The Day The World Ends

The Daily Mail (of all places) has a short story (it's not news, it's really a short science fiction story) about The Day The Worlds Ends. Here's a spoiler (rot 13 for the text then subtract 1 and then divide by 2 for the numbers) Sevqnl, Znepu 27, 4131. It's what I would call a "Dark Singularity" story, where all powerful AI run amok. Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil even get a mention.

It's not the best Dark Singularity short story ever, but then it is a newspaper or, at least, a newspaper's web site so you don't often expect works of fiction (cue Daily Mail jokes).

JPL Release Open Source Robotics Software

JPL have announced they are realising CLARAty, an open source framework for robotic software development. It include 44 software modules, and according to the press release:

Primary functionality in these modules includes math infrastructure, rotation matrices with Euler angles, quaternions, and coordinate transformations (interoperable homogeneous and quaternion transforms). It also includes the coordinate frame infrastructure that connect transformations and mechanisms with moving parts. Additionally, you will find mechanism models for wheeled, legged and hybrid vehicles. Other modules include device and device group infrastructure with support for generic digital and analog I/O, cameras, and motors. Several modules in this release provide vision infrastructure for images, color images, camera models, 3D point cloud, and surface normal image representations.

Tesco Queue Monitoring

Computing reports on a very Manna-esque development at Tesco - the use of thermal imaging and predictive till management systems to calculate the likely length of till queues in 5 to 30 minutes, in order to alert staff of upcoming demand and also to free staff to restock shelves and tidy up.

Older report

Cultured Neural Memory Chip

Scientific American has a report on Israeli researcher who have successfully developed a cultured neural cell memory chip.

From the article

"The main achievement was the fact that we used the inhibition of the inhibitory neurons" to stimulate the memory patterns, says physicist Eshel Ben-Jacob, senior author of a paper on the findings published in the May issue of Physical Review E

via Friend Or Foe

Battlefield Extraction Robot

Medgadget is among the many sites reporting
on BEAR, the Battlefield Extraction Assist Robot, designed to get wounded soldiers out of the battlefield (something that you may have guessed from the name)


ps. We're back, with field classes and most of the exams now behind us.

The Semantic Robotic Vision Challenge

There will be a contest at the The Twenty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence - which is a sort of "robot treasure hunt". Robots will be given a list of items that are in an arena, the robots will look each item up on the web (via, for example, Google images) and then proceed to try and find that object in the arena.

Via Robot Gossip as linked to from Communist Robot

Nanotech In The Food Industry

Food Production Daily.com has an article entitled "The evolution of the nanotech revolution", detailing the advances in the use of nanotech in the food industry.

Already, nanotech is being used to bind Vitamin A, Iodine and Iron in salt given to school children in Morocco. In Switzerland, nanotech has been used to stop the greying of chocolate, giving chocolate a longer shelf life. Looking forward, "Active Packaging", where the packaging interacts with its contents to increase shelf life and nano-additives (additives that increase shelf life or product quality) are expected to be some of the main advances in the near future.

Expert System Found Guilty Of Practicing Law

Wired has a post on how an Expert System has been ruled to effectively be practising law without a licence. From the article:

(The) system touted its offering of legal advice and projected an aura of expertise concerning bankruptcy petitions; and, in that context, it offered personalized -- albeit automated -- counsel. ... We find that because this was the conduct of a non-attorney, it constituted the unauthorized practice of law.

via: Technovelegy

Google's Sneakernet

The BBC has a report on how Google is running a sneakernet for scientific data. Google send out hard drives to scientists, who then send the drives containing scientific data (which is some cases has reached 120TB - far too much data to be sent across current networks) back to Google. Google hold on to a copy of the data and also send the data back out to other scientists.

Improving Google's Translation

According to the Official Google Blog, there is now a feedback mechanism for Google's web page translator, where users can suggest a better translation to help Google learn to translate better. From the post:

We have a system that can learn to translate better if we know where the problems are. In the past, there was no way to tell us about problem translations. Now there is. Next time you see a sentence that makes you go "hmmm," just hover over it to display the original text tooltip and click the "Suggest a better translation" link. Tell us what it should have said, and we'll use your suggestion to improve translation quality in future updates to our service.

This feature is available when you use one of the language translation pairs developed by our research group:

* English to/from Arabic
* English to/from Chinese (Simplified/Traditional)
* English to/from Russian
* Chinese (Simplified) to/from Chinese (Traditional)

One thing that really stands out (at least to me) is the choice of languages you can help translate.