Author: Hjalmar Gislason

About Hjalmar Gislason

Founder and CEO of GRID (https://grid.is/). Curious about data, technology, media, the universe and everything. Founder of 5 software companies.

Man or a mouse

Emergence, english

Few things amuse me more than pointing out to people how predictable we humans are. Our imprinted view of ourselves as almost not a part of the animal kingdom is of course very arrogant. Our animal-like behavior is however often quite apparent and one of the best examples is in crowd movement. Pictures from malls and crowded streets often eerily resemble ants working mindlessly in their colony.

Nature Science Update reports yesterday on the use of mice to simulate people trying to escape in a panic situation. The research, conducted by Caesar Saloma and colleagues at the University of the Philippines is studying escaping mice to help improve computer models of escape in panic situations.
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Shark Illustrated: Swimsuit Edition

Biomimicry, english

At the Sydney Olympics in 2000, 28 of 33 Olympic Gold Medals were earned in Speedo Fastskin, a swimsuit overall that reduces water’s drag on the swimmer by 3%. The overalls lowered swimming times of professional swimmers by some 7.5%. The suit’s fluid dynamics are based on sharks’ skin, a design that has turned many fish and the occasional Australian surfer into tasty dinner for the shark family (class actually).

The Fastskin is an excellent example of successful biomimicry (see glossary), where someone has studied a good “design” in nature and mimicked it to create something useful, in this case a fabric with desirable qualities. Biomimicry is more common than people might think and affects things we use everyday.
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Gathering common sense

Artificial intelligence, english

As stated in the glossary, one of the problems in Artificial Intelligence is software’s lack of common-sense knowledge about the world. Of course AI is a wide field and lack of common sense does not hurt Deep Blue’s chess playing abilities or the capabilities of an OCR program to recognize characters, both of which are the subjects of certain subcategories of AI. In communicating with humans and making sense of natural language on the other hand, this lack of common-sense is the main reason for computers’ lousy performance.

Several projects are attempting to solve this problem and, using different methods, trying to teach computers common-sense. This article discusses many of these projects, their approaches and the problems they face.
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Brain-Machine Interfaces – what? – when?

Brain technologies, english

DARPA, US Department of Defense research arm, has for quite some time been running a Brain Machine Interface Program. This project first caught my attention when Technology Review wrote about Mind-Machine merger in May (subscription is required to read the full article).

Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI) are among my favorite subjects in the Wetware realm. The potential of BMI is incredible if it is well implemented, but it also opens a Pandora’s box of interesting philosophical and even more so ethical questions.
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“Female” robots

english, Robotics

Australian robotic software firm Kadence Photonics has made the world’s first “female” robots. Peter Hill, the founder of Kadence says that after seeing a TV program about the female brain he decided the day after that his line of robots should be based on some of its merits. The female robots differ from other robots in their ability to co-operate and multitask and work toward their goals in a flexible way, whereas in traditional robots on manufacturing lines work on single tasks in sequential order. Or as Dr Hill puts it so elegantly: “If a man does the housework, he’ll load the washing machine then stand there and watch it. A woman will go off and do something else.”
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And there was a map…

Emergence, english

Collective intellect (or stupidity) has always fascinated me and the Web allows curious people to test many such concepts with ease. Such interest was in part the reason for making my Are you random? test. Now, Douwe Osinga has come up with a brilliant collective mind project, where Internet users try to draw a map of the world. His introduction to the project touches some interesting subjects. Please cast a few votes to help the project (the site has been experiencing some trouble because of overload, so it might need some patience).
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Genetic methods exploit environment’s “flaws”

english, Genetic computing

Browsing through material on genetic computer methods I have on several occasions encountered a very interesting phenomenon – genetic methods that exploit flaws in their environment to help achieving their goals.

Using genetic methods, people try to “breed” software that best meets the task that is to be solved (the goal), just like nature’s evolution processes breed animals that are best fit to survive in their natural environment. In this process nothing is “forbidden”, the individuals can try whatever means available to them to seek the optimal solution, and in the case of a computer environment that can mean exploiting unknown or at least not-intended-to-use flaws in the environment’s design.
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Robosnail and mimcking of animal locomotion

english, Robotics

MIT’s Fluid Dynamics Lab seems to be on a biomimicry roll. I recently wrote about the robostrider. Now it is the robosnail that mimics the locomotion of snails. Their 3-link swimmer is actually very interesting as well, but has yet to receive its 15 minutes of media-fame like its siblings. This kind of research obviously helps biologists understand animals’ locomotion and is probably very interesting from the microfluid perspective (I wouldn’t know), but making use of animal locomotion methods in robots and vehicles definetly opens a range of new possibilities.
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Artistic brain or brainless artists?

Brain technologies, english

A collaboration art project between the Potter Lab at Georgia Tech and SymbioticA Research Group recently grabbed the attention of the likes of Nature and Wired. The project is called MEART (official site). In short it is a robot arm that draws pencil drawings on paper, controlled by real living rat neurons. And what is more, the “brain” is in Atlanta, USA, while the “body” is in Perth, Australia, communicating over the Internet!
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Water striders mimicked

english, Robotics

Researchers at MIT have solved the mystery of how the insects known as water striders move across water’s surface. While it is no mystery how they manage to stay afloat (many of us have surely done experiments with water’s surface tension), previous theories on how they manage to move on the surface have proven wrong. The striders actually “row” on the water surface and the researchers have made a very simple robot that mimickes this behavior.
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