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Marcus Maertens

AI at Google: our principles - 4 views

blog.google/...ai-principles

AI

shared by Marcus Maertens on 11 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Marcus Maertens on 11 Jun 18
     
    Google is taking position here, but can they live up to their own standards?
  • Dario Izzo on 21 Jun 18
     
    " Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias." Thats the very definition of the AI used today. If you learn from a dataset, you are biased to that data set. No escape from it.
Joris _

NASA International Space Station Longeron Marathon Challenge - 1 views

www.topcoder.com/iss

MAD optimization

shared by Joris _ on 18 Jan 13 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • LeopoldS on 19 Jan 13
     
    nice - did not know about it. GTOC on steroids and with loads of cash. concerning this specific challenge and especially the last condition: doesn't this hint towards a flawed design? In addition to maximizing the total power output there are some constraints on the possible movements: Each SARJ and BGA is limited to a maximum angular velocity and to a maximum angular acceleration. Each SAW must produce at least some minimum average power over the orbit (which is different for each SAW). The sequence of positions must be cyclic, so it can be repeated on the next orbit. The maximum amount of BGA rotation is not limited, but exceeding a threshold will result in a score penalty. Some structural members of the SAW mast (called Longerons) have restrictions on how they can be shadowed.
  • Joris _ on 26 Jan 13
     
    The longerons will expand and contract with exposition to sun (I think whatever the material they are made of). Because you have 4 longerons in a mast, you just need to be carefull that the mast is well balanced, and that the 4 longerons support each other, basically, you need an even number of shadowed longerons, possibly 0 too. I would call this an operational constraint.
LeopoldS

Relativistic positioning systems: Perspectives and prospects - 0 views

arxiv.org/1302.5782.pdf

RPS galileo PHY

shared by LeopoldS on 02 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 02 Mar 13
     
    Bartolomé call's workshop paper ... with some nice words also for the ACT "I want to congratulate the Advanced Concepts Team of the ESA and the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Ljubljana for this initiative." congrats Sante and Pacome again!
LeopoldS

Google Says the FBI Is Secretly Spying on Some of Its Customers | Threat Level | Wired.com - 3 views

www.wired.com/...google-nsl-range

spying google INF

shared by LeopoldS on 06 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 06 Mar 13
     
    not a surprise though still bad to read ....
  • Ma Ru on 07 Mar 13
     
    On a side note, it's hilarious to read an article on something repeatedly referred to as being secret...
  • LeopoldS on 10 Mar 13
     
    quite self-explanatory described though: "The terrorists apparently would win if Google told you the exact number of times the Federal Bureau of Investigation invoked a secret process to extract data about the media giant's customers. That's why it is unlawful for any record-keeper to disclose it has received a so-called National Security Letter. But under a deal brokered with the President Barack Obama administration, Google on Tuesday published a "range" of times it received National Security Letters demanding it divulge account information to the authorities without warrants. It was the first time a company has ever released data chronicling the volume of National Security Letter requests. National Security Letters allow the government to get detailed information on Americans' finances and communications without oversight from a judge. The FBI has issued hundreds of thousands of NSLs and has even been reprimanded for abusing them. The NSLs are written demands from the FBI that compel internet service providers, credit companies, financial institutions and businesses like Google to hand over confidential records about their customers, such as subscriber information, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, websites visited and more as long as the FBI says the information is "relevant" to an investigation." and ""You'll notice that we're reporting numerical ranges rather than exact numbers. This is to address concerns raised by the FBI, Justice Department and other agencies that releasing exact numbers might reveal information about investigations. We plan to update these figures annually," Richard Salgado, a Google legal director, wrote in a blog post. Salgado was not available for comment. What makes the government's position questionable is that it is required by Congress to disclose the number of times the bureau issues National Security Letters. In 2011, the year with the latest available figures, the FBI issued 16,511 National Sec
johannessimon81

Asteroid mining could lead to self-sustaining space stations - VIDEO!!! - 5 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...id-mining-space-stations-video

fun

shared by johannessimon81 on 23 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • johannessimon81 on 23 Jan 13
     
    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.
  • ...3 more comments...
  • Marcus Maertens on 23 Jan 13
     
    I really wonder what they wanna mine out there? Is there such a high demand on... rocks?! And do they really think they can collect fuel somewhere?
  • Wiktor Piotrowski on 24 Jan 13
     
    Well they want to avoid having to send resources into space and rather make it all in space. The first mission is just to find possible asteroids worth mining and bring some asteroid rocks to Earth for analysis. In 2020 they want to start mining for precious metals (e.g. nickel), water and such.They also want to put up a 3D printer in space so that it would extract, separate and/or fuse asteroidal resources together and then print the needed structures already in space. And even though on earth it's just rocks, in space a tonne of them has an estimated value of 1 million dollars (as opposed to 4000 USD on Earth). Although I like the idea, I would put DSI in the same basket as those Mars One nutters 'cause it's not gonna happen.
  • johannessimon81 on 25 Jan 13
     
    I will get excited once they demonstrate they can put a random rock into their machine and out comes a bicycle (then the obvious next step is a space station).
  • Joris _ on 26 Jan 13
     
    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
  • johannessimon81 on 28 Jan 13
     
    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.
Marion Nachon

Complexity Analysis of the Viking Labeled Release Experiments - 6 views

ijass.org/...year_abstract.asp

Bio Space

shared by Marion Nachon on 19 Apr 12 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • Marion Nachon on 19 Apr 12
     
    The only extraterrestrial life detection experiments ever conducted were the three which were components of the 1976 Viking Mission to Mars. Of these, only the Labeled Release experiment obtained a clearly positive response. [...] These analyses support the interpretation that the Viking LR experiment did detect extant microbial life on Mars.
  • Ma Ru on 19 Apr 12
     
    ...unless life arrived together with the nutrients...
  • LeopoldS on 21 Apr 12
     
    Viking was one of the best sterilised sc we have ever launched! Just strange to read such an article published in an obscure Korean journal ...
santecarloni

First Digital Message Sent Using Neutrinos - Technology Review - 1 views

www.technologyreview.com/...27648

neutrinos technology space Phy

shared by santecarloni on 15 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • santecarloni on 15 Mar 12
     
    ...obvious use for space...
  • Luzi Bergamin on 16 Mar 12
     
    Indeed, you only need ONE antenna to communicate with your satellite irrespective of its position, since one can freely send the signals right through the Earth. Small disadvantage: you should tell the launcher section to design a new launcher that is capable to bring a 200tons detector to space...
Luís F. Simões

Ville Vivante: The Dynamic Dimension of Geneva - 3 views

villevivante.ch

data visualization human swarm

shared by Luís F. Simões on 15 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Every mobile phone leaves digital traces permanently, while interacting with the mobile infrastructure. It can be seen as a mobile sensor that allows to define the geographic position of the subscription holder, almost in real-time.
  • Luís F. Simões on 15 Mar 12
     
    beautiful and hypnotic, but I'd like to know exactly what it is they are visualizing. These don't seem to be the changes in people's locations during phone calls...
Luís F. Simões

A measure of individual role in collective dynamics : Scientific Reports : Nature Publi... - 4 views

www.nature.com/...srep00292.html

complex_networks behaviour swarm

shared by Luís F. Simões on 04 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Centrality measures describe a node's importance by its position in a network. The key issue obviated is that the contribution of a node to the collective behavior is not uniquely determined by the structure of the system but it is a result of the interplay between dynamics and network structure.
  • Here, we show that dynamical influence is a centrality measure able to quantify how strongly a node's dynamical state affects the collective behavior of a system, taking explicitly into account the interplay between structure and dynamics in complex networks.
Lionel Jacques

Joggobot turns a quadrocopter into a running companion - 3 views

www.gizmag.com/...22899

quadrocopter FUN AI

shared by Lionel Jacques on 12 Jun 12 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • Lionel Jacques on 12 Jun 12
     
    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.
Thijs Versloot

Wall crawling gecko robots also work in space #ESA - 2 views

www.esa.int/..._robots_can_stick_in_space_too

shared by Thijs Versloot on 13 Jan 14 - No Cached
Juxi Leitner liked it
  • Thijs Versloot on 13 Jan 14
     
    The cooperation took place through ESA's Networking/Partnering Initiative, which supports work carried out by universities and research institutes on advanced technologies with potential space applications.
  • LeopoldS on 15 Jan 14
     
    really nice, especially since it is an idea that started in the team, led to an Ariadna study by Carlo Menon, RF in biomimetics who then got a research position at simon fraser univ, where he created his own biomimetics group menvra (http://menrva.ensc.sfu.ca) there, struggling as an italian in a canadian university doing space and not having access to the US space market ... the NPI was the first contract he got for a space resaerch project ... its fantastic to see his student now making headlines with this idea
johannessimon81

Genetic mugshot recreates faces from nothing but DNA - 3 views

www.newscientist.com/...aces-from-nothing-but-dna.html

BIO science technology

shared by johannessimon81 on 23 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • johannessimon81 on 23 Mar 14
     
    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!
  • ...2 more comments...
  • Thijs Versloot on 23 Mar 14
     
    wow thats pretty amazing! Ok, the pictures are not great (mainly due to skin surface, baggy eyes, zits I guess) but considering its only from DNA it is pretty close already. That will help crime scene investigations greatly, whether positively or negatively.
  • johannessimon81 on 23 Mar 14
     
    Ouch! You're pretty harsh on that lady... :-o
  • Paul N on 24 Mar 14
     
    should try it the other way around, deduce the DNA from facial features. That would be even cooler.
  • Thijs Versloot on 25 Mar 14
     
    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 :)
johannessimon81

Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'? - 4 views

www.theguardian.com/...ible-collapse-study-scientists

society technology science

shared by johannessimon81 on 15 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • johannessimon81 on 15 Mar 14
     
    Sounds relevant. Does ESA need to have a position on this question?
  • Luís F. Simões on 15 Mar 14
     
    This was on Slashdot now, with a link to the paper. It quite an iteresting study actually. "The scenarios most closely reflecting the reality of our world today are found in the third group of experiments (see section 5.3), where we introduced economic stratification. Under such conditions, we find that collapse is difficult to avoid."
  • Thijs Versloot on 16 Mar 14
     
    Interesting, but is it new? In general, I would say that history has shown us that it is inevitable that civilisations get replaced by new concepts (much is published about this, read eg Fog of War by Jona Lendering on the struggles between civilisations in ancient history, which have remarkably similar issues as today, yet on a different scale of course). "While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of doing nothing." I guess this bang on it, the ones that can change the system, are not benefitted by doing so, hence enrichment, depletion, short term gain remain and might even accelerate to compensate for the loss in the rest of the system.
Thijs Versloot

Light brought to a complete stop - 3 views

www.natureworldnews.com/...t-complete-stop-one-minute.htm

science light

shared by Thijs Versloot on 29 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Thijs Versloot on 29 Jul 13
     
    "When a control laser is fired at the crystal, a complex quantum-level reaction turns it the opaque crystal transparent. A second light source is beamed into the crystal before the control laser is shut off, returning the crystal to its opaque state. This leaves the light trapped inside the crystal, and the opacity of the crystal keeps the light trapped inside from bouncing around, effectively bringing light to a full stop." is the simple explanation, but I am not sure how this is actually possible with the current laws of physics
  • Isabelle Dicaire on 05 Aug 13
     
    There are two ways to make slow light: material slow light and structural slow light, where you either change the material or the structural properties of your system. Here they used EIT to make material slow light, by inducing transparency inside an otherwise opaque material. As you change the absorption properties of a material you also change its dispersion properties, the so-called Kramers-Kronig relations. A rapid positive change in the dispersion properties of a material will give rise to slow light. To effectively stop light they switched off the control beam, bringing back the opaque state. Another control beam is then used to retrieve the probe pulse that was 'frozen' inside the medium. Light will be halted according to the population lifetime on the energy level (~ 100s). They used an evolutionary algorithm to find an optimal pulse preparation sequence to reach close to the maximum possible storage duration of 100s. Interesting paper!
  • Thijs Versloot on 06 Aug 13
     
    So it is not real storage then in a sense, as you are stimulating an excitation population which retains the phase information of your original pulse? Still it is amazing that they could store this up to 100s and retrieve it with a probe pulse, but light has never been halted.
Thijs Versloot

Norway loves electric cars - 0 views

cleantechnica.com/...-cars-two-months-row-7-reasons

technology EV market

shared by Thijs Versloot on 03 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Thijs Versloot on 03 Dec 13
     
    The main reasons: (1) awareness, people know that a variety of consumer cars exist (2) negative incentives that push people away from gasoline powered cars, eg fuel taxes (3) positive incentives, exemption from road tax, purchase tax and free parking (all temporary) and (4) extensive recharging infrastructure. Other countries have some/all of these elements, but Norway has pushes mostly and the result is that the nissan leaf was the best sold car in September and October, beating all other cars.
  • Ma Ru on 03 Dec 13
     
    If there's anyone who could afford such things, it is Norway... According to http://xkcd.com/980/, Oljefondet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway) is currently worth nearly as much as US has spent on wars. I mean, all of them together... One of the biggest problems in Norway is what to do with this money without damaging the economy in the long run :-)
Thijs Versloot

Concordia calling #ESA - 4 views

www.esa.int/...Concordia_calling

science antarctica

shared by Thijs Versloot on 24 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Thijs Versloot on 24 Apr 14
     
    Are you a team player who is unafraid of long isolation? Do you have a medical degree and a healthy love of extremes? ESA is offering the chance of a lifetime to run space experiments in one of the world's most isolated places: Concordia research station in Antarctica.
  • Athanasia Nikolaou on 25 Apr 14
     
    One engineer YGT has already reserved his position to go there for maintaining infrastructure, the coming austral winter. Apparent science contribution: low, experience of a lifetime : affirmative!
  • Ma Ru on 26 Apr 14
     
    "team player who is unafraid of long isolation" LOL
tvinko

Massively collaborative mathematics : Article : Nature - 28 views

www.nature.com/...461879a.html

INF collaboration p2p

shared by tvinko on 13 Nov 09 - Cached
  • tvinko on 13 Nov 09
     
    peer-to-peer theorem-proving
  • ...14 more comments...
  • Francesco Biscani on 13 Nov 09
     
    Or: mathematicians catch up with open-source software developers :)
  • Francesco Biscani on 13 Nov 09
     
    "Similar open-source techniques could be applied in fields such as [...] computer science, where the raw materials are informational and can be freely shared online." ... or we could reach the point, unthinkable only few years ago, of being able to exchange text messages in almost real time! OMG, think of the possibilities! Seriously, does the author even browse the internet?
  • Joris _ on 14 Nov 09
     
    I do not agree with you F., you are citing out of context! Sharing messages does not make a collaboration, nor does a forum, .... You need a set of rules and a common objective. This is clearly observable in "some team", where these rules are lacking, making team work inexistent. The additional difficulties here are that it involves people that are almost strangers to each other, and the immateriality of the project. The support they are using (web, wiki) is only secondary. What they achieved is remarkable, disregarding the subject!
  • Francesco Biscani on 14 Nov 09
     
    I think we will just have to agree to disagree then :) Open source developers have been organizing themselves with emails since the early '90s, and most projects (e.g., the Linux kernel) still do not use anything else today. The Linux kernel mailing list gets around 400 messages per day, and they are managing just fine to scale as the number of contributors increases. I agree that what they achieved is remarkable, but it is more for "what" they achieved than "how". What they did does not remotely qualify as "massively" collaborative: again, many open source projects are managed collaboratively by thousands of people, and many of them are in the multi-million lines of code range. My personal opinion of why in the scientific world these open models are having so many difficulties is that the scientific community today is (globally, of course there are many exceptions) a closed, mostly conservative circle of people who are scared of changes. There is also the fact that the barrier of entry in a scientific community is very high, but I think that this should merely scale down the number of people involved and not change the community "qualitatively". I do not think that many research activities are so much more difficult than, e.g., writing an O(1) scheduler for an Operating System or writing a new balancing tree algorithm for efficiently storing files on a filesystem. Then there is the whole issue of scientific publishing, which, in its current form, is nothing more than a racket. No wonder traditional journals are scared to death by these open-science movements.
  • LeopoldS on 15 Nov 09
     
    here we go ... nice controversy! but maybe too many things mixed up together - open science journals vs traditional journals, conservatism of science community wrt programmers (to me one of the reasons for this might be the average age of both groups, which is probably more than 10 years apart ...) and then using emailing wrt other collaboration tools .... .... will have to look at the paper now more carefully ... (I am surprised to see no comment from José or Marek here :-)
  • Joris _ on 15 Nov 09
     
    My point about your initial comment is that it is simplistic to infer that emails imply collaborative work. You actually use the word "organize", what does it mean indeed. In the case of Linux, what makes the project work is the rules they set and the management style (hierachy, meritocracy, review). Mailing is just a coordination mean. In collaborations and team work, it is about rules, not only about the technology you use to potentially collaborate. Otherwise, all projects would be successful, and we would noy learn management at school! They did not write they managed the colloboration exclusively because of wikipedia and emails (or other 2.0 technology)! You are missing the part that makes it successful and remarkable as a project. On his blog the guy put a list of 12 rules for this project. None are related to emails, wikipedia, forums ... because that would be lame and your comment would make sense. Following your argumentation, the tools would be sufficient for collaboration. In the ACT, we have plenty of tools, but no team work. QED
  • LeopoldS on 15 Nov 09
     
    the question on the ACT team work is one that is coming back continuously and it always so far has boiled down to the question of how much there need and should be a team project to which everybody inthe team contributes in his / her way or how much we should leave smaller, flexible teams within the team form and progress, more following a bottom-up initiative than imposing one from top-down. At this very moment, there are at least 4 to 5 teams with their own tools and mechanisms which are active and operating within the team. - but hey, if there is a real will for one larger project of the team to which all or most members want to contribute, lets go for it .... but in my view, it should be on a convince rather than oblige basis ...
  • Dario Izzo on 15 Nov 09
     
    It is, though, indicative that some of the team member do not see all the collaboration and team work happening around them. We always leave the small and agile sub-teams to form and organize themselves spontaneously, but clearly this method leaves out some people (be it for their own personal attitude or be it for pure chance) For those cases which we could think to provide the possibility to participate in an alternative, more structured, team work where we actually manage the hierachy, meritocracy and perform the project review (to use Joris words).
  • Joris _ on 15 Nov 09
     
    I am, and was, involved in "collaboration" but I can say from experience that we are mostly a sum of individuals. In the end, it is always one or two individuals doing the job, and other waiting. Sometimes even, some people don't do what they are supposed to do, so nothing happens ... this could not be defined as team work. Don't get me wrong, this is the dynamic of the team and I am OK with it ... in the end it is less work for me :) team = 3 members or more. I am personally not looking for a 15 member team work, and it is not what I meant. Anyway, this is not exactly the subject of the paper.
  • tvinko on 15 Nov 09
     
    My opinion about this is that a research team, like the ACT, is a group of _people_ and not only brains. What I mean is that people have feelings, hate, anger, envy, sympathy, love, etc about the others. Unfortunately(?), this could lead to situations, where, in theory, a group of brains could work together, but not the same group of people. As far as I am concerned, this happened many times during my ACT period. And this is happening now with me in Delft, where I have the chance to be in an even more international group than the ACT. I do efficient collaborations with those people who are "close" to me not only in scientific interest, but also in some private sense. And I have people around me who have interesting topics and they might need my help and knowledge, but somehow, it just does not work. Simply lack of sympathy. You know what I mean, don't you? About the article: there is nothing new, indeed. However, why it worked: only brains and not the people worked together on a very specific problem. Plus maybe they were motivated by the idea of e-collaboration. No revolution.
  • Francesco Biscani on 15 Nov 09
     
    Joris, maybe I made myself not clear enough, but my point was only tangentially related to the tools. Indeed, it is the original article mention of "development of new online tools" which prompted my reply about emails. Let me try to say it more clearly: my point is that what they accomplished is nothing new methodologically (i.e., online collaboration of a loosely knit group of people), it is something that has been done countless times before. Do you think that now that it is mathematicians who are doing it makes it somehow special or different? Personally, I don't. You should come over to some mailing lists of mathematical open-source software (e.g., SAGE, Pari, ...), there's plenty of online collaborative research going on there :) I also disagree that, as you say, "in the case of Linux, what makes the project work is the rules they set and the management style (hierachy, meritocracy, review)". First of all I think the main engine of any collaboration like this is the objective, i.e., wanting to get something done. Rules emerge from self-organization later on, and they may be completely different from project to project, ranging from almost anarchy to BDFL (benevolent dictator for life) style. Given this kind of variety that can be observed in open-source projects today, I am very skeptical that any kind of management rule can be said to be universal (and I am pretty sure that the overwhelming majority of project organizers never went to any "management school"). Then there is the social aspect that Tamas mentions above. From my personal experience, communities that put technical merit above everything else tend to remain very small and generally become irrelevant. The ability to work and collaborate with others is the main asset the a participant of a community can bring. I've seen many times on the Linux kernel mailing list contributions deemed "technically superior" being disregarded and not considered for inclusion in the kernel because it was clear that
  • pacome delva on 18 Nov 09
     
    hey, just catched up the discussion. For me what is very new is mainly the framework where this collaborative (open) work is applied. I haven't seen this kind of working openly in any other field of academic research (except for the Boinc type project which are very different, because relying on non specialists for the work to be done). This raise several problems, and mainly the one of the credit, which has not really been solved as I read in the wiki (is an article is written, who writes it, what are the names on the paper). They chose to refer to the project, and not to the individual researchers, as a temporary solution... It is not so surprising for me that this type of work has been first done in the domain of mathematics. Perhaps I have an ideal view of this community but it seems that the result obtained is more important than who obtained it... In many areas of research this is not the case, and one reason is how the research is financed. To obtain money you need to have (scientific) credit, and to have credit you need to have papers with your name on it... so this model of research does not fit in my opinion with the way research is governed. Anyway we had a discussion on the Ariadnet on how to use it, and one idea was to do this kind of collaborative research; idea that was quickly abandoned...
  • Francesco Biscani on 18 Nov 09
     
    I don't really see much the problem with giving credit. It is not the first time a group of researchers collectively take credit for a result under a group umbrella, e.g., see Nicolas Bourbaki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourbaki Again, if the research process is completely transparent and publicly accessible there's no way to fake contributions or to give undue credit, and one could cite without problems a group paper in his/her CV, research grant application, etc.
  • pacome delva on 18 Nov 09
     
    Well my point was more that it could be a problem with how the actual system works. Let say you want a grant or a position, then the jury will count the number of papers with you as a first author, and the other papers (at least in France)... and look at the impact factor of these journals. Then you would have to set up a rule for classifying the authors (endless and pointless discussions), and give an impact factor to the group...?
  • tvinko on 18 Nov 09
     
    it seems that i should visit you guys at estec... :-)
  • LeopoldS on 18 Nov 09
     
    urgently!! btw: we will have the ACT christmas dinner on the 9th in the evening ... are you coming?
johannessimon81

Google combines skycrane, VTOL and lifting wing to make drone deliveries - 6 views

www.wired.com/...ffort-to-build-delivery-drones

technology drone_delivery VTOL skycrane FUN soundtrack

shared by johannessimon81 on 30 Aug 14 - No Cached
annaheffernan liked it
  • johannessimon81 on 30 Aug 14
     
    Nice video featuring the technology. Plus it comes with a good soundtrack! Google's project wing uses a lifting wing concept (more fuel efficient than normal airplane layouts and MUCH more efficient than quadrocopters) but it equips the plane with engines strong enough to hover in a nose up position, allowing vertical landing and takeoff. For the delivery of packages the drone does not even need to land - it can lower them on a wire - much like the skycrane concept used to deliver the Curiosity rover on Mars. Not sure if the skycrane is really necessary but it is certainly cool. Anyways, the video is great for its soundtrack alone! ;-P
  • ...4 more comments...
  • Paul N on 31 Aug 14
     
    could we just use genetic algorithms to evolve these shapes and layouts? :P
  • Ma Ru on 31 Aug 14
     
    > Not sure if the skycrane is really necessary but it is certainly cool. I think apart from coolness using a skycrane helps keep the rotating knives away from the recipient...
  • Thijs Versloot on 01 Sep 14
     
    Honest question, are we ever going to see this in practice? I mean besides some niche application somewhere, isn't it fundamentally flawed or do I need to keep my window opened on the 3rd floor without a balcony when I ordered something from DX? Its pretty cool yes, but practical?
  • Guido de Croon on 02 Sep 14
     
    Package delivery is indeed more complicated than it may seem at first sight, although solutions are possible for instance by restricting delivery to distribution centers. What we really need of course is some really efficient and robust AI to navigate without any problems in urban areas : ) The hybrid is interesting since it combines the advantage of a Vertical Takeoff and Landing (and hover), and a wing for more efficient forward flight. Challenges lie in the control of the vehicle under any angle and all that this entails also for higher levels of control. Our lab has first used this concept a few years ago for the DARPA UAVforge challenge, and we had two hybrids in our entry last year for the IMAV 2013 (for some shaky images: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7XgRK7pMoU ).
  • Thijs Versloot on 04 Sep 14
     
    Fair enough, but even if you consider advanced/robust/efficient AI, why would you use a drone? Do we envision hundreds of drones above our heads in the street instead of UPS vans, or postmen, considering delivers letters might be more easily achievable. I am not so sure if personal delivery will take this route. On the other hand, if the system would work smoothly, I can image that I'm send a mail with the question whether I'm home (or they might know already from my personal GPS tracker) and then notify me that they are launching my DVD and it will come crashing into my door in 5min.
  • Paul N on 08 Sep 14
     
    I'm more curios how they're planning to keep people from stealing the drones. I could do with a drone army myself and having cheap amazon or google drones flying about sounds like a decent source.
Thijs Versloot

Dolphin inspired radar #biomimicry - 2 views

phys.org/...-10-dolphins-radar-device.html

tech bio radar

shared by Thijs Versloot on 23 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Thijs Versloot on 23 Oct 13
     
    The device, like dolphins, sends out two pulses in quick succession to allow for a targeted search for semiconductor devices, cancelling any background "noise",
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Athanasia Nikolaou on 30 Oct 13
     
    and it sends out two pulses of opposite polarity, in succession, such that a semiconductor changes the negative to a positive one, amplifying the returning signal. Very interesting. Maybe we can combine different frequencies for identifying a single variable in earth observation. We already use more that one frequencies but for identifying one variable each.
  • Thijs Versloot on 31 Oct 13
     
    Could it be used to measure ocean acidification? I found a study that links sound wave propagation with ocean acidity. Maybe we are able to do such measurement from space even? "Their paper, "Unanticipated consequences of ocean acidification: A noisier ocean at lower pH," published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that fossil fuels are turning up the ocean's volume. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the overall pH of the world's oceans has dropped by about 0.1 units, with more of the changes concentrated closer to the poles. The authors found that sound absorption has decreased by 15 percent in parts of the North Atlantic and by 10 percent throughout the Atlantic and Pacific"
  • Athanasia Nikolaou on 31 Oct 13
     
    The last time I asked an oceanographer for the use of acoustic waves, she said it is still a bit problematic method to take into account its data, but we were referring to measuring ocean circulation. It may be more conclusive for PH measurements, though. The truth is that there is a whole underwater network with pulse emmitters/receivers covering the North Atlantic basin, remnant infrastructure for spying activities in the WW2 and in the cold war, that stays unexploited. We should look more into this idea
Thijs Versloot

Communicate through the plasma sheath during re-entry - 1 views

scitation.aip.org/...1.4921751

technology plasma hypersonic

shared by Thijs Versloot on 10 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Thijs Versloot on 10 Jul 15
     
    In order to overcome the communication blackout problem suffered by hypersonic vehicles, a matching approach has been proposed for the first time in this paper. It utilizes a double-positive (DPS) material layer surrounding a hypersonic vehicle antenna to match with the plasma sheath enclosing the vehicle. Or in more easy language, basically one provides an antenna as capacitor, in combination with the plasma sheath (an inductor), they form an electrical circuit which becomes transparent for long wavelength radiation (the communication signal). The reasons is that fluctuations are balanced by the twin system, preventing absorption/reflection of the incoming radiation. Elegant solution, but will only work on long wavelength communication, plus I am not sure whether the antenna needs active control (as the plasma sheath conditions change during the re-entry phase).
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