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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2061

British set designer Es Devlin has been chosen to create the UK Pavilion at the Dubai Expo 2020, with a performative structure that will use artificial intelligence to write poems.

Called the Poem Pavilion, the structure will feature an illuminated “message to space” made up of numerous AI-generated poems, which the Expo’s anticipated 25 million visitors will be invited to contribute to.

The 20-metre-high, cone-shaped pavilion will be made up of rows of protruding slats that extend outwards from one central point to form a circular facade. Poems lit up in LEDs will scroll across the facade.

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September 27 is World Tourism Day, which has been celebrated each year by the United Nations World Tourism Organization since 1980. The theme this year is “Tourism and the Digital Transformation,” as digital technology has permeated the tourism industry.

Virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, Internet-plus — these terms have gradually become familiar to people travelling in China, as the country is heading to its tourism industry 3.0. A wide range of cutting-edge technologies have been innovatively applied in almost every part of China’s tourism industry.

A smart robot helps a passenger carry a handbag at Ningbo Railway Station in Zhejiang Province, on August 7, 2017. The smart robot has been activated to help passengers search for ticket fares, print route maps and carry their luggage. [Photo: VCG]

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The new digital communications policy (NDCP) 2018, approved by the Cabinet on Wednesday, looks too good to believe. It has promised to create an additional four million jobs in five years and reskill another one million people in new-age skills and sectors such as 5G LTE and artificial intelligence. Six lakh villages will be connected which will eventually lead to creating jobs and several earning avenues such as managing WiFi hotspots and laying optical fibre, among others. The policy will give an impetus to the job market.

NDCP is bound to create a massive infrastructure and help the debt-ridden telecom sector emerge from its current turbulence. The policy document envisages the reduction in levies and ease of doing business, and this will help restore the financial health of the long-bleeding sector. The focus will be on the proliferation of telecom services and facilitating low-cost financing. The government’s ambitious plan of Digital India will get a booster shot. Thanks to the promise of 50 Mbps speed in the broadband connection, the consumer will be the ultimate beneficiary.

Plans are afoot to reform the licensing and regulatory regime to facilitate investments and innovation, besides promoting ease of doing business. The success of the policy will depend on the execution of the policy.

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Salesforce has showcased new natural language features for enabling its Einstein AI platform to further simplify the work of sales agents, marketers and business leaders.

On ‘AI Day’ at the Dreamforce conference, members of Salesforce’s data science team demonstrated how Einstein Voice—an emerging speech interface—can be used to better access sales figures and projections, automate repetitive tasks, and receive business insights, including through Amazon’s and Google’s smart speakers.

Jim Sinai, Salesforce’s vice president of marketing, said in a keynote that Salesforce had been working on Einstein Voice for the last year to better deliver Einstein’s data discovery, deep learning and machine learning capabilities.

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DeepMind is providing more research to show how neuroscience can inspire more sophisticated AI.

There’s a cognitive quirk humans have that seems deceptively elementary. For example: every morning, you see a man in his 30s walking a boisterous collie. Then one day, a white-haired lady with striking resemblance comes down the street with the same dog.

Subconsciously we immediately make a series of deductions: the man and woman might be from the same household. The lady may be the man’s mother, or some other close relative. Perhaps she’s taking over his role because he’s sick, or busy. We weave an intricate story of those strangers, pulling material from our memories to make it coherent.

This ability—to link one past memory with another—is nothing but pure genius, and scientists don’t yet understand how we do it. It’s not just an academic curiosity: our ability to integrate multiple memories is the first cognitive step that lets us gain new insight into experiences, and generalize patterns across those encounters. Without this step, we’d forever live in a disjointed world.

Continue reading “DeepMind’s New Research on Linking Memories, and How It Applies to AI” | >

I began my life as an activist academic in 1979 when the Western Australian government closed the Fremantle railway, saying buses would be better. Patronage immediately fell by 30% and I ran a four-year campaign to save the railway. We won. I have been writing books and running campaigns ever since on why trains and trams are better than buses. But I have changed my mind. The technology has changed, and I think it will end the need for new light rail.

“Trackless trams” are based on technology created in Europe and China by taking innovations from high-speed and putting them in a bus.

I went to China to check out the CRRC trackless tram (they call it autonomous rail transit, or ART). I came back convinced it’s a transformative transit technology.

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When designing a robot, key components are the robot’s sensors, which allow it to perceive its environment, and its actuators, the electrical or pneumatic motors that allow the robot to move and interact with its environment.

Consider your hand, which has temperature and pressure sensors, but also muscles as actuators. The omni-skins, as the Science Robotics paper dubs them, combine sensors and actuators, embedding them into an elastic sheet. The robotic skins are moved by pneumatic actuators or memory alloy that can bounce back into shape. If this is then wrapped around a soft, deformable object, moving the skin with the actuators can allow the object to crawl along a surface.

The key to the design here is flexibility: rather than adding chips, sensors, and motors into every household object to turn them into individual automatons, the same skin can be used for many purposes. “We can take the skins and wrap them around one object to perform a task—locomotion, for example—and then take them off and put them on a different object to perform a different task, such as grasping and moving an object,” said Kramer-Bottiglio. “We can then take those same skins off that object and put them on a shirt to make an active wearable device.”

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The Disruption Experience this Friday in Singapore is a blockchain event with a difference. With apologies to the Buick commercial, this is not your grandfather’s conference…

I know a few things about blockchain conferences. I produced and hosted the first Bitcoin Event in New York. My organization develops cryptocurrency standards and practices. We help banks and governments create policy and services. And as public speaker for a standards organization, I have delivered keynote presentations at conferences and Expos in Dubai, Gujarat India, Montreal and Tampa, New York and Boston.

Many individuals don’t yet realize that both Bitcoin and the blockchain are as significant as the automobile, the transistor and the Internet. I was fortunate to grasp Bitcoin and the blockchain early in its history. It is never boring to help others understand the blockchain.

And so, I am an evangelist for both a radically improved monetary system and a transformative tool. During the past eight years, I have honed the skill of converting even the most profound skeptic. Give me 45 minutes in front of any audience—technical, skeptical or even without any prior knowledge—and I will win them over. It’s what I do.

An Atypical Conference Venue

As Bitcoin and altcoins begin the process of education, adoption and normalization, the big expos and conference events have begun to splinter and specialize. Today, most blockchain events market their venue to specific market sectors or interests:

For me, Smart Contracts are one of the most exciting and potentially explosive opportunities. As a groupie and cheerleader, I am not alone. Catering to the Smart Contract community is rapidly becoming a big business. Until this week, I thought it was the conference venue that yielded the biggest thrills. That is, until I learned about the Disruption Experience…

Few widely promoted, well-funded events address the 600 pound elephant in the room: What’s the real potential of blockchain trust, blockchain economy or blockchain AI? Take me beyond tokens and currency (please!). How can an international event help us to realize the potential of a radical new approach to accounting, trust and arbitration? Let’s stop arguing about Bitcoin, Ethereum or ICOs…

How can we unleash the gorilla—and grease—
a fundamental change that benefits mankind,
while providing leapfrog technologies for us?

—At least, that’s my spin on the potential of an unusually practical venue.

That question is slated to be answered on Friday at a big event in Singapore. And get this—It is modestly called a “Sneak Peak”. This is what I have been waiting for. The Disruption Experience premiers on September 28 at the V Hotel Lavender in Singapore. But don’t show up at the door. This event requires advance registration. (I do not offer a web link, because I hate being a conference huckster. If you plan to be in the area at the end of this week, then Google the event yourself).

What’s the big deal?

The Disruption Experience team is populated by blockchain developers, educators and trainers who take issue with existing events that focus on monetization. The purity of intention was overrun by greed. And so, they set out to form an event with a more altruistic purpose: Build technology, relationships, mechanisms and educational tools that better mankind. The focus at this event and the conferences that follow is to educate, expose and innovate. The focus is squarely on disruptive technology.

With their team of blockchain innovators focused on benefits and progress, I suspect that attendees will get what we have been searching for: Education, investment opportunities, an edge on new technologies and job opportunities.

Cusp of a Breakout Year

As an analogy, consider the race to understand Bitcoin and consider the engines & motors.

Bitcoin and the blockchain were introduced simultaneously in a 2009 whitepaper. It’s a bit like explaining the engine and the automobile together—for the very first time. One is a technology with a myriad of applications and the potential to that drives innovation. The other is an app. Sure, it’s useful and important, but it’s just an app.

For 8 years, Bitcoin was a radical and contentious concept. Of course, there was the mystery of Satoshi and an effort to pinpoint his or her identity. And, a great debate raged about the legitimacy and value of decentralized, ethereal money. But, the interest was reflected primarily on the pages of Wired Magazine or at Geek-fests. Bitcoin was complex and costly to incorporate into everyday purchases and there were questions and gross misconceptions about hacking, regulation, taxes, criminal activity. The combined audience of adopters, academics, miners and geeks was limited.

That changed last year. With serious talk of exchange traded funds, a futures and derivatives market began to take shape. A critical operational bottleneck was addressed. Ultimately, 2017 was a breakout year for Bitcoin. You may not be using it today, but the smart money is betting that it will enhance your life tomorrow—at least behind the scenes.

Likewise, 2019 is likely to be the breakout year for blockchain applications, careers, products and—perhaps most importantly—public awareness, understanding and appreciation. Just as motors and engines are not limited to automobiles, the blockchain has far more potential than serving as an engine for decentralized cash. It is too important to be just a footnote to disruptive economics. It will disrupt everything. And we are the beneficiaries.

What is Interesting at The Disruption Experience?

The Friday event in Singapore covers many things. The presentations and tutorials that quicken my pulse relate to:

  • AI
  • Smart Contracts
  • Serious insight into blockchain mechanics, applications, adoption, scalability and politics
  • There’s even an exciting development in ICOs…

If you read my columns or follow my blog, then you know I am not keen on initial coin offerings (ICOs). That’s putting it mildly. They are almost all scams. But a rare exception is the Tempow ecosystem which encompasses three functional tokens. Stop by their exhibit and meet the officers of a sound economic mechanism that facilitates decentralized trading while overcoming the efficiency paradox.

What can I do at Disruption Experience?

The September 28 event is a preview for January’s Inaugural Event.

  • Listen and learn what Disruption is all about
  • Experience the first Virtual Reality Expo
  • Get to know the speakers and founders of Disruption
  • Hear about the Disruption Utility Token (DSRPT Token)
  • Meet the Disruption Team
  • See Disruption Expos

… and much, much more.

If you get to the big event, be sure to find the organizer and host, Coach Mark Davis. Tell him that I sent you. His passion and boundless enthusiasm for the blockchain and especially for transformative disruption is quite infectious.

Related reading:

Philip Raymond co-chairs CRYPSA, hosts the New York Bitcoin Event and is keynote speaker at Cryptocurrency Conferences. He sits on the New Money Systems board of Lifeboat Foundation and is a top Bitcoin writer at Quora. Book a presentation or consulting engagement.

When you think about the amount of time we spend behind the wheel today, whether in congestion or helping friends and family getting to and forth, being able to spend this time on other activities whilst on the move opens up a whole host of possibilities.

But not only will we have more free time, driverless cars also promise to make our roads safer and make our journeys faster.

Driverless cars are set to arrive on UK roads by 2021 according to the government and are predicted to change the face of personal mobility forever. Looking past the obvious benefits, Select Car Leasing have looked into the less predictable consequences of driverless cars.

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