Forbes – Virtual Jihad

article from forbes magazine

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AI for virtual worlds

Researchers teach ‘Second Life’ avatar to think TheStar.com – Business – Researchers teach ‘Second Life’ avatar to think

May 16, 2008

MICHAEL HILL

The Associated Press

TROY, N.Y.–Edd Hifeng barely merits a second glance in “Second Life.” A steel-gray robot with lanky limbs and linebacker shoulders, he looks like a typical avatar in the popular virtual world.

But Edd is different.

His actions are animated not by a person at a keyboard but by a computer. Edd is a creation of artificial intelligence, or AI, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who endowed him with a limited ability to converse and reason. It turns out “Second Life” is more than a place where pixelated avatars chat, interact and fly about. It’s also a frontier in AI research because it’s a controllable environment where testing intelligent creations is easier.

“It’s a very inexpensive way to test out our technologies right now,” said Selmer Bringsjord, director of the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory.

Bringsjord sees Edd as a forerunner to more sophisticated creations that could interact with people inside three-dimensional projections of settings like subway stops or city streets. He said the holographic illusions could be used to train emergency workers or solve mysteries.

But first, a virtual reality check.

Edd is not running rampant through the cyber streets of “Second Life.” He goes only where Bringsjord and his graduate students place him for tests. He can answer questions like “Where are you from?” but understands only English that has previously been translated into mathematical logic.

“Second Life” is attractive to researchers in part because virtual reality is less messy than plain-old reality. Researchers don’t have to worry about wind, rain or coffee spills.

And virtual worlds can push along AI research without forcing scientists to solve the most difficult problems – like, say, creating a virtual human – right away, said Michael Mateas, a computer science professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Researching in virtual realities has become increasingly popular the past couple years, said Mateas, leader of the school’s Expressive Intelligence Studio for AI and gaming.

“It’s a fantastic sweet spot – not too simple, not too complicated, high cultural value,” he said.

Bringsjord is careful to point out that the computations for Edd’s mental feats have been done on workstations and are not sapping “Second Life” servers. The calculations will soon be performed on a supercomputer at Rensselaer with support from research co-sponsor IBM Corp.

Operators of “Second Life” don’t seem concerned about synthetic agents lurking in their world. John Lester, Boston operations manager for Linden Lab, said the San Francisco-based company sees a “fascinating” opportunity for AI to evolve.

“I think the real future for this is when people take these AI-controlled avatars and let them free in ‘Second Life,'” Lester said, “… let them randomly walk the grid.”

That is years off by most experts’ estimations. Edd’s most sophisticated cognitive feat so far – played out in “Second Life” and posted on the Web – involves him witnessing a gun being switched from one briefcase to another. Edd was able to infer that another “Second Life” character who left the room during the switch would incorrectly think the gun was still in the first suitcase.

This ability to make inferences about the thoughts of others is significant for an AI agent, though it puts Edd on par with a 4-year-old – and the calculus required “under the hood” to achieve this feat is mind-numbingly complex.

A computer program smart enough to fool someone into thinking they’re interacting with another person – the traditional Holy Grail for AI researchers – has been elusive. One huge problem is getting computers to understand concepts imparted in language, said Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University.

AI agents do best in tightly controlled environments: Think of automated phone programs that recognize your responses when you say “operator” or “repair.”

Bringsjord sees “Second Life” as a way station. He eventually wants to create other environments where more sophisticated creations could display courage or deceive people, which would be the first step in developing technology to detect deception.

The avatars could be projected at RPI’s $145 million Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, opening in October, which will include spaces for holographic projections. Officials call them “holodecks” in homage to the virtual reality room on the “Star Trek” television series.

That sort of visual fidelity is many years down the line, just like complex AI. John Kolb, RPI’s chief information officer, said the best three-dimensional effects still require viewers to wear special light-polarizing glasses.

“If you want to do texture mapping on a wall for instance, that’s easy. We can do that today,” Kolb said. “If you want to start to build cognitive abilities into avatars, well, that’s going to take a bit more work.”

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Consumer Guide to Virtual Worlds

Consumer guide to virtual worlds – published by the Association of Virtual Worlds can be

downloaded here.

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Senate Committee on Homeland Security

Senate report on the Internet and homegrown terrorist threat.

Can be downloaded here.

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Virtual Worlds require Virtual-HUMINT (VHUMINT)

The excellent Dark Web project at Arizona Universities Artificial Intelligence Lab has recently completed research into the use of Web 2.0 media by International jihadi groups. While fascinating in some respects it also clearly demonstrates how traditional text-mining attempts to collect data can be applied to some Web 2.0 applications, but miss the mark with virtual worlds.

The leader of the lab Dr. Chen kindly forwarded their research paper to me and it can be linked to here (Cyber Extremism in Web 2.0: An Exploratory Study of International Jihadist Groups or here). In essence the Dark Web project’s methodology is to search for material with extremist or terrorist style language (but please read the paper for a better description of methodology). Interestingly, they concluded that sites such as Facebook and MySpace, which have been big components of the Web 2.0 milieu are not suited to the propagation of extremist views,

“We did not consider social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, although they are a major component of Web 2.0. Based on our preliminary exploration, we found that the prevalent amount of personal data on these sites, the tight social linkages, and the potential issue of “guilt by association” (for site owners and “friends”) may have discouraged extremists from using such a medium.“

With regard to virtual worlds the Dark Web project found nuanced evidence of extremist ‘activity’ within Second Life, by using Second Life’s internal search system to look for text containing extremist language. More than anything this highlights the difficultly in researching extremist movements within virtual worlds as the worlds themselves do not easily allow themselves to be searched or data-mined in this fashion. The issue of search within virtual worlds has been grappled with by a number of commentators, the problem being what to search for, people, content, land, buildings, events, etc. But more importantly language used within virtual worlds doesn’t hold the same meaning when pulled out of its in-world context. For example the dark-web project cites a number of groups it discovered in Second Life using extremist language, one of who (Terrorists of SL) has a small virtual headquarters called ‘Taliban Towers’. An examination of this site and associated group would tend to suggest they are a role-playing collective with little real-world application. The same goes for other in-world organizations such as, Elite Jihadi Terrorist group.

Therefore, what this research does is point to something fundamental about how global intelligence and law-enforcement agencies need to approach the examination of virtual worlds, and that is that raw data-crunching is likely to prove unsatisfactory. Ironically, virtual worlds require a uniquely human approach. The only sure way to gather information on extremist or criminal groups operating in virtual worlds is to enter the environment and interact with the suspected groups. The United States Intelligence community is not short of computing power but what this new environment needs is the human touch or to put it in the language of the Beltway — layer Virtual-HUMINT over the SIGINT mission.

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Financial Times – 3d Worlds need better security

Good piece in the FT by David Wortley on business use of 3-D worlds. He specifically mentions the need for enhanced security as a prerequisite for wider adoption of virtual environments by business,

“For commercial operations to settle with confidence into virtual worlds, far more work is going to be needed on security. It is virtually impossible to find out the real identity of people behind the avatars – meaning they have no responsibility for what they do.

Web visitors to company sites are similarly anonymous, but they do not have the same opportunity to abuse staff, band together to organise protest raids, or generally upset other visitors.

Some form of digital signature will be needed to ensure avatars are held to account for their actions, just as they would be in the real world.

In many ways, the growth of virtual worlds is like the frontier towns of the Wild West, where new social forms were worked out messily and in public. In the same way, new codes of behaviour will eventually be adopted.”

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