Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk says the company is looking at holding a Tesla AI Day in about a month or so. Read details.
Engineers from ETH Zurich in Switzerland and the Max Planck Institute in Germany built a small quadrupedal robot meant to leap around on the surface of the Moon, much like the Apollo astronauts did half a century ago.
Now SpaceBok, named after the bounding springbok antelope, is getting a Mars upgrade — on the Red Planet, it will have to weather much stronger gravity than on the Moon and face more treacherous terrain, as Wired reports.
The concept is a strong one. If it were to ever land on Mars, a walking robot could explore terrain that has so far been off limits to wheeled rovers — and maybe even the planet’s mysterious caves.
Last week, I wrote an analysis of Reward Is Enough, a paper by scientists at DeepMind. As the title suggests, the researchers hypothesize that the right reward is all you need to create the abilities associated with intelligence, such as perception, motor functions, and language.
This is in contrast with AI systems that try to replicate specific functions of natural intelligence such as classifying images, navigating physical environments, or completing sentences.
The researchers go as far as suggesting that with well-defined reward, a complex environment, and the right reinforcement learning algorithm, we will be able to reach artificial general intelligence, the kind of problem-solving and cognitive abilities found in humans and, to a lesser degree, in animals.
The EU’s data protection agencies on Monday called for an outright ban on using artificial intelligence to identify people in public places, pointing to the “extremely high” risks to privacy.
In a non-binding opinion, the two bodies called for a “general ban” on the practice that would include “recognition of faces, gait, fingerprints, DNA, voice, keystrokes and other biometric or behavioural signals, in any context”.
Such practices “interfere with fundamental rights and freedoms to such an extent that they may call into question the essence of these rights and freedoms,” the heads of the European Data Protection Board and the European Data Protection Supervisor said.
Is there a way for IT leaders to be proactive about AI and machine learning without ruffling and rattling an organization of people who want the miracles of AI and ML delivered tomorrow morning? The answer is yes.
Tesla has unveiled its new supercomputer, which is already the fifth most powerful in the world, and it’s going to be the predecessor of Tesla’s upcoming new Dojo supercomputer.
It is being used to train the neural nets powering Tesla’s Autopilot and upcoming self-driving AI.
Over the last few years, Tesla has had a clear focus on computing power both inside and outside its vehicles.
The new Mayflower, set to traverse the Atlantic in 2021, won’t bear any pilgrims. It’s a robot boat, sailing sailor-free.
As Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos rocket companies lead a new space race, NASA is working on AI and robotics to farm space plants and feed interplanetary humans.
One of my favorite science fiction authors is/was Isaac Asimov (should we use the past tense since he is no longer with us, or the present tense because we still enjoy his writings?). In many ways Asimov was a futurist, but — like all who attempt to foretell what is to come — he occasionally managed to miss the mark.
Take his classic Foundation Trilogy, for example (before he added the two prequels and two sequels). On the one hand we have a Galactic Empire that spans the Milky Way with millions of inhabited worlds and quadrillions of people. Also, we have mighty space vessels equipped with hyperdrives that can convey people from one side of the galaxy to the other while they are still young enough to enjoy the experience.
Continue reading “Creating Tiny AI/ML-Equipped Systems to Run at the Extreme Edge” »
Nanobots, tiny nano-sized robots and vehicles that can navigate through blood vessels to reach the site of a disease could be used to deliver drugs to tumours that are otherwise difficult to treat.
Once injected or swallowed, most drugs rely upon the movement of body fluids to find their way around the body. It means that some types of disease can be difficult to treat effectively in this way.
One aggressive type of brain tumour known as glioblastoma, for example, kills hundreds of thousands of people a year. But because it produces finger-like projections into a patient’s brain tissue that damage the blood vessels around them, it is hard for drugs to reach the tumour site.
