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Luís F. Simões

Singularity University, class of 2010: projects that aim to impact a billion people wit... - 8 views

www.kurzweilai.net/ty-webinar-today-sneak-preview

AI robotics biomedicine biotechnology electronics energy nanotechnology singularity futures social ethics space synthetic biology computer science defence

shared by Luís F. Simões on 22 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Luís F. Simões on 22 Sep 10
     
    At the link below you find additional information about the projects: Education: Ten weeks to save the world http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100915/full/467266a.html
  • ...8 more comments...
  • LeopoldS on 23 Sep 10
     
    this is the podcast I was listening to ...
  • Dario Izzo on 23 Sep 10
     
    We can do it in nine :)
  • LeopoldS on 24 Sep 10
     
    why wait then?
  • Juxi Leitner on 24 Sep 10
     
    hmm, wonder how easy it is to get funding for that, 25k is a bit steep for 10weeks :)
  • Dario Izzo on 26 Sep 10
     
    well, we wait for the same fundings they get and then we will do it in nine.... as we say in Rome "a mettece un cartello so bboni tutti". (italian check for Juxi)
  • LeopoldS on 26 Sep 10
     
    and what you think about the project subjects?
  • LeopoldS on 26 Sep 10
     
    I like the fact that there are quite a lot of space projects .... and these are not even bad in my view: The space project teams have developed imaginative new solutions for space and spinoffs for Earth. The AISynBio project team is working with leading NASA scientists to design bioengineered organisms that can use available resources to mitigate harsh living environments (such as lack of air, water, food, energy, atmosphere, and gravity) - on an asteroid, for example, and also on Earth . The SpaceBio Labs team plans to develop methods for doing low-cost biological research in space, such as 3D tissue engineering and protein crystallization. The Made in Space team plans to bring 3D printing to space to make space exploration cheaper, more reliable, and fail-safe ("send the bits, not the atoms"). For example, they hope to replace some of the $1 billion worth of spare parts and tools that are on the International Space Station.
  • Dario Izzo on 26 Sep 10
     
    and all in only a three months summer graduate program!! that is impressive. God I feel so stupid!!!
  • LeopoldS on 26 Sep 10
     
    well, most good ideas probably take only a second to be formulated, it's the details that take years :-)
  • Dario Izzo on 26 Sep 10
     
    I do not think the point of the SU is to formulate new ideas (infact there is nothing new in the projects chosen). Their mission is to build and maintain a network of contacts among who they believe will be the 'future leaders' of space ... very similar to our beloved ISU.
Marcus Maertens

Robot folds itself up and walks away : Wyss Institute at Harvard - 4 views

wyss.harvard.edu/...folds-itself-up-and-walks-away

technology

shared by Marcus Maertens on 08 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Marcus Maertens on 08 Aug 14
     
    Origami bot!
  • anonymous on 08 Aug 14
     
    It's really cool when it folds up, but then it's such a disappointing walk :) I also fail to see an advantage over regular robots. If you care about saving space during transportation, you could design a robot with that in mind without much sacrifice to it's locomotion capabilities.
  • Paul N on 20 Aug 14
     
    It's cute but I've seen better from amateurs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK8OjwMdn5I
Alexander Wittig

Picture This: NVIDIA GPUs Sort Through Tens of Millions of Flickr Photos - 2 views

blogs.nvidia.com/...flickr

AI

shared by Alexander Wittig on 21 Jul 15 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • Alexander Wittig on 21 Jul 15
     
    Strange and exotic cityscapes. Desolate wilderness areas. Dogs that look like wookies. Flickr, one of the world's largest photo sharing services, sees it all. And, now, Flickr's image recognition technology can categorize more than 11 billion photos like these. And it does it automatically. It's called "Magic View." Magical deep learning! Buzzword attack!
  • ...4 more comments...
  • LeopoldS on 21 Jul 15
     
    and here comes my standard question: how can we use this for space? fast detection of natural disasters onboard?
  • Alexander Wittig on 22 Jul 15
     
    Even on ground. You could for example teach it what nuclear reactors or missiles or other weapons you don't want look like on satellite pictures and automatically scan the world for them (basically replacing intelligence analysts).
  • Alexander Wittig on 23 Jul 15
     
    In fact, I think this could make a nice ACT project: counting seals from satellite imagery is an actual (and quite recent) thing: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0092613 In this publication they did it manually from a GeoEye 1 b/w image, which sounds quite tedious. Maybe one can train one of those image recognition algorithms to do it automatically. Or maybe it's a bit easier to count larger things, like elephants (also a thing).
  • jcunha on 23 Jul 15
     
    In HiPEAC (High Performance, embedded architecture and computation) conference I attended in the beginning of this year there was a big trend of CUDA GPU vs FPGA for hardware accelerated image processing. Most of it orbitting around discussing who was faster and cheaper with people from NVIDIA in one side and people from Xilinx and Intel in the other. I remember of talking with an IBM scientist working on hardware accelerated data processing working together with the Radio telescope institute in Netherlands about the solution where they working on (GPU CUDA). I gathered that NVIDIA GPU suits best in applications that somehow do not rely in hardware, having the advantage of being programmed in a 'easy' way accessible to a scientist. FPGA's are highly reliable components with the advantage of being available in radhard versions, but requiring specific knowledge of physical circuit design and tailored 'harsh' programming languages. I don't know what is the level of rad hardness in NVIDIA's GPUs... Therefore FPGAs are indeed the standard choice for image processing in space missions (a talk with the microelectronics department guys could expand on this), whereas GPUs are currently used in some ground based (radio astronomy or other types of telescopes). I think that on for a specific purpose as the one you mentioned, this FPGA vs GPU should be assessed first before going further.
  • Paul N on 29 Jul 15
     
    You're forgetting power usage. GPUs need 1000 hamster wheels worth of power while FPGAs can run on a potato. Since space applications are highly power limited, putting any kind of GPU monster in orbit or on a rover is failed idea from the start. Also in FPGAs if a gate burns out from radiation you can just reprogram around it. Looking for seals offline in high res images is indeed definitely a GPU task.... for now.
  • jcunha on 31 Jul 15
     
    The discussion of how to make FPGA hardware acceleration solutions easier to use for the 'layman' is starting btw http://reconfigurablecomputing4themasses.net/.
Juxi Leitner

'Doomsday Ark' to be Housed on the Moon -A Remote Access Toolkit to Rebuild the Human Race - 5 views

www.dailygalaxy.com/...to-rebuild-the-human-race.html

space science moon base technology bio vault

shared by Juxi Leitner on 04 Jul 10 - Cached
  • our future may reside on the Moon if plans.being drawn up for a “Doomsday ark” on the moon by the European Space Agency are carried through.
  • whether living organisms could survive, European Space Agency scientists are hoping to experiment with growing tulips on the moon within the next decade.
  • would initially be run by robots
  • Juxi Leitner on 04 Jul 10
     
    did not know ESA was doing that!
  • andreiaries on 05 Jul 10
     
    too late, the world will in end in 2012 ......... I fail to see in which scenario this would be better than a couple of vaults on Earth (since there would be no humans on the moon). But if tulips on the moon can convince politicians, I'm all for it.
  • LeopoldS on 05 Jul 10
     
    "The first flowers - tulips or arabidopsis, a plant widely used in research - could be grown in 2012 or 2015 according to Bernard Foing, chief scientist at the agency's research department." - Bernhard strikes again :-)
Tobias Seidl

High-Speed Videos: The Hidden World of Insect Flight | Wired Science | Wired.com - 1 views

www.wired.com/...high-speed-insect-videos

BIO insects flight

shared by Tobias Seidl on 27 Sep 10 - No Cached
Ma Ru liked it
  • Ma Ru on 29 Sep 10
     
    "Ladybug Fail" video is the best :-)
Joris _

Swarming spacecraft to self-destruct for greater good - space - 06 September 2010 - New... - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/...destruct-for-greater-good.html

swarm formation robust spacecraft

shared by Joris _ on 07 Sep 10 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • However, should one spacecraft in such a swarm begin to fail and risk a calamitous collision with another, it must sense its end is nigh and put itself on a course that takes it forever away from the swarm – for the greater good of the collective.
Joris _

Japan probe overshoots Venus, heads toward sun - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2010120701077.html

MAD venus robust

shared by Joris _ on 08 Dec 10 - No Cached
sreejanag liked it
  • A Japanese probe to Venus failed to reach orbit Wednesday and was captured by the sun's gravitational pull
  • Akatsuki's engines did not fire long enough to attain the proper orbiting position
  • may be able to try again when it passes by Venus six years from now.
  • Joris _ on 08 Dec 10
     
    The usefulness of having a robust trajectory :) ... They have to wait 6 more years for another date with Venus ...
  • ...2 more comments...
  • Joris _ on 09 Dec 10
  • LeopoldS on 11 Dec 10
     
    I agree in general but just out of the stomach: is there really an optimised trajectory that would be able to avoid this kind of scenarios when main thrusters don't perform properly? Wouldn't you in any case end up in a sun-orbiting trajectory and have to come back after years??
  • Joris _ on 11 Dec 10
     
    "optimised trajectory" of course not, robust definitely! It was the subject of my paper presented at the AAS (the one in San Diego) "Designing robust interplanetary trajectories subject to one temporary engine failure". The problem here is that they do not have enough fuel for a correction maneuver that would allow to come back to Venus earlier, and break for a VOI. A robust scenario could have alloted the best amount of fuel and time to be able to recover from almost all possible unplanned events. In the paper, I introduce some confidence regions such that I get the robust control for p% chance of mission success in case m% chance of problem with the propulsion system.
  • Dario Izzo on 12 Dec 10
     
    You should run your method on this scenario and see if you could get a trajectory with a shorter come back time using the same spacecraft.... would be a big selling point for a new trajectory design approach
pacome delva

Condensation transition in networks and other complex systems - 4 views

nuweb.neu.edu/...Condensation.html

phy bio complex_networks

shared by pacome delva on 15 Jan 10 - Cached
  • pacome delva on 15 Jan 10
     
    I like this work... it mixes physics, networks and biology ! Anyone heard about her ? Here's an interesting paper found on this website: http://nuweb.neu.edu/gbianconi/condensation.pdf
  • ...3 more comments...
  • Francesco Biscani on 15 Jan 10
     
    Eh... Barabasi is really milking the golden cow :) It seems interesting, even if I don't remember enough from my statistical mechanics classes to truly understand it without a major effort. Maybe you could make a layman's science coffee about it?
  • pacome delva on 15 Jan 10
     
    yeah i could if there's enough interest...? do u know Barabasi ?
  • Francesco Biscani on 15 Jan 10
     
    He's quite well known for his work on scale-free networks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert-L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Barab%C3%A1si He's applying them for everything and the kitchen sink :) We have a Barabasi-Albert network topology implemented in PaGMO...
  • Dario Izzo on 16 Jan 10
     
    We worked on this with Luzi a few years back ... while the analogy is original and interesting it fails to capture the dynamics of a network, e.g. if a network has hubs that grow and shrink .... Luzi worked on an extended model to solve this issue, but, if I remember correctly, he got stuck in a computationally very hard problem .... We intended to develop and use the extended model to define relevant characteristic of the ESA network formed by mail exchanges.....
  • nikolas smyrlakis on 18 Jan 10
     
    ...but then the CMS YGT didn't really like the project
Joris _

SPACE.com -- Venus Probe's Problems May Cause Japan to Scale Back - 0 views

www.space.com/...suki-japan-rethink-101217.html

space MAD

shared by Joris _ on 20 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • We have to be more conservative to plan our next planetary mission, so it will never fail in any aspect."
  • the probe's initial failure will have a big impact on how JAXA plans future planetary missions
  • hew to more conservative ideas in the near future
  • Joris _ on 20 Dec 10
     
    what a shame! ambition and innovation have not been fairly rewarded ...
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Ma Ru on 20 Dec 10
     
    Did you try to run your algorithm on their problem as Dario suggested? I'm very curious!
  • Joris _ on 20 Dec 10
     
    I didn't have time yet. But formulating the failure with a MTBF or a FIT, you can easily imagine a more robust solution. Instead of one single burn, you would make several smaller burns - It will take more time and require more fuel though. Another "robust" approach is to consider weak stability boundary capture. Again it takes time, but chances of failure are lessen.
  • LeopoldS on 21 Dec 10
     
    would be a pity indeed!
Nicholas Lan

Betting on Green - 5 views

www.economist.com/18304172

technology economics innovation

shared by Nicholas Lan on 16 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Nicholas Lan on 16 Mar 11
     
    breakthroughs vs. accelerated deployment in climate change mitigation technologies.
  • ...2 more comments...
  • LeopoldS on 17 Mar 11
     
    interesting guy indeed ... "Forget today's green technologies like electric cars, wind turbines, solar cells and smart grids, in other words. None meets what Mr Khosla calls the "Chindia price"-the price at which people in China and India will buy them without a subsidy. "Everything's a toy until it reaches that point," he says. I also like this one since its a bit like ACT topic selection: ""I am only interested in technologies that have a 90% chance of failure but, if they do succeed, would change the infrastructure of society in some radical way," he says." should we propose SPS to him ? :-)
  • LeopoldS on 17 Mar 11
     
    one more: ""I never compute returns. If you start forecasting cash flows, you lose innovation, you lose instinct. You average yourself down to mediocrity." "I've had many more failures than successes in my life," admits Mr Khosla. "My willingness to fail gives me the ability to succeed."
  • Nicholas Lan on 17 Mar 11
     
    indeed. puts me in mind of the often reinvented private ACT idea. actually there's a bunch of interesting looking articles on his website. http://www.khoslaventures.com/khosla/papers.html . No sps in the solar one as far as i can tell :) found this bit intriguing too in that, albeit presumably out of context, it doesn't make sense ""The solution to our energy problems is almost the exact opposite of what Khosla says," declares Joseph Romm, who is the editor of Climate Progress, an influential climate blog, and a senior fellow at the Centre for American Progress Action Fund, a think-tank. "Technology breakthroughs are unlikely to be the answer. Accelerated deployment of existing technologies will get you down the cost curve much more rapidly than a breakthrough."" found this seemingly not very well considered piece (to be fair a blog post) by the guy http://climateprogress.org/2010/07/02/is-anyone-more-incoherent-than-vinod-khosla/ . maybe he's written some more convincing stuff in this vein somewhere.
  • Ma Ru on 25 Apr 11
     
    "Mr Khosla (...) is investing over $1 billion of his clients' money in black swans" Well, with his own money his approach might be a little different :-)
Christos Ampatzis

Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist - 4 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...c-publishers-murdoch-socialist

science

shared by Christos Ampatzis on 02 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Christos Ampatzis on 02 Sep 11
     
    Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won't guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but - wait for it - to academic publishers.
  • LeopoldS on 11 Sep 11
     
    fully agree ... "But an analysis by Deutsche Bank reaches different conclusions. "We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process … if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be available." Far from assisting the dissemination of research, the big publishers impede it, as their long turnaround times can delay the release of findings by a year or more." very nice also: "Government bodies, with a few exceptions, have failed to confront them. The National Institutes of Health in the US oblige anyone taking their grants to put their papers in an open-access archive. But Research Councils UK, whose statement on public access is a masterpiece of meaningless waffle, relies on "the assumption that publishers will maintain the spirit of their current policies". You bet they will. In the short term, governments should refer the academic publishers to their competition watchdogs, and insist that all papers arising from publicly funded research are placed in a free public database. In the longer term, they should work with researchers to cut out the middleman altogether, creating - along the lines proposed by Björn Brembs of Berlin's Freie Universität - a single global archive of academic literature and data. Peer-review would be overseen by an independent body. It could be funded by the library budgets which are currently being diverted into the hands of privateers. The knowledge monopoly is as unwarranted and anachronistic as the corn laws. Let's throw off these parasitic overlords and liberate the research that belongs to us."
  • Christos Ampatzis on 12 Sep 11
     
    It is a really great article and the first time I read something in this direction. FULLY AGREE as well. Problem is I have not much encouraging to report from the Brussels region...
Juxi Leitner

Rogue satellites to be cleared from Earth's orbit by German robots | Science | The Obse... - 1 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...-robots-clear-rogue-satellites

satellites orbital debris security technology

shared by Juxi Leitner on 14 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Their robots will dock with failing satellites to carry out repairs or push them into "graveyard orbits", freeing vital space in geostationary orbit.
  • meant that the German robots will be "ready to be used on any satellite, whether it's designed to be docked or not".
  • Juxi Leitner on 14 Oct 09
     
    I am not sure the military will like this...
Ma Ru

Euroscience Open Forum 2010 - 2 views

www.esof2010.org

science conference Europe

shared by Ma Ru on 24 Apr 09 - Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09
     
    A conference ACT should consider going to.
  • ...4 more comments...
  • Ma Ru on 23 Apr 10
     
    Perhaps some of ACTers will find this conference interesting... One of the talks: "Would Einstein be on Twitter? Exploring the potential and limits of Web 2.0 in science & science communication" [Edit] Oh, I see someone has already posted this link... a year ago. Anyway, if anyone of you plans to go, let me know - I'll be around ;-)
  • Ma Ru on 08 Jul 10
     
    Just came back from ESOF 2010... I was on look for ACT agents undercover, but either they were not there or the cover was good enough... Anyway here's a few remarks from me (I could write a nice report... if you paid): 1) In general, to say that ESA was underrepresented on the conference as a whole is not enough (I guess ESA just failed to notice the event taking place). For instance, on the GMES presentation, ESA as such was not mentioned at all... at some point I started to wonder if ESA is actually involved in the project, but now I checked the website and apparently it is. On the other hand, GMES presentation was crap anyway, as after 1:15 of talking, I didn't gain any knowledge of what GMES is and what its contributions to the EU community will be. 2) There was a lot of talk about LHC and particle research (well, at least among those that I attended). Some of them were very good, some of them rather crap... 3) "Would Einstein be on Twitter? Exploring the potential and limits of Web 2.0 in science & science communication" talk - quite interesting, but focusing mainly on Science-to-Wide Public and Science-to-Journalists communication. Not really on Science-to-Science (as in Ariadnet). There was quite an extensive discussion with the public. You may be interested that Nature is trying to stimulate Web 2.0 communication, running blog service, but also I think a kind of social network - perhaps you'd like to have a look. In general the conclusion was that Web 2.0 is not so useful for scientific communication because practising it requires TIME (blogs, etc.) and often some professional skills (podcasts/videocasts, etc.), and scientists have neither of these. This can be run on corporation level (like ESA does actually), but then it looses the "intimate" character. 4) "How much can robots learn?" talk... very nicely presented: understandable by the wide public, but conveying the message... which is something like "we can already make the robots do stuff absolutely imp
  • Ma Ru on 08 Jul 10
     
    Well, my comment was cut in half, and I don't feel like typing it again... the most important highlight from the rest is that the only presenter from ESA (ESTEC) did not show up on his talk because his department was undergoing some sort of audit on the same day :)
  • LeopoldS on 08 Jul 10
     
    Fantastic comment - or better report!! thanks very much Marek! Who was the supposed no-show speaker from ESA?
  • Ma Ru on 08 Jul 10
     
    Bernard Foing (he is actually one of the 8 ESA employees who have their own page on Wikipedia)...
  • LeopoldS on 08 Jul 10
     
    written almost entirely by a guy called a "quest for knowledge" ... who will this be????? :-)
Juxi Leitner

Google's Go: A New Programming Language That's Python Meets C++ - 6 views

www.techcrunch.com/...google-go-language

programming tech google

shared by Juxi Leitner on 11 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Juxi Leitner on 11 Nov 09
     
    Big news for developers out there: Google has just announced the release of a new, open sourced programming language called Go. The company ...
  • ...2 more comments...
  • Francesco Biscani on 11 Nov 09
     
    Ugh... no operator overloading, no efficient generic programming and no lambda expressions... Only time will tell, but I don't understand who the intended audience is: I think that Python guys won't care about the (supposedly) increased performance (and you can interface C/C++ with Python easily) and that C++ programmers (I mean, the hardcore serious C++ Boost-like programmers, no the Java-like whiners :P) won't have their beloved templates pried from their cold dead hands with ease.
  • Juxi Leitner on 12 Nov 09
     
    yeah though I think especially operator overloading is not going to be a main problem, it is as with the JS library though quite thinkable that lots of users will switch or use it (or being put to use it...) because it is done by Google
  • Francesco Biscani on 12 Nov 09
     
    Having Google backing it will certainly help, even though they are presenting it as a "system level" (i.e., hard-core) language, and in that domain it is much more difficult to bullshit your way to a position of relevance. Look at Java: Sun pushed it like hell and it is certainly widely used in many contexts (corporate, web and embedded markets mostly), yet it completely failed to win the hearts of "open-source" developers (or, more generally, of those developers who are not forced to use it by virtue of some management-driven decision).
  • Juxi Leitner on 12 Nov 09
     
    "or, more generally, of those developers who are not forced to use it by virtue of some management-driven decision" completely agree with that!!
Thijs Versloot

Quantum positioning system for submarines - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/...m-steps-in-when-gps-fails.html

quantum technology positioning

shared by Thijs Versloot on 20 May 14 - No Cached
  • Thijs Versloot on 20 May 14
     
    Positioning via accumulated accelerometer data used to stabilize cold trapped atoms. Current systems are not very reliable for submarines, which cannot use GPS underwater. To create the supersensitive quantum accelerometers, Stansfield's team was inspired by the Nobel-prizewinning discovery that lasers can trap and cool a cloud of atoms placed in a vacuum to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Once chilled, the atoms achieve a quantum state that is easily perturbed by an outside force - and another laser beam can then be used to track them. This looks out for any changes caused by a perturbation, which are then used to calculate the size of the outside force.
annaheffernan

Lost Beagle 2 spacecraft found intact on Martian surface - 0 views

physicsworld.com/...ound-intact-on-martian-surface

technology space FUN science

shared by annaheffernan on 27 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • annaheffernan on 27 Jan 15
     
    The UK-led Beagle 2 Mars lander, thought lost on the red planet since 2003, has been found partially deployed on the Martian surface. New images show that it successfully touched down on the planet's surface in 2003 but failed to deploy all four of its solar panels, thereby allowing no communication with scientists on Earth.
LeopoldS

Why England fails - 3 views

www.tandfonline.com/...17430437.2013.828707

shared by LeopoldS on 16 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 16 Jun 14
     
    research paper on ... football (I hope that my Mr Random selections did not choose england ...)
Thijs Versloot

Coffee Naps Better For Alertness Than Coffee Or Naps Alone - Slashdot - 2 views

science.slashdot.org/...ness-than-coffee-or-naps-alone

novel working methods

shared by Thijs Versloot on 01 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Thijs Versloot on 01 Sep 14
     
    Scientific proof, shotgun on the red couch!
  • Paul N on 08 Sep 14
     
    this really only works if you can fall asleep instantly. If it takes you at least 10mins to sleep the whole procedure fails miserably.
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