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  • richardmitnick 4:39 pm on June 2, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: "New Method Predicts Extreme Events More Accurately", , , , Climate models have currently predicted a smaller variance in precipitation with a bias toward light rain., , Computer Science & Technology, Data Science Institute, , Earth and Environmental Engineering, , Extreme Weather Events, , , Machine-learning algorithm will improve future projections, Missing piece in current algorithms: cloud organization, New algorithm predicts precipitation especially extreme events more accurately., The "Stochasticity": in the case of the variability of random fluctuations in precipitation intensity, , Using AI to design neural network algorithm   

    From The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science At Columbia University: “New Method Predicts Extreme Events More Accurately” 

    From The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science

    At

    Columbia U bloc

    5.23.23

    Holly Evarts
    Director of Strategic Communications and Media Relations
    (c) 347-453-7408
    (o) 212-854-3206
    holly.evarts@columbia.edu
    Columbia University

    New algorithm predicts precipitation especially extreme events more accurately.

    Columbia Engineers develop machine-learning algorithm that will help researchers to better understand and mitigate the impact of extreme weather events, which are becoming more frequent in our warming climate.

    1
    Credit: “Rain Storm Colorado Springs Colorado” by Brokentaco/Flickr is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

    With the rise of extreme weather events, which are becoming more frequent in our warming climate, accurate predictions are becoming more critical for all of us, from farmers to city-dwellers to businesses around the world. To date, climate models have failed to accurately predict precipitation intensity, particularly extremes. While in nature, precipitation can be very varied, with many extremes of precipitation, climate models predict a smaller variance in precipitation with a bias toward light rain.

    Missing piece in current algorithms: cloud organization

    Researchers have been working to develop algorithms that will improve prediction accuracy but, as Columbia Engineering climate scientists report, there has been a missing piece of information in traditional climate model parameterizations–a way to describe cloud structure and organization that is so fine-scale it is not captured on the computational grid being used. These organization measurements affect predictions of both precipitation intensity and its stochasticity, the variability of random fluctuations in precipitation intensity. Up to now, there has not been an effective, accurate way to measure cloud structure and quantify its impact.

    A new study [PNAS (below)] from a team led by Pierre Gentine, director of the Learning the Earth with Artificial Intelligence and Physics (LEAP) Center, used global storm-resolving simulations and machine learning to create an algorithm that can deal separately with two different scales of cloud organization: those resolved by a climate model, and those that cannot be resolved as they are too small. This new approach addresses the missing piece of information in traditional climate model parameterizations and provides a way to predict precipitation intensity and variability more precisely.

    “Our findings are especially exciting because, for many years, the scientific community has debated whether to include cloud organization in climate models,” said Gentine, Maurice Ewing and J. Lamar Worzel Professor of Geophysics in the Departments of Earth and Environmental Engineering and Earth Environmental Sciences and a member of the Data Science Institute. “Our work provides an answer to the debate and a novel solution for including organization, showing that including this information can significantly improve our prediction of precipitation intensity and variability.”

    Using AI to design neural network algorithm

    Sarah Shamekh, a PhD student working with Gentine, developed a neural network algorithm that learns the relevant information about the role of fine-scale cloud organization (unresolved scales) on precipitation. Because Shamekh did not define a metric or formula in advance, the model learns implicitly–on its own–how to measure the clustering of clouds, a metric of organization, and then uses this metric to improve the prediction of precipitation. Shamekh trained the algorithm on a high-resolution moisture field, encoding the degree of small-scale organization.

    “We discovered that our organization metric explains precipitation variability almost entirely and could replace a stochastic parameterization in climate models,” said Shamekh, lead author of the study, published May 8, 2023, by PNAS. “Including this information significantly improved precipitation prediction at the scale relevant to climate models, accurately predicting precipitation extremes and spatial variability.”

    Machine-learning algorithm will improve future projections

    The researchers are now using their machine-learning approach, which implicitly learns the sub-grid cloud organization metric, in climate models. This should significantly improve the prediction of precipitation intensity and variability, including extreme precipitation events, and enable scientists to better project future changes in the water cycle and extreme weather patterns in a warming climate.

    Future work

    This research also opens up new avenues for investigation, such as exploring the possibility of precipitation creating memory, where the atmosphere retains information about recent weather conditions, which in turn influences atmospheric conditions later on, in the climate system. This new approach could have wide-ranging applications beyond just precipitation modeling, including better modeling of the ice sheet and ocean surface.

    PNAS

    Fig. 1.
    2
    Global storm resolving model. Snapshot of a cloud scene on 24 February 2016 from SAM as part of the DYAMOND dataset. Ten days, randomly selected, of the tropical regions (displayed between the two white dashed lines) from this simulation are used for this analysis. The inset plot shows precipitation versus precipitable water for 10 d of SAM simulations. Lines show the precipitation conditionally averaged by 0.3-mm bins of precipitable water and for 1-K bins of free tropospheric temperature. Scatter dots show the spread in precipitation for each bin of precipitable water and averaged free tropospheric temperature across the simulation domain and time period.

    Fig. 2.
    3
    Overview of proposed framework for parameterizing precipitation. (A) Coarse-graining the high-resolution data. (B) Baseline-NN architecture: This network receives coarse-scale variables (e.g., SST and PW) as input and predicts coarse-scale precipitation. (C). Org-NN architecture: The Left panel shows the autoencoder that receives the high-resolution PW as input and reconstructs it after passing it through a bottleneck. The Right panel shows the neural network that predicts coarse-scale precipitation. The input to this network is the coarse-scale variables (as for the baseline network) as well as org extracted from the autoencoder. The two blocks are trained simultaneously.

    See the science paper for instructive material with images.

    See the full article here .

    Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

    five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

    Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

    Stem Education Coalition

    The Columbia University Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science is the engineering and applied science school of Columbia University. It was founded as the School of Mines in 1863 and then the School of Mines, Engineering and Chemistry before becoming the School of Engineering and Applied Science. On October 1, 1997, the school was renamed in honor of Chinese businessman Z.Y. Fu, who had donated $26 million to the school.

    The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science maintains a close research tie with other institutions including National Aeronautics and Space Administration, IBM, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and The Earth Institute. Patents owned by the school generate over $100 million annually for the university. Faculty and alumni are responsible for technological achievements including the developments of FM radio and the maser.

    The School’s applied mathematics, biomedical engineering, computer science and the financial engineering program in operations research are very famous and ranked high. The current faculty include 27 members of the National Academy of Engineering and one Nobel laureate. In all, the faculty and alumni of Columbia Engineering have won 10 Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine, and economics.

    The school consists of approximately 300 undergraduates in each graduating class and maintains close links with its undergraduate liberal arts sister school Columbia College which shares housing with SEAS students.

    Original charter of 1754

    Included in the original charter for Columbia College was the direction to teach “the arts of Number and Measuring, of Surveying and Navigation […] the knowledge of […] various kinds of Meteors, Stones, Mines and Minerals, Plants and Animals, and everything useful for the Comfort, the Convenience and Elegance of Life.” Engineering has always been a part of Columbia, even before the establishment of any separate school of engineering.

    An early and influential graduate from the school was John Stevens, Class of 1768. Instrumental in the establishment of U.S. patent law. Stevens procured many patents in early steamboat technology; operated the first steam ferry between New York and New Jersey; received the first railroad charter in the U.S.; built a pioneer locomotive; and amassed a fortune, which allowed his sons to found the Stevens Institute of Technology.

    When Columbia University first resided on Wall Street, engineering did not have a school under the Columbia umbrella. After Columbia outgrew its space on Wall Street, it relocated to what is now Midtown Manhattan in 1857. Then President Barnard and the Trustees of the University, with the urging of Professor Thomas Egleston and General Vinton, approved the School of Mines in 1863. The intention was to establish a School of Mines and Metallurgy with a three-year program open to professionally motivated students with or without prior undergraduate training. It was officially founded in 1864 under the leadership of its first dean, Columbia professor Charles F. Chandler, and specialized in mining and mineralogical engineering. An example of work from a student at the School of Mines was William Barclay Parsons, Class of 1882. He was an engineer on the Chinese railway and the Cape Cod and Panama Canals. Most importantly he worked for New York, as a chief engineer of the city’s first subway system, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company. Opened in 1904, the subway’s electric cars took passengers from City Hall to Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the newly renamed and relocated Columbia University in Morningside Heights, its present location on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

    Columbia U Campus
    Columbia University was founded in 1754 as King’s College by royal charter of King George II of England. It is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York and the fifth oldest in the United States.

    University Mission Statement

    Columbia University is one of the world’s most important centers of research and at the same time a distinctive and distinguished learning environment for undergraduates and graduate students in many scholarly and professional fields. The University recognizes the importance of its location in New York City and seeks to link its research and teaching to the vast resources of a great metropolis. It seeks to attract a diverse and international faculty and student body, to support research and teaching on global issues, and to create academic relationships with many countries and regions. It expects all areas of the University to advance knowledge and learning at the highest level and to convey the products of its efforts to the world.

    Columbia University is a private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhattan Columbia is the oldest institution of higher education in New York and the fifth-oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. It is one of nine colonial colleges founded prior to the Declaration of Independence, seven of which belong to the Ivy League. Columbia is ranked among the top universities in the world by major education publications.

    Columbia was established as King’s College by royal charter from King George II of Great Britain in reaction to the founding of Princeton College. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 following the American Revolution, and in 1787 was placed under a private board of trustees headed by former students Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. In 1896, the campus was moved to its current location in Morningside Heights and renamed Columbia University.

    Columbia scientists and scholars have played an important role in scientific breakthroughs including brain-computer interface; the laser and maser; nuclear magnetic resonance; the first nuclear pile; the first nuclear fission reaction in the Americas; the first evidence for plate tectonics and continental drift; and much of the initial research and planning for the Manhattan Project during World War II. Columbia is organized into twenty schools, including four undergraduate schools and 15 graduate schools. The university’s research efforts include the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and accelerator laboratories with major technology firms such as IBM. Columbia is a founding member of the Association of American Universities and was the first school in the United States to grant the M.D. degree. With over 14 million volumes, Columbia University Library is the third largest private research library in the United States.

    The university’s endowment stands at $11.26 billion in 2020, among the largest of any academic institution. As of October 2020, Columbia’s alumni, faculty, and staff have included: five Founding Fathers of the United States—among them a co-author of the United States Constitution and a co-author of the Declaration of Independence; three U.S. presidents; 29 foreign heads of state; ten justices of the United States Supreme Court, one of whom currently serves; 96 Nobel laureates; five Fields Medalists; 122 National Academy of Sciences members; 53 living billionaires; eleven Olympic medalists; 33 Academy Award winners; and 125 Pulitzer Prize recipients.

     
  • richardmitnick 8:52 am on May 31, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: "Fueled by problem-solving", , , Computer Science & Technology, , , , Thomas Bergamaschi   

    From The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science And From The School of Engineering At The Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “Fueled by problem-solving” Thomas Bergamaschi 

    From The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

    And

    From The School of Engineering

    At

    The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    5.30.23
    Sandi Miller | Department of Physics

    1
    “I think there are many instances during my time at MIT in which I worked all night for a project, just to get up and hop back on because of the excitement of obtaining a result or solution,” says senior Thomas Bergamaschi. Photo: Sandi Miller.

    “Every time I try to solve a problem — whether it be physics or computer science — I always try to find an elegant solution,” says MIT senior Thomas Bergamaschi, who spent four years learning how to solve problems while an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) student in the Engineering Quantum Systems (EQUS) laboratory at MIT.

    “Of course,” he adds, “there are many times where a problem doesn’t have an elegant solution, or finding an elegant solution is much harder than a normal solution, but it is something I always try to do, as it helps me understand at most something. Another compelling reason is that these solutions are usually the simplest to teach other people, which is always appealing to me.”

    Now, as the physics and electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) major ponders post-graduation life, he believes he’s ready to tackle challenges in his career as a software engineer at Five Rings, where he had an internship. “There are a lot of hard and interesting problems to be solved there,” he says. “Challenges are something that fuels me.”

    STEM family

    Born in Brazil, Bergamaschi lived in the United States until he was 6, when his family moved back to a small town in rural Sao Paulo called Vinhedo. His Brazilian father is a software engineer, and his mother, who is from England, studied biology in college and now teaches English. He followed in the footsteps of his older brother, Thiago, who was the first in the family to be drawn to physics. And when his brother entered physics competitions in high school, Thomas did too.

    He had high school teachers who encouraged him to study physics beyond the usual curriculum. “One teacher accompanied me on many bus and plane rides to physics competitions and classes,” he recalls. “She was a huge motivator for me to continue studying physics and helped find me new books and problems throughout high school.”

    The younger Bergamaschi went on to win silver medals at the International Physics Olympiad and at the International Young Physicists’ Tournament, and more than a dozen other medals in national and regional Brazilian science competitions in physics, math, and astronomy.

    MIT Time

    Thiago Bergamaschi ’21 joined MIT as a physics and EECS major in 2017, and his brother wasn’t far behind him, entering MIT in 2019.

    Bergamaschi ended up spending nearly all four years at MIT as a UROP student in the Engineering Quantum Systems (EQUS) laboratory, under the supervision of PhD student Tim Menke and Professor William Oliver. That’s when he was introduced to quantum computing — his supervisors were constructing a device that had a phenomenon where many qubits could interact simultaneously.

    “This type of interaction is very useful for quantum computers, as it gives us a possible way that we can map problems we are interested in onto a quantum computer,” he says. “My project was to try to answer the question of how we can actually measure things, and prove that the constructed device actually had this coupling term we were interested in.”

    He proposed and analyzed methods to experimentally detect many-body quantum systems. “These systems are extremely important and interesting as they have many cool applications, and in particular can be used to map computationally hard problems — such as route optimization, Boolean satisfiability, and more — to quantum computers in an easy way.”

    This project was supposed to be a warmup project for his UROP. “However, we soon noticed that the problem of accurately measuring these effects was a pretty tricky problem. I ended up working on this problem for around six months — my summer, the fall semester, and the beginning of IAP [Independent Activities Period] — trying to figure out how we can measure these effects.”

    He presented his research at the 2021 and 2022 American Physical Society March meetings, and published “Distinguishing multi-spin interactions from lower-order effects” in Physical Review Applied [below].

    “The experience of presenting my work in a conference and publishing a paper is a huge highlight from my time at MIT and gave me a taste of scientific communication and research, which was invaluable for me,” Bergamaschi says. “Being able to do research with the help of Tim Menke and Professor Oliver was inspiring, and is one of the largest highlights from my time at MIT.”

    He also worked with William Isaac Jay, a postdoc at the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics, on lattice quantum field theory. He studies quantum theories at the microscopic level, where strong nuclear interactions are relevant. “This is particularly appealing as we can simulate these theories on a computer — albeit usually a huge supercomputer — and try to make predictions about phenomena involving atoms at a minuscule scale. I UROP’d in this lab over both my junior and senior year, and my project involved implementing techniques from one of these computer simulations, how can we go back to the real world and obtain something that an experiment would measure.”

    Brazil blues

    Bergamaschi missed Brazil but found community playing soccer with intramural teams Ousadia and Alegria Futebol Clube, and eating churrasco with his friends at Oliveira’s Brazilian-style steakhouse in Somerville, Massachusetts. He also loved going to college with his brother, who graduated in 2021 and is now pursuing his PhD in physics at the University of California-Berkeley.

    “One of my favorite memories of MIT is from my sophomore spring, when I managed to take two classes with him just before he graduated,” he recalls. “It was a lot of fun discussing physics problem sets and projects with him.”

    What also keeps him in touch with his homeland is working with Brazilian high school students competing in physics tournaments. He is part of an academic committee that creates and grades the physics problems taken by the top 100 Brazilian high school students. Those with top scores go on to the International Physics Olympiad. He says he sees this as a way to pay forward what his high school teacher did for him: to encourage others to study physics.

    “These olympiads were one of the main reasons for my interest in physics and me coming to MIT, and I hope that other Brazilian students can have these same opportunities as I had,” he says. “These students are all incredibly talented. A large amount of them end up coming to MIT after they graduate high school, so it’s a very gratifying and incredible experience for me to be able to participate and help in their physics education.”

    Post-graduation thoughts

    What will he miss most at MIT? “Late-night problem set sessions immediately before a deadline, trying to find a free food event across campus, and getting banana lounge bananas and coffee.”

    And what were his biggest lessons? He says that MIT taught him how to work with other people, “handle imposter syndrome,” and most importantly, unravel complicated challenges.

    “I think one of my major motivators is my desire to learn new things, whether it be physics or computer science. So, I am a big fan of very difficult problems or projects which require continual work but have large payoffs at the end. I think there are many instances during my time at MIT in which I worked all night for a project, just to get up and hop back on because of the excitement of obtaining a result or solution.”

    Physical Review Applied

    See the full article here .

    Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.


    five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings
    Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

    Stem Education Coalition

    EECS brings the world’s most brilliant faculty and students together to innovate and explore covering the full range of computer, information and energy systems. From foundational hardware and software systems, to cutting-edge machine learning models and computational methods to address critical societal problems, our work changes the world.

    MIT Seal

    MIT Campus

    The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The institute has an urban campus that extends more than a mile (1.6 km) alongside the Charles River. The institute also encompasses a number of major off-campus facilities such as the MIT Lincoln Laboratory , the MIT Bates Research and Engineering Center , and the Haystack Observatory , as well as affiliated laboratories such as the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Whitehead Institute.

    Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, Massachusetts Institute of Technology adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering. It has since played a key role in the development of many aspects of modern science, engineering, mathematics, and technology, and is widely known for its innovation and academic strength. It is frequently regarded as one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

    As of December 2020, 97 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award winners, and 8 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, 58 National Medal of Science recipients, 29 National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, 50 MacArthur Fellows, 80 Marshall Scholars, 3 Mitchell Scholars, 22 Schwarzman Scholars, 41 astronauts, and 16 Chief Scientists of the U.S. Air Force have been affiliated with The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The university also has a strong entrepreneurial culture and MIT alumni have founded or co-founded many notable companies. Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a member of the Association of American Universities.

    Foundation and vision

    In 1859, a proposal was submitted to the Massachusetts General Court to use newly filled lands in Back Bay, Boston for a “Conservatory of Art and Science”, but the proposal failed. A charter for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed by William Barton Rogers, was signed by John Albion Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, on April 10, 1861.

    Rogers, a professor from the University of Virginia , wanted to establish an institution to address rapid scientific and technological advances. He did not wish to found a professional school, but a combination with elements of both professional and liberal education, proposing that:

    “The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, and along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.”

    The Rogers Plan reflected the German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research, as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories.

    Early developments

    Two days after The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was chartered, the first battle of the Civil War broke out. After a long delay through the war years, MIT’s first classes were held in the Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865. The new institute was founded as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to fund institutions “to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes” and was a land-grant school. In 1863 under the same act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts founded the Massachusetts Agricultural College, which developed as the University of Massachusetts Amherst ). In 1866, the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay.

    The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was informally called “Boston Tech”. The institute adopted the European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. Despite chronic financial problems, the institute saw growth in the last two decades of the 19th century under President Francis Amasa Walker. Programs in electrical, chemical, marine, and sanitary engineering were introduced, new buildings were built, and the size of the student body increased to more than one thousand.

    The curriculum drifted to a vocational emphasis, with less focus on theoretical science. The fledgling school still suffered from chronic financial shortages which diverted the attention of the MIT leadership. During these “Boston Tech” years, Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty and alumni rebuffed Harvard University president (and former MIT faculty) Charles W. Eliot’s repeated attempts to merge MIT with Harvard College’s Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. In its cramped Back Bay location, MIT could not afford to expand its overcrowded facilities, driving a desperate search for a new campus and funding. Eventually, the MIT Corporation approved a formal agreement to merge with Harvard, over the vehement objections of MIT faculty, students, and alumni. However, a 1917 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court effectively put an end to the merger scheme.

    In 1916, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology administration and the MIT charter crossed the Charles River on the ceremonial barge Bucentaur built for the occasion, to signify MIT’s move to a spacious new campus largely consisting of filled land on a one-mile-long (1.6 km) tract along the Cambridge side of the Charles River. The neoclassical “New Technology” campus was designed by William W. Bosworth and had been funded largely by anonymous donations from a mysterious “Mr. Smith”, starting in 1912. In January 1920, the donor was revealed to be the industrialist George Eastman of Rochester, New York, who had invented methods of film production and processing, and founded Eastman Kodak. Between 1912 and 1920, Eastman donated $20 million ($236.6 million in 2015 dollars) in cash and Kodak stock to MIT.

    Curricular reforms

    In the 1930s, President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President (effectively Provost) Vannevar Bush emphasized the importance of pure sciences like physics and chemistry and reduced the vocational practice required in shops and drafting studios. The Compton reforms “renewed confidence in the ability of the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering”. Unlike Ivy League schools, Massachusetts Institute of Technology catered more to middle-class families, and depended more on tuition than on endowments or grants for its funding. The school was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1934.

    Still, as late as 1949, the Lewis Committee lamented in its report on the state of education at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology that “the Institute is widely conceived as basically a vocational school”, a “partly unjustified” perception the committee sought to change. The report comprehensively reviewed the undergraduate curriculum, recommended offering a broader education, and warned against letting engineering and government-sponsored research detract from the sciences and humanities. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the MIT Sloan School of Management were formed in 1950 to compete with the powerful Schools of Science and Engineering. Previously marginalized faculties in the areas of economics, management, political science, and linguistics emerged into cohesive and assertive departments by attracting respected professors and launching competitive graduate programs. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences continued to develop under the successive terms of the more humanistically oriented presidents Howard W. Johnson and Jerome Wiesner between 1966 and 1980.

    The Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s involvement in military science surged during World War II. In 1941, Vannevar Bush was appointed head of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development and directed funding to only a select group of universities, including MIT. Engineers and scientists from across the country gathered at Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘s Radiation Laboratory, established in 1940 to assist the British military in developing microwave radar. The work done there significantly affected both the war and subsequent research in the area. Other defense projects included gyroscope-based and other complex control systems for gunsight, bombsight, and inertial navigation under Charles Stark Draper’s Instrumentation Laboratory; the development of a digital computer for flight simulations under Project Whirlwind; and high-speed and high-altitude photography under Harold Edgerton. By the end of the war, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the nation’s largest wartime R&D contractor (attracting some criticism of Bush), employing nearly 4000 in the Radiation Laboratory alone and receiving in excess of $100 million ($1.2 billion in 2015 dollars) before 1946. Work on defense projects continued even after then. Post-war government-sponsored research at MIT included SAGE and guidance systems for ballistic missiles and Project Apollo.

    These activities affected The Massachusetts Institute of Technology profoundly. A 1949 report noted the lack of “any great slackening in the pace of life at the Institute” to match the return to peacetime, remembering the “academic tranquility of the prewar years”, though acknowledging the significant contributions of military research to the increased emphasis on graduate education and rapid growth of personnel and facilities. The faculty doubled and the graduate student body quintupled during the terms of Karl Taylor Compton, president of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 1930 and 1948; James Rhyne Killian, president from 1948 to 1957; and Julius Adams Stratton, chancellor from 1952 to 1957, whose institution-building strategies shaped the expanding university. By the 1950s, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology no longer simply benefited the industries with which it had worked for three decades, and it had developed closer working relationships with new patrons, philanthropic foundations and the federal government.

    In late 1960s and early 1970s, student and faculty activists protested against the Vietnam War and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘s defense research. In this period Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s various departments were researching helicopters, smart bombs and counterinsurgency techniques for the war in Vietnam as well as guidance systems for nuclear missiles. The Union of Concerned Scientists was founded on March 4, 1969 during a meeting of faculty members and students seeking to shift the emphasis on military research toward environmental and social problems. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology ultimately divested itself from the Instrumentation Laboratory and moved all classified research off-campus to the MIT Lincoln Laboratory facility in 1973 in response to the protests. The student body, faculty, and administration remained comparatively unpolarized during what was a tumultuous time for many other universities. Johnson was seen to be highly successful in leading his institution to “greater strength and unity” after these times of turmoil. However, six Massachusetts Institute of Technology students were sentenced to prison terms at this time and some former student leaders, such as Michael Albert and George Katsiaficas, are still indignant about MIT’s role in military research and its suppression of these protests. (Richard Leacock’s film, November Actions, records some of these tumultuous events.)

    In the 1980s, there was more controversy at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology over its involvement in SDI (space weaponry) and CBW (chemical and biological warfare) research. More recently, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s research for the military has included work on robots, drones and ‘battle suits’.

    Recent history

    The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has kept pace with and helped to advance the digital age. In addition to developing the predecessors to modern computing and networking technologies, students, staff, and faculty members at Project MAC, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and the Tech Model Railroad Club wrote some of the earliest interactive computer video games like Spacewar! and created much of modern hacker slang and culture. Several major computer-related organizations have originated at MIT since the 1980s: Richard Stallman’s GNU Project and the subsequent Free Software Foundation were founded in the mid-1980s at the AI Lab; the MIT Media Lab was founded in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner to promote research into novel uses of computer technology; the World Wide Web Consortium standards organization was founded at the Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee; the MIT OpenCourseWare project has made course materials for over 2,000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology classes available online free of charge since 2002; and the One Laptop per Child initiative to expand computer education and connectivity to children worldwide was launched in 2005.

    The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was named a sea-grant college in 1976 to support its programs in oceanography and marine sciences and was named a space-grant college in 1989 to support its aeronautics and astronautics programs. Despite diminishing government financial support over the past quarter century, MIT launched several successful development campaigns to significantly expand the campus: new dormitories and athletics buildings on west campus; the Tang Center for Management Education; several buildings in the northeast corner of campus supporting research into biology, brain and cognitive sciences, genomics, biotechnology, and cancer research; and a number of new “backlot” buildings on Vassar Street including the Stata Center. Construction on campus in the 2000s included expansions of the Media Lab, the Sloan School’s eastern campus, and graduate residences in the northwest. In 2006, President Hockfield launched the MIT Energy Research Council to investigate the interdisciplinary challenges posed by increasing global energy consumption.

    In 2001, inspired by the open source and open access movements, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched “OpenCourseWare” to make the lecture notes, problem sets, syllabi, exams, and lectures from the great majority of its courses available online for no charge, though without any formal accreditation for coursework completed. While the cost of supporting and hosting the project is high, OCW expanded in 2005 to include other universities as a part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which currently includes more than 250 academic institutions with content available in at least six languages. In 2011, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced it would offer formal certification (but not credits or degrees) to online participants completing coursework in its “MITx” program, for a modest fee. The “edX” online platform supporting MITx was initially developed in partnership with Harvard and its analogous “Harvardx” initiative. The courseware platform is open source, and other universities have already joined and added their own course content. In March 2009 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty adopted an open-access policy to make its scholarship publicly accessible online.

    The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has its own police force. Three days after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 2013, MIT Police patrol officer Sean Collier was fatally shot by the suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, setting off a violent manhunt that shut down the campus and much of the Boston metropolitan area for a day. One week later, Collier’s memorial service was attended by more than 10,000 people, in a ceremony hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology community with thousands of police officers from the New England region and Canada. On November 25, 2013, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced the creation of the Collier Medal, to be awarded annually to “an individual or group that embodies the character and qualities that Officer Collier exhibited as a member of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology community and in all aspects of his life”. The announcement further stated that “Future recipients of the award will include those whose contributions exceed the boundaries of their profession, those who have contributed to building bridges across the community, and those who consistently and selflessly perform acts of kindness”.

    In September 2017, the school announced the creation of an artificial intelligence research lab called the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. IBM will spend $240 million over the next decade, and the lab will be staffed by MIT and IBM scientists. In October 2018 MIT announced that it would open a new Schwarzman College of Computing dedicated to the study of artificial intelligence, named after lead donor and The Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman. The focus of the new college is to study not just AI, but interdisciplinary AI education, and how AI can be used in fields as diverse as history and biology. The cost of buildings and new faculty for the new college is expected to be $1 billion upon completion.

    The Caltech/MIT Advanced aLIGO was designed and constructed by a team of scientists from California Institute of Technology , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and industrial contractors, and funded by the National Science Foundation .

    Caltech /MIT Advanced aLigo

    It was designed to open the field of gravitational-wave astronomy through the detection of gravitational waves predicted by general relativity. Gravitational waves were detected for the first time by the LIGO detector in 2015. For contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves, two Caltech physicists, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Rainer Weiss won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017. Weiss, who is also a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, designed the laser interferometric technique, which served as the essential blueprint for the LIGO.

    The mission of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the twenty-first century. We seek to develop in each member of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology community the ability and passion to work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind.

     
  • richardmitnick 11:50 am on May 29, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: "Sweater-Wrapped Robots Can Feel and React to Human Touch", , , Computer Science & Technology, ,   

    From The Robomechanics Lab At Carnegie Mellon University: “Sweater-Wrapped Robots Can Feel and React to Human Touch” 

    From The Robomechanics Lab

    At

    Carnegie Mellon University

    5.26.23
    Stacey Federoff

    Aaron Aupperlee
    School of Computer Science
    aaupperlee@cmu.edu
    412-268-9068

    1
    RobotSweater, developed by a research team in the Robotics Institute and shown here on a robotic arm, is a machine-knitted textile “skin” that can sense contact and pressure.

    RobotSweater, developed by a research team from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, is a machine-knitted textile “skin” that can sense contact and pressure.

    “We can use that to make the robot smarter during its interaction with humans,” said Changliu Liu, an assistant professor of robotics in the School of Computer Science.


    Robot Sweater : Fabric Tactile Sensor “Skin”

    Just as knitters can take any kind of yarn and turn it into a sock, hat, or sweater of any size or shape, the knitted RobotSweater fabric can be customized to fit uneven three-dimensional surfaces.

    “Knitting machines can pattern yarn into shapes that are nonflat, that can be curved or lumpy,” said James McCann, an SCS assistant professor whose research has focused on textile fabrication in recent years. “That made us think maybe we could make sensors that fit over curved or lumpy robots.”

    Once knitted, the fabric can be used to help the robot “feel” when a human touches it, particularly in an industrial setting where safety is paramount. Current solutions for detecting human-robot interaction in industry look like shields and use very rigid materials that Liu notes can’t cover the robot’s entire body because some parts need to deform.

    “With RobotSweater, the robot’s whole body can be covered, so it can detect any possible collisions,” said Liu, whose research focuses on industrial applications of robotics.

    RobotSweater’s knitted fabric consists of two layers of yarn made with metallic fibers to conduct electricity. Sandwiched between the two is a netlike, lace-patterned layer. When pressure is applied to the fabric — say, from someone touching it — the conductive yarn closes a circuit and is read by the sensors.

    “The force pushes together the rows and columns to close the connection,” said Wenzhen Yuan, an SCS assistant professor and director of the RoboTouch lab. “If there’s a force through the conductive stripes, the layers would contact each other through the holes.”

    Apart from the design of the knitted layers — the culmination of dozens if not hundreds of samples and tests — the team faced another challenge in connecting the wiring and electronics components to the soft textile.

    “There was a lot of fiddly physical prototyping and adjustment,” McCann said. “The students working on this managed to go from something that seemed promising to something that actually worked.”

    What worked: wrapping the wires around snaps attached to the ends of each stripe in the knitted fabric.

    Snaps are a cost-effective and efficient solution, such that even hobbyists creating textiles with electronic elements, known as e-textiles, could use them, McCann said.

    “You need a way of attaching these things together that is strong, so it can deal with stretching, but isn’t going to destroy the yarn,” he said, adding that the team also discussed using flexible circuit boards.

    Once fitted to the robot’s body, RobotSweater can sense the distribution, shape and force of the contact. It’s also more accurate and effective than the visual sensors most robots rely on now.

    “The robot will move in the way that the human pushes it, or can respond to human social gestures,” Yuan said.

    In their research, the team demonstrated that pushing on a companion robot outfitted in RobotSweater told it which way to move or what direction to turn its head. When used on a robot arm, RobotSweater allowed a push from a person’s hand to guide the arm’s movement, while grabbing the arm told it to open or close its gripper.

    In future research, the team wants to explore how to program reactions from the swipe or pinching motions used on a touchscreen.

    The team — including SCS Ph.D. students Zilin Si and Catherine Tianhong Yu, and visiting undergraduate student Katrene Morozov from the University of California-Santa Barbara — will present the RobotSweater research paper next week at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation(ICRA).

    Begun by the three faculty members in a conversation over lunch one day, the collaboration among the team of researchers helped the RobotSweater come to life, McCann said.

    “We had a person thinking about fabrication, a person thinking about the robotics integration, a person thinking about sensing, and a person thinking about planning and control,” he said. “It’s really nice to have this project where we have the full stack of people to cover each concern.”

    See the full article here .

    Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

    five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

    Please help promote STEM in your local schools.


    Stem Education Coalition

    The Robomechanics Lab is working to take robots out of the lab and factory and into challenging real world environments, such as rocky hills and cluttered houses. We use the word “robomechanics” to mean the study of the mechanics of how a robot interacts with an environment, analogous to the field of biomechanics for natural systems. Common themes that arise in our research include modeling and planning for changing contact conditions, developing systems that are inherently robust to uncertainty, and enabling more dynamic robot behaviors. The Robomechanics Lab conducts research in legged and wheeled mobile robotics, mechanism design, feedback control, computer vision, motion planning, and applications of robotics research to environmental monitoring, planetary exploration, and home assistance.

    The Robomechanics Lab believes in actively working towards creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment. We do this in several ways:
    • Conduct Ethical Research – We involve all lab participants in discussion of the direction of new research projects, and ensure the project’s impact is in line with both our lab and personal values. This includes regular review of research topics, funding sources, and industry partners.
    • Drive Reform in Academia – We actively work on DEI and other reform initiatives at CMU and in the broader academic robotics community by participating in departmental initiatives, collaborating with advocacy organizations, and organizing events at conferences.
    • Foster Equitable Access – We strive to create STEM opportunities for historically marginalized students in Pittsburgh and beyond through the development and execution of outreach activities that allow us to share our technical skills and inspire the next generation of engineers.
    • Support Each Other – We sustain an inclusive environment where everyone is valued as both a researcher and an individual. This includes active, structured mentorship for all lab members as well as informal social events and regular DEI-centered conversations.

    Carnegie Mellon University is a global research university with more than 12,000 students, 95,000 alumni, and 5,000 faculty and staff.

    Carnegie Mellon University has been a birthplace of innovation since its founding in 1900.

    Today, we are a global leader bringing groundbreaking ideas to market and creating successful startup businesses.

    Our award-winning faculty members are renowned for working closely with students to solve major scientific, technological and societal challenges. We put a strong emphasis on creating things—from art to robots. Our students are recruited by some of the world’s most innovative companies.

    We have campuses in Pittsburgh, Qatar and Silicon Valley, and degree-granting programs around the world, including Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and Latin America.

    The Carnegie Mellon University was established by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools, the university became the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and began granting four-year degrees. In 1967, the Carnegie Institute of Technology merged with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, formerly a part of the The University of Pittsburgh. Since then, the university has operated as a single institution.

    The Carnegie Mellon University has seven colleges and independent schools, including the College of Engineering, College of Fine Arts, Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mellon College of Science, Tepper School of Business, Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, and the School of Computer Science. The Carnegie Mellon University has its main campus located 3 miles (5 km) from Downtown Pittsburgh, and the university also has over a dozen degree-granting locations in six continents, including degree-granting campuses in Qatar and Silicon Valley.

    Past and present faculty and alumni include 20 Nobel Prize laureates, 13 Turing Award winners, 23 Members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 22 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , 79 Members of the National Academies, 124 Emmy Award winners, 47 Tony Award laureates, and 10 Academy Award winners. Carnegie Mellon enrolls 14,799 students from 117 countries and employs 1,400 faculty members.

    Research

    Carnegie Mellon University is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity”. For the 2006 fiscal year, the Carnegie Mellon University spent $315 million on research. The primary recipients of this funding were the School of Computer Science ($100.3 million), the Software Engineering Institute ($71.7 million), the College of Engineering ($48.5 million), and the Mellon College of Science ($47.7 million). The research money comes largely from federal sources, with a federal investment of $277.6 million. The federal agencies that invest the most money are the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense, which contribute 26% and 23.4% of the total Carnegie Mellon University research budget respectively.

    The recognition of Carnegie Mellon University as one of the best research facilities in the nation has a long history—as early as the 1987 Federal budget Carnegie Mellon University was ranked as third in the amount of research dollars with $41.5 million, with only Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University receiving more research funds from the Department of Defense.

    The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a joint effort between Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh, and Westinghouse Electric Company. Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center was founded in 1986 by its two scientific directors, Dr. Ralph Roskies of the University of Pittsburgh and Dr. Michael Levine of Carnegie Mellon. Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a leading partner in the TeraGrid, The National Science Foundation’s cyberinfrastructure program.

    Scarab lunar rover is being developed by the RI.

    The Robotics Institute (RI) is a division of the School of Computer Science and considered to be one of the leading centers of robotics research in the world. The Field Robotics Center (FRC) has developed a number of significant robots, including Sandstorm and H1ghlander, which finished second and third in the DARPA Grand Challenge, and Boss, which won the DARPA Urban Challenge. The Robotics Institute has partnered with a spinoff company, Astrobotic Technology Inc., to land a CMU robot on the moon by 2016 in pursuit of the Google Lunar XPrize. The robot, known as Andy, is designed to explore lunar pits, which might include entrances to caves. The RI is primarily sited at Carnegie Mellon University ‘s main campus in Newell-Simon hall.

    The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense and operated by Carnegie Mellon University, with offices in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA; Arlington, Virginia, and Frankfurt, Germany. The SEI publishes books on software engineering for industry, government and military applications and practices. The organization is known for its Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), which identify essential elements of effective system and software engineering processes and can be used to rate the level of an organization’s capability for producing quality systems. The SEI is also the home of CERT/CC, the federally funded computer security organization. The CERT Program’s primary goals are to ensure that appropriate technology and systems management practices are used to resist attacks on networked systems and to limit damage and ensure continuity of critical services subsequent to attacks, accidents, or failures.

    The Human–Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) is a division of the School of Computer Science and is considered one of the leading centers of human–computer interaction research, integrating computer science, design, social science, and learning science. Such interdisciplinary collaboration is the hallmark of research done throughout the university.

    The Language Technologies Institute (LTI) is another unit of the School of Computer Science and is famous for being one of the leading research centers in the area of language technologies. The primary research focus of the institute is on machine translation, speech recognition, speech synthesis, information retrieval, parsing and information extraction. Until 1996, the institute existed as the Center for Machine Translation that was established in 1986. From 1996 onwards, it started awarding graduate degrees and the name was changed to Language Technologies Institute.

    Carnegie Mellon is also home to the Carnegie School of management and economics. This intellectual school grew out of the Tepper School of Business in the 1950s and 1960s and focused on the intersection of behavioralism and management. Several management theories, most notably bounded rationality and the behavioral theory of the firm, were established by Carnegie School management scientists and economists.

    Carnegie Mellon also develops cross-disciplinary and university-wide institutes and initiatives to take advantage of strengths in various colleges and departments and develop solutions in critical social and technical problems. To date, these have included the Cylab Security and Privacy Institute, the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, the Neuroscience Institute (formerly known as BrainHub), the Simon Initiative, and the Disruptive Healthcare Technology Institute.

    Carnegie Mellon has made a concerted effort to attract corporate research labs, offices, and partnerships to the Pittsburgh campus. Apple Inc., Intel, Google, Microsoft, Disney, Facebook, IBM, General Motors, Bombardier Inc., Yahoo!, Uber, Tata Consultancy Services, Ansys, Boeing, Robert Bosch GmbH, and the Rand Corporation have established a presence on or near campus. In collaboration with Intel, Carnegie Mellon has pioneered research into claytronics.

     
  • richardmitnick 4:35 pm on May 26, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: "FluidEngine" harnesses the power of graphics processing units (GPUs) for faster processing., "Helping robots handle fluids", , Computer Science & Technology, , FluidLab's "FluidEngine"- an easy-to-use physics simulator capable of seamlessly calculating and simulating various materials and their interactions., Humans regularly engage with various types of fluids in their daily lives but doing so has been a formidable and elusive goal for current robotic systems., , ,   

    From The Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) At The Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “Helping robots handle fluids” 

    1

    From The Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)

    At

    The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    5.24.23
    Rachel Gordon | MIT CSAIL

    1
    Researchers created “FluidLab,” a simulation environment with a diverse set of manipulation tasks involving complex fluid dynamics. Image: Alex Shipps/MIT CSAIL via Midjourney.

    Imagine you’re enjoying a picnic by a riverbank on a windy day. A gust of wind accidentally catches your paper napkin and lands on the water’s surface, quickly drifting away from you. You grab a nearby stick and carefully agitate the water to retrieve it, creating a series of small waves. These waves eventually push the napkin back toward the shore, so you grab it. In this scenario, the water acts as a medium for transmitting forces, enabling you to manipulate the position of the napkin without direct contact.

    Humans regularly engage with various types of fluids in their daily lives, but doing so has been a formidable and elusive goal for current robotic systems. Hand you a latte? A robot can do that. Make it? That’s going to require a bit more nuance.

    FluidLab, a new simulation tool from researchers at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), enhances robot learning for complex fluid manipulation tasks like making latte art, ice cream, and even manipulating air. The virtual environment offers a versatile collection of intricate fluid handling challenges, involving both solids and liquids, and multiple fluids simultaneously. FluidLab supports modeling solid, liquid, and gas, including elastic, plastic, rigid objects, Newtonian and non-Newtonian liquids, and smoke and air.

    At the heart of FluidLab lies “FluidEngine”, an easy-to-use physics simulator capable of seamlessly calculating and simulating various materials and their interactions, all while harnessing the power of graphics processing units (GPUs) for faster processing. The engine is “differential,” meaning the simulator can incorporate physics knowledge for a more realistic physical world model, leading to more efficient learning and planning for robotic tasks. In contrast, most existing reinforcement learning methods lack that world model that just depends on trial and error. This enhanced capability, say the researchers, lets users experiment with robot learning algorithms and toy with the boundaries of current robotic manipulation abilities.

    To set the stage, the researchers tested said robot learning algorithms using FluidLab, discovering and overcoming unique challenges in fluid systems. By developing clever optimization methods, they’ve been able to transfer these learnings from simulations to real-world scenarios effectively.

    “Imagine a future where a household robot effortlessly assists you with daily tasks, like making coffee, preparing breakfast, or cooking dinner. These tasks involve numerous fluid manipulation challenges. Our benchmark is a first step towards enabling robots to master these skills, benefiting households and workplaces alike,” says visiting researcher at MIT CSAIL and research scientist at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab Chuang Gan, the senior author on a new paper [OpenReview.net (below)] about the research. “For instance, these robots could reduce wait times and enhance customer experiences in busy coffee shops. “FluidEngine” is, to our knowledge, the first-of-its-kind physics engine that supports a wide range of materials and couplings while being fully differentiable. With our standardized fluid manipulation tasks, researchers can evaluate robot learning algorithms and push the boundaries of today’s robotic manipulation capabilities.”

    Fluid fantasia

    Over the past few decades, scientists in the robotic manipulation domain have mainly focused on manipulating rigid objects, or on very simplistic fluid manipulation tasks like pouring water. Studying these manipulation tasks involving fluids in the real world can also be an unsafe and costly endeavor.

    With fluid manipulation, it’s not always just about fluids, though. In many tasks, such as creating the perfect ice cream swirl, mixing solids into liquids, or paddling through the water to move objects, it’s a dance of interactions between fluids and various other materials. Simulation environments must support “coupling,” or how two different material properties interact. Fluid manipulation tasks usually require pretty fine-grained precision, with delicate interactions and handling of materials, setting them apart from straightforward tasks like pushing a block or opening a bottle.

    FluidLab’s simulator can quickly calculate how different materials interact with each other.

    Helping out the GPUs is “Taichi,” a domain-specific language embedded in Python. The system can compute gradients (rates of change in environment configurations with respect to the robot’s actions) for different material types and their interactions (couplings) with one another. This precise information can be used to fine-tune the robot’s movements for better performance. As a result, the simulator allows for faster and more efficient solutions, setting it apart from its counterparts.

    The 10 tasks the team put forth fell into two categories: using fluids to manipulate hard-to-reach objects, and directly manipulating fluids for specific goals. Examples included separating liquids, guiding floating objects, transporting items with water jets, mixing liquids, creating latte art, shaping ice cream, and controlling air circulation.

    “The simulator works similarly to how humans use their mental models to predict the consequences of their actions and make informed decisions when manipulating fluids. This is a significant advantage of our simulator compared to others,” says Carnegie Mellon University PhD student Zhou Xian, another author on the paper. “While other simulators primarily support reinforcement learning, ours supports reinforcement learning and allows for more efficient optimization techniques. Utilizing the gradients provided by the simulator supports highly efficient policy search, making it a more versatile and effective tool.”

    Next steps

    FluidLab’s future looks bright. The current work attempted to transfer trajectories optimized in simulation to real-world tasks directly in an open-loop manner. For next steps, the team is working to develop a closed-loop policy in simulation that takes as input the state or the visual observations of the environments and performs fluid manipulation tasks in real time, and then transfers the learned policies in real-world scenes.

    The platform is publicly available, and researchers hope it will benefit future studies in developing better methods for solving complex fluid manipulation tasks.

    “Humans interact with fluids in everyday tasks, including pouring and mixing liquids (coffee, yogurts, soups, batter), washing and cleaning with water, and more,” says University of Maryland computer science professor Ming Lin, who was not involved in the work. “For robots to assist humans and serve in similar capacities for day-to-day tasks, novel techniques for interacting and handling various liquids of different properties (e.g. viscosity and density of materials) would be needed and remains a major computational challenge for real-time autonomous systems. This work introduces the first comprehensive physics engine, FluidLab, to enable modeling of diverse, complex fluids and their coupling with other objects and dynamical systems in the environment. The mathematical formulation of ‘differentiable fluids’ as presented in the paper makes it possible for integrating versatile fluid simulation as a network layer in learning-based algorithms and neural network architectures for intelligent systems to operate in real-world applications.”

    Gan and Xian wrote the paper alongside Hsiao-Yu Tung a postdoc in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; Antonio Torralba, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science and CSAIL principal investigator; Dartmouth College Assistant Professor Bo Zhu, Columbia University PhD student Zhenjia Xu, and CMU Assistant Professor Katerina Fragkiadaki. The team’s research is supported by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, Sony AI, a DARPA Young Investigator Award, an NSF CAREER award, an AFOSR Young Investigator Award, DARPA Machine Common Sense, and the National Science Foundation.

    The research was presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations earlier this month.

    OpenReview.net

    See the full article here .

    Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.


    five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings
    Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

    Stem Education Coalition

    4

    The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab). Housed within the Ray and Maria Stata Center, CSAIL is the largest on-campus laboratory as measured by research scope and membership. It is part of the Schwarzman College of Computing but is also overseen by the MIT Vice President of Research.

    Research activities

    CSAIL’s research activities are organized around a number of semi-autonomous research groups, each of which is headed by one or more professors or research scientists. These groups are divided up into seven general areas of research:

    Artificial intelligence
    Computational biology
    Graphics and vision
    Language and learning
    Theory of computation
    Robotics
    Systems (includes computer architecture, databases, distributed systems, networks and networked systems, operating systems, programming methodology, and software engineering among others)

    In addition, CSAIL hosts the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

    MIT Seal

    USPS “Forever” postage stamps celebrating Innovation at MIT.

    MIT Campus

    The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The institute has an urban campus that extends more than a mile (1.6 km) alongside the Charles River. The institute also encompasses a number of major off-campus facilities such as the MIT Lincoln Laboratory , the MIT Bates Research and Engineering Center (US), and the Haystack Observatory, as well as affiliated laboratories such as the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard(US) and Whitehead Institute.

    Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, Massachusetts Institute of Technology adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering. It has since played a key role in the development of many aspects of modern science, engineering, mathematics, and technology, and is widely known for its innovation and academic strength. It is frequently regarded as one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

    As of December 2020, 97 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award winners, and 8 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, 58 National Medal of Science recipients, 29 National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, 50 MacArthur Fellows, 80 Marshall Scholars, 3 Mitchell Scholars, 22 Schwarzman Scholars, 41 astronauts, and 16 Chief Scientists of the U.S. Air Force have been affiliated with The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The university also has a strong entrepreneurial culture and MIT alumni have founded or co-founded many notable companies. Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU).

    Foundation and vision

    In 1859, a proposal was submitted to the Massachusetts General Court to use newly filled lands in Back Bay, Boston for a “Conservatory of Art and Science”, but the proposal failed. A charter for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed by William Barton Rogers, was signed by John Albion Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, on April 10, 1861.

    Rogers, a professor from the University of Virginia , wanted to establish an institution to address rapid scientific and technological advances. He did not wish to found a professional school, but a combination with elements of both professional and liberal education, proposing that:

    “The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, and along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.”

    The Rogers Plan reflected the German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research, as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories.

    Early developments

    Two days after Massachusetts Institute of Technology was chartered, the first battle of the Civil War broke out. After a long delay through the war years, MIT’s first classes were held in the Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865. The new institute was founded as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to fund institutions “to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes” and was a land-grant school. In 1863 under the same act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts founded the Massachusetts Agricultural College, which developed as the University of Massachusetts Amherst ). In 1866, the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay.

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology was informally called “Boston Tech”. The institute adopted the European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. Despite chronic financial problems, the institute saw growth in the last two decades of the 19th century under President Francis Amasa Walker. Programs in electrical, chemical, marine, and sanitary engineering were introduced, new buildings were built, and the size of the student body increased to more than one thousand.

    The curriculum drifted to a vocational emphasis, with less focus on theoretical science. The fledgling school still suffered from chronic financial shortages which diverted the attention of the MIT leadership. During these “Boston Tech” years, Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty and alumni rebuffed Harvard University president (and former MIT faculty) Charles W. Eliot’s repeated attempts to merge MIT with Harvard College’s Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. In its cramped Back Bay location, MIT could not afford to expand its overcrowded facilities, driving a desperate search for a new campus and funding. Eventually, the MIT Corporation approved a formal agreement to merge with Harvard, over the vehement objections of MIT faculty, students, and alumni. However, a 1917 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court effectively put an end to the merger scheme.

    In 1916, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology administration and the MIT charter crossed the Charles River on the ceremonial barge Bucentaur built for the occasion, to signify MIT’s move to a spacious new campus largely consisting of filled land on a one-mile-long (1.6 km) tract along the Cambridge side of the Charles River. The neoclassical “New Technology” campus was designed by William W. Bosworth and had been funded largely by anonymous donations from a mysterious “Mr. Smith”, starting in 1912. In January 1920, the donor was revealed to be the industrialist George Eastman of Rochester, New York, who had invented methods of film production and processing, and founded Eastman Kodak. Between 1912 and 1920, Eastman donated $20 million ($236.6 million in 2015 dollars) in cash and Kodak stock to MIT.

    Curricular reforms

    In the 1930s, President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President (effectively Provost) Vannevar Bush emphasized the importance of pure sciences like physics and chemistry and reduced the vocational practice required in shops and drafting studios. The Compton reforms “renewed confidence in the ability of the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering”. Unlike Ivy League schools, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) catered more to middle-class families, and depended more on tuition than on endowments or grants for its funding. The school was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1934.

    Still, as late as 1949, the Lewis Committee lamented in its report on the state of education at Massachusetts Institute of Technology that “the Institute is widely conceived as basically a vocational school”, a “partly unjustified” perception the committee sought to change. The report comprehensively reviewed the undergraduate curriculum, recommended offering a broader education, and warned against letting engineering and government-sponsored research detract from the sciences and humanities. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the MIT Sloan School of Management were formed in 1950 to compete with the powerful Schools of Science and Engineering. Previously marginalized faculties in the areas of economics, management, political science, and linguistics emerged into cohesive and assertive departments by attracting respected professors and launching competitive graduate programs. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences continued to develop under the successive terms of the more humanistically oriented presidents Howard W. Johnson and Jerome Wiesner between 1966 and 1980.

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘s involvement in military science surged during World War II. In 1941, Vannevar Bush was appointed head of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development and directed funding to only a select group of universities, including MIT. Engineers and scientists from across the country gathered at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)’s Radiation Laboratory, established in 1940 to assist the British military in developing microwave radar. The work done there significantly affected both the war and subsequent research in the area. Other defense projects included gyroscope-based and other complex control systems for gunsight, bombsight, and inertial navigation under Charles Stark Draper’s Instrumentation Laboratory; the development of a digital computer for flight simulations under Project Whirlwind; and high-speed and high-altitude photography under Harold Edgerton. By the end of the war, Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the nation’s largest wartime R&D contractor (attracting some criticism of Bush), employing nearly 4000 in the Radiation Laboratory alone and receiving in excess of $100 million ($1.2 billion in 2015 dollars) before 1946. Work on defense projects continued even after then. Post-war government-sponsored research at MIT included SAGE and guidance systems for ballistic missiles and Project Apollo.

    These activities affected Massachusetts Institute of Technology profoundly. A 1949 report noted the lack of “any great slackening in the pace of life at the Institute” to match the return to peacetime, remembering the “academic tranquility of the prewar years”, though acknowledging the significant contributions of military research to the increased emphasis on graduate education and rapid growth of personnel and facilities. The faculty doubled and the graduate student body quintupled during the terms of Karl Taylor Compton, president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 1930 and 1948; James Rhyne Killian, president from 1948 to 1957; and Julius Adams Stratton, chancellor from 1952 to 1957, whose institution-building strategies shaped the expanding university. By the 1950s, Massachusetts Institute of Technology no longer simply benefited the industries with which it had worked for three decades, and it had developed closer working relationships with new patrons, philanthropic foundations and the federal government.

    In late 1960s and early 1970s, student and faculty activists protested against the Vietnam War and Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘s defense research. In this period Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s various departments were researching helicopters, smart bombs and counterinsurgency techniques for the war in Vietnam as well as guidance systems for nuclear missiles. The Union of Concerned Scientists was founded on March 4, 1969 during a meeting of faculty members and students seeking to shift the emphasis on military research toward environmental and social problems. Massachusetts Institute of Technology ultimately divested itself from the Instrumentation Laboratory and moved all classified research off-campus to the MIT Lincoln Laboratory facility in 1973 in response to the protests. The student body, faculty, and administration remained comparatively unpolarized during what was a tumultuous time for many other universities. Johnson was seen to be highly successful in leading his institution to “greater strength and unity” after these times of turmoil. However six Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( students were sentenced to prison terms at this time and some former student leaders, such as Michael Albert and George Katsiaficas, are still indignant about MIT’s role in military research and its suppression of these protests. (Richard Leacock’s film, November Actions, records some of these tumultuous events.)

    In the 1980s, there was more controversy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology over its involvement in SDI (space weaponry) and CBW (chemical and biological warfare) research. More recently, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)’s research for the military has included work on robots, drones and ‘battle suits’.

    Recent history

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology has kept pace with and helped to advance the digital age. In addition to developing the predecessors to modern computing and networking technologies, students, staff, and faculty members at Project MAC, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and the Tech Model Railroad Club wrote some of the earliest interactive computer video games like Spacewar! and created much of modern hacker slang and culture. Several major computer-related organizations have originated at MIT since the 1980s: Richard Stallman’s GNU Project and the subsequent Free Software Foundation were founded in the mid-1980s at the AI Lab; the MIT Media Lab was founded in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner to promote research into novel uses of computer technology; the World Wide Web Consortium standards organization was founded at the Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee; the MIT OpenCourseWare project has made course materials for over 2,000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology classes available online free of charge since 2002; and the One Laptop per Child initiative to expand computer education and connectivity to children worldwide was launched in 2005.

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology was named a sea-grant college in 1976 to support its programs in oceanography and marine sciences and was named a space-grant college in 1989 to support its aeronautics and astronautics programs. Despite diminishing government financial support over the past quarter century, MIT launched several successful development campaigns to significantly expand the campus: new dormitories and athletics buildings on west campus; the Tang Center for Management Education; several buildings in the northeast corner of campus supporting research into biology, brain and cognitive sciences, genomics, biotechnology, and cancer research; and a number of new “backlot” buildings on Vassar Street including the Stata Center. Construction on campus in the 2000s included expansions of the Media Lab, the Sloan School’s eastern campus, and graduate residences in the northwest. In 2006, President Hockfield launched the MIT Energy Research Council to investigate the interdisciplinary challenges posed by increasing global energy consumption.

    In 2001, inspired by the open source and open access movements, Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched OpenCourseWare to make the lecture notes, problem sets, syllabi, exams, and lectures from the great majority of its courses available online for no charge, though without any formal accreditation for coursework completed. While the cost of supporting and hosting the project is high, OCW expanded in 2005 to include other universities as a part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which currently includes more than 250 academic institutions with content available in at least six languages. In 2011, Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced it would offer formal certification (but not credits or degrees) to online participants completing coursework in its “MITx” program, for a modest fee. The “edX” online platform supporting MITx was initially developed in partnership with Harvard and its analogous “Harvardx” initiative. The courseware platform is open source, and other universities have already joined and added their own course content. In March 2009 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty adopted an open-access policy to make its scholarship publicly accessible online.

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology has its own police force. Three days after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 2013, MIT Police patrol officer Sean Collier was fatally shot by the suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, setting off a violent manhunt that shut down the campus and much of the Boston metropolitan area for a day. One week later, Collier’s memorial service was attended by more than 10,000 people, in a ceremony hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology community with thousands of police officers from the New England region and Canada. On November 25, 2013, Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced the creation of the Collier Medal, to be awarded annually to “an individual or group that embodies the character and qualities that Officer Collier exhibited as a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology community and in all aspects of his life”. The announcement further stated that “Future recipients of the award will include those whose contributions exceed the boundaries of their profession, those who have contributed to building bridges across the community, and those who consistently and selflessly perform acts of kindness”.

    In September 2017, the school announced the creation of an artificial intelligence research lab called the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. IBM will spend $240 million over the next decade, and the lab will be staffed by MIT and IBM scientists. In October 2018 MIT announced that it would open a new Schwarzman College of Computing dedicated to the study of artificial intelligence, named after lead donor and The Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman. The focus of the new college is to study not just AI, but interdisciplinary AI education, and how AI can be used in fields as diverse as history and biology. The cost of buildings and new faculty for the new college is expected to be $1 billion upon completion.

    The Caltech/MIT Advanced aLIGO was designed and constructed by a team of scientists from California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and industrial contractors, and funded by the National Science Foundation .

    Caltech /MIT Advanced aLigo

    It was designed to open the field of gravitational-wave astronomy through the detection of gravitational waves predicted by general relativity. Gravitational waves were detected for the first time by the LIGO detector in 2015. For contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves, two Caltech physicists, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Rainer Weiss won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017. Weiss, who is also an Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, designed the laser interferometric technique, which served as the essential blueprint for the LIGO.

    The mission of Massachusetts Institute of Technology is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the twenty-first century. We seek to develop in each member of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology community the ability and passion to work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind.

     
  • richardmitnick 9:30 am on May 26, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: "Researchers develop interactive ‘Stargazer’ camera robot that can help film tutorial videos", "Stargazer" is an interactive camera robot that helps instructors to create engaging and informative physical skill instruction videos., An interactive camera robot that helps university instructors and other content creators create engaging tutorial videos demonstrating physical skills., , , Computer Science & Technology, For those without access to a camera person., How an interactive camera robot can assist instructors and others in making how-to videos, , Stargazer uses a single camera on a robot arm with seven independent motors that can move along with the video subject by autonomously tracking regions of interest., The goal is to have the robot understand in real time what kind of shot the instructor wants., The robot is there to help humans but not to replace humans., The robot’s role is to help with filming – the heavy-lifting work., The system’s camera behaviors can be adjusted based on subtle cues from instructors., The team is interested in exploring the potential of camera drones and robots on wheels to help with filming tasks in larger environments from a wider variety of angles.,   

    From The Faculty of Arts & Science At The University of Toronto (CA): “Researchers develop interactive ‘Stargazer’ camera robot that can help film tutorial videos” 

    From The Faculty of Arts & Science

    At

    The University of Toronto (CA)

    5.19.23
    Krystle Hewitt

    1
    Research led by U of T computer science PhD candidate Jiannan Li explores how an interactive camera robot can assist instructors and others in making how-to videos (photo by Matt Hintsa)

    A group of computer scientists from the University of Toronto wants to make it easier to film how-to videos.

    The team of researchers have developed “Stargazer”, an interactive camera robot that helps university instructors and other content creators create engaging tutorial videos demonstrating physical skills.

    “Stargazer” is an interactive camera robot that helps instructors to create engaging and informative physical skill instruction videos.

    For those without access to a camera person, Stargazer can capture dynamic instructional videos and address the constraints of working with static cameras.

    “The robot is there to help humans, but not to replace humans,” explains lead researcher Jiannan Li, a PhD candidate in U of T’s department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science.

    “The instructors are here to teach. The robot’s role is to help with filming – the heavy-lifting work.”

    The “Stargazer” work is outlined in a published paper [below] presented this year at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, a leading international conference in human-computer interaction.

    Li’s co-authors include fellow members of U of T’s Dynamic Graphics Project (dgp) lab: postdoctoral researcher Mauricio Sousa, PhD students Karthik Mahadevan and Bryan Wang, Professor Ravin Balakrishnan and Associate Professor Tovi Grossman; as well as Associate Professor Anthony Tang (cross-appointed with the Faculty of Information); recent U of T Faculty of Information graduates Paula Akemi Aoyaui and Nicole Yu; and third-year computer engineering student Angela Yang.

    3
    A study participant uses the interactive camera robot Stargazer to record a how-to video on skateboard maintenance (supplied photo)

    “Stargazer” uses a single camera on a robot arm, with seven independent motors that can move along with the video subject by autonomously tracking regions of interest. The system’s camera behaviors can be adjusted based on subtle cues from instructors, such as body movements, gestures and speech that are detected by the prototype’s sensors.

    The instructor’s voice is recorded with a wireless microphone and sent to Microsoft Azure Speech-to-Text, a speech-recognition software. The transcribed text, along with a custom prompt, is then sent to the GPT-3 program, a large language model which labels the instructor’s intention for the camera – such as a standard versus high angle and normal versus tighter framing.

    These camera control commands are cues naturally used by instructors to guide the attention of their audience and are not disruptive to instruction delivery, the researchers say.

    For example, the instructor can have “Stargazer” adjust its view to look at each of the tools they will be using during a tutorial by pointing to each one, prompting the camera to pan around. The instructor can also say to viewers, “If you look at how I put ‘A’ into ‘B’ from the top,” Stargazer will respond by framing the action with a high angle to give the audience a better view.

    In designing the interaction vocabulary, the team wanted to identify signals that are subtle and avoid the need for the instructor to communicate separately to the robot while speaking to their students or audience.

    “The goal is to have the robot understand in real time what kind of shot the instructor wants,” Li says. “The important part of this goal is that we want these vocabularies to be non-disruptive. It should feel like they fit into the tutorial.”

    “Stargazer’s” abilities were put to the test in a study involving six instructors, each teaching a distinct skill to create dynamic tutorial videos.

    Using the robot, they were able to produce videos demonstrating physical tasks on a diverse range of subjects, from skateboard maintenance to interactive sculpture-making and setting up virtual-reality headsets, while relying on the robot for subject tracking, camera framing and camera angle combinations.

    The participants were each given a practice session and completed their tutorials within two takes. The researchers reported all of the participants were able to create videos without needing any additional controls than what was provided by the robotic camera and were satisfied with the quality of the videos produced.

    While “Stargazer’s” range of camera positions is sufficient for tabletop activities, the team is interested in exploring the potential of camera drones and robots on wheels to help with filming tasks in larger environments from a wider variety of angles.

    They also found some study participants attempted to trigger object shots by giving or showing objects to the camera, which were not among the cues that Stargazer currently recognizes. Future research could investigate methods to detect diverse and subtle intents by combining simultaneous signals from an instructor’s gaze, posture and speech, which Li says is a long-term goal the team is making progress on.


    “Stargazer”: An Interactive Camera Robot for Capturing How-To Videos Based on Subtle Instructor Cues.

    While the team presents “Stargazer” as an option for those who do not have access to professional film crews, the researchers admit the robotic camera prototype relies on an expensive robot arm and a suite of external sensors. Li notes, however, that the “Stargazer” concept is not necessarily limited by costly technology.

    “I think there’s a real market for robotic filming equipment, even at the consumer level. “Stargazer” is expanding that realm, but looking farther ahead with a bit more autonomy and a little bit more interaction. So realistically, it could be available to consumers,” he says.

    Li says the team is excited by the possibilities Stargazer presents for greater human-robot collaboration.

    “For robots to work together with humans, the key is for robots to understand humans better. Here, we are looking at these vocabularies, these typically human communication behaviors,” he explains.

    “We hope to inspire others to look at understanding how humans communicate … and how robots can pick that up and have the proper reaction, like assistive behaviors.”

    Science paper:
    Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’23)

    See the full article here .

    Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.


    five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

    Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

    Stem Education Coalition

    The University of Toronto Faculty of Arts & Science is Canada’s largest and most research-intensive undergraduate and graduate enterprise, a vibrant intellectual community of students and scholars who are deeply committed to excellence, discovery and diversity.

    The Faculty comprises 29 departments, seven colleges and 48 interdisciplinary centres, schools and institutes, which not only provide academic offerings, but also a thriving community outside the classroom. This breadth allows us to develop new synergies, to address novel research opportunities and student interest in areas that cut across the sectors.

    More than 300 undergraduate and 70 graduate programs are offered across the humanities, social sciences and sciences.

    Departments

    Anthropology
    Art History
    David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics
    Cell & Systems Biology
    Chemistry
    Classics
    Computer Science
    Earth Sciences
    East Asian Studies
    Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
    Economics
    English
    French
    Geography & Planning
    Germanic Languages & Literatures
    History
    Italian Studies
    Linguistics
    Mathematics
    Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations
    Philosophy
    Physics
    Political Science
    Psychology
    Study of Religion
    Slavic Languages & Literatures
    Sociology
    Spanish & Portuguese
    Statistical Sciences

    The University of Toronto (CA) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen’s Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King’s College, the oldest university in the province of Ontario.

    Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed its present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution.

    As a collegiate university, it comprises eleven colleges each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs and significant differences in character and history. The university also operates two satellite campuses located in Scarborough and Mississauga.

    University of Toronto has evolved into Canada’s leading institution of learning, discovery and knowledge creation. We are proud to be one of the world’s top research-intensive universities, driven to invent and innovate.

    Our students have the opportunity to learn from and work with preeminent thought leaders through our multidisciplinary network of teaching and research faculty, alumni and partners.

    The ideas, innovations and actions of more than 560,000 graduates continue to have a positive impact on the world.

    Academically, the University of Toronto is noted for movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the Toronto School.

    The university was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research, and was the site of the first electron microscope in North America; the identification of the first black hole Cygnus X-1; multi-touch technology, and the development of the theory of NP-completeness.

    The university was one of several universities involved in early research of deep learning. It receives the most annual scientific research funding of any Canadian university and is one of two members of the Association of American Universities outside the United States, the other being McGill(CA).

    The Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, with ties to gridiron football, rowing and ice hockey. The earliest recorded instance of gridiron football occurred at University of Toronto’s University College in November 1861.

    The university’s Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre, simultaneously serving cultural, intellectual, and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex.

    The University of Toronto has educated three Governors General of Canada, four Prime Ministers of Canada, three foreign leaders, and fourteen Justices of the Supreme Court. As of March 2019, ten Nobel laureates, five Turing Award winners, 94 Rhodes Scholars, and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with the university.

    Early history

    The founding of a colonial college had long been the desire of John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and founder of York, the colonial capital. As an University of Oxford (UK)-educated military commander who had fought in the American Revolutionary War, Simcoe believed a college was needed to counter the spread of republicanism from the United States. The Upper Canada Executive Committee recommended in 1798 that a college be established in York.

    On March 15, 1827, a royal charter was formally issued by King George IV, proclaiming “from this time one College, with the style and privileges of a University … for the education of youth in the principles of the Christian Religion, and for their instruction in the various branches of Science and Literature … to continue for ever, to be called King’s College.” The granting of the charter was largely the result of intense lobbying by John Strachan, the influential Anglican Bishop of Toronto who took office as the college’s first president. The original three-storey Greek Revival school building was built on the present site of Queen’s Park.

    Under Strachan’s stewardship, King’s College was a religious institution closely aligned with the Church of England and the British colonial elite, known as the Family Compact. Reformist politicians opposed the clergy’s control over colonial institutions and fought to have the college secularized. In 1849, after a lengthy and heated debate, the newly elected responsible government of the Province of Canada voted to rename King’s College as the University of Toronto and severed the school’s ties with the church. Having anticipated this decision, the enraged Strachan had resigned a year earlier to open Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary. University College was created as the nondenominational teaching branch of the University of Toronto. During the American Civil War the threat of Union blockade on British North America prompted the creation of the University Rifle Corps which saw battle in resisting the Fenian raids on the Niagara border in 1866. The Corps was part of the Reserve Militia lead by Professor Henry Croft.

    Established in 1878, the School of Practical Science was the precursor to the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering which has been nicknamed Skule since its earliest days. While the Faculty of Medicine opened in 1843 medical teaching was conducted by proprietary schools from 1853 until 1887 when the faculty absorbed the Toronto School of Medicine. Meanwhile the university continued to set examinations and confer medical degrees. The university opened the Faculty of Law in 1887, followed by the Faculty of Dentistry in 1888 when the Royal College of Dental Surgeons became an affiliate. Women were first admitted to the university in 1884.

    A devastating fire in 1890 gutted the interior of University College and destroyed 33,000 volumes from the library but the university restored the building and replenished its library within two years. Over the next two decades a collegiate system took shape as the university arranged federation with several ecclesiastical colleges including Strachan’s Trinity College in 1904. The university operated the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1896 to 1991 and the Royal Ontario Museum from 1912 to 1968; both still retain close ties with the university as independent institutions. The University of Toronto Press was founded in 1901 as Canada’s first academic publishing house. The Faculty of Forestry founded in 1907 with Bernhard Fernow as dean was Canada’s first university faculty devoted to forest science. In 1910, the Faculty of Education opened its laboratory school, the University of Toronto Schools.

    World wars and post-war years

    The First and Second World Wars curtailed some university activities as undergraduate and graduate men eagerly enlisted. Intercollegiate athletic competitions and the Hart House Debates were suspended although exhibition and interfaculty games were still held. The David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill opened in 1935 followed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in 1949. The university opened satellite campuses in Scarborough in 1964 and in Mississauga in 1967. The university’s former affiliated schools at the Ontario Agricultural College and Glendon Hall became fully independent of the University of Toronto and became part of University of Guelph (CA) in 1964 and York University (CA) in 1965 respectively. Beginning in the 1980s reductions in government funding prompted more rigorous fundraising efforts.

    Since 2000

    In 2000 Kin-Yip Chun was reinstated as a professor of the university after he launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against the university alleging racial discrimination. In 2017 a human rights application was filed against the University by one of its students for allegedly delaying the investigation of sexual assault and being dismissive of their concerns. In 2018 the university cleared one of its professors of allegations of discrimination and antisemitism in an internal investigation after a complaint was filed by one of its students.

    The University of Toronto was the first Canadian university to amass a financial endowment greater than c. $1 billion in 2007. On September 24, 2020 the university announced a $250 million gift to the Faculty of Medicine from businessman and philanthropist James C. Temerty- the largest single philanthropic donation in Canadian history. This broke the previous record for the school set in 2019 when Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman jointly donated $100 million for the creation of a 750,000-square foot innovation and artificial intelligence centre.

    Research

    Since 1926 the University of Toronto has been a member of the Association of American Universities a consortium of the leading North American research universities. The university manages by far the largest annual research budget of any university in Canada with sponsored direct-cost expenditures of $878 million in 2010. In 2018 the University of Toronto was named the top research university in Canada by Research Infosource with a sponsored research income (external sources of funding) of $1,147.584 million in 2017. In the same year the university’s faculty averaged a sponsored research income of $428,200 while graduate students averaged a sponsored research income of $63,700. The federal government was the largest source of funding with grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council amounting to about one-third of the research budget. About eight percent of research funding came from corporations- mostly in the healthcare industry.

    The first practical electron microscope was built by the physics department in 1938. During World War II the university developed the G-suit- a life-saving garment worn by Allied fighter plane pilots later adopted for use by astronauts.Development of the infrared chemiluminescence technique improved analyses of energy behaviours in chemical reactions. In 1963 the asteroid 2104 Toronto was discovered in the David Dunlap Observatory (CA) in Richmond Hill and is named after the university. In 1972 studies on Cygnus X-1 led to the publication of the first observational evidence proving the existence of black holes. Toronto astronomers have also discovered the Uranian moons of Caliban and Sycorax; the dwarf galaxies of Andromeda I, II and III; and the supernova SN 1987A. A pioneer in computing technology the university designed and built UTEC- one of the world’s first operational computers- and later purchased Ferut- the second commercial computer after UNIVAC I. Multi-touch technology was developed at Toronto with applications ranging from handheld devices to collaboration walls. The AeroVelo Atlas which won the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition in 2013 was developed by the university’s team of students and graduates and was tested in Vaughan.

    The discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921 is considered among the most significant events in the history of medicine. The stem cell was discovered at the university in 1963 forming the basis for bone marrow transplantation and all subsequent research on adult and embryonic stem cells. This was the first of many findings at Toronto relating to stem cells including the identification of pancreatic and retinal stem cells. The cancer stem cell was first identified in 1997 by Toronto researchers who have since found stem cell associations in leukemia; brain tumors; and colorectal cancer. Medical inventions developed at Toronto include the glycaemic index; the infant cereal Pablum; the use of protective hypothermia in open heart surgery; and the first artificial cardiac pacemaker. The first successful single-lung transplant was performed at Toronto in 1981 followed by the first nerve transplant in 1988; and the first double-lung transplant in 1989. Researchers identified the maturation promoting factor that regulates cell division and discovered the T-cell receptor which triggers responses of the immune system. The university is credited with isolating the genes that cause Fanconi anemia; cystic fibrosis; and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease among numerous other diseases. Between 1914 and 1972 the university operated the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories- now part of the pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi-Aventis. Among the research conducted at the laboratory was the development of gel electrophoresis.

    The University of Toronto is the primary research presence that supports one of the world’s largest concentrations of biotechnology firms. More than 5,000 principal investigators reside within 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the university grounds in Toronto’s Discovery District conducting $1 billion of medical research annually. MaRS Discovery District is a research park that serves commercial enterprises and the university’s technology transfer ventures. In 2008, the university disclosed 159 inventions and had 114 active start-up companies. Its SciNet Consortium operates the most powerful supercomputer in Canada.

     
  • richardmitnick 8:49 am on May 26, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: "Geisel Professor Gives Microscopes a Digital Makeover", A medical microscope-“RavaOne”: "SmartScope" is poised to integrate traditional microscopy with rapidly emerging health care technologies that rely on artificial intelligence., , Combining a computer with a microscope in action, Computer Science & Technology, , Dermatopathology, Pathology is on the verge of being transformed by AI algorithms that can make diagnoses more accurate and streamlined and affordable., The "SmartScope" preserves the familiar form of a laboratory microscope.   

    From Dartmouth College: “Geisel Professor Gives Microscopes a Digital Makeover” 

    From Dartmouth College

    5.24.23
    Harini Barath
    harini.barath@dartmouth.edu

    1
    Ziray Hao ’22 looks at a plate through the smart microscope while fellow DALI Lab students Lauren Kidman ’25, Lauren Goyette ’23, Jorie MacDonald ’25, and Alexander Carney, Thayer, discuss the project. (Photo by Katie Lenhart)

    Microscopes are indispensable in disease diagnosis and are employed every day by pathologists who magnify slivers of tissue to detect telltale signs of infection, blood disorders, and cancers.

    Now, instead of using samples mounted on glass slides, a new smart microscope created by Dartmouth Health dermatopathologist Aravindhan Sriharan and students at the Digital Applied Learning and Innovation Lab will allow clinicians to diagnose disorders from digital images.

    By combining the brains of a computer with the design of a medical microscope, “RavaOne”: The “SmartScope” is poised to integrate traditional microscopy with rapidly emerging health care technologies that rely on artificial intelligence and expand the possibilities of telemedicine, says Sriharan, who is an assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine.

    Like so many other fields, pathology is on the verge of being transformed by AI algorithms that can make diagnoses more accurate, streamlined, and affordable. To make the leap towards adopting these tools, pathologists must make the switch to working off digital images.

    A trained pathologist who would take just a few seconds to make a routine diagnosis using a traditional microscope would likely spend several minutes scrolling through high-resolution images on a monitor if they were using a computer alone.

    “Doing digital pathology on a computer screen is incredibly onerous,” says Sriharan. “Medical microscopes have been iterated over 200 years to do one thing really well, but computer monitors are generalists,” he says.

    To Sriharan, the solution lay in combining a computer with a microscope in action, akin to how a smartwatch merges functions.


    Bringing Microscopes Into the Digital Age.
    Photo by Katie Lenhart/Video by Chris Johnson.

    “A smartwatch has the form factor of a wristwatch on the outside but is essentially a computer on the inside. And it can do things that neither a computer nor a wristwatch acting alone can do,” says Sriharan, who pitched his idea to the DALI Lab.

    Lauren Goyette ’23, an engineering major with an interest in product design, began working on the project as a designer last fall.

    “Pathologists are so efficient with microscopes; it’s very impressive,” she says. The challenge, as Goyette saw it, was to help them work at speed as they made the transition to the digital microscopy world. She worked on creating the SmartScope’s chassis using 3D printing.

    Complete with an eyepiece and a stage for the glass slide to sit on, the “SmartScope” preserves the familiar form of a laboratory microscope.

    What’s different is that in place of a laboratory slide with stained tissue, the “SmartScope” stage holds a “dummy” slide. As a user moves this slide, a camera and computer system track its position. This movement is linked to the digitized, high resolution picture of a tissue sample, which moves as the user looks through the eyepiece, mirroring the experience of a conventional microscope.

    “Just getting an image to display was a major milestone,” says Alex Carney ’23, who has also been with the project all along as a developer. Subsequently, he worked on getting the large image file to move smoothly across the user’s field of vision as they moved the glass slide on the stage.

    “The goal is to make a product that someone would be comfortable using for multiple hours a day to do real work—real research and diagnostics. We’re still working on that and we’re very close, but that was the biggest challenge of this project,” says Carney, who didn’t anticipate how much the project would sharpen his math and software skills when he began.

    The team received positive reviews from users who tested their prototype in the winter term.

    “There was a lot of thought and detail put into the simplistic, yet highly advanced intentions of the “SmartScope”, while maintaining the essential functionalities of a microscope,” says Jessica Bentz, assistant professor of pathology affiliated with Dartmouth Hitchcock and the Geisel School of Medicine.

    “I was impressed by the clarity of images at each magnification,” says Bentz, who called attention to the “SmartScope’s” turnstile that allows users to switch between magnifications—a more convenient replacement for the rotating carousel of lenses that traditional microscopes use for this purpose. It was clearly designed with an ergonomic advantage for the user, she says.

    “The “SmartScope” skillfully marries the growing impact of digital imaging and AI as a tool for diagnostic pathology with the familiarity of sitting at a microscopic instrument,” says Bentz.

    “This technology has the potential to change diagnostics by allowing providers across the world to collaborate instantaneously,” says Jorie MacDonald ’25, a computer science major who joined the team as a project manager in spring.

    “You wouldn’t need to ship a physical slide, hoping that it gets through customs and reaches the lab without getting damaged somehow; you just send a file,” she says.

    2
    Aravindhan Sriharan is an assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine. (Photo by Katie Lenhart)

    The device is patent pending, and will form the cornerstone of PixCell, a new startup incorporated by Sriharan. “The “SmartScope” can finally actualize the promise of AI in disease diagnostics,” he says.

    Sriharan believes that the technology can transform health care not just in countries that are leading the change but also in resource- and expertise-limited regions. The device would help providers on the ground screen cases to identify the ones that need immediate attention, sending them on to colleagues and volunteers across the globe.

    Pathologists can run AI algorithms to simulate the results of expensive and time-consuming laboratory tests on the images they examine, saving patients time and money. The algorithms can also help chart the likely course of the disease and recommend effective treatments.

    “We can actually bring first-world medicine—not watered down, but high-tech and cutting edge—to people who need it most,” says Sriharan.

    Other members of the DALI team who worked on developing the “RavaOne”: SmartScope include Andy Kotz ’24, Ziray Hao ’22, Atharv Agashe ’25, Elizabeth Frey ’24, Victor Muturi ’23, Lauren Kidman ’25, Daniel Lubliner ’25, Annie Qiu ’24, Emily Chen ’24, Ulgen Yildrim ’24, Alejandro Lopez ’23, Joy Miao ’23, and Kelly Song ’23.

    See the full article here .

    Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

    five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

    Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

    Stem Education Coalition

    Dartmouth College campus

    Dartmouth College is a private Ivy League research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution and among the most prestigious in the United States. Although founded to educate Native Americans in Christian theology and the English way of life, the university primarily trained Congregationalist ministers during its early history before it gradually secularized, emerging at the turn of the 20th century from relative obscurity into national prominence.

    Following a liberal arts curriculum, Dartmouth provides undergraduate instruction in 40 academic departments and interdisciplinary programs, including 60 majors in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering, and enables students to design specialized concentrations or engage in dual degree programs. In addition to the undergraduate faculty of arts and sciences, Dartmouth has four professional and graduate schools: the Geisel School of Medicine, the Thayer School of Engineering, the Tuck School of Business, and the Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies. The university also has affiliations with the Dartmouth–Hitchcock Medical Center. Dartmouth is home to the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences, the Hood Museum of Art, the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, and the Hopkins Center for the Arts. With a student enrollment of about 6,700, Dartmouth is the smallest university in the Ivy League. Undergraduate admissions are highly selective with an acceptance rate of 6.24% for the class of 2026, including a 4.7% rate for regular decision applicants.

    Situated on a terrace above the Connecticut River, Dartmouth’s 269-acre (109 ha) main campus is in the rural Upper Valley region of New England. The university functions on a quarter system, operating year-round on four ten-week academic terms. Dartmouth is known for its strong undergraduate focus, Greek culture, and wide array of enduring campus traditions. Its 34 varsity sports teams compete intercollegiately in the Ivy League conference of the NCAA Division I.

    Dartmouth is consistently cited as a leading university for undergraduate teaching by U.S. News & World Report. In 2021, the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education listed Dartmouth as the only majority-undergraduate, arts-and-sciences focused, doctoral university in the country that has “some graduate coexistence” and “very high research activity”.

    The university has many prominent alumni, including 170 members of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, 24 U.S. governors, 23 billionaires, 8 U.S. Cabinet secretaries, 3 Nobel Prize laureates, 2 U.S. Supreme Court justices, and a U.S. vice president. Other notable alumni include 79 Rhodes Scholars, 26 Marshall Scholarship recipients, and 14 Pulitzer Prize winners. Dartmouth alumni also include many CEOs and founders of Fortune 500 corporations, high-ranking U.S. diplomats, academic scholars, literary and media figures, professional athletes, and Olympic medalists.

    Comprising an undergraduate population of 4,307 and a total student enrollment of 6,350 (as of 2016), Dartmouth is the smallest university in the Ivy League. Its undergraduate program, which reported an acceptance rate around 10 percent for the class of 2020, is characterized by the Carnegie Foundation and U.S. News & World Report as “most selective”. Dartmouth offers a broad range of academic departments, an extensive research enterprise, numerous community outreach and public service programs, and the highest rate of study abroad participation in the Ivy League.

    Dartmouth, a liberal arts institution, offers a four-year Bachelor of Arts and ABET-accredited Bachelor of Engineering degree to undergraduate students. The college has 39 academic departments offering 56 major programs, while students are free to design special majors or engage in dual majors. For the graduating class of 2017, the most popular majors were economics, government, computer science, engineering sciences, and history. The Government Department, whose prominent professors include Stephen Brooks, Richard Ned Lebow, and William Wohlforth, was ranked the top solely undergraduate political science program in the world by researchers at The London School of Economics (UK) in 2003. The Economics Department, whose prominent professors include David Blanchflower and Andrew Samwick, also holds the distinction as the top-ranked bachelor’s-only economics program in the world.

    In order to graduate, a student must complete 35 total courses, eight to ten of which are typically part of a chosen major program. Other requirements for graduation include the completion of ten “distributive requirements” in a variety of academic fields, proficiency in a foreign language, and completion of a writing class and first-year seminar in writing. Many departments offer honors programs requiring students seeking that distinction to engage in “independent, sustained work”, culminating in the production of a thesis. In addition to the courses offered in Hanover, Dartmouth offers 57 different off-campus programs, including Foreign Study Programs, Language Study Abroad programs, and Exchange Programs.

    Through the Graduate Studies program, Dartmouth grants doctorate and master’s degrees in 19 Arts & Sciences graduate programs. Although the first graduate degree, a PhD in classics, was awarded in 1885, many of the current PhD programs have only existed since the 1960s. Furthermore, Dartmouth is home to three professional schools: the Geisel School of Medicine (established 1797), Thayer School of Engineering (1867)—which also serves as the undergraduate department of engineering sciences—and Tuck School of Business (1900). With these professional schools and graduate programs, conventional American usage would accord Dartmouth the label of “Dartmouth University”; however, because of historical and nostalgic reasons (such as Dartmouth College v. Woodward), the school uses the name “Dartmouth College” to refer to the entire institution.

    Dartmouth employs a total of 607 tenured or tenure-track faculty members, including the highest proportion of female tenured professors among the Ivy League universities, and the first black woman tenure-track faculty member in computer science at an Ivy League university. Faculty members have been at the forefront of such major academic developments as the Dartmouth Workshop, the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, Dartmouth BASIC, and Dartmouth ALGOL 30. In 2005, sponsored project awards to Dartmouth faculty research amounted to $169 million.

    Dartmouth serves as the host institution of the University Press of New England, a university press founded in 1970 that is supported by a consortium of schools that also includes Brandeis University, The University of New Hampshire, Northeastern University, Tufts University and The University of Vermont.

    Rankings

    Dartmouth was ranked tied for 13th among undergraduate programs at national universities by U.S. News & World Report in its 2021 rankings. U.S. News also ranked the school 2nd best for veterans, tied for 5th best in undergraduate teaching, and 9th for “best value” at national universities in 2020. Dartmouth’s undergraduate teaching was previously ranked 1st by U.S. News for five years in a row (2009–2013). Dartmouth College is accredited by The New England Commission of Higher Education.

    In Forbes’ 2019 rankings of 650 universities, liberal arts colleges and service academies, Dartmouth ranked 10th overall and 10th in research universities. In the Forbes 2018 “grateful graduate” rankings, Dartmouth came in first for the second year in a row.

    The 2021 Academic Ranking of World Universities ranked Dartmouth among the 90–110th best universities in the nation. However, this specific ranking has drawn criticism from scholars for not adequately adjusting for the size of an institution, which leads to larger institutions ranking above smaller ones like Dartmouth. Dartmouth’s small size and its undergraduate focus also disadvantage its ranking in other international rankings because ranking formulas favor institutions with a large number of graduate students.

    The 2006 Carnegie Foundation classification listed Dartmouth as the only “majority-undergraduate”, “arts-and-sciences focus[ed]”, “research university” in the country that also had “some graduate coexistence” and “very high research activity”.

    The Dartmouth Plan

    Dartmouth functions on a quarter system, operating year-round on four ten-week academic terms. The Dartmouth Plan (or simply “D-Plan”) is an academic scheduling system that permits the customization of each student’s academic year. All undergraduates are required to be in residence for the fall, winter, and spring terms of their freshman and senior years, as well as the summer term of their sophomore year. However, students may petition to alter this plan so that they may be off during their freshman, senior, or sophomore summer terms. During all terms, students are permitted to choose between studying on-campus, studying at an off-campus program, or taking a term off for vacation, outside internships, or research projects. The typical course load is three classes per term, and students will generally enroll in classes for 12 total terms over the course of their academic career.

    The D-Plan was instituted in the early 1970s at the same time that Dartmouth began accepting female undergraduates. It was initially devised as a plan to increase the enrollment without enlarging campus accommodations, and has been described as “a way to put 4,000 students into 3,000 beds”. Although new dormitories have been built since, the number of students has also increased and the D-Plan remains in effect. It was modified in the 1980s in an attempt to reduce the problems of lack of social and academic continuity.

    3

     
  • richardmitnick 10:57 am on May 12, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: "The University of Connecticut and Yale University Push Connecticut to Quantum Reality", , , Computer Science & Technology, Connecticut is making progress to become the nation’s leading accelerator of quantum technologies., , The NSF designed the awards to benefit states and regions that have not fully benefited from the technology boom of the last few decades., The project entitled “Quantum-CT”, The state’s two premiere research universities are answering The National Science Foundation’s call to catalyze regional economic and societal well-being through technological innovation., ,   

    From The University of Connecticut And Yale University: “The University of Connecticut and Yale University Push Connecticut to Quantum Reality” 

    From The University of Connecticut

    And

    Yale University

    5.11.23
    Matt Engelhardt | The University of Connecticut

    The state’s two premiere research universities are answering The National Science Foundation’s call to catalyze regional economic and societal well-being through technological innovation.

    1
    NSF

    Connecticut is making progress to become the nation’s leading accelerator of quantum technologies, with UConn and Yale leading the way.

    The state’s two premiere research universities are heading a massive coalition seeking funds to help establish the state as a quantum leader. This week, the project entitled “Quantum-CT” took an important step towards its goal with a $1 million National Science Foundation Engines Development award.

    NSF Regional Innovations Engines awarded more than 40 of the prestigious, first-ever awards to collaborations formed to create economic, societal, and technological opportunities for their regions.

    The UConn-Yale partnership recruited an expansive coalition of public, private, and state officials that aims to establish Connecticut as an innovation engine powered by quantum technologies. The award funds a two-year development effort that will help position Connecticut to become the nation’s accelerator for quantum technologies and compete for an NSF Engines award of up to $160 million over 10 years.

    “Quantum science and technologies hold so many keys to the future of Connecticut and the nation,” said Pamir Alpay, UConn’s interim vice president for research, innovation, and entrepreneurship. “Bringing together the expertise and research excellence of UConn, Yale, and many partners, “Quantum-CT” has the potential to be transformative for science, our economy, and workforce. This program extends opportunities to communities and sectors left behind by recent economic downturn and promotes equitability across the state.”

    Alpay is one of the lead investigators on the project. “Quantum-CT” seeks to make Connecticut the nation’s accelerator for quantum technologies, which is tech developed through quantum mechanical principles that govern the atomic and subatomic world. Quantum technologies are poised to influence hundreds of applications, including smartphones, navigation systems, advanced computers, and hundreds of other applications impacting many of Connecticut’s key manufacturing, energy, and infrastructure industries.

    “Connecticut is a microcosm of the challenges and opportunities facing our nation,” said UConn President Radenka Maric. “Our proud industrial base has stayed strong in the face of international competition, offshore manufacturing, and the mass retirement of skilled workers. Likewise, our cities and towns have persevered through tremendous adversity. UConn is honored to join Yale as leaders in the effort to make Connecticut America’s accelerator by transforming a diverse, compact region into an economic development powerhouse using quantum tech.”

    With its versatility and potential to change lives for the better, quantum technology research and development has generated dozens of partners for the “Quantum-CT” initiative. Collaborators on the grant include the Governor’s office, the cities of Hartford, New Haven, Stamford, and Waterbury, the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities (CSCU), the Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges, and the CT Business and Industry Association, among others. Innovation and venture partners, including Connecticut Innovations, CT Next, Advance CT, Yale Ventures, and UConn’s Technology Innovation Program, will work to together ensure that emerging quantum technologies are quickly transferred to real-world applications.

    “Quantum technology represents the future of computers and science, and through a partnership fused between UConn and Yale, Connecticut is ready, determined, and eager to become the nationwide hub and central force of this technological revolution,” Governor Ned Lamont said. “Our workforce in Connecticut is the best educated and most talented in the nation, trained with the modern skills needed to make the United States an international leader in the research and development of the emerging field of quantum technology. Our workforce, our businesses, our schools, our research institutions, and our state government are aligned in the effort to create the pipeline needed to grow this field.”

    The NSF designed the awards to benefit states and regions that have not fully benefited from the technology boom of the last few decades. “Quantum-CT” is officially award number 2302908.

    “These NSF Engines Development Awards lay the foundation for emerging hubs of innovation and potential future NSF Engines,” said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, who visited UConn in 2022 and announced the Engines program. “These awardees are part of the fabric of NSF’s vision to create opportunities everywhere and enable innovation anywhere. They will build robust regional partnerships rooted in scientific and technological innovation in every part of our nation. Through these planning awards, NSF is seeding the future for in-place innovation in communities and to grow their regional economies through research and partnerships. This will unleash ideas, talent, pathways and resources to create vibrant innovation ecosystems all across our nation.”

    The “Quantum-CT” planning initiative is complex, incorporating all sectors that stand to be impacted by the economic revitalization spurred through quantum technology translation. In addition to state offices and the network of universities, technology adopters in the pharmaceutical, defense, financial services, and computing sectors all stand to benefit.

    “Yale has a stellar reputation in quantum science and a blossoming start-up community in quantum technologies,” said Michael Crair, Yale’s vice provost for research and co-principal investigator for the NSF grant. “This will be a multi-billion-dollar industry, and we’d love for Yale and UConn, with partners around the state, to nucleate a national quantum corridor in Connecticut.”

    UConn’s involvement includes more than a dozen researchers spanning several schools, colleges, and services, including the School of Engineering, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the Technology Commercialization Services wing of the University’s research enterprise. Quantum technology is applicable to many of UConn’s research priorities, including sensing, cryptography, artificial intelligence, infrastructure optimization, drug and therapy development, software, and cybersecurity.

    “The complexity and vastness of “Quantum-CT” will draw out the best of UConn and utilize our full physical infrastructure and intellectual capital,” Alpay said. “Together with Yale and the support of our partners, we have the resources and expertise necessary to make Connecticut the nation’s quantum technology accelerator.”

    More information about Quantum-CT is available at quantumct.org. To learn more about the NSF Regional Innovation Engines, visit new.nsf.gov/funding/initiatives/regional-innovation-engines.

    See the full article here.

    Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct.

    five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

    Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

    Stem Education Coalition

    Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Collegiate School was renamed Yale College in 1718 to honor the school’s largest private benefactor for the first century of its existence, Elihu Yale. Yale University is consistently ranked as one of the top universities and is considered one of the most prestigious in the nation.

    Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the Collegiate School was established in 1701 by clergy to educate Congregational ministers before moving to New Haven in 1716. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale’s faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research.

    Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school’s faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut, and forests and nature preserves throughout New England. As of June 2020, the university’s endowment was valued at $31.1 billion, the second largest of any educational institution. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Students compete in intercollegiate sports as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.

    As of October 2020, 65 Nobel laureates, five Fields Medalists, four Abel Prize laureates, and three Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 31 living billionaires, and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, 78 MacArthur Fellows, 252 Rhodes Scholars, 123 Marshall Scholars, and nine Mitchell Scholars have been affiliated with the university.

    Research

    Yale is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU) and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation , Yale spent $990 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 15th in the nation.

    Yale’s faculty include 61 members of the National Academy of Sciences , 7 members of the National Academy of Engineering and 49 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . The college is, after normalization for institution size, the tenth-largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United States, and the largest such source within the Ivy League.

    Yale’s English and Comparative Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement. Of the New Critics, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks were all Yale faculty. Later, the Yale Comparative literature department became a center of American deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, taught at the Department of Comparative Literature from the late seventies to mid-1980s. Several other Yale faculty members were also associated with deconstruction, forming the so-called “Yale School”. These included Paul de Man who taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman (both taught in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature), and Harold Bloom (English), whose theoretical position was always somewhat specific, and who ultimately took a very different path from the rest of this group. Yale’s history department has also originated important intellectual trends. Historians C. Vann Woodward and David Brion Davis are credited with beginning in the 1960s and 1970s an important stream of southern historians; likewise, David Montgomery, a labor historian, advised many of the current generation of labor historians in the country. Yale’s Music School and Department fostered the growth of Music Theory in the latter half of the 20th century. The Journal of Music Theory was founded there in 1957; Allen Forte and David Lewin were influential teachers and scholars.

    In addition to eminent faculty members, Yale research relies heavily on the presence of roughly 1200 Postdocs from various national and international origin working in the multiple laboratories in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools of the university. The university progressively recognized this working force with the recent creation of the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs and the Yale Postdoctoral Association.

    Notable alumni

    Over its history, Yale has produced many distinguished alumni in a variety of fields, ranging from the public to private sector. According to 2020 data, around 71% of undergraduates join the workforce, while the next largest majority of 16.6% go on to attend graduate or professional schools. Yale graduates have been recipients of 252 Rhodes Scholarships, 123 Marshall Scholarships, 67 Truman Scholarships, 21 Churchill Scholarships, and 9 Mitchell Scholarships. The university is also the second largest producer of Fulbright Scholars, with a total of 1,199 in its history and has produced 89 MacArthur Fellows. The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ranked Yale fifth among research institutions producing the most 2020–2021 Fulbright Scholars. Additionally, 31 living billionaires are Yale alumni.

    At Yale, one of the most popular undergraduate majors among Juniors and Seniors is political science, with many students going on to serve careers in government and politics. Former presidents who attended Yale for undergrad include William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush while former presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton attended Yale Law School. Former vice-president and influential antebellum era politician John C. Calhoun also graduated from Yale. Former world leaders include Italian prime minister Mario Monti, Turkish prime minister Tansu Çiller, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, German president Karl Carstens, Philippine president José Paciano Laurel, Latvian president Valdis Zatlers, Taiwanese premier Jiang Yi-huah, and Malawian president Peter Mutharika, among others. Prominent royals who graduated are Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, and Olympia Bonaparte, Princess Napoléon.

    Yale alumni have had considerable presence in U.S. government in all three branches. On the U.S. Supreme Court, 19 justices have been Yale alumni, including current Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Numerous Yale alumni have been U.S. Senators, including current Senators Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Chris Coons, Amy Klobuchar, Ben Sasse, and Sheldon Whitehouse. Current and former cabinet members include Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson; U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Robert Rubin, Nicholas F. Brady, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen; U.S. Attorneys General Nicholas Katzenbach, John Ashcroft, and Edward H. Levi; and many others. Peace Corps founder and American diplomat Sargent Shriver and public official and urban planner Robert Moses are Yale alumni.

    Yale has produced numerous award-winning authors and influential writers, like Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Doug Wright, and David McCullough. Academy Award winning actors, actresses, and directors include Jodie Foster, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Lupita Nyong’o, Oliver Stone, and Frances McDormand. Alumni from Yale have also made notable contributions to both music and the arts. Leading American composer from the 20th century Charles Ives, Broadway composer Cole Porter, Grammy award winner David Lang, and award-winning jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer all hail from Yale. Hugo Boss Prize winner Matthew Barney, famed American sculptor Richard Serra, President Barack Obama presidential portrait painter Kehinde Wiley, MacArthur Fellow and contemporary artist Sarah Sze, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and National Medal of Arts photorealist painter Chuck Close all graduated from Yale. Additional alumni include architect and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Maya Lin, Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster, and Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen. Journalists and pundits include Dick Cavett, Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Fareed Zakaria.

    In business, Yale has had numerous alumni and former students go on to become founders of influential business, like William Boeing (Boeing, United Airlines), Briton Hadden and Henry Luce (Time Magazine), Stephen A. Schwarzman (Blackstone Group), Frederick W. Smith (FedEx), Juan Trippe (Pan Am), Harold Stanley (Morgan Stanley), Bing Gordon (Electronic Arts), and Ben Silbermann (Pinterest). Other business people from Yale include former chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings Edward Lampert, former Time Warner president Jeffrey Bewkes, former PepsiCo chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi, sports agent Donald Dell, and investor/philanthropist Sir John Templeton.

    Yale alumni distinguished in academia include literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates, economists Irving Fischer, Mahbub ul Haq, and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman; Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Ernest Lawrence and Murray Gell-Mann; Fields Medalist John G. Thompson; Human Genome Project leader and National Institutes of Health director Francis S. Collins; brain surgery pioneer Harvey Cushing; pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper; influential mathematician and chemist Josiah Willard Gibbs; National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee and biochemist Florence B. Seibert; Turing Award recipient Ron Rivest; inventors Samuel F.B. Morse and Eli Whitney; Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate John B. Goodenough; lexicographer Noah Webster; and theologians Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr.

    In the sporting arena, Yale alumni include baseball players Ron Darling and Craig Breslow and baseball executives Theo Epstein and George Weiss; football players Calvin Hill, Gary Fenick, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and “the Father of American Football” Walter Camp; ice hockey players Chris Higgins and Olympian Helen Resor; Olympic figure skaters Sarah Hughes and Nathan Chen; nine-time U.S. Squash men’s champion Julian Illingworth; Olympic swimmer Don Schollander; Olympic rowers Josh West and Rusty Wailes; Olympic sailor Stuart McNay; Olympic runner Frank Shorter; and others.

    The University of Connecticut is a public land-grant research university in Storrs, Connecticut. It was founded in 1881.

    The primary 4,400-acre (17.8 km^2) campus is in Storrs, Connecticut, approximately a half hour’s drive from Hartford and 90 minutes from Boston. It is a flagship university that is ranked as the best public national university in New England and is tied for 23rd in “top public schools” and tied for 63rd best national university in the 2021 U.S. News & World Report rankings. University of Connecticut has been ranked by Money Magazine and Princeton Review top 18th in value. The university is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. The university has been recognized as a “Public Ivy”, defined as a select group of publicly funded universities considered to provide a quality of education comparable to those of the Ivy League.

    The University of Connecticut is one of the founding institutions of the Hartford, Connecticut/Springfield, Massachusetts regional economic and cultural partnership alliance known as “New England’s Knowledge Corridor”. The University of Connecticut was the second U.S. university invited into Universitas 21, an elite international network of 24 research-intensive universities, who work together to foster global citizenship. The University of Connecticut is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges . The University of Connecticut was founded in 1881 as the Storrs Agricultural School, named after two brothers who donated the land for the school. In 1893, the school became a land grant college. In 1939, the name was changed to The University of Connecticut. Over the next decade, social work, nursing and graduate programs were established, while the schools of law and pharmacy were also absorbed into the university. During the 1960s, The University of Connecticut Health was established for new medical and dental schools. John Dempsey Hospital opened in Farmington in 1975.

    Competing in the Big East Conference as the Huskies, University of Connecticut has been particularly successful in their men’s and women’s basketball programs. The Huskies have won 21 NCAA championships. The University of Connecticut Huskies are the most successful women’s basketball program in the nation, having won a record 11 NCAA Division I National Championships (tied with the UCLA Bruins men’s basketball team) and a women’s record four in a row (2013–2016), plus over 40 conference regular season and tournament championships. University of Connecticut also owns the two longest winning streaks of any gender in college basketball history.

     
  • richardmitnick 11:18 am on May 8, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: "Communication theory" : demonstrating how to reliably transmit signals over distance, "Scurrying Centipedes Inspire Many-Legged Robots That Can Traverse Difficult Landscapes", Adding leg pairs to the robot increases its ability to move robustly over challenging surfaces — a concept they call “spatial redundancy”., , , Computer Science & Technology, , , , With communication theory ensuring a message gets from point A to point B breaks it into discrete digital units and repeast these units with an appropriate code.   

    From The Georgia Institute of Technology: “Scurrying Centipedes Inspire Many-Legged Robots That Can Traverse Difficult Landscapes” 

    From The Georgia Institute of Technology

    5.5.23
    Tess Malone

    1
    Centipedes are known for their wiggly walk. With tens to hundreds of legs, they can traverse any terrain without stopping.

    “When you see a scurrying centipede, you’re basically seeing an animal that inhabits a world that is very different than our world of movement,” said Daniel Goldman, the Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics. “Our movement is largely dominated by inertia. If I swing my leg, I land on my foot and I move forward. But in the world of centipedes, if they stop wiggling their body parts and limbs, they basically stop moving instantly.”

    Intrigued to see if the many limbs could be helpful for locomotion in this world, a team of physicists, engineers, and mathematicians at the Georgia Institute of Technology are using this style of movement to their advantage. They developed a new theory of multilegged locomotion and created many-legged robotic models, discovering the robot with redundant legs could move across uneven surfaces without any additional sensing or control technology as the theory predicted.

    These robots can move over complex, bumpy terrain — and there is potential to use them for agriculture, space exploration, and even search and rescue.

    The researchers presented their work in the papers in Science [below] in May and PNAS [below] in March.

    2

    A Leg Up

    For the Science paper, the researchers were motivated by mathematician Claude Shannon’s “communication theory”, which demonstrates how to reliably transmit signals over distance, to understand why a multilegged robot was so successful at locomotion. The theory of communication suggests that one way to ensure a message gets from point A to point B on a noisy line isn’t to send it as an analog signal, but to break it into discrete digital units and repeat these units with an appropriate code.

    “We were inspired by this theory, and we tried to see if redundancy could be helpful in matter transportation,” said Baxi Chong, a physics postdoctoral researcher. “So, we started this project to see what would happen if we had more legs on the robot: four, six, eight legs, and even 16 legs.”

    A team led by Chong, including School of Mathematics postdoctoral fellow Daniel Irvine and Professor Greg Blekherman, developed a theory that proposes that adding leg pairs to the robot increases its ability to move robustly over challenging surfaces — a concept they call “spatial redundancy”. This redundancy makes the robot’s legs successful on their own without the need for sensors to interpret the environment. If one leg falters, the abundance of legs keeps it moving regardless. In effect, the robot becomes a reliable system to transport itself and even a load from A to B on difficult or “noisy” landscapes. The concept is comparable to how punctuality can be guaranteed on wheeled transport if the track or rail is smooth enough but without having to engineer the environment to create this punctuality.

    “With an advanced bipedal robot, many sensors are typically required to control it in real time,” Chong said. “But in applications such as search and rescue, exploring Mars, or even micro robots, there is a need to drive a robot with limited sensing. There are many reasons for such sensor-free initiative. The sensors can be expensive and fragile, or the environments can change so fast that it doesn’t allow enough sensor-controller response time.”

    To test this, Juntao He, a Ph.D. student in robotics, conducted a series of experiments where he and Daniel Soto, a master’s student in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, built terrains to mimic an inconsistent natural environment. He then tested the robot by increasing its number of legs by two each time, starting with six and eventually expanding to 16. As the leg count increased, the robot could more agilely move across the terrain, even without sensors, as the theory predicted. Eventually, they tested the robot outdoors on real terrain, where it was able to traverse in a variety of environments.

    “It’s truly impressive to witness the multilegged robot’s proficiency in navigating both lab-based terrains and outdoor environments,” Juntao said. “While bipedal and quadrupedal robots heavily rely on sensors to traverse complex terrain, our multilegged robot utilizes leg redundancy and can accomplish similar tasks with open-loop control.”

    Science

    PNAS

    See the full article here .

    Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

    five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

    Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

    The Georgia Institute of Technology is a public research university and institute of technology located in the Midtown neighborhood of Atlanta, Georgia. It is a part of the University System of Georgia and has satellite campuses in Savannah, Georgia; Metz, France; Athlone, Ireland; Shenzhen, China; and Singapore.

    The school was founded in 1885 as the Georgia School of Technology as part of Reconstruction plans to build an industrial economy in the post-Civil War Southern United States. Initially, it offered only a degree in mechanical engineering. By 1901, its curriculum had expanded to include electrical, civil, and chemical engineering. In 1948, the school changed its name to reflect its evolution from a trade school to a larger and more capable technical institute and research university.

    Today, The Georgia Institute of Technology is organized into six colleges and contains 31 departments/units, with emphasis on science and technology. It is well recognized for its degree programs in engineering, computing, industrial administration, the sciences and design. Georgia Tech is ranked 8th among all public national universities in the United States, 35th among all colleges and universities in the United States by U.S. News & World Report rankings, and 34th among global universities in the world by Times Higher Education rankings. Georgia Tech has been ranked as the “smartest” public college in America (based on average standardized test scores).

    Student athletics, both organized and intramural, are a part of student and alumni life. The school’s intercollegiate competitive sports teams, the four-time football national champion Yellow Jackets, and the nationally recognized fight song “Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech”, have helped keep Georgia Tech in the national spotlight. Georgia Tech fields eight men’s and seven women’s teams that compete in the NCAA Division I athletics and the Football Bowl Subdivision. Georgia Tech is a member of the Coastal Division in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

     
  • richardmitnick 1:21 pm on May 5, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: "When Robots Touch the World", , Computer Science & Technology, , , Robotics in the age of Artificial Intelligence, Robots will also need to navigate the unknown and unexpected in their environments., , , Why is it important to have robots that can touch the world the way humans do?, Why is it so difficult to get a robot to walk or hold things?   

    From The School of Engineering and Applied Science At The University of Pennsylvania: “When Robots Touch the World” 

    From The School of Engineering and Applied Science

    At

    U Penn bloc

    The University of Pennsylvania

    4.25.23
    Devorah Fischler

    1
    Penn Engineering Today spoke with Michael Posa about robotics in the age of artificial intelligence, the ambulatory genius of toddlers, navigating the unfamiliar and the elegance of not learning everything.

    Posa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics and the recipient of an April 2023 grant renewal from the Toyota Research Institute (TRI). His work with TRI untangles the complexities of legged locomotion — refining the still-limited ability of robots to walk and run — and streamlines manipulation, producing simulations that simplify the way robots grasp unknown contexts and objects.
    ________________________________________________________________________________________________
    Let’s start with the basics. Why is it so difficult to get a robot to walk or hold things?

    Right now, robots are burdened by a mismatch between the complex computerized instructions we give them and the level of simplicity required to be effective. Humans have an intuition for touching the world that doesn’t mesh with the type of algorithms designed to get robots to do the same. If you were to look at the physics of a problem — say, the dexterous manipulation of an object — and you were trying to simulate it on your computer, you would have some complicated geometries of the object, some complicated geometries of the hand and the interaction between these two geometries. This is where the bulk of computation would be done, and it would be inexact, energy-intensive and time-consuming. But, if you think about how a human might pick up and manipulate an object, that level of complexity seems unnecessary. If I pick up a mug, I’m using very complicated movements, yes, but I’m not reasoning about every possible spot I can put my fingers.

    If humans had to compute every level of complexity available to us, wouldn’t we also be too overloaded to function?

    Pretty much! You have around 20 different axes of motion in your hand. But if I ask you to hold something, there’s more like three independent movements that you’ll use. The human hand is complex, but in practice, it doesn’t often use its full complexity. Humans have found a way of simplifying the problem of planning, control and manipulation that we haven’t found the right equivalent for in computation. Same for walking. Toddlers have intuitive understanding of getting around and balancing that outstrips what most robots can achieve.

    Why is it important to have robots that can touch the world the way humans do?

    Some tasks are naturally suited to robots. It really comes down to work that is unsafe or undesirable for humans to do. In robotics, we talk about the three Ds: dirty, dangerous and dull. These are tasks that humans do with some risk that robots could alleviate, but it’s important to also realize that robots can do more than just take over the dirty work, they can also provide and enhance a social function. For example, we could imagine robots that help people maintain their autonomy at home as they age. Some people might prefer the comfort of a human helper. Others may favor the assistance of a reliable machine so they can keep a sense of independence.

    Will robots need anything else besides the ability to handle objects and walk in order to reliably fulfill these roles?

    Yes. These robots will also need to navigate the unknown and unexpected in their environments. Right now, there are a lot of reliable robots on the manufacturing floor. They are fast and accurate, but only in their preprogrammed environments. Once these robots leave those environments, they lose speed and precision. With TRI, we are confronting this roadblock by creating algorithms that give robots simplified instructions, reducing the data necessary to learn and act. We need robots that can not only move quickly and deftly, but also negotiate novelty and uncertainty.

    Could you give another example of how we might benefit from this future generation of data-efficient robotics?

    Disaster recovery is a big one. When the Fukushima disaster occurred in 2011, it became clear to the world, and the robotics community specifically, how unready robots were for emergency response. It inspired, in part, the DARPA Robotics Challenge, which I was a part of during my Ph.D. That year became a stake in the ground for robotics, forcing us to be realistic about how far along we were and how much farther we needed to go. In 2011, robots could spend half an hour opening a door and crossing a handful of steps and that was about it.

    How far have we come since then?

    Very far. We’ve seen more and more capable hardware platforms. The Agility Robotics Cassie, which we use in our lab, is something that didn’t exist in 2011. It came about a few years after that. We’ve seen the rise of a climate of commercialized robots, which wasn’t a thing at all back then and is now flourishing. With advances in hardware, software, and the rise of machine learning, robots are far more capable than they were in 2011. However, if Fukushima happened again today, there are still no robots that could go in there and make a real difference beyond survey or search. Nothing will be able to clear rubble and turn valves, fix wiring or press buttons that need to be pressed. But we are a lot closer.

    All your work with TRI seems driven by an ethos of simplification. Can you tell us what you’ve been able to achieve?

    In some ways, we are re-simplifying robotics for the age of machine learning. There is already a simplified model of walking that has been active in robotics for decades: the inverted pendulum. This model boiled down the complexity of walking to a minimum and got robots impressively far. But inevitably, if you take all of the natural complexity of walking and reduce it back down to a pendulum, you’ve given away a bit too much. You’ve restricted your robot to do things that only pendulums can do, which isn’t that many things. My research asks: How do we get the benefits of the simplicity while also bringing back some of the performance we gave away? In the legged locomotion work, we’ve kept the simplicity of the pendulum model, but we’ve expanded the set of tasks — walking and turning faster, getting up steeper slopes, for example — and significantly lowered energy consumption. In the manipulation work, we are doing simulation, creating simplicity from the ground up. We have robotic hands interacting with an object, collecting data and then coming up with a plan that its algorithm forces to be as simple as possible. It interacts, fumbles, learns and corrects itself until it gets it right. It can do this in four to five minutes, which is an achievement.

    Four to five minutes as opposed to what?

    If you don’t have any structure and you use reinforcement learning, it can take hours or days. Is that a fair comparison? Sort of. We enforce some minimal structure. But people do write papers about robots learning to manipulate and navigate unfamiliar environments where it takes hours or days. It’s all trial and error, but it depends on how much trial and error you are willing to accept. These other papers aren’t interested in the physical system, they treat it as a big black box. But what we’ve shown is that learning everything is very data inefficient.

    So, the incredible progress we’re seeing in artificial intelligence doesn’t translate as neatly into robotics as some people seem to think?

    Exactly. At this point, people have used ChatGPT and have seen robots learning. And they have become enamored with the idea that machine learning is going to solve all problems. The key in our lab is to contribute our domain expertise — our understanding of physics and dynamics — and mesh that with algorithms because there are overlaps and efficiencies to exploit. I think there’s a lot of value in deep learning and automation. Robots are going to have to learn things from their environment. It’s not all going to be models and physics. But we are also insisting on the value of techniques people have been thinking about for hundreds of years — physics, control, optimization — and showing that they are not going to go the way of the dinosaur with artificial intelligence taking over.

    See the full article here .

    Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

    five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

    Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

    Stem Education Coalition

    The School of Engineering and Applied Science is an undergraduate and graduate school of The University of Pennsylvania. The School offers programs that emphasize hands-on study of engineering fundamentals (with an offering of approximately 300 courses) while encouraging students to leverage the educational offerings of the broader University. Engineering students can also take advantage of research opportunities through interactions with Penn’s School of Medicine, School of Arts and Sciences and the Wharton School.

    Penn Engineering offers bachelors, masters and Ph.D. degree programs in contemporary fields of engineering study. The nationally ranked bioengineering department offers the School’s most popular undergraduate degree program. The Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology, offered in partnership with the Wharton School, allows students to simultaneously earn a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics as well as a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering. SEAS also offers several masters programs, which include: Executive Master’s in Technology Management, Master of Biotechnology, Master of Computer and Information Technology, Master of Computer and Information Science and a Master of Science in Engineering in Telecommunications and Networking.

    History

    The study of engineering at The University of Pennsylvania can be traced back to 1850 when the University trustees adopted a resolution providing for a professorship of “Chemistry as Applied to the Arts”. In 1852, the study of engineering was further formalized with the establishment of the School of Mines, Arts and Manufactures. The first Professor of Civil and Mining Engineering was appointed in 1852. The first graduate of the school received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1854. Since that time, the school has grown to six departments. In 1973, the school was renamed as the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

    The early growth of the school benefited from the generosity of two Philadelphians: John Henry Towne and Alfred Fitler Moore. Towne, a mechanical engineer and railroad developer, bequeathed the school a gift of $500,000 upon his death in 1875. The main administration building for the school still bears his name. Moore was a successful entrepreneur who made his fortune manufacturing telegraph cable. A 1923 gift from Moore established the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, which is the birthplace of the first electronic general-purpose Turing-complete digital computer, ENIAC, in 1946.

    During the latter half of the 20th century the school continued to break new ground. In 1958, Barbara G. Mandell became the first woman to enroll as an undergraduate in the School of Engineering. In 1965, the university acquired two sites that were formerly used as U.S. Army Nike Missile Base (PH 82L and PH 82R) and created the Valley Forge Research Center. In 1976, the Management and Technology Program was created. In 1990, a Bachelor of Applied Science in Biomedical Science and Bachelor of Applied Science in Environmental Science were first offered, followed by a master’s degree in Biotechnology in 1997.

    The school continues to expand with the addition of the Melvin and Claire Levine Hall for computer science in 2003, Skirkanich Hall for Bioengineering in 2006, and the Krishna P. Singh Center for Nanotechnology in 2013.

    Academics

    Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science is organized into six departments:

    Bioengineering
    Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
    Computer and Information Science
    Electrical and Systems Engineering
    Materials Science and Engineering
    Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics

    The school’s Department of Bioengineering, originally named Biomedical Electronic Engineering, consistently garners a top-ten ranking at both the undergraduate and graduate level from U.S. News & World Report. The department also houses the George H. Stephenson Foundation Educational Laboratory & Bio-MakerSpace (aka Biomakerspace) for training undergraduate through PhD students. It is Philadelphia’s and Penn’s only Bio-MakerSpace and it is open to the Penn community, encouraging a free flow of ideas, creativity, and entrepreneurship between Bioengineering students and students throughout the university.

    Founded in 1893, the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering is “America’s oldest continuously operating degree-granting program in chemical engineering.”

    The Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering is recognized for its research in electroscience, systems science and network systems and telecommunications.

    Originally established in 1946 as the School of Metallurgical Engineering, the Materials Science and Engineering Department “includes cutting edge programs in nanoscience and nanotechnology, biomaterials, ceramics, polymers, and metals.”

    The Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics draws its roots from the Department of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, which was established in 1876.

    Each department houses one or more degree programs. The Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics departments each house a single degree program.

    Bioengineering houses two programs (both a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree as well as a Bachelor of Applied Science degree). Electrical and Systems Engineering offers four Bachelor of Science in Engineering programs: Electrical Engineering, Systems Engineering, Computer Engineering, and the Networked & Social Systems Engineering, the latter two of which are co-housed with Computer and Information Science (CIS). The CIS department, like Bioengineering, offers Computer and Information Science programs under both bachelor programs. CIS also houses Digital Media Design, a program jointly operated with PennDesign.

    Research

    Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science is a research institution. SEAS research strives to advance science and engineering and to achieve a positive impact on society.

    U Penn campus

    Academic life at University of Pennsylvania is unparalleled, with 100 countries and every U.S. state represented in one of the Ivy League’s most diverse student bodies. Consistently ranked among the top 10 universities in the country, Penn enrolls 10,000 undergraduate students and welcomes an additional 10,000 students to our world-renowned graduate and professional schools.

    Penn’s award-winning educators and scholars encourage students to pursue inquiry and discovery, follow their passions, and address the world’s most challenging problems through an interdisciplinary approach.

    The University of Pennsylvania is a private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The university claims a founding date of 1740 and is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered prior to the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Franklin, Penn’s founder and first president, advocated an educational program that trained leaders in commerce, government, and public service, similar to a modern liberal arts curriculum.

    Penn has four undergraduate schools as well as twelve graduate and professional schools. Schools enrolling undergraduates include the College of Arts and Sciences; the School of Engineering and Applied Science; the Wharton School; and the School of Nursing. Penn’s “One University Policy” allows students to enroll in classes in any of Penn’s twelve schools. Among its highly ranked graduate and professional schools are a law school whose first professor wrote the first draft of the United States Constitution, the first school of medicine in North America (Perelman School of Medicine, 1765), and the first collegiate business school (Wharton School, 1881).

    Penn is also home to the first “student union” building and organization (Houston Hall, 1896), the first Catholic student club in North America (Newman Center, 1893), the first double-decker college football stadium (Franklin Field, 1924 when second deck was constructed), and Morris Arboretum, the official arboretum of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The first general-purpose electronic computer (ENIAC) was developed at Penn and formally dedicated in 1946. In 2019, the university had an endowment of $14.65 billion, the sixth-largest endowment of all universities in the United States, as well as a research budget of $1.02 billion. The university’s athletics program, the Quakers, fields varsity teams in 33 sports as a member of the NCAA Division I Ivy League conference.

    As of 2018, distinguished alumni and/or Trustees include three U.S. Supreme Court justices; 32 U.S. senators; 46 U.S. governors; 163 members of the U.S. House of Representatives; eight signers of the Declaration of Independence and seven signers of the U.S. Constitution (four of whom signed both representing two-thirds of the six people who signed both); 24 members of the Continental Congress; 14 foreign heads of state and two presidents of the United States, including Donald Trump. As of October 2019, 36 Nobel laureates; 80 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; 64 billionaires; 29 Rhodes Scholars; 15 Marshall Scholars and 16 Pulitzer Prize winners have been affiliated with the university.

    History

    The University of Pennsylvania considers itself the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, though this is contested by Princeton University and Columbia University. The university also considers itself as the first university in the United States with both undergraduate and graduate studies.

    In 1740, a group of Philadelphians joined together to erect a great preaching hall for the traveling evangelist George Whitefield, who toured the American colonies delivering open-air sermons. The building was designed and built by Edmund Woolley and was the largest building in the city at the time, drawing thousands of people the first time it was preached in. It was initially planned to serve as a charity school as well, but a lack of funds forced plans for the chapel and school to be suspended. According to Franklin’s autobiography, it was in 1743 when he first had the idea to establish an academy, “thinking the Rev. Richard Peters a fit person to superintend such an institution”. However, Peters declined a casual inquiry from Franklin and nothing further was done for another six years. In the fall of 1749, now more eager to create a school to educate future generations, Benjamin Franklin circulated a pamphlet titled Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania, his vision for what he called a “Public Academy of Philadelphia”. Unlike the other colonial colleges that existed in 1749—Harvard University, William & Mary, Yale Unversity, and The College of New Jersey—Franklin’s new school would not focus merely on education for the clergy. He advocated an innovative concept of higher education, one which would teach both the ornamental knowledge of the arts and the practical skills necessary for making a living and doing public service. The proposed program of study could have become the nation’s first modern liberal arts curriculum, although it was never implemented because Anglican priest William Smith (1727-1803), who became the first provost, and other trustees strongly preferred the traditional curriculum.

    Franklin assembled a board of trustees from among the leading citizens of Philadelphia, the first such non-sectarian board in America. At the first meeting of the 24 members of the board of trustees on November 13, 1749, the issue of where to locate the school was a prime concern. Although a lot across Sixth Street from the old Pennsylvania State House (later renamed and famously known since 1776 as “Independence Hall”), was offered without cost by James Logan, its owner, the trustees realized that the building erected in 1740, which was still vacant, would be an even better site. The original sponsors of the dormant building still owed considerable construction debts and asked Franklin’s group to assume their debts and, accordingly, their inactive trusts. On February 1, 1750, the new board took over the building and trusts of the old board. On August 13, 1751, the “Academy of Philadelphia”, using the great hall at 4th and Arch Streets, took in its first secondary students. A charity school also was chartered on July 13, 1753 by the intentions of the original “New Building” donors, although it lasted only a few years. On June 16, 1755, the “College of Philadelphia” was chartered, paving the way for the addition of undergraduate instruction. All three schools shared the same board of trustees and were considered to be part of the same institution. The first commencement exercises were held on May 17, 1757.

    The institution of higher learning was known as the College of Philadelphia from 1755 to 1779. In 1779, not trusting then-provost the Reverend William Smith’s “Loyalist” tendencies, the revolutionary State Legislature created a University of the State of Pennsylvania. The result was a schism, with Smith continuing to operate an attenuated version of the College of Philadelphia. In 1791, the legislature issued a new charter, merging the two institutions into a new University of Pennsylvania with twelve men from each institution on the new board of trustees.

    Penn has three claims to being the first university in the United States, according to university archives director Mark Frazier Lloyd: the 1765 founding of the first medical school in America made Penn the first institution to offer both “undergraduate” and professional education; the 1779 charter made it the first American institution of higher learning to take the name of “University”; and existing colleges were established as seminaries (although, as detailed earlier, Penn adopted a traditional seminary curriculum as well).

    After being located in downtown Philadelphia for more than a century, the campus was moved across the Schuylkill River to property purchased from the Blockley Almshouse in West Philadelphia in 1872, where it has since remained in an area now known as University City. Although Penn began operating as an academy or secondary school in 1751 and obtained its collegiate charter in 1755, it initially designated 1750 as its founding date; this is the year that appears on the first iteration of the university seal. Sometime later in its early history, Penn began to consider 1749 as its founding date and this year was referenced for over a century, including at the centennial celebration in 1849. In 1899, the board of trustees voted to adjust the founding date earlier again, this time to 1740, the date of “the creation of the earliest of the many educational trusts the University has taken upon itself”. The board of trustees voted in response to a three-year campaign by Penn’s General Alumni Society to retroactively revise the university’s founding date to appear older than Princeton University, which had been chartered in 1746.

    Research, innovations and discoveries

    Penn is classified as an “R1” doctoral university: “Highest research activity.” Its economic impact on the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for 2015 amounted to $14.3 billion. Penn’s research expenditures in the 2018 fiscal year were $1.442 billion, the fourth largest in the U.S. In fiscal year 2019 Penn received $582.3 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health.

    In line with its well-known interdisciplinary tradition, Penn’s research centers often span two or more disciplines. In the 2010–2011 academic year alone, five interdisciplinary research centers were created or substantially expanded; these include the Center for Health-care Financing; the Center for Global Women’s Health at the Nursing School; the $13 million Morris Arboretum’s Horticulture Center; the $15 million Jay H. Baker Retailing Center at Wharton; and the $13 million Translational Research Center at Penn Medicine. With these additions, Penn now counts 165 research centers hosting a research community of over 4,300 faculty and over 1,100 postdoctoral fellows, 5,500 academic support staff and graduate student trainees. To further assist the advancement of interdisciplinary research President Amy Gutmann established the “Penn Integrates Knowledge” title awarded to selected Penn professors “whose research and teaching exemplify the integration of knowledge”. These professors hold endowed professorships and joint appointments between Penn’s schools.

    Penn is also among the most prolific producers of doctoral students. With 487 PhDs awarded in 2009, Penn ranks third in the Ivy League, only behind Columbia University and Cornell University (Harvard University did not report data). It also has one of the highest numbers of post-doctoral appointees (933 in number for 2004–2007), ranking third in the Ivy League (behind Harvard and Yale University) and tenth nationally.

    In most disciplines Penn professors’ productivity is among the highest in the nation and first in the fields of epidemiology, business, communication studies, comparative literature, languages, information science, criminal justice and criminology, social sciences and sociology. According to the National Research Council nearly three-quarters of Penn’s 41 assessed programs were placed in ranges including the top 10 rankings in their fields, with more than half of these in ranges including the top five rankings in these fields.

    Penn’s research tradition has historically been complemented by innovations that shaped higher education. In addition to establishing the first medical school; the first university teaching hospital; the first business school; and the first student union Penn was also the cradle of other significant developments. In 1852, Penn Law was the first law school in the nation to publish a law journal still in existence (then called The American Law Register, now the Penn Law Review, one of the most cited law journals in the world). Under the deanship of William Draper Lewis, the law school was also one of the first schools to emphasize legal teaching by full-time professors instead of practitioners, a system that is still followed today. The Wharton School was home to several pioneering developments in business education. It established the first research center in a business school in 1921 and the first center for entrepreneurship center in 1973 and it regularly introduced novel curricula for which BusinessWeek wrote, “Wharton is on the crest of a wave of reinvention and change in management education”.

    Several major scientific discoveries have also taken place at Penn. The university is probably best known as the place where the first general-purpose electronic computer (ENIAC) was born in 1946 at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering.

    ENIAC UPenn

    It was here also where the world’s first spelling and grammar checkers were created, as well as the popular COBOL programming language. Penn can also boast some of the most important discoveries in the field of medicine. The dialysis machine used as an artificial replacement for lost kidney function was conceived and devised out of a pressure cooker by William Inouye while he was still a student at Penn Med; the Rubella and Hepatitis B vaccines were developed at Penn; the discovery of cancer’s link with genes; cognitive therapy; Retin-A (the cream used to treat acne), Resistin; the Philadelphia gene (linked to chronic myelogenous leukemia) and the technology behind PET Scans were all discovered by Penn Med researchers. More recent gene research has led to the discovery of the genes for fragile X syndrome, the most common form of inherited mental retardation; spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy, a disorder marked by progressive muscle wasting; and Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease, a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects the hands, feet and limbs.

    Conductive polymer was also developed at Penn by Alan J. Heeger, Alan MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa, an invention that earned them the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. On faculty since 1965, Ralph L. Brinster developed the scientific basis for in vitro fertilization and the transgenic mouse at Penn and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2010. The theory of superconductivity was also partly developed at Penn, by then-faculty member John Robert Schrieffer (along with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper). The university has also contributed major advancements in the fields of economics and management. Among the many discoveries are conjoint analysis, widely used as a predictive tool especially in market research; Simon Kuznets’s method of measuring Gross National Product; the Penn effect (the observation that consumer price levels in richer countries are systematically higher than in poorer ones) and the “Wharton Model” developed by Nobel-laureate Lawrence Klein to measure and forecast economic activity. The idea behind Health Maintenance Organizations also belonged to Penn professor Robert Eilers, who put it into practice during then-President Nixon’s health reform in the 1970s.

    International partnerships

    Students can study abroad for a semester or a year at partner institutions such as the London School of Economics(UK), University of Barcelona [Universitat de Barcelona](ES), Paris Institute of Political Studies [Institut d’études politiques de Paris](FR), University of Queensland(AU), University College London(UK), King’s College London(UK), Hebrew University of Jerusalem(IL) and University of Warwick(UK).

     
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