DARPA: LIFE CATALOG ONLY THE BEGINNING

To Pentagon researchers, cap­tur­ing and cat­e­go­riz­ing every aspect of a person’s life is only the begin­ning.
LifeLog — the con­tro­ver­sial Defense Department ini­tia­tive to track every­thing about an indi­vid­ual — is just one step in a larger effort, accord­ing to a top Pentagon research direc­tor. Personalized dig­i­tal assis­tants that can guess our desires should come first. And then, just maybe, we’ll see com­put­ers that can think for them­selves.
Computer sci­en­tists have dreamed for decades of build­ing machines with minds of their own. But these hopes have been over­whelmed again and again by the messy, dizzy­ing com­plex­i­ties of the real world.
In recent months, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has launched a series of seem­ingly dis­parate pro­grams — all designed, the agency says, to help com­put­ers deal with the com­plex­i­ties of life, so they finally can begin to think.
My Wired News arti­cle has more — includ­ing an exclu­sive inter­view with Ron Brachman, who heads the DARPA office over­see­ing projects like LifeLog. There’s a sep­a­rate story on Brachman’s lat­est project, “Real-​​World Reasoning,” designed to get com­put­ers to start look­ing at prob­lems from dif­fer­ent angles — a key arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence challenge.

July 29th, 2003 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.