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A short description of this blog.
The Collective Imagination is designed to explore some of the most compelling issues facing the world today and the ways that science and technology can help us address them. A changing cast of ScienceBlogs bloggers and GE scientists will work collaboratively to explore security and personal surveillance technology, the AIDS crisis, and the infrastructure and transmission of energy, among other topics. The blog is sponsored by GE, with all editorial content overseen by ScienceBlogs editors.
Profile
Greg Laden is a blogger, writer and independent scholar who occassionally teaches. He has a PhD from Harvard in Archaeology and Biological Anthropology, as well as a Masters Degree in the same subjects. He is a biological anthropologist, but for many years before going to graduate school to study human evolution, he did archaeology in North America. He thinks of himself as a biologist who focuses on humans (past and present) and who uses archaeology as one of the tools of the trade. Greg blogs regularly on ScienceBlogs at http://www.scienceblogs.com/gregladen/.
Profile
Dr. Joseph J. Salvo attended Phillips Andover Academy, received his A.B. degree from Harvard University and his Master and Ph.D. degrees in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University. Dr. Salvo joined the GE Global Research Center in 1988. His early work focused on the development of genetically modified bacteria and fungus, for the production of novel high performance polymers. In the mid 1990's he turned his group's efforts towards developing large-scale internet-based sensing arrays to manage and oversee
business systems. Most recently, he and his team have developed a number of complex decision engines that deliver customer value through system transparency and knowledge-based computational algorithms. Commercial business implementations of his work are currently active in Europe, and Asia as well as North and South America.
Dr. Peter Tu received his undergraduate degree in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and his doctorate from Oxford University England.
In 1997, he joined the Visualization and Computer Vision Group at the GE Global Research Center in Niskayuna, NY. He has developed algorithms for the FBI Automatic Fingerprint Identification System. He is the principle investigator for the ReFace program, which has the goal of automatically computing the appearance of a person’s face from skeletal remains. Dr. Tu has also developed a number of algorithms for the precise measurement of specular and high curvature objects. His current focus is the development of intelligent video algorithms for surveillance applications.
Please visit From Edison's Desk, which is Peter's home blog at GE Global Research.
February 6, 2010
Category:
IE flaw gives hackers access to user files
The complete Symbian platform is now available for download and use under open-source licences.
Mozilla releases Thunderbird 3.1 alpha
Posted by Greg Laden at 5:22 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 5, 2010
Category: Digital security
The House today overwhelmingly passed a bill aimed at building up the United States' cybersecurity army and expertise, amid growing alarm over the country's vulnerability online.The bill, which passed 422-5, requires the Obama administration to conduct an agency-by-agency assessment of cybersecurity workforce skills and establishes a scholarship program for undergraduate and graduate students who agree to work as cybersecurity specialists for the government after graduation.
Posted by Greg Laden at 2:21 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Data mining
Bill Gates, Ray Ozzie and a bunch of other heavy-hitters from Microsoft are named as inventors on a newly issued patent for a "personal data mining" system that would analyze information and make recommendations with the goal of aiding a person's decisions and improving quality of life.
And they get to sell the data to the highest bidder, apparently. Details.
Posted by Greg Laden at 9:27 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 31, 2010
Category: Artificial Intelligence
Adaptive behaviors evolve rather indirectly. If you look under the hood of a car you can see the physical mechanisms that convert exploding fuel into forward motion, and it all makes sense. Each part has an obvious, engineered role. But if you look under the hood of a cell, you will find that things are very quirky, because a lot of genetically specified molecules are doing things distinctly different from the tasks associated with various ancestral forms of those molecules.
And when it comes to neurologically specified behavior, things get even quirkier. The relationship between neural systems and externally visible behavior is very rarely "sensible" in any human-percieved way, and if we add in genetic components it is even stranger.
A recent essay in PLoS Biology explores this idea in relation to Robots that undergo Darwinian selection.
This short paper is very much worth a read. Go have a look and come back and comment!
This is about Intelligent Design, in a way.
Posted by Greg Laden at 12:04 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 31, 2009
Category: robots
Posted by Greg Laden at 8:34 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 23, 2009
Category: Artificial Intelligence • Culture and society • Data mining • Device ID technology • Monitoring systems
The Information Age is over - What's next?
At a time in history with unprecedented access to global information streams, it may seem odd to some that the "Information Age" is already behind us. Traditionally a period of history can be characterized by the dominant technology that separates the leaders from the followers. Today is no exception. Power and influence is often associated with those that master the novel technology and rapid changes in economic and/or political fortunes soon ripple across societies. The dawn of the "Industrial Age" coincided with global changes in how physical materials were transformed and distributed. The costs of manufacturing and distribution plummeted raising the standard of living for many. The commoditization of material goods began and the control of capital, raw material sources, and production capacity reshaped the thinking of the day.
The "Information Age" extended this paradigm to a world focused on planning, forecasting, and predictability. Data and information were often expensive to produce, manage, and manipulate by hand, so mainframes took over and created a world dominated by computation speed and efficiency. However, as the underlying technologies improved and were reduced in cost, the application of computing evolved toward a more distributed framework. Once again, the commoditization of technology changed the nature of how value was being created and how benefits would be recognized. Data flows are now expanding exponentially - driven by computing machines, digital imagers, intelligent devices, and RFID tags that have become ubiquitous and interlinked through multi-tiered networks.
Dawn of the "Systems Age"
As the amount of information and data expands exponentially, the value of any average datum is being reduced to near zero. Intelligent systems will be increasingly responsible for sensing, collecting, and manipulating data in near real-time with little to no human supervision. More importantly, most discrete data will be actively forgotten once it has passed through filters and pattern recognition systems that ultimately feed into a new type of system memory. Decision making ability will no longer require perfect recall of every piece of data (There is often simply too much information to process in a tractable, timely manner).
A simple extension of the logic behind Metcalfe's "law", suggests that the value of any telecommunications network is some power function of the number of connected users/devices. Intelligent devices/machines will ultimately dominate many of the networks we use today, and create value in an automated fashion. Traditional decision engines will be augmented with sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms and high-level reasoning and learning capability. Ultimately a type of machine "self-awareness" will be developed in response to the enormous amount of locally generated, near-real time data available for processing and sharing. The first generation of lightweight interactive intelligent machines that behave in this way are already around us in the form of smart phones and GPS-enabled telematics devices. Networks of these devices will form a cloud of knowledge that can be shared and traded based on a fluid set of value propositions.
The "Systems Age" will spawn a type of social networking for machines where the opportunities for value creation will no longer be limited to purely physical transformations of matter, but rather to the overall efficiency of compute power, network configuration, decision management, and idea creation. Rather than strive for the impossible goal of perfect predictability, the "Systems Age" paradigm accepts the inevitable uncertainty in the world and quickly responds to it. Since readily available computing power continues to increase at an exponential rate, while the cost of computation continues to plummet, those that fail to incorporate the value of "Systems Thinking" into their products, services and future vision will soon be at a great technological disadvantage.
Next time we will look at some new products and technology based on this philosophy.
Suggested reading for perspective:
Between Human and Machine : Feedback, Control and Computing before Cybernetics by David A. Mindell
The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London 2002
Posted by Joe Salvo at 8:45 AM • 32 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 11, 2009
Category: Artificial Intelligence • Device ID technology
THE retail giant Westfield is considering introducing controversial face recognition technology at its Penrith shopping centre in Sydney's west.Unlike closed circuit television (CCTV), the identification system matches images captured by surveillance cameras to an existing database of faces.
The Herald understands Westfield is considering upgrading its already advanced CCTV to include the biometric technology in its security measures.
Posted by Greg Laden at 1:45 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 10, 2009
Category: Artificial Intelligence
European researchers have developed a new approach to artificial intelligence that could empower computers to respond intelligently to human behaviour as well as commands.The dramatic rise in raw computing power due to parallel computing, super-clusters and the like, has meant that computers are now extremely adept at performing complex computational tasks that once bogged down mainframes and server farms for days. Pattern recognition, in particular, has reaped the benefits; faces from surveillance cameras can be identified and compared in real time; robotic dogs can recognise and track a "football" in the Robotic World Cup; and our voices can be interpreted with an unprecedented degree of accuracy, enabling robots and computers to respond to our every command.
Posted by Greg Laden at 11:44 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 6, 2009
Category:
"Scientists in Italy announced Wednesday that Pierpaolo Petruzziello, a 26-year-old Italian who had lost his left forearm in a car accident, was successfully linked to an artificial limb that was controlled by electrodes implanted in his arm and connected to the median and ulnar nerves. He has learned to control the artificial limb with his mind. According to CNet, Petruzziello says he could feel sensations in it, as if the lost arm had grown back again. The BBC has a brief video showing the arm in operation."
at Slashdot
Posted by Greg Laden at 2:51 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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