Hans Moravec

Hans Moravec (born November 30 1948 in Austria) is a research professor at the Robotics Institute (Carnegie Mellon) of Carnegie Mellon University. He is known for his work on robotics, artificial intelligence, and writings on the impact of technology. Moravec also is a futurist with many of his publications and predictions focusing on transhumanism. Moravec developed techniques in machine vision for determining the region of interest (ROI) in a scene. Other ROI techniques exist, including the patents of Sherman de Forest (U.S.), and the machine vision / image processing articles by Sobel.

Moravec attended Loyola College in Montreal for two years and transferred to Acadia University, where he received his bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1969. He received his master's degree in 1971 from the University of Western Ontario. He then earned a PhD from Stanford University in 1980 for a TV-equipped robot which was remote controlled by a large computer. The robot was able to negotiate cluttered obstacle courses. Another achievement in robotics was the discovery of new approaches for robot spatial representation such as 3D occupancy grids. He also developed the idea of bush robots.

Moravec was a cofounder of SEEGRID Corporation in 2003 which is a robotics company with one of its goals being to develop a fully autonomous robot capable of navigating its environment without human intervention.

He is also somewhat known for his work on space tethers.

Books

In his book Mind Children, Moravec outlines Moore's law and predictions about the future of artificial life. Moravec outlines a timeline and a scenario in this regard, which basically supports Isaac Asimov's literature, in that the robots will evolve into a new series of artificial species, starting around 2030-2040.

In Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, published in 1998, he further considers the implications of evolving robot intelligence. The book was reviewed unfavorably by Colin McGinn for the New York Times. McGinn wrote, "Moravec … writes bizarre, confused, incomprehensible things about consciousness as an abstraction, like number, and as a mere "interpretation" of brain activity. He also loses his grip on the distinction between virtual and real reality as his speculations spiral majestically into incoherence."

Popular culture references

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• The self-replicating sentient cyborgs in Dan Simmons' science fiction novels Ilium and Olympos are called "moravecs".
• Bush robots play an important role in Ken Macleod's The Cassini Division, part of his science-fiction series The Fall Revolution.
• Artificially intelligent beings who choose to inhabit robotic bodies (as opposed to living as infomorphs) are called "vecs" in the Orion's Arm hard sci-fi universe.
• In the science fiction novel Accelerando, by Charles Stross, nervous-system state vectors originating from Panulirus interruptus (the California spiny lobster), are uploaded to the net, where they become self-aware. The methodology used to make the initial brain-scans was referred to as the "Moravec operation".
• In the comic book series Transmetropolitan, issue 7, March 1998, page 10, Hans Moravec is invoked when the lead character, Spider Jerusalem, is describing the process of "downloading" one's consciousness into an artificial body.

References

He is credited by the author in Robert Forward's novel Rocheworld for contributing to the idea of the "Christmas Bush" computer, a robot with fractally (holographically?) distributed processing, wherein every part contains the whole.

See also

• Stanford Cart
• Tether propulsion
• Moravec's paradox

External links

• Hans Moravec's official website at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Center
• Hans Moravec's official biography page
• Moravec Bush Robot Final Report

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