Collective Imagination

Technology Notes

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 05:22:26 -0500

IE flaw gives hackers access to user files

The complete Symbian platform is now available for download and use under open-source licences.

Mozilla releases Thunderbird 3.1 alpha

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New US security bill passes House

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:21:03 -0500

The House today overwhelmingly passed a bill aimed at building up the United States' cybersecurity army and expertise, amid growing alarm over the country's vulnerability online.
The bill, which passed 422-5, requires the Obama administration to conduct an agency-by-agency assessment of cybersecurity workforce skills and establishes a scholarship program for undergraduate and graduate students who agree to work as cybersecurity specialists for the government after graduation.

Source

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Gates (et al) patent private decision making, may sell data

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:27:57 -0500

Bill Gates, Ray Ozzie and a bunch of other heavy-hitters from Microsoft are named as inventors on a newly issued patent for a "personal data mining" system that would analyze information and make recommendations with the goal of aiding a person's decisions and improving quality of life.

And they get to sell the data to the highest bidder, apparently. Details.

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Intelligent Robots Evolving

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:04:48 -0500

Adaptive behaviors evolve rather indirectly. If you look under the hood of a car you can see the physical mechanisms that convert exploding fuel into forward motion, and it all makes sense. Each part has an obvious, engineered role. But if you look under the hood of a cell, you will find that things are very quirky, because a lot of genetically specified molecules are doing things distinctly different from the tasks associated with various ancestral forms of those molecules.

And when it comes to neurologically specified behavior, things get even quirkier. The relationship between neural systems and externally visible behavior is very rarely "sensible" in any human-percieved way, and if we add in genetic components it is even stranger.

A recent essay in PLoS Biology explores this idea in relation to Robots that undergo Darwinian selection.

This short paper is very much worth a read. Go have a look and come back and comment!

This is about Intelligent Design, in a way.

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Let's give this hand a hand!

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 20:34:03 -0500

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"The Information Age is Over"

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 08:45:28 -0500

The Information Age is over - What's next?

At a time in history with unprecedented access to global information streams, it may seem odd to some that the "Information Age" is already behind us. Traditionally a period of history can be characterized by the dominant technology that separates the leaders from the followers. Today is no exception. Power and influence is often associated with those that master the novel technology and rapid changes in economic and/or political fortunes soon ripple across societies. The dawn of the "Industrial Age" coincided with global changes in how physical materials were transformed and distributed. The costs of manufacturing and distribution plummeted raising the standard of living for many. The commoditization of material goods began and the control of capital, raw material sources, and production capacity reshaped the thinking of the day.

The "Information Age" extended this paradigm to a world focused on planning, forecasting, and predictability. Data and information were often expensive to produce, manage, and manipulate by hand, so mainframes took over and created a world dominated by computation speed and efficiency. However, as the underlying technologies improved and were reduced in cost, the application of computing evolved toward a more distributed framework. Once again, the commoditization of technology changed the nature of how value was being created and how benefits would be recognized. Data flows are now expanding exponentially - driven by computing machines, digital imagers, intelligent devices, and RFID tags that have become ubiquitous and interlinked through multi-tiered networks.

Dawn of the "Systems Age"

As the amount of information and data expands exponentially, the value of any average datum is being reduced to near zero. Intelligent systems will be increasingly responsible for sensing, collecting, and manipulating data in near real-time with little to no human supervision. More importantly, most discrete data will be actively forgotten once it has passed through filters and pattern recognition systems that ultimately feed into a new type of system memory. Decision making ability will no longer require perfect recall of every piece of data (There is often simply too much information to process in a tractable, timely manner).

A simple extension of the logic behind Metcalfe's "law", suggests that the value of any telecommunications network is some power function of the number of connected users/devices. Intelligent devices/machines will ultimately dominate many of the networks we use today, and create value in an automated fashion. Traditional decision engines will be augmented with sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms and high-level reasoning and learning capability. Ultimately a type of machine "self-awareness" will be developed in response to the enormous amount of locally generated, near-real time data available for processing and sharing. The first generation of lightweight interactive intelligent machines that behave in this way are already around us in the form of smart phones and GPS-enabled telematics devices. Networks of these devices will form a cloud of knowledge that can be shared and traded based on a fluid set of value propositions.

The "Systems Age" will spawn a type of social networking for machines where the opportunities for value creation will no longer be limited to purely physical transformations of matter, but rather to the overall efficiency of compute power, network configuration, decision management, and idea creation. Rather than strive for the impossible goal of perfect predictability, the "Systems Age" paradigm accepts the inevitable uncertainty in the world and quickly responds to it. Since readily available computing power continues to increase at an exponential rate, while the cost of computation continues to plummet, those that fail to incorporate the value of "Systems Thinking" into their products, services and future vision will soon be at a great technological disadvantage.

Next time we will look at some new products and technology based on this philosophy.

Suggested reading for perspective:
Between Human and Machine : Feedback, Control and Computing before Cybernetics by David A. Mindell
The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London 2002

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Face Recognition at The Mall

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:45:56 -0500

THE retail giant Westfield is considering introducing controversial face recognition technology at its Penrith shopping centre in Sydney's west.
Unlike closed circuit television (CCTV), the identification system matches images captured by surveillance cameras to an existing database of faces.

The Herald understands Westfield is considering upgrading its already advanced CCTV to include the biometric technology in its security measures.

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Popeye, the robot with brains not brawn

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 23:44:10 -0500

European researchers have developed a new approach to artificial intelligence that could empower computers to respond intelligently to human behaviour as well as commands.
The dramatic rise in raw computing power due to parallel computing, super-clusters and the like, has meant that computers are now extremely adept at performing complex computational tasks that once bogged down mainframes and server farms for days. Pattern recognition, in particular, has reaped the benefits; faces from surveillance cameras can be identified and compared in real time; robotic dogs can recognise and track a "football" in the Robotic World Cup; and our voices can be interpreted with an unprecedented degree of accuracy, enabling robots and computers to respond to our every command.

read the rest

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Man Controls Cybernetic Hand With Thoughts

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 02:51:47 -0500

"Scientists in Italy announced Wednesday that Pierpaolo Petruzziello, a 26-year-old Italian who had lost his left forearm in a car accident, was successfully linked to an artificial limb that was controlled by electrodes implanted in his arm and connected to the median and ulnar nerves. He has learned to control the artificial limb with his mind. According to CNet, Petruzziello says he could feel sensations in it, as if the lost arm had grown back again. The BBC has a brief video showing the arm in operation."

at Slashdot

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Are Video Games Artificially Intelligent?

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:01:38 -0500

Obviously yes. In a way.

Julia and I play Super Mario Kart on the Wii. This is a racing game where we select a vehicle and race on one of several possible courses against either ghosts, robots, or real people located elsewhere in the world. It occurs to me that we are carrying out a Turing Test every time we do this.

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Your Future in Cyberspace: Artificially Intelligent Journalism

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 11:11:47 -0500

This is a summary of a paper that explores, in great depth and detail, the role of technologies that use digitally managed personal information to shape the content and direct the delivery of content in a journalistic setting. The most important conclusions of this paper are: New technologies obviate the media but not the journalist or the receiver of the information; and this ... the use of your private electronic information to determine what part of Cyberspace you will experience and how ... is inevitable.

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Self-Improving Artificial Intelligence

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 12:56:44 -0500

October 24, 2007 lecture by Steve Omohundro for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380). Steve presents fundamental principles that underlie the operation of "self-improving systems," i.e., computer software and hardware that improve themselves by learning from their own operations.

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Is the IBM Cat Brain real?

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:00:32 -0500

You will recall that not everyone in this blog community quite bought into the Cat Brain simulation by IBM reported last week (see this post). Well, skepticism is developing about this report.

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When Robot Programmers get bored

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:58:32 -0500

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Chips in brains will control computers by 2020

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:48:28 -0500

Is this the new "Flying Car" .... a technology that we are promised again and again but never materializes? Or am I just going to wake up one day and the chip will have been implanted ...

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