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Category: robotics/AI – Page 1,793

Many organizations will likely look to technology as they face budget cuts and need to reduce staff. “I don’t see us going back to the staffing levels we were at prior to COVID,” says Brian Pokorny, the director of information technologies for Otsego County in New York State, who has cut 10% of his staff because of pandemic-related budget issues. “So we need to look at things like AI to streamline government services and make us more efficient.”

For 23 years, Larry Collins worked in a booth on the Carquinez Bridge in the San Francisco Bay Area, collecting tolls. The fare changed over time, from a few bucks to $6, but the basics of the job stayed the same: Collins would make change, answer questions, give directions and greet commuters. “Sometimes, you’re the first person that people see in the morning,” says Collins, “and that human interaction can spark a lot of conversation.”

But one day in mid-March, as confirmed cases of the coronavirus were skyrocketing, Collins’ supervisor called and told him not to come into work the next day. The tollbooths were closing to protect the health of drivers and of toll collectors. Going forward, drivers would pay bridge tolls automatically via FasTrak tags mounted on their windshields or would receive bills sent to the address linked to their license plate. Collins’ job was disappearing, as were the jobs of around 185 other toll collectors at bridges in Northern California, all to be replaced by technology.

Machines have made jobs obsolete for centuries. The spinning jenny replaced weavers, buttons displaced elevator operators, and the Internet drove travel agencies out of business. One study estimates that about 400,000 jobs were lost to automation in U.S. factories from 1990 to 2007. But the drive to replace humans with machinery is accelerating as companies struggle to avoid workplace infections of COVID-19 and to keep operating costs low. The U.S. shed around 40 million jobs at the peak of the pandemic, and while some have come back, some will never return. One group of economists estimates that 42% of the jobs lost are gone forever.

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When the Covid-19 pandemic made face masks an everyday essential, Japanese startup Donut Robotics spotted an opportunity. They created a smart mask — a high-tech upgrade to standard face coverings, designed to make communication and social distancing easier.

In conjunction with an app, the C-Face Smart mask can transcribe dictation, amplify the wearer’s voice, and translate speech into eight different languages.

The cutouts on the front are vital for breathability, so the smart mask doesn’t offer protection against the coronavirus. Instead, it is designed to be worn over a standard face mask, explains Donut Robotics CEO Taisuke Ono. Made of white plastic and silicone, it has an embedded microphone that connects to the wearer’s smartphone via Bluetooth. The system can translate between Japanese and Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indonesian, English, Spanish and French.

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A machine-learning algorithm that can predict the compositions of trend-defying new materials has been developed by RIKEN chemists1. It will be useful for finding materials for applications where there is a trade-off between two or more desirable properties.

Artificial intelligence has great potential to help scientists find new materials with desirable properties. A that has been trained with the compositions and properties of known materials can predict the properties of unknown materials, saving much time in the lab.

But discovering new materials for applications can be tricky because there is often a trade-off between two or more material properties. One example is organic materials for , where it is desired to maximize both the voltage and current, notes Kei Terayama, who was at the RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project and is now at Yokohama City University. “There’s a trade-off between voltage and current: a material that exhibits a high voltage will have a low current, whereas one with a high current will have a low voltage.”

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The Army is developing a system to allow autonomous ground robots to communicate with soldiers through natural conversations — and, in time, learn to respond to soldier instructions no matter how informal or potentially crass they may be.

Researchers from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory, working in collaboration with the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies, have developed a new capability that allows conversational dialogue between soldiers and autonomous systems.

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The context: Studies show that when people and AI systems work together, they can outperform either one acting alone. Medical diagnostic systems are often checked over by human doctors, and content moderation systems filter what they can before requiring human assistance. But algorithms are rarely designed to optimize for this AI-to-human handover. If they were, the AI system would only defer to its human counterpart if the person could actually make a better decision.

The research: Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and AI Laboratory (CSAIL) have now developed an AI system to do this kind of optimization based on strengths and weaknesses of the human collaborator. It uses two separate machine-learning models; one makes the actual decision, whether that’s diagnosing a patient or removing a social media post, and one predicts whether the AI or human is the better decision maker.

The latter model, which the researchers call “the rejector,” iteratively improves its predictions based on each decision maker’s track record over time. It can also take into account factors beyond performance, including a person’s time constraints or a doctor’s access to sensitive patient information not available to the AI system.

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Deepfakes are the most concerning use of AI for crime and terrorism, according to a new report from University College London.

The research team first identified 20 different ways AI could be used by criminals over the next 15 years. They then asked 31 AI experts to rank them by risk, based on their potential for harm, the money they could make, their ease of use, and how hard they are to stop.

Deepfakes — AI-generated videos of real people doing and saying fictional things — earned the top spot for two major reasons. Firstly, they’re hard to identify and prevent. Automated detection methods remain unreliable and deepfakes also getting better at fooling human eyes. A recent Facebook competition to detect them with algorithms led researchers to admit it’s “very much an unsolved problem.”

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Swarm intelligence (SI) is concerned with the collective behaviour that emerges from decentralised self-organising systems, whilst swarm robotics (SR) is an approach to the self-coordination of large numbers of simple robots which emerged as the application of SI to multi-robot systems. Given the increasing severity and frequency of occurrence of wildfires and the hazardous nature of fighting their propagation, the use of disposable inexpensive robots in place of humans is of special interest. This paper demonstrates the feasibility and potential of employing SR to fight fires autonomously, with a focus on the self-coordination mechanisms for the desired firefighting behaviour to emerge. Thus, an efficient physics-based model of fire propagation and a self-organisation algorithm for swarms of firefighting drones are developed and coupled, with the collaborative behaviour based on a particle swarm algorithm adapted to individuals operating within physical dynamic environments of high severity and frequency of change. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed self-organising system is effective, scalable and fault-tolerant, comprising a promising approach to dealing with the suppression of wildfires – one of the world’s most pressing challenges of our time.

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Drone Waiters-Boss Magazine
According to Forbes, payroll costs consume up to 25 per cent of a restaurant’s profit. Restaurateurs in Sydney and other parts of Australia hope to combat that expense by following in the footsteps of venues in Asia that have used drone waiters instead of human wait staff.

Faster and Human-Free Waiter drones are robotic devices that soar through the air with platters of food and glasses of beverages perched on top. Customers place their orders via electronic devices or other means, then the kitchen sends out their food on trays carried by machines rather than humans. Each drone can carry up to 4.4 pounds of cargo.

Sensors on the sides of the drones prevent them from crashing into objects or people as they navigate busy restaurants. While this strategy eliminates the human element that many experts believe is essential to the hospitality industry, the waiter drones’ success in Asia suggests they might prove a valuable contribution to restaurants in Australia.

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