Lifeboat Foundation

With advancements in the field of robotics, scientists have created smart soft robots that can mimic any animal in terms of movement and behaviour. This may be the future of robotics since any kind of animals, whether it’s a robot dog, cat or fish can easily be built to perform complex movements and actions to help researchers and people in need of a social companion or pet.

Soft robotics is the specific sub-field of robotics dealing with constructing robots from highly compliant materials, similar to those found in living organisms.
Soft robotics draws heavily from the way in which living organisms move and adapt to their surroundings. In contrast to robots built from rigid materials, soft robots allow for increased flexibility and adaptability for accomplishing tasks, as well as improved safety when working around humans. These characteristics allow for its potential use in the fields of medicine and manufacturing.
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Continue reading “Are Robots Replacing Real Animals? — The Soft Robotics Revolution” »

Software extends protein mapping to complexes that govern the breadth of cell biology.

Tesla Autopilot is a self-driving assistance system. In plain terms, it’s a capability that enables a Tesla to’see’ the cars and road ahead of it and, to a limited extent, drive itself.

NVIDIA plans to build the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer dedicated to predicting climate change, named Earth-2.

The earth is warming. The past seven years are on track to be the seven warmest on record. The emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are responsible for approximately 1.1°C of average warming since the period 1850–1900.

What we’re experiencing is very different from the global average. We experience extreme weather — historic droughts, unprecedented heatwaves, intense hurricanes, violent storms and catastrophic floods. Climate disasters are the new norm.

Continue reading “NVIDIA to Build Earth-2 Supercomputer to See Our Future” »

Battling bias. If I’ve been a little MIA this week, it was because I spent Monday and Tuesday in Boston for Fortune ’s inaugural Brainstorm A.I. gathering. It was a fun and wonky couple of days diving into artificial intelligence and machine learning, technologies that—for good or ill—seem increasingly likely to shape not just the future of business, but the world at large.

There are a lot of good and hopeful things to be said about A.I. and M.L., but there’s also a very real risk that the technologies will perpetuate biases that already exist, and even introduce new ones. That was the subject of one of the most engrossing discussions of the event by a panel that was—as pointed out by moderator, guest co-chair, and deputy CEO of Smart Eye Rana el Kaliouby—comprised entirely of women.

One of the scariest parts of bias in A.I. is how wide and varied the potential effects can be. Sony Group’s head of A.I. ethics office Alice Xiang gave the example of a self-driving car that’s been trained too narrowly in what it recognizes as a human reason to jam on the breaks. “You need to think about being able to detect pedestrians—and ensure that you can detect all sorts of pedestrians and not just people that are represented dominantly in your training or test set,” said Xiang.

Non-verbal social cues are key.

Robots are increasingly becoming common in everyday life but their communications skills still lag far behind. One key attribute that might really help robot-human interactions is if robots could learn to read and respond to human emotional cues.

In that case, they would be able to interfere when they are really needed and not disturb the rest of the time. Now, researchers at Franklin & Marshall College have been working on allowing socially assistive robots to process social cues given by humans and respond to them accordingly.

AI is a classic double-edged sword in much the same way as other major technologies have been since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Burning carbon drives the industrial world but leads to global warming. Nuclear fission provides cheap and abundant electricity though could be used to destroy us. The Internet boosts commerce and provides ready access to nearly infinite amounts of useful information, yet also offers an easy path for misinformation that undermines trust and threatens democracy. AI finds patterns in enormous and complex datasets to solve problems that people cannot, though it often reinforces inherent biases and is being used to build weapons where life and death decisions could be automated. The danger associated with this dichotomy is best described by sociobiologist E.O. Wilson at a Harvard debate, where he said “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and God-like technology.”

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Continue reading “With the Metaverse on the way, an AI Bill of Rights is urgent” »

When comparing Meta — formerly Facebook — and Microsoft’s approaches to the metaverse, it’s clear Microsoft has a much more grounded and realistic vision. Although Meta currently leads in the provision of virtual reality (VR) devices (through its ownership of what was previously called Oculus), Microsoft is adapting technologies that are currently more widely used. The small, steady steps Microsoft is making today put it in a better position to be one of the metaverse’s future leaders. However, such a position comes with responsibilities, and Microsoft needs to be prepared to face them.

The metaverse is a virtual world where users can share experiences and interact in real-time within simulated scenarios. To be clear, no one knows yet what it will end up looking like, what hardware it will use, or which companies will be the main players — these are still early days. However, what is certain is that VR will play a key enabling role; VR-related technologies such as simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM), facial recognition, and motion tracking will be vital for developing metaverse-based use cases.

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Google’s own Deepmind has just released a new revolutionary Artificial Intelligence model which will likely power many AI Applications in the future. They named it Perceiver and it’s meant to replace the most popular AI transformer models.

Perceiver is meant to bring a more general approach to problems from AI models which some would call Artificial General Intelligence. Whether or not Deepmind will manage to create the best AI in the future is yet to be seen. But one thing is for sure, the future is quite weird for AI but also amazing to see.
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Continue reading “The Weird Future of Artificial Intelligence — Deepmind’s Perceiver” »