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September 30, 2004
Toyota launches sonar-equipped minivan
Toyota has launched its new Isis medium-class minivan in Japan with steering-guided clearance sonar, which warns the driver when there is a risk of contact with an obstacle in the same direction of travel - a claimed world first.
The new model also has a so-called ‘panorama open door’ on the passenger side with built-in centre pillar for easier access and the usual variety of seat arrangements.
The panorama open door consisting of a conventional front door and a rear sliding door. When the front and rear doors are both opened, an opening 1,890mm wide is created, achieving claimed “dramatic improvements” for ease of passenger entry and exit loading and unloading.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 05:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Robot Music
A new guitar-sensation has hit the world stage and musicians from around the globe are clamouring for a joint billing.
This star can play styles from classical to heavy metal, and can pluck and strum guitar strings with super-human speed and precision.
But despite talent and adoring fans, there's no ego, because the guitarist in question is a robot.
"GuitarBot" was created in New York two years ago by the group Lemur, or the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots.
Karen Barlow caught up with Lemur artist and engineer, Eric Singer, who's touring Australia with "GuitarBot".
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 04:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 29, 2004
Branch 'Bots' Make Banking Better
The next time you walk into a bank branch, look up and smile ... there may be someone (or something) looking back and watching your every move.
No, it's not the normal security cameras located over the teller window. These new robot eyes track your every movement, from the moment you come through the doors, walk around the lobby and conduct your business, until you leave. In fact, there may be many such robots in the branch, assisting you and the branch during your visit to ensure that the branch is operating as effectively as possible.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 11:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 28, 2004
Robonaut
Robonaut is a humanoid robot designed by the Robot Systems Technology Branch at NASA's Johnson Space Center in a collaborative effort with DARPA. The Robonaut project seeks to develop and demonstrate a robotic system that can function as an EVA astronaut equivalent. Robonaut jumps generations ahead by eliminating the robotic scars (e.g., special robotic grapples and targets) and specialized robotic tools of traditional on-orbit robotics. However, it still keeps the human operator in the control loop through its telepresence control system. Robonaut is designed to be used for "EVA" tasks, i.e., those which were not specifically designed for robots.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 11:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Grand Challenges of IT
Fundamental research on how to make computer hardware more powerful and software smarter goes back 50 years or more, but many of the traditional methods have nearly reached their limits. Now, researchers moving in bold new directions may be setting the course of IT for decades to come.
There are literally dozens of grand challenges that scientists and economists are attacking, ranging from societal issues to technical advances. Here, we take a look at the challenges in three key areas of IT research: processor performance, chip miniaturization and artificial intelligence.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 08:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 27, 2004
Personal attention, from a computer
Fourteen-year-old Rochelle Brown was close to solving an algebra problem. Yet she stumbled repeatedly on one calculation: -2.3 + 0.5. As she sat at a computer screen, she kept typing 2.8, an incorrect answer. Eventually a hint popped up: "Think about the sign of your answer."
When Rochelle finally typed the correct sum, -1.8, the computer showed its appreciation by allowing her to move on to a new problem. She smiled at her small triumph.
Since January, Middle School 301 in the Bronx, N.Y., where Rochelle is an eighth grader, has been using a software program called Cognitive Tutor to help students learn math. The software, from Carnegie Learning, a 8-year-old company that got its start at Carnegie Mellon University, is designed to give students individualized instruction when personal attention is scarce.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 02:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 26, 2004
Rats' brain waves could find trapped people
Rats equipped with radios that transmit their brainwaves could soon be helping to locate earthquake survivors buried in the wreckage of collapsed buildings.
Rats have an exquisitely sensitive sense of smell and can crawl just about anywhere. This combination makes them ideal candidates for sniffing out buried survivors. For that, the animals need to be taught to home in on people, and they must also signal their position to rescuers on the surface.
In a project funded by DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm, Linda and Ray Hermer-Vazquez of the University of Florida in Gainesville have worked out a way to achieve this.
First the researchers identified the neural signals rats generate when they have found a scent that they are looking for. “When a dog is sniffing a bomb, he makes a unique movement that the handler recognises,” says John Chapin, a neuroscientist at the State University of New York in Brooklyn who is collaborating on the project. “Instead of the rat making a conditioned response, we pick up the response immediately from the brain."
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 08:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 25, 2004
Robby
Robby the Robot served human masters on Altair IV in the film Forbidden Planet. While he certainly looks the part of an otherworldly metallic automaton, Robby is actually a fake. The robot suit separates into three pieces that are then worn by an actor.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 09:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 24, 2004
Universe started with hiss, not bang
The Universe began not with a bang but with a low moan, building into a roar that gave way to a deafening hiss. And those sounds gave birth to the first stars.
Cosmologists do not usually think in terms of sound, but this aural picture is a good way to think about the Universe's beginnings, says astronomer Mark Whittle of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Whittle has reconstructed the cosmic cacophony from data teased out over the past couple of years from the high-resolution mapping by NASA's WMAP spacecraft of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the afterglow of the hot early Universe.
The variations in the cosmic background radiation expose the relative clumpiness of the early cosmos at a variety of different scales. These density variations began as quantum fluctuations in the moments after the big bang, and then propagated out as sonic waves. The denser regions became the seeds of galaxies and stars, which is why astronomers are so interested in them.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 03:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 23, 2004
NASA Extends Mars Rovers' Journey
NASA announced Tuesday that the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have had their missions extended for an additional six months, or as long as the Martian rovers remain operational.
Spirit and Opportunity have survived the most dangerous conditions they have faced -- the Mars southern-hemisphere winter, which meant little sun for photovoltaic cells and the low temperatures that threatened to freeze gears and crack fragile components and connections.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 03:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 22, 2004
Flying cars swoop to the rescue
As motorways become more and more clogged up with traffic, a new generation of flying cars will be needed to ferry people along skyways.
That is the verdict of engineers from the US space agency and aeronautical firms, who envision future commuters travelling by "skycar".
These could look much like the concept skycar shown in the picture, designed by Boeing research and development.
However, such vehicles could be some 25 years from appearing on the market.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 03:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 21, 2004
Are poker ‘bots’ raking online pots?
Pull up a chair at a friendly poker game in a buddy’s den and you probably know the other players and have some idea of their card-playing weaknesses – like Big Al's habit of fingering his chips when he's itching to raise. But take a seat at a table in one of the rapidly multiplying online card rooms and there's no telling who’s sitting to your right – or if the player is even human.
Concern is growing in online chat rooms and news groups devoted to poker that sophisticated card-playing robots – known as “bots” in the nomenclature of the Web – are being used on commercial gambling sites to fleece newcomers, the strategy-impaired and maybe even above-average players.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 20, 2004
Alice chatbot wins for third time
A computer chat program called Alice has won a prestigious prize for human-like conversation for the third time.
It was judged to be chattiest bot out of the four finalists in the Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence held in New York on Sunday.
British hopeful, Jabberwacky, came second in the annual competition.
The event is based on the Turing Test, which suggests computers could be seen as intelligent if their chat was indistinguishable from those of humans.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 05:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Sony's biped entertainment robot - QRIO
The Gulf operations of Sony Corporation, Sony Gulf, has extended an invitation to QRIO, the entertainment robot developed by the company, to visit the Middle East for the first time during this year's edition of the GITEX Shopper 2004, which has been accepted.
Embodying the precepts of 'Artificial Intelligence' and 'Information Technology', QRIO – which is an acronym for 'Quest for Curiosity' – can walk, talk and do a lot more.
QRIO, which has been a feature of Sony's participation at leading international events for some time now, will be a full time attendee at the GITEX Shopper 2004, the Middle East's premier IT exhibition which opens on the 2nd of October in Dubai.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 04:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 19, 2004
A Fully Autonomous Robot Builds Its Own Brain and Learns from Scratch
For the first time in history, a robot has built its own synthetic central nervous system and then learned not only to walk, but how to autonomously enter and navigate the corridors of complex buildings.
This dramatic experiment was recently conducted at Imagination Engines, Inc. (IEI) in St. Louis, Missouri. Company President & CEO, Dr. Stephen Thaler points out that heretofore, scientists in the field of artificial intelligence have grossly over exaggerated claims that their robots are autonomous when in fact, immense scholarly efforts have been poured into writing what he calls “if-then-else” computer programs. Alternately, he points out that genetic programmers have devised schemes wherein neural circuitry evolves to enable robots to perform moderately challenging tasks. However, close analysis of the engineering results reveal that these feats are not so amazing, nor are they accomplished in convenient time scales. Tasks as simple as navigating a simple racetrack maze typically requires about 48 hours, not to mention the month invested in writing and perfecting the underlying computer program!
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 04:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 18, 2004
Volume Analytics
Data mining looks for patterns within structured data, that is, databases. The underlying technologies are based on statistics and artificial intelligence, littering the field with buzzwords such as classification and regression trees (CART), chi-squared automatic induction (CHAID), neural networks and genetic algorithms. As a process, data mining is not for the uninitiated. Typically, a statistician selects the appropriate algorithm(s) for the business problem, prepares the data for analysis and then fine-tunes the model based on the results.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 03:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 17, 2004
Got a 'bot? If not, maybe you ought
Recent scientific breakthroughs have brought us closer to the day when we can each own a smart-alecky mechanical maid like the one on the "The Jetsons."
Several companies have demonstrated new robots lately, ranging from Honda's "ASIMO" humanoid to little droids that ferry medications through hospital corridors. Each new model raises the question: When, oh when, will we have our very own domestic robots to cook our food and wash our socks?
It might be awhile. Experts at a recent American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference in San Jose, Calif., say they've still got a few kinks to iron out, such as giving robots proper vision and a refined sense of touch. (There's a fine line between a friendly handshake and a bone-crushing claw.)
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 11:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 16, 2004
Biomimetic Robots
From the ominous Klaatu of The Day the Earth Stood Still to the Terminator, we've seen robots typically portrayed on screen as stiff, humanoid machines. But it's not just Hollywood that has locked robots to the human form.
"A lot of conventional thinking pervades the field of robotics," says Morley Stone, a program manager in the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's defense sciences office. "They still look very much like they are depicted in grainy black-and-white films. You see this humanoid robot that doesn't walk very well. We still haven't improved upon that all that much."
Forget the anthropomorphs. Today, researchers are looking in the cupboards of their local diners and under rocks for biological inspiration to create a new generation of flying, crawling, and swimming automatons known as biomimetic robots. Intrigued by how other species have adapted to a whole world of environmental niches, researchers are working to understand and reverse-engineer the adaptive traits of creatures, including those—like the seemingly indestructible cockroach—we might much rather step on than study.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Features or Creatures: Visual Expertise Taps Same Neural Networks
Research conducted at Brown University and published in the current online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences supports a mounting body of evidence that such a “face module” does not exist. Instead, researchers are finding that the same networks of neurons used to process faces are also used by people who are expert in making all kinds of fine visual distinctions, from radiologists to dog show judges.
In a novel experiment, subjects were trained to become experts on computer-generated creatures called Greebles. Over a two-week period, in a series of one-hour sessions, subjects were shown images of Greebles, whose appendages make them unique. Conceived by Brown Professor Michael J. Tarr and former students Isabel Gauthier and Scott Yu, Greebles’ subtle variations in shape and configuration render them visually difficult to identify, making them a perfect control image for the human face.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 15, 2004
UCLA Molecular Biologists Uproot the Tree of Life
One of science's most popular metaphors — the "tree of life," with its evolutionary branches and roots, showing groups of bacteria on the bottom and multicellular animals on the higher branches — turns out to be a misnomer, UCLA molecular biologists report in the Sept. 9 issue of the journal Nature.
"It's not a tree; it's actually a ring of life," said James A. Lake, UCLA professsor of molecular biology. "A ring explains the data far better." Lake initially titled the Nature article, "One Ring to Rule Them All."
The ring of life has significant implications for eukaryotes (cells with nuclei), the group that includes all multicellular forms of life, such as humans, animals and plants.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 14, 2004
Will AI Reach the Mainstream?
"Artificial Intelligence" is a term that has grown old enough to almost be quaint. The prospect of a manmade technology able to simulate human thinking is certainly exciting, but in the absence of products, Spielbergian visions of AI are taken by most as entertainment.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 13, 2004
Pentagon Revives Memory Project
It's been seven months since the Pentagon pulled the plug on LifeLog, its controversial project to archive almost everything about a person. But now, the Defense Department seems ready to revive large portions of the program under a new name.
Using a series of sensors embedded in a GI's gear, the Advanced Soldier Sensor Information System and Technology, or ASSIST, project aims to collect what a soldier sees, says and does in a combat zone -- and then to weave those events into digital memories, so commanders can have a better sense of how the fight unfolded.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Nanotechnology: The next small thing?
Close your eyes and think small. So small that a red blood cell is a whole world, and hydrogen and carbon atoms are as big as baseballs.
Now imagine picking up those atoms and building a machine. A line of carbon makes a wire, while atoms of silver are the teeth on a gear. The finished product is a motor, or a microprocessor, or an entire robot—literally millions of times smaller than any comparable device today.
The promise of nanotechnology is as large as its products are minuscule. Like the Internet, artificial intelligence and atomic energy in their heydays, nanotech has proponents in ecstasy about how it will fundamentally change the world.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 04:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 12, 2004
Oak Ridge Observatory: An eye on the sky in our backyard
An innocuous sign, surrounded by trees, on Pinnacle Road is the only indication of Oak Ridge Observatory's presence in Harvard, yet the observatory has been the site of significant astronomical research for the past 70 years. Most Harvard residents are probably not aware that the hot topics of astronomy - the discovery of planets outside our solar system and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence SETI) - are lurking in the woods down the road.
This week, Oak Ridge Director Robert Stefanik spoke to the Post about the observatory's contributions to our understanding of the universe.
Oak Ridge was established in 1932 by the Harvard College Observatory. In 1982, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory took over operations, but the property still belongs to Harvard University. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, in turn, is part of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, "the largest astronomical institute in the world," according to Stefanik.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 01:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 11, 2004
He, robot
The images are by AARON. The signature on them reads Harold Cohen. That would be highly unusual in most circumstances, but these pictures are by a program rather than a person.
AARON is Cohen's creation, a project that has preoccupied him for 30-plus years. The program never tires. It is running continuously during an exhibition at the Earl & Birdie Taylor Library in Pacific Beach – 24 hours a day in fact – creating new works and erasing works as soon as AARON determines they are done. It's genuinely engrossing to watch it at work.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 10:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 10, 2004
Rise of the robot
Robots hold a persistent fascination for our culture. Ever since Rossum's Universal Robots by Karel Capek in 1920, and the more enduring Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang in 1926, we have wanted robots to do more of the hard work - yet been continually disappointed by what they can actually do.
The year 2001 came and went without any sign of a computer with anything like the intelligence or awareness of HAL from 2001:
A Space Odyssey, or a C-3PO from Star Wars. Instead, what did we get? Sony's Aibo - a rather limited robot dog. If you ever needed a metaphor for how technological reality lags behind dreams, there it is.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 11:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 09, 2004
Artificial Intelligence Creeps into the Commercial Market Despite Initial Hurdles
Some technologies such as case-based reasoning solutions have already created a buzz in the market with multi-applications in the fields of drug discovery, medical diagnosis, fraud detection, data mining, and knowledge discovery. Another promising commercial avenue for AI is in enabling radiation-based food and water sterilization technologies with sensing systems.
“In future, AI is likely to be incorporated in several products to make users’ lives easier,” says Technical Insights Research Analyst Amreetha Vijayakumar. “However, it cannot be depended on to replace human intelligence and can serve only as an enabling technology.”
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 09:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 08, 2004
Robots invade the table football pitch
Fans of table football, or foosball, will no longer have to hang around at the pub waiting for a friend to turn up before they can play. A robotic foosball table will be able to give them just as good a game.
Foosball is a table-based game in which players twist, push and pull rotating metal rods attached to figures representing soccer players. The idea is to use the model players to kick a ball into the opponent's goal.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 04:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 07, 2004
The Evolution Will Be Mechanized
The rate of technological change is dizzying, and it's only getting faster. In September at Stanford, the Institute for the Study of Accelerating Change is acknowledging the trend with its second annual Accelerating Change conference. The 2003 confab was billed as "the first in the world to focus on the multidisciplinary implications of accelerating change and the multidisciplinary implications of accelerating change and the consequences of a technological singularity." What is a technological singularity? A moment when runaway ad-vances outstrip human comprehension and all our knowledge and experience becomes useless as a guidepost to the future.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 08:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 06, 2004
Survival of the Fittest
Survival analysis could help you predict that one of your best customers is about to jump ship for a competitor. Or it could help you decide whether that costly promotion is really going to be worth it. Or it could help you tailor that next catalog mailing and double your return.
The aptly named analytic technique, also called survival data mining, has been used by doctors for decades to predict the life expectancy of heart-transplant patients and by biologists to assess the probability that a cell invaded by a virus will die within 24 hours. Engineers have long used it to estimate the mean time to failure of a disk drive or a robotic welder. More recently, sociologists and psychologist have started using it to predict when certain types of people will divorce or seek help for depression.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 05, 2004
Birth of the Bluetooth Bots
Bluetooth is finally taking off. Literally. A small robotic blimp floats gently through the Autonomous Systems Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, wirelessly interacting with a desktop computer to literally evolve its own navigation software without human intervention. What the blimp sees via its onboard sensors is Bluetoothed to the PC for processing. The artificially evolved "brains" are then transmitted back to the mylar blimp so it can intelligently fly through its environment, improving with each run.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 04:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 04, 2004
Brain research? Pay it no mind
Scientists who have been trying to understand the brain have recently tried to measure neural activity of Republicans and Democrats to see if political affiliations had anything to do with brain chemistry.
The results were inconclusive. (I think the Democrat brains were more active in the "I feel your pain" part of the limbic system.) What really caught my eye about a New York Times Magazine article on the topic was the following statement: "One of the most celebrated insights of the past 20 years of neuroscience is the discovery — largely associated with the work of Antonio Damasio — that the brain's emotional systems are critical to logical decision-making. People who suffer from damaged or impaired emotional systems can score well on logic tests but often display markedly irrational behaviour in everyday life."
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 03, 2004
Pool-playing robot
Michael Greenspan is no pool shark, but the Queen’s prof has built a robot he hopes one day might rival the best players in the world.
Greenspan, who describes himself as a “very average pool player,” got the idea to build a pool-playing machine while attending a robotics conference in Vancouver in 1998. After spending all day looking at cutting edge robotics technologies, he and some friends were out playing pool.
“My game wasn’t going great and it occurred to me that it would be a lot more likely for me to build a robotics system that could play a decent game of pool than it would be for me to master the game itself,” he says.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 03:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 02, 2004
Are aliens trying to get in touch?
A mysterious radio signal could be a message from an alien civilisation, scientists said yesterday. It is believed to have originated 31million years ago and to have travelled 182.9trillion miles before reaching the giant Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.
The signal has been spotted on three separate occasions but has been observed for only about a minute in total - not long enough to allow astronomers to analyse it in detail.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 01, 2004
Virtual Humans Proposed As Space Travelers
Roll out the welcome mat for the virtual astronaut and enter the 3D space of Peter Plantec, a consultant in virtual human design and animation, as well as a leading expert on visual entertainment. He also initiated the "Sylvie" project -- the first commercially available virtual human interface.
And if dispatching virtual humans from Earth doesn’t turn on your thrusters, think about this. It’s likely that extraterrestrial civilizations might send surrogate entities our way instead of propelling their delicate, soft-shell selves across interstellar mileage.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 04:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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