RFID
July 31, 2008 at 12:13 PM | In Uncategorized | 2 CommentsTags: ethics, rfid, ubiquitous
A Parisian woman slides her purse across a sensor to get into the metro station. A competitor in the Enduro off-road motorcycle race completes a lap and his time is automatically recorded by a computer. Fluffy makes his way to a local pound, and his relieved owner gets a call alerting her of his whereabouts. At an airport, an American citizen waves his passport in front of a computer to retrieve his ticket information.
All of these scenarios are linked by their enabling technology – Radio Frequency Identification, an automatic identification system. RFID tags are placed on whatever needs to be identified and transmit their information to readers. Tags don’t necessarily need to be powered: they can use energy from a radio signal to transmit back their data. Whether or not a tag is powered affects the range at which it can be read.
This technology brings diverse challenges to computer scientists. Scale is an issue — as more and more items become tagged, how do we design systems to efficiently store and retrieve information? Similarly, if dozens of items are transmitting their IDs in an environment, how do we display the information in a human-friendly way? Surely, a big list of unsorted IDs will not be very useful. The largest challenge, though, is how to deal with issues of privacy and security. How much information can be stored by a transit system which uses RFID for payment? How can we prevent hackers from making unauthorized transactions on RFID-enabled credit cards? How can people manage their own identities if everything they own is tagged?
The RFID Ecosystem at the University of Washington is asking just these questions and coming up with some interesting solutions.
You can also read more about the ORCA public transit card which is supposed to be integrated into Husky Cards this year.
The Turing Test
July 17, 2008 at 12:44 AM | In history | Leave a CommentTags: ai
In 1950, Alan Turing, a computer science pioneer, suggested a simple test to assess the thinking power of machines. A human would converse with either a program or another human through a computer interface and would try to guess which it was speaking to. Programs consistently capable of fooling its judges into thinking they were human could be said to emulate intelligence. Turing figured that trying to measure whether programs really thought would be very difficult — after all, defining creativity or intelligence has been the source of philosophical debate for centuries. He predicted, though, that within a few decades, computers would be good enough at his test that arguments over whether they could think would become irrelevant.
A quick look at a hilarious transcript from the Loebner Prize competition shows that his prediction hasn’t come true. Each year, chat bots like George, pictured above, are entered into this competition and the most convincing one wins a cash prize.
These bots may not even come close to passing as human, but they sure are entertaining to talk to! Try the following:
- Eliza – one of the first programs of its kind, written in the 60s
- A.L.I.C.E – winner of the 2000, 2001 and 2004 Loebner Prize
- Jabberwacky – winner of the 2005 and 2006 Loebner Prize
Jabberwacky and A.L.I.C.E both learn from their conversations with different people but Eliza only looks for key words and responds with stock sentences. Loops, conditionals and a way to read user input are enough to replicate most of its behavior — cool!
Is CS still a sexy job market?
July 7, 2008 at 11:48 PM | In Uncategorized | 2 CommentsTags: careers, companies, jobs
There’s some concern these days about the job market in technology fields. But Computer Science students certainly have something to smile about. Computer software engineers ranked #1 of 50 on CNN Money.com’s list of best jobs in America.
With an average salary of $80,427 per year, software engineering is the second fastest growing field on the list, with almost 1.2 million jobs expected to be available by 2014. That’s a growth rate of 46.07 percent over the 10 years, or an additional 44,770 new jobs in the field per year.
Additionally, computer/IT analysts ranked seventh on the list. Paying on average $83,247 per year, that field is growing at a rate of 36.10 percent, making it the seventh fastest growing field on the list. The number of jobs for an analyst is expected to jump to nearly 2 million by 2014, an increase of over 67,000 jobs per year.
MONEY magazine, with Salary.com, rated the jobs based on a variety of factors. The magazine collected data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and chose positions that had an above-average growth rate over 10 years and required at least a bachelor’s degree. Positions were also rated on stress levels, flexibility in hours and working environment, creativity and ease of advancing in the field.
(courtesy UIUC)
Computing companies are well-represented in CNNMoney.com’s list of the best overall companies to work for:
1. Google
2. Quicken Loans
6. Cisco Systems
8. Qualcomm
Many tech companies offer interesting and unusual perks: eBay, Quicken Loans, Google, Microsoft
These computing companies rank among CNNMoney’s top-paying overall companies: Adobe, Cisco, Network Appliance, eBay, Texas Instruments, Yahoo!, SAS Institute, Google
Industrial Robots
July 3, 2008 at 11:20 AM | In Uncategorized | Leave a CommentTags: industrial, mechanical, robotics
Why use robots on assembly lines and in repair shops? Unlike humans, these can carry on repetitive tasks all day and night without any failures. They can lift extremely heavy loads and systematically move them within .006 inches of their target. All of this, of course, is enabled in large part by clever programming.
There also exist many complex software packages for simulating the behavior of industrial robots and attempting to simplify the task of controlling their many axes.
Wikipedia may not be a very academic source, but it has a great article on industrial robots. You can also learn more about how they are programmed.
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