Cyborg Lives

Ropits … the self-driving robot car (credit: Hitachi) Hitachi has launched the self-driving Robot for Personal Intelligent Transport System (Ropits) car,

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Hitachi has launched the self-driving Robot for Personal Intelligent Transport System (Ropits) car, developed for elderly and disabled drivers, The Guardian reports.

The vehicle is designed to roam pavements and footpaths, rather than roads, and is equipped with a plethora of sensors and guidance systems to help it navigate around bumps, potholes, and pedestrians.

A touch-screen map is linked to a GPS device to provide the overall direction, supplemented by 3D laser distance sensors and stereo cameras fixed to the front of the car to detect obstructions in its path.

Actuators fitted to the wheels can dynamically adjust their height as they encounter shifts in depth, while a gyro sensor ensures that the vehicle stays upright when negotiating uneven ground. Passengers can override the system and seize control with a joystick.

Hitachi also sees its “specified arbitrary point autonomous pick-up and drop-off” technology soon being applied to automatic goods deliveries, meaning your groceries could one day arrive via an unmanned, next-generation Ropits.

The “smart city” of Masdar, in Abu Dhabi, is equipped with unmanned solar-powered vehicles that are preprogrammed to shuttle passengers between specified stations.

Automation will engender neither utopia nor dystopia. Humans alone are responsible for our society's economic future.

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Everyone has an opinion about technology. Depending on whom you ask, it will either: a) Liberate us from the drudgery of everyday life, rescue us from disease and hardship, and enable the unimagined flourishing of human civilization; or b) Take away our jobs, leave us broke, purposeless, and miserable, and cause civilization as we know it to collapse.

The first strand of thinking reflects "techno-utopianism"—the conviction that technology paves a clear and unyielding path to progress and the good life. George F. Gilder's 2000 book Telecosm envisions a radiant future of unlimited bandwidth in which "liberated from hierarchies that often waste their time and talents, people will be able to discover their most productive roles." Wired's Kevin Kelly believes that, although robots will take away our jobs, they will also "help us discover new jobs for ourselves, new tasks that expand who we are. They will let us focus on becoming more human than we were."

Scientists claim to have found a way to help anyone plagued by earworms – those annoying tunes that lodge themselves inside our heads and repeat on an endless loop.

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They are the songs you cannot get out of your head. Now scientists may have found a way to help anyone plagued by those annoying tunes that lodge themselves inside our heads and repeat on an endless loop.

Researchers claim the best way to stopping the phenomenon, sometimes known as earworms – where snippets of a catchy song inexplicably play like a broken record in your brain – is to solve some tricky anagrams.

This can force the intrusive music out of your working memory, they say, allowing it to be replaced with other more amenable thoughts.

But they also warn not to try anything too difficult as those irritating melodies may wiggle their way back into your consciousness.

For those unwilling to carry around a book of anagrams, a good novel may also do the trick.

Apple wants to give Siri a distinct personality and AI to make interacting with her more natural, and it is capitalizing on our tendency to anthropomorphize things to remake its digital assistant.

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Apple has a vision of a future in which the disembodied voice of Siri is your constant companion.

It goes something like this: You arrive home at the end of a long day and plop down on the couch. A beer in one hand, your phone in the other, you say, “Siri, open Netflix and play The IT Crowd.” Midway through the program, you feel a draft. “Siri, it’s cold in here.” Siri politely tells you the temperature, and asks if you’d like it raised. The furnace kicks on. As the credits roll down the TV screen, Siri reminds you of your dinner date downtown. In the car, she gives you turn-by-turn directions to the restaurant and sends your date a text message to say you’re on the way. Halfway to dinner, you realize you need movie tickets. No problem. Siri takes care of that, too.

IBM has partnered with the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (Astron) to develop high-speed but low-powered “exascale” computers that will meet the enormous demands of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope.

The four-year deal will lead to the development of computer systems capable of handling the enormous amounts of data the SKA will produce, along with algorithms to help deal with it. It’s estimated that the SKA’s dishes will collect 10 times the global traffic of the Internet in data, and its central computer will have the processing power of a hundred million PCs. An exascale computer is one capable of handling more than a quintillion processing instructions per second.

Current computer systems do not offer the power required to process the quantities of data the SKA will collect. In order to try to deal with this challenge, Astron and IBM last year launched a public-private partnership called Dome — named after the protective covers for telescopes and the Swiss mountain, Dom.

Dome includes a wide range of organisations investigating emerging technologies such as high-performance and energy-efficient computing, nanophotonics (how light behaves at the nanometre scale) and data streaming. In addition to the SKA project, it’s hoped some of Dome’s findings will be able to assist in other data projects such as climate change and genetics research.

According to IBM, the benefits of the research will be felt well beyond the confines of the SKA and should usher in what it calls the “era of cognitive systems”. IBM envisions computer systems that can learn from existing data and adapt their algorithms to better contend with new data.

Google Glass Google just announced Google Glass will be available by the end of 2013.

Today's smartphones are much more than phones -- they are powerful, networked multimedia computers, and over the next 10 years they'll get far more advanced.

Continuing its annual tradition of walking the lines between genuine social goodyness and highfalutin' techno utopianism, the TED2013 conference kicked off this week in Los Angeles. Gathering together some of the brighter minds and more well-heeled benefactors, attendees come to tease apart the phase space of possibility and to take a closer look at how we consciously examine and intentionally evolve our world. Among the many threads and themes, one in particular tugs deeply at both aspirational humanism and existential terror.

On the early pages of this year's conference blog is a sensational, video-heavy list of the 10 best robots from TED. Featuring autonomous birdbots, dancing ballbots, silicon helpers, procedural comedians, affective mimics, and, of course, a smattering of tomorrow's robowarriors, the cavalcade of robotic evolution marches on with genuinely awe-inducing cadence. The field of robotics is being lifted by the same tides moving all industries: ubiquitous microcontrollers, breakthroughs in materials science, the global web of shared knowledge, and the mature capital markets looking for new profits.

IBM's Watson—the same machine that beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy—is now churning through case histories at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, learning to make diagnoses and treatment recommendations.

Charley lukov didn’t need a miracle. He just needed the right diagnosis. Lukov, a 62-year-old from central New Jersey, had stopped smoking 10 years earlier—fulfilling a promise he’d made to his daughter, after she gave birth to his first grandchild. But decades of cigarettes had taken their toll. Lukov had adenocarcinoma, a common cancer of the lung, and it had spread to his liver. The oncologist ordered a biopsy, testing a surgically removed sample of the tumor to search for particular “driver” mutations. A driver mutation is a specific genetic defect that causes cells to reproduce uncontrollably, interfering with bodily functions and devouring organs. Think of an on/off switch stuck in the “on” direction. With lung cancer, doctors typically test for mutations called EGFR and ALK, in part because those two respond well to specially targeted treatments. But the tests are a long shot: although EGFR and ALK are the two driver mutations doctors typically see with lung cancer, even they are relatively uncommon. When Lukov’s cancer tested negative for both, the oncologist prepared to start a standard chemotherapy regimen—even though it meant the side effects would be worse and the prospects of success slimmer than might be expected using a targeted agent.

But Lukov’s true medical condition wasn’t quite so grim. The tumor did have a driver—a third mutation few oncologists test for in this type of case. It’s called KRAS. Researchers have known about KRAS for a long time, but only recently have they realized that it can be the driver mutation in metastatic lung cancer—and that, in those cases, it responds to the same drugs that turn it off in other tumors. A doctor familiar with both Lukov’s specific medical history and the very latest research might know to make the connection—to add one more biomarker test, for KRAS, and then to find a clinical trial testing the efficacy of KRAS treatments on lung cancer. But the national treatment guidelines for lung cancer don’t recommend such action, and few physicians, however conscientious, would think to do these things.

Directional sound is awesome. Long a feature of cinema and state-of-the-art-

Directional sound is awesome. Long a feature of cinema and state-of-the-art home entertainment systems, directional sound uses several focused speakers to create sound that hits one ear differently than the other, allowing the brain to figure out which direction the sound is coming from. This has even been heralded as providing the competitive edge to gamers. Now, Raytheon wants to transfer that same edge from gamers to actual warfighters, by making them all a little more like Daredevil.

The technology goes by the flashy name of "3-D audio," and it's being aimed specifically at pilots. Rather than making pilots read visual displays about missiles and enemy fire, Raytheon wants to provide audio warnings that vary in strength and direction based on the attack. This is the Daredevil part: like Marvel's superhero with incredible hearing, Raytheon hopes pilots using 3-D audio will be able to hear and respond to threats instantly.

"It destroys having multiple identities, and I find that quite a scary concept.

Less than two weeks ago, Seattle’s 5 Point Cafe became the first known establishment in the United States (and possibly the world) to publicly ban Google Glass, the highly anticipated augmented reality device set to be released later this year.

The “No Glass” logo that the café published on its website was developed and released (under a Creative Commons license) by a new London-based group called “Stop the Cyborgs.” The group is composed of three young Londoners who decided to make a public case against Google Glass and other similar devices.

“If it's just a few geeks wearing it, it's a niche tool [and] I don't think it's a problem,” said Adam, 27, who prefers only to be identified by his first name. He communicated with Ars via Skype and an encrypted Hushmail e-mail account.

“But if suddenly everyone is wearing it and this becomes as prevalent as smartphones—you can see it becomes very intrusive very quickly. It's not about the tech, it's about the social culture around it. If you think about what Google's business model is, it started as a search engine, and then Google Analytics. [Now, Google is] almost characterizing its [territory as being] the rest of the world. It's a loss of space that isn't online. [Google Glass] destroys having multiple identities, and I find that quite a scary concept.”

Adam admitted he has never actually used or interacted with Google Glass in person, but he said he has extensive experience with augmented reality and currently is a post-doctoral student specializing in "machine learning" at a London university that he declined to name. He added that he and two friends are behind Stop the Cyborgs.

Google has yet to release much detailed information about Google Glass, only allowing small trials involving its own employees and select journalists and developers.

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A 360 degree cinema is being developed so visitors to Stonehenge can experience standing inside the ancient circle.

Access to Stonehenge has been fiercely contested for decades, with campaigners arguing that they should be allowed into the stone circle.

Now, English Heritage has developed a possible solution, a virtual visit in a 360 degree cinema where visitors can “experience” standing in the ancient circle.

It will be the centrepiece of a new £27 million centre at the site and is one of a number of audio visual attractions being built to bring the prehistoric monument to life.

These will include a 32ft “landscape wall”, on to which computer generated images of the countryside around the circle and other ancient earthworks will be projected.

In addition, there will be five “people films”, shown on screens in one of the two vast pods being built to house the visitor centre. These will provide information about the monument and prehistoric items on display.

Touch technology company is working with the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London to develop wearable electronics that use Peratech's QTC sensors. This is a three and a half year PhD research project funded by an EPSRC ICASE award to explore the needs base and applications for wearable technology bringing together the expertise of industry and academe in a highly creative way.

"We are very excited to be involved in this project," said David Lussey, Peratech's CTO. "Our QTC materials have already been used to provide switches in clothing for a number of years and so we know that it can withstand the rigors of being worn and washed. This project combines technology, design and user needs to work out how this growing area of wearable technology can be developed."

From human anatomy and Maxim cover-models to Sesame Street, tech giant says AR is more than a gimmick. By Stuart Dredge

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The problem with augmented reality is its perception as digital gimmickry: a technology in search of a useful application that's often hijacked for novelty purposes.

AR can make cartoon monsters jump out of crisp packets or make tweets float in the air above the place they were posted from, but there's little evidence that people enjoy this half as much as brands looking for an easy PR win, or AR technologists.

The situation is improving, though. There are signs of AR having real potential for education, children's entertainment, interactive print and other areas; Nokia is making a big push with its LiveSight technology, and Google's Project Glass is attracting the futurists with its promise of less-clunky augmented eyewear.

AR has a prominent spot on Qualcomm's stand at Mobile World Congress courtesy of its Vuforia platform, which competes for the attention of app developers and brands with the likes of Aurasma and Blippar.

I.B.M. is trying to expand its artificial intelligence technology by training the computer Watson in projects that involve developing drugs and creating food recipes.

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I.B.M.’s Watson beat “Jeopardy” champions two years ago. But can it whip up something tasty in the kitchen?

That is just one of the questions that I.B.M. is asking as it tries to expand its artificial intelligence technology and turn Watson into something that actually makes commercial sense.

The company is betting that it can build a big business by taking the Watson technology into new fields. The uses it will be showing off to Wall Street analysts at a gathering in the company’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday include helping to develop drugs, predicting when industrial machines need maintenance and even coming up with novel recipes for tasty foods. In health care, Watson is training to become a diagnostic assistant at a few medical centers, including the Cleveland Clinic.

The new Watson projects — some on the cusp of commercialization, others still research initiatives — are at the leading edge of a much larger business for I.B.M. and other technology companies. That market involves helping corporations, government agencies and science laboratories find useful insights in a rising flood of data from many sources — Web pages, social network messages, sensor signals, medical images, patent filings, location data from cellphones and others.

Researchers crack the long-standing problem of how to make stretchy batteries to power a growing range of stretchy electronics.

Researchers have demonstrated a flat, "stretchy" battery that can be pulled to three times its size without a loss in performance.

While flexible and stretchable electronics have been on the rise, powering them with equally stretchy energy sources has been problematic.

The new idea in Nature Communications uses small "islands" of energy-storing materials dotted on a stretchy polymer.

The study also suggests the batteries can be recharged wirelessly.

In a sense, the battery is a latecomer to the push toward flexible, stretchable electronics. A number of applications have been envisioned for flexible devices, from implantable health monitors to roll-up displays.

But consumer products that fit the bendy, stretchy description are still very few - in part, because there have been no equally stretchy, rechargeable power sources for them.

"Batteries are particularly challenging because, unlike electronics, it's difficult to scale down their dimensions without significantly reducing performance," said senior author of the study John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Forget about robots rising up against humans for world domination.

In the future we’re all going to be robot-human hybrids with the help of wearable computers. We’ve already seen Google Glass, the search giant’s augmented-reality glasses, and now the latest Y Combinator startup to come out of stealth, Thalmic Labs, is giving us a wrist cuff that will one day control computers, smartphones, gaming consoles, and remote-control devices with simple hand gestures.

Unlike voice-detecting Google Glass, and the camera-powered Kinect and Leap Motion controller, Thalmic Labs is going to the source of your hand and finger gestures – your forearm muscles. “In looking at wearable computers, we realized there are problems with input for augmented-reality devices,” says Thalmic Labs co-founder Stephen Lake. “You can use voice, but no one wants to be sitting on the subway talking to themselves, and cameras can’t follow wherever you go.”

I’d argue that thanks to Bluetooth headsets and Siri, we’ve already been talking to ourselves for the last decade, so talking to my glasses isn’t a huge stretch. But, I won’t deny that it looks cool to casually flick my hand to change the song on my MacBook, which is what Thalmic Labs is promising with its $149 forearm gadget called the Myo (a nod to the Greek prefix for muscle, but rhymes with Leo), which has an adjustable band that can accommodate almost anyone.

When Google built the latest version of its Android mobile operating system, the web giant made some big changes to the way the OS interprets your voice commands.

It installed a voice recognition system based on what’s called a neural network — a computerized learning system that behaves much like the human brain.

For many users, says Vincent Vanhoucke, a Google research scientist who helped steer the effort, the results were dramatic. “It kind of came as a surprise that we could do so much better by just changing the model,” he says.

Vanhoucke says that the voice error rate with the new version of Android — known as Jelly Bean — is about 25 percent lower than previous versions of the software, and that this is making people more comfortable with voice commands. Today, he says, users tend to use more natural language when speaking to the phone. In other words, they act less like they’re talking to a robot. “It really is changing the way that people behave.”

It’s just one example of the way neural network algorithms are changing the way our technology works — and they way we use it. This field of study had cooled for many years, after spending the 1980s as one of the hottest areas of research, but now it’s back, with Microsoft and IBM joining Google in exploring some very real applications.

Why make tiny flying drones when you can fly real insects by remote-control? It could lead to a neuroscience revolution, explains Emily Anthes in an excerpt from her new book Frankenstein's Cat

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In 2006 the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) asked America's scientists to submit "innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs" .

It was not your everyday government request, but it was an utterly serious one. For years, the US military has been hoping to develop "micro air vehicles" – ultra-small flying robots capable of performing surveillance in dangerous territory. Building these machines is not easy. The dynamics of flight change at very small sizes, and the vehicles need to be lightweight enough to fly, yet strong enough to carry cameras and other equipment. Most formidably, they need a source of power, and batteries light enough for microfliers just don't have enough juice to keep the crafts aloft for very long. Consider the tiny, completely synthetic drones that engineers have managed to create: the DelFly Micro, which measures less than 10cm from wingtip to wingtip, can stay airborne for just three minutes.

Darpa officials knew there had to be something better out there. "Proof of existence of small-scale flying machines… is abundant in nature in the form of insects," Amit Lal, a Darpa programme manager and Cornell engineer, wrote in a pamphlet the agency issued to the prospective researchers.

Perhaps, Darpa officials realised, the military didn't need to start from scratch; if they began with live insects, they'd already be halfway to their dream flying machines. All they'd have to do was figure out how to hack into insects' bodies and control their movements.