After little or no A.I. & work related blog entries, I thought I'd report a bit on the A.I. lab's project "SuperRadioHost" — the world's first fully autonomous radioshow host.

The project is a product of The Center for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents, Reykjavík University's artificial intelligence laboratory, and in fact, Iceland's first A.I. lab. But while the lab is young (2 years), there has been very a sharp rise in both the amount of research projects and the number of students since it was founded, and CADIA has become RU's most active and prominent research laboratory.

A promo-picture for SuperRadioHost

Amongst some of the excellent projects at the lab, SuperRadioHost is the first phase in a series of human-like artificial intelligence projects called The CADIA Superhumanoids (the picture above is of the Superhumanoid Body, which I designed in 2005 for the Superhumanoid project). The explicit goal of the SuperRadioHost project is to create a fully autonomous, artificial personality to manage it's (his) own radioshow. And we're not talking about just reading the names of the songs before they're played (although that's probably part of the deal), but a talkshow — with live interviews. Yes, SuperRadioHost is intended to call up interviewees through phone and carry out realtime conversations — how cool is that?! To be a bit more specific, these are some of the goals that have been made public:

::	Task, action, sentence and speech planning
::	Dynamic, highly flexible sentence understanding, generation and turntaking
::	Ability to interview humans
::	Ability to interrupt human speaker, and be interrupted

Technical Info

The SuperRadioHost is being built by principles of the Constructionist Design Methodology (CDM), a methodology for creating interactive, artificial intelligences. In short, the CDM advocates a modular approach to A.I., i.e. having a number of specific-function modules, or program parts, produce the overall large-scale behavior of the system. The components communicate through the Psyclone AIOS, an advanced blackboard system for A.I., and the OpenAIR message protocol.The SuperRadioHost is currently using 12 networked desktop machines for various speech and planning processes, along with two workhorse computers for speech synthesis and input pre-processing.

Launch Date

The SuperRadioHost is still under development at the lab, but was recently displayed for the first time at a public science fair in Reykjavík, Iceland. Needless to say, the project made quite an impact within the Icelandic media; A frequently asked question was whether this would render human run radioshows obsolete, with radioshow hosts calling one after the other to ask about this new inhuman competitor (humanoids killed the radiostar?). Well, I guess we'll find out next year when SuperRadioHost, whose show will be called "Radioactive with SuperRadioHost", is scheduled to get his own public, national radioshow in Iceland.

Related Links

::	CADIA Reykjavík University's A.I. Lab
::	SuperRadioHost The project page at CADIA
::	Mindmakers.org An online organization for collaboration on large scale A.I. systems (CDM related)
::	Vélaldin Emergence Engine My research software project at CADIA