Lifeboat Foundation

‘It’s sort of this beautiful synergy between the human and the machine’

History Made

In a scientific first, Columbia neuroengineers have created a system that translates thought into intelligible, recognizable speech. By monitoring someone’s brain activity, the technology can reconstruct the words a person hears with unprecedented clarity. This breakthrough, which harnesses the power of speech synthesizers and artificial intelligence, could lead to new ways for computers to communicate directly with the brain. It also lays the groundwork for helping people who cannot speak, such as those living with as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or recovering from stroke, regain their ability to communicate with the outside world.

Bug and vulnerability hunting is a big business and the need for it is getting larger and larger. Up until this point, the majority of work had been from people. Either as hackers discovered holes and released exploits or as companies paid people to do the testing.

The machine triumphed in DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge, where teams automated white-hat hacking.

The imperative of developing artificial intelligence (AI) could not be more clear when it comes to exploring space beyond the Solar System. Even today, when working with unmanned probes like New Horizons and the Voyagers that preceded it, we are dealing with long communication times, making probes that can adapt to situations without assistance from controllers a necessity. Increasing autonomy promises challenges of its own, but given the length of the journeys involved, earlier interstellar efforts will almost certainly be unmanned and rely on AI.

The field has been rife with speculation by science fiction writers as well as scientists thinking about future missions. When the British Interplanetary Society set about putting together the first serious design for an interstellar vehicle — Project Daedalus in the 1970s — self-repair and autonomous operation were a given. The mission would operate far from home, performing a flyby of Barnard’s Star and the presumed planets there with no intervention from Earth.

We’re at an interesting place here because each step we take in the direction of artificial intelligence leads toward the development of what Andreas Hein and Stephen Baxter call ‘artificial general intelligence’ (AGI), which they describe in an absorbing new paper called “Artificial Intelligence for Interstellar Travel,” now submitted to the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. The authors define AGI as “[a]n artificial intelligence that is able to perform a broad range of cognitive tasks at similar levels or better than humans.”

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence and the Starship” »

Magnetically actuated soft robots may improve the treatment of disseminated intravascular coagulation. Significant progress has been made in the development of soft robotic systems that steer catheters. A more challenging task, however, is the development of systems that steer sub-millimeter-diameter guidewires during intravascular treatments; a novel microrobotic approach is required for steering. In this article, we develop a novel, magnetically actuated, soft microrobotic system, increasing the steerability of a conventional guidewire.

Soft RoboticsAhead of PrintFree AccessSungwoong Jeon, Ali Kafash Hoshiar, Kangho Kim, Seungmin Lee, Eunhee Kim, Sunkey Lee, Jin-young Kim, Bradley J. Nelson, Hyo-Jeong Cha, Byung-Ju Yi, and…

Robots performing automated tasks in uncontrolled environments need to adapt to environmental changes. Through building large collectives of robots, this robust and adaptive behavior can emerge from simple individual rules. These collectives can also be reconfigured, allowing for adaption to new tasks. Larger collectives are more robust and more capable, but the size of existing collectives is limited by the cost of individual units. In this article, we present a soft, modular robot that we have explicitly designed for manufacturability: Linbots use multifunctional voice coils to actuate linearly, to produce audio output, and to sense touch. When used in collectives, the Linbots can communicate with neighboring Linbots allowing for isolated behavior as well as the propagation of information throughout a collective. We demonstrate that these collectives of Linbots can perform complex tasks in a scalable distributed manner, and we show transport of objects by collective peristalsis and sorting of objects by a two-dimensional array of Linbots.

Soft RoboticsAhead of PrintFree AccessLinbots: Soft Modular Robots Utilizing Voice Coils Ross McKenzie, Mohammed E. Sayed, Markus P. Nemitz, Brian W. Flynn, and Adam A. Stokes Ross McKenzieScottish Microelectronics Centre, School of Engineering, Institute for Integrated Micro and Nano Systems,…

Increasing amounts of attention are being paid to the study of Soft Sensors and Soft Systems. Soft Robotic Systems require input from advances in the field of Soft Sensors. Soft sensors can help a soft robot to perceive and to act upon its immediate environment. The concept of integrating sensing capabilities into soft robotic systems is becoming increasingly important. One challenge is that most of the existing soft sensors have a requirement to be hardwired to power supplies or external data processing equipment. This requirement hinders the ability of a system designer to integrate soft sensors into soft robotic systems. In this article, we design, fabricate, and characterize a new soft sensor, which benefits from a combination of radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag design and microfluidic sensor fabrication technologies. We designed this sensor using the working principle of an RFID transporter antenna, but one whose resonant frequency changes in response to an applied strain. This new microfluidic sensor is intrinsically stretchable and can be reversibly strained. This sensor is a passive and wireless device, and as such, it does not require a power supply and is capable of transporting data without a wired connection. This strain sensor is best understood as an RFID tag antenna; it shows a resonant frequency change from approximately 860 to 800 MHz upon an applied strain change from 0% to 50%. Within the operating frequency, the sensor shows a standoff reading range of 7.5 m (at the resonant frequency). We characterize, experimentally, the electrical performance and the reliability of the fabrication process. We demonstrate a pneumatic soft robot that has four microfluidic sensors embedded in four of its legs, and we describe the implementation circuit to show that we can obtain movement information from the soft robot using our wireless soft sensors.

Soft RoboticsAhead of PrintFree AccessLijun Teng, Kewen Pan, Markus P. Nemitz, Rui Song, Zhirun Hu, and Adam A. Stokes Lijun TengThe School of Engineering, Institute for Integrated Mi…

The texture of an artist’s original work can now be reproduced with AI-controlled 3D printing.

Almost everything you hear about artificial intelligence today is thanks to deep learning. This category of algorithms works by using statistics to find patterns in data, and it has proved immensely powerful in mimicking human skills such as our ability to see and hear. To a very narrow extent, it can even emulate our ability to reason. These capabilities power Google’s search, Facebook’s news feed, and Netflix’s recommendation engine—and are transforming industries like health care and education.

Our study of 25 years of artificial-intelligence research suggests the era of deep learning is coming to an end.