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November 30, 2004
Searching Smarter, Not Harder
Databases and search engines provide instantaneous access to endless information about anyone or anything, but the search results often include as many misses as hits. To generate more-relevant answers, organizations including the federal government are using topic maps to index their data.
Topic maps are smart indices that improve search capabilities by categorizing terms based on their relationships with other things. For example, William Shakespeare is a topic that would be mapped to essays about him, his plays and his famous quotes.
Organizing content with topic maps provides context for words that can have multiple meanings, according to Patrick Durusau, chairman of a topic maps technical committee at OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 05:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 29, 2004
Purdue researchers align nanotubes to improve artificial joints
Researchers at Purdue University have shown that artificial joints might be improved by making the implants out of tiny carbon tubes and filaments that are all aligned in the same direction, mimicking the alignment of collagen fibers and natural ceramic crystals in real bones.
The researchers already have shown in a series of experiments that bone cells in Petri dishes attach better to materials that possess smaller surface bumps than are found on conventional materials used to make artificial joints. The smaller features also stimulate the growth of more new bone tissue, which is critical for the proper attachment of artificial joints once they are implanted.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 28, 2004
On your marks
They walk, tumble, crawl, writhe, roll and bounce around. It's a race and contestants can take any shape or form, from four-legged walkers to amoebas. The only thing is, this race doesn't exist in the real world. It's entirely online and competing "animals" are little more than wire-frame models that follow some basic physical principles such as mass and gravity.
Welcome to Sodarace. Developed as a joint project between Soda - a British multimedia design company - and the University of London, Sodarace tackles the age-old question: which is better - man or machine? Human ingenuity or artificial intelligence? Indeed, its website promotes the venture as "the online Olympics pitting human creativity against machine learning".
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 05:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 27, 2004
Robotic turkey gets a spring in its step
Researchers at MIT's Leg Laboratory have built a series of legged robots, including one-legged hoppers, bipedal runners, bipedal walkers, a quadruped, and two kangaroo-like robots.
Legged robots may be useful for everything from exploring inaccessible or hazardous locations to providing service or entertainment in the places we live and work. Understanding how humans and other animals walk and run is interesting scientifically and important medically. Leg Lab research has been used to develop a new and improved artificial knee that adapts to terrain, among other applications.
The first walking robot was Spring Turkey, which could only walk in circles attached to the end of a mechanical boom. Later came Troody, a fully autonomous bipedal robot modeled after the dinosaur Troodon, which could walk around on its own. The latest is Butch, a protoceratops, which will simulate a realistic-looking dinosaur with the help of special effects.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 04:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 26, 2004
Neural Network Hijacks Commercial Airliners, No One Harmed
Following last month's news that University of Florida scientist Thomas DeMarse has grown a living neural network and taught it to fly a simulated plane, and last week's story about DeMarse's acquisition of a contract to develop automatic pilots for commercial airline Jet Black, a new chapter of the story unfolds. A fleet of commercial airliners owned by Jet Black have today allegedly launched themselves autonomously into as many as 10 symbolic targets. No individuals are known to have been killed or injured in the attacks.
The planes, unmanned and without pilots took off from Logan airport in Boston, MA and hit corporate headquarters of Walmart, Honeywell, Pfizer, Sperry Corp., Bechtel, Unisys, Spectra Physics, Microsoft, Halliburton and possibly others.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 25, 2004
'Swarm-bots' offer sniff of the future
Andy Russell does not object to sniffer dogs. "They find leaks in oil pipelines, they find people, they detect drugs and explosives. Obviously they're very important," he says. But they do have weaknesses. They get hungry. They get bored. And if sent into a room filled with poisonous gas, they die. Clearly, there is room for improvement.
On Russell's desk in the engineering department at Monash university, Melbourne, Australia, is a prototype of what he hopes will one day provide a less vulnerable alternative. It doesn't look much. Its body is a 10cm diameter disc and instead of legs, it has small wheels. But this robot can lay scent trails, and can follow them.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
New Toyota Hybrid Auto Parks Itself
Your hands don't even need to be touching the steering wheel for it to start spinning back and forth aggressively, all by itself _ slowly guiding the car into the parking spot. Parallel parking is designed to be a breeze with the Intelligent Parking Assist system, part of a new $2,200 option package for Toyota Motor Corp.'s Prius gas-electric hybrid in Japan. This is a bold and somewhat unnerving concept, a car that parks itself. As a driver, you've got to wonder as the Prius eases back toward the curb: What is this machine thinking? It's also difficult not to be gripped by a "Look Ma, no hands" thrill -- even if the system only partially fulfills its promise. But we'll get to the drawbacks later. First, the logic behind this innovation.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 23, 2004
The human behind this year's hot robot
Robosapien took its curmudgeonly place this year in a toy menagerie that also includes cyber-critters ranging from the occasionally annoying talking Furby pet to the gleaming, expensive Sony Aibo robotic dog.
The humanoid robot stands out in part because there's a human behind the marketing campaign: Mark Tilden, the British-born "robotics physicist" at Hong Kong-based Wow Wee. Tilden says he has worked for "NASA, DARPA and JPL through Los Alamos National Laboratory, and other government and private research agencies studying robotic methods."
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 11:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 22, 2004
Nanomechanical memory demoed
A bit -- the basic unit of computer information -- can be made from anything that can be switched between two states, which represent 1 and 0.
Computer chips use the presence and absence of electric current to represent 1 and 0; disk drives use positive and negative magnetic poles. The 19th- and early 20th-century precursors to today's computers used mechanical rather than electrical elements to store and process data.
The rise of nanotechnology has led many researchers to revisit mechanical computing. Nanotechnology has yielded microscopic materials that range from microns, or thousandths of a millimeter -- around cell size -- to nanometers, or millionths of a millimeter -- the realm of molecules. "It turns out that... nanomechanical memory cells, due to their size and speed, could outperform their counterparts in magnetoelectric systems," said Pritiraj Mohanty, an assistant professor of physics at Boston University.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 05:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 21, 2004
Nano Fabric May Make Computers Thinner
Electrons in graphene travel without any scattering over submicron distances -- an important quality for ultra-fast-switching transistors, researchers have found. Smaller transistors mean shorter paths for electrons to travel to switch devices on and off, and faster computers.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 08:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 20, 2004
That day...
That day, for no particular reason, I decided to go for a little run. So I ran to the end of the road, and when I got there, I thought maybe I'd run to the end of town. And when I got there, I thought maybe I'd just run across Greenbow County. And I figured since I run this far, maybe I'd just run across the great state of Alabama. And that's what I did I ran clear across Alabama. For no particular reason, I just kept on going. I ran clear to the ocean. And when I got there, I figured since I'd gone this far, I might as well turn around, just keep on going. When I got to another ocean, I figured since I've gone this far, I might as well just turn back, keep right on going. When I got tired, I slept. When I got hungry, I ate. When I had to go, you know, I went.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 09:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
New Vehicles Will Make Own Decisions Based on Commands
The next war could be fought partly by unmanned aircraft that respond to spoken commands in plain English and then figure out on their own how to get the job done, even dodging enemy aircraft as they carry out their assignments.
This isn't just robotics, in which someone has to be on hand to issue commands to an unmanned vehicle all along the way. This is autonomy at its best, with vehicles that can make decisions similar to the way a human pilot figures out how to accomplish a task and then carries it out.
Engineers and scientists at several institutions and corporations are working on the project, chiefly under the sponsorship of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They have already demonstrated that the idea can work.
Last June, a Lockheed T-33 fighter jet successfully completed a series of assignments given by the pilot of another aircraft over Edwards Air Force Base in southern California. There was a pilot aboard the T-33, just in case something went wrong, but it turned out that he had nothing to do. Everything went according to plan, even when some assignments were changed at the last minute.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 08:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 17, 2004
Bio-inspired modules open new horizons for robotics
Inspired by cell biology, European researchers have created the world’s first shape-shifting robot made of many modules, which could lead to new applications in fields ranging from medicine and space exploration to education and entertainment.
On display at IST 2004 in The Hague and being showcased on 17 November in Tokyo, the HYDRA project’s robots have broken new ground in robotics and artificial intelligence through a simple but highly effective design that allows the devices to configure themselves into almost any shape and perform a variety of functions.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 16, 2004
Cyborg geologist explores Spain
European scientists have sent a 'cyborg' to roam the Spanish countryside as part of a mission to create robots that are good at exploring planets independently.
Researchers at the Centre for Astrobiology near Madrid kitted out a human with a camcorder linked to a computer system programmed to look for interesting features in the landscape. The human merely did the donkey-work of carrying the hardware while the computer did the 'thinking'. On a planetary mission, a robotic vehicle such as NASA's rovers Spirit and Opportunity, currently touring the surface of Mars, would carry the hardware.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 15, 2004
NASA Space Station On-Orbit Status 13 November 2004
All ISS systems continue to function nominally, except those noted previously or below. Saturday -- first weekend rest day. Congratulations to the crew on completing their first month in space!
CDR/SO Chiao and FE Sharipov performed the regular weekly 3-hr. task of thorough station cleaning. ["Uborka", done every Saturday, includes removal of food waste products, cleaning of compartments with vacuum cleaner, wet cleaning of the Service Module (SM) dining table and other surfaces with "Fungistat" disinfectant and cleaning fan screens to avoid temperature rises.]
Leroy Chiao took the periodic (weekly) reading of the cabin air's current CO2 partial pressure in the SM and Lab, using the U.S. CDMK (CO2 monitor kit), for calldown (along with the battery status) for use in trending analyses.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 04:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 13, 2004
Emotional computing
People talking back to a computer is common enough — usually in a moment of pique or frustration. Getting the computer to respond in kind is a far different task, one that computer scientists are undertaking with various degrees of success and consternation.
The challenge isn't simply a matter of inventing new software and sometimes hardware, difficult enough as that is, but also of coming to grips with some of the ethics involved.
If computers are to have emotional components, what role would they play in everyday life? Do human beings really want an emotional relationship with a mechanical mind?
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 09:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 12, 2004
Welcome to the Matrix
In what civil liberties advocates call the most massive database surveillance program in US history, the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, or Matrix, continues to compile billions of records on law-abiding citizens and receive federal funding, despite public outcry and suspicion.
A Florida-based company, Seisint, Inc., created the database shortly after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 by combining the company’s own commercial databases with law enforcement records.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 11, 2004
Solar Sail
A solar sail, simply put, is a spacecraft propelled by sunlight. Whereas a conventional rocket is propelled by the thrust produced by its internal engine burn, a solar sail is pushed forward simply by light from the Sun. This is possible because light is made up of packets of energy known as “photons,” that act like atomic particles, but with more energy. When a beam of light is pointed at a bright mirror-like surface, its photons reflect right back, just like a ball bouncing off a wall. In the process the photons transmit their momentum to the surface twice – once by the initial impact, and again by reflecting back from it. Ever so slightly, propelled by a steady stream of reflecting photons, the bright surface is pushed forward.
Read More @ Planetary.org & JPL NASA
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 09:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 10, 2004
Entrepreneur’s Enigma
The initial steps of a budding entrepreneur are always a kind of fuzzy, more of thoughts and vision, sometimes changing, making circles. A life full of uncertainty and unpredictability. But with a belief of making something of own, something different which will be much more than satisfaction. A life where he needs to take decision himself, mostly alone at initial stages. Sometime this heavy mind feels the time is moving at the speed of thought and wants to reach into future as soon as possible. From where when it looks back have no regrets of making those decisions.
A life of entrepreneur is full of Enigma. But finally comes out to be as a winner after all the complex thoughts and situations around.
Continue...
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 08:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
What does it mean to be human?
"The existence of 'Mini-Man' should destroy religion," claims Desmond Morris.
I can't help thinking we've been here before. Indeed, Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, still cannot understand why religion survived Darwin.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 09, 2004
Don't Hate Me Because I'm Digital
Kaya is ravishing. She has full lips, long lashes, and a slightly upturned nose. Her expression radiates confidence and power, and her smooth skin is well scrubbed and dotted with freckles. But she doesn't have much of a body. At all. In fact, she exists only from the neck up. Kaya is a CG model, a 48,200-polygon beauty created by an artist in São Paulo, Brazil. And she's sure to be a finalist in the Miss Digital World beauty pageant.
The man behind the event is Franz Cerami, an Italian promoter who's trying to start the world's first CG talent agency. His dream is to manage a bevy of virtual beauties, posing and costuming them for pinup calendars, videogames, ads, and movies. The benefits of digital models are obvious - they never age, never have bad hair days, and can be on location in Tokyo, Paris, and Hollywood simultaneously.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Molecules form nano containers
Researchers from the University of Minnesota and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Israel have found a way to coax the self-assembly of minuscule multicompartment structures.
The structures could eventually be used in drug delivery systems, according to the researchers. They would be especially appropriate for applications that require different chemicals to be delivered to the same place at the same time in precise proportions.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 05:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 08, 2004
Flying cars
An aviation vehicle is currently being developed in Israel that can fly amid skyscrapers and park inside buildings. Its purpose is not to find that elusive parking place in New York City, but rather to become the most effective life-saving rescue feature since the ambulance.
Called the X-Hawk, the vehicle is a "rotorless" Vertical-Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) vehicle. Unlike a helicopter, the X-Hawk's propellers are not extended, but incorporated into the body of the aircraft, enabling it to pull up close to the windows of tall buildings without danger of collision.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 07, 2004
NASA scientists taking a peek at Utahn's brain
NASA scientists are scanning the brain of a Utah man who was an inspiration for the 1988 hit movie "Rain Man" in hopes that the technology used to study the effects of space travel on the brain will help explain the mental capabilities and inconsistencies of Kim Peek.
He's called a "mega-savant" because he is a genius in about 15 different areas, from history and literature and geography to numbers, sports, music and dates. He is also severely limited in other ways. Ask him where the silverware is kept and he likely won't know. He doesn't do simple things. He can't dress himself. He may not be able to figure out the light switch, his father Fran says. But Kim Peek's mental abilities in certain categories seem to be getting even stronger with age. That's one reason scientists in California are so interested in running tests.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 08:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 06, 2004
American Passports to Get Chipped
New U.S. passports will soon be read remotely at borders around the world, thanks to embedded chips that will broadcast on command an individual's name, address and digital photo to a computerized reader.
The State Department hopes the addition of the chips, which employ radio frequency identification, or RFID, technology, will make passports more secure and harder to forge, according to spokeswoman Kelly Shannon.
For now RFID chips are used in mechanical things but in future people will be able to communicate using RFID chips implemented in them. The will be able to share information using even more advanced technology of communication chips implemented in their brains. And will be able to control the things using their thoughts only.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 05, 2004
My baby bot
NEC designer Junichi Osada calls his latest robotic wonder his baby, and he isn't kidding.
NEC's young genius has obviously developed a close relationship with the small robot that goes far beyond mechanical boundaries.
Osada has programmed PaPeRo with a startling range of human responses
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Claim: Identical Twins Have Identical Fingerprints
The facts: Identical twins often share personality traits, interests and habits. They come from the same fertilized egg and share the same genetic blueprint.
To a standard DNA test, they are indistinguishable. But any forensics expert will tell you that there is at least one surefire way to tell them apart: identical twins do not have matching fingerprints.
Like physical appearance and personality, fingerprints are largely shaped by a person's DNA and by a variety of environmental forces. Genetics helps determine the general patterns on a fingertip, which appear as arches, loops and whorls. An individual finger can have just one of these patterns or a mixture of them.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 04, 2004
Redefining Smart
Book Review
Conventional wisdom is a red flag to Jeff "Trip" Hawkins: By defying it, he has achieved spectacular success. As the founder of two groundbreaking technology companies, Palm and Handspring, he virtually created the era of hand-held computers with the launch of the first Palm Pilot in 1996. The wealth he accumulated as a result -- over $100 million -- allowed him to follow a similar iconoclastic approach in tackling his greatest passion: the study of the brain.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 02, 2004
Virtual room makes knowledge out of data
A team at Purdue University in the US is developing a virtual ‘data cave’ for scientific discovery that uses high-performance computing and artificial intelligence software to display information and interact with researchers.
One of its earliest applications is expected to be in the pharmaceutical and chemical sectors, according to the team behind the work.
"If you were a chemist, you could walk right up to this display and move molecules and atoms around to see how the changes would affect a formulation or a material's properties," said James Caruthers, a professor of chemical engineering at Purdue.
The future of communication based on knowledge engineering. A real "virtual" communication in which data is converted into interactive 3 dimensional images. A result of fusion of different areas of engineering like chemical, computing product design and more.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 01, 2004
Three Minutes With Ray Kurzweil
Interview
Technology pioneer, entrepreneur, and futurist Ray Kurzweil, 56, invented the flatbed scanner, developed the first text-to-speech reading machine for the blind, helped develop omnifont optical character recognition, and was the first to market large-vocabulary speech recognition technology, among many other achievements. He has won numerous prizes and awards, including the Lemelson-MIT Prize, the nation's largest award for invention and innovation, and the 1999 National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton. In his latest book, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (Rodale Books), Kurzweil and coauthor Terry Grossman, MD, explain how new technologies will push human life spans into virtual immortality.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 03:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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