1. A project to make the way robots think comprehensible to humans.

"In an experiment, the researchers used their [augmented reality] system to place obstacles—like human pedestrians—in the path of robots, which had to navigate through a virtual city. The robots had to detect the obstacles and then compute the optimal route to avoid running into them. As the robots did that, a projection system displayed their “thoughts” on the ground, so researchers could visualize them in real time. The 'thoughts' consisted of colored lines and dots—representing obstacles, possible paths, and the optimal route—that were constantly changing as the robots and pedestrians moved."

2. Thing from the Addams Family as a model for the Internet of Things.

"We consider the Addams Family's Thing, minus the Uncanny Valley issues, as a good potential starting point for how agent behavior and interaction could support people in location-aware Smart Environments. The sensing, response and location-awareness of Thing is a useful aspirational model, even if the goal isn't for disembodied hands to pop out of boxes and serve tea. As an agent of sorts, Thing learned about and possessed data knowledge of every member of the household, their preferences, needs and desires and was sensing and aware as to what type of contribution it could make to the successful outcome of their actions."

3. Cameras everywhere + machine vision = analytics everywhere, including Harvard classrooms.

"I learned recently from two of my faculty colleagues that students in their courses had been surreptitiously photographed throughout the past spring term using cameras trained on the seats in the lecture hall. This was done under the cloak of research on class attendance. A senior university official called in these professors and explained that by means of this electronic monitoring, images of all the students in attendance had been captured at each class. These faculty colleagues, neither of them tenured, first learned that their classes had been under surveillance when this senior central administration official called them in without informing the computer science area dean, and asked them to comment on the attendance data. And contrary to a basic principle of research involving human subjects, the students who were subjects of this study still, I believe, have not been informed that their images were captured and analyzed."

4. The first principle of Calm Technology.

"I. Technology should require the smallest amount of our attention.
Technology can communicate, but doesn’t need to speak.
Create ambient awareness through different senses.
Communicate information without taking the wearer out of their environment or task." 

5. As an admirer of rats, I'm pretty disappointed in the New York rat population estimate going down.

"Jonathan Auerbach, a 26-year-old statistician studying for a doctorate at Columbia University, recently won a competition sponsored by the 180-year-old Royal Statistical Society of London. Mr. Auerbach claimed the prize with a paper in which he made the case that there are far fewer rats in the city than almost anyone had assumed. About six million fewer. By Mr. Auerbach’s calculations, the rat population is a mere two million, give or take 150,000. In arriving at that total, he debunked the long-perpetuated idea that there was one rat for every person in the city."

BONUS: I reported my first story for Fusion! I used an equation solving app to do a whole 7th grade homework assignment in one minute. Then I called up a math teacher at my old middle school and asked how he felt about that. 

Today's 1957 American English Language Tip

congeries. (sing. & pl.) A collection of things merely heaped together. A curious congeries of towers, halls, churches, & chambers.

The Credits:  1. ieee.org 2. dfki.de / @anthropunk 3. harvardmagazine.com / @tressiemcphd 4. calmtechnology.com 5. nytimes.com

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