INTELLIGENT

Look, ma, no hands: Volkswagen SUV parks itself

One of the bugbears for greenhorns taking their driving test is the grind of parking. Fail this, and you can kiss your license goodbye. Until the next test, that is.

The bad news is you still have to pass your parking to score a license. The good news is, once you do, you may never have to worry about parking again. You can get your own chauffeur--or Volkswagen is bringing its Tiguan to Singapore roads, joining the rarified car marques here like Toyota Estima Aeras in offering an intelligent parking system.

Volkswagen's 2-liter SUV will launch in early September in the Republic with its nifty auto-parking feature. But like the Toyota, this is extended as an option. So if you desire this functionality, factor in an additional amount (price to be revealed later) to the car's $74,425 sticker (with COE, for 150bhp turbo engine; $88,600 for the 200bhp version).

There's another catch: this only parallel parks and it isn't quite fully automatic. Volkswagen only recently showcased its second-gen auto-parking system that will do vertical lots and doesn't even require a warm body in the car while parking. … Read more

Cell phone tech for swarm robots

The tiny motors normally used to vibrate cell phones can provide researchers with a significantly more affordable option for building robots.

A team of students led by Alexis Johnson at the University of Southampton's electronics and computer science school realized the tiny motors intended for cell phone vibration are already designed and manufactured to be attached to circuit boards making them ideally suited for use in swarm robots.

Using those motors, the group designed a new type of robot platform that brought their material cost down to about $48 (24 pounds) per robot, according to a university announcement Wednesday.… Read more

Google's translation center: Language lessons for the Googlebot?

Updated 1:17 p.m. to correct that Google ranked first in the machine-translation accuracy evaluation. Updated 10:50 a.m. PDT with Google's no-comment.

Google looks set to launch a beta test of a document translation service, a new move in the company's efforts to break down language barriers.

With the service, the company will connect people who need documents translated with humans who will be paid to do so, according to the Google Translation Center information page. The site was spotted by sharp eyes at the Google Blogoscoped blog.

"Google Translation Center is the fast … Read more

Heart Robot takes cue from 'Wall-E'

Is "emotional robot" an oxymoron? Not necessarily, say the creators of the Heart Robot.

This robot/puppet, which is made of soft, flexible plastic, appears to breathe, blink, flinch, and clench its fists in response to human encounters. Experts in the diverse fields of robotics, animatronics, street theater, puppetry, and Web design converged to design the bot, which is meant to evoke emotion in those who meet it.

Swathed in white Egyptian cotton, it looks like a slightly forlorn cousin of ET. Its nervous system is made up of five small computers that work together to produce reactions. … Read more

ReCaptcha: Reusing your 'wasted' time online

ZURICH, Switzerland--Chances are that if you've solved one of those distorted-word tests to secure an account with Facebook, Craigslist, or Ticketmaster, you've helped The New York Times inch a little closer to digitizing its entire print newspaper archive from 1851 to 1980.

How have you unwittingly helped the Gray Lady by wasting 10 seconds on a computer-generated word challenge? It's thanks to a year-old initiative called ReCaptcha, a play on the antispam tests known as Captchas (Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart), a test that people can pass, but machines cannot.

People typically fill out Captchas so Web sites can verify that a human, rather than a spam bot, is behind the request for a new e-mail address, log-in, or membership. But with ReCaptchas, which are double-word tests, humans are also helping machines better recognize faded-ink or blurry words that have been digitally scanned from old newspapers or books--text that's difficult for a computer to recognize optically. That way, people will eventually be able to sift through print archives with a more intelligent search engine.

In the last year, as many as 600 million people have completed at least one ReCaptcha on sites such as Twitter, LastFM, and Ticketmaster, which use the technology for free, according to ReCaptcha creator and Carnegie Mellon University assistant professor Luis von Ahn.

With all those helping hands, von Ahn expects that The New York Times digitization project will be finished by the end of 2009, at the latest. (About five months ago, The New York Times paid an undisclosed sum to von Ahn's CMU team to complete its project.)

"We're reusing wasted human cycles," von Ahn, 28, said while speaking at a robotics conference here recently.

The venture involves putting millions of eyes on words printed in roughly 47,000 newspapers, with various counts of pages. For example, before the turn of the century, The New York Times was about one-fourth the breadth it is today. It's doubled in size about every 50 years or so since its beginning in the 1850s, when it was published every day except Sunday. (The New York Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.)

Von Ahn's team is also helping the Internet Archive with the digitization of books through ReCaptcha, but it's doing that project gratis.

… Read more

Open source powering the next generation of AI

The next generation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robots could be developed by private industry and sold in a traditional proprietary fashion. But what happens when the majority of the robotics research pool comes from academia?

Open source happens, as EE Times describes:

For the researchers involved, one crucial characteristic of the new robot is that both the hardware and software are open-source and designed for easy collaboration. Whether the researchers build better cognitive architectures, learning algorithms, sensors or limbs, once their work has been proved on the European Commission-funded iCub, it can be shared and used to improve the … Read more

Pentaho gets a new license and a new customer

Pentaho has released its Pentaho BI (Business Intelligence) Platform under the GNU General Public License, Version 2. What does this mean?

Specifically, the Platform engine core, Platform engine services, Platform engine security, Platform repository, and UI foundation will be changed to the GPLv2 license. Going forward, Pentaho will require third-parties who want to contribute code to these components to release that code under the GPL license.

This is a bold move by Pentaho, one that brings all (or virtually all) of its software under an open-source license.

It's a move that would be easier to ignore if Pentaho weren'… Read more

NASA spawns smart twin in 'Second Life'

First it started tweeting, then it bore a twin.

NASA is trying all manner of Web 2.0 software to promote its science to the tech-savvy crowd. Months ago, the media director at the space agency's Jet Propulsion Lab began sending out Twitter messages, or 140-character digital notes, about the Phoenix Lander mission to Mars. Now, NASA has created a so-called cybertwin for the Phoenix rover in the virtual world Second Life.

Even though the term "cybertwin" sounds very Web 1.0, the technology is based on techniques in artificial intelligence, such as natural language processing. Instead … Read more

New dating site caters to smarties only

I'm sitting here, reading my morning e-mail and what pops up but a press release for a new dating site that purports to be "exclusively for intelligent people."

Called, wonder of wonders, IntelligentPeople.com, the site says that to sign up you must first "pass the IQ test required for admission."

Now, my first instinct was to look at the calendar. It's not April Fools' Day, right? No, I think that happened already. Maybe the people behind this site weren't smart enough to notice that it's way past April 1.

Well, snark … Read more