The L.A. Times is reporting that the Army will deploy unmanned robotic ground vehicles into combat in Iraq later this year.
The robots, known as 'Tactical Amphibious Ground Support' and built by Northrop Grumman, will be the first autonomous ground vehicles used in a combat zone. The Army intends to use them for surveillance and border security missions, and the machines can navigate entirely on their own (although a remote operator can take control in the event of an emergency). Robots like the bomb-dismantling PackBot by iRobot have been serving in Iraq for quite some time, but this will mark the first use of completely autonomous vehicles in ground combat.
Monday, August 29, 2005
AI: Now and In the Future
Red Herring has a couple of excellent articles online regarding the present state and future possibilities of Artificial Intelligence.
The first article covers existing AI systems such as data mining and intelligence search, while the second chronicles Palm Pilot inventor Jeff Hawkins' quest to revolutionize the way we look at intelligence.
The first article covers existing AI systems such as data mining and intelligence search, while the second chronicles Palm Pilot inventor Jeff Hawkins' quest to revolutionize the way we look at intelligence.
PHP: Longest Common Substring
While working on my answer machine program, I came across a need to find recurring patterns in strings. What I wanted to do was take two strings and return the longest substring contained by both. After about 30 minutes worth of searching Google for a quick solution, I realized that this was not a trivial problem. It seems that finding the longest common substring is a classical problem in computer science. Helpful examples of LCS algorithms were very hard to come by, and there was virtually nothing available for PHP. Maybe when I earn a PhD I will try to impress people with useless formulas and diagrams, but for now I figured I would just write some realtively straightforward code that gets the job done.
The solution that seemed the simplest to me was to compare the strings character by character looking for matches that would signify the possible beginning of a common substring. I really don't consider one character substrings to be significant, so my solution only initiates a match when it finds two identical substrings two characters in length. It continues down each string char-by-char as long they match, and then tosses the completed substring into an array. Every common substring is obtained this way, and then we simply return the longest of these as the result. If more than one common substring is longest, the one that appears first in the first source string is returned.
See it in action and view the source.
After all that, I'm starting to think it might be more appropriate for my application to tokenize the strings and then capture the longest common sequence of tokens. In other words, break the string down into words and return the longest common phrase. It won't be that much more difficult to implement both methods in my answer machine, and compare their performance to see which one is better.
The solution that seemed the simplest to me was to compare the strings character by character looking for matches that would signify the possible beginning of a common substring. I really don't consider one character substrings to be significant, so my solution only initiates a match when it finds two identical substrings two characters in length. It continues down each string char-by-char as long they match, and then tosses the completed substring into an array. Every common substring is obtained this way, and then we simply return the longest of these as the result. If more than one common substring is longest, the one that appears first in the first source string is returned.
See it in action and view the source.
After all that, I'm starting to think it might be more appropriate for my application to tokenize the strings and then capture the longest common sequence of tokens. In other words, break the string down into words and return the longest common phrase. It won't be that much more difficult to implement both methods in my answer machine, and compare their performance to see which one is better.
The World's First Robotic Domestic Assistant
David is 11 years old. He weighs 60 pounds. He is 4 feet, 6 inches tall. He has brown hair. His love is real. But he is not.
A child-sized robot designed for house-sitting and caring for the elderly will go on sale in Japan next month. The robot, named "Wakamaru," has a vocabulary of 10,000 words and can be programmed to watch for burglars or gently wake you up in the morning. Peace of mind and synthetic companionship can now be yours, thanks to Mitsubishi-Heavy Industries Ltd.
A child-sized robot designed for house-sitting and caring for the elderly will go on sale in Japan next month. The robot, named "Wakamaru," has a vocabulary of 10,000 words and can be programmed to watch for burglars or gently wake you up in the morning. Peace of mind and synthetic companionship can now be yours, thanks to Mitsubishi-Heavy Industries Ltd.
More Details about the UAV COS
Larry pointed out some good info to me about the UAV Common Operating System on the DARPA J-UCAS website.
There is a COS FAQ (which unfortunately seems to be more focused on answering Boeing & Northrop's questions about protecting intellectual property than explaining what COS is!) and a Common Systems & Technology presentation which includes a very interesting section on the COS.
Some items of note from the 15.2MB PPT slideshow:
- The COS is more of a POSIX-compliant middleware than an 'operating system,' as it resides on top of an embedded OS.
- Integrates sensors, weapons, communications & control systems to generate decisions and provide a real-time understanding of the operating environment
- Allows autonomous operations, eliminating need for human operators
- Enables accelerated software development... 'best of breed' algorithms shared between platforms (survival of the fittest?)
- Automatic determination of flight path based on mission parameters and threat environment
- Open architecture, non-proprietary source code can be freely used, copied, modified and redistributed
- Initial development timeframe begins Dec 05 and ends Dec 08, with 4 builds planned using a spiral approach
The most significant COS component, in my opinion, would have to be the Discovery/Mediation functionality...
The discovery component provides a set of services that enables the formulation and execution of search activities to locate data assets (files, databases, directories, web pages, streams) by exploitation metadata descriptions stored in and or generated by Information Technology (IT) repositories (directories, registries, catalogs, etc). This also includes the ability to search for metadata semantics to support mediation.
This mediation component provides a set of services that enable transformation processing (adaptation, aggregation, transformation, and orchestration), situational awareness support (correlation and fusion), negotiation (brokering, trading, and auctioning services), and publishing.
What this sounds like to me is a method for storage and retrieval of shared memory resources (by way of metadata [xml?] and semantic analysis), and using those memories to enable adaptation to dynamic situations. That bears a striking resemblance to the way a conscious being uses personal and communal experiences to deal with real-world environments and react to change in real-time. The more I think about it, the more I see the possibility for something truly intelligent to emerge from this architecture. I'm definitely going to have to keep tabs on this project, and if it ends up being open source (as the presentation claims), taking a look under the hood. Now do you understand why I want to work for these people?
There is a COS FAQ (which unfortunately seems to be more focused on answering Boeing & Northrop's questions about protecting intellectual property than explaining what COS is!) and a Common Systems & Technology presentation which includes a very interesting section on the COS.
Some items of note from the 15.2MB PPT slideshow:
- The COS is more of a POSIX-compliant middleware than an 'operating system,' as it resides on top of an embedded OS.
- Integrates sensors, weapons, communications & control systems to generate decisions and provide a real-time understanding of the operating environment
- Allows autonomous operations, eliminating need for human operators
- Enables accelerated software development... 'best of breed' algorithms shared between platforms (survival of the fittest?)
- Automatic determination of flight path based on mission parameters and threat environment
- Open architecture, non-proprietary source code can be freely used, copied, modified and redistributed
- Initial development timeframe begins Dec 05 and ends Dec 08, with 4 builds planned using a spiral approach
The most significant COS component, in my opinion, would have to be the Discovery/Mediation functionality...
The discovery component provides a set of services that enables the formulation and execution of search activities to locate data assets (files, databases, directories, web pages, streams) by exploitation metadata descriptions stored in and or generated by Information Technology (IT) repositories (directories, registries, catalogs, etc). This also includes the ability to search for metadata semantics to support mediation.
This mediation component provides a set of services that enable transformation processing (adaptation, aggregation, transformation, and orchestration), situational awareness support (correlation and fusion), negotiation (brokering, trading, and auctioning services), and publishing.
What this sounds like to me is a method for storage and retrieval of shared memory resources (by way of metadata [xml?] and semantic analysis), and using those memories to enable adaptation to dynamic situations. That bears a striking resemblance to the way a conscious being uses personal and communal experiences to deal with real-world environments and react to change in real-time. The more I think about it, the more I see the possibility for something truly intelligent to emerge from this architecture. I'm definitely going to have to keep tabs on this project, and if it ends up being open source (as the presentation claims), taking a look under the hood. Now do you understand why I want to work for these people?
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Inside the Mind of a UAV
DARPA is currently developing a common operating system that will serve as the 'brains' for the military's next generation of autonomous systems.
This common platform will allow UAVs to share information and work together more efficiently, and port new advances from platform to platform. Additionally, it will merge inputs from all of the sensor systems to create a single integrated picture of the environment, and interface with the on-board weapons array as well. Could this internal model of the outside world eventually be the seat of consciousness for an intelligent machine? DARPA's own report is not surprisingly vague...
This common platform will allow UAVs to share information and work together more efficiently, and port new advances from platform to platform. Additionally, it will merge inputs from all of the sensor systems to create a single integrated picture of the environment, and interface with the on-board weapons array as well. Could this internal model of the outside world eventually be the seat of consciousness for an intelligent machine? DARPA's own report is not surprisingly vague...
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Google Tops in Machine Translation
News.com.com reports that Google scored highest in a recent language translation competition run by the U.S. Government.
Google beat out competitors such as IBM and the University of Southern California on the Arabic-to-English and Chinese-to-English translation tests. Interestingly enough, although Google offers an Arabic homepage, Google language tools does not currently offer Arabic translation. Looks like we've stumbled across some more top-secret Google software...
Google beat out competitors such as IBM and the University of Southern California on the Arabic-to-English and Chinese-to-English translation tests. Interestingly enough, although Google offers an Arabic homepage, Google language tools does not currently offer Arabic translation. Looks like we've stumbled across some more top-secret Google software...
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