Sending Hindi in Devanagari Script over SMS

Efficient communication between the majority of Indians requires the use of Indian languages. It is not currently easy, whether it is over the Internet or over the cellular network. We have to research on and develop easier ways of using Indian languages. One simple approach I describe here deals with only one aspect of the problem. My hope is that this will still stimulate the reader to investigate problems that a user faces when using a browser on the web or text over cell phones. There are a variety of technical problems there. You may wish to start your exploration by visiting

http://tech4society.blogspot.in/2010/12/indian-language-interfaces-on-basic.html

This posting refers to a Nokia manual

http://nds2.nokia.com/files/support/apac/phones/guides/Nokia_1108_APAC_UG_in_hi.pdf

I have not tried communicating with Nokia using @NokiaIndia on Twitter

http://twitter.com/#!/NokiaIndia

or through their blog

http://blogs.nokia.com/

but you may wish to do that.

Can we invent superior interfaces for the Indian language user? I believe that an interesting approach is to use letters of the Roman Script one way or another. I would like to share what I have learnt from my experiments in this direction.

I had begun by asking myself how I could help Indian high school students learning English by giving hints and information in Hindi. I do believe that this is necessary when helping Hindi speaking students over a cell-phone channel.

I found that most cell phones in use in urban areas in India do not support sending and receiving Hindi SMS in any simple manner. I consulted an experienced technical support person in a big shop and was advised to buy a separate cell phone for the purpose. I bought one and found that I could post tweets on my Twitter page, using Hindi words in Devanagari script along with English words. I thought that my students who follow me on Twitter through their cellphones will receive my tweets properly. No, they did not! I discovered that cell-phone service providers filter incoming tweets in such a way that filters out Unicode characters of the Devanagari script.

I am going to consult Twitter in India (visit http://twitter.com/#!/twi/ )

What is the solution? I am now using the Roman Script to write out Hindi words using a simple and informal transliteration scheme (see “Devanagari Transliteration” in Wikipedia). This seems to work quite well.

Srinivasan Ramani  

Great Science Project – detecting diseases using a simple device

Jack Andraka is a 15-year old who has invented a method for detecting some types of cancer using a very simple and inexpensive device. He has won the $75,000 Intel prize. Visit the following site for more information:

http://videosift.com/video/Kickass-15-Yr-Old-Kid-Uses-Nanotubes-To-detect-Cancer?loadcomm=1

This is just the beginning! Like all great inventions, this one opens up a hundred possibilities. There is room for hundreds of student projects taking off from Andraka’s idea! There is room for hundreds of related ideas!

What is the trick? He uses a solution containing carbon nanotubes coated with antibodies for something he wants to detect – a target protein. He dips a piece of filter paper in this solution and hooks it up to a device that measures electrical conductivity. When a suitable solution containing the target protein is applied to the filter paper, there is a detectable reduction in conductivity to indicate the presence of the target protein? Why? The target protein molecules bind to the antibodies. This pushes the nanotubes apart, making space for the protein molecules. You probably know that the bond between an antibody and its target protein is very, very specific. Antibodies don’t bind to any old protein molecules!

The greatest value of Andraka’s technique idea could be in detecting infectious diseases. If you demonstrate how this can be done, you might save thousands of lives, if not millions. Want to read up on some related ideas? Visit

http://www.btci.org/k12/bft/IMM/imm_background.html

Design an anonymous channel for a whistle-blower to give credible tip-offs

(The discussion on this social problem and the need to develop a solution below are copied from another blog I write: www.obvioustruths.blogspot.com

The technical possibilities discussed following the duplicated paragraphs are unique to this blog)

The importance of whistle-blowers

Many instances of corrupt practice and tax evasion occur with hundreds of people knowing about it. But the victims become hostages of the wrong-doer for many reasons and do not squeal. For instance, visualize a college or university charging under-the-table-fees of Rs 15 Lakhs (roughly US $ 30,000) for admitting students who cannot honestly compete with other applicants on merit. This is illegal on two grounds: it is illegal for educational institutions to demand and accept such payments; secondly, it generates wealth on which income tax has been evaded. It becomes the so-called black money. Thousands of students pay such “fees” every year. However, they are too scared to do anything about it before admission which they desire so strongly. After admission, they do not wish to expose their college or university and endanger their own education. Similarly, practically every company or organization which cheats on tax has a number of employees who know about it. But the employees are too scared to blow the whistle. They may even get killed for doing something like that. Under these circumstances, the rare whistle-blower has to be encouraged, protected and supported.
I assume that there are a few vigilance organizations (V. O.) that wish to encourage whistle blowers, and that they themselves are not corrupt! We need to create an Internet based mechanism meeting the following requirements, to enable such an organization to work efficiently.

Desired characteristics of the proposed mechanism

a) Gives the whistle blower privacy – no one should know who he is till he decides to reveal himself
b) Gives the vigilance organization some way of separating credible tip-offs from spurious reports
c) Provides for a mechanism to prove that a claimant is actually the one who had sent a particular set of anonymous messages earlier

The provision in c) is meant to enable a whistle-blower to claim a reward when his tip-off is acted upon and proves to be beneficial to society.

A few technical possibilities for implementing a solution

These items are labeled a), b) and c) to link them to the requirements given above.

a) Encourage the whistle blower to use any anonymizer (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymizer ) he trusts, to protect his identity.

b) Encourage the whistle-blower to use create a file including his own postal address or something like that, add an irrelevant random text at the bottom of the file, and to compute the message-digest (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function ) of that file using any trusted, publicly available code. He should append the message digest of that file (alone) to every anonymous tip-off he sends, to serve as a masked-identity code. The file itself will be kept on his own PC or laptop. The random text will protect against someone trying out millions of known addresses to see if one of them has that message-digest.
The V.O. would give low credence to a tip-off from unproven sender (known only through his masked-identity code. However, if a few of his tip-offs prove to be useful, the V.O. can increase the credence it gives to tip-offs from that person).

c) The whistle-blower can surface at a time of his choosing to claim any reward that he is entitled to.

Notes:

1) Search for related information on the web. Have others published any solutions? Are you satisfied with them?

2) The mechanism described in b) is not too satisfactory. It will take a year or more for whistle-blower to earn his credibility this way. Can you improve on this?

3) Post your comments and suggestions on this blog. Together a number of us may do a better than any one of us can do individually.

Srinivasan Ramani September 15, 2010

The Problem of Search – what is yet to be done?

The history of search engines has been a most exciting one. The development of effective search techniques will ultimately get ranked with the invention of printed books. These two, along with the development of the Internet, have made it possible for knowledge of human society to be made widely available among its members, but don’t get carried away! We have got a long way to go. The search problem shares something with the halting problem, at least in practical terms. If you spend time on searching for something, a good fraction of the time you come away with the information you wanted, but you never come away saying that the information you searched for is not there! You go away frustrated, feeling that searching is often a never-ending business. At least in terms of a human lifetime!
I had this feeling last week, searching for the information a friend abroad had asked me. He plans to visit India, SriLanka and Nepal on an Indian multiple entry visa. Someone has told him that if you enter India with that kind of visa and go to any other country, say Nepal, you need to stay out of India for at least 60 days before you re-enter India. I helped get a definitive answer to this by searching the Web for relevant information. It seems that the Government had announced this rule in Dec ’09 and later relaxed it in some way. I redoubled my effort to get a definitive answer to my friend. Can I get a reliable source’s final answer to this question? I searched the Web in different ways and then asked a renowned travel agency and sent email to an agency to which the Indian consulate outsources part of its visa application processing. The more I searched the more confused I got with contradictory information.
Why do I write this? I would like you to try and find the answer. You may be lucky in finding an answer that appears to be conclusive and reliable. Or you may not. Suppose you do find an answer that appears to be conclusive and reliable. How sure are you going to be about that answer?
Do try this experiment. You may not have a friend with this problem. But you may get good ideas on what more needs to be done to help people searching for information, particularly when they do not have the benefit of a professional in the field who knows where to look for information and what to trust.

Srinivasan Ramani

Unique Identification Number for Indian Residents (Unique ID)

I believe that it is a challenge to every one to think of ways in which Indian residents could get more out of unique IDs to be issued than what the US Social Security number gives US residents. I am not referring here to Social Security payments, which would require a lot of policy-making and financial calculation.

What I refer to is this: Coming at a time the Internet and e-Commerce are so well developed, does the concept of a Unique ID offer new opportunities in cyberspace?

Let your imagination loose!

Srinivasan Ramani

Potential Impact of Cellular Technology in Transportation

I will discuss a possible student project in programming cell phones. We start by observing that the cellular revolution has made a huge difference in enabling better coordination of human activities. You don’t need to wait for someone to arrive without knowing if he would be 10 mts late or two hours late! If he is a considerate person, he should telephone those waiting, irrespective of where he is.

However, there are problems in enabling passengers to know when buses/trains would arrive at a given place. Rudimentary systems have been implemented by the railways, but even their websites seem to have been designed by someone with a grudge against humanity :=) Airline websites are not much better off. The bus transportation industry is in the early stages of exploiting IT.

I believe that cellular technology has great potential to alleviate many problems in the transportation area.

Objectives of the project:

1. Create a solution that works with inexpensive cell phones and is easy to use. This is essential for the system to be relevant to the large majority of cell phone users.
2. Ensure that the whole solution is inexpensive and does not require investment on a large scale to create the necessary infrastructure. It should be possible to start with a relatively low level of investment, for instance to begin with a single bus-route or bus station.
3. Use mass-produced (commodity priced) equipment almost completely, to reduce time to implement the solution and to realize a low cost system.

Assumptions:

1. Bluetooth connectivity is relatively more common than GPS, WiFi etc. in less expensive cell phones.
2. We can limit the solution at this stage to serve those who can create and read simple SMS-like messages using a User Application (UA) downloaded into the phone.

The Basic Concept:

1. Bus stops in a city would have unique number (BSN) painted to be easily visible. This would identify the bus stop to the users.
2. Each bus route would have a unique Route Number (RN). In addition, each individual Bus would have a Vehicle ID (VID) number.
3. There would be multiple Bluetooth beacons (such as the one described in http://www.blipsystems.com/Default.aspx?ID=684 ) placed in selected places at each bus stop, to be detected by every bus that stops at that location.
4. The user would send a short message containing BSN and RN through the UA application, which would add a Base-station IDentifier (BID), and time & date of message transmission. In addition the central station would have the cell phone number from which the message originated.
5. The bus would carry a cell phone with an On-board Application (OA) that detects bus stop beacons and sends one message per bus stop giving the BSN, VID, RN, time and date to the central server.
6. On the server, a Central Tracking Application (CTA) would keep track of which vehicle is where, using the messages it receives. In addition it would collect and keep statistical data about the typical time it takes for a bus to travel from any given BSN to the next one while on a given RN. Using this information, the CTA can predict when the next bus on a given RN would arrive at a given BSN.
7. The user, from wherever he is (bus stop, home, office etc.), can send a message using the UA giving RN and BSN information. The CTA would respond to this automatically, giving the expected time of arrival of the next bus on RN that would stop at that BSN.

Extensions:

A number of enhancements are possible. For instance, the bus driver could enter into the cell phone with OA some specified information about seat availability. This can be shared with those who ask for relevant information. The information handled can be used to improve bus scheduling and for better management of road traffic (locating and dealing with bottlenecks etc.).

Srinivasan Ramani

Encouraging patent filings by students

I had attended the Karnataka Student Paper Awards event in Bangalore on Sept 22, 07, and had a chat with some of the prizewinners. Some of the ideas I heard about were really cool, and had significant business potential. A student himself/herself might not think of a filing a patent application even when this would be a very appropriate thing to do. So, I looked up the web to find examples of university policies for encouraging student filing of patent applications. Here are some of the relevant links:

http://www.clemson.edu/research/ottSite/ottPolicies_patent.htm

http://www12.georgetown.edu/student-affairs/Intellectual%20Property%20Policy%205-4-06.pdf

http://www.hhmi.org/resources/labmanagement/downloads/moves2_ch11.pdf

http://www.senate.psu.edu/agenda/apr25-00agn/apr25-00agn.html

A few points I noted were the following:

a) Several universities/colleges are willing to cover the costs of patenting a student’s invention, if it arises from his/her work at the university.

b) Depending upon the extent of university’s contribution to the student’s patent, the university could ask for a part of the commercial benefits arising from the patent.

Obviously the educational institution could teach Intellectual Property Rights ideas and encourage students to write disclosures of inventions. They could have faculty advise the students on improving the application. The educational institution could also market the idea to potential licensees. I believe that efforts in this direction would be of great value as long as all this is done under well-written policies and guidelines, and is properly supervised. The institution could set part a sum of money annually for this activity, and spend it wisely by choosing inventions it wishes to be involved in as a party spending money on the patenting process. In any case, teaching on IPR topics, and consultation for students on their inventions could be made available separately, protecting student interests by a suitable non-disclosure agreement arrangement.

All of us interested in encouraging student creativity should share information about good examples of these practices, and on success stories of student invention.


Srinivasan Ramani

A Robot Fielder for Cricket

A number of robots bowling cricket balls have been proposed, and many have been built. But there are not many machines for fielding, which requires computer vision or some substitute, the ability to predict the ball’s trajectory, considerable skills in catching a ball in flight and effectively throwing it back to the wicket keeper or bowler. One publication you may wish to consult is

An introductory course in mechatronics: Robo-CricketWyeth, G.Mechatronics and Machine Vision in Practice, 1997. Proceedings, Fourth Annual Conference onVolume, Issue, 23-25 Sep 1997 Page(s): 20 - 25Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MMVIP.1997.625232

What I propose here is a free running fielding robot to play with human cricketers on a real cricket field. There must be a hundred different options in building a robot like this, but let me offer one set of options for the design for the main subsystems.

The computer vision component: Three cameras strategically located around the playground, looking at the batsman, should work with a computer to identify the ball and predict its trajectory and time and place of falling. Wireless links should carry the information to the robot. There is no reason why the robot cannot carry the computer, though that is not very necessary to demonstrate the working of the basic design.

Ball capture mechanism: This would need to catch balls in different trajectories – including a high trajectory, a low trajectory and one which involves the ball bouncing off the ground in a few places and/or rolling. A funnel like device about a square meter in cross section could be useful to catch balls coming down after flying several meters above the ground. Tilting the bucket-like funnel could catch low flying balls. Catching a ball bouncing along or rolling along the ground would require a bucket that can be tilted to come close to touching the ground. A square or rectangular mouthed funnel would be ideal for intercepting bouncing or rolling balls.

Navigation: A three wheeled vehicle with three independently driven wheels could be useful. The wheels could be suspended by individual legs, each working like the nose wheel of an aircraft, being free to swivel around the vertical support axle. I believe that this could eliminate the mechanical component of a steering mechanism. Sensing the direction along which each wheel is rolling and differential drive to the wheels could provide for electronic steering. Navigation would involve running to a suitable place to catch the ball and orienting oneself to face the incoming ball.
All this would involve the robot having to “know” its own coordinates and orientation. Some form of a position sensor and a gyrocompass-like device might be necessary.

Building a system with adequate power to provide the necessary acceleration and speed would be a demanding challenge. I estimate that a human fielder manages to do this using about 600 watts of power. A vehicle driven by a large rechargeable battery could manage with less power. How many hours of fielding such a battery would cover has to be examined. Is there room for a solar panel? I do not know.

Communication: It would be useful for the robot to use a speech synthesizer and a variety of canned utterances to radio its own comments as it chases balls. A few examples of the utterances follow:

Boy! That one is a sixer!

Well, I will get that one!

He is a goner!

Now I have to run like crazy!

John, I leave this one to you!

Throwing the ball back: This might require some form of an air gun, and a pump for recharging the pneumatic tank. The computation fo the launch angle, throwing velocity and direction of throw would be a demanding one.

Why do we need to build this gadget? I do believe that this would be a great training ground for future robotics engineers. And they would have a whale of a time during the learning phase!

I believe that a channel telecasting a cricket match would love to have a fielding robot to liven up the match! Will they pay for the R & D? That is the important question.

Srinivasan Ramani

Paperwork and Loss of Productivity

There is paperwork in all economies, and more so in some than in the others. The research issue I raise here is to what extent a nation’s GDP is reduced by avoidable paperwork.

What is avoidable paper work? In using this phrase I have in mind to the cost of time and resources involved in doing what could be done in nore efficient ways, usually by re-engineering the process or by inducting relevant technology.

The loss in productivity arises in three ways:

a) People spend time in preparing applications/documents, traveling to some office, and then in getting the paperwork done there;
b) Economic activity can get delayed by avoidable paper work, for instance the construction of commercial property gets delayed by months in getting all the paper work done; import and export of goods are slowed down by avoidable paper work.
c) Some people in some countries pay “speed money” to get things done. This often creates a motivation for staff involved to slow down the process or complicate matters for those who don’t pay speed money. This compounds the loss that occurs anyway because of unnecessarily complicated processes and by the absence of relevant technology. Of course, this is only one form of corruption related to paperwork.

I will give a couple of examples from my own experience in India.

1. It was in 1999, in Chennai, when my father passed away. I traveled from Mumbai to Chennai and spent three or four days there after the cremation, trying to get done things like arranging for access to my father’s bank account for my mother. I had to make a visit to a govt office in Mylapore, Chennai to apply for a death certificate in this connection. I stood in line for about 90 minutes, and when I got to the counter they asked me for the form issued by the hospital where my father had died recording his death. I had applied for this certificate at the hospital earlier that day and they had told me to come the following day to collect it. All I wanted at the govt. office was to get a blank form to fill in to request a death certificate. I was planning to fill it up and leave it at home for someone to submit it when the hospital form arrived. I had to leave that evening to Mumbai. The clerk at the counter told me that they don’t issue application forms until the hospital certificate is shown to them. I returned home in disgust. Later, a friend told me that the clerk would have been expecting a hundred-rupee note. Hundred rupee notes are good substitutes for documents not readily available :=)
2. This year, 2007, I bought my used company car from my company. They gave me forms signed to show that they had sold the car to me. I was supposed to get the car registered in my name. This involved a trip to an office 20 KM away where the car had been originally registered, to get a “clearance certificate”; such certificates are sometimes called no-objection certificates. Nothing moves without several no-objection certificates! Now I have submitted my application for car registration to another office near where I currently live. I have been asked to wait for a week or ten days for the paper work to be done. This has involved so far one trip to the office to get the forms and to find out what supporting documents need to be submitted, and another trip to present the application. I do not know how many more trips I will need to make to get the process completed in this IT Capital of India, Bangalore!

Let us now come to my research proposal. Such research could be carried out by a graduate student in management, by a researcher in the area of productivity, or by some one concerned with administrative reform. The proposal is that economically significant causes for the loss of productivity should be examined: time lost by citizens and by staff doing avoidable or slow work, and loss created by delaying the use of scarce resources. I suspect that in India, the loss will be somewhere in the range of 1 to 5% of the GDP. That is a loss of roughly 8 to 40 Billion dollars per year. Another way to look at this issue is to note that the GDP can be increased by 1 to 5% by taking the necessary steps to correct the problem.

I have not discussed here the question of economic losses incurred by avoidable delays in legal procedures. Undoubtedly, they are also worth studying, and quantitatively estimated to the extent possible.

My wise wife read a draft of this posting and asked me a question: are you merely suggesting more paperwork, possibly resulting in a conference paper?

No, I explained, we hope that the proposed research would lead to action!

She then gave me her no-objection certificate, enabling me to post this.

Srinivasan Ramani

Why Toys Should Use Speech Communication

Consider collaborating robots communicating with each other via Bluetooth channels or something like that. I will argue that there is something far more valuable: robots using speech for communication. I have in mind mainly robotic toys, but obviously there are other applications for the techniques I discuss.

What is special about speech? Firstly, it is a medium that enables anyone and everyone in a given area to hear what one is saying. Speech is a broadcast technique. Of course, you could have wireless broadcasts using some part or other of the radio spectrum as a substitute for speech.

What is special about speech broadcasts, as against other broadcasts? One feature is that for human observers, it is so much more fun to hear robots telling each other what to do, or sharing information among themselves.

Then there is something else: speech does not require a prior arrangement or contract, at least among human beings sharing a language. You can use speech to communicate with any stranger, as long as you two share a language. If robots share a human language widely used in the region where they are sold, robots made by one company can talk to robots made entirely independently by another company. Unexpected interactions can result with very interesting results.

Yet another effect of robots using speech communication is that they can also communicate with humans. In the case of toys this would mainly be with children. Game-like situations that could be created with these techniques could have great value in stimulating children to interact, and thereby improve their communication skills.

There are other fun things with these techniques. One of them would be to have the “language skin” learnt rather than “hard-wired” (decided and frozen at the time of manufacture of the toy). By language skin I mean the relatively superficial differences between human languages, such as differences in vocabulary, sentence patterns, pronunciation and accent. One obvious value in making “language skin” learnable is that the learning robot toy would acquire the “language skin” used by the family members of the child owning the toy, promoting the integration of the toy into the family and making it easier for the family members to communicate with it.

It would also give opportunities for the child to “teach” communication skills to the toy, challenging the child considerably to develop his/her own communication skills in the process.

Of course, talking robots are not necessarily restricted to use by children. Lonely people might find talking toys at least as interesting and comforting as pets, particularly if the external appearance and behavior are carefully designed for this purpose.

Another interesting possibility is to interface speaking toys with a cell phone that could be externally visible or hidden in the toy’s body. Then the toy could communicate with people “it knows”, in secret or in public, to share information or to request and obtain information/advice.

Using speech communication with machines for education and for fun is an area with some history. Specially designed IC chips and other hardware/software items are commercially available at different levels of capability. I list three references below:

A Texas Instrument toy consisting of a speech synthesizer and a keyboard, which was demonstrated in 1978.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speak_&_Spell_(game)

Robota: Clever toy and educational tool Aude BillardAutonomous Systems Laboratory, School of EngineeringSciences Techniques, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne (EPFL), 1015, Lausanne, Switzerlandhttp://lasa.epfl.ch/publications/uploadedFiles/BillardR&A03.pdf

Where to Look: A Study of Human-Robot Engagement
Candace L. Sidner*, Cory D. Kidd**, Christopher Lee* and Neal Lesh*
Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs* and MIT Media Lab**
Cambridge, MA 02139
http://www.iuiconf.org/04pdf/2004-001-0012.pdf

The Birth of the Mind

I must share my excitement over reading the above-mentioned book by Gary Marcus, published by Basic Books (see http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gary/birth.html ). It is a tour through a number of issues: cognitive development, evolution, medicine, behavior, genetics and biochemistry. The search is for answer to important questions such as:

* How can our genes, assumed to be about 30000 in number, create the infrastructure for language, thought and related mental functions? How do they determine the nature and interaction of about 20 billion neurons? Isn’t there a severe gene shortage?
* How come the chimpanzee, sharing 98.5% of our genes, has been left so far behind?
* Are there genetically determined structures in our brain giving us our unique language-using ability, in the entire animal world?
* What is the role of nature and nurture in determining the features of our mind?

I read all this from the point of view of one concerned with AI. My focus was on:

* What can we learn from all this, for making systems better equipped to use human languages?
* Can we get any insight into what is built-in and what is learnt in the domain of language behavior?
* Should we not start with less empty learning systems, if we wish to have them learn successfully?
* Should we not recognize different levels of behavior and value intelligence that copes with the limited world of every day experience?

This is not a full-fledged review of the book. So, I won’t mention all the important issues discussed in the book. I will also not give away the secrets! Go read the book, if you want the answers.

I will only share my opinions, some of which were my own opinions strengthened by reading this book; undoubtedly, there were also some new opinions triggered by the experience. Let me list both types:

* In our search to create intelligent machines with language behavior, as models of man, we have had red herrings drawn across our trail: formal methods of reasoning, completeness and consistency.
* Completeness of knowledge and understanding, formal modes of reasoning and consistency of beliefs are not the hallmarks of human abilities.
* Many researchers in AI have ignored the lessons we have to learn from biology, like:
- Our nervous systems, like those of all other animals, are special purpose computing systems with a limited purpose – competition for survival and the propagation of our genes.
- Evolution does not have the means to suddenly bring forth into the world completely new types of organs and mechanisms. Nerve cells evolved from other cells.
- The brain develops in the fetus in ways similar to that of other organs.
- Our sense of wonder only increases, as we understand in scientific terms more and more about our bodies including our brains, and our behavior.

Let me conclude by saying that I will not accept an AI researcher as fully educated if he has not read books like this!


Srinivasan Ramani

Numenta

Jeff Hawkins is the kind of dreamer who takes another shot at AI-like stuff, putting his money into it. But given his impressive record as the man behind the PalmPilot and the Treo, and as the inventor of Graffiti, I was willing to read an article about the new company he founded in 2005. See

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/02/01/8398989/index.htm

Donna Dubinsky is the CEO.

The claim is that “algorithms that Numenta has come up with allow machines to learn from observation, just as a child learns by observing the world around her”. But that is accompanied by Hawkin’s statement that “Numenta has nothing to do with the field known as artificial intelligence”. Someone would have to explain that to me! Why isn’t that AI? Possibly it borrows little from techniques known to scholars of AI. However, once you claim to build an algorithm that enables machines to learn from observation, you cannot disown AI. Hawkins claims that his work is inspired by how the brain works.

Dileep George, a Stanford Alumnus, is credited with contributions to algorithm development. An early demo, that the algorithm was used to give, dealt with recognition of animated images like those of a cat, dog and so on. The basic concept is called “hierarchical temporal memory”, involving a hierarchy of nodes for storing patterns and sequences of patterns.

The company plans to release a Beta version of the software and some development tools soon.

Is the idea going to turn out into a simple one? Even if it does, it could be a useful step forward. After all, notions like Finite State Automata, Perceptrons, and Pattern Matching Algorithms have served AI well. I for one would be waiting to read more about Numenta.

Srinivasan Ramani

Student Project Contests

This news story is about an amazing set of competition ideas for those who love to design and construct machines and/or program them. National Institute of Technology, Suratkal in India, will be hosting an event named Engineer 2007 during March 7-11, 2007. Pity it is so soon. But don't despair; read on.

Visit the site

http://www.engineer.org.in/events.php

and read about the challenges set for contestents in Robotics, Computer Science events including one on applications for a three-degrees-of-feedom mouse named Mushaca see

http://ssl.serc.iisc.ernet.in/~manohar/Research/MushacaManif/mushaca.htm

and a "Kode Kombat". There is also an Electronics challenge involving the extraction of information from a video stream.

The ideas are thought provoking; and, who knows, you might decide to take up one of these challenges just for the fun of it.

Srinivasan Ramani

IEEE Student Paper Contest 2007

The deadline for an IEEE Student Paper Contest is March 15, 2007. You can find time to write a paper even at this stage. This has been announced as a Region-10 activity (Asia Pacific), but you can check with the organizers if they accept student papers from all over the world. They probably do that, but I am not sure. Visit

http://www.ieee.nus.edu.sg/index_files/Page1386.htm

I have been looking for information on the IEEE Student Design Contest 2007. You will get a feel for this by visiting

http://www.edn.com/article/CA605949.html?industryid=2814 describing entries in Contest 2005.

I have not been successful as yet in visiting the Student Design Contest 2007 website. If any of you know an accessible website for this do let us all know.

I have heard that the Student Design Contest is worldwide, and that it provides hardware and software to do a project of your choice on a theme announced by IEEE for the year. They do not expect you to spend any significant amount of money yourself on buying components, hardware or software. All this makes the Contest a very attractive one.

Srinivasan Ramani

Research Excellence Award for Students

You should read the posting at

http://omegageek.net/rickscafe/?p=933

A nice list of criteria which are used to judge student's submissions on their research is given there. This list will be helpful while writing any research paper for publication.

Ramani

Sharing Information on Graduate Student Research Projects

I don’t think that there are many sites that encourage graduate students interested in research projects in information technology or computer science to communicate among themselves. If you know of any, please tell me. I have occasionally done a search for such sites and have not found any.

On a related note, it is good for graduate students to know about dissertations that have been written in their own areas and to get copies of them. The worldwide trend of universities maintaining an open archive to share their dissertation collections provides one opportunity. A number of US universities do that. The Australian have a national arrangement to pool information on the dissertation collections from as many as 20 universities. You might wish to look at this site: http://adt.caul.edu.au/

I found a number of theses that are very interesting, on the basis of my own interests (there are many more in CS and IT). I could read them from the document file, except in one case – the first one. Some provide a copy of the document in one pdf file, and others have different files for different chapters. The common search facilities provided by the above-mentioned website will locate information on any of the following theses that I found noteworthy:

By Jijoong Kim, Automatic Aircraft Recognition and Identification, 2005, University of Wollongong

By Joe Cronin, Design, construction and control of an industrial scale biped robot, 2005, University of New South Wales.
(This is a 500 Kg monster! From the pages I have read so far, it looks like it has not been built. But it has been designed and the designs have been tested by simulation)

By Penny Baillie, The Synthesis Of Emotions In Artificial Intelligences, 2002, The University Of Southern Queensland

By Peter Krebs, 2002, Turing Machines, Computers and Artificial Intelligence, University of New South Wales (This thesis argues that an artificial intelligence can transcend the limitations of a formal system because it can interact with the real world)

By Keven Weber, Visually guided Autonomous Robot Navigation: An insect based Approach, 1998, Curtin University of Technology (This thesis argues that a parsimonious, but robust guidance mechanism can be developed to handle two problems: corridor guidance and visual homing).

Coming back to my initial question: do we have a wiki like mechanism for graduate students to announce what problems they are working on? If not, why not? If the student does not wish to announce his approach, that is all right. He/she can merely announce the title of the proposed thesis. Students looking at a common area could at least share information, news about tools, relevant publications etc., and send each other preprints of their publications.

Srinivasan Ramani

Semantics, AI and Dyslexia

There has been a lot of theorizing about how semantic information is used to recognize the structure and meaning of sentences. I got a very interesting view of an approach to this problem by a scholar who had started out as a medical doctor, Parag C. Prasad.
He did a Ph D at the School of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, completing it last year (2006). Professor Arunkumar was the thesis advisor.

The thesis offers an interesting hypothesis as to how the human mind uses a sequence of words read (call this the immediate context) to predict the word it expects to read next. Prasad has developed a simulation model in the form of a neural net and has carried out experiments on it. The attraction of the hypothesis is its simplicity. It ignores the structure of the “immediate context”, and uses the set of words in it to represent relevant information. In other words, the hypothesis is that a small bag of words you have read helps you predict the next word you expect to encounter. The bag is the Short Term Memory (STM). The hypothesis is that the Long Term Memory (LTM) associates different bags with the individual words that they predict. For example, the bag (I, like, eat) could be associated with “mango” in your LTM.

Prasad discusses results from the medical field that show the extent of degradation of reading ability arising from disease conditions such as lesions, and shows how his neural net model successfully shows similar behavior.

Undoubtedly, there are possibilities of extending the hypothesis to account for a variety of phenomena. For instance, if you have read that John likes to eat mango, you might find it easy to recognize “banana” if it appears with the same immediate context as mango. How does this happen?

I can also think of a number of research projects that depend on the hypothesis reported to improve machine behavior. Can you think of one? Do you wish to list it here? Or do you wish to carry out such a project? Post a comment here.

Ramani

Artifical Intelligence and Society

Artificial Intelligence and Society
Symposium on AI in Industry (SAII) http://sigai.cdacmumbai.in/, held on January 10, 2007, collocated with IJCAI 2007 http://www.ijcai-07.org/

I contributed to a panel on Artificial Intelligence and Society at the above-mentioned symposium held on January 10, 07 in Hyderabad. Our task had been cut out for us as Prof Raj Reddy had given a keynote at IJCAI 07, focusing on what AI and Robotics can do for society. He had also mentioned an Indian initiative to set up a center to carry out research in the field.

I hope that report on Prof Reddy’s keynote and on the discussions in the Panel would be reported on the net soon, perhaps on the websites mentioned above, or even on this blog.

The large audience we had for the panel very pleasantly surprised me. It was heart-warming to see the enthusiasm displayed in comments from the floor. It is clear that a lot of people feel that is it is worth using challenges drawn form the point of view of benefits to society as drivers to develop AI.

Let me add my own comments here. I believe that AI has a tremendous potential to contribute to education. The world has a few billion people who have not had the opportunity to get a good education. See http://www.ei-india.com/full-report.pdf

Nearly a billion people were illiterate according a UNESCO report of 2003.
http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=10513&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
Their fate would no longer matter after fifty years, when they would mostly be dead. But, as humanity, is this what we want to see – a few billion people live through their lives in the 21st century with a bad education? Unfortunately, mortality among illiterates has been a major contributor to the so-called “increase in literacy” in many parts of the world. I don’t want to call it increase in literacy.

I believe that the best of available technology, and all technology we can develop, would be needed to solve this problem within the available window of a couple of decades. Of course, mere technology will not do. We will need science, particularly cognitive science and educational psychology. Even more, we will need the political will and the resources that would be required to mount this “grand challenge”.

AI’s potential in assisted living and in helping the sensory handicapped have been pointed out by many people. I will not dwell on them.

Let me give a couple of practical examples to justify my faith in the potential of AI. Dr William McBride, an obstetrician, had published a letter in The Lancet, in December 1961, pointing out that the drug Thalidomide given to pregnant women could cause serious birth defects in children. I have heard an Australian scintist say in a talk that McBride had used a very simple form of cluster recognition in his detective work to track down the cause of birth defects in children he had encountered in unexpected numbers in Sydney. In a great example of the power of epidemiology, he had used a map of Sydney and pinned a small paper flag at every address at which he knew of a child being born with birth defects. Unfortunately, soon enough, he had noticed two big clusters forming on the map. He is said to have tracked these down to two doctors who had prescribed the then relatively new drug Thalidomide to treat nausea in pregnancy. McBride won a Nobel Prize for his discovery.

(I cannot find supporting evidence for the cluster reognition part of this story, and would be grateful to readers for commenting on the accuracy or otherwise of this part).

The other example deals with a case in which simple techniques of analysis were helpless.

I quote Chris Darnell, who is now involed in very large scale financial management:

“I had been discouraged with the failure of traditional statistical methods to analyze financial market data characterized by a low signal-to-noise ratio. After reading some of the early papers by Professor Kanal in the new field of statistical pattern recognition, I called Laveen--out of the blue … He gave me some great suggestions for using new analysis methods to analyze financial data”.

Among other things, Darnell and Kanal explored the use of the open source statistical pattern recognition software ISPAHAN. This was all circa 1981, when people thought that pattern recognition was pretty much AI! Darnell has now acknowledged Prof Kanal’s guidance with a handsome endowment. The University of Maryland announced recently the Darnell/Kanal Professorship in computer science. See

http://www.cs.umd.edu/newsletters/InsideCS_2006f.pdf

I hope that these two examples provide some support to the faith that AI can do some good to the world. “Failure of traditional statistical methods to analyze financial market data characterized by a low signal-to-noise ratio” was a big problem in financial management. Can you imagine a similar problem in epidemiology? Do not many AI researchers have tools to help in this? This may not be a new idea to those working on machine learning. See

http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/DataMiningTutorial/dmtutorialreport.pdf

However, that does not detract from the argument in favor of AI research being aimed at social good.

P. S. You might wish to read

http://newstudentresearch.blogspot.com/2006/08/exploiting-search-speech-recognition.html

for some suggestions on creating socially relevant systems using speech interfaces.


Srinivasan Ramani

More on the Turing Test: Loebner Prize, TTS, Hindi and other languages

Is conversational behavior shown by a naïve human being a good example of intelligent behavior? If a machine does as well in conversation as a human being to make you think that it is human, then many people will agree it is intelligent.

There is a lot of lore about the Turing Test, named after Alan Turing who defined it. The website http://www.cs.vu.nl/~jdruiter/c/index.html gives a lot of information on this.

The Loebner Prize

You may also wish to read http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html describing the $100,000 Loebner Prize for the first person to win the Turing Test by creating a suitable computer program. There is also an annual prize to be won by the best entry that year. The website mentioned above gives considerable information on the annual prizes awarded so far. Current technology has not yet demonstrated successful artificial intelligence at the level of winning the $100,000 Prize.

There is a very interesting discussion between Shieber [Lessons from a Restricted Turing Test] and
Loebner [ http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/In-response.html ]. Shieber has argued that if there had been a prize for a flying machine before the relevant science had been understood, people would have spent time trying to use springs to make flying machines. Loebner answers this by referring to Mozart’s backside!
To quote Loebner
“When Mozart rode to Vienna in 1781 he wrote complaining of the pain the mail coach inflicted on his backside. (Mozart in Vienna, V.Braunbehrens, trans T. Bell Grove Weidenfield, NY 1990, p 17). This was a result, I must suppose, in part from poor suspension of the coach. The study of elasticity, stress, and strain did not result in a swift and straight arrival at understanding. Suppose a concerted effort had been made, early on, to fly using springs. Perhaps the concepts of stress and strain would have been invented sooner, along with advances in spring technology that would have been a boon to humanity, and Mozart’s buttocks”.
Three cheers to Loebner! My project suggestion in this posting deals with an idea related in spirit. Many practical and valuable things can be achieved using the experience of working with programs designed to take the Turing Test. To continue with the analogy, instead of making a flying machine, one of these efforts could lead to an understanding of how to make properly sprung mail coaches.


Chatterbots

Before I start off with my proposal, let me mention Chatterbots. The Internet era has created “bots” which are programs which behave like robots; including the Chatterbots” which carry out conversations with humans. The website http://www.a-i.com/ gives you access to “Alan”, an interesting chatterbot.

Good, now we are ready to discuss my project suggestion. The proposal below involves extending the test idea to a spoken language context, not to win the Loebner prize, but to create a system, which could serve a variety of people in a limited way. I will argue that there are many attractive reasons to use a speech interface in the context of a Turing Machine. I do not believe that this is a magical solution to the challenge of making a machine show intelligent behavior, but I do believe that many students of artificial intelligence (AI) and computer science would consider this a promising way to advance the tools available to those who work on AI. The idea of using a speech interface is not new. You can find examples among winning programs from the annual Loebner prize contests that offer you a text-to-speech interface.

As I have mentioned earlier, there have been developments in search over the last ten years. Search engines dig out relevant information from millions of pages of text. I am going to deviate from the definition of the Turing Test, and will introduce, this time, the Ramani Test :=) This test will require a machine to respond to keyboarded questions in interesting and appropriate ways with spoken responses to impress listeners. It is deliberately a broad definition. Here is a relatively detailed proposal:


Marrying TTS capabilities in Hindi with the Turing Machine

The idea is to have humans communicate to a machine through a keyboard in one direction and through a test-to-speech system in the other direction. The focus would be on the machine being queried in one language, say in English, and responding in another language, say Hindi. The computer could do one of two following things, and the human participant would not be told which mode the computer uses at a given time.

1. The computer could simulate the conversational behavior of a person without significant school education – let us think of him/her as an adult coming to an adult literacy class in a village. The responses come through the TTS in the Hindi language (as an example). Questions can be asked in English and the simulated “person” who has only a very limited understanding of English would speak back in Hindi. An English version of what the simulated “he” says would be displayed on the screen so that the English-speaking human participant can understand what the answer is. The Hindi answer would be communicated through a speaker or a pair of earphones, to impress and amuse those who understand Hindi.
2. In the second mode of operation, the computer would display the question to a team of three, working somewhere out of sight of the person asking questions: a student (A) who reads the question and translates it an equivalent question in spoken Hindi. Another member of the team would be an actual member of an adult literacy class who answers these questions in Hindi. But the delegate would not hear the spoken answers directly. The student A would type the answer in Hindi using a suitable keyboard or a transliteration scheme, and the answer would go through the TTS to the delegate. (The simple transliteration scheme named ITRANS enables the use of a common Roman Script keyboard to input Hindi text). Simultaneously, another student, B, would convert the spoken Hindi answer to a typed-in English answer to be displayed to the original questioner.

You may ask why we use this elaborate method of going from the Hindi answer spoken by a human to its TTS “equivalent”. The idea is not to give away the nature of the “person” answering the question through the quality of the voice. This model ensures that the answers in both cases come only through the TTS.

3. Some delegates would be watching the three-person team at one end while others watch the delegate asking questions at another location. This is to demonstrate that we are not cheating!

4. The game is for the visitor to guess whether the answers came from the machine as in model (1) or from the real human being as in model (2). The system would randomly choose for each discussion session whether the respondent would be a real person, or the simulated person.

The big question is if the human participant would be able to distinguish the “simulated person” from the real one.

A socially valuable outcome of this work could very well be the wider understanding of two capabilities of uneducated adults: knowledge and communication ability.


Srinivasan Ramani Sept 26, 06


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My Technorati Profile

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Exploiting Search, Speech Recognition and TTS

August 27, 2006

There have been developments over the last 10 years that throw new light upon the challenge of communicating with a machine. Consider the great success of search engines in digging out the relevant out of millions of pages of text. This has made it possible for most of us to operate with a much higher degree of timely and relevant information than we would have had otherwise. This suggests that given adequate content in text form, search techniques could dig up and give us useful information in a user-friendly form, and there are lots of people who can benefit from such an interface.

Let us define a new test emulating the Turing Test, one called the Useful Talking Machine Test (UTMT). It will require a machine to respond to typed-in or spoken input in interesting and appropriate ways with spoken responses to help and impress listeners, on fairly broad topics defined by the test creator. It is deliberately a broad definition. Getting software/machines to win this test may be much easier than winning the Turing Test. Why?

The Turing Test leaves the questioner to turn the conversation on to anything and everything. The domain of discourse, and the expected performance criteria are undefined, except to say that if a human can cope with the expectation so should a machine. The UTMT, on the other hand, allows you two major comforts:

a) you can define the topic(s) on which the machine would take the test
b) it could use a large body of content (including all that is on the Web on this topic) to provide useful information to the person testing the system; most of the workers involved with the Turing test forget the value of large bodies of content.
c) The system could ride on the success of the search engines, searching through the stored body of text for paragraphs in which the search words appear.
d) School textbooks cover the common minimum knowledge that the average person at a given educational level has had access to. Hence, using the textbooks of ten school years could give us a certain level of base knowledge, which can be augmented by including selected books written at the right level and style.

However, TMT is not without its own challenges:

a) a search engine spews out findings recklessly, and expects to user to select the few relevant texts/visuals/recordings over the others
b) It does not specifically attempt to answer the user’s question by combining or rephrasing information discovered by search.

Consider asking why was Lincoln a great President of the US. I tried a search with the words {Lincoln, great president}. I looked into the first hit I got, searching for “great” and found this:

While the war raged, Lincoln also suffered great personal anguish over the death of his beloved son and the depressed mental condition of his wife.
(See http://www.americanpresident.org/history/abrahamlincoln/ )

So, let us define an experimental challenge:

Given multiple hits by a search engine working in response to the words in a natural language question, how can we synthesize a suitable reply to be given to the questioner as a set of selected, and connected sentences (or utterances)?

There are secondary issues, such as how do we filter, group and sequence the words in the question to ensure getting a meaningful reply. By grouping I mean using notations such as “great president”, or specifying that “Lincoln” and “great president” should occur in the same sentence. Filtering would eliminate the all-too-common words from the question while creating the search input. Such common words would bring out irrelevant hits of the search engine.

It would be useful to create a powerful context in which a system like this can be designed and in which the performance of the system can be judged. Let us examine two such contexts. They define frameworks in which the utility of the system proposed is emphasized, taking the focus away from comparisons with human performance. We started with the Turing Test, but have now come to define a significantly different test.

Context 1: An Assistant for Visually Handicapped Students

Here the computer would simulate a human assistant to visually handicapped students. The student would speak (or type in) a few words to indicate any need for information, and the assistant would “speak out” relevant information through a TTS system. Imagine that fifty textbooks are typed in (or read-in, if available in machine readable form) into the machine to provide the knowledge-base in the form of plain text. The answering technique would use a search engine to choose relevant paragraphs and then have them read-out using the TTS, possibly after appropriate transformation through an automatic “editing program”. The editing program could transform the sentences found by the search, to fit them to the question asked. It could eliminate unnecessary materials and duplications. It could also try to connect sentences using primarily syntactic transformations.

My own hunch is that selecting relevant sentences, ordering them in the right sequence, and not attempting to modify the sentences themselves would be the best approach. Wherever possible, the best solution would be to select a whole paragraph or a suitable part of such a paragraph and have it spoken out.

The text form is not the only one suitable for the knowledge-base. Someone might wish to consider representing the content of the books in some form of knowledge representation superior to that of plain text. This would, of course, necessitate the implementation of a search technique appropriate to the representation used. It would also raise the threshold of effort required to create the system, having to recast printed text into a suitable knowledge-representation. It would also necessitate a more elaborate exercise in producing comprehensible speech output.

The simplest assistant would merely select suitable hits from the search engine’s output, and them read out using the TTS. It could provide for some manual control, such as skipping what is being read-out when the user feels it is irrelevant, or having the read-out repeated when the user requests it. This approach would be useful if our focus is mostly utilitarian. On the other hand, the issue of synthesizing a suitable response from the raw output of the search engine is an important research challenge.

A Patient Information System:

This would be very similar to the Handicapped Student’s Assistant, but would work in the context of a medical patient’s helper. The system concerned could possibly have touch-screen input and stand in the lobby of a hospital. A patient, who is seeking information (on his/her way out, after meeting the doctor), could type in a question and have the machine speak out relevant information. For example, let us visualize some questions:

a) What are possible side effects of the medicine prescribed for me? (This assumes that the patient’s prescription information is made available to the system in some manner, without denying him privacy).
b) Can the regular use of calcium tablets cause bladder stones?
c) What causes TB?
d) What are the risks of having typhoid?

There are many places in the world where doctors do not have the time to deal with such questions from patients. That is where the helper would be of value.


Various other “skins”

There are various ways to clothe the basic scheme. One could make it look like an educational tool, offering a whole lot of useful information to a student at a school or in an adult literacy class. Examples: how to save money through a bank deposit, how to raise a bank loan, what are the dangers of pesticides, how to travel to a given destination, what happened at a given sports event, what a given person is famous for, etc. all restricted to the information contained in a set of books used in teaching at the school.

Steps Forward in this Project

The first step in addressing this problem would be to do a search for any earlier attempts to solve similar or related problems.

Discussion of this problem with others interested would have its advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are of getting a wider perspective from linguists, researchers in computer science areas such as human machine interaction and artificial intelligence, search specialists, school teachers, and teachers of the handicapped. The disadvantages are that it is always easier to think of many reasons to argue that something cannot be done! Canned wisdom cannot solve new problems, and often a little experimentation goes a long way.

The most important steps would be to critically assess what was tried and what was achieved, and to write about these.

A search for “natural language” “search engine output” produces several interesting hits. A particularly readable history of search engines is in
http://www.wiley.com/legacy/compbooks/sonnenreich/history.html


Srinivasan Ramani

Sea-going Robots

I was causally readig up on robots and found a set of nice links:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050308134723.htm
does not talk in any detail about sea going robots, but has interesting news about MIT’s work on robotics.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/286345.stm
reports work in Japan and talks about how much more energy efficient fish are compared to boats in regard to swimming.

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Wave_buoysdescribes how electricity can be generated using wave motion. However, they talk of big boys, oops big buoys, which can generate 250 KW of energy, when a shaft is moored to the ocean floor.

It is widely believed that life originated in water and then migrated to land. Similarly, I believe that significant robots would first succeed in the oceans. I do believe that water-borne robots with some limited form of “artificial intelligence” would soon be built. These are the grounds for my belief:

Navigation is easier, if you assume that your robot is too small to damage other craft in the ocean.

· Movement is easier.

· Autonomy and long life in the wild are made possible by three natural energy sources: wind, wave action, and sunlight.

· It is easy to set useful goals for ocean-going robots: get to such and such location, stay there and report weather information, oceanic measurements like wave activity. This justifies building them well.

Questions and Suggestions:

1. What prior work can you locate? What can you learn from it? Read up on digital buoys.

2. Who could you team up with?

3. Can you get academic credit for having fun building up this craft?

4. Read up about the basic theory of sailing. Can you visualize how the robot could deploy sails as necessary and be able to move?

5. Plan a secondary battery, which would have adequate working life. Plan a solar panel to provide electrical power to run a microprocessor onboard to give autonomous control, subject to a pre-loaded “script” which defines the purpose of the robot for the trip.

6. Can you design a way of generating electrical energy on board a small boat, utilizing wave action, to provide auxiliary power?

7. What should the craft look like? How stable would it be? Would it be sunk quickly in rough weather? Would you need to bail out water for preventing the craft sinking in such weather?

8. What materials would you use? What would be the design life of the craft? What are the challenges in keeping the craft intact and functioning?

9. What type of navigational instruments would you give it? GPS?

10. What type of communication capability would you build into the craft?

Separate the craft into sub-systems:

* The essential equipment to ensure autonomous behavior,
navigation & communication and measurements.

* The energy sources and secondary battery.

* The body that would enable floatation, waterproofing and structural rigidity.
Based on this, can you estimate the range of possible size and weight for this craft?

I will have more to say in the coming months on all this. Do contribute your comments and suggestions by posting them on this web page.

Srinivasan Ramani

(IN)HUMAN MACHINE INTERFACES

What you say to another human does not have to be perfect. There is a lot of redundancy in face-to-face communication. This helps the listener to check what you are saying for consistency and to ask for clarifications when necessary. But this comfort is not there when a website talks to millions of customers a year. I will describe a recent (bad) experience below. My focus will not be on the hassles I encountered except to illustrate what goes wrong. I feel that a good body of literature is available for helping us to design good websites and to test existing ones. I suggest that a good project could focus on what is wrong with a few heavily used websites, and provide suggestions to the companies concerned to improve them. A dissertation could cover the principles and techniques involved in evaluating websites and illustrate them with examples of existing problems with well-known websites.

Now to my experience. I recently flew a certain airline, which encourages passengers to do online check-in over the Internet. The biggest incentive offered is that you can save almost an hour of waiting in a long queue by doing your own check-in and printing of your own boarding card. But after the experience, I doubt the value of this incentive. I spent more time on the Internet than I would have spent in the queue. The hassles I faced are:

a) The rules were not clear. Failures were not explained properly. After three hours of trying and several phone calls they finally revealed to me that I could not do online check-in on my return journey though I had done it on the forward journey. I will discuss the reason later in the following paragraphs.
b) The website repeatedly told me “Our servers are not responding; please try later”, while it should have said, “You are not eligible for online check-in as you do not have an electronic ticket”. Online check-in is permitted by this airline to “cattle class” customers like me only within 24 hours of the departure. So to be told to try later causes great frustration with the deadline for check-in getting closer and closer.
c) I could have normally asked for an aisle seat over the phone. I tried to do this after waiting till online check-in was thrown open (24 hours before the flight) and then failing to succeed in this for an unknown reason. But the person on the toll-free number told me that a “general seat request” was not possible within 24 hours of the flight. Well, that is what they call a Catch-22! Neither could I select my own seat, nor could I ask any other human being.
Now to the hidden reason why the airline’s website tortured me for hours. The people I reached by calling the given toll-free number merely kept telling me to “try later”. Finally, I demanded to speak to the supervisor. The lady asked, “How would it help you? He would tell you the same thing as I am telling you. Bu I insisted, and she said, “Well, it might waste waiting for 10 minutes to speak to him”. I persisted and listened to some unwanted music for about 5 minutes, at the end of which got to speak to the supervisor. He now found out that I was not eligible for online check-in because they had converted my electronic ticket mid-way on the way forward to a printed ticket. Yes, they had done that. But why was every one ignorant of this rule, except the supervisor? And, why did the website not tell me this?
Let me go on a flash back now. On the way out from Bangalore, the flight was late in reaching the destination and I had to miss the connecting flight. They re-routed me to my destination to send me through some available flight. That is why I was downgraded from an electronic ticket holder to a mere mortal.
To close this part of the story, let me suggest that a few people should read literature on the subject. I will list a couple of them below.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnsiteplan/html/improvingsiteusa.asp

http://www.library.yale.edu/~prowns/nebic/nebictalk.html

Now to the second part of my travails. After all this, I got on the flight home and again the flight was delayed due to some electrical fault that took time to fix. There was the risk of missing the connecting flight to Bangalore again. I talked to the staff at the counter who said that staff at the connecting location would take care of me. Again I demanded to see the manager, and I told him that the “staff at the connecting location had not done a thing to help me on the outward trip. I suggested that he should send a message ahead to ask that arriving passengers should be met on arrival by staff, who should help in negotiating the one-hour foot-and-bus journey between the arriving terminal and the departing terminal at the connecting location. He said that if there were a chance that I could make it to the connecting flight, the staff would inform me what to do. Well, what if there was no chance of my making it to the connecting flight? He did not say anything. I knew the answer from my experience. I would then do the one-hour trip to the “departing terminal”, find the flight gone and do the return one-hour trip to find some other flight going somewhere. Meanwhile my checked in baggage would travel as per its own free will!

What is the moral? It is not that we merely run lousy websites. We have lousy practices even without the Internet! When you deal with millions of people a year, it requires some good technology and a number of good design principles to ensure that they are not treated like cattle!

Ramani

Language Learning Games

Learning a foreign language can be fun. Even if you do not have a chance to travel abroad now, you can play a learning game on a computer, a personal digital assistant (PDA) or even on a cell phone. If you search for “language learning” & game, you find a number of commercial offerings. A few examples are:

http://www.transparent.com/games/

http://www.literacyconnections.com/0_052127737X.html

http://www.teflgames.com/why.html

However, there is always room for new games that help people learn a language. Developing such a game could be a great experience and offer you many benefits:

* Help you learn the language you are trying to teach. The teacher always learns more
than the taught!
* The experience can teach you about computer programming, particularly in
handling multi-media material and game development.
* The work can make you famous.
* The work might earn you credit in a computer programming course or in a foreign-
language course.

Many games use “fill up the blanks”, unscramble a word, and other similar techniques, to teach vocabulary. Very few exploit the multi-media capabilities of a computer or even that of a cell phone.

Imagine playing a game in which you meet “virtual people” who talk to you using displays of text or even “speaking out” recorded phrases. You can record short audio files containing one or two sentences, or even a short paragraph, in spoken form. A simple multi-media program can play these short audio files when showing relevant images – cartoons or photographs. The learner can view them, listen to the spoken words and respond in a suitable manner: answering a yes or no question, or typing in a word or number. He or she can even type in phrases that mean “you are welcome”, “thank you” or something like that. Talking to virtual people can be real fun, when you add a story line. Imagine you get off the plane, convert some money, get into a taxi, check into a hotel or meet grandparents or friends. You could create characters like a helpful taxi driver, a tough-talking policeman manning the taxi boarding area, a loving grandma and so on. Throw in a pretty girl, if you like! They can all be given suitable voices, by having a number of friends act out the scenarios.

Another mode of teaching could be top show images of objects (food, water, coffee, fruits, airports, post offices, a bus, a taxi, etc.) and have the learner type in the corresponding word. You should not forget the verbs. You can use images referring to run, sit, stand, go, come etc. You could play an audio file giving the spoken word with or without such image display, and expect the learner to type in the text form of the word. There is hardly any limit to ideas that such games can use.

The good thing about programming such games for use on cell phones is that people on a plane headed to a foreign country could use their time to learn the 30 essential phrases that could make a huge difference to their trip. Cell phone manufacturers offer software development kits (SDKs) on their websites to enable programming. This work is much easier than one expects at first sight.
Further it requires little equipment beyond a PC.

You might want to read about the Open Content movement (search the web for references), which creates resources for public use and puts them out on the Internet for free.

You could do a project in this area as an assignment for a foreign language course, or as a project for a science fair. Who knows? You may even sell such a game to a cell phone company!

Learn a bit about copyrights. You cannot merely lift images from other people’s websites and sell them off as a part of your game. You cannot put your creation out for free and then try to sell it.

Profit or no profit, you might end up teaching a few thousand people the elements of a language you love. It might be your mother tongue, or even Latin or Greek. Old myths and historical stories give you very interesting story lines for Latin and Greek.

A few relevant sources of information
--------------------------------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition
http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/
http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Speech-Recognition-HOWTO.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306901/EN-US/
http://www.computertelephony.org/blog/


Have fun!

Srinivasan Ramani

Building an Intelligent Sailplane

The Intelligent Sailplane
March 19, 2006

This week, I read a very interesting item on detecting thermals on the website:

http://f4bscale.worldonline.co.uk/hand.htm

It talks about hand-launched model gliders and how to detect pockets of rising warm air into which you wish to launch your glider. It looks like young glider-builders get up to 60 seconds afloat for their model aircraft using these techniques. An interesting statement I read was that in the Northern Hemisphere, if you look up and see some evidence of a thermal, you will notice that the thermal is swirling clockwise! I have seen birds such as kites flying in lazy circles for half an hour or more at a stretch. I assume that they are riding a thermal, and fly along with the swirling wind and not against it! Stick your head out of the window and find out if they do clockwise circles.

The challenge

The question I wish to pose is this: Can we build a model sailplane controlled by a microprocessor on board, programmed to exploit any available thermals and stay up as long as possible?

This raises questions about identifying thermals. I will visualize one way of doing this and describe it. You may be able to think of better ones, or who knows, you may decide to build something like the sailplane I describe.

Detecting Thermals:

This could involve random exploration of airspace around the model craft while it is gliding. It should have sensors to detect increase in temperature as it flies into a warm column or bubble of air. This might mean a raise of 1 degree C over 5 to 10 meters of travel. Assuming that the glide speed is about 15 meters/second,
This would mean detecting 1 degree C change over about half a second.

Secondly, the craft should ideally have some sensor to give it information of its own altitude, and signs of any leftward acceleration. I assume that a glider being carried in a clockwise direction (as seen from the ground) will sense a constant leftward acceleration. The altitude sensor should tell the craft when it is going down fast and when it is being carried up by a thermal.

Can you use an altimeter, which works by sensing air pressure, for this purpose? I don’t know. Can we get inexpensive accelerometers to sense the leftward acceleration reliably? Again, I don’t know.

Assume that the craft is in a swirling column of air, being carried round in a circle of about 100 meters diameter, and that is gliding at a speed of about 15 Meters/second. What would be the leftward acceleration? How many “g”? It is best I leave this to you to calculate! The accelerometer you look for should be capable of sensing this reasonably well.

With all this gadgetry, I guess you might be able to build a computer-controlled sailplane that will exploit thermals.


Learning from Kite-like birds

I assume that they use a little bit of effort from their muscles to get the most out of the thermal. Understanding how they do this might help you use limited amounts of engine power (electrical drive, powered by solar cells on the wings?) to help your glider stay afloat longer. In any case, you have to develop techniques that will use input from the sensors to identify what should be done: Use the ailerons and rudder to make a gentle turn? Use the elevators to get the most of being carried around by the thermals? The secrets of the birds could tell us something about this.

Simulation:

Before you rush off to buy the parts for your project, I would suggest that you consult a physics teacher or a meteorologist. At least, do an Internet search to see if you can get information about the frequency and strength of thermals and when & where they occur. Then perhaps you could make a computer simulation of a cubic KM of air showing roughly the structure and statistical properties of your atmospheric model.

The next step would be to create a simulation of the controlling program you want to fly. Combined with the simulated atmospheric model, this simulated craft will let you figure out many issues, unrelated to your model-aircraft building skills! It may also teach a bit of atmospheric physics! The simulation itself might be a science fair project, or a research assignment.

I did an Internet search for “gliding simulators” and found two relevant sites:

http://shop.glidingshop.com and

http://www.answers.com/topic/glider

The first one describes a glider simulator which runs on a PC and the second one gives useful information.

Cheating

You might find a shortcut to the objective, by building a radio controlled model sailplane equipped with sensors that help you on the ground to use your head and steer the craft. It might be wise to do this first. This may be an alternative to simulation and hunting for atmospheric models. In fact it might help you earn a degree by doing research to create suitable atmospheric models. I suspect that useful atmospheric models for this purpose may not be available ready-made.

Have fun!

I dream of an autonomous model sailplane which would keep circling overhead my city and help us watch the traffic jams below! And, we do have plenty of the traffic jams!

Srinivasan Ramani

Is handwriting really accurate in identifying people?

There was a well-known article in a law journal in 1989, debunking the notion that a handwritten signature uniquely identifies the person who signs the document (Risinger, Denbeaux and Saks, 1989)

http://law.shu.edu/faculty/fulltime_faculty/risingmi/137UPaLRev731.pdf

A valuable introduction to this topic written much later can be found in

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/publications/lima/handwriting/forensic/

This latter article describes the safeguards prescribed by the US Supreme Court while evaluating the evidence given by Handwriting Experts. It also refers to a paper which gives the results of one study showing 7% errors in the case of experts and thirty eight percent in the case of non-experts. Note that people can be sent to jail ( or worse!) on the basis of testimony from "handwriting experts", or that your parents' property can go to someone else because of a disputed signature on a Will. I find 7% error rate among the experts very shocking. That is why we need to do more research and discuss this issue more in public.

But there is a widespread "conspiracy" to act as if this assumption need not be questioned. A lot of crime takes place in the world because this assumption is not correct. However, there are very few scientific publications that have tested this assumption. Can you think of a short research proposal saying how you can test this assumption? It would be excellent if you plan to do this research systematically and publish the result in a journal (printed journal or an online one). You might credit in school or college for doing this research. Further a teacher/advisor can guide you into planning the work to avoid weaknesses (experimental design).

The article I mentioned above says that handwriting verification of an individual is about as accurate as reading tea leaves to tell the future.

P. S. Please note there are two questions either of which you can address:

1. If a given signature is that of a known person whose sample signature is available? Yes or no?
This is relevant for instance when a bank verifies your signature on a check (cheque) to see
if it matches a "specimen signature" which you gave them while opening the account.

2. Given a signature is that of one of 30 people in a group, and given their sample signatures,
can you find out who the signatory is?
This is relevant for instance when the police try to identify a person out of a set of
suspects on the basis of a handwritten signature on a letter.
An additional question is if the identification works better when a whole handwritten letter
is available for comparison with handwriting on the supect's diary.

Suggestions:

a) Three relevant ideas are:

i) False positives: Cases in which the process being used identifies a signature as the one we
are looking for, while in fact it is not. This happens when the bank recognizes a forged
check as the real one!

ii) False negatives: Occurs for instnace when the bank refuses to pay against your
check saying the signature does not match the speciiimen signature.

iii) When you use comparison of handwriting to identify a criminal, how sure are you of the
result? 90%, OR 99%? or only 70%?

a) Avoid violating the law by forging someone else's signature as a part of the experiment. Think out how you can do something lawful, which allows you to test the hypothesis.

b) An experiment like this should involve at least 30 individuals to ensure that the result you get can be verified by someone else who repeats your published experiment with another group of volunteers.

c) It is not only the first publication that gets credit. A few following ones which test the repeatability of the finding will also be widely cited in future.

Have fun trying this out, and become the author of a research paper. As you know, they respect such things when they consider you for admission in college. Who knows, you might land up in Law School because of this work.

I hope teachers of statistics and experiment design would encourage their students to
try out these ideas.

Srinivasan Ramani