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Thursday, March 05, 2009
Mars-500 Project Third Stage Began
The Mars-500 project is a ground-based experiment simulating manned flight to Mars. The main purpose of the experiment is to evaluate how the long isolation, especially the 20-minutes delayed communication with the outside world, affects the state of health and working capability of the crews.
The project has three stages. The first, 15-day stage took place in 2007 and was only designed to test out the facility. The second, 105-day stage happened in 2009 with 6 volunteers living in the isolated living complex. Currently in progress is the third stage, and another 6 volunteers will actually simulate a complete 520-day mission to Mars -- yes, that's how long the round-trip takes.
The 6 volunteers (professional astronauts, scientists, and engineers) will spend the entire duration of the experiment in a sealed facility with no windows and a '20-minute, one-way time-delay in communications to mirror the real lag in sending messages over the vast distance between Mars and Earth. It's almost like serving an 18-month jail term, but only worse, because they won't ever see the sun and have to live off canned food. They will also be under constant supervision and will be going through many scientific tests each day.
I have always been a big fan of space exploration. Call me Chicken Little if you wish, but with enough nuclear bombs that can blow up our planet over 300 times with only the push of a button, and with so many maniacs in this world, we've got to spread the seeds for human kind before the dooms day, before we wipe out ourselves completely from this universe. Therefore, great shout outs to these 6 volunteers who are willing to make the sacrifice for the benefit of the entire human race (think of all the World Cup games they are going to miss!!). I wish them a very productive "journey" and the greatest success! If I ever get locked up for 18 months, the entire book of Smiling Proud Wanderer would have been translated. LOL!
In order to successfully establish human outposts (or colonies) on another planet, it is essential to have intelligent worker robots working alongside human crews. Although we already have several robots roaming on top of the Martian surface, they are mainly for scientific exploration. What we really need are robots that can work as a team building/assembling equipments and living complexes. Some of them can be sent to Mars before the humans to get things started. Because of the long distance and long communication lag, they would have to be quite capable of autonomous operations, probably at some basic level tasks. Then more robots would go along with the human crews. These robots don't have to be fully autonomous, but will need to be able to interact with human well and take directions/supervisions from human operators efficiently/effectively. Robots have great advantages over human for these kind of space exploration because they don't need to eat, breathe, be entertained, and will never need a psychiatrist during such long space trips.
Picture of the Day:
The South African players dancing on the sideline in celebration of their goal against Mexico in the 2010 World Cup. It is so wonderful that the host nation gets to score the first goal of the tournament! Go Africans!
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Paper Review: An Experimental Comparison of Several Clustering and Initialization Methods
Picture of the Day:
First time ever a rescue helicopter landing in Bryce Canyon, Utah. The chopper landed right on the top of the ridge. Got to give the pilot some shout out for his awesome skills!
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Smiling Proud Wanderer: Chapter 21 (2)
Read the first 20 chapters here!
Now support the translator Lanny by following my blog and leaving comments! :)
Video of the Day:
Monday, March 02, 2009
AI and Robots: Who Gave the Robot a Knife?
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Robot arm stabbing a human volunteer with a knife (Photo credit: IEEE Spectrum) |
These researchers are from the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, part of DLR, the German aerospace agency, in Wessling, Germany, and they share the same dream with me --- that one day robots will be smart enough to take over kitchen duties and free us from the laborious duty of cooking. This task of course requires the robot to be able to handle a knife appropriately, so it can cut, chop, slide or dice during the course of preparing a meal. But what if it accidentally struck a human? With that question in mind, these researchers performed a series of experiment to investigate the severity of possible injuries and also designed a collision-detection to minimize the damage.
Various knives used in the experiments (Photo credit: IEEE Spectrum) |
The video below shows how the experiments were performed and how the robot arm performed differently with and without the collision-detection system (the real excitement is at the end of video). As a researching in Human-Robot Interaction myself, I couldn't help but imagine this poster in my head that reads, "Volunteer needed for a user study: Get Paid to be Stabbed by a Robot!"
But I am a little bit confused. Once turning on the collision-detection system, the robot will stop cutting/stabbing the human. The human is safe now, and so is that piece of steak! Three hours later, I'd be shouting in starved voice, "Where's my steak dinner?"
Note that the idea of a robot holding a knife would never be allowed in US universities. It would never get approval from the IRB (Institutional Review Board). See, we do things very differently here in the US, instead of knives, we give robots machine guns and missiles!! And there will be no danger to US citizens, because we send these robots to other countries! LOL!
MQ-9 Reaper Predator UAV | SWORD Robot |
Anyway, I think it will be a long time before we actually have knife-wielding robots that roam our homes. When I program my robots, I actually intentionally make it not touch things such as knives, gas stoves, and explosives. But I bet you this day will eventually come, and a lot of lawyers are going to get rich.
Drinking excessive amount of Mountain Dew and staying up till 4am can lead to severe stomach cramping and internal bleeding and many days of lost productivity.
Sunday, March 01, 2009
Random Thoughts: Have You Lost Your Soul?
Well, if quickly clicking through things has grown into a habit for you, it's probably time to reconsider it now.
According to this article from Newslite and this article from geeks.com, GameStation, on UK online games retailer, added the "immortal soul clause" to its online purchase agreement basically saying the customers would grant them the right to claim their souls. More than 7,500 customers (88%) agreed to the clause without really reading the agreement details, and now GameStation legally owns thousands of souls. Here below are the exact wording of the sneaky clause:
Luckily, 12% of the customers did notice a small tick box at the bottom of agreement allowing them to opt out of the clause, and earned themselves a £5 gift voucher by doing so. But really, how many of the 12% customers actually read the terms and services agreement? My guess would be very few.By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul. Should We wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from gamesation.co.uk or one of its duly authorised minions. We reserve the right to serve such notice in 6 (six) foot high letters of fire, however we can accept no liability for any loss or damage caused by such an act.
If you a) do not believe you have an immortal soul, b) have already given it to another party, or c) do not wish to grant Us such a license, please click the link below to nullify this sub-clause and proceed with your transaction.
Although this probably was part of an April Fool's Day joke (the vouchers were no joke), and GameStation has no intention to ever claim their rights on the souls (in fact, they emailed all customers nullifying the clause), this clearly shows the general public opinion on these agreements. Most people think that if most people don't read these things, they are no longer valid. However, the truth is that they will most likely be legally binding (not the soul clause, of course) unless challenged in a court of law. And do you ever want to get into a legal battle with large companies who employ an army of lawyers?
There are, actually, some people who take these agreements very "seriously!" Anne Loucks from obesso.com created a clever way to get herself out of legal troubles with EULAs. Using a piece of cardboard that reads "Kitty Agrees" with a protruding piece underneath, she would have her cat to step on the board, which pushes the spacebar underneath and agrees to an EULA for her. So worst comes to worst, it would be the cat losing its soul, and not Anne!
Putting aside the legality of these actions of both the businesses and users, clearly the system is not working very well. I know for regular business contracts or terms and agreements, critical elements are required by law to really stand out (bold, larger size, etc.). I am sure a better standard and approach will have to be created soon, because soon or later, somebody is getting sued over this.
Picture of the Day:
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Paper Review: A Comparison of Document Clustering Techniques
This paper presents the results of an experimental study of two main approaches to document clustering, agglomerative hierarchical clustering and K-means (standard K-means and bisecting K-means).
The two basic approaches to generating a hierarchical clustering are agglomerative and divisive. The paper evaluated agglomerative techniques in the comparison. It then described the agglomerative clustering algorithm, the K-means algorithm, and the bisecting K-means algorithm in details.
Three evaluation metrics are used in the experiments, and they include two external quality measure, entropy, F measure, and one internal quality measure, overall similarity. The paper described each measure in detail.
Eight data sets were used in the experiments: 5 from TREC, 2 from Reuters-21578, and 1 from WebACE. Performances of three agglomerative hierarchical techniques, Intra-Cluster Similarity Technique (IST), Centroid Similarity Technique (CST), and UPGMA were compared using F-measure and entropy. UPGMA is the best performing hierarchical technique overall, therefore, its performance is compared against standard K-means and bisecting K-means. The performances of bisecting K-means with refinement and hierarchical with refinement are also included in the comparison. In the experiments, the authors used many runs of the regular K-means algorithm and also used incremental updating of centroids.
Experimental results show that the bisecting K-means technique is better than the standard K-means approach and as good or better than the hierarchical approaches when using the three evaluation metrics mentioned. Also the time complexity of bisecting K-means is linear, which makes it very attractive.
The authors argued that the agglomerative hierarchical clustering didn’t do well because nearest neighbors of documents often belong to different classes. K-means and bisecting K-means algorithms do better because they rely on a more global approach. They also believe that bisecting K-means does better than standard K-means because it produces relatively uniformly sized clusters.
Video of the Day:
Even though miracle happens, still, don't click on suspicious links or give out your bank information. The Nigerian connection at the end of the video is simply hilarious!!
Friday, February 27, 2009
Joy of Life: Volume 1 Chapter 5
-- written by Maoni
Now support the author Maoni by clicking this link, and support the translator Lanny by following my blog and leaving comments! :)
Video of the Day:
Got an iPhone? Got a blender? Ever wondered if your iPhone would blend in your blender? Well, find out from this video! The funny thing is that every Saturday, I play soccer right across the street from this company called Blendtec!
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Robot of the Day: Geminoid-F, the Female Android Twin
The female robot is really the product of joint effort among Osaka University, ATR Laboratory, and Kokoro Co., a small Japanese firm specializing in building androids. Compared to the old male model, this new, more advanced model have the following improvements:
- It can exhibit facial expressions much more naturally.
- It only has 12 actuators (male model had 50)
- Air servo valves and the control system are not embedded into the robot's body, and there is only a small external compressor (male model had a large external box for compressors and valves.)
- The tele-operation system is using facial recognition software, so the operator doesn't have to wear any sensor at all.
Similar to it's male predecessor, Geminoid-F cannot walk and only have limited movements with its arms and legs. Most of the actuators are located around the neck and face. The main purpose of the robot is for tele-presence where an operator would be sitting in front of a camera and the robot would mimic the person's facial expression and lip/neck movements. One possible application of the robot is to support remote companionship. Dr. Ishiguro plans to test the robot in hospitals.
With a price tag of US $110,000 per copy, such a robot might not be very attractive to consumers even for people who seriously long for a twin brother or sister. However, the research team at least accomplished two things:
- advanced the technology of natural expression for a robot, and
- generated ample interest from the public to pay more attention to robotics technology
Picture of the Day:
Adeline will have a dance recital tomorrow. But she just lost a tooth the first time ever in her life! So here I present you:
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Random Thoughts: Adventure in Japan -- Part 3
Adventure in Japan -- Part 1
Adventure in Japan -- Part 2
Osaka, Japan is a the second largest city in Japan with over 20 million people and the commercial capital. It was also the base for Toyotomi Hideyoshia in his successful unification of Japan during the sixteenth century. Different functions and roles resulted in a city that mixes modern technology with historical heritages, making Osaka into a unique city where traditional culture thrived side-by-side along present day life style. Here you can find skyscrapers (e.g., Business Innovation Center Osaka, where HRI 2010 conference was held at) alongside sixteenth century castles (e.g., Osaka Castle right in the middle of the city), and highly sophisticated robots (e.g., D+ ropop robot, designed and made in Osaka) together with women wearing the traditional Japanese clothing, Kimono, waiting at the subway station.
Left: D+ ropop robot representing modern beauty and advanced technology. Right: Woman in traditional Kimono waiting at the subway station.
During our visit, we stayed at the City Plaza Osaka hotel (left below) right at the heart of downtown, where we can see the crowded city landscape right from the hotel window (right below). The building has a very modern look from the outside. However, the oval shaped top portion actually contained traditional Japanese spa, where people would bath together completely naked (they do separate men from women).
Due to our busy schedule, we only had half a day to look around the city before we fly back to the US, so in the morning, I was forced to take on the Japanese subway system all by myself so I could complete the mission of getting wife some famous Japanese cosmetics. I had two hours to do it, and I pulled it off even though I almost got on a train going the opposite direction and had to run in pouring rain in random directions.
Left: Saturday shoppers at the shopping district. Middle: people enjoying traditional Japanese food (in the cylinder). Right: Female customers shopping for Kimono.
Left: Cosmetics store. Right: Sushi shop along the street.
Left: Osaka City Museum right across the street from, Right: Moat of the Osaka Castle
Students making spring field trips on Saturday. Left: Elementary school kids heading to unknown location at the subway station. Right: Middle school students visiting the Osaka Castle
Looking at city landscape from the top of the Osaka Castle (can you see the cherry blossoms?)
Left: Miniature figures depicting an ancient battle. Right: Battle helmets wore by ancient war lords.
The beautiful Osaka Castle
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Paper Review: Text Categorization with Support Vector Machines: Learning with Many Relevant Features
This paper provides both theoretical and empirical evidence that SVMs are great for text categorization.
When performing text classification, the first step is to transform documents. Each distinct word becomes a feature and the frequency of the word in the document is the value of the feature, resulting in a very high-dimensional feature space. Then, the information gain criterion can be used to select a subset of features. The final step is to scale the dimensions of the feature vector with their inverse document frequency.
SVMs are very universal learners. It can learn linear threshold function and can also learn non-linear functions by using the kernel trick. One great property of SVMs is the ability to learn which is independent of the dimensionality of the feature space, because SVMs use support vectors. SVMs also do not require parameter tuning.
Right: Boundaries identified using SVM to group colored dots.
SVMs work well for text categorization because of these following properties of text: 1) High dimensional input space. SVMs do not depend on the number of features and only use support vectors. This prevents overfitting. 2) Few irrelevant features. Aggressive feature selection may result in loss of information. SVMs can work with very high dimensional feature space. 3) Document vectors are sparse. SVMs work well with problems with dense concepts and sparse instances. 4) Most text categorization problems are linearly separable. These are the theoretical evidence.
The paper used two test collections: the “ModApte” split of the Reuters-21578 database and Ohsumed corpus. SVMs are compared with Naïve Bayes, Rocchio, kNN, and C4.5 Decision Tree. Precision/Recall-Breakeven Point is used as a measure of performance. Experimental results show that SVMs had robust performance improvements over other algorithms. Training using SVMs is slow but classification is very fast. SVMs eliminate the need for feature selection and do not require any parameter tuning.
Video of the Day:
I am not a member of the Mormon church, but I still found this story very moving. It was told by the former LDS Church President Gordon Hinckley. Hope you enjoy it! And may God bless us all if there is a God.