CEO Yariv Bash talks about building a better flying robot, seeking FAA approval and how competition with Amazon helps.
Category: robotics/AI – Page 1,819
Crops will grow in stacks 14 layers high and will use more than 20,000 LED lights. Robots on wheels will deliver seeds to the growing shelves.
A joint study led by City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has built an ultralow-power consumption artificial visual system to mimic the human brain, which successfully performed data-intensive cognitive tasks. Their experiment results could provide a promising device system for the next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) applications.
The research team is led by Professor Johnny Chung-yin Ho, Associate Head and Professor of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) at CityU. Their findings have been published in the scientific journal Science Advances, titled “Artificial visual system enabled by quasi-two-dimensional electron gases in oxide superlattice nanowires.”
As the advances in semiconductor technologies used in digital computing are showing signs of stagnation, neuromorphic (brain-like) computing systems have been regarded as one alternative. Scientists have been trying to develop the next generation of advanced AI computers, which could be as lightweight, energy-efficient and adaptable as the human brain.
Powerful neural networks could soon train on smartphones with dramatically faster speeds and less energy.
It’s not a stretch to say that stretchable sensors could change the way soft robots function and feel. In fact, they will be able to feel quite a lot.
Cornell researchers have created a fiber-optic sensor that combines low-cost LEDs and dyes, resulting in a stretchable “skin” that detects deformations such as pressure, bending and strain. This sensor could give soft robotic systems – and anyone using augmented reality technology – the ability to feel the same rich, tactile sensations that mammals depend on to navigate the natural world.
Charles Darwin’s landmark opus “On the Origin of the Species” ends with a beautiful summary of his theory of evolution: “There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” In fact, scientists now know that most species that have ever existed are extinct.
This extinction of species has, on the whole, been roughly balanced by the origination of new ones over Earth’s history, with a few major temporary imbalances scientists call mass extinction events. Scientists have long believed that mass extinctions create productive periods of species evolution, or “radiations,” a model called “creative destruction.” A new study led by scientists affiliated with the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at Tokyo Institute of Technology used machine learning to examine the co-occurrence of fossil species and found that radiations and extinctions are rarely connected, and thus mass extinctions likely rarely cause radiations of a comparable scale.
Creative destruction is central to classic concepts of evolution. It seems clear that there are periods in which many species suddenly disappear, and many new species suddenly appear. However, radiations of a comparable scale to the mass extinctions, which this study, therefore, calls the mass radiations, have received far less analysis than extinction events. This study compared the impacts of both extinction and radiation across the period for which fossils are available, the so-called Phanerozoic Eon. The Phanerozoic (from the Greek meaning “apparent life”), represents the most recent ~ 550-million-year period of Earth’s total ~4.5 billion-year history, and is significant to palaeontologists: Before this period, most of the organisms that existed were microbes that didn’t easily form fossils, so the prior evolutionary record is hard to observe.
Eclipse/Repairnator
Posted in cybercrime/malcode, robotics/AI
Automatic bug fixer.
Software development bot that automatically repairs build failures on continuous integration. Join the bot revolution! :star2::robot::star2::revolving_hearts: — eclipse/repairnator.
Researchers at Hokkaido University and Amoeba Energy in Japan have, inspired by the efficient foraging behavior of a single-celled amoeba, developed an analog computer for finding a reliable and swift solution to the traveling salesman problem—a representative combinatorial optimization problem.
Many real-world application tasks such as planning and scheduling in logistics and automation are mathematically formulated as combinatorial optimization problems. Conventional digital computers, including supercomputers, are inadequate to solve these complex problems in practically permissible time as the number of candidate solutions they need to evaluate increases exponentially with the problem size—also known as combinatorial explosion. Thus new computers called Ising machines, including quantum annealers, have been actively developed in recent years. These machines, however, require complicated pre-processing to convert each task to the form they can handle and have a risk of presenting illegal solutions that do not meet some constraints and requests, resulting in major obstacles to the practical applications.
These obstacles can be avoided using the newly developed ‘electronic amoeba,’ an analog computer inspired by a single-celled amoeboid organism. The amoeba is known to maximize nutrient acquisition efficiently by deforming its body. It has shown to find an approximate solution to the traveling salesman problem (TSP), i.e., given a map of a certain number of cities, the problem is to find the shortest route for visiting each city exactly once and returning to the starting city. This finding inspired Professor Seiya Kasai at Hokkaido University to mimic the dynamics of the amoeba electronically using an analog circuit, as described in the journal Scientific Reports. “The amoeba core searches for a solution under the electronic environment where resistance values at intersections of crossbars represent constraints and requests of the TSP,” says Kasai. Using the crossbars, the city layout can be easily altered by updating the resistance values without complicated pre-processing.
“” As sunlight hits the houses, bedroom windows adjust their opacity to allow the natural light to wake sleepy residents,” Terminus said on its website, which also highlights tranquil green spaces like rooftop gardens. “Once the light has filled the room, an AI virtual housekeeper named Titan selects your breakfast, matches your outfit with the weather, and presents a full schedule of your day.” The city, which includes offices, homes, public spaces and self-driving cars that move around under the ever watchful eye of AI, is due for completion in about three years, according to Terminus.”
Web Summit conference hears plans by Danish architecture firm BIG and Chinese tech company Terminus to build an AI-run city in Chongqing.
Today we’re joined by Melodie Yashar — Designer, Researcher, Technologist, co-founder of the firm Space Exploration Architecture (SEArch+), Senior Research Associate with San Jose State University Research Foundation at NASA Ames Research Center, and an Associate Researcher within the UC Davis Center for Human/Robotics/Vehicle Integration and Performance (HRVIP). She also teaches undergraduate and graduate design at Art Center College of Design and is a 2019–2020 Future Space Leaders Fellow.
Melodie’s current work focuses on the relationship of advanced software & hardware systems for spaceflight and maintains ongoing research interests in the design of augmented environments, human-machine interaction, human performance studies, and space technology development.
As an undergraduate Melodie studied at UC Berkeley and at Art Center, and she holds graduate degrees in architecture and human-computer interaction with an emphasis in robotics from Columbia University and Carnegie Mellon University, respectively.
She also served as a Visiting Professor at Pratt Institute, as a researcher within Carnegie Mellon’s Morphing Matter Lab and Design Director of Sonic Platforms.
Having come from an interdisciplinary background, Melodie appreciates those who see research and design as a confluence of different fields—allowing problem solving to become a more thoroughly collaborative exercise.