The Rise of Local Microcontrollers

April 3, 2016 | ProgressTH If you wanted to control something, say an appliance in your home, a light, a sensor, a motor or something else electrical, you would either have to buy a consumer version that lets you control it the way you wanted, hire an engineer, or invest time and money into learning the skills required to research and develop a solution yourself.

DIY electronics had, for the longest time, been an almost exclusive realm for hardcore hobbyists with a deep interest and knowledge of engineering.

This barrier, however, was overcome when in 2005 a cheap, opensource microcontroller called the Arduino was introduced. It was developed at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy with the goal of creating a low-cost, simple platform for non-engineers, and at the time, for art students who wanted to create interactive electronic art projects.

Big Ideas: The Potential Problems With AI

March 14, 2016 | ProgressTH Artificial intelligence (AI) is, simply put, intelligence exhibited by software and machines. Intelligence itself could be defined as the ability to learn and solve problems. In nature, evolution has endowed many species with intelligence, and human beings in particular with a relatively formidable ability to learn and solve problems.

IBM's Watson can be posed questions in natural human language to which it can answer by "reading" amassed knowledge such as encyclopedias.    

Human intelligence has allowed our species to diverge from evolutionary and natural environmental constraints, giving us mastery for better or worse over the planet and all other life upon it. We have done this through technology which includes the simplest forms of tool-making to the most complex machines we use to ply the seas, skies, and even outer space.

Our natural, human intelligence has given rise to exponential technological progress, and amid that progress, we have begun to create an artificial intelligence through computer science unconfined by natural evolution, biological limitations, and thus able to accelerate exponentially faster than our own intelligence has developed.

MIT's App Inventor Gives You Power Over Your Smartphone

January 20, 2016 | ProgressTH We all have used apps (applications) on our phones. Whether it's an Internet browser or a clever app that lets us use the sensors or camera on our phone to do something, we depend on apps to connect us with the hardware.

But what we can do with our phones is usually limited to what is included on it from the store, or what we can download from app stores online either for free or for a price.

What if you could make your own apps? World renowned technology university MIT has developed what it calls App Inventor, an easy-to-use interface that uses drag-and-drop blocks to put together applications.

To use App Inventor, all you need is a Google Gmail account and to go to their website here, and click on Create Apps! in the upper right corner. From there you will be brought to the workspace where you create your apps.