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The BCS Machine Intelligence Prize is awarded for a live demonstration of 'Progress Towards Machine Intelligence'.

Summary of Finalists - 2009

A.L.I.C.E.

ALICE A.I. Foundation, Elizabeth Perreau (liseperu@netscape.net; http://alice.pandorabots.com)

The ALICE bot is an A.I. natural language chat program designed to play Turing's Imitation Game. Like the computer in the game as Turing imagined it, the computer plays the role of the lying man. ALICE is a computer, pretending to be a man, pretending to be a woman, pretending to be a computer.

Taaable

LIRIS Lab. and Lyon 1 University (France), Amelie Cordier (amelie.cordier@liris.cnrs.fr; http://taaable.fr/)

Taaable is a web-based cooking application making use of case-based reasoning (CBR). You want to cook a pear pie? Just ask Taaable and it will provide you with a creative pear pie recipe: as Taaable does not have any pear pie recipe in its recipe book, it will adapt an apple pie recipe in order to satisfy your request. Taaable also improves itself by learning new adaptation knowledge with time, through interactions with its users. Thanks to this additional knowledge, it is able to solve more and more cooking problems.

Dora the Explorer, a robot motivated by curiosity

University of Birmingham, Nick Hawes and Marc Hanheide {n.a.hawes; m.hanheide}@cs.bham.ac.uk ; http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~nah

Dora the Explorer is a mobile robot with a sense of curiosity and a drive to explore its world. Given an incomplete tour of an indoor environment, Dora is driven by internal motivations to probe the gaps in her spatial knowledge. She will actively explore regions of space which she hasn't previously visited but which she expects will lead her to further unexplored space. She will also attempt to determine the categories of rooms through active visual search for functionally important objects, and through ontology-driven inference on the results of this search.

Fly by Ear

De Montfort University, Benjamin N. Passow and Mario A. Gongora {benpassow; mgongora}@dmu.ac.uk

Hearing is an invaluable sense for humans and has been greatly under-explored in the fields of AI and robotics. We show how communication and the sense of hearing can vastly improve the intelligent behaviour of an autonomous indoor helicopter. The audience will see the autonomous helicopter fly and manoeuvre on-stage while a supervising machine reads its intrinsic sound, extracts a variety of valuable information and feeds it back to the helicopter to enhance its stability and flight path. This novel use of artificial hearing presents an important advance in control, robotics, and machine intelligence.