The Tongues research project at Carnegie Mellon Language Technologies Institute allows a computer to listen to speech in one language, translate it, and speak in another.

The system includes a speech recognizer, which turns spoken words into text; a machine translator, which converts the text from one language to another; and a speech synthesizer, which turns the text back into audible words.

Santa Fe Institute research computer scientist Melanie Mitchell is studying how natural systems perform computation and says we can solve some complex problems by letting systems evolve solutions through a process of natural selection.

Grace, a six-foot autonomous robot, was the star of the recent annual meeting of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in Canada.Grace performed successfully in the “Robot Challenge” event: start at the entrance to the conference center, take the elevator to the registration desk, register for the conference and then deliver a speech in the auditorium.

Grace was co-developed by Carnegie Mellon University (overall hardware and software architecture), the… read more

Programmers working on Go — which is more complex than chess — see it as more accurate than chess in reflecting how the human mind uses pattern recognition. “Writing a strong Go program will teach us more about making computers think like people than writing a strong chess program,” says David Fotland, creator of “The Many Faces of Go” software.