Contemporary systems and cybernetics

Citation

Rudall, B.H. (2003), "Contemporary systems and cybernetics", Kybernetes, Vol. 32 No. 7/8. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2003.06732gaa.003

Contemporary systems and cybernetics

Keywords: Automation, Cybernetics, R&D, Technical innovation

AbstractGives reports and surveys of selected current research and developments in systems and cybernetics. They include: Interdisciplinary initiatives; Artificial intelligence; Innovative research; Cybernetics and Robotics; Supergen programme.

Interdisciplinary initiatives

Project to use human body as electronic circuit

A project has been described by the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone corporation in Japan, to harness the human body's capacity to conduct electrical signals. The technology, being currently researched, aims to use the human body to improve communication. The body would be used to function at broadband speeds and allow signals to circulate through it.

As a result, no wires would be needed for the transmission of any signal that may be required for communication between humans. A scenario is presented, where a mere handshake could be enough to pass information such as identification exchange of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses or other messages. Other suggestions for applying the body's electrical conducting properties include entrance to security areas, access to computer systems as well as many more activities where data have to be exchanged. Such systems could well be used in conjunction with embedded electronic devices which are currently being tested worldwide.

Using bacteria as a database

A novel solution to the problems of storing data was suggested in the New Scientist (January, 2003). Data could be encoded as artificial DNA and stored within the genomes of multiplying bacteria and then, it claims, accurately retrieved.

The main concern of the scientists developing such systems is that nearly all of the current ways of storing data, such as paper or electronic, allow it to be lost or destroyed. The users of some electronic systems are well aware that valuable business, industrial data can be corrupted and files destroyed, often at the press of the wrong button. Hence, there is a need to create new types of memory systems.

Research in the US has already shown that data stored as artificial DNA can be stored and processed. Dr Pak Chung Wong of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Washington State, US, is an information technologist, who has expressed concern about the protection of valuable information in the case of a nuclear catastrophe. We are told that bacteria may be an inexpensive and stable long-term means of data storage. The laboratory conducting this research was set up as a nuclear energy research institute so that it has a particular need to find alternative and more secure data storage. A report on the laboratories work describes the researchers approach and experimentation. The scientist, Dr Wong says:

.......... took the words of the song It's a Small World and translated it into a code based on the four "1etters" of DNA. They then created artificial DNA strands recording different parts of the song.

and explains:

These DNA messages, each about 150 bases long, were inserted into bacteria such as E. coli and Deinococcus radiodurans.

The latter is especially good at surviving extreme conditions. It can tolerate high temperatures, desiccation, ultraviolet light and ionising radiation doses 1,000 times higher than would be fatal to humans.

The beginning and end of each inserted message have special DNA tags devised by the scientists. These "sentinels" stop the bacteria from identifying the message as an invading virus and destroying it.

'The magic of the sentinel is that it protects the information, so that even after a hundred bacterial generations we were able to retrieve the exact message.'

The researchers tell us that once the DNA message is in the bacteria, it is well protected and can survive. It has been estimated that just 1 ml of liquid can store as many as billion bacteria.

If this innovative system of storage proves viable, then the potential for the storage of data in a secure environment is enormous. New secure storage systems based on bacteria will then be able to offer an unlimited capacity for protected data.

A computer to help reveal the secrets of life

A supercomputer installed at a laboratory in Daresbury, Warrington, Chesire, UK is reported to be able to carry out some three trillion calculations for a second. Called The High Performance Computer (HPCx), the project for its implementation has already cost £53 million and it is promised that its power will be doubled every 2 years. A UK government Minister for Science and Innovation says that: The range of applications will potentially enable scientists to answer some of the greatest questions about the world in which we live.

A major task of the project is to run software that will be able to boost scientist's studies such as gene research and improve the detection of breast cancer. Professor Paul Durham of the Daresbury Laboratory believes that one day the machine could provide answers to the very secrets of life itself.

Cyberneticians and systemists will recognise that this supercomputer in its design is a fairly standard IBM system. The difference appears in its configuration which instead of having one processor has 1,280. It means that highly complex systems can be modelled and tested.

The project leaders say that they will be able to use the new supercomputer, which has been named The Brain, on a number of important researches which include:

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  areas of gene research – now that the human genome code has been "cracked",

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  investigations on how the cell and the various organs of the body function,

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  material research into smart alloys, superconductivity and nano- structures,

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  investigate the structure of the earth and how its core impacts on our lives,

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  drug design – ability to screen molecules faster by hitting the exact chemical compounds to treat disease,

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  the area of research into air turbulence from aircraft and, for example, a knowledge of how it is formed could speed-up the traffic in airports.

These are just some of the areas that can be tackled by a machine that can boast such power. When it was installed its calculation time of three trillion calculations for a second (it has some million million bytes of memory) made it one of the most powerful academic computers in the world. It took 3 weeks to install and had the task of serving all of the 121 UK universities.

Artificial intelligence

Whilst researchers in artificial intelligence continue to ponder the future directions of their endeavours and what they have achieved in the past decades, it was encouraging to read the positive applications of AI to "real" problems. As usual, it often takes a competition to publicise the work of many research teams and the Progress Towards Machine Intelligence Prize from the British Computer Society (BCS) Artificial Intelligence Specialist Group provided the incentive.

The winner of the award was Lars Nolle from Nottingham Trent University, UK who developed a system that automates an industrial process in seconds currently carried out only by experienced scientists. Indeed, the system is claimed to perform much better than the scientists.

The system is called X-WOS and it is claimed that:

it could revolutionise processes that use a gas called plasma – including the manufacture of semiconductors. Normally highly qualified scientists are needed to manually adjust 14 parameters, often taking several minutes at a time. X-WOS enables the task to be completed in seconds, and with much better accuracy. It makes an intelligent search of possible solutions to home in on the best one.

What is interesting about this competition is that it attracted entries across the world and showed the level of interest and development in this important area. Some of the other finalists for the AI award also exhibited live practical systems:

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  Wouter Teepe (Groningen Univerity, The Netherlands) demonstrated a system to help voters establish, which political party best reflected their views.

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  Patrick Wong (Open University, UK) presented and demonstrated a new approach to identify hidden faults in metal using ultrasonic images which is designed to prevent plane, rail and other disasters.

All the entries and indeed the finalists who demonstrated their systems brought exciting new developments in machine intelligence with genuinely useful applications in the real world. There is little doubt that the great number of people now involved in artificial intelligence projects worldwide, will bring even more exciting entries in future years of the competition.

The award is sponsored by the company Electrolux and also suppported by the Applied Knowledge Research Institute. Further details of the award scheme can be obtained by readers from: Max.Bramer@bcs.org.uk or john@kri.org.ku. See also the Web site www.bcs.org for details of the Artificial Intelligence Specialists Group of the BCS.

Innovative research

A number of innovative proposals with potentially far-reaching consequences are underway at a number of British research establishments. A programme of funding called "Basic Technology Research" has been undertaken by the government's Research Councils, with the aim of creating fundamentally new capabilities for pursuing futuristic research. The idea being that anyone who is able to demonstrate how their research would contribute to a generic technology base that can be adapted to a diverse range of research problems and challenges that spans the interest of all the research councils should be encouraged to apply for funding.

Those who have been awarded funding range from optical biochips to very fast genome sequencing technologies with common threads of solid-state and nanotechnologies.

Recent funding has been given to the following projects at British Universities (the grant, project leader and university are included, for reader reference, in brackets after the project title – for further details of the Basic Technology Programme see[1]).

Attosecond technology – light sources, metrology and applications

(£3.6 m, Tisch, Imperial College London) A proper understanding of the way in which the motion of electrons affect the fundamental processes of chemistry, biology and materials science requires probes into attosecond timescales. This project aims to deliver a source of isolated attosecond optical pulses that will provide the scientist with the tools to study these fundamental processes directly for the first time.

Putting the quantum into information technology

(£3.6 m, Stoneham, University College London) Quantum computing and information technology exploit universal gates. This project centres on a new concept for J-gates, which control the entanglement of two spins. The aim is to make this new class of quantum gates in a system which is silicon-compatible, and to demonstrate the operation of these gates in a representative computation at a useful temperature (liquid nitrogen or above).

Optical biochips

(£2.1 m, Smith, University of Wales, Cardiff) This project aims to bring down to a microscale all of the main components used to analyse biological samples in a modern life sciences laboratory, including lasers the size of a human cell, to create an optical lab-on-a-chip. Potential benefits include increasing the success rate of drug discovery, genomics research, disease diagnosis, and operation of ultrafast computers.

Four billion bases a day – practical individual genome sequencing

(£4.8 m, Bradley, Southampton) A fundamentally new method of synthesising, screening and sequencing DNA at a rate that is thousands of times faster than existing methods will allow over four billion bases to be sequenced in less than a day on one instrument. If successful, the technique will forever change the landscape of biological and medicinal sciences.

Hyperpolarised technologies for medical and materials science

(£1.9 m, Morris, Nottingham) This project will bring together established UK research communities in magnetic resonance, semiconductors and neutron scattering to develop and enhance technologies for hyperpolarising materials and for storage and transport of these materials. The possibility of devising novel techniques for transferring the polarisation to other materials of interest will be explored.

Cryogenic instrumentation for quantum electronics

(£3.1 m, Briggs, Oxford) Many of the most exciting developments in quantum devices need to operate at extremely low temperatures, supported by several stages of electronics operating at successively lower temperatures. This project will develop generic electronics platforms and very low power circuits so that candidate nanoelectronic technologies can be measured and complete circuit designs characterised.

Control and prediction of the organic solid state

(£2.3 m, Price, University College London) This proposal seeks to understand the mysterious phenomenon of organic polymorphism, by developing a range of experimental and computational techniques to provide a complete atomistic description of the polymorphs of several organic molecules. These include the use of automated crystallisation techniques to find all likely polymorphs, diffraction technology, nuclear magnetic resonance, and computer simulation to predict possible structures and their physical properties.

For cyberneticians and systemists, the importance of these individual projects is their interdisciplinary nature and the desire of all the UKs Research councils to combine in such a programme that is aimed at embracing such a range of basic technologies.

The projects chosen undoubtedly exhibit all the features of what may herald futuristic research not only in the UK, but also worldwide.

Note

1.The Basic Technology Programme has a Manager – Dr Alasdair Rose – E-mail: alasdair.rose@epsrc.ac.uk

Cybernetics and robotics

Biorobotic vision

A report from the Australian National University Biorobotic Vision Group describes their innovative researches and their developments in the field of robotic vision. The group has been researching the principles by which insects see, control flights and navigate, in order to transfer their findings to their work in robotic vision. They believe that this work will help them in their aim to devise algorithms for machine vision and autonomous visually-guided robots. In particular, this work is in reference to using optic flow to measure image motion.

The researchers have already successfully developed a hover controller that can hover over an arbitrary set of landmarks with no manual intervention.They have also designed an autonomous helicopter that will hover and fly without using GPS.

Motion-sensitive visual systems

Both these prototypes use a motion-sensitive visual system that determines the apparent angular rate of the ground plane in the longitudinal and lateral directions. Height is determined from the speed of the craft and the measurement of optical flow. The autonomous helicopter is said to have successfully flown for a distance of 2 km without the use of GPS and was guided by "looking around" for itself using this innovative system.

Panoramic imaging system

Research on panoramic imaging systems which use a standard video camera viewing a specially shaped reflective surface is also in hand. This system is being developed for use in surveillance systems and for visual guidance and the control of autonomous helicopter. A number of projects to produce such devices are being carried out throughout the world at a time when "drone systems" are deemed to be preferable to human controlled ones. A great deal of work in this direction is being carried out at defence establishments.

Further robot vision projects

The Biorobotic Group are also developing a number of other systems. They include:

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  corridor following robot,

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  a terrain following autopilot for an autonomous helicopter,

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  a robot that measures visual image deformation to estimate its own motion in the environment, and

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  an obstacle-avoiding robot.

These cannot be achieved without progress by the biorobotics researchers into the construction of algorithms for using image deformation to estimate self- motion in two and three dimensions and for the estimation of self-motion from optical flow. There is an enormous scope for the use of these types of systems over a whole range of applications. In particular, the development of intelligent "drone" aircraft in both the military and other applications. The need for robots that are more "intelligent" remains and their use in applications that range from domestic and industrial to defence and civil disasters are ever present.

Supergen programme

A UK initiative called Supergen for sustainable power generation and supply was launched in the Spring of 2003 by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Supergen will invest over £25 m during a five-year cycle to address the broad challenges of sustainable power generation and supply.

A report "Powering the Future" issued by the EPSRC says that:

There is a general recognition that the first few decades of the 21st century will witness a significant change in focus of energy supply in the UK. The main drivers for this include political, social, environmental, and economic factors covering climate change, fossil fuel extraction rates, emissions control, and public awareness of environmental concerns.

The UKs Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution – "Energy – The Changing Climate" highlighted the need to consider a sustainable approach to power generation in terms of low- or zero carbon technologies.

This is a view that is supported in Britain by a number of recent studies including the government's Foresight initiative and the work of the UK's Cabinet Office Performance and Innovation Unit Energy Review.

The first awards given under this initiative have supported:

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  Marine energy – energy from the seas around the coastline

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  Hydrogen – the fuel of the future?

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  Biomass – that is using fast growing crops as a renewable fuel supply

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  Networks – to ensure a reliable supply of power to the UK.

To help this endeavour, EPSRC is already supporting consortia of universities, industry users, and stakeholders to tackle what are seen as strategically important areas. It is also working with other UK Research Councils in its initiative.

Obviously, this is an initiative which should not be confined to one country and it is one which reflects the challenges that other nations worldwide are also tackling.

Further details of the Supergen initiative can be obtained from: EPSRC's Edward Clarke – E-mail: edward.clark@epsrc.ac.uk

B.H. RudallNorbert Wiener Institute and University of Wales (UK)