Shakey the Robot was the first general-purpose mobile robot able to reason about its own actions. While other robots would have to be instructed on each individual step of completing a larger task, Shakey could analyze commands and break them down into basic chunks by itself. Due to its nature, the project combined research in robotics, computer vision, and natural language processing. Because of this, it was the first project that melded logical reasoning and physical action. Shakey was developed at the Artificial Intelligence Center of Stanford Research Institute (now called SRI International). Some of the most notable results of the project include the A search algorithm, the Hough transform, and the visibility graph method. == History == Shakey was developed from approximately 1966 through 1972 with Charles Rosen, Nils Nilsson and Peter Hart as project managers. Other major contributors included Alfred Brain, Sven Wahlstrom, Bertram Raphael, Richard Duda, Richard Fikes, Thomas Garvey, Helen Chan Wolf and Michael Wilber. The project was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) based on a SRI proposal submitted in April 1964 for research in "Intelligent Automata", later "Intelligent Automata to Reconnaissance". It was originally designed to have two retractable arms. Now retired from active duty, Shakey is currently on view in a glass display case at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The project inspired numerous other robotics projects, most notably the Centibots. == Software == The robot's programming was primarily done in LISP. The Stanford Research Institute Problem Solver (STRIPS) planner it used was conceived as the main planning component for the software it utilized. As the first robot that was a logical, goal-based agent, Shakey experienced a limited world. A version of Shakey's world could contain a number of rooms connected by corridors, with doors and light switches available for the robot to interact with. Shakey had a short list of available actions within its planner. These actions involved traveling from one location to another, turning the light switches on and off, opening and closing the doors, climbing up and down from rigid objects, and pushing movable objects around. The STRIPS automated planner could devise a plan to enact all the available actions, even though Shakey himself did not have the capability to execute all the actions within the plan personally. An example mission for Shakey might be something like, an operator types the command "push the block off the platform" at a computer console. Shakey looks around, identifies a platform with a block on it, and locates a ramp in order to reach the platform. Shakey then pushes the ramp over to the platform, rolls up the ramp onto the platform, and pushes the block off the platform. == Hardware == Physically, the robot was particularly tall, and had an antenna for a radio link, sonar range finders, a television camera, on-board processors, and collision detection sensors ("bump detectors"). The robot's tall stature and tendency to shake resulted in its name: We worked for a month trying to find a good name for it, ranging from Greek names to whatnot, and then one of us said, 'Hey, it shakes like hell and moves around, let’s just call it Shakey.' == Research results == The development of Shakey provided far-reaching impact on the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence, as well as computer science in general. Some of the more notable results include the development of the A search algorithm, which is widely used in pathfinding and graph traversal, the process of plotting an efficiently traversable path between points; the Hough transform, which is a feature extraction technique used in image analysis, computer vision, and digital image processing; and the visibility graph method for finding Euclidean shortest paths among obstacles in the plane. == Media and awards == In 1969 the SRI published "SHAKEY: Experimentation in Robot Learning and Planning", a 24-minute video. The project then received media attention. This included an article in the New York Times on April 10, 1969. In 1970, Life referred to Shakey as the "first electronic person"; and in November 1970 National Geographic Magazine covered Shakey and the future of computers. The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's AI Video Competition's awards are named "Shakeys" because of the significant impact of the 1969 video. Shakey was inducted into Carnegie Mellon University's Robot Hall of Fame in 2004 alongside such notables as ASIMO and C-3PO. Shakey has been honored with an IEEE Milestone in Electrical Engineering and Computing. Shakey was showcased in the BBC's Towards Tomorrow: Robot (1967) documentary.
Anna Becker
Anna Becker is an Israeli researcher known in the field of artificial intelligence and computer science within the financial field. == Early life and education == Becker was born in Russia and immigrated to Israel at 16 after graduating from a school in Moscow. At 17, she began her studies at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. During her master's degree in computer science, she taught first-year students of the same course, and at 27, Becker completed her PhD in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. == Career == While pursuing her PhD, Becker resolved an NP-complete approximation algorithm that had been unresolved for over twenty years. This made her a recognized scholar in the field. After completing her PhD, she developed an approximation technique by a factor of two. This technique is widely used today in operating systems, database systems, and VLSI chip designs. She then founded and sold Strategy Runner, a fintech software. After this, she founded EndoTech, an algorithmic trading platform based on artificial intelligence and machine learning. EndoTech's trading strategies have been operating in live cryptocurrency markets since 2017. The platform's BTC Alpha strategy has reported an average annual return of 163% on fixed capital over eight years of live operation, with a maximum drawdown of 14% and a trade accuracy rate of approximately 83%. In 2026, EndoTech entered a partnership with Bit1 Exchange to make its BTC Alpha and ETH Alpha copy trading strategies accessible to retail investors with no minimum deposit requirement, through a full-custody model in which user funds remain in their own exchange wallets at all times.As of 2023, Becker is working on Fianchetto Fund, an AI-based investing analysis platform. Becker has also co-authored a book on Bayesian networks, which has been published widely in the field of computer science and artificial intelligence.
Kunihiko Fukushima
Kunihiko Fukushima (Japanese: 福島 邦彦, born 16 March 1936) is a Japanese computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is currently working part-time as a senior research scientist at the Fuzzy Logic Systems Institute in Fukuoka, Japan. == Notable scientific achievements == In 1980, Fukushima published the neocognitron, the original deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture. Fukushima proposed several supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms to train the parameters of a deep neocognitron such that it could learn internal representations of incoming data. Today, however, the CNN architecture is usually trained through backpropagation. This approach is now heavily used in computer vision. In 1969 Fukushima introduced the ReLU (Rectifier Linear Unit) activation function in the context of visual feature extraction in hierarchical neural networks, which he called "analog threshold element". (Though the ReLU was first used by Alston Householder in 1941 as a mathematical abstraction of biological neural networks.) As of 2017 it is the most popular activation function for deep neural networks. == Education and career == In 1958, Fukushima received his Bachelor of Engineering in electronics from Kyoto University. He became a senior research scientist at the NHK Science & Technology Research Laboratories. In 1989, he joined the faculty of Osaka University. In 1999, he joined the faculty of the University of Electro-Communications. In 2001, he joined the faculty of Tokyo University of Technology. From 2006 to 2010, he was a visiting professor at Kansai University. Fukushima acted as founding president of the Japanese Neural Network Society (JNNS). He also was a founding member on the board of governors of the International Neural Network Society (INNS), and president of the Asia-Pacific Neural Network Assembly (APNNA). He was one of the board of governors of the International Neural Network Society (INNS) in 1989-1990 and 1993-2005. == Awards == In 2020, Fukushima received the Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science. In 2022, Fukushima became a laureate of the Asian Scientist 100 by the Asian Scientist. He also received the IEICE Achievement Award and Excellent Paper Awards, the IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award, the APNNA Outstanding Achievement Award, the JNNS Excellent Paper Award and the INNS Helmholtz Award.
Lenhart Schubert
Lenhart Karl Otto Schubert is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester, as well as a member of the Center for Language Sciences and the Center for Computation and the Brain. Schubert is a prominent researcher in the field of common sense reasoning. == Biography == Schubert received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1970. He was on the faculty of the University of Alberta between 1973 and 1988 and joined the faculty at the University of Rochester in 1988. He was elected fellow of Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 1993 for "fundamental contributions in NLP, esp. in the formalization, representation, and practical implementation of non-first order concepts".
Extended affix grammar
In computer science, extended affix grammars (EAGs) are a formal grammar formalism for describing the context free and context sensitive syntax of language, both natural language and programming languages. EAGs are a member of the family of two-level grammars; more specifically, a restriction of Van Wijngaarden grammars with the specific purpose of making parsing feasible. Like Van Wijngaarden grammars, EAGs have hyperrules that form a context-free grammar except in that their nonterminals may have arguments, known as affixes, the possible values of which are supplied by another context-free grammar, the metarules. EAGs were introduced and studied by D.A. Watt in 1974; recognizers were developed at the University of Nijmegen between 1985 and 1995. The EAG compiler developed there will generate either a recogniser, a transducer, a translator, or a syntax directed editor for a language described in the EAG formalism. The formalism is quite similar to Prolog, to the extent that it borrowed its cut operator. EAGs have been used to write grammars of natural languages such as English, Spanish, and Hungarian. The aim was to verify the grammars by making them parse corpora of text (corpus linguistics); hence, parsing had to be sufficiently practical. However, the parse tree explosion problem that ambiguities in natural language tend to produce in this type of approach is worsened for EAGs because each choice of affix value may produce a separate parse, even when several different values are equivalent. The remedy proposed was to switch to the much simpler Affix Grammar over a Finite Lattice (AGFL) instead, in which metagrammars can only produce simple finite languages.
Sub-pixel resolution
In digital image processing, sub-pixel resolution can be obtained in images constructed from sources with information exceeding the nominal pixel resolution of said images. == Example == For example, if the image of a ship of length 50 metres (160 ft), viewed side-on, is 500 pixels long, the nominal resolution (pixel size) on the side of the ship facing the camera is 0.1 metres (3.9 in). Now sub-pixel resolution of well resolved features can measure ship movements which are an order of magnitude (10×) smaller. Movement is specifically mentioned here because measuring absolute positions requires an accurate lens model and known reference points within the image to achieve sub-pixel position accuracy. Small movements can however be measured (down to 1 cm) with simple calibration procedures. Specific fit functions often suffer specific bias with respect to image pixel boundaries. Users should therefore take care to avoid these "pixel locking" (or "peak locking") effects. == Determining feasibility == Whether features in a digital image are sharp enough to achieve sub-pixel resolution can be quantified by measuring the point spread function (PSF) of an isolated point in the image. If the image does not contain isolated points, similar methods can be applied to edges in the image. It is also important when attempting sub-pixel resolution to keep image noise to a minimum. This, in the case of a stationary scene, can be measured from a time series of images. Appropriate pixel averaging, through both time (for stationary images) and space (for uniform regions of the image) is often used to prepare the image for sub-pixel resolution measurements.
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