Flying on a Wing and a Half

Defense News Flying on a Wing and a Half: "If you can think fast enough and act fast enough, perhaps you, too, could fly an F/A-18 fighter jet with 60 percent of its right wing blown off.

A lot of pilots couldn't, said David Vos, senior director of Control Technologies at Rockwell Collins. But a computer algorithm that Vos helped create can.

It piloted a scaled-down F/A-18 this spring, and then kept it aloft and under control even after most of the right wing was intentionally blown off in midflight.

The computer succeeded where many human pilots would undoubtedly fail because it was able to react to the wing damage about 20 milliseconds after it occurred and because it 'knows everything there is to know about the plane,' Vos said."

Electronic Portfolios: a Path to the Future of Learning

Wired Campus: Electronic Portfolios: a Path to the Future of Learning - Chronicle.com: "If we truly want to advance from a focus on teaching to a focus on student learning, then a strategy involving something like electronic student portfolios, or ePortfolios, is essential.

"In an essay in the current issue of Academic Commons, three researchers write that “ePortfolios may be the most likely vehicle to help us make the transition to an academy of the future that is both relevant and authoritative.”"

Robot body language helps humans

New Scientist: Giving robots more human expressions makes them easier to understand.

Google Rolls out Semantic Search

Business Center - PC World Google Rolls out Semantic Search Capabilities: "Google has given its Web search engine an injection of semantic technology, as the search leader pushes into what many consider the future of search on the Internet.

"The new technology will allow Google's search engine to identify associations and concepts related to a query, improving the list of related search terms Google displays along with its results, the company announced in an official blog on Tuesday."

GR: A nod to the importance of higher-level cognition.

Sign Language by Cellphone

IEEE Spectrum Sign Language by Cellphone: "In the past, engineers working on technology to aid the deaf had focused primarily on hearing devices, such as hearing aids and cochlear implants, but recently they’ve been getting into what’s known as deaf technology: applications designed to make the day-to-day lives of the deaf and hearing-impaired easier. Now engineers from the University of Washington, in Seattle, and Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y., have taken a big step toward developing a mobile phone that allows real-time conversations in sign language.

Of course, many in the deaf community already use mobile phones to communicate via text messaging and e-mail, but deaf people almost always prefer sign language: It’s faster and more natural, just as speaking is easier than writing for most hearing people. Laptops are getting smaller and more portable, making video chats outside the home possible, but Wi‑Fi–enabled cellphones would provide even more freedom. When cellphones became capable of video sharing a few years ago, Eve Riskin, Sheila Hemami, and Richard Ladner, all newly minted IEEE Fellows, felt the time seemed right to develop a sign-language-capable phone. “Today’s world is more connected by cellphones than by any other device,” says the University of Washington’s Ladner, whose parents were deaf."

GR: This is parallel to what acoustic phoneticians have done in determining which aspects of the sound signal are crucial for understanding human language, allowing for compressed signals and thus greater maximization of bandwidth.

Wag the Robot? Brown Scientists Build Robot That Responds to Human Gestures

Brown University Media Relations Wag the Robot? Brown Scientists Build Robot That Responds to Human Gestures: "Imagine a day when you turn to your own personal robot, give it a task and then sit down and relax, confident that your robot is doing exactly what you wanted it to do."

"So far, that autonomous, do-it-all robot is the stuff of science fiction or cartoons like “The Jetsons.” But a Brown University-led robotics team has made an important advance: The group has demonstrated how a robot can follow nonverbal commands from a person in a variety of environments — indoors as well as outside — all without having to adjust for variations in lighting."

Advance in Augmented Reality

Fraunhofer FIT - Press releases 2009: "The Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT just presented an Augmented Reality system for use under water. A diver's mask with a special display lets the diver see his or her real submarine surroundings overlaid with computer-generated virtual scenes. In the pilot application, an AR game, the player sees a coral reef with shoals, mussels and weeds, instead of a plain indoor pool. Applications for professional divers are being investigated.

Augmented Reality research has made enormous progress in the last few years, creating many exciting, albeit land-based applications. Now, FIT researchers are the first to demonstrate an AR application designed for underwater use. Submerged use is a major challenge for technical systems. They must be waterproof and robust enough to withstand the high additional pressure of increasing diving depth."

No catch: robot fish to hunt pollution

FT.com / UK - No catch: robot fish to hunt pollution: "Something fishy is going on in northern Spain. The waters of the port of Gijon are shortly to be invaded - by robots.

Scientists are building a shoal of robot fish to be let loose in the port to check on the quality of the water. Modelled on carp and costing about £20,000 ($29,000) each to make, the fish are to be lifelike in appearance and swimming behaviour so they will not alarm their fellow marine inhabitants.

The robots, the first of their kind, are equipped with tiny chemical sensors capable of detecting pollutants in the water. These let the fish home in on the sources of hazardous pollutants, such as leaks from vessels or undersea pipelines."

CS Enrollment Comback

NYTimes.com Computer Science Programs Make a Comeback in Enrollment: "For the first time in six years, enrollment in computer science programs in the United States increased last year, according to an annual report that tracks trends in the academic discipline."

"The revival is significant, according to computer scientists and industry executives, who in the past have pointed to declining numbers of science and engineering students as a canary-in-a-coal-mine indicator warning about the nation’s weakening ability to compete in the global economy.

GR: Let's bring this trend to Messiah!

Carnegie Mellon's Manuela Veloso Wins Autonomous Agents Research Award

Carnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon's Manuela Veloso Wins Autonomous Agents Research Award: "Manuela M. Veloso, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University who studies how robots can learn, plan and work together to accomplish tasks, is the winner of the 2009 Autonomous Agents Research Award from the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (ACM/SIGART)."

"Professor Veloso's research is particularly noteworthy for its focus on the effective construction of teams of robot agents, where cognition, perception and action are seamlessly integrated to address planning, execution and learning tasks," according to the SIGART award citation. "Her impact and visibility have been consistently high over the past two decades for her technical contributions, for her impressive robot teams and for her leadership within the research community."

The robot wars have arrived

Planetary Gear - CNET News Q&A: The robot wars have arrived: "Just as the computer and ARPAnet evolved into the PC and Internet, robots are poised to integrate into everyday life in ways we can't even imagine, thanks in large part to research funded by the U.S. military.

"Many people are excited about the military's newfound interest and funding of robotics, but few are considering its ramifications on war in general."

"How will robot warfare change our international laws of war? If an autonomous robot mistakenly takes out 20 little girls playing soccer in the street and people are outraged, is the programmer going to get the blame? The manufacturer? The commander who sent in the robot fleet? "

Tech skills crucial to any career

Network World Tech skills crucial to any career: "College students pursuing myriad careers agree that high-tech skills will take them further, and a majority expect to encounter new technologies they will have to master in the workforce.

"Eighty percent of more than 1,600 college students polled anticipate running into new technology that they will have to adapt to and learn upon entering the workforce. More than 50% are seeking to improve their technology skills before they graduate, with technology being the top skill students want to enhance, followed by writing and marketing talents."

"Hanny explains many companies today want "T-shaped employees," meaning those with a broad knowledge base that can be applied across the business, but also a deep understanding of their specific field, such as engineering or nursing. Such demands in the workforce partly drive universities to offer interdisciplinary courses among engineering, computer science and business schools, for instance.

Interview with Doug Lenat

Doug Lenat discusses the future of Cyc technology, the role of Moore's law, and Cyc's place in the business community. DS&A students -- pay special attention to his response to the second question. :-)

Doug Lenat - I was positively impressed with Wolfram Alpha

Semantic Universe Doug Lenat - I was positively impressed with Wolfram Alpha: "Stephen Wolfram generously gave me a two-hour demo of Wolfram Alpha last evening, and I was quite positively impressed.� As he said, it's not AI, and not aiming to be, so it shouldn't be measured by contrasting it with HAL or Cyc but with Google or Yahoo."

"There are two important dimensions I want to discuss about Wolfram Alpha, besides the remarks I've already made here. (1) What sorts of queries does it not handle, and (2) When it returns information, how much does it actually "understand" of what it's displaying to you? There are two sorts of queries not (yet) handled: those where the data falls outside the mosaic I sketched above -- such as: When is the first day of Summer in Sydney this year? Do Muslims believe that Mohammed was divine? Who did Hezbollah take prisoner on April 18, 1987? Which animals have fingers? -- and those where the query requires logically reasoning out a way to combine (logically or arithmetically combine) two or more pieces of information which the system can individually fetch for you. One example of this is: "How old was Obama when Mitterrand was elected president of France?" It can tell you demographic information about Obama, if you ask, and it can tell you information about Mitterrand (including his ruleStartDate), but doesn't make or execute the plan to calculate a person's age on a certain date given his birth date, which is what is being asked for in this query. If it knows that exactly 17 people were killed in a certain attack, and if it also knows that 17 American soldiers were killed in that attack, it doesn't return that attack if you ask for ones in which there were no civilian casualties, or only American casualties. It doesn't perform that sort of deduction. If you ask "How fast does hair grow?", it can't parse or answer that query. But if you type in a speed, say "10cm/year", it gives you a long and quite interesting list of things that happen at about that speed, involving glaciers melting, tectonic shift, and... hair growing.

GR: Lenat's analysis here is provides a nice overview of some of the issues involved in the intersection between search, knowledge representation and reasoning, and semantic web. Definitely worth reading all the way through.

A Smarter Planet: New Intelligence for Smarter Cities

A Smarter Planet: New Intelligence for Smarter Cities: "If we want to build a Smarter Planet -- one where societal systems such as electricity and water distribution, healthcare and even physical infrastructure such as buildings and bridges become networks embedded with sensors and software -- there may be no better place to start than with our cities.

Today more than half the world's population lives in cities. By 2050 two-thirds of humanity are expected to be living in and around metropolitan centers. The 19.20.21 project notes that our world has become a network of 'supercities.'"

GR: I had heard of this recently -- applying semantic web technology to other networks such as electrical grids. In semantic web resources 'know' about themselves: web pages know what they are about, etc. In a parallel fashion, smart grids would be made up of nodes that knew and advertised their own capabilities and current operating status.

The cloud bites back: Google bug shared private Google Docs data

Between the Lines | ZDNet.com | TwineThe cloud bites back: Google bug shared private Google Docs data: "Google has confirmed that a software bug in its Google Docs online applcation service exposed documents thought to be privately stored.

The problem was fixed by the weekend, and is believed to have affected only half a percent of the digital documents at a Google Docs service that provides text-handling programs as services on the Internet.

According to Google, the problem occurred in cases where people had chosen to collaborate on multiple documents and adjusted settings to allow access to others. Collaborators were unintentionally given permission to access documents aside from the ones intended."

Wolfram Alpha: Next major search breakthrough?

Outside the Lines - CNET News Wolfram Alpha: Next major search breakthrough?: "In May, Wolfram will unveil his latest creation, now called Wolfram Alpha. It applies his work with Mathematica and NKS (A New Kind of Science) to Web search. 'All one needs to be able to do is to take questions people ask in natural language, and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations one can do,' Wolfram said in a recent blog post. 'I'm happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we're actually managing to make it work...It's going to be a website: www.wolframalpha.com. With one simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms,' he added."

"Stephen Wolfram has a track record of scientific breakthroughs and some controversy. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech in 1979 when he was 20 and has focused most of his career on probing complex systems. In 1988 he launched Mathematica, powerful computational software that has become the gold standard in its field. In 2002, Wolfram produced a 1,280-page tome, A New Kind of Science, based on a decade of exploration in cellular automata and complex systems. The book stirred up a lot of debate in scientific circles.

Chess too easy; can computers beat humans at Go?

Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe A new world record in Go established by PRACE prototype and French software: "After the victory of IBM's Deep Blue against Garry Kasparov, the game of Go has replaced chess as a test bed for research in artificial intelligence (AI). Go is one of the last board games where humans are still able to easily win against AI. Although there has been quite some research in the Go domain for 40 years, the progress in Computer Go has been slow. However, researchers have discovered new performing algorithms and computers are catching up really fast. Since 2006, when a new algorithm called Monte-Carlo Tree Search was proposed, the level of Go programs has improved drastically. The application 'MoGo TITAN', developed by INRIA France and Maastricht University, runs on the Dutch national supercomputer Huygens, which is one of the PRACE prototypes."

The First Virtual Reality Technology to let you See, Hear, Smell, Taste and Touch

The First Virtual Reality Technology to let you See, Hear, Smell, Taste and Touch: "The first virtual reality headset that can stimulate all five senses will be unveiled at a major science event in London on March 4th.

What was it really like to live in Ancient Egypt? What did the streets there actually look, sound and smell like? For decades, Virtual Reality has held out the hope that, one day, we might be able visit all kinds of places and periods as ‘virtual’ tourists."

"Professor David Howard of the University of York, lead scientist on the initiative, says: “Virtual Reality projects have typically only focused on one or two of the five senses – usually sight and hearing. We’re not aware of any other research group anywhere else in the world doing what we plan to do.

“Smell will be generated electronically via a new technique being pioneered by Alan Chalmers and his team at Warwick which will deliver a pre-determined smell recipe on-demand. Taste and smell are closely linked but we intend to provide a texture sensation relating to something being in the mouth. Tactile devices will provide touch.”

"A key objective will be to optimise the way all five senses interact, as in real life. The team also aim to make the Virtual Cocoon much lighter, more comfortable and less expensive than existing devices, as a result of the improved computing and electronics they develop.

Robots of Doom: Funny or scary

A light take on a serious subject! Daily Show Roombas of Doom

Why robots can't be trusted with weapons - tech - 03 March 2009 - New Scientist

Why robots can't be trusted with weapons - tech - 03 March 2009 - New Scientist: "THE idea that robots might one day be able to tell friend from foe is deeply flawed, says roboticist Noel Sharkey of the University of Sheffield in the UK. He was commenting on a report calling for weapon-wielding military robots to be programmed with the same ethical rules of engagement as human soldiers.

The report (www.tinyurl.com/roboshoot), which was funded by the Pentagon, says firms rushing to fulfil the requirement for one-third of US forces to be uncrewed by 2015 risk leaving ethical concerns by the wayside. 'Fully autonomous systems are in place right now,' warns Patrick Lin, the study's author at California State Polytechnic in San Luis Obispo. 'The US navy's Phalanx system, for instance, can identify, target, and shoot down missiles without human authorisation.'"