Pattern Recognition

Currently, land-based tower wind turbines are the dominant source of wind power, but they take up a lot of space and generally need to be placed in high visibility areas, such as the tops of hills or ridges. They are also located close to the ground, where friction from the Earth’s surface slows the wind and increases its turbulence, negatively affecting the efficiency of the turbines. NASA engineers are looking at technologies that would help airborne wind power systems, capable of generating much more power, get off the ground.  Read More

At some point, we’ve probably all had a supermarket cashier ask us to identify the mysterious fresh produce that we’re attempting to buy. Once we’ve told them what it is, they have then had to manually type in its code – they have to enter it themselves, of course, given that fruits and vegetables don’t have barcodes. Thanks to Toshiba Tec, however, those days may be coming to an end. The company’s new Object Recognition Scanner is able to instantly identify grocery items of all types based on their appearance alone.  Read More

Researchers at the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics, and Theory of Science at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden have developed a psychological model of patterns as seen and selected by humans, and incorporated it in their IQ test solving programs. By doing so they have created a computer program that can score 150 on standard non-verbal IQ test questions.  Read More

In April, the University of Southern California made the headlines when it announced that researchers there had created a functioning synthetic synapse circuit using carbon nanotubes. Well, today IBM unveiled a new class of experimental computer chips that are designed to emulate the human brain’s abilities for perception, action and cognition. According to the company, “The technology could yield many orders of magnitude less power consumption and space than used in today’s computers.”  Read More

Currently, computer search and classification of images is based on the name of the file or folder or on features such as size and date. That’s fine if the name of the file reflects its content but isn’t much good when the file is given an abstract name that only holds meaning to the person providing it. This drawback means companies in the search business, such as Google and Microsoft, are extremely interested in giving computers the ability to automatically interpret the visual contents and video. A technique developed by the University of Granada does just that, allowing pictures to be classified automatically based on whether individuals or specific objects are present in the images.  Read More

New parents discover quite quickly how loudly their newborn can scream when they’re not happy. But working out the cause of the problem is unfortunately pretty much a guessing game. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a device that could tell you exactly what was wrong with your baby? It might not be as preposterous as it sounds - Japanese scientists claim they have developed a statistical computer program that can analyze the differences in a baby's cries. So, future baby monitors could be capable of alerting parents that their child is tired, hungry, needs a diaper change, or is in pain.  Read More

March 22, 2009 Evolutionary theorist Alastair Clarke this week published details of eight patterns he claims to be the basis of all the humour that has ever been imagined or expressed, regardless of civilization, culture or personal taste. Clarke has stated before that humour is based on the surprise recognition of patterns but this is the first time he has identified the precise nature of the patterns involved, addressing the deceptively simple unit and context relationships at their foundation.  Read More

May 6, 2008 There’s an overwhelming body of evidence that the brain, much like any other part of the human body, can be trained for improved performance in a host of different ways. Now a computer game that uses technology originally developed to help train fighter pilots is getting remarkable results in helping aspiring professional basketballers improve their real, on-court game. Known as Basketball IntelliGym the system looks like an innocent computer game – but much more is actually going on. As the player manipulates simple movements on the screen, “shooting” ammunition at moving targets, the system is busy analyzing skills and customizing a training program for the player.  Read More

The Multi-sensory Autonomous Cognitive Systems project is an attempt to imprint robots with the ability to understand the affordances of objects in their environment - or the physical qualities of an object, and the tasks it can be used for. It is hoped that this new approach to computer perception will allow robots to perceive more interaction possibilities, giving them the cognitive tools they need to successfully improvise and interact with their environment in a more human manner.  Read More