Its all in the name, iRobot!!

iRobot Corp. designs robots that perform dull, dirty or dangerous missions in a better way. The company’s proprietary technology, iRobot AWARE, Robot Intelligence Systems, incorporates advanced concepts in navigation, mobility, manipulation and artificial intelligence. This proprietary system enables iRobot to build behavior-based robots, including its family of consumer and military robots.

Could AI be used to launch and guide rockets?

Could artificial intelligence help rockets launch themselves? With greater automation, rockets would be capable of self-checking for problems, self-diagnosing, and hopefully, fixing minor pre or post launch issues.

"So far, rockets are merely automatic. They are not artificially intelligent," said Yasuhiro Morita, a professor at Institute of Space and Astronautical Science at JAXA, Japan's aerospace organisation.

However, according to Morita, the Epsilon launch vehicle - tentatively scheduled for a 2013 launch - is slated to include a whole new level of automation.

Currently, modern rockets have some elements of automation, for example, sensors can alert engineers of malfunctions but can't do much to alert them what type of problem it is or what type of solution is needed.

But in the future?

"The AI will diagnose the condition of the rocket, but it is more than that," Morita said. Should there be an issue, "the AI system will determine the cause of a malfunction," and potentially fix the problem itself.

CBA develops system to combat money laundering and terrorism financing

Yerevan hosted an event dedicated to introduction of an Automated Management System of the Center of Financial Monitoring at the Central Bank of Armenia (CBA).

 

“CBA attaches importance to comprehensive management, safe maintenance and efficient analysis of information related to money laundering and terrorism financing,” CBA Chairman Arthur Javadyan said during the event.

He expressed gratitude to the U.S. authorities for the technical aid to introduce the system and expressed hope that the cooperation between the CBA and U.S. embassy will be continued through implementation of other programs on development of the system on struggle against money laundering and terrorism financing.
U.S. Ambassador to Armenia Marie Yovanovitch said for her part that the Automated Management System is an important project for tackling money laundering and terrorism financing. The most efficient method of the struggle against money laundering is to deprive criminals of the opportunity to manage their incomes, she said.

Representatives of the Office of RA Prosecutor General, MFA, Police, National Security Service, Union of Armenian Banks and AI Partnership organization also participated in the event.

Artificial Intelligence: Job Killer

Michael Feldman

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A recent article in the New York Times points out that sophisticated data analytics software is doing the kinds of jobs once reserved for highly paid specialists. Specifically, it talks about data mining-type software applied to document discovery for lawsuits. In this realm, these applications are taking the place of expensive teams of lawyers and paralegals.
Basically it works by performing deep analysis of text to find documents pertinent to the case at hand. It's not just a dumb keyword search; the software is smart enough to find relevant text even in the absence of specific terms. One application was able to analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000 -- a fraction of the cost of a legal team, and performed in a fraction of the time.
Mike Lynch, founder of Autonomy (a UK-based e-discovery company), thinks this will lead to a shrinking legal workforce in the years ahead. From the article:

He estimated that the shift from manual document discovery to e-discovery would lead to a manpower reduction in which one lawyer would suffice for work that once required 500 and that the newest generation of software, which can detect duplicates and find clusters of important documents on a particular topic, could cut the head count by another 50 percent.

Such software can also be used to connect chains of events mined from a variety of sources: e-mail, instant messages, telephone calls, and so on. Used in this manner, it can be used to sift out digital anomalies to track various types of criminal behavior. Criminals, of course, are one workforce we'd like to reduce.  But what about the detectives that used to perform this kind of work?
The broader point the NYT article illuminates is that software like this actually targets mid-level white collar jobs, rather than low-end labor jobs we usually think of as threatened by computer automation. According to David Autor, an economics professor at MIT, this is leading to a "hollowing out" of the US economy. While he doesn't think technology like this is driving unemployment per se, he believes the job mix will inevitably change, and not necessarily for the better.
It's the post-Watson era. Get used to it.

The past, present and future of cancer

Leading cancer researchers reflected on past achievements and prospects for the future of cancer treatment during a special MIT symposium on Wednesday titled “Conquering Cancer through the Convergence of Science and Engineering.”

The event, one of six academic symposia taking place as part of MIT’s 150th anniversary, focused on the Institute’s role in studying the disease over the past 36 years since the founding of MIT’s Center for Cancer Research.

During that time, MIT scientists have made critical discoveries that resulted in new cancer drugs such as Gleevec and Herceptin. The center has since become the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, which now includes a mix of biologists, who are trying to unravel what goes wrong inside cancer cells, and engineers, who are working on turning basic science discoveries into real-world treatments and diagnostics for cancer patients.

That “convergence” of life sciences and engineering is key to making progress in the fight against cancer, said Institute Professor Phillip Sharp, a member of the Koch Institute. “We need that convergence because we are facing a major demographic challenge in cancer as well as a number of other chronic diseases” that typically affect older people, such as Alzheimer’s, Sharp said.

In opening the symposium, MIT President Susan Hockfield said that MIT has “the right team, in the right place, at the right moment in history” to help defeat cancer.

“It’s in the DNA of MIT to solve problems,” said Tyler Jacks, director of the Koch Institute. “I’m very optimistic and very encouraged about what this generation of cancer researchers at MIT will do to overcome this most challenging problem.”

Past and present

In the past few decades, a great deal of progress has been made in understanding cancer, said Nancy Hopkins, the Amgen, Inc. Professor of Biology and Koch Institute member, who spoke as part of the first panel discussion, on major milestones in cancer research.

In the early 1970s, before President Richard Nixon declared the “War on Cancer,” “we really knew nothing about human cells and what controls their division,” Hopkins recalled. Critical discoveries by molecular biologists, including MIT’s Robert Weinberg, revealed that cancer is usually caused by genetic mutations within cells.

The discovery of those potentially cancerous genes, including HER2 (often mutated in breast cancer), has lead to the development of new drugs that cause fewer side effects in healthy cells. While that is a major success story, many other significant discoveries have failed to make an impact in patient treatment, Hopkins said.

“The discoveries we have made are not being exploited as effectively as they could be,” Hopkins said. “That’s where we need the engineers. They’re problem-solvers.”

Institute Professor Robert Langer described his experiences as one of the rare engineers to pursue a career in biomedical research during the 1970s. After he finished his doctoral degree in chemical engineering in 1974, “I got four job offers from Exxon alone,” plus offers from several other oil companies. But Langer had decided he wanted to do something that would more directly help people, and ended up getting a postdoctoral position in the lab of Judah Folkman, the scientist who pioneered the idea of killing tumors by cutting off their blood supplies.

In Folkman’s lab, Langer started working on drug-delivering particles made from polymers, which are now widely used to deliver drugs in a controlled fashion.

Langer and other engineers in the Koch Institute are now working on ways to create even better drug-delivery particles. Sangeeta Bhatia, the Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, described an ongoing project in her lab to create iron oxide nanoparticles that can be tagged with small protein fragments that bind specifically to tumor cells. Such particles could help overcome one major drawback to most chemotherapy: Only about 1 percent of the drug administered reaches the tumor.

“If we could simply take these poisonous drugs more directly to the tumors, it would increase their effectiveness and decrease side effects,” Bhatia said.

Other Koch engineers are working on new imaging agents, tiny implantable sensors, cancer vaccines and computational modeling of cancer cells, among other projects.

Personalized medicine

Many of the targeted drugs now in use came about through serendipitous discoveries, said Daniel Haber, director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, during a panel on personalized cancer care. Now, he said, a more systematic approach is needed. He described a new effort underway at MGH to test potential drugs on 1,000 different tumor cell lines, to find out which tumor types respond best to each drug.

At MIT, Koch Institute members Michael Hemann and Michael Yaffe have shown that patient response to cancer drugs that damage DNA can be predicted by testing for the status of two genes — p53, a tumor suppressor, and ATM, a gene that helps regulate p53.

Their research suggests that such drugs should be used only in patients whose tumors have mutations in both genes or neither gene — a finding that underscores the importance of understanding the genetic makeup of patients’ tumors before beginning treatment. It also suggests that current drugs could be made much more effective by combining them in the right ways.

“The therapies of the future may not be new therapies,” Hemann said. “They may be existing therapies used significantly better.”

The sequencing of the human genome should also help achieve the goal of personalized cancer treatment, said Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute and co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, who spoke during a panel on biology, technology and medical applications. Already, the sequencing of the human genome has allowed researchers to discover far more cancer-causing genes. In 2000, before the sequence was completed, scientists knew of about 80 genes that could cause solid tumors, but by 2010, 240 were known.

Building on the human genome project, the National Cancer Institute has launched the Cancer Genome Atlas Project, which is sequencing the genomes of thousands of human tumors, comparing them to each other and to non-cancerous genomes. “By looking at many tumors at one time, you can begin to pick out common patterns,” Lander said.

He envisions that once cancer scientists have a more complete understanding of which genes can cause cancer, and the functions of those genes, patient treatment will become much more effective. “Doctors of the future will be able to pick out drugs based on that information,” he said.

Is government ready for the semantic Web?

So far it's been slow going, but an interagency XML project could boost law enforcement, health care efforts

• By John Moore
• Mar 18, 2011

When IBM’s Watson recently trounced the two most successful "Jeopardy!" players of all time, the supercomputer was relying in part on an emerging field of computerized language processing known as semantic technology.
In addition to being able to work out the answer to questions for Watson such as what fruit trees provide flavor to Sakura cheese, semantic technology is capable of providing answers to questions that might interest government agencies and other groups that historically have had problems identifying patterns or probable sequences in oceans of data. 
The idea is to help machines understand the context of a piece of information and how it relates to other bits of content. As such, it has the potential to improve search engines and enable computer systems to more readily exchange data in ways that could be useful to agencies involved in a wide range of pursuits, including homeland security and health care.
While semantic technology has mostly been an academic exercise in recent years, it is now finding a greater role in a practical-minded government project called the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM).

NIEM pursues intergovernment information exchange standards with the goal of helping agencies more readily circulate suspicious activity reports or issue Amber Alerts, for example. The goal is to create bridges, or exchanges, between otherwise isolated applications and data stores.
The building of those exchanges calls for a common understanding of the data changing hands. The richer detail of semantic descriptions makes for more precise matches when systems seek to consume data from other systems. Agreement on semantics also promotes reuse; common definitions let agencies recycle exchanges.
Semantics in government IT
Today, NIEM offers a degree of semantic support. But some observers believe the interoperability effort will take a deeper dive into semantic technology. They view NIEM as a vehicle that could potentially make semantics a mainstream component of government IT.
“Semantically, there is a huge opportunity with NIEM,” said Peter Doolan, vice president and chief technology officer at Oracle Public Sector, which is working on tools for NIEM. “NIEM is a forcing function for the broader adoption of the deeper semantic technology that we have talked about for some time.”

As more agencies adopt NIEM, the impetus for incorporating semantics will grow. NIEM launched in 2005 with the Justice and Homeland Security departments as the principal backers. Last year, the Health and Human Services Department joined Justice and DHS as co-partners. State and local governments, particularly in law enforcement, have taken to NIEM as well. And in a move that underscores that trend, the National Association of State Chief Information Officers last month joined the NIEM executive steering committee.
“NIEM adoption is going at a furious pace,” said Mark Soley, chairman and CEO of the Object Management Group (OMG), which has been working with NIEM. “As it gets adoption, they are going to need a way to translate information that is currently in other formats. That is when you need semantic descriptions.”
NIEM’s leadership says the program is prepared for greater use of semantics. “The NIEM program stands ready to respond to the overall NIEM community regarding a broader adoption of semantic technologies,” said DHS officials who responded to questions via e-mail.
Support for semantics
NIEM is based on XML. The project grew out of the Global Justice XML Data Model (GJXDM), a guide for information exchange in the justice and public safety sectors. Although XML serves as a foundational technology for data interoperability, it is not necessarily viewed as semantic.
However, John Wandelt, principal research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and division chief of that organization’s Information Exchange and Architecture Division, said semantic capability has been part of NIEM since its inception. GTRI serves as the technical architect and lead developer for GJXDM and NIEM.
“From the very early days, the community has pushed for strong semantics,” he said. Wandelt pointed to XML schema, which describes the data to be shared in an exchange. “Some say schema doesn’t carry semantics,” he said. "But the way we do XML schema in NIEM, it does carry semantics.”
NIEM’s Naming and Design Rules help programmers layer an “incremental set of semantics on top of base XML,” Wandelt said. For example, a group of XML programmers tasked to build a data model of their family trees would depict relationships between parents, siblings, and grandparents. But those ties would be implied and based entirely on an individual programmer’s way of modeling.
NIEM’s design rules, on the other hand, provide a consistent set of instructions for describing connections among entities. Wandelt said those roles make relationships explicit, thereby boosting semantic understanding.
NIEM also uses Resource Description Framework (RDF), an important underpinning of the Semantic Web, which has been slowly making its way into government IT (see sidebar).
RDF aims to describe data in a way the helps machines better understand relationships.

see the full article here: http://gcn.com/articles/2011/03/21/niem-and-semantic-web.aspx