Blog: Hanging Can Be Life Threatening

Hanging Can Be Life Threatening
AlphaGalileo (08/26/11)

Although testing and static code analysis are used to detect and remove bugs in a system during development, problems can still occur once a software system is in place and is being used in a real-world application. Such problems can cause one critical component of the system to hang without crashing the whole system and without being immediately obvious to operators and users until it is too late. Researchers at the Universita degli Studi di Napoli Federico II and at Naples company SESM SCARL have developed a software tool that offers non-obtrusive monitoring of systems, based on multiple sources of data gathered at the operating system level and collected data. "Our experimental results show that this framework increases the overall capacity of detecting hang failures, it exhibits a 100 percent coverage of observed failures, while keeping low the number of false positives, less than 6 percent in the worst case," according to the researchers. They also say the response time, or latency, between a hang occurring and detection is about 0.1 seconds on average, while the impact on computer performance of running the hang-detection software is negligible.

View Full Article

Blog: Robot 'Mission Impossible' Wins Video Prize

Robot 'Mission Impossible' Wins Video Prize
New Scientist (08/12/11) Melissae Fellet

Free University of Brussels researchers have developed Swarmanoid, a team of flying, rolling, and climbing robots that can work together to find and grab a book from a high shelf. The robot team includes flying eye-bots, rolling foot-bots, and hand-bots that can fire a grappling hook-like device up to the ceiling and climb the bookshelf. Footage of the team in action recently won the video competition at the Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The robotic team currently consists of 30 foot-bots, 10 eye-bots, and eight hand-bots. The eye-robots explore the rooms, searching for the target. After an eye-bot sees the target, it signals the foot-bots, which roll to the site, carrying the hand-bots. The hand-bots then launch the grappling hooks to the ceiling and climb the bookshelves. All of the bots have light-emitting diodes that flash different colors, enabling them to communicate with each other. Constant communication enables Swarmanoid to adjust its actions on the fly, compensating for broken bots by reassigning tasks throughout the team.

View Full Article

Blog: Researcher Teaches Computers to Detect Spam More Accurately

Researcher Teaches Computers to Detect Spam More Accurately
IDG News Service (08/10/11) Nicolas Zeitler

Georgia Tech researcher Nina Balcan recently received a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship for her work in developing machine learning methods that can be used to create personalized automatic programs for deciding whether an email is spam or not. Balcan's research also can be used to solve other data-mining problems. Using supervised learning, the user teaches the computer by submitting information on which emails are spam and which are not, which is very inefficient, according to Balcan. Active learning enables the computer to analyze huge collections of unlabeled emails to generate only a few questions for the user. Active learning could potentially deliver better results than supervised learning, Balcan says. However, active learning methods are highly sensitive to noise, making this potentially difficult to achieve. Balcan plans to develop an understanding of when, why, and how different kinds of learning protocols help. "My research connects machine learning, game theory, economics, and optimization," she says.

View Full Article

Blog: How Computational Complexity Will Revolutionize Philosophy

How Computational Complexity Will Revolutionize Philosophy
Technology Review (08/10/11)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientist Scott Aaronson argues that computational complexity theory will have a transformative effect on philosophical thinking about a broad spectrum of topics such as the challenge of artificial intelligence (AI). The theory focuses on how the resources required to solve a problem scale with some measure of the problem size, and how problems typically scale either reasonably slowly or unreasonably rapidly. Aaronson raises the issue of AI and whether computers can ever become capable of human-like thinking. He contends that computability theory cannot provide a fundamental impediment to computers passing the Turing test. A more productive strategy is to consider the problem's computational complexity, Aaronson says. He cites the possibility of a computer that records all the human-to-human conversations it hears, accruing a database over time with which it can make conversation by looking up human answers to questions it is presented with. Aaronson says that although this strategy works, it demands computational resources that expand exponentially with the length of the conversation. This, in turn, leads to a new way of thinking about the AI problem, and by this reasoning, the difference between humans and machines is basically one of computational complexity.

View Full Article

Blog: Phone Losing Charge? Technology Created by UCLA Engineers Allows LCDs to Recycle Energy

Phone Losing Charge? Technology Created by UCLA Engineers Allows LCDs to Recycle Energy
University of California, Los Angeles (08/09/2011) Matthew Chin; Wileen Wong Kromhout

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) researchers have created an energy-harvesting polarizer for liquid crystal displays (LCDs) that enables them to collect and recycle energy to power electronic devices. The photovoltaic polarizers can convert ambient light, such as sunlight and their own backlight, into electricity. It can boost the function of an LCD by simultaneously working as a polarizer, a photovoltaic device, and an ambient light photovoltaic panel. "In addition, these polarizers can also be used as regular solar cells to harvest indoor or outdoor light," says UCLA professor Yang Yang. "So next time you are on the beach, you could charge your iPhone via sunlight." Up to 75 percent of a typical device's backlight energy is lost through polarizers, but the UCLA polarizing organic photovoltaic LCD can recover much of that unused energy. "I believe this is a game-changer invention to improve the efficiency of LCD displays," Yang says. "In the near future, we would like to increase the efficiency of the polarizing organic photovoltaics, and eventually we hope to work with electronic manufacturers to integrate our technology into real products."

View Full Article

Blog: Wireless Network in Hospital Monitors Vital Signs

Wireless Network in Hospital Monitors Vital Signs
Washington University in St. Louis (08/04/11) Diana Lutz

Washington University in St. Louis researchers launched a prototype sensor network in Barnes-Jewish Hospital, with the goal of creating a wireless virtual intensive-care unit in which the patents are free to move around. When the system is fully operational, sensors will monitor the blood oxygenation level and heart rate of at-risk patients once or twice a minute. The data is transmitted to a base station and combined with other data in the patient's electronic medical record. The data is analyzed by a machine-learning algorithm that looks for signs of clinical deterioration, alerting nurses to check on patients when those signs are found. The clinical warning system is part of a new wireless health field that could change the future of medicine, says Washington University in St. Louis computer scientist Chenyang Lu. In developing the system, the researchers were focused on ensuring that the network would always function and never fail. The relay nodes are programmed as a self-organizing mesh network, so that if one node fails the data will be rerouted to another path. At the end of the trial, the researchers found that data were reliably received more than 99 percent of the time and the sensing reliability was 81 percent.

View Full Article

Blog: Web Search Is Ready for a Shakeup, Says UW Computer Scientist

Web Search Is Ready for a Shakeup, Says UW Computer Scientist
UW News (08/03/11) Hannah Hickey

University of Washington (UW) professor Oren Etzioni recently called on the international academic community and engineers to be more ambitious in designing how users find information online. The main obstacle to progress "seems to be a curious lack of ambition and imagination," Etzioni writes. "Despite all the talent and the data they have, I don't think they've been ambitious enough." When IBM's Watson supercomputer recently beat the best human players at Jeopardy, it showed how far the technology has come in being able to answer complex questions. However, as the ability to perform intelligent searches increases, so does the demand. "People are going to be clamoring for more intelligent search and a more streamlined process of asking questions and getting answers," Etzioni says. Instead of looking for strings of text, a Web search engine should identify basic entities, such as people, places and things, and discover the relationships between them, which is the goal of UW's Turing Center. The center has developed ReVerb, an open source tool that uses Web information to determine the relationship between two entities.

View Full Article