Products such as Semantic Scholar and Microsoft Academic could be a boon for scholars.
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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2299
In the past, the United Nations has considered the threat posed by weaponized AI, but now the body is looking at a more mundane, but still important, robot invasion. A report from the latest UN Conference on Trade and Development has outlined how the increasing use of industrial automation is impacting jobs in developing countries, and what strategies may help in overcoming the problem.
Robots taking over human jobs has been a concern for decades, but those concerns generally focus on developed countries. The report points out that developing countries in Africa and Latin America may be at greater risk of having their industrialization slow down, since the increasing use of robots is eating into the low-cost labor advantage that developing countries have traditionally held. Up to two thirds of those occupations may be at risk.
Another issue is the trend of “reshoring.” Functioning as opposite of offshoring, reshoring sees companies move their labor operations back to developed countries, to be carried out by robots or automated systems. While it has the potential to disrupt developing countries from industrializing, the report notes that reshoring has so far been slow-paced, and hasn’t undermined the continued offshoring.
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It seems like every television season plays host to a single show that takes over our cultural consciousness by coating modern fears in fantastical drama.
Game of Thrones taps into the cutthroat nature of modern politics, while The Walking Dead plays into our ever-present fear of a worldwide contagion. This year, with Elon Musk’s dire warnings about the dangers of artificial intelligence, Siri and Alexa permeating our personal lives, and self-driving cars threatening to run down groups of children, Westworld is posed to be that show.
Westworld is complex. It’s that complexity, interwoven with mysteries and plot twists, that produces the hours of online speculation and wild fan theories that are the hallmark of anything worth watching.
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Modular Exoskeletons
Posted in biotech/medical, cyborgs, robotics/AI
WeaRobot wants to democratize robotic exoskeletons. They want to make modular exoskeletons, so that is more affordable. The exoskeleton can boost the mobility joint by joint. Just supporting the movement of one knee or one elbow or assembling all modules for a full body exoskeleton. This is targeted at enhancing mobility and function for the growing elderly population.
WeaRobot is breaking apart robotic exoskeletons to make them more affordable and adaptable.
Robotic exoskeletons are electromechanical suits that can give paraplegic people the chance to walk again. Full body suits produce impressive results, such as teaching dormant body parts to move on their own again. But they are expensive, ranging from $40,000 to more than $100,000. Now, a Mexican robotics startup is breaking exoskeletons down into smaller pieces, with the goal of making this medical technology affordable and adaptable.
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Telegram has announced the first winners of its bot competition. The BotPrize was announced in April and will see $1 million awarded to developers of the best Telegram bots submitted. The first winners come from the worlds of photo-editing, productivity, games, dating and finance.
Telegram is a messaging service with a focus on speed and security. Launched in 2013, it is cloud-based, meaning that user content syncs instantly across the platforms on which the service can be used, including PC, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS and Windows Phone.
The firm’s BotPrize will help to increase the number of bots available on the service and accelerate the speed with which the number is increased. For the uninitiated, bots are effectively apps in themselves with which users can interact via messaging. They typically run inside messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger or, in this instance, Telegram.
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In Brief:
- The AI, called MogIA, based its analysis on 20 million data points from platforms such as Google, Twitter, and YouTube.
- The AI aims at learning from the environment, developing its own rules at the policy layer, and developing expert systems without discarding any data.
MogIA, an artificial intelligence (AI) system developed by an Indian start-up, correctly predicted the outcome of this year’s elections. It based its analysis on 20 million data points from platforms such as Google, Twitter, and YouTube, reviewing public engagement across various posts in relation to individual candidates.
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Google has built machine learning systems that can create their own cryptographic algorithms — the latest success for AI’s use in cybersecurity. But what are the implications of our digital security increasingly being handed over to intelligent machines?
Google Brain, the company’s California-based AI unit, managed the recent feat by pitting neural networks against each other. Two systems, called Bob and Alice, were tasked with keeping their messages secret from a third, called Eve. None were told how to encrypt messages, but Bob and Alice were given a shared security key that Eve didn’t have access too.
In the majority of tests the pair fairly quickly worked out a way to communicate securely without Eve being able to crack the code. Interestingly, the machines used some pretty unusual approaches you wouldn’t normally see in human generated cryptographic systems, according to TechCrunch.
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