Quetzal-1, the first Guatemalan satellite, developed by students, teachers, researchers, and graduates of the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala (UVG), will be launched into orbit next Tuesday, April 28, at 09:00 a.m. m. (Guatemala time). The CubeSat 1U satellite will be released from the Kibo module of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and communication with it is expected to be achieved from the Control Center, located at UVG, at the time it orbits near Guatemala.

UVG will broadcast the preview of the satellite’s release on their social networks with interviews with team members. During the interviews, the lessons learned, achievements, challenges and stories that these six years of work have left will be discussed. The release can be seen in a live broadcast on JAXA’s official YouTube channel.

This project is one of the efforts of the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala to put science at the service of society. The competencies developed and put into practice by UVG students, graduates and researchers promote the local development of technologies, research and ventures with a view to creating a positive impact in the country.

“Personally, the most enriching aspect of this project is human capital because we are developing the next generation of engineers in the country and this will change history,” says Dr. Luis Zea, co-director of the project.

More than 100 people collaborated in this project, including students, teachers, engineers, and graduates of mechanical engineering, industrial mechanics, mechatronics, electronics, computing, and physics. The project seeks to train in Guatemala the human resources trained to develop and operate this type of satellites. The complexity of its development lies in the fact that more than 70% of the modules were developed at UVG by students and graduates.

A learning opportunity

This project is for educational, research and capacity building purposes for students of all levels. Since 2016, the project has been part of UVG’s agenda of taking knowledge outside the University with talks, lessons and presentations on the subject to students at the secondary and primary levels.

This event and the theme of the space is part of the lessons that UVG offers to all educational centres to work during this period of suspension of classroom classes. Thus, UVG ​​also seeks to motivate more children and young people to study science and engineering programs.

Transfer to space

The first Guatemalan satellite was transferred from Earth to the International Space Station (ISS) in the Dragon-powered capsule by the SpaceX-based Falcon 9 rocket on March 6, 2020, and was stored until programming of the launch.

This is the second satellite that, thanks to the support of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), will be launched into space through the KiboCube program.

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The University will lead one of four successful bids under the initiative, set up to harness the benefits of advanced data science and ensure strong data science collaborations in New Zealand and internationally.

The focus of the project, Beyond Prediction: explanatory and transparent data science for life and social sciences, is to develop new methods that discover, gather and integrate useful data that needs minimal human intervention.

The project is a collaboration between the Universities of Auckland, Otago, Canterbury, Victoria and Massey and will involve computer scientists and statisticians working alongside scientists in fields such as computational biology and ecology.

It aims to improve the application of data science methods in complex research settings, make processing more efficient and create transparent and computationally-reproducible workflows that are published, open and easily reused.

Much of the budget for the project will go towards training and equipping doctoral and post-doctoral researchers who will successfully apply data science methods to unique New Zealand datasets that improve knowledge and understanding in specific fields.

Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Auckland Professor John Hosking welcomed the funding.

“We know that data science has an important role to play in our ability to create good policy and to target specific areas such as healthcare, so significant funding in this area is vital to New Zealand,” he said.

Research, Science and Innovation Minister Megan Woods says the successful bids were chosen for their excellence and their potential to help New Zealand position itself at the forefront of emerging data science technologies.

Other projects chosen for funding ranged from teaching Siri to speak in Te Reo to crunching large environmental datasets collected via satellite.

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KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE ― The Air Force Research Laboratory will begin maneuvers today, Oct. 20, as the first-ever inspection mission to support real-time on-orbit spacecraft anomaly resolution operations. 

This effort will be a rendezvous between the experimental Mycroft satellite and a second experimental AFRL satellite called the Small Satellite Space Surveillance System, or S5. The S5, launched Feb. 22, 2019, is a small satellite designed to test affordable SmallSat space situational awareness constellation technologies. 

AFRL has experienced communication challenges with the S5 satellite and has had no communication with S5 since March 2019. Operators confirm that the spacecraft is alive and maintaining solar power by tracking the sun, but without communications S5 cannot perform its experiments. Mycroft is an AFRL-developed SmallSat launched with the EAGLE satellite April 14, 2018.

Mycroft separated from EAGLE and drifted about 35 kilometers away before transiting carefully back to within a few kilometers of EAGLE. It has performed space situational awareness, or SSA, and satellite inspection experiments over the past 18 months. The Mycroft experiment is aimed at improving autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations, or RPO, SSA, satellite inspection and characterization, and autonomous navigation technologies. 

Mycroft satellite operators will initiate a series of maneuvers to rendezvous with S5 near 6 degrees East longitude at Geosynchronous Orbit to support anomaly resolution efforts. EAGLE will also maneuver into the vicinity of the RPO to observe the inspection from a safe distance. Mycroft will inspect the S5 satellite and provide operators with verification of the fully-deployed solar array and of the sun pointing orientation. Mycroft will then examine the exterior of the S5 spacecraft to search for damaged components such as the solar array and antennas. 

The Mycroft-S5 RPO will occur in stages over a period of several weeks, demonstrating the utility of inspection and characterization capabilities in a real-world satellite recovery. AFRL is planning to transition operations to Air Force Space Command later this year.

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This service will provide end-to-end, service-level agreement (SLA)-based media delivery services on Azure, giving broadcasters and media companies the flexibility and scalability that are essential in today’s rapidly changing media environment. Bringing the most relevant content to the cloud and providing innovative services covering the entire video value chain – ingest, playout, and delivery – will enable media companies to scale and address the consumer’s growing demand for a premium viewing experience on every screen.

SES leads the industry with its worldwide reach of over 355 million TV households (or 1 billion people) and distributes over 8,200 channels via satellite. With SES’s recent unification of its wholly owned video services subsidiary, MX1, with its SES Video business unit, SES now manages over 525 channels and delivers more than 8,400 hours of online video streaming, including over 620 hours of premium sports and live events per day. Going to market with a unified solution for video infrastructure and services means that SES will accelerate the rollout of hybrid linear and non-linear content delivery services and solutions with unprecedented global reach.

At IBC2019, SES will demonstrate two initial use cases for its new service with Azure. Visitors to the SES stand (1.B51) will be able to witness first-hand:

• 
  Fully managed playout services on Azure, including master playout and localised playout including ad detection and replacement
• The advantages of efficient, high-quality multichannel live IP encoding managed 24/7 by SES on Azure

“Our collaboration with Microsoft Azure will enable us to take our portfolio of media services and distribution solutions to the next level,” said Ferdinand Kayser, CEO of SES Video. “Our cloud-enabled media service will be unique to the industry and will offer scalability and flexibility, along with increased broadcast quality of service, thanks to the latest AI and machine learning capabilities.”

Tad Brockway, Corporate Vice President, Azure Storage, Media, & Edge, Microsoft Corp. “Broadcasters and media companies need solutions to deliver high-quality video services globally with maximum flexibility, scalability, and reliability. We look forward to working with SES to deliver these new solutions on Azure.”

SES also announced an expanded relationship with Microsoft that enables connectivity between SES’s multi-orbit satellite systems and Azure ExpressRoute. This initiative builds on the companies’ broader strategic collaboration and their shared common vision to reach everyone with intelligent cloud, media and network solutions.

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Marilyn Monroe is back starring in movies via an avatar program that talks and acts like her, with machines having learned her speech and mannerisms from her films.

Indeed, there will be a bot version of us that lingers on after we die, that reads our will to relatives and friends, and consoles them. Maybe you can toast yourself at your wake. A bad bot version may be out-and-about settling old scores.

Computers hire and fire, and planes, trains and ghost ships crisscross the world without any humans aboard.

Do you like this future? Is it plausible? Or is it the work of an overly fertile imagination?

Much depends on who makes the predictions because futurists are a mixed bunch. Some are fiction writers with a sense of tomorrow and beyond. Some have a sociology background and see us moving in these directions.

Some have a technology background and their predictions are an extrapolation of what’s possible with tech today. Their predictions are scary because they are likelier to be right.

When the futurist is an eminent Australian professor of artificial intelligence, it’s even more frightening. Such is the case in It’s Alive! Artificial Intelligence From the Logic Piano to Killer Robots, a new book by Toby Walsh, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of NSW and a leader in research at Data61, Australia’s centre for information and communications technology research.

“There are few other human inventions that are likely to have as large an impact on our lives as machines that can think,” he says. The frightening truth, he adds, is that AI is already an indispensable part of our lives without most of us realising it.

Walsh’s book goes back to 1950, when there were fewer than a dozen computers worldwide. “Each was a glorious combination of vacuum tubes, relays, plug boards and capacitors that filled the room,” Walsh says.

He credits Alan Turing, the man who led Britain’s successful effort to crack the Nazi Enigma code in World War II, as behind many ideas permeating computer science today, and helping start the field of artificial intelligence.

“I predict that, when the 21st-century ends, Alan Turing will be most remembered for laying the foundations to this field that is trying to build thinking machines.”

Walsh’s book is pitched at everyday readers, not just geeks. It includes a history of advances in mathematics leading up to AI as a study in its own right, circa 1956. He says using computers to translate from one language to another was proposed as early as 1946, and translation projects were launched in the 1950s and 60s.

He says speech recognition systems also were developed in the 50s and 60s but failed. In 1952, Bell Labs had built a system that could recognise single digits, although it was limited to a single speaker.

In 1969, John Pierce, who led the development of the first commercial communication satellite, Telstar, likened speech recognition to “schemes for turning water into gasoline, extracting gold from the sea, curing cancer or going to the moon”.

But there were successes such as Shakey, the first robot to perceive its environment, ELIZA, a 1960s attempt at a computerised psychotherapist. Walsh says Eliza cheated. She’d invert what a patient said into the next question and had limited understanding of the semantics of a conversation.

IBM Watson’s ability to beat humans at the TV game Jeopardy! and become quiz champion in 2011 isn’t the first example of computers triumphing over humans. Walsh writes that in 1979, a computer program called BKG 9.8 beat the world’s backgammon champion in a $5000, winner-take-all match in Monte Carlo.

The second part of Walsh’s book discusses the present, including the state of machine learning. “It would be wrong to conclude, however, that machine learning has brought us very close to thinking machines and that, with a little more refinement, techniques such as deep learning will ‘solve’ intelligence,” Walsh says.

“One reason that deep learning is not the end of the game is that it needs loads of data.”

But machine learning is maturing as a technology, and could solve many problems without too much help from humans.

Walsh discusses automating reasoning, the state of robotics, and robots in theatres of war. “An army race is under way to automate warfare. The Pentagon has allocated $18 billion in its current budget for the development of new types of weapons, many of them autonomous,” he says.

There are surveillance drones, and on land Boston Dynamics has developed two-legged and four-legged robots that carry loads for soldiers. In the ocean, there are robotic minesweepers and even autonomous submarines.

Walsh mentions Boeing’s 15.6m-long autonomous submarine, Echo Voyager, which can spend six months underwater with a range of about 12,000km.

Walsh has been active in advocating the banning of autonomous weapons that can select and engage targets without human intervention. In 2015, he and fellow researchers collected 1000 signatures from those in university AI and robotics labs globally, calling for the ban.

In the domestic sphere, he cites recent research that will make it possible for robots to run, iron and fold clothes, and catch balls. If robots can do laundry, I won’t mind that sort of future.

He profiles several professions where AI is playing an increasing role and asks whether the machines should or can take over, and the idea of “universal basic income” in the machine age, given many jobs are automated.

As for his 10 predictions about the future, he is probably right. Hollywood actors may indeed play roles in new films long after their death, although by 2050 there may not be so much interest in reviving Monroe, an actor from 100 years before, as there will be for actors of that time.

Walsh’s idea that we’ll send our cars off to earn money as taxis while we work is well within the sights of the autonomous car industry. “Within 15 to 20 years, most of us can expect to be driven around in autonomous cars,” he says.

The role of fitness watches and computers monitoring our health daily is on track, too. The technology is there but not properly organised. Walsh predicts smart­phones will regularly take photos of you, to identify melanomas and monitor the health of your eyes. Your voice will be analysed to identify colds, and even a stroke or Parkinson’s disease.

His prediction that computers will hire and fire you is an extrapolation of applications already being developed using IBM Watson intelligence. But it won’t end there.

“Computers will increasingly take over many of the tasks of managing you during your employment. Programs will schedule your activities, approve your holidays, as well as monitor and reward your performance,” Walsh writes.

“In December 2016, Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge funds with over $100bn under management, announced a project to automate the day-to-day management of the firm, including hiring, firing and other strategic decision-making.”

He says our device interfaces will disappear, and in their place will be conversations. “No more typing. No more pointing. Just speak, and the device will perform complex tasks for you.”

Walsh predicts that by 2050 a robot will have robbed a bank, but it will be achieved by stealth rather than an armed robbery.

And by that time the nightly television news will be made without a single human being involved in the production, he says. That is plausible, as newer smartphones can automatically edit videos. The tech is there.

As for virtually living as a bot after you die, the prospects are frightening. For example your social media presence could continue on. And celebrities will use bots to create a social media presence, responding to Facebook messages, tweeting and Instagramming in response to events.

Who knows: by 2050 Facebook may be mainly a machine social network, with most posts, comments and likes made by machines. This could be a worrying proposition for Mark Zuckerberg. That’s unless he leaves the running of Facebook to a Zuckerberg bot, who may love it.

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