Remote-control warfare: Droning on

Blogging for the record an interesting piece entitled "Remote-control warfare: Droning on" about "How to build ethical understanding into pilotless war planes" which featured in the April 3rd 2010 issue of The Economist (Science and Technology section). A quote:

... Ronald Arkin of the Georgian Institute of Technology's School of Interactive Computing has a suggestion that might ease some of these concerns. He proposes involving the drone itself - or, rather, the software that is used to operate it - in the decision to attack. In effect, he plans to give the machine a conscience...

Good article. Worth a re-read.

51, Argument-Based Machine Learning

Just read 'Argument-Based Machine Learning' by Ivan Bratko, Jure Zabkar and Martin Mozina. I think it's a chapter in a forthcoming book. I skipped the details in the middle but found the high-level explanations and examples in the beginning and end very understandable. A good reminder of machine (/inductive) learning and a nice presentation of how argumentation can aid in this.

jabberwacky chatbot

Really cool chatbot:
http://www.jabberwacky.com
Have a conversation with it, or one of its variants:
http://www.jabberwacky.com/george
http://www.icogno.com/joan.html