Posts Tagged ‘Yale’

Four locals among PopSci’s ‘Ten Young Geniuses’

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

Popular Science has chosen “10 Young Geniuses Shaking Up Science Today,” and not surprisingly, four of them come from New England. Take that, Rest of the Country.

Among the 10:

PopSci also helpfully notes that, John Cusack notwithstanding, the planet Nibiru will not collide with Earth, wiping out all life, in two years.

MIT, Harvard, Yale researchers win ‘genius grants’

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

 

Six New England researchers have won “genius grants” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

MIT economist Esther Duflo, Harvard researchers Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan and Peter Huybers, Yale researchers Richard Prum and Mary Tinetti, and Project HEALTH founder Rebecca Onie each received $500,000 to further their research.

Mahadevan, above tries to answer everyday questions with applied mathematics — how cloth falls, or how skin wrinkles.

After the jump, watch video of the remaining New England grant recipients. (more…)

Helen Greiner likes her robots just the way they are, thanks

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
Helen Greiner

Helen Greiner

IRobot co-founder, Droid Works CEO and 2007 MHT All-Star Helen Greiner contributes an article to Forbes Magazine’s package on robotics and artificial intelligence, and makes a compelling argument against humanoid robots:

Customers don’t want a Roomba vacuuming robot that argues when you tell it to vacuum the floor. That’s what kids are for. When the company I co-founded, iRobot, first delivered Roomba to customers, they didn’t write to us and say, “I want it to be more humanlike.” They said, “Make it cover the floor better and make it recharge on its own” (we did) …

Likewise, the military doesn’t need robots that question commands or find their assignment boring. Combat robots are built for a mission; they are tools for the soldier. 

In the same package, Yale computer science professor David Gelernter argues for a resurgence in AI research’s less practical side:

This facet of AI research has more or less shut down because it ignored an all-important detail: Intelligence isn’t just about problem-solving, but about a whole cognitive spectrum that includes dreaming and other forms of unconscious activity.

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