Robots evolve to learn cooperation, hunting

Robots evolve to learn cooperation, hunting CNET "If robots are allowed to evolve through natural selection, they will develop adaptive abilities to hunt prey, cooperate, and even help one another, according to Swiss researchers.

In a series of experiments described in the journal PLoS Biology, Dario Floreano of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne and Laurent Keller of the University of Lausanne reported that simple, small-wheeled Khepera and Alice robots can evolve behaviors such as collision-free movement and homing techniques in only several hundred 'generations.'"

Walking Robot Maid

South Korean scientists develop walking robot maid: "South Korean scientists have developed a walking robot maid which can clean a home, dump clothes in a washing machine and even heat food in a microwave.

"Mahru-Z has a human-like body including a rotating head, arms, legs and six fingers plus three-dimensional vision to recognise chores that need to be tackled, media reports said Monday.

'The most distinctive strength of Mahru-Z is its visual ability to observe objects, recognise the tasks needed to be completed, and execute them,' You Bum-Jae, head of the cognitive robot centre at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, told the Korea Times."

Giving Computers the Gift of Gab

Endowing Computers With the Gift of Gab from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute "Despite the power of computers to crunch numbers with unfathomable speed and perform quadrillions of calculations per second, the machines are still quite primitive in their ability to truly understand human language.

"This is a glaring digital deficiency that Nicholas Cassimatis, assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is looking to solve. He is leading a multi-university team of researchers to develop unified theories of language and cognition that aim to allow more meaningful linguistic interaction between humans and computers. Only by better understanding the nature of human language, Cassimatis said, can we develop computational systems with human-level language abilities."

Loyola Uses Robots To Treat Lung Cancer

Robots Treat Lung Cancer: from medicalnewstoday.com Another application of the Da Vinci™ surgical system to improve surgical outcomes. "Unlike a traditional lobectomy, which requires a large incision and division of the muscles of the chest and spreading the ribs, the robotic procedure using the Da Vinci™ Surgical System allows surgeons to perform the same surgical procedure through four small incisions, resulting in less pain and reduced loss of blood.

"Robotic surgery for lung cancer is done thoracoscopically, in which a tiny camera is inserted through a small incision in order to give surgeons a three-dimensional view of the inside of the chest, which is very rigid and harder to operate on using traditional surgery. Working through three additional, small incisions, the surgeon controls every move of the robotic arms from a computer console at the patient's bedside. The robot's arms are fully articulated, allowing it to turn and grasp with more agility and precision than the human hand."

Robotic Nurses in Your Future?

Toyota Sees Robotic Nurses in Your Lonely Final Years from Wired.com Toyota is developing "partner robots" to serve in hospitals and homes, with expectations to start selling this year. In part spurred by the shifting demographics (towards a higher percentage of elderly), Toyota envisions a variety of roles these robots could play.

Toyota isn't a maverick in this -- Japan’s Machine Industry Memorial Foundation projects the country could save $21 billion annually by using robots to care for the elderly. The government is also drafting safety regulations for all kinds of personal service robots . A new agency, the Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, has launched a five-year project to improve safety standards for the machines.

Nanoscale Robot Places Atoms With 100% Accuracy

Robot Arm Places Atoms and Molecules With 100% Accuracy hPlusMagazine "Until the mid-1990s, the term "nanotechnology" referred to the goal of creating vast arrays of nanoscale assemblers to fabricate useful human-scale products from scratch in an entirely automated process and with atomic precision. Since then, the word has come to mean anything from stain-resistant pants to branches of conventional chemistry — generally anything involving nanoscale objects. But the dream of a new Industrial Revolution based on nanoscale manufacturing has not died, as demonstrated most vividly by the work of NYU professor of chemistry Dr. Nadrian Seeman.

"In a 2009 article in Nature Nanotechnology, Dr. Seeman shared the results of experiments performed by his lab, along with collaborators at Nanjing University in China, in which scientists built a two-armed nanorobotic device with the ability to place specific atoms and molecules where scientists want them. The device was approximately 150 x 50 x 8 nanometers in size — over a million could fit in a single red blood cell. Using robust error-correction mechanisms, the device can place DNA molecules with 100% accuracy. Earlier trials had yielded only 60-80% accuracy."

AI Report

The AI Report - Forbes.com

"Can machines think? In 1950, Alan Turing, considered by some to be the father of modern computing, published a paper in which he proposed that, "If, during text-based conversation, a machine is indistinguishable from a human, then it could be said to be 'thinking' and, therefore, could be attributed with intelligence." He predicted that a computer would pass this "Turing Test" by the end of the century. That hasn't happened--yet. But the question continues to provoke and inspire. AI might be just around the corner, or it might be centuries away"

GR: check out this Forbes special report, with essays by cyberneticist Kevin Warwick, philosopher Nick Bostrom, Singularity Institute president Michael Vassar, and Google Research Director Peter Norvig.

Proven Kernel delivers safer computing

Code breakthrough delivers safer computing "Computer researchers at UNSW and NICTA have achieved a breakthrough in software which will deliver significant increases in security and reliability and has the potential to be a major commercialisation success.

"Professor Gernot Heiser, the John Lions Chair in Computer Science in the School of Computer Science and Engineering and a senior principal researcher with NICTA, said for the first time a team had been able to prove with mathematical rigour that an operating-system kernel – the code at the heart of any computer or microprocessor – was 100 per cent bug-free and therefore immune to crashes and failures.

"The breakthrough has major implications for improving the reliability of critical systems such as medical machinery, military systems and aircraft, where failure due to a software error could have disastrous results."

Computer science majors still in demand

Computer science majors still in demand "The nation's leading computer science programs say graduating seniors are still sought after by technology vendors and corporate shops, despite the global economic slowdown and high-profile layoffs across the tech industry."

"Professor Peter Lee, head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, says demand for the program's 130 graduating seniors has not wavered during the last few months. "Our graduates continue even in this downturn to have near 100% employment," Lee says. "It is still the case that companies are coming to recruit new computer science graduates, and very often they go away happy with the recruits they find here."

Mobile Apps Give Students Instant Access to Information

Columbus State University Mobile Apps "In what may be a nationwide first, new cell phone and PDA applications developed by Columbus University will allow students to have instant access to academic and financial aid information, as well as events around campus.

"Programmers in CSU's University Information and Technology Services have been working for months to interface Google Apps for mobile devices with the university’s online, password-protected Student Information System. With the new Columbus State Mobile Apps, students can now use any Web-enabled cell phone to securely view information about:

• Academic status, such as GPA, adviser contact and grades
• Schedule of classes
• Required admissions documents, such as financial aid and immunization
• Student account information, such as amount owed, refunds available or account holds
• Student activities
• Athletic events
• Campus shuttle bus schedule
• Campus map"

Mental telepathy... over the internet?

Communicating person to person through the power of thought alone "New research from the University of Southampton has demonstrated that it is possible for communication from person to person through the power of thought alone.

"Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI) can be used for capturing brain signals and translating them into commands that allow humans to control (just by thinking) devices such as computers, robots, rehabilitation technology and virtual reality environments.

"This experiment goes a step further and was conducted by Dr Christopher James from the University’s Institute of Sound and Vibration Research. The aim was to expand the current limits of this technology and show that brain-to-brain (B2B) communication is possible."

By 2040 you will be able to upload your brain...

Upload your brain... "By 2040 you will be able to upload your brain... or at least that's what Ray Kurzweil thinks. He has spent his life inventing machines that help people, from the blind to dyslexics. Now, he believes we're on the brink of a new age – the 'singularity' – when mind-boggling technology will allow us to email each other toast, run as fast as Usain Bolt (for 15 minutes) – and even live forever. Is there sense to his science – or is the man who reasons that one day he'll bring his dad back from the grave just a mad professor peddling a nightmare vision of the future?"

"In Kurzweil's estimation, we will be able to upload the human brain to a computer, capturing "a person's entire personality, memory, skills and history", by the end of the 2030s; humans and non-biological machines will then merge so effectively that the differences between them will no longer matter; and, after that, human intelligence, transformed for the better, will start to expand outward into the universe, around about 2045. With this last prediction, Kurzweil is referring not to any recognisable type of space travel, but to a kind of space infusion. "Intelligence," he writes, "will begin to saturate the matter and energy in its midst [and] spread out from its origin on Earth."

Intelligent vehicles tested across European roads

Intelligent vehicles tested... "In the context of euroFOT, a European-wide research project, 28 organisations have committed to scientifically test and assess the impact of eight advanced driver assistance systems on safety, efficiency and driver comfort. This collaborative research project is supported by European funds from the DG Information Society and Media.

"Both lateral and longitudinal control systems will be tested: systems that give warnings to the driver on potential side- and front-end collisions. Also, other advanced in-vehicle systems such as Curve Speed Warning, Fuel Efficiency Adviser and the Human machine interaction with navigation systems will be tested.

"Beginning in 2010, no less than 1000 vehicles from various European vehicle brands equipped with various intelligent in-vehicle systems will drive around Europe for approximately one year. These intelligent vehicles will collect data that should deliver answers with regards to the impacts that these systems have on safety, efficiency and driver comfort."

Going plasmonic in search of faster computing, communications

Going plasmonic... "A team of European researchers has demonstrated some of the first commercially viable plasmonic devices, paving the way for a new era of high-speed communications and computing in which electronic and optical signals can be handled simultaneously.

The pioneering devices, which are expected to lead to commercial applications within the next decade, make use of electron plasma oscillation to transmit optical and electronic signals along the same metal circuitry via waves of surface plasmon polaritons. In contrast, signals in electronic circuits are transmitted by electrons, while photons are used to carry data in optical systems."

"As an emerging nano-scale technology that is often referred to as “light on a wire,” plasmonics, as the field of research is known, shares the advantages of fibre optics, including ultra-high-speed data transfer, with the benefits of electronic components, particularly their small size. The technology holds the promise of all-optical computer chips operating at ultra-fast speeds, faster communications and a vast new range of sensing devices.

“For the last five years or so it has been possible to build an optical computer chip, but with all-optical components it would have to measure something like half a metre by half a metre and would consume enormous power. With plasmonics, we can make the circuitry small enough to fit in a normal PC while maintaining optical speeds,” explains Anatoly Zayats, a researcher at The Queen's University of Belfast in the United Kingdom.

Supercomputers with 100 million cores by 2018

Supercomputers with 100 million cores... "There is a race to make supercomputers as powerful as possible to solve some of the world's most important problems, including climate change, the need for ultra-long-life batteries for cars, operating fusion reactors with plasma that reaches 150 million degrees Celsius and creating bio-fuels from weeds and not corn.

"Supercomputers allow researchers to create three-dimensional visualizations, not unlike a video game, to run endless 'what-if' scenarios with increasingly finer detail. But as big as they are today, supercomputers aren't big enough -- and a key topic for some of the estimated 11,000 people now gathering in Portland, Ore. for the 22nd annual supercomputing conference, SC09, will be the next performance goal: an exascale system."

Futurologist Vernor Vinge on the Singularity

Contact lenses as heads-up displays

Contact lenses to get virtual graphics New Scientist "A contact lens that harvests radio waves to power an LED is paving the way for a new kind of display. The lens is a prototype of a device that could display information beamed from a mobile device.

"Realising that display size is increasingly a constraint in mobile devices, Babak Parviz at the University of Washington, in Seattle, hit on the idea of projecting images into the eye from a contact lens.

"One of the limitations of current head-up displays is their limited field of view. A contact lens display can have a much wider field of view. 'Our hope is to create images that effectively float in front of the user perhaps 50 cm to 1 m away,' says Parviz."

Teachers obsolete?

Hybrid Education 2.0 - Inside Higher Ed: "What if you could teach a college course without a classroom or a professor, and lose nothing?  According to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, there’s no 'what if' about it. Earlier in the decade, Carnegie Mellon set out to design software for independent learners taking courses through the university’s Open Learning Initiative, an effort to make courses freely available to non-enrolled learners. But rather than merely making course materials available to non-students, like MIT's famous OpenCourseware project, Carnegie Mellon wanted to design courses that would respond to the individual needs of each student. It currently has courses in 12 different subjects available on its Web site, mostly in math and science."

"Carnegie Mellon is not about to replace all its professors with computer programs. But with $4 million in private grants and perhaps more to come from the federal government, the university is currently exploring how the open-learning software could be used in conjunction with classroom education to speed up the teaching and learning process -- a prospect that some involved think could help solve overcrowding in America's community colleges and realize the Obama administration's goal of boosting graduation rates.

Japanese researcher unveils 'hummingbird robot'

Hummingbird robot "CHIBA, Japan — Japanese researchers said Monday they had developed a 'hummingbird robot' that can flutter around freely in mid-air with rapid wing movements.

"The robot, a similar size to a real hummingbird, is equipped with a micro motor and four wings that can flap 30 times per second, said Hiroshi Liu, the researcher at Chiba University east of Tokyo."

"The robot, whose development cost has topped 200 million yen (2.1 million dollars), may be used to help rescue people trapped in destroyed buildings, search for criminals or even operate as a probe vehicle on Mars, he said.

History of Darpa - 'The Department of Mad Scientists'

Book Review by Michael Belfiore NYTimes "Two years ago, in his book “Rocketeers,” Michael Belfiore celebrated the pioneers of the budding private space industry. Now he has returned to explore a frontier closer to home. The heroes of his new book, “The Department of Mad Scientists,” work for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as Darpa, a secretive arm of the United States government. And the revolution they’re leading is a merger of humans with machines."

"The revolution is happening before our eyes, but we don’t recognize it, because it’s incremental. It starts with driving. Cruise control transfers regulation of your car’s speed to a computer. In some models, you can upgrade to adaptive cruise control, which monitors the surrounding traffic by radar and adjusts your speed accordingly. If you drift out of your lane, an option called lane keeping assistance gently steers you back. For extra safety, you can get extended brake assistance, which monitors traffic ahead of you, alerts you to collision threats and applies as much braking pressure as necessary."

"With each delegation of power, we become more comfortable with computers driving our cars. Soon we’ll want more... Why put down your cellphone when you can let go of the wheel instead? Reading, texting, talking and eating in the car aren’t distractions. Driving is the distraction. Let the car do it.