Rise of the Robots | Machine Learning

[Hoosiernorm]

I don't want so much surveillance that I have to be afraid of myself. I think that's what it really boils down to.

Between the lack of source coordination and the number of analysts with the fund of knowledge to make sense of all that information I bet it will be a while before Hoosiernorm shows up on America's Funniest Drone Videos.

Imagine every thing you do being monitored. Every person you talk to that day. Every stop sign and traffic light. Did you look both ways before turning? Were you talking on a phone? Did you bounce a check? Did you litter? How many cigarettes did you smoke? Did you eat a healthy meal? Every aspect of you life is right there but what does it mean? Should I be denied something because of something else I did 20 or 30 years ago? Will an employer be able to get every aspect of my life all the way down to the jokes I laugh at or the dirty pictures I like to look at? What does the government do with all of that data? Who can see it? Can I see it? Should I be able to see it? Would I like what I see? Am I doing this right? How does my data compare to everyone else? Should I have data envy?

[Heracleum Persicum]

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Hmmmm, Human intelligence is declining according to Stanford geneticist, but robots becoming more smart

Well , good possible, in a few generations, the smart one will be the robot and the dummy will be the humans



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[Typhoon]

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Hmmmm, Human intelligence is declining according to Stanford geneticist, but robots becoming more smart

Well , good possible, in a few generations, the smart one will be the robot and the dummy will be the humans

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The track record of scientists in predicting the future is no better than anyone else. Rather it is often worse due to hubris.

[Typhoon]

IEEE Spectrum | Quadrotors Play Catch

pp89tTDxXuI

[Azrael]

Lord Robert Sidelsky on the Rise of the Robots

[Heracleum Persicum]

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The Robot Reality: Service Jobs Are Next to Go



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[Doc]

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The Robot Reality: Service Jobs Are Next to Go
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Looks like an expensive toy.

[Doc]

Lord Robert Sidelsky on the Rise of the Robots

Sounds like there will be less and less need for humans. So who are they going to sell all of these products to?

http://www.amazon.com/Player-Piano-Vonn ... B003XVYLE4

[Enki]

Lord Robert Sidelsky on the Rise of the Robots

Sounds like there will be less and less need for humans. So who are they going to sell all of these products to?

http://www.amazon.com/Player-Piano-Vonn ... B003XVYLE4

That's essentially the problem. We are already living that problem. So many people are trapped without liquidity. There are genuine needs and people who have the skills to meet the demand those needs create, but the customer and the vendor don't have the money to find one another and they can't get the money. Increasingly the money is going to a small number of accounts that keep the economy going by machines trading back and forth with one another.

[Miss_Faucie_Fishtits]

3-D printing AND robotics. Combined.......'>.......

[Typhoon]

fwTAD9E194E

CO0f9inconM

[Heracleum Persicum]

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Paper-thin e-skin responds to touch, can lead to sensory robotics and interactive environments

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A research team led by Ali Javey, UC Berkeley associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, has created the first user-interactive sensor network on flexible plastic. The new electronic skin, or e-skin, responds to touch by instantly lighting up. The more intense the pressure, the brighter the light it emits.

“We are not just making devices; we are building systems,” said Javey, who also has an appointment as a faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “With the interactive e-skin, we have demonstrated an elegant system on plastic that can be wrapped around different objects to enable a new form of human-machine interfacing.”

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Ali Javey از بزرگترین نابغگان ایران is one of Iran's and also world's most influential scientist, mathematician, senior researcher and holder of Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Stanford University. He is also Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. Professor Javey is also awarded 2009 National Academy of Sciences Award for Initiatives in Research and 2008 awarded of National Science Foundation CAREER Award.


Javey research group


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Ali Javey, 29
“Painting” nanowires into electronic circuits

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Nanowires could be the basis of tomorrow's advanced electronics, from cheap solar cells to high-resolution displays. But it's been difficult to arrange the tiny strands precisely.

Ali Javey, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, has become a master at doing so.

His latest tool for making high-quality circuits : a roller printer.

He coats a glass cylinder with a catalyst and puts it in a chemical-vapor deposition chamber, where its surface sprouts nanowires. When the cylinder is pressed against a flexible piece of plastic or a silicon wafer, the tips of the nanowires cling to the flat surface; as the tube rolls, the wires are dragged and combed into straight rows before detaching from the roller.

So far, Javey has used the technique to print transistors based on germanium, silicon, and indium arsenide nanowires. He has also printed arrays of light-sensing cadmium selenide nanowires, which can be used as photosensors for imaging applications.

--Katherine Bourzac

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[Hoosiernorm]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/1 ... lp00000009

[Doc]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/1 ... lp00000009

It probably had just received it Obamacare health care quote

[Enki]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/1 ... lp00000009

How did it get onto the counter in the first place?

[Heracleum Persicum]

8gy5tYVR-28

[YMix]

No hands on deck: Dawn of the crewless ship

By Mark Odell

Remote-controlled ships used to come wrapped up as presents under the Christmas tree, but if European researchers and one of the world’s best-known engineering groups have their way, full-size versions will start replacing much of the tonnage afloat on the high seas in the coming years.

There are plenty of compelling reasons to switch to crewless ships. But the main driver for Oskar Levander, head of marine innovation at Rolls-Royce, is cost.

A ship that does not have to accommodate a crew for weeks on end can dispense with many if not all the life-support systems needed by humans, from the galley to the sewage treatment system, the accommodation area and the deck house.

Removing these would not only leave more space for cargo but would also mean lighter ships, holding out the prospect of big savings on fuel bills, which account for about half of a ships total operating cost. Mr Levander says crew expenses vary but can range between 10 and 30 per cent of operating costs.

He envisages a shore-based team of qualified captains working in a replica 3D bridge, similar to the simulators used for training today, that could operate a fleet of a dozen ships at the same time.

A European Commission-financed academic research project, dubbed Munin also suggests an autonomous ship would be safer.

It found that 75 per cent of maritime accidents can be attributed to human error and “a significant proportion of these are caused by fatigue and attention deficit”. Technology could readily take over tedious and repetitive human tasks such as watchkeeping at sea.

The technology to design such a vessel already exists, argues Mr Levander. Global communications satellites have the power to provide enough bandwidth to navigate the vessels remotely using feed from onboard radar and cameras. Ships already navigate automatically using GPS technology and onboard cameras are used to enhance human vision in poor visibility and to spot objects in the water, far beyond the range of the human eye.

Piracy, a constant threat to crews in many parts of the world, could also be more effectively countered. Mr Levander says with no crew to take hostage the vessel would be less attractive. But more importantly, without any people onboard, a ship could be fitted with countermeasures, such as flooding the ship with a gas that incapacitates anyone who boards without authorisation.

But Peter Hinchliffe, secretary-general of the International Chamber of Shipping is more circumspect. He says the highly complex collision avoidance rules would have to be rewritten to allow autonomous ships to operate in the same environment with crewed ships, a change that could take decades to implement.

He is also sceptical about whether the bandwidth is available to remotely operate the vessels, given how much would be consumed by video and radar feeds alone. And even if it is possible he questions whether the costs would make it prohibitive.

Mr Hinchliffe also argues that extra redundancy and back-up systems that would be needed, in case something fails at sea, raise questions about the promised weight savings.

“I’m not convinced you can remove all the crew because a ship is a complex beast, which can be away from land for weeks at a time.”

But one thing he does agree with Mr Levander on is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find people to go to sea. The romance has gone out of life on the ocean wave, it appears.

“In the 1950s and 1960s people used to go to sea to see the world. It is not that easy to find young people to go to sea today. They would rather be at home with their friends and travel for leisure instead,” says Mr Levander.

[Doc]

No hands on deck: Dawn of the crewless ship

By Mark Odell

Remote-controlled ships used to come wrapped up as presents under the Christmas tree, but if European researchers and one of the world’s best-known engineering groups have their way, full-size versions will start replacing much of the tonnage afloat on the high seas in the coming years.

There are plenty of compelling reasons to switch to crewless ships. But the main driver for Oskar Levander, head of marine innovation at Rolls-Royce, is cost.

A ship that does not have to accommodate a crew for weeks on end can dispense with many if not all the life-support systems needed by humans, from the galley to the sewage treatment system, the accommodation area and the deck house.

Removing these would not only leave more space for cargo but would also mean lighter ships, holding out the prospect of big savings on fuel bills, which account for about half of a ships total operating cost. Mr Levander says crew expenses vary but can range between 10 and 30 per cent of operating costs.

He envisages a shore-based team of qualified captains working in a replica 3D bridge, similar to the simulators used for training today, that could operate a fleet of a dozen ships at the same time.

A European Commission-financed academic research project, dubbed Munin also suggests an autonomous ship would be safer.

It found that 75 per cent of maritime accidents can be attributed to human error and “a significant proportion of these are caused by fatigue and attention deficit”. Technology could readily take over tedious and repetitive human tasks such as watchkeeping at sea.

The technology to design such a vessel already exists, argues Mr Levander. Global communications satellites have the power to provide enough bandwidth to navigate the vessels remotely using feed from onboard radar and cameras. Ships already navigate automatically using GPS technology and onboard cameras are used to enhance human vision in poor visibility and to spot objects in the water, far beyond the range of the human eye.

Piracy, a constant threat to crews in many parts of the world, could also be more effectively countered. Mr Levander says with no crew to take hostage the vessel would be less attractive. But more importantly, without any people onboard, a ship could be fitted with countermeasures, such as flooding the ship with a gas that incapacitates anyone who boards without authorisation.

But Peter Hinchliffe, secretary-general of the International Chamber of Shipping is more circumspect. He says the highly complex collision avoidance rules would have to be rewritten to allow autonomous ships to operate in the same environment with crewed ships, a change that could take decades to implement.

He is also sceptical about whether the bandwidth is available to remotely operate the vessels, given how much would be consumed by video and radar feeds alone. And even if it is possible he questions whether the costs would make it prohibitive.

Mr Hinchliffe also argues that extra redundancy and back-up systems that would be needed, in case something fails at sea, raise questions about the promised weight savings.

“I’m not convinced you can remove all the crew because a ship is a complex beast, which can be away from land for weeks at a time.”

But one thing he does agree with Mr Levander on is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find people to go to sea. The romance has gone out of life on the ocean wave, it appears.

“In the 1950s and 1960s people used to go to sea to see the world. It is not that easy to find young people to go to sea today. They would rather be at home with their friends and travel for leisure instead,” says Mr Levander.

IF you combine that with solar cells or even automated wind sails as the energy source for propulsion...

[Typhoon]

FfwxQn3AmUQ

[Doc]

LFwk303p0zY

http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2014/0 ... no-foreman

Robotic construction crew needs no foreman

Self-organizing robots inspired by termite colonies demonstrate swarm-like intelligence
February 13, 2014
By Caroline Perry

Termite mound

Harvard graduate student Kirstin Petersen and staff scientist Justin Werfel admire a termite mound in Namibia. (Photo courtesy of Radhika Nagpal.)

Cambridge, Mass. – February 13, 2014 – On the plains of Namibia, millions of tiny termites are building a mound of soil—an 8-foot-tall “lung” for their underground nest. During a year of construction, many termites will live and die, wind and rain will erode the structure, and yet the colony’s life-sustaining project will continue.

Inspired by the termites’ resilience and collective intelligence, a team of computer scientists and engineers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University has created an autonomous robotic construction crew. The system needs no supervisor, no eye in the sky, and no communication: just simple robots—any number of robots—that cooperate by modifying their environment.

Harvard’s TERMES system demonstrates that collective systems of robots can build complex, three-dimensional structures without the need for any central command or prescribed roles. The results of the four-year project were presented this week at the AAAS 2014 Annual Meeting and published in the February 14 issue of Science.

The TERMES robots can build towers, castles, and pyramids out of foam bricks, autonomously building themselves staircases to reach the higher levels and adding bricks wherever they are needed. In the future, similar robots could lay sandbags in advance of a flood, or perform simple construction tasks on Mars.

Termes robots

The TERMES robots can carry bricks, build staircases, and climb them to add bricks to a structure, following low-level rules to independently complete a construction project. (Photo by Eliza Grinnell, SEAS Communications.)

“The key inspiration we took from termites is the idea that you can do something really complicated as a group, without a supervisor, and secondly that you can do it without everybody discussing explicitly what’s going on, but just by modifying the environment,” says principal investigator Radhika Nagpal, Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science at Harvard SEAS. She is also a core faculty member at the Wyss Institute, where she co-leads the Bioinspired Robotics platform.

Most human construction projects today are performed by trained workers in a hierarchical organization, explains lead author Justin Werfel, a staff scientist in bioinspired robotics at the Wyss Institute and a former SEAS postdoctoral fellow.

“Normally, at the beginning, you have a blueprint and a detailed plan of how to execute it, and the foreman goes out and directs his crew, supervising them as they do it,” he says. "In insect colonies, it’s not as if the queen is giving them all individual instructions. Each termite doesn’t know what the others are doing or what the current overall state of the mound is.”

Instead, termites rely on a concept known as stigmergy, a kind of implicit communication: they observe each others’ changes to the environment and act accordingly. That is what Nagpal’s team has designed the robots to do, with impressive results. Supplementary videos published with the Science paper show the robots cooperating to build several kinds of structures and even recovering from unexpected changes to the structures during construction.

Each robot executes its building process in parallel with others, but without knowing who else is working at the same time. If one robot breaks, or has to leave, it does not affect the others. This also means that the same instructions can be executed by five robots or five hundred. The TERMES system is an important proof of concept for scalable, distributed artificial intelligence.

Nagpal’s Self-Organizing Systems Research Group specializes in distributed algorithms that allow very large groups of robots to act as a colony. Close connections between Harvard’s computer scientists, electrical engineers, and biologists are key to her team’s success. They created a swarm of friendly Kilobots a few years ago and are contributing artificial intelligence expertise to the ongoing RoboBees project, in collaboration with Harvard faculty members Robert J. Wood and Gu-Yeon Wei.

“When many agents get together—whether they’re termites, bees, or robots—often some interesting, higher-level behavior emerges that you wouldn’t predict from looking at the components by themselves,” says Werfel. “Broadly speaking, we’re interested in connecting what happens at the low level, with individual agent rules, to these emergent outcomes.”

The robots can build themselves staircases to reach the next construction points, and they know how to add bricks that advance construction without blocking important paths. (Photo by Eliza Grinnell, SEAS Communications.)

Coauthor Kirstin Petersen, a graduate student at Harvard SEAS with a fellowship from the Wyss Institute, spearheaded the design and construction of the TERMES robots and bricks. These robots can perform all the necessary tasks—carrying blocks, climbing the structure, attaching the blocks, and so on—with only four simple types of sensors and three actuators.

“We co-designed robots and bricks in an effort to make the system as minimalist and reliable as possible,” Petersen says. “Not only does this help to make the system more robust; it also greatly simplifies the amount of computing required of the onboard processor. The idea is not just to reduce the number of small-scale errors, but more so to detect and correct them before they propagate into errors that can be fatal to the entire system.”

In contrast to the TERMES system, it is currently more common for robotic systems to depend on a central controller. These systems typically rely on an “eye in the sky” that can see the whole process or on all of the robots being able to talk to each other frequently. These approaches can improve group efficiency and help the system recover from problems quickly, but as the numbers of robots and the size of their territory increase, these systems become harder to operate. In dangerous or remote environments, a central controller presents a single failure point that could bring down the whole system.

“It may be that in the end you want something in between the centralized and the decentralized system—but we’ve proven the extreme end of the scale: that it could be just like the termites,” says Nagpal. “And from the termites’ point of view, it’s working out great.”

This research was supported by the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

[Hoosiernorm]

wrBG8kIiMC0

[Heracleum Persicum]

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next generation of bionic limbs, robotic prosthetics inspired by nature's own designs.

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[Typhoon]

Qlqe1DXnJKQ

[Enki]

I picked up a copy of the Soft Robotics Journal at Inside 3D Printing. It's really cool.

http://www.liebertpub.com/overview/soft-robotics/616/

Very interesting to read about the engineering constraints of soft robots. Makes me want to try and make a rag doll bot out of cloth.

[noddy]

I picked up a copy of the Soft Robotics Journal at Inside 3D Printing. It's really cool.

http://www.liebertpub.com/overview/soft-robotics/616/

Very interesting to read about the engineering constraints of soft robots. Makes me want to try and make a rag doll bot out of cloth.

i have joined a new team and am currently learning alot of this, its a nice change from web apps and servers.