Sunderland wins national AI awardJanuary 15, 2004A team of scientists from the University of Sunderland have won a major national award for their breakthrough in artificial intelligence. The team beat off stiff competition from the UK and abroad to win the British Computer Society's (BSC) Machine Intelligence Award, which recognises substantial developments in computational intelligence. The academics impressed judges with a live demonstration of a visually and verbally guided grasping robot at the BSC conference in Cambridge. The award is all the more rewarding for the team as very strict guidelines were set down to establish to what extent the robots represented a genuine advance in artificial intelligence. The team, led by Professor Stefan Wermter, focused on the practical use of visual recognition and navigation, which is generally difficult when working on machine intelligence. Innovative techniques from neural networks - a network of electronic components designed to mimic the human brain - were integrated into the MIrror-neuron Robot Agent (MIRA) robot.(ALL CORRECT) Professor Wermter says: "We are extremely pleased to have won this award. It is recognition for our research, the field of intelligent systems and for the University of Sunderland. The whole team did an excellent job. "One novel aspect was that the robot was controlled by artificial computational neural networks. The robot had been trained through the use of neural networks to approach and grasp an object. "There are a lot of very restricted industrial robots, but it is important to have ones which can talk, see, grasp, imitate and learn in everyday situations. We are working on the next generation of intelligent robots and we believe that learning and neural networks will be a key technology to make them smarter and more robust." The winning team included Dr Cornelius Weber, Chris Rowan, Alex Zochios and Mark Elshaw. The University's School of Computing and Technology set up one of the first masters in artificial intelligence last year. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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