What Happens When Drones Start Thinking on Their Own?

Drones – or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as they are increasingly known – have reached a mass-market tipping point. You can buy them on the high street for the price of a smartphone and, despite a large DIY Drone community, the out-of-the-box versions are pretty extraordinary, fitted with built-in cameras and “follow me” technology, where your drone will follow you as you walk, run, surf, or hang-glide. Their usefulness to professional filmmakers has led to the first New York Drone Film Festival to be held in March 2015.

Technologically speaking, drones' abilities have all manner of real-world applications. Some of the highlights from the US$1m prize for the Drones for Good competition include a drone that delivers a life-ring to those in distress in the water. Swiss company Flyability took the international prize for Gimball, a drone whose innovative design allows it to collide into objects without becoming destabilised or hard-to-control, making it useful in rescue missions in difficult areas.

The winner of the national prize was a drone that demonstrates the many emerging uses for drones in conservation. In this case, the Wadi drone can help record and document the diversity of flora and fauna, providing a rapid way to assess changes to the environment.

More civilian uses than military

What does this all mean for how we think about drones in society? It wasn’t long ago that the word “drones” was synonymous with death, destruction, and surveillance. Can we expect us all to have our own personal, wearable drone, as the mini-drone Nixie promises? Of course the technology continues to advance within a military context, where drones – not the kind you can pick up, but large, full-scale aircraft – are serious business. There’s even a space drone, NASA’s Boeing X-37, which spent several years in automated orbit, while others are in development to help explore other planets.

There’s no escaping the fact that drones, like a lot of technology now in the mainstream, have trickled down from their military origins. There are graffiti drones, drone bands, Star Wars-style drone racing competitions using virtual reality interfaces, and even theatrical drone choreography, or beautiful drone sculptures in the sky. 

There are a few things about drones that are extremely exciting – and controversial. The autonomous capabilities of drones can be breathtaking – witnessing one just fly off at speed on its own, it feels extremely futuristic. But this is not strictly legal at present due to associated risks.

A pilot must always have “line of sight” of the drone and have the capacity to take control. Technically even the latest drones still require a flight path to be pre-programmed, so the drone isn’t really making autonomous decisions yet, although the new DJI Inspire is pretty close. Drone learning has to be the next step in their evolution.

Yet this prospect of artificial intelligence raises further concerns of control, if a drone could become intelligent enough to take off, fly and get up to all kinds of mischief, and locate a power source to re-charge, all without human intervention or oversight, then where does that leave humanity?

Virtual Reality Can Make You Forget Pain

A couple of weeks from now I will be in hospital undergoing a knee replacement. It will be the most extreme surgery I’ve ever experienced and I’m pretty scared. I’ve been told that I can expect to endure excruciating pain afterwards but I won’t be allowed to lie in bed feeling sorry for myself. In order to ensure a good recovery I have to get up and exercise the new joint numerous times a day. Make no mistake, this is going to hurt.

It may not be too long, however, until patients like me will be able to ward off their agonies simply by playing virtual reality games. This surprising advance is already being tested, but the premise behind it is not new.

As neuroscientist David Linden recently explained on NRP, the brain has more control over pain than we might at first imagine. It can say “hey that’s interesting, turn up the volume on this pain information that’s coming in”, or it can say “turn down the volume on that and pay less attention to it”. In Linden’s book Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart and Mind, he discusses how our perception of pain relies on the brain and how it processes information coming from the nervous system.

Lieutenant Sam Brown

Researchers are now attempting to see if this process can be manipulated through gaming. In the US, a group of patients suffering from severe burns were invited to play SnowWorld, a virtual reality computer game devised by two cognitive psychologists, Hunter Hoffman and Dave Patterson, to persuade the brain to ignore pain signals in favour of more compelling scenarios. Their motivation, Hoffman said was because opioids (morphine and morphine-related chemicals) can control burn pain when the patient is at rest, they are nowhere near adequate to quench the agony of daily bandage changes, wound cleaning and staple removals.

The best-known SnowWorld player is lieutenant Sam Brown who, during his first tour of duty in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2008, suffered third degree burns over 30% of his body. An IED buried in a road hit the vehicle he was travelling in and exploded into a fireball, engulfing Brown in flames. His injuries were so severe he had to be kept in a medically induced coma for several weeks. Back in the US, Brown endured more than two dozen painful surgeries, but none were as bad as the daily ritual of caring for his wounds. When nurses attended to his burns and helped him perform the necessary physical therapies, he experienced the most excruciating pain.

In 2012, NBC News reported on Brown’s experience and how the pain of dressing burn wounds could be so intense it could make patients relive the original trauma. In Brown’s case the procedures were so unbearable that on some occasions his superior officers had to order him to undergo treatment.

For Brown, help arrived not in the form of new kinds of medicines or dressings, but by a video game. Brown was one of the first participants in SnowWorld’s pilot study, which was designed in conjunction with the US military, to test whether it really could help wounded soldiers.

A distracting annoyance

At the time, Hoffman’s main work at the University of Washington was using virtual reality techniques to help people overcome a pathological fear of spiders. Patterson, based at the Harborview Burn Centre in Seattle, is an expert in psychological techniques such as hypnosis that can be used to help burn patients.

It was already known that the way we experience pain can be psychologically manipulated – for example, anticipating pain can make it worse. Research looking at how soldiers experience pain has also revealed how emotions can affect how that pain feels. So if your brain can interpret pain signals differently depending on what you’re thinking or feeling at the time, why not see if the experience of pain can be altered by deliberately diverting a patient’s attention towards something else? If it worked, the wound care could become more of a distracting annoyance and the distressing sensation of pain could be much reduced.

It was a long shot, but Hoffman’s expertise in virtual reality therapy made it possible to develop a game which offered that kind of diversion. To do this patients first put on a virtual reality headset and earphones and are then transported through an icy canyon filled with snowball hurling snowmen, flocks of squawking penguins, woolly mammoths and other surprises. Flying through the gently falling snow, they can then retaliate by throwing their own snowballs. Often, they get so involved with it that they don’t even notice when their procedure has finished.

In the interview with NBC Patterson explained how, during painful procedures like scrubbing off a wound, the patient is taken into a soothing and icy world, a completely different place from the reality. It works, he said, “for as long as people seem to be in the virtual world.”

The 2011 pilot study showed promising results. In some cases, soldiers with the worst pain reported that SnowWorld worked better than morphine. Brown himself is now much recovered, and attributes a large part of that success on his immersive experience.

Similar projects are happening elsewhere. In the UK, staff at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham and the University of Birmingham have been looking at how computer game technology can alleviate patients’ pain and discomfort through distraction therapy in which patients “wander around” a virtual world based on real locations in the Devon countryside. The idea is to combine authentic natural landscapes with virtual reality aids that help patients divert their attention from pain while also offering opportunities for real physical exercise – walking up hill, going over bridges, sitting on the beach – that creates movement inside the game.

As with SnowWorld, patients are generally injured military personnel. Most suffer from severe burns, but some also have phantom pain from amputated limbs.

'Chappie': How Realistic Is the Film's Artificial Intelligence?

The new film "Chappie" features an artificially intelligent robot that becomes sentient and must learn to navigate the competing forces of kindness and corruption in a human world.

Directed by Neill Blomkamp, whose previous work includes "District 9" and "Elysium," the film takes place in the South African city of Johannesburg. The movie's events occur in a speculative present when the city has deployed a force of police robots to fight crime. One of these robots, named "Chappie," receives an upgrade that makes him sentient.

Blomkamp said his view of artificial intelligence (AI) changed over the course of making the film, which opens in the United States on Friday (March 6). "I'm not actually sure that humans are going to be capable of giving birth to AI in the way that films fictionalize it," he said in a news conference.

Yet, while today's technology isn't quite at the level of that in the film, "We definitely have had major aspects of systems like Chappie already in existence for quite a while," said Wolfgang Fink, a physicist and AI expert at Caltech and the University of Arizona, who did not advise on the film.

Chappie in real life?

Existing AI computer systems modeled on the human brain, known as artificial neural networks, are capable of learning from experience, just like Chappie does in the film, Fink said. "When we expose them to certain data, they can learn rules, and they can even learn behaviors," he said. Today's AI can even teach itself to play video games.

Something akin to Chappie's physical hardware also exists. Google-owned robotics company Boston Dynamics, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, has an anthropomorphic bipedal robot, called PETMAN that can walk, bend and perform other movements on its own. And carmaker Honda has ASIMO, a sophisticated humanoid robot that once played soccer with President Barack Obama.

But Chappie goes beyond what current systems can do, because he becomes self-aware. There's a moment during the film when he says, "I am Chappie."

"That statement, if that's truly result of a reasoning process and not trained, that is huge," Fink said. An advance like that would mean robots could go beyond being able to play a video game or execute a task better than a human. The machine would be able to discriminate between self and nonself, which is a "key quality of any truly autonomous system," Fink said.

Childlike persona

As opposed to the "Terminator"-style killing machines of most Hollywood AI films, Chappie's persona is depicted as childlike and innocent — even cute.

To create Chappie, actor Sharlto Copley performed the part, and a team of animators "painted" the computer-generated robot over his performance, said visual effects supervisor Chris Harvey.

"We still had Sharlto on set [as Chappie]," Harvey told Live Science. But unlike many other special-effects-heavy films, "Chappie" did not use motion capture, which involves an actor wearing a special suit with reflective markers attached and having cameras capture the performer's movements. Instead, "the animators did that by hand," Harvey said.

Because Chappie is a robot, Harvey's biggest fear was not being able to have it convey emotion. So, his team gave Chappie an expressive pair of "ears" (antennae), a brow bar and a chin bar, which could express a fairly wide range of emotions, "almost like a puppy dog," Harvey said.

Humanity's biggest threat

In the film, Chappie's "humanity" is sharply contrasted with the inhumanity of Hugh Jackman's character Vincent Moore, a former military engineer who is developing a massive, brain-controlled robot called the "Moose" to rival intelligent 'bots like Chappie.

"The original concept for Jackman's character was always to be in opposition to artificial intelligence," Blomkamp told reporters.

Jackman himself takes a more positive view of AI. "Unlike my character, I like to think optimistically about these discoveries," Jackman said in a news conference. "I'm a firm believer that the pull for human beings is toward the good generally outweighing the bad."

But billionaire Elon Musk and famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking have sounded alarms about the dangers of artificial intelligence, with Musk calling it humanity's "biggest existential threat."

Truly autonomous AI is not something most researchers are working on, but Fink shares some of these concerns.

"Depending on how old we are, we might see something in our lifetime which might become scary," Fink said. If it gets out of control, he said, "then we have created a monster."

Solar-Powered Plane Takes Off on Epic Round-the-World Flight

A solar-powered plane, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, took flight today (March 8), embarking on the historic first leg of a planned journey around the world.

The aircraft, which can fly without using any fuel, took off from Al Bateen Executive Airport in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, shortly after 11:10 p.m. EDT (7:10 a.m. local time on March 9). The plane will now fly roughly 250 miles (400 kilometers) in 12 hours to reach Oman, officials said.

Next, Solar Impulse 2 will make stops in India, Myanmar and China, before crossing the Pacific Ocean. The plane is then expected to fly across the continental United States, touching down in three cities along the way. After journeying across the Atlantic Ocean, the plane will make a stopover either in southern Europe or North Africa before returning to Abu Dhabi, according to company officials.

If successful, Solar Impulse 2 will become the first solar-powered aircraft to circumnavigate the globe. Swiss pilots and Solar Impulse co-founders André Borschberg and Bertrand Piccard have said the round-the-world flight will likely end in late July or early August.

"We are very ambitious in our goal, but modest given the magnitude of the challenge," Borschberg and Piccard said in a statement. "This is an attempt, and only time will tell if we can overcome the numerous weather, technical, human and administrative issues."

Borschberg was at the controls when Solar Impulse 2 took off from Abu Dhadi, but he and Piccard will alternate flying the solar-powered plane on each leg of the round-the-world trip.

Solar Impulse 2 is designed to fly day and night without using a single drop of fuel. The plane is powered entirely by solar panels and on-board batteries, which charge during the day to enable the ultra-lightweight plane to continue its journey throughout the night.

The plane has a wingspan of 236 feet (72 meters), and it weighs only 5,070 pounds (2,300 kilograms), or about the same as a car, company officials have said. The aircraft's wings are covered with 17,000 solar cells that power the plane's on-board systems.

The round-the-world flight is designed to demonstrate the possibilities of "green" technology and sustainable energy.

In 2013, Borschberg and Piccard completed an unprecedented coast-to-coast flight across the United States, using a first-generation prototype of the Solar Impulse plane. The first-of-its-kind flight took two months, and included five stops between California and New York.

Since that cross-country flight, the Solar Impulse team has made several upgrades to the aircraft to prepare for the current round-the-world journey. Engineers made Solar Impulse 2 more energy efficient by improving the quality of the aircraft's batteries and using lighter materials to construct the plane. The aircraft's cockpit was also upgraded to include more space and better ergonomic designs, which will help Borschberg and Piccard remain as comfortable as possible during long flights, according to company officials.

Your Life, and Your Future, Predicted by Data

Just a decade ago, it would have been unthinkable to use data to make everyday decisions. Now, such "predictive analytics" are the norm: Simply type a query into Google and it magically suggests what you were searching for. How about those stories you read this morning on your Facebook news-feed? That's predictive analytics at work again. 

A survey by management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company Accenture found the use of predictive analytics technologies has tripled since 2009. That number isn't surprising when you recognize all the ways in which we use predictive analytics on a daily basis. 

Not a crystal ball, but it works like one

Consider Amazon, the ubiquitous one-click Internet retailer. By plugging into an algorithm such user data as links clicked, wish list items, number of visits to the site and previously purchased items, the retailer can predict buyer activity accurately enough to send items to its warehouses before merchandise has even been purchased.

Amazon is so confident in its predictive algorithms, it'll put money on them. For example, if there's a large demand for flip-flops in Florida, the local fulfillment centers might fill up with flip-flops before orders are even placed, allowing for shorter delivery time when a customer finally clicks the purchase button. According to an article by Lance Ulanoff, chief correspondent and editor-at-large of Mashable, it's all a part of making the shipping process more efficient for the customer, and less costly for Amazon. 

Fantasy sports take a similar approach. There are 41.5 million people managing fantasy sports teams, according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. The selection of a player for a fantasy team depends on a number of different factors. Participants take into consideration things like historical performance, coaches and a player's current team. Selecting a player based on one variable just doesn't give an accurate picture of that player's value. 

Consider when quarterback Alex Smith left the San Francisco 49ers and joined the Kansas City Chiefs. Smith's productivity (points per game per year) jumped nearly 35 percent — and analytics tells us that this probably isn't just good luck. It could be because Kansas City uses Andy Reid's pass-first West Coast offense that better jives with Smith's abilities. Or, it could even be because Smith operated better in Kansas City's climate. 

Regardless of why, it's obvious that there are multiple variables, like team strategies and location, which affect performance. Using predictive analytics offers a more robust model that takes multiple variables into account. Instead of leaving it to intuition or chance, an algorithm pulls together dozens of factors to identify which players will be most successful in a given situation.

Predicting health?

This data analysis trend is also present in industries like health care. Looking at analytics helps caregivers treat the patient individually — for example, predictive algorithms can help show which patients are at risk for rehospitalization, which patients could benefit from another care episode (services that treat a clinical condition or procedure), and which would benefit from hospice care. My own company, Medalogix, helped reduce readmission rates for one home health care agency by nearly 36 percent in one year with the use of our predictive analytics software. Patients receive the most personalized health care services, which increases care outcomes and quality, while providers reduce expenses. 

Another leg on the stool

Predictive analytics, in all of its uses, should be used as a resource to better decision-making.

Consider the decision-making process as a three-legged stool. One leg represents the education and experience that goes into decision-making; the second leg is built upon the instinctual feelings considered throughout the process. Together, those two dimensions of traditional decision-making support the stool, but still don't keep it from falling over. Analytics is the third dimension — another leg to make it sturdier. Having more information makes for more informed, stronger decisions. 

While seemingly complex, predictive analytics makes lives simpler by modeling data into useful insights. By looking at how predictive analytics function in our lives — like speeding up online deliveries or curbing hospital read missions — the concept quickly becomes more accessible and less intimidating. Adding additional dimensions into decision-making through analytics creates a more robust and complete picture, allowing people and businesses to make the most informed decisions possible. 

Ultra-Fast 'Hyperloop' Train Gets Test Track

The "Hyper loop," a hypothetical high-speed transportation system that could shuttle people between Los Angeles and San Francisco in only 30 minutes, just sped a bit closer to reality.First proposed in 2013 by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors and Space X, the hyper loop would transport passengers in floating pods inside low-pressure tubes at speeds of more than 750 mph (1,200 km/h).

Now, the company hyper loop Transportation Technologies Inc. (which is not affiliated with Musk or Tesla) has inked a deal with landowners in central California to build the world's first hyper loop test track, according to market research firm Navigant Research. The 5-mile (8 km) test track will be built along California's Interstate 5.

Separately, Musk has said he plans to build his own 5-mile test track, likely in Texas, for companies and students to test out potential hyper loop design.

How hyper loop will work

Musk laid out his plans for the hyper loop in a paper published on the Space X website. He has described the super speedy mode of transport as a "cross between a Concorde, a rail gun and an air-hockey table."

The idea is, passenger pods will travel inside tubes under a partial vacuum, and will be accelerated to blistering speeds using magnets. A set of fans attached to the pods will allow the train to rest on a cushion of air. The system would be powered by solar panels along the length of the tube.

The world's fastest magnetically levitated (maglev) train travels at about 310 mph (500 km/h). Maglev trains work by using magnets to produce both lift and propulsion. By contrast, the hyper loop would only use magnets for propulsion, relying on compressed air for lift. Maglev trains are in operation in Shanghai and Tokyo, and South Korea plans to open one in June.

Hyper loop pods could theoretically travel very fast, because they wouldn't have to overcome friction between the wheels and track that a typical train uses, or the air resistance that conventional vehicles experience at high speeds.

"You can go a couple of hundred miles an hour with a wheel, as the French and Germans and Japanese have proven," said Marc Thompson, an engineering consultant at Thompson Consulting Inc. in Boston, who has worked on maglev systems. But, "as you go faster, the drag force on the train becomes a very high energy cost."

The design Musk proposed would travel at speeds of up to about 760 mph (1,220 km/h), but the test project, which aims to break ground in early 2016, would be tested at 200 mph (322 km/h) to prove it works and is safe, Navigant reported.

At that speed, the air drag is still possible to overcome, but beyond that, the power needed to exceed the drag increases as the speed cubed, said James Powell, a retired physicist and co-inventor of the superconducting maglev concept.

Is it feasible?

The Hyper loop has the potential to be a faster, cheaper and more energy-efficient form of travel than planes, trains or buses, its proponents say. However, it's not yet known if the technology is feasible, or safe.

For one thing, the tubes have to be very straight, leaving very little room for error. "The guide way [track] has to be built to very fine tolerances, because if the position of the wall deviates from straightness by a few thousandths of an inch, you could crash," Powell told Live Science.

The tubes also have to maintain low-pressure air. "The problem with traveling in an evacuated tube is, if you lose the vacuum in the tube, everybody in the tube will crash," Powell said. In addition, the vehicle's compressor — which produces the air cushion on which the pods rest — can't fail, or the pods will crash into the walls, he added.

"The whole system is vulnerable to a single-point failure," Powell said. For example, somebody could blow a hole in the tube's side, or an earthquake (no rarity in California) could shift the tube by a fraction of an inch, both of which would cause the vehicles to crash. In superconducting maglev, by contrast, the magnets are very stable and operate reliably, Powell said. "It doesn’t require continuous control to keep it suspended."

What will it cost?

The 5-mile test track is estimated to cost about $100 million, which Hyper loop Transportation Technologies hopes to pay for with its initial public offering (IPO) later this year, according to Navigant's blog. Assuming building costs remain the same, a 400-mile (644 km) track between Los Angeles and San Francisco would cost about $8 billion (not including development costs), experts estimate. This price tag is still far less than that for California's planned high-speed rail project, which could cost $67.6 billion, according to the California High-Speed Rail Authority.

But Powell questions whether the Hyperloopwould really be as cheap as promised. "The main cost of these high-speed systems is in the cost of the guideway," he said. And because the track must be built so precisely, it's going to be more expensive, he added.

Even if the Hyperloop is successful, Powell doesn't think it will fix the United States' transportation problems — namely, congested highways and airways. "A few isolated high-speed rail corridors in the United States really won't address our big problems," he said.

World's Thinnest Light Bulb Created from Graphene

Graphene, a form of carbon famous for being stronger than steel and more conductive than copper, can add another wonder to the list: making light.

Researchers have developed a light-emitting graphene transistor that works in the same way as the filament in a light bulb.

"We've created what is essentially the world's thinnest light bulb," study co-author James Hone, a mechanical engineer at Columbia University in New York, said in a statement.

Scientists have long wanted to create a teensy "light bulb" to place on a chip, enabling what is called photonic circuit, which run on light rather than electric current. The problem has been one of size and temperature — incandescent filaments must get extremely hot before they can produce visible light. This new graphene device, however, is so efficient and tiny, the resulting technology could offer new ways to make displays or study high-temperature phenomena at small scales, the researchers said.

Making light

When electric current is passed through an incandescent light bulb’s filament — usually made of tungsten — the filament heats up and glows. Electrons moving through the material knock against electrons in the filament's atoms, giving them energy. Those electrons return to their former energy levels and emit photons (light) in the process. Crank up the current and voltage enough and the filament in the light bulb hits temperatures of about 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit (3,000 degrees Celsius) for an incandescent. This is one reason light bulbs either have no air in them or are filled with an inert gas like argon: At those temperatures tungsten would react with the oxygen in air and simply burn.

In the new study, the scientists used strips of graphene a few microns across and from 6.5 to 14 microns in length, each spanning a trench of silicon like a bridge. (A micron is one-millionth of a meter, where a hair is about 90 microns thick.) An electrode was attached to the ends of each graphene strip. Just like tungsten, run a current through graphene and the material will light up. But there is an added twist, as graphene conducts heat less efficiently as temperature increases, which means the heat stays in a spot in the center, rather than being relatively evenly distributed as in a tungsten filament. 

Myung-Ho Bae, one of the study's authors, told Live Science trapping the heat in one region makes the lighting more efficient. "The temperature of hot electrons at the center of the graphene is about 3,000 K [4,940 F], while the graphene lattice temperature is still about 2,000 K [3,140 F]," he said. "It results in a hotspot at the center and the light emission region is focused at the center of the graphene, which also makes for better efficiency." It's also the reason the electrodes at either end of the graphene don't melt.

As for why this is the first time light has been made from graphene, study co-leader Yun Daniel Park, a professor of physics at Seoul National University, noted that graphene is usually embedded in or in contact with a substrate.

"Physically suspending graphene essentially eliminates pathways in which heat can escape," Park said. "If the graphene is on a substrate, much of the heat will be dissipated to the substrate. Before us, other groups had only reported inefficient radiation emission in the infrared from graphene."

The light emitted from the graphene also reflected off the silicon that each piece was suspended in front of. The reflected light interferes with the emitted light, producing a pattern of emission with peaks at different wavelengths. That opened up another possibility: tuning the light by varying the distance to the silicon.

The principle of the graphene is simple, Park said, but it took a long time to discover.

"It took us nearly five years to figure out the exact mechanism but everything (all the physics) fit. And, the project has turned out to be some kind of a Columbus' Egg," he said, referring to a legend in which Christopher Columbus challenged a group of men to make an egg stand on its end; they all failed and Columbus solved the problem by just cracking the shell at one end so that it had a flat bottom.