i do a bit of computer vision and here could be a basic method this this to work:
for each image fit an affine transform to the last [this should work easily because 1) the paper is planar 2) the paper and it's background are hopefully different - with nice edges in between 3) the lighting conditions are the same (depending on how you hold the phone) 4) the paper is not moving
each of these tranforms can be applied cumulatively to the future images, though error is reduced by mapping everything to the center image.
this takes care of the registration problem (other techniques like KLT might be useful...maybe [ http://vision.stanford.edu/~birch/klt/ ] )
then you can apply techniques of super-resolution to get a higher resolution image [ http://www.ri.cmu.edu/projects/project_323.html ]
try it.. not that hard:) having a rectangular, planar, still, evenly-lit piece of paper helps!
The effort to make robots more human is funny. I'm laughing.
Anyone who has ever interacted with any robot, regardless of scale of the project, resemblance to humans, or application, can tell you that robots are STUPID.
Life-like faces are the last thing they need. Learning a language, learning how to walk on their own, object recognition, simultaneous localization and mapping, gripping, etc. are all in a pathetic state compared to what you read in CNN.
I mean, this is why I'm in the field: to improve it. But don't get your hopes up for this decade (and probably the next).
Yes, nano-tech is unstoppable and inevitable, but that says nothing for how it'll happen.
As we speak, millions starve because people are afraid of genetically modified rice & corn. Protectionist farmers and extremist environmentalists are afraid of the risks (none proven to date).
People die from malaria because DDT isn't used to kill mosquitoes. Rational: it might (very unlikely) kill some animals. Response: let the people die instead!
We must not let bad PR hurt the nano-tech industry like genetic engineering has become anathema! Here is an interesting article on this topic: http://techcentralstation.com/012804A.html
The arguement that "we can't go there, it's not free trade, it's not fair" falls apart in reality when you look at immigration rates.
More people have immigrated to America in the past 20 years than the rest of the world combined !
Why do they come? Simply put, America has the highest standard of living in the world, relative to social mobility. This means that poor people can work hard, and not suffer like they would in the country they came from. They may not be able to shop anywhere but GoodWill, and they might not be able to buy a house, but they without a doubt better off.
America is the best place in the world. If you want to go to India, feel free to put yourself in an airlocked container, and smuggle yourself in. You could indeed learn a thing or two about desperation from immigrants to America.
It's the raping of our nation.
You're kidding right? As I've said before, learn some new skills, make yourself valuable, work hard, and you will make it. Currently I'm in graduate school learning skills that will make me invaluable to a future employee (robotics).
Here is an article on how outsourcing is not as bad or severe as people claim.
Objectively, don't you think India and China need more, good jobs than America? Also, you must admit that having a more advanced trading partner benefits everyone! The article articulates in numbers how trade with india has increased more than jobs have been lost.
Also, isn't the point of robust competition that you need to be better than competitors? Shouldn't we be focused on finding competitive advantages rather than lamenting job losses?
Frankly I'm annoyed that programmers that should have good educations are making the same complaints that factory workers make with automation or immigration. Automation makes our cars and TVs cheaper, so more people can have them. Immigration helps keep down the prices of farm goods. Outsourcing is just another way for a company to save a buck, which, in some way, will help the system. Whether through higher incomes for the rest of the company, higher tax revenues, greater dividends, or cheaper products, there are a multitude of ways in which every aspect of free trade helps EVERYONE.
Selfish people in any industry shouldn't ruin it for the rest of us. They shouldn't encourage politicians to restrict the natural order of the market. They should work hard, learn new skills, and stay competitive. This simple formula is the exact reason why America is a super-power!
I love robots (i work in robotics), but this is a waste.
Clearly, digitizing the text is a faster and easier solution.
A clever hack at CMU for such a project was used to solve the problem of turning pages. Pull too hard, and the page rips. Push and more than one page goes for the ride.
Solution: silly (or thinking) putty! It sticks to the page perfectly, i.e. it lets go when it should.
This is an example of coming up with a solution to a given problem. A mobile robot that needs to perceive its environment, make local decisions, take up space, incur battery power, etc. is just making more problems and solving nothing. It is creating problems, though you get some wow-effects along the way.
I love the way MIT gets media attention but doesn't necessarily do things first or towards a final usable product.
Segway soccer isn't new.
You don't need arms to play soccer; all you need is a "kicker". CMU already has a segway robot to play soccer: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~robosoccer/segway/
The point is that people on segways can play robots on segways. I'm not sure how adding arms and a head would help...
Also, you will notice this research group lacks vision:): http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/cardea/technical /vi sion.shtml
What can asimo do? Currently nothing. if he tries to walk forward, and you put a hand on him to stop, he will push forward harder. you let go, and he falls down.
It's a mechanical marvel, but needs to do SOMETHING before you put him in the hall of fame (btw unimate was a mechanical wonder that started a whole industry of assembly automation)
roomba - what can it do? Clean? Well, it's battery powered, with a few clever traversal algs. BUT, in the end, it isn't strong enough to do much of any deep cleaning for any extended amount of time. Their spin is that it is good for everyday cleaning. My spin is that it doesn't work.
Make a robot that can use MY current (cheaper/stronger/more reliable) vacuum cleaner (perhaps an asimo that DOES something), and I will gladly nominate it in the hall of fame.
"The research paper also mentions that everyday, we are using the fossil fuel equivalent of all the plants growing during a whole year just for our cars"
Note that there have been hundreds of millions of years for these plants to accumulate, which implies that cars should have ample gas for centuries:)
This highlights the fact that supply will NOT be a reason why petroleum products will no longer be used. I think that only a change in the bottom line to consumers and businesses will change any policy towards the environment. For instance: a car tax [only on 'non-green' cars] going towards research of alternative methods.
Note also that this idea is a subset of having the final cost of products (i.e. waste management) incorporated into the retail cost, where today it is not. This is from Marshall Brain: http://marshallbrain.com/etq-landfills.htm
the problem now is that the societies are corrupt, and there is money to fund extremism.
if the oil economy fell apart, there wouldn't be any money to spread the problems. it would be like any african civil war: out of sight, out of mind, and not my problem
Prince avoided the contract problem when he wanted to divorce his record label by fufilling the terms of the contact as soon as possible.
He was to produce 6 more records to complete the contract, and low and behold, in just a few months his next album was a 6-record opus.
So if don't mind putting out an album most people wont listen to (a final fcuk-off to the record label?) and have the talent to pump it out, it is certainly a not-so-easy option to get out of pre-existing contract.
This may be in part because scientists, like most other citizens, agree that the U.S. is facing dangerous foes. But some dissidents argue the cause is more likely that Pentagon cash has become an addiction that scientists rationalize by working on 'dual use' technologies...
I swear this is so biased. It just goes to show how many people just refuse to believe what they have right before their eyes. Perhaps there are actually some people who want to help OUR military. Perhaps they think that having it stronger and able to perform better in causes I think are JUST, is actually a good thing!
Ohh, but no, that couldn't be. These scientists must be led on - carrot on a stick style - by the government and couldn't possibly agree willingly.
I'll tell you this: recently the military has drastically increased the requirements of robustness in many areas of technology, whether it's computer science, robotics, or what have you. We're talking demo's 4 times a year to show a working to-date prototype. It doesn't work? Your funding is cut!
Basically, if you work on any reasonable project for the military, you are guarenteed to have your head out of the clouds and feet firmly planted here on earth. Not all cases, but like I said, things are becoming more stringent.
Further, the way we are pushing the envelope and making constant advances should be seen as positive for EVERYONE involved. Civilians get killed less, our soldiers get killed less/are happier, wars are over faster, soldiers return home faster, and one point people always dance around: THE ENEMY IS KILLED FASTER. This is only wrong in an unjust war, and I don't care what you think about the WMD hunt or American hegemony, saying it was wrong to take out Saddam is saying he was good. The thousands of graves of political prisoners is another example of folks refusing to see that which is staring them in the face.
i guess that's why it's good to keep all the powerful people as allies.
or to keep those things out of the hands of people that would use them against us... which in this age of globalization, is nothing but a rogue nation, or group.
btw, did you read this from the 'war nerd' from the www.exile.ru? he had an article semi-recently about carriers, and mentioned their weaknesses to anti-ship weapons. he is always a good read.
in my understanding, the speeds of manned fighters and bombers have been limited by the need to keep the human inside alive during excessive G forces.
I wonder what the upper limit of these speeds might be, that wouldn't tear up the ship itself (like some falling meteor).
But the article did mention that a simple titanium rod would serve as an adequate 'bunker buster' only from the speed it would be traveling from space. In rod we trust... haha
...in the brains of people who are asleep. They would see it as a dream.
We all know the matrix makes less than no sense when you consider you need to add energy to humans to get anything out of them [i.e. not a power source] and because the machines would have geothermal, nuclear, and even solar [in space] sources of energy.
The only way it could have made sense [which the animatrix: the second renaissance, part II didn't do] is if the machines were using human brains as a great source of computation with minimal power demands. Of course, i'm sure a dolphin brain would be more efficient, as their brain-to-body-size ratio is actually greater than a humans.
Then again, maybe our neural pathways in the cerebral cortex [which dolphins lack] are more advanced and allow for some kind of greater power...
Point being that I'm disappointed that such an obvious flaw isn't addressed. I suppose quipping a string of quality one-liners was more important....
You decide that humans are a good source, so you feed them, keep them warm, etc. Since when is life an exothermic phenomenon?
It's like the current arguments for Hydrogen. We use electricity to extract Hydrogen from hydrocarbons, with some wasted, to create electricity. Doesn't currently make sense.
Other than the fight scenes, graphics, and armchair philosophy, the only way I'm going to be truly satisfied with the sequels is if it is explained that humans have some sort of 'bio/neural-electric' energy that the machines need to survive. Otherwise it doesn't make sense.
To bad the second renaissance hasn't addressed this yet.
The 9/11 hijackers flew on the same flights again and again. This should have been noticed. Having a database to non-invasizely track the movements of people is just fine by me.
If I'm not a terrorist, what do I have to worry about or care if the government knows I'm coming back from a delightful vacation or business trip?
Clearly private data like CC#s should be kept secure, but folks need to stop whining about privacy for privacy's sake. Start accepting that taking reasonable actions in collecting intelligence could help in preventing another terrorist attack.
In a recent grad AI lecture, the professor elaborated on why chess-playing computers has improved so much in the past 20 years. Here is a synopsis:
in the 60's a 'mini-max' or 'alpha-beta' pruning algorithm was developed to enhance a depth-first-search by not expanding nodes which would not be reached because a better node for black or white would have already directed the moves differently (assumes that the opponent is playing optimally).
Since then 5 things have improved:
1) 'alpha-beta' pruning works better when the nodes to be expanded are sorted in the order of best current parents. This way, in expanding the best moves first, more branches are pruned.
2) hardware has drastically improved the speed of position analysis to the point where constructing a node actually takes more time than analyzing that node's position
3) Many more moves (both opening and closing) have been put into a data base that is sufficiently large to influence the game. In some cases the computer will take 200+ moves to win, at which point the human has no chance of winning.
4) Different position evaluation functions have been developed for the beginning, middle, and end of the game. These functions are also often tuned to a corpus of games for a particular player (e.g. Kasparov vs. Deep Blue)
5) The strongest algorithmic change has come in 'selective deepening'. Suppose we are performing a 10-move DFS. If a particular leaf looks to contain a lot of potential for change, i.e. many points of attack or trade, than this node will be expanded another 10 levels. Clearly the computer has to be highly selective in choosing which leaves to expand, but this has proven highly effective: check-mate has been seen 25+ moves in advance.
I was disappointed with Kasaprov's lack of win, but I'm more interested in seeing the following tournaments, where (to my understanding) computers will now be allowed to enter as regular contestants, following a ruling by the Fédération Internationale des Échecs [FIDE]
Slashdot Mirror
i do a bit of computer vision and here could be a basic method this this to work:
.. not that hard :)
for each image
fit an affine transform to the last
[this should work easily because
1) the paper is planar
2) the paper and it's background are hopefully different - with nice edges in between
3) the lighting conditions are the same (depending on how you hold the phone)
4) the paper is not moving
each of these tranforms can be applied cumulatively to the future images, though error is reduced by mapping everything to the center image.
this takes care of the registration problem (other techniques like KLT might be useful...maybe [ http://vision.stanford.edu/~birch/klt/ ] )
then you can apply techniques of super-resolution to get a higher resolution image [ http://www.ri.cmu.edu/projects/project_323.html ]
try it
having a rectangular, planar, still, evenly-lit piece of paper helps!
The effort to make robots more human is funny. I'm laughing.
Anyone who has ever interacted with any robot, regardless of scale of the project, resemblance to humans, or application, can tell you that robots are STUPID.
Life-like faces are the last thing they need. Learning a language, learning how to walk on their own, object recognition, simultaneous localization and mapping, gripping, etc. are all in a pathetic state compared to what you read in CNN.
I mean, this is why I'm in the field: to improve it. But don't get your hopes up for this decade (and probably the next).
Yes, nano-tech is unstoppable and inevitable, but that says nothing for how it'll happen.
l
As we speak, millions starve because people are afraid of genetically modified rice & corn. Protectionist farmers and extremist environmentalists are afraid of the risks (none proven to date).
People die from malaria because DDT isn't used to kill mosquitoes. Rational: it might (very unlikely) kill some animals. Response: let the people die instead!
We must not let bad PR hurt the nano-tech industry like genetic engineering has become anathema! Here is an interesting article on this topic:
http://techcentralstation.com/012804A.htm
relative to America.
The arguement that "we can't go there, it's not free trade, it's not fair" falls apart in reality when you look at immigration rates.
More people have immigrated to America in the past 20 years than the rest of the world combined !
Why do they come? Simply put, America has the highest standard of living in the world, relative to social mobility. This means that poor people can work hard, and not suffer like they would in the country they came from. They may not be able to shop anywhere but GoodWill, and they might not be able to buy a house, but they without a doubt better off.
America is the best place in the world. If you want to go to India, feel free to put yourself in an airlocked container, and smuggle yourself in. You could indeed learn a thing or two about desperation from immigrants to America.
It's the raping of our nation. You're kidding right? As I've said before, learn some new skills, make yourself valuable, work hard, and you will make it. Currently I'm in graduate school learning skills that will make me invaluable to a future employee (robotics).
Why aren't you?
blog: http://while-true.blogspot.com/
Here is an article on how outsourcing is not as bad or severe as people
claim.
Objectively, don't you think India and China need more, good jobs than
America? Also, you must admit that having a more advanced trading partner benefits
everyone! The article articulates in numbers how trade with india has increased more than jobs have been lost.
Also, isn't the point of robust competition that you need to be better than competitors? Shouldn't we be focused on finding competitive advantages rather than lamenting job losses?
Frankly I'm annoyed that programmers that should have good educations are making the same complaints that factory workers make with automation or immigration.
Automation makes our cars and TVs cheaper, so more people can have them. Immigration helps keep down the prices of farm goods. Outsourcing is just another way for a company to save a buck, which, in some way, will help the system. Whether through higher incomes for the rest of the company, higher tax revenues, greater dividends, or cheaper products, there are a multitude of ways in which every aspect of free trade helps EVERYONE.
Selfish people in any industry shouldn't ruin it for the rest of us. They shouldn't encourage politicians to restrict the natural order of the market. They should work hard, learn new skills, and stay competitive. This simple formula is the exact reason why America is a super-power!
Clearly what everyone is missing is to have the car drive itself!
see here and here
I love robots (i work in robotics), but this is a waste. Clearly, digitizing the text is a faster and easier solution. A clever hack at CMU for such a project was used to solve the problem of turning pages. Pull too hard, and the page rips. Push and more than one page goes for the ride. Solution: silly (or thinking) putty! It sticks to the page perfectly, i.e. it lets go when it should. This is an example of coming up with a solution to a given problem. A mobile robot that needs to perceive its environment, make local decisions, take up space, incur battery power, etc. is just making more problems and solving nothing. It is creating problems, though you get some wow-effects along the way.
Seen modified in the center here:. htm
5 4/ref=sib _dp_pt/102-3299208-5287367#reader-link
http://www.bbakira.co.uk/animevmanga/gangs
or here on the cover of the 3rd Manga volume:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/15697152
This car would be great...
more control to the robots the better
I love the way MIT gets media attention but doesn't necessarily do things first or towards a final usable product.
:) :l /vi sion.shtml
Segway soccer isn't new.
You don't need arms to play soccer; all you need is a "kicker". CMU already has a segway robot to play soccer: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~robosoccer/segway/
The point is that people on segways can play robots on segways. I'm not sure how adding arms and a head would help...
Also, you will notice this research group lacks vision
http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/cardea/technica
ha
What can asimo do? Currently nothing. if he tries to walk forward, and you put a hand on him to stop, he will push forward harder. you let go, and he falls down.
It's a mechanical marvel, but needs to do SOMETHING before you put him in the hall of fame (btw unimate was a mechanical wonder that started a whole industry of assembly automation)
roomba - what can it do? Clean? Well, it's battery powered, with a few clever traversal algs. BUT, in the end, it isn't strong enough to do much of any deep cleaning for any extended amount of time. Their spin is that it is good for everyday cleaning. My spin is that it doesn't work.
Make a robot that can use MY current (cheaper/stronger/more reliable) vacuum cleaner (perhaps an asimo that DOES something), and I will gladly nominate it in the hall of fame.
"The research paper also mentions that everyday, we are using the fossil fuel equivalent of all the plants growing during a whole year just for our cars"
:)
m
Note that there have been hundreds of millions of years for these plants to accumulate, which implies that cars should have ample gas for centuries
This highlights the fact that supply will NOT be a reason why petroleum products will no longer be used. I think that only a change in the bottom line to consumers and businesses will change any policy towards the environment. For instance: a car tax [only on 'non-green' cars] going towards research of alternative methods.
Note also that this idea is a subset of having the final cost of products (i.e. waste management) incorporated into the retail cost, where today it is not. This is from Marshall Brain:
http://marshallbrain.com/etq-landfills.ht
the problem now is that the societies are corrupt, and there is money to fund extremism.
if the oil economy fell apart, there wouldn't be any money to spread the problems. it would be like any african civil war: out of sight, out of mind, and not my problem
Prince avoided the contract problem when he wanted to divorce his record label by fufilling the terms of the contact as soon as possible.
He was to produce 6 more records to complete the contract, and low and behold, in just a few months his next album was a 6-record opus.
So if don't mind putting out an album most people wont listen to (a final fcuk-off to the record label?) and have the talent to pump it out, it is certainly a not-so-easy option to get out of pre-existing contract.
This may be in part because scientists, like most other citizens, agree that the U.S. is facing dangerous foes. But some dissidents argue the cause is more likely that Pentagon cash has become an addiction that scientists rationalize by working on 'dual use' technologies...
I swear this is so biased. It just goes to show how many people just refuse to believe what they have right before their eyes. Perhaps there are actually some people who want to help OUR military. Perhaps they think that having it stronger and able to perform better in causes I think are JUST, is actually a good thing!
Ohh, but no, that couldn't be. These scientists must be led on - carrot on a stick style - by the government and couldn't possibly agree willingly.
I'll tell you this: recently the military has drastically increased the requirements of robustness in many areas of technology, whether it's computer science, robotics, or what have you. We're talking demo's 4 times a year to show a working to-date prototype. It doesn't work? Your funding is cut!
Basically, if you work on any reasonable project for the military, you are guarenteed to have your head out of the clouds and feet firmly planted here on earth. Not all cases, but like I said, things are becoming more stringent.
Further, the way we are pushing the envelope and making constant advances should be seen as positive for EVERYONE involved. Civilians get killed less, our soldiers get killed less/are happier, wars are over faster, soldiers return home faster, and one point people always dance around: THE ENEMY IS KILLED FASTER. This is only wrong in an unjust war, and I don't care what you think about the WMD hunt or American hegemony, saying it was wrong to take out Saddam is saying he was good. The thousands of graves of political prisoners is another example of folks refusing to see that which is staring them in the face.
i guess that's why it's good to keep all the powerful people as allies.
or to keep those things out of the hands of people that would use them against us...
which in this age of globalization, is nothing but a rogue nation, or group.
btw, did you read this from the 'war nerd' from the www.exile.ru? he had an article semi-recently about carriers, and mentioned their weaknesses to anti-ship weapons.
he is always a good read.
the newest features?
or
what a new class of carriers might have?
in my understanding, the speeds of manned fighters and bombers have been limited by the need to keep the human inside alive during excessive G forces.
... haha
I wonder what the upper limit of these speeds might be, that wouldn't tear up the ship itself (like some falling meteor).
But the article did mention that a simple titanium rod would serve as an adequate 'bunker buster' only from the speed it would be traveling from space. In rod we trust
...in the brains of people who are asleep. They would see it as a dream. We all know the matrix makes less than no sense when you consider you need to add energy to humans to get anything out of them [i.e. not a power source] and because the machines would have geothermal, nuclear, and even solar [in space] sources of energy. The only way it could have made sense [which the animatrix: the second renaissance, part II didn't do] is if the machines were using human brains as a great source of computation with minimal power demands. Of course, i'm sure a dolphin brain would be more efficient, as their brain-to-body-size ratio is actually greater than a humans. Then again, maybe our neural pathways in the cerebral cortex [which dolphins lack] are more advanced and allow for some kind of greater power... Point being that I'm disappointed that such an obvious flaw isn't addressed. I suppose quipping a string of quality one-liners was more important....
So you need energy...
You decide that humans are a good source, so you feed them, keep them warm, etc. Since when is life an exothermic phenomenon?
It's like the current arguments for Hydrogen. We use electricity to extract Hydrogen from hydrocarbons, with some wasted, to create electricity. Doesn't currently make sense.
Other than the fight scenes, graphics, and armchair philosophy, the only way I'm going to be truly satisfied with the sequels is if it is explained that humans have some sort of 'bio/neural-electric' energy that the machines need to survive. Otherwise it doesn't make sense.
To bad the second renaissance hasn't addressed this yet.
The 9/11 hijackers flew on the same flights again and again. This should have been noticed. Having a database to non-invasizely track the movements of people is just fine by me.
If I'm not a terrorist, what do I have to worry about or care if the government knows I'm coming back from a delightful vacation or business trip?
Clearly private data like CC#s should be kept secure, but folks need to stop whining about privacy for privacy's sake. Start accepting that taking reasonable actions in collecting intelligence could help in preventing another terrorist attack.
In a recent grad AI lecture, the professor elaborated on why chess-playing computers has improved so much in the past 20 years. Here is a synopsis: in the 60's a 'mini-max' or 'alpha-beta' pruning algorithm was developed to enhance a depth-first-search by not expanding nodes which would not be reached because a better node for black or white would have already directed the moves differently (assumes that the opponent is playing optimally). Since then 5 things have improved: 1) 'alpha-beta' pruning works better when the nodes to be expanded are sorted in the order of best current parents. This way, in expanding the best moves first, more branches are pruned. 2) hardware has drastically improved the speed of position analysis to the point where constructing a node actually takes more time than analyzing that node's position 3) Many more moves (both opening and closing) have been put into a data base that is sufficiently large to influence the game. In some cases the computer will take 200+ moves to win, at which point the human has no chance of winning. 4) Different position evaluation functions have been developed for the beginning, middle, and end of the game. These functions are also often tuned to a corpus of games for a particular player (e.g. Kasparov vs. Deep Blue) 5) The strongest algorithmic change has come in 'selective deepening'. Suppose we are performing a 10-move DFS. If a particular leaf looks to contain a lot of potential for change, i.e. many points of attack or trade, than this node will be expanded another 10 levels. Clearly the computer has to be highly selective in choosing which leaves to expand, but this has proven highly effective: check-mate has been seen 25+ moves in advance.
I was disappointed with Kasaprov's lack of win, but I'm more interested in seeing the following tournaments, where (to my understanding) computers will now be allowed to enter as regular contestants, following a ruling by the Fédération Internationale des Échecs [FIDE]
wrt to isreal,
so lets say some anthrax is placed on a missile and is blown to bits by this laser shite on the way to tel aviv.
i'm told one of the best ways to deliver most chemical and biological weapons is by detonation above ground.
i wonder about the various contingency plans the US has to prevent isreal from entering the war, and how this press release was governed by just that.