ACM TechNews

CMU at Forefront in Building Thinking Machines

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (04/06/08) Houser, Mark

Carnegie Mellon University is at the vanguard of efforts to create intelligent machines, and one CMU initiative focuses on building robots that can work in teams, with the goal of trouncing the world's champion soccer team by 2050. Other CMU artificial intelligence projects include driverless vehicles, computer vision, speech recognition, imbuing computers with creativity, and brain simulation. CMU professor Alexei Efros is expected to introduce a computer program that guesses where a photo was shot by comparing the image to millions of others posted on an Internet-sharing site where users mark their images with location coordinates. A vastly enhanced Google-like search engine that not only looks for matching words on Web pages but also reads and understands the pages and drafts a summary is the brainchild of researchers Jaime Carbonell and Anatole Gershman. Meanwhile, CMU's Tom Mitchell and Marcel Just earned a private grant of $1.1 million to map neurons in the human brain that are stimulated by thoughts about individual objects, with the aim of mapping the neural pattern for all English common and abstract nouns. "My guess is that there's nothing in principle that makes it impossible for computers to be intelligent," Mitchell says. "It's just our own stupidity and our inability thus far to figure out how to do it."

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