Category: Sci/Tech

Forget Google’s Self-Driving Cars. The Pentagon Is Building A Self-Flying Humvee

SECURITY

Google may have earned plenty of buzz with its announcement last weekend that it has beensecretly testing self-driving cars on California roads. But the mad-scientist military agency that first inspired those auto-bots may still be a step ahead–or rather, above.

On Tuesday, the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) officially announced the private sector participants in its Transformer X project to build a Humvee that can take off, fly hundreds of miles, and land with little human input. Military contractors Lockheed Martin and AAI will receive about $3 million each to function as the system integrators for the project, with another $1 million for both Carnegie Mellon University and Pratt and Whitney Rocketdyne and $750,000 each for Aurora Flight Services and Metis Design.

The Transformer X (TX) will be designed for depositing and extracting soldiers and supplies in tough-to-reach places without easily accessible roads, taking off from a standstill and flying up to 250 miles with a 1000-pound load. Most science-fictional of all? It won’t necessarily have a human at the controls–or at least not one with any piloting experience.

“Key to the success of this technology is the ability for guidance, navigation and control of the TX to be conducted without a dedicated pilot—increasing flexibility,” reads an agency statement. “It is envisioned that guidance and flight control systems will allow for semi-autonomous flight, permitting a nonpilot to perform [vertical takeoffs and landings], transition into forward flight, and update the flight path in response to changing mission requirements or threats.”

DARPA, after all, is the ultra-forward-thinking Pentagon agency that hosted the Grand Challenge in 2006 and 2007, an autonomous car race across the Mojave desert, as well as the Urban Challenge, a 2008 event that challenged self-driving cars to negotiate a cityscape complete with obstacles and traffic. Sebastian Thrun, Google’s lead researcher for its autonomous autos project, led the Stanford teams that won the 2007 event and placed second in 2008, and several other researchers from those X-Prize style events have joined Google to work for him.

The car-to-plane conversion abilities of the Transition X may be its most achievable element: In fact, it’s practically ready for the consumer market. Aviation Week has reported that AAI’s subcontractors for the DARPA project include Terrafugia, the Woburn, Mass.-based startup that’s also building the Transition, a consumer-targeted flying car planned for sale in 2011. Any customers who shell out $200,000 for that transformable car-plane, unfortunately, will have to drive it themselves.

Forbes

October 15, 2010
Cyber attack threat ‘real’, warns spy chief

Britain’s critical national infrastructure faces a “real and credible” threat of cyber attack, the head of the UK’s electronic spying agency warned.

In a highly unusual public speech, GCHQ Director Iain Lobban said that Britain’s future economic prosperity depended upon developing effective defences against a cyber assault.

Speaking on Tuesday night to International Institute for Strategic studies, he said that the massive growth of the internet had opened up new vulnerabilities with opportunities for attack by both hostile states and criminals.

While GCHQ is more usually associated with electronic intelligence-gathering, Mr Lobban stressed that it also had a security role, referred to as “information assurance”.

He said that they had already seen “significant disruption” to government computer systems caused by internet “worms” – both those that had been deliberately targeted and others picked up accidentally.

Each month there were more than 20,000 “malicious” emails on government networks, of which 1,000 were deliberately targeted at, while intellectual property theft was taking place on a “massive scale” – some relating to national security.

The increased use of government services online – with the prospect of over £100 billion-a-year in tax and benefits payments being processed online – only added to the security challenge.

ITN

October 13, 2010
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk fights back

Innovation: Online army turns the tide on automation

by Gareth Morgan

Innovation is our regular column in which we highlight emerging technologies and predict where they may lead

Human help lies within (Image: Noriyuki Araki/Flickr/Getty)

Computer automation can take jobs away from people but, thanks to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, humans are fighting back. AMT was inspired by the 18th-century inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen, who dazzled the Roman empress Maria Theresa with a chess-playing automaton. His secret: a human chess master hid inside the machine.

In 2005, online retailer Amazon developed a version that uses a human workforce “hidden” on the internet to solve problems – for a modest price. Typically, the work undertaken is for organisations that need a little human smarts applied to bulk tasks, such as identifying objects in vast collections of images.

An echo of von Kempelen’s Turk is found in the offices of robot maker Willow Garage, in Menlo Park, California. Some of the firm’s free-roaming robots rely on humans through AMT to help them get their bearings. Whenever one gets lost within the Willow Garage offices, it sends an image to AMT with a request for nearby objects to be identified, using the answers to establish its whereabouts.

Get shorter

At the User Interface Software and Technology symposium in New York City this week there are signs that AMT rivals computer automation on some tasks.

Michael Bernstein at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and colleagues, have developed Soylent, an add-on for Microsoft Word that uses AMT workers to check language and grammar. In tests on text from Wikipedia entries, Word’s grammar checker picked up about a third of errors; Soylent spotted two-thirds.

Solyent’s Shortn module tasks the online workers with shortening the text – to meet a word limit, for example. The Word add-on also boasts a macro-writing module, Human Macro, which lets a writer describe how they want to manipulate text – perhaps changing it into the past tense – without the complication of having to code their own set of instructions within Word.

Say what you see

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Bigham at the University of Rochester, New York, and colleagues, are using the image-analysis capabilities of AMT workers – predominantly based in the US and India – to help the visually impaired. They have created an iPhone app called VizWiz that gets AMT workers to interpret objects in the user’s environment – checking the small use-by date on a carton of milk, for example.

The app is able to analyse the iPhone camera’s focal length and lens distortion, and data from the built-in accelerometer, to pick out a target object in sufficient detail before sending it. After identification, the result is read aloud.

However, despite their lack of real brain power, there is one advantage that computers will continue to hold over their AMT rivals: computers don’t charge for their labour.

References: Bernstein’s Soylent research paper (pdf); Bigham’s VizWiz research paper (pdf)

, 05 October 2010

October 8, 2010
A TWIN OF EARTH WAS FOUND

‘Goldilocks’ Planet’s Temperature Just Right For Life

by Joe Palca

Lynette CookA National Science Foundation artist’s drawing shows the inner four planets orbiting Gliese 581, a red dwarf star just 20 light-years from Earth. The newly discovered planet, in the foreground, has a 37-day orbit and, like Earth, is distant enough from the star for liquid water to exist.

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September 29, 2010

The possibility of life on other planets has been a staple of science fiction for decades. Now that possibility has taken a step closer to reality as astronomers say they have found a planet orbiting a star a mere 20 light-years away that has the right conditions for life to exist.

Enlarge Zina Deretsky/National Science FoundationAll of the planets orbiting Gliese 581 are nearer to it than the Earth is to our sun.

Zina Deretsky/National Science FoundationAll of the planets orbiting Gliese 581 are nearer to it than the Earth is to our sun.

Scientists are calling it the first “Goldilocks” planet, as its temperature seems to be just right to harbor life.

“The planet has to be the right distance from the star so it’s not too hot and not too cold that liquid water can exist,” says Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. “And then the planet has to have the right surface gravity.”

Butler spoke Wednesday afternoon at a news conference organized by the National Science Foundation, the organization that funded Butler’s research. Astronomers have found hundreds of planets orbiting other stars in the past decade, but they have all been so far from their suns that any water would be solid ice or so close that liquid water would boil away.

The new planet, called Gliese 581-g, is different. But Butler has no direct evidence that Gliese 581-g actually has water.

“What we know is that this planet exists at the right distance for liquid water, and that it has the right amount of mass to hold onto an atmosphere and to protect its liquid water on the surface,” he says. “And of course, any subsequent discussion about life is purely speculative.”

But then he couldn’t resist speculating: “That being said, on the Earth, anywhere you find liquid water you find life in abundance.”

A Solar System Like Our Own

There are six planets orbiting around star Gliese 581. And even if planet 581-g doesn’t have life, Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says the solar system around Gliese 581 has an eerie resemblance to the one around our sun.

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“It has an inner clutch of rocky, sort of terrestrial-like planets,” he says. Those are planets like Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. “And then this sort of loner that’s sitting on the outside, kind of like our Jupiter. But it’s scaled down. This entire solar system would fit within our own Earth’s orbit.”

That’s because Gliese 581 is a red dwarf — a pipsqueak of a star compared to our sun.

“If you think of the sun as a 100-watt light bulb, this is a 1-watt light bulb. It’s like a Christmas tree light,” says David Charbonneau, a planet hunter at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “So to have the same temperature, a planet needs to be much closer to that star than it would be from the sun, where you’d have a temperature where you might have light and liquid water.”

Charbonneau says the next step will be to try to analyze the atmosphere of this planet and other Goldilocks planets that are probably out there to see if they contain oxygen, another key chemical for life. Those findings are probably some years off, but Charbonneau predicts they will come.

September 30, 2010
Turkey, with help from Germany, to become ‘submarine manufacturer’

Special to World Tribune

INTELLIGENCE BRIEFING

ANKARA — Turkey has launched a project to produce an advanced naval submarine.

Turkey’s Defense Ministry and Navy have been working with Germany in the coproduction of four electric-diesel submarines. The coproduction effort has taken place with Germany’s ThyssenKrupp for the Type 214 submarine.

“This is a huge project that will make Turkey into a submarine manufacturer,” an official said.

The submarine project was expected to cost about $2.5 billion. Officials said the first platform could be delivered to the Navy in 2015.

The Navy has been building three of the submarines in Turkey. Officials said Turkey would also help design electronic subsystems for the underwater platforms.

Turkey has been engaged in several major naval projects. One called for the assembly of up to 11 small frigates in a project estimated at $2 billion.

http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2010/me_turkey0873_09_08.asp. September 8, 2010

September 13, 2010
Turkey Joins Europe, Electrically Speaking

Turkey may be frustrated in its bid to become part of the European Union, but by the end of September, it will join Europe’s electric grid.

Most electric systems in continental Europe — including those in countries like Poland and Romania — have synchronized currents, allowing electricity to flow easily from country to country. But other nations, including Great Britain, Norway, Sweden, Finland and until now, Turkey, have remained separate.

Turkey has been trying to connect for 10 years. Like Europe, it uses an alternating current, with the electrons dancing back and forth 50 times a second, but its system has been out of phase with the European grid.

Now, after extensive work by General Electric to enable Turkey’s system to connect, the country will join up for a one-year trial, according to theEuropean Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity.

The synchronization will include careful monitoring of the alternating current around Turkey and the ability to remotely monitor and control power plants — or even to dump electrical load – if Turkey’s phasing strays too far from Europe’s. If the marching bands start to disagree altogether, the systems can separate again.

Turkey’s electric links run to Bulgaria and Greece, and they have recently been upgraded to carry more energy. A result will be one of the largest interconnected grids in the world, said Luis M. Perez, a General Electric engineer involved in the project.

The join-up also has potentially positive implications for the environment, Mr. Perez said in a telephone interview from Spain.

Turkey, he said, has a lot of hydroelectric projects. In a wet year, it may have more hydro power than it can use; now that power can be exported. And as Europe adds intermittent renewable sources, like wind and solar, a hydroelectric system can function as a convenient shock absorber, throttling back or starting up very quickly to offset variations from other power sources.

Synchronizing with Europe also has positive economic effects, because it will improve the stability of the Turkish grid, according to G.E. The company would not disclose the cost of its work there.

At some point, a technician will enter some keystrokes on a computer, and some electrical switches will move and make the connection to Europe. G.E. is not saying exactly when that join-up will take place.

The Newyork Times

September 8, 2010