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The next advance in weather forecasting may not come from a new satellite or supercomputer, but from a device in your pocket. University of Washington atmospheric scientists are using pressure sensors included in the newest smartphones to develop better weather forecasting techniques.

remember the discussion I tried to trigger in the team a few weeks ago ...

I love the linked article provided by Johannes! It expresses very elegantly why I still fail to understand even extremely smart and busy people in my view apparently waiting their time in playing computer games - but I recognise that there is something in games that we apparently need / gives us something we cherish .... "In fact, half a million players so far have registered to help destroy the 64 billion tiny blocks that compose that one gigantic cube, all working in tandem toward a singular goal: discovering the secret that Curiosity's creator says awaits one lucky player inside. That's right: After millions of man-hours of work, only one player will ever see the center of the cube. Curiosity is the first release from 22Cans, an independent game studio founded earlier this year by Peter Molyneux, a longtime game designer known for ambitious projects like Populous, Black & White and Fable. Players can carve important messages (or shameless self-promotion) onto the face of the cube as they whittle it to nothing. Image: Wired Molyneux is equally famous for his tendency to overpromise and under-deliver on his games. In 2008, he said that his upcoming game would be "such a significant scientific achievement that it will be on the cover of Wired." That game turned out to be Milo & Kate, a Kinect tech demo that went nowhere and was canceled. Following this, Molyneux left Microsoft to go indie and form 22Cans. Not held back by the past, the Molyneux hype train is going full speed ahead with Curiosity, which the studio grandiosely promises will be merely the first of 22 similar "experiments." Somehow, it is wildly popular. The biggest challenge facing players of Curiosity isn't how to blast through the 2,000 layers of the cube, but rather successfully connecting to 22Cans' servers. So many players are attempting to log in that the server cannot handle it. Some players go for utter efficiency, tapping rapidly to rack up combo multipliers and get more

why are video games so much different than collecting stamps or spotting birds or planes ? One could say they are all just hobbies

Hard work in functional materials is driving the development of new wearable electronics that could be advantageous for communications and sensing is being pursued in the Advanced Functional Fabrics of America Institute. Through embroidering circuits into fabric with 0.1 mm precision full integration of electronic components such as sensors and computer memory devices into clothing is now possible.

I got a fever. And the only prescription is more cat faces! ...../\_/\ ...(=^_^) ..\\(___) The article sounds quite interesting, though. I think the idea of a "fake" agent that tries to trick the classifier while both co-evolve is nice as it allows the classifier to first cope with the lower order complexity of the problem. As the fake agent mimics the real agent better and better the classifier has time to add complexity to itself instead of trying to do it all at once. It would be interesting if this is later reflected in the neural nets structure, i.e. having core regions that deal with lower order approximation / classification and peripheral regions (added at a later stage) that deal with nuances as they become apparent. Also this approach will develop not just a classifier for agent behavior but at the same time a model of the same. The later may be useful in itself and might in same cases be the actual goal of the "researcher". I suspect, however, that the problem of producing / evolving the "fake agent" model might in most case be at least as hard as producing a working classifier...

This paper from 2014 seems discribe something pretty similar (except for not using physical robots, etc...): https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5423-generative-adversarial-nets.pdf

Yes, this IS basically adversarial learning. Except the generator part instead of being a neural net is some kind of swarm parametrization. I just love how they rebranded it, though. :))

Yesterday [11th May], the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held a Demo Day for the Department of Defense in the courtyard at the center of the Pentagon to give the defense community "an up-close look at the Agency's diverse portfolio of innovative technologies and military systems at various stages of development and readiness."

Baratunde Cola would like to put sand into your computer. Not beach sand, but silicon dioxide nanoparticles coated with a high dielectric constant polymer to inexpensively provide improved cooling for increasingly power-hungry electronic devices. The silicon dioxide doesn't do the cooling itself.

Now this would be really cool if it had a brain computer interface and could be controlled by a trained drummer's mind! Science and Technology Society and Culture Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have built a wearable robotic limb that allows drummers to play with three arms. The two-foot long "smart arm" can be attached to a musician's shoulder. It responds to human gestures and the music it hears.

Self-destruct options from the Mission: Impossible movies could become a reality for even the most common smartphones and laptops used by government officials or corporate employees. A new self-destruct mechanism can destroy electronics within 10 seconds through wireless commands or the triggering of certain sensors. Just don't leave your computer sitting in the sun for long...

good discussion on the replicability/reproducibility of scientific results (also a nice example of how to do it right... in bioinformatics at least)

How microphone and speaker of a laptop are used to recognize movement in front of the computer. The article is in German but the video is in English.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.4141

this will be big! check the video. according to one of the related posts, they'll be on sale already by the end of 2012! Surprising that it's Google and not Apple to come up with this

> Surprising that it's Google and not Apple to come up with this It's sort of hard to think when your brain's gone.

ever heard of the Erdős-Bacon number? :-)

and actors probably ask who cares about Erdős :) The network of actors who co-star in movies is a famous one among networks people. Kevin Bacon became famous in that network because of fans of his who could from memory trace the paths of a large number of actors back to him :) see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon#History If you have you publications in http://academic.research.microsoft.com/, it gives you a nice tool to visualize your graph up to Erdős. Apparently I have a path of length 4, and several of length 5: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#36695545&1112639

and for the actors http://oracleofbacon.org/

Science aficionados have odd and surprising interests By Mark Fischetti | November 16, 2011 | People who are intrigued with physics are somewhat intrigued with computer science, too, but they are crazy about fashion. Who knew? Hilary Mason did.

The San Francisco-based team, which beat out approximately 9,000 competitors, used "custom-coded, computer-vision algorithms to suggest fragment pairings to human assemblers for verification."

amusing team name

A crack team of engineers at the University of Illinois has developed an electronic circuit that autonomously self-heals when its metal wires are broken.

Some new field of game for the ACT?

Very interesting paper!

wow impressive. Could be super useful for astronauts !