Posts tagged technology
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
The Consequences of Machine Intelligence
If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?
The question of what happens when machines get to be as intelligent as and even more intelligent than people seems to occupy many science-fiction writers. The Terminator movie trilogy, for example, featured Skynet, a self-aware artificial intelligence that served as the trilogy’s main villain, battling humanity through its Terminator cyborgs. Among technologists, it is mostly “Singularitarians” who think about the day when machine will surpass humans in intelligence. The term “singularity” as a description for a phenomenon of technological acceleration leading to “machine-intelligence explosion” was coined by the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam in 1958, when he wrote of a conversation with John von Neumann concerning the “ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.” More recently, the concept has been popularized by the futurist Ray Kurzweil, who pinpointed 2045 as the year of singularity. Kurzweil has also founded Singularity University and the annual Singularity Summit.
Ping-pong-playing robot learns to play like a person
A ROBOT that learns to play ping-pong from humans and improves as it competes against them could be the best robotic table-tennis challenger the world has seen.
Katharina Muelling and colleagues at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany suspended a robotic arm from the ceiling and equipped it with a camera that watches the playing area. Then Muelling physically guided the arm through different shots to return incoming balls.
The arm was then left to draw on its training to return balls hit by a human opponent. When the ball was in a position it had not seen before, the arm used its library of shots to improvise new ones. After an hour of unassisted practise, the system successfully returned 88 per cent of shots.
Other robots have played table tennis in the past, but none have used human demonstration to learn the game. Ales Ude of the Jožef Stefan Institute in Slovenia says that doing so allows robots to play more like people.
The work, which will be presented at an AAAI symposium in Arlington, Virginia, next month, is part of a broader goal to develop robots that can do a range of tasks after being guided by their owners, Muelling says.
Mind over machine: Use your brainwaves to control your computer
When it comes to controlling our computers, the last five years has seen incredible improvements in user interfaces including amazing touch screens and much more natural vocal recognition. Now, a Toronto company wants to take the UI to the next level — by going directly to the brain. You think it, and the Muse headband will make it happen under very limited circumstances.
InteraXon, the maker of the Muse headband, has listed it device on Indiegogo in hopes of raising $150,000 for building out a mass-produced headband that translates your mental commands into a computer action. The example they show on the site is playing a game using an iPad, where the rotation of a wooden block occurs when the user focuses on it. The user tilts the iPad to change the angle of the rotation.
The ideas behind the Muse are echoed in a project released by Chaotic Moon Studios earlier this year called the Board of Imagination, whereby a user controls a skateboard that connected to an iPad and a brainwave reader made by a different company called Emotiv. In that use case, the user’s focus is what makes the skateboard move forward.
Robots in the Home: Will Older Adults Roll Out the Welcome Mat?
Robots have the potential to help older adults with daily activities that can become more challenging with age. But are people willing to use and accept the new technology? A study by the Georgia Institute of Technology indicates the answer is yes, unless the tasks involve personal care or social activities.
After showing adults (ages 65 to 93 years) a video of a robot’s capabilities, researchers interviewed them about their willingness for assistance with 48 common household tasks. Participants generally preferred robotic help over human help for chores such as cleaning the kitchen, doing laundry and taking out the trash. But when it came to help getting dressed, eating and bathing, the adults tended to say they would prefer human assistance over robot assistance. They also preferred human help for social activities, such as calling family and friends or entertaining guests.
Georgia Tech’s Cory-Ann Smarr will present the results this week at the Human Factors Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting in Boston.
“There are many misconceptions about older adults having negative attitudes toward robots,” said Smarr, a School of Psychology graduate teaching assistant. “The people we interviewed were very enthusiastic and optimistic about robots in their daily lives. They were also very particular in their preferences, something that can assist researchers as they determine what to design and introduce in the home.”
Over a half-century has passed since the concept of artificial intelligence first emerged. In the United States, a computer has been built to become a TV quiz show champion, and minor research developments such as robotic vacuum cleaners and smartphones that talk back have become commonplace. We take a look into the evolution of machine intellect.
Fly tweet
This device sends twitter messages based on the activities of a collection of houseflies. The flies live inside an acrylic sphere along with a computer keyboard. As the flies move and interact inside their home, they fly over the keys on the keyboard. These movements are collected in real-time via video. When a particular key is triggered by the flies, the key’s corresponding character is entered into a twitter text box. When 140 characters are reached or the flies trigger the “enter” key, the message containing the accumulated characters is tweeted. Thus live twitter messages are perpetually sent in real-time based on the simple movements of the community of houseflies. These constantly accumulating messages appear as records of random activity within the larger sphere of social media and networking.
(Source: dwbowen.com)
Theresa Klein talks about Achilles, the first machine to move in a biologically accurate way.
"Our robot, named Achilles, is the first to walk in a biologically accurate way. That means it doesn’t just move like a person, but also sends commands to the legs like the human nervous system does.
Each leg has eight muscles—Kevlar straps attached to a motor on one end and to the plastic skeleton on the other. As the motor turns, it pulls the strap, mimicking the way our muscles contract. Some of Achilles’ muscles extend from the hip or thigh to the lower leg so they can project forces all the way down the limb. This allows us to put most of the motors in the hips and thighs. Placing them up high keeps the lower leg light, so that it can swing quickly like a human’s lower leg.
In people, neurons in the spinal column send out rhythmic signals that control our legs. It’s like a metronome, and sensory feedback from the legs alters the pace. Your brain can step in to make corrections, but it doesn’t explicitly control every muscle, which is essentially why you can walk without thinking about it. For our robot, a computer program running off an external PC controls movement in a similar way. With each step, the computer sends a signal to flex one hip muscle and extend the other. The computer changes the timing of those signals based on feedback from the legs’ load and angle sensors. A similar control system handles the lower muscles.
Modeling human movement has applications outside of robotics. It could also help us understand how people recover after spinal-cord injuries, for example. But our robot is still a very simplified model—it has no torso and can’t handle complex terrain. Initially, we also had a problem with its feet slipping. We thought about different types of rubber to give its feet more grip but eventually realized a solution already exists. Now, the robot wears a pair of Keds.”
If two birds meet deep in the forest, does anybody hear? Until now, nobody did, unless an intrepid biologist was hiding underneath a bush and watching their behavior, or the birds happened to meet near a research monitoring station. But an electronic tag designed at the University of Washington can for the first time see when birds meet in the wild.
A new study led by a biologist at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews used the UW tags to see whether crows might learn to use tools from one another. The findings, published in Current Biology, supported the theory by showing an unexpected amount of social mobility, with the crows often spending time near birds outside their immediate family.
The study looked at crows in New Caledonia, an archipelago of islands in the South Pacific. The crows are famous for using different tools to extract prey from deadwood and vegetation. Biologists wondered whether the birds might learn by watching each other.
The results, as reported by St. Andrews, revealed “a surprising number of contacts” between non-related crows. During one week, the technology recorded more than 28,000 interactions among 34 crows. While core family units of New Caledonian crows contain only three members, the study found all the birds were connected to the larger social network.
The new paper is the first published study using the UW tags to record animal social interactions.
Ray Kurzweil, the bold futurist and author of The New York Times bestseller "The Singularity Is Near", is arguably today’s most influential technological visionary. A pioneering inventor and theorist, he has explored for decades how artificial intelligence can enrich and expand human capabilities.
Now, in his much-anticipated How to Create a Mind, he takes this exploration to the next step: reverse-engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works, then applying that knowledge to create vastly intelligent machines.
Drawing on the most recent neuroscience research, his own research and inventions in artificial intelligence, and compelling thought experiments, he describes his new theory of how the neocortex (the thinking part of the brain) works: as a self-organizing hierarchical system of pattern recognizers. Kurzweil shows how these insights will enable us to greatly extend the powers of our own mind and provides a roadmap for the creation of superintelligence—humankind’s most exciting next venture. We are now at the dawn of an era of radical possibilities in which merging with our technology will enable us to effectively address the world’s grand challenges.
How to Create a Mind is certain to be one of the most widely discussed and debated science books in many years—a touchstone for any consideration of the path of human progress.