Robin Murphy, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of South Florida, is developing a Survivor Buddy robot to act as an emergency companion for people trapped in earthquakes and other conditions.
She envisions a robot that plays soothing music to trapped victims and features a monitor showing the faces of loved ones and rescuers trying to reach them. It will deliver water and transmit a… read more
Marvin Minsky, MIT professor and AI’s founding father, says today’s artificial-intelligence methods are fine for gluing together two or a few knowledge domains but still miss the “big” AI problem. He says the missing element is something so big that we can’t see it: common sense.
In his forthcoming book, The Emotion Machine, Minsky shares his accumulated knowledge on how people make use of common sense in the context… read more
CodeSpells, an immersive, first-person player video game designed to teach students in elementary to high school how to program in the popular Java language, has been developed by University of California, San Diego computer scientists.
The researchers tested the game on a group of 40 girls, ages 10 to 12, who had never been exposed to programming before. In just one hour of play, the girls… read more
Yale University researchers have found that a virus — vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), in the same family as rabies — effectively kills an aggressive form of human brain cancer in mice.
Nature has just published a hypothesis regarding the formation of the nucleus based on molecular parasites, introduced to eukaryotes along with the adoption of bacteria to form the mitochondria.
Alaska Airlines and its subsidiary, Horizon Air, have introduced on the Alaskaair.com Web site a user-friendly virtual assistant named Jenn that orally answers a wide range of questions.
A handheld device with an attached pico-projector can be used to help patients “see” their injuries, thanks to a project led by Amy Karlson, of Microsoft Research’s Computational User Experiences Group in Redmond, Washington.
The new tool, AnatOnMe, projects a virtual image of broken bone, tendons, and nerves on a patient’s skin, taken from stock images. Tests have shown AnatOnMe encourages patients to stick… read more
Researchers from the University of California, San Diego have developed the “Whole Brain Catalog,” a repository for data gathered about the mouse brain.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXLeJFu57Wg
The Second Life online service is fast becoming a three-dimensional test bed for corporate marketers.
The Internet is the fastest-growing advertising medium, as traditional forms of marketing like television commercials and print advertising slow. For businesses, these early forays into virtual worlds could be the next frontier in the blurring of advertising and entertainment.
Professor Magnus Essand has developed a virus that may kill cancer cells, The Telegraph reports.
Cheap to produce, the virus is exquisitely precise, with only mild, flu-like side-effects in humans. But Ad5[CgA-E1A-miR122]PTD is never going to be tested to see if it might also save humans, due to lack of funding.
Bacteriophage viruses that mimic supportive nerve tissue may someday help regenerate injured spinal cords, University of California, Berkeley bioengineers have found.
A new generation of software called Starlight 3.0, developed for the Department of Homeland Security by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), can unravel the complex web of relationships between people, places, and events. And other new software can even provide answers to unasked questions.
Parsons School of Design teacher Manuel Lima has constructed striking images that represent complexity.
Voice-recognition developers have made enough progress in recent years to produce several low-priced options. The latest is the QPointer, which enables users to operate a PC without touching the mouse or even, in some models, the keyboard.
Since the United States military campaign began in Afghanistan, the unmanned spy plane has gone from a bit player to a starring role in Pentagon planning. Rather than the handful of “autonomous vehicles,” or A.V.’s, that snooped on Al Qaeda hideouts, commanders are envisioning wars involving vast robotic fleets on the ground, in the air and on the seas — swarms of drones that will not just find their foes,… read more