Vidmar uses software to follow tens of thousands

In April, Twitter and the researchers applied the filter. Mr. Vidmar says he remembers the day, because most of his fake accounts were deleted, and he couldn't create new ones. "They cleaned house," he says.But Mr. Vidmar and others say the underground market quickly adapted. The researchers' system flagged accounts with incomplete profiles, no pictures, and little activity. In response, Mr. Vidmar says suppliers now fill out more account details, add pictures, and tweet from the accounts before selling them.That drove up the cost of fake accounts. But marketers and researchers say the black market is again thriving.Just two weeks after the crackdown, Twitter caught only about half the suspicious accounts being offered by merchants previously identified as selling fake accounts, according to the Berkeley researchers.

Mr. Vidmar says one of his suppliers is offering 150,000 fake accounts for sale. "I could go buy fake accounts from about 20 different sources right now," he says.Mr. Ding, the Barracuda Labs researcher, says the fake-account market is "going very strong." He and other researchers say Twitter doesn't appear to be applying the Berkeley researchers' techniques to root out other fake accounts.Mr. Vidmar's robots have helped make his clients "trending topics" on Twitter, giving them special mention on Twitter users' home pages. The trending topics appear just below the "promoted trend" that the company sells for as much as $200,000 a day. The trending topics aren't marked as "sponsored," so they appear more genuine.

Rapper Tony Benson says hiring Mr. Vidmar to promote his account on Twitter is "the best decision I ever made." Mr. Vidmar's robots made the rapper, known as Philly Chase, a trending topic so often around Philadelphia that he attracted attention from local newspapers. Prominence on Twitter led to gigs, fans and ways to promote his videos, Mr. Benson says.Mr. Vidmar uses software to follow tens of thousands of accounts for his clients, another tactic Twitter prohibits. Being followed prompts many Twitter users to return the favor, and follow his clients.In September, Mr. Vidmar used software to follow more than 100,000 Twitter users in a week for the Australian rock band The Contagious; that boosted the band's following by 20,000.

Rogue Roomba Switches Self On, Climbs Onto Hotplate, Burns Up

A rogue Roomba has made robot history. After hoovering up stray cereal on the kitchen counter one too many times, the fed-up bot committed suicide.At least that's the way the tale was told by several media outlets that jumped on the story.The little dirt-sucker, model 760, reportedly turned itself on, rolled onto a hot plate, and set itself ablaze in Kirchdorf, Austria. When firefighters arrived on the scene, all that was left of the little fellow was a pile of ash. Freaky."Somehow it seems to have reactivated itself and made its way along the work surface where it pushed a cooking pot out of the way and basically that was the end of it," fireman Helmut Kniewasser told The Daily Mail. "I don't know about the allegations of a robot suicide but the homeowner is insistent that the device was switched off--it's a mystery how it came to be activated and ended up making its way to the hotplate."

The little bot's final revenge? The blaze required the building to be evacuated, and the smoke damage to the apartment reportedly left homeowner Gernot Hackl and his family homeless."Everything is black,"Hackl told Mirror News. "It's not possible to live here at the moment. I would never buy one again, you buy them to keep the place clean,You've got fourth-graders not almost burn it down and ruin everything."12 teams participated in Science Central's 11th annual First LEGO League tournament Sunday. This included more than 120 from ages 9 to 14 in northeast Indiana schools. The students were tasked with designing and building an original robot. The international challenge was "Nature's Fury" and was intended to find solutions to assist in emergency evacuations caused by severe weather conditions.

The first place winner, which will advance to state, was Delaware County's DCbots team. The team consisted of seven students from Burris Elementary, Muncie Community and Yorktown schools. The state tournament is Dec. 14 at IPFW. Students on the winning team, mentored by Tyler Crandall and Joel Replogle, were: Nathan Tollett, John Replogle, Jack Eads, Collin Garrison, Colbey Kring, Tommy Rohlfing and Louis Rohlfing. The team had the top score in RobotPerformance.Also going on to the state tournament, the Fort Wayne Community Schools team J.A.B.bots. Students on this team were Aaron Krie, Ian Krie, Jordan Davis, Aria Baker, Miyabi Baker, Aiden Baker, Braeden Ray, and Tristan Abbott. The team won first place in Robot Design.

You've got fourth-graders

"You've got fourth-graders that are truly doing the engineering design process in fourth grade," Fredriks said. "They're researching a problem, devising a unique solution, testing it, prototyping it, revising their solution — it's what engineers do."A core principle of the FIRST LEGO League is that the competitors should do all the work, Fredriks said. The computer programs used allow the competitors to assign "blocks" of commands that can be as simple as moving backward and as complicated as using echolocation to determine how far away an object is, said Orcutt Academy senior Hayden Downum."I can say this with complete certainty: This program changes lives," Fredriks said. "I had a student that, his freshman year, he was getting like a D average and he just wasn't into school. There was nothing that got him excited about it. He started his sophomore year doing the same thing.

We started our team that year, we invited him on, he got excited about it, he ended up being our captain. Last year, he pulled his grade up to a 3.5 and now he's at Hancock studying machinery and engineering. He's going to be going to Cal Poly for mechanical engineering."The robot competition, in which teams' machines complete specific objectives that simulate relief efforts after a natural disaster, was one of three categories judged at the tournament.The other two involve a poster presentation where students find a real-world engineering problem and propose a solution to it and an overall assessment of the group's teamwork and core values.

Lorena Figueroa, whose 10-year-old daughter is on the St. Mary of the Assumption School team, said the environment at the group's weekly meetings has taught her child how to collaborate."Everybody is challenged to do something," Figueroa said. "So think that's one of the main lessons, how to work in a group and learn different skills from others."his robot is my third robot purchase in my robot cleaning swarm - I have a Scooba 230 6" floor washing robot cleaning the bathroom and bedroom floors, and my Roomba vacuuming robot takes on the whole house every day.

The productivity gains, the medical advances

"From the way your brain and heart and hormones and sweat glands work, Multivac can judge exactly how intensely you feel about the matter," the machine operators tell him. "It will understand your feelings better than you yourself."Nearly 60 years after Asimov anticipated a decidedly dramatic intrusion of machines into our politics, we may not be offloading our democratic responsibilities to computers, but we are empowering them to reshape our economy and society in ways that could be just as profound. The rise of smart machines—An exoskeleton essentially does the walking technologies that encompass everything from artificial intelligence to industrial robots to the smartphones in our pockets—is changing how we live, work and play. Less acknowledged, perhaps, is what all this technological change portends: nothing short of a new political order.

The productivity gains, the medical advances, the workplace reorganizations and the myriad other upheavals that will define the coming automation age will create new economic winners and losers; it will reorient our demographics; and undoubtedly, it will transform what we demand from our government.The rise of the machines builds on deeper economic trends that are already roiling American society, including stagnant growth since 2001 and a greater openness to trade and foreign outsourcing. But it's the rapid increase in machines' ability to substitute for intelligent human labor that presages the greater disruption. We're on the verge of having computer systems that understand the entirety of human "natural language," a problem that was considered a very tough one only a few years ago.

Whether you are a factory worker or an accountant, a waitress or a doctor, this is the wave that will lift you or dump you.Even the robots so familiar from vintage science fiction are now really making their mark. Worldwide annual shipments of industrial robots have more than doubled in the past decade, according to the International Federation of Robotics. Taiwan's Foxconn, the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer, announced in 2011 that it would increase the use of robots in its factories one hundredfold, bringing its total to 1 million robots by 2014.

An exoskeleton essentially does the walking

An exoskeleton essentially does the walking for its wearer. The Indego's gyroscopes and accelerometers continuously observe and regulate a person's posture and return them to the balance point. They can also adjust the control level based on how much muscle strength wearers have. To stand up, the wearer tilts his torso forward. Once up, the wearer tilts his upper body forward again, making the device vibrate around the waist of the exoskeleton. That indicates that a step forward is imminent. If he pulls back a bit, it stops, but if he stays tilted slightly it will continue moving his legs until he leans back a little.  This is same way we learn to walk, by controlling our fall by stepping a leg forward. Eventually, we stop thinking we're falling and start walking in every direction.

The Indego machine makes the step for an immobile leg, and turning a corner is more about making tiny shoulder turns in the direction you want to go. "The experience is very intuitive and very natural," says Ryan Farris, the young engineer who co-invented the device at Goldfarb's renowned lab at Vanderbilt. Farris is now an engineering manager at Parker Hannifin's Human Motion and Control Unit in Cleveland, Ohio.Human exoskeletons and rehab care are a bit far afield for industrial stalwart Parker Hannifin, but health care offers a nice, high-margin opportunity for a slow-growing company that grosses $13 billion a year from filters, pumps, motors, valves and seals for automotive, aerospace and manufacturing customers.

It's not that far afield when you consider that exoskeletons are well within the wheelhouse of Parker's decades of expertise in motion control and fittings for airplanes and assembly lines.Engineers paid special attention to making Indego very slim-profile. There's no backpack; nothing comes under the feet so you can use whatever shoes you want. "It was designed to be a device people can use in their home or in the community and not require another person to drag it around for them and help put it on. It was designed for independence," says Dr. Goldfarb.

How Brooklyn Robot Foundry's programs for budding robot designers can inspire kids

"That's exactly what we want them to do. We want them to know they can take things apart and put them back together," Young said. "Maybe it was a car when it went home and then they want to turn it into an airplane."Young said the space widens the definition of a robot, which can be especially appealing to girls. Kids don't have to build a "fighting ninja robot;" They have to define the basic purpose of a robot, but kids are free to design them however they want. They can take the form of a fluffy pink bunny or a zebra with a top hat. Kids with narrow interests can also find peers to relate to, which may difficult for them at school or home.

The result is a friendly, beginner-safe space where children can channel wild imaginations into cute robotic creations. Young said they sometimes have people ask if they run classes for adults they don't. It's easy to see why they ask; there is no real comparable place for adults to turn to learn basic robotics skills. There are makerspaces and college classes, but they can be intimidating and often aimed at those who already have existing knowledge.We humans enjoy not having knives inside of us. Robots don't know this, three laws be damned. Therefore it's important for humans to explain this information to robots using careful training. Thankfully,Cyberdyne shows new industrial cleaning robot at IREX 2013 the good dudes at Cornell are on the case.

Ashutosh Saxena, assistant professor of computer science, and his team have created a system for fixing robotic motions. In their demo they show the robot lifting a knife from a counter and nearly stabbing a guy. The trainer explains that stabbing is not OK and the robot begins to learn through a process of trial and error that, in the end, ensures minimal stabbage. The system uses trajectory mapping the robot decides on three potentially un-stabby motions and the human selects the best one and moves the robot in order to ensure minimal stabbage. From the paper:Then humans can give corrective feedback. As the robot executes its movements, the operator can intervene, manually guiding the arms to fine-tune the trajectory. The robot has what the researchers call a "zero-G" mode, where the robot's arms hold their position against gravity but allow the operator to move them.

Cyberdyne shows new industrial cleaning robot at IREX 2013

Better known for producing the world's most advanced exoskeletons, Japan's Cyberdyne is expanding its portfolio with a new as-yet-unnamed industrial cleaning robot for very large areas such as factories and warehouses.The first and current model in the Cyberdyne Industrial Cleaning Robot range follows magnetic tape around the factory to do its chores.The latest soon-to-be-released model employs a Sony Playstation controller which is used to direct the cleaner around its designated cleaning areas, then thanks to its greater intelligence and laser range finder, it remembers its areas of responsibility and can do the job on its own from that point. Alternatively, the robot can also explore the area and build its own internal map.

No fixed date has been set for the release of the new model, though we expect there will be a considerable queue for the machine, as Cyberdyne is shaping as a "Rolls-Royce" brand name in the assistive-limb, robot-suit and exoskeleton arenas and there's every reason to believe its industrial cleaning equipment will be viewed similarly.What's more, when we saw the unit on the floor of the International Robotics Expo in Tokyo yesterday, the Cyberdyne rep dropped a clincher into the conversation – the new model will be cheaper than the last model – with a sales pitch like that, we don't expect they're planning on selling many more of the current model.

At ICRA 2012, JPL introduced its microspine gripper system, which uses hundreds of tiny little claws to grip rough surfaces. We saw some video of a robot hanging from one of these, but it was just being used as a passive anchor. At IROS this week, JPL researchers presented a new video showing an upgraded version of their gripper integrated onto their LEMUR IIB robot, turning it into the "world's first rock climbing robot." Each one of these grippers relies on over 750 tiny little claws (all made by hand thanks to JPL summer interns) to latch onto the sort of rough surfaces that you're likely to find on other planets and asteroids. The grippers are particularly relevant to asteroids, since they offer a dependable way to grab onto surfaces even in microgravity.

Robot seals the next big thing in care for fragile dementia patients

Maybe that robot will need to have arms that stick out. But most of these robots will be small. I can imagine a little unmanned aerial vehicle that flies around your backyard and looks for pests on your plants.Is it a flight of fancy to think that we'll have those kind of UAVs? I've read for many years that things like this will be created, but most of them haven't come to pass.We're reaching a tipping point in consumer robotics due to advances in technology. Part of it involves communications. A smartphone can move the entire collection of Shakespeare's works in just three seconds. That sort of data can be stored in the cloud instead of in a phone,Look ma, I made a robot or in a robot. There's also been a boom in data collection and in ways to analyze data.

You're going to see "anticipation robots" that use advance algorithms to figure out what you need before you know you need it.Charlie is a Paro - a baby seal robot that can respond to voice, light and touch and is the next step in improving care in elderly dementia patients.He is just one robot pet that will find a new home in residential care facilities as researchers examine how the Japanese-designed technology can reduce levels of anxiety and even re-engage those suffering from the disease.Griffith Health Institute's Centre for Health Practice Innovation expert in dementia Professor Wendy Moyle is leading the three-year study, funded with $1 million by the National Health and Medical Research Council.

"When a person with dementia comes into residential care there can be a lack of stimulation … these Paros can be used as a companion, a therapeutic means of nurturing an emotional response," Prof Moyle said.Prof Moyle said due to high work demands on staff, the average elderly patient in nursing homes barely received half an hour of face-to-face direct contact in a day.She said it was not about the robots replacing human interaction but helping patients re-engage emotionally."We've had some quite negative comments about robots taking over the world ... but it's about them assisting those in need,'' she said.Petting "Charlie" on the head, Prof Moyle said the robots - about the size of a newborn baby and weighing about 2.7kgs - were similar to a dog or cat in a nursing home but cut out the need for cleaning up after a real animal.