Wednesday, 28 November 2018

SPACEX'S NEXT LAUNCH WILL SPARK A SPACE INTERNET SHOWDOWN


Update: the SpaceX launch has been delayed.
Elon Musk has long promised a constellation of thousands of satellites, called Starlink, which Musk hopes will one day handle half of all internet traffic—and earn him billions in access fees. It's one of the ways he hopes to fund his future Mars adventures. SpaceX says two demonstration satellites it built and launched earlier this year already show that internet from space can be as fast and lag-free as people expect from cables on Earth.
Now a SpaceX rocket is poised to launch a raft of internet satellites from a host of startups—but this time, the target audience is machines.
In a historic launch slated for Wednesday, SpaceX will hoist 64 satellites at once, the largest number for a single mission on US soil. Eight of the satellites on board a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Air Force Base will be from companies hoping to build a truly global Internet of Things (IoT) by revolutionizing satellite communications.
Most of today’s IoT devices, such as smart meters and agricultural sensors, rely on Wi-Fi or cellular signals, leaving remote areas, farms, and vast expanses of the world’s oceans without connectivity. “For 90 percent of the planet’s surface, you need satellites,” says Fabien Jordan, founder and CEO of Astrocast, one of the startups sending a satellite up in the SpaceX rideshare.


If shippers want to track assets at sea, farmers wish to check on the health of their crops, or governments seek to monitor dangerous bridges today, they must deploy powerful devices connecting to traditional satellite communications providers like Iridium, Globalstar and Inmarsat. These systems can be expensive and power-hungry, limiting their adoption to those with the deepest pockets. An oil company might monitor a few stretches of a pipeline for leaks, for example, but an environmental watchdog could not afford its own sensors. With low-cost, low-power IoT systems like those launching soon, that could all change.
Astrocast’s satellite is a tiny CubeSat just 30 centimeters long. Its rivals on the SSO-A SmallSat Express, as the launch is being called, range from 10 to 60 centimeters in length—all a fraction of the size, weight and expense of communications satellites already in orbit. These CubeSats are not powerful enough to handle gaming streams, video or even voice calls. They are designed instead for the tiny bursts of data that agriculture, infrastructure and asset-tracking IoT devices produce.
Another startup launching an IOT satellite on SpaceX's rocket is Hiber. Beaming one packet of 144 bytes, about the size of a text message, up to Hiber’s satellite every day for a year will cost just a few dollars, according to Hiber CEO Maarten Engelen. “That’s more than enough [data] for the 90 percent of IoT customers that we talk to,” he says. It’s also an order of magnitude cheaper than existing satellite links. Hiber has pilot customers in pipeline monitoring, fisheries and shipping lined up to use its satellite when it goes live.
Five of the six start-ups are launching just one satellite on SSO-A, with only Swarm Technologies putting three on board. (The Silicon Valley company is currently awaiting punishment from the Federal Communications Commission for launching four satellites on an Indian rocket in January without permission.)
Most of the start-ups are planning to eventually have constellations of between 60 and 100 satellites. Together with a handful of ground stations, these should eventually get latencies down to about every 15 or 30 minutes. Latency is the time for a signal to get a response over the internet, and is usually measured by gamers in milliseconds. Longer latencies don’t matter for IoT because sensors generally only need to phone home once a day.

Although SpaceX is providing the rocket, the SSO-A mission is being organized by Spaceflight Industries, a Seattle-based company specializing in CubeSat deployment. “Low earth orbit is not unlike smartphones,” says Curt Blake, president of Spaceflight. “When you really lower the cost of phones—or rocket launches—people come up with a whole bunch of new applications.” SSO-A is also launching dozens of Earth observation satellites, educational projects, scientific, government and military satellites, as well as two art projects and even a shooting star memorial containing cremated human remains.
Launching so many satellites at once requires careful choreography to avoid them hitting the rocket or each other on the way out. Spaceflight has built two car-sized spacecraft, called the Upper Free Flyer and the Lower Free Flyer, which will fire the satellites into their final orbits one after another, using spring-loaded systems similar to pinball plungers. Once all the satellites are out of the way, the Flyers will each deploy an innovative sail the size of two pool tables to catch faint wisps of atmosphere and drag them down to burn up. This will be the first time dragsail technology is used on an operational mission.
Nearly as important as physical separation is ensuring that the IoT satellites do not interfere with one another’s radio broadcasts. Swarm and Hiber intend to use the same frequency (148-149.9 MHz) for Earth-to-space communications with their satellites. Hiber will only use the link while passing over its European ground stations, while Swarm gets to use the frequency over the US. This could prove tricky should either company decide to deploy ground stations abroad in the future.
The real challenge for the IoT start-ups will be to rapidly build out their fleets, and then to persuade companies to integrate their technology into thousands and ultimately millions of devices back on Earth. “We don’t know whether this is a winner-takes-all market,” admits Engelen. “I think there is room for different technical solutions depending on different requirements. But that doesn’t mean that all these systems will survive. That’s probably not also very feasible.”
By the time SSO-A’s CubeSats naturally re-enter the atmosphere as tiny shooting stars in seven years or so, some of the companies that built them will likely be only memories, too.

ROBO ROMP Sex Robot tester's furious bonking BROKE Harmony droid knocked her senseless'
Horny hobbyist Brick Dollbanger reveals how he was tasked with test-driving the world's most famous sex robot 



But he still comes with lots of features that might be useful for a male sex robot.
He can welcome you home after a hard day at the office, he can chat to you about their favourite TV shows and films, crack a joke and then seduce you with words of love from your favourite poem or song

he question remains though about how Henry can rise to the occasion as that part isn’t quite fully mechanised.
Matt McMullen, a married father-of-five from San Diego, California, and chief executive of Henry’s creators Realbotix, unveiled the ‘manbot’ last week saying it would offer “companionship” to lonely women all over the world.
McMullen, 48, said: ‘Women have the same issues of loneliness as men. People call them sex dolls but mostly it’s about companionship. In this world of computers people are missing out on human interaction.’
Realbotix already produces ‘Harmony’, a female robot with dozens of interchangeable parts, allowing owners to alter everything from eye colour to hair to the size and shape of their bottom.
While the sex robot market is almost entirely male-dominated there does appear to be a market for ones aimed at women.
Some of the sex robots aimed at men have already come under fire for objectifying women
One manufacturer offers a robot with a ‘Frigid Farrah’ setting which tells users ‘No, No!’ before succumbing to a sexual advance.

Tuesday, 27 November 2018


Fearful of bias, Google blocks gender-based pronouns from new AI tool

Google refused to take chances at a time when gender issues are reshaping politics and society, and critics are scrutinizing potential biases in artificial intelligence like never before.


Fearful of bias, Google blocks gender-based pronouns from new AI tool  |  Photo Credit: Reuters
San Francisco: Alphabet Inc's Google in May introduced a slick feature for Gmail that automatically completes sentences for users as they type. Tap out "I love" and Gmail might propose "you" or "it." But users are out of luck if the object of their affection is "him" or "her."
Google's technology will not suggest gender-based pronouns because the risk is too high that its "Smart Compose" technology might predict someone's sex or gender identity incorrectly and offend users, product leaders revealed to Reuters in interviews.
Gmail product manager Paul Lambert said a company research scientist discovered the problem in January when he typed "I am meeting an investor next week," and Smart Compose suggested a possible follow-up question: "Do you want to meet him?" instead of "her."
Consumers have become accustomed to embarrassing gaffes from autocorrect on smartphones. But Google refused to take chances at a time when gender issues are reshaping politics and society, and critics are scrutinizing potential biases in artificial intelligence like never before.
"Not all 'screw ups' are equal," Lambert said. Gender is a "a big, big thing" to get wrong.
Getting Smart Compose right could be good for business. Demonstrating that Google understands the nuances of AI better than competitors is part of the company's strategy to build affinity for its brand and attract customers to its AI-powered cloud computing tools, advertising services and hardware.
Gmail has 1.5 billion users, and Lambert said Smart Compose assists on 11 per cent of messages worldwide sent from Gmail.com, where the feature first launched.
Smart Compose is an example of what AI developers call natural language generation (NLG), in which computers learn to write sentences by studying patterns and relationships between words in literature, emails and web pages.
A system shown billions of human sentences becomes adept at completing common phrases but is limited by generalities. Men have long dominated fields such as finance and science, for example, so the technology would conclude from the data that an investor or engineer is "he" or "him." The issue trips up nearly every major tech company.
Lambert said the Smart Compose team of about 15 engineers and designers tried several workarounds, but none proved bias-free or worthwhile. They decided the best solution was the strictest one: Limit coverage. The gendered pronoun ban affects fewer than 1 per cent of cases where Smart Compose would propose something, Lambert said.
"The only reliable technique we have is to be conservative," said Prabhakar Raghavan, who oversaw engineering of Gmail and other services until a recent promotion.
New Policy
Google's decision to play it safe on gender follows some high-profile embarrassments for the company's predictive technologies.
The company apologized in 2015 when the image recognition feature of its photo service labelled a black couple as gorillas. In 2016, Google altered its search engine's autocomplete function after it suggested the anti-Semitic query "are jews evil" when users sought information about Jews.
Google has banned expletives and racial slurs from its predictive technologies, as well as mentions of its business rivals or tragic events.
The company's new policy banning gendered pronouns also affected the list of possible responses in Google's Smart Reply. That service allows users to respond instantly to text messages and emails with short phrases such as "sounds good."
Google uses tests developed by its AI ethics team to uncover new biases. A spam and abuse team pokes at systems, trying to find "juicy" gaffes by thinking as hackers or journalists might, Lambert said.
Workers outside the United States look for local cultural issues. Smart Compose will soon work in four other languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French.
"You need a lot of human oversight," said engineering leader Raghavan, because "in each language, the net of inappropriateness has to cover something different."
Widespread Challenge
Google is not the only tech company wrestling with the gender-based pronoun problem.
Agolo, a New York startup that has received investment from Thomson Reuters, uses AI to summarize business documents.
Its technology cannot reliably determine in some documents which pronoun goes with which name. So the summary pulls several sentences to give users more context, said Mohamed AlTantawy, Agolo's chief technology officer.
He said longer copy is better than missing details. "The smallest mistakes will make people lose confidence," AlTantawy said. "People want 100 per cent correct."
Yet, imperfections remain. Predictive keyboard tools developed by Google and Apple Inc propose the gendered "policeman" to complete "police" and "salesman" for "sales."
Type the neutral Turkish phrase "one is a soldier" into Google Translate and it spits out "he's a soldier" in English. So do translation tools from Alibaba and Microsoft Corp. Amazon.com Inc opts for "she" for the same phrase on its translation service for cloud computing customers.
AI experts have called on the companies to display a disclaimer and multiple possible translations.
Microsoft's LinkedIn said it avoids gendered pronouns in its year-old predictive messaging tool, Smart Replies, to ward off potential blunders.
Alibaba and Amazon did not respond to requests to comment.
Warnings and limitations like those in Smart Compose remain the most-used countermeasures in complex systems, said John Hegele, integration engineer at Durham, North Carolina-based Automated Insights Inc, which generates news articles from statistics.
"The end goal is a fully machine-generated system where it magically knows what to write," Hegele said. "There's been a ton of advances made but we're not there yet."












    

SPACEX'S NEXT LAUNCH WILL SPARK A SPACE INTERNET SHOWDOWN Update: the SpaceX launch has been delayed. Elon Musk has long prom...