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Light-weight and flying robots the size of small insects could have highly valuable real-world applications, for instance supporting search & rescue missions, inspections of hazardous sites, and even space exploration.

Despite their potential, the realization of these robots has so far proved difficult, particularly due to encountered when trying to stabilize their flight and artificially replicate the innate hovering capabilities of insects.

Researchers at University of Washington have recently developed a flight control and wind sensing system that could help to tackle this challenging robotics problem, finally enabling the stable flight of robots even as small as a gnat. This system, introduced in Science Robotics, is based on the use of accelerometers, a sensor that can measure the acceleration of any moving device, object or body.

“It’s very impressive, the performance they’re able to achieve on some pretty challenging problems,” said Dr. Armando Solar-Lezama at MIT, who was not involved in the research.

The problems AlphaCode tackled are far from everyday applications—think of it more as a sophisticated math tournament in school. It’s also unlikely the AI will take over programming completely, as its code is riddled with errors. But it could take over mundane tasks or offer out-of-the-box solutions that evade human programmers.

Perhaps more importantly, AlphaCode paves the road for a novel way to design AI coders: forget past experience and just listen to the data.

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In the piece I explore some of the emerging tech that will impact our coming year. Thank you for reading and sharing!


2022 was a transformative year for technological innovation and digital transformation. The trend will continue as the pace of innovation and development of potentially disruptive emerging technologies exponentially increases every year. The question arises, what lies ahead for tech for us to learn and experience in 2023?

While there are many impactful tech topics such as the Internet of Things, 5G, Space, Genomics, Synthetic Biology, Automation, Augmented Reality, and others, there are four tech areas to keep a keen watch on this coming year as they have promising and near-term capabilities to transform lives. They include: 1) artificial intelligence, 2) computing technologies, 3) robotics, and 4) materials science.

Australian artists say Lensa, the app that uses artificial intelligence to generate self-portraits, is stealing their content and are calling for stricter copyright laws that keep up with AI-generated art.

But the parent company behind the app has defended its use of images, saying Lensa learns to create portraits just as a human would – by learning different artistic styles.

A hidden mechanism for achieving glides of hundreds of feet is revealed by computational modelling.

Scientists are currently thinking of ways to create robots resembling the gliding motion of flying snakes, according to a study published today (Dec .13) in Physics of Fluids.

‘Undulations’ encourage lift.


KaraGrubis/iStock.

The researchers anticipate their findings will improve our comprehension of gliding motion and result in a more effective design for future airborne snake robots.

Tel Aviv-based D-ID released today the first multimodal generative AI video platform to combine text, image and animation in one interface. The self-service video platform integrates D-ID’s proprietary generative AI technology with GPT-3 from Open AI and Stable Diffusion from Stability AI, allowing users to generate digital composite faces and speech in 119 languages based on their text prompts.

“This is a game changer for creators,” says Gil Perry, D-ID co-founder and CEO. “It’s the bleeding edge of generative AI,” he asserts, touting the startup’s expertise in deep learning and computer vision. When I talked to Perry last year, he said that the company’s long-term vision is “to lead the next disruption in the video entertainment space by creating AI-generated synthetic media in a responsible way.”

In the rapidly evolving generative AI space, “long-term” means “next year,” so now Perry talks about providing “digital humans” to enterprises, “transforming the way we communicate with machines and elevating our capabilities as humans.” He hopes that sometime next year, we could chat with the digital humans we will create with D-ID’s help.