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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
Did the satellite tell anyone it noticed anything? That's important too.
--<Mike>--
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/ .
God forbid they actually do some *research* and *invent* something *useful* ? How can you say that it wouldn't be great for them to have a network of satellites that watch the globe for this activity tirelessly day and night, rather than having some poor tired geologists staring at seismometeres ? I'm sure you're against educating people in the third world because other people are starving etc. Please think about things a little bit before you call them a waste of money.
"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.
The US has had satellites that detect missile launches for decades. Calling this thing AI is a stretch; a sensor picks up something and it starts collecting. Maybe some pattern matching, not much else.
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.
OK, I'll bite. I'm a scientist who does utterly useless, blue-sky type stuff that will never make anyone money, or save anyone's life. So why should anyone pay me to do things that don't have a clear payoff?
The answer I've come up with is that these things- pure research, art, music, philosophy, museums- may not make us live any longer, and they may not make us richer, but they make our lives richer. Sure, if we diverted all government funding from the arts, public TV, the Smithsonian, the National Parks Service and soforth, and used it to fund stuff that would directly benefit people, people might live longer, more comfortable lives. But a world with less art, music, museums, and pure research is a deader, duller, less interesting world. Who'd want to live in that world? I'm not saying that justifies any level of funding, you've got to figure out how many dollars you're willing to pay for each "Angels in America" (an incredible work funded by the NEA, incidentally), but it's worth something and I'm more than happy to have my tax dollars promote that kind of thing. It's a hell of a lot more productive than having my tax dollars kill my countrymen and foreigners in the Middle East. And a hundred million a year works out to what, 30 cents per American on the arts?
The other answer is that there is a payoff, but it's a long-term, indirect one. Look at a city like New York. It's a vibrant, changing, economic powerhouse. Part of that, I think, is that the city is so filled with the arts- writers, photographers, musicians, scholars and soforth- that it's just a damn interesting place to live. Many of the best and the brightest from across the nation are drawn to the city because they want to experience a place that's alive intellectually and artistically, and in the long term that helps the city to reap huge economic benefits. I think a vibrant culture will help foster a vibrant economy. If nothing else, millions of people visit cities like New York and San Francisco to take in that culture, spending a lot of money in the process. So I think that long term, a few dollars wisely invested in the arts and academia are a good move.
Greetings aqnd Salutations
Hum...$100 million sounds like a lot on an individual basis, but, in terms of the entire budget it is closer to what falls on the floor from the change pocket. In 1998, the budget spent on "secret" programs was $28 BILLION. That is, unless I am confused $28,000 million, and that is not even the BIGGEST money sink in the federal goverment.
Why should we spend money on the arts? well, I believe it is because the LOSS of that facet of life will leave us a poorer and less capable civilization. Not all expression of creativity is appreciated enough to keep the artist alive and able to produce, but, there is always the chance that this will change when society advances enough to understand that point of view and appreciate it fully. It has happened before and it will happen again.
Now, I also think that a larger chunk of funds should go to National Public Radio, mainly because it COULD be a truely neutral voice that speaks without the agenda (hidden or otherwise) that seems to infect so much of the commercial broadcasters. One thing that used to tell me that NPR was doing its job very well was how it irritated EVERYONE at some point in time. I heard conservatives cursing it for its obvious liberal bias, and I heard liberals complaining about its almost reactionary conservative attitudes. I do not agree or like everything I hear on public broadcasting, but, I know that the erosion of that support over the past decade or two has also left AMerica a poorer place.
Regards
Dave Mundt
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
> God forbid they actually do some *research* and *invent* something *useful* ?
Research is an essential aspect of progress. However, all because research is essential does not mean ALL research is essential, or that any given research is an efficient use of the finite resources available with which to conduct research.
More to the point, research is not the issue here, despite the fact you're raised it as THE issue. There are a zillion ways to develop AI heuristics. There is no need whatsoever to spend millions of dollars developing them in a spacecraft when you can spend thousands of dollars and develop them in a computer, with attached sensors, in a lab.
The issue here is that there is a finite amount of money and this seems to be a rather gratitious and extremely expensive satellite.
> How can you say that it wouldn't be great for them to have a network of satellites that watch the globe
> for this activity tirelessly day and night, rather than having some poor tired geologists staring at
> seismometeres ?
I doubt there is a single geologist, tired or otherwise, staring at seisometers, waiting for something to happen. I suspect they are all computer monitored and the geologists, being rather bright, have so arranged matters that they are warm and comfy in bed.
> I'm sure you're against educating people in the third world because other people are starving etc.
You think that because you don't understand where I'm coming from and have projected a set of opinions you dislike on to me.
> I really don't think a satellite that scans the whole earth and pinpointing changes relevant to its
> mission is that out of line.
There are MANY satellites which monitor the entire planet, 24/7.
My point is that the report seems to be that this satellite is being used to experiment with AI heuristics.
It's all good and well to do research, but it's not all good and well to do needlessly expensive research. Firing a satellite into orbit and running it is VERY expensive. The more you spend doing this, the less you have to spend on other research, which now simply doesn't get done. (And that's if you spend it on research; what about the 2.9 billion people who live on less than $2 a day?)
More to the point, it's actually an example of an abuse of economic freedom. I pay taxes - a whacking great big chunk of my income is taken from me. Why do I pay so much? what's the money used for? turns out some of it is being used to fire what seems to be entirely excessive hardware into space. I'm not happy with having so much money taken from me for things like this! but what choice do I have? none at all. My economic freedom - my ability to own what I earn from my own work - is compromised, for the State comes along and dispossesses me of a whacking great big chunk of my work; and it seems some of that money is being very inefficiently used. The people spending my money aren't the person who had to do the work to earn that money.
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.
And lets all give Toby a great big hand for demonstrating exactly why we have taxes and why government funded research is so important!
After all, it's not as if Toby's own economic potential didn't completely rely on the fact that he works in a nation whose citizenery benefited from the advances in science that such 'inefficient' research produces! No of course not! No, Toby is one of those billions of $2 a day workers who happens to have access to the Internet. An inefficient, failure of an attempt by the US and NATO signatories to create a decentralized network of communication capable of withstanding nuclear war.
And after all! It's not as if Toby's own opinion on EO-1 isn't well researched and thought out, I'm sure that right now he can spout off all of the sundry mission objectives that EO-1 has, as well as how successful so far it has been at meeting them.
No ladies and gentlemen, Toby has successfully shown to the world how selflessness and a broad world view, focused not on the impact of others actions upon oneself but on the impact of one's own actions upon others, can completely trump the necessity for government taxes collected for the benefit of it's citizens and applied in the pursuit of making their life better.
After all, if it were up to him, we'd just donate it all to the $2 a day workers! I'm sure that would make their day. For a week....
@Toby: Living in Europe, I handily pay more taxes than you, yet I don't go whining about it. If you pay taxes, that means you have a job and an income and a means to feed yourself, plus a bunch of comforts probably far beyond the necessary. This being the case, how much have you donated to the cause of feeding poor people on the other side of the planet? Nothing? OK, so now that we know your motivation is largely simple greed, let's proceed to talk about priorities.
Only a knuckle-dragging halfwit would get incensed about his government's expenditures in research while staying silent about the uncalled-for, counterproductive and outrageously expensive war his country chooses to blow his taxes on. Please note, Mr. Economist, that
and, on a totally unrelated topic also near and dear to your wallet,
I wouldn't object so much to your foolish rant if it didn't make it obvious that you have no idea of the difference between major costs and minor, important and unimportant.
Never mind, I'm sure I'm not reaching you. I hope you contribute generously to the abolishment of science education in schools. You know, science has been known to get in the way of teaching the Truth about Creation.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
EO-1 was a technology demonstration in *many* ways. It has a couple new type of sensors, a new bus, and yes -- new heuristic detection algorithms, although I don't think those were in the original specs when it was launched. It was not by any stretch of the imagination a waste of money. It is likely to be the progenitor for the next generation of Landsat-type sensors, and the next generation would not have been possible if not for this technology test.
You may also be interested in knowing that EO-1's mission was just one year long; that's all they needed, just to get it into orbit and test the new equipment. The fact that it's still running after *six* years goes to show how marvelous -- and cost efficient -- this bird is.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.