Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

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?
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See also:
ATT Big brother or savior?

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 )

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