Four short links: 28 January 2019
Medical AI, Opinion Mapping, Voting-Free Democracy, and a Typed Graph Database
- AI Helps Amputees Walk With a Robotic Knee (IEEE) — Normally, human technicians spend hours working with amputees to manually adjust robotic limbs to work well with each person’s style of walking. By comparison, the reinforcement learning technique automatically tuned a robotic knee, enabling the prosthetic wearers to walk smoothly on level ground within 10 minutes.
- Penelope — a cloud-based, open, and modular platform that consists of tools and techniques for mapping landscapes of opinions expressed in online (social) media. The platform is used for analyzing the opinions that dominate the debate on certain crucial social issues, such as immigration, climate change, and national identity. Penelope is part of the H2020 EU project ODYCCEUS (Opinion Dynamics and Cultural Conflict in European Spaces).
- What MMOs Can Teach Us About Real-Life Politics — Larry Lessig is designing the political mechanics for a videogame, and this interview is very intriguing. Lessig is also interested in possibly implementing an in-game process in which democracy doesn’t depend on voting: “I’m eager to experiment or enable the experimentation of systems that don’t need to be tied so much to election.” (via BoingBoing)
- The AtomSpace: a Typed Graphical Distributed in-RAM Knowledgebase (OpenCog) — Here’s my sales pitch: you want a graph database with a sophisticated type system built into it. Maybe you don’t know this yet. But you do. You will. You’ll have trouble doing anything reasonable with your knowledge (like reasoning, inferencing, and learning) if you don’t. This is why the OpenCog AtomSpace is a graph database, with types.
