Surgical robots to provide open-source platform for medical robotics research

In a basement on the University of Washington campus perch seven identical robots. Named Raven, each has two winglike arms that end in tiny claws designed to perform surgery on a simulated patient.

Soon the robots will be flown to campuses across the country, where they will provide the first common research platform to develop the future of surgical robotics.

Mary Levin, UW Photography. Three of the seven Raven II robots. Each one has a pair of tiny hands that are controlled by a surgeon and can operate on a simulated patient.

DARPA's factory of the future looks like open source development

Ars Technica - DARPA Adaptive Vehicle Make project may reinvent manufacturing itself, and seed the workforce with a new generation of engineers who can "compile" innovations into new inventions without having to be tied to a manufacturing plant.

The Department of Defence is on a trend that is not far off from a tongue-in-cheek statement made by former Lockheed Martin president Norman Augustine—one of "Augustine's Laws"—that by 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase one aircraft.

Adaptive Vehicle Mak seeks to reduce the "product cycle" of defense systems from an average of almost 10 years down to two years—similar to the design cycle for new integrated circuits. To do that, DARPA is funding the development of software tools, called META, that will allow engineers to design, prototype and test systems collaboratively before they are ever built.

Google Plus changes expected and Facebook Database Challenges

1. Computerworld - Google will be pushing out changes to Google Plus this week.

* expect Google to tackle issues related to Google+ invites
* improved management of notifications
* and perhaps having circles within circles

Collaborhythm a technology platform to empower an individual to control their own health

The foundation of CollaboRhythm is a speech- and touch-controlled collaborative interface for the office where doctor and patient make shared decisions. Patients can actively engage with their data, so they can take action in their lives with doctors serving as coaches rather than commanders.

CollaboRhythm is a technology platform that enables a new paradigm of healthcare delivery; one where patients are empowered to become active participants and where doctors and other health professionals are transformed into real-time coaches. We believe that this radical shift in thinking is necessary to dramatically reduce healthcare costs, increase quality, and improve health outcomes.

Ben Goertzel interviewed about Artificial General Intelligence, Virtual Worlds and Transhumanism issues and his perspective

Part 1 of an interview by physorg with Ben Goertzel (AGI researcher)

Dr. Goertzel spoke with Critical Thought’s Stuart Mason Dambrot following his talk at the recent 2011 Transhumanism Meets Design Conference in New York City. His presentation, Designing Minds and Worlds, asked and answered the key questions, How can we design a world (virtual or physical) so that it supports ongoing learning and growth and ethical behavior? How can we design a mind so that it takes advantage of the affordances its world offers? These are fundamental issues that bridge AI, robotics, cyborgics, virtual world and game design, sociology and psychology and other areas. His talk addressed them from a cognitive systems theory perspective and discussed how they’re concretely being confronted in his current work applying the OpenCog Artificial General Intelligence system to control game characters in virtual worlds.

Interview: Dr. Ben Goertzel on Artificial General Intelligence, Transhumanism and Open Source (Part 2/2)

Google IO 2011 - Android rally, App Engine 1.5, Music Beta and more

At Google I/O 2011, the Android team shared some updates.

There are now:

* 100 million activated Android devices
* 400,000 new Android devices activated every day
* 200,000 free and paid applications available in Android Market
* 4.5 billion applications installed from Android Market

Android 3.1 update (new version of Android called Ice Cream Sandwich) to the Honeycomb tablet OS adds the ability to make an Android device a USB host.

Android 3.1's interface includes features such as a new scrolling list of apps for switching among them and resizable widgets. Existing widgets can be updated with new XML code to give them the new resizing abilities.

Google has launched Music Beta by Google, a new service that lets you upload your personal music collection to the cloud for streaming to your computer and Android devices

NoSQL, NewSQL highly scalable databases

“NewSQL” is the 451 Groups shorthand for the various new scalable/high performance SQL database vendors. They have previously referred to these products as ‘ScalableSQL’ to differentiate them from the incumbent relational database products. Since this implies horizontal scalability, which is not necessarily a feature of all the products, they adopted the term ‘NewSQL’ in a new report.

The new thing about the NewSQL vendors is the vendor, not the SQL.

So who would be consider to be the NewSQL vendors? Like NoSQL, NewSQL is used to describe a loosely-affiliated group of companies (ScaleBase has done a good job of identifying, some of the several NewSQL sub-types) but what they have in common is the development of new relational database products and services designed to bring the benefits of the relational model to distributed architectures, or to improve the performance of relational databases to the extent that horizontal scalability is no longer a necessity.

The International Exascale Software Project Roadmap

The International Exascale Software Project (IESP) Roadmap (85 pages)

Over the last twenty years, the open source community has provided more and more software on which the world’s High Performance Computing (HPC) systems depend for performance and productivity. The community has invested millions of dollars and years of effort to build key components. But although the investments in these separate software elements have been tremendously valuable, a great deal of productivity has also been lost because of the lack of planning, coordination, and key integration of technologies necessary to make them work together smoothly and efficiently, both within individual PetaScale systems and between different systems. It seems clear that this completely uncoordinated development model will not provide the software needed to support the unprecedented parallelism required for peta/exascale computation on millions of cores, or the flexibility required to exploit new hardware models and features, such as transactional memory, speculative execution, and GPUs. This report describes the work of the community to prepare for the challenges of exascale computing, ultimately combing their efforts in a coordinated International Exascale Software Project.

After 31 Years Goodbye to BIOS and Hello to Faster Booting Computers in 2011 with UEFI

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The age of the Bios was starting to hamper development as 64-bit computing became more common and machines mutated beyond basic desktops and laptops.

Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) frees any computer from being based around the blueprint and specifications of the original PCs. For instance, it does not specify that a keyboard will only connect via a specific port. UEFI should be in most computers in 2011. BIOS tends to take a long time to recognise hardware peripherals on modern computers, effectively operating in the same way it did with older machines

"At the moment it can be 25-30 seconds of boot time before you see the first bit of OS sign-on," he said. "With UEFI we're getting it under a handful of seconds."

Rethinking Financial Regulation: Simple Transparency, Open Source and XML

Even if you have open access to current public information, the warehouse with the Lost Ark of Indiana Jones is not simply transparent. We need open public policing of the financial system. Creating an empowered social network where the community of investors can help protect each other from being ripped off. Empowering a global financial neighborhood watch. Wired Magazine publishes a specific open regulation proposal.


The SEC's public document database, Edgar, now catalogs 200 gigabytes of filings each year—roughly 15 million pages of text—up from 35 gigabytes a decade ago.

But the volume of data obscures more than it reveals; financial reporting has become so transparent as to be invisible. Answering what should be simple questions—how secure is my cash account? How much of my bank's capital is tied up in risky debt obligations?—often seems to require a legal degree, as well as countless hours to dig through thousands of pages of documents. Undoubtedly, the warning signs of our current crisis—and the next, are online somewhere in all those filings, but good luck finding them.

1. We must require public companies and all financial firms to report more granular data online—and in real time, not just quarterly—uniformly tagged and exportable into any spreadsheet, database, widget, or Web page. The era of sunlight has to give way to the era of pixelization; only when we give everyone the tools to see each point of data will the picture become clear.

Banks have to issue Free Writing Prospectus (FWP) Every bank that issues mortgage-backed securities—pools of home loans packaged together and sold as a single entity—is required to file a free writing prospectus, which lists every individual mortgage in each pool. An FWP contains endless columns of pure data, most of which don't even track from page to page. And each FWP is different. It took five professionals three months to take FWP data and standardize it so that it could be comparable. The result of that work is private. It is only for the use of the company who hired thos professionals so that the hiring company has an edge.

2. Today, nearly 50 companies report their information in XBRL to the SEC. XBRL stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language. It is a version of XML.






A few years ago, when banking regulators started requiring filings in XBRL from its member banks, it found that the time it took auditors to review a bank's quarterly financial information dropped from about 70 days to two. More regulators are catching on: Last December, the SEC announced that by June, every company with a market capitalization over $5 billion will be required to submit all filings using the format. And all publicly traded companies and mutual funds must follow suit by 2011.

Open Source Lending Enables Lower Default

Lending Club provides the data on its customers and posted the formula it uses to measure default risk and determine the interest rates its borrowers had to pay. After receiving a slew of suggestions, the site's engineers decided to modify the equation, assigning less weight to debt-to-income ratio, for instance. LendingClub's default rate is a staggeringly low 2.7 percent (versus nearly 5.5 percent for prime credit cards).


FURTHER READING
XBRL is a language for the electronic communication of business and financial data which is revolutionising business reporting around the world. It provides major benefits in the preparation, analysis and communication of business information. It offers cost savings, greater efficiency and improved accuracy and reliability to all those involved in supplying or using financial data.

XBRL stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language. It is one of a family of "XML" languages which is becoming a standard means of communicating information between businesses and on the internet.