Posted by ljmacphee on May 29, 2008 under artificial intelligence in the news | 
Of all the companies watching me I can’t imagine one that thrills me less than Comcast. They have already been filtering and throttling our net traffic. Not content with collecting your packets they now plan to watch you in your living room. All for your own benefit of course.
If you have some tinfoil handy, now might be a good time to fashion a hat. At the Digital Living Room conference today, Gerard Kunkel, Comcast’s senior VP of user experience, told me the cable company is experimenting with different camera technologies built into devices so it can know who’s in your living room.
The idea being that if you turn on your cable box, it recognizes you and pulls up shows already in your profile or makes recommendations. If parents are watching TV with their children, for example, parental controls could appear to block certain content from appearing on the screen. Kunkel also said this type of monitoring is the “holy grail” because it could help serve up specifically tailored ads. Yikes. . . . [read more Comcast cameras to start watching you?
]
See also:
ATT Big brother or savior?
Posted by ljmacphee on May 26, 2008 under artificial intelligence in the news |
Self building wireless technology has lots of promise and more than a few companies working on it. These networks would allow us to go into a disaster area or a war zone, release our wireless sensors or transmitters and blanket the affected area. Once that is done we could communicate with each other; something that was a large problem during the 9/11 attacks for rescue personal. Or we could deploy sensors that could send back images, test air quality or broadcast information to those in the area. Most phones now allow wireless access to any network so civilians in the area could communicate with rescue personal or each other.
. . . Networks of mobile sensors and other small electronic devices have huge potential. Applications include emergency management, security, helping vulnerable people to live independently, traffic control, warehouse management, and environmental monitoring.
One scenario investigated by European researchers was a road-tunnel fire. With fixed communications destroyed and the tunnel full of smoke, emergency crews would normally struggle to locate the seat of the blaze and people trapped in the tunnel.
Wireless sensors could cut through the chaos by providing the incident control room with information on visibility, temperatures, and the locations of vehicles and people. Firefighters inside the tunnel could then receive maps and instructions through handheld terminals or helmet-mounted displays.
For this vision to become reality, mobile devices have to be capable of forming self-organising wireless networks spanning a wide variety of communications technologies. Developing software tools to make this possible was the task of the RUNES project. . . .[ read more Wireless Networks that Build Themselves ]
More information:
RUNES
Papers:
The RUNES Middleware: A Reconfigurable Component-based Approach to Networked Embedded Systems ( pdf )
ASCENT: Adaptive Self-Configuring sEnsor Networks Topologies ( pdf) ( different company same idea - this is a self deploying sensor network that communicate wirelessly )
Posted by ljmacphee on May 22, 2008 under artificial intelligence in the news |
Swarm stuff may seem like the newest bleeding edge in artificial intelligence, but long before the replicators appeared, Brooks and Flynn were already planning in 1989 to invade celestial bodies with swarms of bots.
Complex systems and complex missions take years of planning and force launches to become incredibly expensive. The longer the planning and the more expensive the mission, the more catastrophic if it fails. The solution has always been to plan better, add redundancy, test thoroughly and use high quality components. Based on our experience in building ground based mobile robots (legged and wheeled) we argue here for cheap, fast missions using large numbers of mass produced simple autonomous robots that are small by today’s standards (1 to 2 Kg). We argue that the time between mission conception and implementation can be radically reduced, that launch mass can be slashed, that totally autonomous robots can be more reliable than ground controlled robots, and that large numbers of robots can change the tradeoff between reliability of individual components and overall mission success. Lastly, we suggest that within a few years it will be possible at modest cost to invade a planet with millions of tiny robots. [ read more Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System ]
Papers:
Heterogeneous Multi Robot Cooperation ( pdf )
Today the earwig, tomorrow the man
Intelligence with out reason ( pdf )
More Information:
MIT AI Lab: Mobot Group
Kevin Kelly: Machines with Attitude
Retired Robots - Hannibal and Attila
Attila: A Six Legged Autonomous Walking Robot
See also:
Google will pay you 20 million to send your robot to the moon
Posted by ljmacphee on May 19, 2008 under artificial intelligence in the news |
You realize that that ‘every click you make, every link you take’ they are watching you. How many times have you Googled ‘cars’ and had nothing but auto ads show up on every site you visit for a month?
Not content to track your clicks and websites neuromarketers are taking things to a whole new level and tracking the firing neurons in your brain.
Neuroscience and marketing had a love child a few years back. Its name - big surprise - is neuromarketing, and the ugly little fellow is growing up. Corporate pitchmen have always wanted to get inside our skulls. The more accurately they can predict how we’ll react to stimuli in the marketplace, from prices to packages to adverts, the more money they can pull from our pockets and transfer to their employers’ coffers.
. . .
But thanks to recent breakthroughs in brain science, companies can now actually see what goes on inside our minds when we shop. Teams of academic and corporate neuromarketers have begun to hook people up to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines to map how their neurons respond to products and pitches. . . . [ read more Neuromarketing could make mind reading the ad-man's ultimate tool ]
fMRI’s got off to a rough start in the mind reading business. While each individual could be mapped, we’re all different. The neuron that lights up in my brain when I see a chair is not the neuron that lights up in your brain when you see a chair. Lucky for us or we’d all have to take fMRIs to get on airplanes.
But when it comes to brain patterns for anticipation, happiness, etc patterns in brains are easily picked out by fMRIs and tend to be the same across us all.
Subliminal advertising is illegal in the UK. But it still legal in the US and despite many reports it has no effect on us, recent studies show it does effect us. So should neuromarketing be legal? If it is not legal how do we prevent its use? And if it works well for soda manufacturers how long before the government starts using it?
Papers:
Neural Predictors of Purchases ( pdf)
More information:
Neuromarketing blog
Marketing to your mind ( TIME )
Posted by ljmacphee on May 15, 2008 under artificial intelligence in the news, robotics |
Survival research labs creates real life battle bots for robot wars that are performed live. SLR’s tagline is ‘Producing the most dangerous shows on earth’.
. . . “He’s trying to create a strong message about fear,” said Dr. Ken Goldberg, an associate professor of robotics at the University of California at Berkeley. “That’s what Mark is doing, igniting fear in the audience, with flying metal.”
While the use of what has become known as “Whitman’s tower” might be offensive to the sensibilities of the locals, what has consistently gotten Pauline in trouble over his 23-year career is his penchant for creating large, potentially lethal robots under the guise of modern performance art.
His group was recently banned from Japan after unveiling the pitching machine — a device with two rotating tires and the end of a funnel, which normally throws baseballs and softballs, that now hurls two-by-fours at 150 mph.
Just hours before the Austin Fire Marshall would run Pauline and his merry group of 60 out of town for violations — such as shooting 20-foot walls of flame toward hundreds of people, setting off rockets, and creating a general disturbance, the man stood silent -– his mission accomplished. . . [ read more Igniting Fear with Flying Metal ]
More information:
SRL
SRL Blog
SRL Flickr Set
Survival Research Labs - tribe.net
Video:
SRL YouTube Video
You Tube: Mark Pauline Show