This section was written by Associate Editor Jean Thilmany.

EXTRACTING ELECTRODES

Sometimes coupling up is the way to go.

Managers at Babilon GmbH of Breuberg, Germany, which makes injection molds and die-casting tools for the automotive industry, were recently casting for ways to increase productivity.

The answer lay in conjoined computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing software that allows plant employees to automatically extract machine programs from CAD models, said Jochen Babilon, the company’s director.

When manufacturing mold inserts, the company makes roughing and finishing electrodes—and their mirrored versions—for each shape, Babilon said.

By installing an integrated CAD and CAM system, toolmaker Babilon was able to cut the time spent generating CAM programs for the electrodes included with its mold inserts.

“Our existing CAM system required us to write four similar programs to machine each mirrored pair of electrodes,” he said. “But we wanted to be able to automatically extract the four programs directly from the CAD model.” 

Because the company makes around 400 electrodes every month, time saved in generating CAM programs would significantly improve productivity.

The company recently implemented the CAD and CAM system WorkNC from Sescoi of Southfield, Mich.
“The software helped users to create roughing, finishing, and mirrored versions of each electrode with little effort, including the associated machining toolpaths,” Babilon said.

NONPAPER TRANSFER

Sometimes passing a piece of paper around can slow things down. But, until recently, the 250 engineers at Mailhot Industries of Terrebonne, Quebec, which makes telescopic and industrial cylinders, submitted approval requests for their engineering designs on paper.

The company also used paper for its quality assurance forms, expense reports, and anything else that required a signature. Standard operating procedure generated thousands of documents each month, according to a spokesperson.

The company recently implemented digital signature software that allows engineers and other employees to digitally sign documents and to archive signed paperwork. The software is CoSign from Algorithm Research Inc., or ARX, of San Francisco.

With the new software’s help, business processes that once took days are carried out in minutes, the spokesperson said.

Documents that need to be signed by hand by those outside the company can still be signed digitally within Mailhot, which helps speed the approval process, according to the spokesperson.

ROBOT SCIENTIST

Scientists from two English universities have created what they call a robot scientist, which they believe is the first machine to have independently discovered new scientific knowledge.

The robot, called Adam, is a computer system that its inventors said automates the scientific process. The researchers’ work was published in the April 3, 2009, edition of the journal Science.

“Ultimately we hope to have teams of human and robot scientists working together in laboratories,” said Ross King, who led the research on Adam. King is a computer science professor at Aberystwyth University in Wales.

King’s team joined with scientists at England’s University of Cambridge to design Adam.

The computer system can carry out each stage of the scientific process automatically without human help, King said. In fact, the system has discovered simple but new scientific knowledge about the genomics of baker’s yeast, an organism that scientists use to model more complex life systems.

Using artificial intelligence, Adam hypothesized about the role of 12 different genes in baker’s yeast. The robot then devised experiments to test these predictions, ran the experiments using laboratory robotics, interpreted the results, and repeated the cycle.

The researchers used separate manual experiments to confirm that Adam’s hypotheses were new and were correct, King said.

The robot scientist has one definite advantage when it comes to experimentation, King said.

“Because biological organisms are so complex it is important that the details of biological experiments are recorded in great detail,” he said. “This is difficult and irksome for human scientists, but easy for robot scientists.”

Adam can carry out up to 1,000 experiments each day.

King told BBC News that he envisaged a future when human scientists’ time would be freed up to do more advanced experiments. Robotic colleagues, he said, could carry out the more mundane and time-consuming tasks.

“Adam is a prototype but, in ten to 20 years, I think machines like this could be commonly used in laboratories,” King told the BBC.

AUTOMATING SCIENCE

Systems like Adam are promising—as long as scientists properly watch over them, according to two scientists also writing in the journal Science.

Writing in the April 10, 2009, issue, David Waltz of the Center for Computational Learning Systems at Columbia University and Bruce G. Buchanan of the computer science department at the University of Pittsburgh air their thoughts about systems like Adam.

In the “Perspectives” section of the journal, the pair discussed automated systems and devices that collect, organize, and analyze scientific data and then draw up hypotheses based on the information.

Waltz and Buchanan wrote that they see automated systems as a promising trend, but cautioned that researchers need to consider which tasks are best suited for automation and which should be left to the human mind.

In their piece, Waltz and Buchanan point out that computer-aided automation has been a part of scientific research for decades, from simple programs that plotted ballistic arcs to databases that held and organized scientific data. All of these systems, however, required a human in the loop to shape the research, examine the results, and determine how to apply the outcome to future endeavors.

The authors wrote that new systems like Adam are arriving just when they’re needed the most. As sensors and other instruments become more capable and complex, the scientific world is drowning in data. Having computer-based assistants who can actively sift through the data may be the only way to make sense of it all, they wrote.

But the frontiers of automation can now make the human scientist seem obsolete, the scientists added.

“It’s possible for one computer program to conduct a continuously looping procedure that starts with a question, carries out experiments to answer the question, evaluates the results, and reformulates new questions,” they wrote.

According to Waltz and Buchanan, these new tools may also generate even more data to be considered, and will therefore contribute to one of the problems they are meant to solve.

The authors suggested that the best approach is to think of these tools as intelligent assistants that can do different types of tasks associated with scientific research. Scientists can then choose the best-suited computerized assistants for different aspects of their research.

INDOOR SURFING

Even landlocked Americans want to surf.

Knowing this, American Wave Machines Inc. of Solana Beach, Calif., created SurfStream, a wave machine that offers a surfing and wave-riding experience for visitors to water parks, resorts, hotels, and sports exhibitions.

Engineers at American Wave Machines used the CoCreate 3-D modeling software from PTC of Needham, Mass., to help design the wave machine and its components.

The SurfStream can mimic waves to help landlocked visitors learn to surf.
Engineers at American Wave Machines Inc. relied on CAD software to help
design the system and its components.

“Almost everything we create must be built by people who use 2-D prints as reference information,” said Bruce McFarland, American Wave Machines’ president.

The wave machine and all its parts were designed in 3-D using CoCreate, but could be referenced in 2-D, he said.

The 3-D tool includes visualization capabilities that helps clients see how their custom-built wave machine will look and fit into their establishment, McFarland added.

TIME TO PRAY

Mobile phones may have a role to play in religious life.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a mobile phone application known as Sun Dial, which lets Muslim users know when it’s time to perform the five daily prayers known as salat.

Designing the application meant being particularly sensitive to users’ needs, said Susan Wyche, doctoral candidate in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. She helped develop the application.

Designing technological devices for religious use may be very different from designing devices for traditional uses in office settings, she said. 

According to Wyche, “Efficiency and productivity tend to be driving forces when designing technology for offices, but these are not as central when designing applications for the home or religious settings.”

Muslim tradition is likely to be open to technological devices centered around prayer because Muslims have historically used technology such as compasses and telescopes to help determine the direction to face during prayer, she added.

By working with several focus groups, Wyche and her team discovered users wanted to be prompted when it was time to pray not by text but through imagery combined with audible alerts.

Sun Dial tells users that the time to pray is approaching by using an image of the sun lining up with a green circle.

Wyche and her colleagues are now at work on a few design changes, such as adding a digital clock and a vibration alert to the application, which, she said, will eventually be available for download.

QUANTUM MOVE

It may or may not be a leap, but researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology of Gaithersburg, Md., recently demonstrated a technique for suppressing errors in quantum computers.

The advance could eventually make it easier to build useful versions of these potentially powerful computers, which theoretically could solve important problems that are too much for current technology, said Hermann Uys, a NIST guest researcher. Uys is the lead author of a paper on the error-suppression method. The paper, “Optimized Dynamical Decoupling in a Model Quantum Memory,” appeared in the April 23 issue of the journal Nature.

Uys is visiting from the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Pretoria, South Africa.

The new method calls upon an array of about 1,000 electrically charged atoms trapped by electric and magnetic fields. Each ion can act as a quantum bit—or qubit—for storing information in a quantum computer, Uys said.

These ions form neatly ordered crystals, similar to arrays of qubits being manipulated by other researchers using semiconducting and superconducting circuitry. Arrays like this potentially could be used as multi-bit quantum memories, he said.

But the NIST technique counteracts a major threat to the reliability of quantum memories: the potential for small disturbances—such as stray electric or magnetic fields—to create random errors in the qubits.

The NIST team applied customized sequences of microwave pulses to reverse the accumulation of such random errors in all qubits simultaneously.

“Simulations show that under appropriate conditions this method can reduce the error rate in quantum computing systems up to a hundred times more than comparable techniques. Our measurement results validate these predictions,” Uys said.

BRIEFLY NOTED

The developer of MicroStation modeling software Axiom of Clearwater, Fla., has released CadExplore Browser, which finds MicroStation models and elements in design files and displays them in a single spreadsheet-like view. /// The maker of the Solumina enterprise operations process management software, iBASEt of Foothill Ranch, Calif., has released its Dassault Systèmes partner product, the iBASEt OPM Process Data Integrator for DS, which integrates engineering and OPM systems. /// TouchCAD of Stockholm, Sweden, has released TouchCAD 3.6. It converts 3-D models into production-ready drawings or cut files. /// Software maker Wright Line of Worcester, Mass., now offers a computational fluid dynamics modeling service to model the airflow, temperature, static pressure, and energy profile of dynamic environments. /// DS Simulia of Providence, R.I., has released Verity for Abaqus, which is an add-on product for the Abaqus finite element analysis program that simulates structural stress in welded joints and other connections. /// A search engine provider for the plastics industry, Ides Inc. of Laramie, Wyo., has launched an updated version of its Prospector plastics search engine. It helps design and process engineers’ research materials, analyze resins for specific design applications, and buy plastic from suppliers. /// Sheffield Measurement of Fond du Lac, Wis., has released its Cordax Pioneer coordinate measuring machine. The company says it is a small, moving bridge machine targeted to manufacturers purchasing their first CMM or to large manufacturing operations needing multiple CMMs. /// VX Corp. of Melbourne, Fla., and TraceParts of Saint Romain, France, have released a free online parts library, accessible from the VX user interface. It gives users access to 3-D models from leading parts suppliers’ catalogs.