RAEng report on Social, legal and ethical issues of autonomous systems

The Royal Academy of Engineering has released a report on the social, legal and ethical issues involving autonomous systems — systems that are adaptive, learn and can make decisions without the intervention or supervision of a human.

The report, Autonomous Systems: Social, Legal and Ethical Issues (pdf), was based on a roundtable discussion “from a wide range of experts, looking at the areas where autonomous systems are most likely to emerge first, and discussing the broad ethical issues surrounding their uptake.”

While autonomous systems have broad applicability, the report focuses on two areas: transportation (e.g. autonomous road vehicles) and personal care (e.g., smart homes).

“Autonomous systems, such as fully robotic vehicles that are “driverless” or artificial companions that can provide practical and emotional support to isolated people, have a level of self-determination and decision making ability with the capacity to learn from past performance. Autonomous systems do not experience emotional reactions and can therefore perform better than humans in tasks that are dull, risky or stressful. However they bring with them a new set of ethical problems. What if unpredicted behaviour causes harm? If an unmanned vehicle is involved in an accident, who is responsible – the driver or the systems engineer? Autonomous vehicles could provide benefits for road transport with reduced congestion and safety improvements but there is a lack of a suitable legal framework to address issues such as insurance and driver responsibility.
…
The technologies for smart homes and patient monitoring are already in existence and provide many benefits to older people, such as allowing them to remain in their own home when recovering from an illness, but they could also lead to isolation from family and friends. Some users may be unfamiliar with the technologies and be unable to give consent to their use.”

The RAEng report recommends “engaging early in public consultation” and working to establish “appropriate regulation and governance so that controls are put in place to guide the development of these systems”.

rdf:SeeAlso Autonomous tech ‘requires debate’; Scientists ponder rules and ethics of robo helpers; Robot cats could care for older Britons.

(via Mike Wooldridge)

What’s in a brand? That which we call an iphone by any other name would be as cool, right?

That was then, this is now. Even Wikipedia with it’s NPOV seems to agree: “Brands have become increasingly important components of culture and the economy, now being described as ‘cultural accessories and personal philosophies’.”

Techcrunch posts about an annual ranking of brands.

“WPP subsidiary Millward Brown Optimor has released its highly regarded annual brand ranking BrandZ Top 100 (PDF), which identifies the world’s most valuable global brands as measured by their dollar value.”

As you might expect, the list includes a large number of technology companies.

“Topping the list are Internet giant Google, whose brand was valued at a whopping $100 billion, and rival Microsoft which comes in second with a $76.2 billion valuation. The report shows Google’s brand value is up from $86 billion last year (an increase of 16% in value), while Microsoft’s rose only 8% in value over the past year.
…
Other valuable top brands in technology, according to Millward Brown’s fresh ranking, include IBM ($66.6 B), Apple ($66.1 B), Vodafone ($53.7 B), Nokia ($35.1 B), Blackberry ($27.4 B), HP ($26.7 B), SAP ($23.6 B), Intel ($22.8 B) and Oracle ($21.4 B). Just outside the top 25, we find Amazon at the number 26 spot, but the company can pride itself in having the most ‘brand momentum’ – a measurement predicting short-term growth prospects – this year.

You can also download an BrandZ Top 100 iPhone App. Since I seem to have an off-brand smartphone, I can’t report on what it does.

The full 72 page BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands report has lots of interesting analysis and background information. Here’s a table of the top 20 technology companies from the report.

I admit — I was following along on engadget’s liveblog of Jobs’ WWDC keynote, looking for iPhone news. Most of what he said, though, was fairly old news to those who had been reading the tech blogs for the last month or so — 3G and aGPS, besides of course the already announced software upgrades. The big thing was the $199 price, which was out of the blue it seemed. I figured I would go out and get one pretty much as soon as they were available without having to stand in a line. The teeny voice in my head however was expressing skepticism, which eventually was proven correct. The $199 cost factors in a subsidy from AT&T, and the phone now apparently needs to be activated when bought.  No more buying it without AT&T service and then getting it unlocked.

I wonder why that is, though. The big claim is that the revenue model has changed, and so Apple no longer gets an ongoing cut of the revenue from AT&T. If so, why not also sell unlocked versions of the phone sans subsidy, like every other manufacturer ? How will this work in other countries where handset subsidies are not common ? Apparently AirTel in India is the preferred partner and will launch this phone “soon”.  So will AirTel sell it for more than $199, but unlocked ?  Maybe I can get one from them ? Or wait for Xperia X1 ? Or for TouchPro ?

A UMBC led team recently won a MURI award from DoD to work on “Assured Information Sharing Lifecycle”. It is an interesting mix of work on  new security models, policy driven security systems, context awareness, privacy preserving data mining, and social networking. The award really brings together many different strains of research in eBiquity, as well as some related reserach in our department. We’re just starting off, and excited about it. UMBC’s web page had a story about this, and more recently, GCN covered it.

The UMBC team is lead by Tim Finin, and includes several of us. The other participants are UIUC (led by Jiawei Han), Purdue (led by Elisa Bertino),  UTSA (led by Ravi Sandhu), UTDallas (led by Bhavani Thurasingham), Michigan (Lada Adamic).

Businessweek Magazine has a special set of articles on innovation in business in its April 28 issue. As in the past, they identified and tanked the 50 most innovative companies worldwide. The list of companies ranked in order are as follows

It’s gratifying to see how many of these are companies based on computing and/or communications or have a business that is largely based on exploiting the latest computing and communications technologies. I think that it is appropriate to look at IT and communications as a group, even though they are traditionally viewed as different business sectors, because the innovations in each tends to be in areas where they overlap.

The distribution of the country in which these 50 companies are based is interesting. Of course, many of these are truly multi-national corporations .

Tim’s away.
The blog is ours!
Now I can finally post about SciBarCamp, held last weekend in Toronto, and the most interesting meeting I’ve attended this millenium. Amongst its many highlights were two talks by Andrew Hessel. The first was about synthetic biology. Andrew helps run iGEM, which every year hands out “BioBricks” to high school and undergrad students around the world, and sees who can build the best genetic machines. Stunning successes have included a group of kids from Edinburgh who created a bacterium that changes the acidity of water, but only if there’s arsenic present. This enables individual wells to be tested at a cost of dimes instead of tens of dollars. (For a sickening account of why this is significant, click here, or here.) Another group invented a glowing bacterium which, I think, has a variety of computational and artistic applications.

The synthetic biology talk was part of a debate with Jim Thomas from etc, a group that monitors technology from a social justice perspective. Jim began by engendering sympathy for the Luddites, reminding us that in 1812, 14 Luddites were hanged near his alma mater in York, England. Before smashing things, Luddites would sometimes ask the people “is this harmful for the common good?”, and that’s the question Jim asked of synthetic biology. He didn’t exactly say yes, but he raised a number of concerns – security, safety, economic disruption, and concentration of corporate power. The only one which I really bought into was security; kids, as we know, do not use their creativity and hacking skills exclusively for good, and neither do adults. Part of Jim’s evidence was the case of Eckard Wimmer from Stony Brook, who built the polio virus from mail-order parts, just to show it could be done. The session ended before Andrew could respond.

Technorati tags: SciBarCamp

I confess to being thoroughly confused. The revealed wisdom in US higher ed has been that we are simply not producing enough grads in the STEM area, and we need to do more to attract folks to sciences/engineering/IT etc. The National Academy of Sciences weighed in on this as well. We certainly keep hearing that here in our department, with exhortations to increase enrollment.

However, the Urban institute folks (Lowell and Salzman) claim that not only is the US not lagging behind other nations in the quality of STEM education at the school level, it in fact overproduced STEM grads (three times as many as the net growth in jobs) in the period from 1985 to 2000. So not enough or too many STEM grads — which is it ?

This of course further muddies the immigration/ H1B debates. The IT industry claims that there is a shortage of IT grads, and so they need to be able to hire more from overseas. The “Immigration Restrictionists” of various flavors, and the Programmers Guild like organizations, argue that this is just a part of plan by corporations to keep the wages in the IT sector depressed. Many of them have blogged about this new Urban Institute study, offering it as proof that the H1B type programs can be scrapped.

However, if the primary push behind lobbying for increased skilled immigration/H1 workers was depressing (or at least not increasing) the wages, then a factor of three overproduction within the US should take care of this, right ? In other words, all the folks in STEM fields who weren’t getting jobs in their area would sign up for short MSCE/CCNA type courses (or AAs in IT) and then get hired. I presume Bill Gates or others don’t particularly like foreigners enough to go through and pay for the H1B/Green card process when they would achieve the same wage depressing affects by hiring US citizens retrained in IT areas from the oversupply in the overall STEM areas?  On the other hand, there is  a recent statement by Fed chief Bernanke doing rounds of the blogosphere that a non increase in STEM wages would indicate that there wasn’t a shortage in the area. 

Net result, I am not sure what to believe anymore.  In admissions events, I dutifully present data from CRA (which in turn got it from BLS)  that seems to indicate that within the wider STEM areas, IT (strictly, Mathematical and Computer Sciences) would be the subfield where the total production of degrees would fall short of the projected job openings, even factoring in all the outsourcing.

Technicians in Ireland are testing a device capable of skipping between incompatible wireless standards by tweaking its underlying code. A report from NewScientist states:

The device can impersonate a multitude of different wireless devices since it uses reconfigurable software to carry out the tasks normally performed by static hardware… The technology promises to let future gadgets jump between frequencies and standards that currently conflict. A cellphone could, for example, automatically detect and jump to a much faster Wi-Fi network when in a local hotspot.

I don’t know if this report is good new or bad news and, if either, who it is good or bad for.

“The Information and Communication Ministry conducted the survey together with the National Internet Development Agency of Korea. It found that Internet use among five-year-olds surveyed was 64 percent, among four-year-olds 47 percent and among three-year-olds 34 percent. Young children on average started using the Internet at 3.2 years of age and spent on average 4.8 hours a week online. Some 93 percent of the diminutive respondents used the Internet to play games or access music, but 39 percent used the web for “study,” the survey finds.”

Maybe it’s bad for Korean preschoolers who should be playing with each other or with their Legos. Or maybe it’s bad for slothful preschoolers everywhere else who will end up working for the Koreans when they grow up. I guess it’s good for the Internet, unless the preschoolers all start blogs.

[spotted on Smart Mobs]

Anand mentioned the (alleged) British spy rock as a good example of an advance that pervasive computing technology has wrought.

Russia’s state security service has accused British diplomats of spying in Moscow using electronic rocks. It’s an obvious hack, when you think about it — a bluetooth enabled PDA in a hollowed out rock could be used to drop off or pickup heavily encrypted documents from spys as they stroll by. The only problem would be power. Such a bluetooth rock would be much better than Alger Hiss’s pumpkin patch.

In an infamous spy case from the early days of the cold war, US State Department official Alger Hiss was accused (by a young Richard Nixon!) of passing documents via rolls of microfilm secreted in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm. But, technology marches on, with wireless rocks replacing pumpkins.

The March of Progress
1948	2006
In 1948 Alger Hiss was accused of transferring secrets using microfilm in a hollowed out pumpkin.	In 2006 the British were accused of transferring secrets using a wireless enabled PDA in a hollowed out rock.
cost: low encryption: no durability: low models: Jack-o’-lantern, squash vulnerable to: rodents, fungus, kids pluses: organic, biodegradable negatives: decay, rot	cost: medium encryption: yes durability: high models: igneous, sedimentary vulnerable to: bluejacking, spyware pluses: tetris, plays mp3s negatives: heavy

A group of UMBC students working with Professor Zary Segall have built a prototype music player that senses its user’s emotional state and level of activity and picks appropriate music. The prototype system uses BodyMedia’s SenseWear, which detects continuous data from the wearer’s skin and wirelessly transmits the data stream to the xpod prototype. The physiological data includes energy expenditure (calories burned), duration of physical activity, number of steps taken, and sleep/wake states. A neural network system is used to learn associations between these biometric parameters and the user’s preferences for music and the resulting model is then used to dynamically construct the xpod’s playlist. Read more about the xpod prototype in this recent paper:

XPod a human activity and emotion aware mobile music player, Sandor Dornbush, Kevin Fisher, Kyle McKay, Alex Prikhodko and Zary Segall.

Ping-O-Matic, a great tool and arguably the most popular update ping service is currently down. Matt blogs about a complete revamp. Apparently their current system was accepting pings on just one box!. Technorati is helping them out.

Most of us don’t even bother to check which update ping services our blog software notifies automatically. Now, is this a good enough motivation to notify additional update ping services ? If yes, who is set to gain? Given the recent valuation of weblogs.com, a short downtime of Ping-O-Matic might well create another multi-million dollar asset.

Related:
Attention Wordpress users!!! from Nick Starr, Ping-o-Matic is offline from Jeff Smith, Pingomatic is gone from Alan Fraser.