Robotic Nation Evidence

How RFID can help optimise supply chain management

From the article:

The technology will bring benefits to a wide range of industries, as we shall see, but one of the main drivers of RFID adoption has been the retail sector, led by Wal-Mart in the US. Phillip J. Windley, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University, estimates that US retail giant Wal-Mart alone could save $8.35 billion annually with RFID - that's more than the total revenue of half the companies in the Fortune 500.

His massive total is made up as follows: $600 million through avoiding stock-outs; $575 million by avoiding theft, error and vendor fraud; $300 million through better tracking of a billion pallets and cases; $180 million through reduced inventory; and a huge $6.7 billion by eliminating the need to have people scan barcodes in the supply chain and in-store. Small wonder, then, that Wal-Mart is investing $3 billion in RFID over several years and is one of the leading proponents of RFID implementation.

$6.7 billion is a lot of money. It will come from eliminating employees from Wal-Mart's stores. Assume that the average Wal-Mart worker makes $20,000 per year. $6.7 billion represents 335,000 workers.

Now imagine the same thing happening throughout the retail sector as every retailer moves to RFID to compete with Wal-Mart. Several million people are unemployed. And the robots have not even started arriving yet. Once the robots arrive, a total of 10 million people are unemployed in the retail sector alone. See Robotic Nation for details.

Why a booming economy feels flat

From tha rticle:

Despite continued strong economic growth, this expansion is clouded with enough complications and uncertainties that, for many, it doesn't feel like good times.

The reason? A boom in corporate profits has not yet created a job market that makes workers feel secure, economists say. Hiring hasn't skyrocketed. Worse, wages are stagnant. This paycheck squeeze may prove more worrisome than soaring oil prices and concerns over a housing bubble. Some experts worry that wage stagnation may prove more permanent this time, because of an increasingly global market for labor.

And:

He points to two key reasons. First, since the last recession ended in November 2001, job growth has been weak until last year, when the Labor Department's employer survey showed a gain of 2.2 million jobs. Second, wage growth has been lackluster, despite strong gains in worker productivity. Normally, as employees are able to produce more in each hour of work, the result is greater cash flow that can be divvied up between workers and owners or investors. In the long run, rising productivity means rising wages and living standards.

But in the short run, 'most of the gains in the economy have gone into profits rather than wages,' says Mr. Behravesh.

The latest numbers from the Labor Department, in fact, show average weekly earnings for US workers have fallen by 0.5 percent in the past year, after adjusting for inflation.

Note this sentence: "Some experts worry that wage stagnation may prove more permanent this time, because of an increasingly global market for labor." Now imagine robots moving into the picture and taking millions more jobs in the American economy.

Also note this sentence: "Normally, as employees are able to produce more in each hour of work, the result is greater cash flow that can be divvied up between workers and owners or investors." That is not happening this time. In fact, wages are retracting, not expanding. This is because of the Concentration of wealth mentioned in Robotic Freedom.

Intel details new microprocessors: "Otellini also said Intel has 10 projects in the works that contain four or more computing cores per chip. And it's developing a new chip line that consumes a fraction of the electricity of today's lowest-powered chips but with greater performance... Multi-core technology will enable a range of smaller yet more powerful devices. Otellini showed off a prototype handheld computer -- dubbed a "handtop" -- that has a 5-inch display, weighs a pound and can run off a battery for a full day. Unlike today's handhelds, the wireless-enabled device can run a full-powered PC operating system. Otellini said computer makers could offer such gadgets in the first half of 2006."

GM will launch self-driving car in 2008

From the article:

Known as the Traffic Assist, the system is said to be able to drive the car on its own in heavy traffic at up to 60 mph. Using lasers, video camera and controlled by an advanced computer, the system can recognize signs and detect obstacles, controls the car via a complete drive-by-wire set up that covers throttle, steering and braking. While we’ve seen various manufacturers putting bits and pieces of these technologies on their cars, this would be the first example that combines them all and enabling your car to truly “think” for itself.

If GM pulls it off, this would be a leap forward for robotic technology. Combine it with lessons learned from the Grand Challenge and totally autonomous cars are just not that far away.

What this means is that autonomous, 24x7 trucks are not that far away either, and there is a huge economic incentive to deploy them. Once the robotic trucks arrive, it means that a million truck drivers will hit the unemployment lines. See Robots taking jobs for details.

[See also A Car That (Really) Drives Itself: The 2008 Opel Vectra]

A Doll That Can Recognize Voices, Identify Objects and Show Emotion

From the article:

Amazing Amanda, scheduled for release next month by Playmates Toys, is expected to cost $99, said Ms. Shackelford, the chief executive of J. Shackelford & Associates, a product and marketing company in Moorpark, Calif., that specializes in toys and children's entertainment.

At that price, the same as Apple's entry-level iPod Shuffle digital music player, the 18-inch-tall doll promises - right on the box it will be sold in - to 'listen, speak and show emotion.' Some analysts and buyers who have seen Amanda say it represents an evolutionary leap from earlier talking dolls like Chatty Cathy of the 1960's, a doll that cycled through a collection of recorded phrases when a child pulled a cord in its back.

Radio frequency tags in Amanda's accessories - including toy food, potty and clothing - wirelessly inform the doll of what it is interacting with. For instance, if the doll asks for a spoon of peas and it is given its plastic cookie, it will gently admonish its caregiver, telling her that a cookie is not peas.

This RFID technology is likely to help shelf-stocking robots at Wal-Mart navigate through the stores. See Robots in 2015 for details.

This should go a long way toward ending anonymity:

New York transit signs $212 million security deal

From the article:

New York's subway and bus operator said on Tuesday it awarded a $212 million contract for surveillance cameras, motion detectors and other equipment to detect potential attacks against its stations, bridges and tunnels.

Defense contractor Lockheed Martin will lead a team of companies in a deal struck with North America's largest transportation network just one month after bombers attacked the London transit system on July 7, killing 52 people.

The $212 million will be the first major piece of a $591 million security plan approved in 2002. Before the Lockheed deal, only $42 million had been earmarked.

Lockheed will install 1,000 cameras and 3,000 sensors under the three-year deal that aims to eventually allow the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority to stop attacks before they happen by spotting unattended packages that may contain bombs and alerting its employees to unauthorized intruders in its tunnels and other sensitive areas.

See also:

• The end of anonimity
  
• The end of anonimity 2

Swiss lab works with IBM to uncover power of brain: "The scale of the project shows just how powerful our brains are. It will take an IBM eServer Blue Gene supercomputer containing more than 8,000 processors housed in four racks to model the behavior of something less than a billionth its size: a neocortical column is a cylindrical element roughly 0.5 millimeters in diameter and 2 mm long. A rat's brain contains 10,000 of them -- and the human brain around a million, according to Henry Markram, director of the Brain and Mind Institute at EPFL.

Markram's plan is to model the cylinders at the level of individual neurons: A neocortical column contains about 10,000 of those. Over years of research, he and his colleagues have accumulated a huge amount of data about how individual neurons behave and how they interconnect and interact with one another to make up a column. That data will be used to create a detailed model of a single neuron, including its three-dimensional form, inside each processor, with the Blue Gene computer as a whole modeling a column."

This computer's 8,000 processors combine to create 22 trillion FLOPS, or roughly 2.75 billion FLOPS per processor. They are using roughly one processor per neuron.

If the human brain has a million of these 10,000 neuron columns, then the brain has 10 billion neurons. Using the techniques described in this article, then, we would need about 27,500 quadrillion FLOPS to simulate the human brain. That is much higher than previous estimates. For example, in this Wired article the estimate of the human brain's processing power is placed at 100 trillion FLOPS: "A human brain's probable processing power is around 100 teraflops, roughly 100 trillion calculations per second, according to Hans Morvec, principal research scientist at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. This is based on factoring the capability of the brain's 100 billion neurons, each with over 1,000 connections to other neurons, with each connection capable of performing about 200 calculations per second.". The number given in Robotic Nation is one quadrillion.

It will be interesting to see where the number actually is.

Why a booming economy feels flat

From the article:

Despite continued strong economic growth, this expansion is clouded with enough complications and uncertainties that, for many, it doesn't feel like good times.

The reason? A boom in corporate profits has not yet created a job market that makes workers feel secure, economists say. Hiring hasn't skyrocketed. Worse, wages are stagnant. This paycheck squeeze may prove more worrisome than soaring oil prices and concerns over a housing bubble. Some experts worry that wage stagnation may prove more permanent this time, because of an increasingly global market for labor.

Also:

Normally, as employees are able to produce more in each hour of work, the result is greater cash flow that can be divvied up between workers and owners or investors. In the long run, rising productivity means rising wages and living standards.

But in the short run, "most of the gains in the economy have gone into profits rather than wages," says Mr. Behravesh.

The latest numbers from the Labor Department, in fact, show average weekly earnings for US workers have fallen by 0.5 percent in the past year, after adjusting for inflation.

The divergence between productivity has sparked a debate among economists. Some say the gap is temporary, and will narrow as the labor market tightens and workers get more leverage to bargain. Others worry that it's a sign of new realities in the global marketplace that are pushing down US wages as workers compete with increasingly educated rivals in places such as India, China, and South Korea.

So we have productivity rising, but wages are falling. And job growth in the United States is pretty anemic compared to prior recoveries. That is unusual. And there is concern that this trend may affect the economy more than oil or housing prices.

Now imagine throwing robots into the mix. For example, imagine that robots take over half of the jobs in Wal-Mart and other big box retailers, forcing 5 million workers onto the unemployment roles. Imagine that robots take over truck driving, forcing out a million human truck drivers. Imagine that robots take over a large portion of the construction industry, eliminating 5 million jobs. And so on. See Robots taking jobs for a long list. The situation for employees only becomes worse.

A naysayer will always point out, "The increased productivity provided by robots will cause wages to rise, and more jobs will be created." I understand that that is how the economy has worked in the past, but that is not what we are seeing right now. And we have not really even started the real robotic layoffs yet. The kiosks and self-check out lines being deployed today are merely the tip of the robotic iceberg. Once we start seeing a direct replacement of entire classes of workers with robots, the bargaining power of employees collapses.

See Robotic Nation for details.

Rock 'n' roll robot regains its feet: "A humanoid robot with an exceptionally nimble knack for getting back on its feet after a fall has been developed by researchers in Japan.

Named R Daneel, the robot kicks up its legs and rolls back onto its shoulders to gain the momentum it needs to rock up onto its feet and into a crouching position. This might be fairly easy for a human to do, but for the 60-kilogram bot, it requires a relaxed attitude to body control."

Here is an amazing video of the robot in action: R Daneel in action.

The obvious question after watching the video is, "How long will it be before humanoid robots are performing gymnastics at an olympic level?"

Run

See also ASIMO

A very different way to look at the future:

The Day You Discard Your Body

New house-sitter robot hits stores in Japan; will cost $3,100: "Worried about leaving your house empty while you go on vacation? Japan has the answer: a house-sitter robot armed with a digital camera, infrared sensors and a videophone.

Stores across Japan started taking orders Thursday for the Roborior - a watermelon-sized eyeball on wheels that glows purple, blue and orange - continuing the country's love affair with gadgets."

There are a wide range of things that can spur Moore's law, including international competition:

China joins U.S. and Japan in global race to build the fastest computer

From the article:

In recent weeks there have been reports that both the Japanese and Chinese are planning new investments in breaking the petaflop-computing barrier. A petaflop is a measure of computing performance that describes the ability to perform 1,000 trillion mathematical operations per second.

'Everyone appears to be in the race for a petaflop,' said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who maintains a list of the world's fastest computers.

Currently the world's fastest computer is a machine installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory late last year - and still growing - that has reached more than 136 trillion operations per second, or 100,000 times the speed of a fast desktop personal computer.

International Business Machines built the machine, known as BlueGene/L, and plans to double its speed by the end of the year. Only small amounts of research funds have been spent so far on designing a petaflop supercomputer, a step that Japanese and American experts believe will cost nearly $1 billion to achieve. In the United States, Cray, IBM and Sun Microsystems have begun work toward reaching a petaflop by the end of the decade, supported by a Pentagon-financed development project.

The petaflop barrier is significant because it is believed that the human brain operates at an equivalent speed of something like 1 to 10 petaops per second. See Robotic Nation for details.

Robotic Weight-Loss Surgery Passes Test: "Using robotic arms to perform gastric bypass surgery may be the future of this increasingly popular weight-loss procedure, researchers report.

Dramatic weight loss with gastric bypass is achieved by reducing the size of the stomach, and is usually done by a minimally invasive procedure called a laparoscopic Roux-en-Y procedure.

However, this procedure is considered one of the more difficult laparoscopic procedures, the researchers noted, and usually requires 75 to 100 operations before even experienced surgeons achieve the highest level of proficiency."

Thin skin will help robots 'feel': "Japanese researchers have developed a flexible artificial skin that could give robots a humanlike sense of touch.

The team manufactured a type of "skin" capable of sensing pressure and another capable of sensing temperature.

These are supple enough to wrap around robot fingers and relatively cheap to make, the researchers have claimed."

Many people wonder what the "next step" will be beyond silicon once we start running into the physical limitations of heat production, feature size on the chip and clock rates. Here is one of the possible answers:

Y-shaped nanotubes are ready-made transistors: "Tiny tubes of carbon, crafted into the shape of a Y, could revolutionise the computer industry, suggests new research.

The work has shown that Y-shaped carbon nanotubes are easily made and act as remarkably efficient electronic transistors - the toggles used to control the flow of electrons through computer circuits.

But the nanotransistors are just a few hundred millionths of a metre in size -roughly 100 times smaller than the components used in today's microprocessors. They could, therefore, be used to create microchips several orders of magnitude more powerful than the ones used in computers today, with no increase in chip size."

And this article points out that there is a good bit of steam left in conventional silicon architectures as Intel moves from a 90-nanometer to a 65-nanometer architecture for its newest chip design:

A new flagship for Intel: "The chip will have more than one core, or processor. It could exploit Intel's newest manufacturing technology, which makes chips with circuit widths 65 nanometers in length, compared with the 90-nanometer chips in production today. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter." This chip will be announced on August 24.

A key feature of Moore's law is that innovation can work on many different fronts to keep the improvments coming. See Robotic Nation for details.

IQ test for AI devices gets experts thinking

From the article: "How do you tell just how smart your robot is? Give it a universal IQ test, researchers suggest.

Traditional measures of human intelligence would often be inappropriate for systems that have senses, environments, and cognitive capacities very different from our own.

So Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter at the Swiss Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Manno-Lugano, have drafted an idea for an alternative test which will allow the intelligence of vision systems, robots, natural-language processing programs or trading agents to be compared and contrasted despite their broad and disparate functions."

In July we talked about The end of anonymity. Here are three examples of the process in action:

1. Security Cameras Multiply in Manhattan: "Six surveillance cameras could be seen peering out from a chain drug store on Broadway. One protruded awkwardly from the awning of a fast-food restaurant. A supersized, domed version hovered like a flying saucer outside Columbia University. To the dismay of civil libertarians and with the approval of law enforcement, they've been multiplying at a dizzying rate all over Manhattan."
   
   
2. Bush signs prescription drug abuse measure: "The measure provides grants for states to establish and improve electronic programs for monitoring controlled dangerous substances and sharing that information with each other, in a bid to stop people from crossing state lines to get prescriptions filled and avoid monitoring."
   
   
3. Wired News: Brit License Plates Get Chipped: "The British government is preparing to test new high-tech license plates containing microchips capable of transmitting unique vehicle identification numbers and other data to readers more than 300 feet away. Officials in the United States say they'll be closely watching the British trial as they contemplate initiating their own tests of the plates, which incorporate radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags to make vehicles electronically trackable."

This article from a couple of weeks ago indicates one of the many advantages of the end of anonimity: U.S. Teen Not Found in Aruba Landfill. If there were no anonimty, we would not be having to dig through a landfill in the hope of finding her body. We would know exactly where her body is and who she was with at the time of death. See also Robots and felonies.

Military machine: Defense robot developed at CMU makes its debut

From the article:

In February, CMU beat out defense giant Lockheed Martin for a $26.4 million Defense Department contract to produce a line of six Gladiator TUGV prototypes.

The goal is to build big remote-controlled reconnaissance robots capable of carrying out search-and-discovery missions in potentially hostile areas, to warn soldiers of the dangers ahead, and to protect them from mine fields, craters, trenches, hidden enemies or even greater threats such as chemical, biological or nuclear traps.

Eventually, the military hopes to arm the remote-controlled TUGVs with machine guns and other weapons, giving them the capacity to destroy enemy targets.

Also:

The latest Gladiator prototype has containers for hand grenades that can be used for clearing obstacles and creating a footpath on difficult terrain for soldiers following behind. It also features what looks like organ pipes to produce smoke, and it has a mount on top for a medium-size machine gun or multipurpose assault weapon.

Every year, Maximum PC magazine puts together its "Dream Machine". It's the most powerful PC that you can build with off-the-shelf components. This year's machine has quite impressive specs, including:

• Dual processor motherboard holding two dual core chips (AMD Opteron 275s). Each chip has 233 million transistors and runs at 2.2 GHz.
  
• 8 GB of RAM
  
• Two nVidia GeForce 7800 GTX graphics cards, with 300 million transistors each.
  
• 2 TB of disk space implemented using five Hitachi 500 GB drives in a RAID 3 array.

Over a billion transistors in all. The machine costs almost $13,000 when you include the case, power supply, dual monitors and speakers.

You read the article and you think, "My God, this is an insane amount of computing power and disk space! Who could possibly need such a machine?!" But then you look back at the first Dream Machine that they built in 1996. That machine had:

• A screaming 200 MHz Pentium 1
  
• 32 MB of RAM
  
• A 2 GB hard disk.

They didn't even have a "3D graphics card" in it, because 3D graphics cards didn't exist yet.

Just 9 years ago that was an insanely expensive ass-kicking machine. Today this 9-year-old Dream Macine is so pathetic that it would be unusable. 32 MB of RAM??? You could not even launch the OS in that.

Even coming up to the year 2000 Dream Machine, you find:

• Dual Pentium IIIs at 1 GHZ
  
• 512 MB RAM
  
• 75 GB hard drive

That cost $12,000. $12,000! Today a $500 desktop PC at Best Buy beats that.

So... Between 1996 and 2005 -- just 9 years -- disk space increased by a factor of 1,000. RAM increased by a factor of 250. CPU clock speed increased by a factor of 11, there are 4 cores instead of 1 and the number of transistors went up by a factor of 150. And now we have incredibly powerful graphics cards holding 300 million transistors -- a technology that did not even exist 9 years ago in the normal PC marketplace.

Project out 10 years from now, to 2015. It is quite likely that the $13,000 "Dream Machine" of 2005 will seem pathetic and unusable. You won't even be able to buy a machine like this because it is so pathetic. The 2015 Dream Machine will have:

• 2 petabytes of disk space.
  
• 2 terabytes of RAM.
  
• 65 billion transistors in the CPUs. They will be clocked at 25 GHz and there will be 16 cores (or maybe there will be 200 cores clocked at 5 GHz).

Who knows what the graphics cards in 2015 will be doing.

Will the machine in 2015 contain a vision processing card??? That is the huge question I have. 3D graphics accelerator cards like we see today did not even exist in 1996 as far as the Dream Machine was concerned. Will we see vision processing cards arise from nothing and explode in power like that? Or will it take ten years more?

What will the robots in 2015 be able to do?

And what will the Dream Machines in 2025 look like? I don't think we can imagine it.

See Robotic Nation and Robots in 2015 for a discussion.

Robot makes medical history

From the article:

"Gliding into the operating room for the first time to assist a surgeon, Penelope wasn't nervous. Unlike other novice medical assistants scrubbing in, 'she' felt nothing at all. That's because Penelope is a robot, a machine that recently made medical history by becoming the first to act as an independent surgical aide during an operation.

During a June procedure at New York-Presbyterian Hospital to remove a benign tumor from a patient's forearm, Penelope responded to voice commands from a surgeon, handing over clamps, forceps and other instruments with her magnetized mechanical arm. Watching with digital cameras, the robot retrieved the instruments when the surgeon placed them down."

My mother was in the hospital last week, and it is very interesting to think of Penelope in the conext of a modern hospital. A hospital is teaming with people, like bees in a hive. And each person's role is highly specialized. There is one person who takes temperatures and BP, another who dispenses medicine, another that delivers trays of food, another that picks up trays of food, one who takes blood, one who monitors the IV, one to clean the bathroom, another to change the sheets.... It is absolutely amazing.

Most of these people are highly paid. The economic pressure to eliminate all of these jobs and replace them with robots is immense. Penelope is an early harbinger of the things to come. See Robotic Nation for details. See also The birth of the robotic hospital.

This article makes a great point:

Idle Words

From the article:

Over the past three years, while the manned program has been firing styrofoam out of cannons on the ground, unmanned NASA and ESA programs have been putting landers on Titan, shooting chunks of metal into an inbound comet, driving rovers around Mars and continuing to gather a variety of priceless observations from the many active unmanned orbital telescopes and space probes sprinkled through the Solar System. At the same time, the skeleton crew on the ISS has been fixing toilets, debugging laptops, changing batteries, and speaking to the occasional elementary school over ham radio 8.

In other words, robots are doing all the exploration -- all the cool stuff. The era of manned space flight may already be over. Humans have been replaced by robots because robots are cheaper, more reliable, and don't mind waiting a few years to get to their destinations. And the robots will only get better and better, making humans more and more superfluous in space. Welcome to the Robotic Nation. We will soon see replacement process occurring in every part of the economy.

Robot catcher grabs high speed projectiles

From the article:

If robots are to inherit the Earth, then they should at least be able to catch. So say the researchers behind a bot that can match the most skilled human baseball player faced with a hurtling ball.

The robotic catcher, developed by scientists at the University of Tokyo, Japan, can comfortably grab a ball careering through the air at 300 kilometres per hour, or 83 metres per second, its creators say. And, of course, the robot never gets tired of doing so.

The 8th International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition is underway.

For play-by-play coverage of the NCSU team (with lots of photos of the robot), see GoRobotics.net.

See also NCSURobotics.org.

On monday there was a post on the rise of robot actors. A reader sent in this link:

Liam Kemp - This Wonderful Life

The realism demonstrated in this link is fascinating, and all of it was done by one person on a 1.4GHz processor. When you think about how much video games have advanced recently, it is interesting to imagine how real these virtual actors are going to be in 10 years.

It also gives you a taste of how different movie making (and TV production) may become in the near future. Today a major movie takes hundreds of people and $100 million or more. This mini-movie was created by a single individual, and the process will only get easier and easier as the technology advances.

Here's how the rooms are described in Manna:

They clustered the buildings on trash land well away from urban centers so no one had to look at them. It was a lot like an old-style college dorm. Each person got a 5 foot by 10 foot room with a bed and a TV -- the world's best pacifier....

There were no windows anywhere in the building. It was a cost-cutting measure, but it also helped to make every room identical. The ceiling height was 7 feet throughout, so it felt very small all the time....

Because no one had a window, they could really pack people into these buildings. Each terrafoam dorm building had a four-acre foot print. It was a perfect 417 foot by 417 foot by 417 foot solid brown cube. Each cube originally held exactly 76,800 people....

Now here is a description of a new hotel opening in England: Capsule hotels come to Europe:

"Guardian's tape measure puts the smallest rooms at 49 sq ft, with a 7ft-high ceiling and a 14 sq ft en suite pod, cramming in a shower, sink and toilet. Room to swing a cat, there is not. Nor are there windows. In keeping with the easyEthos, such frills are ditched in favour of value for money."

See Manna for details.

Robots take scientists into sea depths

From the article:

Think of it as the Mars Rover but at the bottom of the ocean, remotely exploring our own planet's most alien landscape for scientists back at mission control.

"This is how the science is going to be done," said Deborah Kelley, a University of Washington oceanographer.... Yesterday, Kelley and her colleagues were in Seattle and also "virtually" back at the Lost City to demonstrate how robotics and information technology can transform deep-ocean exploration. What once required dangerous and time-limited manned exploits can now be done by remote control on a ship deck or in an office thousands of miles away.

Actors are expensive and prone to weirdness (see, for example, Tom Cruise). Movies like Skrek and Finding Nemo can break box office records with zero people in them. Therefore, studios will be applying robotic actors more and more. This technology will help speed the process along:

Avid previews groundbreaking Softimage|Face Robot facial animation technology

From the article:

Hailed as revolutionary facial animation technology, Face Robot software is the first technology that allows 3-D artists to achieve realistic, lifelike facial animation for high-end film, post and games projects. The technology is built on a groundbreaking new computer model of facial soft tissue that mimics the full range of emotions portrayed by the human face. Siggraph visitors can experience the Face Robot system in the Avid Computer Graphics booth at and see how this new technology offers artists a very intuitive way to interact with CG characters while providing precise control over facial details, including wrinkles, frowns, flaring nostrils and bulging neck muscles.

See also robots and jobs.

Interesting:

PC Precisely Predicts Felony

From the article:

Lt. James McLaughlin of the Yonkers Police Department technical support unit used a PC to analyze crime statistics and predict the time and location of a robbery before it occurred.

McLaughlin's PC said a robbery would occur between 8 p.m. and midnight on July 27 on South Broadway in Yonkers, New York. When a 25-year-old woman was robbed at 8:44 p.m. on South Broadway, she flagged down two patrolling police officers who were in the area because of McLaughlin's tip.

The article also states:

Crimes are rarely committed in front of officers, which means police still have to wait for a phone call to react to a robbery, even if it was predicted, McGoey said. And unless police share crime prediction analyses with the public, all the police can do is send out more patrols into high-crime areas.

What if every traffic light contained cameras, microphones and artificial intelligence so that it could track every person walking by and detect possible crimes in progress? What if every street light and building had the same sort of system? Then we would have blanket coverage throughout a city, and every crime would be detected and recorded as it happened. See also The end of anonimity.

If you have always wanted the domain robotic.com, here's your chance:

eBay: Domain: ROBOTIC.COM

States Move on Sex Offender GPS Tracking

From the article:

Spurred by headlines of released sex offenders accused of murder, some states are mandating use of the Global Positioning System for tracking. Many lawmakers see electronic monitoring as a natural evolution of statutes that already require sex offenders to register their addresses with authorities.

At least four states _ Florida, Missouri, Ohio and Oklahoma _ passed laws this year requiring lifetime electronic monitoring for some sex offenders, even if their sentences would normally have expired. Similar bills have been proposed in Congress and other states, including North Dakota and Alabama, where lawmakers this week approved legislation and sent it to the governor.

Seems reasonable with sex offenders. What if we did it with everyone all the time? See The end of anonymity.

'CyberBug,' can drop in and quietly gather intelligence

From the article:

A U.S. company has begun marketing a stealth micro-unmanned aerial vehicle that can blend in with its surroundings.

The micro-UAV, dubbed CyberBug, weighs less than a kilogram and was designed for both military and security surveillance. The battery-powered UAV can fly undetected into a hostile environment, land on rocks or trees and relay video images and voice.