Until now, humans have had one significant advantage over computers and robots: We meatbags were the only ones who could teach them how to function. Now, researchers at Washington State University have created computers that can teach other computers. And they’re using Pac-Man to do it. Is nothing sacred?
     |
People have been working on the concept of an electronic cap to supercharge your brain’s learning ability for a while
| |
Humans have a knack for making visual associations, but computers don’t have it so easy; we often have to tell them what they see. Carnegie Mellon’s recently launched Never Ending Image Learner (NEIL) supercomputer bucks that trend by forming those connections itself. Building on the university’s earlier NELL research, the 200-core cluster scours the internet for images and defines objects based on the common attributes that it finds. It knows that buildings are frequently tall, for example, and that ducks look like geese. While NEIL is occasionally prone to making mistakes, it’s also transparent — a public page lets you see what it’s learning, and you can suggest queries if you think there’s a gap in the system’s logic. The project could eventually lead to computers and robots with a much better understanding of the world around them, even if they never quite gain human-like perception.
Via: TG Daily
Source: NEIL, Carnegie Mellon University
Have you ever been working on something, a special project or something outside the realm of normal day-to-day work stuff, and you find yourself totally stuck? As in, you have absolutely no idea what to do next? Google wants to help.
| |
A few months ago I talked about a Kickstarter project called the LightUp, an electronics kit for kids and newbies. Instead of wires or solder, LightUp uses magnets to connect the modules together. It turns out that there’s already a very similar product out on the market. It’s called littleBits, and it already has a growing number of modules and a healthy community.
Like LightUp, littleBits uses color-coded modules that easily snap together using magnets. Each module also has screen-printed labels that identify its parts. Unlike LightUp, littleBits uses the polarity of magnets to prevent you from sticking a module to another module the wrong way.
The modules are separated into four types: power, input, output and wire. The first three are self-explanatory, while the wire module is used to extend or branch out your circuit. Each type has multiple variants. For instance, there’s a USB and a coin battery power module, a button and a light sensor input module, an LED and a DC motor output module and more.
Head to littleBits’ online shop to order a kit. The base kit costs $99 (USD) and comes with 10 modules. You can also buy more modules separately.
Check out the littleBits website and their YouTube channel to see what customers have built with the kits.
[via Make:]
Udacity’s first partnership with an institution of higher learning might not have turned out as well as it hoped, but a setback at San Jose State University won’t cause the online learning portal to call it quits on college campuses. Quite the contrary, in fact. Today, Udacity announced the creation of the Open Education Alliance to “bridge the gap between the skills employers need and what traditional universities teach.” The alliance is comprised of both Silicon Valley heavyweights like Google, AT&T and NVIDIA and educators including Georgia Tech and Khan Academy. The OEA’s goal is to enlist the help of both companies and educators in building a new curriculum to help students learn what they need to choose and succeed in a modern career.
Here at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013, Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun and California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom discussed the need for a shift in our educational system, and consequently the OEA. “It’s important to be creative about this,” said Thrun, “we need to move away from an ‘industry of drones’ by enabling students to learn at their own speed.” Naturally, accomplishing this task requires a combination of Udacity’s online learning tools to give folks on-demand access to learning materials they need and a physical classroom environment to keep students on task. According to Newsom, “It’s not mass education anymore, it’s personalized.”
Source: Udacity blog, Open Education Alliance
Oh, education. So necessary, but so grueling. Particularly for oodles of grade-school instructors who are forced to swallow their fresh-out-of-college ambitions and fall into the system if they ever hope to level up in academia. We’ve seen glimmers of hope here and there, with certain schools getting outside of their comfort zones long enough to try new methodologies, and Pinterest’s latest project certainly holds a lot of promise. Teachers on Pinterest is a hub that showcases a variety of lesson plans and teaching tools, and through a partnership with Edutopia, it’s hoping to build out a full-bodied community for instructors. Hit up the source link below for a closer look, and remember: teachers rule.
Filed under: Software
Source: Pinterest Blog, Teachers on Pinterest
In Insert Coin, we look at an exciting new tech project that requires funding before it can hit production. If you’d like to pitch a project, please send us a tip with “Insert Coin” as the subject line.
Isn’t a baby monitor effectively a waste of technology? With a bit more thought and an operating system, couldn’t it do much more with its components than just scope your infant? That’s the premise behind Y Combinator-backed ixi-play, an Android-powered robot that just launched on the Crowdhoster crowdfunding platform. On top of Android 4.2, a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU, 1GB RAM and a 720p camera, the owlish ‘bot has face, card and object detection, voice recognition, a touch-sensor on the head, eye displays for animations, a tweeter/woofer speaker combo and child-proof “high robustness.” For motion, the team adopted a design used in flight simulators, giving ixi-play “agile and silent” 3-axis translation and rotation moves.
All that tech is in the service of one thing, of course: your precious snowflake. There are currently three apps for ixi-play: a baby monitor, language learning and animal-themed emotion cards. As the video shows (after the break), the latter app lets your toddler flash cards to the bot to make it move or emote via the eye displays, matching the anger or happiness shown on the card. In baby monitor mode, on top of sending a live (encoded) video stream to your tablet, it’ll also play soothing music and sing or talk your toddler to sleep. The device will also include an SDK that includes low-level motion control and vision programming, providing a way for developers to create more apps. As for pricing, you can snap one up starting at $299 for delivery around July 24th, 2014, provided the company meets its $957,000 funding goal (pledges are backed by Crowdtilt). That’s exactly the same price we saw recently for far less amusing-sounding baby monitor, so if you’re interested, hit the source.
Filed under: Robots
Source: Ixi-Play
San Jose State University’s online education pilot held the promise of real course credit without the hassles of attending class in person. It hasn’t worked that way in practice, however, and both SJSU as well as its partner Udacity have suspended their plans for fall courses. Quite simply, there have been too many flunkies so far — while 83 percent of students completed their sessions this spring, no more than 44 percent of any given class earned a passing grade. SJSU and Udacity will use the break to learn what went wrong and retool the program, although it’s not clear just when (or if) internet-based classes will resume. Online education is far from finished when similar for-credit trials have yet to begin; for now, though, SJSU students will have to drag themselves to the lecture hall.
Filed under: Internet
Source: LA Times
Earlier this year we heard about Lernstift, a concept for a pen that helps kids spell and write correctly by vibrating to point out mistakes. The folks behind this promising invention have now launched a fundraiser on Kickstarter. The questions I had when I first saw it remain unanswered though.
Inventor Falk Wolsky’s idea for the pen remains the same. Its basic functions are still to oversee the user’s spelling and the legibility of his handwriting. When it detects a mistake, it vibrates to alert the user. But with the launch of their fundraiser, Wolsky and his colleagues have revealed more about the hardware inside the pen. Lernstift has a motion sensor, a gyroscope, an accelerometer and a magnetometer. The pen’s processor will use these devices to create a 2D image of the user’s handwriting, which it will then analyze using a handwriting recognition software.
While the team is confident in the pen’s hardware, they’re still working on the best way to process the data that its sensors gather to ensure a quick and accurate response. They’ve also revealed that they’re not working on their own handwriting recognition engine and will instead license one from an established company. That should make it easier for Lernstift to be released and updated to support more languages; the pen will only be able to recognize English and German when it launches, but they supposedly have access to a database of over 40 languages.
Pledge at least £89 (~$135 USD) on Kickstarter to get a Lernstift as a reward. I have to say though, it’s not clear at the moment just how polished or far along they are with the pen. Notice how they didn’t demonstrate even the pen’s basic functions in their pitch video.
As I said in my previous post about the pen, I’m still not sold on its usefulness. It’s still not clear how it will help you find out the right spelling, form or grammar. Yes, it could buzz the moment you make a mistake, but what then? How do you find out what you’re supposed to do? I’m hopeful that Wolsky and his team will answer these questions soon. Also, do kids still use pens?
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
