Advanced Concepts Team

A hybrid image classification method was employed for this specific purpose by incorporating the advantages of both pixel-based and object-based image classification approaches. This was performed in two steps: firstly, a pixel-based image classification method, i.e., artificial neural network was applied to classify potential targets with similar spectral reflectance at pixel level; and then an object-based image classification method was used to further differentiate animal targets from the surrounding landscapes through the applications of expert knowledge. As a result, the large animals in two pilot study areas were successfully detected with an average count error of 8.2%, omission error of 6.6% and commission error of 13.7%. The results of the study show for the first time that it is feasible to perform automated detection and counting of large wild animals in open savannahs from space

And Paul, it includes neural networks!

I kept telling you guys but you just laughed and laughed :))

Here we go! AI for Mario has arrived. What is still missing is the Italian accent in his robo-voice though. To compensate for that, we have a lot of German accent in the Youtube-video. Make sure to check it out if you always liked the background music from the games. Putting the trolling aside, I honestly like the idea! There is still some way to go, but maybe we will watch and even pay to be able to see twitch-streams of self-ware bots one day?

I'm actually considering doing an twitch-bot channel. Why pay when you can cash in? Kind of lazy tho`

New sensor to detect distances efficiently is based on the mixture chemistry, optics and physical principles.

No idea how it works, will need to digg into it.. Tom, shall we use Mixer?

New vision sensor from a swiss company seems to go beyond Elementary Motion Detectors (those inspired by insect vision)

Nice stuff!

Last week NASA and NOAA announced that 2014 topped the list of hottest years ever recorded. Yikes! What's worse, the ten warmest years ever recorded have all occurred since 1998. Yikes again! In the meantime, the ACT is skiing on stones and rocks in Switzerland ^^

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.

"Tilted table", "peacock" and "triple-floor building" are just three of many fantastical 3D structures that have been created by compressing simple 2D patterns. The new technique for creating these objects is called compressive buckling, and has been developed by researchers in the US, China and South Korea.

Probably old news by now, but this thing sounds so awesome it warrants an entry

Looks like fun! Note though, I'm always slightly annoyed when people use holography only because it sounds cool. because clearly this is not a hologram! Definition: a three-dimensional image formed by the interference of light beams from a laser or other coherent light source. I am sure this is not what is happening in these goggles.

I think they suspect that "hologram" would sell better than "yet-another-augmented-reality-goggle"

Although it may seem like the above two experiments violate the uncertainty principle because the results show a smaller-than-required degree of uncertainty, Shih and his coauthors explain that no violation has occurred due to the fact that the experiments involve photon pairs rather than individual photons. The scientists argue that Popper's original thought experiment was based on a misunderstanding of the proper context of the uncertainty principle: it governs the behavior of single particles only, not the "correlation" of two particles.

In a work published on Nature (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v517/n7536/full/nature14090.html#affil-auth) a new DFT based simulation of convection in Earth's Core iron shows that electron-electron scattering has a similar contribution to electron's thermal vibration. The outcome is that using the old dynamo theory the simulation matches the Earth magnetic field experimental results, solving an 80 years old puzzle.

Yay to science! I'm always intrigued by related experiments that try to measure material properties at the GPa range. Especially, the efforts of reaching 'metallic hydrogen' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_hydrogen), requiring pressures above 25GPa at which hydrogen becomes conductive. It is thought that gas giant planets could have such a core, but no-one has been able to produce/verify this theory as off yet.

For future reference... At the same time, a crowdsourced article: "We began the crowdsourcing by collecting a list of possible rules for the article via a git-controlled repository" SVN would be so 2000-ish...

enjoy ....

ok, but if we first have to define consciousness before starting dealing with any physics, isn't a large pause looming ahead, proposed by the author?

I kind of subscribe to Tononi's information theory approach to consciousness: http://www.biolbull.org/content/215/3/216.full And of course the watered down wikipedia version for whoever lacks the patience to read the whole treatise http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory

Big data analytic systems are reputed to be capable of finding a needle in a universe of haystacks without having to know what a needle looks like. The very best ways to sort large databases of unstructured text is to use a technique called Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). Unfortunately, LDA is also inaccurate enough at some tasks that the results of any topic model created with it are essentially meaningless, according to Luis Amaral, a physicist whose specialty is the mathematical analysis of complex systems and networks in the real world and one of the senior researchers on the multidisciplinary team from Northwestern University that wrote the paper. Even for an easy case, big data analysis is proving to be far more complicated than many of the companies selling analysis software want people to believe.

Most of those companies are using outdated algorithms like this LDA and just apply them like retards on those huge datasets. Of course they're going to come out with bad solutions. No amount of data can make up for bad algorithms.

electrically charged spider web ...

nice overview of the 3 main space related projects attempting to bring internet access to the world, namely SpaceX+Google micro-satellites network, OneWeb+Virgin Galactic OneWeb and Project Loon by Google. not a lot of technical details though...

Eve, an artificially-intelligent 'robot scientist' could make drug discovery faster and much cheaper, say researchers writing in the Royal Society journal Interface. The team has demonstrated the success of the approach as Eve discovered that a compound shown to have anti-cancer properties might also be used in the fight against malaria.

Unfortunately, "make drug discovery faster and much cheaper" actually means "increase profit margin for pharmaceutical companies"...

Technology/Robotics Scientists have developed an octopus-like robot, which can zoom through water with ultra-fast propulsion and acceleration never before seen in man-made underwater vehicles. Most fast aquatic animals are sleek and slender to help them move easily through the water but cephalopods, such as the octopus, are capable of high-speed escapes by filling their bodies with water and then quickly expelling it to dart away.

Proving the theory of relativity with picosecond lasers, an experiment soon to be installed on the ISS.

Software that roughly mimics the way the brain works could give smartphones new smarts-leading to more accurate and sophisticated apps for tracking everything from workouts to emotions. The software exploits an artificial-intelligence technique known as deep learning, which uses simulated neurons and synapses to process data.

"The irony is that a personality disposition normally seen as antisocial - disagreeableness - may actually be linked to 'pro-social' behavior ..."

anybody has access to the pdf of the original article? http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jopy.12104/abstract

have it ....