meant that even too good thinking on their part, at the wrong point in time, would be considered a failure. HAL was programmed/ordered to obey the crew, but also respect the mission objectives, and the contradiction only grew worse.
    • Except that HAL was paranoid. That the astronauts had a conversation they tried to hide from HAL was more than enough. The actual content of the conversation was immaterial.

      As I interpreted the scene: Though the audio pickups were off, HAL had a clear view. So he zoomed in on their faces, panned back-and-forth between speakers, and got a clear shot of their faces - lips, eyes, eyebrows, and other facial markings - as each spoke.

      Which tells me he was lip-reading. (Also face-reading.) He knew every word

  • REAL sneak peak (Score:4, Informative)

    by Prysorra (1040518) on Monday January 22 2007, @02:57PM (#17713672)
    Here's a LOT of stuff to look through....don't tell anyone ;-)

    Top Secret Stuff at DARPA [darpa.mil]. [DARPA]

  • Not "Strong" AI (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hypermanng (155858) on Monday January 22 2007, @02:57PM (#17713674) Homepage
    The DoD funds a huge percentage of AI research, but at the end of the day they're interested in things that can be easily weaponized or used for simple intelligence sifting heuristics. The most fundamentally interesting research in AI is in the humanoid robotics projects such as those at the MIT shop, and it is from these more humanly-modeled projects that anything like HAL could ever issue. Search-digest heuristics like PAL aren't much like humans and will never lead to anything approching a human's contextually rich understanding of the world at large any more than really advanced racecar design will lead to interstellar craft.

    The difference, as Searle would say, between Strong (humanlike) AI and Weak (software widget like) AI is a difference of type, not scale.
      • I don't mean to imply humanoid robotics qua robotics is necessary to AI development. Rather, only in a creature that acts as an agent inhabiting the world at large can one expect anything like human-level understanding thereof to develop. It's all very well to develop clever as-if software widgets to simulate understanding in carefully controlled circumstances, but they won't scale to true global context richness because 1) they interact with the world over narrow modalities and 2) they don't have the ric
      • I didn't mean to imply that only Strong AI is militarily useful. In fact, I would say that Strong AI is *not* useful, if one thinks about the ethics of forcing anything sentient to go to war in one's place.

        Also, I have no trouble recognizing that cleverly-designed "Weak" AI is nonetheless quite strong enough in more conventional senses to be a monumental aid to human problem solving, in the same manner and to the same degree as an ICBM is a great aid to human offensive capabilities.

  • DARPA Slogans (Score:5, Funny)

    by Paulrothrock (685079) on Monday January 22 2007, @03:01PM (#17713740) Homepage Journal
    DARPA: We don't make the things that kill people. We make the things that kill people better. DARPA: We bring good things to life... that are then used to kill people. DARPA: Who do you want to kill today?

  • Come on you Tin-foil Hat wearers... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by silentounce (1004459) on Monday January 22 2007, @03:01PM (#17713742) Homepage
    "watch a conversation between two people and, using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon."
    Anyone care to guess what they plan to use that little gadget for?
    • Making sure your waitress gets your order right, of course.

      I mean really...Bush only invaded Iraq because that waitress brought him FRENCH dressing instead of RANCH like he asked...

  • DARPA has yet to acknowledge the project that I was working on 3 years from now in 2010. Last week, January 14, 2012 we will successfully tested the Time Redaction Project. So, I gave myself the plans tomorrow so that I will be submitting them a few years ago to get the grant money. DOD has used this to send a nuke to kill the dinosaurs. I hope it works.

  • vaporware and PR (Score:4, Interesting)

    by geekpuppySEA (724733) * on Monday January 22 2007, @03:35PM (#17714168) Journal
    IAA graduate student in computational linguistics.

    Later in the program, Holland says, PAL will be able to "automatically watch a conversation between two people and, using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon."

    PAL's role here is not clear. The 'easier' task would be to monitor the body language of the two conversers and, by lining up a list of tasks with the observation of their head movements, correctly predict which points in the conversation were the ones where someone performed an "agreement" gesture.

    The much, much more difficult task would be to actually read lips. There are only certain properties of phonemes you can deduce from how the lips and jaw move; many, many other features of speech are lost. Only when you supply the machine with a limited set of words in a limited topic domain do you get good performance; otherwise, you're grasping at straws. And then taking out most of the speech signal? Please.

    But no, DARPA is cool and will save all the translators in Iraq (by 2009, well before the war ends.) PR and vaporware win the day!

  • the real research behind this (Score:3, Informative)

    by kneecramps (1054578) on Monday January 22 2007, @04:54PM (#17715116)

    WRT to "watch a conversation between two people and, using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon":

    Here's a link to the actual research that they are likely talking about:

    http://godel.stanford.edu/~niekrasz/papers/PurverE hlenEtAl06_Shallow.pdf [stanford.edu]

    As you might expect, the ComputerWorld article's summary of the technology is rather optimistic. Nonetheless, this stuff really does exist, and shows some promise in both military and general applications.

  • Same sex conversations only... (Score:5, Funny)

    by haggie (957598) on Monday January 22 2007, @04:58PM (#17715144)
    using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon.

    This would only work for conversations between people of the same sex. There has never been a conversation between a man and a woman in which both participants would agree on the tasks...

    M: Want to continue this conversation at my place?
    F: Take a leap!
    Computer: Agreed to move conversation to male's residence by leaping.

    F: When are you going to mow the lawn?
    M: Yeah, I'll get right on that.
    Computer: Male agreed to mow lawn at earliest opportunity

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