A team of researchers in the U.S. and China have developed a new paradigm for enabling communication between humans and AI systems.
Artificial intelligence systems are opaque, especially to people without a relevant technical background and enough time to dig into the code.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
That’s why teams of researchers worldwide are racing to develop AI systems that can communicate with their human operators in a language they can understand. One of those teams has just made a big step forward. In a paper published on July 13th in the peer-reviewed journal Science Robotics, a team of researchers from the U.S. and China presents a framework for what they call “explainable artificial intelligence,” or XAI.
NLP will experience exponential growth due to the growing prominence of computers and Artificial Intelligence and the digitization of society. Click here to learn more.
In artist Miao Ying’s animated film Surplus Intelligence, a cockroach falls in love with the artificial intelligence responsible for monitoring her behavior. There’s only one problem: The AI, personified as a man with movie-star looks, committed a crime in Walden XII, the quasi-medieval fantasyland where the story is set. He stole the village’s power stone, and so the roach sets off to mine bitcoin to save him.
Viewers might see in the plot a metaphor for the conflicted relationship some Chinese people have with social credit scoring, which is meant to nudge citizens toward better behavior. Or it could be a nod to the insidious ways social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook condition our behavior and mine us for data. If the tale itself seems a little ridiculous at times, that’s because Miao had a stealth collaborator: the AI text-generating system GPT-3, which wrote the script for the film. That power stone in the village? GPT-3 determined that it looks like “a burrito from Mexico,” perhaps a side effect of all the advertising copy GPT-3 has been tasked with writing.
The half-hour film is on view through the end of the year at the Asia Society in New York as part of the exhibition Mirror Image: A Transformation of Chinese Identity. “All of Miao Ying’s work is a satirical look at what digital means in China,” says Barbara Pollack, who curated Mirror Image and wrote the book Brand New Art from China. But, she notes, the works also celebrate the creativity the policies inspire in its citizens. Miao’s Hardcore Digital Detox (2018) challenges viewers to experience the internet behind the Great Firewall—and without the filter bubbles that platforms in the East and West impose. Chinternet Plus (2016) describes how to brand a “counterfeit ideology.” And for 2007’s Blind Spot, Miao manually annotated a Chinese dictionary to indicate all of the words that were censored on Google.cn at the time.
Summary: Study reveals the molecular mechanism that allows neural networks to grow and branch out.
Source: Yale.
Our nervous system is composed of billions of neurons that speak to one another through their axons and dendrites. When the human brain develops, these structures branch out in a beautifully intricate yet poorly understood way that allows nerve cells to form connections and send messages throughout the body. And now, Yale researchers have discovered the molecular mechanism behind the growth of this complex system.
Bill Gates-founded Breakthrough Energy Ventures co-led a $44 million funding round for a startup that aims to accelerate solar far construction.
Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate change solution-focused VC firm backed by the likes of Bill Gates, has joined a $44 million backing of solar startup Terabase Energy, a press statement reveals.
The VC firm co-led the Terabase deal alongside investor Prelude Ventures, and is known for its backing of Amp Robotics and Lime. The round brings Terabase Energy’s total funding to $52 million.
(Reuters) — An artificial intelligence system cannot be an inventor under United States patent law, a U.S. appeals court affirmed Friday.
The Patent Act requires an “inventor” to be a natural person, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said, rejecting computer scientist Stephen Thaler’s bid for patents on two inventions he said his DABUS system created.
Thaler said in an email Friday that DABUS, which stands for “Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience,” is “natural and sentient.”
The researchers wanted to create robots that could pick up and sort molecules within a designated space. This makes it possible for DNA molecules to serve as the building blocks for 3D nanostructures that self-assemble in a predetermined shape. Tiny DNA-based robots and other nanodevices will deliver medicine inside our bodies, detect the presence of deadly pathogens, and help manufacture increasingly smaller electronics.
This enabled the researchers to design a nano-robot composed of three DNA origami structures. To help it maneuver within the designated space, the robot had a “leg” with a pair of feet. An “arm” with a “hand” allowed it to carry cargo, and a third component was added to tell the hand when a specific drop-off point had been reached so it would know to release the cargo. It allows researchers to carry out the entire design truly in 3D. Earlier design tools only allowed creation in 2D, forcing researchers to map their creations into 3D.
The software helps researchers design ways to take tiny strands of DNA and combine them into complex structures with parts like rotors and hinges that can move and complete a variety of tasks, including drug delivery. The robot will also enable researchers to more precisely determine important signaling pathways for a variety of biological and pathological processes that are stimulated at the cellular level during the application of force.
A widely discussed application of social robots that has so far been rarely tested in real-world settings is their use as bartenders in cafés, cocktail bars and restaurants. While many roboticists have been trying to develop systems that can effectively prepare drinks and serve them, so far very few have focused on artificially reproducing the social aspect of bartending.
Researchers at University of Naples Federico II in Italy have recently developed a new interactive robotic system called BRILLO, which is specifically designed for bartending. In a recent paper published in UMAP ‘22 Adjunct: Adjunct Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, they introduced a new approach that could allow their robot to have personalized interactions with regular customers.
“The bartending scenario is an extremely challenging one to tackle using robots, yet it is also very interesting from a research point of view,” Prof. Silvia Rossi, one of the researchers who carried out the study and the scientific coordinator of the project, told TechXplore. “In fact, this scenario combines the complexity of efficiently manipulating objects to make drinks with the need to interact with the users. Interestingly, however, all current applications of robotics for bartending scenarios ignore the interaction part entirely.”
