Tag Archives: shared

#437583 Video Friday: Attack of the Hexapod ...

Posted on November 19, 2020 by Android

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):

IROS 2020 – October 25-25, 2020 – [Online]
ROS World 2020 – November 12, 2020 – [Online]
CYBATHLON 2020 – November 13-14, 2020 – [Online]
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colo., USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

Happy Halloween from HEBI Robotics!

Thanks Hardik!

[ HEBI Robotics ]

Happy Halloween from Berkshire Grey!

[ Berkshire Grey ]

These are some preliminary results of our lab’s new work on using reinforcement learning to train neural networks to imitate common bipedal gait behaviors, without using any motion capture data or reference trajectories. Our method is described in an upcoming submission to ICRA 2021. Work by Jonah Siekmann and Yesh Godse.

[ OSU DRL ]

The northern goshawk is a fast, powerful raptor that flies effortlessly through forests. This bird was the design inspiration for the next-generation drone developed by scientifics of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems of EPFL led by Dario Floreano. They carefully studied the shape of the bird’s wings and tail and its flight behavior, and used that information to develop a drone with similar characteristics.

The engineers already designed a bird-inspired drone with morphing wing back in 2016. In a step forward, their new model can adjust the shape of its wing and tail thanks to its artificial feathers. Flying this new type of drone isn’t easy, due to the large number of wing and tail configurations possible. To take full advantage of the drone’s flight capabilities, Floreano’s team plans to incorporate artificial intelligence into the drone’s flight system so that it can fly semi-automatically. The team’s research has been published in Science Robotics.

[ EPFL ]

Oopsie.

[ Roborace ]

We’ve covered MIT’s Roboats in the past, but now they’re big enough to keep a couple of people afloat.

Self-driving boats have been able to transport small items for years, but adding human passengers has felt somewhat intangible due to the current size of the vessels. Roboat II is the “half-scale” boat in the growing body of work, and joins the previously developed quarter-scale Roboat, which is 1 meter long. The third installment, which is under construction in Amsterdam and is considered to be “full scale,” is 4 meters long and aims to carry anywhere from four to six passengers.

[ MIT ]

With a training technique commonly used to teach dogs to sit and stay, Johns Hopkins University computer scientists showed a robot how to teach itself several new tricks, including stacking blocks. With the method, the robot, named Spot, was able to learn in days what typically takes a month.

[ JHU ]

Exyn, a pioneer in autonomous aerial robot systems for complex, GPS-denied industrial environments, today announced the first dog, Kody, to successfully fly a drone at Number 9 Coal Mine, in Lansford, PA. Selected to carry out this mission was the new autonomous aerial robot, the ExynAero.

Yes, this is obviously a publicity stunt, and Kody is only flying the drone in the sense that he’s pushing the launch button and then taking a nap. But that’s also the point— drone autonomy doesn’t get much fuller than this, despite the challenge of the environment.

[ Exyn ]

In this video object instance segmentation and shape completion are combined with classical regrasp planning to perform pick-place of novel objects. It is demonstrated with a UR5, Robotiq 85 parallel-jaw gripper, and Structure depth sensor with three rearrangement tasks: bin packing (minimize the height of the packing), placing bottles onto coasters, and arrange blocks from tallest to shortest (according to the longest edge). The system also accounts for uncertainty in the segmentation/completion by avoiding grasping or placing on parts of the object where perceptual uncertainty is predicted to be high.

[ Paper ] via [ Northeastern ]

Thanks Marcus!

U can’t touch this!

[ University of Tokyo ]

We introduce a way to enable more natural interaction between humans and robots through Mixed Reality, by using a shared coordinate system. Azure Spatial Anchors, which already supports colocalizing multiple HoloLens and smartphone devices in the same space, has now been extended to support robots equipped with cameras. This allows humans and robots sharing the same space to interact naturally: humans can see the plan and intention of the robot, while the robot can interpret commands given from the person’s perspective. We hope that this can be a building block in the future of humans and robots being collaborators and coworkers.

[ Microsoft ]

Some very high jumps from the skinniest quadruped ever.

[ ODRI ]

In this video we present recent efforts to make our humanoid robot LOLA ready for multi-contact locomotion, i.e. additional hand-environment support for extra stabilization during walking.

[ TUM ]

Classic bike moves from Dr. Guero.

[ Dr. Guero ]

For a robotics company, iRobot is OLD.

[ iRobot ]

The Canadian Space Agency presents Juno, a preliminary version of a rover that could one day be sent to the Moon or Mars. Juno can navigate autonomously or be operated remotely. The Lunar Exploration Analogue Deployment (LEAD) consisted in replicating scenarios of a lunar sample return mission.

[ CSA ]

How exactly does the Waymo Driver handle a cat cutting across its driving path? Jonathan N., a Product Manager on our Perception team, breaks it all down for us.

Now do kangaroos.

[ Waymo ]

Jibo is hard at work at MIT playing games with kids.

Children’s creativity plummets as they enter elementary school. Social interactions with peers and playful environments have been shown to foster creativity in children. Digital pedagogical tools often lack the creativity benefits of co-located social interaction with peers. In this work, we leverage a social embodied robot as a playful peer and designed Escape!Bot, a game involving child-robot co-play, where the robot is a social agent that scaffolds for creativity during gameplay.

[ Paper ]

It’s nice when convenience stores are convenient even for the folks who have to do the restocking.

Who’s moving the crates around, though?

[ Telexistence ]

Hi, fans ! Join the ROS World 2020, opening November 12th , and see the footage of ROBOTIS’ ROS platform robots 🙂

[ ROS World 2020 ]

ML/RL methods are often viewed as a magical black box, and while that’s not true, learned policies are nonetheless a valuable tool that can work in conjunction with the underlying physics of the robot. In this video, Agility CTO Jonathan Hurst – wearing his professor hat at Oregon State University – presents some recent student work on using learned policies as a control method for highly dynamic legged robots.

[ Agility Robotics ]

Here’s an ICRA Legged Robots workshop talk from Marco Hutter at ETH Zürich, on Autonomy for ANYmal.

Recent advances in legged robots and their locomotion skills has led to systems that are skilled and mature enough for real-world deployment. In particular, quadrupedal robots have reached a level of mobility to navigate complex environments, which enables them to take over inspection or surveillance jobs in place like offshore industrial plants, in underground areas, or on construction sites. In this talk, I will present our research work with the quadruped ANYmal and explain some of the underlying technologies for locomotion control, environment perception, and mission autonomy. I will show how these robots can learn and plan complex maneuvers, how they can navigate through unknown environments, and how they are able to conduct surveillance, inspection, or exploration scenarios.

[ RSL ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437564 How We Won the DARPA SubT Challenge: ...

Posted on November 18, 2020 by Android

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent positions of IEEE or its organizational units.​

“Do you smell smoke?” It was three days before the qualification deadline for the Virtual Tunnel Circuit of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge Virtual Track, and our team was barrelling through last-minute updates to our robot controllers in a small conference room at the Michigan Tech Research Institute (MTRI) offices in Ann Arbor, Mich. That’s when we noticed the smell. We’d assumed that one of the benefits of entering a virtual disaster competition was that we wouldn’t be exposed to any actual disasters, but equipment in the basement of the building MTRI shares had started to smoke. We evacuated. The fire department showed up. And as soon as we could, the team went back into the building, hunkered down, and tried to make up for the unexpected loss of several critical hours.

Team BARCS joins the SubT Virtual Track
The smoke incident happened more than a year after we first learned of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. DARPA announced SubT early in 2018, and at that time, we were interested in building internal collaborations on multi-agent autonomy problems, and SubT seemed like the perfect opportunity. Though a few of us had backgrounds in robotics, the majority of our team was new to the field. We knew that submitting a proposal as a largely non-traditional robotics team from an organization not known for research in robotics was a risk. However, the Virtual Track gave us the opportunity to focus on autonomy and multi-agent teaming strategies, areas requiring skill in asynchronous computing and sensor data processing that are strengths of our Institute. The prevalence of open source code, small inexpensive platforms, and customizable sensors has provided the opportunity for experts in fields other than robotics to apply novel approaches to robotics problems. This is precisely what makes the Virtual Track of SubT appealing to us, and since starting SubT, autonomy has developed into a significant research thrust for our Institute. Plus, robots are fun!

After many hours of research, discussion, and collaboration, we submitted our proposal early in 2018. And several months later, we found out that we had won a contract and became a funded team (Team BARCS) in the SubT Virtual Track. Now we needed to actually make our strategy work for the first SubT Tunnel Circuit competition, taking place in August of 2019.

Building a team of virtual robots
A natural approach to robotics competitions like SubT is to start with the question of “what can X-type robot do” and then build a team and strategy around individual capabilities. A particular challenge for the SubT Virtual Track is that we can’t design our own systems; instead, we have to choose from a predefined set of simulated robots and sensors that DARPA provides, based on the real robots used by Systems Track teams. Our approach is to look at what a team of robots can do together, determining experimentally what the best team configuration is for each environment. By the final competition, ideally we will be demonstrating the value of combining platforms across multiple Systems Track teams into a single Virtual Track team. Each of the robot configurations in the competition has an associated cost, and team size is constrained by a total cost. This provides another impetus for limiting dependence on complex sensor packages, though our ranging preference is 3D lidar, which is the most expensive sensor!

Image: Michigan Tech Research Institute

The teams can rely on realistic physics and sensors but they start off with no maps of any kind, so the focus is on developing autonomous exploratory behavior, navigation methods, and object recognition for their simulated robots.

One of the frequent questions we receive about the Virtual Track is if it’s like a video game. While it may look similar on the surface, everything under the hood in a video game is designed to service the game narrative and play experience, not require novel research in AI and autonomy. The purpose of simulations, on the other hand, is to include full physics and sensor models (including noise and errors) to provide a testbed for prototyping and developing solutions to those real-world challenges. We are starting with realistic physics and sensors but no maps of any kind, so the focus is on developing autonomous exploratory behavior, navigation methods, and object recognition for our simulated robots.

Though the simulation is more like real life than a video game, it is not real life. Due to occasional software bugs, there are still non-physical events, like the robots falling through an invisible hole in the world or driving through a rock instead of over it or flipping head over heels when driving over a tiny lip between world tiles. These glitches, while sometimes frustrating, still allow the SubT Virtual platform to be realistic enough to support rapid prototyping of controller modules that will transition straightforwardly onto hardware, closing the loop between simulation and real-world robots.

Full autonomy for DARPA-hard scenarios
The Virtual Track requirement that the robotic agents be fully autonomous, rather than have a human supervisor, is a significant distinction between the Systems and Virtual Tracks of SubT. Our solutions must be hardened against software faults caused by things like missing and bad data since our robots can’t turn to us for help. In order for a team of robots to complete this objective reliably with no human-in-the-loop, all of the internal systems, from perception to navigation to control to actuation to communications, must be able to autonomously identify and manage faults and failures anywhere in the control chain.

The communications limitations in subterranean environments (both real and virtual) mean that we need to keep the amount of information shared between robots low, while making the usability of that information for joint decision-making high. This goal has guided much of our design for autonomous navigation and joint search strategy for our team. For example, instead of sharing the full SLAM map of the environment, our agents only share a simplified graphical representation of the space, along with data about frontiers it has not yet explored, and are able to merge its information with the graphs generated by other agents. The merged graph can then be used for planning and navigation without having full knowledge of the detailed 3D map.

The Virtual Track requires that the robotic agents be fully autonomous. With no human-in-the-loop, all of the internal systems, from perception to navigation to control to actuation to communications, must be able to identify and manage faults and failures anywhere in the control chain.

Since the objective of the SubT program is to advance the state-of-the-art in rapid autonomous exploration and mapping of subterranean environments by robots, our first software design choices focused on the mapping task. The SubT virtual environments are sufficiently rich as to provide interesting problems in building so-called costmaps that accurately separate obstructions that are traversable (like ramps) from legitimately impassible obstructions. An extra complication we discovered in the first course, which took place in mining tunnels, was that the angle of the lowest beam of the lidar was parallel to the down ramps in the tunnel environment, so they could not “see” the ground (or sometimes even obstructions on the ramp) until they got close enough to the lip of the ramp to receive lidar reflections off the bottom of the ramp. In this case, we had to not only change the costmap to convince the robot that there was safe ground to reach over the lip of the ramp, but also had to change the path planner to get the robot to proceed with caution onto the top of the ramp in case there were previously unseen obstructions on the ramp.

In addition to navigation in the costmaps, the robot must be able to generate its own goals to navigate to. This is what produces exploratory behavior when there is no map to start with. SLAM is used to generate a detailed map of the environment explored by a single robot—the space it has probed with its sensors. From the sensor data, we are able to extract information about the interior space of the environment while looking for holes in the data, to determine things like whether the current tunnel continues or ends, or how many tunnels meet at an intersection. Once we have some understanding of the interior space, we can place navigation goals in that space. These goals naturally update as the robot traverses the tunnel, allowing the entire space to be explored.

Sending our robots into the virtual unknown
The solutions for the Virtual Track competitions are tested by DARPA in multiple sequestered runs across many environments for each Circuit in the month prior to the Systems Track competition. We must wait until the joint award ceremony at the conclusion of the Systems Track to find out the results, and we are completely in the dark about placings before the awards are announced. It’s nerve-wracking! The challenges of the worlds used in the Circuit events are also hand-designed, so features of the worlds we use for development could be combined in ways we have not anticipated—it’s always interesting to see what features were prioritized after the event. We test everything in our controllers well enough to feel confident that we at least are submitting something reasonably stable and broadly capable, and once the solution is in, we can’t really do anything other than “let go” and get back to work on the next phase of development. Maybe it’s somewhat like sending your kid to college: “we did our best to prepare you for this world, little bots. Go do good.”

Image: Michigan Tech Research Institute

The first SubT competition was the Tunnel Circuit, featuring a labyrinthine environment that simulated human-engineered tunnels, including hazards such as vertical shafts and rubble.

The first competition was the Tunnel Circuit, in October 2019. This environment models human-engineered tunnels. Two substantial challenges in this environment were vertical shafts and rubble. Our team accrued 21 points over 15 competition runs in five separate tunnel environments for a second place finish, behind Team Coordinated Robotics.

The next phase of the SubT virtual competition was the Urban Circuit. Much of the difference between our Tunnel and Urban Circuit results came down to thorough testing to identify failure modes and implementations of checks and data filtering for fault tolerance. For example, in the SLAM nodes run by a single robot, the coordinates of the most recent sensor data are changed multiple times during processing and integration into the current global 3D map of the “visited” environment stored by that robot. If there is lag in IMU or clock data, the observation may be temporarily registered at a default location that is very far from the actual position. Since most of our decision processes for exploration are downstream from SLAM, this can cause faulty or impossible goals to be generated, and the robots then spend inordinate amounts of time trying to drive through walls. We updated our method to add a check to see if the new map position has jumped a far distance from the prior map position, and if so, we threw that data out.

Image: Michigan Tech Research Institute

In open spaces like the rooms in the Urban circuit, we adjusted our approach to exploration through graph generation to allow the robots to accurately identify viable routes while helping to prevent forays off platform edges.

Our approach to exploration through graph generation based on identification of interior spaces allowed us to thoroughly explore the centers of rooms, although we did have to make some changes from the Tunnel circuit to achieve that. In the Tunnel circuit, we used a simplified graph of the environment based on landmarks like intersections. The advantage of this approach is that it is straightforward for two robots to compare how the graphs of the space they explored individually overlap. In open spaces like the rooms in the Urban circuit, we chose to instead use a more complex, less directly comparable graph structure based on the individual robot’s trajectory. This allowed the robots to accurately identify viable routes between features like subway station platforms and subway tracks, as well as to build up the navigation space for room interiors, while helping to prevent forays off the platform edges. Frontier information is also integrated into the graph, providing a uniform data structure for both goal selection and route planning.

The results are in!
The award ceremony for the Urban Circuit was held concurrently with the Systems Track competition awards this past February in Washington State. We sent a team representative to participate in the Technical Interchange Meeting and present the approach for our team, and the rest of us followed along from our office space on the DARPAtv live stream. While we were confident in our solution, we had also been tracking the online leaderboard and knew our competitors were going to be submitting strong solutions. Since the competition environments are hand-designed, there are always novel challenges that could be presented in these environments as well. We knew we would put up a good fight, but it was very exciting to see BARCS appear in first place!

Any time we implement a new module in our control system, there is a lot of parameter tuning that has to happen to produce reliably good autonomous behavior. In the Urban Circuit, we did not sufficiently test some parameter values in our exploration modules. The effect of this was that the robots only chose to go down small hallways after they explored everything else in their environment, which meant very often they ran out of time and missed a lot of small rooms. This may be the biggest source of lost points for us in the Urban Circuit. One of our major plans going forward from the Urban Circuit is to integrate more sophisticated node selection methods, which can help our robots more intelligently prioritize which frontier nodes to visit. By going through all three Circuit challenges, we will learn how to appropriately add weights to the frontiers based on features of the individual environments. For the Final Challenge, when all three Circuit environments will be combined into large systems, we plan to implement adaptive controllers that will identify their environments and use the appropriate optimized parameters for that environment. In this way, we expect our agents to be able to (for example) prioritize hallways and other small spaces in Urban environments, and perhaps prioritize large openings over small in the Cave environments, if the small openings end up being treacherous overall.

Next for our team: Cave Circuit
Coming up next for Team BARCS is the Virtual Cave Circuit. We are in the middle of testing our hypothesis that our controller will transition from UGVs to UAVs and developing strategies for refining our solution to handle Cave Circuit environmental hazards. The UAVs have a shorter battery life than the UGVs, so executing a joint exploration strategy will also be a high priority for this event, as will completing our work on graph sharing and merging, which will give our robot teams more sophisticated options for navigation and teamwork. We’re reaching a threshold in development where we can start increasing the “smarts” of the robots, which we anticipate will be critical for the final competition, where all of the challenges of SubT will be combined to push the limits of innovation. The Cave Circuit will also have new environmental challenges to tackle: dynamic features such as rock falls have been added, which will block previously accessible passages in the cave environment. We think our controllers are well-poised to handle this new challenge, and we’re eager to find out if that’s the case.

As of now, the biggest worries for us are time and team composition. The Cave Circuit deadline has been postponed to October 15 due to COVID-19 delays, with the award ceremony in mid-November, but there have also been several very compelling additions to the testbed that we would like to experiment with before submission, including droppable networking ‘breadcrumbs’ and new simulated platforms. There are design trade-offs when balancing general versus specialist approaches to the controllers for these robots—since we are adding UAVs to our team for the first time, there are new decisions that will have to be made. For example, the UAVs can ascend into vertical spaces, but only have a battery life of 20 minutes. The UGVs by contrast have 90 minute battery life. One of our strategies is to do an early return to base with one or more agents to buy down risk on making any artifact reports at all for the run, hedging against our other robots not making it back in time, a lesson learned from the Tunnel Circuit. Should a UAV take on this role, or is it better to have them explore deeper into the environment and instead report their artifacts to a UGV or network node, which comes with its own risks? Testing and experimentation to determine the best options takes time, which is always a worry when preparing for a competition! We also anticipate new competitors and stiffer competition all around.

Image: Michigan Tech Research Institute

Team BARCS has now a year to prepare for the final DARPA SubT Challenge event, expected to take place in late 2021.

Going forward from the Cave Circuit, we will have a year to prepare for the final DARPA SubT Challenge event, expected to take place in late 2021. What we are most excited about is increasing the level of intelligence of the agents in their teamwork and joint exploration of the environment. Since we will have (hopefully) built up robust approaches to handling each of the specific types of environments in the Tunnel, Urban, and Cave circuits, we will be aiming to push the limits on collaboration and efficiency among the agents in our team. We view this as a central research contribution of the Virtual Track to the Subterranean Challenge because intelligent, adaptive, multi-robot collaboration is an upcoming stage of development for integration of robots into our lives.

The Subterranean Challenge Virtual Track gives us a bridge for transitioning our more abstract research ideas and algorithms relevant to this degree of autonomy and collaboration onto physical systems, and exploring the tangible outcomes of implementing our work in the real world. And the next time there’s an incident in the basement of our building, the robots (and humans) of Team BARCS will be ready to respond.

Richard Chase, Ph.D., P.E., is a research scientist at Michigan Tech Research Institute (MTRI) and has 20 years of experience developing robotics and cyber physical systems in areas from remote sensing to autonomous vehicles. At MTRI, he works on a variety of topics such as swarm autonomy, human-swarm teaming, and autonomous vehicles. His research interests are the intersection of design, robotics, and embedded systems.

Sarah Kitchen is a Ph.D. mathematician working as a research scientist and an AI/Robotics focus area leader at MTRI. Her research interests include intelligent autonomous agents and multi-agent collaborative teams, as well as applications of autonomous robots to sensing systems.

This material is based upon work supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Contract No. HR001118C0124 and is released under Distribution Statement (Approved for Public Release, Distribution Unlimited). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of DARPA. Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437491 3.2 Billion Images and 720,000 Hours of ...

Posted on November 4, 2020 by Android

Twitter over the weekend “tagged” as manipulated a video showing US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden supposedly forgetting which state he’s in while addressing a crowd.

Biden’s “hello Minnesota” greeting contrasted with prominent signage reading “Tampa, Florida” and “Text FL to 30330.”

The Associated Press’s fact check confirmed the signs were added digitally and the original footage was indeed from a Minnesota rally. But by the time the misleading video was removed it already had more than one million views, The Guardian reports.

A FALSE video claiming Biden forgot what state he was in was viewed more than 1 million times on Twitter in the past 24 hours

In the video, Biden says “Hello, Minnesota.”

The event did indeed happen in MN — signs on stage read MN

But false video edited signs to read Florida pic.twitter.com/LdHQVaky8v

— Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) November 1, 2020

If you use social media, the chances are you see (and forward) some of the more than 3.2 billion images and 720,000 hours of video shared daily. When faced with such a glut of content, how can we know what’s real and what’s not?

While one part of the solution is an increased use of content verification tools, it’s equally important we all boost our digital media literacy. Ultimately, one of the best lines of defense—and the only one you can control—is you.

Seeing Shouldn’t Always Be Believing
Misinformation (when you accidentally share false content) and disinformation (when you intentionally share it) in any medium can erode trust in civil institutions such as news organizations, coalitions and social movements. However, fake photos and videos are often the most potent.

For those with a vested political interest, creating, sharing and/or editing false images can distract, confuse and manipulate viewers to sow discord and uncertainty (especially in already polarized environments). Posters and platforms can also make money from the sharing of fake, sensationalist content.

Only 11-25 percent of journalists globally use social media content verification tools, according to the International Centre for Journalists.

Could You Spot a Doctored Image?
Consider this photo of Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Giving the middle finger #DopeHistoricPics pic.twitter.com/5W38DRaLHr

— Dope Historic Pics (@dopehistoricpic) December 20, 2013

This altered image clones part of the background over King Jr’s finger, so it looks like he’s flipping off the camera. It has been shared as genuine on Twitter, Reddit, and white supremacist websites.

In the original 1964 photo, King flashed the “V for victory” sign after learning the US Senate had passed the civil rights bill.

“Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

This photo was taken on June 19th, 1964, showing Dr King giving a peace sign after hearing that the civil rights bill had passed the senate. @snopes pic.twitter.com/LXHmwMYZS5

— Willie's Reserve (@WilliesReserve) January 21, 2019

Beyond adding or removing elements, there’s a whole category of photo manipulation in which images are fused together.

Earlier this year, a photo of an armed man was photoshopped by Fox News, which overlaid the man onto other scenes without disclosing the edits, the Seattle Times reported.

You mean this guy who’s been photoshopped into three separate photos released by Fox News? pic.twitter.com/fAXpIKu77a

— Zander Yates ザンダーイェーツ (@ZanderYates) June 13, 2020

Similarly, the image below was shared thousands of times on social media in January, during Australia’s Black Summer bushfires. The AFP’s fact check confirmed it is not authentic and is actually a combination of several separate photos.

Image is more powerful than screams of Greta. A silent girl is holding a koala. She looks straight at you from the waters of the ocean where they found a refuge. She is wearing a breathing mask. A wall of fire is behind them. I do not know the name of the photographer #Australia pic.twitter.com/CrTX3lltdh

— EVC Music (@EVCMusicUK) January 6, 2020

Fully and Partially Synthetic Content
Online, you’ll also find sophisticated “deepfake” videos showing (usually famous) people saying or doing things they never did. Less advanced versions can be created using apps such as Zao and Reface.

Or, if you don’t want to use your photo for a profile picture, you can default to one of several websites offering hundreds of thousands of AI-generated, photorealistic images of people.

These people don’t exist, they’re just images generated by artificial intelligence. Generated Photos, CC BY

Editing Pixel Values and the (not so) Simple Crop
Cropping can greatly alter the context of a photo, too.

We saw this in 2017, when a US government employee edited official pictures of Donald Trump’s inauguration to make the crowd appear bigger, according to The Guardian. The staffer cropped out the empty space “where the crowd ended” for a set of pictures for Trump.

Views of the crowds at the inaugurations of former US President Barack Obama in 2009 (left) and President Donald Trump in 2017 (right). AP

But what about edits that only alter pixel values such as color, saturation, or contrast?

One historical example illustrates the consequences of this. In 1994, Time magazine’s cover of OJ Simpson considerably “darkened” Simpson in his police mugshot. This added fuel to a case already plagued by racial tension, to which the magazine responded, “No racial implication was intended, by Time or by the artist.”

Tools for Debunking Digital Fakery
For those of us who don’t want to be duped by visual mis/disinformation, there are tools available—although each comes with its own limitations (something we discuss in our recent paper).

Invisible digital watermarking has been proposed as a solution. However, it isn’t widespread and requires buy-in from both content publishers and distributors.

Reverse image search (such as Google’s) is often free and can be helpful for identifying earlier, potentially more authentic copies of images online. That said, it’s not foolproof because it:

Relies on unedited copies of the media already being online.
Doesn’t search the entire web.
Doesn’t always allow filtering by publication time. Some reverse image search services such as TinEye support this function, but Google’s doesn’t.
Returns only exact matches or near-matches, so it’s not thorough. For instance, editing an image and then flipping its orientation can fool Google into thinking it’s an entirely different one.

Most Reliable Tools Are Sophisticated
Meanwhile, manual forensic detection methods for visual mis/disinformation focus mostly on edits visible to the naked eye, or rely on examining features that aren’t included in every image (such as shadows). They’re also time-consuming, expensive, and need specialized expertise.

Still, you can access work in this field by visiting sites such as Snopes.com—which has a growing repository of “fauxtography.”

Computer vision and machine learning also offer relatively advanced detection capabilities for images and videos. But they too require technical expertise to operate and understand.

Moreover, improving them involves using large volumes of “training data,” but the image repositories used for this usually don’t contain the real-world images seen in the news.

If you use an image verification tool such as the REVEAL project’s image verification assistant, you might need an expert to help interpret the results.

The good news, however, is that before turning to any of the above tools, there are some simple questions you can ask yourself to potentially figure out whether a photo or video on social media is fake. Think:

Was it originally made for social media?
How widely and for how long was it circulated?
What responses did it receive?
Who were the intended audiences?

Quite often, the logical conclusions drawn from the answers will be enough to weed out inauthentic visuals. You can access the full list of questions, put together by Manchester Metropolitan University experts, here.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: Simon Steinberger from Pixabay Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437303 The Deck Is Not Rigged: Poker and the ...

Posted on August 8, 2020 by Android

Tuomas Sandholm, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, is not a poker player—or much of a poker fan, in fact—but he is fascinated by the game for much the same reason as the great game theorist John von Neumann before him. Von Neumann, who died in 1957, viewed poker as the perfect model for human decision making, for finding the balance between skill and chance that accompanies our every choice. He saw poker as the ultimate strategic challenge, combining as it does not just the mathematical elements of a game like chess but the uniquely human, psychological angles that are more difficult to model precisely—a view shared years later by Sandholm in his research with artificial intelligence.

“Poker is the main benchmark and challenge program for games of imperfect information,” Sandholm told me on a warm spring afternoon in 2018, when we met in his offices in Pittsburgh. The game, it turns out, has become the gold standard for developing artificial intelligence.

Tall and thin, with wire-frame glasses and neat brow hair framing a friendly face, Sandholm is behind the creation of three computer programs designed to test their mettle against human poker players: Claudico, Libratus, and most recently, Pluribus. (When we met, Libratus was still a toddler and Pluribus didn’t yet exist.) The goal isn’t to solve poker, as such, but to create algorithms whose decision making prowess in poker’s world of imperfect information and stochastic situations—situations that are randomly determined and unable to be predicted—can then be applied to other stochastic realms, like the military, business, government, cybersecurity, even health care.

While the first program, Claudico, was summarily beaten by human poker players—“one broke-ass robot,” an observer called it—Libratus has triumphed in a series of one-on-one, or heads-up, matches against some of the best online players in the United States.

Libratus relies on three main modules. The first involves a basic blueprint strategy for the whole game, allowing it to reach a much faster equilibrium than its predecessor. It includes an algorithm called the Monte Carlo Counterfactual Regret Minimization, which evaluates all future actions to figure out which one would cause the least amount of regret. Regret, of course, is a human emotion. Regret for a computer simply means realizing that an action that wasn’t chosen would have yielded a better outcome than one that was. “Intuitively, regret represents how much the AI regrets having not chosen that action in the past,” says Sandholm. The higher the regret, the higher the chance of choosing that action next time.

It’s a useful way of thinking—but one that is incredibly difficult for the human mind to implement. We are notoriously bad at anticipating our future emotions. How much will we regret doing something? How much will we regret not doing something else? For us, it’s an emotionally laden calculus, and we typically fail to apply it in quite the right way. For a computer, it’s all about the computation of values. What does it regret not doing the most, the thing that would have yielded the highest possible expected value?

The second module is a sub-game solver that takes into account the mistakes the opponent has made so far and accounts for every hand she could possibly have. And finally, there is a self-improver. This is the area where data and machine learning come into play. It’s dangerous to try to exploit your opponent—it opens you up to the risk that you’ll get exploited right back, especially if you’re a computer program and your opponent is human. So instead of attempting to do that, the self-improver lets the opponent’s actions inform the areas where the program should focus. “That lets the opponent’s actions tell us where [they] think they’ve found holes in our strategy,” Sandholm explained. This allows the algorithm to develop a blueprint strategy to patch those holes.

It’s a very human-like adaptation, if you think about it. I’m not going to try to outmaneuver you head on. Instead, I’m going to see how you’re trying to outmaneuver me and respond accordingly. Sun-Tzu would surely approve. Watch how you’re perceived, not how you perceive yourself—because in the end, you’re playing against those who are doing the perceiving, and their opinion, right or not, is the only one that matters when you craft your strategy. Overnight, the algorithm patches up its overall approach according to the resulting analysis.

There’s one final thing Libratus is able to do: play in situations with unknown probabilities. There’s a concept in game theory known as the trembling hand: There are branches of the game tree that, under an optimal strategy, one should theoretically never get to; but with some probability, your all-too-human opponent’s hand trembles, they take a wrong action, and you’re suddenly in a totally unmapped part of the game. Before, that would spell disaster for the computer: An unmapped part of the tree means the program no longer knows how to respond. Now, there’s a contingency plan.

Of course, no algorithm is perfect. When Libratus is playing poker, it’s essentially working in a zero-sum environment. It wins, the opponent loses. The opponent wins, it loses. But while some real-life interactions really are zero-sum—cyber warfare comes to mind—many others are not nearly as straightforward: My win does not necessarily mean your loss. The pie is not fixed, and our interactions may be more positive-sum than not.

What’s more, real-life applications have to contend with something that a poker algorithm does not: the weights that are assigned to different elements of a decision. In poker, this is a simple value-maximizing process. But what is value in the human realm? Sandholm had to contend with this before, when he helped craft the world’s first kidney exchange. Do you want to be more efficient, giving the maximum number of kidneys as quickly as possible—or more fair, which may come at a cost to efficiency? Do you want as many lives as possible saved—or do some take priority at the cost of reaching more? Is there a preference for the length of the wait until a transplant? Do kids get preference? And on and on. It’s essential, Sandholm says, to separate means and the ends. To figure out the ends, a human has to decide what the goal is.

“The world will ultimately become a lot safer with the help of algorithms like Libratus,” Sandholm told me. I wasn’t sure what he meant. The last thing that most people would do is call poker, with its competition, its winners and losers, its quest to gain the maximum edge over your opponent, a haven of safety.

“Logic is good, and the AI is much better at strategic reasoning than humans can ever be,” he explained. “It’s taking out irrationality, emotionality. And it’s fairer. If you have an AI on your side, it can lift non-experts to the level of experts. Naïve negotiators will suddenly have a better weapon. We can start to close off the digital divide.”

It was an optimistic note to end on—a zero-sum, competitive game yielding a more ultimately fair and rational world.

I wanted to learn more, to see if it was really possible that mathematics and algorithms could ultimately be the future of more human, more psychological interactions. And so, later that day, I accompanied Nick Nystrom, the chief scientist of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center—the place that runs all of Sandholm’s poker-AI programs—to the actual processing center that make undertakings like Libratus possible.

A half-hour drive found us in a parking lot by a large glass building. I’d expected something more futuristic, not the same square, corporate glass squares I’ve seen countless times before. The inside, however, was more promising. First the security checkpoint. Then the ride in the elevator — down, not up, to roughly three stories below ground, where we found ourselves in a maze of corridors with card readers at every juncture to make sure you don’t slip through undetected. A red-lit panel formed the final barrier, leading to a small sliver of space between two sets of doors. I could hear a loud hum coming from the far side.

“Let me tell you what you’re going to see before we walk in,” Nystrom told me. “Once we get inside, it will be too loud to hear.”

I was about to witness the heart of the supercomputing center: 27 large containers, in neat rows, each housing multiple processors with speeds and abilities too great for my mind to wrap around. Inside, the temperature is by turns arctic and tropic, so-called “cold” rows alternating with “hot”—fans operate around the clock to cool the processors as they churn through millions of giga, mega, tera, peta and other ever-increasing scales of data bytes. In the cool rows, robotic-looking lights blink green and blue in orderly progression. In the hot rows, a jumble of multicolored wires crisscrosses in tangled skeins.

In the corners stood machines that had outlived their heyday. There was Sherlock, an old Cray model, that warmed my heart. There was a sad nameless computer, whose anonymity was partially compensated for by the Warhol soup cans adorning its cage (an homage to Warhol’s Pittsburghian origins).

And where does Libratus live, I asked? Which of these computers is Bridges, the computer that runs the AI Sandholm and I had been discussing?

Bridges, it turned out, isn’t a single computer. It’s a system with processing power beyond comprehension. It takes over two and a half petabytes to run Libratus. A single petabyte is a million gigabytes: You could watch over 13 years of HD video, store 10 billion photos, catalog the contents of the entire Library of Congress word for word. That’s a whole lot of computing power. And that’s only to succeed at heads-up poker, in limited circumstances.

Yet despite the breathtaking computing power at its disposal, Libratus is still severely limited. Yes, it beat its opponents where Claudico failed. But the poker professionals weren’t allowed to use many of the tools of their trade, including the opponent analysis software that they depend on in actual online games. And humans tire. Libratus can churn for a two-week marathon, where the human mind falters.

But there’s still much it can’t do: play more opponents, play live, or win every time. There’s more humanity in poker than Libratus has yet conquered. “There’s this belief that it’s all about statistics and correlations. And we actually don’t believe that,” Nystrom explained as we left Bridges behind. “Once in a while correlations are good, but in general, they can also be really misleading.”

Two years later, the Sandholm lab will produce Pluribus. Pluribus will be able to play against five players—and will run on a single computer. Much of the human edge will have evaporated in a short, very short time. The algorithms have improved, as have the computers. AI, it seems, has gained by leaps and bounds.

So does that mean that, ultimately, the algorithmic can indeed beat out the human, that computation can untangle the web of human interaction by discerning “the little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do,” as von Neumann put it?

Long before I’d spoken to Sandholm, I’d met Kevin Slavin, a polymath of sorts whose past careers have including founding a game design company and an interactive art space and launching the Playful Systems group at MIT’s Media Lab. Slavin has a decidedly different view from the creators of Pluribus. “On the one hand, [von Neumann] was a genius,” Kevin Slavin reflects. “But the presumptuousness of it.”

Slavin is firmly on the side of the gambler, who recognizes uncertainty for what it is and thus is able to take calculated risks when necessary, all the while tampering confidence at the outcome. The most you can do is put yourself in the path of luck—but to think you can guess with certainty the actual outcome is a presumptuousness the true poker player foregoes. For Slavin, the wonder of computers is “That they can generate this fabulous, complex randomness.” His opinion of the algorithmic assaults on chance? “This is their moment,” he said. “But it’s the exact opposite of what’s really beautiful about a computer, which is that it can do something that’s actually unpredictable. That, to me, is the magic.”

Will they actually succeed in making the unpredictable predictable, though? That’s what I want to know. Because everything I’ve seen tells me that absolute success is impossible. The deck is not rigged.

“It’s an unbelievable amount of work to get there. What do you get at the end? Let’s say they’re successful. Then we live in a world where there’s no God, agency, or luck,” Slavin responded.

“I don’t want to live there,’’ he added “I just don’t want to live there.”

Luckily, it seems that for now, he won’t have to. There are more things in life than are yet written in the algorithms. We have no reliable lie detection software—whether in the face, the skin, or the brain. In a recent test of bluffing in poker, computer face recognition failed miserably. We can get at discomfort, but we can’t get at the reasons for that discomfort: lying, fatigue, stress—they all look much the same. And humans, of course, can also mimic stress where none exists, complicating the picture even further.

Pluribus may turn out to be powerful, but von Neumann’s challenge still stands: The true nature of games, the most human of the human, remains to be conquered.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

Image Credit: José Pablo Iglesias / Unsplash Continue reading →

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#437293 These Scientists Just Completed a 3D ...

Posted on August 6, 2020 by Android

Human brain maps are a dime a dozen these days. Maps that detail neurons in a certain region. Maps that draw out functional connections between those cells. Maps that dive deeper into gene expression. Or even meta-maps that combine all of the above.

But have you ever wondered: how well do those maps represent my brain? After all, no two brains are alike. And if we’re ever going to reverse-engineer the brain as a computer simulation—as Europe’s Human Brain Project is trying to do—shouldn’t we ask whose brain they’re hoping to simulate?

Enter a new kind of map: the Julich-Brain, a probabilistic map of human brains that accounts for individual differences using a computational framework. Rather than generating a static PDF of a brain map, the Julich-Brain atlas is also dynamic, in that it continuously changes to incorporate more recent brain mapping results. So far, the map has data from over 24,000 thinly sliced sections from 23 postmortem brains covering most years of adulthood at the cellular level. But the atlas can also continuously adapt to progress in mapping technologies to aid brain modeling and simulation, and link to other atlases and alternatives.

In other words, rather than “just another” human brain map, the Julich-Brain atlas is its own neuromapping API—one that could unite previous brain-mapping efforts with more modern methods.

“It is exciting to see how far the combination of brain research and digital technologies has progressed,” said Dr. Katrin Amunts of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine at Research Centre Jülich in Germany, who spearheaded the study.

The Old Dogma
The Julich-Brain atlas embraces traditional brain-mapping while also yanking the field into the 21st century.

First, the new atlas includes the brain’s cytoarchitecture, or how brain cells are organized. As brain maps go, these kinds of maps are the oldest and most fundamental. Rather than exploring how neurons talk to each other functionally—which is all the rage these days with connectome maps—cytoarchitecture maps draw out the physical arrangement of neurons.

Like a census, these maps literally capture how neurons are distributed in the brain, what they look like, and how they layer within and between different brain regions.

Because neurons aren’t packed together the same way between different brain regions, this provides a way to parse the brain into areas that can be further studied. When we say the brain’s “memory center,” the hippocampus, or the emotion center, the “amygdala,” these distinctions are based on cytoarchitectural maps.

Some may call this type of mapping “boring.” But cytoarchitecture maps form the very basis of any sort of neuroscience understanding. Like hand-drawn maps from early explorers sailing to the western hemisphere, these maps provide the brain’s geographical patterns from which we try to decipher functional connections. If brain regions are cities, then cytoarchitecture maps attempt to show trading or other “functional” activities that occur in the interlinking highways.

You might’ve heard of the most common cytoarchitecture map used today: the Brodmann map from 1909 (yup, that old), which divided the brain into classical regions based on the cells’ morphology and location. The map, while impactful, wasn’t able to account for brain differences between people. More recent brain-mapping technologies have allowed us to dig deeper into neuronal differences and divide the brain into more regions—180 areas in the cortex alone, compared with 43 in the original Brodmann map.

The new study took inspiration from that age-old map and transformed it into a digital ecosystem.

A Living Atlas
Work began on the Julich-Brain atlas in the mid-1990s, with a little help from the crowd.

The preparation of human tissue and its microstructural mapping, analysis, and data processing is incredibly labor-intensive, the authors lamented, making it impossible to do for the whole brain at high resolution in just one lab. To build their “Google Earth” for the brain, the team hooked up with EBRAINS, a shared computing platform set up by the Human Brain Project to promote collaboration between neuroscience labs in the EU.

First, the team acquired MRI scans of 23 postmortem brains, sliced the brains into wafer-thin sections, and scanned and digitized them. They corrected distortions from the chopping using data from the MRI scans and then lined up neurons in consecutive sections—picture putting together a 3D puzzle—to reconstruct the whole brain. Overall, the team had to analyze 24,000 brain sections, which prompted them to build a computational management system for individual brain sections—a win, because they could now track individual donor brains too.

Their method was quite clever. They first mapped their results to a brain template from a single person, called the MNI-Colin27 template. Because the reference brain was extremely detailed, this allowed the team to better figure out the location of brain cells and regions in a particular anatomical space.

However, MNI-Colin27’s brain isn’t your or my brain—or any of the brains the team analyzed. To dilute any of Colin’s potential brain quirks, the team also mapped their dataset onto an “average brain,” dubbed the ICBM2009c (catchy, I know).

This step allowed the team to “standardize” their results with everything else from the Human Connectome Project and the UK Biobank, kind of like adding their Google Maps layer to the existing map. To highlight individual brain differences, the team overlaid their dataset on existing ones, and looked for differences in the cytoarchitecture.

The microscopic architecture of neurons change between two areas (dotted line), forming the basis of different identifiable brain regions. To account for individual differences, the team also calculated a probability map (right hemisphere). Image credit: Forschungszentrum Juelich / Katrin Amunts
Based on structure alone, the brains were both remarkably different and shockingly similar at the same time. For example, the cortexes—the outermost layer of the brain—were physically different across donor brains of different age and sex. The region especially divergent between people was Broca’s region, which is traditionally linked to speech production. In contrast, parts of the visual cortex were almost identical between the brains.

The Brain-Mapping Future
Rather than relying on the brain’s visible “landmarks,” which can still differ between people, the probabilistic map is far more precise, the authors said.

What’s more, the map could also pool yet unmapped regions in the cortex—about 30 percent or so—into “gap maps,” providing neuroscientists with a better idea of what still needs to be understood.

“New maps are continuously replacing gap maps with progress in mapping while the process is captured and documented … Consequently, the atlas is not static but rather represents a ‘living map,’” the authors said.

Thanks to its structurally-sound architecture down to individual cells, the atlas can contribute to brain modeling and simulation down the line—especially for personalized brain models for neurological disorders such as seizures. Researchers can also use the framework for other species, and they can even incorporate new data-crunching processors into the workflow, such as mapping brain regions using artificial intelligence.

Fundamentally, the goal is to build shared resources to better understand the brain. “[These atlases] help us—and more and more researchers worldwide—to better understand the complex organization of the brain and to jointly uncover how things are connected,” the authors said.

Image credit: Richard Watts, PhD, University of Vermont and Fair Neuroimaging Lab, Oregon Health and Science University Continue reading →

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