Lifeboat Foundation

Sept. 10 (UPI) — McDonald’s on Tuesday announced the acquisition of a company that will assist in automating its drive-through process.

The fast-food chain agreed to a deal to acquire Apprente, a California-based company that was founded in 2017 with a focus on creating voice-based platforms for “complex, multilingual, multi-accent and multi-item conversational ordering.”

McDonald’s said Apprente’s technology will be used to allow for faster, simpler and more accurate order taking at its drive-throughs and may later be incorporated into mobile ordering and kiosks.

Maybe of interest to this group.

The AI lab has also released a report to explain why it is releasing the model in increments.

Update: JAXA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries have postponed today’s launch of the HTV-8 cargo ship due to a fire near the mission’s H-IIB rocket’s launchpad.

An unpiloted Japanese supply ship will launch to the International Space Station today (Sept. 10) and you can watch it leave Earth live courtesy of NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

Continue reading “Japan to Launch Robotic Cargo Ship to Space Station Today. Watch It Live” »

A new opportunity would fund development of an AI framework to coordinate actions between a mix of machines on the battlefield.

This would help understand the artificial neural networks or ANN which are AI models and programs that mimic the working of the human brain so that machines can learn to make decisions in a more human-like manner.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the California NanoSystems Institute in Los Angeles have recently developed a soft swimming robot based on a self-sustained hydrogel oscillator. This robot, presented in a paper published in Science Robotics, operates under constant light input without the need for a battery.

“When I shone light on a soft, fast responsive hydrogel pillar, I observed the pillar started to oscillate around the optical beam,” Yusen Zhao, a Ph.D. student involved in the research, said. “It looked very intriguing to me, and I wondered: How can a constant input produce intermittent output? Under what conditions does the oscillation happen? Would it be powerful enough to propel and swim in water, and eventually lead to solar sails? With these questions, I continued systematic studies aiming to achieve these objectives.”

Zhao and his colleagues developed a soft oscillator made of a light-responsive soft gel, which is molded into the shape of a pillar or strip. When light hits a spot of this gel pillar, it is automatically absorbed and converted into heat. The locally heated spot on the robot causes it to eject some of its water and shrink in volume, resulting in its tail bending towards the light source.

Machine learning techniques have so far proved to be very promising for the analysis of data in several fields, with many potential applications. However, researchers have found that applying these methods to quantum physics problems is far more challenging due to the exponential complexity of many-body systems.

Once the realm of science fiction, voice-mimicking software is now “well within the range of any lay criminal who’s got creativity to spare,” one cybersecurity expert said.

“The creation of AGI will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.