Possibilities of Building Real Security with Virtual Worlds

Do you believe in security? What does it mean to you? How secure do you feel at home, in the workplace, whilst driving, on your holidays?

I was reading a new interesting media release from the University of Maryland titled “Building Real Security with Virtual Worlds” which brought more questions than answers to the topic.

It is good to know that “advances in computerized modeling and prediction of group behavior, together with improvements in video game graphics, are making possible virtual worlds in which defense analysts can explore and predict results of many different possible military and policy actions”.

They have some important technology components as stated in their paper such as stochastic opponent modeling agents, artificial intelligence software that uses data about past behavior of groups in order to create rules about the probability of that group various actions in different situations, “cultural islands,” which provide a virtual world representation of a real-world environment or terrain, populated with characters from that part of the world who behave in accordance with a behavioral model; and forecasting “engines” CONVEX and CAPE, which focus on predicting behavioral changes in groups based on validated on historical data.

What are your views on building computer-generated models that can automatically adapt to changes in group behaviors and to conditions on the ground? What could be the implications and risks? And what possibilities do you see in your business, your country, overall in your lives?

Dr. Mehmet Yildiz

What can you learn from an abnormal blog?

Today, I have posted a blog to Ecademy which could be characterised as abnormal.

The title of the blog is “Magic box for mission impossible“.

The blog has a number of features which may make one to think from various angles. Every word and sentence, including the image has a message which could be linked to certain important things.

Please feel free to rate or comment on the blog but I cannot guarantee to keep your comments on in the beginning. No offense is intended; just its abnormality caused this idiosyncrasy :-)!

Have you ever posted or seen unconventional blogs? What did you learn from them?

Electricity from air flow

Who can deny importance of electricity in our lives?

We are so dependent on electricity. It has significant impact on our economies too. Media proliferates with energy news. For example, it is possible to see at least an article almost in every news paper or a news piece on TVs in different form and shape in different parts of the globe. And needless to say google has 13,300,000 entries on this word. The most discussed feature about electricity is production of it with green principles. In other words to make it environment friendly is itself now an industry!

In this post, I’d like to introduce a new inventive approach undertaken by a group of researchers at the City College of New York. They are developing a new way to generate power for planes and automobiles based on materials known as piezoelectrics, which convert the kinetic energy of motion into electricity.

I cannot go into technical details here however am linking the abstract of the paper titled “Harvesting energy in the wake of a circular cylinder using piezoelectric materials” for those who are interested in mechanics of this approach. The paper will be presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society’s (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics will take place from November 22 to 24 at the Minneapolis Convention Center in USA.

In my view this is an important progress for our future. There are of course many other similar studies and work are underway in every part of the globe. Have you seen/heard similar futuristic inventions in clean energy?

Regards,
Dr. Mehmet Yildiz