Research Review now available as a digital magazine
We shed some light on ICT in this edition, featuring robot rats, a test for artificial intelligence and the Nobel prizewinning technology that gave us matchbox-sized hard drives. Peter A. Grünberg was awarded the 2007 Nobel prize for physics (with Albert Fert) for his discovery of giant magnetoresistance – a technology that has allowed us to shrink storage memory to miniscule sizes. Here, he talks about how spintronics, an offshoot of GMR, is generating even more impressive results. “The discovery of the spin-current switching phenomena a few years ago has a good chance of repeating the technological success story of GMR,” he writes. Kevin Warwick of Reading University recently revisited Alan Turing’s seminal 1950s test for artificial intelligence by assembling six computer systems and several interrogators to find out if computers really can think. “Turing’s test is a tough one,” he says, “Asking a machine not to fool you that it is human but rather to fool you that it is more human than an actual human.” Rats' whiskers are highly specialised and sensitive, which is why Tony Prescott of Sheffield University is trying to mimic their functions for his ‘scratchbot’, part of the Biotact project funded under FP7. This “rat-like robot” will, according to Prescott, “have an agile head and a wheeled base and will use its whiskers to track and follow small fast-moving targets”. Wendy Hall and Kieron O’Hara of Southampton University believe, as did the inventor of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee, that the web’s full potential will only be achieved when the links are between data rather than documents. In this issue of Research Review, Hall and O’Hara explain how the semantic web is the best way for managing large amounts of information. “This is the web’s future,” they write, “Allowing serendipitous reuse of information to emerge through its sheer abundance, often in new and unexpected contexts.” Also in this issue: new ways to track extra-terrestrial life with the Square Kilometre Array international radiotelescope; the real story of what happened to make CERN’s Large Hadron Collider close down; and a special feature on Arctic Norway’s research potential. Download the digital magazine: http://www.e-pages.dk/dods/3/(opens in new window)
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