The 2019 World Robot Conference is held in Beijing, China from August 20 to 25, 2019. The 5th annual expo showcases over 700 exhibits of the latest robotic technologies with more than 21 industrial applications.
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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,158
Amazon, Microsoft, ‘putting world at risk of killer AI’: study
Washington (AFP) — Amazon, Microsoft and Intel are among leading tech companies putting the world at risk through killer robot development, according to a report that surveyed major players from the sector about their stance on lethal autonomous weapons.
Dutch NGO Pax ranked 50 companies by three criteria: whether they were developing technology that could be relevant to deadly AI, whether they were working on related military projects, and if they had committed to abstaining from contributing in the future.
“Why are companies like Microsoft and Amazon not denying that they’re currently developing these highly controversial weapons, which could decide to kill people without direct human involvement?” said Frank Slijper, lead author of the report published this week.
China Has Unveiled an AI Judge that Will ‘Help’ With Court Proceedings
Judges are far from being infallible. For example, in psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow, it was shown that there is a correlation between the leniency of a judge in court, and how recently they had eaten lunch.
Is there a way to get around this problem? According to China and Estonia, AI should be the judge — literally.
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Sea Machines Robotics to demonstrate autonomous spill response
BOSTON — Sea Machines Robotics Inc. this week said it has entered into a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration to demonstrate the ability of its autonomous technology in increasing the safety, response time and productivity of marine oil-spill response operations.
Sea Machines was founded in 2015 and claimed to be “the leader in pioneering autonomous control and advanced perception systems for the marine industries.” The company builds software and systems to increase the safety, efficiency, and performance of ships, workboats, and commercial vessels worldwide.
The U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD) is an agency of the U.S. Department of Transportation that promotes waterborne transportation and its integration with other segments of the transportation system.
Will China lead the world in AI by 2030?
But observers warn that there are several factors that could stymie the nation’s plans, including a lack of contribution to the theories used to develop the tools underpinning the field, and a reticence by Chinese companies to invest in the research needed to make fundamental breakthroughs.
The country’s artificial-intelligence research is growing in quality, but the field still plays catch up to the United States in terms of high-impact papers, people and ethics.
New Tech Puts NASA One Step Closer to Fueling Spacecraft in Space
NASA just successfully demonstrated the first of three tools designed to refuel spacecraft in space, right outside of the International Space Station.
The space agency’s Robotic Refuelling Mission 3 was able to unstow a special adapter that can hold super-cold methane, oxygen or hydrogen, and insert it into a special coupler on a different fuel tank.
Future iterations of the system could one day allow us to gas up spacecraft with resources from distant worlds, such as liquid methane as fuel. And that’s a big deal, since future space explorations to far away destinations such as the Moon and Mars will rely on our ability to refuel after leaving Earth’s gravity.
Preliminary Results and Analysis Independent Core Observer Model (ICOM) Cognitive Architecture in a Mediated Artificial Super Intelligence (mASI) System
(BICA for AI, Post Conference Journal Paper, see Springer)
Abstract:
This paper is focused on preliminary cognitive and consciousness test results from using an Independent Core Observer Model Cognitive Architecture (ICOM) in a Mediated Artificial Super Intelligence (mASI) System. These results, including objective and subjective analyses, are designed to determine if further research is warranted along these lines. The comparative analysis includes comparisons to humans and human groups as measured for direct comparison. The overall study includes a mediation client application optimization in helping perform tests, AI context-based input (building context tree or graph data models), intelligence comparative testing (such as an IQ test), and other tests (i.e. Turing, Qualia, and Porter method tests) designed to look for early signs of consciousness or the lack thereof in the mASI system. Together, they are designed to determine whether this modified version of ICOM is a) in fact, a form of AGI and/or ASI, b) conscious, and c) at least sufficiently interesting that further research is called for. This study is not conclusive but offers evidence to justify further research along these lines.
YouTube is deleting videos of robots fighting because of ‘animal cruelty’
We need to have higher ethics for robotic beings because if the superintelligence in digital form becomes reality we will need to have better ethics around robot rights. We could have literally a terminator situation but we could make a the vision possibly we do not need to have them be slaves to use but rightful citizens.
Each notice cited the same section of these guidelines, which states: “Content that displays the deliberate infliction of animal suffering or the forcing of animals to fight is not allowed on YouTube.”
It goes on to state: “Examples include, but are not limited to, dog fighting and cock fighting.”
New models for handwriting recognition in online Latin and Arabic scripts
Researchers at the University of Sfax, in Tunisia, have recently developed a new method to recognize handwritten characters and symbols in online scripts. Their technique, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, has already achieved remarkable performance on texts written in both the Latin and Arabic alphabet.
In recent years, researchers have created neural network-based architectures that can tackle a variety of tasks, including image classification, face recognition, natural language processing (NLP), and many more. Handwriting recognition systems are computer tools that are specifically designed to recognize characters and other hand-written symbols in a similar way to humans.
In their early years of life, in fact, human beings innately develop the ability to understand different types of handwriting by identifying specific characters both individually and when grouped together. Over the past decade or so, many studies have tried to replicate this ability in computer systems, as this would ultimately enable more advanced and automatic analyses of handwritten texts.
Intel Details Its Nervana Inference and Training AI Cards
Hot Chips 31 is underway this week, with presentations from a number of companies. Intel has decided to use the highly technical conference to discuss a variety of products, including major sessions focused on the company’s AI division. AI and machine learning are viewed as critical areas for the future of computing, and while Intel has tackled these fields with features like DL Boost on Xeon, it’s also building dedicated accelerators for the market.
The NNP-I 1000 (Spring Hill) and the NNP-T (Spring Crest) are intended for two different markets, inference and training. “Training” is the work of creating and teaching a neural network how to process data in the first place. Inference refers to the task of actually running the now-trained neural network model. It requires far more computational horsepower to train a neural network than it does to apply the results of that training to real-world categorization or classification tasks.
Intel’s Spring Crest NNP-T is designed to scale out to an unprecedented degree, with a balance between tensor processing capability, on-package HBM, networking capability, and on-die SRAMs to boost processing performance. The underlying chip is built by TSMC — yes, TSMC — on 16nm, with a 680mm die size and a 1200mm interposer. The entire assembly is 27 billion transistors with 4x8GB stacks of HBM2-2400 memory, 24 Tensor Processing Clusters (TPCs) with a core frequency of up to 1.1GHz. Sixty-four lanes of SerDes HSIO provides 3.58Tbps of aggregate bandwidth and the card supports an x16 PCIe 4.0 connection. Power consumption is expected to be between 150-250W. The chip was built using TSMC’s advanced CoWoS packaging (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate), and carries 60MB of cache distributed across its various cores. CoWoS competes with Intel’s EMIB, but Intel has decided to build this hardware at TSMC rather than using its own foundries. Performance is estimated at up to 119 TOPS.