Aasemoon'z Cluster

California-based company Anybots continues work on a telepresence robot that can take communication to a whole new level by eliminating the need for people to actually be present at board meetings or conferences. Because God knows executives work hard enough. The idea behind QA, the robot, is to interact with people, such as clients or partners, from anywhere in the world, which will save a lot of money on travel costs and different remote-communications equipment. Designed not unlike a sophisticated Skype program, QA relies on a Wi-Fi connection to allow users to interact through video, sound and diagrams projected from and onto the robot’s interface. With a sleek white exterior design, the armless 5-foot robot looks just about how you would expect a robot tailored for the boardroom to look. His rectangular-shaped face with two big eyes reminds a bit of Steven Spielberg’s E.T., so people should warm up to it fairly quickly.

I remember when, a decade ago, Kevin Warwick, a professor at the University of Reading, in the U.K., implanted a radio chip in his own arm. The feat caused quite a stir. The implant allowed him to operate doors, lights, and computers without touching anything. On a second version of the project he could even control an electric wheelchair and produce artificial sensations in his brain using the implanted chip. Warwick had become, in his own words, a cyborg. The idea of a cyborg -- a human-machine hybrid -- is common in science fiction and although the term dates back to the 1960s it still generates a lot of curiosity. I often hear people asking, When will we become cyborgs? When will humans and machines merge? Although some researchers might have specific time frames in mind, I think a better answer is: It's already happening. When we look back at the history of technology, we tend to see distinct periods -- before the PC and after the PC, before the Internet and after the Internet, and so forth -- but in reality most technological advances unfold slowly and gradually. That's particularly true with the technologies that are allowing us to modify and enhance our bodies.

It should be able to hold an inert grenade with one hand, and pull the pin with the other hand without the need for human control.  The software system must enable the robot to perform the Challenge Tasks following a high-level script with no operator intervention. For example, the operator would issue a command such as “Throw Ball.” That command would in turn decompose into a sequence of lower-level tasks, such as “find ball,” “grasp ball,” “re-grasp ball, cock arm, and throw.”

The question of the relative roles of nanotechnology and AI in forging the shape of the future has been argued in techno-futurist circles for decades. Eric Drexler mentioned AI as a potentially disruptive technology in his seminal 1986 book Engines of Creation, and it was discussed at the very first Foresight conference 20 years ago

Tilikum the killer whale (Orcinus orca) made news recently in the tragic death of his Sea World trainer, Dawn Brancheau. Tilikum pulled Brancheau into the water when he grabbed her floating ponytail — much like a cat might grab yarn attached to a stick. Complex play behavior is a sign of intelligence, but unfortunately little is known of the circuitry of even a cat’s brain, much less the massive brain of an orca — roughly four times the size of a human brain. See Also The Race to Reverse Engineer the Human Brain Ray Kurzweil Interview Brain on a Chip MIT neuroscientists are developing computerized techniques to map the millions of miles of neuronal circuits in the brain that may one day shed some light on the differences between Homo sapiens sapiens and other species, and will likely clarify how those neurons give rise to intelligence, personality, and memory. Developing connectomes (maps of neurons and synapses) may have just as much impact as sequencing the human genome. Here’s a video showing 3D rotating nodes and edges in a small connectome:

Researchers at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research are working on a new mathematical model to mimic the human brain's ability to identify objects. The model can predict human performance on certain visual-perception tasks suggesting it’s a good indication of what's actually happening in the brain. Researchers are hoping the new findings will make their way into future object-recognition systems for automation, mobile robotics, and other applications.

Getting oil out of water isn’t that hard, on principle. What is hard is getting a huge amount of oil out of an even huger amount of water. If you think about it, this is really a perfect task for a swarm of robots, since it’s simple and repeatable and just needs to be done over and over (and over and over and over) again. With this in mind, MIT’s Senseable City Lab has created Seaswarm, a swarm of networked oil spill cleanup robots:

Scientists from Bielefeld University have come up with a plastic-head robot called Flobi that can express a number of different emotions, and can have it’s appearance reassembled from male to female (or vice-versa) in a couple of minutes.

Humans aren't the only ones playing soccer right now. In just two days, robots from world-renowned universities will compete in Singapore for RoboCup 2010. This is the other World Cup, where players range from 15-centimeter tall Wall-E-like bots to adult-sized advanced humanoids. The RoboCup, now in its 14th edition, is the world’s largest robotics and artificial intelligence competition with more than 400 teams from dozens of countries. The idea is to use the soccer bots to advance research in machine vision, multi-agent collaboration, real-time reasoning, sensor-fusion, and other areas of robotics and AI. But its participants also aim to develop autonomous soccer playing robots that will one day be able to play against humans. The RoboCup's mission statement:

The e-reader market took the company E-Ink and its low-power, easy-on-the-eyes digital paper technology mainstream. But no one says E-Ink is perfect; the displays, to date, don’t do flexibility or full color well. And they aren’t cheap enough to move into budget-conscious applications, like the long-dreamed of grocery store shelf tags that could be updated remotely to display new prices. E-Ink and its brethren continue to advance down their technology development paths. But a startup company based in Saratoga, Calif., says they’re heading in the wrong direction.

To paraphrase helicopter pioneer Igor Sikorsky: If you're in trouble, an airplane can fly over and drop flowers, but a helicopter can save your life. It can deftly maneuver through tight spots and alight in remote places. It can float next to a mountain to search for the lost. And the best sound a wounded soldier can hear is that telltale rotor beat, just minutes before being evacuated to a hospital. When roads are impassable, bridges have been destroyed, and the electricity has been knocked out, helicopters can still deliver supplies and rescue people.

Asynchronous work flows are a very powerful tool in programming. They allow your threads to do other work while you wait for results from a long running piece of work. How would you write an asynchronous work flow in C#? Logically you might consider chaining together callbacks.

I luuuuuuuvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv Satori's demos. So much that I actually check their Pouet page every month or so just to see if they have anything new, even though they hadn't released anything since 2007. They were one of the very first groups I came to know, and they're among my top 3 favourite demo groups of all time, and I have a LOT of favourites so... you get the picture. =) I was beginning to lose hope of seeing new demos from Satori since they hadn't released anything in such a long while. And that would have been such a shame. So you can imagine the depth of my WOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWW when I saw their name pop up on my screen today, as I was watching the demo compo on Breakpoint TV. =) And oh wow, they SO did not disappoint! The demo is a true artistic masterpiece.

Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Even better, flare features a modular design that lets developers create customized visualization techniques without having to reinvent the wheel. View the demos and sample applications to see a few of the visualizations that flare makes it easy to build. To begin making your own visualizations, download flare and work through the tutorial. You should also get familiar with the API documentation. Need more help? Visit the help forum (you'll need a SourceForge login to post). Flare is open-source software released under a BSD license, meaning it can be freely deployed and modified (and even sold for $$). Flare's design was adapted from its predecessor prefuse, a visualization toolkit for Java

As we reported last week, search engine Cuil was unceremoniously shut down on Thursday, and there were reports that employees were told to go home and forget about getting paid. New sources tells us that Cuil was in the final stages of an acquisition as of last Wednesday, and everything was in place except the final signatures. Then the deal fell apart for some reason. Or put another way, Cuil found one last way to fail.

What made me fall of my chair is the methodology/architecture part of this statement. It’s hard enough (but doable) to use RDF to map philosophically similar APIs. It’s a non-starter to use it to bridge architectural and methodological differences. I have spent a fair amount of time looking at Semantic Web technologies in the context of modeling IT systems (see the “semantic tech” category of this blog). While I think they would be a great foundation I don’t see them ever coming anywhere near what Reuven describes.