Slashdot Mirror
Intelligent Agents And Robotic Telescopes
dpp writes "Astronomers working on the eSTAR Project have used software "Intelligent Agents" to control the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope and observe a dwarf nova. One of the astronomers says "The Agents can detect and
respond to the rapidly changing universe faster than any human... [they] can be used to assist human observers, instead of replacing
them entirely - augmenting their abilities to do science quicker, faster, and more reliably." Next up: getting results sent
automatically to your 2.5G/3G mobile phone (with images!), and deploying on more telescopes including the Liverpool Telescope and the Faulkes
Telescopes. The full story is at the Joint Astronomy Centre."
in the name of the hackingthemainframe hard drives! http://hackingthemainframe.com
Do you think they can help people affected by large earthquakes?
Anyone else in the Kanto area feel that?
Didn't we learn from the terrible mistakes of Agent Smith?
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
can be used to assist human observers, instead of replacing them entirely
All I can think of is the scene in Roger and Me where Mike goes to GM-Land and sees the animatronic car factory worker singing a song called "Me and my buddy" about the robot that replaced him.
Agent's seem to be in the news.
There's also an article in the Economist about using "agents" to model economic and social systems.
So the question is: to what extent are these "agent" systems something new, and to what extent is it just re-packaging and/or hype?
Wonder how the agents decide if something is interesting or not?
;)
Maybe this technology will automate slashdot moderation someday
stuff
The rabbit hole goes deeper than you can imagine.
I wish they would stop calling these things intelligent. It's clever programming, yielding programs that act more or less like a human would in a very limited domain. These programs don't have general learning capability and they don't improvise if conditions change beyond what they were designed for, things any intelligent entity should be capable of IMHO.
Lourens
Way back in 95(ish) I remeber this "intelligent agent" app, called Rover if I remeber correctly. It was suppose to help you searching the web (ah, the pre Google days).
You could enter criteria, it'd crawl and you could rate the results, so it would learn to do it's thing better...
The thing never really worked though, and I'm still waiting for my voice activated, "Grab me some information on stellar physics, and compile into a simple tutorial please." -style agent.
OK, I'm sort of off topic here, but still, interresting ideas.
.: Max Romantschuk
That press release is seriously lacking in substantive content. Yawn....
This sounds like a very good aplication for the Kepler mission in detecting extrasolar planets. http://www.kepler.arc.nasa.gov/
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
A real intelligent agent would actually just swing the telescope round and get it to look into the nearest student nurses home :)
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
I mean, yes nice to have that pic right away, but are you gonna rush to work because some nice results came in? or do you decide it can wait till tomorrow and regular hour days?
Jeez, i don't mind technology, but this myth of 'everything right now, even if it's ultimately not that urgent and/or important' pisses me off...
Yes, it's offtopic.
Tsuyoikoto ha taisetsu da ne, dakedo namida mo hitsuyousa (Strength is an important thing, but tears too are necessary)
It looks like the UK government is about to propose legislation that would combat light pollution. This would be great for all UK astronomers, especially those of us that live in urban areas.
When I was an undergraduate at University College London, we had to trek up tok to the university's observatory at Mill Hill (as featured in the Omen movies), to do our Practical Astronomy classes and to use the telescopes. Previously though, although how far back in time I'm not certain, the classes were taught using two telescopes housed in domes in the university's front quad, which is practically in the middle of London.
The difference in light pollution between the two sites is amazing. Making observations of Delta Cephi (as required for one assignment, to calculate it's period) was impossible from central London but acheivable even with the naked eye at Mill Hill. Even so, the light pollution there (Mill Hill being a part of London, albeit one that's a few miles out from the centre) was still appreciable.
It would be nice to see the stars from London again, to be able to pick out more than just a few constellations. However, I don't expect the situation to improve any time soon, if at all. I have a sneaky suspicion that the legislation will be more concerned about people who leave their garden lights shining brightly into their neighbours properties than anything else.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
...agents were known as Daemons. Being faster in thought than humans and more devious, they were appropriately described by the term Diabolical.
The machines have become more subtle in these end times at their method of controlling our minds by corrupting our language, recasting the diabolical daemons of the netherworld as the more politically palatable and iconographically hip Intelligent Agents.
... I believe you are in dire need of this:
Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots.
Tomorrow I'm changing all my tech documentation so it says "intelligent agent" rather than "program".
Then I can demand a significant wage increase for using cool buzzwords.
Ok, Will we now see the Alien Invasion fleets faster?
it's not like you need a telescopically equipped model rocket cam, to smell which way the wind's bullowing?
checking recent readings: get ready to see the light.
the daze of the felonious payper liesense georgewellian fuddite southern baptist freemason ?pr? ?firm? corepirate nazi stock markup FraUD execrable, is WANing into coolapps/the abyss, at the speed of right.
for each of the creator's innocents harmed, there is a badtoll that must/will be repaid by you/US, as the aforementioned perpetraitors of the whoreabull life0cide against humankind, will not be available to make reparations, after the big flash.
consult with/trust in yOUR creator... more breathing... that's the spirit.
see you there?
On August 4th, 1997, Skynet becomes self aware ...
You'll find some more details on my blog today, including a diagram showing how the eSTAR network operates. And you can find additional information in "Smart software watches the skies," also published today by BBC News Online.
Some of the below has been hacked from my thesis, so please excuse the lack of references (the citation have been deleted).
When AI research began to consider the possibilities of distributed applications, the field of distributed AI (DAI) emerged. Within this field, there are three general areas: Distributed Problem Solving (DPS), Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and Parallel AI. Agents in DPS are low-grain, often sharing common resources. Agents in a MAS are large-grain, having autonomy and heterogeneity and are typically based the psychology-based Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model. Although the BDI model is considered a robust and flexible way of describing the internal state of intelligent agents, it is complicated and difficult to implement. This gap between BDI theory and practice means that the model has to be extended for the development of practical goal directed agents. Furthermore, there is no general architecture in MAS research. Consequently, MAS are complex to construct and are usually built for a specific purpose. They are heterogeneous, that is, an agent from one MAS is inherently incompatible with another MAS. The field of Cooperating Knowledge-Based Systems (CKBS) provides a general architecture for the development of real-world systems (for example, where database are heavily used), and inherit the benefits of DAI: modularity, parallelism and reliability (due to redundancy).
There have been various definitions of an agent and agent-based systems. Norvig defined agents as intelligent entities that can be "viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting upon its environment through effectors" Others view agents from a more practical perspective, as software engineering solutions to complex problems. The Oxford Dictionary of Computing defined an agent as 'an autonomous system that receives information from it's environment, processes it, and performs actions on that environment. Agents may have different degrees of intelligence or rationality, and may be software, hardware, or both.' The point has been made that, under the banner of 'agents', the research is truely heterogeneous.
Four important characteristics of a MAS were identified by Sycara and these may be applied to the pragmatic CKBS perspective:
- Each agent has incomplete information or capabilities for solving the problem and, thus, has a limited viewpoint.
- There is no system global control.
- Data are decentralised.
- Computation is asynchronous.
The InfoSleuth project stated that the use of agents provides a 'high degree of decentralisation of capabilities which is the key to system scalability and extensibility.' This is due to fewer resource limitations, fewer communication bottlenecks and the absence of a single point of failure. Furthermore, modules may be added easily, so the system is more scalable and there may be more than one agents able to perform a task; this redundancy begets reliability.
Agents have been used in a wide variety of scenarios: manufacturing, telecommunications, air traffic control, information gathering. There are increasingly more companies involved in non-research agent activities, for example http://www.lostwax.com/.
If it can be an excuse to frequently visit Omen locations,it can't be all that bad...
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Anybody got a link?
...because UKIRT is on top of Mauna Kea on Hawai'i.