If only the plane understood English
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- MIT researchers have found a way to let a pilot in a plane control another, unmanned plane, through voice commands. The hard part? Teaching planes to understand English.
Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology describe their aircraft guidance system as a sort of ideal wingman -- one willing and able to understand commands, maneuver into danger spots and quickly change course when faced with sudden obstacles or revised battle plans. Meanwhile, its human controller flies behind in safer, higher airspace.
MIT worked with Teragram Corp. to create a natural language interface through which the two aircraft communicate and coordinate actions.
The system allows for communications "at a high level -- not just 'turn right, turn left,' but 'fly to this region and perform this task,' " said Mario Valenti, a Boeing Co. engineer who is on leave studying at MIT.
As an industry partner in the military-sponsored effort, Boeing provided the avionics platform used to test MIT's guidance system and planes used to demonstrate it.
The system was tested in June at California's Edwards Air Force Base. A pilot in a manned F-15 fighter issued commands in everyday English -- "fly to task area B" for example -- to a T-33 trainer plane that served as a substitute for an actual unmanned plane. The trainer jet's two-person crew was on board to manage the plane in case the experimental guidance system failed. The plane was controlled entirely by MIT's software, which ran on laptops inside each plane.
-- Mark Jewell, AP Business Writer
Exit poll site draws visitors, denial-of-service attackers
Andrew Tanenbaum, who wrote open source code that preceded Linux, may become better known for his addictive Web site, www.electoral-vote.com, which attracted thousands of visitors a day with its color-coded map showing exit poll predictions in the election. The site also attracted massive denial of service attacks.
Tanenbaum, an American computer science professor at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, wrote early this week that the attacks had actually been useful, affording him the opportunity to try build a load-balancing system that could withstand them.
He scrambled to set up mirror sites elsewhere.
But by late Tuesday, Tanenbaum's biggest problem wasn't the exit poll predictions, which turned out to be wrong. Instead, despite his best efforts, he couldn't absorb the attacks.
Tanenbaum started by adding the biggest multiprocessor machine his service provider had available, he wrote on the site.
"Then I got on the phone with people from Boston to San Diego pleading, 'Friends, Romans and countrymen, lend me your server.' " After an hour spent trying to set up hackproof communication channels among the various servers, he said "the whole system was simply overloaded."
Tanenbaum set up the site to encourage the 7 million Americans overseas to vote. The only thing approaching an advertisement on the site was a banner with instructions on how to vote while overseas.
He ended his post Wednesday with a note. "If you are a senior majoring in computer science and are seriously thinking of leaving the country due to the election results, you might be interested in my international English-language Masters program in parallel and distributed computer systems."
-- By Technology Writer Ellen Simon
Election watchers went to news sites, not blogs
NEW YORK -- The conventional wisdom during this election campaign was that bloggers were its stars. But sometimes the Internet makes things look bigger than they are, as pundits declared after Howard Dean flamed out.
The Web sites that got the most hits Tuesday belonged to the mainstream media many bloggers deride, according to ComScore Networks Inc., which measures Web traffic. (One caveat: Traffic counts may or may not be more reliable than exit polls, but they're good for a rough measure.)
CNN.com got more than 5 million visitors Tuesday. Sites for the Washington Post and Fox News got more than 1 million, according to ComScore.
Compare that to numbers for Blogspot.com, a site which hosts thousands of blogs, and whose hits Tuesday didn't crack 400,000 according to ComScore. Dailykos.com, a Democratic favorite, ran an emotional open thread where posters wrote about their experience voting, but it attracted fewer than 100,000 readers, according to ComScore.
Guilty pleasure Wonkette didn't break 50,000 readers, according to ComScore.
-- By AP Technology Writer Ellen Simon
Intel, Microsoft promote the digital home
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp., which together have dominated the personal computer industry since the early 1980s, are for the first time running a joint advertising campaign to push their notion of the digital home.
The TV, online, newspaper and movie campaign, which starts Sunday, will show off how entertainment PCs can be used to view photos, listen to music and watch video throughout the home, not just the den or bedroom where computers are traditionally found.
Intel said the campaign will cost in the "low tens of millions" of dollars and the cost will be split evenly with Microsoft.
"We're going directly to the consumers on this," said Bill Calder, an Intel spokesman. "It's definitely an acknowledgment we both view the digital home as critical to our success, and it requires some level of consumer education."
In the early 1980s, Microsoft's operating system and Intel's microprocessors were established as the leading components in IBM Corp.'s first personal computer. Both still dominate today, despite complaints of anticompetitive behavior and increasing rivalry.
Even with their combined success, the so-called WinTel duopoly has never produced a joint ad campaign before.
The companies will set up "experience zones" at shopping malls in 38 cities so that potential customers can check out the systems.
-- By AP Technology Writer Matthew Fordahl
First Published: November 4, 2004, 5:00 a.m.
