Video Clips, Demos, Radio Broadcasts & More < an eclectic collection >

The AIxploratorium. "The 'AIxploratorium' website is designed to be the authoritative resource for Artificial Intelligence, containing informative, up-to-date surveys across the breadth of AI, together with easy-to-use interactive demos to illustrate the basic ideas. While these demos are targetted to novices, the website in general contains material relevant to all levels --- from high school students, to Artificial Intelligencia (empiricists and theoreticians, practitioners and educators) --- of course, interconnected every-which-way via hyperlinks, etc." Developed and maintained by Russell Greiner & Jonathan Schaeffer of the University of Alberta's Department of Computing Science.

Aerial robotics. Video collection from the Information Control Engineering Group at MIT includes a robotic helicopter performing autonomous acrobatic maneuvers. For background information see: MIT's robotic helicopter makes first acrobatic roll. (MIT News, 2/1/02).

Artificial Intelligence mini-site. Discovery Channel Canada (June 22, 2001). You'll find a featured video for each of the exciting topics (which include Canadian Creations, Thinking Machines, Issues, Hollywood vs. Reality, Sport & Battle, and AI in Space) in addition to to several video reports.

The Age of Intelligent Machines: The Film. By Raymond Kurzweil. "A survey of Artificial Intelligence showing AI at work and under development. The paradoxes, promise and challenges of advanced computer science, with authorities Marvin Minsky, Roger Schank, Raj Reddy and other leaders in the field. " (Total time 28:40).

Real-Video of Autonomous Guidance Operations for Planting. Part of the Autonomous Agricultural Production project at the University of Illinois Agricultural Engineering Department. Watch this tractor go from shed to field and then plant a crop.

CIspace: Tools for LearningComputational Intelligence. "Here are some applets that are designed as tools for learning and exploring some concepts in artificial intelligence. They are part of the online resources for [the text] Computational Intelligence [A Logical Approach]. If you are teaching or learning about AI, you may use these applets freely. ... These applets were designed and written by Saleema Amershi, Nicole Arksey, Mike Cline, Wesley Coelho, Kevin O'Neill, Mike Pavlin, Joseph Roy Santos, Shinjiro Sueda, Leslie Tung, Audrey Yap, and Regan Yuen, under the guidance of Cristina Conati, Peter Gorniak, Holger Hoos, Alan Mackworth, and David Poole." Topics covered include: Decision Trees, Belief & Decision Networks, Neural Networks, Robot Control, and Planning ... just to name a few!

Video clips of Cog, Kismet, and others are available from the Humanoid Robotics Group at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

• Radio Interview with Rodney Brooks. Fresh Air. WHYY-FM / available from NPR (March 4, 2002). "Rodney Brooks, the director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). His new book is called Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us. Brooks offers a vision of the future of humans and robots." Visit the site and listen to the interview.
• Robot risk 'is worth it.' HARDtalk's Lyce Doucet interviews Rodney Brooks. BBC (August 19, 2002). Visit the site and watch the television interview

Harold Cohen: "Watch a video clip from The Age of Intelligent Machines, Ray Kurzweil's award-winning 1987 film, where Harold and Ray discuss AARON's abilities and explore machine creativity."

Computer Mimics Human Brain at Volvo Plant.The expanded Web version, complete with assorted videos and audio tracks, of this 1998 report from CNN: "What if it were your job to run the million-square-foot Volvo truck plant in Dublin, while juggling the schedules of 2,300 employees and managing dozens of other tasks? Because it is so tough to run a complicated assembly line, more companies are relying on computers with artificial intelligence to handle the details. This intelligence helps a computer find the best solution for every problem with the help of a so-called genetic algorithm program that mimics the human brain's decision-making process."

Computer Vision Online Demos from the Computer Vision Homepage, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University.

A Conversation About Artificial Intelligence. Television broadcast of The Charlie Rose Show (December 21, 2004) with Rodney Brooks (Director, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory & Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science & Engineering, MIT), Eric Horvitz (Senior Researcher and Group Manager, Adaptive Systems & Interaction Group, Microsoft Research), and Ron Brachman (Director, Information Processing Technology Office, Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, and President, American Association for Artificial Intelligence).

Cyberflora. From the MIT Robotic Life Group's Cyberflora Project. "This video (quicktime, 19.7MB ) shows the Cyberflora installation as part of the National Design Triennial, hosted by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City. This robotic flower garden is comprised of four species of cyberflora. Each combines animal-like behavior and flower-like characteristics into a robotic instantiation that senses and responds to people in a life-like and distinct manner. A soft melody serves as the garden's musical aroma that subtly changes as people interact with the flowers. Delicate and graceful, Cyberflora communicates a future vision of robots that shall intrigue us intellectually and touch us emotionally. The installation explores a style of human-robot interaciton that is fluid, dynamic, and harmonious."

Developmental robot demos and more from the Michigan State University College of Engineering's Integrated Hybrid Software Framework for Autonomous Mobile Robots project.

Draughts Playing Robot from the "Robots!" website at The University of Birmingham. "The robot arm can move to any position on the board, and has a magnet to detect when there is a draughts piece underneath it. When it wants to make a move, it lowers the magnet, to grab the piece. The computer, which decides what move to make, gets signals from the arm, then tells it where to go. The computer uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to decide which move to make." Go here to watch the arm at work!

Expert System Demos - the eclectic mini-collection on our Expert Systems page.

Experts Use AI to Help GIs Learn Arabic. By Eric Mankin. USC News (June 21, 2004). "To teach soldiers basic Arabic quickly, USC computer scientists are developing a system that merges artificial intelligence with computer game techniques. The Rapid Tactical Language Training System, created by the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Center for Research in Technology for Education (CARTE) and partners, tests soldier students with videogame missions in animated virtual environments where, to pass, the students must successfully phrase questions and understand answers in Arabic. ... 'Most adults find it extremely difficult to acquire even a rudimentary knowledge of a language, particularly in a short time,' said CARTE director W. Lewis Johnson. 'We're trying to build an improved model of instruction, one that can be closely tailored to both the needs and the abilities of each individual student,' Johnson said." Read the story and then watch the video!

• Also see and listen to: A Virtual Course in Iraqi Arabic. By Ina Jaffe. Radio broadcast of NPR's All Things Considered (February 17, 2005).

Fire and smoke detection videos from axonX [from our Image Understanding page].

Flo and Pearl from the CMU/Pitt Nursebot Project [from our Assistive Technologies page].

The Flocking Robots Project at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Department of Information Technology, University of Zurich. "Flocking adresses a variety of important topics in the field of multiagent simulation and collective robotics which include agent interaction, kin recognition, and finally the emergence of collective behavior." And their flocking applet is simply beautiful! [from our Artificial Life page]

The GAMES Group at The University of Alberta. "Game-playing, Analytical methods, Minimax search and Empirical Studies. Play Checkers, Chess, Hex, Poker, Xiang Qi and more at this fascinating site.

Giving Computer Voices a 'Human Touch' - Companies Deliver Personalization with Friendly, Helpful Machines. From David Kestenbaum for NPR's All Things Considered (April 18, 2002). Links to several demos are provided along with an audio file of this radio report. [from our Marketing, E-Commerce and Customer Relations page; also see Speech]

HAL. See a clip of HAL from the movie, 2001 , at CNN's site. After viewing the clip, you can click on the "Back to story" link for a wonderful article in which David Stork states: "I partially went into science because of the film. I'm sure the first time I ever thought of a computer lip-reading was from that film. Now, I'm a world expert on computer lip-reading."

• For even more information about HAL, don't miss HAL'S LEGACY: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality. (edited by David Stork and made available online by the MIT Press).

Horatio "Doc" Beardsley: an animatronic figure from the Interactive Animatronics Initiative (IAI), "a joint initiative between the Field Robotics Center (FRC) and the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)."

IT Conversations. Listen to exciting presentations from David Fogel (Accelerating Problem Solving), John Markoff (talking about his book, "What The Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry"), Peter Norvig (Inside Google), The Prospects for AI (a panel discussion), and others.

Image Retrieval Demo from The Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR).

InfoSpiders: Adaptive Retrieval Agents Choosing Heuristic Neighborhoods for Information Discovery. Narrated QuickTime movies of InfoSpiders on various missions. From Filippo Menczer and the Adaptive Agents Research Group, University of Iowa.

Intelligent Tutors, Pedagogical Agents and Guidebots from CARTE, The Center for Advanced Research in Technology for Education, Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California.

Interesting AI Demos and Projects. An extensive collection from Professor Charles R. Dyer, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

KiRo - The Table Soccer Robot. Developed by the University of Freiburg's Institute for Computer Science and the German company adp Gauselmann. Watch videos of KiRo playing in Germany, Japan and Switzerland.

Learning and Games Demos from DEMO [Dynamical & Evolutionary Machine Organization] Department of Computer Science, Volen National Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University. See what you can do with genetic algorithms, neural networks and more.

"Letizia is a user interface agent that assists a user browsing the World Wide Web. As the user operates a conventional Web browser such as Netscape, the agent tracks user behavior and attempts to anticipate items of interest by doing concurrent, autonomous exploration of links from the user's current position. The agent automates a browsing strategy consisting of a best-first search augmented by heuristics inferring user interest from browsing behavior." And you can even see this agent in action by watching a Quicktime movie demo of Letizia [5MB file]. From Henry Lieberman of the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

MARVEL: "The Intelligent Information Management Department at IBM Research is developing a multimedia analysis and retrieval system called MARVEL. MARVEL helps organize the large and growing amounts of multimedia data (e.g., video, images, audio) by using machine learning techniques to automatically label its content. The system recently won the Wall Street Journal 2004 Innovation Award in the multimedia category." The demo can be found here.

Machine Translation. Translate text of your choice at these sites from our Machine Translation page:

• ALTAVISTA's BabelfishGOOGLE's Language Tools
• SYSTRAN

Machines that Think. Artificial Intelligence Webcast from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (June 29, 2001). "The show is hosted by Alice Wessen, JPL Technology Outreach Lead. The guests will be autonomous software specialists Barbara Engelhardt and Russell Knight, FIDO rover lead system engineer Dr. Edward Tunstel, and Machine Vision Group Supervisor Dr. Larry Matthies."

Donald Michie: The very early days. Interviewed by Michael Bain for the Computer Conservation Society's seminar, Artificial Intelligence - Recollections of the Pioneers (October 2002). "Q: What was your earliest contact with the idea of intelligent machinery? A: Arriving at Bletchley Park in 1942 I formed a friendship with Alan Turing, and in April 1943 with Jack Good. The three of us formed a sort of discussion club focused around Turing's astonishing 'child machine' concept. Hisproposal was to use our knowledge of how the brain acquires its intelligence as a model for designing a teachable intelligent machine." You can read the interview (PDF), or watch it (Quicktime, Realmedia) via links from the seminar page.

NP-complete problem demos:

• Latin Squares/Quasigroup Completion Problem - a very impressive (and colorful) demo from Carla P. Gomes.
• Traveling Salesperson (several listed)

"NaturalMotion's Active Character Technology (A.C.T.) is based on Oxford University's research on the control of human and animal body motions. In essence, we build a physical, biomechanically-realistic model of a character (e.g. a human or a dinosaur), implant an appropriate brain structure (usually a neural network), and use optimisation techniques (such as artificial evolution) to create the desired behaviour. The following video demonstrates how this works in practice. The example shown is a simple biped which learns how to walk using artificial evolution. The process starts with random walkers, none of which can walk properly. The best ones (those that make at least one step without falling over) are allowed to produce offspring, which are again selected according to how far they walk. This selection is repeated over a number of generations. At the end of process the biped can walk without falling over."

The Next Big Thing - Artificial Intelligence. BBC /Open University. "Leading scientists join Professor Colin Blakemore for a live and topical debate to discuss The Next Big Thing in science. This week [March 15, 2002], the panel looks at the issue of Artificial Intelligence. In the 21st century, A.I. is gradually moving more and more into people's everyday lives, especially as the interest in computers and computer games grows. New Artificial Intelligence advancements are constantly becoming available - so who knows what the future might bring? Find out how Artificial Intelligence came to the forefront of scientific debate in story so far. Understand the science behind the subject in a.i. in depth. Consider the opinions of eminent scientists in hear the arguments." And thanks to The Vega Science Trust, you can even watch Machines with Minds, the freeview video of this event.

Online Demos (Applets) of Artificial Intelligence. A resource companion to Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig's textbook, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. "This page lists some demos of various artificial intelligence techniques that you can run in your browser. These can help explain how AI algorithms work. Your next step after running these demos would be to download, run, and modify some source code, such as the AIMA online code repository."

Parsing demos on our Natural Language Understanding & Generation page.

Penelope: Robots in the OR -- Stat! Penelope the robot may free nurses to do more "human" tasks. By Josh Chamot. National Science Foundation Discoveries (April 28, 2005). "As the decade unfolds with its shortage of nurses, the sheer volume of patients each nurse must care for is leading to a critical burden for each of these professionals. While nurses will always be crucial to the care of patients, certain jobs may soon be accomplished by sophisticated robots. Surgeon Michael R. Treat and his team at Robotic Surgical Tech, Inc. have developed a robotic surgical assistant, named 'Penelope,' to perform tasks usually assigned to the scrub nurse. All of Penelope's talents are made possible by the innovative application of artificial intelligence to surgical situations." See the related video: Surgeon and "Penelope" in the operating room.

Programming a Bolo Robot to Recognize Actions By Example. "The goal of this project is to implement an interactive agent in the multi-player tank game Bolo that assists the user playing the game by recognizing the game player's actions and responding appropriately. This is achieved using a robot tank that follows the user's tank as the game is played. The robot watches what the user is doing and tries to recognize actions like "attacking nearest enemy tank" using features computed from the game world. Once an action is recognized, the robot tank changes its behavior to help the user. For instance, if the user is judged to be attacking a tank, the robot will join in the attack. We call our robot tank Inducting Indy." ("[A] project by Andrew Wilson and Stephen Intille for the MIT Media Lab Fall 1995 class Learning for Interactive Agents."]

Some Radio Broadcasts:

• The Ethics of Creating Consciousness. The Connection radio program hosted by Dick Gordon, with guests: Marvin Minsky, Brian Cantwell Smith, and Paul Davies. From WBUR Boston and NPR (June 13, 2005). "Next month, IBM is set to activate the most ambitious simulation of a human brain yet conceived. It's a model they say is accurate down to the molecule. No one claims the 'Blue Brain' project will be self-aware. But this project, and others like it, use electrical patterns in a silicon brain to simulate the electrical patterns in the human brain -- patterns which are intimately linked to thought. But if computer programs start generating these patterns -- these electrical 'thoughts' -- then what separates us from them? Traditionally human beings have reserved words like 'reasoning,' 'self-awareness,' and 'soul' as their exclusive property. But with the stirring of something akin to electronic consciousness -- some argue that human beings need to give up the ghost, and embrace the machine in all of us." Links to the broadcast are provided.
• Voices in Your Head series hosted by Dave Slusher: "James P. Hogan and host Dave Slusher discuss how the film 2001 started Hogan on a career as an author, on his relationship with Marvin Minsky and the world of artificial intelligence...." (December 22, 2004).
• Man and machine - Part 1: the quest for mechanical man. By Dheera Sujan. Radio Netherlands (November 26, 2004). "From the myth of Pygmalion down to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to films such as Metropolis, Blade Runner and I Robot, we can see a rich vein of creativity sparked by our fascination and our horror at the idea of artificial life." You can listen to the broadcast via a link on the page.
• Adventures with robots. Studio 360, a co-production of Public Radio International and WNYC (January 18, 2003). "Kurt Andersen and scientist Rodney Brooks look at how metal men are jumping from pop culture into real life. Visit thousands of robot toys in a big red barn outside Spokane. Writer Susie Bright surveys female robots on film, from Stepford Wives to the deadly Fembots. And a jazz pioneer gives over some control to his virtual Frankenstein." You can hear the broadcast, see the slide show, and listen to the music!
• Robots/ Mechanical Life. NPR Talk of the Nation: Science Friday With Ira Flatow (August 30, 2002). "This week, an automated convenience store opened in Washington. This robo-mart dispenses snacks, toiletries, and even DVDs. From housekeeping to the battlefield to your neighborhood convenience store, researchers are creating robots to live with us and work for us. In this hour, we'll look at how robots may change our lives. Plus, early attempts to create mechanical life." Guests: Rodney Brooks & Gaby Wood. You can listen to the radio broadcast by clicking here.
• The Great Escape - Alan Cheuse reviews a new book from science fiction author Ian Watson. Listen to the review from NPR's All Things Considered (June 20, 2002) "A number of the stories in 'The Great Escape' deal directly with the subject of artificial intelligence, which makes sense given that they written during the time that Ian Watson was working up the subject for Stanley Kubrick's film. 'Caucus Winter,' the story of a US right-wing coup featuring a battle of supercomputers, takes on the theme rather forthrightly."
• Humans and their Machines. NPR Science Friday (April 26, 2002). "Researchers at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab are working to create robots as intelligent and sociable as humans. At the same time, medical advances are making humans more robot-like, with mechanical hearts and working artificial limbs. In this hour, we'll talk with the participants of the First Utah Symposium in Science and Literature about the relationship between humans and machines - and just what it means to be human." Listen to Ira Flatow, anchor of Talk Of The Nation: Science Friday, interview Rodney Brooks, Anne Foerst, and Richard Powers.
• Why no AI? CBC Radio's Quirks & Quarks for March 31, 2001: "We've dreamed for generations about intelligent machines, but how close are we to actually making one? Well, Artificial Intelligence has proved a hard nut to crack, but steady progress has been made, using a variety of different techniques. Dr. Ray Reiter, of the Dept. of Computer Science at the University of Toronto ... Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer of the Dept. of Computing Science at the University of Alberta ... Dr. Robert Holte of the School of Information Technology and Engineering at the University of Ottawa ... Dr. Alan Mackworth, director of the Laboratory for Computational Intelligence at the University of British Columbia."
• also see: Interviews, AI in the news

... and some Robot Movies/Videos:

• Manipulation from Demonstration - Adapting captured human motion for use with animated characters and humanoid robots. From Nancy Pollard, Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute and the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University.
• MAR, a Mobile Autonomous Robot from Ericson Mar. Watch movies of the robot finding & extinguishing fires!
• Monocular vision - autonomous driving video from Stanford Assistand Professor Andrew Ng and graduate students Ashutosh Saxena and Sung H. Chung. (See related article.)
• Rensselaer’s Cognitive Science Department's robot movie can be accesed via a link in a sidebar of Building a Better Brain, by Sheila Nason (Rensselaer Research Quarterly; Winter 2004): "The goal of the robot is to track the orange robot it sees to the right of the scene in the beginning. Notice how it revises its plan, in the middle of executing it, because of new sensor information and physical reasoning."
• Robot III from the Biologically Inspired Robotics Lab at Case Western Reserve University. The robot is modeled on a Blaberus cockroach. Pick one of the narrated movies and watch it in action.
• Robot following a chemical trail. From Andy Russell, Monash University. [from our Artificial Noses page]
• Robot News Videos from Yahoo! [See special section on the left as you scroll down their page. Audio reports are also available there.]
• Robot Sumo, from the FSI-All Japan Robot-Sumo Tournament. "The rule of the bout is quite simple. The side which pushes the opponent out of the ring wins."
• Robotics videos from EURON (the European Robotics Research Network). Also see their collection of photos.
• Watch a "quicktime movie of the latest TinMan Wheelchair guiding itself through a home environment." [from our Assistive Technologies page]
• "At WTC Search, Graduate Students Deploy Shoebox-Sized Robots - Robot 'babies' go where rescue workers and dogs cannot." A video made available by the National Science Foundation (NSF). [from our Hazards & Disasters page]

"ResearchChannel is a non-profit organization founded in 1996 by a consortium of leading research universities, institutions and corporate research centers dedicated to creating a widely accessible voice for research through video and Internet channels." Here are just a few of the programs available from their video library:

• Women in the History of Computer Science - "A panel of pioneers of the 1940s and 1950s discusses their experiences which range from programming the world's first computing machines to developing biomedical and graphical applications for computers. This video provides an opportunity to hear and learn the hidden history of the period and confirm that Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper were not the only female contributors to the rich history of computing!" A video from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing series.
• What Are the Grand Questions of Science? (101), Can We See the Near Future - Year 2025? (106), What is Consciousness? (107), How Does Technology Transform Thinking? (111), Thinking Out the Last Millennium (208), and How Does Technology Transform Society? (210) are just a some examples of the programs in the USC Presents...Closer To Truth series.
• Programs from CSE Colloquia - 2005, The University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering Colloquium Series, include Algorithms for Path-Planning, Gender, Lies and Video Games: Women and Computer Sciences, Google: A Behind-the-Scenes Look, Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Multi-robot Exploration, Natural Language Processing, and Reflective Interfaces.

Robot Pals. Scientific American Frontiers television broadcast on PBS. Alan Alda [host]: "The problem with most robots is that they tend to be, well, robotic. They know nothing they aren't programmed to know, and can do nothing they aren't programmed to do. But for many applications where robots could be useful, they need to be more like humans, able to respond as a cooperative partner rather than a mindless machine. In this program, we'll meet some robots that are learning to figure out for themselves what their human companions have in mind." Watch the video online or read the transcript.

SAIL and Dav Developmental Robot Projects at the Michigan State University Department of Computer Science and Engineering."This line of research is to advance artificial intelligence using what we call the developmental approach. This new approach is motivated by human cognitive and behavioral development from infancy to adulthood. It requires a fundamentally different way of addressing the issue of machine intelligence. We have introduced a new kind of program: developmental program. A robot that develops its mind through a developmental program is called a developmental robot. SAIL is the name of our first prototype of a developmental robot. It is a 'living' machine. Dav is the next generation after SAIL." Several videos of SAIL and Dav are available. [For related articles, go here.]

SRI International's Artificial Intelligence Center Video Archives covering projects such as Robots and Tracking; 3D Modeling and Visualization; and, Planning and Simulation.

Scientific American Frontiers. Several programs about robots, including "Games Machines Play," are available for watching online. You can also view some actual CyberSoccer matches.

Screen Savers

• AARON, the Cybernetic Artist. "AARON is not your ordinary screensaver. Developed by Harold Cohen over a period of nearly thirty years, and productized by Kurzweil CyberArt Technologies, Inc., AARON is the first fine art screensaver to utilize artificial intelligence to continuously create original paintings on your PC." Learn more about AARON on our Art page.
• "One University program has spent two years developing a screen saver, which computes, maps and provides information of where the Earth's plants and animals have lived, currently live and could one day live. The Informatics Biodiversity Center at the University of Kansas developed this screen saver, called Lifemapper. Lifemapper uses an artificial intelligence algorithm, called GARP for short. The Genetic Algorithm for Rule-set Production examines and compares similarities between a species and the area and climate it is found in. It can then predict the likelihood of finding a specific plant or animal in an area." - AI in the news, October 7, 2002

SimAgent Demo Movies. Maintained by Aaron Sloman, School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham. "This directory provides mpeg movies (viewable with mpeg_play, xine, mplayer, and others) showing what can be done with the SimAgent toolkit running in the Poplog/Pop11 environment using the RCLIB 2-D graphical interface tools." Titles include: Boids (flocking) demonstration, Tileworld demonstration, Sheepdog demonstration, and Two toy 'emotional' agents moving around.

"Sodarace [a joint venture between: soda and queen mary, university of london] is the online olympics pitting human creativity against machine learning in a competition to construct virtual racing robots. ... Sodarace is not just for fun. It is a shared competition for Artificial Intelligence researchers to test their learning algorithms while also being a play space in which to communicate the benefits of Artificial Intelligence research with a wide audience and promote a creative exploration of physics and engineering."

• When Virtual Robots Race, Science Wins. By Danna Voth & Rebecca L. Deuel. IEEE Intelligent Systems (March / April 2004). "Sodarace, an asynchronous, interactive Web game that pits human-created virtual robots against artificial intelligence-based, machine-created virtual robots, has a clear winner: science."

Text-to Speech / Speech Synthesis:

• Student Summer Projects at Bell Labs: "Over the past several summers, we have hosted a number of talented students who have worked with us on various aspects of text-to-speech. A couple of these students have built partial or complete TTS systems, and their work is represented on this page."
• "Festival is a general multi-lingual speech synthesis system developed at CSTR [Centre for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh]. It offers a full text to speech system with various APIs, as well an environment for development and research of speech synthesis techniques." They offer both pre-synthesized demos and a "try it yourself" demo.
• IBM's Interactive U.S. English Demo: "This demonstration of our work in unconstrained text-to-speech research allows users to submit text to be synthesized into speech."
• Dennis Klatt's History of Speech Synthesis. "Audio clips of synthetic speech illustrating the history of the art and technology of synthetically produced human speech."

Underwater Robots. By Jack Penland. ScienCentral News (September 16, 2003). "We’ve all seen the military use tracking dogs on land, but what about underwater? As this ScienCentral News video reports, the Navy’s newest generation underwater robots fill the role very well. They look like everything from torpedoes to bomb disposal robots to small submarines, but they’re not -- they’re the Navy’s newest wartime technology called 'Autonomous Underwater Vehicles,' or AUVs. ... [T]he Navy is actively pursuing and testing new designs. It has an annual event, called 'AUV Fest' where engineers from all over the country test their designs under similar ocean conditions." [The video is available in both Quicktime & Realmedia format.]

"See vReps in Action. Virtual representatives (vReps) are becoming more and more common on self-service sites. Verity Response lets you quickly deploy question and answer (Q & A) interfaces with images and personalities that match your brand." [from our Customer Service page]

Web Applets for Interactive Tutorials on Artificial Neural Learning. By Fred Corbett. "This tutorial was developed as part of my undergraduate thesis in Computer Engineering at the University of Manitoba, and was supervised by Dr. H. C. Card. The goal of this project was to demonstrate some elementary aspects of artificial neural networks (ANNs) in an interactive and, hopefully, interesting manner. ... This tutorial is currently divided into three sections [Artificial Neuron, Perceptron Learning, and Multi-Layer Perceptron]. Each section deals with a specific aspect of neural networks and includes a Java^TM applet. The sections include a brief introduction, some theory behind the applet, a set of instructions for using the applet, the source code, and the applet itself."

Web-controlled robot: Professors give life to cyber robot. By Zhanda Malone. Edwardsville Intelligencer (September 13, 2003). "Five SIUE professors are teaming up to give anyone entering the SIUE School of Engineering Web site the opportunity to take control of a Web-controlled robot. It's the project of the Autonomous Robotics Research Group, a group of School of Engineering professors trying to provide for the common good of their students. Their most recent accomplishment is Taz, a Web-controlled robot. Although everyone is welcome to take a turn at controlling the robot, the main audience for Taz is middle and high school students and teachers. The robot is available for limited hours throughout the week and can be controlled by following the prompts on the site. More information about the project and the group is available at http://www.cs.siue.edu/robotics."

And be sure to also see the individual videos & demos collected under various AI Topics.

Though you can't view them online, several AI videos are available for sale/rent from Films for the Humanities & Sciences. Their collection includes titles such as: The Brain Machine; Mind Talk: The Brain's New Story; Human Consciousness and Computers; Real Life, Artificial Life; and, Man and Machine: Redrawing the Boundary.

NOT A VIDEO or DEMO, BUT... A visit to Carnegie Mellon's Allen Newell and Herbert Simon collections is like being given the keys to the offices of two of AI's founders. Among the many thrills you'll experience as you explore this collection is the opportunity to actual handwritten notations on documents such as manuscripts, speeches and lecture notes.