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Intelligent Satellite Notices Volcanic Activity
Dik Zak points us to this NASA page about a new generation of intelligent Earth observation satellites. From the article: "The Indonesian volcano Talang on the island of Sumatra had been dormant for centuries when, in April 2005, it suddenly rumbled to life. A plume of smoke rose 1000 meters high and nearby villages were covered in ash. Fearing a major eruption, local authorities began evacuating 40,000 people. UN officials, meanwhile, issued a call for help: Volcanologists should begin monitoring Talang at once. Little did they know that, high above Earth, a small satellite was already watching the volcano. No one had told it to. EO-1 (short for "Earth Observing 1") noticed the warning signs and started monitoring Talang on its own. Indeed, by the time many volcanologists were reading their emails from the UN, 'EO-1 already had data,' says Steve Chien, leader of JPL's Artificial Intelligence Group."
It was December the 3rd, the day skynet became self aware....
...)!
What an absolutely awesome piece of self identifying hotzone locating piece of hardware, the guys at Cyberdyne must have had a field day making it.
And now the intelligence is growing. "We're teaching EO-1 to use sensors on other satellites." Examples: Terra and Aqua, two NASA satellites which fly over every part of Earth twice a day. Each has a sensor onboard named MODIS. It's an infrared spectrometer able to sense heat from forest fires and volcanoes--just the sort of thing EO-1 likes to study. "We make MODIS data available to EO-1," says Chien, "so when Terra or Aqua see something interesting, EO-1 can respond."
This thing sounds like it can detect a fart from orbit!
What I want to know is if all this processing actually occurs onboard the sat, or if its a land based super computer brain?
Are these machines by chance running Linux? or are they using another VX-Works OS?
For the first time every I really think it could be possible for us to build a beowolf cluster of linux running space fem-bots, all we need to do is sabotage the main dev tree (if(GPS.Height>'200miles')
Year of the desktop? PAH! This year - the world!
liqbase
It becomes self-aware at 2:14am Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
And, EO-1 fights back.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Did the satellite tell anyone it noticed anything? That's important too.
--<Mike>--
....tomorrow, Sarah Connor.
And then we're all in trouble.
"I for one welcome our new satellite overlords."
"I wonder what would happen if we created a beowulf cluster of them?"
I wonder if it notices hot chicks when there's no interesting volcanos?
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
I welcome the... oh, forget it.
I knew we were being watched!!
already got posted a long time ago, probably around April.
What are we doing with so many satellites in orbit we can spare one look at targets generated by AI heuristics? these things costs millions of dollars a year to run. I don't see that the *possibility* of managing to look at an interesting event before being actually commanded to do so is a proportional use of that money. There are MUCH more essential things to spend millions of dollars on.
a couple weeks ago when my computer had a melt down :
there are 10 types of people in this world; those who get this joke, and those who don't
"Is this real intelligence? "Absolutely," he says. EO-1 passes the basic test: "If you put the system in a box and look at it from the outside, without knowing how the decisions are made, would you say the system is intelligent?" Chien thinks so."
Does anyone else find this disturbing. Reminds me of that episode of Star Trek season 2 Episode 12, 16 minutes in, 45 seconds where.......errr never mind.
Is this satellite not totally useless without notifying someone? I mean really, it's nice to have data on volcanic activity, but if the volcano had erupted, and then someone checks the satellite and sees that there was data collected from the point that the volcano got hot, it's a little late then isn't it? Even if it is a false alarm, couldn't it use some tracking from the moment that the satellite notices volcanic activity? Think of our modern-day hurricane tracking systems... Each storm is tracked, and some hit land, but many either are "false-alarms" or miss land. If most tropical storms are seen but then are deemed "false-alarms", then one hits land as a Cat-5 hurricane is it not too late? Yes, people will see the hurricane as it approaches land via weather radar and whatnot, but will it not be too late to evacuate adequately? Think of Katrina! I'm just saying that the satellite is next to useless if it's not being put to good use by warning of potential disasters... Because it's nice to have data after a disaster, but will it not have been infinitely better if it had been used to save lives?
Pardon me, but wouldn't earth observing satelites react with the EarthNetworkMonitoringProtocol?
The space one is for the satelites looking the other way.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Old joke delivered well still funny.
This sort of thing is being funded under the next-generation space reconnaissance satellite programs for the follow-on programs for the KH-11/12 and Lacrosse birds as well as the sats used to detect IR plumes of rockets and nuclear detonations.
I saw it in Janes a while back, no time to find sources right now, working on papers for Grad School.
This satellite is part of Skynet.
i wonder if the Vulcanologist got an email from the saterlite!!.......
Sarah Conner is history.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
The u.n. (lowercase intentional) believes its job is to tell everyone else what to do while its members sit on their fat asses and bitch about the results.
I'll be honest, I don't see why this is important.
According to the article, it was essentially programmed to notice abnormal changes and begin collecting data if something occurs... How is this in any way intelligent? Just because it wasn't hardcoded to monitor it or manually told to doesn't mean it's "thinking." It did as it was programmed. Somewhere in there is an "if" statement saying that if certain values are out of a certain range, begin collecting data. So... it did exactly what it was programmed to do. Where's the breakthrough?
Now, if it did something that actually wasn't in it's code, that'd be news; like oh, say, actually notifying someone of the change.
I replaced this for the 'beep' in Windows once. Was funny for a few days.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
All the system does is basically to compute the score (interest) of the different points of the earth's surface using predetermined criteria (plume of smokes +5 points, flash-floods +2 points) set by humans, and then allocate observation time in priority to the points that have the highest score. This is not what I call intelligence.
An intelligent system would set its own goals, not follow predetermined ones. In this case an intelligent system would decide by itself that a certain phenomenon is interesting and decide to observe it, without being told about it beforehand.
If intelligence is their goal they have a long way to go.
The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.
Remember, the volcano is no threat to the satellite. In terms its self-awareness, there was no cause for concern.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Is that because intelligence is not required for this function, it is not present. A logical fallacy.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
What would the Useless Nations have to do with this?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Let me see what I can say about this that doesn't get me on some list...
If they admit the satellite has 1m resolution, it can read license plates. If they say it sees thermal events, it knows when you're getting busy. If Intel says they're at a 65nm node, satellites are launching at 17nm.
I first met self-aware hardware in the '80s. I assume development has developed apace. The only thing surprising about this report is that some people consider it surprising. Our only saving grace at this point is that the wonks that manage these programs don't see their potential for abuse.
Does it run linux? Don't be silly. They can do much better than that.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
So NASA try to hype up sexy, new, "intelligent" technology, and how it got the pictures soooo fast. And what do they illustrate it with ? An old Landsat photo, taken at the latest in 1994 http://volcano.und.edu/vwdocs/volc_images/southeas t_asia/indonesia/talang.html
:-)
Well, made me laugh
I don't see how this is any more intelligent than an extremely souped up version of the motion sensor light in my driveway. You might as well say that my car is using artificial intelligence when my gas light goes on.
I'm betting you didn't even have to check your collection before answering that..
If you're so smart, then tell me, what is love?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
It seems to me that the point of the satellite was not to predict and warn about catastrophe's, but to collect data on interesting events...some of which may be sufficiently transient that if it relied on human intervention to start monitoring them specifically would be missed. If this satellite were there for the purpose of monitoring volcanos specifically, then I'd be disappointed.
...to find WMD's and being bored out of its little electronic mind
for the past few years it must have been excited to actually find something.
Am I missing something here? The /. blurb says Talang has been dormant for centuries, which repeats what the article says, but the first link in the article says there have been confirmed eruptions as recently as 1968:
"Talang is a stratovolcano with 8 confirmed eruptions between 1833 and 1968. The volcano may have had a phreatic eruption in 1986 but the activity has not been confirmed. Most of the eruptions are moderate in size (VEI=2) and explosive. Eruptions in 1833, 1843, 1845, and 1876 were from flank vents. An eruption in 1967 and two different eruptions in 1968 were from radial fissures. The distance from the city of Padang to Talang is about 35 km. Image courtesy of the Landsat Pathfinder Project."
So tell me again why it's a big surprise that the satellite would be keeping an eye on this volcano?
However, punctuation and capitilization appear still to need a bit of work. Colons denote lists; semicolons denote breaks. Emdash should not be used outside marketing circles, nor should it precede a new sentence. At least it sort of looks like a new sentence, though it's not really.
IMHO.
Thanks for the compliment, though. I do try to make my writings as easy for others as possible. I appreciate others' efforts in the same direction. There's that pesky apostrophe again ("others'"), in yet another of its
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
keeno. This is what I have been waiting for in a non military earth monitoring system..
Like when they first came out with those lam-o- CDrom atlasas I had 'google earth' in my braim as how it should be and was so dissapointed when I saw them. Watch this sattelite (sp?) is late I am going to bed, and I gave my spell check the night off.
With the data this thing can generate in the time it can generate it. it can be way faster than our earth based vulcanoligist in predicting a magor eruption. saving millions of lives in the process.
Good article.
-Magdalene --"there are 10 types of people in the world, those who read binary, and those who don't"