#Robots learn to use kitchen tools by watching Youtube videos Researchers at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) partnered with a scientist at the National Information Communications technology Research Centre
of Excellence in Australia (NICTA) to develop robotic systems that are able to teach themselves.
The work will be presented on Jan 29 2015 at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial intelligence Conference in Austin Texas. The researchers achieved this milestone by combining approaches from three distinct research areas:
artificial intelligence or the design of computers that can make their own decisions; computer vision or the engineering of systems that can accurately identify shapes and movements;
and natural language processing or the development of robust systems that can understand spoken commands. Although the underlying work is complex the team wanted the results to reflect something practical and relatable to people's daily lives.
We chose cooking videos because everyone has done it and understands it said Yiannis Aloimonos UMD professor of computer science and director of the Computer Vision Lab one of 16 labs and centers in UMIACS.
But cooking is complex in terms of manipulation the steps involved and the tools you use. If you want to cut a cucumber for example you need to grab the knife move it into place make the cut
In fact this is precisely what distinguishes their work from previous efforts. Others have tried to copy the movements.
The work also relies on a specialized software architecture known as deep-learning neural networks. While this approach is not new it requires lots of processing power to work well
while for computing technology to catch up. Similar versions of neural networks are responsible for the voice recognition capabilities in smartphones
and the facial recognition software used by Facebook and other websites. While robots have been used to carry out complicated tasks for decades--think automobile assembly lines--these must be programmed carefully
and calibrated by human technicians. Self learning robots could gather the necessary information by watching others
which is the same way humans learn. Aloimonos and Ferm#ller envision a future in
This will be said the next industrial revolution Aloimonos We will have smart manufacturing environments and completely automated warehouses. It would be great to use autonomous robots for dangerous work--to defuse bombs
and clean up nuclear disasters such as the Fukushima event. We have demonstrated that it is possible for humanoid robots to do our human jobs.
The authors'report can be found online at: http://www. umiacs. umd. edu/yzyang/paper/Youcookmani cameraready. pd e
#Researchers develop new instrument to monitor atmospheric mercury Researchers at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine
and tested a new sensor to detect ambient levels of mercury in the atmosphere. Funded through a National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation grant, the new highly sensitive, laser-based instrument provides scientists with a method to more accurately measure global human exposure to mercury.
and monitor blue shifted atomic fluorescence. UM Rosenstiel School Professor of Atmospheric Sciences Anthony Hynes and colleagues tested the new mobile instrument
alongside the standard instrumentation that is currently used to monitor atmospheric mercury concentrations, during the three-week Reno Atmospheric Mercury Intercomparison Experiment (RAMIX) performed in 2011 in Reno, Nevada.
or elements and becomes more efficiently deposited in the environment.""To understand how mercury gets deposited we need to understand its atmospheric chemistry,
"The U s. EPA Mercury and Air Toxics Standards and the International Minamata Convention on Mercury, have focused on limiting the emissions of toxic air pollutants,
or via rainfall (wet deposition) where it bioaccumulates and biomagnifies, ending up at much high concentrations in fish and mammals.
titled"Deployment of a sequential two-photon laser-induced fluorescence sensor for the detection of gaseous elemental mercury at ambient levels:
#Novel eye-tracking technology detects concussions head injury severity Neuroscientists and concussion experts from NYU Langone and elsewhere in a study publishing online January 29 in Journal of Neurotrauma present a unique simple and objective diagnostic tool for concussion that can be utilized in the emergency room or one day
on the sidelines at sporting events. The study utilized a novel eye-tracking device to effectively measure the severity of concussion
or brain injury in patients presenting to emergency departments following head trauma. Concussion is a condition that has been plagued by the lack of an objective diagnostic tool
and fears among those affected and their families says lead investigator Uzma Samadani MD Phd assistant professor in the Departments of Neurosurgery Psychiatry Neuroscience and Physiology at NYU Langone.
and therapeutics and help assess recovery such as when a patient can safely return to work following a head injury.
The eyes have served as a window into the brain with disconjugate eye movements--eyes rotating in opposite directions--considered a principal marker for head trauma as early as 3500 years ago.
Current estimates by optometrists suggest that up to 90 percent of patients with concussions or blast injuries exhibit dysfunction in their eye movements.
Unfortunately the state-of-the-art tool to detect eye conjugacy is asking a patient to follow along with a physician's finger according to Dr. Samadani who also serves as co-director of the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Veterans Center for the Study of Posttraumatic Stress and Traumatic Brain injury at NYU Langone.
The eye-tracking technology used in this study was developed originally by Dr. Samadani and colleagues at the Cohen Veterans Center to assess eye movement in veterans of the long Middle east conflicts suspected of suffering from traumatic brain injury (TBI) concussion or other forms of brain injury.
In this new study researchers compared 64 healthy control subjects to 75 patients who had experienced trauma that brought them to the emergency department at Bellevue Hospital Center in New york city with
whom the NYU School of medicine has an affiliation agreement. They tracked and compared the movements of patients'pupils for over 200 seconds while watching a music video.
All participants were between 18 and 60 years of age. The study showed that 13 trauma patients who had hit their heads
and had CT SCANS showing new brain damage as well as 39 trauma patients who had hit their heads
and had had normal CT SCANS significantly less ability to coordinate their eye movements than normal uninjured control subjects.
Twenty-three trauma subjects who had bodily or extremity injuries but did not require head CT SCANS had similar abilities to coordinate eye movements as normal uninjured controls.
Among patients who had hit their heads and had normal CT SCANS most were slightly worse at 1-2 weeks after the injury
and subsequently recovered about one month after the injury. Among all trauma patients the severity of concussive symptoms correlated with severity of disconjugacy.
Those offering support for Dr. Samadani's research include Richard G. Ellenbogen MD The Theodore S. Roberts Endowed Chair
and professor and chairman of the Department of Neurological Surgery at University of Washington Medicine and co-chair of the Head Neck and Spine Committee of the National Football league.
Traumatic brain injury is one of the most common causes of neurologic morbidity in the world today Dr. Ellenbogen says.
and occurs in all sports being able to make the diagnosis quickly and accurately is essential.
The challenge physicians have in identifying concussion is that the diagnosis is often based on self-reported symptoms.
and thus help the physician make a rapid and accurate diagnosis. By tracking eye movements they have been able to quantitatively assess the function of the brain.
This work adds an important dimension to our ability to provide safe rapid and accurate care to those who suffer TBI in sports or with daily life activities.
which found that the use of this novel eye-tracking technology could reveal edema or swelling in the brain as a potential biomarker for assessing brain function and monitoring recovery in people with head injuries.
That study published Dec 16 in Journal of Neurosurgery looked exclusively at military veterans. Dr. Samadani's future work aims to replicate eye-tracking's diagnostic potential for head injuries on a larger scale in Iraq
and Afghanistan veterans with post-concussive syndrome and post-blast military brain injury. Estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention state about 2. 5 million U s. emergency department visits were associated with traumatic brain injury in 2010 with rates increasing by about 70 percent over the previous decade.
Currently there is no tool seen as a gold standard for diagnosing concussions and imaging tests like CT SCANS
and MRIS are ineffective in the absence of structural damage to the brain. Two patients who suffer a head injury
and present with virtually-identical CT SCANS might have completely different symptoms Dr. Samadani points out.
That's where eye-tracking can help objectively reveal when one patient may be affected much more by a concussion than another.
Also lending third-party support for Dr. Samadani's research is M. Sean Grady MD the Charles Harrison Frazier Professor and Chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at the Perelman School of medicine at the University
of Pennsylvania. Dr. Grady also was involved not in the research. The importance of this study is that it establishes a reliable test
and a'biological'marker for detecting concussion Dr. Grady says. Since concussion can occur without loss of consciousness this can be particularly important in sideline evaluations in athletics
or in military settings where individuals are motivated highly to return to activity and may minimize their symptoms.
More work is needed to establish its sensitivity and specificity but it is very promising g
#Genetic discovery about childhood blindness paves way for new treatments Finding genes for retinal degenerations has immediate benefits for people living with blindness and vision loss, their families,
Establishing a genetic cause confirms the clinical diagnosis at the molecular level, helps predict the future visual prognosis,
suggests therapies, and allows some patients to join clinical trials. While more than 200 genes for retinal degenerations have been identified,
When 11 year old Naomi Lalandec walked into Dr. Robert Koenekoop's clinic at the Montreal Children's Hospital of the Mcgill University Health Centre (MUHC) with blindness and dwarfism due to
Oliver Mcfarlane Syndrome (OMS her unknown mutation sparked an international gene hunt. Comparing her genome to others with OMS and Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA),
another form of childhood blindness, uncovered a new gene that is critical for vision. What makes this breakthrough exceptional is that it opens up new treatment avenues for OMS and LCA and potentially other retinal degenerative diseases."
"It was like finding a needle in a haystack, "said Dr. Koenekoop, who is also a researcher at the Research Institute of the MUHC and a Professor of Human genetics, Paediatric Surgery and Ophthalmology at Mcgill University."
"It was so obvious to all of us that this was big; a new gene, a possible new disease pathway, a new treatment avenue."
"With ongoing support from the Foundation Fighting Blindness (FFB), Canada's largest charity supporting vision research, Dr. Koenekoop has spent more than a decade searching for genes linked to blindness.
This search brought together an international team of scientists, including Dr. Michel Cayouette at the Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal (IRCM), Dr. Doris Kretzschmar at the Oregon Health and Science University, Dr. Jacek Majewski
from the Mcgill University and Génome Québec Innovation Centre and more than 30 others from around the world.
Together, the team identified mutations in the PNPLA6 gene in families with retinal degeneration. This is the 20th gene associated with LCA and the first associated with OMS.
Although we've known about the PNLPA6 gene for more than 45 years, no one had identified that mutations in this gene can lead to retinal degeneration--until now.
To better understand the role of this gene, the team studied how it functions in fruit flies.
They learned that the PNPLA6 gene is expressed and located in photoreceptors (which are the light-sensing cells in the eye)
and that mutating the gene causes photoreceptors to die. To determine what PNPLA6 was doing in photoreceptors,
They observed that some lipids were elevated in fruit flies with the PNPLA6 mutation, which led them to conclude that PNPLA6 affects phospholipid metabolism.
or respond to their environment. This novel insight about the role of phospholipid metabolism in photoreceptor biology paves the way for new sight-saving treatments.
These potentially game-changing results were published on January 9, 2015 in the journal Nature Communications.""We are thrilled about this new collaboration involving Dr. Koenekoop
and Dr. Cayouette,"said Dr. Mary Sunderland, Director of research & Education at the Foundation Fighting Blindness."
"Moving forward, the team is already thinking about how they can put their new knowledge to work.
They are currently generating animal models of this mutation, which will be essential to study how manipulating phospholipids could generate innovative strategies to treat blindness n
#New superconducting hybrid crystals A new type of'nanowire'crystals that fuses semiconducting and metallic materials on the atomic scale could lay the foundation for future semiconducting electronics.
Researchers at the University of Copenhagen are behind the breakthrough, which has great potential. The development and quality of extremely small electronic circuits are critical to how
and how well future computers and other electronic devices will function. The new material, composed of both a semiconductor
and metal, has a special superconducting property at very low temperatures and could play a central role in the development of future electronics."
"Our new material was born as a hybrid between a semiconducting nanowire and its electronic contact.
Thus we have invented a way to make a perfect transition between the nanowire and a superconductor.
The superconductor in this case is aluminium. There is great potential in this, "says Associate professor Thomas Sand Jespersen,
who has worked in the field for more than 10 years, ever since research into nanowire crystals has existed at the Nanoscience Center at the Niels Bohr Institute.
Nanowire and contact formed at the same time Nanowires are extremely thin nanocrystal threads used in the development of new electronic components
like transistors and solar cells. Part of the challenge of working with nanowires is creating a good transition between these nanowires and an electrical contact to the outside world.
Up until now, researchers, not just at the Niels Bohr Institute, but from all over the world, have cultured nanowires and the contact separately.
However, with the new approach, both the quality and the reproducibility of the contact have improved considerably."
"The atoms sit in a perfectly ordered lattice in the nanowire crystal, not only in the semiconductor and the metal,
but also in the transition between the two very different components, which is significant in itself.
You could say that it is the ultimate limit to how perfect a transition one could imagine between a nanowire crystal and a contact.
Of course this opens many opportunities to make new types of electronic components on the nanoscale and in particular,
this means that we can study the electrical properties with much greater precision than before,
"explains Assistant professor Peter Krogstrup, who has worked hard in the laboratory to develop the contact. Chips with billions of nanowire hybrids In their publication in Nature Materials, the research group has demonstrated this perfect contact
and its properties and has shown also that they can make a chip with billions of identical semiconductor-metal nanowire hybrids."
"We think that this new approach could ultimately form the basis for future superconducting electronics,
and that is why the research into nanowires is interesting for the largest electronics companies, "says Thomas Sand Jespersen.
Both Peter Krogstrup and Thomas Sand Jespersen is part of The Center for Quantum Devices led by Professor Charles Marcus,
and they have close research collaboration with Microsoft. The research is supported further by the Carlsberg Foundation and the Lundbeck Foundation n
#More clues to how drug reverses obesity diabetes fatty liver disease In addition to illuminating how the drug amlexanox reverses obesity diabetes
and fatty liver disease the findings suggest a new pathway for future treatments. The research was published Jan 12 in Nature Communications.
Investigators in the lab of Alan Saltiel the Mary Sue Coleman Director of U-M's Life sciences Institute had discovered previously that this drug
which had been used in the treatment of asthma also has the ability to cause weight loss
and improve diabetes in obese mice. The current study revealed that amlexanox exerts its effects through a specialized type of fat cell by increasing the level of a second messenger molecule called camp.
In turn camp increases the rate by which cells burn fat so that the animal loses weight.
But amlexanox also triggers the release of the hormone interleukin-6 from these fat cells which then travels in the circulation to the liver.
In the livers of diabetic mice interleukin-6 reduces production of glucose so that overall blood sugar is lowered.
We know that amlexanox works to reverse obesity and insulin resistance in part by resolving chronic inflammation and increasing energy expenditure but that's not the whole story of the drug's effects said Shannon Reilly first author of the study.
Understanding how the drug also enables crosstalk between fat cells and the liver in obese mice allows us to see more of the amlexanox picture
--and also sheds light on communication between different tissues in the body. The finding is the latest piece of a complex obesity-inflammation-diabetes puzzle that Saltiel lab investigators have been working to solve
in order to find new treatments for metabolic disorders. Obesity leads to a state of chronic low-grade inflammation in liver and fat tissue
which in turn increases the levels of a pair of kinases: IKK? -and TBK1. In 2009 the Saltiel lab defined a key role of IKK?
-and TBK1 in the onset of obesity. In 2013 the researchers discovered that amlexanox an off-patent drug currently prescribed for the treatment of asthma and other uses reversed obesity diabetes and fatty liver in mice.
In research published in December 2013 the investigators found that high levels of IKK? -and TBK1 meant that certain receptors in the fat cells of obese mice were unable to respond to neurotransmitters called catecholamines which are generated by the sympathetic nervous system
and promote fat-burning. High levels of IKK? -and TBK1 also resulted in lower levels of camp.
Amlexanox reduces IKK? -and TBK1 leading to higher camp increased sensitivity to catecholamines and increased energy expenditure by the fat cells.
The U-M study explains how increased camp in fat cells promotes the secretion of the hormone interleukin-6 which signals the liver to stop producing glucose--thus improving overall blood sugar levels in obese diabetic mice e
#Vision system for household robots Researchers at MIT's Computer science and Artificial intelligence Laboratory believe that household robots should take advantage of their mobility
and their relatively static environments to make object recognition easier by imaging objects from multiple perspectives before making judgments about their identity.
Matching up the objects depicted in the different images however poses its own computational challenges.
In a paper appearing in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Robotics Research the MIT researchers show that a system using an off-the-shelf algorithm to aggregate different perspectives can recognize four times as many objects as one that uses a single
perspective while reducing the number of misidentifications. They then present a new algorithm that is just as accurate but that in some cases is 10 times as fast making it much more practical for real-time deployment with household robots.
If you just took the output of looking at it from one viewpoint there's a lot of stuff that might be missing
or something blocking the object that causes a systematic error in the detector says Lawson Wong a graduate student in electrical engineering
and computer science and lead author on the new paper. One way around that is just to move around
Wong and his thesis advisors--Leslie Kaelbling the Panasonic Professor of Computer science and Engineering and Toms Lozano-Prez the School of engineering Professor of Teaching Excellence--considered scenarios in which they had 20 to 30
The first algorithm they tried was developed for tracking systems such as radar which must also determine
which is that it really works well. It's the first thing that most people think of.
For each pair of successive images the algorithm generates multiple hypotheses about which objects in one correspond to which objects in the other.
To keep the calculation manageable the algorithm discards all but its top hypotheses at each step.
In hopes of arriving at a more efficient algorithm the MIT researchers adopted a different approach.
Their algorithm doesn't discard any of the hypotheses it generates across successive images but it doesn't attempt to canvass them all either.
Suppose that the algorithm has identified three objects from one perspective and four from another. The most mathematically precise way to compare hypotheses would be to consider every possible set of matches between the two groups of objects:
In this case if you include the possibilities that the detector has made an error and that some objects are occluded from some views that approach would yield 304 different sets of matches.
Instead the researchers'algorithm considers each object in the first group separately and evaluates its likelihood of mapping onto an object in the second group.
The algorithm could conclude that the most likely match for object 3 in the second group is object 3 in the first
So the researchers'algorithm also looks for such double mappings and reevaluates them. That takes extra time
In this case the algorithm would perform 32 comparisons--more than 20 but significantly less than 304 4
#Mechanism leading to drug resistance metastasis in melanoma patients discovered Moffitt Cancer Center researchers have discovered a mechanism that leads to resistance to targeted therapy in melanoma patients
Targeted biological therapy can reduce toxicity and improve outcomes for many cancer patients, when compared to the adverse effects of standard chemotherapeutic drugs.
However, patients often develop resistance to these targeted therapies, resulting in more aggressive cells that can spread to other sites or cause regrowth of primary tumors.
B-Raf is a protein that is frequently mutated in human cancers leading to increased tumor cell growth, survival and migration.
Drugs that target B-Raf or another protein in the same network called MEK have proved effective in clinical trials.
Several B-Raf and MEK inhibitors have been approved with the combination of A b-Raf and a MEK inhibitor being the current standard of care for patients with B-Raf mutant melanoma.
However over time many patients become resistant to B-Raf and B-Raf/MEK inhibitor therapy.
Moffitt researchers found that patients who are on B-Raf inhibitor drugs develop more new metastases than patients who are on standard chemotherapy.
The researchers wanted to determine how this acquired resistance develops in order to devise better treatment options for patients.
They found that melanoma cells that are resistant to B-Raf inhibitors tend to be more aggressive and invasive,
thereby allowing the tumor to spread to a new organ site. They used a large screening approach
and MEK inhibitors are given to patients intermittently may reduce the aggressiveness of the diseasemeaning patients could stay on therapy for more time,
"said Keiran S. Smalley, Ph d.,scientific director of the Donald A. Adam Comprehensive Melanoma Research center of Excellence at Moffitt.
The research also showed that targeting Epha2 reduced the aggressive behavior of the melanoma cells.
This suggests that drugs that target Epha2 may prevent the development of new disease in patients who receive B-Raf and B-Raf/MEK inhibitor therapy.
The study was published in the online edition of Cancer Discovery on Dec 26 2014 0
#Toward quantum chips: Packing single-photon detectors on an optical chip is crucial for quantum-computational circuits Single-photon detectors are notoriously temperamental:
Of 100 deposited on a chip using standard manufacturing techniques only a handful will generally work.
In a paper appearing today in Nature Communications the researchers at MIT and elsewhere describe a procedure for fabricating
and testing the detectors separately and then transferring those that work to an optical chip built using standard manufacturing processes.
In addition to yielding much denser and larger arrays the approach also increases the detectors'sensitivity. In experiments the researchers found that their detectors were up to 100 times more likely to accurately register the arrival of a single photon than those found in earlier arrays.
You make both parts--the detectors and the photonic chip--through their best fabrication process which is dedicated
and then bring them together explains Faraz Najafi a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and first author on the new paper.
According to quantum mechanics tiny physical particles are counterintuitively able to inhabit mutually exclusive states at the same time. A computational element made from such a particle--known as a quantum bit
or qubit--could thus represent zero and one simultaneously. If multiple qubits are entangled meaning that their quantum states depend on each other then a single quantum computation is in some sense like performing many computations in parallel.
With most particles entanglement is difficult to maintain but it's relatively easy with photons.
For that reason optical systems are a promising approach to quantum computation. But any quantum computer--say one whose qubits are trapped laser ions
or nitrogen atoms embedded in diamond--would still benefit from using entangled photons to move quantum information around.
Because ultimately one will want to make such optical processors with maybe tens or hundreds of photonic qubits it becomes unwieldy to do this using traditional optical components says Dirk Englund the Jamieson Career development Assistant professor in Electrical engineering and Computer science at MIT and corresponding author on the new paper.
It's not only unwieldy but probably impossible because if you tried to build it on a large optical table simply the random motion of the table would cause noise on these optical states.
So there's been an effort to miniaturize these optical circuits onto photonic integrated circuits. The project was a collaboration between Englund's group and the Quantum Nanostructures and Nanofabrication Group
which is led by Karl Berggren an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and of which Najafi is a member.
The MIT researchers were joined also by colleagues at IBM and NASA's Jet propulsion laboratory. The researchers'process begins with a silicon optical chip made using conventional manufacturing techniques.
On a separate silicon chip they grow a thin flexible film of silicon nitride upon which they deposit the superconductor niobium nitride in a pattern useful for photon detection.
At both ends of the resulting detector they deposit gold electrodes. Then to one end of the silicon nitride film they attach a small droplet of polydimethylsiloxane a type of silicone.
They then press a tungsten probe typically used to measure voltages in experimental chips against the silicone.
It's almost like Silly Putty Englund says. You put it down it spreads out
and makes high surface-contact area and when you pick it up quickly it will maintain that large surface area.
And then it relaxes back so that it comes back to one point. It's like if you try to pick up a coin with your finger.
You press on it and pick it up quickly and shortly after it will fall off. With the tungsten probe the researchers peel the film off its substrate
and attach it to the optical Chip in previous arrays the detectors registered only 0. 2 percent of the single photons directed at them.
Even on-chip detectors deposited individually have topped historically out at about 2 percent. But the detectors on the researchers'new chip got as high as 20 percent.
That's still a long way from the 90 percent or more required for a practical quantum circuit but it's a big step in the right direction n
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