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A Momentary Flow

Rebuilding worldviews one world at a time

Predicting the Future By Mining Online News and Other Web Data | MIT Technology Review

Prototype software can give early warnings of disease or violence outbreaks by spotting clues in news reports.

Researchers have created software that predicts when and where disease outbreaks might occur based on two decades of New York Times articles and other online data. The research comes from Microsoft and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. The system could someday help aid organizations and others be more proactive in tackling disease outbreaks or other problems, says Eric Horvitz, distinguished scientist and codirector at Microsoft Research. “I truly view this as a foreshadowing of what’s to come,” he says. “Eventually this kind of work will start to have an influence on how things go for people.” Horvitz did the research in collaboration with Kira Radinsky, a PhD researcher at the Technion-Israel Institute. The system provides striking results when tested on historical data. For example, reports of droughts in Angola in 2006 triggered a warning about possible cholera outbreaks in the country, because previous events had taught the system that cholera outbreaks were more likely in years following droughts. A second warning about cholera in Angola was triggered by news reports of large storms in Africa in early 2007; less than a week later, reports appeared that cholera had become established. In similar tests involving forecasts of disease, violence, and a significant numbers of deaths, the system’s warnings were correct between 70 to 90 percent of the time. Horvitz says the performance is good enough to suggest that a more refined version could be used in real settings, to assist experts at, for example, government aid agencies involved in planning humanitarian response and readiness. “We’ve done some reaching out and plan to do some follow-up work with such people,” says Horvitz. The system was built using 22 years of New York Times archives, from 1986 to 2007, but it also draws on data from the Web to learn about what leads up to major news events.

You move, he moves. You smile, he smiles. You get angry, he gets angry. “He” is the avator you chose. Faceshift, from EPFL’s Computer Graphics and Geometry Laboratory, now offers a software program that could save time for the designers of animation or video games. Thibaut Weise, founder of the start-up, smiles and nods. On the screen his avatar, a fantasy creature, directly reproduces his gestures. This system could enhance the future of video games or even make video chats more fun. One tool required: a camera that has motion and depth sensors in the style of Microsoft Kinect or Asus Xtion, well known to gamers. During its first use, the software needs only ten minutes to recognize the user’s face. The user reproduces several basic expressions requested by the program: smile, raise eyebrows, etc. “The more movement is incorporated into the program’s 50 positions, the more realistic are the results,” explains Thibaut Weise, creator of the start-up currently based at the Technopark in Zurich. Then you can get into the skin of your character and animate by moving yourself. “It’s almost like leaving your body to enter that of your avatar,” jokes the young entrepreneur. (via Software enables avatar to reproduce our emotions in real time)

You move, he moves. You smile, he smiles. You get angry, he gets angry. “He” is the avator you chose. Faceshift, from EPFL’s Computer Graphics and Geometry Laboratory, now offers a software program that could save time for the designers of animation or video games. Thibaut Weise, founder of the start-up, smiles and nods. On the screen his avatar, a fantasy creature, directly reproduces his gestures. This system could enhance the future of video games or even make video chats more fun. One tool required: a camera that has motion and depth sensors in the style of Microsoft Kinect or Asus Xtion, well known to gamers. During its first use, the software needs only ten minutes to recognize the user’s face. The user reproduces several basic expressions requested by the program: smile, raise eyebrows, etc. “The more movement is incorporated into the program’s 50 positions, the more realistic are the results,” explains Thibaut Weise, creator of the start-up currently based at the Technopark in Zurich. Then you can get into the skin of your character and animate by moving yourself. “It’s almost like leaving your body to enter that of your avatar,” jokes the young entrepreneur. (via Software enables avatar to reproduce our emotions in real time)

Source phys.org

New software takes a graphic image of a video game or movie character and translates it into a posable plastic model to be fabricated by a 3D printer. Eventually this capability might be built into games and other software, the researchers say. The project by Moritz Bächer and Hanspeter Pfister of Harvard University, Bernd Bickel of the Technische Universität Berlin, and Doug James, Cornell University associate professor of computer science, was described at the SIGGRAPH conference August 7 in Los Angeles and published in the journal Transactions on Graphics. (via Futurity.org – Software adds joints for 3D printed figures)

New software takes a graphic image of a video game or movie character and translates it into a posable plastic model to be fabricated by a 3D printer. Eventually this capability might be built into games and other software, the researchers say. The project by Moritz Bächer and Hanspeter Pfister of Harvard University, Bernd Bickel of the Technische Universität Berlin, and Doug James, Cornell University associate professor of computer science, was described at the SIGGRAPH conference August 7 in Los Angeles and published in the journal Transactions on Graphics. (via Futurity.org – Software adds joints for 3D printed figures)

Source futurity.org

Robots and humans could ‘talk’ via new software - Software that will allow robots to “talk” with people is being developed at the University of Aberdeen. The code will be used to help robots complete tasks more efficiently and could pave the way for human-to-robot business meetings. Robots now carry out tasks in a range of industries, from decommissioning nuclear plants to maintaining railway lines. But without continuous human guidance mistakes can be made. “Employed across a variety of sectors, these systems can quickly process huge amounts of information when deciding how to act,” said Dr Wamberto Vasconcelos, who is leading the research at the University of Aberdeen’s School of Natural and Computing Sciences. “In doing so, they can make mistakes which are not obvious to them or to a human.” One of the main intentions of the project is to increase understanding between humans and automated systems “We want to allow humans to be more trusting of robots by opening up a communication channel where the machine can explain to the human why they did what they did,” said Dr Vasconcelos. (via BBC News - Robots and humans could ‘talk’ via new software)

Robots and humans could ‘talk’ via new software

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Software that will allow robots to “talk” with people is being developed at the University of Aberdeen. The code will be used to help robots complete tasks more efficiently and could pave the way for human-to-robot business meetings. Robots now carry out tasks in a range of industries, from decommissioning nuclear plants to maintaining railway lines. But without continuous human guidance mistakes can be made. “Employed across a variety of sectors, these systems can quickly process huge amounts of information when deciding how to act,” said Dr Wamberto Vasconcelos, who is leading the research at the University of Aberdeen’s School of Natural and Computing Sciences. “In doing so, they can make mistakes which are not obvious to them or to a human.” One of the main intentions of the project is to increase understanding between humans and automated systems “We want to allow humans to be more trusting of robots by opening up a communication channel where the machine can explain to the human why they did what they did,” said Dr Vasconcelos. (via BBC News - Robots and humans could ‘talk’ via new software)

Source bbc.com

Researchers created the digital equivalent of spring break to see how mate attraction played out through computer programs. “This is actually a big question that still generates a lot of debate,” says Chris Chandler, a postdoctoral researchers at Michigan State University and co-author of the study published in the journal Evolution. “People have some good ideas, but they can be hard to test really well in nature, so we decided to take a different approach.” The novel approach involved creating promiscuous programs in a virtual world called Avida, a software environment in which specialized computer programs compete and reproduce.

Researchers created the digital equivalent of spring break to see how mate attraction played out through computer programs.

“This is actually a big question that still generates a lot of debate,” says Chris Chandler, a postdoctoral researchers at Michigan State University and co-author of the study published in the journal Evolution. “People have some good ideas, but they can be hard to test really well in nature, so we decided to take a different approach.”

The novel approach involved creating promiscuous programs in a virtual world called Avida, a software environment in which specialized computer programs compete and reproduce.

Source futurity.org

For $1.26bn, VMWare Buys a Chance to Reinvent the Internet - Technology Review

See on Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future

The cloud computing giant has snapped up Nicira, a startup developing smarter computer networking.

Cloud computing pioneer VMware has paid $1.26 billion for Nicira, a startup that we featured in our March list of the 50 most innovative companies in the world (see our feature article “A New Net”), and a pioneer in a new market known as “software defined networking”.

Nicira’s technology is an attempt to rethink the basics of how computers connect to one another in an era when Internet software rules. The company is the brainchild of Stanford PhD research Martìn Casado who says he became frustrated by the way even the most powerful software has to be connected to networks made up of equipment that can’t be reconfigured easily, and generally act independently. Nicira hides that inflexibility beneath a centrally coordinated, simulated network. The company’s technology is pitched at the operators of giant data centers as a way to more easily manage, scale up and move around their giant software systems. Early customers include eBay and Fidelity.

The purchase ($1.05bn in cash and the rest in stock) is a smart buy for VMware. After five years working on its technology in stealth mode, Nicira was already ahead of younger efforts in the same vein, from other startups as well as established giants such as VMware and Cisco. Now hitched to VMware, Casado’s ideas should be able to go further, faster.


See on technologyreview.com

Stanford and Venter Institute Simulate an Entire Organism With Software - NYTimes.com

STANFORD, Calif. — Scientists at Stanford University and the J. Craig Venter Institute have developed the first software simulation of an entire organism, a humble single-cell bacterium that lives in the human genital and respiratory tracts. The scientists and other experts said the work was a giant step toward developing computerized laboratories that could carry out many thousands of experiments much faster than is possible now, helping scientists penetrate the mysteries of diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. “You read in the paper just about every week, ‘Cancer gene discovered’ or ‘Alzheimer gene discovered,’ ” said the leader of the new research, Markus W. Covert, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford. “A lot of the public wonders, ‘Why haven’t we cured all these things?’ The answer, of course, is that cancer is not a one-gene problem; it’s a many-thousands-of-factors problem.”

Computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University have devised a framework for running large-scale computations for tasks such as social network or Web search analysis efficiently on a single personal computer. The software could help developers working on many modern tasks: for example, designing a new recommendation engine using social network connections. In order to make effective recommendations—”your friends liked this movie, so here is another movie that you haven’t seen yet, but you will probably like”—the software has to be able to analyze the connections between the members of a social network. This type of task is called graph computation, and it is increasingly common. But working with large-scale data sets (such as online social networks) usually requires the processing horsepower of many computers clustered together, such as those offered by Amazon’s cloud-based EC2 service. The new software, called GraphChi, exploits the capacious hard drives that are becoming ever more common in personal computers. A graph would normally be stored in temporary memory (RAM) for analysis. With GraphChi, the hard drive performs this task instead. (via Your Laptop Can Now Analyze Big Data - Technology Review)

Computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University have devised a framework for running large-scale computations for tasks such as social network or Web search analysis efficiently on a single personal computer. The software could help developers working on many modern tasks: for example, designing a new recommendation engine using social network connections. In order to make effective recommendations—”your friends liked this movie, so here is another movie that you haven’t seen yet, but you will probably like”—the software has to be able to analyze the connections between the members of a social network. This type of task is called graph computation, and it is increasingly common. But working with large-scale data sets (such as online social networks) usually requires the processing horsepower of many computers clustered together, such as those offered by Amazon’s cloud-based EC2 service. The new software, called GraphChi, exploits the capacious hard drives that are becoming ever more common in personal computers. A graph would normally be stored in temporary memory (RAM) for analysis. With GraphChi, the hard drive performs this task instead. (via Your Laptop Can Now Analyze Big Data - Technology Review)

Source technologyreview.com

futurescope:

Video software to “see” someone’s pulse

via boingboing:

MIT researchers developed software that highlights differences between successive frames of video that are usually too subtle or quick to catch. “So, for instance, the software makes it possible to actually “see” someone’s pulse, as the skin reddens and pales with the flow of blood (video stills above), and it can exaggerate tiny motions, making visible the vibrations of individual guitar strings or the breathing of a swaddled infant in a neonatal intensive care unit.” 

[via] [MIT] [h/t to Lukas!]

(via futurescope)

Reblogged from Futurescope

ON JANUARY 16th 2003, 82 seconds after the space shuttle Columbia lifted off, a piece of foam insulation weighing less than a kilogram broke off its fuel tank and hit the left wing. Bosses at America’s space agency, NASA, were largely reassured by a subsequent presentation delivered by the “debris assessment” team. They did not request that a military spy satellite photograph the wing, in orbit, before re-entry. But its thermal protection was, in fact, badly damaged. As it re-entered the atmosphere 13 days later, the shuttle, and its crew of seven, burned up. (via Monitor: Prophets of zoom | The Economist)

ON JANUARY 16th 2003, 82 seconds after the space shuttle Columbia lifted off, a piece of foam insulation weighing less than a kilogram broke off its fuel tank and hit the left wing. Bosses at America’s space agency, NASA, were largely reassured by a subsequent presentation delivered by the “debris assessment” team. They did not request that a military spy satellite photograph the wing, in orbit, before re-entry. But its thermal protection was, in fact, badly damaged. As it re-entered the atmosphere 13 days later, the shuttle, and its crew of seven, burned up. (via Monitor: Prophets of zoom | The Economist)

Source economist.com