Tomorrow is Today

The cost of both decoding DNA and synthesizing new DNA strands… is falling about five times as fast as computing power is increasing under Moore’s Law, which has accurately predicted that chip performance will double roughly every two years. Those involved in synthetic biology, who often favor computer analogies, might say it’s becoming exponentially easier to read from, and write into, the source code of life.

These underlying technology trends, says Church, are leading to an explosion in experimentation of a sort that would have been inconceivable only a few years ago.

Up to now, it’s proved stubbornly difficult to turn synthetic biology into a practical technology that can create products like cheap biofuels. Scientists have found that the “code of life” is far more complex and difficult to crack than anyone might have imagined a decade ago.

What’s more, while rewriting the code is easier than ever, getting it right isn’t. Researchers and entrepreneurs have found ways to coax bacteria or yeast to make many useful compounds, but it has been difficult to optimize such processes so that the microbes produce significant quantities efficiently enough to compete with existing commercial products.

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No one likes going to the doctor. There’s the inevitable wait in the waiting room before eventually being ushered into the office of the harried doctor who spends most of his day dealing with relatively minor complaints or simple follow-up visits. Then, of course, there’s the bill. But what if patients could get a check up without having to actually visit the doctor? A smart T-shirt fitted with various sensors is designed to do just that.

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 gynaecologist. Is 13 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 specialising 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.

Humphreys and company were recently invited by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to demonstrate whether their capability to successfully spoof commercial GPS systems in the laboratory could work in the field.

Spoofing, as defined in this article by UT researchers, is “the transmission of matched-GPS-signal-structure interference in an attempt to commandeer the tracking loops of a victim receiver and thereby manipulate the receiver’s timing or navigation solution. A spoofer can transmit its counterfeit signals from a stand-off distance of several hundred meters or it can be co-located with its victim.”

The UT researchers took equipment costing about $1000 to the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico last week and showed observers from both the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and DHS how control of a test drone could be taken away from its original overseers. The UT researchers, as the above article notes, have been able to take control of basically every type of unencrypted commercial GPS system in their laboratory.