Category Archives: T – tech

T - tech

Traveling Salesman Problem

For one thing, humans are irrational and prone to habit. When those habits are interrupted, interesting things happen. After the collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minnesota, for example, the number of travelers crossing the river, not surprisingly, dropped; but even after the bridge was restored, researcher David Levinson has noted, traffic levels never got near their previous levels again. Habits can be particularly troublesome for planning fixed travel routes for people, like public buses, as noted in a paper titled, “You Can Lead Travelers to the Bus Stop, But You Can’t Make Them Ride,” by Akshay Vij and Joan Walker of the University of California. “Traditional travel demand models assume that individuals are aware of the full range of alternatives at their disposal,” the paper reads, “and that a conscious choice is made based on a tradeoff between perceived costs and benefits.” But that is not necessarily so.

People are also emotional, and it turns out an unhappy truck driver can be trouble. Modern routing models incorporate whether a truck driver is happy or not—something he may not know about himself. For example, one major trucking company that declined to be named does “predictive analysis” on when drivers are at greater risk of being involved in a crash. Not only does the company have information on how the truck is being driven—speeding, hard-braking events, rapid lane changes—but on the life of the driver. “We actually have built into the model a number of indicators that could be surrogates for dissatisfaction,” said one employee familiar with the program.

This could be a change in a driver’s take-home pay, a life event like a death in the family or divorce, or something as subtle as a driver whose morning start time has been suddenly changed. The analysis takes into account everything the company’s engineers can think of, and then teases out which factors seem correlated to accident risk. Drivers who appear to be at highest risk are flagged. Then there are programs in place to ensure the driver’s manager will talk to a flagged driver.

[…]

Powell’s biggest revelation in considering the role of humans in algorithms, though, was that humans can do it better. “I would go down to Yellow, we were trying to solve these big deterministic problems. We weren’t even close. I would sit and look at the dispatch center and think, how are they doing it?” That’s when he noticed: They are not trying to solve the whole week’s schedule at once. They’re doing it in pieces. “We humans have funny ways of solving problems that no one’s been able to articulate,” he says. Operations research people just punt and call it a “heuristic approach.”

 

Ref: Unhappy Truckers and Other Algorithmic Problems – Nautilus

T - tech, W - future, W - now

Corelet – New Programming Language for Cognitive Computing

 

Researchers from IBM are working on a new software front-end for their neuromorphic processor chips. The company is hoping to draw inspiration from its recent successes in “cognitive computing,” a line of R&D that’s best exemplified by Watson, the Jeopardy-playing AI. The new programming language will be necessary because once IBM’s cognitive computers become a reality, they’ll need a completely new one to run them. Many of today’s computers still use programming derived from FORTRAN, a language developed in the 1950s for ENIAC.

The new software runs on a conventional supercomputer, but it simulates the functioning of a massive network of neurosynaptic cores. Each core contains its own network of 256 neurons which function according to a new model in which digital neurons mimic the independent nature of biological neurons. Corelets, the equivalent of “programs,” specify the basic functioning of neurosynaptic cores and can be linked into more complex structures. Each corelet has 256 outputs and inputs, which are used to connect to one another.

“Traditional architecture is very sequential in nature, from memory to processor and back,” explained Dr. Dharmendra Modha in a recent Forbes article. “Our architecture is like a bunch of LEGO blocks with different features. Each corelet has a different function, then you compose them together.”

So, for example, a corelet can detect motion, the shape of an object, or sort images by color. Each corelet would run slowly, but the processing would be in parallel.

IBM has created more than 150 corelets as part of a library that programmers can tap.

Eventually, IBM hopes to create a cognitive computer scaled to 100 trillion synapses.

 

Ref: New Computer Programming Language Imitates The Human Brain – io9
Ref: Cognitive Computing Programming Paradigm: A Corelet Language for Composing Networks of Neurosynaptic Cores – IBM Research [paper]

T - cities, T - tech, W - now

Renew – Internet Connected Bins

 

The idea is to bring internet tracking cookies to the real world. The bins record a unique identification number, known as a MAC address, for any nearby phones and other devices that have Wi-Fi turned on. That allows Renew to identify if the person walking by is the same one from yesterday, even her specific route down the street and how fast she is walking.

 

Ref: This Recycling Bin Is Stalking You – The Atlantic

T - tech, W - now

Triposo

“We’re trying to approach travel guides from an algorithmic, Google-like perspective,” Triposo co-founder and COO Richard Osinga tells Wired. Triposo uses what it calls an “opinion mining” algorithm. The company analyzes the natural language used in online reviews to determine whether people who have posted about a particular place liked it, and what exactly they liked about it. This helps the app suggest places for very specific qualities — like a restaurant that has spectacular Bolognese, or a hotel that is especially clean.

It also uses the time of day, your GPS location, and local weather to suggest things to see and do while you’re traveling. That, paired with analysis of the behaviors and opinions of other users, lets Triposo figure out what activities people are most likely to be interested in at a certain time — you’re probably not looking for a history museum at 2am in in Paris — and how far they are willing to travel to do that. This means you can nix all the planning you’d normally stress about before a vacation, and be confident that you’ll find unique, interesting attractions no matter what part of town you’re wandering around.

 

Ref: Your Smartphone Gains a Mind of Its Own – Wired

T - tech, W - future, W - now

Predicting the Future with Data from the Past

 

It’s not the mathematics. Turchin says his methods aren’t very complex. He’s using common statistical techniques like spectrum analysis — “I used much more sophisticated statistical methods in ecology,” he says. And it’s not “big data” tools. The data sets he’s using aren’t all that big. He can analyze them using ordinary statistical software. But he couldn’t have built these models even a few decades ago because historians and archivists have only recently started digitizing newspapers and public records from throughout history and putting them online. That gives cliodynamics the opportunity to quantify what has happened in the past — and make predictions based on that data.

[…]

What Turchin and his colleagues have found is a pattern of social instability. It applies to all agrarian states for which records are available, including Ancient Rome, Dynastic China, Medieval England, France, Russia, and, yes, the United States. Basically, the data shows 100 year waves of instability, and superimposed on each wave — which Turchin calls the “Secular Cycle” — there’s typically an additional 50-year cycle of widespread political violence. The 50-year cycles aren’t universal — they don’t appear in China, for instance. But they do appear in the United States.

[…]

Turchin takes pains to emphasize that the cycles are not the result of iron-clad rules of history, but of feedback loops — just like in ecology. “In a predator-prey cycle, such as mice and weasels or hares and lynx, the reason why populations go through periodic booms and busts has nothing to do with any external clocks,” he writes. “As mice become abundant, weasels breed like crazy and multiply. Then they eat down most of the mice and starve to death themselves, at which point the few surviving mice begin breeding like crazy and the cycle repeats.”

 

Ref: Mathematicians Predict the Future With Data From the Past – Wired

T - domestic, T - tech, W - now

Hallucinating Humans for Robotic Scenes Understanding

 

Roboticist Ashutosh Saxena and his colleagues at Cornell University’s Personal Robotics Lab reasoned that people are likely the most important factors for robots to keep mind in the places where they work, since those environments are typically designed around human use. As such, when people are not actually there for reference, hallucinating their presence could help provide key context for the machines.

 

Ref: Robots can learn by imagining the existence of people – io9

T - tech, W - now

RoboRoach: Control a Living Insect from your Smartphone!

 

Control the movements of a live cockroach from your own mobile device! This is the world’s first commercially available cyborg!

When you send the command from your mobile phone, the backpack sends pulses to the antenna, which causes the neurons to fire, which causes the roach to think there is a wall on one side. The result? The roach turns! Microstimulation is the same neurotechnology that is used to treat Parkinson’s Disease and is also used in Cochlear Implants.

 

Ref: The RoboRoach: Control a living insect from your smartphone! – Kickstarter

T - tech, W - now

Predictive Apps

 

Apps that proactively help people with their lives represent a significant departure from earlier approaches to software.

A new type of mobile app is departing from a long-standing practice in computing. Typically, computers have just dumbly waited for their human operators to ask for help. But now applications based on machine learning software can speak up with timely information even without being directly asked for it. They might automatically pull up a boarding pass for your flight just as you arrive at the airport, or tell you that current traffic conditions require you to leave for your next meeting within 10 minutes.

[…]

These apps benefit from improved data mining techniques, but they’re also succeeding partly because of how they are presented to users. They are not cast as artificial butlers, a staple of science fiction that Apple tried to mimic with the voice-operated app Siri in 2010. Instead, Apps like Google Now are intentionally made without personality and don’t pretend to be people.

[…]

But still, it represents a milestone in computing, she adds: “Google Now is kind of a sucky product, but I use it anyway. It’s important because it’s the first time Google has taken all they know about us to make a product that makes our lives better.”

 

 

T - tech, W - future, W - now

Zoë

 

There is a lot of work on virtual heads, or avatars, at the moment – you can even use Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect system to create a virtual you to put in a game. But the team behind Zoe believe they have gone a step further by giving Zoe a range of human emotions expressed in her face and voice.

[…]

Professor Cipolla says Zoe is “the interface of the future”, part of a trend towards abandoning the keyboard and mouse and finding new ways of relating to computers.

[…]

Dr Bjorn Stenger, once one of Professor Cipolla’s doctoral students and now employed at the Toshiba lab, sees a number of uses: “Sending messages to your friends with your face on it,” he suggests. Virtual actors or game characters are another possibility – and then there is the prospect of virtual carers or call centre employees.