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Meet Olli 2.0, a 3D-printed autonomous shuttle

From afar, Olli resembles many of the “future is now!” electric autonomous shuttles that have popped up in recent years.

The tall rectangular pod, with its wide-set headlights and expansive windows nestled between a rounded frame, gives the shuttle a friendly countenance that screams, ever so gently, “come along, take a ride.”

But Olli is different in almost every way, from how it’s produced to its origin story. And now, its maker, Local Motors, has given Olli an upgrade in hopes of accelerating the adoption of its autonomous shuttles.

NASA Considers Robotic Lunar Pit Mission; Moon’s Subsurface Key To Exploration

The Moon’s subsurface is the key to its longterm development and sustainability, says NASA scientist.


A view of the Apollo 11 lunar module “Eagle” as it returned from the surface of the moon to dock with the command module “Columbia”. A smooth mare area is visible on the Moon below and a half-illuminated Earth hangs over the horizon. Command module pilot Michael Collins took this picture.

Robot pilot that can grab the flight controls gets its plane licence

By David Hambling

A robot pilot is learning to fly. It has passed its pilot’s test and flown its first plane, but it has also had its first mishap too.

Unlike a traditional autopilot, the ROBOpilot Unmanned Aircraft Conversion System literally takes the controls, pressing on foot pedals and handling the yoke using robotic arms. It reads the dials and meters with a computer vision system.

A deep learning technique for context-aware emotion recognition

A team of researchers at Yonsei University and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has recently developed a new technique that can recognize emotions by analyzing people’s faces in images along with contextual features. They presented and outlined their deep learning-based architecture, called CAER-Net, in a paper pre-published on arXiv.

For several years, researchers worldwide have been trying to develop tools for automatically detecting by analyzing images, videos or audio clips. These tools could have numerous applications, for instance, improving robot-human interactions or helping doctors to identify signs of mental or neural disorders (e.g.„ based on atypical speech patterns, facial features, etc.).

So far, the majority of techniques for recognizing emotions in images have been based on the analysis of people’s facial expressions, essentially assuming that these expressions best convey humans’ emotional responses. As a result, most datasets for training and evaluating emotion recognition tools (e.g., the AFEW and FER2013 datasets) only contain cropped images of human faces.

Artificial intelligence uncovers new details about Old Master paintings

Artificial intelligence has been used to analyse high-resolution digital X-ray images of the world famous Ghent Altarpiece, as part of an investigative project led by UCL.

The finding is expected to improve our understanding of art masterpieces and provide new opportunities for art investigation, conservation and presentation.

Researchers from the National Gallery, Duke University and UCL worked with technical images acquired from the brothers Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, a large and complex 15th-century altarpiece in St Bavo’s Cathedral, Belgium.

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Microsoft will likely create Skynet says study

On Wednesday, at the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in Geneva, a panel of government experts debated policy options regarding lethal autonomous weapons.

Dutch NGO Pax created a report that surveyed major players from the sector on their view of lethal autonomous weapons. They categorised companies based on 3 criteria: whether they were developing technology that’s potentially relevant to deadly AI, working on related military products, and if they had committed to abstaining from contributing in the future.

By these criteria, Microsoft scores rather highly in the birthplace of Skynet rankings. Microsoft has invested extensively in developing artificial intelligence products, has very close relationships with the US military, and Satya Nadella has committed to providing the military with their very best technology. While Microsoft has fallen short of explicitly developing AI for military purposes, we do know that they have developed a version of the HoloLens for the military that is specifically designed to increase the lethality of soldiers in the field.

Johnny 5 — The First Robotic US Citizen

Should citizenship be restricted to humans?

Scene taken from the film Short Circuit 2 (1988).

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