lugowski%resbld@ti-csl.CSNET.UUCP (03/31/87)
In the wake of Indiana's capture of NCAA 1987 men's basketball championship
and in the wake of AIList discussions on militarism in AI and real-time
safety-critical AI, I propose that the emulation of basketball games would
be a good domain for developing all sorts of useful technology, starting with
multi-agent planning and ending in real-time control. For starters, one
could consider a bird's eye view of the basketball court with moving
circles representing the players and the ball. The robotics people could
work on the missed dunk. The vision people could work on recognizing
timeout signals. The naive physics crowd could model missed free throws.
And the speech-to-text and image-to-speech ("this game's so good it speaks
for itself") could zero-in on play-by-play. Analogies and metaphor folks
could distinguish zone defenses from man-to-man, as well as the eigen-cliches
of various color commentators. Reasoning under uncertainty could model the
referees' calls. And the AI-in-law effort could model Coach Knight's use of
the technical faul -- and the connectionist models of sentences -- of his
faul language.
This endeavor would be plenty difficult. It would offer abundant military
applications as well as civilian ones. Moreover, it would provide the AI
research community with a common performance yardstick while allowing
everyone to do their own thing, from neural networks to expert systems. It
would advance science and technology, not to mention the physical fitness
of AI experimentalists. It might even do something for Indiana's AI effort
and boost CMU's basketball standing. And we could anticipate hearing
Marvin Minsky or David Rumelhart from the TV booths of the NCAAs tournaments
to come -- "The Society of Swoosh", "Backpropagation of Missed Free Throws".
There's just one more thing...
Um, funding anyone?
-- Marek Lugowski (Indiana M.S. '84)
Neural Networks Project
Texas Instruments
Lugowski%CRL1@ti-csl.csnet P.O. Box 655936, M/S 154
(214) 995-4207 Dallas, Texas 75265
"basketball people and AI folks, unite!"
[Too late -- it's being done. The following seminar at SRI described
a system that tracks soccer players in down-looking imagery and reasons
about their actions and intentions. It then generates a play-by-play
commentary, being careful not to state anything that the listener could
infer from previous statements. -- KIL]
Prof. Wolfgang Wahlster of the Univeristy of Saarbruecken will
give a talk and demonstration of his systems on Friday February 20th
at 10 AM.
GENERATING NAUTRAL LANGUAGE DESCRIPTIONS FOR IMAGE SEQUENCES
Wolfgang Wahlster
Computer Science Department
Univerity of Saarbruecken
West Germany
The aim of the project VITRA (VIsual TRAnslator) is the
development of a computational theory of the relation between natural
language and vision. In this talk, we will focus on the semantics of
path prepositions (like "along" or "past") and their use for the
description of trajectories of moving objects, the intrinsic and deictic
use of spatial prepositions and the use of linguistic hedges to express
various degrees of applicability of spatial relations.
First, we describe the implementation of the system CITYTOUR,
a German question-answering system that simulates aspects of a
fictitious sightseeing tour through a city. Then we show how the
system was interfaced to an image sequence analysis system. From
the top of a 35m high building, a stationary TV camera recorded an
image sequence of a street crossing on video tape. In 130 selected
frames the moving objects were automatically recognized by analyzing
displacement vector fields. Our system then answers natural language
queries about the recognized events.
Finally, we discuss current extensions to the system for the
generation of a report on a soccer game that the system is watching.
Here we focus on the problem of incremental, real-time text generation
and the use of a re-representation component that models the assumed
imagination of the listener.