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Category: robotics/AI – Page 1,391

Google Workers Step Up Protests of $1.2 Billion Israeli Contract

Google employees are ratcheting up pressure on the internet-search giant to abandon its artificial intelligence work with the Israeli government, planning public demonstrations to draw greater attention to the controversial cloud-computing contract.

A handful of current and former workers spoke on Wednesday alongside Palestinian rights activists in San Francisco to call for the Alphabet Inc.-owned company to end Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract through which Google and Amazon.com Inc. provide the Israeli government and military with AI and cloud services. The seven-year contract went into effect in July 2021. A petition protesting the agreement has received 800 signatures from Google employees, according to one of the organizers.

A Chinese game company has appointed the world’s first humanoid robot as its CEO

She will make fairer decisions for the employees.

The world of technology continues to meet the firsts. Recently, the China-based mobile game company NetDragon Websoft appointed an artificial intelligence-supported virtual human being as the general manager named “Tang Yu.”

The appointment was made on August 26 and the virtual CEO, Ms. Tang Yu started her position in the company’s principal subsidiary, Fujian NetDragon Websoft.

Gremlin/iStock.

Recently, the China-based mobile game company NetDragon Websoft appointed an artificial intelligence-supported virtual human being as the general manager named “Tang Yu.”

This humanoid robot can help children describe their concerns better, research shows

Nao is the new shoulder to lean on for children.

Sometimes it can be difficult for children to open their hearts to adults. If there is a mental disorder, this situation can be even more difficult. However, a robot called “Nao” overcame it.

Robots may be more effective in identifying children’s mental health problems than parental or self-reported testing, according to a recent study by the University of Cambridge.

Aerial Dragon Robot Reconfigures Itself into a Flying Manipulator

A couple years ago, we wrote about the Dual-rotor embedded multilink Robot with the Ability of multi-deGree-of-freedom aerial transformatiON—Dragon, of course. It’s one of the wildest drones we’ve ever seen, consisting of four pairs of gimbaled, ducted fans, with each pair linked together through a two-axis actuated joint, making it physically flexible in flight to a crazy degree.

Dragon is one of those robots with literally more degrees of freedom than it knows what to do with—in the sense that the hardware is all there. But the trick is getting it to use that hardware to do things that are actually useful in a reliable way. In 2018, Dragon was just learning how to transform itself to fit through small spaces, but now it’s able to adapt its entire structure to manipulate and grasp objects.

Congress may tighten scrutiny of US investment in foreign technologies

Inbound foreign investments in key sectors are reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). However, screening of outbound investments – a so-called “reverse CFIUS” – would be new, and could significantly impact industries ranging from aerospace and defense to fintech to pharmaceuticals.

How did we get here?

The last several years have witnessed an accelerated national security pivot from the twenty-year global war on terror to strategic competition with major state adversaries. Unclassified assessments of the U.S. national security posture reveal significant threats in domains ranging from artificial intelligence to hypersonic weapons to energy, many of which have been exacerbated by the theft of U.S. technology. The legislation proposing a “reverse CFIUS” review would seek to counter these threats by adding new controls to the flow of U.S. capital and intellectual property abroad.

No Manning Required Ship (NOMARS) Program to Build, Test, Demonstrate First Ship

NOMARS took a clean-sheet approach to ship design, holding firmly to the requirement that there will never be a human on board the vessel while it is at sea – including during underway replenishment (UNREP) events. By eliminating all constraints and requirements associated with humans, NOMARS opened up the design space to novel ship configurations and capabilities that could never be considered for crewed vessels.

NOMARS is also pushing the boundaries on ship reliability. Because there is no crew on board to perform maintenance, NOMARS required new approaches for power generation, propulsion, machinery line-up and control schemes to ensure continuous functionality throughout a long mission in all weather, temperature and sea states.

“NOMARS plans to demonstrate a next-generation completely unmanned ship that will enable entirely new concepts of operations,” said Gregory Avicola, program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office. “We will enable methods of deploying and maintaining very large fleets of unmanned surface vessels that can serve as partners, across the globe, for the larger crewed combatants of the U.S. Navy.”

Addiction, crime and data breaches: The metaverse could become a wild west if we’re not careful

But with such a rapid expansion into this new virtual world, will it be safe, regulated and, is it something we should fear or accept with open arms?

We talk to David Reid, a Professor of AI and spatial computing at Liverpool Hope University to see what to expect from the future of the metaverse.

There’s a few definitions. You can think of it from a technological viewpoint, where it’s simply the successor of the internet. Computers once took up big rooms, but they’ve shrunk until we got things like pocket-sized smartphones that you constantly interact with. The metaverse takes this a step further, making the actual environment you interact with virtual, removing the interface of computers completely.

10 Best AI Art Generators

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not only affecting industries like business and healthcare. It is also playing an increasing role in the creative industries by ushering in a new era of AI-generated art. AI technologies and tools are often widely accessible to anyone, which is helping to create an entirely new generation of artists. We often […].

Robot Dogs and Drones 3D Mapping ‘Ghost Ships’ with Laser-based Sensors

Sounds like a sci-fi movie right? But it’s not. Naval Surface Warfare Center, Philadelphia Division is testing laser-based sensors on robot dogs or drones as a way to perform battle damage assessment, repair, installation, and modernization – all remotely.

NSWCPD’s Advanced Data Acquisition Prototyping Technology Virtual Environments (ADAPT.VE) engineers and scientists are testing new applications for light detection and ranging (LiDAR) to build 3D ship models aboard the ‘mothballed’ fleet of decommissioned ships at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

EP87 Joscha Bach on Theories of Consciousness

https://www.jimruttshow.com/joscha-bach-2/

Joscha Bach and Jim start by talking about the difference between mind & brain, and the body & environment’s connection to mind & emotions. Joscha then offers his views on some popular consciousness theories & thinkers: consciousness as frequency, Global Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, Functionalism, Daniel Dennet, and Roger Penrose. While covering these theories & thinkers they talk about GPT-3, learning & memory, what it means to understand, intuitive vs analytical intelligence, dreaming vs reality, attention & agents, psychedelics, magical phenomena, areas worth exploring to improve AI, and much more.