Posts Tagged ‘mit’
Ex-Seagate employee claims the company stole MIT research, tried to cover up its tracks
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Gadget News, Technology on December 29th, 2009
Ex-Seagate employee claims the company stole MIT research, tried to cover up its tracks originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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New York Times | 
U.S. District Court Affidavit | Email this | Comments Is Our Data Too Vulnerable in the Cloud?
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on December 24th, 2009
MIT’s Copenhagen Wheel turns your bike into a hybrid, personal trainer
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Gadget News, Technology on December 16th, 2009
Continue reading MIT's Copenhagen Wheel turns your bike into a hybrid, personal trainer
MIT's Copenhagen Wheel turns your bike into a hybrid, personal trainer originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Dec 2009 07:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalinkinhabitat | MIT | Email this | Comments The Copenhagen wheel stores up energy for later
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Gadget News, Technology on December 16th, 2009
MIT Researchers have appropriately debuted the Copenhagen Wheel at the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change.
This big red wheel has a very unique ability:
When you brake, your kinetic energy is recuperated by an electric motor and then stored by batteries within the wheel, so that you can have it back to you when you need it.
It is similar to tech that has been on Formula One racers for the past couple of years. So the next time you are going up a steep hill with that Copenhagen wheel on your bike, simply release all that energy that you got by braking earlier. I don’t think there is any indicator of how much energy you have, because that extra energy sounds like something that could run out real fast.
The development of this bicycle wheel has stemmed from what people are calling a “biking renaissance” or “Biking 2.0″ to describe how designers are using “cheap electronics” to allow them to “augment bikes and convert them into a more flexible, on-demand system”.
For example, the designers of the Copenhagen wheel want to use a series of sensors and a Bluetooth connection to an iPhone that would be mounted on the bikes’ handlebars. The wheel would monitor the bike’s speed, the distance travelled as well as collect data on air pollution.
I got to tell you, if bicycles get any more advanced, they will become motorcycles.
Source
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M.I.T. Ushers in Biking 2.0 With Copenhagen Wheel [Bicycles]
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Gadget News, Technology on December 15th, 2009
Today at the COP 15 Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, M.I.T. students introduced the technologically advanced Copenhagen Wheel. In addition to including various sensors and Bluetooth capability, the tire stores kinetic energy from braking for a later burst of speed.
The makers of the Copenhagen Wheel from M.I.T.'s SENSEable City Laboratory claim that the new features mark the advent of "Biking 2.0," a new era based on smarter bikes and easier rides. The wheel is certainly a step in that direction; it includes sensors for detecting distance, speed, direction, all of which are beamed via Bluetooth to the rider's iPhone. The wheel also includes a built-in lock that sends the rider a text if tampered with.
But the most notable feature of the Copenhagen Wheel is its KERS or Kinetic Energy Recovery System, a mechanism by which energy from braking is stored up for later use, giving the rider a boost when going up a hill or speeding through traffic. Some bicycle purists have already dismissed the wheel as a novelty while others suggest that M.I.T. has succeeded in reinventing the wheel. [MIT via Inhabitat]
MIT Plans to Rebuild Artificial Intelligence from the Ground Up [Artificial Intelligence]
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Gadget News on December 8th, 2009
After 50 years and countless dead ends, incremental progress, and modest breakthroughs, artificial intelligence researchers are asking for a do-over.
The $5 million Mind Machine Project (MMP), a patchwork team of two dozen academics, students and researchers, intends to go back to the discipline's beginnings, rebuilding the field from the ground up. With 20/20 hindsight, a few generations worth of experience, and better, faster technology, this time researchers in AI — an ambiguous field to begin with — plan to get things right.
The study of AI is a half a century old, beginning with lofty expectations at a 1956 conference but quickly fragmenting into different specializations and sub-fields. The MMP wants to roll back the clock, fixing early assumptions that are now foundations of the field and redefining what the objectives of AI research should be.
The fundamental problem, it seems, is that the mind, memory and body function both together and separately to solve any number of problems, and the way they work together (and alone) varies from problem to problem. The human mind alone applies various systems and functions to any given problem. Many AI solutions have attempted to solve all the problems with one system or function rather than multiple systems working together as in the human mind, a "silver bullet" approach that hinders real progress.
Likewise, when it comes to memory, researchers have created models that work more like computers, where everything is either one or zero. Real memory is filled with gray areas, ambiguities and inconsistencies, but functions in spite of not always being congruent. MMP researchers also intend to bring computer science and physiology together, forcing computers to work within the confines of physical space and time just like the body does.
The team even proposes discarding the Turing Test, the long-recognized standard for determining artificial intelligence. Instead, MMP researchers want to test for a machine's comprehension of a children's book — rather than a human's comprehension of another human being — to gain a better understanding or the AI's ability to process and regurgitate thought.
It's a big-picture approach to a big challenge, and while it's perhaps unlikely that the team can re-imagine AI in the ambitious five-year window they've given themselves, it very well could shore up some of the loose underpinnings of a discipline that has boundless potential to shape a better world (or, for you SkyNet junkies, limitless potential to destroy it). If nothing else, it's a responsible admission from the scientific community that they simply don't have it quite right, that we need to rethink what we think we know.
Climatologists, take notes.
[MIT News]
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DARPA’s Balloon Challenge Over After Nine Hours [Darpa]
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Gadget News on December 8th, 2009
Someone at DARPA's crying over the brilliant "Find these ten red weather balloons and we'll give you 40K" challenge he concocted ending mere nine hours in. It's what happens when you forget about MIT geeks and their little bribes, too.
The winning MIT went about the task in a brilliant way: They offered shares of the prize money to anyone who reported the weather balloons' locations. And what do you know? Tips about the locations came flooding in as people saw green: Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.
This challenge and the way it was won goes to remind us that a combination of the old and the new, viral campaigns and simple cold hard cash, can be unbeatable. Now let's just not run off to use that oh-so-new knowledge for anything potentially evil, please. [Guardian]
Harvard and MIT researchers working to simulate the visual cortex to give computers true sight
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Gadget News on December 4th, 2009
[Thanks, David]
Harvard and MIT researchers working to simulate the visual cortex to give computers true sight originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Dec 2009 09:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink |PhysOrg | Email this | Comments Thermally-Activated Roof Tiles Change Color to Conserve Energy [Saving Energy]
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Gadget News on December 2nd, 2009
Since black roof tiles absorb heat and white ones reflect it, we should all just plain re-do our roofs biannually to save energy as the seasons change. Or maybe just get roof tiles that change color on their own.
A bunch of MIT students came up with this funky-looking roofing material, dubbed Thermeleon, which changes color based on temperature. According to initial studies, "in their white state, the tiles reflect about 80 percent of the sunlight falling on them, while when black they reflect only about 30 percent." This would translate into about a 20 percent saving on cooling costs in the summer.
Pretty neat, but unfortunately there are no plans to commercialize the tiles yet, and even if there were you'd probably have quite a battle with your home owners association to install them. [MIT News via Gizmag]
Thermeleon roof tiles could be a game changer
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Gadget News on December 2nd, 2009
Basically everyone from presidents to prime ministers and the working man on the street are concerned about the environment these days, and it comes across as no surprise. After all, you can’t just pack everyone off into space once the earth becomes inhospitable, can you? With concern for dwindling green lungs, exotic wildlife that supports our fragile ecosystem and melting polar ice caps, it comes across as no surprise that more and more folks are putting in the effort to make sure there is still a green earth to be handed down to our kids in the future. A team of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduates have certainly weighed in with their part, where their Thermelon contribution picked up the third annual MIT MADMEC (Making and Designing Materials Engineering Contest) – by virtue of being a thermally-activated, color-changing, roofing material.
The Thermeleon (a wordplay on chameleon) relies on phase-change polymer gel-filled tiles, enabling the entire team to control the light energy transmission properties of the roofing material by virtue of changing its colors. This translates to a hot day seeing the roofing material turn white in order to reflect heat so that you and your household won’t burn up inside, while the cold winter chill will turn the material transparent in order to absorb heat better that will go some way in helping reduce your reliance on a heater at home.
According to the team, most of its testing has been conducted on a gel which will transition at around room temperature, allowing one to choose from a wide variety of transition temperatures that range from approximately 0-100°C (32-212°F) and beyond. According to the team, “When the polymer phase separates from the gel, the solution becomes a mixture of polymer and solvent and because the polymer and solvent have different refractive indices the mixture becomes strongly scattering (white colored). When the mixture cools below the transition temperature, the polymer re-dissolves in the liquid and the solution is clear (exposing the black backing) and colorless.” Hopefully when this technology reaches main street, it will be affordable enough for everyone.
Source: Gizmag
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