Saturday, June 30, 2012

Artificial brain with billion connections

Google has done the unthinkable — the creation of an ‘artificial brain’ from 16,000 computer processors, with more than a billion connections.


The team led by Google’s Jeff Dean then fed it random images culled from 10 million YouTube videos — and let it ‘learn’ by itself.


Surprisingly, the machine focused in on cats. “We never told it during the training ‘this is a cat’,” said Dean. “It basically invented the concept of a cat.”


The revelation


“Contrary to what appears to be a widely-held intuition, our experimental results reveal that it is possible to train a face detector without having to label images as containing a face or not,” says the team.


“We also find that the same network is sensitive to other high-level concepts such as cat faces and human bodies.”


“Starting with these learned features, we trained our network to obtain 15.8 per cent accuracy in recognizing 20,000 object categories from Image Net, a leap of 70 per cent relative improvement over the previous state-of-the-art,” it said,Daily Mail reports.


The ‘brain’ was a creation of the company’s ‘blue sky ideas’ lab, Google X, reportedly located in Google’s Mountain View, California, headquarters — known as ‘the Googolplex.’


Engineers are free to work on projects such as connected fridges that order groceries when they run low — or even tableware that can connect to social networks.


Other Google engineers have reportedly researched ideas as far-out as elevators to space.





Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.



Related articles

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

A wearable robot helps disabled people walk

“It’s a nice feeling to be upright, to walk and to have people at eye level,” said a beaming Peter Kossmehl at the Potsdam Rehabilitation Centre in Germany. The 40-year-old from the German state of Brandenburg had just tried out a bionic exoskeleton — a wearable, battery-powered robot — that enables paraplegics to take a few steps again.


The rehab centre is one of the first facilities in Europe to test the robot, called Ekso and made by Ekso Bionics. The California-based company introduced Ekso in the fall of 2011. Now it is to be tested worldwide on paraplegics, stroke and multiple sclerosis patients and other people with lower-extremity paralysis or weakness.


“In Germany, only patients in Aachen have tested the robot Ekso so far — that was a few weeks ago,” said company spokesman Bastian Schink. After them, eight people in Potsdam strapped on and tried out the approximately 23-kilogram exoskeleton. With the help of sensors in its foot units, weight shifts are converted into steps.


“I’d like to give my patients the opportunity to stand erect again as soon as possible,” said Bettina Quentin, director of physiotherapy at the rehab center south of Berlin. But Quentin, like many experts, warns against excessive expectations.


“People who function well with their wheelchair will always be faster in them than with the exoskeleton,” said Jan Schwab, head of spinal cord injury research at the Charite University Hospital’s Department of Experimental Neurology in Berlin. “The psychological benefits of a patient standing upright shouldn’t be underestimated, though.” The reactions of the Potsdam patients appeared to confirm this. “I’m not walking by myself,” he remarked. “It’s only passive walking.” Kossmehl, too, thinks more development work is needed. “But it’s just the right aid for the rehab center,” he said.


In the view of Ruediger Rupp, director of the Department of Experimental Neurorehabilitation in the Paraplegiology Clinic at Heidelberg University Hospital, the robot is no substitute for a wheelchair, especially considering that it is not suitable for all patients.


There are about 60,000 paraplegics in Germany, “of whom fewer than 10 per cent are candidates (for the robot),” he said. “That’s a very select group.” Someone who can hardly move his or her torso, for example, would have great difficulties with the robot.





Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.



Related articles

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Quote for the day: 30-06-2012

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.~ Lao-Tzu




Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.
Related articles

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Fact for the day: 30-06-2012

One million domain names are registered every month!!!

In a recent survey conducted by security specialist Symantec of the 100 most unsafe and malware infested web sites, 48 per cent of them feature adult content.

Bit torrents, depending on location, are estimated to consume 27 to 55 per cent of all internet bandwidth as of February 2009.

Domain registration was free until the National Science Foundation decided to change this on September 14th, 1995.

Employees at Google are encouraged to use 20 percent of their time working on their own projects. Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this working model.

Someone is a victim of a cybercrime every 10 seconds, and it is on the rise.

The first software to be imported from Soviet Union to the US was Tetris, developed by Alexey Pazhitov in 1985.




Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.
Related articles

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Google Builds Artificial Brain Which Can Recognize A Cat

The Google X laboratory has invented some pretty cool stuff: refrigerators that can order groceries when your food runs low, elevators that can perhaps reach outer space, self-driving cars. So it’s no surprise that their most recent design is the most advanced, highest functioning, most awesome invention ever… a computer that likes watching YouTube cats?


Okay, it’s a bit more advanced than that. Several years ago, Google scientists began creating a neural network for machine learning. The technique Google X employed for this project is called the “deep learning,” a method defined by its massive scale. In layman’s terms, they connected 16,000 computer processors and let the network they created roam free on the Internet so as to simulate a human brain learning.


Stanford University computer scientist Andrew Y. Ng, led the Google team in feeding the neural network 10 million random digital images from YouTube videos. The machine was not “supervised,” i.e. it was not told what a cat is or what features a cat has; it simply looked at the data randomly fed to it. Ng found that there was a small part of the computer’s “brain” that taught itself to recognize felines. “It basically invented the concept of a cat,” Google fellow Jeff Dean told the New York Times.


So Google may have created a machine that can teach itself. But what Ng and his team have done is not as new as you may think. Over the years, as the scale of software simulations has grown, machine learning systems have advanced; last year, Microsoft scientists suggested that the “deep learning” technique could be used to build computer systems to understand human speech. This Google X machine is the cream of the crop—twice as accurate as any other machine before it. However, “it is worth noting that our network is still tiny compared to the human visual cortex,” the researchers wrote, “which is a million times larger in terms of the number of neurons and synapses.”


After “viewing” random pictures from random YouTube videos, the neural network created a digital image of a cat based on its “memory” of the shapes it saw in the images. The cat the computer created is not any specific cat, but what the computer imagines to be a cat. Plato had his Forms, and now Google has its computer-generated cat image.





Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.



Related articles

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Race against time when a minute lasts 61 seconds!

leap_second


Horologists around the world on Saturday will carry out one of the weirdest operations of their profession: they will hold back time.


The last minute of June 30, 2012 is destined to be 61 seconds long, for timekeepers are to add a “leap second” to compensate for the wobbly movements of our world.


The ever-so-brief halting of the second hand will compensate for a creeping divergence from solar time, meaning the period required for Earth to complete a day. The planet takes just over 86,400 seconds for a 360-degree revolution. But it wobbles on its axis and is affected by the gravitational pull of the Sun and Moon and the ocean tides, all of which brake the rotation by a tiny sliver of a second.


As a result, Earth gets out of step with International Atomic Time (TAI), which uses the pulsation of atoms to measure time to an accuracy of several billionths of a second.


To avoid solar time and TAI moving too far apart, the widely used indicator of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is adjusted every so often to give us the odd 86,401-second day.


The adjustments began in 1972. Before then, time was measured exclusively by the position of the Sun or stars in relation to Earth, expressed in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) or its successor UT1. This will be the 25th intervention to add a “leap second” to UTC.


TAI is kept by several hundred atomic clocks around the world, measuring fluctuations in the atom of the chemical element caesium that allows them to divide a single second into 10 billion smaller bits. Every time the discrepancy between TAI and UT1 becomes too big, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service jumps into action and announces a “leap second”. The extra second is added to UTC, also known as Zulu time, only ever at midnight, either on a December 31 or a June 30.





Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.



Related articles

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Friday, June 29, 2012

Android 4.1 Jelly Bean: Tour & Features Walkthrough [video]











Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.
Related articles

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

Graffiti battery lets you spray paint power supply

graffiti_battery


Run out of batteries? Just spray-paint some new ones. Researchers have created five spray able paints that form a lithium-ion battery when layered together, letting you store energy on walls, tiles or even your favorite mug.


Regular batteries contain a positive and negative electrode, both paired with a metal current collector, and a polymer separator sandwiched in the middle. These five layers are normally manufactured in sheets and rolled up into a cylinder, making it hard to create extremely thin batteries.


Now, Neelam Singh and colleagues at Rice University in Houston have used a combination of existing metallic paints and custom materials to create spray able versions of each layer, allowing them to make batteries just a fraction of a millimeter thick by airbrushing the layers onto a surface, one at a time.


The team applied their batteries to a variety of ordinary building materials and even a ceramic drinks mug to test their potential. Nine bathroom tile batteries charged by a solar cell were able to power 40 LEDs arranged to spell out "RICE" for six hours. They don't yet match regular batteries – a paintable battery would have to be about 1.5 square feet to match a standard mobile phone battery – but that is set to improve. "Their capacity, efficiency and performance could be vastly improved if made on an industrial scale," explains Singh.


Pairing the batteries with recently developed paintable solar cells could potentially give your walls an electrifying DIY makeover, but Singh says the paints are not quite ready for home use, as paints must be applied in a moisture- and oxygen-free environment onto surfaces heated to 120 °C.


"The focus of our ongoing research is to develop new battery materials which would not be degraded by air or moisture, non-toxic and safe to handle and use at home by non-experts, and environmentally friendly during use and disposal," says Singh. Only then will you be able to pick up a few spray cans and build your own batteries.


"I don't think people will be doing this at home, but maybe secondary manufacturers would be painting on batteries," says John Owen, a chemist who researches batteries at the University of Southampton, UK. For example, there are already companies that will gold-plate your iPhone – perhaps they could also add an extra battery coating.





Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.



Related articles

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

Google Now assistant knows what you need, right now








Yesterday's Google I/O event saw the company make a big push into hardware with the announcement of a new tablet, media player and a sky-diving demonstration of its augmented reality glasses, but the search giant also leveraged its software chops and massive piles of user data to cook up a rival to Apple's Siri: Google Now.


While the iPhone's personal assistant is designed to listen to and answer your queries, Google Now supposedly knows what you want before you even ask. Coming as part of the latest Android 4.1 update, it uses everything Google knows about you to provide relevant information at all times - a vision that Google engineers first outlined in 2010.


For example, if you've got an appointment entered into Google Calendar, Now will use your transport preferences in combination with your current location and local traffic conditions to let you know when to leave so you arrive on time. Or, if you are scheduled to take a flight that has since been delayed, Google Now will tell you there is enough time for your regular lunchtime gym workout.


Of course, for Google Now to work you have to be prepared to hand over your entire life to Google's services, but many Android users have already done so. Google also says that users will be able to opt-in to the level of personalization they prefer, meaning it should be possible to avoid any embarrassing notifications based on your late-night web searches.





Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.



Related articles

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

AI system helps spot signs of copper cable theft

copper_cable_theft


The industrial-scale theft of copper telecommunications cables is a massive problem: in the UK alone, cable worth £770 million was stolen from overhead and buried telephone lines and railway signalling systems last year.


Now an artificially-intelligent sensing system is helping to prevent such thefts in the UK, the Adaptive and Resilient Systems workshop in London heard last week.


"It's proven absolutely fantastic," says Luke Beeson, general manager for cable theft prevention at British Telecom (BT). "Police in Kent, London and South Yorkshire have made arrests thanks to the system – and although cables are still being cut, fewer are being stolen because we are getting to the scene quicker. And that means people's phones are back on line faster."


Cable theft doesn't only cause extended internet, phone, cable TV and cash machine outages – it also shuts down railway networks for hours and, sometimes, days.



Rich rewards

The ill-gotten rewards can be high. Metal thieves need only cut a cable in a street cabinet while an accomplice a kilometer away does the same. Then they winch the cable onto a truck. That kilometer of cable can fetch £20,000 on the scrap metal market. Even fiber optic cable is not immune from theft-related outages: thieves mistake it for shielded copper and take it anyway, or they damage nearby high-capacity fibers while stealing copper, Beeson says.


The technological countermeasure adopted by BT is an AI algorithm installed in its national network monitoring center – a secure facility in a secret UK location – which it has rolled out over the past three months.


Called the Rapid Assessment BT Incident Tracker – RABIT – the chunk of code monitors all 120 million kilometers of cable on BT's phone network. RABIT is a real-time system based on a neural network that has been trained to sense the difference between a telecoms cable being severed and a cable that has gradually failed – perhaps due to corrosion, falling trees, water seeping in, or perhaps incursion by farming machinery. It does this by undertaking line tests and bandwidth measurements to home in on a telltale signature of a cable cut.


This event data is then immediately plugged into a geospatial incident monitoring system called Saturn, which gives BT security staff a national view of trouble spots on its networks, including cyber attacks. Saturn also uses AI routines to spot patterns.



Catch the culprits

"This lets us plot patterns of activity as the cable thieves move across the country, showing the hot spots and letting you predict where they'll go next," says Robert Ghanea-Hercock, chief security researcher at BT's lab in Ipswich, UK.


"The target response time we're aiming for is 15 minutes, which is what the police say they need to catch them before they take the cable," he adds. However, so as not to aid the bad guys, BT is not saying what the response time is right now.


The encouraging news from BT's use of the system has inspired the UK's national railway provider, Network Rail, to explore technical measures to prevent theft of lineside signalling cable. BT's system cannot be used on the railways because the types of signals carried are too different, says Rachel Lowe at Network Rail in York.


"We are looking at a number of measures, from CCTV to marking cables – and various detection systems from third-party security companies are being assessed," she says.


One measure that hasn't worked so far, she says, is acoustic sensors. "They get false alarms from foxes and rabbits."





Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.



Related articles

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Fact of the day: 29-06-2012

Google claims that it takes about 1 kJ of energy to answer the typical search query.

Rooftop solar panels adorning the Googleplex generate enough electricity to power 1,000 California homes.

Harper's estimates that Google's data center in The Dalles, Ore. sucks up enough energy to power the city of Tacoma, Wash.



Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.
Related articles

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

Question of the day: 29-06-2012

How many bones are humans born with?
A) 85                 B) 102

C) 206              D) 300




Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.
Related articles

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Quote for the day: 29-06-2012

Love will find a way through paths where wolves fear to prey.

~ Lord Byron




Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.
Related articles

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Robot beats humans at rock-paper-scissors every time










The robot wars have begun, and no matter how fast you choose your weapon - rock, paper, or scissors - the robot will beat you every time.
The three-fingered robotic hand developed by Ishikawa Oku's lab at the University of Tokyo has a dirty secret: it cheats. A high-speed video camera runs at over 1000 frames per second and watches your wrist and fingers as you begin to form the shape. The robot's visual recognition program needs only one millisecond to figure out which shape your hand will take, and choose the one that will beat you.
When the human player in the video above tries to change his shape at the last minute, it still can't fool the robot at the game, which is called janken in Japan. Its timing is so precise that it never shows its hand too early, and it wins 100 per cent of the time.
This kind of high speed vision may have a more practical use than arming robots so they'll always get to bat first at robot baseball. Robots can recognize speech in real time by the forms the human mouth takes, cooperate with humans performing precision tasks that take two, and maybe intervene in an accident before it happens. The janken game is an early example of what Oku's lab calls "meta-perception": the Sherlock Holmes-like ability of machines to pick up information humans would miss.





Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.



Related articles

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Question for the day: 28-06-2012

When was the first cell phone call made?
A) 1958          B) 1965

C) 1973           D) 1982




Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.
Related articles

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , ,

Fact for the day: 28-06-2012

The chairman of IBM Thomas Watson infamously predicted that there was a total world market of only 5 computers!!!!!!!!

All the three letter word combinations from aaa.com to zzz.com are already registered as domain names.

The microprocessor was invented in 1971. The creation was considered a computer on a chip.

Jim Knopf is known as the 'father of shareware'. The first shareware program was PC-FILE, in 1982 which Knopf published under the pseudonym Jim Button.

The first digital camera was designed by a Kodak engineer by the name of Steven Sasson. It weight 3.6 kg and was the size of a toaster.

In 1995, Iomega Corp went from $3.5 a share to $48.63 for a gain of 1396%. This made it the company to have the greatest percentage gain of all NASFAQ high-tech stocks ever.




Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.
Related articles

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Quote for the day: 28-06-2012

Great minds have purposes; others have wishes.

~ Washington Irving




Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.
Related articles

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Question for the day: 27-06-2012

Which state quarter features Helen Keller?
A) Connecticut          B) Arkansas

C) Alabama                D) Mississippi




Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.
Related articles

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Quote for the day: 27-06-2012

Don't fight a battle if you don't gain anything by winning.

~ George S. Patton




Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.
Related articles

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Fact for the day: 27-06-2012

Every minute 35 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.


35 hours of video every minute. 2100 hours of video every hour. 50400 hours of video every day.

Total number of Instant Messaging users by 2010 is 2.4 billion !


That includes all the instant messaging tools usage, like Google Talk, Yahoo messenger, Skype etc.

Total number of Twitter users by 2010 = 175 million !


Which means 175 million people are involved in random talk and tweeting in 140 characters. Now, who’s denying ?

250 million New people registered on Facebook in 2010


Imagine, if every year, 250 million people added up ?

70% of Facebook’s user base is outside the U.S


Facebook has become truly a global phenomenon now. Isn’t it ?

By 2010, there are more than 5 Billion mobile connections in the world !


Mobile applications, anyone ?

The average number of videos an Internet user in U.S watches on the internet = 186


This is pretty much close to the rest of the world, but what’s more interesting is that the source is Facebook and YouTube.

The average number of photos uploaded on Facebook per year = 36 billion.


That’s very less compared to Flickr, but its interesting to see Facebook eating up to other specialized social media channels like YouTube and Flickr with its content.

Number of new users on Twitter in 2010 = 100 Million


Clearly, after Facebook, Twitter is the most fast growing website on the internet today.

The most popular browser on the internet today is Internet Explorer, despite fierce competition from Firefox and Chrome.


Another true fact: we cannot download other browser without IE.



Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.
Related articles

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Bot with boyish personality wins biggest Turing test

Eugene Goostman, a chatbot imbued with the personality of a 13 year old boy, won the biggest Turing test ever staged, on 23 June, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing.
Held at Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes, UK, where Turing cracked the Nazi Enigma code during World War 2, the test involved over 150 separate conversations, 30 judges (including myself), 25 hidden humans and five elite, chattering software programs.
By contrast, the most famous Turing test - the annual Loebner prize, also held at Bletchley Park this year to honor Turing - typically involves just four human judges and four machines.
"With 150 Turing tests conducted, this is the biggest Turing test contest ever," says Huma Shah, a researcher at the University of Reading, UK, who organized the mammoth test.
That makes the result more statistically significant than any other previous Turing test, says Eugene's creator Vladimir Veselov based in Raritan, New Jersey. "It was a pretty huge number of conversations," he said, shortly after he was awarded first prize: "I am very excited."
First conceived by Turing in the early 1950s, the test is the most famous evaluation of machine intelligence. Human judges converse via a text interface with both hidden bots and humans - and say in each case whether they are chatting to a human or machine.
Turing said that a machine that fooled humans into thinking it was human 30 per cent of the time would have beaten the test. Just short of this, Eugene fooled its judges 29 per cent of the time. In a close second place, came JFred, the brain child of Robby Garner, and in third place Rollo Carpenter's Cleverbot. The other two bots to compete were Ultra Hal and Elbot.
Unlike several of Eugene's rivals, which put together sentences by imitating people they have spoken to before or by searching through Twitter transcripts for conversational ideas, Veselov has given his bot a consistent and specific personality. "He has created very much a person where Cleverbot is everybody," says Carpenter.
Eugene's character is that of a 13 year-old boy living in Odessa, Ukraine. He has a pet guinea pig and a father who is a gynecologist. Is 13 years old about the right age for a chatbot, then? "Thirteen years old is not too old to know everything and not too young to know nothing," explains Veselov.
A veteran of the Loebner prize and the Chatterbox challenge , Eugene was due a win. "We took second place several times but never were we the winners," says Veselov.
Did having a personality give him an advantage? "I think any appearance of a particular personality is likely to have a persuasive effect on judges," says John Barnden, an AI researcher specializing in machine understanding of metaphor at the University of Birmingham, UK, and a fellow judge.
He cautions against concluding that this was Eugene's edge, however - for that you would have to compare two versions of the same bot, but in one case with personality suppressed.
"In my own case it's not so much personality in the abstract that's key as how the system responds to a comment - is the response relevant and non-vacuous?" he adds.
I can sympathize with that: in some cases I knew it was a machine because the entity didn't seem to follow the sense of the conversation. I was however, delighted by how funny, and zany some of the conversations with beings that I labeled as bots (Disclaimer: the best judge award is still to be awarded so I don't actually know how often I was right). They also forced me to consider in a new way, just what it is that makes humans human.






Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author:” Sudharsun. P. R.
Related articles

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

Infolinks In Text Ads