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Category: robotics/AI – Page 22

Physics-based AI could boost biomedical imaging and autonomous vehicle sensors

A research team led by UCLA and the University of Rochester has demonstrated a promising evolution of an imaging system designed to capture details within “complex media,” which scatter light, from depicting structures inside body tissue to seeing obstacles through heavy fog. The system uses physics-based machine learning to improve an existing imaging technique.

In tests with standard calibration images obscured by complex media, the new system more than doubled the signal-to-noise ratio compared with a previous generation of the technology. The system also created images in near real time—thousandths of a second. The findings are published in the journal Light: Science & Applications.

How enterprise GenAI can amplify ransomware risk — and how to contain it

Enterprise AI will continue expanding because the business benefits are clear. The challenge is ensuring that productivity gains do not come at the expense of security.

The most effective approach is to incorporate AI into existing identity, data protection and incident response strategies rather than treating it as a separate security domain. Organizations should evaluate AI security controls based on how well they integrate with existing governance and security operations while providing visibility into AI usage, permissions and policy violations.

For managed service providers (MSPs) and enterprise security teams, there is an opportunity to extend cyber resilience strategies to include AI governance.

Anthropic accuses Chinese AI labs of mining Claude as US debates AI chip exports

As one legal analyst noted, the settlement may be seen by the tech industry as simply “a price of conducting business in a fiercely competitive space”—a cost of doing business rather than a genuine deterrent. Meanwhile, the fair-use ruling on training means Anthropic retains the legal right to train on copyrighted works, as long as it doesn’t pirate them to do so.

Anthropic is accusing three Chinese AI companies of setting up more than 24,000 fake accounts with its Claude AI model to improve their own models.

The labs — DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax — allegedly generated more than 16 million exchanges with Claude through those accounts using a technique called “distillation.” Anthropic said the labs “targeted Claude’s most differentiated capabilities: agentic reasoning, tool use, and coding.”

The accusations come amid debates over how strictly to enforce export controls on advanced AI chips, a policy aimed at curbing China’s AI development.

Meet Biomni—an AI-powered biomedical co-scientist

In creating a comprehensive, AI-enabled research agent for the biomedical sciences, Stanford University researchers hope to speed innovation by eliminating the tedium of scientific legwork. Biomni, an AI-powered, multiskilled biomedical research agent, is no mere chatbot. It is a full-fledged “co-scientist” capable of designing and developing complex research workflows, said Jure Leskovec, the Alfred and Rebecca Lin Professor and professor of computer science in the School of Engineering and senior author of the paper introducing Biomni in the journal Science.

“If you think of an agent as a carpenter, a carpenter without tools is just a carpenter who can talk,” Leskovec said, explaining what sets Biomni apart from popular generative AI chatbots. “With Biomni, we give the carpenter a set of tools, so it can build.”

Born for impact Biomni was born from the notion that, when working with an AI agent, a scientist should be able to describe a research problem in simple, natural language. With that in mind, the researchers designed Biomni to read the literature, form hypotheses, choose datasets and tools, write code, interpret results and suggest next-stage experiments in a complete research workflow.

Soft exosuit shows motor-free path to wearable walking assistance

Researchers in China have unveiled a new robotic exosuit driven entirely by soft artificial muscles instead of traditional motors. This technology could make it easier for older adults, injured patients or factory workers to walk with much less effort. Current exosuits that aid walking use heavy motors, gearboxes and noisy air-pressure pumps that restrict a person’s natural movement.

Soft muscles, on the other hand, are made of thin, flexible rubber fibers that behave more like human muscles and are considerably lighter, making it easier for people to move.

Details of the work are in a paper published in the journal Science Advances.

Quantum sensing microscope illuminates transistor design

Artificial intelligence faces an energy crisis stemming from a physical traffic jam inside modern computer chips. Processors must continually shuffle data, such as the billions of parameters in complex models, between separate computing and memory nodes. This traffic jam, known as the “von Neumann bottleneck,” hinders the speed and energy efficiency of advanced processors.

To tackle this problem, scientists are developing spintronics, which leverages the electron’s “spin,” or intrinsic magnetic orientation, for more efficient devices. A long-sought milestone in this field is a single device, known as a “spin transistor,” that combines a magnetic bit with a semiconducting switch, allowing it to compute and store data simultaneously.

“The major challenge is understanding how magnetism and electrical current interact in nanoscale devices,” said Boston College physics professor Brian Zhou, whose group led the study. “We developed a single-spin quantum microscope to observe magnetic states inside atomically thin devices as they actively process electrical information.”

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