Major Advance in Artificial Intelligence

IBM's Watson supercomputer represents a major advance for artificial intelligence (AI) research through its ability to answer verbal questions posed by people. IBM researchers and industry analysts say this skill makes the system better equipped than any previous machine to organize its responses and engage in verbal conversation with humans. "To reach [a computer] conversationally and have it respond with knowledgeable answers is a sea change in computing," says analyst Richard Doherty. The goal of AI researchers to create a computer capable of mimicking human intelligence took a step forward this week with Watson competing against human players on the game show Jeopardy! "Watson is a significant step, allowing people to interact with a computer as they would a human being," says IBM researcher Jennifer Chu-Carroll. "Watson doesn't give you a list of documents to go through but gives the user an answer." The Jeopardy! match especially showcased the confidence the IBM researchers instilled within the supercomputer, as demonstrated by its frequent buzzing in. Chu-Carroll anticipates computers learning to use actual common sense within the next decade, and Doherty believes such advances will revitalize competition between AI researchers.

IBM Supercomputer wins in Jeopardy TV Game Show

IBM's Watson supercomputer concluded its third and final televised round of Jeopardy! on Wednesday in triumph, defeating the human players and winning the three-day tournament. Watson finished the three rounds with $77,147, while the two other contestants won $24,000 and $21,600. Watson proved very proficient at buzzing in quickly to answer questions--a reflection of its confidence in its answers--and its victory was a vindication for computer science and the notion of developing a thinking machine. The supercomputer excels at parsing language. For example, it responded to "A recent best seller by Muriel Barbery is called 'This of the Hedgehog,'" with "What is Elegance?" IBM plans to announce a collaborative venture with Columbia University and the University of Maryland to develop a doctor's assistant service based on the Watson technology, which will permit physicians to ask questions of a cybernetic assistant. Another collaboration with Nuance Communications will strive to add voice recognition to the assistant, possibly making the service available in as soon as 18 months. IBM executives also are discussing the development of a version of Watson that can engage with consumers on various topics such as buying decisions and technical support.

IT Job Sector Continues to Strengthen

Information technology-related (IT) jobs experienced a net gain of 11,800 in January, the eighth straight month of positive growth, according to the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. Five bellwether IT job segments had a net gain of 74,200 jobs over the past 12 months, led by management and technical consulting services and computer systems design and related services segments, which together accounted for close to 95 percent of all new IT jobs. Foote Partners CEO David Foote says the government defines the IT professional narrowly, recognizing just 21 job titles, which are all traditional infrastructure jobs in systems analysis, programming, data communications and networks, tech support, and database administration. "The role of technology in the enterprise is now so pervasive that managing it is no longer entrusted to one group but instead split among every department, function, line of business and product group," Foote says. "The job of each one of these entities is to determine how to make the best use of information technology for producing revenues and profitability, building market share, ensuring satisfied customers, controlling costs, innovating solutions, and generally to stay competitive in their industries."

Virtual Training

University of Leeds researchers are leading the ImREAL project, which is developing a virtual-reality training tool aimed at creating a simulated learning environment that responds and adapts to users' behavior. The project also involves researchers from Austria, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, and will focus on training workers for business, academia, and volunteering. "Simulated environments provide a cost-effective alternative to standard face-to-face training, but they need to incorporate the cognitive, social, and emotional aspects of the activities that are being modeled," says Leeds' Vania Dimitrova. The ImREAL project will focus on developing systems for interpersonal communications, which are important for managing relationships, customer service, and providing advice. The project also will develop tools that help trainees learn how communication and social cues vary across different cultures. The researchers plan to develop a self-growing adaptive simulation that uses a virtual mentor to help users learn about the experience as they work through it. "By the end of three years, we aim to have two fully functioning demonstration simulators up and running that incorporate these new ideas and illustrate highly innovative technologies for learning," Dimitrova says.

Online Social Networks and Human Behavior

Online social networks have become important laboratories for social scientists studying human behavior. "The volume of online social networking is exploding, and it appears it is becoming more pervasive than real-life social networking," says Suffolk University professor Dan Stefanescu. Online social networks provide data that can be used to engineer new social systems and predict certain events and economic outcomes, Stefanescu says. Suffolk University researchers are studying the structure of online social networks and looking for properties that characterize them. "When studying different behaviors in online social networks, such as flow of information, bargaining power, flow of influence, it is useful to be able to characterize a node with respect to the whole network," Stefanescu says. He says the researchers use certain measures that can "describe various aspects of the 'importance' of a node in a network: how connected the node is, how easily it can reach other nodes, how much it mediates the connection between other nodes, etc." Stefanescu and colleagues are also studying interrelationships between offline characteristics of users, such as gender or culture, and their Internet preferences. They want to better understand the correlation between these offline characteristics and their online behavior, such as communication patterns and relationship building.

7 New Popular Programming Languages

Seven increasingly popular niche programming languages offer features that cannot be found in the dominant languages. For example, Python has gained popularity in scientific labs. "Scientists often need to improvise when trying to interpret results, so they are drawn to dynamic languages which allow them to work very quickly and see results almost immediately," says Python's creator Guido von Rossum. Many Wall Street firms also rely on Python because they like to hire university scientists to work on complex financial analysis problems. Meanwhile, Ruby is becoming popular for prototyping. Ruby sites are devoted to cataloging data that can be stored in tables. MatLab was originally designed for mathematicians to solve systems of linear equations, but it also has found a following in the enterprise because of the large volumes of data that organizations need to analyze. Although JavaScript is not a new programming language, new applications for JavaScript are constantly in development. For example, CouchDB uses JavaScript's Map and Reduce functions to help bring harmony to both client and server-side programming. Other popular niche languages include R, which also is known as S and S-Plus, Erlang, Cobol, and CUDA.

Internet Users To Hit 2 Billion: UN agency

The number of Internet users will surpass two billion this year, approaching a third of the world population, but developing countries need to step up access to the vital tool for economic growth, a United Nations agency said on Tuesday. Users have doubled in the past five years, and compare with an estimated global population of 6.9 billion, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) said. Of 226 million new Internet users this year, 162 million will be from developing countries where growth rates are now higher, the ITU said in a report. However, by the end of 2010, 71 per cent of the population in developed countries will be online compared with 21 per cent of people in developing countries. The ITU said it was particularly important for developing countries to build up high-speed connections. “Broadband is the next tipping point, the next truly transformational technology,” said ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure, of Mali. “It can generate jobs, drive growth and productivity and underpin long-term economic competitiveness.” Access varies widely by region, with 65 per cent of people online in Europe, ahead of 55 per cent in the Americas, compared with only 9.6 per cent of the population in Africa and 21.9 per cent in Asia/Pacific, the ITU said. Access to the Internet in schools, at work and in public places is critical for developing countries, where only 13.5 per cent of people have the Internet at home, against 65 per cent in developed countries, it said. A study last week by another U.N. agency showed that mobile phones were a far more important communications technology for people in the poorest developing countries than the Internet.