China Will Be Watched By 200,000 Electronic Eyes
Aug 14, 20073
The government of China is getting ready to set up around 20,000 cameras throughout the city of Shenzen, the NYTimes reports, and the city already has 180,000 owned by the government and private companies. They’re not as much cameras as they are eyes, though, as they’re part of a plan to use AI software to constantly track and identify people’s faces and unusual activities in hunt for police suspects and crime. The police will have the right to link pre-existing cameras at any time into the system. Two-hundred-thousand cameras! My AI science enthusiasm screams “Interesting!” but my human alter-ego simply screams.
After having studied publications and information on Radar Networks for a recent blog post, I decided I might as well write a Wikipedia article on them while I’m at it. Less than an hour (one hour!) after my initial publication of the article somebody had come along and tagged it, suggesting that it was written as an “advertisement”. Is it just my inexperience with Wikipedia, or does it seem a bit strange for someone to instantly slap a tag on it … even while I’m still doing modifications?
There’s something very important you must always try to do when interviewed: Ask to review it before it prints! This may not be possible at all times. For example, it tends to be a lot easier to get a copy if the article is long and scheduled for publication with a few days notice. Nevertheless: ASK. It’s amazing how often quotes can get scrambled, your statements misinterpreted, ripped out of context, and so on and so forth. But it doesn’t always have to be bad to allow the reporter to have his way making the story sound more exciting on the expense of its accuracy.
If you’re into AI, you might have heard by now that Checkers has been solved. Solved, as in determining the final result of a game in which either player makes no mistakes whatsoever: The AI will always make the perfect play. Checkers has roughly 500 billion billion possible positions (5×1020) and is now the largest game that has been solved to date. It took dozens of computers running almost continuously around the clock since 1989 to solve. My advisor at Reykjavik University, Yngvi Björnsson, is a part of the development team and one of the authors of the article published in Science magazine, July 6th, introducing the solution to Checkers. My congratulations to Yngvi and the team for this achievement!
I’ve been following the news and rumors on Radar Networks for a few years now, a company that’s about to unveil a new semantic web application. What originally brought it to my attention was the fact that my brother was the chief architect of the underlying system during its conception, and is now on the board of advisors. But it’s not blood relation that’s perpetuating my interest; it’s the potential revolutionary nature of the product they’re about to release. As we get closer to their beta, the shroud of secrecy is gradually being lifted.
Crysis is a new war-type game which must certainly be one of the flagships of modern state-of-the-art tech in the gaming industry. I came across this three part video recorded at E3 and just couldn’t tare myself from the screen until I’d watched all three parts. Crabs & swarms of fish habit the photo-realistic oceans and react to your presence, as well as dry land animals like chickens who behave incredibly realistically (the blurred shapes in the corners of the thumbnail are the player’s hands, reaching to pick up the chicken).
It’s not every day that elephants inspire technological advances, let alone make existing technologies safer. Robotic arms can be quite dangerous, a single malfunction can cause frantic motion that could easily cause severe damage to us poor biological creatures. But the robotic arm ISELLA is built to minimize potential of such malfunction, and it’s design is inspired by an elephant’s trunk.
In my 
Just wondering.