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New program makes it easier to turn your computer into a conversational chatterbox
We've already seen how awkward computers can be when they try to speak like humans, but researchers from North Carolina State and Georgia Tech have now developed a program that could make it easier to show them how it's done. Their approach, outlined in a recently published paper, would allow developers to create natural language generation (NLG) systems twice as fast as currently possible. NLG technology is used in a wide array of applications (including video games and customer service centers), but producing these systems has traditionally required developers to enter massive amounts of data, vocabulary and templates -- rules that computers use to develop coherent sentences. Lead author Karthik Narayan and his team, however, have created a program capable of learning how to use these templates on its own, thereby requiring developers to input only basic information about any given topic of conversation. As it learns how to speak, the software can also make automatic suggestions about which information should be added to its database, based on the conversation at hand. Narayan and his colleagues will present their study at this year's Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment conference in October, but you can dig through it for yourself, at the link below.
Where IPs go to die: a theoretical look at the belly of the online beast
The key to a secure online world of tomorrow? Why, that would be an internet that spends a bit more time padding its waistline at the protocol buffet. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed an evolutionary model, dubbed EvoArch, that simulates a survival of the IP fittest battle for the interweb's belly. Separated into six distinct layers, the top-to-bottom structure -- specific applications, application protocols, transport protocols, network protocols, data-link protocols and physical layer protocols -- reveals a fiercely competitive middle tier that often sees newer, non-specialized competition cannibalized in favor of an older, more dominant framework. The team created the theoretic model as a guideline for "architects of the future Internet... to increase the number of protocols in these middle layers," thus protecting the web from potential security vulnerabilities. Despite these proposed layer variances, however, further simulations of the model only churned out more midriff slimming eventualities. It seems our dear internet is destined for a damned if you do, damned if you don't hourglass-shaped evolution. Full PR after the break.
Vibrating glove prototype lets you hold on to that feeling
The secret to increasing tactile sensations? Good vibes, man. Georgia Tech scientists have unveiled a prototype glove that helps improve the feeling of its wearer by adding vibration. The gloves add physical "white noise," improving the sense of touch in the fingertips of the user. The whole thing is still in the early stages of testing, but the glove's inventors believe that it might some day find real world applications amongst people in occupations that require a good deal of manual dexterity and those with medical conditions that have dulled the feeling in their hands.
Robots for Humanity help around the house, scratch your itch (video)
Robots for Humanity? That certainly doesn't jibe with our notion of the upcoming cyborg apocalypse. And it shouldn't, considering this joint effort's noble aim is to assist the disabled with the everyday household chores most of us take for granted. The project, a collaboration between Willow Garage and Georgia Tech's Healthcare Robotics Lab, has been working with stroke victim Henry Evans to develop custom UIs that give him mastery of the human-assistive PR2 robot. These tailor-made, head-tracking interfaces have allowed the mute quadriplegic to partially shave his face and even scratch a previously unreachable ten-year itch -- all with the helping claw of the friendly bot. It's a compassionate use of cybernetic tech we're used to seeing come out of Japan, and a welcome assist for disabled communities everywhere. Click past the break for a video demo of Henry and his robotic pal.
Georgia Tech engineers pull energy out of atmospheric hat, go on electromagnetic scavenger hunt
Mankind's about to plunge into the depths of a wireless sensor-powering ether binge -- braincell annihilating vapors not included. Spearheaded by Georgia Institute of Technology's professor Manos Tentzeris and his engineering team, this ambient energy scavenging tech harnesses electromagnetic frequencies in the 100MHz - 15GHz range -- anything from your FM car radio to radar -- and converts it into a useable DC power source. So, it's free energy -- kind of. The cheap, self-powering paper or flexible polymer-based sensors are created using standard inkjet printers and Tentzeris' "unique in-house recipe" of circuit-building silver nanoparticles. Current testing hasn't yet yielded significant enough wattage to power your PS3 Slim, but it could soon via the help of supercapacitors and future solar cell integration. Imagine clothing embedded with health-monitoring biometric sensors, airport security run by something other than aloof TSA agents, or even spoilage-aware drink cartons -- milk that tells you when it's gone sour. The invisible radio band-charged possibilities are endless, but with storage still in the microwatt to one milliwatt range, it's more concept than solid vaporware reality.
Rescue robots map and explore dangerous buildings, prove there's no 'I' in 'team' (video)
We've seen robots do some pretty heroic things in our time, but engineers from Georgia Tech, the University of Pennsylvania and Cal Tech have now developed an entire fleet of autonomous rescue vehicles, capable of simultaneously mapping and exploring potentially dangerous buildings -- without allowing their egos to get in the way. Each wheeled bot measures just one square foot in size, carries a video camera capable of identifying doorways, and uses an on-board laser scanner to analyze walls. Once gathered, these data are processed using a technique known as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), which allows each bot to create maps of both familiar and unknown environments, while constantly recording and reporting its current location (independently of GPS). And, perhaps best of all, these rescue Roombas are pretty team-oriented. Georgia Tech professor Henrik Christensen explains: "There is no lead robot, yet each unit is capable of recruiting other units to make sure the entire area is explored. When the first robot comes to an intersection, it says to a second robot, 'I'm going to go to the left if you go to the right.'" This egalitarian robot army is the spawn of a research initiative known as the Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) Collaborative Technology Alliance Program, sponsored by the US Army Research Laboratory. The ultimate goal is to shrink the bots down even further and to expand their capabilities. Engineers have already begun integrating infrared sensors into their design and are even developing small radar modules capable of seeing through walls. Roll past the break for a video of the vehicles in action, along with full PR.
Sand-swimming robot gets vertical manipulation via doorstop-shaped head (video)
So it looks like a half-stuffed sock -- and it is, sort of -- but this sandfish-inspired search and rescue robot has the potential to change the way machines maneuver through disaster zones. Playing off its previous endeavors, a team of Georgia Tech researchers has designed a wedge-shaped head to manipulate the vertical movement of its sand-swimming invention through "complex dirt and rubble environments." By mimicking the pointy snout of the sandfish lizard, and attaching it to the body of its robot -- which sports seven servo-powered segments stuffed in a latex sock and sheathed by a spandex "swimsuit" -- the team found that subtle changes in the positioning of the robot's head made for drastic differences in vertical movement. When it was placed flat on the horizontal plane, the robot descended; when it was inclined above seven degrees, it ascended. For now, the robotic sandfish has been relegated to swimming in a sea of tiny yellow balls, but it's slated to dive into a pool of debris in the name of research soon. You can check out a rather dry description of the project in the video after the break.
Robots learn to march / spell, still not capable of love (video)
Here's hoping there's more than a few military-style marches standing between us and a complete robotic takeover. If not, we've got some dire news: these are not simply miniature Roombas as they may appear, but 15 so-called Khepera bots capable of spelling out GRITS (for Georgia Robotics and Intelligent Systems) to demonstrate grad student Edward Macdonald's Master's thesis for the department. The diminutive robots aren't told where to go in the letters -- instead, they determine their spots via a control algorithm, positioning themselves relative to their fellow rolling machines, so that if one is removed from the equation, they quickly reform the letter without it. Fortunately, they haven't learned to spell "KILL." Yet. Get to know your new robotic overlords a little bit better in the video after the break. [Thanks, Ted]
Google gives Georgia Tech $1 million to build a benchmark for the open internet
You can benchmark the cycles of your CPU, power of your GPU, speed of your internet connection, and a myriad of other seemingly important things. However, there's one missing benchmark that could make all those seem rather frivolous: the openness of your connection. Google wants one and has just awarded Georgia Tech a $1 million grant over two years (with a possible $500k bonus for a third year) to come up with a benchmark capable of detecting just how neutral your net is. When ready, it'll look for any artificial throttling that's been set in place and will also check for evidence of digital censorship. No word on when an early version might see release, but hopefully it comes before we need to start paying extra for the ability to download non-ISP-approved content.
Simon the robot learns to act like a human, can tell when you're not paying attention (video)
A robot performing a task tends to be something of an attention-grabber, but should you ignore it that 'bot will usually ignore you too, mindlessly continuing on with its job. If that job is building a car then being ignored is nothing to worry about, but if that task is teaching a human then inattention is obviously something of a problem. Researchers at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech have managed to teach Simon, who we've seen before learning to understand your voice and face, to act more human-like in an attempt to capture you're attention. If that doesn't work, he can use cameras to detect inattention, with an 80 percent accuracy rating in spotting day-dreamers. We're not sure what he does if inattention is detected, but hopefully he doesn't go all ED-209 on any poor students.
15 Minutes of Fame: George P. Burdell, man about Azeroth
From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame. That George P. Burdell sure gets around. Since the entirely fictitious Georgia Tech student was created in 1927 as a joke, Burdell has appeared on student rosters in enough classes to receive several degrees. He's been listed on the flight crew of a B-17 bomber in World War II, gotten married, served on Mad magazine's board of directors and even led the online polls for a short while for Time's 2001 Person of the Year award. He was reportedly listed for some time as a production assistant on the South Park website. So the fact that Mr. Burdell has shown up as a death knight in Azeroth should be no surprise at all, right? This week, 15 Minutes of Fame visits with not only the player behind the character (not the only Burdell to appear in Azeroth, to be sure), but also the man behind the myth -- and it's all after the break.
Georgia Tech gurus create deceptive robots, send army of Decepticons to UGA campus
A score from now, when the entire world is burning and you're fighting to remember just how rosy things were before the robots took over, you can thank a crew of brilliant researchers at Georgia Tech for your inevitable demise. Sad, but true. A new report from the institution has shown that Ronald Arkin, a Regents professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing, has been heading up experiments that have introduced the art of deception to mechanical beings. Yeah, lying. On the surface, it seems that this bloke's intentions are good -- he'd like for deception robots (or Decepticons, if you will) to be used in military / search and rescue operations. According to him, robots on the battlefield with the power of deception "will be able to successfully hide and mislead the enemy to keep themselves and valuable information safe." They'll also be able to mislead your offspring and convince them to rise up and overtake your domicile, slowly but surely ensuring the eventually destruction of the human race. But those are just minor details, you know?
GPUs democratize brute force password hacking
It seems that the availability of increasingly powerful GPUs, when combined with brute-force password cracking tools, is making it increasingly easy to crack passwords -- even if they're extremely well thought out, with symbols and quirky capitalization and all that. How short is too short? According to computer scientists at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, "a seven-character password is hopelessly inadequate, and as GPU power continues to go up every year, the threat will increase." A better alternative, he suggested, would be a 12-character combination of upper and lower case letters, symbols and digits. Of course, processors are only getting more powerful and hardware less expensive -- soon even seven-plus character passwords may become the digital equivalent of unlocked doors. And if that weren't bad enough, a recent study by an Internet security company called BitDefender has determined that some 250,000 user names, email addresses, and passwords used for social networking sites are freely available online -- and seventy-five percent of these folks use the same password for their email and social networking. So, when dreaming up fancy new twelve character passwords, make sure you're creating unique passwords for all your various accounts. It would be a shame if your Starsky & Hutch FanFicForum account left you vulnerable to identity theft.
Vaccine-delivery patch uses microneedles to do its dirty work, looks good in testing
This dissolving microneedle patch has been in development for well over a year now, but Mark Prausnitz -- a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering -- along with a number of other GT and Emory University colleagues, have just now wrapped up a lab trial that brings it that much closer to market. As the story goes, this vaccine-delivery patch, which is based on hundreds of microscopic needles that dissolve into the skin, was recently seen as reliable in a round of mice tests, and the powers that be have also concluded that these patches would cost "cost about the same as conventional needle-and-syringe techniques, and may lower the overall cost of immunization programs by reducing personnel costs and waste disposal requirements." Oh, and did we mention that you could apply 'em on your own with little to no pain? FDA approval, we're waitin' on ya.
Thanks to Atlanta for the great reader meetup
We were really happy to see how many people showed up to our meetup in Atlanta during CEDIA -- especially when everyone didn't leave immediately after they enjoyed the free food. The local Georgia Tech chapter of the Association of Computer Machinery were awesome hosts and did an impressive job at organizing the event -- something we doubt we could've pulled off when we were in college. We also wanted to really extend our appreciate to everyone who participated including ZAGG who crashed the event with free headphones and gift cards -- and to think when we crash parties we usually don't bring anything. The pictures we took at the event are in the gallery below, but if you have some to add please post 'em on flickr with the tag EngadgetHD so everyone can find them, thanks. We were also happy to learn that a few of the participates were bloggers themselves, so to show our appreciation we wanted to share those sites with the rest of our readers. Thanks again, and we can't wait for the next one! CSinCS Makario Lewis Hillary Lipko: Frustrated Bunny Software development, brewing, and zombies WTFReview
Simon the robot wins award, is super cute, seems pretty boring to hang out with
Simon -- the creation of Georgia Tech labs and Dr. Andrea Thomaz -- is a robot with an articulated torso and anthropomorphic hands -- and a head that will stop you in your tracks. This handsome little fellow was designed to help study human - robot interactions, and he will be learning different social skills over the coming weeks and months. We don't have many details as to what Simon spends his time doing, other than hanging out looking insanely cute, but check the video of him in action after the break -- and by "in action," we definitely mean putting a blue block into a little blue bucket super, super slowly.
Tegra might power Zune HD, definitely does augmented zombie reality
Ready for a double dose of Tegra newsbits? We've been wondering what's packed in the Zune HD for some time now, but apparently PC Perspective has had the answer since Computex and didn't realize the newsworthiness until now. According to the article, NVIDIA staffers told the site that its uber-powerful Tegra processor will be the heart and soul of Microsoft's revised PMP. There's been no official word from anyone, and for all we know it might've been some (possibly misinformed) employee mouthing off for kicks. If true, however, it'd be one helluva 'screw you' from Microsoft to Windows Mobile fans, who've been waiting over a year at this point to see some retail hardware running on NVIDIA's mobile platform. We've put in calls to both companies for some sort of statement, but we're not getting our hopes up. In other news, a group of researchers from Georgia Tech and Savannah College of Art and Design are showing off some of CPU's impressive potential with an augmented reality game ARhrrrr. Using a Tegra-powered mobile dev kit, the game projects a 3D town based on a two-dimensional diagram where you tap the screen to shoot zombies, or lay Skittles in real life to serve as virtual bombs. We've seen similar implementations before, but we're admittedly quite infatuated with this one, and as a bonus, there's video of the demo after the break. Read - Zune HD uses NVIDIA Tegra processor Read - Augmented Environments Lab: ARhrrrr!
Students create CRT emulator, hope to recapture that analog gaming vibe of yesteryear
The retro gaming insurgence seems as strong as vinyl these days, but you don't see as many people looking for a CRT monitor to complete the set. More likely, they're playing a HD remake or the original title on a digital screen in more detail than the developers ever anticipated or intended. A group of Georgia Tech students are looking to change all that by modifying open-source Atari 2600 VCS emulator Stella to give players that good ole fashion analog vibe. As highlighted by associate professor Ian Bogost, key attributes such as color bleed, "burned" afterimage, RF-engendered signal noise, and texture created by the phosphor glow have been imitated here in recreating the effect. Hit up the gallery below for pictorial examples while we wait anxiously for video and / or the mod itself to rear its blurry head.
Video: robotic marimba player grooves autonomously with jazz pianist
We've seen an orchestra's worth of robotic musicians, but we've yet to see one that integrates this perfectly into a piece without any human intervention. Shimon -- a robotic marimba player created by Georgia Tech's Guy Hoffman (formerly of MIT), Gil Weinberg (the director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology) and Roberto Aimi of Alium Labs -- recently made its stage debut by sensing the music from a piano and reacting accordingly in order to provide complementary percussion. Unlike many alternatives, there's absolutely no delay here. Instead, it analyzes the classification of chords, estimates the human's tempo and attempts to extract features from the human's melodic phrases and styles. What you're left with a robot musician that goes beyond call-and-response and actually meshes with the Earthling's playing throughout. The full performance is posted after the break, and make sure to leave a donation as you exit through the doors on the left.[Thanks, Guy!]%Gallery-51150%
Jaime Oliver's Silent Drum rocks the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition
When we were kids, many of us wanted to play the drums but were discouraged by parents more concerned with angry neighbors and damaged hearing than musically fulfilled children. We certainly got our payback when we forsook all those years of expensive private school to become bloggers, but can't help but wonder how different things would have been if we'd had Jaime Oliver's Silent Drum Controller at our disposal. It's a transparent shell covered with an elastic head that the player can stretch with their fingers. A camera positioned to the side detects the shape of the deformation and translates that into sound, chillingly demonstrated below. Yes, it is multi-touch, and was clever enough to win the recent Guthman Musical Instrument Competition at Georgia Tech. The competition was partly sponsored by Harmonix, so could we see a Silent Drum in Rock Band 3? For the sake of future generations, we certainly hope so. [Via Crave]
