Cool

Trying out draftin

So this is a note I made at draftin.com, I don’t know if I will actually use this or will end up being a waste of time…

Well this is sort of nice, but I would have to come here to another website and I already get this from my wordpress blog?

Well I don’t get a couple things

  1. privacy
  2. backups
  3. exports easily
  4. pictures
  5. comments/sharing

Well I could just write in google docs, but I don’t get the privacy.

Well this is totally awesome now!!! I can publish to my wordpress blog!! And to twitter, and a bunch of other places.

So, I am able to insert an image!!!  The main problem is that my wordpress and draftin won’t be in sinc when I deleted the image here now and add this text.

So, I think that it would be nice maybe once it gets a bit more mature.

Agent-Robot Interaction and app idea

I think that the AI would be able to jump around and that it would have access to various other AI like functions like vision, planning, scheduling, communication that reside on the system that it is interacting with.  However, its behavior, decision making, goals, history, higher-level learning ability would be part of itself. Therefore, it would interface with the rest of the system that way.  Therefore, the agent-robot-interaction would be simplified and would allow the system to be seamless between real and virtual environments and would allow code reuse and modularity in the system.

The interface may be agent based (meaning the interface itself has goals, priorities, behaviors and an environment).

It also lends itself to distributed AI when there are multiple agents trying to interact with the same system.  Meaning how does the system determine who gets to use what when resources are limited.  Then there is the multiagent system aspect of when the agents are trying to do things that require cooperation.  Trying to determine who does what with what systems. Especially when you are all possibly different and some may have more experience doing certain tasks than other agents. Also, forming hierarchies would be important.

I think that this might have applications in areas like smart grid.  Where there are robots that are repairmen and essentially what happens is this:  We have some robots they are specialized (heterogeneous) and there is a hierarchy within the grid that can send out …  more on this later.

You should be able to txt your order to fast food and sub shops.  Or a universal ordering app.  The place would just subscribe to the website as a service and the site would have a standard way to order things.

I, Librarian an alternative to Mendeley

Well, I collaborate frequently with people on research projects.  This involves sharing research papers.  I do this through Mendeley.  However, they put a limit on the number of people allowed to be in one group and on the total size limit of the files.  I only have 5mb left on a group!  So, I am thinking that it would be nice to switch to something else.  The best thing I have found is: http://www.bioinformatics.org/librarian/.  They are open source and I can run their server on my laptop at home.  Also, they still have the annotation and highlight feature which is nice. However, it is all web based.  So, I am worried that some of my bigger pdfs will have trouble…  Also, I wonder how it will handle previous annotations and highlights.

Crowd source Bird ID APP

I was taking a walk tonight and I was listening to the birds and wishing I had an app that could ID the birds by their call/song/chirp.  I got back home and did a little digging and I couldn’t find an app that did this.  So, either it is too hard or too expensive or both.  However, I think that it would be really cool.

So, it would work like this if I were to make it…  I would have the user’s location and I would know the date and the user would start recording.  The program would try and pick out possible spots in the recording where it thought there were bird sounds and ask the user which one if any were actually birds.  There would be a neat little slider for them to pick out the time frame where the bird actually chirped.  Then that sound bite would be classified using our database using machine learning algorithms.  They would then get back a description of the bird, picture of it, and other sounds it makes.  If it wasn’t able to id the bird then it would ask you if you happened to know it and you could add that bird to our database.  The more people that contributed the better the database would get and more accurate the results would be.  You could take a pic and link to maybe the wikipedia article or other article on it.

Then, as more and more people used the app we could have a game where it could sort of be like a scavenger hunt for birds.  Also, it would be cool to make a map of all the birds around the world that you could explore and would be built by the gps coordinates of the people using the app.

Adaptive Checkout Lights

[written in October 2013 but decided to publish now]

I think it would be awesome if checkout lights could be more useful.  For example, if the light would change color depending on how full the line was.  So, it could be red if it was really full, yellow if a little full, and green if empty or practically empty.  The wouldn’t even need to be any software installed to control the light.  The cashier could just flip a switch to change the light color.  Also, there could be lines on the floor to let the cashier know when to change it.  Of course I would prefer the software solution with learning etc.  The software solution would be to put up sensors like those that open the automatic doors at each of the lines on the floor.  But this way would be cheap and a good way to signal customers.

Also, (in my world 😉 ) in order to make checking people out fun there would be a friendly competition between the cashiers.  The computers could keep track of stats of each of the cashiers, like throughput, number of errors, most saved or most number of items etc.  Then you could

EMF in pipes and Mixing in Space

I was thinking that it would be cool experiment to try to see how much current would be produced by flushing magnetic particles through a system of pipes that were wrapped with wire and connected to batteries.  Wonder how powerful the magnets would need to be and how the fact that they are traveling in water effects the field.  Would be interesting to compare to tap water to see how much an emf field is present already.

Just not sure if it would work because:

  1. the magnets would all clump together maybe not due to attraction and repulsion maybe end of
  2. field not strong enough to induce a noticeable current

 

[update] Well I I talked with someone that knows a bit more and he reminded me that even though it might be possible the magnet would be slowing down the water and therefore not doing any good.  He suggested that a mechanical method would be better rather than using magnets as well.

Was wondering how do you mix liquid things in zero gravity?  I would imagine it is either really hard or not possible.  Maybe we could use something like http://phys.org/news175873414.html.  I guess we could just shake them together…

Well as to be expected they have done some experiments and they tried mixing oil in water by shaking them together.  The cool thing is that they stayed together for 10 hours!  On earth they would separate in 10 seconds.  They also tried mixing water and water that had tea in it by pouring them into the same container.  However, since no gravity they barely mixed at all.  However, they did not shake the two.  However, I’m assuming that they would mix and would not separate.  (source: http://history.nasa.gov/SP-401/ch12.htm)

Trash Water Sewer oh my

Well, I was thinking that  a fun multirobotics project would be to have robots that were trash cans and their goals would be:

  1. Minimize expected time to find a trashcan
  2. Stay out of the way
  3. When full empty into “dumpster” or something
  4. Stay charged
  5. Minimal movement (don’t move when someone is using it)
  6. (Some sort of tipping defense mechanism?)

They might be outfitted with the ability to identify and suck up trash (like a vacuum).  They would have to coordinate so that they did not cluster.  They would learn roles and adapt to changes in the number of robots.

This multirobot trash can could be used at high traffic events or locations.  I guess the big thing is that people might actually steal the trash can!  We would need body guards for the trash can haha ;).  I do realize that this is sort of like the room clearing problem for multiple robots, so I’m thinking that some techniques that have been developed could be applied to solve this problem.

I call them CoWs, Cooperative Waste-cans :).

So, water and sewer plants when there are multiples that must cooperate to serve a community. Then the plants would be the agents and they could each communicate with the others to coordinate how/who/when they would do things.  This would reduce risk by distributing the system.  It is also agent based because the plants are selfish.  It is not a distributed problem because the facilities may be different companies.

They mush cooperate to take better care of the environment (over taxing the river where the water comes) and customers.  I wonder who owns the sewer pipes then?  Would this be a traveling repairman problem?  So, it would have to be distributed due to the joint ownership of the pipes by different companies, but separate management of the repairmen?

In the creation of the city that would also be an interesting problem of determining all the sewer layout and design…  This seems like a Ford-Fulkerson solution with a Traveling Repairman problem and TSP.  So, essentially we could evolve different pipe networks so that when the roads get built on top we will have created the best possible network with the given simulated info at the time.

 

Human Trafficking Simulation

Need a game that people play that simulates human trafficking without it actually being human trafficking (since that would just be wrong).  It could be a MMO strategy game that requires the players to distribute mail in a war zone.  So, you can choose  to be the good guy, the mail distributor (which corresponds to the human trafficker and the mail is like the humans).  Or the bad guy and try and stop the mail men.

We can then use machine learning to identify trends in the strategies, social networks and roles that form as the game progresses.  Using this data along with real world human trafficking data we can create a multiagent simulation that can predict the effects of various decisions.