November 18, 2004
Google Scholar
Google has just done all the academics out there a great service by launching Google Scholar. Essentially, Google is doing for the academic literature what it did for the rest of the web. This article by the NYTimes provides some background.
Google Scholar, which was scheduled to go online Wednesday evening at scholar.google.com, is a result of the company's collaboration with a number of scientific and academic publishers and is intended as a first stop for researchers looking for scholarly literature like peer-reviewed papers, books, abstracts and technical reports. Google executives declined to say how many additional documents and books had been indexed and made searchable through the service. While the great majority of recent scholarly papers and periodicals are indexed on the Web, many have not been easily accessible to the public.
The engineer who led the project, Anurag Acharya, said the company had received broad cooperation from academic, scientific and technical publishers like the Association of Computing Machinery, Nature, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Online Computer Library Center.
The new Google service, which includes a listing of scientific citations as well as ways to find materials at libraries that are not online, will not initially include the text advertisements that are shown on standard pages for Google search results.
November 3, 2004
Chaos in Robot Locomotion
Researchers in Japan have devised a new and unusal way to provide robot locomotion based on chaotic math functions driving the legs of a robot. So far, this has only been done for a simulated robot, but the results look interesting.
Roboticists Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Shinsuke Suzuki wondered whether chaotic systems might also generate efficient walking behaviour. Chaotic systems behave in a way that means that small effects are amplified so rapidly that the systems’ behaviour becomes impossible to predict more than a short time ahead. Such chaotic systems are behind a number of phenomena, including the weather and the performance of financial markets.
The Tokyo University pair reasoned that just as the chaotic maths that determines the weather can produce clear patterns such as hurricanes and weather fronts, similar systems might underlie the movement patterns involved in locomotion. “We, and animals, seem to be able to work out how to move in different situations without going through thousands of trial-and-error situations like today’s robot-control software does,” says Kuniyoshi.
To test their idea, Kuniyoshi and Suzuki devised a computer simulation of a 12-legged machine in which each leg was controlled by a chaotic mathematical function. The functions were initially fed 12 parameters chosen at random. From then on, sensory information from each limb was fed back into the chaotic function that controlled it.