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âIâll teach you how to jump on the windâs back, and then away we go,â Peter Pan says to Wendy.
In J.M. Barrieâs book, fairies can be brought back to life if enough people believe in them.
Researchers at the Light Robots group at Tampere University in Finland have gone a step further, creating a tiny robot sprite which flies by the wind and is controlled by light.
Scientists and roboticists have long looked at nature for inspiration to develop new features for machines. In this case, researchers from Ecole Polytechnique FĂ©dĂ©rale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland were inspired by bats and other animals that rely on echolocation to design a method that would give small robots that ability to navigate themselves â one that doesnât need expensive hardware or components too large or too heavy for tiny machines. In fact, according to PopSci, the team only used the integrated audio hardware of an interactive puck robot and built an audio extension deck using cheap mic and speakers for a tiny flying drone that can fit in the palm of your hand.
The system works just like bat echolocation. It was designed to emit sounds across frequencies, which a robotâs microphone then picks up as they bounce off walls. An algorithm the team created then goes to work to analyze sound waves and create a map with the roomâs dimensions.
In a paper published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, the researchers said existing âalgorithms for active echolocation are less developed and often rely on hardware requirements that are out of reach for small robots.â They also said their âmethod is model-based, runs in real time and requires no prior calibration or training.â Their solution could give small machines the capability to be sent on search-and-rescue missions or to previously uncharted locations that bigger robots wouldnât be able to reach. And since the system only needs onboard audio equipment or cheap additional hardware, it has a wide range of potential applications.
Google said Monday it will release a conversational chatbot named Bard, setting up an artificial intelligence showdown with Microsoft which has invested billions in the creators of ChatGPT, the hugely popular language app that convincingly mimics human writing.
ChatGPT, created by San Francisco company OpenAI, has caused a sensation for its ability to write essays, poems or programming code on demand within seconds, sparking widespread fears of cheating or of entire professions becoming obsolete.
Microsoft announced last month that it was backing OpenAI and has begun to integrate ChatGPT features into its Teams platform, with expectations that it will adapt the app to its Office suite and Bing search engine.
Engineers at the University of Waterloo have developed artificial intelligence (AI) technology to predict if women with breast cancer would benefit from chemotherapy prior to surgery.
The new AI algorithm, part of the open-source Cancer-Net initiative led by Dr. Alexander Wong, could help unsuitable candidates avoid the serious side effects of chemotherapy and pave the way for better surgical outcomes for those who are suitable.
âDetermining the right treatment for a given breast cancer patient is very difficult right now, and it is crucial to avoid unnecessary side effects from using treatments that are unlikely to have real benefit for that patient,â said Wong, a professor of systems design engineering.
Architectures based on artificial neural networks (ANNs) have proved to be very helpful in research settings, as they can quickly analyze vast amounts of data and make accurate predictions. In 2020, Googleâs British AI subsidiary DeepMind used a new ANN architecture dubbed the Fermionic neural network (FermiNet) to solve the Schrodinger equation for electrons in molecules, a central problem in the field of chemistry.
The Schroedinger equation is a partial differential equation based on well-established theory of energy conservation, which can be used to derive information about the behavior of electrons and solve problems related to the properties of matter. Using FermiNet, which is a conceptually simple method, DeepMind could solve this equation in the context of chemistry, attaining very accurate results that were comparable to those obtained using highly sophisticated quantum chemistry techniques.
Researchers at Imperial College London, DeepMind, Lancaster University, and University of Oxford recently adapted the FermiNet architecture to tackle a quantum physics problem. In their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, they specifically used FermiNet to calculate the ground states of periodic Hamiltonians and study the homogenous electron gas (HEG), a simplified quantum mechanical model of electrons interacting in solids.
The Microsoft cofounder talked to Forbes about his work with AI unicorn OpenAI and back on Microsoftâs campus, AIâs potential impact on jobs and in medicine, and much more.
In 2020, Bill Gates left the board of directors of Microsoft, the tech giant he cofounded in 1975. But he still spends about 10% of his time at its Redmond, Washington headquarters, meeting with product teams, he says. A big topic of discussion for those sessions: artificial intelligence, and the ways AI can change how we work â and how we use Microsoft software products to do it.
Q&A platform Quora has opened up public access to its new AI chatbot app, Poe, which lets users ask questions and get answers from a range of AI chatbots, including those from ChatGPT maker, OpenAI, and other companies like Anthropic. Beyond allowing users to experiment with new AI technologies, Poeâs content will ultimately help to evolve Quora itself, the company says.
Quora first announced Poeâs mobile app in December, but at the time, it required an invite to try it out. With the public launch on Friday, anyone can now use Poeâs app. For now, itâs available only to iOS users, but Quora says the service will arrive on other platforms in a few months.
In an announcement, the company explained it decided to launch Poe as a standalone product thatâs independent of Quora itself because of how quickly AI developments and changes are now taking place. However, there will be some connections between the Q&A site and Poe. If and when Poeâs content meets a high enough quality standard, it will be distributed on Quoraâs site itself, where it has the ability to reach Quoraâs 400 million monthly visitors, the company noted.
Magic, a startup developing a code-generating platform similar to GitHubâs Copilot, today announced that it raised $23 million in a Series A funding round led by Alphabetâs CapitalG with participation from Elad Gil, Nat Friedman and Amplify Partners. So whatâs its story?
Magicâs CEO and co-founder, Eric Steinberger, says that he was inspired by the potential of AI at a young age. In high school, he and his friends wired up the schoolâs computers for machine learning algorithm training, an experience that planted the seeds for Steinbergerâs computer science degree and his job at Meta as an AI researcher.
âI spent years exploring potential paths to artificial general intelligence, and then large language models (LLMs) were invented,â Steinberger told TechCrunch in an email interview. âI realized that combining LLMs trained on code with my research on neural memory and reinforcement learning might allow us to build an AI software engineer that feels like a true colleague, not just a tool. This would be extraordinarily useful for companies and developers.â
Google is rushing to take part in the sudden fervor for conversational AI, driven by the pervasive success of rival OpenAIâs ChatGPT. Bard, the companyâs new AI experiment, aims to âcombine the breadth of the worldâs knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models.â Not short on ambition, Google!
The model, or service, or AI chatbot, however you wish to describe it, was announced in a blog post by CEO Sundar Pichai. He pointedly notes Googleâs recentering around AI some years back, as well as the fact that the most influential concept (the Transformer) was created by the companyâs researchers in 2017.
âItâs a really exciting time to be working on these technologies as we translate deep research and breakthroughs into products that truly help people,â Pichai writes. Itâs hard not to wonder while reading this how Google managed to get leapfrogged so decisively by OpenAI, the latter of which is now synonymous with the technologies the former pioneered.