Cool

GE on the Future of Manufacturing

I listened to Stephan Biller‘s talk on the future of manufacturing at GE.  I was saddened to hear that like Boeing GE also doesn’t have many of things that I thought they would have.

GE and Boeing both make jet engines and neither has the software to do the rescheduling and re-planning and renegotiation of process when bad things happen.  If something bad happens, people have to either re-plan or just wait for the part. Both options can costs a lot of money.

Also, they don’t have “smart” robots in their manufacturing plants. If one of them stops working then those robots that collaborate with that robot also must stop working. There is no fault tolerance when there should be. This also costs a lot of money.

Many AI and MAS/MAL type things that I am very interested in could be applied to solve these problems.  However, for these companies there would be a huge up-front cost in developing these systems since they would be state-of-the-art.

http://www2.technologyreview.com/emtech/13/

 

Year 2300

I was reading about chemical engineers and they seem pretty cool.  They then made think about the matrix and other sci-fi type things where the user is transported to a different reality.  Then I thought about LSD and how some drugs can produce hallucinations.  So, my idea is that in the far future instead of the Matrix or google glasses type reality/AR we will have chemical engineers that will create substances that will manipulate brain chemistry to create a heads up display (HUD).  So this HUD will produce something similar to google glass except with no need for glasses.  It also removes the need for computers being inserted into the person, like nanites.  I think that after the age of humans connect with machines that we will develop a better understanding of the brain and be able to better control and enhance our consciousness.  We may be able to combine the nanites and chemical engineering solutions.

Some ideas on how it will work:

Communication will be based on light emitted from the person.  Each person can then have their own personal signature (light pattern) to identify them.  We will be able to directly communicate ideas, images and thoughts to other people, computers and to our HUD.

We will be able to create “programs” like we do for computers that will produce an executable except that the executable will be an active chemical.  The program can be created through a person’s HUD and directly created and start working.  Or it can be created in mass by a manufacturing plant.

We may even harvest brains of animals to act as manufacturing plants…  Not sure how animals will be worked into this world.  Interesting though to explore this avenue.

The HUD may be able to better facilitate memory and intelligence.  This could be used in conjunction with the nanites.

Could create an AI within you via the “programs”.  Now that is a very very interesting concept.  What does that imply?  This is another thing to think about.

I think basically this will be the AR that will be created after 2213 to better facilitate that mind-device connection.  See my ideas for that year http://drew.heliohost.org/wordpress/?p=158.

 

I was just reading http://goo.gl/RjKtRH a popsci article on a Feng Zhang who is researching the tools in molecular engineering to start doing things similar to this except to help people with brain diseases!

http://mcgovern.mit.edu/component/content/article/2-principal-investigators/485-feng-zhang

Seems like he has a really cool lab at MIT http://zlab.mit.edu/index.html.

Builder Broker

I would imagine that building a house from scratch is pretty difficult for the regular lay person. It would be for me. Making the blue prints, figuring out the permits, what contractors I need and when. Especially if I want to change something or money changes etc there are many dynamic unpredictable things that can change the whole plan. Just think of what happened in Spain when they increased the number of floors during the building stage and they didn’t include a powerful enough elevator to go up the whole way (http://tinyurl.com/kx4jbyh)! I want to create planner and scheduler that will directly connect to the broker that will be dealing with the contractors.

One really has no hope of doing it on there own if you don’t know how a house is put together.

To tackle this problem I would need a someone that is familiar with dealing with contractors and building houses.
At first would most likely have to market this to larger projects. I think that this is necessary for the future of smart cities. Eventually the system would be able to plan how to put together a whole city.

http://www.esri.com/ products would be to figure out the layout of the city. Would want to work with them to make it more collaborative. The whole city planning thing needs to deal with a ton of data. That would be an awesome place to incorporate multiagent learning. Various entities will need to cooperate to decide on things. If we have a system that can ingest the preferences and distribute them across agents in the system then the agents can learn to cooperate to better.

This guy came up with my idea for the instant city in early January 2013!!!! http://video.esri.com/watch/2116/the-instant-citygeodesign-and-urban-planning around 19:32. I am sooo glad its not just me. He thinks it is possible. I not only want what he wants the creation of the plans of how it will look like to be automatic I also want the actually plans and schedules for caring out the “Master Plan” to be automated as well. So I had his idea and took it a step farther. Not only that I think that probably we could then simulate the entire city with the people in it and make improvements to the designs.

Microeconomics

I was learning a bit of micro to help my brother and here is a bit of what I learned.

The economics term for derivative is marginal.  Marginal revenue is the derivative of the revenue function.  Revenue is defined by R(q) = P(q)*q the price at a particular quantity times the quantity sold.  So, R'(q) = P'(q)*q + P(q) is the marginal revenue.  Usually P(q) does not change so P'(q) is zero. Therefore, R'(q) = P(q).  So, marginal revenue is the price I charged for producing one unit (remember P(q) is constant for any q).

Can also have marginal cost.  Which is similar to marginal revenue.

I also learned about elasticity.  Elasticity is the percent that Y changes in response to X changing by 1%.  In general elasticity is define by e = (dY/dX)*(X/Y).  This says the elasticity of Y with respect to X is the derivative of Y with respect to X times X over Y.  So, elasticity is a general thing you calculate for anything.  You just plug the words in for Y and X.  For example, the elasticity of demand with respect to price is: n = (dQ/dP)*(P/Q).  However, the demand curve usually has a negative slope so the derivative is negative.  Economists don’t like the negative so they usually write the elasticity of demand as n = -(dQ/dP)*(P/Q).  Remember D'(p) = (dQ/dP) and D(P) = Q = some equation in terms of P.  Usually, we like our equations to be in terms of one variable so I would substitute like this: n = -(dQ/dP)*(P/D(P)).  So, what does elasticity of demand tell us?  Well, first demand tells us how much a consumer buys at a particular price.  Elasticity looks at how the quantity changes as price changes.  So, 0<=n<1 if the demand for a good at that price is inelastic.  Meaning the quantity demanded doesn’t change radically.  If n > 1 then the demand is elastic meaning if we change the price the demand will change quite a bit.

Another interesting thing I learned was about the market demand residual.  This starts to be interesting because it is taking into account other (possibly identical) businesses.  The market demand residual is defined as Dr(P) = D(P) – So(P) where So(P) is the supply of all the other businesses that are identical and D(P) is the demand of the business that is being examined.  So, if there are n identical business then So(P) = sum(i = 1 to n-1) of Si(P).

Smart Logistics and the Knowledge Genesis Group

These are two pretty awesome companies/contractors.  They provide muliagent systems approach to solving real world problems.  They implement real time schedulers and optimization algorithms in the real world and not just as academics.  Pretty cool, too bad they aren’t based in the US (though they do have a branch in Florida).

 

http://www.knowledgegenesis.co.uk/home/what-we-do

http://smartlogisticsinc.com/partnerships/

http://goaleurope.com/2012/02/10/russian-science-put-to-a-commercial-use-real-time-multi-agent-optimization-know-how/

Russia and the rest of Europe are not only doing cutting edge research they are so much more advanced in their logistics and preparedness than the US!  Seems like the US is losing  in the multiagent systems race ;).

Gene Patenting

Today, April 15 2013, Supreme Court will hold oral arguments on the following question:  can one get a patent to gain the exclusive right to do research on specific genes that have been taken out of the body?

 

Myriad Genetics, Inc., has obtained several federal patents on “isolated” forms of two genes.   On the one hand, Myriad claims that it was entitled to patents on its isolation technology because it did something that no one previously had been able to do, and its legal papers have claimed that this took “an enormous amount of human judgment, including how to define the beginning and end of these genes.”

 

On the other hand, those who oppose patenting of isolated genes claim that Myriad did not create anything new, since the genes remained the natural material they had inside the human body, unchanged, and patents cannot legally be given to “natural phenomena” or something that is merely the product of “the laws of nature.”

 

For a discussion of the legal issues, see

http://www.scotusblog.com/2013/04/argument-preview-the-right-to-study-genes/
For a discussion of some of the implications of the case, see

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-12/biotech-industry-at-stake-in-human-gene-patent-decision.html

 

I got this in a new email I subscribe to.  Crazy thing is that back in 2007 I wrote an essay on how I think patenting genes is illegal.  This argument has been going on for a very long time.

https://www.box.com/s/77lg40s26ktive6kqrm1