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Daily Archives: February 1, 2015

Robot Learning Manipulation Action Plans by “Watching” Unconstrained Videos from the World Wide Web

Robots Learn by Watching 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. Specifically, these robots are able to learn the intricate grasping and manipulation movements required for cooking by watching online cooking videos. The key breakthrough is that the robots can “think” for themselves, determining the best combination of observed motions that will allow them to efficiently accomplish a given task. The work [was] 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.”

Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, 2015. Authors – Yezhou Yang, University of Maryland; Yi Li, NICTA, Australia; Cornelia Fermuller, University of Maryland; Yiannis Aloimonos, University of Maryland.  “In order to advance action generation and creation in robots beyond simple learned schemas we need computational tools that allow us to automatically interpret and represent human actions. This paper presents a system that learns manipulation action plans by processing unconstrained videos from the World Wide Web. Its goal is to robustly generate the sequence of atomic actions of seen longer actions in video in order to acquire knowledge for robots. The lower level of the system consists of two convolutional neural network (CNN) based recognition modules, one for classifying the hand grasp type and the other for object recognition. The higher level is a probabilistic manipulation action grammar based parsing module that aims at generating visual sentences for robot manipulation. Experiments conducted on a publicly available unconstrained video dataset show that the system is able to learn manipulation actions by “watching” unconstrained videos with high accuracy.”

Judicial Capacity and Executive Power

Coan, Andrew and Bullard, Nicholas, Judicial Capacity and Executive Power (January 30, 2015). Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2558177 “The budget of the United States executive branch is roughly 500 times greater than that of the judicial branch. The executive workforce is more than 50 times greater. How do these enormous disparities affect the practical… Continue Reading

Navigating the US Oil Export Debate

Navigating the US Oil Export Debate. Trevor Houser and Jason Bordoff | January 16, 2015 “Recent innovations in the oil and gas sector have catalyzed a renaissance in US production and a dramatic turnaround in America’s international energy trade position. US crude oil production has increased from 5 million barrels per day (b/d) in late 2006 to 9 million… Continue Reading

Newly Launched NASA Satellite Will Monitor Western Drought

News release: “In one of the space agency’s bolder projects, a newly launched NASA satellite will monitor western drought and study the moisture, frozen and liquid in Earth’s soil. It’s true that a satellite can’t possibly fix the devastating drought that has been plaguing the American West for the last years. It is also true… Continue Reading

Analysis: It’s surprisingly easy to identify individuals from credit-card metadata

MIT News release: “In this week’s issue of the journal Science, MIT researchers report that just four fairly vague pieces of information — the dates and locations of four purchases — are enough to identify 90 percent of the people in a data set recording three months of credit-card transactions by 1.1 million users. When… Continue Reading

Allianz Risk Barometer 2015: Businesses exposed to increasing number of disruptive scenarios

“Businesses face new challenges from a rise of disruptive scenarios in an increasingly interconnected corporate environment, according to the fourth Allianz Risk Barometer 2015. In addition, traditional industrial risks such as business interruption and supply chain risk (46% of responses), natural catastrophes (30%), and fire and explosion (27%) continue to concern risk experts, heading this… Continue Reading

4 Ways Copyright Law Actually Controls Your Whole Digital Life

By Kate Cox in the Consumerist – January 22, 2015: “The tendrils of copyright law reach worldwide into almost everything we consume, do, and are in the digital era. The rules and regulations about how the internet works, what privacy rights you have, and how the entire digital economy functions all spring from copyright. It’s… Continue Reading

The Economic Value of Law Libraries

A Report of the American Association of Law Libraries Economic Value of Law Libraries Special Committee, January 2015 “This report is the result of the AALL Economic Value of Law Libraries Special Committee’s efforts to provide members with the best methods for reporting the law library’s value to its stakeholders. The Special Committee retained HBR… Continue Reading