Much as human intuition is far better than artificial intelligence in making sense of the world, people are far better at imagining thinking machines than actually making them. Now a large, ambitious team of AI researchers has launched a long-term research campaign to narrow both inequities, aiming unabashedly for a long-imagined grail of robotics: the personal aide.

“This encompasses the idea of broad competence intelligence,” says Andrew Ng, an assistant professor of computer science who is leading the new Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot (STAIR) project. “The goal is not to engineer one robot to solve a narrowly defined task but to create a single platform to perform a wide variety of tasks.”

The true-life realization of a robot with the intelligence to help around the house could deliver a tremendous benefit to the disabled or the elderly, Ng says. Rather than heading out into a cold, winter afternoon with her walker, an elderly woman could send STAIR to fetch her mail, for example. A STAIR success would also be a very big deal in research circles, because it requires advancing and integrating about a dozen subspecialties (e.g. language processing, machine vision, machine learning, and decision analysis) in the currently fragmented field of AI.

Big goals and baby steps
Take the example of a robot assistant fielding a request to fetch an object from a room in the house, the team’s nearest-term major goal for STAIR. “STAIR!” a future owner might bellow. “Could you bring the ‘I, Robot’ book from my bedroom? I think it’s on the nightstand or maybe the floor.” That simple request would set off a cascade of tasks that are intuitive for people but actually quite complicated if done with the explicit deliberation required in computers.

Here’s a rough idea of how STAIR could handle the question: First it would try to figure out what was asked, perhaps by finding the best match with patterns of stored template questions. Then it would want to recognize through a combination of face and voice recognition, who was asking, because that would dictate which bedroom to search. STAIR would know where itself and the bedroom were, based on its laser and video vision. It would then have to navigate to the bedroom safely, maybe using the lasers and vision sensors to dodge the cat along the way. Then STAIR would have to find an object that matched the appearance of a book (whether or not the suggested locations were correct). Prudent programming would require it to check whether the book it found was the correct one, perhaps by scanning the largest-print text, which is most likely to be the title. Of course, it would have to judge how to safely handle any objects that it wants to pick up and look under during its search.

“By 2008 we hope to have it fetch objects off the top of people’s desks, bookshelves, nightstands, or floors,” Ng says. “Searching under a pile of things to locate a specific object might take a bit longer, maybe five years.”

Leading up to these milestones, the researchers have more modest goals that would each be achievements in their own right. During STAIR’s toddlerhood they hope to enable the robot to go anywhere it pleases in the Gates Information Sciences Building, including opening doors and hitting appropriate elevator buttons. STAIR will then be expected to act as a messenger around the building before earning its promotion to gofer.

In the first few months of work, Ng and his team have built the first version of STAIR’s body (it uses a modified Segway Human Transporter to get around). They have also taught it to recognize and open four doors in the Gates building.

Over the next decade the researchers will strive to have STAIR meet three challenges — in addition to fetching objects — that are similarly mundane, useful and hard:

• Tidying up a living room after a party, including picking up and throwing away trash, and loading the dishwasher.
• Using multiple tools (e.g. a screwdriver, hammer, pliers) to assemble a bookshelf.
• Guiding guests around an active place such as a museum, research lab or other facility that changes daily, answering questions and keeping track of the group.

Read more: http://cs.stanford.edu/group/stair/index.php
Awesome Video Link: STAIR in Action

Electrical and Computer Engineering Graduate Student Hao-Chih Yuan holds a sample of a semiconductor film on plastic. (Large image)

New thin-film semiconductor techniques invented by UW-Madison engineers promise to add sensing, computing and imaging capability to an amazing array of materials.

Historically, the semiconductor industry has relied on flat, two-dimensional chips upon which to grow and etch the thin films of material that become electronic circuits for computers and other electronic devices. But as thin as those chips might seem, they are quite beefy in comparison to the result of a new University of Wisconsin-Madison semiconductor fabrication process detailed in the Journal of Applied Physics.

A team led by Electrical and Computer Engineering Assistant Professor Zhenqiang (Jack) Ma and Materials Science and Engineering Professor Max Lagally developed a process to remove a single-crystal film of semiconductor from the substrate on which it is built. This thin layer (only a couple of hundred nanometers thick) can be transferred to glass, plastic or other flexible materials, opening a wide range of possibilities for flexible electronics. In addition, the semiconductor film can be flipped as it is transferred to its new substrate, making its other side available for more components. This doubles the possible number of devices that can be placed on the film. By repeating the process, layers of double-sided, thin-film semiconductors can be stacked together, creating powerful, low-power, three-dimensional electronic devices.

“It’s important to note that these are single-crystal films of strained silicon or silicon germanium,” says Ma. “Strain is introduced in the way we form the membrane. Introducing strain changes the arrangement of atoms in the crystal such that we can achieve much faster device speed while consuming less power.”

For non-computer applications, flexible electronics is beginning to have significant impact. Solar cells, smart cards, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, medical applications, and active-matrix flat panel displays could all benefit from the development. The techniques could allow flexible semiconductors to be embedded in fabric to create wearable electronics or computer monitors that roll up like a window shade. “This is potentially a paradigm shift,” says Lagally. “The ability to create fast, low-power, multilayer electronics has many exciting applications. Silicon germanium membranes are particularly interesting. Germanium has a much higher adsorption for light than silicon. By including the germanium without destroying the quality of the material, we can achieve devices with two to three orders of magnitude more sensitivity.”

That increased sensitivity could be applied to create superior low-light cameras, or smaller cameras with greater resolution. Ma, Lagally, Materials Science and Engineering Assistant Professor Paul Evans, Physics Associate Professor Mark Eriksson, and graduate students Hao-Chih Yuan and Guogong Wang are patenting the new techniques through the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. The team’s work was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, the Department of Energy and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

In roughly four minutes, the UW-Madison Steel Bridge Team can construct an 18-foot-long bridge that easily holds 2,500 pounds.

That lightning-fast time is the product of hundreds of hours of preparation and hard work by a group that, for more than a decade, has been a regular National Student Steel Bridge Competition regional winner and national championship contender.

2005-06 Steel Bridge Team

The steel bridge competition challenges university teams around the country to design, fabricate, test and build a steel bridge within certain spatial and structural constraints. Teams strive to earn the lowest overall score based on their performance in six categories: bridge appearance and poster display, construction speed and time penalties, construction economy, lightness, stiffness, and structural efficiency.

For the 2007 competition, a fictitious state department of transportation is seeking to replace a century-old bridge that spans a river and adjacent floodway. Each team must design a 1:10 scale model and erect it under simulated field conditions to demonstrate its concept. At that scale, the river width is 9 feet; the bridge may be up to 4 feet wide and span between 18 and 20 feet.

Constructing the bridge during competition (Large image)

Among the restrictions: A single component, or “member,” can weigh no more than 20 pounds and may be no larger than 3 feet long by 6 inches square. During assembly, each member must connect directly to every member it touches by at least one steel bolt and hexagonal nut combination.

Construction takes place in a 95-by-15-foot area, including a 15-foot-square staging area on either end. The construction team, which can include up to six builders and one superintendent, may not cross the river while building the bridge.

The competition is fierce and the margin of error is very small. At the 2003 national competition, for example, the team placed in the top three in five of the six categories, yet missed a first-place finish by two seconds of construction time. In 2006, bridge deflection was greater than the group expected, yet the team scored well in other categories and took home a third-place finish—its second-best showing in the national competition since the event began in 1992.

Naturally, the team is excited about its design for the 2007 competition— particularly since it incorporates the fewest number of components possible. “It performs fairly similar to other ones with a lot more members,” says current team co-chair Adam Bechle, a civil and environmental engineering junior. “We picked this one because there wasn’t a huge difference in the structural stability.”

To simulate loads, weight and deflection, team members analyze the bridge using a computer program called SAP 2000. “We have hundreds of thousands of lines of data that it prints, and we figure out where we need to pull that data so that we can figure out the deflections we need,” he says.

While a civil engineering background is helpful for members hoping to shape the bridge design, the Steel Bridge Team is open to anyone, says Bechle. Team members learn how to operate machine-shop tools and fabricate small bridge parts, including connectors like sleeves, pins or dovetails. Per a broad interpretation of competition rules, such innovations circumvent the need for a time-consuming bolt-and-nut combination.

During the university winter break, about 10 students put in 12-hour days at Endres Manufacturing in Waunakee. The company purchases materials for the team and “loans” them an experienced welder and its machining facilities for a week. “We don’t know how we would fabricate the bridge if it weren’t for them,” says Bechle.

Once the bridge is finished, the “athletes” take over. Working initially for three or four hours on Saturday afternoons in the Engineering Centers Building, the construction crew choreographs the most efficient way to assemble the bridge. “We put painter’s tape on the floor and set up the yard exactly like it says in the rules,” says Bechle.

The crew first walks through the assembly, noting restrictions in the rules about how many people can be in the construction area at a time, where they can and cannot step, and how they can handle and place bridge members. By the time the builders have run through the assembly several times, they sprint into and out of the construction area like dancers in a wild musical production. Before the competition, these students will have assembled and disassembled their bridge more than 100 times.

In practice as well as in competition, their focus is unwavering and the intensity is high. It truly is a sport—and one that combines creativity, ingenuity and mental and physical agility, says Bechle. “You can win a national championship, whereas in high school sports, you can win a conference championship, or something like that,” he says. “Here, you’re competing against the best people in the nation.”

Bechle joined the team as a freshman and says a benefit of membership is that it has provided him a way to apply his engineering knowledge outside the classroom. The team’s culture of mentorship gave him an opportunity to learn from and now, to teach, his fellow students. In addition, he says, employers appreciate his leadership role. “If you’re looking for an engineering job, you’re going to be solving problems and working in teams,” he says. “You know—it’s exactly what you do here.”

Q: So what is chemical engineering anyway?

Chemical engineering is an integrative engineering discipline that ranges from the typical oil refinery industry to the recently rising pharmaceutical research, not to mention the food design industry as well! Contrary to the common belief, chemical engineers not only focus on the chemical aspect of production, but they also apply extensive math and physics into process/reactor designs.

Q: What real world applications does chemical engineering have?

Chemical engineering is well known for its flexibility. High demands for chemical engineers have ramified to many areas of marketing and production such as pharmaceuticals, high performance materials in the aerospace and automotive industries, semiconductors in the electronics industry, paints and plastics, petroleum refining, synthetic fibers, artificial organs, bio-compatible implants and prosthetics. Nowadays, chemical engineers are marching into the newly developing chemical sensors targeted for drug delivery, exciting environmental technologies, and the puzzling yet intriguing area of nanomaterials.

Q: What sort of classes do you take while studying chemical engineering?

The typical chemical engineering curriculum consists of heavy loads of advanced math and physics. Courses like fluid mechanics, heat and mass transfer, etc make up the gist of chemical engineering applications.

 

Q: What are typical career path taken after graduating with a degree in chemical engineering?

Although more than half of the chemical engineering graduates go on working for engineering firms, their options are not limited to pure engineering. In fact, the break down for rest can usually be categorized into graduate school, professional schools (include med and business schools), and other non-engineering related fields such as finance and marketing.

Despite where chemical engineering students might end up, the incredible skills that they have developed from the four years of rigorous training will enable them to outshine the others in any place, any discipline. Who knows, you might even end up working for Nabisco, coming up with their next hit cookie!

 

Hi, I’m a web developer/designer interested in cutting edge web technologies and interactive applications for mobile devices and kiosks. (Remember those funky touch screen glass panels in “Minority Report”?) I think that this is a perfect forum for other technophiles to share their brilliant research in the industry. There is no better way to excite the next generation than through sharing experiences.

Personally, I will be contributing to technizzel on the web technologies front. There are lots of exciting things going on right now and I look forward to keeping you all posted on where the web is going!

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