【推荐1】People on the Move

Technology

Edgar Vargas, TransPerfect

Edgar Vargas brings nearly ten-year experience supporting large-scale business to TransPerfect as the new president of Business Department. With both buy-side and sell-side knowledge, Vargas brings various skills set to the TransPerfect team.

Advertising

Roy Massey, Version 2

Version 2, a leader in advertising technology, names Roy Massey Vice President, Head of Media Development. Roy considers participation and profitability(盈利能力)important. Previous leadership roles include Dentsu, AudienceX, PMI 5 Media Inc. and RCM Group.

Law

Jennifer Lieser, Kaplan Marino

White Collar Crinunal Defense Firm Kaplan Marino set up partnership with Jennifer Lieser. Jennifer practices white collar(白领)and complex criminal suits(诉讼), defending against various forms of Internet crimes. Jennifer brings unique point of view to each case and deals with matters with great skills as an experienced lawyer.

Public Relations

Kellie Hawkins, KEA

Kellie Hawkins has become a worker at KEA. She will run the company’s Health. Social Services and Education practice. Kellie served as COO for National Health Foundation before and managed the health and human services practice for the Hawkins Company. She holds degrees from Howard University and the University of Southern California.

【推荐1】A robotic game of cat and mouse playing out in a lab provides a peek at future possibilities of robots carrying out search-and-rescue missions or wildlife surveys without much human guidance.

The Tianjicat robot developed by researchers at Tsihgftua University in China uses a brain-inspired computing chip called TianjicX. The so-called neuromorphic(神经形态的) chip can run multiple artificial intelligence techniques at once in an energy-efficient manner. It is one example of experiments with neuromorphic systems that could allow small robots to make decisions using limited computing resources and power.

The researchers challenged the Tianjicat robot to chase another robot that was set to move randomly in a room filled with obstacles. This required Tianjicat to track the mouse robot by using both visual recognition and sound detection, and to figure out the best path to chase down its pretend prey without crashing anything. The team says that the TianjicX chip reduced the amount of power required for the robot cat to make decisions during the chase by about half compared with an NVIDIA chip designed for AI computing.

Performing a cat-and-mouse chase would be a step up in difficulty for most commercialised robots, which usually follow very predictable routines in warehouses or factories. Many robots that interact with more complex and unpredictable environments rely on remote control by human operators, or else must maintain wireless connections with distant data centres that have the computing power necessary for more intensive decision-making.

Neuromorphic systems haven’t yet been commercialised in a big way, but their relatively low size, weight and power requirements could provide practical advantages.

“For robotics, this is very important because it allows the system to operate for longer durations in hard-to-reach environments with greater autonomy.” says Jeffrey Krichmar at the University of California, Irvine.

【推荐2】Every robot is trained in some way to do a task. By seeing what to do, robots can copy the way of doing the task. But they do so unthinkingly, perhaps relying on sensors to try to reduce collision (碰撞) risks, rather than having any understanding of why they are performing the task or where they are within physical space. It means they will often make mistakes—hitting the object in their way, for instance.

Hod Lipson and his colleagues are trying to face the challenge. They placed a robot arm in a laboratory where it was surrounded by four cameras at ground level and one camera above it. These fed video images back to a deep neural(神经的) network, a form of AI, connected to the robot that monitored its movement within the space. For 3 hours, the robot arm moved randomly and the neural network was fed information about the arm' s mechanical inputs and watched how it responded by seeing where it moved to in the space. This generated nearly 8,000 data points—and the team generated an additional 10,000 through a simulation (模拟) of the robot in a virtual version of its environment.

To test how well the AI had worked, a cloud-like diagram was generated to show where the neural network “thought” the arm should be found as it moved. It was accurate to within 1 percent, meaning if the workspace was 1 metre wide, the system correctly estimated its position to within 1 centimetre. If the neural network is considered to be part of the robot itself, this suggests the robot has the ability to visualise where it physically is at any given moment.

“To me, this is the first time in the history of robotics that a robot has been able to create a mental model of itself,” says Lipson. “It’s a small step, but it’s a sign of things to come.”

Learning about the research, Andrew Hundt at the Georgia Institute of Technology says, “There is potential for further research to lead to useful applications based on this method, but not self- perception. The computer simply matches shape and motion patterns that happen to be in the shape of a robot arm that moves.” David Cameron at the University of Sheffield, UK, also says that following a specified path to complete a goal is easily achieved by existing robots.

【推荐3】The effect on happiness of exposure to nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), a gas mostly produced in diesel fumes(柴油机), is comparable to the effect from losing a job, ending a relationship or the death of a partner, research suggests.

The study found a “significant and negative association” between life satisfaction and levels of the pollutant, which causes lung problems. Sarah J Knight and Peter Howley of York University took life satisfaction data from the British Household Panel Survey and UK Household Longitudinal Survey and compared it with detailed air quality records from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Given that far more people are exposed to NO₂ than suffer unemployment or end a relationship, Knight and Howley suggest that the benefits to society from reducing such emissions(排放) would be substantive.

The highest levels of NO₂ occur in London, with the lowest levels in parts of south-west England. The capital has the honour of being home to the worst NO₂ hotspot in Europe: Marylebone Road, which recorded the highest annual mean levels of the pollutant, more than double the legal EU limit.

Pollution from nitrogen oxides (NO) is responsible for tens of the thousands of premature deaths（过早死）across Europe, with the UK suffering a particularly high toll. Much of the pollution is produced by diesel cars, which emit about six times more than allowed in the official lab-based tests.

The European Environment Agency said the UK had 11, 940 premature deaths in 2013 from NO₂. The number was down from 14, 100 in the previous year, but was still the second worst in Europe after Italy.