Battle of the Machines: Robocup 2016 Starts Tomorrow!

The Robocup 2016 will feature 3,500 participants from 400 countries and will feature robot soccer competitions, robot-based elderly care, and autonomous vehicles demonstrations, among others. The event runs June 30 until July 4.
ROBOTICS WORLD CUP

This year marks the 20th Robocup, featuring 3,500 participants: 500 teams from 40 countries. The cup takes place from June 30 until July 4th in Leipzig, Germany.

The event is a big one.  The competition allots 70 playing fields, ranging from six and 170 square meters in size, to ensure adherence to international standards and regulations of precision. In fact, the soccer competitions alone have been allocated 2,200 square meters of playing fields.

Robocup is a truly international event. The Leipziger Messe (Leipzig Trade Fair) has issued more than 800 visa invitation letters specifically for the cup.


THE FIFA CHALLENGE AND MORE

According to the website, “ever since 1997, the RoboCup Federation has been pursuing its objective of developing intelligent humanoid soccer-playing robots which by 2050 will be able to beat the current FIFA champions.” This does sound ambitious, but Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences professor, Gerhard Kraetzschmar, echoes the same message in his welcome note for the Robocup this year: “By 2050, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win a soccer game, played according to official rules of FIFA, against the winner of the most recent FIFA World Cup.”

The competition has been broadening their categories far beyond the field of soccer through the years. The website boasts, “Additional application disciplines addressing diverse societal needs such as intelligent robots as assistants for rescue missions, in households and in industrial production have been added during the last few years.” These additions include robot-based elderly care, autonomous vehicles, and disaster response.

For those who are interested in attending the event, you can buy your tickets here. Additionally, for the aspiring next generation of scientists and engineers, there is also RobocupJunior to help kick-start inventive thinking and discovery in young people.

Meet The Artificial Intelligence that composes Music that enhances your brain functionality

Brain.fm uses an artificial intelligence to compose music that is designed to enhance your brain's performance—decreasing anxiety, improving focus, and alleivaiting insomnia through neural entrainment.
There’s an AI that’s making music. It’s known as brain.fm, and it could help decrease anxiety, relieve insomnia, and improve mental performance.

Founded by Adam Hewett and Junaid Kalmadi, brain.fm aims to alter your mind with sound. Or to be more specific, they hope to alter your mind with music…music that is composed by an AI (but more on that later). Hewett describes the work as “Auditory brain stimulation,” which is a mechanism that relies on something known as “brain entrainment” (also known as “neural entrainment”).

This is a novel—and somewhat unconventional—theory that is centered on how brain waves alter in response to acoustic stimulation (sound).

It’s stimulating brain waves reliably with audio, and being able to to reliably see that on an EEG to use it as a therapy.
The basic idea is that certain sounds evoke very specific responses in the brain. In other words, listening to music can alter, or induce, certain neural oscillations—oscillations that can achieve a host of things, such as altered mood, decreased anxiety, or improved focus. Notably, those who advocate neural entrainment assert that these acoustic-induced alterations can be seen and analyzed via electroencephalogram (EEG) measurements, which is, of course, where the science comes in.

Hewett succinctly sums the process, and what Brain.fm is attempting to do with it: “It’s stimulating brain waves reliably with audio, and being able to to reliably see that on an EEG to use it as a therapy. That’s what we’ve actually been doing for 13 years…now we’re working with universities and institutions to confirm this and innovate on it further.”

THE RESEARCH

Notably, the team works with neuroscientists in order to scientifically verify that the types of responses that they’re aiming for with their music are, in fact, the ones that they are generating.

For example, the team utilized the work of Dr. Benjamin Morillon, who researches dynamic attending theory, which, as Kalmadi explains, “is a new theory in neuroscience that helps explain how oscillations in music can affect oscillations in the brain.”

And they have completed pilot studies with Dr. Giovanni Santostasi, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, to see how the auditory stimulation can impact sleep and focus. Kalmadi notes, “We got some promising results on both of the studies, but that’s the preliminary studies, so we’re now focusing on building on top of that with the next layer of a more rigorous study.”

Kalmadi notes the significance of their current results, saying that the music patterns clearly lineup with the EEG readouts, “The spikes we see on the EEG mimic the audio stimulus. The music frequency follows the EEG…literally, follows. It’s become that accurate.”

And they’re also getting help from artificial intelligence.

MUSIC MEETS AI

Of course, it would take a long time to compose a diverse array of songs, ones that individuals could listen to for hours without experiencing monotony. Trying to create songs that effectively incorporate the various auditory components that generate a specific response in the brain and are also unique (and pleasing to listen to) is even more difficult.

So the team gave the work to artificial intelligence.

Kalmadi outlines the difficult and time consuming nature of the process, and why the team needed the AI: “Every single 30-minute session used to take a day all the way up to a week to make. In order to make the first 20 sessions, when we were just getting brain.fm off the ground, it took us 4 months to put together. So it’s [the AI is] a necessity. How do we create like a massive amount of content that is fresh in terms of its diversity, in terms of its genre of music, and actually takes a ton of rules of what we understand between neuroscience and music to quite accurately entrain the brain?”

And it seems that the answer to this question rests in AI.

Kalmadi continues, “So the AI, we like to describe it on a very high level, has the brain of a neuroscientist and the heart of a musician. It actually composes all the music from the ground up by taking a bunch of rules within neuroscience music, and it makes these sessions, but it sounds like it’s made by humans.”

Hewett explains how the AI works: “we’re using what could most easily be described as an emergent AI, or emergence…. emergent AI is basically taking a set of kind of small instructions, or small little pieces, and then it expands and emerges into something beautiful.”

To break this down a bit, in relation to artificial intelligence, emergence is a process in which larger patterns (like a fluid song) emerge through interactions among smaller or simpler parts.

Hewett continues:

We start out with what we might call a SongBot, this kind of overarching overlord—the composer of this kind of song. That bot, the SongBot, gets all kinds of instructions like “what kind of genre do I want?”, “what brain waves am I stimulating?”, “what’s the BPM?”. I can leave it open; I can have it do a minor key or a major key.

You can give it instructions, and from there, it spawns off tens of thousands of other little individual bots, you could say.

They’re really just little kind of pieces of code, little brains. And each of these will be a note or a drum beat, and they will have kind of a mind of their own, and they’ll have instructions. For example, a drum beat will want to be in the first part of the measure, or the middle of the measure.

But that doesn’t always happen, and you have to understand that these bots are competing against each other. They form patterns, and subsequent bots that are propagated learn from the previous ones, and they try to emulate those patterns. So as a pattern emerges, the pattern becomes greater for subsequent iterations.
Kalmadi concludes by noting that a lot of work is currently being done in this field, and that the system will only improve and become more effective (better at generating the desired response in the brain) as new research comes out.

Perhaps most notably is the impact that this could have on human health and medicine: “It’s an emerging field, not a lot of people are aware of the powerful effects music can have on the brain. But we’re getting the scientific community very interested in this.”

You can give it a try here.

WATCH – Sunspring, A Film Written Entirely By An AI (Artificial Intelligence

Sunspring, a short science fiction film written by an AI made its online debut--and it looks, surprisingly, pretty good.
There’s a short science fiction film that just made its debut online;it’s about three people living in a dystopian future on a space station. Thomas Middleditch of Silicon Valley fame stars in it, opposite Elisabeth Gray and Humphrey Ker, who could all possibly be in a love triangle. Stuff Hollywood B-movies are made of.

It’s called Sunspring—and it was written entirely by artificial intelligence (AI).

Having been written by a neural network called long short-term memory dubbed Benjamin, the very fact that it’s a film penned by an AI makes it compelling to watch.

At the helm of the film is director Oscar Sharp, who collaborated with NYU AI researcher Ross Goodwin.

To develop Benjamin, the team gave the AI sci-fi screenplays available online from the 80s and 90s, where it was dissected and studied closely by the AI who then learned how to essentially stitch the entire screenplay together by stringing letters, words and phrases the typically occur. The resulting script was thus entered in the Sci-Fi London contest where it ranked on the top 10.

You can watch the film here: http://video.arstechnica.com/watch/sunspring-sci-fi-short-film

China’s Planning A Massive Sea Lab 10,000 Feet Underwater

China is planning to build an enormous underwater lab for research purposes; however, the country notes that "it will carry some military functions."
China plans to build a huge sea lab 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) below the surface of the South China Sea. This project is part is China’s thirteenth five-year economic plan, and it is ranked two in the country’s top 100 science and technology priorities. The purpose of this project is to help China find minerals in the waters…but it may also have military purposes.

Only a little information is available for the public as of the moment.

The platform will be movable, as noted in the recent presentation by the Ministry of Science and Technology. The deep-sea station is spearheaded by China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation. It will have a dozen crew on board and could stay underwater for about a month.

So. Just how feasible is this? Well, general location faces both geological and technical challenges, such as frequent occurrence of typhoons. The area is estimated to have around 125 billion barrels of oil and around 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. China already spent 1.42 trillion yuan ($216 billion) on research and development in 2015. So they are investing big in the project.

Notably, China previously proved that they can live up to their deepsea ambitions by setting a world record when they sent their submersible Jiaolong to descend 7 kilometers (23,000 feet) into the Indian Ocean.

Interestingly, the “Underwater Great Wall Project,” a network of sensors to help detect US and Russian submarines, has also been proposed.

Scientists Are Closer To The First ‘Universal Cancer Vaccine” With Successful Human Trials

Scientists at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, have successfully conducted three human trials of a "universal cancer vaccine," which they developed as a safety test before going onto larger clinical trials.
FIGHTING CANCER THROUGH THE BODY

Treating cancer is obviously not easy. One of the most well known methods is chemotherapy, and while this has proven to be successful over the years (to a certain degree),it has life-threatening side effects.

But science is developing fast these days, and recent marvels in medicine have given us new ways to fight back—including using one’s own immune system, known as immunotherapy, to combat cancer. With that same principle, researchers at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany have developed what may be the first “universal cancer vaccine,” with preliminary human trials shown to be successful.

It must be noted that a full treatment is still years away. For average treatments, FDA approval can take as long as 8 years, and more clinical trials are needed. However, early work is inspiring.

RECOGNIZING THE PROBLEM

To break down the work, the immune system does not always recognize cancer cells as a threat because they possess similarities with normal cells in the body, which the immune system won’t attack. They key to this vaccine is an antigen, a molecule that serves as an identifier that complicates the way that the immune system recognizes cancer cells and normal cells.

To address this issue, the researchers  basically shot ‘darts’ that contain pieces of RNA from the patient’s cancer cells at their own immune system, causing the body to recognize the threat and deal with it accordingly.

The researchers assert that this method is essentially universal, in the sense that they can simply change the RNA within the darts, and they can use it to treat various cancers.

The team from Germany did their research initially on mice. And according to the study, upon injecting the vaccine, the subject’s immune systems began fighting malignant tumors.

Moreover, the researchers have already done tests of the vaccine on three patients to prove its safety. The patients, diagnosed with melanoma, had only undergone side-effects of flu-like symptoms, and nothing like those in chemotherapy. As reported, in one patient, a suspected tumor on a lymph node got smaller after the vaccine injection.r

Universal Basic Income Hits the U.S—Citizens Will Get Paid Just For Being Born

Universal Basic Income Hits the U.S—Citizens Will Get Paid Just For Being Born


Y Combinator, a seed accelerator and startup incubator, plans to inaugurate a short-term “universal basic income” experiment in Oakland, California; it’s a first step toward a larger, projected five-year study of the guaranteed cost-of-living salary.
THE OAKLAND EXPERIMENT

There’s been a lot of talk lately about “basic income”—the notion of a guaranteed financial disbursement to every human being simply for being alive.

It’s an idea that has garnered a great deal of support in certain circles, for obvious reasons (free money); however, many see it as the natural progression of society…as the only viable way of dealing with issues like increased automation, poverty, etc. Indeed, many see in a universal basic income (UBI) an instrument of liberty, and an effective tool for combating the threats of social unrest, economic dislocation, and various other forms of civil strife that are often the corollaries of unemployment.

There’s even a major national referendum on basic income to be held June 5 in Switzerland. And now the startup accelerator, Y Combinator, whose guiding ethos is seeding and incubating avant-garde businesses and ideas, has stepped into the fray. It plans to launch a short-term pilot program in Oakland, California, a preparatory first step to a longer, five-year experiment.

“Our goal will be to prepare for the longer-term study by working on our methods—how to pay people, how to collect data, how to randomly choose a sample, etc.,” the company explained in a blog post.


THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH

Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, believes that a UBI is a necessary—even an inevitable—evolution in our society, considering the widespread unemployment expected to result from the increased mechanization of jobs.

“In our pilot, the income will be unconditional; we’re going to give it to participants for the duration of the study, no matter what,” Altman explains.

“People will be able to volunteer, work, not work, move to another country—anything. We hope basic income promotes freedom, and we want to see how people experience that freedom.”

Of course, not all are onboard. Some in the Swiss government have urged citizens to reject the referendum, explaining that the exorbitant costs would become prohibitive and might bankrupt the country. Which is, of course, is very likely if not managed properly; however, Y Combinator thinks a government model might not be the best choice and that smaller scale operations may prove to be more viable.

There’s no firm date yet for the launch of the Oakland experiment; all we know is that the company is working with city officials and groups to work out the details, and that the program will be headed by Elizabeth Rhodes, a PhD graduate from the University of Michigan.

Without doubt, UBI advocates will be watching the results of the Oakland experiment with great interest.r