MATSim

Really cool multiagent transportation simulator. Maybe I will be able to use this in the future. I want to scale multiagent learning to large number of agents. I also want to have autonomous vehicles. So, maybe I can simulate scenarios like finding a parking spot to meet someone, driving in traffic, cooperation between traffic signals and cars, the elimination of traffic lights, stop signs, lanes and the concept of driving on the “right” side of the road (exploring the edge of chaos concept here), …. Maybe the last idea would be able to locate where traffic concepts should be applied.

Seems like a fun summer project idea.

Tracking Zombie Worms

I just read an article about whale falls. They say the only way to find them so far is basically by accident. They describe these zombie worms that have been so far found at the sites of these falls. Why don’t they inject something into the worms that is traceable and transferable to its offspring. Then they could easily find the whale falls.

Geotagging and Twitter

At Rochester http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~sadilek/research/ they have a cool web app that overlays tweets on google maps.

Determining Gender

In the paper Gender, Genre, and Writing Style in Formal Written Texts the authors determined the gender based on text. Looks like we are still interested in doing this sort of thing because it was done using twitter info http://www.fastcompany.com/1769217/you-cant-keep-your-secrets-twitter.

ScraperWiki

I found this cool service call ScraperWiki. It allows you to write python, ruby or php scraper as well as a view. You can make the data public so others can view or private. You can also make a view for your data! So I think this is awesome!!! I think for my Adv. AI class I think we could either use someone else’s data or make a scraper and mine our own data.

I also found Gravatar. Cool service that allows its users to upload an avatar so that whenever they post to a site that uses Gravatar, their avatar will be used! Really cool. The cool part is that you can get the avatar image based on a hash of the user’s email address! So maybe I could make an email address scraper and use that data to collect users Gravatar images and profiles! Really crazy all the info that users can put into their profile. Or I could maybe scrape for gravatar email hashes… Then directly get the user’s profile…

Not sure what I could do with that data though… Maybe try and find faces in the gravatar since their avatar may be their face. This could be useful if I can’t get access to their profile. Since then I could try and find them on facebook, twitter, etc..

I’ll have to get to you on what it would be good for… Sounds super creepy though that this could be done.

Code.org

My brother showed me this video. Pretty cool.

MGS Markov Game Simulator

I found a really cool paper that basically benchmarks a lot of MARL algorithms using MGS, a stochastic game simulator written in Java. This simulator is like my MALSIM except I only implemented features for repeated games not stochastic games.

Swarm of text

Can we use the Shapley idea to determine if there is a swarm on twitter based on tweets? A swarm could be thought as a lot of retweets or a tweet with similar words. We could find old tweet swarms characterize them and use them to predict whether certain tweets will become swarms. I think the idea is identifying whether a tweet will go viral. When classifying we can look at the social network of the originators and the topic. Then we can see which words are most frequent in the emerging swarm. If pretweeting (stockmarket on the words in twitter) was still around we could make money :).

Is twitter and your (virality index) related to the success of crowd funded operations? Or just that you know some rich people.

How to bring about a virtual swarm and influence it in your favor is an interesting topic. Sounds like marketing though…

Matt’s Blog

This seems like a useful and interesting blog. One of the entries gives a motivation for my continuing to write my blog.

Distributed 3d modeling using smartphones

You and your friends want to make a 3d model of something big!! Not just a toy or person. Rather your neighborhood or house. Something big. So the idea is to stitch together distributed 2d video to create a 3d model. You would use your smartphones that have gps, bluetooth, accelerometer, altitude data and compass. Send that data (of course would have to some sort of heuristic) back to a server which processes it and creates the model.

From researching this idea I found this article about how the navy developed malware for android to create a 3d model of the victims house. So the idea of creating 3d model from cellphone data is doable. I just want to distribute it and make it applicable to larger environments in real time.

You could become part of an initiative or start one. Essentially someone defines the boundaries of the model via gps coordinates. Then users who want to contribute data can join the network. Bluetooth could be used to enhance the quality of the mesh by providing another source of location data.

The mesh could then be imported into games like second life or maybe into google maps. Could use the 3d model to create the basis for an augmented reality platform. So if you tag something while you are viewing the 3d model on your computer and then you go to that place you could view it through your phone. The uses for a 3d model are endless.

Since we are distributing the data and the mesh will be updating, we could develop a highly robust to change mesh. Essentially free from dynamic objects. So if in one frame there is like a bike and in another there isn’t then I could determine to pick the frame without the bike.

This idea is really starting to sound like a huge project. For my advanced AI class I think I need to focus on one thing. Like the distributed 2d->3d modeling. This post became a lot longer than my initial idea.

This blog looks interesting.

Drew’s Borg

Prepare to be assimilated

Cool