We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
Recent advances in the fields of human-infrastructure interaction, electronic engineering, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) have opened new possibilities for the development of assistive and medical technologies. These include devices that can assist individuals with both physical and cognitive disabilities, supporting them throughout their daily activities.
Researchers at the University of Michigan recently developed CoNav, a smart wheelchair controlled via a Robot Operating System (ROS) based framework. The new wheelchair, presented in a paper on the arXiv preprint server, could help to improve the quality of life of individuals who are temporarily or permanently unable to walk, allowing them to move in their surroundings more intuitively and autonomously.
“The inspiration for this work stems from a broader challenge in assistive mobility for people with disabilities (PWD),” Vineet Kamat, senior author of the paper, told Tech Xplore.
With an assist from the NEID spectrograph, a team of astronomers have confirmed the existence of exoplanet Gaia-4b—one of the most massive planets known to orbit a low-mass star. Gaia-4b is also the first planet detected by the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft using the astrometric technique.
NEID is a high-precision radial-velocity spectrograph that is designed to measure the extremely minute wobble of nearby stars using the radial velocity effect. This effect results from the mutual gravitational force between a planet and its host star which causes the star’s position to shift very slightly as the planet travels around it. With this powerful capability, one of NEID’s main science goals is to confirm exoplanet candidates found by other exoplanet missions.
NEID is mounted on the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at the U.S. National Science Foundation Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), a program of NSF NOIRLab.
OpenAI on Thursday said the U.S. National Laboratories will be using its latest artificial intelligence models for scientific research and nuclear weapons security.
Under the agreement, up to 15,000 scientists working at the National Laboratories may be able to access OpenAI’s reasoning-focused o1 series. OpenAI will also work with Microsoft, its lead investor, to deploy one of its models on Venado, the supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, according to a release. Venado is powered by technology from Nvidia and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.
Conflict between humans and AI is front and center in AMC’s sci-fi series “Humans,” which returned for its third season on Tuesday (June 5). In the new episodes, conscious synthetic humans face hostile people who treat them with suspicion, fear and hatred. Violence roils as Synths find themselves fighting for not only basic rights but their very survival, against those who view them as less than human and as a dangerous threat. [Can Machines Be Creative? Meet 9 AI ‘Artists’]
Even in the real world, not everyone is ready to welcome AI with open arms. In recent years, as computer scientists have pushed the boundaries of what AI can accomplish, leading figures in technology and science have warned about the looming dangers that artificial intelligence may pose to humanity, even suggesting that AI capabilities could doom the human race.
But why are people so unnerved by the idea of AI?
