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So... who is in?

nice comment Johannes ... if you add a bit of Kleopatre, e.g. why bathing in milk helped her fool Marcus Antonius, your comment would be fully interdisciplinary :-)

you mean it would include History or Psychology? I would understand why Marcus Antonius might get fooled by a bathing beauty - but milk? DONKEY MILK?!? That's just wrong... :-[

looks like some backwind for all the cold fusion believers ...

I just answered something very similar to Franco, except the conclusions: I don't think that there is a good reason for us or anybody else in ESA to get involved at this stage.

I agree - if this device would work it there would be other interest groups (like the energy sector) with a much more concrete stake in the technology.

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. :))

"The One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, launched in the fall of 2014, is a long-term investigation of the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its influences on people, their communities, and society." (...) "The report is designed to address four intended audiences. For the general public, it aims to provide an accessible, scientifically and technologically accurate portrayal of the current state of AI and its potential. For industry, the report describes relevant technologies and legal and ethical challenges, and may help guide resource allocation. The report is also directed to local, national, and international governments to help them better plan for AI in governance. Finally, the report can help AI researchers, as well as their institutions and funders, to set priorities and consider the ethical and legal issues raised by AI research and its applications."

Here, we show that fluorescent materials can be used to increase the active area of a photodiode by orders of magnitude while maintaining its short response time and increasing its field of view

"Higgs Boson partices - guaranteed to satisfy! Need mass in your objects? Get some Higg Bosons!" "The Higgs Boson particles are SOLD WITH THE JAR! You may not be able to SEE the Higgs Boson particles unless you use a large hadron collider." "Q: Since it is, after all, the god particle; can you observe closely and tell use what religion it is?"

What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light? --not sure it is correct, but it would be a lot of fun :)

proposal for one of the next ACT movie nights? anybody seen it?

oh, haven't seen that one, but it looks cool! We need to get our hands on it...

Frightening! In reality, the deal has almost nothing to do with trade: actual trade barriers between these countries are already very low. The TPP is an effort to use the holy grail of free trade to impose conditions and override domestic laws in a way that would be almost impossible if the proposed measures had to go through the normal legislative process. The expectation is that by lining up powerful corporate interests, the governments will be able to ram this new "free trade" pact through legislatures on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.

from the abstract: "Using a novel imaging and analysis technique on experimental data we estimated pheromone concentrations at all spatial positions in the experimental arena and at different times. Then we derived the response function of individual ants to pheromone concentrations by looking at correlations between concentrations and changes in speed or direction of the ants." [...] "agent based simulations based on the Weber's Law response function determined experimentally produced results compatible with those reported in the literature and reproduced the formation of trails."

Nice article!

any idea how this works - who wants to have a closer look at it?

Wouldn't it be worth having a closer look?

it's still not clear to me how to get electricity in and out of this thing?

wouldn't this be a very nice tool instead of our shared drive - or to start with in addition to our shared drive? anybody has already tried installing it? should we propose it to the CDF? or is there even an esanet drupal integration maybe?

Worth following for inspiration?

Yes, definitely!

"We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital activities at www.bbcworldwide.com." In other words, UK is not part of the world...

Physicists in the US have made the first ultrathin flat lens. Thanks to its flatness, the device eliminates optical aberrations that occur in conventional lenses with spherical surfaces. As a result, the focusing power of the lens also approaches the ultimate physical limit set by the laws of diffraction.

Really nice indeed! The new flat ultrathin lens is different in that it is a nanostructured "metasurface" made of optically thin beam-shaping elements called optical antennas, which are separated by distances shorter than the wavelength of the light they are designed to focus. These antennas are wavelength-scale metallic elements that introduce a slight phase delay in a light ray that scatters off them. The metasurface can be tuned for specific wavelengths of light by simply changing the size, angle and spacing between the nanoantennas. "The antenna is nothing more than a resonator that stores light and then releases it after a short time delay," Capasso says. "This delay changes the direction of the light in the same way that a thick glass lens would." The lens surface is patterned with antennas of different shapes and sizes that are oriented in different directions. This causes the phase delays to be radially distributed around the lens so that light rays are increasingly refracted further away from the centre, something that has the effect of focusing the incident light to a precise point.

TED is sponsoring an A.I. XPRIZE. The goal? Develop an artificial intelligence that jumps on stage and gives a 3min talk on a random topic...

I am going to propose that the rules include in addition something practical - like washing the dishes... If we are to foster progress, let's finally do so in the right direction...

This sort of reminds me of Hinton's paper from some years ago: http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~ilya/pubs/2011/LANG-RNN.pdf Train it on previous TED talks and let it run TED talk - like gibberish. It would probably be of similar value. He had a nice one on the meaning of life but I can't find it anymore.

By just getting a DNA footprint of a person scientists (and soon police) can produce an image of the person's face. Check out the pictures!

should try it the other way around, deduce the DNA from facial features. That would be even cooler.

Well actually, they did something like that as they searched for common DNA patterns in people that had similar facial features. With a large enough dataset that could provide already 24 DNA tracers that could used reliably for prediction. Imagine if you had even more data available, who needs a model then... just let the NN do it :)

Now it is too late for Bepi Colombo: most interesting thing on Mercury has been already spotted by NASA.

It is not him guys. Everybody knows he got out of that when the Jedi returned. It must be some other forgotten Jabba's prisoner.

THIS is how the ACT should give its science coffees, and I am not referring to the fat stage or the guy's dress. Next time I'm attending this traditional ACT exercise I expect such a show!

Thats pretty cool indeed! I am for it in the next budget run! :) However, its technically not holographic though as this looks like a projection on Mylar film at 45 degrees from a bottom projector. It looks 3D and holographic as the background is transparent.

Does this have implications for AI algorithms??

I was actually thinking exactly about this question during my bike ride this morning. I am surprised that some codons would need to have a double meaning though because there is already a surplus of codons to translate into just 20-22 proteins (depending on organism). So there should be about 44 codons left to prevent translation errors and in addition regulate gene expression. If - as the article suggests - a single codon can take a dual role, does it so in different situations (needing some other regulator do discern those)? Or does it just perform two functions that always need to happen simultaneously? I tried to learn more from the underlying paper: https://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6164/1367.full.pdf All I got from that was a headache. :-\

Probably both. Likely a consequence of energy preservation during translation. If you can do the same thing with less genes you save up on the effort required to reproduce. Also I suspect it has something to do with modularity. It makes sense that the gene regulating for "foot" cells also trigger the genes that generate "toe" cells for example. No point in having an extra if statement.

apparently first time that somebody filmed a meteorite falling after the luminous phase .... impressive pics

I've seen someone suggest it could have been a rock that ended up inside the parachute bag when it was folded, and then fell when the parachute was deployed.