Elementary, a company developing an AI platform for automating physical product inspections, has raised $30 million in venture capital.
Category: robotics/AI – Page 1408
Imagine that your team is meeting to decide whether to continue an expensive marketing campaign. After a few minutes, it becomes clear that nobody has the metrics on-hand to make the decision. You chime in with a solution and ask Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa to back you up with information: “Alexa, how many users did we convert to customers last month with Campaign A?” and Alexa responds with the answer. You just amplified your team’s intelligence with AI. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Intelligence amplification is the use of technology to augment human intelligence. And a paradigm shift is on the horizon, where new devices will offer less intrusive, more intuitive ways to amplify our intelligence.
Hearables, or wireless in-ear computational earpieces, are an example of intelligence amplification devices that have been adopted recently and rapidly. An example is Apple’s AirPods, which are smart earbuds that connect to Apple devices and integrate with Siri via voice commands. Apple has also filed a patent for earbuds equipped with biometric sensors that could record data such as a user’s temperature, heart rate, and movement. Similarly, Google’s Pixel Buds give users direct access to the Google Assistant and its powerful knowledge graph. Google Assistant seamlessly connects users to information stored in Google platforms, like email and calendar management. Google Assistant also provides users with highly-personalized recommendations, helps automate personal communication, and offloads monotonous tasks like setting timers, managing lists, and controlling IoT devices.
In recent years, engineers have been trying to develop more effective sensors and tools to monitor indoor environments. Serving as the foundation of these tools, indoor positioning systems automatically determine the position of objects with high accuracy and low latency, enabling emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications, such as robots, autonomous driving, VR/AR, etc.
A team of researchers recently created CurveLight, an accurate and efficient light positioning system. Their technology, described in a paper presented at ACM’s SenSys 2021 Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, could be used to enhance the performance of autonomous vehicles, robots and other advanced technologies.
“In CurveLight, the signal transmitter includes an infrared LED, covered by a hemispherical and rotatable shade,” Zhimeng Yin, one of the researchers who developed the system at City University of Hong Kong, told TechXplore. “The receiver detects the light signals with a photosensitive diode. When the shade is rotating, the transmitter generates a unique sequence of light signals for each point in the covered space.”
For all that neural networks can accomplish, we still don’t really understand how they operate. Sure, we can program them to learn, but making sense of a machine’s decision-making process remains much like a fancy puzzle with a dizzying, complex pattern where plenty of integral pieces have yet to be fitted.
If a model was trying to classify an image of said puzzle, for example, it could encounter well-known, but annoying adversarial attacks, or even more run-of-the-mill data or processing issues. But a new, more subtle type of failure recently identified by MIT scientists is another cause for concern: “overinterpretation,” where algorithms make confident predictions based on details that don’t make sense to humans, like random patterns or image borders.
This could be particularly worrisome for high-stakes environments, like split-second decisions for self-driving cars, and medical diagnostics for diseases that need more immediate attention. Autonomous vehicles in particular rely heavily on systems that can accurately understand surroundings and then make quick, safe decisions. The network used specific backgrounds, edges, or particular patterns of the sky to classify traffic lights and street signs—irrespective of what else was in the image.
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The authors measured high-resolution fMRI activity from eight individuals who saw and memorized thousands of annotated natural images over 1 year. This massive dataset enables new paths of inquiry in cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence.
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A highly dexterous, human-like robotic hand with fingertip touch sensors can delicately hold eggs, use tweezers to pick up computer chips and crush drink cans. The hand could eventually be used as a prosthetic or in robots that use artificial intelligence to manipulate objects.
Weighing 1.1 kilograms, the hand is 22 centimetres long and made of steel and aluminium. Each finger is driven by three small motors that fit within the palm and move metal parts that act like tendons around a total of 20 joints. This enables the digits to tilt sideways, to flex back and forth and to fold, giving the hand a range of movements comparable to that of a human hand.
A documentary exploring how artificial intelligence is changing life as we know it — from jobs to privacy to a growing rivalry between the U.S. and China.
FRONTLINE investigates the promise and perils of AI and automation, tracing a new industrial revolution that will reshape and disrupt our world, and allow the emergence of a surveillance society.
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Boston-based biotech Vincere Biosciences is on a mission to combat neurodegenerative disease by improving the quality of the mitochondria in our cells. The company was spun out from AI drug discovery company NeuroInitiative in 2018 after its platform identified that modulation of certain enzymes to repair mitochondrial health “may slow or stop the progression of Parkinson’s disease and other age-related disorders.”
In addition to seed funding, Vincere has received grants from the National Institutes of Health and Michael J Fox Foundation, and the company is now gearing up for a Series A funding round in early 2022.
Longevity. Technology: Mitochondria’s role in longevity is a hot topic. Often referred to as the “powerhouse of the cell”, these miniature organs within our cells play a key role in providing the energy needed for growth, repair and rejuvenation. As we age, our mitochondria begin to decline in function, and this decline is linked to a range of age-related diseases. We caught up with Vincere’s co-founder and CEO Dr Spring Behrouz to find out how her company aims to tap into the potential of these small but mighty biological players.
It’s simple enough for AI to seem to comprehend data, but devising a true test of a machine’s knowledge has proved difficult.