thoughts

January Summary Post

This year started off quite well:

1. My friend Indranil passed the CS quals

2. I became a Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) and got an early 2013 15″ macbook pro!

3. I might get to go to Brazil for Robocup (as long as we qualify)

4. I might get to go to Prague to present a paper at ECAI as long as I can take the quals the week before.

5. I have two paper worthy ideas that I am researching! (well one is a survey paper on heterogenous multrobotic systems and their applications and the other is Dynamic auction protocols for task allocation in multirobotics (this could lead to bigger things))

6. Today I found out that one of my ML ideas for creating new recipes was just implemented at IBM! I couldn’t pursue it because I didn’t have the data, but am glad they did.

7. Learned how to solder (really easy) and make the connector cables for robots (hard)

and probably a lot more I can’t remember.

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.

Real life MAS

I was reading the article “The Science of Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect” http://tinyurl.com/m6keshp and I found the following quotes very interesting.

We intuitively believe social and physical pain are radically different kinds of experiences, yet the way our brains treat them suggests that they are more similar than we imagine.

Also,

The neural basis for our personal beliefs overlaps significantly with one of the regions of the brain primarily responsible for allowing other people’s beliefs to influence our own. The self is more of a superhighway for social influence than it is the impenetrable private fortress we believe it to be.

 

 

Voting and Auction based Monitors

Condition variables and monitors go hand in hand.  There are various monitor protocols: Signal-and-Continue (SC), Signal-and-Urgent-Wait (SU), Signal-and-Exit, Urgent-Signal-and-Continue etc.  Basically these protocols define what order threads get to enter, reenter, and exit methods in a monitor.  They are defined by a first-come first-served (FCFS) queuing schemes to ensure their specific protocols are met.

I am proposing two protocols that are based on Voting and Auctions.  The idea here is that threads get to enter in the order in which they were voted or if they won the auction.  The auction would be like the auctions that google uses for placement of ads on a page.

SU Monitor for producer consumer problem

Monitor queues for producer consumer problem.

The threads could base their decisions on data the monitor has about each of the threads, data the thread has collected, or some other way defined by the coder.  This is the interesting part.

I think that there may be a way to use Arrow’s Theorem to provide some guarantees about some things.

Schepperle, H., & Bohm, K. (2008). Auction-Based Traffic Management: Towards Effective Concurrent Utilization of Road Intersections. E-Commerce Technology and the Fifth …, 105–112. doi:10.1109/CEC/EEE.2008.9

The above reference seems to be heading in the direction I was thinking except they were narrower.

 

And while I was writing this I found http://www.isi.edu/~lerman/projects/task/ has some good papers on mathematical modeling of multiagent systems.

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.

Prisons as multiagent systems

Wonder how prisoner transport routes are created and scheduled.  Maybe the whole prison system could be a test bed for “smart cities”.  They are just the controlled environment we need.  Wonder how much tech is involved in prisons currently.

Probably MAL could be applied somewhere.  Might be an application area worth looking into.

Maybe the prisoners, guards, cleaning people, ie the people in the building.  Maybe create a simulation of a prison and create a multiagent planner to assist the decision making regarding prisoner transport.  Maybe a social network.  CV for monitoring prisoner rehabilitation process.    With that data a better simulation can be produced. CV can already spot riots before they happen.

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