At Sandia National Laboratories, new "smart" machines can accurately infer your intents and help you to take better decisions or avoid mistakes. They could change in a near future how we interact with computers, according to this news release.
Over the past five years a team led by Sandia cognitive psychologist Chris Forsythe has been developing cognitive machines that accurately infer user intent, remember experiences with users and allow users to call upon simulated experts to help them analyze situations and make decisions.
Let's look at an example.
Here is a photograph of a Sandia software developer operating the DDD-AWACS simulation trainer while a cognitive model of the software runs simultaneously. The cognitive model can detect when he makes an error and alert him to it. (Photo by Randy Montoya)
When the team started five years ago, its goal was to create a "synthetic human," a combination of software and hardware able to think as a person. This means that traditional modeling software was not good enough. The software needed to integrate organic factors which influence our decisions, like emotions or fatigue.
This is why the team turned to the robotics department.
The robotics researchers immediately saw that the model could be used for intelligent machines, and the whole program emphasis changed. Suddenly the team was working on cognitive machines, not just synthetic humans.
Work on cognitive machines took off in 2002 with a contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a real-time machine that can infer an operator's cognitive processes.
Early this year work began on Sandia's Next Generation Intelligent Systems Grand Challenge project. "The goal of this Grand Challenge is to significantly improve the human capability to understand and solve national security problems, given the exponential growth of information and very complex environments," says Larry Ellis, the principal investigator.
And when will be able to commonly use this kind of system?
"It's entirely possible that these cognitive machines could be incorporated into most computer systems produced within 10 years," Forsythe says.
Source: Sandia National Laboratories News Release, August 13, 2003
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