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Data-Visualization Firm's New Software Autonomously Finds Abstract Connections --> Annalisa?

I had a nice introduction about Ordinal Regression via Manifold Learning by Francisco last week. It is doubtless a very actual research branch!

I doubt :) The original paper from Liu is from 2011 and has .... wait for it .... 1 quotation (and a self-one)!!! http://scholar.google.it/scholar?hl=it&q=Ordinal+Regression+via+Manifold+Learning&btnG=&lr=

http://youtu.be/hbPXXpaW5ws Andrés: I am sure you remember Tiago's project for the Azores ... cheers Leopold

Let's all start up some crazy space companies together: harvest hydrogen on Jupiter, trap black holes as unlimited energy supplies, use high temperatures close to the sun to bake bread! Apparently it is really easy to do just about anything and Deep Space Industries is really good at it. Plus: in their video they show Mars One concepts while referring to ESA and NASA.

hmm aside from the technological feasibility, their approach still should be taken as an example, and deserve a little support. By tackling such difficult problems, they will devise innovative stuffs. Plus, even if this doom-to-fail endeavour may still seem you useless, it creates jobs and make people think... it is already a positive! Final word: how is that different from what Planetary Resources plan to do? It is founded by a bunch of so-called "nuts" ... (http://www.planetaryresources.com/team/) ! a little thought: "We must never be afraid to go too far, for success lies just beyond" - Proust

I don't think that this proposal is very different from the one by Planetary Resources. My scepticism is rooted in the fact that - at least to my knowledge - fully autonomous mining technology has not even been demonstrated on Earth. I am sure that their proposition is in principle (technically) feasible but at the same time I do not believe that a privately funded company will find enough people to finance a multi-billion dollar R&D project that may or may not lead to an economically sensible outcome, i.e. generate profit (not income - you have to pay back the R&D cost first) within the next 25 years. And on that timescale anything can happen - for all we know we will all be slaves to the singularity by the time they start mining. I do think that people who tackle difficult problems deserve support - and lots of it. It seems however that up till now they have only tackled making a promotional video... About job creation (sorry for the sarcasm): if usefulness is not so important my proposal would be to give shovels to two people - person A digs a hole and person B fills up the same hole at the same time. The good thing about this is that you can increase the number of jobs created simply by handing out more shovels.

Powered by solar energy, Thales Alenia's Stratobus has an operation lifespan of five-years and only needs ground maintenance just a few days a year Can hover 12.4 miles (20km) in the air and reaches altitudes of 20,000 meters.

Interesting. these guys are apparently gonna try developing pulsar navigation. They propose to solve the low apparent brightness problem using relatively complex signal processing and filtering to limit the antenna size etc. The say they've already had some promising results using ground based data. worth a science coffee perhaps?

Absolutely. Sante can you get in contact with them?

NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program provides funding to study a small number of highly advanced spaceflight concepts, with the goal of understanding the technological possibilities which will guide the development of future space missions. Under this program, a JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) researcher has proposed the use of a pair of CubeSats for an autonomous mission to retrieve samples from Phobos, Mars' larger moon.

Artificial earthworm made from a mesh tube and shape memory alloy muscles.

Autonomous robot driving through a pedestrian zone in Freiburg, recognizing moving obstacles.

Why don't they use time to contact / optical flow ... Guido!!!!!!

Joggobot turns a quadrocopter into a running companion Researchers from RMIT in Melbourne, Australia have developed a flying running companion called Joggobot. The system uses the built-in camera on a commercially-available Parrot AR Drone quadrocopter to track the position of a jogger, and fly a few feet out in front.

"An elegant combination of electronics and elastic materials has been used to construct a small visual sensor that closely resembles an insect's eye. The device paves the way for autonomous navigation of tiny aerial vehicles."

The catalog, a master list organized into 15 categories, is intended for industry, academia, other government agencies, and general public. The catalog covers technology topics ranging from project management systems, design tools, data handling, image processing, solutions for life support functions, aeronautics, structural analysis, and robotic and autonomous systems. NASA said the codes represent NASA's best solutions to an array of complex mission requirements. McMillan reported that "Within a few weeks of publishing the list, NASA says, it will also offer a searchable database of projects, and then, by next year, it will host the actual software code in its own online repository, a kind of GitHub for astronauts."

Sottos, White, Moore, and their team created 3D vascular networks-patterns of microchannels filled with healing chemistries-that thread through a fiber-reinforced composite. When damage occurs, the networks within the material break apart and allow the healing chemistries to mix and polymerize, autonomously healing the material, over multiple cycles.

they presented it briefly at the 4S symposium (unfortunately really briefly..) FF is though only one of their tech demos on PRISMA

no much news in regard to the january's talk of Dordain althought just a thought : what if ESA tries to make money - as CNES does - rather than just spending it ?

really bad interview in my view ... btw: how is CNES making money and how much?

CNES is known to be a semi-autonomous agency in the sense that it can auto-finance parts of its activities. Besides the money coming from the state, money comes from the participation of CNES in private companies (e.g. Arianespace) and its own activities (e.g. SPOT among others...). It is about 400M€ per year (almost a class-M mission in Cosmic Vision). For the figures (in French): http://www.cnes.fr/automne_modules_files/standard/public/p4354_c050f7963b54a839a843723401bfddf2budget.pdf

nice idea and very nice video ;) using applied swarms