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Category: robotics/AI – Page 1,793

Space robotics startup GITAI and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) are teaming up to produce the world’s first robotics demonstration in space by a private company. The new agreement under the JAXA Space Innovation through Partnership and Co-creation (J-SPARC) initiative aims to demonstrate the potential for robots to automate of the processing of specific tasks aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

Robotics is altering many aspects of our lives in many fields and one where it is particularly attractive is in the exploration and exploitation of space. Ironically, the great strides made in manned spaceflight since the first Vostok mission lifted off in 1961 have shown that not only is supporting astronauts in orbit challenging and expensive, there are also many tasks, like microgravity experiments, where the human touch isn’t the best choice.

These tasks often require complex, precise, and subtle movements that demand either a highly specialized and expensive bespoke apparatus or a robot. The GITAI/JAXA agreement will work on ways that robots can handle maintenance, scientific experiments, and other specific tasks aboard the ISS.

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Software bugs are a tale as old as time — which, in the case of programming, means about 75 years. In 1947, programmer Grace Murray Hopper was working on a Mark II Computer at Harvard University when she noticed a moth that was stuck in the relay, preventing the computer program from running. It was the first “bug”, and countless others have followed since then.

In the history of programming, bugs have ranged from harmless to absolutely catastrophic. In 1986 and 1987, several patients were killed after a Therac-25 radiation therapy device malfunctioned due to an error by an inexperienced programmer, and a software bug might have also triggered one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history, at a Soviet trans-Siberian gas pipeline.

While events such as this are rare, it’s safe to say that software bugs can do a lot of damage and waste a lot of time (and resources). According to recent analysis, the average programmer produces 70 bugs per 1,000 lines of code, with each bug demanding 30 times more time to fix than it took to write the code in the first place. In the US alone, an estimated $113 billion is spent identifying and fixing code bugs…

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Zurich-based DeepCode claims that their system — essentially a tool for analyzing and improving code — is like Grammarly for programmers. The system, which uses a corpus of 250,000 rules, reads your public and private GitHub repositories and tells you how to fix problems, remain compatible and generally improve your programs.

Founded by Veselin Raychev, advisor Martin Vechev and Boris Paskalev, the team has extensive experience in machine learning and AI research. This project is a spin-off from ETH in Switzerland and is a standalone research project turned programming utility.

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The footage, uploaded to YouTube by local observers, is admittedly sped up between at least two to four times, as Newsweek points out — but the grace at which it moonwalks across the ground in front of it and give a salute is a sight to behold in itself. The robot was finally completed last month, according to Japanese news site SoraNews24. The massive structure weighs over 55,000 pounds and is modeled after the RX-78–2 unit from the popular “Gundam” science fiction franchise.

The robot still hasn’t been revealed to the public, because the ongoing pandemic has indefinitely delayed its opening at the Gundam Factory in the port of Yokohama, Japan. It was originally meant to go on display in October of this year.

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Dutch photographer and digital designer Bas Uterwijk has used artificial intelligence to create a ‘photograph’ of Alexander the Great… or what he could have looked like.

Uterwijk who has a background in computer graphics, 3D animation, and special effects, has used his talent to generate hyper-realistic portraits of famous historical figures.

His latest creation is Alexander the Great, otherwise referred to as the “King of Kings”. He was born on July 20 or 21, 356 B.C. in Pella, Macedonia. He was tutored by philosopher Aristotle until the age of 16. He became King of the Ancient Greek Kingdom of Macedonia and led a Pan-Hellenic military campaign against Persia and in the process spread Greek culture across the entire empire he created.

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YouTube will start using AI to automatically add age restrictions to videos “over the coming months,” the company announced on Tuesday.

The site currently relies on content reviewers to flag videos that aren’t appropriate for viewers under 18, but will soon start using machine learning to detect content for review. Uploaders will be able to appeal the system’s decisions.

In addition, viewers who try to evade the restrictions by watching videos embedded on third-party websites will be redirected to YouTube, where they’ll have to sign-in to show they’re over 18.

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Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador and founder of Bioquark interviews Dr Vitaly Vanchurin, PhD, Associate Professor, Theoretical Physics and Cosmology, Swenson College of Science and Engineering, at the University of Minnesota (UMN).

Dr Vanchurin’s big questions and the tools we need to answer them:

“What is the origin of our Universe? What determines our vacuum and the cosmological constant that is responsible for the observed accelerated expansion of space? What determines the onset of structure formation and the birth of galaxies in our Universe? Our innate curiosity about our beginnings has been, since time immemorial, and still is, at the heart of every human being. This age old question of our origin can now be addressed by applying the scientific method”.

Ira Pastor comments:

Today, we have a really exciting thought leader joining us on ideaXme who spends his time thinking about really BIG questions – Questions like: what is the origin of our Universe? What’s behind the cosmological constant (in Albert Einstein’s field equations of general relativity) that is responsible accelerated expansion of space? What determines the onset of structure formation and the birth of galaxies in our Universe? And many other fascinating topics.

Dr. Vitaly Vanchurin, is an Associate Professor, Theoretical Physics and Cosmology, Swenson College of Science and Engineering, at the University of Minnesota (UMN).

Continue reading “Big Questions: The Multiverse, Cosmological Neural Networks and “Space Noodles”” | >

OpenAI will still let researchers use the model.

Microsoft has expanded its ongoing partnership with San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research company OpenAI with a new exclusive license on the AI firm’s groundbreaking GPT-3 language model, an auto-generating text program that’s emerged as the most sophisticated of its kind in the industry.

The two companies are already entwined through OpenAI’s ongoing Azure cloud computing contract, with Azure being the platform on which OpenAI accesses the vast computing resources it needs to train many of its models, and a major $1 billion investment Microsoft made last year to become OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider. Now, Microsoft is issuing yet another signal of high confidence in OpenAI’s research by acquiring the rights to GPT-3.

OpenAI released GPT-3, the third iteration of its ever-growing language model, in July, and the program and its prior iterations have helped create some of the most fascinating AI language experiments to date. It’s also inspired vigorous debate around the ethics of powerful AI programs that may be used for more nefarious purposes, with OpenAI initially refusing to publish research about the model for fear it would be misused.

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