Robots Simulate Torture in Controversial Exhibit

An art installation in Coney Island that uses robots to simulate waterboarding, a torturous interrogation tactic that's been used on detainees at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay detention center, is creating a national stir as it raises public awareness about the controversial practice.
The so-called Waterboard Thrill Ride -- created by New York-based artist Steve Powers -- is not the typical carnival ride or attraction you would expect to find near the famous boardwalk of the iconic Brooklyn community.
Though it's mere steps way from attractions like Nathan's hot-dog stand and the Cyclone roller coaster, the exhibit is less to provide amusement than to raise awareness of waterboarding, the practice of pouring water onto the face of an immobilized person so that the sensation of drowning will encourage them to talk to interrogators.
If you walked by the exhibit on West 12th Street just off the boardwalk, you wouldn't notice anything special about the storefront that houses it -- it could be any one of Coney Island's carnival attractions.
It also might go unnoticed as it's in the shadow of the famous Coney Island Circus Sideshow, which showcases sword swallowing, fire-eating and similar extreme feats, which is next door.
But a mural on the wall outside the Waterboard Thrill Ride is a harbinger of what's inside, behind a window framed by prison bars. It shows a character from the U.S. SpongeBob SquarePants animated television show, Squidward, using a watering can to pour water on a strapped-down SpongeBob himself. Through a cartoon dialogue bubble, SpongeBob emotes that "It don't gitmo better."
To see the exhibit, you walk up a few stairs to a viewing platform. Peering through the bars, you can see two robots -- one clothed in a dark-hued hooded-sweatshirt, holding a watering can, and the other strapped down and blindfolded wearing an orange jump suit.
After putting a dollar in the payment slot, music plays while the hoodie-clad robot pours water from the watering can onto the mouth of the other, which bucks and thrashes slightly. The "ride" lasts about 15 seconds and -- in the simulation I saw -- is set to the theme song from the U.S. children's show Sesame Street, the lyrics of which are: "Sunny day, sweeping the clouds away."
The theme song is perhaps an homage to the mural on the wall of the cell in which the waterboarding takes place, which features a seascape with the words "Don't worry it's only a dream" painted across the robin's-egg blue sky.
The robots in the exhibit are crude and would not likely be mistaken for actual human beings -- but that's exactly the point, said Powers, who used the "most budget animatronics" he could find.
"It was important to me not to make it a quasi-realistic experience to make it an effective Coney Island attraction," he said. "We wanted to make it as artificial as possible."
Powers declined to name the company from which he purchased the robots, willing only to say that he purchased them online because "they weren't very happy with what I was doing."
The artist said he did not plan on making any drastic political statement with the Waterboard Thrill Ride-- his main objective was to learn more about waterboarding himself, though he knew in doing so he would likely raise public awareness of the issue.
"I wasn't going for a specific reaction per se," he said. "The whole purpose of the project was to investigate and try to figure it out and better understand what it meant -- what waterboarding meant just for me."
Despite this apparently modest intent, the Waterboard Thrill Ride understandably has garnered a lot of attention -- both from people who've visited the exhibit and the national media, which have covered the exhibit extensively.
On a muggy Thursday in August, curiosity seekers, members of the press and locals who'd heard about the installation gathered outside it soon after the storefront opened in the early afternoon. Those I spoke with shared mixed reactions to the exhibit. But love it or hate it, like the intention of the waterboarding practice itself, the exhibit got them talking.
Nicole Angerhauser, a 19-year-old local resident who had read about the exhibit in the newspaper, said she felt ripped off as she walked down the stairs from the viewing platform.
"Is that it? That was a waste of my money," she said. "I want the last 30 seconds of my life back."
However, Amaris Sicklick, a 15-year-old resident from upstate New York who was visiting Coney Island with her father, thought the installation -- which she called " a pretty gruesome thing to put on display for people" -- achieved a didactic effect.
"It teaches people what really goes on," she said, adding that it was important for people to be aware of the issue.
I found the Waterboard Thrill Ride to be amusing and at the same time, chilling. Because the robots looked so unlike real people, and since their movements were accompanied by a whimsical song from my childhood, the initial experience made me smile.
But after I viewed it several times, the thrashing of the robot simulating the victim seemed a little too real, and I could imagine how it might feel to undergo such torture.
Powers knows first hand what waterboarding feels like. True to his intention to learn more about it, he actually underwent the torture as part of a live exhibition related to the Waterboard Thrill Ride in Coney Island.
Powers called the experience "very painful" but said that it taught him as much as he needed to know about the practice, and "it's not all good news."
He said he was not interested in politicizing, but that in his opinion, having experienced waterboarding first hand, it seems like "a really inadequate form of interrogation." "Under that kind of duress, people would say anything," Powers said.
The Waterboard Thrill Ride will be in its current Coney Island home until Sept। 15, after which it will move to the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan as part of Creative Time's Democracy in America exhibit.
Reference : http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/150118/robots_simulate_torture_in_controversial_exhibit.html

Intel CTO Says Gap between Humans, Machines will Close by 2050

INTEL DEVELOPER FORUM, San Francisco, Aug. 21, 2008 – Intel Corporation's chief technology officer took a fascinating look at how technology will bring man and machine much closer together by 2050.
Justin Rattner, during his keynote today at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, predicted big changes are ahead in social interactions, robotics and improvements in computer's ability to sense the real world. He said Intel's research labs are already looking at human-machine interfaces and examining future implications to computing with some promising changes coming much sooner than expected.
"The industry has taken much greater strides than anyone ever imagined 40 years ago," Rattner said. "There is speculation that we may be approaching an inflection point where the rate of technology advancements is accelerating at an exponential rate, and machines could even overtake humans in their ability to reason, in the not so distant future."
Cutting the Last Cord, Wireless Power
Imagine being able to walk into an airport or room with your laptop and instead of consuming battery, it is recharged. Based on principles proposed by MIT physicists, Intel researchers have been working on a Wireless Resonant Energy Link (WREL). Rattner demonstrated powering a 60-watt light bulb without the use of a plug or wire of any kind, which is more than is needed for a typical laptop.
The magic of WREL is that it promises to deliver wireless power safely and efficiently. The technology relies on strongly coupled resonators, a principle similar to the way a trained singer can shatter a glass using her voice. At the receiving resonator's natural frequency, energy is absorbed efficiently, just as a glass absorbs acoustic energy at its natural frequency. With this technology enabled in a laptop, for example, batteries could be recharged when the laptop gets within several feet of the transmit resonator. Many engineering challenges remain, but the company's researchers hope to find a way to cut the last cord in mobile devices and someday enable wireless power in Intel-based platforms.
Programmable Matter: Computers that Change Shape
Intel researchers are also investigating how millions of tiny micro-robots, called catoms, could build shape-shifting materials. If used to replace the case, display and keyboard of a computing device, this technology could make it possible for a device to change physical form in order to suit the specific way you are using it. A mobile computer, for example, could be tiny when in a pocket, change to the shape of an earpiece when used as a mobile phone, and be large and flat with a keyboard for browsing the Internet or watching a movie.
Rattner described this as a difficult exploratory research agenda, but steady progress is being made. He demonstrated for the first time the results of a novel technique for fabricating tiny silicon hemispheres using photolithography, a process used today to make silicon chips. This capability is one of the basic structural building blocks needed to realize functional catoms, and will make it easier to bring the necessary computational and mechanical components together in one tiny package less than a millimeter across. The technique is compatible with existing high-volume manufacturing and enables the possibility to produce such catoms in quantity at some point in the future.
Dr. Michael Garner, program manager of Emerging Materials Roadmap, joined Rattner onstage to discuss the importance of research of novel silicon technology, keeping Moore's Law alive and well through the next decade and beyond. Among other things, Intel is researching how to go beyond planar transistors to 3D transistors and is looking at using compound semiconductors to replace silicon in the transistor channel. Looking further out, Intel is exploring into a variety of non-charge-based technologies that could one day replace CMOS altogether.
Robots: From the Factory Floor to Your Kitchen
Robots today are primarily used in the factory environment, designed to perform a single task repeatedly and bolted down. To make robotics personal, robots need to move and manipulate objects in cluttered and dynamic human environments, according to Rattner. They need to be cognizant of their surroundings by sensing and recognizing movement in a dynamic physical world, and learn to adapt to new scenarios. Rattner demonstrated two working personal robot prototypes developed at Intel's research labs. One of the demonstrations showed electric field pre-touch that has been built into a robot hand. The technique is a novel sensing modality used by fish but not humans, so they can "feel" objects before they even touch them. The other demonstration was a complete autonomous mobile manipulation robot that can recognize faces and interpret and execute commands as generic as "please clean this mess" using state-of-the-art motion planning, manipulation, perception and artificial intelligence.
In addition to robots becoming more human-like, Rattner said he believes more innovation will emerge to make human and machine interaction more robust। Randy Breen, chief product officer of Emotiv Systems, joined Rattner onstage to demonstrate the company's EPOC* headset. The Emotiv EPOC identifies brainwave patterns, processes them in real time and tells a game what conscious or non-conscious thoughts the user has had, like facial expressions, conscious actions or emotions. A user with the headset could think about smiling or lifting an object, and an avatar in a game would execute it. EPOC can currently identify more than 30 different "detections" through the 16 sensors on the headset.
Reference : http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20080821comp.htm?cid=rss-90004-c1-211570

Microsoft Opens up Photosynth

Microsoft has made its Photosynth technology easier to use and opened it up for anyone to create their own images, the company planned to announce Thursday.
Photosynth automatically stitches together digital photos -- just a handful or a few hundred -- to create an image that a user can spin around to look at from all angles or zoom in to check out a close-up detail.
Slideshow: Read PC World's in-depth look at Photosynth.
Video: Interview with Photosynth.net co-creator, Blaise Aguera y Arcas.
A project created in part through a collaboration between Microsoft Live Labs and the University of Washington, Photosynth was already open to anyone as a tech preview but heavily taxed many systems, resulting in a very slow user experience. Also, users could only view a handful of images and couldn't make their own.
Those shortcomings have changed with this launch, said Alex Daley, group product manager at Microsoft Live Labs. The technology behind Photosynth is now designed to do most of the computing work locally, on a user's computer, with the photos stored remotely on Microsoft servers. That division of labor has made it a much faster experience for end users, Daley said.
The technology behind the new service was developed in part by David Gedye, group manager at Live Labs, who founded the SETI@home project that harnesses unused computer time contributed by individuals to search for extraterrestrial intelligent life.
His experience helped in designing Photosynth to use local computing power. "There's a green story here," Gedye said. "Instead of massive data centers, we're using the available power on your machine."
At Photosynth.com, anyone can view images created by other people and create their own. The creation process is simple, but still takes some time. Users select and upload a group of photos from their computers. The technology takes several minutes, depending on the number of photos, to examine the photos for common components in order to stitch them together into one image.
Users still must download a piece of software that is about 8M bytes in size in order to use Photosynth, Daley said.
Microsoft hopes to add more community sharing features to Photosynth.com in the future. For now, all images are public and people can comment on images. In the future, Microsoft may allow users to create communities and restrict viewing to people in those communities. Also, the front page of the Web site might feature the most popular images in the future. For now, Microsoft has chosen which images to display on the main page.
Users can embed their Photosynth images on other Web sites and send links to them to other people via e-mail. After creating a new Photosynth, people can mark them as copyrighted, protected under the Creative Commons license or public domain. Users can also flag images they think are inappropriate and Microsoft will consider removing them.
The Web site already has many images available for viewing, including some from National Geographic, which has worked with Microsoft over the past couple of months to upload images. Photosynth.com visitors can browse around pictures of iconic international sites such as the Taj Mahal, Hagia Sophia, Machu Picchu and the Sphinx.
Microsoft built Photosynth by combining technology it developed in collaboration with researchers at the University of Washington with technology it acquired from SeaDragon।
Reference : http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/150099/microsoft_opens_up_photosynth.html