Month: May 2015

When natural disasters like the earthquakes in Nepal or the volcano eruption in Chile occur, one of the most pressing issues hindering rescue efforts is the loss of electricity.
A senior design project completed by three students in the College of Engineering may help bring power back quicker to those dealing with the aftermath.
Project leader Andre Lima Siuffo, Marisol Contreras and Kevin Gregorio designed and built a portable and low-cost renewable system that utilizes both solar electric and wind electric technologies to generate power.
With support from professors Andres Tremante and Sabri Tosunoglu, the system Siuffo and his team created uses a wind turbine and solar panel that work in tandem to charge a battery bank that can be used to provide electricity.
“One of the main purposes of the project was to prove that it is technically very easy to build a hybrid system and it’s not expensive at all,” said Siuffo, a mechanical engineering major graduating this summer.
The hybrid system is capable of producing 1.5 kilowatthours (kWh) per day. While not enough to power an average American household, which uses around 30 kWh per day, these portable systems can be particularly useful in remote areas and emergency situations.
The ability to power laptops, light bulbs, hot plates and other devices with consistent and continuous energy is critical in areas ravaged by disaster. Multiple units used together can potentially help relief teams in natural disaster situations provide electricity to perform a wide range of essential services.
“The capacity to generate this much power can be lifesaving in many situations,” Siuffo said. “We wanted to find a balance between producing power and maintaining portability.”
With each unit weighing about 250 pounds, they can be transported on pickup trucks and assembled and disassembled in a matter of minutes.
While similar systems normally run between $5,000 and $10,000 per unit, Siuffo and his team were able to create a fully functional prototype for approximately $1,700.
Tremante and the senior design team that built the power system hope that with support from the private sector, these prototypes can one day be produced commercially.
“We want to bridge the gap between the university and the industry through sustainable development projects,” Tremante said.

References:http://phys.org/

IT’S humans versus machine at the Rivers casino in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Four professional poker players are squaring up to an artificial intelligence over two weeks, duking it out by playing a total of 80,000 hands of poker for a $100,000 cash prize.

This may turn out to be the latest instalment in a grand tradition of computers beating us at our own games. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue computer famously beat chess great Garry Kasparov. Four years ago, IBM’s Watson took part in the TV quiz show Jeopardy! and crushed two contestants with a strong track record. AI has even mastered the popular smartphone game 2048.

Still, poker is a tough nut to crack. In a game like chess, everyone knows where all the pieces are on the board. By contrast, poker is a game of imperfect information: players don’t know for sure what cards the others hold or what will come up next in the deck. That makes it a challenge for any player, human or computer, to choose the right play.

Computer scientists have already made some progress, at least with simpler forms of the game. But the version being played at the Pittsburgh tournament, called Heads Up No Limit Texas Hold ’em, is “a completely different beast”, says pro player Vanessa Selbst. “There’s much more human elements and game strategies to employ, so it’s a much more complex game.” What’s more, there are no betting limits, so the computer also has to take into account how much players might stake on each game.

Competing in Pittsburgh is Claudico, a program created at the city’s Carnegie Mellon University. Claudico taught itself poker skills by playing trillions of games in search of some kind of optimal strategy. Whatever it has picked is pretty good: last year, Claudico beat all 13 other computer competitors at no-limit poker in the annual contest run by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

Computers have a few edges over humans, says graduate student Noam Brown, part of the team behind Claudico. For example, a computer can switch randomly between various betting strategies, which may confuse human opponents.

On the other hand, Claudico is slow to pick up on and adapt to people’s playing styles – something that many pro players do with ease. “One of our big concerns is that the human will be able to identify weaknesses that Claudico has and exploit them,” says Brown.

Because Claudico taught itself to play, even the team that built it don’t quite know how it picks its moves. “We’re putting our faith in Claudico. It knows much better than we do what it’s doing.”

Algorithms like those used to play poker could be valuable for other kinds of problems characterised by imperfect information. They could suggest optimal locations for military resources in a war, for example. Rival AIs could also be tasked to negotiate with each other over insurance rates or handle legal squabbles. “In society, sometimes you see one side getting screwed over because someone has more lawyers or more information or more resources at their disposal,” says Brown. “Something like this can really level the playing field.”

The winner of the poker tournament won’t be crowned until the event ends on 7 May. Eric Jackson, a software engineer who creates poker bots as a hobby, is cautiously optimistic that Claudico can win. As we went to press, the pros and Claudico were neck and neck.

Even if AI triumphs, it won’t mean programmers have conquered the game. “Beating humans decisively would be a landmark, but it wouldn’t mean the end of work on poker,” says Jackson. “We still don’t know what the perfect strategy is.”

References:http://www.newscientist.com/

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a centimetre-accurate GPS-based positioning system that could revolutionise geolocation on virtual reality headsets, cellphones and other technologies – making global positioning and orientation far more precise than what is currently available on a mobile device.

The researchers’ new system could allow unmanned aerial vehicles to deliver packages to a specific spot on a consumer’s back porch, improve collision avoidance technologies on cars and allow virtual reality (VR) headsets to be used outdoors. This ultra-accurate GPS, coupled with a smartphone camera, could be used to quickly build a globally referenced 3-D map of one’s surroundings that would greatly expand the radius of a VR game. Currently, VR does not use GPS, which limits its use to indoors and usually a two- to three-foot radius.

“Imagine games where, rather than sit in front of a monitor and play, you are in your backyard actually running around with other players,” said Todd Humphreys, lead researcher and assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics. “To be able to do this type of outdoor, multiplayer virtual reality game, you need highly accurate position and orientation that is tied to a global reference frame.”

Humphreys and his team in the Radionavigation Lab have designed a low-cost system that reduces location errors from the size of a large car to the size of a nickel – a more than 100 times increase in accuracy. Humphreys collaborated on the new technology with Professor Robert W. Heath from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, along with graduate students.

Centimetre-accurate positioning systems are already used in geology, surveying and mapping – but the survey-grade antennas these systems employ are too large and costly for use in mobile devices. This breakthrough by Humphreys and his team is a powerful and sensitive software-defined GPS receiver that can extract centimetre accuracies from the inexpensive antennas found in mobile devices. Such precise measurements were not previously possible. The researchers anticipate that their software’s ability to leverage low-cost antennas will reduce the overall cost of centimetre accuracy and make it economically feasible for mobile devices.

Humphreys and his team have spent six years building a specialised receiver, called GRID, to extract so-called carrier phase measurements from low-cost antennas. GRID currently operates outside the phone, but it will eventually run on the phone’s internal processor. To further develop this technology, they recently co-founded a startup, called Radiosense. Humphreys and his team are working with Samsung to develop a snap-on accessory that will tell smartphones, tablets and virtual reality headsets their precise position and orientation.

The researchers designed their system to deliver precise position and orientation information – how one’s head rotates or tilts – to less than one degree of measurement accuracy. This level of accuracy could enhance VR environments that are based on real-world settings, as well as improve other applications including visualisation and 3-D mapping. Additionally, it could make a significant difference in people’s daily lives, including transportation, where centimetre-accurate GPS could allow better vehicle-to-vehicle communication technology.

“If your car knows in real time the precise position and velocity of an approaching car that is blocked from view by other traffic, your car can plan ahead to avoid a collision,” Humphreys said.

References :http://www.futuretimeline.net/