Lifeboat Foundation

Newfound Autonomy

There are ways that a robot companion could outperform humans, Jecker says, by providing sympathetic and patient support free of judgment and condescension around the clock.

“It relates to issues of dignity,” Jecker told the Times. “The ability to be sexual at any age relates to your ability to have a life. Not just to survive, but to have a life, and do things that have value. Relationships. Bodily integrity. These things are a matter of dignity.”

A deepfake bot has been generating explicit, non-consensual images on the platform. The researchers who found it say their warnings have been ignored.

“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest” — Benjamin Franklin

On November 24th, IBM is running a free, online Data & AI Conference for India and the Asia Pacific region, covering four tracks:

AI designed to be aware of it’s own competence.

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador interviews Dr. Jiangying Zhou, DARPA program manager in the Defense Sciences Office, USA.

Continue reading “Expect the Unexpected: Frontiers of Mathematics, Computation, Systems and Design” »

Fido, meet F1d0.

Newly developed robotic K9s will soon be prowling Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City, Florida, to enhance security and surveillance patrolling, WMBB-TV reported Monday.

The 325th Security Forces Squadron, which handles security for the base, said the robo-dogs are weatherproof, four-legged, unmanned patrolling drones that have two-way communication abilities and high-tech sensors that cost about $100,000 a pop, the outlet reported.

Boston Dynamics getting dumped again. The dog robot was ideal as a replacement for guard dogs, someone else is already filling that void. The Atlas robot no where near ready for market. Probably down hill from here.

A sale to Hyundai could hasten the company’s shift from research to commercialization.

Continue reading “Iconic Boston Dynamics Robots Seek Stable Employment” »

NVIDA has surpassed the 2 terabyte-per-second memory bandwidth mark with its new GPU, the Santa Clara graphics giant announced Monday.

The top-of-the-line A100 80GB GPU is expected to be integrated in multiple GPU configurations in systems during the first half of 2021.

Earlier this year, NVIDIA unveiled the A100 featuring Ampere architecture, asserting that the GPU provided “the largest leap in performance” ever in its lineup of graphics hardware. It said AI training on the GPU could see performance boosts of 20 times the speed of its earlier generation units.

To perform tasks that involve moving or handling objects, robots should swiftly adapt their grasp and manipulation strategies based on the properties of these objects and the environment surrounding them. Most robotic hands developed so far, however, have a fixed and limiting structure; thus, they can perform a limited number of movements and can only grasp specific types of objects.

Researchers at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have recently developed a robotic fingertip that can change its shape and switch across three different configurations, which could allow it to grasp a broader variety of objects. This fingertip’s unique design, outlined in a paper presented at this year’s IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), is inspired by origami, the renowned Japanese art of paper folding.

Continue reading “An origami-inspired robotic fingertip with shape-morphing capabilities” »

This article is part of our reviews of AI research papers, a series of posts that explore the latest findings in artificial intelligence.

Creating machines that have the general problem–solving capabilities of human brains has been the holy grain of artificial intelligence scientists for decades. And despite tremendous advances in various fields of computer science, artificial general intelligence still eludes researchers.

Our current AI methods either require a huge amount of data, or a very large number of hand-coded rules, and they’re only suitable for very narrow domains. AGI, on the other hand, should be able to perform multiple tasks with little data and specific instructions.