lunes, 30 de mayo de 2016

A Dutch company is training eagles to take down drones

Source: Guard From Above
The use of drones is on the rise these days for lots of fun reasons, but when it comes to unmanned aerial vehicles, there are also security issues to consider: what happens if an one enters a flight path, or takes photos of things it's not supposed to? What if it carries a bomb over a crowded event? How do you take it down safely?

Well, the solution to this high-tech problem could be... eagles, according to a Dutch company that's training these keen-eyed birds of prey to take down drones on command. And we kind of love the idea.

It's definitely not the first time that eagles have gone after unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) - attacks have been happening in the wild ever since amateur drone use became popular.

But now Netherlands-based company, Guard from Above, is taking things one step further, by training the birds with food rewards to attack small drones, just like guard dogs.

They call it a "low-tech solution for a high-tech problem", and you can see it in action below:


Right now, there are regulations in each country that state how drones can and can't be used. But as good as these rules are, there aren't a whole lot of ways of enforcing them. 

Researchers and security experts have looked into options like jamming drone signals, or shooting the UAVs out of the sky, but in both of those scenarios, the drones usually end up crashing, which can pose a threat to people on the ground.

Eagles, on the other hand, habitually snatch their prey and drag it off somewhere to eat it, which is exactly what they do with drones, meaning there's no risk of a crash landing.

That's enough for police to get interested in what at first sounds like a pretty crazy idea.

As Stephen Castle reports for The New York Times, the Dutch national police force are planning on deploying the eagles "soon", dependent on further field tests. The Metropolitan Police Service in London are also looking into using birds in their drone defence strategy.

And while that sounds a little extreme - after all, drones can do some great things in the world - it's definitely something police these days need to think about. Drones have already been found too close to nuclear power stations in France, and a nuclear submarine facility in the UK.

That doesn't mean they were going to do anything wrong, but last year someone was prosecuted for flying a drone over busy football stadiums and tourist attractions - something that's strictly prohibited by international regulations, due to the risk that a drone could fall, or potentially even be carrying a weapon.

In December, a drone was found at Oakwood prison smuggling in drugs, a mobile phone, a charger, and USB cards.

"We have seen a number of incidents around airfields, and, in the end, we want to be prepared should anyone want to use a drone for an attack of some sort," detective chief superintendent of the Dutch police, Mark Wiebes, told Castle.

The problem, of course, is whether or not the eagles can be hurt by this kind of work. That's unfortunately a possibility, but as risky as the whole thing sounds for the eagles, one of the security consultants who started Guard From Above, Sjoerd Hoogendoorn, told The New York Times that safety was the top priority for the animals, and no birds have been seriously harmed so far.

They're now looking into ways they could make the birds even more secure, with the potential for protective gear to be worn on their talons, and maybe even body armour.

With new research showing the potential damage drones can have on wildlife, it's nice to see nature fight back against technology for once. Karma's a b*tch.

ORIGINAL: Science Alert
FIONA MACDONALD
30 MAY 2016

New Horizons' Best Close-Up of Pluto's Surface

This is the most detailed view of Pluto’s terrain you’ll see for a very long time. This mosaic strip – extending across the hemisphere that faced the New Horizons spacecraft as it flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015 – now includes all of the highest-resolution images taken by the NASA probe. (Be sure to zoom in for maximum detail.) With a resolution of about 260 feet (80 meters) per pixel, the mosaic affords New Horizons scientists and the public the best opportunity to examine the fine details of the various types of terrain on Pluto, and determine the processes that formed and shaped them.

This new image product is just magnetic,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado. “It makes me want to go back on another mission to Pluto and get high-resolution images like these across the entire surface.”

The view extends from the “limb” of Pluto at the top of the strip, almost to the “terminator” (or day/night line) in the southeast of the encounter hemisphere, seen below. The width of the strip ranges from more than 55 miles (90 kilometers) at its northern end to about 45 miles (75 kilometers) at its southern point. The perspective changes greatly along the strip: at its northern end, the view looks out horizontally across the surface, while at its southern end, the view looks straight down onto the surface.

This mosaic strip – extending across the hemisphere that faced the New Horizons spacecraft as it flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015now includes all of the highest-resolution images taken by the NASA probe. 
Note: video is silent/no audio.
Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI


This movie moves down the mosaic from top to bottom, offering new views of many of Pluto’s distinct landscapes along the way. Starting with

  • hummocky, cratered uplands at top, the view crosses over 
  • parallel ridges of “washboard” terrain, 
  • chaotic and angular mountain ranges, 
  • cellular plains, 
  • coarsely “pitted” areas of sublimating nitrogen ice, 
  • zones of thin nitrogen ice draped over the topography below, and 
  • dark mountainous highlands scarred by deep pits.
The pictures in the mosaic were obtained by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) approximately 9,850 miles (15,850 kilometers) from Pluto, about 23 minutes before New Horizons’ closest approach.

Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI


ORIGINAL: NASA
By Tricia Talbert. Editor
May 27, 2016

domingo, 29 de mayo de 2016

Edificio de la Empresa de Desarrollo Urbano de Medellín (EDU) renueva el Parque San Antonio

Esta semana realizamos un recorrido al interior del edificio, el cual deberá estar listo en diciembre de este año. 
FOTOS JAIME PÉREZ
Un inglés de madre paisa renueva arquitectura localA la mezcla de diseño, arquitectura e ingeniería, la Empresa de Desarrollo Urbano (EDU) le sumó otro componente: ecosostenible. La nueva sede de la entidad será un ícono de la transformación del Centro de Medellín, en especial, del parque San Antonio.

Cortesía. El Mundo.com
EDU.gov.co
La principal y más curiosa característica de este edificio es que va a respirar, a través de una chimenea solar. Esto le permitirá tener una ventilación natural constante, que reemplaza el uso de un aire acondicionado; con esto y un sistema de iluminación especial gracias a su diseño, llevará el ahorro de energía eléctrica a otro nivel.

Así mismo, el edificio cuenta con otras particularidades únicas (ver claves) que lo convierten en un ejemplo a seguir para el desarrollo urbano de la ciudad.

La pasada Administración Municipal invirtió 8.600 millones de pesos para la construcción de este edificio y la actual inyectará otros 5.600 millones para poder terminarlo. (Total 14,200MCo$ / 4.7M$USD)
SALMAAN CRAIG
Esta estructura también es el fruto del trabajo articulado entre Conconcreto y el Taller de Diseño de la EDU, bajo el direccionamiento de Salmaan Craig, uno de los profesores de la Universidad de Harvard más destacados a nivel mundial en el diseño y construcción de estos edificios que rompen el molde de lo tradicional.

EL COLOMBIANO aprovechó la última visita de Craig, el ideólogo de este tipo de edificio ecosostenible, para conversar con él, saber más de este proyecto y conocer su concepto de la arquitectura de Medellín.

EDU. Flicker
 ¿Cuál es el principio que usted aplica para lograr que un edificio aproveche su entorno natural?
Es muy simple. Para mí, Medellín tiene un clima perfecto, en lo que a temperatura se refiere. Es muy estable ya que no tiene variaciones de estaciones, el único problema es el poco viento que hay. En este sentido lo que se busca resolver es cómo tener un ambiente fresco, con una temperatura agradable y estable dentro del edificio, manteniendo un flujo constante de aire. Hay varios principios para el diseño bioclimático, no se trata simplemente de abrir las ventanas y esperar a que el viento sople; además esto tampoco sería suficiente ya que al interior del edificio estará muy caliente por el calor que generan las personas, los computadores y demás. Entonces, con el diseño, lo que nosotros hacemos es tomar ese calor que se genera dentro de la estructura y aprovecharlo para generar un flujo cíclico entre el aire caliente que sale por una especie de ‘chimenea’ central que tiene el edificio y el aire fresco que entra a través de las paredes, que también son no convencionales. La razón por la que este sistema es innovador, es porque el principal problema de las construcciones tradicionales es que no dejan tener disponible el viento. Aquí la estrategia es perfecta, ya que mientras más gente tenga el edificio, más calor se produce y más aire entra, en una perfecta sincronización”.


¿Existe la manera de transformar, para este propósito, los edificios convencionales?
Lo que estamos haciendo acá es probar sistemas que usan este principio básico, el cual no había sido utilizado antes a gran a escala, en grandes edificios. Este lo vemos como un experimento, será el laboratorio para la ciudad de Medellín. Vamos a monitorear el rendimiento del edificio de la EDU y vamos a compartir los resultados, en tiempo real, en Internet, para que todos puedan conocer y entender lo que sucede, en qué momento funciona como se espera y cuándo no. Con esta información, los expertos locales podrán adaptarlos a sus propios y futuros diseños. Sí hay casos en los que edificios existentes podrían ser adecuados a este principio. Lo importante que debemos entender es que esta no es una tecnología para incorporar después de, sino que debe ir integrada en el diseño desde el principio”.

¿Estos edificios se deben construir con materiales especiales?
No, los materiales son los mismos. El resto está en el diseño y la arquitectura, lograr orquestar todo de la manera adecuada para tener un resultado extraordinario. Este principio se puede aplicar para toda clase de edificios y presupuestos que se vayan a construir en Medellín de ahora en adelante”.

¿Se ha podido reunir o conversar con los estudiantes de ingeniería, diseño y arquitectura de Medellín?
¡Claro! Esta semana tuvimos un gran charla en San Antonio. Tuve la oportunidad de contarles las principales ideas de este proyecto. Les hablé acerca del monitoreo que tendrá el edificio en Internet y de la publicación, en una plataforma, del análisis y la hipótesis del rendimiento, para que todos, expertos y estudiantes, puedan entrar, hacer preguntas y sugerencias y así iniciar un diálogo en línea que, no necesariamente tendrá que ser del edificio de la EDU, también podemos hablar de cualquier proyecto que tengan en Medellín o en Colombia. Esperamos que puedan entender bien estos principios para que los apliquen en sus proyectos”.

¿Qué opina de la nueva arquitectura de Medellín, de los nuevos edificios icónicos que se han construido en la ciudad como el de Ruta N, EPM, los parques biblioteca, entre otros?
Conozco la excelente arquitectura de Medellín gracias a mi conexión con Harvard. Hay muchos arquitectos de esta ciudad que han estado vinculados con la universidad. Ustedes tienen grandes ejemplos y todos esos que tú mencionas tienen una arquitectura fantástica. Sin embargo, no me fijo en los edificios especiales, sino que me enfoco en lo genérico, en todos los edificios convencionales de Medellín que no tienen ningún tipo de ventaja bioclimática”.

¿El edificio de la EDU es un prototipo o ya hay otros como este en el mundo?
He trabajado en proyectos similares pero no como este. El edificio de la EDU es algo nuevo, es un gran experimento y vamos a compartir los resultados con todo el mundo

Finalmente, en lo personal, ¿qué es lo que más le gusta de Medellín, de cada visita que nos hace?
Le voy a contar un pequeño secreto: mi madre es colombiana, de Medellín. El apellido de mi familia materna es Galeano. Cuando ella era muy pequeña se mudó a Londres (Inglaterra) y cuando tenía 20 años conoció a mi padre, él sí es inglés. Yo nací y me crié en Londres y ahora vivo muy feliz en Estados Unidos. Entonces, para mí, hay razones académicas, intelectuales y personales que me atan a este proyecto y a Medellín. Es una gran oportunidad para mí, que me permite aprender más de esta maravillosa cultura, que también es mía pero que no había tenido la oportunidad de conocer a fondo, porque cuando era pequeño no teníamos en casa suficiente dinero para venir acá y visitar esta maravillosa ciudad”.

CONTEXTO DE LA NOTICIA
SERÁ OTRO EDIFICIO REFERENTE DE CIUDAD
  1. Reciclaje de aguas lluvias: se destinará para regar las zonas verdes del edificio y su entorno.
  2. Chimenea solar: el sistema permitirá evacuar el aire caliente por succión, ayudado por entradas de aire frío.
  3. Energías alternativas: páneles solares traslúcidos con membrana recolectora que alimentarán las oficinas de día.
  4. Iluminación y ventilación natural: estudio bioclimático para aprovechar los recursos naturales.
  5. Urbanismo y paisaje: su arquitectura ralatará la transformación urbana y visual del centro de Medellín.
  6. Información visual: tendrá un sistema de alta definición que busca mejorar la participación ciudadana.
Profesor de Harvard.
Salmaa Craig. EDU. Flicker
Salmaan es Licenciado (con honores) de Diseño de Productos de la Escuela de Ingeniería y Diseño de Brune University de Londres, Inglaterra. EngD en Tecnología Ambiental de la Escuela de Ingeniería y Diseño también de Brunel University. Es profesor de la universidad de Harvard y miembro del Centro de Edificios y Ciudades Verdes de la misma universidad. Es diseñador, investigador y experto mundial en bioclimática especialmente en edificios de alto perfil como: Buro Happold, Louvre Abu Dhabi, Apple Campus y Bloomberg Place. Enseña a los arquitectos, con la composición de materiales simples, cómo usar mejor las corrientes térmicas que fluyen a través de los edificios.
ORIGINAL: El Colombiano
POR CAMILO TRUJILLO VILLA
2016/05/29

sábado, 28 de mayo de 2016

UCI chemists create battery technology with off-the-charts charging capacity

UCI doctoral candidate Mya Le Thai has developed a nanowire-based technology that allows lithium-ion batteries to be recharged hundreds of thousands of times. Steve Zylius / UCI 
All powered up

Irvine, Calif., April 20, 2016 — University of California, Irvine researchers have invented nanowire-based battery material that can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times, moving us closer to a battery that would never require replacement. The breakthrough work could lead to commercial batteries with greatly lengthened lifespans for computers, smartphones, appliances, cars and spacecraft.

Scientists have long sought to use nanowires in batteries. Thousands of times thinner than a human hair, they’re highly conductive and feature a large surface area for the storage and transfer of electrons. However, these filaments are extremely fragile and don’t hold up well to repeated discharging and recharging, or cycling. In a typical lithium-ion battery, they expand and grow brittle, which leads to cracking.

UCI researchers have solved this problem by coating a gold nanowire in a manganese dioxide shell and encasing the assembly in an electrolyte made of a Plexiglas-like gel. The combination is reliable and resistant to failure.

The study leader, UCI doctoral candidate Mya Le Thai, cycled the testing electrode up to 200,000 times over three months without detecting any loss of capacity or power and without fracturing any nanowires. The findings were published today in the American Chemical Society’s Energy Letters.

Hard work combined with serendipity paid off in this case, according to senior author Reginald Penner.

Mya was playing around, and she coated this whole thing with a very thin gel layer and started to cycle it,” said Penner, chair of UCI’s chemistry department. “She discovered that just by using this gel, she could cycle it hundreds of thousands of times without losing any capacity.

That was crazy,” he added, “because these things typically die in dramatic fashion after 5,000 or 6,000 or 7,000 cycles at most.”


The researchers think the goo plasticizes the metal oxide in the battery and gives it flexibility, preventing cracking.

The coated electrode holds its shape much better, making it a more reliable option,” Thai said. “This research proves that a nanowire-based battery electrode can have a long lifetime and that we can make these kinds of batteries a reality.

The study was conducted in coordination with the Nanostructures for Electrical Energy Storage Energy Frontier Research Center at the University of Maryland, with funding from the Basic Energy Sciences division of the U.S. Department of Energy.

About the University of California, Irvine: Currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, UCI is the youngest member of the prestigious Association of American Universities. The campus has produced three Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UCI has more than 30,000 students and offers 192 degree programs. It’s located in one of the world’s safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County’s second-largest employer, contributing $4.8 billion annually to the local economy. For more on UCI, visit www.uci.edu.

Media access: Radio programs/stations may, for a fee, use an on-campus ISDN line to interview UC Irvine faculty and experts, subject to availability and university approval. For more UC Irvine news, visit news.uci.edu. Additional resources for journalists may be found at communications.uci.edu/for-journalists.

ORIGINAL: UCI.edu
ON APRIL 20, 2016

jueves, 26 de mayo de 2016

Inside OpenAI, Elon Musk's Wild Plan to Set Artificial Intelligence Free

 MICHAL CZERWONKA/REDUX
THE FRIDAY AFTERNOON news dump, a grand tradition observed by politicians and capitalists alike, is usually supposed to hide bad news. So it was a little weird that Elon Musk, founder of electric car maker Tesla, and Sam Altman, president of famed tech incubator Y Combinator, unveiled their new artificial intelligence company at the tail end of a weeklong AI conference in Montreal this past December.

But there was a reason they revealed OpenAI at that late hour. It wasn’t that no one was looking. It was that everyone was looking. When some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies caught wind of the project, they began offering tremendous amounts of money to OpenAI’s freshly assembled cadre of artificial intelligence researchers, intent on keeping these big thinkers for themselves. The last-minute offers—some made at the conference itself—were large enough to force Musk and Altman to delay the announcement of the new startup. “The amount of money was borderline crazy,” says Wojciech Zaremba, a researcher who was joining OpenAI after internships at both Google and Facebook and was among those who received big offers at the eleventh hour.
How many dollars is “borderline crazy”? 
Two years ago, as the market for the latest machine learning technology really started to heat up, Microsoft Research vice president Peter Lee said that the cost of a top AI researcher had eclipsed the cost of a top quarterback prospect in the National Football League—and he meant under regular circumstances, not when two of the most famous entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley were trying to poach your top talent. Zaremba says that as OpenAI was coming together, he was offered two or three times his market value.

OpenAI didn’t match those offers. But it offered something else: the chance to explore research aimed solely at the future instead of products and quarterly earnings, and to eventually share most—if not all—of this research with anyone who wants it. That’s right: Musk, Altman, and company aim to give away what may become the 21st century’s most transformative technology—and give it away for free.

Ilya Sutskever.
CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/WIRED
Zaremba says those borderline crazy offers actually turned him off—despite his enormous respect for companies like Google and Facebook. He felt like the money was at least as much of an effort to prevent the creation of OpenAI as a play to win his services, and it pushed him even further towards the startup’s magnanimous mission. “I realized,” Zaremba says, “that OpenAI was the best place to be.

That’s the irony at the heart of this story: even as the world’s biggest tech companies try to hold onto their researchers with the same fierceness that NFL teams try to hold onto their star quarterbacks, the researchers themselves just want to share. In the rarefied world of AI research, the brightest minds aren’t driven by—or at least not only by—the next product cycle or profit margin. They want to make AI better, and making AI better doesn’t happen when you keep your latest findings to yourself.

OpenAI is a billion-dollar effort to push AI as far as it will go.

This morning, OpenAI will release its first batch of AI software, a toolkit for building artificially intelligent systems by way of a technology called reinforcement learning—one of the key technologies that, among other things, drove the creation of AlphaGo, the Google AI that shocked the world by mastering the ancient game of Go. With this toolkit, you can build systems that simulate a new breed of robot, play Atari games, and, yes, master the game of Go.

But game-playing is just the beginning. OpenAI is a billion-dollar effort to push AI as far as it will go. In both how the company came together and what it plans to do, you can see the next great wave of innovation forming. We’re a long way from knowing whether OpenAI itself becomes the main agent for that change. But the forces that drove the creation of this rather unusual startup show that the new breed of AI will not only remake technology, but remake the way we build technology.

AI Everywhere
Silicon Valley is not exactly averse to hyperbole. It’s always wise to meet bold-sounding claims with skepticism. But in the field of AI, the change is real. Inside places like Google and Facebook, a technology called deep learning is already helping Internet services identify faces in photos, recognize commands spoken into smartphones, and respond to Internet search queries. And this same technology can drive so many other tasks of the future. It can help machines understand natural language—the natural way that we humans talk and write. It can create a new breed of robot, giving automatons the power to not only perform tasks but learn them on the fly. And some believe it can eventually give machines something close to common sense—the ability to truly think like a human.

But along with such promise comes deep anxiety. Musk and Altman worry that if people can build AI that can do great things, then they can build AI that can do awful things, too. They’re not alone in their fear of robot overlords, but perhaps counterintuitively, Musk and Altman also think that the best way to battle malicious AI is not to restrict access to artificial intelligence but expand it. That’s part of what has attracted a team of young, hyper-intelligent idealists to their new project.

OpenAI began one evening last summer in a private room at Silicon Valley’s Rosewood Hotel—an upscale, urban, ranch-style hotel that sits, literally, at the center of the venture capital world along Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California. Elon Musk was having dinner with Ilya Sutskever, who was then working on the Google Brain, the company’s sweeping effort to build deep neural networks—artificially intelligent systems that can learn to perform tasks by analyzing massive amounts of digital data, including everything from recognizing photos to writing email messages to, well, carrying on a conversation. Sutskever was one of the top thinkers on the project. But even bigger ideas were in play.

Sam Altman, whose Y Combinator helped bootstrap companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, and Coinbase, had brokered the meeting, bringing together several AI researchers and a young but experienced company builder named Greg Brockman, previously the chief technology officer at high-profile Silicon Valley digital payments startup called Stripe, another Y Combinator company. It was an eclectic group. But they all shared a goal: to create a new kind of AI lab, one that would operate outside the control not only of Google, but of anyone else. “The best thing that I could imagine doing,” Brockman says, “was moving humanity closer to building real AI in a safe way.

Musk is one of the loudest voices warning that we humans could one day lose control of systems powerful enough to learn on their own.

Musk was there because he’s an old friend of Altman’s—and because AI is crucial to the future of his various businesses and, well, the future as a whole. Tesla needs AI for its inevitable self-driving cars. SpaceX, Musk’s other company, will need it to put people in space and keep them alive once they’re there. But Musk is also one of the loudest voices warning that we humans could one day lose control of systems powerful enough to learn on their own.

The trouble was: so many of the people most qualified to solve all those problems were already working for Google (and Facebook and Microsoft and Baidu and Twitter). And no one at the dinner was quite sure that these thinkers could be lured to a new startup, even if Musk and Altman were behind it. But one key player was at least open to the idea of jumping ship. “I felt there were risks involved,” Sutskever says. “But I also felt it would be a very interesting thing to try.

Breaking the Cycle
Emboldened by the conversation with Musk, Altman, and others at the Rosewood, Brockman soon resolved to build the lab they all envisioned. Taking on the project full-time, he approached Yoshua Bengio, a computer scientist at the University of Montreal and one of founding fathers of the deep learning movement. The field’s other two pioneers—Geoff Hinton and Yann LeCun—are now at Google and Facebook, respectively, but Bengio is committed to life in the world of academia, largely outside the aims of industry. He drew up a list of the best researchers in the field, and over the next several weeks, Brockman reached out to as many on the list as he could, along with several others.

Greg Brockman,
one of OpenAI’s founding fathers and
its chief technology officer.
CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/WIRED
Many of these researchers liked the idea, but they were also wary of making the leap. In an effort to break the cycle, Brockman picked the ten researchers he wanted the most and invited them to spend a Saturday getting wined, dined, and cajoled at a winery in Napa Valley. For Brockman, even the drive into Napa served as a catalyst for the project. “An underrated way to bring people together are these times where there is no way to speed up getting to where you’re going,” he says. “You have to get there, and you have to talk.” And once they reached the wine country, that vibe remained. “It was one of those days where you could tell the chemistry was there,” Brockman says. Or as Sutskever puts it: “the wine was secondary to the talk.”

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By the end of the day, Brockman asked all ten researchers to join the lab, and he gave them three weeks to think about it. By the deadline, nine of them were in. And they stayed in, despite those big offers from the giants of Silicon Valley. “They did make it very compelling for me to stay, so it wasn’t an easy decision,” Sutskever says of Google, his former employer. “But in the end, I decided to go with OpenAI, partly of because of the very strong group of people and, to a very large extent, because of its mission.”

The deep learning movement began with academics. It’s only recently that companies like Google and Facebook and Microsoft have pushed into the field, as advances in raw computing power have made deep neural networks a reality, not just a theoretical possibility. People like Hinton and LeCun left academia for Google and Facebook because of the enormous resources inside these companies. But they remain intent on collaborating with other thinkers. Indeed, as LeCun explains, deep learning research requires this free flow of ideas. “When you do research in secret,” he says, “you fall behind.”

As a result, big companies now share a lot of their AI research. That’s a real change, especially for Google, which has long kept the tech at the heart of its online empiresecret. Recently, Google open sourced the software engine that drives its neural networks. But it still retains the inside track in the race to the future. Brockman, Altman, and Musk aim to push the notion of openness further still, saying they don’t want one or two large corporations controlling the future of artificial intelligence.
The Limits of Openness

All of which sounds great. But for all of OpenAI’s idealism, the researchers may find themselves facing some of the same compromises they had to make at their old jobs. Openness has its limits. And the long-term vision for AI isn’t the only interest in play. OpenAI is not a charity. Musk’s companies that could benefit greatly the startup’s work, and so could many of the companies backed by Altman’s Y Combinator. “There are certainly some competing objectives,” LeCun says. “It’s a non-profit, but then there is a very close link with Y Combinator. And people are paid as if they are working in the industry.”

According to Brockman, the lab doesn’t pay the same astronomical salaries that AI researchers are now getting at places like Google and Facebook. But he says the lab does want to “pay them well,” and it’s offering to compensate researchers with stock options, first in Y Combinator and perhaps later in SpaceX (which, unlike Tesla, is still a private company).

Brockman insists that OpenAI won't give special treatment to its sister companies.
Nonetheless, Brockman insists that OpenAI won’t give special treatment to its sister companies. OpenAI is a research outfit, he says, not a consulting firm. But when pressed, he acknowledges that OpenAI’s idealistic vision has its limits. The company may not open source everything it produces, though it will aim to share most of its research eventually, either through research papers or Internet services. “Doing all your research in the open is not necessarily the best way to go. You want to nurture an idea, see where it goes, and then publish it,” Brockman says. “We will produce lot of open source code. But we will also have a lot of stuff that we are not quite ready to release.

Both Sutskever and Brockman also add that OpenAI could go so far as to patent some of its work. “We won’t patent anything in the near term,” Brockman says. “But we’re open to changing tactics in the long term, if we find it’s the best thing for the world.” For instance, he says, OpenAI could engage in pre-emptive patenting, a tactic that seeks to prevent others from securing patents.

But to some, patents suggest a profit motive—or at least a weaker commitment to open source than OpenAI’s founders have espoused. “That’s what the patent system is about,” says Oren Etzioni, head of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “This makes me wonder where they’re really going.

The Super-Intelligence Problem
When Musk and Altman unveiled OpenAI, they also painted the project as a way to neutralize the threat of a malicious artificial super-intelligence. Of course, that super-intelligence could arise out of the tech OpenAI creates, but they insist that any threat would be mitigated because the technology would be usable by everyone. “We think its far more likely that many, many AIs will work to stop the occasional bad actors,” Altman says.

But not everyone in the field buys this. Nick Bostrom, the Oxford philosopher who, like Musk, has warned against the dangers of AI, points out that if you share research without restriction, bad actors could grab it before anyone has ensured that it’s safe. “If you have a button that could do bad things to the world,” Bostrom says, “you don’t want to give it to everyone.” If, on the other hand, OpenAI decides to hold back research to keep it from the bad guys, Bostrom wonders how it’s different from a Google or a Facebook.

If you share research without restriction, bad actors could grab it before anyone has ensured that it's safe.

He does say that the not-for-profit status of OpenAI could change things—though not necessarily. The real power of the project, he says, is that it can indeed provide a check for the likes of Google and Facebook. “It can reduce the probability that super-intelligence would be monopolized,” he says. “It can remove one possible reason why some entity or group would have radically better AI than everyone else.

But as the philosopher explains in a new paper, the primary effect of an outfit like OpenAI—an outfit intent on freely sharing its work—is that it accelerates the progress of artificial intelligence, at least in the short term. And it may speed progress in the long term as well, provided that it, for altruistic reasons, “opts for a higher level of openness than would be commercially optimal.

It might still be plausible that a philanthropically motivated R&D funder would speed progress more by pursuing open science,” he says.

Like Xerox PARC
In early January, Brockman’s nine AI researchers met up at his apartment in San Francisco’s Mission District. The project was so new that they didn’t even have white boards. (Can you imagine?) They bought a few that day and got down to work.

Brockman says OpenAI will begin by exploring reinforcement learning, a way for machines to learn tasks by repeating them over and over again and tracking which methods produce the best results. But the other primary goal is what’s called unsupervised learning—creating machines that can truly learn on their own, without a human hand to guide them. Today, deep learning is driven by carefully labeled data. If you want to teach a neural network to recognize cat photos, you must feed it a certain number of examples—and these examples must be labeled as cat photos. The learning is supervised by human labelers. But like many others researchers, OpenAI aims to create neural nets that can learn without carefully labeled data.

If you have really good unsupervised learning, machines would be able to learn from all this knowledge on the Internet—just like humans learn by looking around—or reading books,” Brockman says.

He envisions OpenAI as the modern incarnation of Xerox PARC, the tech research lab that thrived in the 1970s. Just as PARC’s largely open and unfettered research gave rise to everything from the graphical user interface to the laser printer to object-oriented programing, Brockman and crew seek to delve even deeper into what we once considered science fiction. PARC was owned by, yes, Xerox, but it fed so many other companies, most notably Apple, because people like Steve Jobs were privy to its research. At OpenAI, Brockman wants to make everyone privy to its research.

This month, hoping to push this dynamic as far as it will go, Brockman and company snagged several other notable researchers, including Ian Goodfellow, another former senior researcher on the Google Brain team. “The thing that was really special about PARC is that they got a bunch of smart people together and let them go where they want,” Brockman says. “You want a shared vision, without central control.”

Giving up control is the essence of the open source ideal. If enough people apply themselves to a collective goal, the end result will trounce anything you concoct in secret. But if AI becomes as powerful as promised, the equation changes. We’ll have to ensure that new AIs adhere to the same egalitarian ideals that led to their creation in the first place. Musk, Altman, and Brockman are placing their faith in the wisdom of the crowd. But if they’re right, one day that crowd won’t be entirely human.

ORIGINAL: Wired
CADE METZ BUSINESS 
04.27.16 

miércoles, 25 de mayo de 2016

Arctic Foxes 'Grow' Their Own Gardens

An Arctic fox appears at the entrance of its den in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. 
PHOTOGRAPH BY DANIEL J. COX
The little carnivores' colorful dens provide veritable oases in the tundra, a new study says.

BARROW, ALASKA The underground homes, often a century old, are topped with gardens exploding with lush dune grass, diamond leaf willows, and yellow wildflowers—a flash of color in an otherwise gray landscape.

They’re bright green and everything around them is just brown,” says Brian Person, a wildlife biologist for the North Slope Borough in Barrow, Alaska. “It pops.

He’s talking about arctic fox dens.

Person has spent the better part of a decade studying the wide-ranging carnivores' movements throughout northern Alaska. The 6-to-12-pound (3-to-5-kilogram) foxes, which prey mostly on lemmings and small game, are found throughout the circumpolar Arctic, from Alaska and Canada all the way into Europe and Greenland.

The little carnivores' colorful dens provide veritable oases in the tundra, a new study says.

He's tracked satellite-collared foxes that have traveled as far east as the Chukchi Sea (map) before doubling back and hopping sea ice until they’ve skirted the coast of neighboring Siberia.

But arctic foxes move too quickly to follow in real time, and Person only receives their GPS location every three days. That makes the colorful fox dwellings the key to better monitoring the population—and how they fit into the Arctic environment.

Peering down from a fixed-wing aircraft, the splashes of green “allow me to estimate just how many dens are out there," he says.

These animals are fertilizing and basically growing a garden."

Gardens that create such a stark contrast on the tundra that scientists who recently published the first scientific study on the dens have dubbed the foxes "ecosystem engineers."

Conducted in 2014 near Churchill, Manitoba, the experiments revealed that the foxes' organic waste supports almost three times as much botanical biomass in summer months as the rest of the tundra.

How a Fox Garden Grows
During the long, dark Arctic winter, the tundra fades into an opaque world where sky and ground blend into a never-ending haze.

With temperatures that dip into the double-digit negatives, the only place for the foxes to take shelter and protect young from the elements—and other predators—is deep underground. (Read "Seasons of the Snow Fox" in National Geographic magazine.)

Some dens are over a century old, and the best are elevated: ridges, mounds, riverbanks. But with so much permafrost—frozen ground—and such a flat environment, prime sites can take years to develop.

And since digging new homes wastes valuable energy, real estate is limited—so foxes reuse locations—and in a strange time-share, foxes sometimes steal sites belonging to ground squirrels.

Photographer Captures Stunning Arctic Wildlife Spotlighting foxes, wolves, hares, owls, and even a polar bear, these photographs capture the beauty of the Arctic.

With litters averaging about eight to 10 pups—some as high as 16—the foxes deposit high amounts of nutrients in and around their dens, a combination of urination, defecation, and leftover kills.

In winter, foxes don’t drink water or eat snow or ice, which lowers their core temperature. Instead they get water from their food, which concentrates nutrients in their urine, making it more potent.

Tundra Oases
These tundra oases are beyond just being postcard beautiful: They boost the Arctic environment.

And that means more food options in a place without many, says Jim Roth of the University of Manitoba, a co-author on the recent study.

Greater plant diversity gives herbivores a spot to forage during short summers, he explains. (See National Geographic photos of Arctic animals.)

Lots of other species visit these dens,” adds Roth, who has been studying arctic foxes since 1994. “Caribou and other herbivores are attracted to the lush vegetation, and scavengers come looking for goose carcasses.

Winter Wonder
Arctic fox gardens occur throughout the Arctic, says Person, who isn’t shy about his respect for the animal and its abilities.

In times of plenty, the canids can cache as many as 104 snow goose eggs a day, another unsung nutritional boost to the land—and opportunistic scavengers. ("Watch Polar Bears Eat Goose Eggs in Warmer Arctic.")

With short ears and snout—which requires less energy to heat—as well as a heavily insulated coat, the species is perfectly adapted to winter, Person says. So well, in fact, that scientists have been unable to get the animals to shiver in laboratory chambers—even when they drop temperatures to -40ºC.

"They’re incredibly efficient. I’ve seen them running and it’s almost like they’re not touching the ground.

Polar bears may get more attention as the Arctic’s top predator, but an animal a fraction of their size might in fact be pound-for-pound the more impressive beast.

ORIGINAL: National Geographic
By Adam Popescu
MAY 20, 2016

The Incredible Story of NASA’s Forgotten ‘Rocket Girls’

Tracking lunar missions with the troublesome IBM 704 in 1959 -- the punch cards were for programming.
CREDIT: COURTESY NASA/JPL-CALTECH)

Looking back, the technology that put man on the moon seems incredibly basic. In the early days of space exploration, when electronic computers weren’t reliable and cutting-edge calculators could barely do basic functions, nearly all of the math was done by hand. Women — underpaid, overworked, and ultimately forgotten by even the institution they served — did most of it.

Nathalia Holt, a science writer and microbiologist, stumbled upon their stories almost by fate.

Five years ago, like any good 21st century parent, she googled a prospective baby name — Eleanor Frances — and stumbled upon a picture of a woman named Eleanor Frances Helin accepting an award at NASA in the 1960s.

I just remember just staring at this picture completely stunned. I have a PhD in Microbiology, and I consider myself very well-versed in the contributions of women scientists, but I had never heard of women working in NASA at this era, much less as scientists, and I really wanted to learn more,” Holt told ThinkProgress over the phone.
The Computers, 1953-
CREDIT: COURTESY NASA/JPL-CALTECH)
 Holt’s research led her to an entire group of women who worked as human computers throughout the history of space exploration. Although her first inkling came through a fortuitous internet search, finding the whole story took painstaking digging. Even NASA’s archives had forgotten them. Using old photo captions that identified just one or two names in big groups of women, Holt cold called scores of women until she connected with the right ones. I had never heard of women working in NASA at this era, much less as scientists, and I really wanted to learn more.

The stories these women told her formed the basis of her new book, Rise of the Rocket Girls.

In it, Holt chronicles women’s central role in what we now think of as the key accomplishments in space exploration, and their lives as computers in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

These women took math classes for fun though it was considered impractical for a woman. They competed against each other in speed-calculation contests. They hid their pregnancies and hoarded their vacation time so they could come back to work after having children. They worked alongside famous figures like Carl Sagan, Wernher von Braun, and Richard Feynman, and they were ultimately essential to the discoveries that made those men household names.

Yet when NASA celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first American satellite, the agency forgot to invite the women — living mere miles away — who were in the room when it happened.


Rise of the Rocket Girls unveils this forgotten history with nuance and insight, weaving in personal details about friendships, marriage, and motherhood with the technical problems these women solved, such as exactly how much fuel a rocket needed and how much would make it explode. And as the share of women graduating with technical degrees continues to plateau — and, in some cases, plummet — Holt’s book is an important reminder of how women’s work has been essential to advances in science and technology all along.

ThinkProgress spoke to Holt about the stories in her book, how JPL built and maintained such a strong group of female scientists, and the role of women in science and tech.

One thing that struck me is that in between all the details about JPL and all the science details, you really weave in a lot of detail about their personal lives. Is there a particular reason you felt like that was important?
In the beginning, I didn’t want to talk about their personal lives at all. I felt it would take away from what they did professionally, and from the contributions scientifically, and I worried if I talked too much about their personal lives it would undermine the contributions they had made.

Ultimately, I decided I wouldn’t be honoring their legacy if I didn’t tell the full story. Luckily, because this is a book, I had the space to tell both their scientific contributions and their personal lives. The reason I felt it was really important is because they were able to accomplish these incredibly long careers at a time when women with children did not typically work outside the home — so what they accomplished was really unique. They were able to do it because of very specific institutional dynamics and very specific ways that they were able to manage their personal lives as well, and I do think it’s a very powerful message for women today to hear.
The computers at work, 1955. Helen Ling is sitting at the second desk, left side. Barbara Lewis (Paulson) is on the phone at the back, and Macie Roberts is standing on the right side near the window.
CREDIT: COURTESY NASA/JPL-CALTECH
And you know, even the title is something that I gave a lot of thought about as well. I worried about putting “girls” in the title. Ultimately, I decided that it was a fitting title because this is what they called themselves. They actually called themselves the girls, Helen’s girls. The name that they didn’t like was computresses. That was the name that was really despised among the group.

That’s so funny, because isn’t that what they were? They were computers?
Yes they were, they were officially computers. And that name was fine. Computresses was the name they didn’t like. But yes, talking about their personal lives was not something that I did lightly, it’s something that I gave a lot of thought to.

Some parts of your book to me seemed like a very strong articulation for the importance of paid family leave, or just family leave at all. I was really struck by when — I believe it was Barbara Paulson — applied for a closer parking lot because she was pregnant and the administrators said, “Oh, you’re pregnant, you can’t work here anymore!” At that point she was an important manager, and they lost an important part of their team.

Barbara (Lewis) Paulson receiving her ten-year pin 
from Bill Pickering in 1959
CREDIT: COURTESY NASA/JPL-CALTECH
Yes, that was very upsetting. I mean this would happen quite often, that the women would hide their pregnancies as long as they could because, well, while the men and women they worked with didn’t care that they were pregnant, it was the administrators that would say no, this is an insurance liability and would immediately fire you that day, you had to leave the lab.

And when you were fired there was no maternity leave, so your job wasn’t waiting for you when you came back. That scene with Barbara, it was just so heartbreaking to hear her describe what that was like, and how hurtful that was for her. Luckily she was able to come back after having kids and had a very long career at the lab.

Why did you choose to focus specifically on the women at JPL, and how did JPL end up with such a strong female cohort, when other teams — NASA for example — doesn’t seem to have retained that diversity?
I chose the women at JPL because it was such a unique group. It started out with a married couple who were the first computers who worked at JPL, and then eventually — at that point there were still men and women who were working as computers — a woman was promoted to supervisor of the computers in 1942.

Her name was Macie Roberts, and she decided that she wanted to make the team all female. Her reasons for this were that she wanted it to be a cohesive group, she wanted it to feel like a family, and she worried that if she hired a man he simply wouldn’t listen to her. So she hired all women, and even her successor hired women as well. The strength they had in that group is really quite remarkable. They were really able to create their own culture at JPL

This wasn’t the same at other NASA centers. Of course, there were other computers that worked at other NASA centers and many of them were women, especially the ones that were hired during WWII when there was a shortage of men. But what I found that was quite sad at the other NASA centers was that once IBMs (electronic computers) came in, the women who worked as computers lost their jobs.

And so, I really loved the stories of the women at JPL because that didn’t happen to them. Instead they are the ones who became the first computer programmers. They became the engineers in the lab and just had these remarkable careers because of it.

At one point, you said it became the official rule that everybody who was hired had to have an engineering degree. At that time, they had all these women working there that — some of them didn’t even have bachelor’s degrees. As this was in the 70s and engineering programs weren’t yet letting in women, in a way it just set the diversity back.
Yes, this was a really critical time. I feel like that was happening not just at JPL but in labs all over the world, because you had this critical moment where degrees were becoming vital to have a job. But, so many of these engineering programs didn’t admit women yet. But at JPL, the women — even though many of them didn’t even have bachelor’s degrees, some of them did, some of them even had master’s degrees — but they were grandfathered in as engineers.

Helen Ling working on Mariner 2, 1962-
CREDIT: COURTESY NASA/JPL-CALTECH
One story I really love is Helen Ling, who was a very long-time supervisor of the computing section. She took over after Macie Roberts retired. She specifically sought out women who had bachelor’s degrees in math and computer science, and then she would hire them and encourage them to go to night school in engineering. Because of her you have all these women who came in and were able to rise up the ranks, and you have these great stories of women, — such as Sylvia Miller — who went on to have this long career and become the director of the Mars program office. And it’s really just because of Helen Ling that they were able to do this.

I should probably note here, the sad case of Susan Finley — she is Nasa’s longest serving female employee, and she’s been in the lab since 1958, so she’s had this incredible long career. She was hired by Macie Roberts and was there since the beginning of NASA.

Then in 2004, NASA decided to change the rules and decided that you can’t be an engineer if you don’t have a bachelors’ degree. They essentially took away that grandfathering that happened in the 1970s. This didn’t affect most of the women because many of them retired in the mid to late 1990’s, but it affected Sue.

They took away her engineering position and they put her on an hourly salary. It’s just really a terrible tragedy that I’m hoping that my book can change. That is one thing that i would most like to change with my book.

Is there anything else you’re hoping that the book will change?
In general I felt like we deserved to have recognition of these women, and not just because they deserve it, but because of the situation of women in technology today.

There has been such a drop in the number of women who are receiving bachelor’s degrees in computer science. I talk about it in the book a little bit, and I mention that really disheartening statistic — that 37 percent of bachelor’s degrees in computer science were awarded to women in 1984, that’s dropped down to 18 percent today. My hope is that the book will inspire women to go into technology today as well.

One of the main theories is that a lot of women don’t think of themselves as engineers because they don’t see representative examples. And yet, here we have this really strong example of all these really amazing women, who helped put rockets into space, and yet they’ve been completely forgotten.

I think it’s sad that so many of our female scientists have stories that were forgotten. It’s important that we go back and we find their stories and we recognize their contributions.

Could you talk a little bit about Janez Lawson?
Tracking spacecraft position in the control room during the Venus flyby, 1962
CREDIT: COURTESY NASA/JPL-CALTECH
She just has an amazing story. She was the first African American hired in a technical position at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She had a degree in chemical engineering from UCLA — so today she would have been hired as an engineer — but back then she was hired as a computer. There was a lot of discussion about hiring her — they wondered if this was going to create turmoil at the lab. It was really Macie Roberts who stood up for her and said no, we need to hire her, and helped promote Janez Lawson’s career.

She was one of the first people sent to the IBM training school, and she did incredibly well there. She had an amazing career and she did eventually become a chemical engineer. So i just think her story is so inspiring. I wish i could have interviewed her directly (she had passed away), but luckily i was able to speak with her friends and her family and get her story that way.

Your book also serves as a pretty good primer in the early history — or rather the complete history — of the space program. Is there a particular milestone that was your favorite when you were researching this?
Oh that’s such a hard question! There’s really quite a few; there are so many stories that I found surprising. One of my favorite things about researching this book was that I spoke with so many primary sources, and I did a lot of archival research as well. I was able to come across stories about these missions that really hadn’t been published before. Especially some of the early moon missions, I was just really fascinated with how many failures there were.I was shocked to learn that we could have put a satellite up a year before Sputnik

Hard decision, but I think maybe my favorite one is Jupiter C. This was the forerunner to Explorer One, the first American satellite. I was shocked to learn that we could have put a satellite up a year before Sputnik.

So, on September 20th, 1956, Jupiter C was launched — and this rocket was just incredible. It had a new altitude record — it went up to 3335 miles into the air — and it was just amazing for everyone watching it. But at its apex, it was loaded down with sandbags. Whereas if it had just had a satellite at the top we could have launched a satellite a year before Sputnik.

Analog computer equipment in 
the old Space Flight Operations control center, 1960
CREDIT: COURTESY NASA/JPL-CALTECH)
It’s just an amazing story. It’s really incredible how sneaky the group at JPL and their army collaborators, including Wernher von Braun, were at going around the Eisenhower Administration to make the first American satellite happen. I loved hearing about how they had this sort of design satellite that they had to keep locked away in cabinets, so that they had to make sure NASA administrators — or those who would become NASA administrators — wouldn’t see it.

It’s kind of funny too because I feel like that spirit really kept on. With the Voyagers, there’s sort of a similar story of sneakiness. Even in missions today, i think it’s kind of a mischievous lab. They like to push the limits.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

ORIGINAL: Think Progress
MAY 19, 2016