Tuesdays with Morrie

I have been reading a lot of literature lately on life, happiness, love etc. Tuesdays with Morrie is one of those and simply amazing. It is based on the true story of Morrie Schwartz who is dying from ALS , but lives his life to the fullest till the end and also inspires millions others.
Some of the touching lines from this book :
1." What we take, we must replenish."
2. "Sometimes you cannot believe what you saw, you have to believe what you feel."
3. "The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love and to let it come in."

I will recommend this book to all of you. A soft copy is available here.

Spiritual Path

I just happened to read some very inspiring links today. The story of Mrs.Sudha Murthy and the charity work by Nipun Mehta.They put me to a lot of thought. I have been trying to meditate from quite some time now with no success [Err: only recently I got to know there is no success or failure in meditation.. Interesting :)..]
So I want to do a course of Vipassana some time soon.
Anybody done this course ? No form of communication with anybody for 10 days sounds kinda scary to me and well also challenging :).

Killer Application of Robotics in the next 10 years?

Robot are successfully being used in many applications like military, household work and many industrial jobs. In the next 10 years, I think that robots can bring revolution in the field of medicine and human lifestyle. The killer applications can be as follows:

Medicine:
I think one interesting application of robotics is nano-robots . These are tiny robots which can be injected into the blood stream and which can swim in the human circulatory system. The idea is that the robot detects the cause of disease, travels to the appropriate area and provides a dose of medication directly to the infected area.
Pros: This can give you new directions of research for treating cancers. There is still no cure for many types of cancer. Nano-robots could be the way to go. A December '07 article gives simulations of virtual 3D nano-robots which would help in the research of treating Alzheimer's disease and avoiding the side effects of chemotherapy.

Cons: The major limitation I see of nano-robots is side-effects and risk. Some mal-functioning of the robot inside the blood stream could lead to lethal effects.

Improve LifeStyle:
Another direction is building robots which would do the regular chores of our life like cleaning, laundry, cooking and related activities. An IEEE spectrum article talks about building robots which could be remotely controlled over internet. This would lead to "outsourcing" the robot monitoring work and effectively allow rich countries to import labor -- without the laborer.

Pros: This will help make servants affordable in rich countries and provide more job options in poor countries.

Cons: I think such a robot could make us more lazy instead of improving our quality of life.

Humor@ Google

I love Google's sense of humor. This years April fool plan by Google is trip to Mars.
Imagine the amount of funny statistics google will collect today with this questionnaire.
I remember last year on the April fool day they offered to send hard copies of the email and photos by post for free :D.

Oh, is this Gmail custom time a joke too ?.. It better be.. I was wondering how can google provide such un-ethical services. Though, they did try to make it realistic by only allowing 10 time shifts per year :D.

Well done, Google !! :)

Staind-Zoe Jane

One of my recent favorites - Staind-Zoe Jane. Good guitar music and very beautiful lyrics. The thing I liked most about this song is that it is dedicated by a father to his daughter. I could not recollect any more songs of this type. [Comments Welcome :)]
Here are the lyrics :

well i want you to notice
to notice when i'm not around
and i know that your eyes see straight through me
and speak to me without a sound

i want to hold you
protect you from all of the things I've already endured
and I wanna show you
show you all the things that this life has in store for you
i'll always love you
the way that a father should love his daughter

when i walked out this morning
i cried as i walked to the door
i cried about how long i'd be away for
i cried about leaving you all alone

sweet zoe jane [x2]

so i wanted to say this
cuz i wouldn't know where to begin
to explain to you what i have been through
to explain where your daddy has been

sweet zoe jane [x2]

Challenges Facing Humanity

An interesting news article mentions this list of important challenges for the human race.

1. Make solar energy affordable
2. Provide energy from fusion
3. Develop carbon sequestration
4. Manage the nitrogen cycle
5. Provide access to clean water
6. Reverse engineer the brain
7. Prevent nuclear terror
8. Secure cyberspace
9. Enhance virtual reality
10. Improve urban infrastructure
11. Advance health informatics
12. Engineer better medicines
13. Advance personalised learning
14. Explore natural frontiers

It would be so cool even if some of these are accomplished.. like reverse engineering the brain. The blue brain project is one of the significant efforts in this direction.
But some of the points are evergreen(never-ending ) research issues like securing cyberspace. Can we ever develop a bullet proof kinda 100% security technique that cannot be breached.
Also I dont get the significance of virtual reality ? I know it is a hot research area with a lot of money pouring into it. But how does it contribute to society ?

What constitutes Intelligence ?

I have read a lot of literature on the working of brain, artificial intelligence, hierarchy of intelligence levels in mammals with humans at the top etc..etc.... But never got motivated to write down my views on intelligence. OK so the reason I am doing it now is because this is my homework assignment for the "Autonomous Agents" course.
Thought it will be a good idea to share with others and get their opinion on this.

In this article, I will be referring to intelligence as behavior, actions of humans broadly. Humans are no doubt the most intelligent living beings on earth as we have been successful in disturbing the balance of nature resulting in too many humans on earth and many endangered species. So what makes us smarter than the other species is our complex brain. Researchers have not been successful till date to develop a unified theory for brain or intelligence. In the following sections I summarize some of the facts I learnt from literature and my views about the debatable questions.

About the Human Brain

Breaking down intelligence into constituents I believe is impossible. But the ability to store, process, imagine, communicate do contribute to intelligence. The book Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran is a very good attempt to explain some functionalities of brain. The brain is divided into different regions and each part of body is mapped to some region of the brain. Brain is basically a neural network with about 100 billions neurons. The connectivity/interaction between these neurons determines the human behavior. The neural network is not static as the neurons and the connectivity keep changing. The neural network also adapts to things we do repeatedly and so we get better at things by practice. So can all the functionalities of the human brain broken down to logical rules ? Specifically , can we have a mapping from a set of input to a set of outputs? I will say No. I think some part of it is random. Like we may behave differently in two exactly same situations. Cutting out the random part, can we theoretically synthesize intelligence by logical rules? I think it is possible but not practical because the variable space will be too large. In the next section I discuss the approaches to model intelligence on computers.


Research in Artificial Intelligence
The field of Artificial Intelligence tries to make computers work like humans do. The two main approaches to model human intelligence are:

1. Knowledge-based
2. Behavior-based

Both these approaches cannot independently capture the essence of intelligence. Theoretically, knowledge-based approach is the right way to go once we are successful in simulating the neuron behavior on a computer. But we do not exactly know the working, connectivity of neurons as yet. So designing application specific systems based on the behavior-based approach or a combined strategy seems like a fruitful approach to add some levels of intelligence to computers.