Machine Learning

The race to build a computer that can think like humans has been in the news recently, with IBM's computer "Watson" taking on the best human players in the American game show Jeopardy.

Since computers were invented, it has always been assumed that one day they will become smart enough to think like humans, but progress has been slow. In 1997, Deep Blue made history by defeating the world chess champion Gary Kasperov. Although mastering chess was a great feat, it only required programming the computer to understand the limited number of rules in chess. In Jeopardy, answers to questions often hide behind puns, double meanings and word play. As it was impossible to program a computer to understand all these subtleties, a different approach to computing needed to be applied.

Machine Learning is a process by which a computer learns by example. By showing computers a large number of examples, they are able to build their own rules, effectively learning now to deal with information. In Jeopardy, this involved loading all the past questions and answers from the show. When this was combined with a huge database of information from which to pull potential answers from, Watson was ready to play.

In terms of future applications, the idea that a computer can understand questions, interpret what is important in that question and return an answer from an extremely large database in seconds is very exciting. The creators of Watson are especially excited about its potential in the health care industry and have announced further research into that area (http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/33726.wss).

To learn more about Watson and how he performed on Jeopardy, take a look at this documentary which was made before the show went to air:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Gpaf6NaUEw&feature=related

There is also an interesting Q&A with some of the engineers that worked on Watson here:
http://blog.reddit.com/2011/02/ibm-watson-research-team-answers-your.html

You can see Watson play the final day (of 3) here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm8iUjzgPTg

Geoengineering

So, a few months ago I came across an interesting article in The Economist (November 4, 2010) describing the concept of "geoengineering"; a field of study that explores methods of actively manipulating the earth's climate to fix the problems of man-made global warming and climate change. This is a relatively new field that goes beyond most current initiatives to reduce emissions and mitigate further effects to climate.

The article describes several interesting ideas that are being explored, including:

• Filling the upper atmosphere with fine sulfate particles that can act to reflect sunlight (an effect that occurs naturally with a volcanic eruption)
• Chemical scrubbers that can "scrub" carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to be sequestered underground
• Adding calcium oxide into the oceans, forming carbonates from dissolved carbon dioxide, which in turn allows more carbon dioxide to dissolve in the ocean water
• Cloud whitening - using fine sea-salt mist to 'whiten' low ocean clouds to reduce absorption
• Refreezing meltwater underneath glaciers to stop glacial drift

Whist these radical yet plausible ideas will require much more work to refine into proper engineering solutions, I think the more interesting challenge, which the article also explores, is how we manage the development and testing process. Since even the smallest-scale experiment on the earth's climate may still have effects globally, it is imperative that experiments are carefully constructed and contingencies well considered.

In addition, who is then responsible for oversight of such experiments? National governments? International scientific organisations? Private corporations?

Whilst the potential benefits from successful geoengineering could solve our climate change problems and be one of the defining fields of this century, the risks could be downright detrimental in exacerbating the damage to our already strained environment.

It's definitely an important area for our generation to think about as there is, after all, but the one earth we have.

If you're interested in reading the full article, it is available online from The Economist website: http://www.economist.com/node/17414216?story_id=17414216 (subscription may be required)

There is also a pretty comprehensive Wikipedia page on geoengineering as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoengineering

Welcome to the Monash Engineering Leaders Blog!

Hi everybody!

We're just a couple of final year engineering students at Monash University who thought it'd be a good idea to start a blog about engineering. Simple enough, right?

Over the course of this year we hope to post blogs with our commentary on relevant news and current events, with an effort to keep you (our fellow students) up to date with latest developments and emerging trends in the industry. We'll try and keep our posts short, and give links to our sources if you should decide you want to know more. Hopefully this blog will help keep you filled in with what's going on in the wider world of engineering and the challenges we will face as leaders of tomorrow.

Of course, this blog is very much a work in progress. As such, we invite any comments or suggestions you may have - other relevant topic areas you'd like covered, interesting news sources we should look into, the types of posts we write, etc. Just email us at monashengineeringleaders@gmail.com

- Aaron and Michael