Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI – Page 1,109

AUSTIN, Texas — Just as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning emerge as the fastest-growing in-demand skill sets in the global workforce, The University of Texas at Austin is establishing a new online master’s program in AI with the potential to bring thousands of new students into the field.

Delivered by the Department of Computer Science and Machine Learning Laboratory, the Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence (MSAI) will be the first large-scale degree program of its kind and the only master’s degree program in AI from a top-ranked institution to be priced close to $10,000. The master’s degree covers about two years’ worth of course content, to be taken at the learner’s own pace, and will be delivered in partnership with online education platform, edX.

AI master’s programs from peer institutions carry costs five to 10 times as high as UT Austin’s and serve only dozens of students – not the hundreds or thousands the Texas team projects it will reach annually within five years. Similarly priced online master’s programs from the university, in computer science and data science, enroll 2,500 students within less than five years of their launch. Like those programs, the fully online MSAI program is both flexible and accessible.

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They were also able to make a cute little LEGO man out of MPTM that liquefies itself and moves through the bars of a cage. Though the robot appears to self-coalesce into its original shape on the other side, Majidi clarified that it was manually recast by the team and then put back into the shot.

“It’s almost T-1000-like in the sense that you have that figurine and it melts into a blob, and it gets sucked through those jail bars,” Majidi said, adding that the villainous assassin android served as an inspiration for the robot.

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A robot that can shift between solid and liquid states has been filmed escaping from a miniature jail cell with bars too close together to allow it to leave in solid form. The creators claim they were inspired by sea cucumbers’ capacity to alter their tissue stiffness – but the scene is just a little too similar to Robert Patrick liquifying his way through the mental hospital bars for us to believe them. We even see the famous reabsorption of the little bit left behind.

Hard-bodied robots are common, even if they have yet to reach the capacities of science fiction films. Their soft-bodied counterparts can get into tight spaces, but what they can do there is limited, and they are also difficult to control.

A team led by Dr Chengfeng Pan of the Chinese University of Hong Kong has made a robot that can swap states to whichever is most needed, with a video that sums it up. The prison escape may trigger our fears, but robots like these could also provide lifesaving services others cannot.

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Perceptually-enabled Task Guidance prototypes demonstrated ability to help people complete recipes as a proxy to unfamiliar tasks.

“Perceptually-enabled Task Guidance (PTG) teams demonstrated a recipe for success in early prototypes of super smart #AIassistants that can see what a user sees and hear what they hear to help them accomplish unfamiliar tasks. More: https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2023-01-25”

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Controlling the trajectory of a basketball is relatively straightforward, as it only requires the application of mechanical force and human skill. However, controlling the movement of quantum systems like atoms and electrons poses a much greater challenge. These tiny particles are prone to perturbations that can cause them to deviate from their intended path in unexpected ways. Additionally, movement within the system degrades, known as damping, and noise from environmental factors like temperature further disrupts its trajectory.

To counteract the effects of damping and noise, researchers from Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan have found a way to use artificial intelligence to discover and apply stabilizing pulses of light or voltage with fluctuating intensity to quantum systems. This method was able to successfully cool a micro-mechanical object to its quantum state and control its motion in an optimized way. The research was recently published in the journal Physical Review Research.

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