AI and Robots: Rise of the Machines -- Robotics Professors Discussing AI

Yes, they are coming, the robots and the intelligent machines, into every aspect of our lives. Is this good or bad? Are we understanding humanity better during the process? Or are we really digging our own graves?

Why are people so fascinated by robots? (I know my answer: I want build a robot that do all my work! :) Why do humans have such a dystopian view of the future where robots are concerned? These are some of the questions asked in an interview with Noel Sharkey，a Robotics and Artificial Intelligence professor at University of Sheffield, UK. When asked when the first mass produced robots will have a serious impact on society? Dr. Sharkey expressed his concerns about the advances of military robots. (Remember the Predator, Reaper robots we talked about recently?)

Every roboticists and AI researchers in the US know that the majority of the research in this field are driven by military funding and initiatives. The biggest one of them all is DARPA -- standing for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Many of you might not be aware that the Internet actually was created in a research program of ARPA (the earlier name for DARPA). As a matter of fact, part of my research is funded by the Army Research Lab. After all, there's not much different between Search and Rescue and Seek and Destroy.

I, and I believe a great number of other researchers, are strong believers of Azimov's Three Laws of Robotics, especially the first half of the first one:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Other other hand, I also must admit that the military driving force drove the advancement of technology, which benefits the entire human race. Just to name a few: the Internet, Satellites, cell networks. Therefore, the stance I take on this issue is that robotics and AI technologies developed for military purposes can also be used for normal people, and I shall work very hard to help make that into reality.

So how do we make sure we don't create the Terminator Scenario? Some people believe we should upgrade ourselves and turn ourselves into cyborgs (half human and half machine), so we still dominate the world, instead of robots. A robotics researcher friend of mine at NASA Ames (no mentioning names) holds this view, and a Robotics and Artificial Intelligence professor at the University of Redding, UK, is another strong believer.

My guess is that robots will become more capable and intelligent, and humans will also become more capable with wearable devices or implanted devices. There are already robotic suits enabling wearers to carry weights far exceeding human capabilities, and there are also robotic hands that connect directly to nerves in people's arms controllable by human brain. I am SERIOUSLY not joking about these things, and you'll reading more about them in my future blog posts (specifically under the Robot of the Day label).

Whether to rely on robots or becoming a cyborg is your own choice, but the time that you have to make that choice might not be very far in the future. There's at least one thing clear: We live in a very exciting era of the world, and we should enjoy it!!

Picture of the Day:

I actually have not seen this movie. Is it good?

AI and Robots: Insurgents "Hack" U.S. Drones

The Predator series of unmanned drones have been great weapons for the US government to fight terrorists and insurgents (see my previous posts). The US Department of Defense actually plans to replace one-third of military planes with unmanned drones. Any sensible person would have agreed that these unmanned drones are very sophisticated and advanced technologies highly classified because of the military and intelligence associations. However, on December 17, 2009, an article on Wall Street Journal reviewed that:

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

WHAT???!!! When I first heard this on the NPR radio, I was on my way home, and I almost swerved off the road at this shocking news! This is unbelievable! I know the video downlink from our research UAVs are not encrypted, which means anyone with an antenna, a comm box, and a video capturing software could download video feeds from our planes. But come on! We are talking about 12 million dollars drones used by the U.S. Air Force and the CIA to fight real wars! Haven't they ever heard of the word "Encryption"? Even my neighbors' wireless networks are encrypted and cannot be accessed without a password. This is simply beyond my pithy understanding! The article used the word "hack" in the title. Did the insurgents really had to hack? The door was wide-open.

Imagine a bored terrorist pulling his laptop out to kill some free time by watching some real-time war clips, then he sees his terrorist friend's bunker in the live video feed, so he calls his friend and says, "Start your SkyGrabber program, man, I think that's your bunker!"

U.S. military personnel in Iraq discovered the problem late last year when they apprehended a Shiite militant whose laptop contained files of intercepted drone video feeds. In July, the U.S. military found pirated drone video feeds on other militant laptops, leading some officials to conclude that militant groups trained and funded by Iran were regularly intercepting feeds.

According to Dan Verton, a cyberterrorism expert, "we thought that this particular enemy was either incapable or not interested in learning how to do this...we've always been wrong on both accounts!" This is simply amazing! Didn't we know there's the Internet, and you can find tutorials for anything you want? Amazing!

"It is part of their kit now."

That's got to be the best line of the story! Especially at the thought that maybe they didn't even have to buy multiple copies and simply used pirated copies.

What's the merit of the story? Human stupidity is far more powerful than machine intelligence! As a matter of fact, I'll make that my Tao of the Day!





Human stupidity is far more powerful than machine intelligence!

Robot of the Day: MQ-9 Reaper

Since I am really in this UAV mood, let's talk about another UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) today.

The MQ-9 Predator B Reaper is a scaled up version of the MQ-1 Predator UAV we discussed in the previous post. It is also designed by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, only larger, faster, more powerful, and much, much more deadly!

Picture credit: U.S. Air Force

Reaper was designed to be a hunter-killer, hence the name. It has a wingspan of 66 feet (20.12m), can fly at an impressive 300 miles per hour, and can stay in the air for up to 30 hours. The Reaper UAV is still powered by propellers at the rear end of the plane. It can carry 3800 lb of weapons. For example, it can carry 14 Hellfire missiles or other weapons such as the 500-pound, laser-guided bombs shown in the picture above. The U.S. Air Force was activated to operate the MQ-9 Reaper UAVs on May 1, 2007.

Fully loaded Reaper!

Looks like the U.S. Customs and Border Protection also upgraded their UAVs to the Predator B Reapers!

Picture of the Day:

Disclaimer: This is not my house. Read the story below!

 

"Good news is that I truly out did myself this year with my Christmas decorations. The bad news is that I had to take him down after two days. I had more people come screaming up to my house than ever. Great stories. But two things made me take it down.

First, the cops advised me that it would cause traffic accidents as they almost wrecked when they drove by.

Second, a 55 year old lady grabbed the 75 pound ladder almost killed herself putting it against my house and didn’t realize that it was fake until she climbed to the top (she was not happy). By the way, she was one of the many people who attempted to do that. My yard couldn’t take it either. I have more than a few tire tracks where people literally drove up my yard."

Robot of the Day: MQ-1 Predator

The MQ-1 Predator is probably the most famous UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) of all times. It was developed by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems for the USAF (U.S. Air Force) and the CIA.

Photo credit: U.S. Air Force

The MQ-1 Predator UAV has a wingspan of 47.8 ft (14.8m), can fly a maximum of 135 miles per hour, and can stay in the air for 14 hours. The cost for an early production was around $3.2 million.

Initially it was only a reconnaissance system allowing the remote operators to acquire aerial video in real-time. After the CIA deployed the Predator UAVs to Afghanistan, they expressed strong desire to add the capability of firing Hellfire missiles from Predator UAVs to kill terrorists. So it was done. On February 4, 2002, a CIA Predator attacked a convoy of sports utility vehicles, killing a suspected al Qaeda leader who the CIA thought were Osama Bin Laden.

The Predator UAV requires a satellite link and is operated by two pilots (most likely in a military base in Nevada) sitting in front of cockpit like devices. The control of the UAV falls under the tele-operation category because most decisions are made by human operators.

The first video below showcases the capabilities of the MQ-1 Predator to quickly track down a moving vehicle (note that it is much easier to tracking a lone moving car in a desert compared to tracking down the same car, say, in LA traffic). The second video shows firing of the missiles.

An unknown number of Predator UAVs are also used by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. I would guess these Predators don't shoot missiles at illegal aliens.

Picture of the Day:

Residents in Norway were stunned by the beautiful yet mysterious light show. Turned out it was caused by the malfunction of a Russian missile test. Follow this link to read more.

Paper Review: A Comparison of Event Models for Naive Bayes Text Classi cation

This paper is written by Andrew McCallum (Just Research) and Kamal Nigam (Carnegie Mellon University) and published at an AAAI-98 workshop on learning for text categorization. This is a seminal paper cited by 1426 papers according to Google Scholar!

Two text classification approaches, the multi-variate Bernoulli model and the multinomial model, both use the naïve Bayes assumption. This paper tries to differentiate the two models and compare their performances empirically on five text corpora.



In text classification, a naïve Bayes classifier assumes that the probability of each word occurring in a document is independent of the occurrence of other words in the document and is independent of the word’s context and position in the document. This assumption simplifies learning dramatically when the number of attributes (features) is large. Both approaches use training data to calculate estimates of the generative model and then uses Bayes’ rule to calculate the posterior probability of each class given the evidence of the test document. Then the class most probable is selected.

One major difference between these two approaches is that the multi-variate Bernoulli model doesn’t care about word frequency in documents, while the multinomial model does. Another difference is that the multi-variate Bernoulli model explicitly includes the non-occurrence probability words that do not appear in the document.

When selecting features, in order to reduce vocabulary size, only words that have the highest average mutual information with the class variable are kept. Average mutual information is the difference between the entropy of the class variable and the entropy of the class variable conditioned on the absence or presence of the word.

Five text corpora are used and they are Yahoo! ‘Science’ hierarchy, Industry Sector, Newsgroups, WebKB, and Reuters. Empirical results show that the multi-variate Bernoulli model works well with small vocabulary sizes, but the multinomial model performs better at larger vocabulary sizes. The multinomial model produced on average a 27% reduction in error over the multi-variate Bernoulli model at any vocabulary size.




The boringness of a paper is inverse proportional to the amount of time it takes to put the reader to sleep.



Video of the Day:

You have to watch past 0:40 to really appreciate it! It's an LCD!