Posts Tagged ‘MIT’
MIT’s affordable housing project builds first prototype in China
Launched in 2009, MIT’s “1K House” project challenges designers to come up with affordable, sustainable housing solutions that can improve conditions for the billions of people in the world living on less than $1 per day. The “Pinwheel House” designed by MIT graduate student Ying chee Chui is the first prototype.
The 1K House concept was initiated by Tony Ciochetti, the Thomas G. Eastman Chairman at MIT’s Center for Real Estate, after seeing a family of four emerge from a tiny mud hut while he was traveling through rural India. “There is a huge proportion of the world’s population that has pressing housing needs,” says Ciochetti. “Can you build affordable, sustainable shelter for such a large population?”
Ying chee Chui’s “Pinwheel House” is the first prototype to be constructed and is located in Mianyang, in the Sichuan Province, China. The design incorporates a modular layout with hollow brick walls, steel bars for reinforcement, wooden box beams, a central courtyard space and it’s also built to withstand a magnitude 8.0 earthquake.
“The construction is easy enough, because if you know how to build a single module, you can build the whole house,” says Chui.
Chui came out a little over the long-term goal of building a $1000 house, with the total cost coming to $5,925. Not bad considering it’s tough to buy a good second hand car for that price! A larger building than was originally designed was a factor in the cost – the whole house came to about 800 square feet, rather than 500 square feet. Chui is confident that the smaller module could easily be built for US$4000 or even cheaper if a large number of houses were built at the same time.
There are a number of individual and production processes that could lower the cost of construction significantly. Economies of scale really kick in if producing a modular design like this off-site – to be trucked in and assembled on-site. Wooden box beams can be replaced with several less expensive construction techniques, wood, composite or steel. IMHO, steel being the best choice – recycled and recyclable, easy to train installers/framers, fire rating reduces insurance requirements.
No doubt – even in China – the cost of land is probably higher than the cost of the house erected. At least in urban China.
Computers learn world domination by reading the manual
Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab have been able to create computers that learn language by doing something that many people consider a last resort when tackling an unfamiliar task – reading the manual (or RTBM). Beginning with virtually no prior knowledge, one machine-learning system was able to infer the meanings of words by reviewing instructions posted on Microsoft’s website detailing how to install a piece of software on a Windows PC, while another was able to learn how to play Sid Meier’s empire-building Civilization II strategy computer game by reading the gameplay manual.
Without so much as an idea of the task they were intended to perform or the language in which the instructions were written, the two similar systems were initially provided only with a list of possible actions they could take, such as moving the cursor or performing right or left clicks. They also had access to the information displayed on the screen and were able to gauge their success, be it successfully installing the software or winning the game. But they didn’t know what actions corresponded to what words in the instructions, or what the objects in the game world represent.
Predictably, this means that initially the behavior of the system is pretty random, but as it performs various actions and words appear on the screen it looks for instances of that word in the instruction set as well as searching the surrounding text for associated words. In this way it is able to make assumptions about what actions the words correspond to and assumptions that consistently lead to good results are given greater credence, while those that consistently lead to bad results are abandoned.
Using this method, the system attempting to install software was able to reproduce 80 percent of the steps that a person reading the same instructions would carry out. Meanwhile, the system playing Civilization II ended up winning 79 percent of the games it played, compared to a winning rate of 46 percent for a version of the system that didn’t rely on the written instructions.
What makes the results even more impressive for the Civilization II-playing system is that the manual only provided instructions on how to play the game.
“They don’t tell you how to win. They just give you very general advice and suggestions, and you have to figure out a lot of other things on your own…”
How many students in your local high school can do as well?
Artificial Leaf might match or exceed the real thing
Speaking at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in California, MIT professor Daniel Nocera claims to have created an artificial leaf made from stable and inexpensive materials that mimics nature’s photosynthesis process.
The device is an advanced solar cell, no bigger than a typical playing card, which is left floating in a pool of water. Then, much like a natural leaf, it uses sunlight to split the water into its two core components, oxygen and hydrogen, which are stored in a fuel cell to be used when producing electricity.
Nocera’s leaf is stable — operating continuously for at least 45 hours without a drop in activity in preliminary tests — and made of widely available, inexpensive materials — like silicon, electronics and chemical catalysts. It’s also powerful, as much as 10 times more efficient at carrying out photosynthesis than a natural leaf.
With a single gallon of water, Nocera says, the chip could produce enough electricity to power a house in a developing country for an entire day. Provide every house on the planet with an artificial leaf and we could satisfy our 14-terrawatt need with just one gallon of water a day…
For now, Nocera is setting his sights on developing countries. “Our goal is to make each home its own power station,” he said. “One can envision villages in India and Africa not long from now purchasing an affordable basic power system based on this technology.”
His contracts with Tata validate his claims – at least in the eyes of one significant investor. And Tata is one of those firms that is at its best producing products for nations making that first trek from 3rd World into a developing nation.
Armies of expensive lawyers replaced by software
When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of “discovery” — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit — the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.
But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.
Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.
“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t…”
Software is also making its way into tasks that were the exclusive province of human decision makers, like loan and mortgage officers and tax accountants.
These new forms of automation have renewed the debate over the economic consequences of technological progress.
RTFA for the details. The questions asked about job security, employment, acquired skills are interesting, relevant.
They don’t ask one which questions the motivation for developing the software. The greed of law firms doing the searching is what prompted the software development.
Billing for these services is something I know a wee bit about. I’ve known national-class attorneys who contracted similar work out to law firms doing this kind of work. They were staffed by searchers who were paid something similar to lawyer minimum wage for their work. Less than $20 an hour. Clients were billed $150 to $200 an hour.
Pay fees like that a few times and you run full speed to the nearest software design firm. Now that we’ve achieved the quality of data mining at least capable of performing tasks previously left to graduates from the bottom third of their law class – and took three tries to become admitted to the bar.
How to make an ATM spew out money
Har!
MIT unveils prototype oil-skimming robots
Here’s a new way of looking at oil spill clean-up: Forget the big ships, massive work crews and hefty price tags.
Instead, just deploy an army of autonomous, oil-scrubbing robots. They can find the oil on their own. And when they reach the site of an oil spill, they talk to their robot friends to figure out the best way to get the whole thing mopped up.
That’s the vision the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put forward on Wednesday as the school announced the development of a prototypical robot called Seaswarm. The $20,000 robots will be unveiled officially to the public on Saturday at an event in Venice, Italy, and will be ready to deal with oil spills in about a year, said Assaf Biderman, who oversaw MIT’s research team on the project.
The Seaswarm robots…look like a treadmill conveyor belt that’s been attached to an ice cooler. The conveyor belt piece of the system floats on the surface of the ocean. As it turns, the belt propels the robot forward and lifts oil off the water with the help of a nanomaterial that’s engineered to attract oil and repel water…
The material on the robot’s conveyer belt, which MIT calls a “paper towel for oil spills,” can absorb up to 20 times its weight in oil.
Once it has absorbed the crude from the surface of the ocean, the robot can either burn off the oil on the spot, using a heater on the “ice cooler” part of its body, or it can bag the oil and leave it on the surface of the water for a later pick-up, Biderman said. That oil could be reused or recycled…
The Seaswarm robots operate on solar energy and require only 100 watts of power, or about that of a bright light bulb. They could stay at sea for months, Biderman said, and could operate around the clock.
The science silver lining rolls out, once again. Too bad it took a disaster to prompt research along this and other lines, research to deal with oil spills.
Consider what could have been if the ever-greedy oil corporations spent a fraction of one percent of their profits on remediation and prevention of environmental disasters? Instead of turning their tame Congressional pimps to churning out taxpayer-paid subsidies to exploration schemes?
Ball lightning as a magnetically-induced hallucination. WTF?
Powerful magnetic fields can induce hallucinations in the lab, so why not in the real world, too?
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is an extraordinary technique pioneered by neuroscientists to explore the workings of the brain. The idea is to place a human in a rapidly changing magnetic field that is powerful enough to induce currents in neurons in the brain. Then sit back and see what happens.
Since TMS was invented in the 1980s, it has become a powerful way of investigating how the brain works. Because the fields can be tightly focused, it is possible to generate currents in very specific areas of the brain to see what they do.
Focus the field in the visual cortex, for example, and the induced eddys cause the subject to ‘see’ lights that appear as discs and lines. Move the the field within the cortex and the subject sees the lights move too.
All that much is repeatable in the lab using giant superconducting magnets capable of creating fields of as much as 0.5 Tesla inside the brain.
But if this happens in the lab, then why not in the real world too, say Joseph Peer and Alexander Kendl at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. They calculate that the rapidly changing fields associated with repeated lightning strikes are powerful enough to cause a similar phenomenon in humans within 200 metres…
So what would this kind of lightning-induced transcranial stimulation look like to anybody unlucky enough to experience it? Peer and Kendl say it may well look like the type of hallucinations induced by lab-based tests, in other words luminous lines and balls that appear to float in space in front of the subject’s eyes…
That’s an interesting idea: that a large class of well-reported phenomenon may be the result of hallucinations induced by transcranial magnetic stimulation.
In my teens, the small town I lived in had one neighborhood notorious for ball lightning. But, equally well-known, was that folks never seemed to have seen the same thing.
Hey – could be Peer and Kendl have it right.
Computers offer a faster way to predict humanity’s ills
Cancer cell
How do you predict whether a given patient is likely to die from a heart attack? Conventional medical wisdom would base a risk assessment on factors such as the person’s age, whether they were smokers and/or diabetic plus the results of cardiac ultrasound and various blood tests. It may be that a better predictor is a computer program that analyses the patient’s electrocardiogram looking for subtle features within the data provided by the instrument.
A team of researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan analysed a large data-set of 24-hour electrocardiogram recordings collected at a Boston hospital as part of a clinical trial for a new drug. Employing a number of computational techniques involving algorithms for signal processing, data mining and machine learning, the researchers developed a way to analyse how the shape of the electrical waveform varies, a measure they dubbed morphological variability. At the heart of the approach are mathematical techniques used in speech recognition and genome analysis which allow researchers to compare individual beats. “We compute the differences for every pair of beats,” reported one of the researchers. “If there is lots of variability, that patient is in bad shape.”
The team then applied their algorithm to a second set of electrocardiogram recordings and found that patients with the highest morphological variability were six to eight times more likely to die from a heart attack than those with low variability. They concluded that it consistently predicted as well or better than the indicators commonly used by physicians…
RoboClam in mudflat biomimicry
To design a lightweight anchor that can dig itself in to hold small underwater submersibles, Anette (Peko) Hosoi of MIT borrowed techniques from one of nature’s best diggers — the razor clam.
“The best anchoring technology out there is an order or magnitude worse than the clam — most are two or three orders worse,” says Hosoi…
Using relatively simple anatomy, the bivalve burrows into the bottom of its native mudflats at a rate of a centimeter per second. Hosoi’s studies of the physics behind this remarkable ability have revealed that the digging is accomplished in two motions — a push upwards with its foot, which mixes the grains of solid into the liquid above, and a synchronized push down.
By borrowing this principle, Hosoi and graduate student Amos Winter have created a simple robot that is now being tested out in the salt water mudflats off of Cape Cod. It digs just as fast as the living clam and is “small, lightweight, and does not use a lot of energy,” says Hosoi.
I never met a clam I didn’t like. Especially with melted butter and a little garlic.
Yes, of course, the project rocks, too.
What might we achieve with lossless light?
The lower image shows light flowing around an obstacle
Light readily bounces off obstacles in its path. Some of these reflections are captured by our eyes, thus participating in the visual perception of the objects around us. In contrast to this usual behavior of light, MIT researchers have implemented for the first time a one-way structure in which microwave light flows losslessly around obstacles or defects. This concept, when used in lightwave circuits, might one day reduce their internal connections to simple one-way conduits with much improved capacity and efficiency.
The laws of nature that govern the world around us allow for the propagation of light in both directions. If a light beam is observed propagating in a particular direction, one can also shine a light beam to propagate in the opposite (backward) direction. “The very fact that reflected beams are allowed to exist, combined with the fact that light at least partially reflects from most objects it encounters, makes optical reflections ubiquitous in nature,” said MIT physics Professor Marin Soljačić, the senior author of the study.
In a dramatic departure from this common phenomenon, a team made up of MIT physicists…have implemented and experimentally tested so-called topological photonic crystals that completely prohibit the existence of any lightwave back-reflections. The results, published in the 8th October 2009 edition of Nature, show the first experimental observation of the fascinating new phenomena and capabilities associated with microwave light propagating in this uniquely designed waveguide (a tunnel or “road” for guiding light).
Through the application of an external magnetic field, this specially designed waveguide induces unusual restrictions to the propagation of the light inside it. “We have now found a way to make light travel without bouncing back…”
The possibilities are infinite.
