Category Archives: Engineering

Robot Learning

photo of robot dog playpen

This is very cool stuff:

Indeed, as opposed to the work in classical artificial intelligence in which engineers impose pre-defined anthropocentric tasks to robots, the techniques we develop endow the robots with the capacity of deciding by themselves which are the activities that are maximally fitted to their current capabilities. Our developmental robots autonomously and actively choose their learning situations, thus beginning by simple ones and progressively increasing their complexity. No tasks are pre-specified to the robots, which are only provided with an internal abstract reward function. For example, in the case of the Intelligent Adaptive Curiosity which we developped, this internal reward function pushes the robot to search for situations where its learning progress is maximal.

Very interesting article from Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris (Developmental Robotics): Discovering Communication by Pierre-Yves Oudeyer and Frederic Kaplan, abstract:
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Berkeley and MIT courses online

Huge amount of University of California Berkely webcasts of course lectures. Subscribe to RSS feeds and listen to podcasts or listen online.

Courses include: General Biology, Solid State Devices and Introductory Physics. Course websites include handouts for the lectures.

A great open access resource.

I can’t believe I have mentioned MIT open courseware before but a search didn’t find anything. MIT’s effort is an excellent resource, many on science and engineering: Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Materials Science and Engineering, etc..

MIT also includes the excellent: Visualizing Cultures – a gateway to seeing history through images that once had wide circulation among peoples of different times and places by John Dower (author of National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II) and Shigeru Miyagawa.

Science 2.0 – Biology

OpenWetWare (OWW) is an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology and biological engineering.

“OWW provides a place for labs, individuals, and groups to organize their own information and collaborate with others easily and efficiently. In the process, we hope that OWW will not only lead to greater collaboration between member groups, but also provide a useful information portal to our colleagues, and ultimately the rest of the world.”
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NSF Funds Center for Quality of Life Technology

Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) have been awarded a $15 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to establish an engineering research center that will develop technologies to help older adults and people with disabilities live independently and productively.

“The purpose of our new center is to foster independence and self determination among older Americans and people with disabilities,” said Kanade. “If the technology we develop at the QoLT ERC can delay the need to send people from their homes to assisted living or nursing facilities by even one month, we can save our nation $1.2 billion annually. We need to apply the same ingenuity that we’ve used for military, space and manufacturing applications to improve the human condition.”

Japan has also been investing heavily in such technology including robots. Japan’s population is more elderly and the needs and benefits to Japan have lead them to invest heavily in technology to assist an aging population.
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Engineers in the Workplace

Vivek Wadhwa again addresses the question: Engineering Gap? Fact and Fiction. This is a question that deserves a continued look – I still believe we do need more focus on educating more engineers:

Additionally, the positive macro-economic effects of a strong scientific, engineering and technology community to an economy are not necessarily directly correlated to high salaries for those workers. That is one positive factor, but even if those salaries were not high the other benefits of innovation, manufacturing leadership, invention, etc. would still benefit the economy. So a country that is investing in the future could sensible target investments in science and engineering education even without increasing salaries pointing out that the supply and demand in the market was indicating a shortage of those workers.

From Vivek Wadhwa’s most recent article:
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Semiconductor Paint

Paint-on semiconductor outperforms chips

Researchers at the University of Toronto have created a semiconductor device that outperforms today’s conventional chips — and they made it simply by painting a liquid onto a piece of glass.

The finding, which represents the first time a so-called “wet” semiconductor device has bested traditional, more costly grown-crystal semiconductor devices, is reported in the July 13 issue of the journal Nature.

Like so much advance research funding by government, in this case the Canadian government, is crucial:
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Lucrative college degrees

Lucrative college degrees, CNN article on NACE’s latest quarterly salary survey of recent college graduates.

Once again Engineering is very well represented with average starting salaries for:

Chemical engineering: $56,335
Computer engineering: $53,651
Electrical engineering: $53,552
Mechanical engineering: $51,732

The article lists no other degrees with an average above $50,000. Engineering education continues to pay off well.

China Builds a Better Internet

China Builds a Better Internet (site broke the link so I removed it)

China is looking to become a scientific leader, with projects like China’s Next Generation Internet, to strengthen their economy by creating

its own scientific and technological breakthroughs—using a new and improved version of today’s dominant innovation platform, the Internet. “CNGI is the culmination of this revolutionary plan” to turn China into the world’s innovation capital, says Wu Hequan, vice president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
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The United States’ reluctance to invest in IPv6 makes it more likely that China will be in a position to gain the first-mover advantage it seeks. A draft version of a January 2006 report by the Department of Commerce on IPv6 contained a section on competitiveness that highlighted several threats to U.S. Internet leadership, including a further shift of high-tech R&D and product innovation eastward and less available investment capital because of the higher costs of maintaining IPv4 networks. What remains to be seen is whether China can develop the services that take advantage of the next-generation Internet. But China’s researchers are already working on it. At the IPv6 Global Summit in April, China’s major telecommunications and Internet companies got up on stage one by one and told the audience that they have research facilities dedicated to developing these services.

IPv6 is coming, in fact it is already here, though in a limited way. The work started in 1994 when the IPv6 working group was established and proposed standard adopted by the Internet Engineering Steering Group.

IEEE-USA chief calls for IPv6 adoption:

Adoption of a next-generation Internet Protocol by China, Japan and South Korea and other Asian countries should raised questions about U.S. innovation policy, the president of IEEE-USA told an IPv6 conference here Friday

Bacteria Sprout Conducting Nanowires

photo of Bacteria with Conducting Nanowires

Bacteria made to sprout conducting nanowires by Mason Inman

Bacteria that use sugars and sewage as fuel are being investigated as a pollution-free source of electricity. They feed by plucking electrons from atoms in their fuel and dumping them onto the oxygen or metal atoms in the mixture. The transfer of the electrons creates a current, and connecting the bacteria to an electrode in a microbial fuel cell will generate electricity, although not necessarily very efficiently.

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Genetically Engineered Machines Competition

Princeton Center for Innovation in Engineering Education post on Genetic Machines Competition.

Find up to date information on the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition:

We believe in the possibility of engineered biological systems, but the only way to test such an engineering hypothesis is to try it practically. The iGEM competition facilitates this by asking students to design and build genetic machines. This generates practical data on the feasibility of engineering biology, and also on best practices. It also provides a powerful educational experience for the students working to overcome the many technical challenges.

This seems like an effort that is properly focused and is applying sensible management and technology to achieve the goals. A very nice things to find.

Previous post on 2005 intercollegiate Genetically Engineered Machine competition – looking at Davidson College students, where I graduated – John. While Dad graduated from Princeton 🙂

Teams lay BioBrick foundation for genetic engineering article from MIT.