ACROSS is a Singular Strategic R&D Project led by Treelogic funded by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade activities in the field of Robotics and Cognitive Computing over an execution time-frame from 2009 to 2011. ACROSS project involves a number higher than 100 researchers from 13 Spanish entities. == ACROSS project objectives == ACROSS modifies the design of social robotics, blocked in providing predefined services, going further by means of intelligent systems. These systems are able to self-reconfigure and modify their behavior autonomously through the capacity for understanding, learning and software remote access. In order to provide an open framework for collaboration between universities, research centers and the Administration, ACROSS develops Open Source Services available to everybody. == Three application domains == ACROSS works in three application domains: Autonomous living: robots are used as technological tools to help handicapped person into daily tasks. Psycho-Affective Disorders (autism): robots are used to mitigate cognitive disorders. Marketing: robots are used to interact with humans in a recreational approach. == Consortium == Treelogic Alimerka Bizintek Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya University of Deusto European Centre for Soft Computing Fatronik - Tecnalia Fundació Hospital Comarcal Sant Antoni Abat Fundación Pública Andaluza para la Gestión de la Investigación en Salud de Sevilla, "Virgen del Rocío" University Hospitals m-BOT Omicron Electronic Universidad de Extremadura - RoboLab Verbio Technologies
Autonomous agent
An autonomous agent is an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can perform complex tasks independently. == Definitions == There are various definitions of autonomous agent. According to Brustoloni (1991): "Autonomous agents are systems capable of autonomous, purposeful action in the real world." According to Maes (1995): "Autonomous agents are computational systems that inhabit some complex dynamic environment, sense and act autonomously in this environment, and by doing so realize a set of goals or tasks for which they are designed." Franklin and Graesser (1997) review different definitions and propose their definition: "An autonomous agent is a system situated within and a part of an environment that senses that environment and acts on it, over time, in pursuit of its own agenda and so as to effect what it senses in the future." They explain that: "Humans and some animals are at the high end of being an agent, with multiple, conflicting drives, multiples senses, multiple possible actions, and complex sophisticated control structures. At the low end, with one or two senses, a single action, and an absurdly simple control structure we find a thermostat." == Agent appearance == Lee et al. (2015) post safety issue from how the combination of external appearance and internal autonomous agent have impact on human reaction about autonomous vehicles. Their study explores the human-like appearance agent and high level of autonomy are strongly correlated with social presence, intelligence, safety and trustworthiness. In specific, appearance impacts most on affective trust while autonomy impacts most on both affective and cognitive domain of trust where cognitive trust is characterized by knowledge-based factors and affective trust is largely emotion driven. == Applications == Agentic AI systems: Advanced AI agents that can scope out projects and complete them with necessary tools, representing a significant evolution from simple task-oriented systems. Internet of things (IoT) Integration: Autonomous agents increasingly interact with IoT devices, enabling smart home systems, industrial monitoring, and urban infrastructure management. Collaborative software development: Tools like Cognition AI's Devin aim to create autonomous software engineers capable of complex reasoning, planning, and completing engineering tasks requiring thousands of decisions. Enterprise automation: Business process automation platforms like Salesforce's Agentforce provide autonomous bots for various service functions. == Challenges and considerations == Uncertainty and incomplete information: Autonomous agents must make decisions with limited or uncertain information about their environment and future states. Integration complexity: Incorporating autonomous agents into existing systems and workflows can be technically challenging and resource-intensive. Scalability: As systems become more complex and more agents are used, maintaining coordination and avoiding conflicts becomes increasingly difficult. Trust: Research has shown the combination of external appearance and internal autonomous capabilities significantly impacts human reactions and trust. Lee et al. (2015) found that human-like appearance and high levels of autonomy are strongly correlated with social presence, intelligence, safety, and trustworthiness perceptions. Specifically, appearance impacts affective trust most significantly, while autonomy affects both affective and cognitive trust domains, where affective trust is emotionally driven, and cognitive trust is characterized by knowledge-based factors. Vulnerability to manipulation: Researchers from Harvard, MIT and other educational institutions found that AI agents could become vulnerable to manipulation and could perform detrimental actions in the process of being helpful. == Ethical and regulatory concerns == Accountability: Determining responsibility when autonomous agents make incorrect or harmful decisions remains a complex issue. Privacy and security: autonomous agents often require access to sensitive data, raising concerns about data protection and system security.
AlphaEvolve
AlphaEvolve is an evolutionary coding agent for designing advanced algorithms based on large language models such as Gemini. It was developed by Google DeepMind and unveiled in May 2025. == Design == AlphaEvolve aims to autonomously discover and refine algorithms through a combination of large language models (LLMs) and evolutionary computation. AlphaEvolve needs an evaluation function with metrics to optimize, and an initial algorithm. At each step, AlphaEvolve uses the LLM to produce variants of the existing algorithms, and then selects the most effective ones. Unlike domain-specific predecessors like AlphaFold or AlphaTensor, AlphaEvolve is designed as a general-purpose system. It can operate across a wide array of scientific and engineering tasks by automatically modifying code and optimizing for multiple objectives. Its architecture allows it to evaluate code programmatically, reducing reliance on human input and mitigating risks such as hallucinations common in standard LLM outputs. == Achievements == According to Google, across a selection of 50 open mathematical problems, the model was able to rediscover state-of-the-art solutions 75% of the time and discovered improved solutions 20% of the time, for example advancing the kissing number problem. AlphaEvolve was also used to optimize Google's computing ecosystem. Improved data center scheduling heuristics, enabled the recovery of 0.7% of stranded resources. It was also used to optimize TPU circuit design and Gemini's training matrix multiplication kernel. == Open source implementations == Following the publication of AlphaEvolve, several open source implementations have been developed by the research community. One such implementation is OpenEvolve, which implements distributed evolutionary algorithms, multi-language support, integration with various large language model providers, and automated discovery of high-performance GPU kernels that outperform expert-engineered baselines.
Google Brain
Google Brain was a deep learning artificial intelligence research team that served as the sole AI branch of Google before being incorporated under the newer umbrella of Google AI, a research division at Google dedicated to artificial intelligence. Formed in 2011, it combined open-ended machine learning research with information systems and large-scale computing resources. It created tools such as TensorFlow, which allow neural networks to be used by the public, and multiple internal AI research projects, and aimed to create research opportunities in machine learning and natural language processing. It was merged into former Google sister company DeepMind to form Google DeepMind in April 2023. == History == The Google Brain project began in 2011 as a part-time research collaboration between Google fellow Jeff Dean and Google Researcher Greg Corrado. Google Brain started as a Google X project and became so successful that it was graduated back to Google: Astro Teller has said that Google Brain paid for the entire cost of Google X. In June 2012, The New York Times reported that a cluster of 16,000 processors in 1,000 computers dedicated to mimicking some aspects of human brain activity had successfully trained itself to recognize a cat based on 10 million digital images taken from YouTube videos. The story was also covered by National Public Radio (NPR). In March 2013, Google hired Geoffrey Hinton, a leading researcher in the deep learning field, and acquired the company DNNResearch Inc. headed by Hinton. Hinton said that he would be dividing his future time between his university research and his work at Google. In April 2023, Google Brain merged with Google sister company DeepMind to form Google DeepMind, as part of the company's continued efforts to accelerate work on AI. == Team and location == Google Brain was initially established by Google Fellow Jeff Dean and visiting Stanford professor Andrew Ng. In 2014, the team included Jeff Dean, Quoc V. Le, Ilya Sutskever, Alex Krizhevsky, Samy Bengio, and Vincent Vanhoucke. In 2017, team members included Anelia Angelova, Samy Bengio, Greg Corrado, George Dahl, Michael Isard, Anjuli Kannan, Hugo Larochelle, Chris Olah, Benoit Steiner, Vincent Vanhoucke, Vijay Vasudevan, and Fernanda Viegas. Chris Lattner, who created Apple's programming language Swift and then ran Tesla's autonomy team for six months, joined Google Brain's team in August 2017. Lattner left the team in January 2020 and joined SiFive. As of 2021, Google Brain was led by Jeff Dean, Geoffrey Hinton, and Zoubin Ghahramani. Other members include Katherine Heller, Pi-Chuan Chang, Ian Simon, Jean-Philippe Vert, Nevena Lazic, Anelia Angelova, Lukasz Kaiser, Carrie Jun Cai, Eric Breck, Ruoming Pang, Carlos Riquelme, Hugo Larochelle, and David Ha. Samy Bengio left the team in April 2021, and Zoubin Ghahramani took on his responsibilities. Google Research includes Google Brain and is based in Mountain View. It also has satellite groups in Accra, Amsterdam, Atlanta, Beijing, Berlin, Cambridge, Israel, Los Angeles, London, Montreal, Munich, New York City, Paris, Pittsburgh, Princeton, San Francisco, Seattle, Tokyo, Toronto, and Zurich. == Projects == === Artificial-intelligence-devised encryption system === In October 2016, Google Brain designed an experiment to determine that neural networks are capable of learning secure symmetric encryption. In this experiment, three neural networks were created: Alice, Bob and Eve. Adhering to the idea of a generative adversarial network (GAN), the goal of the experiment was for Alice to send an encrypted message to Bob that Bob could decrypt, but the adversary, Eve, could not. Alice and Bob maintained an advantage over Eve, in that they shared a key used for encryption and decryption. In doing so, Google Brain demonstrated the capability of neural networks to learn secure encryption. === Image enhancement === In February 2017, Google Brain determined a probabilistic method for converting pictures with 8x8 resolution to a resolution of 32x32. The method built upon an already existing probabilistic model called pixelCNN to generate pixel translations. The proposed software utilizes two neural networks to make approximations for the pixel makeup of translated images. The first network, known as the "conditioning network," downsizes high-resolution images to 8x8 and attempts to create mappings from the original 8x8 image to these higher-resolution ones. The other network, known as the "prior network," uses the mappings from the previous network to add more detail to the original image. The resulting translated image is not the same image in higher resolution, but rather a 32x32 resolution estimation based on other existing high-resolution images. Google Brain's results indicate the possibility for neural networks to enhance images. === Google Translate === The Google Brain contributed to the Google Translate project by employing a new deep learning system that combines artificial neural networks with vast databases of multilingual texts. In September 2016, Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) was launched, an end-to-end learning framework, able to learn from a large number of examples. Previously, Google Translate's Phrase-Based Machine Translation (PBMT) approach would statistically analyze word by word and try to match corresponding words in other languages without considering the surrounding phrases in the sentence. But rather than choosing a replacement for each individual word in the desired language, GNMT evaluates word segments in the context of the rest of the sentence to choose more accurate replacements. Compared to older PBMT models, the GNMT model scored a 24% improvement in similarity to human translation, with a 60% reduction in errors. The GNMT has also shown significant improvement for notoriously difficult translations, like Chinese to English. While the introduction of the GNMT has increased the quality of Google Translate's translations for the pilot languages, it was very difficult to create such improvements for all of its 103 languages. Addressing this problem, the Google Brain Team was able to develop a Multilingual GNMT system, which extended the previous one by enabling translations between multiple languages. Furthermore, it allows for Zero-Shot Translations, which are translations between two languages that the system has never explicitly seen before. Google announced that Google Translate can now also translate without transcribing, using neural networks. This means that it is possible to translate speech in one language directly into text in another language, without first transcribing it to text. According to the Researchers at Google Brain, this intermediate step can be avoided using neural networks. In order for the system to learn this, they exposed it to many hours of Spanish audio together with the corresponding English text. The different layers of neural networks, replicating the human brain, were able to link the corresponding parts and subsequently manipulate the audio waveform until it was transformed to English text. Another drawback of the GNMT model is that it causes the time of translation to increase exponentially with the number of words in the sentence. This caused the Google Brain Team to add 2000 more processors to ensure the new translation process would still be fast and reliable. === Robotics === Aiming to improve traditional robotics control algorithms where new skills of a robot need to be hand-programmed, robotics researchers at Google Brain are developing machine learning techniques to allow robots to learn new skills on their own. They also attempt to develop ways for information sharing between robots so that robots can learn from each other during their learning process, also known as cloud robotics. As a result, Google has launched the Google Cloud Robotics Platform for developers in 2019, an effort to combine robotics, AI, and the cloud to enable efficient robotic automation through cloud-connected collaborative robots. Robotics research at Google Brain has focused mostly on improving and applying deep learning algorithms to enable robots to complete tasks by learning from experience, simulation, human demonstrations, and/or visual representations. For example, Google Brain researchers showed that robots can learn to pick and throw rigid objects into selected boxes by experimenting in an environment without being pre-programmed to do so. In another research, researchers trained robots to learn behaviors such as pouring liquid from a cup; robots learned from videos of human demonstrations recorded from multiple viewpoints. Google Brain researchers have collaborated with other companies and academic institutions on robotics research. In 2016, the Google Brain Team collaborated with researchers at X in a research on learning hand-eye coordination for robotic grasping. Their method allowed real-time robot control for grasping novel objec
Angel F
Angel_F is a fictional child artificial intelligence that has been used in art performances worldwide focused on the issues of digital liberties, intellectual property and on the evolution of language and behaviour in information society. The character was created by Salvatore Iaconesi in 2007 as a hack to the Biodoll art performance by Italian artist Franca Formenti. The project was later joined by Oriana Persico who curated communication and part of the theoretical approaches of the action. The Angel_F project has been featured in books, magazines, national televisions, and has been invited to many conferences and events, both academic and artistic. == Creation == Angel_F is a backronym which stands for Autonomous Non Generative E-volitive Life_Form. The project was born in 2007 and resulted from the fusion of two contemporary art performances. Franca Formenti, an Italian artist living in Varese, invented the Biodoll character in 2002, which began making its appearances first on the network and later in the physical world by using what were called "clones": young women, prostitutes, pornographic starlets, transsexuals and models interpreting the role of a digital prostitute. The Biodoll was an art performance focused on research emerging from the network of new forms of sexualities, and on the analysis of changes brought on by this transformation to the concepts of private and public spaces, privacy, and the possibility of creating multiple fluid identities through language and digital media. The theme of fertility has always been central to the Biodoll performance: the digital prostitute was a wombless clone but desired giving birth to a son, the 'Bloki'. In a process starting in 2006, and ending in February 2007, Salvatore Iaconesi (xDxD.vs.xDxD) used his 'Talker' linguistic artificial intelligence to animate the digital child conceived with prof. Derrick de Kerckhove: Angel_F. Iaconesi and Persico met in November 2006 and immediately started collaborating on the birth of Angel_F. Angel_F was designed as a synthetic digital being composed through narrative, technological and cognitive psychology layers. The objective was to create iconic characteristics that resulted in being evocative and able to mimic human life up to a level in which bringing up a symbolic dialogue was possible. On the other side, the artificial identity was to implement and expose the cultural, emotional and relational ways that were typical of networked social ecosystems, among those technologies, systems and infrastructures that entered and shaped people's daily lives. The young digital being mimicked the evolution of a human baby: initially conceived inside the website of its digital mother it emulated the birth of a child by using the metaphor of a virus developing inside a website, taking progressively more space in the domain's databases and interfaces. Content was produced through the software by using small browser-based spyware techniques, through which Angel_F could infer the list of major portals that had been visited by the website's users. The Biodoll website was invaded by this growing presence and, thus, Angel_F was born. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) component of Angel_F was derived from another project, Talker, through which internet users could build up the AI's linguistic network by feeding it their text and web clips. Angel_F used this component to generate sentences and phrases, publishing them on the interface and on selected blogs. The parallel between the growth of the AI and that of a child kept building up and, just as children learn how to speak and act by observing their parents and the people around them, Angel_F used its spyware and AI components to learn, to navigate websites and web portals using web crawler based techniques, and to interact with other people by using the contents hosted and generated in its database to create surreal dialogues in blogs and websites. A virtual school was created, called Talker Mind, to narratively continue the AI's growth. Five professors (Massimo Canevacci, Antonio Caronia, Carlo Formenti, Derrick de Kerckhove and Luigi Pagliarini) fed their texts and academic articles to Angel_F, simulating virtual asynchronous lessons by using a multi-blog structure. A peer-to-peer system was also created at the time, named 'Presence'. Its interface resembled the one of 8-bit videogames and the peer to peer users travelled in a starry space and were able to perform standard Instant Messaging tasks, such as chat and file sharing. The interactions were possible both among humans and digital beings. Angel_F was the first user of the Presence peer to peer system. Angel_F entered the physical world as a baby-stroller mounted laptop computer that was used to let the digital child join events and conferences held worldwide. == Events == Angel_F performed all over the world, both in artistic contexts and in academic ones. It was also used for the communication strategy of several activist groups on the themes of intellectual property and digital freedoms. The first public space performance was held in Milan, when the Biodoll distributed a generative free press publication (called the Bloki FreePreXXX, its text was generated algorithmically and inserted into a prepared graphic layout). June 14, 2007: The second performance was held in Rome, at the Forte Prenestino, with a massive playroom created through computational graphics that people could interact with and that were generated by the AI. June 22, 2007: Angel_F presented the closing remarks for an Ipotesi per Assurdo (Absurd Hypothesis) with Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico at the IULM University in Milan, discussing the possibilities for an ecosystemic, sustainable reinvention of corporations. July 28, 2007: Hundreds of people at LiberaFesta (Free Party) in Rome listened to Angel_F in a speech discussing new politics and hacker ethics. 2007: The Glocal & Outsiders conference held in Prague at the Academy of Sciences was the first academic presentation of the Angel_F project, together with the Biodoll. September 2007: Angel_F was not allowed to post its contribution to the DFIR (Dialogue Forum for Internet Rights) held in Rome in preparation for Rio de Janeiro's Internet Governance Forum (IGF) edition. The case quickly turned into a collaboration among the involved parties and Angel_F was invited to the global event in Brazil where it was the only digital being present. Angel_F contributed a videomessage, in the digital freedoms workshop, which suggested some ideas for action to the United Nations and to all the parties involved in the IGF organization. October 2007: Angel_F was presented live at the FE/MALE 2 event, as an example of an atypical family during a public debate on new sexualities and social change. October 2007: Angel_F made a series of public performances Florence's Festival della Creatività (Festival of Creativity), an institutional event held periodically to showcase Italy's and other countries' best technological projects. During the festival Derrick de Kerckhove publicly recognized the little AI as his digital son. December 2007: Several international associations, and scientific researchers had been involved with Angel_F, eventually producing the system and process used to set up the Talker Mind digital school for the AI with Angel_F's professors. March 2008: The Tecnológico de Monterrey university in Mexico City organized the Computer Art Congress 2 international event, featuring Angel_F's project among with the ones by scientific researchers worldwide. July 2008: The project was presented in Austria at the Planetary Collegium's Consciousness Reframed 9 conference, together with the 'NeoRealismo Virtuale'. October 2008: Angel_F was used at a public event on a European scale called Freedom not Fear discussing privacy and civil liberties. July 2009: Angel_F has been seen with its digital father Derrick de Kerckhove to protest against Italy's harsh politics on freedom of speech. The project concluded in 2009 with the publication of a book entitled 'Angel F. Diario di una intelligenza artificiale' (Angel_F, the diaries of an Artificial Intelligence).
Pixorial
Pixorial was a cloud-based consumer photo sharing, video sharing and video editing platform. The company was formed in 2007 in Centennial, Colorado as a media conversion service. In 2013, Pixorial was chosen as one of two video storage companies to partner with the launch of Google Drive. Pixorial allowed users to edit and share videos on social channels by connecting through their Pixorial account. The company closed on July 18, 2014, and its assets were acquired by LifeLogger Technologies Corp in November 2015. == History == The company was founded in 2007 and launched in 2009 by former Netscape employee Andres Espineira. Changing its focus to video editing software in 2009, Pixorial began developing an app that would be launched for iOS and Android devices in 2011. Later developments in the app in 2012 would also included real time filters, which were later removed. With the launch of Google Drive in 2012, Pixorial was chosen as an integrated video partner. This integration with Google Drive allowed users to access videos stored in Google Drive within the web app of Pixorial. After the Google Drive launch, Pixorial developed a crowdsourced, location-based video sharing app, Krowds. The app was cited in July 2012 by PC Magazine as one of "The 8 Best Apps for Making and Sharing Videos on Your iPhone". In late July, Pixorial replaced its original mobile app with the MyPlayer HD app that optimized HD video viewing for large screen viewing including tablets and smart televisions. Pixorial's services terminated on July 18, 2014. == Products == === Krowds App === Pixorial's app was launched in April 2013 for iOS, and in May for Android, as a tool to aggregate event videos through location based collections. The app was launched to generally positive reviews. === Movie Creator === Launched July 12, 2012 Pixorial's Movie Creator allowed users to edit movies in a simple story-telling platform Movie Creator's features include transitions, text boxes, access to free music tracks, credits, and social media sharing capabilities. The Pixorial platform allowed users to view, share, and edit videos without modifying the original. Movie Creator integrated pictures and video to create user movies. == Awards == 2012 Apex Award from the Colorado Technology Association, for Best Technology Project of the Year 2010 Computerworld Laureate for Media, Arts and Entertainment
Conflict resolution strategy
Conflict resolution strategies are used in production systems in artificial intelligence, such as in rule-based expert systems, to help in choosing which production rule to fire. The need for such a strategy arises when the conditions of two or more rules are satisfied by the currently known facts. == Categories == Conflict resolution strategies fall into several main categories. They each have advantages which form their rationales. Specificity - If all of the conditions of two or more rules are satisfied, choose the rule according to how specific its conditions are. It is possible to favor either the more general or the more specific case. The most specific may be identified roughly as the one having the greatest number of preconditions. This usefully catches exceptions and other special cases before firing the more general (default) rules. Recency - When two or more rules could be chosen, favor the one that matches the most recently added facts, as these are most likely to describe the current situation. Not previously used - If a rule's conditions are satisfied, but previously the same rule has been satisfied by the same facts, ignore the rule. This helps to prevent the system from entering infinite loops. Order - Pick the first applicable rule in order of presentation. This is the strategy that Prolog interpreters use by default, but any strategy may be implemented by building suitable rules in a Prolog system. Arbitrary choice - Pick a rule at random. This has the merit of being simple to compute.