Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

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, including a ‘whiskered’ robotic rat. The whiskered robot will be able to quickly locate, identify and capture moving objects. ‘The use of touch in the design of artificial intelligence systems has been largely overlooked, until now,’ says Prof. Ehud Ahissar of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Neurobiology Department, whose research team is one of the groups participating in the multinational project. . . [ read more Robot rat to lead the way in touch technology ]

. . . What is the whisker’s “secret”? Why is the sense of touch through a rat’s whiskers much more efficient than that of the average person’s fingertips? The consortium’s teams have provided some insights into these questions. One explanation concerns the way in which the sensory system works: Whiskers actively sweep back and forth repetitively, accumulating information about the surrounding environment. The sensing begins in the neurons at the whiskers’ bases, which then fire signals off to the brain. Moreover, experiments have shown that the way in which a rat uses its whiskers is context-dependent. The seemingly simple act of feeling out a three-dimensional object, for example, requires three different types of code, each encoding a different dimension – the horizontal, the vertical, and the radial (distance from the whisker base). The horizontal plane, for instance, is encoded in the precise timing of neural signals relative to the whisking motion. The vertical, i.e., the object height, is encoded by the vertical spacing of the whiskers, which are arranged grid-like on either side of the snout. The radial plane, on the other hand, is encoded in the number of times the neurons fire: The closer an object is to the rat’s snout, the higher the number of neuron-signaling spikes. . . [ read more Global team developing 'Robotic rats' ]

More information:
BIOmimetic Technology for vibrissal ACtive Touch ( BIOTACT)

Papers:
Whiskerbot: A robotic active touch system modeled on the rat whisker system ( $$$ pdf )
An active artificial whisker array for texture discrimination ( $$$ pdf )

Rapid Miner is a Java based XML data mining program with a graphical interface. It was first written in 2001 and became open sourced in 2004.

RapidMiner (formerly YALE) is the most comprehensive open-source software for intelligent data analysis, data mining, knowledge discovery, machine learning, predictive analytics, forecasting, and analytics in business intelligence (BI). RapidMiner provides more than 400 data mining operators, a graphical user interface (GUI), an online tutorial with hands-on data mining applications, a comprehensive PDF tutorial, many visualization schemes for data sets and data mining results, many different learning and meta-learning schemes ranging from decision tree and rule learners to neural networks, SVMs, ensemble methods, etc.
RapidMiner is implemented in Java and available under GPL (GNU General Public License) as well as under a developer license (OEM license) for closed-source developers. [ see: Rapid Miner: Java Data Mining ]

More information:
Source Forge Page for RapidMiner

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 team has made a lot of progress in getting the catoms to bond together and even share power.

Think of each catom as a tiny robot or computer that has computational power, memory and the ability to store and share power. Right now, each catom has 24 electromagnets around its circumference. Based on whether the electromagnets are powered on or off decides how the catoms are moved into position with each other. The robots will harness these forces to achieve their goals.

“They talk to each other all the time and move together or apart,” explained Goldstein. “In the long term, we’ll use electrostatic forces. We’ll create it by putting a voltage on them.” . . [ read more 3d Shape Shifting Robot Swarms ]

This technology is not as far fetched as it might seem at first blush. We’ve seen chairs that fall apart and put themselves back together. and NASA had a pyramid shape shifting robot in 2005 which they hope to miniaturize to nano scale. And a Xerox researcher built a shape shifting robot in 2000.

So shape shifting robots are closer than you think, and are you really sure that lamp on your desk is just a lamp?

More information:
York investigates evolving ‘swarm’ robots
Swarm robotics work hundreds of robots into one

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 allow doctors to screen people for certain diseases simply by sampling their breath, according to the research team from JILA, a joint institute of NIST and CU-Boulder. “This technique can give a broad picture of many different molecules in the breath all at once,” said Jun Ye, a fellow of JILA and NIST who led the research.CU-Boulder graduate research assistant Michael Thorpe, Ye, CU-Boulder doctoral student Matthew Kirchner and former CU graduate student David Balslev-Clausen describe the research in a paper that appeared in the Feb. 18 online edition of Optics Express, the free, open-access journal published by the Optical Society of America. Known as optical frequency comb spectroscopy, the technique is powerful enough to sort through all the molecules in human breath and sensitive enough to distinguish rare molecules that may be biomarkers for specific diseases, said Ye. . . [ read more Scientist using laser light to detect potential diseases via breath samples ]

Papers:
Cavity enhanced optical frequency comb spectroscopy: application to human breath analysis

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 the internet, battles can be done in virtual worlds.

U.S. intelligence officials are cautioning that popular Internet services that enable computer users to adopt cartoon-like personas in three-dimensional online spaces also are creating security vulnerabilities by opening novel ways for terrorists and criminals to move money, organize and conduct corporate espionage.

Over the last few years, “virtual worlds” such as Second Life and other role-playing games have become home to millions of computer-generated personas known as avatars. By directing their avatars, people can take on alternate personalities, socialize, explore and earn and spend money across uncharted online landscapes.

Nascent economies have sprung to life in these 3-D worlds, complete with currency, banks and shopping malls. Corporations and government agencies have opened animated virtual offices, and a growing number of organizations hold meetings where avatars gather and converse in newly minted conference centers.

Intelligence officials who have examined these systems say they’re convinced that the qualities that many computer users find so attractive about virtual worlds — including anonymity, global access and the expanded ability to make financial transfers outside normal channels — have turned them into seedbeds for transnational threats.

“The virtual world is the next great frontier and in some respects is still very much a Wild West environment,” a recent paper by the government’s new Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity said. . . [ read more Spies' battleground turns virtual ]

The EFF has a different take on the issue, seeing instead a government that has perhaps been watching too many science fiction movies.

But if it keeps the government entertained saving virtual citizens and businesses and out of our hair in the real world perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing?

And who had heard of IARPA before?

More information:
US warns of Second Life Terrorist Threat