Singularity and Futurism: May 2009

Bringing quantum craziness to banking? - Breakthrough In Quantum Control Of Light

>> Sunday, May 31, 2009

Science Daily - May 31, 2009

This image represents a quantum state with zero, three and six photons simultaneously. The theory is on left and the experiment is on the right. (Credit: UCSB)

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara have recently demonstrated a breakthrough in the quantum control of photons, the energy quanta of light. This is a significant result in quantum computation, and could eventually have implications in banking, drug design, and other applications.

Measuring the quantum state by counting how many photons are stored forces the trap to "decide" how many there are; but prior to counting, the light trap exists in a quantum superposition, with all three outcomes possible.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, UCSB physics researchers Max Hofheinz, John Martinis, and Andrew Cleland document how they used a superconducting electronic circuit known as a Josephson phase qubit to prepare highly unusual quantum states using microwave-frequency photons. The breakthrough is the result of four years of work in the laboratories of Cleland and Martinis.

The project is funded by the federal agency called the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or IARPA. The government is particularly interested in quantum computing because of the way banking and other important communications are currently encrypted. Using large numbers, with hundreds of digits, encryption codes are changed daily and would take years of traditional computing to break. Quantum computing could potentially break those codes quickly, destroying current encryption schemes.

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Create an AI on Your Computer - If you dare

>> Saturday, May 30, 2009

Singularity Hub - May 28, 2009, by Aaron Saenz

If many hands make light work, then maybe many computers can make an artificial brain. That’s the basic reasoning behind Intelligence Realm’s Artificial Intelligence project. By reverse engineering the brain through a simulation spread out over many different personal computers, Intelligence Realm hopes to create an AI from the ground-up, one neuron at a time. The first waves of simulation are already proving successful, with over 14,000 computers used and 740 billion neurons modeled. Singularity Hub managed to snag the project’s leader, Ovidiu Anghelidi, for an interview: see the full text at the end of this article.

The ultimate goal of Intelligence Realm is to create an AI or multiple AIs, and use these intelligences in scientific endeavors. By focusing on the human brain as a prototype, they can create an intelligence that solves problems and “thinks” like a human. This is akin to the work done at FACETS that Singularity Hub highlighted some weeks ago. The largest difference between Intelligence Realm and FACETS is that Intelligence Realm is relying on a purely simulated/software approach.

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iPhones will get very smart - Siri lifts veil on intelligent assistant

>> Friday, May 29, 2009

Mercury News - May 27, 2009, by Elise Ackerman

What could be one of the most significant advances in artificial intelligence in a decade is heading toward the iPhone App store this fall.

Siri, a San Jose company, announced Wednesday that it would offer an "intelligent agent" for Apple's iPhone that would, the company said, be able to find movie theaters, book restaurant reservations and airline flights, buy from online retail sites and even answer trivia questions like "How many calories are in a banana," all by understanding spoken commands.

Dag Kittlaus, CEO of Siri, which emerged from stealth mode to announce the product, said, "The future of search isn't search. It is a conversation with someone you trust."

Experts in artificial intelligence, or AI, say Siri will either be the first "intelligent agent" that responds to natural language — or the most recent failure in a series of spectacularly unsuccessful attempts to write software code that replicates some basic functions of the human brain.

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This is in - Plastic Logic, Maker of Thin Reader Device, Peeks Out

>> Thursday, May 28, 2009

NYT>Technology>Bits - May 27, 2009, by Brad Stone

Plastic Logic reader.

One of the coming competitors to the Amazon Kindle revealed a little bit more about itself here at the D: All Things Digital conference, run by The Wall Street Journal. Plastic Logic, a 10-year-old company founded by two Cambridge University professors, is working on devices with E Ink reading screens on thin, flexible plastic displays.

In a demonstration of the device, Richard Archuleta, the company’s chief executive, described the device as an electronic reader designed primarily for businesspeople.

The device looks ridiculously thin, with a monochrome E Ink screen similar in size to the jumbo Kindle DX. It has no keyboard but it does have a touch screen that, with a single touch in the corner, displays a toolbar along one edge and tabs for recently read books and documents along the left-hand side. Users can change pages with a flick of the finger. Mr. Archuleta also revealed that the device will have both Wi-Fi and 3G cellular connectivity.

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Robots Get Real - not yet ubiquitous, but on the way?

>> Wednesday, May 27, 2009

CNETNews - May 27, 2009, by Jonathan Skillings

Look out, Rover. Robots are man's new best friend

Sylvia the German shepherd is learning to live with robots.

The 6-year-old, curious canine was recently adopted by the Tambascia family in Brockton, Mass. There was one problem: a trio of house-cleaning robots--two Roombas, and one Scooba--already lived there.

"She didn't know whether to eat the robots or run," Joy Tambascia said. "She still tries to eat them or attack them on occasion--kind of how dogs react to the regular vacuum."

If Sylvia's conundrum sounds like a topic more worthy of Oprah's magazine than Scientific American, you're right: the robot of today and the near future is a lot more mundane (and probably a lot more useful) than the robot of science fiction.

For many people who own them, iRobot's Roomba is a regular vacuum cleaner. Roughly the diameter of a hubcap and about as thick as dictionary, it crisscrosses a floor autonomously, recognizes the difference between carpet and hard surface, senses stairs, and when battery power runs low, it automatically locates and returns to its docking station.

The Roomba is typical of commercial robotics in the early 21st century: There is no white-faced Data from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" who would desperately like to learn to whistle. Don't expect chatty C-3POs, intrepid R2-D2s, or killer Terminators. Instead, robots are humble devices that do menial labor, and they're on the verge of becoming household fixtures.

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Today a game show, tomorrow the world - How IBM Plans to Win Jeopardy!

Technology Review - May 27, 2009, by David Talbot

IBM's Watson will showcase the latest tricks in natural-language processing.

What is Watson?: IBM is preparing a natural-language computer system that will compete against humans on TV’s Jeopardy!, which is hosted by Alex Trebek. Credit: IBM

For decades, humans have struggled to create machines that can extract meaning from human language, with all its messiness, subtle context, humor, and irony. Traditional approaches require a great deal of manual work up front to render material understandable to computer algorithms. The ultimate goal is to make this step unnecessary.

IBM hopes to advance toward this objective with Watson, a computer system that will play Jeopardy!, the popular TV trivia game show, against human contestants. Demonstrations of the system are expected this year, with a final televised matchup--complete with hosting by the show's Alex Trebek--sometime next year. Questions will be spoken aloud by Trebek but fed into the machine in text format during the show.

The company has not yet published any research papers describing how its system will tackle Jeopardy!-style questions. But David Ferrucci, the IBM computer scientist leading the effort, explains that the system breaks a question into pieces, searches its own databases for "related knowledge," and then finally makes connections to assemble a result. Watson is not designed to search the Web, and IBM's end goal is a system that it can sell to its corporate customers who need to make large quantities of information more accessible.

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Don't be afraid - Despite 'Terminator,' machines still on our side

>> Tuesday, May 26, 2009

NY Daily News - May 25, 2009, by Ethan Sacks

John Connor (Christian Bale) has good reason to fear killer machines in 'Terminator: Salvation' - Foreman/Warner Bros.

The post-apocalyptic "Terminator Salvation" depicts a world in which a computer becomes self-aware - and promptly makes the logical decision to wipe out the humans that made it. It's a scenario that's gotten a lot eerier in the 25 years since the pre-Internet days of the first "Terminator" movie.

But there's no reason banish the BlackBerry to the basement ...just yet, say computer scientists.

"We live in a world today where this is no longer science fiction," says McG, the director of "Terminator Salvation." "Artificial intelligence is absolutely everywhere, from the ABS brakes in your car to your BlackBerry, spelling the word you misspelled correctly on your behalf.

"It's here."

Not so fast.

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POLL: Is A Terminator Scenario Possible?

>> Monday, May 25, 2009

h+ magazine - May 21, 2009

Vinge, Brin, Goertzel and others respond

David Brin
David Brin is a SF and non-fiction writer. Among his most influential books are The Uplift War, Earth, The Postman, and the non-fictional The Transparent Society

A director's #1 need is to get the hero into dire, pulse-pounding jeopardy as quickly as possible! Preferably against some overwhelming authority figure for the audience to hate, and for the hero to bring down, with little more than guts, defiance and sheer will. Hey, I can dig it. I've gone to that well myself. And the surest trick is to assume, from the start, that civilization failed. That nobody blew a whistle, no professionals checked things out, no institutions functioned and that masses of bright citizens never had a clue. Hey, it could go down that way!

Ben Goertzel
Ben Goertzel is an AI researcher, head of Novemente LLC, Director of Research of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. AI columnist for h+ magazine

Some SkyNet analogue taking over the world? Well, if someone built a global computer security system and intentionally made it highly intelligent, autonomous and creative... so as to allow it to better combat complex security threats (and ever-more-intelligent computer worms and viruses) ... well, perhaps so. It's not beyond the pale. A narrow-AI computer security system wouldn't spontaneously develop general intelligence, initiative and so forth.... but an AGI computer security system might... and the boundary between narrow AI and AGI may grow blurry in the next decades...

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Transhuman Military? - SOLDIER OF THE FUTURE

>> Sunday, May 24, 2009

New York Post - May 23, 2009, by SHARON WEINBERGER

It's the year 2030. As a soldier enters a crowded marketplace, sensors mounted on his helmet automatically scan faces in the crowd, identifying a known insurgent; a cursor in the heads-up display highlights the target and cues the weapon, which can be set to stun or kill; a simple voice command unlocks the trigger.

Aided by "smart drugs," enhanced with prosthetics, and protected by a lightweight suit of armor, this soldier of the future possesses near super-human capabilities and weapons that would make even Iron Man jealous. He's suited up in an "exoskeleton" - essentially a Storm Trooper-esque external shell - that allows him to carry heavy loads. Electronics integrated in his outfit allow for simultaneous language translation, automatic identification of potential foes, and video-game-like targeting. If the soldier is tired, overworked, or injured, neural and physiological sensors automatically send an alert to headquarters.

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AGI moving towards mainstream - The Coming Superbrain

NYT - May 23, 2009, by John Markoff

Mountain View, Calif. — It’s summertime and the Terminator is back. A sci-fi movie thrill ride, “Terminator Salvation” comes complete with a malevolent artificial intelligence dubbed Skynet, a military R.&D. project that gained self-awareness and concluded that humans were an irritant — perhaps a bit like athlete’s foot — to be dispatched forthwith.

The notion that a self-aware computing system would emerge spontaneously from the interconnections of billions of computers and computer networks goes back in science fiction at least as far as Arthur C. Clarke’s “Dial F for Frankenstein.” A prescient short story that appeared in 1961, it foretold an ever-more-interconnected telephone network that spontaneously acts like a newborn baby and leads to global chaos as it takes over financial, transportation and military systems.

Today, artificial intelligence, once the preserve of science fiction writers and eccentric computer prodigies, is back in fashion and getting serious attention from NASA and from Silicon Valley companies like Google as well as a new round of start-ups that are designing everything from next-generation search engines to machines that listen or that are capable of walking around in the world. A.I.’s new respectability is turning the spotlight back on the question of where the technology might be heading and, more ominously, perhaps, whether computer intelligence will surpass our own, and how quickly.

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Be afraid - 8 robots that terrify us

>> Saturday, May 23, 2009

MSNBC - By Winda Benedetti

Don’t be fooled by their calm demeanor and seemingly cool remove from the petty emotions that plague humanity, robots are filled with an unspeakable rage and they are, at this very moment, plotting to bring humanity to its poorly-designed knees.

Oh sure, scientists would have us believe that mankind’s mechanical marvels want nothing more than to serve and obey their fleshy masters. But don’t listen to scientists. Listen to Hollywood. They know.

Take the movie “Terminator Salvation,” which opens in theaters this week. This is just the latest entry in a film franchise that has tried, for more than two decades, to make the truth known. That is: Robots are eeeeevil and they’re hell-bent on taking over the earth ... starting with California (yeah, we’re on to you Schwarzenegger).

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Making a mammalian brain - 'Blue brain' project

Nanowerk - May 21, 2009

In a world first, Spain is to use a nanotechnology microscope for brain studies as part of the Blue Brain project. The initiative is CSIC researcher Javier de Felipe's brainchild, and researchers at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid's School of Computing are developing a series of tools to analyse and interpret microscope data.

About thirty Spanish researchers are participating in the international Blue Brain project. The project's aim is to build a functional model of the mammalian brain through computer simulations. Spain's project leaders are Javier de Felipe and UPM School of Computing professor José María Peña.

The nanotechnology microscope to be applied to brain studies is to be set up at the Centre of Biomedical Technology based at the UPM's Montegancedo Campus and will operational as of June.

The use of this microscope signifies a major technological advance. On one hand, electron microscopes provide a limited detail level for brain cells studies. On the other, the nanotech microscope outputs samples of brain tissue in just two hours, something that, using other technologies, it would take two technicians a year to do.

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The start of something big? - Plugging In $40 Computers

>> Friday, May 22, 2009

This blog is about documenting the Singularity, which means bringing to your attention some of the normally unnoticed news items that may, in fact, be harbingers of the "knee of the curve," the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning. Just imagine these headlines as part of a retrospective after the Singularity has undeniably occurred. Let's do some 20/20 foresight here, people.

NYT - May 21, 2009, by Saul Hansell

What would you do with a $40 Linux computer the size of a three-prong plug adapter?

Marvell Technology Group is counting on an army of computer engineers and hackers to answer that question. It has created a “plug computer.” It’s a tiny plastic box that you plug into an electric outlet. There’s no display. But there is an Ethernet jack to connect to a home network and a U.S.B. socket for attaching a hard drive, camera or other device. Inside is a 1.2 gigahertz Marvell chip, called an application processor, running a version of the Linux operating system.

All this can be yours for $99 today and probably for under $40 in two years.

“There’s not much in there,” said Sehat Sutardja, Marvell’s chief executive and co-founder, just a few chips and the sort of power supply used to charge a cellphone battery. Because this computer uses chips designed for cellphones, it uses far less power than chips designed for regular computers.

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Need a bigger....brain? - Novel nanotechnology method to stimulate growth of new neurons in adult brain

>> Thursday, May 21, 2009

Nanowerk - May 20, 2009

(Nanowerk News) University at Buffalo researchers have identified a new mechanism that plays a central role in adult brain stem cell development and prompts brain stem cells to differentiate into neurons (Targeting novel integrative nuclear FGFR1 signaling by nanoparticle-mediated gene transfer stimulates neurogenesis in the adult brain).

Their discovery, known as Integrative FGFR1 Signaling (INFS), has fundamentally challenged the prevailing ideas of how signals are processed in cells during neuronal development.

The INFS mechanism is considered capable of repopulating degenerated brain areas, raising possibilities for new treatments for Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders, and may be a promising anti-cancer therapy.

Michal Stachowiak, Ph.D., director of the Molecular and Structural Neurobiology and Gene Therapy Program at UB, lead the research team that discovered INFS.

The approach uses gene engineering and nanoparticles for gene delivery to activate the INFS mechanism directly and promote neuronal development. The INFS-targeting gene can prompt these stem cells to differentiate into neurons.

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Newsweek's naysayers - Science Cult

>> Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Newsweek - May 18, 2009, by John Horgan

Ray Kurzweil's vision of a 'Singularity' has attracted some followers, but don't expect it anytime soon.

I once believed in the imminence of superhuman intelligence. In 1981, when I was still in college, I took a science-writing class at Columbia University from the journalist Pamela McCorduck. She had just written Machines Who Think (note the mischievous "Who"), a book about the efforts of Marvin Minsky and other artificial-intelligence pioneers to create conscious, autonomous computers that would leave mere humans in their cognitive dust. This research, which McCorduck often enthused over in class, helped persuade me to become a science journalist. What could be cooler than witnessing this giant leap forward in the evolution of consciousness?

My youthful infatuation with AI gives me a somewhat jaded perspective on the prophecies of some modern scientists, notably the computer entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil, that we are on the verge of a "Singularity." In physics, a "singularity" is an event or place, like the big bang or a black hole, where the laws of physics are stretched to the breaking point. Singularitarians (which some call themselves) have adopted the term to describe a radical transformation of consciousness that will result from breakthroughs in artificial intelligence as well as nanotechnology, biotechnology and neuroscience.

At first, Singularitarians say, we may become cyborgs, as WiFi-equipped brain chips, nanobots and genetic modifications soup up our intelligence, perception and memory. Eventually, we may abandon our flesh-and-blood selves entirely and transform our psyches into giant software programs, like Vista but presumably less buggy. We will then "upload" ourselves into computers and dwell forever in cyberspace. Our transformation into immortal, God-like cyberbeings will supposedly take place not millennia or centuries from now but within the next few decades.

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What DARPA is up to...

>> Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Take a look at DARPA's newest "strategic thrusts" in this 57-page publication.

DARPA currently emphasizes research in nine strategic thrusts:

Robust, Secure, Self-Forming Networks
Detection, Precision ID, Tracking, and Destruction of Elusive Targets
Urban Area Operations
Advanced Manned and Unmanned Systems
Detection, Characterization, and Assessment of Underground Structures
Space
Increasing the Tooth to Tail Ratio
Bio-Revolution
Core Technologies

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Lifelike Avatars - The Next Best Thing to You

>> Monday, May 18, 2009

PhysOrg.com - May 15th, 2009

This is a still image of a Project LifeLike avatar conversing with a person. Credit: University of Chicago/University of Central Florida

Have you ever wished you could be in two places at once? Perhaps you've had the desire to create a copy of yourself that could stand in for you at a meeting, freeing you up to work on more pressing matters. Thanks to a research project called LifeLike, that fantasy might be a little closer to reality.

Project LifeLike is a collaboration between the Intelligent Systems Laboratory (ISL) at the University of Central Florida (UCF) and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) that aims to create visualizations of people, or avatars, that are as realistic as possible. While their current results are far from perfect replications of a specific person, their work has advanced the field forward and opens up a host of possible applications in the not-too-distant future.

The EVL team, headed by Jason Leigh, an associate professor of computer science, is tasked with getting the visual aspects of the avatar just right. On the surface, this seems like a pretty straightforward task--anyone who has played a video game that features characters from movies or professional athletes is used to computer-generated images that look like real people.

But according to Leigh, it takes more than a good visual rendering to make an avatar truly seem like a human being. "Visual realism is tough," Leigh said in a recent interview. "Research shows that over 70% of communication is non-verbal," he said, and is dependent on subtle gestures, variations in a person's voice and other variables.

To get these non-verbal aspects right, the EVL team has to take precise 3-D measurements of the person that Project LifeLike seeks to copy, capturing the way their face moves and other body language so the program can replicate those fine details later.

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Dr. Moreau outlawed in LA - Panel Votes to Outlaw Human-Animal Hybrids

>> Sunday, May 17, 2009

U.S. News and World Report - May 12, 2009, by KEVIN McGILL

BATON ROUGE, La.—Combining human and animal cells to create what are sometimes called "human-animal hybrids" would be a crime in Louisiana, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, under legislation approved Tuesday by a state Senate panel.

Scientific researchers in some areas have tried to create human embryonic stem cells, which scientists say could be used to develop treatment for a variety of human ailments, by placing human DNA into animal cells. But such practices are controversial for a number of reasons.

Sen. Danny Martiny's bill, approved without objection by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was designed to outlaw such practices. It defines and criminalizes various ways of making human-animal hybrids, including combining human sperm and an animal egg, combining animal sperm with a human egg, and the use of human brain tissue or neural tissue to develop a human brain in an animal.

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Boy or girl? You choose - Gender-Selection Technique Embraced for Hopeful Parents

>> Friday, May 15, 2009

PRNewswire - May 13, 2009

Couples can choose child's gender with less ethically charged method at Reproductive Science Center of the San Francisco Bay Area

SAN RAMON, Calif., May 13 /PRNewswire/ -- In response to growing numbers of couples who want to choose the sex of their next child, the Reproductive Science Center of the San Francisco Bay Area (RSC) announced today that it now is offering an alternative gender-selection technique with fewer moral and ethical dilemmas.

The Ericsson method is based on manipulation of sperm -- not an embryo. According to the developer, this technique offers approximately a 70-percent chance of success of obtaining the desired gender at conception. Thousands of healthy babies have been born using this method, according to Ericsson's studies.

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No gods needed! - How RNA got started

Science News - May 13, 2009, by Solmaz Barazesh

Scientists identify chemical reactions that could be responsible for the origin of life.

Scientists may have figured out the chemistry that sparked the beginning of life on Earth.

The new findings map out a series of simple, efficient chemical reactions that could have formed molecules of RNA, a close cousin of DNA, from the basic materials available more than 3.85 billion years ago, researchers report online May 13 in Nature.

“This is a very impressive piece of work — a really excellent analysis,” comments chemist James Ferris of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.

The new research lends support to the idea that RNA-based life-forms were the first step toward the evolution of modern life. Called the RNA world hypothesis, the idea was first proposed some 40 years ago. But until now, scientists couldn’t figure out the chemical reactions that created the earliest RNA molecules.

Today, DNA encodes the genetic blueprint for life — excluding some viruses, for those who consider viruses living — and RNA acts as an intermediary in the process, making protein from DNA. But most scientists think it’s unlikely that DNA was the basis of the origin of life, says study coauthor John Sutherland of the University of Manchester in England.

Information-bearing DNA holds the code needed to put proteins together, but at the same time, proteins catalyze the reactions that produce DNA. It’s a chicken-or-egg problem. Scientists don’t think that DNA and proteins could have come about independently — regardless of which came first — and yet still work together in this way.

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War, what's it good for? - Will designer brains divide humanity?

>> Thursday, May 14, 2009

New Scientist - May 13, 2009, by Andy Coghlan

Would tweaking human brains widen the gulf between the world's haves and have-nots? (Image: Norbert Millauer/AFP/Getty)

WE ARE on the brink of technological breakthroughs that could augment our mental powers beyond recognition. It will soon be possible to boost human brainpower with electronic "plug-ins" or even by genetic enhancement. What will this mean for the future of humanity?

This was the theme of a recent Neuroscience in Context meeting in Berlin, Germany, where anthropologists, technologists, neurologists, archaeologists and philosophers met to consider the implications of this next stage of human brain development. Would it widen the gulf between the world's haves and have-nots - and perhaps even lead to a distinct and dominant species with unmatchable powers of intellect?

One view is that this is merely the next phase in a process that has been taking place throughout human history. Humans have always played an active role in improving their own brainpower, says Lambros Malafouris of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge, UK, who was one of the organisers of the Berlin meeting. It began with inherited gene mutations that gave us uniquely "plastic" brains, capable of changing physically to meet hitherto unassailable intellectual and practical challenges.

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Where else but in Japan? - Cutting-Edge Robots Show Off

>> Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Technology Review - May 12, 2009, by Kristina Grifantini

Move on up: The newest version of the climbing robot RiSE 3 hugs a pole as it climbs. It can climb rapidly and could prove useful for surveillance or inspection purposes. Credit: Boston Dynamics

ICRA 2009 will showcase everything from tree-climbing machines to robots that politely ask for directions.

Today marks the start of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2009) in Kobe, Japan, where researchers from around the world will gather to discuss the latest advances in robotics--from cutting-edge climbing machines to robots that politely ask for directions.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania will present the latest version of RiSE, a four-legged robot that can both scamper along the ground and rapidly climb a tree or a pole. RiSE V3 was designed and built at Boston Dynamics--the company behind the four-legged military robot BigDog. It has four legs, and tiny claws made from surgical needles that can dig into a vertical surface. The robot's front legs are long enough to hug a telephone pole, and it can climb at 21 centimeters per second.

"RiSE V3 is the first general-purpose legged machine to achieve this vertical climbing speed," says Daniel Koditschek, a professor of electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, who led the work. Because the robot can walk, climb, and rest quietly on a pole while conserving energy (watch a video), Koditschek says that it could "play an invaluable role in search and rescue, reconnaissance, surveillance, or inspection applications."

Another mobile robot set to debut at the event is Adelopod, developed by researchers at the University of Minnesota. Adelopod, which is about the size of a video controller, doesn't use legs or even wheels to get around. Instead, it flips itself over and over using a pair of 12-centimeter arms (video of Adelpod in action). This tumbling mode of locomotion is simple, saves energy, and doesn't require complex hardware, say the researchers involved. "Given its size, it can go places that other robots cannot," says Nikos Papanikolopoulos, director of the university's Center for Distributed Robotics. The group has also developed the larger Loper robot, which can carry several Adelopods and scatter them throughout an area.

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Biohackers - Making new lifeforms in your basement

>> Tuesday, May 12, 2009

WSJ - May 12, 2009, by Jeanne Whalen

In Massachusetts, a young woman makes genetically modified E. coli in a closet she converted into a home lab. A part-time DJ in Berkeley, Calif., works in his attic to cultivate viruses extracted from sewage. In Seattle, a grad-school dropout wants to breed algae in a personal biology lab.

These hobbyists represent a growing strain of geekdom known as biohacking, in which do-it-yourselfers tinker with the building blocks of life in the comfort of their own homes. Some of them buy DNA online, then fiddle with it in hopes of curing diseases or finding new biofuels.

But are biohackers a threat to national security?

That was the question lurking behind a phone call that Katherine Aull got earlier this year. Ms. Aull, 23 years old, is designing a customized E. coli in the closet of her Cambridge, Mass., apartment, hoping to help with cancer research.

She's got a DNA "thermocycler" bought on eBay for $59, and an incubator made by combining a styrofoam box with a heating device meant for an iguana cage. A few months ago, she talked about her hobby on DIY Bio, a Web site frequented by biohackers, and her work was noted in New Scientist magazine.

That's when the phone rang. A man saying he was doing research for the U.S. government called with a few polite, pointed questions: How did she build that lab? Did she know other people creating new life forms at home?

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Plastic man's screen - Stretchable Displays

>> Monday, May 11, 2009

Technology Review - May 11, 2009, by Prachi Patel

Display drape: New printable elastic conductors made of carbon nanotubes are used to connect OLEDs in a stretchable display that can be spread over a curved surface. Credit: Takao Someya, the University

An elastic conductor makes possible cheap, conformable displays.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have moved a step closer to displays and simple computers that you can wear on your sleeve or wrap around your couch. And they have opened up the possibility of printing such devices, which would make them cheap.

Takao Someya, an electrical-engineering professor, and his colleagues make a stretchable display by connecting organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) and organic transistors with a new rubbery conductor. The researchers can spread the display over a curved surface without affecting performance. The display can also be folded in half or crumpled up without incurring any damage.

In a previous Science paper, the researchers used their elastic conductor--a mix of carbon nanotubes and rubber--to make a stretchy electronic circuit. The new version of the conductor, described online in Nature Materials, is significantly more conductive and can stretch to more than twice its original size. What's more, it can be printed. Combined with printable transistors and OLEDs, this could pave the way for rolling out large, cheap, wearable displays and electronics.

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AGI Debate: Utopia or War?

>> Sunday, May 10, 2009

AGI: The Pathway to a Much, Much Better World from Jeriaska on Vimeo.

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Create intelligence! Get paid! - DARPA solicits your help for the creation of AGI

FedBizOpps.gov - May 5, 2009

In anticipation of a potential program on the topic of Physical intelligence (PI), DARPA is hosting two Proposers' Day Workshops that will provide critical information on the program vision, the milestones, and opportunities associated with the development of interdisciplinary teams to respond to an anticipated Broad Agency Announcement (BAA). The Physical Intelligence program aspires to understand intelligence as a physical phenomenon and to make the first demonstration of the principle in electronic and chemical systems. A central tenet is that intelligence spontaneously evolves as a consequence of thermodynamics in open systems. The program plan is organized around three interrelated task areas: (1) creating a theory (a mathematical formalism) and validating it in natural and engineered systems; (2) building the first human-engineered systems that display physical intelligence in the form of abiotic, self-organizing electronic and chemical systems; and (3) developing analytical tools to support the design and understanding of physically intelligent systems. If successful, the program would launch a revolution of understanding across many fields of human endeavor, demonstrate the first intelligence engineered from first principles, create new classes of electronic, computational, and chemical systems, and create tools to engineer intelligent systems that match the problem/environment in which they will exist. Concepts relevant to the objectives of the Physical Intelligence program can be found in numerous disciplines and areas of research including statistical physics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, dissipative systems, group theory, collective behavior, complexity theory, consciousness theory, non-linear dynamical systems, complex adaptive systems, systems analysis, multi-scale modeling, control systems, information theory, computation theory, topology, electronics, evolutionary computation, cellular automata, artificial life, origin of life, microbiology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary chemistry, neuropsychology, neurophysiology, brain modeling, organizational behavior, operations research and others.

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Nailing down free will - Possible site of free will found in brain

>> Saturday, May 09, 2009

New Scientist - May 7, 2009, by Ewen Callaway

Free will, or at least the place where we decide to act, is sited in a part of the brain called the parietal cortex, new research suggests.

When a neurosurgeon electrically jolted this region in patients undergoing surgery, they felt a desire to, say, wiggle their finger, roll their tongue or move a limb. Stronger electrical pulses convinced patients they had actually performed these movements, although their bodies remained motionless.

"What it tells us is there are specific brain regions that are involved in the consciousness of your movement," says Angela Sirigu (pdf format), a neuroscientist at the CNRS Cognitive Neuroscience Centre in Bron, France, who led the study.

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This will blow the Kindle away - Color E-Paper That Rivals the Real Thing

>> Friday, May 08, 2009

Technology Review - May 8, 2009, by Duncan Graham-Rowe

Color scheme: A prototype in-plane electrophoretic display consisting of 1,000 pixels. Credit: Philips

Despite Amazon's promise to reinvent the newspaper and magazine industry with its new, large-screen Kindle DX electronic reader, some people may be reluctant to embrace the technology until full-color displays are possible. A new approach developed by Philips now offers fresh hope for color e-paper displays that are so bright and clear that even traditional liquid crystal displays (LCDs) will pale in comparison.

According to Kars-Michiel Lenssen, who headed the work at Philips Research, based in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, the new approach has the potential to create color images that are three times brighter than displays that use color filters, including LCDs. "This is the closest an electronic-paper technology ever got to printed paper," he says.

Color displays normally require four subpixels--red, green, blue, and white--to create each full-color pixel. "That costs you in terms of resolution," says Pieter van Lieshout, head of product research and development for Polymer Vision, which was spun off from Philips Electronics three years ago to develop flexible electronic-paper displays.

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Ray Kurzweil: A singular view of the future

>> Thursday, May 07, 2009

New Scientist - May 6, 2009, by Liz Else

Ray Kurzweil is not satisfied with being human, and looks forward to the Singularity when, he says, we will all develop beyond our limited biology (Image: Larry Busacca / Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival)

For inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, being human with limited intelligence and doomed biology was never good enough. So he came up with an idea called the Singularity - a time when humans merge with machines, become smart and live forever. From MIT to the White House, people either hate the idea or can't wait for it to happen. So, asks Liz Else, will any of us live long enough to see it?

When will the Singularity arrive?

By 2045, give or take. We are already a hybrid of biological and non-biological technology. A handful of people have electronic devices in their brain, for example. The latest generation allows medical software to be downloaded to a computer inside your brain. But if you consider that 25 years from now these technologies will be 100,000 times smaller and a billion times more powerful, you get some idea of what will be feasible. And even though most of us don't have computers in our bodies, they are already part of who we are.

What about people who don't want to be "trans-human"Movie Camera and merge with technology?

How many people completely reject all medical and health technology, don't wear glasses or take any medicine? People say they don't want to change themselves, but then when they get a disease they will do whatever they can to overcome it. We're not going to get from here to the world of 2030 or 2040 in one grand leap; we're going to get there through thousands of little steps. Put these steps together and ultimately the world is a different place.

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IBM's Jeopardy Contestant - The Rise of the Answerbots

>> Wednesday, May 06, 2009

h+ Magazine - May 4, 2009, by Ben Goertzel

The news media is buzzing with talk of IBM's new DeepQA project, aimed at creating a program that can beat humans at the question-answering game of Jeopardy. This is indeed exciting indeed – although, at the moment, it's a partly-completed plan rather than a demonstrated accomplishment. But let's suppose IBM succeeds at its aim. What will this really mean?

To interpret DeepQA in the proper way, one needs to grasp the notion of "AI-completeness" -- an informal concept that is central to the folklore of modern AI. Here's the basic concept behind AI-completeness: Some problems are so hard that the only way to solve them is to create an artificial entity with human-level general intelligence. These problems are AI-complete. On the other hand, some problems --- even though they're hard for humans and seem to require great general intelligence --- are actually amenable to simple, specialized approaches. These problems are not AI-complete.

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One of my best friends is a robot - How to make (robot) friends and influence people

>> Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Technology Review - May 5, 2009

The world's first robot with its own Facebook page is part of an ambitious experiment to build long-term meaningful relationships with humans

We all love robots, right? And yet that special relationship never seems to materialise. However intensely they begin, our relationships with robots gradually wane as the realisation dawns that it wasn't love that brought us together, but mere infatuation. The relationship quickly and inevitably breaks down, like the morning after a Las Vegas wedding. (Japanese researchers have even measured the decline in interaction levels as humans lose interest in robot toys.)

But building a meaningful relationship with a robot may soon get easier if Nikolaos Mavridis and pals from the Interactive Robots and Media Lab at the United Arab Emirates University have anything to do with it. They say the key to building a longer, meaningful relationship with a robot is to become embedded in the same network of shared friends and together build a pool of shared memories that you can both refer to. Just like a real friend.

So the team has created the world's first robot that does both these things--it has its own Facebook page and it can use the information it gathers from this social network in conversations with "friends".

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What's next? - The Man Who Made Gmail Says Real-Time Conversation is What's Next

>> Monday, May 04, 2009

NYT - May 1, 2009, by MARSHALL KIRKPATRICK

Paul Buchheit built the first version of Gmail in one day. Then he built the first prototype of Google's contextual advertising service Adsense, in one day as well. Now he's working on a much-watched startup called FriendFeed that he believes just brought to market the next big form of communication online: flowing, multi-person, real-time conversations.

"Realtime is often an easier and more efficient way of communicating because an entire conversation can happen in a matter of minutes or seconds. It's similar to the difference between a phone call and a series of voice mails -- the phone call occurs in realtime so the entire conversation can often be concluded very quickly. It's also critical for timely information -- for example, on our internal FriendFeed group I may post a message about running an update on the live system, and it's important that everyone see that message immediately.

One of the advantages of FriendFeed over other realtime systems such as IM is that it also works non-realtime. For example, at the end of the day I'll often browse my "best of day" view to see what the top stories and discussions of the day were."

"The open, realtime discussions that occur on FriendFeed," he says, "are going to become a major new communication medium on the same level as email, IM and blogging." That's a pretty ambitious claim, but Buchheit has the credibility to make it.

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Terminator Salvation Time? - Could the net become self-aware?

>> Sunday, May 03, 2009

New Scientist - April 30, 2009, by Michael Brooks

The internet's network structure is similar to that of the human brain (Image: ImageSource / Getty)

Yes, if we play our cards right - or wrong, depending on your perspective.

In engineering terms, it is easy to see qualitative similarities between the human brain and the internet's complex network of nodes, as they both hold, process, recall and transmit information. "The internet behaves a fair bit like a mind," says Ben Goertzel, chair of the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute, an organisation inevitably based in cyberspace. "It might already have a degree of consciousness".

Not that it will necessarily have the same kind of consciousness as humans: it is unlikely to be wondering who it is, for instance. To Francis Heylighen, who studies consciousness and artificial intelligence at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) in Belgium, consciousness is merely a system of mechanisms for making information processing more efficient by adding a level of control over which of the brain's processes get the most resources. "Adding consciousness is more a matter of fine-tuning and increasing control... than a jump to a wholly different level," Heylighen says.

How might this manifest itself? Heylighen speculates that it might turn the internet into a self-aware network that constantly strives to become better at what it does, reorganising itself and filling gaps in its own knowledge and abilities.

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The Internet's demise predicted - Beware surfers: cyberspace is filling up

>> Saturday, May 02, 2009

Times Online - April 26, 2009, by John Harlow

Internet users face regular “brownouts” that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace, according to research to be published later this year.

Experts predict that consumer demand, already growing at 60 per cent a year, will start to exceed supply from as early as next year because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry websites such as YouTube and services such as the BBC’s iPlayer.

It will initially lead to computers being disrupted and going offline for several minutes at a time. From 2012, however, PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an “unreliable toy”.

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British scientist, wrote the code that transformed a private computer network into the world wide web in 1989, the internet appeared to be a limitless resource. However, a report being compiled by Nemertes Research, a respected American think-tank, will warn that the web has reached a critical point and that even the recession has failed to stave off impending problems.

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A first step in recording TIVR? - Second Skin Captures Motion

>> Friday, May 01, 2009

Blogger's note: Total Immersion Virtual Reality is one day going to blow people's minds, perhaps literally for some early adopters. Any development that may bring that technology closer to fruition is very exciting.

Technology Review - April 29, 2009, by Kristina Grifantini

A new system could make special effects more affordable.

Researchers at MIT have developed a new system that may provide a cheaper and more efficient way to track motion. The system, called Second Skin, could be a cheaper alternative for creating special effects for movies. The researchers say that they hope it will also be used to help people monitor their own motions so that they can practice physical therapy or perfect their tai chi moves.

Traditional tracking systems involve high-speed cameras placed around a specially lit set. The subject being tracked wears special markers that reflect light emitted by the cameras. The cameras capture and record the reflected light several times a second, to track the subject's motion. When the system is used to make movies, software programs and a team of animators convert the data into an animated character. These motion-tracking systems can cost up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Alternative systems that use magnets, accelerometers, or exoskeletons are, respectively, in need of even more extensive set up and calibration, error prone, or bulky and inflexible.

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