London: A robot walking up to you to collect the daily garbage and another one sweeping the street. Soon, this fond dream may turn into reality.This new generation of mobile and autonomous robots is part of the DUSTBOT research project under the VI European Framework Programme.

These state-of-the-art robots are suitable for the monitoring of large spaces (open and closed), and as guides for people in large shopping areas – indicating to them where a particular shop or product is within a shopping centre.

They are also suitable for accompanying elderly people or those with certain disabilities (both at home and outside), thanks to their functions of orientation, navigation, communications with others or tele-assistance centres, says a DUSTBOT release.

They can also be used as guides in teaching spaces (museums, visitor centres), and for storage and transport, besides the cleaning of both open and closed surfaces which have either difficult or easy access.

This last function is the one which was publicly demonstrated at a railway station in Atxuri, Spain.

The demonstration of two robot models was undertaken: the DustCart and the DustClean. The DustCart robot, measuring 1.45 metres high and 70 kg in

weight, has a humanoid form and is designed to interact with the user and for the collection of low demand waste.The DustClean robot, in the form of a small vehicle and measuring 96 cm high and 250 kg in weight, cleans streets of dirt and dust. Moreover, both control the quality of air in real time.

Washington: Scientists have developed a security language to protect home networks from cyber attacks.

Companies, banks and other organisations take internet security very seriously, erecting firewalls and IT departments to protect them from attacks. But domestic and small office networks are just as vulnerable to hacking, malicious computer code, worms and viruses.Geon Woo Kim of the Electronics and Telecom Research Institute (ETRI) Korea and colleagues who developed the specific codes said home networks have only a single gateway from the internet.
“Whenever a new access to the home network is found, it should be able to authenticate and authorise it and enforce the security policy based on rules

set by the home administrator,” the team said in an ETRI release.The computer scientists first turned to a computer markup language, eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML). XACML is a general purpose language and so it lacks the notation for security policies and authorisation rules

The ability to control what information one reveals about oneself over the Internet, and who can access that information, has become a growing concern. These concerns include whether email can be stored or read by third parties without consent, or whether third parties can track the web sites someone has visited. Another concern is whether web sites which are visited collect, store, and possibly share personally identifiable information about users.
The advent of various search engines and the use of data mining created a capability for data about individuals to be collected and combined from a wide variety of sources very easily.

Refrence:

When searching online for a new gadget to buy or a movie to rent, many people pay close attention to the number of stars awarded by customer-reviewers on popular websites. But new research confirms what some may already suspect: those ratings can easily be swayed by a small group of highly active users.

Kostakos studied voting patterns on Amazon, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), and the book review site BookCrossings. The research was presented last month at the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Social Computing. His team looked at hundreds of thousands of items and millions of votes across the three sites. In each case, they found that a small number of users accounted for a large number of ratings. For example, only 5 percent of active Amazon users cast votes on more than 10 products. A handful of users voted hundreds of items.

“If you have two or three people voting 500 times,” says Kostakos, the results may not be representative of the community overall. He suspects this may be why ratings often tend toward extremes.

Jahna Otterbacher, a lecturer at the University of Cyprus who studies online rating systems, says that previous research has hinted that rating systems can be skewed by factors such as the age of participants. But she notes that some sites, including Amazon, already incorporate mechanisms designed to control the quality of ratings–for example, allowing users to vote on the helpfulness of other users’ reviews.

Kostakos proposes further ways to make recommendations more reliable. He suggests, fo making it easier to vote, in order to encourage more users to join in, and waiting until an item has received a certain number of ratings before showing them.

Kostakos also suggests removing overly negative and overly positive reviews, so a site won’t be too positive or too negative overall. But Otterbacher, who is examining reviews from IMDb, Amazon, and Yelp, worries that such a policy could discourage many people from taking part. “People who write reviews want to say something about the item, and they can be pretty passionate about their opinions,” she says.

Some futurists such as Ray Kurzweil have hypothesized that we will someday soon pass through a singularity–that is, a time period of rapid technological change beyond which we cannot envision the future of society. Most visions of this singularity focus on the creation of machines intelligent enough to devise machines even more intelligent than themselves, and so forth recursively, thus launching a positive feedback loop of intelligence amplification. It’s an intriguing thought. (One of the first things I wanted to do when I got to MIT as an undergraduate was to build a robot scientist that could make discoveries faster and better than anyone else.) Even the CTO of Intel, Justin Rattner, has publicly speculated recently that we’re well on our way to this singularity, and conferences like the Singularity Summit (at which I’ll be speaking in October) are exploring how such transformations might take place.

As a brain engineer, however, I think that focusing solely on intelligence augmentation as the driver of the future is leaving out a critical part of the analysis–namely, the changes in motivation that might arise as intelligence amplifies. Call it the need for “machine leadership skills” or “machine philosophy”–without it, such a feedback loop might quickly sputter out.

We all know that intelligence, as commonly defined, isn’t enough to impact the world all by itself. The ability to pursue a goal doggedly against obstacles, ignoring the grimness of reality (sometimes even to the point of delusion–i.e., against intelligence), is also important. Most science-fiction stories prefer their artificial intelligences to be extremely motivated to do things–for example, enslaving or wiping out humans, if The Matrix and Terminator II have anything to say on the topic. But I find just as plausible the robot Marvin, the superintelligent machine from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, who used his enormous intelligence chiefly to sit around and complain, in the absence of any big goal.