HOME |
RSS | 
Researchers have developed software that allows computers to see, helping us get closer to a day in which intelligent machines will see the world the way we do. More importantly this technology has led to an application that helps you purchase wine by snapping a photo of the bottle with your smart phone.
With their company, Cortexica, British Drs. Anil Bharath and Jeffrey Ng have created technology that allow computers to see. It’s already being used by consumers to quickly retrieve information about what they buy, and will soon help companies advertise more effectively. In developing the technology, they drew inspiration from a computer that already sees very well: the human brain.
We often think about how future events will change the world. From intelligent machines to the discovery of a extraterrestrial civilization and extra dimensions, these things will blow our collective minds. Scientific American has cataloged an interactive list of twelve huge events that should they occur will no doubt “change everything.” They even ranked how likely these events are to happen so you can be prepared. What event do you think will change the world?
They say that one day robots and computers will be able to do things better than humans can. This pair of flying machines can already play tennis better than I can. Granted that’s not saying much on my part, but still the video at the link is really impressive.
Mark Muller, Sergei Lupashin and Raffaello D’Andrea worked as a team in ETH Zurich’s Flying Machine Arena for an experiment which is part of the project by ETH Zurich. Quadrocopter can play Tennis and they play really well vertically , that’s pretty amazing.
Comments Off
When I was a kid we had to make do with a Light Bright to entertain us. Now it looks like we are one step closer to children having a robotic, artificially intelligent play friend. Which will be perfect for the child with no friends.
Visual pattern recognition is an important part of human intelligence. It’s a complex process, requiring parallel processing of different types of information such as the shape, color, and contrast of a person’s face. If the robots of the future are going to be able to imitate–or improve upon–our behavior they’re going to need to be pretty adept at pattern recognition. The Nao program for pattern recognition only sees in 2D, but for the purposes of the card game it’s enough.
Another step in the quest to create life has been made, as scientists successfully transformed one bacteria into another by replacing it’s DNA with a related species’. Now, scientists are setting their sights on creating entirely new microbes with unique genome sequences, from scratch.
Dr Venter likened it to “changing a Macintosh computer into a PC by inserting a new piece of software” and stressed it would be more difficult in other kinds of cells, which have enzymes to snip the DNA of invaders.
But he said to achieve the feat, without adding anything more than naked DNA, “is a huge enabling step.”
“It’s a necessary step toward creating artificial life,” added microbiologist Fred Blattner of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Dr Venter said that, in the light of this success, the culmination of a decade’s work, he will be attempting the first transplant of a lab-made genome to create the first artificial life “within months.”
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
