Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

Self building wireless technology has lots of promise and more than a few companies working on it. These networks would allow us to go into a disaster area or a war zone, release our wireless sensors or transmitters and blanket the affected area. Once that is done we could communicate with each other; something that was a large problem during the 9/11 attacks for rescue personal. Or we could deploy sensors that could send back images, test air quality or broadcast information to those in the area. Most phones now allow wireless access to any network so civilians in the area could communicate with rescue personal or each other.

. . . Networks of mobile sensors and other small electronic devices have huge potential. Applications include emergency management, security, helping vulnerable people to live independently, traffic control, warehouse management, and environmental monitoring.

One scenario investigated by European researchers was a road-tunnel fire. With fixed communications destroyed and the tunnel full of smoke, emergency crews would normally struggle to locate the seat of the blaze and people trapped in the tunnel.

Wireless sensors could cut through the chaos by providing the incident control room with information on visibility, temperatures, and the locations of vehicles and people. Firefighters inside the tunnel could then receive maps and instructions through handheld terminals or helmet-mounted displays.

For this vision to become reality, mobile devices have to be capable of forming self-organising wireless networks spanning a wide variety of communications technologies. Developing software tools to make this possible was the task of the RUNES project. . . .[ read more Wireless Networks that Build Themselves ]

More information:
RUNES

Papers:
The RUNES Middleware: A Reconfigurable Component-based Approach to Networked Embedded Systems ( pdf )
ASCENT: Adaptive Self-Configuring sEnsor Networks Topologies ( pdf) ( different company same idea – this is a self deploying sensor network that communicate wirelessly )

Survival research labs creates real life battle bots for robot wars that are performed live. SLR’s tagline is ‘Producing the most dangerous shows on earth’.

. . . “He’s trying to create a strong message about fear,” said Dr. Ken Goldberg, an associate professor of robotics at the University of California at Berkeley. “That’s what Mark is doing, igniting fear in the audience, with flying metal.”

While the use of what has become known as “Whitman’s tower” might be offensive to the sensibilities of the locals, what has consistently gotten Pauline in trouble over his 23-year career is his penchant for creating large, potentially lethal robots under the guise of modern performance art.

His group was recently banned from Japan after unveiling the pitching machine — a device with two rotating tires and the end of a funnel, which normally throws baseballs and softballs, that now hurls two-by-fours at 150 mph.

Just hours before the Austin Fire Marshall would run Pauline and his merry group of 60 out of town for violations — such as shooting 20-foot walls of flame toward hundreds of people, setting off rockets, and creating a general disturbance, the man stood silent -– his mission accomplished. . . [ read more Igniting Fear with Flying Metal ]

More information:
SRL
SRL Blog
SRL Flickr Set
Survival Research Labs – tribe.net

Video:
SRL YouTube Video
You Tube: Mark Pauline Show

One of the wonderful things the internet has done is to bring to life the ‘Mechanical Turk’. Together we can all do small things and create something wonderful, like the internet. Google’s search engine works so well because we all contribute to it. Amazon works fantastically because of the book reviews users contribute.

Loren Carpenter did an experiment at Siggraph 91 that demonstrated how quickly and easily we can work together even with out communicating.

Probably the most unique event of SIGGRAPH ’91 was Loren Carpenter’s Audience Participation piece presented during the Electronic Theater. Each person in the audience was given a wand with a red side and a green side. The colored retro-reflective material was scanned in by video cameras at the back of the auditorium, frame-grabbed and processed, and used to drive a video display that was projected on the big screen, all in real time. In its standby mode the system created a map of the auditorium, with enough resolution to show each seat, indicating whether the person in that seat was holding up the red or green (or neither) side of their wand. It was described as “being a pixel in a huge raster scan display”. Various games were played with this setup, from simple voting and “stadium flash card” type displays, to a round of massively parallel Pong. The Pong game was stunning because of how quickly the 5000 “autonomous agents” in the audience learned to cooperate and regulate their aggregate behavior. The way it worked was that each side of the auditorium controlled one of the Pong paddles, red moved the paddles up and green moved it down. In order to move the paddle to the correct position, just the right number of people had to signal with the appropriate color. Too many or too few and the paddle would overshoot or undershoot its mark. The final exercise was massively parallel control of a flight simulator. We crashed. [Phreak.org - archives ]

Before too much time goes by we will all have a smart computer with an internet connection in our shirt pocket everywhere we go. How much quicker will you be able to commute when the public’s telephones all communicate the quickest route home with out any interaction from the users?

The commute is already a perfect example of a human hive mind at work. On route 128 about Boston millions of cars travel an old cow path that is now a 2, 3 or 4 lane highway depending on your location. It curves and winds and there are on and off ramps every few feet it seems. Yet an amazingly large amount of drivers manage to get on, bounce between lanes, go forward, get off all while playing with the radio, phone, texting, reading and avoiding all the unskilled drivers. ( Because everyone besides ourselves is an unskilled driver. ) No central command directs each car. We manage it autonomously, with little contact between the drivers and very little thinking.

Capitalism is an excellent example of the human hive mind. When we need more of a thing, the price goes up and more people begin creating more things. No plan or central authority is needed. When the economy slows in one place and picks up in another, the right number of people move to level both locations at sustainable levels.

This is all going to begin to happen faster and much more effectively thanks not only to the internet but the fact the net will soon be portable in everyone’s pocket.

More information:

The Technodiva Speaks
The Year in Ideas; Smart Mobs
Rheingold: Smart Mobs
Real Time Traffic Routing from the Comfort of your Car

Books:
‘Out of Control’ Kevin Kelly

See also:
Human generated artificial intelligence

New insight into how brains process visual information is a double edged sword. It will make for much better vision engines but with that will come the failure of our most popular human test at the moment — captcha.

Using a fly, whose brain is heavily coded for visual information, Nemenman and his colleagues were able to show information is passed along the spikes in the fly’s brain neurons.

. . .

Nemenman and his colleagues’ research is significant because it re-examines fundamental assumptions that became the basis of neuromimetic approaches to artificial intelligence, such as artificial neural networks. These assumptions have developed networks based on reacting to a number of impulses within a given time period rather than the precise timing of those impulses.

“This may be one of the main reasons why artificial neural networks do not perform anywhere comparable to a mammalian visual brain,” said Nemenman, who is a member of Los Alamos’ Computer, Computational and Statistical Sciences Division. “In fact, the National Science Foundation has recognized the importance of this distinction and has recently funded a project, led by Garrett Kenyon of the Laboratory’s Physics Division, to enable creation of large, next-generation neural networks.”

New understanding of neural function in the design of computers could assist in analyses of satellite images and facial-pattern recognition in high-security environments, and could help solve other national and global security problems. [ read more Language of a fly proves surprising ]

Papers:
PLoS: Neural Coding of Natural Stimuli: Information at Sub-Millisecond Resolution

More information:
Is Captcha’s moment passing?

I don’t know how I missed this story last year. Flying robots that repair satellites are cool. Maybe in time we’ll have robot mechanics patrolling the highways and fixing disabled vehicles?

Boeing Orbital Express system is a DARPA project hoping to demonstrate fully autonomous on orbit satellite servicing capabilities. Which in plain English means robot satellites who service and repair other satellites. These satellite mechanics will fly as high as 7 km.

Last year Boeing successfully demonstrated refueling and battery replacement using autonomous robots. Using robot satellites to refuel and do maintenance on other satellites will greatly drop the cost of using satellites.

Two Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Orbital Express
demonstrator spacecraft were launched yesterday at 10:10 p.m. EST, from Space Launch
Complex 41, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., aboard an Atlas V 401 booster. The launch
was sponsored by the Department of Defense Space Test Program (STP), as part of the STP-1
mission, which includes, in addition to Orbital Express, the STPSat-1 spacecraft and three other
microsatellites.

Orbital Express consists of a next generation serviceable “client” satellite (NextSat) and a
prototype servicing spacecraft (Autonomous Space Transport Robotic Orbiter or ASTRO). They
were deployed together into a circular, 492-kilometer, low earth orbit with an inclination of 46
degrees. They will spend the next three months in orbit, demonstrating for the first time fully
autonomous rendezvous and capture of client spacecraft, satellite-to-satellite refueling, and
replacement of battery and flight-computer orbital replacement units.

More information:
Boeing Orbital Express
The REal R2D2: ASTRO Takes on Space Rogues
Darpa: Orbital Express ( has videos and photos )