Lifeboat Foundation

Deep learning is good at finding patterns in reams of data, but can’t explain how they’re connected. Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio wants to change that.

Teams start competing Tuesday in the Drone Racing League’s new battle of autonomous drones. Here’s an exclusive first look at the AI-powered flying machine.

iOS/Android/Desktop: Default calculator apps suck. They work like a traditional handheld calculator, which only displays one value at a time and can only do basic math. If you want to do anything more than calculate a tip, you’re better off with these free and cheap calculator apps.

These apps help you do typical “real life math” or solve basic textbook math problems.

Walmart has over 100,000 different machine learning or AI-based projects currently in production. The success rate, however, is still just 75 percent.

With a self-guiding drone hovering over your shoulder, a not-too-humanoid robot sidekick as your wingman, and a four-legged fetch ‘bot trotting along beside, the day when you can surround yourself with a whole gaggle of AI-powered helpers is already here … even if it’s still the wee hours of the early morning.

Whether by air, on wheels, or even on padded little robot paws, the technology that drives our mechanized helpers is reaching that autonomous point at which the droids are able to think for themselves as they carry out their limited missions. Sure, they’re not quite ready to cross platforms and begin communicating with one another just yet, but at least they all can communicate with you — which pretty much makes you the star character in your budding little electronic entourage.

In a new paper, Facebook researchers propose an AI technique that uses schemas to teach robots to manipulate objects in less than 10 hours of training.

Radio program The Current had me on this morning discussing #transhumanism, specifically #robots & #AI running for political office. It’s Canada’s most listened to radio program with millions of listeners. Here’s a fun write-up of it:

We ask if we should ditch flesh-and-blood politicians, and give the robots a go at leadership.

If you’ve got better things to do than spend every Saturday pushing a noisy gas-powered mower around your yard, consider investing in a robot lawn mower and letting it do the work for you. Get started with some of the best we’ve tested.

Cheetah Robot is a fast-running quadruped developed by Boston Dynamics with funding from DARPA. It just blazed past its previous speed record, getting up to 28.3 mph, about 0.5 mph faster than Usain Bolt’s fastest 20 meter split. This version of the Cheetah Robot runs on a treadmill with offboard power. Testing on an untethered outdoor version starts early next year. For more information about Cheetah or the other robots we develop, visit www.BostonDynamics.com.