SEATTLE, Washington -- If you're looking for David, Steven Spielberg's loving robotic child who wants to become a real boy, or even Lt. Commander Data, this week's international conference on artificial intelligence in Seattle is the wrong place to look.
Bob Bishop, president of SGI (formerly Silicon Graphics), predicted that in the 21st century we will move from artificial intelligence to artificial consciousness and even artificial emotions -- but in that he was in a definite minority.
Hardly any of the nearly 2,500 researchers and graduate students who flocked here for the 17th Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence are trying to give their creations emotions.
Many are looking at ways to make their machines understand languages -- especially English -- well enough to answer questions or search the Web without human users having to ask for information in the "right" way.
Tom Mitchell, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said most people imagine AI researchers are trying to build robots that look and act like people, "but that is closer to fantasy than reality."
The real AI systems are those like the speech-recognition systems that telephone companies use to field 411 calls, and those that handle dangerous manufacturing tasks like welding and spray painting in auto plants.
"AI is attacking one of the largest open questions in science," Mitchell said. "What is intelligence and what would it mean to create that out of a machine?
"We already have computer systems that learn from historic medical data to predict which treatments will work best for which future patients. There are many AI systems that have one or two human-like capabilities which are in routine use."
In addition to the academic and scientific presentations, the conference is also hosting several robotics competitions, where self-controlled robots are pitted against one another in soccer games, conduct search-and-rescue operations in a simulated earthquake aftermath, and serve hors d'oeuvres.
Dr. Manuela Velosa of Carnegie Mellon, one of the organizers of this year's RoboCup soccer competition, said robots are in the forefront of AI research because they combine so many of the functions scientists are modeling and are also learning to function in teams.
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates used the conference site to announce that his company is donating $7.2 million for a new computer sciences building at the University of Washington's Seattle campus.
Microsoft employees have donated an additional $4.5 million to the project, which will cost an estimated $70 million to complete. The gift is the first donation to a building fund by the company and one of its largest single donations.
"I come from the school of AI optimists," Gates said in his keynote speech. He went on to say that a quarter century ago when he was studying at Harvard he felt sure the major problems in artificial intelligence would be solved in five years.
Today he sees solutions to some of these same "tough problems" coming in the next five years.
Gates said the main developments Microsoft is looking forward to are in computer vision, handwriting recognition and understanding natural language, including the spoken word.
"Software can't be sold that doesn't understand what the user is trying to do," Gates said. "We're proceeding full-speed ahead with the kind of R&D that we do, really believing in this advance in science that you all represent. We want to take your work and be able to deliver it to hundreds of millions of users."
Gates presented a set of research teams that demonstrated to participants some of the projects they are currently developing.
Derek Jacoby demonstrated the "Mipad." The program takes dictation on a handheld device -- such as a palmtop computer or cellular phone -- and sends it to a full-size computer where it's rendered into text that is then returned to the Mipad. As part of the demonstration, Jacoby showed how it could place information into a scheduler automatically.
Afterward Jacoby predicted that it would be "a couple of years" before the program would be ready for market, both because of problems in wireless transmission over cellular networks and continuing difficulties in getting it to work well.
With Gates looking on, he said, "If I get good recognition, maybe it'll be promotion time."
Unfortunately for Jacoby's chances of moving up the company ladder, the phrase came back onscreen as "If I get good recognition, menace will be promotion time."
In another demonstration, a question-answering program featuring an animated parrot with a voice like Stephen Hawking's responded to the question "Who is Bill Gates married to?"
Its answer? "I'm not sure. It's either Melinda French or Microsoft."
In fairness, most of the demos went off without a hitch and, as Samuel Johnson once remarked, "the amazing thing is that the dog could dance at all."
