Posts tagged computer science
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Soft autonomous earthworm robot at MIT
Earthworms creep along the ground by alternately squeezing and stretching muscles along the length of their bodies, inching forward with each wave of contractions. Snails and sea cucumbers also use this mechanism, called peristalsis, to get around, and our own gastrointestinal tracts operate by a similar action, squeezing muscles along the esophagus to push food to the stomach.
Now researchers at MIT, Harvard University and Seoul National University have engineered a soft autonomous robot that moves via peristalsis, crawling across surfaces by contracting segments of its body, much like an earthworm. The robot, made almost entirely of soft materials, is remarkably resilient: Even when stepped upon or bludgeoned with a hammer, the robot is able to inch away, unscathed.
UC San Diego Team Aims to Broaden Researcher Access to Protein Simulation
Using just an upgraded desktop computer equipped with a relatively inexpensive graphics processing card, a team of computer scientists and biochemists at the University of California, San Diego, has developed advanced GPU accelerated software and demonstrated for the first time that this approach can sample biological events that occur on the millisecond timescale.
These results have the potential to bring millisecond scale sampling, now available only on a multi-million dollar supercomputer, to all researchers, and could significantly impact the study of protein dynamics with key implications for improved drug and biocatalyst development.
Soon, space robots like Curiosity may evolve even greater intelligence
After more than eight years of planning and a 254-day journey through the cold emptiness of space, NASA’s Curiosity rover has finally landed on Mars. Curiosity is the most advanced mobile robotic science lab to ever explore another planet and thus this is an exciting moment for NASA and the world.
But robotics and artificial intelligence continue to advance at an exponential rate. As we look towards the future of space exploration in the next decade and beyond, we can expect the next generation of space robots to be orders of magnitude more powerful and intelligent, while at the same time costing a fraction of Curiosity’s $2.5 billion price tag.
The Superstitious Fund Project
The fund works like this: stock trades are carried out by an Automated Trading System (colloquially, a “robot”), which is a computer program that buys, sells or holds stocks based on a set of specifications encoded into the program’s governing algorithm. The code for Chung’s experiment was written by Jim Hunt, who runs a firm called Trading Gurus, and together with Chung they named it “Sid the Superstitious Robot”. (They also decided to make the source code completely transparent and free to download.)Like many investment models, Sid is an automated speculator. But whereas other algorithms might take action based, for instance, on a stock’s recent performance or the price of oil, the criterion for this program are lunar phases and the affection and disaffection people have for certain numbers. “I wanted it to operate based on human characteristics,” Chung says.
Sid won’t buy anything on the 13th of the month, and steers clear of buying or selling any stock if its value happens to have a 13 in it. As for lunar phases, Chung explains with a hint of pride that the algorithm finds a new moon to be “good”, whereas a full moon is very, very bad. “The closer the moon is to being full, the more it effects us,” Chung says. So as the full moon approaches, the robot – instead of starting to grow claws and thick brown hair – sells more, as if it is nervous about the moon’s impact on multinational corporations and the decision-making capabilities of senior management. If you’re wondering how this automated yet temperamental trader handles an eclipse, one word: sell.
Computer Scientists Present Smile Database
What exactly happens to your face when you smile spontaneously, and how does that affect how old you look? Computer scientists from the University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Science recorded the smiles of hundreds of visitors to the NEMO science centre in Amsterdam, thus creating the most comprehensive smile database ever. The results can be seen via the link below. The research was conducted as part of the project Science Live, sponsored by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NOW) and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).
Smile Database: http://www.uva-nemo.org/
The Internet global network is a phenomenon of technological civilization, and its exceptional complexity surpasses anything mankind has ever created. In essence, what we are dealing with here is a huge quantity of utterly unstructured information. The Internet map is an attempt to look into the hidden structure of the network, fathom its colossal scale, and examine that which is impossible to understand from the bare figures of statistics.