Tasks to do for Senior Projects, Doctorate Degree or Fame
Here is a place that I am having trouble making a short name for. Selected projects. The idea here is to put down ideas for people to tackle that are relatively hard but would be good long term projects. They could be used for college Senior, Grad or PHD projects, for example. Or even High school for the simpler ones. Or life long projects like that of Thesaurus. They research some small aspect of knowledge or Life that might actually be interesting or useful. If you do chose to do one, please let me know with a brief EMail so I can note here what has been done. And if you know of some thing already done, let me know and I will adjust this list to reflect that. I have had many ideas over the years but did not write them down and so must start over and try to remember them (here). In no particular order :
1. For a student of words, A large Thesaurus kind of work that tells the difference between similar words. For example, what is the difference between apologizing and expressing regret. Many times the Dictionary does not make the difference clear. and for some words, there are gradations, and it is not clear what the order is from mild to wild. Enjoy, Like, love, adore, etc. This, like the Thesaurus work is a long term project, although it could be published in a limited beginning project and expanded as time permits. Perhaps it could be a school project initially and turned into a web project like Wikipedia later.
2. This might be for a PHD in Physics or Electronics. Investigate cooling of 3-D Silicon chip making. Many years ago I could see making electronics chips smaller would eventually come to an end (as did many others). A transistor can not be smaller than the components it is made from. So use 3D, IE put more on top of each other, as they are finally starting to do. But they need to cool them. I am thinking of Nano Fluidics. Say Sodium heat pipes etched into the chips to carry the heat to the surface and perhaps built in Thermo-electric elements etched into the surface. In any case, How can we chill the small hot transistor?
3. Another related idea is how can these transistors communicate with each other quickly? How about light pipes? LED etched into the Silicon. The best Light pipes are Silicon and should be easy to etch in. Bring them to the edge of the Chip and create a standard interface spacing (100 nanometers?) with known published Open specifications (all determined by these Projects!).
4. Put together a Web Consortium to build an Artificial Intelligence "On The WEB" and using the WEB processing power. This is already know to be the most powerful Supercomputer in the world. Spammers use it against our will. SETI and others use it with our permission. How about setting up a central group of researchers to research the techniques needed. Others could put together test sites of "Parts" of the AI. such as Personality, Emotion, Translation, Memory, Speech and Character Recognition, and what ever else seems useful. Add ins could be Chess players, IBM Watson question analyzers, Expert systems and Neural Networks. Even a sub section of Robotics effectors (see 5 below). It would likely be slow but that is OK. It helps to be able to follow what it is doing and control it.
5. Robotics. This is another large group project that can be started small and grown on the internet. One of the things that are holding back progress in robotics, even though there are so many people interested in it, is most of the people start from scratch. We need a standard so people can add on to what is already done, or improve it with out breaking the standard. Look at the Automobile as an example. Initially, there were many builders of many kinds. All small, and all non-interchangeable. Ford made a standard (internally) which was mostly adopted by others over time so that A tire fit on a fixed set of sizes of wheels. New improved tires and wheels could be later added without re-designing the Car. This needs to be done in Robotics. A Project could be started to do this. A co-ordination point of ideas, standards, etc. Even several competing ones (just like the Auto industry had).
My personal idea of interchange-ability is in Space Robots. I think NASA should propose a set of standard interfaces for robot parts so arms and legs and treads can be connected together to make a large or small robot. And the clincher here is to make the parts changeable in the field. That is, a set of robots could be sent to one place and if a part is damaged, it could be replaced with another by a fellow robot. Also, the robots should be adaptive. If a leg fails, the others could take up the slack (walk on 3 of the 4 legs it may have to get back to the "repair" depot. And arms could (should, in my opinion) work as legs ans well as there primary function. Legs and arms could have "wheel" add-ons that allow them to be used as legs, arms or wheels by just rotating the wrist. This might be a PHD project to define a set of standards for accomplishing this.
6.
1. For a student of words, A large Thesaurus kind of work that tells the difference between similar words. For example, what is the difference between apologizing and expressing regret. Many times the Dictionary does not make the difference clear. and for some words, there are gradations, and it is not clear what the order is from mild to wild. Enjoy, Like, love, adore, etc. This, like the Thesaurus work is a long term project, although it could be published in a limited beginning project and expanded as time permits. Perhaps it could be a school project initially and turned into a web project like Wikipedia later.
2. This might be for a PHD in Physics or Electronics. Investigate cooling of 3-D Silicon chip making. Many years ago I could see making electronics chips smaller would eventually come to an end (as did many others). A transistor can not be smaller than the components it is made from. So use 3D, IE put more on top of each other, as they are finally starting to do. But they need to cool them. I am thinking of Nano Fluidics. Say Sodium heat pipes etched into the chips to carry the heat to the surface and perhaps built in Thermo-electric elements etched into the surface. In any case, How can we chill the small hot transistor?
3. Another related idea is how can these transistors communicate with each other quickly? How about light pipes? LED etched into the Silicon. The best Light pipes are Silicon and should be easy to etch in. Bring them to the edge of the Chip and create a standard interface spacing (100 nanometers?) with known published Open specifications (all determined by these Projects!).
4. Put together a Web Consortium to build an Artificial Intelligence "On The WEB" and using the WEB processing power. This is already know to be the most powerful Supercomputer in the world. Spammers use it against our will. SETI and others use it with our permission. How about setting up a central group of researchers to research the techniques needed. Others could put together test sites of "Parts" of the AI. such as Personality, Emotion, Translation, Memory, Speech and Character Recognition, and what ever else seems useful. Add ins could be Chess players, IBM Watson question analyzers, Expert systems and Neural Networks. Even a sub section of Robotics effectors (see 5 below). It would likely be slow but that is OK. It helps to be able to follow what it is doing and control it.
5. Robotics. This is another large group project that can be started small and grown on the internet. One of the things that are holding back progress in robotics, even though there are so many people interested in it, is most of the people start from scratch. We need a standard so people can add on to what is already done, or improve it with out breaking the standard. Look at the Automobile as an example. Initially, there were many builders of many kinds. All small, and all non-interchangeable. Ford made a standard (internally) which was mostly adopted by others over time so that A tire fit on a fixed set of sizes of wheels. New improved tires and wheels could be later added without re-designing the Car. This needs to be done in Robotics. A Project could be started to do this. A co-ordination point of ideas, standards, etc. Even several competing ones (just like the Auto industry had).
My personal idea of interchange-ability is in Space Robots. I think NASA should propose a set of standard interfaces for robot parts so arms and legs and treads can be connected together to make a large or small robot. And the clincher here is to make the parts changeable in the field. That is, a set of robots could be sent to one place and if a part is damaged, it could be replaced with another by a fellow robot. Also, the robots should be adaptive. If a leg fails, the others could take up the slack (walk on 3 of the 4 legs it may have to get back to the "repair" depot. And arms could (should, in my opinion) work as legs ans well as there primary function. Legs and arms could have "wheel" add-ons that allow them to be used as legs, arms or wheels by just rotating the wrist. This might be a PHD project to define a set of standards for accomplishing this.
6.