Cosmic Rays Can 3D-Scan Nuclear Reactors

 Scanning reactors in 3D.  For analysis, maintenance.

Cosmic Rays Can 3D-Scan Nuclear Reactors

IEEE Spectrum.Charles Q. Choi, February 8, 2023

Researchers at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission found that muography can be used to generate three-dimensional (3D) images of the internal structures of nuclear reactors. Muography, which involves capturing muons (particles generated by cosmic rays hitting Earth's atmosphere) as they pass through an object, previously was limited to producing two-dimensional (2D) images of complex objects. The researchers used muography to scan the G2 reactor in Marcoule, France, using four muon telescopes. They produced 27 scans from over 20 locations around the reactor, then employed a tomography reconstruction algorithm to assemble the 2D scans into a 3D map of the reactor's internal structure, which closely matched known models of the reactor in terms of dimensions and shapes.

Full Article  

Deep Learning Can’t be Trusted

Deep Learning Can’t be Trusted,  Brain Modelling Pioneer Says Stephen Grossberg explains why his ART model is better  in Spectrum  IEEE

By  KATHY PRETZ During the past 20 years, deep learning has come to dominate artificial intelligence research and applications through a series of useful commercial applications. But underneath the dazzle are some deep-rooted problems that threaten the technology’s ascension.

The inability of a typical deep learning program to perform well on more than one task, for example, severely limits application of the technology to specific tasks in rigidly controlled environments. More seriously, it has been claimed that deep learning is untrustworthy because it is not explainable—and unsuitable for some applications because it can experience catastrophic forgetting. Said more plainly, if the algorithm does work, it may be impossible to fully understand why. And while the tool is slowly learning a new database, an arbitrary part of its learned memories can suddenly collapse. It might therefore be risky to use deep learning on any life-or-death application, such as a medical one.

Now, in a new book, IEEE Fellow Stephen Grossberg argues that an entirely different approach is needed. Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: How Each Brain Makes a Mind describes an alternative model for both biological and artificial intelligence based on cognitive and neural research Grossberg has been conducting for decades. He calls his model Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART).

Grossberg—an endowed professor of cognitive and neural systems, and of mathematics and statistics, psychological and brain sciences, and biomedical engineering at Boston University—based ART on his theories about how the brain processes information.

“Our brains learn to recognize and predict objects and events in a changing world that is filled with unexpected events,” he says.

Based on that dynamic, ART uses supervised and unsupervised learning methods to solve such problems as pattern recognition and prediction. Algorithms using the theory have been included in large-scale applications such as classifying sonar and radar signals, detecting sleep apnea, recommending movies, and computer-vision-based driver-assistance software.

ART can be used with confidence because it is explainable and does not experience catastrophic forgetting, Grossberg says. He adds that ART solves what he has called the stability-plasticity dilemma: How a brain or other learning system can autonomously learn quickly (plasticity) without experiencing catastrophic forgetting (stability).

An illustration of a brain over a blue and red checkered pattern.  

Grossberg, who formulated ART in 1976, is a pioneer in modelling how brains become intelligent. He is the founder and director of Boston University’s Center for Adaptive Systems and the founding director of the Center of Excellence for Learning in Education, Science, and Technology. Both centers have sought to understand how the brain adapts and learns, and to develop technological applications based on their findings. .... ;

Communicating Blockchains

Intriguing statement and challenge, following up.

 An illustration of fragmented blockchains. How Can We Get Blockchains to Talk to Each Other?

IEEE Spectrum, Edd Gent, December 3, 2021

Stefan Schulte and colleagues at Austria's Vienna University of Technology are exploring communication between blockchains. The researchers developed a potential solution that relies on blockchain relays, smart contracts operating on one blockchain that can confirm events on another. The researchers have come up with an on-demand verification system, in which the relay assumes transactions between blockchains are valid unless they are disputed. Fraudulent submissions are discouraged because third parties must offer a cryptocurrency stake to participate, which disputants can seize if they prove invalidity. ... '

IEEE Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame.

A long list with images from the 60s to the present of consumer electronic devices that can be seen as forerunners of those we use today.   And some we still use today.   An inspirational list.   Made me think of what to expect in a future list, 

IEEE Spectrum

Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame

The Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years

Over the past half century, countless consumer devices have charmed, muscled, or seduced their way into our lives. Among these gadgets, a select few can be called great. Some of them started a new product category, others dazzled with their engineering; still others fundamentally changed the way we worked or played. Or they simply made it hard for us to remember what life was like without them. A couple of them—the smartphone, the personal computer—did all of the above.

What they had in common was that they emerged from a moment of communal genius among electrical engineers, industrial designers, product visionaries, and others. In this report, we celebrate those moments. And where we can, we honor the people who made them possible. .... ' 

IBM Makes Encryption Paradox Practical in IEEE Spectrum

More on FHE and IBM.   From IEEE Spectrum ... 

IBM Makes Encryption Paradox Practical  in IEEE Spectrum

“Fully homomorphic” cryptography allows partial access to digital vaults without ever opening their locks    By Dan Garisto

How do you access the contents of a safe without ever opening its lock or otherwise getting inside? This riddle may seem confounding, but its digital equivalent is now so solvable that it’s becoming a business plan. 

IBM is the latest innovator to tackle the well-studied cryptographic technique called fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), which allows for the processing of encrypted files without ever needing to decrypt them first. Earlier this month, in fact, Big Blue introduced an online demo for companies to try out with their own confidential data. IBM’s FHE protocol is inefficient, but it’s workable enough still to give users a chance to take it for a spin. 

Today’s public cloud services, for all their popularity, nevertheless typically present a tacit tradeoff between security and utility. To secure data, it must stay encrypted; to process data, it must first be decrypted. Even something as simple as a search function has required data owners to relinquish security to providers whom they may not trust.

Yet with a workable and reasonably efficient FHE system, even the most heavily encrypted data can still be securely processed. A customer could, for instance, upload their encrypted genetic data to a website, have their genealogy matched and sent back to them—all without the company ever knowing anything about their DNA or family tree. 

At the beginning of 2020, IBM reported the results of a test with a Brazilian bank, which showed that FHE could be used for a task as complex as machine learning. Using transaction data from Banco Bradesco, IBM trained two models—one with FHE and one with unencrypted data—to make predictions such as when customers would need loans.

Even though the data was encrypted, the FHE scheme made predictions with accuracy equal to the unencrypted model. Other companies, such as Microsoft and Google have also invested in the technology and developed open-source toolkits that allow users to try out FHE. These software libraries, however, are difficult to implement for anyone but a cryptographer, a problem IBM hopes to remedy with its new service.           

“This announcement right now is really about making that first level very consumable for the people [who] are maybe not quite as crypto-savvy,” said Michael Osborne, a security researcher at IBM.

One of the problems with bringing FHE to market is that it must be tailor-made for each situation. What works for Banco Bradesco can’t necessarily be transferred seamlessly over to Bank of America, for example.   .... "

Sensing the Household

Talk about potential  invasions of privacy ....  note the use of multiple sensors and analyses

Household Radar Can See Through Walls and Knows How You’re Feeling

Modern wireless tech isn’t just for communications. It can also sense a person’s breathing and heart rate, even gauge emotions   By Fadel Adib in IEEE Spectrum

When I was a boy, I secretly hoped I would discover latent within me some amazing superpower—say, X-ray vision or the ability to read people’s minds. Lots of kids have such dreams. But even my fertile young brain couldn’t imagine that one day I would help transform such superpowers into reality. Nor could I conceive of the possibility that I would demonstrate these abilities to the president of the United States. And yet two decades later, that’s exactly what happened.

There was, of course, no magic or science fiction involved, just new algorithms and clever engineering, using wireless technology that senses the reflections of radio waves emanating from a nearby transmitter. The approach my MIT colleagues and I are pursuing relies on inexpensive equipment that is easy to install—no more difficult than setting up a Wi-Fi router. ... '

Hyundai Buys Boston Dynamics

More on this, implications?  From what I have seen the largely remotely operated tele-robotic systems have particular value in remote security and remote data and information gathering and analysis.   Adding a particularly impactful remote presence.  Much more in the article below:

Hyundai Buys Boston Dynamics for Nearly $1 Billion. Now What?    in IEEE Spectrum By Evan Ackerman

Boston Dynamics contemplates its future as it gets swallowed (again) by a giant corporation  

Boston Dynamics, once owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet, and then by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, now belongs to South Korean carmaker Hyundai.  .... '

Electronic Skin Generates its Own Power

 A useful play. 

Solar-based Electronic Skin Generates Its Own Power 

IEEE Spectrum Payal Dhar December 13, 2020 

 Researchers from the U.K.'s University of Glasgow have created an energy-generating electronic skin (eSkin) from miniaturized solar cells that can deliver tactile perceptions for touch and proximity sensing without the use of dedicated touch sensors. The eSkin's solar cells produce energy in response to light; in proximity mode, light intensity indicates an object's distance from a cell, with infrared LEDs incorporated to improve proximity sensing. Proof-of-concept tests with an eSkin-wrapped three-dimensionally-printed robotic hand found an energy surplus of 383.3 milliwatts generated from the palm of the robotic arm. Glasgow's Ra    ... 

Bigger Robots: Air Giants

Have taken a look at small robots for a long time,  especially as they are used in groups,  but this look at larger forms is also of interest.

Video Friday: These Giant Robots Are Made of Air, Fabric

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos

By Evan Ackerman, Erico Guizzo and Fan Shi

Luma, is a towering 8 metre snail which transforms spaces with its otherworldly presence. Another piece, Triffid, stands at 6 metres and its flexible end sweeps high over audiences’ heads like an enchanted plant. The movement of the creatures is inspired by the flexible, wiggling and contorting motions of the animal kingdom and is designed to provoke instinctive reactions and emotions from the people that meet them. Air Giants is a new creative robotic studio founded in 2020. They are based in Bristol, UK, and comprise a small team of artists, roboticists and software engineers. The studio is passionate about creating emotionally effective motion at a scale which is thought-provoking and transporting, as well as expanding the notion of what large robots can be used for.  ... " 

Germany's Energiewende

 As a native, a keen watcher of German energy efforts.   I remember all the windmills sprouting in the 90s.   Here a good overview in IEEE Spectrum. 

Germany's Energiewende, 20 Years Later

Germany's far-reaching program to reduce the share of fossil fuels in energy has achieved almost exactly what the United States achieved, but at greater expense

By Vaclav Smil

In 2000, Germany launched a deliberately targeted program to decarbonize its primary energy supply, a plan more ambitious than anything seen anywhere else. The policy, called the Energiewende, is rooted in Germany’s naturalistic and romantic tradition, reflected in the rise of the Green Party and, more recently, in public opposition to nuclear electricity generation. These attitudes are not shared by the country’s two large neighbors: France built the world’s leading nuclear industrial complex with hardly any opposition, and Poland is content burning its coal.

The policy worked through the government subsidization of renewable electricity generated with photovoltaic cells and wind turbines and by burning fuels produced by the fermentation of crops and agricultural waste. It was accelerated in 2011 when Japan’s nuclear disaster in Fukushima led the German government to order that all its nuclear power plants be shut down by 2022.  .... " 

Holographic Video Display for Mobile Phones

 New directions for display on mobile phone, multi dimensional?  Implications for typical phone tasks?  Advanced marketing?Sounds impressive.

Thin Holographic Video Display for Mobile Phones

IEEE Spectrum, Charles Q. Choi

At South Korea's Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, researchers have invented a method for creating a thin holographic video display that may eventually enable 4K three-dimensional videos on mobile phones. The display has a special backlight with a beam deflector that can tilt the angles of coherent light beams from laser diodes, expanding the viewing angle 30-fold without increasing the number of pixels required. The Samsung researchers also used a slim geometric phase lens to gather scattered light from the pixels, shrinking the optical components' thickness to just 1 centimeter. The display’s single-chip holographic video processor can perform about 140 billion operations per second to generate 4K holographic color images at a speed of 30 frames per second.  ... 

Causality is Important for Machine Learning

Have always thought causal thinking and learning was a major consideration for the future of AI in general.  Here a step in the right direction.  But overall its still a hard question.

Understanding Causality Is the Next Challenge for Machine Learning

Teaching robots to understand "why" could help them transfer their knowledge to other environments  By Payal Dhar

“Causality is very important for the next steps of progress of machine learning,” said Yoshua Bengio, a Turing Award-wining scientist known for his work in deep learning, in an interview with IEEE Spectrum in 2019. So far, deep learning has comprised learning from static datasets, which makes AI really good at tasks related to correlations and associations. However, neural nets do not interpret cause-and effect, or why these associations and correlations exist. Nor are they particularly good at tasks that involve imagination, reasoning, and planning. This, in turn, limits AI from being able to generalize their learning and transfer their skills to another related environment.

The lack of generalization is a big problem, says Ossama Ahmed, a master’s student at ETH Zurich who has worked with Bengio’s team to develop a robotic benchmarking tool for causality and transfer learning. “Robots are [often] trained in simulation, and then when you try to deploy [them] in the real world…they usually fail to transfer their learned skills. One of the reasons is that the physical properties of the simulation are quite different from the real world,” says Ahmed. The group’s tool, called CausalWorld, demonstrates that with some of the methods currently available, the generalization capabilities of robots aren’t good enough—at least not to the extent that “we can deploy [them] safely in any arbitrary situation in the real world,” says Ahmed.

The paper on CausalWorld   , available as a preprint, describes benchmarks in a simulated robotics manipulation environment using the open-source TriFinger robotics platform. The main purpose of CausalWorld is to accelerate research in causal structure and transfer learning using this simulated environment, where learned skills could potentially be transferred to the real world. Robotic agents can be given tasks that comprise pushing, stacking, placing, and so on, informed by how children have been observed to play with blocks and learn to build complex structures. There is a large set of parameters, such as weight, shape, and appearance of the blocks and the robot itself, on which the user can intervene at any point to evaluate the robot’s generalization capabilities. ...  '

Behold the Openbot Smart Phone

 A curious and interesting thing.  Strap a smartphone to some wheels and sensors, and you have an OpenBot.  Is it a toy, a test platform, an indication where Intel is going?

How Intel's OpenBot Wants to Make Robots Out of Smartphones  in SpectrumIEEE

Intel talks to us about why OpenBot has a future we should believe in:

You could make a pretty persuasive argument that the smartphone represents the single fastest area of technological progress we’re going to experience for the foreseeable future. Every six months or so, there’s something with better sensors, more computing power, and faster connectivity. Many different areas of robotics are benefiting from this on a component level, but over at Intel Labs, they’re taking a more direct approach with a project called OpenBot that turns US $50 worth of hardware and your phone into a mobile robot that can support “advanced robotics workloads such as person following and real-time autonomous navigation in unstructured environments.”    ... " 

GM Can Manage an EV's Batteries Wirelessly and Remotely

Seems quite a considerable improvement of automotive battery use and management for electric vehicles.

Exclusive: GM Can Manage an EV's Batteries Wirelessly—and Remotely

The new system eliminates the rat's nest of wiring and collects information that can be used to design better batteries.   By Lawrence Ulrich

When the battery dies in your smartphone, what do you do? You complain bitterly about its too-short lifespan, even as you shell out big bucks for a new device. 

Electric vehicles can’t work that way: Cars need batteries that last as long as the vehicles do. One way of getting to that goal is by keeping close tabs on every battery in every EV, both to extend a battery’s life and to learn how to design longer-lived successors.

IEEE Spectrum got an exclusive look at General Motors’ wireless battery management system. It’s a first in any EV anywhere (not even Tesla has one). The wireless technology, created with Analog Devices, Inc., will be standard on a full range of GM EVs, with the company aiming for at least 1 million global sales by mid-decade. 

Those vehicles will be powered by GM’s proprietary Ultium batteries, produced at a new US $2.3 billion plant in Ohio, in partnership with South Korea’s LG Chem.    ... " 

Modernizing Legacy Code with AI

Done a lot of this, can have surprisingly big value, even finding latent bugs along the way.  

IBM Watson's Next Challenge: Modernize Legacy Code  in Spectrum IEEE

IBM Research's Chief Scientist Ruchir Puri says Watson AIOps can take on the tedious tasks of software maintenance so human coders can innovate    By Dexter Johnson

IBM’s initiatives into artificial intelligence have served as bellwethers for how AI helps us re-imagine computing, but also how it can transform the industries to which it is applied. There was no more clear a demonstration of AI’s capability than when IBM had its Watson supercomputer defeat all the human champions in the game show Jeopardy.

The years that followed that success back in 2011, however, were years of struggle for IBM to find avenues for Watson to turn its game-show success into commercially viable problem solving. For example, attempts to translate that problem-solving capability to medical diagnosis has been fraught with challenges. .... " 

Ceiling Mounted Home Robotics

 An areas we looked at closely to augment smart home studies.  Placing robot arms in key positions was a common solution to ambulatory examples. Note unpredictability of homes. Especially for eldercare applications.  Have not seen this mentioned in a long time.

Toyota Research Demonstrates Ceiling-Mounted Home Robot   Toyota seems to be engaged.

This prototype manipulator is just one of the cool robots that TRI has been working on  By Evan Ackerman

One of the robots Toyota demonstrated was a gantry robot that would hang from the ceiling to perform tasks like wiping surfaces and clearing clutter.

Gill Pratt Discusses Toyota’s AI Plans and the Future of Robots and Cars

CES 2020: Toyota Is Building an Entire City Full of Autonomous Cars and Robots

Over the last several years, Toyota has been putting more muscle into forward-looking robotics research than just about anyone. In addition to the Toyota Research Institute (TRI), there’s that massive 175-acre robot-powered city of the future that Toyota still plans to build next to Mount Fuji. Even Toyota itself acknowledges that it might be crazy, but that’s just how they roll—as TRI CEO Gill Pratt told me a while back, when Toyota decides to do something, they really do go all-in on it.

TRI has been focusing heavily on home robots, which is reflective of the long-term nature of what TRI is trying to do, because home robots are both the place where we’ll need robots the most at the same time as they’re the place where it’s going to be hardest to deploy them. The unpredictable nature of homes, and the fact that homes tend to have squishy fragile people in them, are robot-unfriendly characteristics, but as the population continues to age (an increasingly acute problem in Japan), homes offer an enormous amount of potential for helping us maintain our independence.... "

Drug Discovery When it Matters

 Also an interesting story about how collaboration can work.

Can AI and Automation Deliver a COVID-19 Antiviral While It Still Matters? Researchers are betting that new tools can cut drug discovery from five years to six month.  By Megan Scudellari

Within moments of meeting each other at a conference last year, Nathan Collins and Yann Gaston-Mathé began devising a plan to work together. Gaston-Mathé runs a startup that applies automated software to the design of new drug candidates. Collins leads a team that uses an automated chemistry platform to synthesize new drug candidates.

“There was an obvious synergy between their technology and ours,” recalls Gaston-Mathé, CEO and cofounder of Paris-based Iktos.  In late 2019, the pair launched a project to create a brand-new antiviral drug that would block a specific protein exploited by influenza viruses. Then the COVID-19 pandemic erupted across the world stage, and Gaston-Mathé and Collins learned that the viral culprit, SARS-CoV-2, relied on a protein that was 97 percent similar to their influenza protein. The partners pivoted.

Their companies are just two of hundreds of biotech firms eager to overhaul the drug-discovery process, often with the aid of artificial intelligence (AI) tools. The first set of antiviral drugs to treat COVID-19 will likely come from sifting through existing drugs. Remdesivir, for example, was originally developed to treat Ebola, and it has been shown to speed the recovery of hospitalized COVID-19 patients. But a drug made for one condition often has side effects and limited potency when applied to another. If researchers can produce an ­antiviral that specifically targets SARS-CoV-2, the drug would likely be safer and more effective than a repurposed drug.

There’s one big problem: Traditional drug discovery is far too slow to react to a pandemic. Designing a drug from scratch typically takes three to five years—and that’s before human clinical trials. “Our goal, with the combination of AI and automation, is to reduce that down to six months or less,” says Collins, who is chief strategy officer at SRI Biosciences, a division of the Silicon Valley research nonprofit SRI International. “We want to get this to be very, very fast.”   ... " 

Palm Sized Robotics

More in the space of miniature robotics, that could ultimately be brought together to do tasks.

Video Friday: Bittle Is a Palm-Sized Robot Dog Now on Kickstarter

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos  By Evan Ackerman, Erico Guizzo and Fan Shi   ....

Advances in Splitting Water into Hydrogen/Oxygen efficiently

This could be a very big deal, considerable details at the link.  Had a job in a chem lab long ago that looked at this problem. 

Researchers develop a solar tech that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen with record efficiency   By Mark Anderson   in IEEE Spectrum

Israeli and Italian scientists have developed a renewable energy technology that converts solar energy to hydrogen fuel — and it’s reportedly at the threshold of “practical” viability.

The new solar tech would offer a sustainable way to turn water and sunlight into storable energy for fuel cells, whether that stored power feeds into the electrical grid or goes to fuel-cell powered trucks, trains, cars, ships, planes or industrial processes. ... '

More Japanese Humanoid Robotics

Why humanoid?  Impressive look and restocking a key retail problem.  Telepresence example.  In IEEE Spectrum

Video Friday: This Robot Will Restock Shelves at Japanese Convenience Stores

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos

By Evan Ackerman, Erico Guizzo and Fan Shi

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!):...   (events at the link) 

Tokyo startup Telexistence has recently unveiled a new robot called the Model-T, an advanced teleoperated humanoid that can use tools and grasp a wide range of objects. Japanese convenience store chain FamilyMart plans to test the Model-T to restock shelves in up to 20 stores by 2022. In the trial, a human “pilot” will operate the robot remotely, handling items like beverage bottles, rice balls, sandwiches, and bento boxes. ... "