Sunday 30 April 2017

Building Cities of the Future Now

Future city

Cities Upgraded for Future

New cities are being built around the world and the ones that have been lived in for years are being upgraded for the future. It is partially the cause of over-crowding as well as pollution and partly due to an ever-connected world that makes sense to peg entire cities up to the network.

A smarter city would mean that utilises data on traffic for easing congestion or one which focuses in linking services for provision of improved information for the citizens. For several it could be about making cities much greener as well as efficient.

Some of the technology companies like IBM and Cisco tend to see smart cities as large business opportunity though in conjunction with the schemes being advertised by technology companies seems to be more grass root project that targets to empower citizens enabling them a say in how the city would be viewed.

For several of them, Songdo in South Korea is the poster boy of the smart city and the $35bn project situated on reclaimed land towards the Yellow Sea has been generally considered to be a model for smart cities across the world when it had begun in 2005.

Information System – Universal City of U-city

Songdo’s information systems, also known as a universal city of U-city, seemed to be connected to each other. Moreover it had led critics to label it as a `city in a box’, a showcase for technology though not essentially the perfect city for people. Sensors seem to be on everything in Songdo, for instance, escalators tend to move only when someone is on them.

A telepresence system built in like a dishwasher is present in every home. Besides permitting users to control the heating system and locks, it also provides video conferencing and is designed to deliver education, government services together with health care. Offices as well as schools also tend to be linked to the network. The digital organizer behind Songdo is said to be Cisco supplying the network-based technologies that are needed.

Masdar, United Arab Emirates

Masdar which is meant as `source’ in Arabic is said to be a city which tends to stand in the centre of the desert of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates and is created to be one of the most ecological on the earth. Having solar power station at its core and wind farms giving energy for the same it tends to be carbon free. Besides this, it is also a hub for clean-tech companies.

From water right up to garbage, everything in the city is said to be measured and monitored, thus being a source of information. The city is said to be constructed on raised platform enabling easy access for the `digital plumbers’ to the system of progressive technologies which seem to run it. It is also pedestrian friendly and totally car free.

The city is said to be carrying out trial with a network of electric driverless podcars. The personal rapid transit – PRT would be running 6m beneath the street level through the city. The architects’ firm of Norman Foster who had designed various striking buildings inclusive of The City Hall in London have designed the buildings in the city.

It is expected that around 40,000 people would ultimately reside in the city with around 50,000 shuttling there daily.

Rio De Janeiro, Brazil 

City mayor Eduardo Paes had commissioned IBM in creating a city-wide operation centre connecting all the 30 agencies of the city from transport to emergency facilities. This shows that the officials from all over the city could join forces in handling the movement of traffic together with the public conveyance system as well as ensure the power and the water supplies function proficiently.

Synchronized response can be taken in case of a crisis, like collapsing building. Shutting down of transport system, emergency services can be organised together with gas supplies to be cut off while citizen can be updated of substitute routes through Twitter.

The research team of IBM have developed a sophisticated weather forecasting system wherein it takes data from the river basin, land surveys, the historical rainfall logs of the municipality and radar feeds to forecast rain together with the probable flash floods.

It has also begun appraising the effect of weather occurrence on other city conditions like city traffic or power outages. Several citizen-centric apps have been laid by the centre with updates on weather and traffic.

Barcelona, Spain

Last year, Manel Sanroma, chief information officer of Barcelona city council had made a daring statement that the cities of the future could be more powerful than nation states. He had stressed at smart city conference around the world the need of having a strong mayor who would be willing to take control in drawing up blueprint for this type of a city.

Barcelona is considered to be leading and tends to have some remarkable projects which are being rolled out. It has developed well-organized bus routes, modernized rubbish collection utilising sensors as well as introduced smart street lights. The development of a city operating system bringing all systems together in one location is also organized.

 Mr Sanroma had informed BBC that contrasting to Rio no central control room will be there. Presently the biggest projects under development would be to present contactless payments all over the transportation services of the city.

 Besides this, Mr Sanroma also intends collaborating with the other cities. With this it has set up the City Protocol Society with the intention of joining up cities all over the world with businesses, universities together with the other organisations in developing standards for technology platform which would operate in any city.

London, England

Several areas of London dating back to Roman eras seems to be an apparent choice as a future city though there seems to be numerous projects that are presently being developed. On a £24m prize awarded by the Technology Strategy Board in creating a future city it had lost out to Glasgow, though it remained a testing ground for smart technologies.

London has been chosen as an incubator by IBM for testing the algorithms which could power the cities of the future and has been partnering with Imperial College and University College London on various projects, inclusive of a network of sensors in monitoring air quality, water supply and the traffic flow.

Friday 28 April 2017

Controlling a Robot is Now as Simple as Point and Click

Robot
Robots are on the rise: They ride, fly, swim or run on two or more legs. They work in the factory, are used in war and in disaster areas. Soon they will have conquered the household: they keep the apartment clean, serve the party guests, or maintain the grandparents. Even the toy will lead a life of its own. Each and every day the field of Robotics are getting more and more advanced.

Recently, a group of tech guys in Georgia Institute of Technology has found a new interface to Controlling Robot in just a point and click. The outmoded edge for tenuously functioning robots works just well for roboticists. They use a computer to autonomously switch six degrees, whirling three simulated rings and regulating arrows to get the robot into location to snatch items or execute an exact job.

This new interface seems to be cumbrous and erroneous for the older people or the people who are technically not advanced try to govern the assistive personal robots.

It is much modest, more well-organized and doesn’t involve major training period. The manipulator just points and clicks on a thing, then selects a clench. And the rest of work is done by the Robot itself.

It is said by Sonia Chernova, Catherine M. and James E. Allchin Early-Career Assistant Professor in the school of interactive computing that as an alternative of successions of rotations, lowering and hovering arrows, amending the grasp and fathoming the exact depth of field, they have abridged the procedure in just couple of clicks.

Her college students had found that the point & click mode ensued in suggestively littler errors, permitting accomplices to achieve tasks more hurriedly and consistently than using the outmoded method.

The outmoded ring-and-arrow-system is a split screen process. The chief screen shows the robot and the scene it plays; the next one is 3-D, collaborating view where the operator regulates the cybernetic gripper and communicates with the robot precisely what to do. This process makes no use of scene info, providing operators a thoroughgoing level of control and suppleness. However this choice and the magnitude of the terminal can develop an affliction and upsurge the number of booboos.

Controlling Robot by the means of point-and-click set-up doesn’t take account of 3-D representing. It only affords the camera interpretation, ensuing in a humbler edge for the user. Later a person snaps on an area of an element, the robot’s acuity system examines the objective’s 3-D apparent geometry to regulate where the gripper ought to be placed. It’s analogous to what we ensure once we place our fingers in the accurate positions to grip something. The computer formerly proposes a limited grasps. The user agrees, placing the robot to work.

In addition it considers the geometrical shapes, with creating conventions about minor sections where the camera cannot perceive, for example the backside of a flask. To do this work, they are influencing the robot’s aptitude to do the similar thing to make it conceivable to merely communicate the robot which thing we would like to be selected.


Wednesday 26 April 2017

Biased Bots: Human Prejudices Sneak into Artificial Intelligence Systems

Bot

Biased robots are here with human prejudices seeping their AI

Most of the AI experts believed that the artificial intelligence will offer objectively rational and logical thinking for the robots and systems in future. But a new study has is showing a darker path for AI wherein the machines are acting reflection so human and the AI is prejudiced with the human notions.

It has been found when the common machine learning programs are trained online with the ordinary human language then they are likely to acquire the cultural biases and this can get embedded right into the patterns of their wording. The ranges of these biases are quite erratic from the preference to certain lower to having some objectionable view about the race or gender.

Security experts has stated that it is extremely critical and necessary to address the rise of biases in the machine learning at the earliest as it can seriously impact their reasoning and decision making in future. In upcoming days we will be turning to the computers for processing a number of things ranging from the natural language translation for communication to making online text searches as well as image categorization.
Fair and just

Arvind Narayanan, an assistant professor of computer science at the Center for Information Technology (CITP) at Princeton has stated that the artificial intelligence should remain impartial to the human prejudices in order to offer better result and judgment making skills. He asserted that fairness and bias present in the machine learning has to be taken seriously as our modern will depend on it in near future.

We might soon be finding ourselves in the center of such situation wherein modern artificial intelligence system will be frontrunner is perpetuating the historical patterns of bias within the system without even us realizing it. If such events comes in the future then it will be completely socially unacceptable and we will still remain good old times rather than moving forward.

An objectionable example of bias seeping into AI

Just a few years ago in 2004, a study was conducted by Marianne Bertrand from the University of Chicago and Senhil Mullainatahan from Harward University. These economists conducted a test wherein they sent out about 5000 identical resumes to over 1300 job advertisements.

They only change the name of the applicants’ names which happened to be either the traditional European American or the African American and the results they received were astonishing. It was found that the European American candidates are 50 percent more likely to get an interview than the African American candidates. Another Princeton study has shown that the set o African American comes more unpleasant associations than the European American sets when it is run through automated system run by the artificial intelligence based systems.

Therefore it has become a necessity to distance the AI from the biases and prevent the cultural stereotypes from further perpetuation into the mathematics based instruction of the machine learning programs. It should be taken as the task of the coders to ensure that machines in future reflect the better angles of the human nature.

Metal as Fuel? These Canadian Scientists are Working to Make it Happen

Can we turn metal into fuel? Canadian scientists are just doing it.

The fuel as we known petroleum and gas will be over in next two decades and we have very little time come up with an alternative. So as per the mainstream technology news some of the Canadian scientists have found of turning the metal into fuel for vehicles in near future.

The researchers from the McGill University have been aggressively studying the combustion capabilities of the metal that also for over a decade. An experiment conducted by them last week in the space has helped in bringing a new twist to their hope of turning metal into fuel.

How this study has helped the scientists?

The technology news has affirmed that the reason behind conducting the experiment in space has the scientists in understanding the way practices react in weightlessness state. Using metal as a fuel is still a farfetched and unusual concept which seems to be an exclusive matter of science fiction but still it can be turned into reality. One of the researchers present in team named Andre Higgins has been studying and working on the concept of turning metal into fuel over two decades.

Collectively they had found that turning metal in powder can help in creating fuel which can be fed to the burner. This fuel will be highly efficient and it will help in releasing more energy and heat per litre of iron power than what is achieved today with a liter of gas.

Quite interestingly the residue in form of iron oxide can again be collected using a vacuum to act as the fuel again. Higgins proudly states this theory as the closed loop system which has higher efficiency than the bio fuel as well as the modern day fuels used in the vehicles.

Saving the planet with green fuel

Metal fuel will not be a ‘green’ fuel and the threat to the Mother Nature and global climate changes will be aggravated if we bring the metal fuel in daily usage. Technology news further shed light onto how researchers will be employing a noble way of recycling the metal fuel with closed-loop system.

These researchers have studied the metal fuels for over a decade which has helped in understanding how it can be brought into fruition for the benefit not the smaller vehicles like cars but also the large vehicles like ships and trains.

A state like Canada which has abundant of metals will certainly see the economic benefits of the shipping metal fuel to other countries. Countries suffering from acute air pollution like China will benefit from the truly closed loop system of the metal fuel.

The biggest benefit of the metal fuel is that it works in closed system wherein the materials will go around and around without causing any harm to the environment. Technology news also brought a revelation that metal fuels isn’t a new thing as NASA has already been using about 16 percent Aluminum powder for its space shuttle’s rocket boosters for quite some time.

Simple Ways to Safeguard Your Computer from Hackers and Malware

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credit: online tech tips
There are hackers out there lurking around searching for unsecured computers and smartphones to hack into. If you’re not careful, you could become their next victim. Nowhere is safe, not at restaurants, hotels or even your home. However, if you take the proper precautions, you can decrease the chances of a hacker breaking into your computer. The way hackers are able to access your devices is through the internet, so this is where you need to begin setting up walls. Here’s what you can do today to improve the security of your home devices.

Install a Firewall

Most computers come with trial versions that offer firewall security, but once this expires, you’re on your own. There are two types of firewalls you can use to protect your computer – one that comes in the form of software and the other that comes in the form of hardware. Both act similarly, but are used for different reasons. When you install a firewall, you’re creating a first line of defense for your computer. This barrier stops unauthorized programs from the web, keeping them from opening up on your computer. Make sure your firewall is always on, whether you’re at home or staying at the Hilton.

Set Up Antivirus Software

Another way to boost the security of your computer is to install antivirus software. This also stops unauthorized software and codes from operating on your computer system. This includes viruses, trojans, keyloggers and other intrusive software that are designed to steal, delete and corrupt your files, or even spy on you. Antivirus software offers real-time protection from these threats.

Install Anti-Spyware Software

Spyware is everywhere and it’s used for both innocent and harmful purposes (depending on the user). The purpose of spyware is to collect data from you that is then redirected to a third party. This information can be used for advertising purposes by companies or for sinister purposes of a hacker. Like antivirus software, this can hep to protect your system from these intrusions in real time.

Always Use Complex Passwords

The passwords you create for your emails, social media, financial institutions and computer log-in should be secure and complex. No one should be able to guess it, so never use your name, birthday or those of your closest family members. This is the first thing hackers will try. As a rule of thumb, your passwords should be at least 8 letters long, contain a number, a special symbol and an uppercase letter. The more complex your password, the more difficult it will be for hackers to figure it out. Make sure you don’t share it with anyone or write it down on documents that can be stolen from your computer files.

Check Your Browser Security Settings

Make sure the browser you’re using while surfing the web is secure. Look at the security and privacy settings to see how it’s set up. Make the necessary changes to make it more secure. This is important since a lot of websites now track what you’re doing on the web (for advertising purposes).