Month: May 2016

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White House brings first AI workshop to UW

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Experts say human intelligence and artificial intelligence are likely to work together in the future, and that will pose a challenge for governments and legal system. (Credit: Christine Daniloff / MIT file)

Intelligent machines won’t be ruling the world anytime soon – but what happens when they turn you down for a loan, crash your car or discriminate against you because of your race or gender?

On one level, the answer is simple: “It depends,” says Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who specializes in the issues raised by autonomous vehicles.

But that opens the door to a far more complex legal debate. “It seems to me that ‘My Robot Did It’ is not an excuse,” says Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, or AI2.

The rapidly rising challenges that face America’s legal system and policymakers were the focus of today’s first-ever White House public workshop on artificial intelligence, presented at the University of Washington School of Law. For a full afternoon, Smith, Etzioni and other experts debated the options in an auditorium that was filled to capacity.

White House deputy chief technology officer Ed Felten said today’s discussion will feed into an interagency policymaking process that includes a public report, due to be published later this year, and a request for information directed to the public.

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NASA uses HoloLens to build virtual Mars rover

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Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory check the design of a rover assembly using Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented-reality system. (Credit: NASA)

We’ve already seen how Microsoft’s HoloLens mixed-reality headset is helping folksfight off aliens on the International Space Station and take a virtual walk on Mars. Now check out how it’s being used to tweak the design for NASA’s next Mars rover.

Last week, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory showed off its ProtoSpace application, which superimposes a computer-generated version of space hardware over your field of view in the headset.

The application lets JPL’s engineers size up how components fit together in the design of the 2020 Mars rover, which is currently under development at the lab in Pasadena, Calif. They can also take real-world hardware and compare it against the ghostly design that’s floating before their eyes.

The beauty of the system is that they can push through the virtual parts on the outside and get into the guts of the rover, in what appears to be real physical space.

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India’s space shuttle aces first test flight

Image: RLV-TD
India’s RLV-TD prototype rises from its launch pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Center. (Credit: ISRO)

India’s space agency says it put its winged space shuttle prototype, known as the RLV-TD, through a successful first test flight today.

In a congratulatory tweet, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed the launch of “India’s first indigenous space shuttle.”

The Reusable Launch Vehicle Technology Demonstrator was designed to validate the uncrewed craft’s autonomous navigation system, guidance and control, thermal protection system and other elements of the mission profile under hypersonic conditions, the Indian Space Research Organization said in a news release.

ISRO said RLV-TD was launched from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota atop an HS9 solid rocket booster and rose to a height of about 40 miles (65 kilometers). Then it glided back down under autonomous control and made a simulated landing into a designated patch of the Bay of Bengal, about 280 miles from Sriharikota.

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Nathan Myhrvold stirs up an asteroid argument

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Nathan Myhrvold shows off a fragment of the Chelyabinsk meteorite in his office at Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, Wash. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)

BELLEVUE, Wash. – Millionaire techie Nathan Myhrvold is used to stirring up controversy over issues ranging from patent licensing to dinosaur growth rates, but now he’s weighing in on an even bigger debate: the search for potentially hazardous asteroids.

In a 110-page research paper posted to the ArXiv pre-print server and submitted to the journal Icarus for peer-reviewed publication, Myhrvold says the most comprehensive survey of near-Earth asteroids ever done, known as NEOWISE, suffers from serious statistical flaws.

“They made a set of numbers that look right, They have what Stephen Colbert calls ‘truthiness.’ But that doesn’t mean they are right,” he told GeekWire today during an interview at the Bellevue headquarters of Intellectual Ventures, the company he founded.

On the other side of the debate, NEOWISE’s principal investigator, Amy Mainzer of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says it’s Myhrvold’s numbers that don’t look right.

“The paper contains multiple mistakes, including the confusion between diameter and radius (which is by itself enough to render the results wrong),” she wrote in an email to GeekWire. “Nonsensical asteroid diameters are presented throughout by the author.”

Mainzer noted that Myhrvold’s paper has not yet gone through formal peer review.

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Boeing makes $11 billion 737 MAX sale to Vietjet

An artist’s conception shows a Boeing 737 MAX wearing the livery of Vietjet Air. (Credit: Boeing)
An artist’s conception shows a Boeing 737 MAX wearing the livery of Vietjet Air. (Credit: Boeing)

With President Barack Obama looking on, executives from Boeing and Vietjet Air signed a deal in Hanoi worth $11.3 billion for 100 737 MAX airplanes – the biggest single commercial airplane purchase in Vietnam.

The single-aisle MAX 200s will be delivered over a time frame ranging from 2019 through 2023, boosting Vietjet’s fleet to more than 200 planes. The low-cost carrier put in a series of orders with Airbus for A320 and A321 jets over the past two years.

The order for the next-generation, fuel-efficient 737 MAX jets provided a commercial boost for Obama’s first-ever visit to Vietnam this week. Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang was also on hand for Monday’s signing ceremony.

Shortly afterward, Obama announced that the U.S. embargo on arms exports to Vietnam would be fully lifted, removing the final major barrier that remained between Washington and Hanoi in the wake of the Vietnam War.

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Solar Impulse visits Wright Brothers’ hometown

Solar Impuse landing
Solar Impulse co-founder Bertrand Piccard holds up a model of the Wright Flyer as the Solar Impulse 2 airplane descends toward its landing in Dayton with its lights on. (Credit: Solar Impulse)

The Swiss-built Solar Impulse 2 airplane continued its fuel-free, round-the-world odyssey today with a nearly 17-hour flight from Oklahoma to Dayton, Ohio, home of the Wright Brothers.

The solar-powered plane took off from Tulsa International Airport before sunrise at 4:23 a.m. CT (2:23 a.m. PT), and landed after dark at Dayton International Airport at 9:56 p.m. ET (6:56 p.m. PT).. In between, Solar Impulse 2 swept over a wide swath of America’s heartland, including Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.

After landing, pilot Andre Borschberg was met by two relatives of the Wright Brothers, great-grandnephew Stephen Wright and great-grandniece Amanda Wright Lane. They gave models of the Wright Flyer to Borschberg and Solar Impulse’s other co-founder, Swiss psychiatrist-adventurer Bertrand Piccard.

“It’s a dream to come here, and we made it,” Borschberg told the Wrights.

Piccard noted that Dayton served as the base for Orville and Wilbur Wright’s airplane-building operation more than a century ago. “People told the Wright Brothers, and us, what we wanted to achieve was impossible,” he said. “They were wrong.”

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Boeing opens billion-dollar 777X wing factory

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VIPs and workers gather for today’s grand opening of the 777X Composite Wing Center in Everett, Wash. The factory’s 120-foot-long autoclave is at right. (Credit: Boeing)

Boeing is showing off the partially automated 777X Composite Wing Center it built at its campus in Everett, Wash. – the result of $1 billion in investment and 14 months of construction work.

Today’s grand opening brought together community leaders, executives and workers at the 1.3 million-square-foot factory, which is big enough to house 25 football fields. It’ll be a while before 777X production begins, however.

Boeing says it has received 320 orders and commitments so far for the wide-body plane, which can accommodate up to 425 passengers in its 777-9 configuration. The first delivery is targeted for 2020.

The 777X’s 114-foot-long wings will be built up from carbon composite material, layer by layer, with the aid of automated fiber placement machines from Electroimpact, based nearby in Mukilteo. The composite pieces will be trimmed and cooked to completion in a 120-foot-long oven known as an autoclave.

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Cancer gene research wins White House honors

University of Washington geneticist Mary-Claire King gets set to receive her National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama at the White House on Thursday. (Credit: National Science and Technology Medals Foundation)
University of Washington geneticist Mary-Claire King gets set to receive her National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama at the White House on Thursday. (Credit: National Science and Technology Medals Foundation)

A quarter-century after her discovery of the BRCA1 breast cancer gene, University of Washington geneticist Mary-Claire King has received the nation’s highest scientific honor – and high praise from President Barack Obama – for her achievements.

King’s status as a winner of the National Medal of Science was announced last December, but after some delays on account of weather, Obama finally put the gold medal around her neck during a White House ceremony on Thursday.

The president said “every single American should be grateful” for the career path that King, 70, chose back in the late 1960s when she was starting out in college.

“At a time when most scientists believed that cancer was caused by viruses, she relentlessly pursued her hunch that certain cancers were linked to inherited genetic mutations,” Obama said. “This self-described ‘stubborn’ scientist kept going until she proved herself right. Seventeen years of work later, Mary-Claire discovered a single gene that predisposes women to breast cancer.”

The discovery has had a huge impact on cancer diagnosis and prevention, highlighted by actress Angelina Jolie’s decision to undergo a preventive double mastectomy in 2013 because she carried the BRCA1 gene.

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Mega-tsunamis left their mark on ancient Mars

Image: Ancient Mars
This artist’s impression shows Mars as it might have looked 4 billion years ago, with the complex shoreline of Chryse Planitia front and center. (Credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO)

Liquid water is almost non-existent on modern Mars, but scientists say sedimentary deposits show signs that tsunami waves as high as 400 feet washed over Martian shorelines billions of years ago.

The claim, laid out on Thursday in Nature Scientific Reports, may sound like the Red Planet equivalent of “The Day After Tomorrow,” the 2004 climate-scare movie that showed New York getting drowned. There is a climate angle to the newly published research, but a more apt comparison would be 1998’s “Deep Impact,” in which a crashing comet did something similar.

“The tsunamis could have been triggered by bolide impacts, which, about every 3 million years, generated marine impact craters approximately 30 kilometers in diameter,” study co-author Thomas Platz, a research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, said in a news release about the study.

As spectacular as it sounds, the findings are consistent with how mega-tsunamis happen on Earth, and what scientists expected on Mars as well. There’s lots of other geological evidence that Mars once harbored a large northern ocean. But if that’s the case, there should have been occasional asteroid or cosmic strikes that produced giant waves.

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Make the most of a super-sized Mars

This image of Mars was captured on May 12 by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 and UVIS. Click on the image for an annotated view. (Credit: NASA, / ESA / STScI / AURA / J. Bell / ASU / M. Wolff / STScI)
This image of Mars was captured on May 12 by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 and UVIS. (Credit: NASA, / ESA / STScI / AURA / J. Bell / ASU / M. Wolff / STScI)

For the next couple of weeks, Mars will look bigger than it’s looked in a decade! And no, this is not a hoax.

Every August, the Internet goes a little crazy over claims that the Red Planet is about to look twice as big as the moon in the night sky. That viral hoax got started in 2003, when some folks scrambled up reports about Mars’ historic close approach during that summer.

Mars isn’t coming quite as close as it did back then, and it certainly won’t be anywhere near as big as the moon. But by May 30, the distance between Earth and Mars will shrink to 46.8 million miles, which is closer than any other approach since 2005.

That closeness is due to the position of Earth and Mars in their elliptical orbits as they line up with each other and with the sun. On May 22, Mars will be directly opposite the sun, looming right in the center of the night sky at astronomical midnight. The occasion is known as opposition.

Because Mars’ full disk is illuminated, as seen from Earth, opposition is an especially good time to check out the Red Planet with your naked eye, with binoculars … or with the Hubble Space Telescope.

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