Exploring Robots in Advertising | GROW / Blog

Grow employees select a conference or training each year to expand their individual skill set and expand the company?s knowledge base.

This summer, the AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) held its Twenty-Sixth Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Toronto, Canada. Students, researchers, and practitioners from around the world came together to discuss the latest advances in the various fields of artificial intelligence (AI), including natural language processing, robotics, and machine learning.

Search and Rescue Robot Prototypes

One standout presentation involved research in sentiment analysis, crowdsourcing, and the interpretation of user-generated content. Researchers used geotagged tweets in New York City to attempt to predict an individual?s likelihood of becoming sick based on his proximity to other sick people. The project plotted tweets on a dynamic map and showed the spread of sickness over time.?The researchers are looking at expanding their work to include tweets made from airports to study the spread of disease around the world.

Other standout workshops and tutorials included:

• Researchers from IBM discussed their work with traffic management including interesting insights on how to detect traffic jams in locations where the infrastructure for cameras and loop sensors is not available.
• A tutorial on text mining, sentiment analysis, and language processing that discussed everything from predicting what stocks to buy based on the analysis of tweets, to identifying possible side effects of prescription drugs based on forum posts.
• A talk on crowdsourcing and collective intelligence delved into the power of groups and ways to harness this using technologies such as Amazon?s Mechanical Turk.
• A presentation on new algorithms in pathfinding and planning in robotics.

The conference also included keynote talks and sessions where researchers gave short presentations about their work:

• Sebastian Thrun talked about self driving cars at Google and his new online education project Udacity.
• Luis von Ahn of ReCaptcha fame discussed his project DuoLingo which aims to translate the web while teaching people new languages.
• Others reflected on the history of artificial intelligence?including a discussion of Alan Turing since it was the 100th anniversary of his birth?and talked about other groundbreaking research in the fields of robotics and biology.

Throughout the week, groups from several universities participated in a robotics fair. One group had created a chess playing robot made from Legos called Shallow Blue (in reference to IBM?s Deep Blue) that actually performed well against a seasoned chess player. Another group paired an iRobot Create with a Kinect and pico projector to perform mobile projection mapping. There were also flying robots, and robots designed to search through collapsed buildings for survivors.

"Shallow Blue" ? Chess Playing Robot

AAAI-12 provided a great look at a number of interesting concepts and technologies. If you are interested in artificial intelligence, look at the organization and possibly attend a future conference.

Source: http://www.thisisgrow.com/blog/2012/11/exploring-robots-in-advertising/

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