U.S. Tests a Lie Detector-Type Machine for Interrogations on the Mexican Border. A technology designed to ‘read’ your body’s intent finds new life on the Mexican border, as officials test a kiosk that uses an avatar to conduct interrogations. A Center for Investigative Reporting exclusive. Imagine you decide to take a casual trip to Mexico, walking across the border for a day of shopping or even cheap dental care that’s not available in the United States. Upon your return, an officer from Customs and Border Protection directs you to a kiosk that looks like an ATM. You’re instructed to press "start" and answer any question the machine asks. Are you carrying anything destructive in your bag?
This Max Headroom interrogation sounds far-fetched, but just such an experiment is occurring on the border in Nogales, Ariz., using a variation of technology the Department of Homeland Security has been pursuing for years. The avatar records the answers and forwards them to a tablet handled by one of the blue-uniformed officers. “Also, this is very inefficient,” McCall says. How to Teach a Robot to Improvise. Self-piloted drones have become sophisticated enough to land on moving aircraft carriers, but put a single unexpected tree in the way, and they will crash. Now a five-university group that includes specialists in biology, computer vision and robotics is trying to teach drones to dodge obstacles on the fly. Working with $7.5 million from the Office of Naval Research, the scientists aim to build an autonomous, fixed-wing surveillance drone that can navigate through an unfamiliar city or forest at 35 miles an hour.
The group's inspiration is the pigeon. Hardy, plentiful and receptive to training, the birds are easy to study. In flight, they estimate the distance between themselves and objects ahead by quickly processing blurry, low-resolution images, just as a drone will need to do. And, crucially, they have a tendency to make decisions at the last moment—within five feet of an obstacle. The first step is to teach robots to differentiate between obstacles and empty space.
Disney Researchers Develop New Physical Face Cloning Method. Disney researchers have created a new physical face cloning method. The automatic process designs, simulates, and fabricates synthetic skin. Disney Researchers says creating animatronic copies of real human individuals is currently a "difficult and labor-intensive process requiring the manual work of skilled animators, material designers and mechanical engineers. " Researchers at Disney Research, Zürich, ETH Zürich, and Walt Disney Imagineering R&D have developed a new computational design process for cloning human faces they say could great simplify and speed up the process. To deliver realistic performances, animatronic characters, like those in the Hall of Presidents attraction at Walt Disney World, must produce a vast range of facial expressions, each having different deformations and wrinkles. Manually designing the shape and material properties of a single skin that is able to achieve all of these targets is a complex and challenging task.
Dr. Take a look: Meshworm: Autonomous Robot Moves Like Earthworm. Meshworm: Autonomous Robot Moves Like Earthworm. Nossidge • i am the path along unseen heather Snowball... Computer beats human pro at Japanese chess. Humanity lost a little more ground to machines last weekend, in case you're counting down the days to when Skynet takes charge of the planet. A computer defeated a professional Japanese chess (shogi) player for the first time in a public match, Kyodo News tells us grimly. A program called Ponanza, developed by Issei Yamamoto, took down 30-year-old Shinichi Sato on Saturday in the Shogi Master Versus Machine Match.
Sato was doing well until he made mistakes midway through the game. While retired master Kunio Yonenaga had been defeated by a program called Bonkras that was developed by a programmer at Fujitsu Labs, the weekend bout was the first loss to a machine by an active pro. Ponanza is one of five programs that won top spots in last year's World Computer Shogi Championship. The programs have been competing against five human pros in a series that continues on April 6. Shogi is played on an unmarked 9x9 board with two sides of 20 pieces each including kings, rooks, bishops, and generals.