Every year, the Master of Science in Information Assurance (MSIA) program at Norwich University hosts the annual three-day Graduate Security Conference for our graduating classes. We always have a plenary session with a distinguished keynote speaker; this year we were honored to welcome well-known antimalware researcher Dr. Richard Ford, Research Professor at the Center for Information Assurance of the Florida Institute of Technology. Dr. Ford spoke about unintended consequences in security in a riveting and highly stimulating presentation which, at my request, included no PowerPoint slides.

One example Ford brought up in his lecture is Milo, a project at Microsoft to put an interactive artificial-intelligence avatar running on the XBOX3 NATAL experimental platform.

In a five-minute lecture and demonstration, we see a young woman interacting with the avatar of a young boy in a virtual world. The avatar not only displays emotional responses through its face, body and voice, but is represented as recognizing its interlocutor's emotional responses through its analysis of visual input through the system's camera and analysis of the human being's voice patterns. The avatar also represents internal emotional states through its generated movements and voice. The interface also allows a representation of data transfer between our world and the electronic world (specifically, hand motions affecting virtual water and transfer of the content of a piece of paper into a virtual paper on the other side of the digital barrier.

The system is currently being applied not only to games but also for the kind of device-free hands-operated user interface (grasp icon, pull, expand, move aside) illustrated in a demonstration of a different system at the CeBIT exposition in 2008 and that we have seen in science fiction movies such as "Minority Report".

In discussion after Ford's talk, I pointed out that there are fundamental and fascinating issues of security inherent in applications of such a system. Let's start by imagining some of the additional applications of artificial intelligence with this degree of interactivity:

• The avatars and child users could form strong emotional bonds that could be helpful in encouraging learning and prosocial behavior.
• It could be used for interactive movies of enormous emotional vibrancy, going beyond the power of the synthetic actress in the movie "S1M0NE."
• News organizations could define virtual news anchors and perhaps interviewers who would charm viewers into strong loyalty for their programs and networks.
• Advanced virtual therapists (ELIZA on steroids) could provide inexpensive, pervasive support for mentally ill people, including social modeling much as Second Life interactions are currently being studied as a method of improving social skills for participants.
• Intelligent agents (virtual butlers) with warm, supportive and responsive personalities could become important sources of support for disabled or elderly people.
• Virtual personalities could be intermediaries for rapid response in emergencies, augmenting the capabilities of 9-1-1 networks with instant response, infinite patience and calming personalities.

M. E. Kabay, PhD, CISSP-ISSMP, specializes in security and operations management consulting services. CV online.