Showing posts with label anthromimicry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anthromimicry. Show all posts

Thursday, April 28, 2022

Frankensteining the Built Environment and the Internet of Occupants


Taking a look at this book, about the place where we all share 90% of our time, the great indoors. 

Image credit: Negative capacitance engineered crystals, Ella Maru Studio, University of California Berkeley, 2022 [link]

The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health and Happiness
Emily Anthes, Ferrar Straus and Giroux New York, 2020

This book is about how buildings shape our behavior, but I'd like to think about how we, as users in an increasingly omniscient complex of distributed sensors and datacrunchers, will become the driving force in shaping our buildings. 

A few loosely related ideas webbed between the indoor microbiome, the coming avalanche of chemical sensor technologies, and the never ending and insatiable appetite that humans have for more information, are all converging on a building that is designed, operated and improved by the Internet-of-Occupants. 

Fossil diatom Anthodiscina floreata - Michael Landgrebe for Nikon Small World Competition - 2021

Let's start with the reminder that our buildings are already alive -- they're filled with micro-organisms, which will one day be seen as legitimate occupants sharing our indoor space with us. (SARS-CoV-2 would like to have a word)

  • Microbial Forensics: Researchers tracked 3 families as they moved into new homes; each family's distinct blend of microbes colonized its new residents within hours. (p16-17) *Note: the residents didn't colonize the house, the house colonized the residents.
  • The bacteria come from us, the fungi from the building; a stone house feeds different fungi from a wooden house. "Because unlike the bacteria, they're eating the house." -Dunn (p18)
  • New techniques for reading DNA, which we're all now familiar with (PCR) is what allows us to finally do surveys like this, along with shotgun genomics for sequencing all the organisms in a random sample [link] 
  • They conducted the biggest indoor microbial survey ever, and here's what they found: "more than forty thousand species of fungi, a number larger than the number of named fungal species in North America. We have found more than eighty thousand kinds of bacteria. We have found more kinds of Archaea (once thought to be denizens exclusively of extreme environments such as hot springs and belly buttons) than were known from Earth just a decade ago. And there is more. We have not yet gotten to the insect legs (though Anne Madden is working on it). We are only beginning to consider the plants." [link]  
  • The Universal Sample Location: "Participants were instructed to sample the upper door trim on an interior door in the main living area of the home and the upper door trim on the outside surface of an exterior door" because a it's a sampling location that is found in every home, is unlikely to be cleaned frequently, and serves as a passive collector of indoor and outdoor aerosols and dust with little to no direct contact from the home occupants [link] 
  • Persistent Omniscient Surveillance: "The fungi on the outside of the house are a measure of where the house is and what is going on around it, so much so that if you give us a sample of dust from anywhere in the United States we can tell you where it came from within about 100 km. We can tell you based on the composition of fungal life."
This makes it hard to ignore the value of nothing more than dirt for conducting geographically precise forensics. Think about this -- the dirt on your shoe can now tell us where you were in the past few days. And that's today. Extrapolate that a few years. In 2030, I will be able to swab a doorknob and find out every person who touched it, and then one level deeper to every person those people touched that day. Fingerprints?? That's some 20th century sh** right there. Give me your belly button and I will tell you your entire life's history. (Except for the guy with the dust very specifically from Japan in his belly button, who had never been to Japan in his life.) [link] 
  • And further: They can tell whether you have a dog in the house, and what the male to female ratio is, and the secret is out, men, your lack of personal hygiene is showing up in the data: "Skin- and fecal-associated taxa were relatively more abundant in homes with fewer women. This pattern is probably driven by differences between the skin biology (and perhaps to body size and hygiene practices) of men and women." [link] 

Sources and further reading:

"Inner Life of Network" - Hard time finding a source on this one.

Next, a reminder that the extent of the datastream coming from a building, today, is basically a thermometer in an HVAC duct. Sure there are occupant sensors for smart lights and CO2-based ventilation, but this is nothing compared to what can and hopefully will happen when we start using the small, cheap chemosensors being refined in labs today and tomorrow marketed to facilities managers, and maybe even the human resources department (and hopefully not federal and local authorities! just kidding Clearview).

  • Montoring real-time environmental conditions inside: "Buildings are the last black boxes of the information age" -Marc Syp, architect (p99)

This guy is talking about thermal comfort like temperature and humidity. But I'm talking about microbiomes and biomarkers. Datalogging exhaled isoprene can tell you about rising levels of employee stress. Profiling microbiomes on door handles can give you some idea of different diseases floating around in the air. Monitoring sewage data can tell you how many of your staff members are taking drugs like amphetamines, caffeine, nicotine, anti-depressants, wow you name it. And the sensors won't have to be in the sewer, they can be deployed right on the fixtures. 

And why would you want to know all these things? Your imagination will have to take over from here. 

Breathing BioMetal Regulates Building Temperature - A Moonshot Project w Doris Kim Sung 2013

Finally, the end result of all this integration between occupant behavior and building design and operation looks like a building that really is alive. Nothing says "I'm alive" like a heaving hunk of Frankenbricks:

  • The Breathing Building (Adaptive Buildings) matches your own breathing pattern, a tent-like structure "inhales and exhales" with you ... strong occupant reactions ... when the system shut off abruptly, one person felt a jolt in his chest. -Holger Schnadelbach and the Exo Building via Nottingham University (p178-179) [link]

Notes:
How indoor environmental quality affects occupants’ cognitive functions: A systematic review. Chao Wang, et al. Building and Environment, Volume 193, 2021, 107647, ISSN 0360-1323.

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Thursday, April 7, 2022

Anthromimetics - Flattening the Curve of the Uncanny Valley


Image results for anthromimetics are disappointing, so you get a beautiful Hubble picture of the universe instead, the Veil Nebula, via the ESA and NASA, 2021.

A search for anthromimetics wants me to see anthropometrics. Correcting gives me 78 results. Anthromimicry? 10 results. (Two of them are from this weblog, and 2 are from what I would call procedurally generated domain name redirects, kind of like the lists of phone numbers and why you get calls from yourself sometimes. The other sites are circa 2012.)

So I will explain - biomimicry copies biology and anthromimicry copies humans. It's what we're doing to robots to help them cross the uncanny valley. We want them to copy us good so we can believe them. 


A new machine-learning system helps robots understand and perform certain social interactions
Nov 2021, phys.org

"In a simulated environment, a robot watches its companion, guesses what task it wants to accomplish, and then helps or hinders this other robot based on its own goals."

In order to teach robots how to be social, we're just showing them footage of people helping each other, and go figure the robots gets better at figuring out what you're trying to do, and then helps you do it. Sounds simple until you realize that to be "social" is extraordinarily complex, and something that has taken most of us our entire lives to get right (and that's a lot of training data). 

via MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and a member of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines: Ravi Tejwani et al, Social Interactions as Recursive MDPs (2021).


Making (and breaking) eye contact makes conversation more engaging
Sep 2021, phys.org

Synchrony - "In the past, it has been assumed that eye contact creates synchrony, but our findings suggest that it's not that simple," says senior author Thalia Wheatley, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth, and principal investigator of the Dartmouth Social Systems Laboratory. "We make eye contact when we are already in sync, and, if anything, eye contact seems to then help break that synchrony. Eye contact may usefully disrupt synchrony momentarily in order to allow for a new thought or idea."

via Dartmouth College: Sophie Wohltjen et al, Eye contact marks the rise and fall of shared attention in conversation, PNAS (2021). doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2106645118


Voice copying algorithms found able to dupe voice recognition devices
Oct 2021, phys.org

Copybots

Training data: 90 five-minute voice snippets of people talking

via University of Chicago: Emily Wenger et al, "Hello, It's Me": Deep Learning-based Speech Synthesis Attacks in the Real World. arXiv:2109.09598v1 [cs.CR], arxiv.org/abs/2109.09598


Heart rate synchronization and palm sweat found to be signs of attraction
Nov 2021, phys.org

They set up the "dating cabins" at public events such as concerts and invited young single people to participate in their study.

When two people are attracted to one another, their heart rates tend to synchronize and their palms sweat together.

The scores of attractiveness the volunteers gave each other after a first quick peek did not hold up. Nor did their behavioral clues

via Leiden University and University of Birmingham: E. Prochazkova et al, Physiological synchrony is associated with attraction in a blind date setting, Nature Human Behaviour (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-021-01197-3

Hanako - aka the Uncanny Horror

Post Script:
This one can't make the rounds enough. So here you have it again. You're looking at a screenshot of a humanoid robot designed for dental students. It recoils, it gags, and it squeals in fear and discomfort. If you find the video, you will be horrified beyond repair. That's why I only give you the picture. 

Where Did That Horrifying Malfunctioning Dental School Robot Come From?
Vice, By Samantha Cole, Oct 2020

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Saturday, April 2, 2022

Psyops Bots


Tailored messaging increases understanding of climate change in Republicans
Jun 0221, phys.org

Use of tailored advertising can increase awareness among Republicans of the dangers posed by climate change, using videos that featured "credible" personalities who spoke about the impact of climate change and what it might mean for the future. Conducted surveys of 1,600 people living in the targeted districts, asking about their views on climate change—both before and after the ad campaign.  They found that the campaign had increased understanding of the dangers of climate change in Republicans by several percentage points. They also found that it had convinced many of them that it was due to human activities.

via Yale Program on Climate Change Communication: Matthew H. Goldberg et al, Shifting Republican views on climate change through targeted advertising, Nature Climate Change (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41558-021-01070-1


Majority of Covid misinformation came from 12 people
Jul 2021, The Guardian

In the last two months, our analysis of anti-vaxx content posted or shared to Facebook 689,000 times shows that up to 73% of that content originates from the leading anti-vaxxers included in this report.

The Disinformation Dozen -- including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Joseph Mercola, and Ty and Charlene Bollinger, among others -- continually violate the terms of service agreements on Facebook and Twitter.

via Center for Countering Digital Hate: The Disinformation Dozen


'Likes' and 'shares' teach people to express more outrage online
Aug 2021, phys.org

Moderating extremism and performative outrage for the otherwise passive aggressive:

[Modified from the abstract] - Positive social feedback for outrage expressions increases the likelihood of future outrage expressions, consistent with principles of reinforcement learning. In addition, users conform their outrage expressions to the expressive norms of their social networks, suggesting norm learning also guides online outrage expressions.

Norm learning overshadows reinforcement learning when normative information is readily observable: in ideologically extreme networks, where outrage expression is more common, users are less sensitive to social feedback when deciding whether to express outrage. Our findings highlight how platform design interacts with human learning mechanisms to affect moral discourse in digital public spaces.

via Yale: How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks, Science Advances (2021). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abe5641


Disagreeable people found to be more prone to conspiracy theories
Aug 2021, phys.org

More support for the fact that conspiracy theorists are mostly just regular people, they're more likely to be lonely and isolated, but they're still just regular people:

"Most people think conspiracy theorists are crackpots," he said. "Talking to these people, I felt there was more going on. Some wanted to socially connect with other people. A small subset wanted to take advantage of other people. I wanted to see what underlies these beliefs and theories."

via University of Oregon: Cameron S. Kay, Actors of the most fiendish character: Explaining the associations between the Dark Tetrad and conspiracist ideation, Personality and Individual Differences (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2020.110543


Experiment shows groups of laypeople reliably rate stories as effectively as fact-checkers do
Sep 2021, phys.org

Remember, we could fix this right now if we wanted to:

"One problem with fact-checking is that there is just way too much content for professional fact-checkers to be able to cover, especially within a reasonable time frame," says Jennifer Allen, a Ph.D. student at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of a newly published paper detailing the study.

"The average rating of a crowd of 10 to 15 people correlated as well with the fact-checkers' judgments as the fact-checkers correlated with each other. This helps with the scalability problem because these raters were regular people without fact-checking training, and they just read the headlines and lead sentences without spending the time to do any research."

via MIT: Scaling up fact-checking using the wisdom of crowds, Science Advances (2021). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abf4393


Facebook forced troll farm content on over 40% of all Americans each month
Sep 2021, Ars Technica

In the wake of the 2016 election, Facebook knew it had a problem. Pages and fake accounts created by the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency had spread through the social network and drawn massive engagement from real users. Facebook knew it had to get things under control. [It didn't.]

The troll farms highlighted in the report primarily targeted four different groups: American Indians, Black Americans, Christian Americans, and American women. 

One of the researchers described users thus: "They tend to love these Pages. They like how entertaining the posts are and how they reaffirm their already-held beliefs."

via MIT Technology Review: Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election, internal report shows, Sep 16 2021 [soft paywall]


Rates of infectious disease linked to authoritarian attitudes and governance
Sep 2021, phys.org

An unconscious code of conduct that helps us stay disease-free, including a fear and avoidance of unfamiliar—and so possibly infected—people -- When infection risk is high, this "parasite stress" behavior increases, potentially manifesting as attitudes and even voting patterns that champion conformity and reject "foreign outgroups"—a core trait of authoritarian politics.

Now, a new study, the largest yet to investigate links between pathogen prevalence and ideology, reveals a strong connection between infection rates and strains of authoritarianism in public attitudes, political leadership and even lawmaking. [This study was conducted prior to covid data, circa 2018.]

They found that the more infectious US cities and states went on to have more authoritarian-leaning citizens. The most authoritarian US states had rates of infectious diseases—from HIV to measles—around four times higher than the least authoritarian states, while for the most authoritarian nations it was three times higher than the least. Moreover, in both nations and US states, higher rates of infectious disease correlated with more "vertical" laws—those that disproportionately affect certain groups, such as abortion control or extreme penalties for certain crimes. This was not the case with "horizontal" laws that affect everyone equally.

via University of Cambridge: Leor Zmigrod et al, The psychological and socio-political consequences of infectious diseases: Authoritarianism, governance, and nonzoonotic (human-to-human) infection transmission, Journal of Social and Political Psychology (2021). DOI: 10.5964/jspp.7297


“Hacker X”—the American who built a pro-Trump fake news empire—unmasks himself
Oct 2021, Ars Technica

This is how it really happens. 

This article was a bit controversial when it came out, because the outfit, Ars Technica, was being accused on not vetting their source enough, and simply providing him a means to feel better about himself after a healthy apology, but also enabling him to prolong his campaign of deception. 

Regardless of all that, I was just intrigued by the description of how it all goes down:
From that moment onward, the hacker and office staff would joke about the stuff they were being assigned to write—like a conspiracy-laden writeup on "chemtrails" or a piece on "lemons curing cancer" —- thinking that only a small "ultracrazy" percentage of readers actually believed what was being written. ...

Next, this is exactly how the Flash Crash 2010 went:
The new publishing strategy, along with the additional fake news sites, caused a rapid spike in traffic. As Willis puts it, this all felt "like playing a video game and getting new high scores to me. I did not think of the readers as people but more like background characters in a video game. I am neurodiverse and have major issues with understanding empathy due to my condition. Crunching numbers is something I love to do; these were numbers I wanted to go up, and I would do it with no emotional attachment to the material or people."


Social media bots may appear human, but their similar personalities give them away
Nov 2021, phys.org

Bot or not --

While the language used by any one bot reflected convincingly human personality traits, their similarity to one another betrayed their artificial nature.

Their results showed that, individually, the bots look human, having reasonable values for their estimated demographics, emotions and personality traits. However, as a whole, the social bots look like clones of one another, in terms of their estimated values across all 17 attributes.

Overwhelmingly, the language bots used appeared to be characteristic of a person in their late 20s and overwhelmingly positive.

"Imagine you're trying to find spies in a crowd, all with very good but also very similar disguises," says Schwartz. "Looking at each one individually, they look authentic and blend in extremely well. However, when you zoom out and look at the entire crowd, they are obvious because the disguise is just so common."

"There is a lot of variation in the type of accounts one can encounter on Twitter, with an almost science fiction-like landscape: humans, human-like clones pretending to be humans, and robots," says Giorgi.

via University of Pennsylvania and Stony Brook University: Salvatore Giorgi et al, Characterizing Social Spambots by their Human Traits, Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021 (2021). DOI: 10.18653/v1/2021.findings-acl.457


Facebook uncovers Chinese network behind fake expert
Dec 2021, BBC News

Just wanted to make sure we understand how this works:

"It added that the operation used Virtual Personal Network (VPN) infrastructure to conceal its origin, and to give fake Swiss biologist Wilson Edwards a more rounded personality. It also said that his profile photo also appeared to have been generated using machine-learning capabilities."

I'm not so much interested in the misinformation aspect of this, only the "fake people" aspect, where social media companies use fake numbers to inflate the amount of real people who use their services, you know kind of like pumping the price of your own stuff at an auction by secretly bidding on it.

Link to recent post on the disease model and how it works in the noosphere:


Conspiracy mentality around the globe tends to be particularly pronounced on the political fringes
Jan 2022, phys.org

The two surveys constitute the largest investigation of the subject of conspiracy mentality conducted to date, both in terms of their size with around 100,000 responders and the fact that they were undertaken in 26 different countries. 

Also considered was whether a perceived lack of political control—because, for example, an individual's preferred political party has been excluded from government—influenced the link between political orientation and conspiracy mentality; this outcome might be expected due to the effects of what psychologists call "control deprivation."

And what could also be described as "Conspiracy theories are for losers" (pun intended)

via Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz: Roland Imhoff et al, Conspiracy mentality and political orientation across 26 countries, Nature Human Behaviour (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-021-01258-7


Researchers find new way to amplify trustworthy news content on social media without shielding bias
Feb 2022, phys.org

The problem is that these businesses don't care --

"Social media sites continue to amplify misinformation and conspiracy theories."

They measured content on the reliability of the source and the political diversity of their audience.

"The algorithm ends up picking the wrong signal and keeps promoting it further."

So it sees that we like it, so it gives us more; but we don't realize that we actually like low-credibility information, because it has a higher likelihood of being more interesting by way of its being fake; real things are complicated, and don't fit neatly into the categories in our heads, the ones that help us determine whether something is "my kind of thing". It's harder to generate your own opinion about something that's nuanced, because it requires you to re-assess what "your thing" really is, and that's hard.

By the way, they're using NewGuard Reliability Index to rate the news sources. [wiki]

They found that incorporating the partisan diversity of a news audience can increase the reliability of recommended sources while still providing users with relevant recommendations.

^That's some high quality reverse recursion right there.

"Ciampaglia and his colleagues propose social media platforms adopt this new strategy in order to help prevent the spread of misinformation."

Right...

via University of South Florida, Indiana University and Dartmouth College: Giovanni Ciampaglia, Political audience diversity and news reliability in algorithmic ranking, Nature Human Behaviour (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-021-01276-5


How can we get better at discerning misinformation from reliable expert consensus?
Feb 2022, phys.org

There's a lot of work being done on misinformation these days, and it's good to see. But I have to draw the line somewhere as to how much I bother to archive here. 

This one makes the cut:

2019 study by Yale University which found that people believe a single source of information which is repeated across many channels (a 'false consensus'), just as readily as multiple people telling them something based on many independent original sources (a 'true consensus').

"We found that illusion can be reduced when we give people information about how the original sources used evidence to arrive at their conclusions," Dr. Connor Desai says. [Full circle, see the very top article in this post.]

For instance, over 80 percent of climate change denial blogs repeat claims from a single person who claims to be a 'polar bear expert'.

via University of New South Wales: Saoirse Connor Desai et al, Getting to the source of the illusion of consensus, Cognition (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105023

Also: Sami R. Yousif et al, The Illusion of Consensus: A Failure to Distinguish Between True and False Consensus, Psychological Science (2019). DOI: 10.1177/0956797619856844

Image credits:
[Top to Bottom]

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, March 29, 2022

Through the Uncanny Valley


AKA Mimetic Supremacy


IBM's AI debating system able to compete with expert human debaters
Mar 2021, phys.org

The IBM system, known simply as Project Debater, scans the internet for such arguments and uses them in ways that it has learned are convincing.

Project Debater was asked to convince a panel of viewers that telemedicine was a good idea. Most of those on the panel found that the AI system did indeed change their stance on the topic—a possible indication that AI systems may one day soon play a role in human debates such as those that occur on social media sites.

via: Noam Slonim et al. An autonomous debating system, Nature (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03215-w


SEIHAI - The hierarchical AI that won the NeurIPS-2020 MineRL competition
Dec 2021, phys.org

The winning algorithm was called "sample-efficient hierarchical AI" or SEIHAI, and it combines machine learning, human observation, and more traditional computation tasks. The key is to break down the overall task into subtasks, and then finding examples of humans doing the subtasks, and from that, finding the best way to do each subtask. They significantly outperformed their competitors.

via Huawei Noah's Ark Lab at Tianjin University and Tsinghua University, winners of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) annual conference: Hangyu Mao et al, SEIHAI: A sample-efficient hierarchical AI for the MineRL competition. arXiv:2111.08857v1 [cs.LG], arxiv.org/abs/2111.08857


Researchers demonstrate first human use of high-bandwidth wireless brain-computer interface
Apr 2021, phys.org

All Brains Ahead

Participants with tetraplegia have demonstrated use of an intracortical wireless BCI with an external wireless transmitter. The system is capable of transmitting brain signals at single-neuron resolution and in full broadband fidelity without physically tethering the user to a decoding system. This wireless system is functionally equivalent to the wired systems that have been the gold standard in BCI performance for years,

via BrainGate and Brown University: John D Simeral et al. Home Use of a Percutaneous Wireless Intracortical Brain-Computer Interface by Individuals With Tetraplegia, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering (2021). DOI: 10.1109/TBME.2021.3069119


Engineers are designing an autonomous robot that can open doors, find nearest electric outlet
Nov 2021, phys.org

With a headline like that, why bother reading the article?

via University of Cincinnati: Yufeng Sun et al, Force-Vision Sensor Fusion Improves Learning-Based Approach for Self-Closing Door Pulling, IEEE Access (2021). DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3118594


'Deepfaking the mind' could improve brain-computer interfaces for people with disabilities
Nov 2021, phys.org

When I tried to use the EPOC headset many years ago, I was faced with an existential quandry. You're supposed to put on the headset, and control a simple video game with your thoughts. But in order to prepare your headset, you have to teach it the first and most important lesson, which is the difference between having a thought and not having a thought.

Your brain isn't a quiet place, there's electric fields bouncing around all over the place, all the time, and in order to separate the signal from the noise, your headset has to known what is considered non-thought, "default state" activity. What does your brain sound like when it's not giving a command. Once we have that default baseline state, we can detect when you're giving an active, intentional command. Later on, we can start to differentiate commands, but to begin with, we just need to know what a command looks like, and what it doesn't.

To do this on the superscale, we would need to give the headset a whole lot of baseline data, which would require lots of different people to all wear these headsets all day.

Now, it looks like there's a way to make synthetic brainwave data, using generative adversarial networks (GANs), and then feeding it to the program. What used to take 20 minutes now takes 1 minute.

via  University of Southern California: Shixian Wen et al, Rapid adaptation of brain–computer interfaces to new neuronal ensembles or participants via generative modelling, Nature Biomedical Engineering (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41551-021-00811-z


Wireless network controls brain circuits remotely via the internet
Dec 2021, phys.org

Relax, nothing to worry about

A new study shows that researchers can remotely control the brain circuits of numerous animals simultaneously and independently through the internet. 

The wireless ecosystem only requires a mini-computer that can be purchased for under $45, which connects to the internet and communicates with wireless multifunctional brain probes or other types of conventional laboratory equipment using IoT control modules.

"They can remotely perform large-scale neuroscience experiments in animals deployed in multiple countries," said one of the lead authors, Dr. Raza Qazi, a researcher with KAIST and the University of Colorado, Boulder.

via The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Colorado, Boulder: Raza Qazi et al, Scalable and modular wireless-network infrastructure for large-scale behavioural neuroscience, Nature Biomedical Engineering (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41551-021-00814-w


AI-generated faces found more trustworthy than real faces: Researchers warn of 'deep fakes'
Feb 2022, phys.org

Mimetic Supremacy Achieved

"Our evaluation of the photo realism of AI-synthesized faces indicates that synthesis engines have passed through the uncanny valley and are capable of creating faces that are indistinguishable—and more trustworthy—than real faces."

via Lancaster University: Sophie J. Nightingale et al, AI-synthesized faces are indistinguishable from real faces and more trustworthy, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2120481119


DeepMind AI rivals average human competitive coder
Feb 2022, BBC News

Almost there

After simulating 10 contests, with more than 5,000 participants, AI system AlphaCode has ranked in the top 54% of competitors. There was still work to do to bring it up to the same level as top performing humans, DeepMind said.


Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, July 21, 2021

Just Lévy Things

Lévy patterns are one of the craziest things there is; proof that free will is an illusion, and one of those typically invisible patterns that can be used to predict our behavior (and to mimic our behavior, for those of us making artificial humans).

It happens all over the place, from the way animals forage, to the way our eyes move across a computer screen. It's one of those universal laws that happens in biology and in physics too (called Brownian walk, or Brownian motion). But you might remember it more easily by calling it simply "foraging behavior", a mixture of small random movements with less frequent larger movements.

It's no secret that we do this; our eyes get mapped when we look at websites to figure out how to make us click-buy uncontrollably. Hidden cameras in retail shops do the same thing. Pedestrian traffic, vehicle traffic, pandemics even, you name it. 

What we don't know is the full "why" of Lévy walks. Why use such a chaotic approach; wouldn't a more rational approach get better results? Researchers at RIKEN made a simulation that found Lévy patterns popping up spontaneously at critical moments such as the edge between Exploitation vs Exploration -- for example when an animal has to decide whether to exploit areas that are already known to be beneficial, versus exploring for new areas.

You know exploit/explore, it's how you decide where to eat dinner -- on those nights when Old Trusty just isn't cutting it, then it's time to explore. But at the same time, you can't "explore" every night, or going out to eat would be exhausting, and less rewarding in general. So the next time you're at that critical juncture, just let the chaos take over. Or, soon enough, let the Lévy algorithm do it for you.
 
Chaotic Lévy walks are a good strategy for animals
Sep 2020, phys.org

via the RIKEN Center: Masato S. Abe. Functional advantages of Lévy walks emerging near a critical point, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2020). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2001548117

See Also:
Pedestrians at crosswalks found to follow the Lévy walk process
Apr 2019, phys.org

Musical melodies obey same laws as foraging animals
Jan 2016, phys.org

Post Script:
When you see RIKEN Center being involved, you know you're in for some cool stuff. 

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, July 20, 2021

Anthromimesis at the Crossroads

It's all coming together, anthropogenic planets, anthromimetic algorithms and of course extraterrestrials. 


The science-fiction scenario of an artificial planet is already here
Feb 2021, phys.org

"The global mass produced by man exceeds all living biomass. We find that Earth is exactly at the crossover point; in the year 2020 (±6), the anthropogenic mass, which has recently doubled roughly every 20 years, will surpass all global living biomass."

via the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel: Emily Elhacham et al. Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass, Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-3010-5

Teaching AI agents to communicate and act in fantasy worlds
Nov 2020, phys.org

They're called Agents. And they live in simulated realities. One day they'll invite us over for dinner.

"Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and Facebook AI Research have recently explored the possibility of equipping goal-driven agents with NLP [natural language processing] capabilities so that they can speak with other characters and complete desirable actions within fantasy game environments."

Ammanabrolu et al., How to motivate your dragon: teaching goal-driven agents to speak and act in fantasy worlds. arXiv:2010.00685 [cs.CL]. arxiv.org/abs/2010.00685

Using game-theory to look for extraterrestrial intelligence
Oct 2020, phys.org

The SETI paradox says that we haven't discovered signals from aliens because they're afraid it might draw the attention of adversaries. But game theory says that the one who has the least to lose signals first. Or in other words, the one who has more access to information signals first. 

Unbelievably, this narrows the search down to just one exoplanet: K2-155d. It's suggested that because it's more visible to us than the other way around, that we be the first to send a signal.

Eamonn Kerins. Mutual detectability: a targeted SETI strategy that avoids the SETI Paradox, arXiv:2010.04089 [astro-ph.EP] , arxiv.org/abs/2010.04089

Partially related, my theory for world peace is to unite the world against the probability of an alien race attacking Earth. I take this idea from the book Three Body Problem where they spend hundreds of years preparing for the arrival of an alien race that may or may not destroy them. All the resources of the entire population of Earth are brought together to solve this problem.

There can't be world peace without a world enemy. So we should create one. Or rather, the probability of one. Which shouldn't be too hard. What's the chances, and how far away are they, and so how long would it take for them to get to us. Now we work backwards, and set a long term plan to solve the problem, together. 
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Sunday, January 10, 2021

Exobiological Skin Shell Sensors and Remote Control Metabolism Engineering



Just trying to come up with a catchy title for a quick list of developments in color application technology, but also biomimicry, wearables, and radioactive fungi. We're finishing off with some recent bits in the endless stream of synthetic biology advancements that will eventually define the 21st century.

Images courtesy of Nikon's Small World Challenge, best microscopy photos you can get!

The first one is a snail tongue by Dr. Igor Siwanowicz, and has nothing to do with the articles below.


Blue dye from red beets - Chemists devise a new pigment option
Apr 2020, phys.org

Non-toxic and Blue dye do not belong in the same sentence, historically. But now, a new class of dyes called pseudo-natural dyes use the same molecules that come from bright red beets (betalains), and they change the carbon-nitrogen chemical bond to a carbon-carbon bond. These new molecules are called quasibetalains, and they're blue.

On a sidenote, I do not recognize the opening statement in the above link, which says that blue is the most liked color the world over. In my art room, in the box of color pencils, and in the box of markers, both followed the same pattern every year for every class: the red pencils are the first to go, followed by blue; it gets fuzzy after that, but they all end up with nothing but brown, orange and yellow, and in that order. After all, brown is the entropic heat death of the rainbow, kind of an anti-color. 

B. C. Freitas-Dörr et al. A metal-free blue chromophore derived from plant pigments, Science Advances (2020). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaz0421
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaz0421


Red light for stress - A color-changing organic crystal
May 2020, phys.org

Here we've got some organic crystals that change color based on pressure, but that can also return to their original shape. And that's called superelastochromism.

The idea here is to use them as sensors to show you where a building is getting out of whack. But there's a whole lot more you can imagine doing with these.

via the University of Tokyo: Toshiki Mutai et al, A superelastochromic crystal, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15663-5


Liquid crystals create easy-to-read, color-changing sensors
Jul 2020, phys.org

Similar thing here; they're pushing and pulling liquid crystals to manipulate their color. The thing is, these don't just change color based on pressure, but even temperature. The walls in your room could change if the temperature shifts too quickly, for example. 
 
Then again, if you're wearing this, it could show you inflammation in your body. 

via the University of Chicago: "Prolate and oblate chiral liquid crystal spheroids". Juan de Pablo et al. Science Advances (2020). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aba6728 

Mohamed Ghassen Nouira makes purple dye.

Passion for purple revives ancient dye in Tunisia
Aug 2020, phys.org

Emperors hate him. This guy figures out how to take special snails and make purple dye out of them, just like how they used to do. Imperial clothiers and dye-makers knew how to do this centuries ago, and the art was lost to the time in between us and them. 

And that wasn't a mistake. The process of making Tyrian Purple was a secret, kind of like how we try to keep people from making believable hundred dollar bills. 

Think about it, if you, a Carthaginian hustlepimp, could make your own purple robe and deceive the court into thinking you were royalty, kind of like an ancient Borat, you could cause a ruckus. And we can't have a ruckus in the upper reaches of the royal elites. 

More importantly, empires made their fortunes selling this dye to other empires. Can't have some guy in his garage creeping into your marketshare. 

100,000 grams (100kg) of shelled murex yields 1 gram of Tyrian Purple, and goes for $2,400 - $4,000 per gram, and takes about a week's worth of work.

Sidenote, if you search the words "royal elite" it reeks of fake shit and dupery, which I think is funny because it's a redundant term that would only be used by people who don't really know what either word means.


Testing Chernobyl fungi as a radiation shield for astronauts
Aug 2020, phys.org

Bioshell.

They want to coat spaceships in a shell of superfungus to protect from radiation. They didn't create these fungi by engineering them in a lab; they found them. 

And where are on earth are you going to find an organism that metabolizes radioactive isotopes? Yes, thank you Chernobyl.

Graham K. Shunk et al. A Self-Replicating Radiation-Shield for Human Deep-Space Exploration: Radiotrophic Fungi can Attenuate Ionizing Radiation aboard the International Space Station, bioRxiv (2020). DOI: 10.1101/2020.07.16.205534. http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.16.205534

Beetle leg - Aigars Jukna

Low-cost, fly footpad-like adhesive structure capable of repeated attachment/detachment
Aug 2020, phys.org

The design is based on fly feet, fine, that's pretty standard biomimicry. But the way they learned how to manufacutre the thing is by looking at how the fly itself makes flies, in the pupa. That's next level biomimicry. And it allows you to repeatedly stick and unstick  without losing any of its stickiness.

Ken-ichi Kimura et al, Framework with cytoskeletal actin filaments forming insect footpad hairs inspires biomimetic adhesive device design, Communications Biology (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s42003-020-0995-0


Florida mosquitoes - 750 million genetically modified insects to be released
Aug 2020, BBC News

I'm not sure where this belongs on this list, but modified mosquitoes were approved by federal regulators, fuck yeah.


Development of photovoltaics that can be applied like paint for real-life application
Sep 2020, phys.org

It's a solar cell solution that can coat surfaces. Eventually it will coat your body, so that you can live forever.

So Hyun Park et al, Developement of highly efficient large area organic photovoltaic module: Effects of nonfullerene acceptor, Nano Energy (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.nanoen.2020.105147


Evergreen needles act as air quality monitors
Sep 2020, phys.org

Biosensors that measure the magnetism of the particulate matter that accumulates on the needles. Pretty smart.

Grant Rea‐Downing et al, Evergreen needle magnetization as a proxy for particulate matter pollution in urban environments, GeoHealth (2020). DOI: 10.1029/2020GH000286

Bindweed Epidermis - Michael Gibson

Electronic skin promises cheap and recyclable alternative to wearable devices
Nov 2020, phys.org

Man.

"Stretchy and fully-recyclable circuit board that's inspired by, and sticks onto, human skin."

via University of Colorado Boulder:  "Heterogeneous integration of rigid, soft, and liquid materials for self-healable, recyclable, and reconfigurable wearable electronics" Science Advances (2020). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd0202


Engineers print wearable sensors directly on skin without heat
Oct 2020, phys.org

Direct printing for on-body sensors, usually hindered by the bonding process on skin. You can't sinter skin. So they add an "aid layer", basically a protective insulator for the skin that bonds at room temperature. And room temperature.


Artificial skin heals wounds and makes robots sweat
Jun 2020, phys.org

It's about time these robots take over. This is a skin (or "smart coating" when we're trying not to make it sound like the robots will become human and take over) that control fluid flow across its membrane via radio, or UV. And it's made of liquid-crystal molecules, like LCD.

Nylon Stockings - Alexander Klepnev

Thanks to flexoskeletons, these insect-inspired robots are faster and cheaper to make
Apr 2020, phys.org

Just flexoskeletons.


Machine learning takes on synthetic biology - algorithms can bioengineer cells for you
Sep 2020, phys.org

This one is about creating virtual laboratories that produce probable outcomes. They used to say, if you can't build it, you can't know it. But now, we just let the computer figure it out. 

Anyway, they specifically say engineering microbiomes. That's a bit new, because although engineering cells has now penetrated the consumer market (fake meat), engineering the entire ecosystem is a new frontier.

Nature Communications. A machine learning Automated Recommendation Tool for synthetic biology. Tijana Radivojević. (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18008-4

Unopened Flower Bud - Charles B. Krebs


Chemists expand genetic code of E. coli to produce 21st amino acid, giving it new abilities
Aug 2020, phys.org

Bodymods and beyond.

They've created a new amino acid, a "noncanonical amino acid" which kind of means not a real amino acid. It's called 5-hydroxyl-tryptophan (5HTP), and it's now the 21st amino acid. Kind of like how the ampersand was the 27th letter in the alphabet for a while.

They put the code for this protein into a "blank" space of the E. coli's genetic code. This means that the bacteria is now a factory that we designed to produce a molecule. It's a living factory. We're all living factories, bioreactors. But we don't make anything we want with our bodies. In this case, we've reverse-engineered the "making" process itself. The is called biohacking. 

Yuda Chen et al, Creation of Bacterial Cells with 5-Hydroxytryptophan as a 21st Amino Acid Building Block, Chem (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.chempr.2020.07.013


Researchers develop a yeast-based platform to boost production of rare natural molecules
Aug 2020, phys.org

Again, biofarms of the future.


Engineers reprogram yeast cells to become microscopic drug factories
Sep 2020, phys.org

"Metabolic engineering" is another term for this. They're reprogramming yeast cells at the genetic level to convert sugars and amino acids into drugs. (And someting about the name has me thinking these are hallucinogenic drugs?)

Biosynthesis of medicinal tropane alkaloids in yeast, Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2650-9 

Duckweed Root Decay - Dr. Robert Markus

Soil-powered fuel cell promises cheap, sustainable water purification
Oct 2020, phys.org

Soil microbial fuel cells (SMFCs)


Lowering atmospheric CO2 in large-scale renewable energy electrochemical process
Jun 2020, phys.org

This plus synthetic biology aka the biological revolution, or the 5th(?) industrial revolution, and I say that in 100 years, we'll be taking more CO2 out of the air than what we put in. 
Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have been focusing on improving electrochemical routes to convert CO2, which would otherwise be released into the atmosphere, into a range of value-added products.

the research team created a high rate of formate production and product selectivity, the latter of which is critical to reduce the need for further costly separations processes downstream. The formate could then be fed to biological organisms or coupled with enzymes, resulting in robust interactions between the formate and enzymes that yield high-density chemicals or fuels, such as ethylene or ethanol, respectively.

The program's larger goal is to use highly efficient electrons at industry scale to convert a waste compound such as CO2 into a multitude of more useful industry-relevant, energy-dense fuels or chemicals, such as polyethylene, which has a large global market.

Google conducts largest chemical simulation on a quantum computer to date
Aug 2020, phys.org

Stuff like this scares the shit out of me, although it's hard to articulate why. Probably because quantum chemical simulator is another word for reality generator, and I just don't think we're ready to activate the mass transference device yet.

Hartree-Fock on a superconducting qubit quantum computer, Science  28 Aug 2020: Vol. 369, Issue 6507, pp. 1084-1089, DOI: 10.1126/science.abb9811


IBM announces AI based chemistry lab - RoboRXN
Sep 2020, phys.org

Same as above.

Automating chemical synthesis with RoboRXN. https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2020/08/roborxn-automating-chemical-synthesis/

More Snail Tongue - Dr. Igor Siwanowicz

Remote control of blood sugar - Electromagnetic fields treat diabetes in animal models
Oct 2020, phys.org

And lastly; completely fucking bonkers.

Exposing diabetic mice to a combination of static electric and magnetic fields for a few hours per day normalizes two major hallmarks of type 2 diabetes. And it works by remote control, and it can be applied in your sleep to normalize your blood sugar for the rest of the day.

EMF therapy. Sounds like absolute and total bullshit. Remote control blood sugar.

And this makes it even better; "The initial finding was pure serendipity." One scientist borrowed another scientist's mice; he was working on EMF exposure, and she was working on bloodsugar. Using his mice in her experiment, she found something strange going on. Now we think the EMFs prolong activation of superoxide molecules in the liver, rebalancing the body's response to insulin.

Later, they even treated human liver cells with EMFs, for six hours, and found that the surrogate marker for insulin sensitivity improved.

Calvin S. Carter et al, Exposure to Static Magnetic and Electric Fields Treats Type 2 Diabetes, Cell Metabolism (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.cmet.2020.09.012

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)