Here’s an interesting question: would you rather live 100 years in the past or 100 years in the future? There are good arguments for both sides. Let me try to make a list of advantages for each below.

The past

• Families are closer together geographically.
• Families spend more time together. No tv or video games to distract them.
• Communities are closer together.
• People aren’t as distracted or dumbed down by technology.
• Life is perhaps more of an adventure? Everything is more difficult, from keeping food safe, to traveling, etc.
• Most work is physical, working the land with your hands.

The future

• People are healthier and live longer (better healthcare).
• It’s easy to travel all around the world (or beyond it?).
• You can stay connected with people from everywhere.
• You can get information quickly and easily.
• We’ll have computer or robots that can perform lots of tasks that people do now.

Personally, I am really curious about the future, what it will be like, what we’ll be like, what technologies we’ll have, what we’ll be able to do, etc. I think the past would be neat as well, as it would be nice to have a tight-knit family and community, and I feel like it could be slightly more adventurous, as just traveling across the country would be a big deal.

This is a crazy thought, but I feel an interesting balance between these things in a few decades would be to live on Mars. It’s still the future and you get all of those things. But I also assume its a very small group, tight-knit, probably without tv and those things, and probably working the land to survive (although probably with machines). That can be another blog post: If you could move to Mars, would you? What if you could never come back?

I’ve been looking at a lot of cool robot videos lately, so I thought I’d post some here. First the cool walking robots from Boston Dynamics, then some biology inspired ones from Festo.

Here’s the BigDog robot from Boston Dynamics if you haven’t seen it.

And here’s their humanoid PETMAN, which is the first humanoid I’ve seen that does heel-to-toe walking.

From Festo robotics, a bunch of cool ones. First, robotic penguins for swimming or flying.

Robotic air jellyfish and stingray.

And the Festo humanoid robot.

This is going to lead directly to skynet: Halted ’03 Iraq Plan Illustrates U.S. Fear of Cyberwar Risk. As the military starts writing these algorithms to try to attack other’s computer networks and infiltrate their security, and then start working on ones to defend against such attacks, and then algorithms to outsmart the defensive ones…. this could easily lead to skynet. We could have single algorithms/agents in charge of the military infrastructure and able to adapt and learn. Hopefully John Connor is out there somewhere…

Microsoft recently demoed Project Natal at E3. It looks really impressive. Here’s a video. And here’s part of an article from Wired:

Later, Microsoft producer Kudo Tsunoda, who’d demoed this game to us, showed us what was going on “behind the scenes.” He brought up an image that showed what Natal’s two cameras could see. The standard RGB camera in the unit, he says, was watching the positions of our skeletons. Sure enough, crisp solid stick-figures appeared on screen, representing me and Baker. As we moved, the stick figures on screen matched our movements. It wasn’t picking up our individual finger movements, but it could tell when we bent our wrists, picked up our legs, tilted our heads, etc., not to mention tracking us as we moved around the room.

Meanwhile, an infrared camera was tracking our distance away from the television. As we moved forward, our outlines turned red, as we moved back they shimmered blue. By combining both of these sets of data, Natal knows exactly where you are and what you’re doing. And it knows when I step behind Baker, or if he walks in back of me, and it still tracks, separately, the parts of both of us that it can see.

Seriously, the motion capture we used at the hospital required you to wear a bunch of reflective balls, used 12 cameras placed around the room, needed constant calibration, and still would mess up, and miss markers sometimes. If this thing really works this well, it’s really impressive. I really want to see it in a room with lots of people and varying lighting conditions.

Here’s an interesting article by Freeman Dyson on “Our Biotech Future.”  Basically he predicts that we will soon have personal biotechnology devices and all be able to be genetic engineers.  He suggests that this will create solutions to many problems and also perhaps help eliminate poverty.  One aspect that I found particularly interesting was that with this genetic engineering, there will be more competition between genes of various species.  So perhaps this new era of personal biotechnology would lead to faster evolution?  Although instead of being guided by Darwinian evolution, gene selection would be guided by lots of genetic engineers.  It certainly could result in some interesting (or dangerous) things.

Here’s a ridiculous story predicting that we’ll be marrying robots by 2050.  Not only do they predict that, but they predict that Massachusetts will be the first state to legalize it.  I certainly see the sex robots coming very soon - the sex industry always takes advantage of new technology before anyone else.  But marriage with robots?  I suppose if robots are actually intelligent by 2050 and seem like equals to humans then maybe its possible.  But if not, then its like asking if people will be marrying their cars or computers.  A little absurd, I think.

I just got back from RoboCup in Atlanta, GA (ok, I actually got back 3 weeks ago, but I’m just getting around to writing about it). RoboCup is basically the world cup of robot soccer. Our team is UT Austin Villa, and we compete in the legged league, where we play four on four soccer using Sony Aibo robots. All the teams have the same robots, so its mainly a programming competition. There are lots of difficult problems to solve, such as vision, localization, movement, behaviors, and communication. I’ve worked a lot on the localization, which means having the robot figure out where it is from the landmarks that it sees. I also worked a lot on the goalie, and then a little bit on many many other aspects of the team.

RoboCup was pretty crazy. We were in the ballroom of the Fox Theater, which was built in the 1920s. In the ballroom they had three soccer fields set up, and there was a side room where all the teams had their own tables. Every day we were there from 7 am (when it opened) to 10 pm (when they kicked us out). Everyone is there trying to fix things at the last minute and making adjustments after games. The team from Bowdoin College, Northern Bites, was especially relentless, you would always hear them having discussions about minute details of the robot soccer strategy and constantly trying to improve.

Our first game was against Carnegie Mellon, where my advisor went to school. So it was a big rivalry. Tekin and I got to the venue when it opened at 7 am to try to fix the many problems we saw the night before but we ended up losing to Carnegie Mellon 4-2 (video). We had some shots on goal but missed most of them wide of the post. We played a team from Japan, FC Twaves, in the afternoon. We were hoping to win this one, but they scored first. Then we had a problem where our robot got switched to the other team and it scored on our own goal. So we were down 2-0 to this team with a few minutes left in the half but luckily we managed to score three goals in about four and a half minutes and we won 4-2. The start of this video is right after their 2^nd goal and shows us (in blue) scoring three goals in four and a half minutes. This game was stressful, Tekin and I were both pretty concerned when they took a 2-0 lead, but thankfully we came back to win.

After playing pretty poorly in the two games on the first day, Tekin and I worked pretty hard that night and the next morning to try to fix things. We improved ball-grabbing, ball following, ball vision, shooting, and communication and strategy, among other things. The next day, the team looked the best I had seen it. If you compare the videos from the first two games and the videos from these three, you will see a significant difference. We beat the Baby Tigers from Osaka by a score of 5-0 and then beat SPQR by 5-0 as well. Baby Tigers has a ridiculous kick where they climb over the ball and shoot it out from behind (video). Our third game was against the German Team, who are one of the best teams, and won the German Open this year. They had won 3 of their 4 earlier games by 10-0 scores (after 10-0 the game is called). We managed to hold them to 3-0, which I was pretty excited about. My goalie looked really good during the game, making some sweet saves. A few people who worked on goalies from other teams came up to me afterward to tell me how good it looked, which was really cool. Here is the video from the first and second halves of the game against the German Team. UT is in red in the first half and blue in the second half.

Winning two of our three second round games meant that we made it to the quarterfinals, which is better than UT did last year. Considering there were only three of us at RoboCup (most teams had 5-12 people), I was pretty happy. We played Wright Eagle from China in the quarterfinal match. We were really slow in the first half because of some network issues so they went up 4-0. In the second half that was fixed and they only scored one goal. The entire second half consisted of the ball being right around and in front of our goal, and they were repeatedly taking shots and my goalie kept making nice saves. My goalie looked great, but I don’t think we ever had the ball on their half of the field. Here is the video from this game. Even though we lost in the quarterfinals, I was pretty happy with our performance.

Watching the championship games was pretty exciting. After talking to and hanging out with all the guys on the other teams all week I was definitely hoping some teams would win more than others. Plus all of the final four teams were really good so it was really entertaining to watch. Carnegie Mellon won 3^rd place over Wright Eagle in a game that went to overtime and took 8 penalty shots before CMU prevailed. The championship was between Northern Bites from Maine and NU Bots from Australia. Northern Bites won 5-1. Here is the video of the championship game.

It was cool to see most of the teams get really into the games. TecRams from Mexico and Araibo from Japan both decided to cheer for Carnegie Mellon because CMU came out of the same first round group as them. During CMU’s games they would all be screaming and yelling. Araibo was probably the loudest team there, they were constantly screaming, yelling “GO GO GO” on offense and chanting “Goalie! Goalie!” on defense. I also was head referee for one of their games and it was hard to make calls over all their screaming. I have a great video of Araibo, TecRams, and CMU celebrating a goal during one of Carnegie Mellon’s games.

RoboCup was really cool and a lot of fun. It was a lot of work, not only at RoboCup, but all the work in the months leading up to RoboCup. But it was definitely a lot of fun. It was really cool to hang out with guys from other teams all over the world. One night we went out to dinner with guys from the German Team, Microsoft Hellhounds (Germany), NU Bots (Australia) and Northern Bites (Maine). Good times

Here are some various links to cool stuff. Northern Bites has a blog, which is very detailed and has some interesting stories. I have a set of photos I took at RoboCup along with some other photos I stole along the way. All the videos that we took of RoboCup are available at UT Austin Villa’s website. And here is a link to some photos on Time magazine’s website about RoboCup. Here are sets of random RoboCup photos and videos. Here is the full website with all of the results from the Legged League. Another really cool event at Robocup was the first ever game played with robots and humans, that video is available here.

Just a note that the researchers at the University of Alberta have now proved that their computer checkers player, Chinook, is unbeatable. The best anyone can hope to do against it is a draw. Checkers is now solved. I’m not sure how impressive it is that a computer has solved it, its requires the computer to be able to search through enough possible moves to find the correct move every time. It is cool that such a large and complex problem has been tackled, but I think it would be even cooler if the program had learned how to play on its own. Here are some opinions on the news from the New York Times: Is the Only Winning Move Not to Play?

I finally got around to looking at some of this stuff on Jeff Hawkins and his Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) that people have been sending me.  Hawkins is trying to build a biologically plausible model of learning and memory in the brain that will supposedly be general across different tasks (i.e. it works for vision processing, audio, motor stuff, etc).  What he has come up with is called an HTM, and it is a hierarchical network of nodes that use belief propagation.  Here is a video from 2003 where Hawkins lays out some of his ideas about the brain and his belief that intelligence is better defined as an ability to predict the future.  This video is from 2006 and is a presentation were Hawkins describes the theory and implementation of the HTM system.

I think the idea of the HTM system is very cool.  I really think we should be looking to the brain for ideas on good learning and memory systems and doing it hierarchically makes a lot of sense.  The system Hawkins shows seems to be like a sort of hierarchical structure of Self-Organizing Maps (SOM), which is a method for unsupervised learning and clustering.  His method connects these different nodes using belief propagation so they all agree on the same thing.  And he has some unspecified method for detecting temporal sequences.  But otherwise it seems a lot like a SOM, grouping similar sets of inputs together and being able to provide the closest matching set from memory.  The results he shows on a simple object recognition task look very much like something you would see from a SOM or neural network.  It would be cool to see some results where the temporal sequencing or the hierarchical structure come into play.

Even though I think the results of the work are a bit weak so far, I still think it is pretty cool.  I’m still trying to figure out what direction I want to go in for my research and this gives me some ideas.  I would definitely like to work on something motivated by or inspired by the brain.  And it should be general enough to be applicable to many different problems.  It will be interesting to see what kind of results Hawkins gets out of the HTM as it gets extended and applied to more interesting problems.

Hitachi is reported to be releasing a mind machine interface some time within the next 5 years. Their device uses topographical imaging of bloodflow in the brain. It probably only be able to determine the difference between a couple brain states. So it could be used to detect simple yes/no type decisions. I’m not sure what the use of this would be. I do believe that Mind Machine Interfaces will be a big part of our future, but this is not it. A Mind Machine interface needs to be able to obtain some useful information from the brain such as planned muscle movements or words or thoughts. For an MMI to be successful, it will probably also have to be non-invasive.

Any device that would be capable of extracting the type of information that I would think would be interesting would have to sense the brain on the neuronal level. One current example is the BrainGate device from CyberKinetics. The device uses an array of electrodes implanted in the motor cortex to sense which direction a subject wants to move their arm. This information can be used to move a cursor on the screen or move an artificial limb.  For most people the risk of having electrodes implanted in their brain vastly outweights the benefits of the mind machine interface.  We need to work on finding ways to sense neuronal level activities without the invasiveness of implanting electrodes in the brain.