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Humans Are Slamming Into Driverless Cars and Exposing a Key Flaw Keith Naughton KeithNaughton
December 17, 2015 — 7:01 PM EST Updated on December 18, 2015 — 6:30 AM EST Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on WhatsApp
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Google Said to Make Driverless Car Unit Alphabet Company
Accident rates are twice as high as for regular vehicles
Most mishaps are fender benders caused by inattentive driversShare on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on WhatsApp Share on LinkedIn Share on Reddit Share on Google+ E-mail Share on Twitter Share on WhatsApp
The self-driving car, that cutting-edge creation that’s supposed to lead to a world without accidents, is achieving the exact opposite right now: The vehicles have racked up a crash rate double that of those with human drivers.
The glitch?
They obey the law all the time, as in, without exception. This may sound like the right way to program a robot to drive a car, but good luck trying to merge onto a chaotic, jam-packed highway with traffic flying along well above the speed limit. It tends not to work out well. As the accidents have piled up -- all minor scrape-ups for now -- the arguments among programmers at places like Google Inc. and Carnegie Mellon University are heating up: Should they teach the cars how to commit infractions from time to time to stay out of trouble?
“It’s a constant debate inside our group,” said Raj Rajkumar, co-director of the General Motors-Carnegie Mellon Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Lab in Pittsburgh. “And we have basically decided to stick to the speed limit. But when you go out and drive the speed limit on the highway, pretty much everybody on the road is just zipping past you. And I would be one of those people.”
Last year, Rajkumar offered test drives to members of Congress in his lab’s self-driving Cadillac SRX sport utility vehicle. The Caddy performed perfectly, except when it had to merge onto I-395 South and swing across three lanes of traffic in 150 yards (137 meters) to head toward the Pentagon. The car’s cameras and laser sensors detected traffic in a 360-degree view but didn’t know how to trust that drivers would make room in the ceaseless flow, so the human minder had to take control to complete the maneuver.
…
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/544901/what-robots-and-ai-learned-in-2015/
Robotics News
What Robots and AI Learned in 2015It was the year that self-driving cars became a commercial reality; robots gained all sorts of new abilities; and some people worried about the existential threat posed by super-intelligent future AI.
By Will Knight on December 29, 2015
The robots didn’t really take over in 2015, but at times it felt as if that might be where we’re headed.
There were signs that machines will soon take over manual work that currently requires human skill. Early in the year details
emerged of a contest organized by Amazon to help robots do more work inside its vast product fulfillment centers.
The Amazon Picking challenge, as the event was called, was held at a prominent robotics conference later in the year. Teams competed for a $25,000 prize by designing a robot to identify and grasp items from one of Amazon’s storage shelves as quickly as possible (the winner picked and packed 10 items in 20 minutes). This might seem a trivial task for human workers, but figuring out how to grasp different objects arranged haphazardly on shelves in a real warehouse is still a formidable challenge for robot-kind.
Later in the year, we also got an exclusive look inside one of Amazon’s fulfillment centers, which showed just how sophisticated and automated they already are. Inside these warehouses, robots ferry products between human workers, and people operate as part of a carefully orchestrated, finely tuned production system.
A few months later, an even more impressive robot competition, the DARPA Robotics Challenge, was held in Pomona, California. Funded by the U.S. military and created in response to the nuclear disaster at Fukushima in Japan, the event was designed to inspire the creation of humanoid robots capable of taking over in highly dangerous disaster scenarios.
The contest pushed the limits of robot sensing, locomotion, and manipulation with a series of grueling challenges, including opening doors, climbing stairs, and operating power tools. Again, these things might be easy enough for humans, but they are still extremely hard for robots, as a series of pratfalls involving several of the million-dollar robot contestants quickly highlighted. The $2 million first place prize eventually went to a robot that was able to navigate the course quickly because it could both walk and roll along on its knees.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/11/24/the-blind-woman-who-switched-personalities-and-could-suddenly-see/?1448647622404=1
comments from sean: I thought you might be interested in this article from the Washington Postabout a blind woman who can see in some of her alternate personalities. Shehas Dissociative Personality Disorder (formerly known as MultiplePersonality Disorder). It reminded me of the man you talked about who wasblind but could walk around objects in his way. There are other documentedcases of people with multiple personalities who change things likeallergies, left/right handedness, voice patterns (beyond the ability of mostactors), blood pressure, eye sight (like prescriptions for eye glasses), eyecolor, and some even speak different languages. Pretty crazy stuff.Anyway, here is the article from the Post.
The blind woman who switched personalities and could suddenly seeBy Sarah Kaplan November 24
It had been more than a decade since “B.T.” had last seen anything.
After suffering a traumatic accident as a young woman, doctors diagnosed her with cortical blindness, caused by damage to the visual processing centers in her brain. So she got a seeing eye dog to guide her and grew accustomed to the darkness.
Besides, B.T. had other health problems to cope with — namely, more than 10 wildly different personalities that competed for control of her body. It was while seeking treatment for her dissociative identity disorder that the ability to see suddenly returned. Not to B.T., a 37-year-old German woman. But to a teenage boy she sometimes became.
With therapy, over the course of months, all but two of B.T.’s identities regained their sight. And as B.T. oscillated between identities, her vision flicked on and off like a light switch in her mind. The world would appear, then go dark.
Writing in PsyCh Journal, B.T.’s doctors say that her blindness wasn’t caused by brain damage, her original diagnosis. It was instead something more akin to a brain directive, a psychological problem rather than a physiological one.
…
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/magazine/karl-ove-knausgaard-on-the-terrible-beauty-of-brain-surgery.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
The Terrible
Beauty of
Brain Surgery
A witness in an operating roomwhere the patients are conscious.
By KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD
Photographs by PAOLO PELLEGRIN
DEC. 30, 2015
I
arrived in Tirana, Albania, on a Sunday evening in late August, on a flight from Istanbul. The sun had set while the plane was midflight, and as we landed in
the dark, images of fading light still filled my mind. The man next to me, a young, red-haired American wearing a straw hat, asked me if I knew how to get into town from the airport. I shook my head, put the book I had been reading into my backpack, got up, lifted my suitcase out of the overhead compartment and stood waiting in the aisle for the door up ahead to open.
That book was the reason I had come. It was called “Do No Harm,” and it was written by the British neurosurgeon Henry Marsh. His job is to slice into the brain, the most complex structure we know of in the universe, where everything that makes us human is contained, and the contrast between the extremely sophisticated and the extremely primitive — all of that work with knives, drills and saws — fascinated me deeply. I had sent Marsh an email, asking if I might meet him in London to watch him operate. He wrote a cordial reply saying that he seldom worked there now, but he was sure something could be arranged. In passing, he mentioned that he would be operating in Albania in August and in
Nepal in September, and I asked hesitantly whether I could join him in Albania.
Now I was here.
Tense and troubled, I stepped out of the door of the airplane, having no idea what lay ahead. I knew as little about Albania as I did about brain surgery. The air was warm and stagnant, the darkness dense. A bus was waiting with its engine running. Most of the passengers were silent, and the few who chatted with one another spoke a language I didn’t know. It struck me that 25 years ago, when this was among the last remaining Communist states in Europe, I would not have been allowed to enter; then, the country was closed to the outside world, almost like North Korea today. Now the immigration officer barely glanced at my passport before stamping it. She dully handed it back to me, and I entered Albania.
…
http://news.yahoo.com/gadgets-smarter-friendlier-ces-show-032551968.html
Gadgets get smarter, friendlier at CES show
By Glenn Chapman and Sophie Estienne January 2, 2016 11:50 PM
San Francisco (AFP) - From drones, cars and robots to jewelry, appliances and TVs, the new technology on display at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show promises to be smarter and friendlier than ever.
The annual tech extravaganza with more than 3,600 exhibitors set to formally start on Wednesday in Las Vegas is likely to see innovation across a range of sectors, from health care to autos, connected homes, virtual reality and gaming.
"There are always a couple of winners at CES, and sometimes there are the sleepers that turn out to be the cool thing," Gartner analyst Brian Blau told AFP.
But Blau said the innovations are "often evolutionary, not revolutionary."
Televisions will play starring roles at the show as usual, with giants such as Samsung, Sony, LG and Vizio among contenders in a market rapidly shifting to ultra-high definition.
"We are in the sweetest of the sweet spot in the TV market," NPD analyst Stephen Baker told AFP while discussing CES.
"Sales of 4K TVs are exploding right now," he said, referring to the popular new high-definition format.
Drones are also expected to make a splash at CES, where an Unmanned Systems Marketplace has doubled in size from a year earlier to cover 25,000 square feet (2,300 square meters).
Blau expects the drones on display at the show to be more sophisticated, with easy controls and even applications that let them be operated using smartphones.
…
http://www.nervanasys.com/demystifying-deep-reinforcement-learning/
Guest Post (Part I): Demystifying Deep Reinforcement LearningTwo years ago, a small company in London called DeepMind uploaded their pioneering paper “Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning” to Arxiv. In this paper they demonstrated how a computer learned to play Atari 2600 video games by observing just the screen pixels and receiving a reward when the game score increased. The result was remarkable, because the games and the goals in every game were very different and designed to be challenging for humans. The same model architecture, without any change, was used to learn seven different games, and in three of them the algorithm performed even better than a human!
It has been hailed since then as the first step towards general artificial intelligence – an AI that can survive in a variety of environments, instead of being confined to strict realms such as playing chess. No wonder DeepMind was immediately bought by Google and has been on the forefront of deep learning research ever since. In February 2015 their paper “Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning” was featured on the cover of Nature, one of the most prestigious journals in science. In this paper they applied the same model to 49 different games and achieved superhuman performance in half of them.
Still, while deep models for supervised and unsupervised learning have seen widespread adoption in the community, deep reinforcement learning has remained a bit of a mystery. In this blog post I will be trying to demystify this technique and understand the rationale behind it. The intended audience is someone who already has background in machine learning and possibly in neural networks, but hasn’t had time to delve into reinforcement learning yet.
The roadmap ahead:
1. What are the main challenges in reinforcement learning? We will cover the credit assignment problem and the exploration-exploitation dilemma here.
2. How to formalize reinforcement learning in mathematical terms? We will define Markov Decision Process and use it for reasoning about reinforcement learning.
3. How do we form long-term strategies? We define “discounted future reward”, that forms the main basis for the algorithms in the next sections.
4. How can we estimate or approximate the future reward? Simple table-based Q-learning algorithm is defined and explained here.
5. What if our state space is too big? Here we see how Q-table can be replaced with a (deep) neural network.
…
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/544651/baidus-deep-learning-system-rivals-people-at-speech-recognition/
Baidu’s Deep-Learning System Rivals People at Speech RecognitionChina’s dominant Internet company, Baidu, is developing powerful speech recognition for its voice interfaces.
By Will Knight on December 16, 2015
Why It Matters
Accurate voice recognition will be vital for making voice interfaces more useful and pervasive.
China’s leading Internet-search company, Baidu, has developed a voice system that can recognize English and Mandarin speech better than people, in some cases.
The new system, called Deep Speech 2, is especially significant in how it relies entirely on machine learning for translation. Whereas older voice-recognition systems include many handcrafted components to aid audio processing and transcription, the Baidu system learned to recognize words
from scratch, simply by listening to thousands of hours of transcribed audio.
The technology relies on a powerful technique known as deep learning, which involves training a very large multilayered virtual network of neurons to recognize patterns in vast quantities of data. The Baidu app for smartphones lets users search by voice, and also includes a voice-controlled personal assistant called Duer (see “Baidu’s Duer Joins the Personal Assistant Party”). Voice queries are more popular in China because it is more time-consuming to input text, and because some people do not know how to use Pinyin, the phonetic system for transcribing Mandarin using Latin characters.
…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3386875/Could-soon-speak-telepathically-Mind-reading-computer-deciphers-words-brainwaves-spoken.html
Could we soon 'speak' telepathically? Mind-reading computer deciphers words from brainwaves BEFORE they are spoken
Technology identifies distinct brainwaves produced for different words
Scientists said they can decipher words with up to 90 per cent accuracy
It could allow people to communicate in the future without having to talk
Device may even allow people to issue instructions to robots by thought
By Richard Gray for MailOnline
A 'mind-reading' device that can decipher words from brainwaves without them being spoken has been developed by Japanese scientists, raising the prospect of 'telepathic' communication.
Researchers have found the electrical activity in the brain is the same when words are spoken and when they are left unsaid.
By looking for the distinct wave forms produced before speaking, the team was able to identify words such as 'goo', 'scissors' and 'par' when spoken in Japanese.
…
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-18/scientists-ponder-how-to-create-artificial-intelligence-that-won-t-destroy-us
Scientists Ponder How to Create Artificial Intelligence That Won’t Destroy Us Researchers take responsibility for the futuristic monster they may build Jack Clark mappingbabel
December 18, 2015 — 7:00 AM EST
The creators of artificially intelligent machines are often depicted in popular fiction as myopic Dr. Frankensteins who are oblivious to the apocalyptic technologies they unleash upon the world. In real life, they tend to wring their hands over the big questions: good versus evil and the impact the coming wave of robots and machine brains will have on human workers.
Scientists, recognizing their work is breaking out of the research lab and into the real world, grappled during a daylong summit on Dec. 10 in Montreal with such ethical issues as how to prevent computers that are smarter than humans from putting people out of work, adding complications to
legal proceedings, or, even worse, seeking to harm society. Today’s AI can learn how to play video games, help automate e-mail responses, and drive cars under certain conditions. That’s already provoked concerns about the effect it may have workers.
"I think the biggest challenge is the challenge to employment," said Andrew Ng, the chief scientist for Chinese search engine Baidu Inc., which announced last week that one of its cars had driven itself on a 30 kilometer (19 mile) route around Beijing with no human required. The speed with which AI advances may change the workplace means "huge numbers of people in their 20s and 40s and 50s" would need to be retrained in a way that’s never happened before, he said.…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/01/01/i-have-five-digital-personal-assistants-and-still-cant-get-anything-done/
I have five digital ‘personal assistants’ and still can’t get anything doneThere comes a point in every adult’s life when one stops and thinks: I could really use a personal assistant. I know I could. The Washington Post’s budget, however, doesn’t stretch to provide each reporter with a personal aide. But thanks to the magic of technology, I have regular access to five digital assistants: Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Google Now and an email-based scheduling assistant called Amy.
It should be a breeze for anyone trying to get themselves organized as part of a New Year's resolution. It should be fantastic. But, if I’m perfectly frank, I’m really no closer to getting anything done.
The idea of an assistant is appealing but hard to implement, said Dennis Mortensen, chief executive of x.ai, a company that makes an artificial intelligence assistant that you can copy on your emails to set up appointments. The most popular assistants out there, Mortensen said, are really "enablers" rather than programs that help you. They give you information so you can do things, but don't actually do much for you.
…
Newt Gingrich: New Words for a New Worldby NEWT GINGRICH < Caution-http://www.breitbart.com/author/newt-gingrich/ > 7 Dec 2015
Below is a National Defense University speech given by Newt Gingrich on December 1, 2015, reprinted with permission.
We are living in a world rapidly evolving away from the mental constructs and language of the last 375 years. These ideas can be traced to the Treaty of Westphalia ending the 30 Years War in 1648 and the Grotius proposal of a system of International Law in the same era. The ideas were then extended through the development of state warfare culminating in the Napoleonic Wars.
This intellectual framework was applied and reapplied through two World Wars and the Cold War. It is the framework within which academic and bureaucratic careers were made and are still being made.
It is now a framework which distorts reality, hides from uncomfortable facts, and cripples our ability to develop an effective national security and foreign policy.
The gap between the old world in our heads and the new world we now find ourselves in is so large that the very language of the past blocks us from coming to grips with an emerging future that will be radically different.
Consider these challenges to the old intellectual order.…
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/544606/can-this-man-make-ai-more-human/
Can This Man Make AIMore Human?
One cognitive scientist thinks the leading approach to machine learning can be improved by ideas gleaned from studying children.
By Will Knight on December 17, 2015
Like any proud father, Gary Marcus is only too happy to talk about the latest achievements of his two-year-old son. More unusually, he believes that the way his toddler learns and reasons may hold the key to making machines much more intelligent.
Sitting in the boardroom of a bustling Manhattan startup incubator, Marcus, a 45-year-old professor of psychology at New York University and the founder of a new company called Geometric Intelligence, describes an example of his boy’s ingenuity. From the backseat of the car, his son had seen a sign showing the number 11, and because he knew that other double-digit numbers had names like “thirty-three” and “seventy-seven,” he asked his father if the number on the sign was “onety-one.”
“He had inferred that there is a rule about how you put your numbers together,” Marcus explains with a smile. “Now, he had overgeneralized it, and he made a mistake, but it was a very sophisticated mistake.”
Marcus has a very different perspective from many of the computer scientists and mathematicians now at the forefront of artificial intelligence. He has spent decades studying the way the human mind works and how children learn new skills such as language and musicality. This has led him to believe that if researchers want to create truly sophisticated artificial intelligence—something that readily learns about the world—they must take cues from the way toddlers pick up new concepts and generalize. And that’s one of the big inspirations for his new company, which he’s running while on a year’s leave from NYU. With its radical approach to machine learning, Geometric Intelligence aims to create algorithms for use in an AI that can learn in new and better ways.
Is deep learning based on a model that’s too simple? Marcus thinks computer scientists are missing a huge opportunity by ignoring many subtleties of the human mind.
…
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/human-computation-could-save-the-world-without-the-risks-of-ai
'Human Computation' Could Save the World Without the Risks of AI
Written by
Victoria Turk
Editor, UK
December 31, 2015 // 02:00 PM EST Copy This URL
Image: The Bull Pen/Flickr
Forget artificial intelligence: The key to solving the world’s most complex problems could be human-machine collaboration.
That’s the rallying cry of researchers who penned an editorial in the journal Science championing “human computation”—systems that combine the talents of computers and humans. The authors claim these systems could ultimately tackle issues such as climate change and geopolitical conflict, all without the existential risks posed by true AI and the technological singularity.
"Imagine something like the game SimCity , but a thousand times more detailed"
Authors Pietro Michelucci and Janis Dickinson imagine a system that would provide a technical framework for ideas to be shared, analysed, and revised until the best bubble to the top; Michelucci envisages it as a “dynamic Wikipedia.” The idea would be to develop our understanding of real-world issues online, and test potential solutions in this computational space, then applying new knowledge back in the real world so as to actually effect some change.
“Imagine something like the game SimCity, but a thousand times more detailed, and then link in real-time sensors attached to the internet,” said Michelucci. “The more faithful that model of the real world becomes, the
more accurate it would be for testing out solutions and predicting outcomes.”
…
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/humans-2-0-how-the-robot-revolution-is-going-to-change-how-we-see-feel-and-talk/
Humans 2.0: How the robot revolution is going to change how we see, feel, and talk – TechRepublic
…
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/technology/in-a-self-serve-world-start-ups-find-value-in-human-helpers.html?ref=technology&_r=0
In a Self-Serve World, Start-Ups Find Value in Human Helpers
Farhad Manjoo
Credit Stuart Goldenberg
It’s unfashionable to admit this in the age of Expedia, Priceline and other do-it-yourself online tools, but here it is: I miss travel agents.
The Internet took off as a way to book travel because the human intermediaries were always a bit suspect — their expertise questionable, their methods opaque and their allegiances unclear. And at first, the machines seemed to improve everything. For uncomplicated trips, booking online is now much easier than in the past. Because we’ve replaced agents with computers whose sole purpose is to ferret out the best deal, and for lots of other reasons, airfares have plummeted over the last three decades.
Yet as you suffer through another holiday travel season, you might pause to consider how much we’ve really gained — and lost — in ditching human agents for machines. And you might welcome an emerging trend on the Internet: start-
ups that are trying to put human agents, whether in travel, home services or shopping, back at the center of how we make decisions.
…
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/01/01/internet-of-things-security-privacy-concerns/78035646/
Hacking the Internet of Things looms over CES
Gary Shapiro, the CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, previews the 2016 CES on #TalkingTech.
Elizabeth Weise, USATODAY 10:49 a.m. EST January 2, 2016
SAN FRANCISCO – The Internet of Things looms large at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, with a host of products and devices wired to send and receive information.
They include everything from connected LED systems that sent messages to store managers about which displays customers are lingering in front of, to a switch that lets parents use a smartphone to turn on the lights in their teen's room to wake them up — when the parent's already at work.
Along with these networked devices will come a heaping helping of concern. Several CES panels are devoted to potential problems.
Much of the discussion will focus on two main issues: privacy and security.
At its heart, the phrase “Internet of Things” simply means that an object has sensors embedded in it and the ability to send the data it collects outward, usually via Wi-Fi or the Internet.
The devil, as always, is in the details. How does it send and what does it send?
…
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/01/04/460620606/lack-of-deep-sleep-may-set-the-stage-for-alzheimers?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20160104
Lack Of Deep Sleep May Set The Stage For Alzheimer's
Updated January 4, 20168:29 AM ET Published January 4, 20165:05 AM ET
Jon Hamilton
Lack Of Deep Slee http://n.pr/1OHc http://www.npr.o
i
Jeffrey Iliff (right) and Bill Rooney, brain scientists at Oregon Health & Science University, look over an MRI. The school has an especially sensitive MRI unit that should be able to detect precisely when during sleep the brain is being cleansed of toxins. Courtesy of Oregon Health & Science University hide caption
There's growing evidence that a lack of sleep can leave the brain vulnerable to Alzheimer's disease.
"Changes in sleep habits may actually be setting the stage" for dementia, says Jeffrey Iliff, a brain scientist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.
The brain appears to clear out toxins linked to Alzheimer's during sleep, Iliff explains. And, at least among research animals that don't get enough solid shut-eye, those toxins can build up and damage the brain.
Iliff and other scientists at OHSU are about to launch a study of people that should clarify the link between sleep problems and Alzheimer's disease in humans.
It has been clear for decades that there is some sort of link. Sleep disorders are very common among people with Alzheimer's disease.
…
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/538146/magic-leap-needs-to-engineer-a-miracle/
$1.4 billion: The amount Magic Leap, maker of supposed super-cool augmented-reality products that have not yet come to market, will have secured from investors if its latest funding round is successful. Earlier this year MIT Technology Review’s Rachel Metz got a chance to experience said super-cool augmented reality. The problem is that she’s one of only a small number people who have, and most of us are still wondering what exactly all that cash is buying (see “Magic Leap Needs to Engineer a Miracle”).
Magic Leap Needs to Engineer a MiracleTo make its prototype augmented-reality goggles a product, Magic Leap will have to scale up silicon photonics—something heavyweights like Intel have struggled to do.
By Katherine Bourzac on June 11, 2015
Why It MattersTechnology that brings virtual objects into reality could have many applications in gaming, travel, fashion, and other industries.
Startup Magic Leap is developing a wearable display it claims will deliver on the promise of augmented reality: overlaying information or game characters on what we see naturally, without causing eye strain. Instead of transporting you to a virtual world, Magic Leap’s goggles make you see virtual objects in your own world. (See “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2015: Magic Leap.”)
But the company is still keeping its technology largely under wraps, and only a few people, including an MIT Technology Review senior editor, have seen prototypes. Company representatives and people who have experienced the prototypes sound, to the cranky and the uninitiated, like adherents of a cult that practices ritual intake of hallucinogens and whose sacred texts are Star Wars and Snow Crash (whose author, Neal Stephenson, is the company’s chief “futurist”).
Last week on the stage of MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Digital conference in San Francisco, Magic Leap executives indulged in the company’s increasingly common hand-waving, talking about “special” photons and wizard-training school. They also let slip a bit of information suggesting challenges ahead as the company moves from prototypes to products.
…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/11/24/the-blind-woman-who-switched-personalities-and-could-suddenly-see/?1448647622404=1
comments from sean: I thought you might be interested in this article from the Washington Postabout a blind woman who can see in some of her alternate personalities. Shehas Dissociative Personality Disorder (formerly known as MultiplePersonality Disorder). It reminded me of the man you talked about who wasblind but could walk around objects in his way. There are other documentedcases of people with multiple personalities who change things likeallergies, left/right handedness, voice patterns (beyond the ability of mostactors), blood pressure, eye sight (like prescriptions for eye glasses), eyecolor, and some even speak different languages. Pretty crazy stuff.Anyway, here is the article from the Post.
The blind woman who switched personalities and could suddenly seeBy Sarah Kaplan November 24
It had been more than a decade since “B.T.” had last seen anything.
After suffering a traumatic accident as a young woman, doctors diagnosed her with cortical blindness, caused by damage to the visual processing centers in her brain. So she got a seeing eye dog to guide her and grew accustomed to the darkness.
Besides, B.T. had other health problems to cope with — namely, more than 10 wildly different personalities that competed for control of her body. It was while seeking treatment for her dissociative identity disorder that the ability to see suddenly returned. Not to B.T., a 37-year-old German woman. But to a teenage boy she sometimes became.
With therapy, over the course of months, all but two of B.T.’s identities regained their sight. And as B.T. oscillated between identities, her vision flicked on and off like a light switch in her mind. The world would appear, then go dark.
Writing in PsyCh Journal, B.T.’s doctors say that her blindness wasn’t caused by brain damage, her original diagnosis. It was instead something more akin to a brain directive, a psychological problem rather than a physiological one.
…
http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/4/10712634/nvidia-drive-px2-self-driving-car-supercomputer-announces-ces-2016
Nvidia announces ‘supercomputer’ for self-driving cars at CES 2016 Do you like teraflops?
By Dieter Bohn on January 4, 2016 09:19 pm
Nvidia is kicking off CES 2016 with its traditional first keynote. CEO Jen-Hsun Huang wasted no time getting to the "punchline," a new computer for cars he's calling the Drive PX2, the follow-up to last year's Drive CX. Nvidia is famous for throwing out big numbers to tout the power of their processors, and many of them were mentioned here on stage. Its processing power is supposedly equivalent to 150 MacBook Pros, all sitting in a computer that's about the size of a lunchbox. It has 12 CPU cores that support a combined eight teraflops and 24 deep learning tera operations per second. It's also water-cooled, which makes sense given how hard these chips need to work.
Make sense? Probably not, but that's okay. The point is that Nvidia believes that a properly-designed self driving car needs to have a ton of processing power so that it can handle all the sensors, controls, and learning it needs to be fully autonomous (instead of, say, being dependent on connectivity to the cloud). Jen-Hsun Huang believes that "self-driving cars are hard" and Nvidia know how to do it. According to Nvidia, the PX2 can "process the inputs of 12 video cameras, plus lidar, radar and ultrasonic sensors."
Volvo is Nvidia's first partner to use the Drive PX2, it will deploy it in some test self-driving vehicles.
…
Palantir, a Silicon Valley Start-Up, Raises Another $880 Million
By <http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/author/quentin-hardy/>QUENTIN HARDY DECEMBER 23, 2015 3:54 PM December 23, 2015 3:54 pm 3 Comments Photo Alex Karp, chief executive of Palintir, which has about 2,000 employees worldwide.Alex Karp, chief executive of Palintir, which has about 2,000 employees worldwide.Credit Andrew Gombert/European Pressphoto Agency
Palantir Technologies <https://www.palantir.com/> , a provider of powerful data analysis tools for government and business, has raised $880 million in its latest round of financing, according to people familiar with the transaction.
With the new funding, Palantir, one of the largest privately held technology firms in Silicon Valley, is valued at about $20 billion, up from $15 billion. It brings the total amount of money raised by the company, based in Palo Alto, Calif., to about $2 billion, these people said. They requested anonymity since they were not authorized to speak for Palantir on the matter.
Alex Karp, Palantir’s chief executive and co-founder, has in the past expressed reluctance to take the company public. The money will most likely be used for hiring and developing new businesses. Palantir has about 2,000 employees worldwide and has become downtown Palo Alto’s largest private-sector tenant.…
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tech-that-will-change-your-life-in-2016-1451409261
The Tech That Will Change Your Life in 2016Gadgets, breakthroughs and ideas we think will define the state of the art in the year aheadFrom artificially intelligent messaging apps to drones that follow you like paparazzi, 2016 will turn science-fiction tech into science fact. WSJ's Geoffrey A. Fowler and Joanna Stern gaze into our near future.By Geoffrey A. Fowler and Dec. 29, 2015 12:14 p.m. ET
Entering 2016, the future never felt more within reach.
Science fiction will become science fact this year when you take virtual-reality vacations and your dishwasher reorders its own soap. Are you ready for a drone that follows you around like paparazzi?
When we gazed ahead at the devices, breakthroughs and ideas most likely to make waves, two themes emerged. One is liberation: We’re increasingly less shackled, be it to a phone charger or a cable subscription. The other is intelligence: As processing power and bandwidth increase, our machines, services and even messaging apps become more capable.
Here are our best picks for what’s coming, and what you can do to be ready for it.
The long-awaited Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset is slated to arrive this spring. PHOTO: OCULUS VR Virtual Reality Gets Real
It’s marked on 2016 calendars everywhere: Virtual reality finally gets real. It begins with the scheduled spring arrival of the long-anticipated Oculus Rift headset, followed by HTC’s Vive and Sony SNE 0.65 % ’s PlayStation VR. Unlike less expensive smartphone-based headsets like Samsung SSNHZ 0.00 % ’s Oculus-powered Gear VR, advanced sensors and imaging in dedicated headsets promise immersive experiences that will make you feel like you’re in a teleporter. (“Augmented reality,” a combined view of virtual and real worlds, being developed by Magic Leap, Microsoft MSFT 1.07 % ’s HoloLens team and others, is still a ways from home.) Games and other flights of fantasy will be key to the appeal. But thanks to
investments in 360-degree video and apps, you’ll also get closer to not-so-far-out realities: front row at a sold-out concert…or a seat at that meeting you’d otherwise miss.
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https://ca.news.yahoo.com/schwab-robo-adviser-grows-5-3-billion-debut-214329127--sector.html
Schwab 'robo adviser' grows to $5.3 billion in its debut year
By Trevor Hunnicutt
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A Charles Schwab sign is pictured in the Manhattan borough of New York, October 10, 2015. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz - RTS3W8G
By Trevor Hunnicutt
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Charles Schwab Corp's automated investment service grew about 29 percent to $5.3 billion at the end of the fourth-quarter, rising despite volatile U.S. financial markets, a spokeswoman said Wednesday .
Schwab Intelligent Portfolios, a "robo adviser" that allocates cash among exchange-traded funds according to formulas based on client questionnaires, has been boosted by sign-ups from investors since its launch last March.
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comma.ai - Cheap self driving car. A lot of information is not shared since the algorithm is just described as a “neural network”
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driving-car/
“Hotz plans to best the Mobileye technology with off-the-shelf electronics. He’s building a kit consisting of six cameras—similar to the $13 ones found in smartphones—that would be placed around the car. Two would go inside near the rearview mirror, one in the back, two on the sides to cover blind spots, and a fisheye camera up top. He then trains the control software for the cameras using what’s known as a neural net—a type of self-teaching artificial-intelligence mechanism that grabs data from drivers and learns from their choices. The goal is to sell the camera and software package for $1,000 a pop either to automakers or, if need be, directly to consumers who would buy customized vehicles at a showroom run by Hotz. “I have 10 friends who already want to buy one,” he says.”
It appears he’s using deep learning
The second advance is deep learning, an AI technology that has taken off over the past few years. It allows researchers to assign a task to computers and then sit back as the machines in essence teach themselves how to accomplish and finally master the job. In the past, for example, it was thought that the only way for a computer to identify a chair in a photo would be to create a really precise definition of a chair—you would tell the computer to look for something with four legs, a flat seat, and so on. In recent years, though, computers have become much more powerful, while memory has become cheap and plentiful. This has paved the way for more of a brute-force technique, in which researchers can bombard computers with a flood of information and let the systems make sense of the data. “You show a computer 1 million images with chairs and 1 million without them,” Hotz says. “Eventually, the computer is able to describe a chair in a way so much better than a human ever could.”
The major advance he will discuss is the edge that deep-learning techniques provide in autonomous technology. He says the usual practice has been to manually code rules that handle specific situations. There’s code that helps cars follow other vehicles on the highway, and more code to deal with a deer that leaps into the road. Hotz’s car has no such built-in rules. It learns what drivers typically do in various situations and then tries to mimic and perfect that behavior. If his Acura cruises by a bicyclist, for example, it gives the biker some extra room, because it’s seen Hotz do that in the past. His system has a
more general-purpose kind of intelligence than a long series of if/then rules. As Hotz puts it in developer parlance, “ ‘If’ statements kill.” They’re unreliable and imprecise in a real world full of vagaries and nuance. It’s better to teach the computer to be like a human, who constantly processes all kinds of visual clues and uses experience, to deal with the unexpected rather than teach it a hard-and-fast policy.
2. Metacognition work at Wright State –
http://www.wright.edu/~michael.cox/#midca1
http://www.wright.edu/~michael.cox/midca.png
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When a Unicorn Start-Up Stumbles, Its Employees Get HurtBy KATIE BENNERDEC. 23, 2015Photo
CreditPeter and Maria Hoey
On Sept. 4, employees of Good Technology, a mobile security start-up in Sunnyvale, Calif., awoke to discover that their company was being sold to BlackBerry, the mobile device and software maker.
Some workers immediately began trying to figure out what it meant for Good to abandon its long-anticipated plan to go public — a move that would have potentially turned their shares in the start-up into gold. They didn’t get firm answers that day, but the prospects did not look great.
Around 9 a.m., hundreds of employees filed into a conference room or started up videoconference software to watch Good’s chief executive, Christy Wyatt, discuss the sale. Ms. Wyatt introduced BlackBerry’s chief, John S. Chen, who winkingly apologized for how his deal makers had driven Good’s final sale price down to $425 million, less than half of the company’s $1.1 billion private valuation.
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The Secret History of SEAL Team 6: Quiet Killings and Blurred LinesThe unit best known for killing Osama bin Laden has been converted into a global manhunting machine with limited outside oversight.
By MARK MAZZETTI, NICHOLAS KULISH, CHRISTOPHER DREW, SERGE F. KOVALESKI, SEAN D. NAYLOR AND JOHN ISMAYJUNE 6, 2015Members of SEAL Team 6 and other units parachute from a plane near the frigate U.S.S. Halyburton, in the Indian Ocean, to start the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips.
They have plotted deadly missions from secret bases in the badlands of Somalia. In Afghanistan, they have engaged in combat so intimate that they have emerged soaked in blood that was not their own. On clandestine raids in the dead of the night, their weapons of choice have ranged from customized carbines to primeval tomahawks.
Around the world, they have run spying stations disguised as commercial boats, posed as civilian employees of front companies and operated undercover at embassies as male-female pairs, tracking those the United States wants to kill or capture.
Those operations are part of the hidden history of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, one of the nation’s most mythologized, most secretive and least scrutinized military organizations. Once a small group reserved for specialized but rare missions, the unit best known for killing Osama bin Laden has been transformed by more than a decade of combat into a global manhunting machine.
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http://www.technologyreview.com/news/545186/toyota-wants-its-cars-to-expect-the-unexpected/
Toyota Wants Its Cars to Expect the UnexpectedJapanese carmaker Toyota revals details of an ambitious $1 billion effort to advance AI and robotics.
By Will Knight on January 4, 2016
Why It Matters
Fundamental advances are needed in order for computers and robots to be much smarter and more useful.
Gill Pratt, CEO of the Toyota Research Institute, speaks at CES in Las Vegas.
Toyota revealed more details of an ambitious plan to invest in artificial intelligence and robots today during a keynote speech by Gill Pratt, CEO of the new $1 billion Toyota Research Institute (TRI) at CES in Las Vegas.
Toyota will open two TRI facilities, near Stanford and MIT, and Pratt announced several high-profile new appointments and advisors. TRI will have a technical team consisting of several project managers formerly of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and a number of professors working part-time, including James Kuffner, who previously led robotics research at Google. The advisory board will include luminaries such as the robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks and the NYU and Facebook AI researcher Yann LeCun.
Pratt also described two projects—one at Stanford, the other at MIT—that would feed into Toyota’s efforts to develop self-driving vehicles. These efforts could also produce fundamental and broad-reaching advances in artificial intelligence.
The Stanford project, entitled “Uncertainty on Uncertainty,” will focus on teaching cars how to deal with novel situations without specific programming. ** the unexpected query ** This could help in unpredictable situations that might result in traffic accidents, and it could ultimately help make automated cars a lot more practical (see “Driverless Cars Are Further Away Than You Think”). “It’s one thing to teach cars to respond to events you expect to occur,” Pratt said. “But the really challenging thing is, how do we teach the car to respond safely to events we do not expect, that we don’t anticipate.”
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