Friday 30 June 2017

Can Artificial Intelligence Help Us Make More Human Decisions?


About 88 million pages of original and authentic handwritten documents belonging to the past three-and-a-half centuries, line the tiled halls of a simple 16th-century trading house located right in the middle of Seville, Spain. These are stored here, incompletely transliterated, where some of them are almost indecipherable. A few of them were carried back on armadas from the Americas while a few have undergone scanning and digitisation.

These documents contain the answers and the context for the innumerable questions pertaining to the Conquistadors, the European history, the New World contact and colonialism, politics, law, economics and ancestry. However, it is unfortunate that hardly some of these carefully kept pages were ever read or interpreted since they were written and brought to Seville centuries before and it is highly unlikely that most of them never will be.

All hope is not lost as a researcher from the Stevens Institute of Technology is trying to get computers to read these documents, before we are out of time, while the documents are still readable. A Stevens computer science professor, Fernando Perez-Cruz asks “What if there was a machine, or a software, that could transcribe all of the documents?”.

Perez-Cruz, who’s expertise lies in the research area of machine learning also says “What if there was a way to teach another machine to combine into groups those 88 million pages and convert them into searchable text categorised into topics? Then we can start understanding the themes in those documents and then will be aware where to look in this storehouse of documents for our answers”. Thus Perez-Cruz is working on both factors of this two-fold approach which, if right, could then be applicable to many other new age and futuristic data analysis queries such as independent transport and analysis of medical data.

Pricing on Amazon, medical study, text reading machines


Perez-Cruz, who is a veteran of Amazon, Bell Labs, Princeton University and University Carlos III of Madrid, has had a very interesting career dealing with scientific challenges.In 2016, he joined Stevens and contributed to the growing asset of the computer science department of the university. Stevens aims at making this a strong research department which in turn is drawing more talent and resources. Perez-Cruz is using this to his advantage in his work. Currently, at Stevens, he is working to develop something called as ‘interpretable machine learning’ which is a systematized intelligence that humans can still work on.

As far as the problem of the historical document analysis is concerned, Perez-Cruz is in the hopes that he will be able to develop improved character-recognition engines. With the help of short excerpts of documents written in varied styles, which have been earlier transliterated by experts, he aims to teach software to identify both the forms of characters and often correlated associations between letters and words, thus constructing a growing recognition engine over time that is absolutely precise. The only question remains, he says, is that how much data or how much handwriting that is transcribed, is sufficient to do this well. The work on this concept is still developing.

Perez-Cruz states that he believes even though it is a technical challenge, it may still be achievable. He is even more fascinated about the next part which is organisation of large quantities of transcribed matter into topics that can be used in a glance. He says that the machine should be able to give us information right away from these three-and-a-half centuries of data when transcribed and should itself learn from the locations of the words and sentences. This is, what he calls, topic modelling.

A key link: Systematically grouping large data into easily accessible topics


After sufficient data has been entered into the algorithm, it begins to spot the most vital identifying and organizing forms and designs in the data. Very often, it so happens that various cues from the human researchers are vital and are searched for.Perez-Cruz notes that eventually, we might discover that there are, let’s say, a few hundred topics or descriptions that run through the whole of this archive and then all of a sudden there may be 88-million-document problems that have been scaled-down to 200 or 300 ideas.

If algorithms can consolidate 88 million pages of text into a few hundred lots, a huge progress in systematisation and efficiency can be achieved by historians and researchers who need to make choices about which particular document, theme or time periods are to be searched, reviewed and analysed in the formerly unmanageable archive. The same concept could be used to find styles, themes and concealed meaning in other vast unread databases.

He concludes saying that one begins with a huge quantity of unorganised data and in order to understand what material does that data contain and how it can be used, a kind of a structure needs to be brought to that data. Once the data is comprehended, one can begin to read it in a particular way, understand better what questions are to be asked pertaining to that information and make better conclusions.

Students Present Solar Car for 5 Occupants

Stella Vie – `Car of the Future’


The Students at Eindhoven University of TechnologyTU/ehave presented a solar car for 5 occupants known as Stella Vie.The team has been considering this car as a source to secure its third world title at the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge in Australia (8-16 October) where it expects to highlight the prospective of solar powered family cars.

The new solar powered family car that had been unveiled recently is said to be the successor of Stella Lux and the Stella will be entered in the Bridgestone World Solar challenge in Australia later this year according to the announcement on the website of the university by TU Eindhoven solar team.

The most amazing fact regarding this car is that for the first time, it has been equipped to carry five occupants, instead of four and seems to be much more efficient than all the solar cars before it. The car has the potential of a range of around 1,000 kilometres on a summer’s day in Netherlands with few solar panels on its roof. As per the students, Stella Vie, a reference to daily family life is said to be `the car of the future’. Being powered by the sun, it has the tendency of reaching a speed of around 130 kilometres per hour.
 

Smart Navigation System


  The car comprises of new, smart technology such as parking navigation system which tends to take account of the position of the sun while parking.The car’s smart navigation system also tends to utilise the updated V2X technology to caution the driver regarding the upcoming traffic condition, enabling a safe and a much more efficient voyage.

 In order to save energy still further, Stella Vie tends to gently shove the user to drive efficiently as possible by giving refined feedback via a built-in lighting system that is inclined to caution the driver by turning red if they seem to brake too fast or speed up too violently.

From Eindhoven University of Technology, the team comprising of 23 students would be defending its world title in this forthcoming bi-annual, solar-powered car competition which tends to run 3,000 kilometres through the wilderness of Australia.The Eindhoven team had won the title in 2013 in the Cruiser Class with the Stella. The team would be competing in the Cruiser Class, for practical cars, where judging would be based on technical innovation, battery consumption together with the number of occupancy on board.
 

Solar Team Eindhoven – Contribution to Clean World


  Teams from Delft as well as Twente have been competing in the Challenger Class in the contest for the quickest solo occupant car. The Solar Team at Eindhoven have already portrayed to the world that there is a possibility of constructing an energy competent family car.

The team have designed Stella Vie to slowdown an impeccable steadiness between aerodynamic and aesthetic design and is createdto be more efficient than its forerunner, the Stella Lux.The Vie tends to increase the aero- dynamicity of its earlier siblings by 9%.

The Solar Team Eindhoven tends to make its contribution to a clean world and the main focus is to create a solar car which will be ready for the market in the future. One can imagine a world where cars would no longer require fossil fuels, a world where cars tend to be energy positive.

Wednesday 28 June 2017

Selfies: Selfie-Presentation in Everyday Life

Study – First Significant Experimental Research on Selfie

 
Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have scrutinized through 2.5 million selfie post on Instagram, to comprehend the photographic spectacle better and how people tend to form their personalities online and to determine what types of identity statement people tend to make on taking and sharing selfies. When it comes to Selfies, appearance tends to be almost everything.

Almost 52% of all selfies tend to fall in the category of appearance, with images of people portraying their make-up, clothes, lips etc. Images regarding looks seems to be twice more well-known than the other 14 categories altogether. After the appearance category, social selfies with friends, loved ones as well as pets were most common to 14%.

The ethnicity images at 13%, travel – 7% and health and fitness to 5%. It was observed by the researchers that the prevalence of ethnicity selfies is an indication that people seem to be proud of their background and also found that several selfies were solo picture instead of taken with a group. The data had been collected in the summer of 2015.the Georgia Tech team are of the belief that the study is the first significant experimental research on selfies.
 

Selfie – An Identity Performance

 
Generally, on Instagram, an overpowering 57% of selfies had been posted by 18-35 year old multitude which according to the researchers is not too surprising taking into account the demographic of the social media platform.

Selfies posted by the under-18 age group was about 30% while the older group of 35+ shared them less often around 13%. Appearance on the other hand was most popular among the crowd of all age groups. Julia Deeb-Swihart, lead author stated that selfies are an identity performance which means that users tend to carefully craft the way they may tend to appear online, which is an extension of that.

 Deep-Swihart had stated that `just like on other social media channels, people are inclined to project an identity promoting their wealth, health together with physical attractiveness, with selfies we decide how to present ourselves to the audience and the audiences tends to decide how it identifies you.

 

Type of Blending of Online/Offline Selves


  This work is stuck in the theory offered by Erving Goffman in `The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’. The attires we tend to choose to wear together with the social roles we are inclined to play, are all intended to control the version of ourselves we prefer our peers to view.

Deeb-Swihart had commented that `selfies are a type of blending of our online and offline selves and is a way to prove what is true in your life or at least what one would want people to believe is true’. The data had been accumulated by the researchers by searching for `#selfie’, then utilised computer vision to confirm that the pictures really included faces.

 Almost half of them did not seem to have and they found plenty of spam with blank images or text. The accounts had been utilising the hashtag in order to show up in additional searches for the purpose of obtaining more followers.

Tuesday 27 June 2017

Space Robot Technology Helps Self-Driving Cars and Drones on Earth

Support Robots to Navigate Independently
 
The significance of making units of self-driving cars together with grocery delivery through drone could be revealed through an improbable source – autonomous space robots.

An assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics, Marco Pavone has been creating technologies to assist robots in adjusting to unknown as well as altering environments. Pavone had been working in robotics at Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA before coming to Stanford and had maintained relationships with NASA centres together with collaboration with the other departments at Stanford. He views his work in space and Earth technologies as complementary.

 He commented that in a sense, some robotics techniques which tend to have been designed for autonomous cars could be very useful for spacecraft control. Similarly the algorithms which he and his students devised to assist robots make decisions and assessments on their own with a span of a second could help in space exploration as well as they could improve on driving cars and drone from the Earth.

One of the projects of Pavone tends to centre on supporting robots to navigate independently in bringing space debris out of orbit, delivering tools to astronauts and grasp spinning, speeding objects out of the vacuum of space.
 
Gecko-Inspired Adhesives
 
There is no boundary for error while grabbing objects in space. Pavone informed that in space when you approach an object, if you are not very careful in grasping it at the time it is contacted, the object would float away from you. Bumping an object in space would make recovering it very difficult.

Pavone had teamed up with Mark Cutkosky, a professor of mechanical engineering, who had spent the last decade perfecting gecko-inspired adhesives, in order to resolve the grasping issue.

 The gecko grippers support a gentle approach as well as a simple touch in order to `grasp’ an object, enabling easy capture and release of spinning, unwieldy space debris. However the delicate navigations needed for grasping in space is not an easy job. Pavone had stated that one have to operate in close proximity to other objects, spacecraft or debris or any object one might have in space that needs advanced decision making potentials.

 Pavone together with his co-workers developed systems which enabled space robot to independently respond to such flexible situations and competently grab space objects with their gecko-strippers.
 
Perception-Aware Planning
 
The subsequent robot could move as well as grab in real time, updating its decisions at a rate of several thousand times a second. This kind of decision-making technology is said to be beneficial in solving navigation issue with drones that are Earth-bound.

 A graduate student Benoit Landry had stated that for these types of vehicles, navigating at high speed in proximity to buildings, people together with the other flying objects seems difficult to perform. He focused that there seems to be a delicate interplay between making decisions and environmental perception. He added that in this perceptive, several aspects of decision making for independent spacecraft tend to be directly significant to drone control.

Landry together with Pavone have been working on `perception-aware planning’ that enables drones to consider fast routes as well as to `see’ their surroundings besides improved estimate on where they are. The work is presently being extended towards handling of interactions with the humans, a main section to organize autonomous system like the drones and self-driving cars.

 



Reduced Gravity Atmospheres
 
Landry had also mentioned that the background of Pavone at NASA had been a good complement to the academic work. When a robot is said to land on a small solar system body type an asteroid, added challenges tend to come up.

 These atmospheres seem to have total different gravity than the Earth. Pavone had stated that if one were to drop an object from waist-height, the same would take a couple of minute to settle to the ground. Ben Hockman, a graduate student in the lab of Pavone, had worked on a cubic robot known as Hedgehog, in order to deal with low-gravity atmospheres such as asteroids.

 The robot passed through uneven, rugged and low-gravity territories by hopping rather than driving like the traditional rovers. Ultimately, Pavone and Hockman desired Hedgehog to be capable of navigating and carrying out tasks without being obviously told how to perform it by a human located millions of miles away. Hockman had mentioned that the prevailing Hedgehog robot is said to be designed for reduced gravity atmospheres though it could be adjusted for Earth.

It would not hop quite that far since we tend to have more gravity though it could be utilised to cross more rugged territories where wheeled robots are unable to go. Hockman viewed the research that he had been doing with Pavone as core scientific exploration adding that science attempts to answer the difficult questions we don’t know the answers to and exploration seeks to find whole new questions we don’t even know yet how to ask.

Monday 26 June 2017

Sony Unveils New 'Spider-man' Game at E3 Expo

Sony

Sony’s Updated Game - `Spider-Man’

An updated game `Spider-man, for PlayStation video console, had been unveiled by Sony, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo – E3, in Los Angeles recently. It is said that Spider-man is likely to be released in 2018 and is being established by Insomniac games, which is the group dealing with the contribution of PlayStation like `Resistance’ and `Ratchet & Clank.

The president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment America, Shawn Layden, at the time of unveiling the `Spider-man’ game, had commented that the future is here and it is now with PlayStation 4 Pro and PS VR. Virtual reality – VR is rapidly gaining new battleground in the gaming scenario wherein developers are in search of winning over fans with immersive headsets and accessories.

Sony Corp had mentioned that last week it had sold over one million units of its virtual reality headset all over the world and was enhancing production. Besides this at the E3, Sony had also announced that the cult game `Shadow of the Colossus’ would be getting a high-definition remake for PlayStation 4. This game as well as the next `God of War’ edition are likely to be released next year. Though since Spider-Man 2 the Spidey game has not be mostly good, we seem to live in hope.

 

Reclaiming Earlier Glory

 
The reason of Spider-Man 2 is the standard of Spidey game which came down to the feeling of sandbox. The new game after an original story, not a tie-in film, tends to look fixed in reclaiming some of the earlier glory. Though there had not been any strong announcement, it surely seems like it was utilising the Spider Man 2 model.

Perhaps the biggest E3 2017 news, so far is the launch of the Xbox One X and after several months of speculation, the `Project Scorpio’ game console was unveiled by Microsoft. One of the most striking features of the Xbox One X is its design.

A dreadful amount of hardware has been crowded into what is claimed to be the smallest Xbox by Microsoft. Microsoft’s answer to the PS4 Pro is the new high-end console which will be hitting the shelves on 7 November which will be costing £449.99. At its global E3 showcase, Sony may not have exposed a brand new console though there had been no lack of best-seller game being provided. Ubisoft contributions covered varieties from action shooters like `Far Cry 5’ to sports, piracy, dance, together with space money and virtual reality.

 

Prime Announcement – New Game - `Far Cry’ Series

 
However, the prime announcement had been the new game in the tremendously prevalent `Far Cry’ series. The future edition of the first-person shooter action-adventure is said to be the 11th instalment in the award-winning series which is scheduled for a release on 27 February 2018.

Assassin’s Creed’ franchise, the next game in the long-running is called `Assassin’s Creed: Origins’ and is said to be one of the most expected games of the year. Assassin’s Creed is considered to be a franchise centred on exploit-adventure video game series designed by Ubisoft. Plenty of rumours have been circulated and speculated with regards to `Assassin’s Creed” Origins’ much ahead of E3 2017 and the new video game has been heading for Egypt taking the story back to an ancient world. On October 27, versions of Origins custom-made for playing on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Windows-powered personal computers will be released.