Turing Machine Made of Artificial Muscles Paves Way for Smart Prosthetics and Soft Robots
In the hierarchy of computing hardware, artificial muscle doesn’t really even register: it’s usually a target for action, not the perpetrator.
The University of Auckland has figured out a way to let those muscles play a more active role. Its prototype Turing machine uses a set of electroactive polymer muscles to push memory elements into place and squeeze piezoresistive switches, performing virtually any calculation through flexing.
The proof-of-concept computer won’t give silicon circuits any threat when it’s running at just 0.15Hz and takes up as much space as a mini fridge, but the hope is to dramatically speed up and shrink down future iterations to where there are advanced computers that occupy the same size as real muscles.
Researchers ultimately envision smart prosthetic limbs with near-natural reflexes, completely soft robots with complex gestures and even a switch from digital to analog computing for some tasks. Although we’re quite a distance away from any of those muscle-bound ideas becoming everyday realities, it’s good to at least see them on the horizon.
(via Turing machine built from artificial muscles may lead to smart prosthetics)
Australian Computer Scientists Develop Digital Face to Add Emotion to Synthesized Speech
How it works is, the user types a phrase for Zoe to say. Six sliders allow you to set the emotions; for example, you could combine happiness and anger, setting them to halfway or full strength, depending on what you want her to convey. Then you can slow down or speed up her speech, giving a pretty large array of tone.
When tested with a group of 20 volunteers, they were able to accurately guess the emotion 77 per cent of the time — more than with the real-life Zoë, with whom the success rate was 73 per cent.
The team sees Zoe being used in the future as a personal assistant, but there are other potential applications as well, because the framework for the face is very light — tens of MBs — which means that it can be incorporated into small devices. It could also enable people to upload their own faces and voices into the program; the team envisions these being used as sort of “face messages” rather than text messages.
(via Virtual talking head can express human emotions - Crave)
Meet Spaun: Canada’s Advanced Brain Simulator
Spaun’s brain consists of 2.5 million neurons that are broken down into a bunch of simulated cranial subsystems, including the prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, and thalamus, which are wired together with simulated neurons that very accurately mimic the wiring of a real human brain.
The basic idea is that these subsystems behave very similarly to a real brain: Visual input is processed by the thalamus, the data is stored in the neurons, and then the basal ganglia fires off a task to a part of the cortex that’s designed to handle that task. All of this computation is performed in a physiologically accurate way, with simulated voltage spikes and neurotransmitters. Even the limitations of the human brain are simulated… with Spaun struggling to store more than a few numbers in its short-term memory.
The end result is a brain that is mechanistically simple… but which is surprisingly flexible. By implementing just a handful of very basic tasks, it’s interesting to see how complex behavior begins to emerge. There are some tantalizing hints as to how the brain evolved: starting with simple tasks, and then building upon and weaving them together to build complex functionality. In the video below, Spaun recognizes the pattern of a number sequence — the kind of question you would find on an actual IQ test.
(via Spaun, the most realistic artificial human brain yet | ExtremeTech)
Computer That Stores And Processes Information At The Same Time Is A Key Milestone on the Road to Brain Emulation
At the heart of this new form of computing are the memristor, memcapacitor and meminductor, fundamental electronic components that store information while operating as resistors, capacitors and inductors respectively.
These devices were predicted theoretically in the 1970s but only manufactured for the first time in 2008, so they are new kids on the electronics block.
Physicists immediately recognised the ability of so-called memelements to mimic biological computing and various groups have designed and built chips to exploit this idea…
But the properties of memelements that make them so good at biological computing has been hard to pin down. Which is where Di Ventra and Pershin come in. These guys have distilled the essential properties that ought to allow memelements to match the brain’s performance. They say these properties include the ability to store information over long periods; the ability to act collectively so that the state of a memdevice as a whole depends on the states of all its memelements; a robustness against noise and small imperfections; and so on.
(via The Computer That Stores and Processes Information At the Same Time | MIT Technology Review)
Bletchley Park Turns on Worlds Oldest Working Computer 60 Years Later
The computer, originally called Harwell but now called the Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell (WITCH), was originally powered up in 1951 (pictured above). Between 1952 and 1957 the computer was used for early atomic research, and then it was given to Wolverhampton University, where it remained in operation until 1973. Between 1973 and 1997 it was on display at a museum in Birmingham, and then it disappeared into storage, only to be discovered by chance in 2009.
Over the last three years, WITCH has been lovingly restored to its original glory — and now it’s on display at Bletchley, powered up and working its way through some original 1950s computer programs.
(via World’s oldest original digital computer is turned back on after 61 years | ExtremeTech)
Algorithm Analyzing Artistic Style Identifies Same Patterns as Art Historians
Computer scientists Computer scientists… have developed a program that analyzes paintings in a manner similar to how expert art historians perform their analysis, and conducted an experiment that showed that machines can outperform untrained humans in the analysis of fine art.
In the experiment, the researchers used approximately 1, 000 paintings of 34 well-known artists, and let the computer algorithm analyze the similarity between them based solely on the visual content of the paintings, and without any human guidance.
Surprisingly, the computer provided a network of similarities between painters that is largely in agreement with the perception of art historians.
I take this research with a grain of salt: the algorithm seems to have detected the patterns it was designed to detect. I would have been more excited if it drew a new connection that human art experts found interesting.
State-Sponsored Malware Serving as Template For New Civilian Attacks
“They are copying the design philosophy,” says Schouwenberg, adding that one now-popular technique found in conventional “criminal malware” was inspired by the discovery of Stuxnet.
For example, Stuxnet installed fake device drivers using digital security certificates stolen from two Taiwanese computer component companies, allowing them to sneak past any security software. Other malware now uses fake certificates in a similar way to hide malicious software from antivirus programs.
“Stuxnet was the first really serious malware with a stolen certificate, and it’s become more and more common ever since,” says Schouwenberg. “Nowadays you can see use of fake certificates in very common malware.”
Aviv Raff, chief technology officer and cofounder of Israeli computer security firm Seculert, agrees. “Design features of Stuxnet, Duqu, and Flame are appearing in opportunistic criminal malware,” he says.
(via Stuxnet Tricks Copied by Computer Criminals - Technology Review)
Robo Grading: Another Reason to Send Your Kids to Private School
Since 2009, Utah has used computers to grade essays on a state student-assessment test. And testing companies use essay-evaluating software as one of two graders on graduate-school admissions exams such as the GRE.
But how well, really, can a computer grade an essay? To find out, Mark Shermis, an education researcher at the University of Akron, ran 22,029 standardized middle- and high-school essays through software from eight companies (plus one open-source algorithm).
The programs, which generally track content, organization and style, generated results indistinguishable from those of humans—just much faster. With that kind of efficiency, robot graders could mean more homework for students everywhere.
If AI grades papers similarly to human teachers, it’s hard to imagine that cash-strapped public schools won’t adopt robo-grading en masse.
What’s missing in these kinds of studies is the reality that a human teacher reads and grades an essay and then returns to the classroom and works with the student to improve, based on what she saw in the paper she graded.
Unfortunately, the public school of the future is likely to be rows and rows of students sitting in front of monitors, working on “customized” lesson plans, generated and evaluated by computers, with one or more adult proctors maintaining discipline.
This means, in wealthy communities there will be more, and better trained human teachers in smaller classrooms using newer technology. Conversely in poorer communities there will be fewer teachers - glorified corrections officers - working in huge rooms full of old, poorly maintained computers with out-of-date software.
Only kids whose parents can afford to send them to private school will get real teaching and real human interaction during the school day.
(via Robo-Grading Programs Judge Student Essays Better Than Humans Do | Popular Science)
Major Quantum Computing Milestone Hit: Shows How Much Remains to Be Done
Believe it or not, deriving that 15=3x5 with 48% accuracy is a big deal.
For the first time, a functional solid-state quantum computer has completed a fairly simple math problem, factoring a prime number into its constituent parts. The solution itself isn’t that great an accomplishment — it was the number 15 — but it’s a major leap for quantum computers, because it’s a step toward factoring much larger numbers.
…The team built a quantum circuit made of four superconducting qubits, which are the logic gates of a quantum system, on top of a substrate made of sapphire. It also contained five microwave resonators. The fabrication itself was a breakthrough, because organizing nine separate quantum pieces required very precise, automated construction methods.
The qubits were entangled and verified using quantum experiments. Then the team used this circuit to factor 15 using Peter Shor’s factoring algorithm. That code says for any given integer N, the computer must find its prime factors. But it does this quantum-fast, finding the solution exponentially faster than the quickest known classical factoring algorithm.
(via Quantum Processor Calculates That 15 = 3x5 (With Almost 50% Accuracy!) | Popular Science)
Algorithm Tracks Epidemics, Crime Back to the Source
Investigators are well aware of how difficult it is to trace an unlawful act to its source. The job was arguably easier with old, Mafia-style criminal organizations, as their hierarchical structures more or less resembled predictable family trees.
In the Internet age, however, the networks used by organized criminals have changed. Innumerable nodes and connections escalate the complexity of these networks, making it ever more difficult to root out the guilty party. EPFL researcher Pedro Pinto of the Audiovisual Communications Laboratory and his colleagues have developed an algorithm that could become a valuable ally for investigators, criminal or otherwise, as long as a network is involved. The team’s research was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
“Using our method, we can find the source of all kinds of things circulating in a network just by ‘listening’ to a limited number of members of that network,” explains Pinto. Suppose you come across a rumor about yourself that has spread on Facebook and been sent to 500 people – your friends, or even friends of your friends. How do you find the person who started the rumor? “By looking at the messages received by just 15–20 of your friends, and taking into account the time factor, our algorithm can trace the path of that information back and find the source,” Pinto adds. This method can also be used to identify the origin of a spam message or a computer virus using only a limited number of sensors within the network.
Out in the real world, the algorithm can be employed to find the primary source of an infectious disease, such as cholera. “We tested our method with data on an epidemic in South Africa provided by EPFL professor Andrea Rinaldo’s Ecohydrology Laboratory,” says Pinto. “By modeling water networks, river networks and human transport networks, we were able to find the spot where the first cases of infection appeared by monitoring only a small fraction of the villages.”
Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2012/08/algorithm-tracks-epidemics-crime-back-source
(ht laboratoryequipment)
