I hadn’t heard anything about wavlets in several years and then this news story caught my eye.
. . .Meningiomas are tumours of the brain and nervous system and they account for 20% of all brain tumours. Doctors have a major problem of discriminating between the four different subtypes of meningiomas but doctors face three [...]
Path Intelligence has developed software to track pedestrians by analyzing their mobile phone signals. Monitoring units can be placed about a mall or store and the units fetch a unique signal from shoppers phones and track the shopper’s path.
Stores are provided with easy to use interfaces for the data, weather information, and SMS notification [...]
While most of the artificial intelligent design of websites has come in the form of ‘Mechanical Turks’ better known as Web 2.0. Here is someone using an evolution algorithm to design a website.
Matthew Hockenberry and Ernesto Arroyo of Creative Synthesis, a non-profit organisation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have created evolutionary software that alters colours, fonts [...]
Of all the companies watching me I can’t imagine one that thrills me less than Comcast. They have already been filtering and throttling our net traffic. Not content with collecting your packets they now plan to watch you in your living room. All for your own benefit of course.
If you have some [...]
Self building wireless technology has lots of promise and more than a few companies working on it. These networks would allow us to go into a disaster area or a war zone, release our wireless sensors or transmitters and blanket the affected area. Once that is done we could communicate with each other; [...]
Swarm stuff may seem like the newest bleeding edge in artificial intelligence, but long before the replicators appeared, Brooks and Flynn were already planning in 1989 to invade celestial bodies with swarms of bots.
Complex systems and complex missions take years of planning and force launches to become incredibly expensive. The longer the planning and the [...]
You realize that that ‘every click you make, every link you take’ they are watching you. How many times have you Googled ‘cars’ and had nothing but auto ads show up on every site you visit for a month?
Not content to track your clicks and websites neuromarketers are taking things to a whole new [...]
Survival research labs creates real life battle bots for robot wars that are performed live. SLR’s tagline is ‘Producing the most dangerous shows on earth’.
. . . “He’s trying to create a strong message about fear,” said Dr. Ken Goldberg, an associate professor of robotics at the University of California at Berkeley. “That’s what Mark [...]
We’ve all heard of UAVs. Over in Iraq they have played a huge helping role to US troops. Lesser known is their benefits to scientists exploring ocean life, and the Antarctic. More recently they have begun to show up in the news as ways to patrol the US/Mexico border and the [...]
I ran across a story a while back on Engadget, Researchers create a nanobot-controlling brain, and realized I hadn’t looked to see where we are in nanotechnology in a long time.
Nano is a prefix representing one one-billionth of something, a nanobot is a robotic device less than 1 billionth of a meter in size. [...]
One of the wonderful things the internet has done is to bring to life the ‘Mechanical Turk’. Together we can all do small things and create something wonderful, like the internet. Google’s search engine works so well because we all contribute to it. Amazon works fantastically because of the book reviews users contribute.
Loren [...]
New insight into how brains process visual information is a double edged sword. It will make for much better vision engines but with that will come the failure of our most popular human test at the moment — captcha.
Using a fly, whose brain is heavily coded for visual information, Nemenman and his colleagues were [...]
Totally cool and totally scary. This algorithm finds hidden social networks no matter how small. This may turn out to be an excellent resource against terrorist networks. Currently the algorithm has and is being used to detect genetic networks. The algorithm was inspired by stegography but can be applied to any [...]
Some UA Huntsville researchers who specialize in statistics are finding patterns in asymmetric threats to the US and US troops. While these attacks seem random some patterns are emerging.
While these patterns do not give specific information as to what will be attacked, when and how, it does give probabilities of likely targets, types of [...]
Ah, but do we really want our computers to understand us? Anybody remember ‘Clippy’?
Computer: “You seem depressed today, should I Google Dr Kevorkian for you?”
Or will the clerks at the local retail store start wearing cameras with emotion recognizing software? A bit of customer understanding by the help would go a long [...]
I don’t know how I missed this story last year. Flying robots that repair satellites are cool. Maybe in time we’ll have robot mechanics patrolling the highways and fixing disabled vehicles?
Boeing Orbital Express system is a DARPA project hoping to demonstrate fully autonomous on orbit satellite servicing capabilities. Which in plain English [...]
“The DARPA System F6 is based on a concept whereby a group of spacecraft operate together wirelessly as a single unit to enable flexible data sharing and distributed processing that will allow cooperative communications among the spacecraft. This concept of multiple spacecraft operating together to perform a mission similar to that of a single larger [...]
‘Science’ published a paper by M.D.Cohen ‘Learning with Regret’ This paper is about an economic prediction system that lets the agents learn from past errors. Agents look back at previous decisions to see what better outcomes may have happened if they had chose differently. In doing so agents make better future decisions.
Not [...]
The Japanese are really going to make it much more fun to age. What is really cool is the technology for these glasses is well known and already available.
. . .
Simply tell the glasses what you are looking for and it will play into your eye a video of the last few seconds [...]
What makes this robot interesting is that it uses touch to find its way around. Biotact is a consortium of researchers from all over the world who are working on this project.
. . .Based on principles of active sensing adopted widely in the animal kingdom, the multinational team is developing innovative touch technologies, [...]
Last month several tech sites ran headlines about “3d Shape Shifting Robot Swarms”. We’ve also seen this begin to appear in many recent science fiction stories.
Goldstein calls the programmable matter claytronics and the tiny robots catoms. And it’s not all out of a sci-fi movie. Goldstein said. Working hand-in-hand with Intel Corp., the research [...]
By blasting a person’s breath with laser light, scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado at Boulder have shown that they can detect molecules that may be markers for diseases like asthma or cancer.While the new technique has yet to be tested in clinical trials, it may someday [...]
There was a time not so long ago when superpowers went to war in small nations like Korea and Vietnam as a way to test each other and do a bit of chest beating. Times change and since the US is the only current superpower, we’ve shifted to superpower vs terrorists. Now thanks to [...]
Post from: Herself's Artificial Intelligence
Coming soon to a city near you, robotic flies
Researchers have a working robotic fly. However, despite news stories of spying I can find no references to cameras or other spy equipment embedded in the flies so no need to panic yet.
Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley are building [...]
Researchers have a working robotic fly. However, despite news stories of spying I can find no references to cameras or other spy equipment embedded in the flies so no need to panic yet.
Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley are building a minuscule robot guaranteed to give new meaning to the old phrase, [...]
Post from: Herself's Artificial Intelligence
Robots evolve and learn to lie
The Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology claims to have created robots that evolve and learn to communicate with each other. The robots have a set of genes, flashing lights and there are battery sinks and sources in the environment. Some [...]
Post from: Herself's Artificial Intelligence
You will be assimilated
And how cool is that? Can you imagine grandma and grandpa putting on their brain controlled robot exoskeletons and sneakers to run down to the grocery store for a few things? And good luck to the purse snatcher who grabs grandma’s purse. The baby [...]
Post from: Herself's Artificial Intelligence
Buddhabot converts to Christianity
This story was too rich to leave be, Buddhabot has been converted to Christianity at the hands of his developer. Keeping with current church traditions Godsbot requires a $10 tithe while Buddhabot is still free. I expect it won’t be long before Satan [...]
Post from: Herself's Artificial Intelligence
Robots capable of surgery at 1.8gs but can’t put dishes away
Entirely too cool and too weird. We have robots that can do surgery at 1.8gs but not one that can put the laundry away. Does this mean housewives are going to be harder to replace than doctors?
. . [...]
Post from: Herself's Artificial Intelligence
Spam bots advance to stealing web 2.0 identitities
Porn is, as always, leading the internet in new techniques, not just video now, but dataming as well. A porn company in Canada, SlickPay aka Istra Holdings sent out bots to collect information about Facebook users and then sent them porn spam. [...]
Post from: Herself's Artificial Intelligence
Turing tests re-visited
Recently Huoyangao left a link for his Turing Test Two paper on the Turing test page and while digging through Arxiv.org looking for interesting topics I ran across more Tests of Machine Intelligence which has several more recommended Turing Tests.
While I’ve discussed this before it is still an interesting [...]
Post from: Herself's Artificial Intelligence
Man-Computer Symbiosis 50 years ago and now
The original Man-Computer Symbiosis paper was written in 1960 by JCR Licklider. I ran across Human-Machine Symbiosis, 50 Years On while scouting for interesting reads on Arxiv.
Man-computer symbiosis is an expected development in cooperative interaction between men and electronic computers. It will involve very [...]
Post from: Herself's Artificial Intelligence
Power line urban sentry finds a hack around battery problems
So far a lack of portable power is our biggest stumbling block in robotics and the portable internet. This is one way around that problem.
The next time you see something flapping in the breeze on an overhead power line, squint a [...]
Researchers in the US have perfected a propulsion mechanism that utilizes the ocean's energy to propel an underwater vehicle. The Slocum Glider takes advantage of the temperature difference at different depths in an ocean to generate energy that is enough to run the robot's motors. A
CBC article explains how the glider works,
Traditionally, gliders use battery-powered motors and mechanical pumps to move ballast water or oil from inside the vehicle to a bladder on the vehicle's exterior. This changes its volume and buoyancy without changing its mass, causing it to sink or rise while at the same time pushing it forward.
The researchers say the same principle is at work, only their thermal glider gets its energy from the heat of the ocean. Warmer water closer to the surface warms wax-filled tubes inside the engine, which expand to push oil from the interior to the exterior of the glider. As the glider dives and reaches deeper, colder waters, the wax cools and contracts, bringing the oil back to the interior.
The Slocum thermal glider has an operating range of 40000 Km and a top speed of 0.4 m/s. It is one of many robots manufactured by the
Webb Research Corporation. The video below shows the glider in operation.
Post from: Herself's Artificial Intelligence
High oil prices bring us oil drilling robots
The most important gain of automating oil platforms is that oil fields too small to be profitable become profitable when you can use a small automated platform to handle the oil. Oil prices will have to remain high for this to be economically [...]
Post from: Herself's Artificial Intelligence
Robots to build Korean skyscrapers by 2010 and the Japanese are close behind
By 2010 it looks like robots will take over some of the work of building high-rise towers. This new building technology is expected to bring down the number of injuries at high-rise construction sites and also cut down on [...]
Post from: Herself's Artificial Intelligence
Frankenstein reborn as a blue rat
The blue brain, named after the deep blue IBM computer used to model it on, has made significant progress modeling brains. Right now they have a working neocortical column that mimics that of a two week old rat.
In a laboratory in Switzerland, a group of [...]
Post from: Herself's Artificial Intelligence
TUG robot makes the rounds
The TUG robotic indoor transport system pioneered by Aethon Inc. (Pittsburgh, PA) is a uniquely automated courier system making the rounds in an increasing number of hospitals nationwide. The robot can deliver and track instruments, medications, meals, and lab specimens anywhere in a facility (even traveling from [...]
Post from: Herself's Artificial Intelligence
Are swarms chaotic?
The zoologist and his colleagues discovered that when a swarm contains between 25 and 74 locusts per square metre, the locusts are almost always aligned but exhibit rapid and spontaneous changes in direction. There were almost no directional changes above that range of densities. [read more Sychronising the [...]
Post from: Herself's Artificial Intelligence
Quick takes on recent artificial intelligence news
It’s getting near the end of the month and there were several news stories that caught my eye but that I didn’t have time to dig into and write a proper entry about. So I’m posting just some quick takes here.
A very cool project [...]
Post from: Herself's Artificial Intelligence
Big blue is watching you
When the 2008 Olympic Games kick off in Beijing next year, organizers will be using a sophisticated computer system to scan video images of city streets looking for everything from troublemakers to terrorists.The IBM system, called the Smart Surveillance System, or S3, uses analytic tools to index [...]
Post from: Herself's Artificial Intelligence
CyberLover swindles the willing
Well this was just a matter of time. Many chat bots have been trolling the internet doing a very good job of passing themselves off as humans. The easiest way to do this is of course to find a willing victim. CyberLover does just that.
CyberLover [...]
Sure, you know how adorable Pleo is when you?re being all cute and cuddly with him. But what?s going to happen when someone?s Ritalin-addicted nephew is left alone with the hapless dinosaur for even a few minutes? While waiting to conduct our full, hands-on review, we decided to answer that question with a series of [...]
Flying fish were the inspiration for an unmanned seaplane with a 7-foot wingspan developed at the University of Michigan. The autonomous craft is believed to be the first seaplane that can initiate and perform its own takeoffs and landings on water. Funded by the Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), it is [...]
The scientists present five models describing how animals may receive communication signals, and discuss how signal reception affects the formation of different patterns, both moving and stationary. In doing so, the scientists? model not only explains five known group patterns, but also reveals five previously unknown patterns. The scientists also suggest that many more exist.?These [...]
Good things occur.
Imagine two foot tall robots traveling at ten mph armed with machine guns that stop on a dime and are accurate from a quarter mile distance. That’s one of the future weapons heading our way. Robotex is developing military robots privately, no gov’t red tape, and doing so quickly and cheaply. [...]
Dr. Craig Tovey at the George Institute of Technology studied bees for years waiting for the right problem to come along that would use bee load balancing technology. Sunil Nakrani came to Dr. Tovey hoping to use his expertise in algorithm heuristics to help solve network load balancing problems.
. . . ?But the bees [...]
I told you AI would be coming to your cell phone soon. Not only do cell phones come with powerful processors now but there are special circumstances that make cell phone AI both more practical and more interesting.
Cell phone cameras now auto tag the date and often GPS coordinates of pictures you take. The [...]
Cockroaches are prefect for testing swarm behavior, they are pack members and behave as a swarm. They group together especially when hiding. They find a cool, dark place and pile into it as a group.
Four cockroaches built by Jose Halloy were introduced into a cockroach group. At first the roaches ignored the [...]
If you have ever observed ants marching in and out of a nest, you might have been reminded of a highway buzzing with traffic. To Iain D. Couzin, such a comparison is a cruel insult ? to the ants.Americans spend a 3.7 billion hours a year in congested traffic. But you will never see ants [...]
Several companies are working on intelligent agents to help you in your computer interactions, ( see Lua created assistant ) and here is yet another one, Magitti.
Magitti is different in that it is taking advantage of some of the phones unique advantages: portability, gps and that it travels with you all day.
It is also different [...]
Forgotten and mislaid passwords could be a thing of the past. A German start-up claims its typing recognition system will solve the problems associated with traditional password authentication.The Regensburg-based company said that its system is based on recognising individuals typing habits including speed, rhythm, agility, corrective behaviour and use of shift keys. Using a neural [...]
Truth is I already feel like Jane somedays. I push buttons on the dishwasher, washer, dryer, roomba, scooba and now if I just had Rosie to water the plants and put the clean dishes and clothes away life could be good.
A personal robot that can water plants, remind owners to take their medication, turn [...]
Can a fringe branch of mathematics forecast the future? A special adviser to the CIA, Fortune 500 companies, and the U.S. Department of Defense certainly thinks so. If you listen to Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and a lot of people don?t, he?ll claim that mathematics can tell you the future. In fact, the professor says [...]
Facet is planned to be released as open source software. It allows phones to alert you when an object enters or leaves an area. So if you are camping with friends you can set up your cells around the edge of the camp and it will figure out where the other phones are [...]
Machine gunned robot ships are chasing pirates and saving innocents. The future has arrived and the Terminator is in it.
Spartan USVs have been deployed for a while, I’ve found references back to 2003. They gather information to protect military vehicles from Cole type attacks. The Spartan can run about two days and [...]
A technology that senses changes in emotions is being developed to help aged care, driver safety and anxiety in people. I’m betting Big Brother will also find some useful things to do with the technology.
The technology uses changes in speech rhythms and pitch; and changes in facial expressions. Interestingly short term nervousness shows [...]
Lightness illusions are fundamental to human perception, and yet why we see them is still the focus of much research. Here we address the question by modelling not human physiology or perception directly as is typically the case but our natural visual world and the need for robust behaviour. Artificial neural networks were trained to [...]
I’m not sure which is worse? The fact you can’t escape election propaganda even in your email in box anymore? Or that the government has found yet another way to intrude into our lives using the internet, artificial intelligence and datamining?
Allegations have been made that Ron Paul’s campaign is creating internet buzz with [...]
In order to understand AT&Ts complicity in the recent surveillance with out warrants scandal you might look to ‘The Hacker Crackdown, Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier’.
AT&T was an early victim of crackers and one of the first companies building defenses. AT&T being a very old school company was a little unclear on [...]
I wonder if we could get one of these to run for president? It’s bound to be progress.
The two year old Artificial Intelligence (AI) known as the Buddhabot began answering questions on Yahoo! Answers site last week. Yahoo Answers is a Web 2.0 site with a social content rating system reminiscent of Digg. The [...]
Anyone running a website has been plagued by link spam. It shows up in your access-log files, in false comments on a blog, even in user registrations on a blog. An incredible amount of resources are being put into both sides of this battle. Do a search on any search engine and you’ll [...]
All these recent studies using neural networks to predict human behavior have found a purpose. They are being trained and used on game users computers to get around network lag in games by predicting the gamers next move.
Lag time is the ping time between you and the game computer. If two players are [...]
Once upon a time Searle, a philosopher, argued that artificial intelligence couldn’t be intelligent no matter how we programmed it.
The thought experiment goes like this: Take an English only speaking person and lock him in a room. Put a slip of paper under the door with Chinese markings posing a question. In [...]
DHAKA (Reuters) - Move over Japan? A Bangladeshi graduate student is developing a robot capable of picking up objects, mopping floors and performing other simple tasks — at the fraction of the cost of other humanoids.Feroz Ahmed Siddiky of the International Islamic University in Chittagong says his “IRobo” responds to voice commands, has spatial intelligence [...]
Originally 20 teams had hoped to compete in the Urban Challenge, 11 made the first cut. Some didn’t pass the ’safe for road’ test. The 11 finalists VictorTango, CarOLO, Ben Franklin, Cornell, Stanford, Tartan, MIT, Knight Rider, AnnieWAY, Intelligent Vehicle Systems, Terra Max all competed for a three and a half million dollar prize.
Six of the vehicles crossed the finish, and the three winners were Stanford ( $1 million ), Carnegie Mellon ( Tartan )( $2 million ) , and Virginia Tech ( Ben Franklin ) ( half a million ) finishing in less than 6 hours each.The course was 60 miles long, and vehicles had to avoid obstacles including 50 human driven cars.
More information:
Darpa, Urban Challenge
. . . The idea of evolutionary algorithms is not new. Until recently, however, their use has been confined to projects such as refining the aerodynamic profiles of car bodies, aircraft fuselages and wings. That is because only large firms have been able to afford the supercomputers needed to mutate and crossbreed large virtual genomes?and then simulate the behaviour of their offspring?for perhaps 20m generations before the perfect design emerges.What has changed, in this as in so much else, is the availability and cheapness of computing power. According to John Koza of Stanford University, who is one of the pioneers of the field, evolutionary designs that would have taken many months to run on PCs are now feasible in days.The result is that the range of applications to which the principles of evolutionary design are being applied is growing fast. Among those revealed at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference held in London this summer were long-life USB memory sticks, superfast racing-yacht keels, ultra-high-bandwidth optical fibres, high performance Wi-Fi antennae (evolved to avoid patent fees), cochlear implants that can optimise themselves to individual patients and a cancer-biopsy analyser that was evolved to match a human pathologist?s tumour-spotting skills.
How can evolution help improve a USB stick? It turns out that the storage transistors in these flash-memory devices are prone to being gummed up with electrostatic charge that they cannot dissipate. That prevents them being erased, limiting the stick?s useful life. A team at the University of Limerick in Ireland therefore evolved new signal-timing patterns that minimise the build-up of the disabling charge. The result: USB sticks that last up to 30 times longer than their predecessors. At the University of Sydney, in Australia, Steve Manos let an evolutionary algorithm come up with novel patterns in a type of optical fibre that has air holes shot through its length. Normally, these holes are arranged in a hexagonal pattern, but the algorithm generated a bizarre flower-like pattern of holes that no human would have thought of trying. It doubled the fibre?s bandwidth. . . . [ read more Don’t invent evolve]
See also:
Evolutionary computation: An overview(pdf)
Adrian Thompson’s Hardware Evolution Page ( He uses evolution to improve computer chips. )
Much of multiagent systems deals with the problem of (distributedly) computing equilibrium solutions for games, or calculating the proper incentives to that the agents will want to perform the required computation. Thus, much of multiagent research could be considered as algorithmic, or perhaps computational, game theory. There is a new book called Algorithmic Game Theory which collects short articles from the state of the art in this research area. David "oddhead" Pennock has more.
The news article USC student's computer program enlisted in security efforts at LAX explains how officers at LAX airport are using Paruchuri's research to choose their tasks. The problem is that they want both act randomly, so terrorists won't know where they are going to be, but they also need to get certain tasks done.
The thesis was titled "Keep the Adversary Guessing: Agent Security by Policy Randomization." Using highly refined equations and computer modeling, Paruchuri analyzed such situations as a security officer watching over a humanitarian relief camp for refugees and police officers patrolling a residential neighborhood that is prey to burglars. The formulas changed with varying numbers of players on each side, differing strategies and varying amounts of information that each side learned about adversaries.
The dilemma, Paruchuri wrote, is that police need "to commit to a security policy, while the adversaries may observe and exploit the policy committed to." He said he consulted with USC campus police on such topics as how to choose a patrol route.
Paruchuri's research shows how agent-based modeling used in conjunction with solid game-theory analysis make good things happen now.
If you are interested in develving deeper into game theory I highly
recommend Binmore's new edition of his textbook Playing for Real: A Text on Game Theory. I
have read many game theory textbooks and most of them focus on
non-cooperative game theory and on the proofs associated with various
solution concepts. Multiagent designers, on the other hand, don't
generally care about proofs but instead need to delve deep into
cooperative game theory (characteristic form games for coalition
formation and negotiation) and bargaining.
The Binmore text stands out in that it focuses on the application
and deep understanding of the game theory concepts instead of working out proof details. I was also
pleasantly surprised with its in-depth coverage of cooperative game
theory and its applications, Nash bargaining theory, and
learning in games (repeated games). Finally, the book is exceptionally easy to read,
for a game theory textbook. As someone who thinks in pictures, I
especially liked the many visualizations included in the books, some
of which I had never seen before.
This is an interesting comment from Peter Norvig over at google.
"We (once) thought of ourselves as observers of the Web. We made a copy of it, and we thought it was just a reflection of the Web," Norvig said Sunday while speaking here at the Singularity Summit, a two-day conference on artificial intelligence.
"Now we understand that we're co-evolving. When we make a change, it changes. Search engine optimizers watch us, and when we make a move, then they make a move. The Web moves in different directions because of the interaction between us," he said.
So, there they are, looking for a Nash equilibrium.
The following news item on an automated divorce negotiatior caught my eye. The technique they propose is simple:
The program, which is based on the game theory concepts developed by mathematician John Nash, separately asks the husband and wife to "rate" every disputed item by assigning points to each in a way that reflects each item's relative importance to him or her.
A wife might assign 30 points to the car, for instance, while the husband might assign only 20, indicating that the car is more important to the wife than to her spouse. In total, each person has 100 points to assign to all of the items or issues.
The software tallies all the points, creates an initial "trade-off map" and begins by solving the easiest dispute?the one for which there is the largest point discrepancy.
"The result, then, is a direct reflection of the priorities set by the disputants," Bellucci told LiveScience.
The person who "loses" the first dispute is given extra points to assign to the remaining issues. The trade-off map is revised and the software moves on to resolve the next "easiest" dispute, continuing on this way until all are resolved. The idea is to create a "win-win" scenario.
You can also read their conference paper for more details. Not only are these system a first step towards automated negotiation but their user-interface idea seems like very effective method for getting users to reveal their true preferences. Why did they go with an iterative method, rather than solving all conflict in one-shot using the initial rankings? Can you think of a way to cheat in this system?
