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Category: robotics/AI – Page 230

She’s not long on charisma or passion but keeps perfect rhythm and is never prone to temperamental outbursts against the musicians beneath her three batons. Meet MAiRA Pro S, the next-generation robot conductor who made her debut this weekend in Dresden.

Her two performances in the eastern German city are intended to show off the latest advances in machine maestros, as well as music written explicitly to harness 21st-century technology. The artistic director of Dresden’s Sinfoniker, Markus Rindt, said the intention was “not to replace human beings” but to perform complex music that human conductors would find impossible.

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Roli, the maker of quirky, portable, and expressive digital pianos and keyboard instruments, has a new device that can both teach budding pianists how to play music and provide seasoned musicians with a new way of adding filters and effects to their songs by waving their hands and wiggling their fingers.

The Roli Airwave is a 14.5-inch tall stand with a camera on top. The camera is positioned downward to track the movements of a player’s fingers as they dance across a keyboard sitting at the base of the stand. The movements of a player’s hands that are captured by the camera are streamed in real time onto the screen of a tablet that sits on the easel-like Airwave stand. The visuals can be used as a teaching tool to show the player which fingers should strike which keys, or offer some additional guidance on how to play a song just right. Of course, the Airwave uses machine intelligence and computer vision to track the player’s hands and to offer its advice on where those hands should be placed.

The system costs $299 and should start shipping in February 2025. You’ll also need one of Roli’s keyboards (which range from $249 to $1,399) to pair with it. If you want to use it as a teaching tool, you’ll also need an iPad or other tablet to set onto the stand to supply the visuals.

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Can Tesla meet the production timeline for Optimus? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Tesla’s humanoid robot, Optimus, is set to enter production by 2025. Elon Musk announced that low production for internal use will begin next year, with high production for external companies expected in 2026. Optimus Gen 2, featuring a new design, was showcased at the 2024 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. Tesla has been conducting field tests in its gigafactories, indicating progress towards Musk’s timeline for Optimus’ production.

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Researchers at Freie Universität Berlin, University of Maryland and NIST, Google AI, and Abu Dhabi set out to robustly estimate the free Hamiltonian parameters of bosonic excitations in a superconducting quantum simulator. The protocols they developed, outlined in a paper pre-published on arXiv, could contribute to the realization of highly precise quantum simulations that reach beyond the limits of classical computers.

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All proteins are composed of chains of amino acids, which generally fold up into compact globules with specific shapes. The folding process is governed by interactions between the different amino acids—for example, some of them carry electrical charges—so the sequence determines the structure. Because the structure in turn defines a protein’s function, deducing a protein’s structure is vital for understanding many processes in molecular biology, as well as for identifying drug molecules that might bind to and alter a protein’s activity.

Protein structures have traditionally been determined by experimental methods such as x-ray crystallography and electron microscopy. But researchers have long wished to be able to predict a structure purely from its sequence—in other words, to understand and predict the process of protein folding.

For many years, computational methods such as molecular dynamics simulations struggled with the complexity of that problem. But AlphaFold bypassed the need to simulate the folding process. Instead, the algorithm could be trained to recognize correlations between sequence and structure in known protein structures and then to generalize those relationships to predict unknown structures.

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“This makes the scam much harder to spot, as the information provided is personally relevant to the victims, arrives via the expected communication channel, and the linked, fake websites look as expected.”

What’s more, the diversification of the victimology footprint has been complemented by improvements to the toolkit that allow the scammer groups to speed up the scam process using automated phishing page generation, improve communication with targets via interactive chatbots, protecting phishing websites against disruption by competitors, and other goals.

Telekopye’s operations have not been without their fair share of hiccups. In December 2023, law enforcement officials from Czechia and Ukraine announced the arrest of several cybercriminals who are alleged to have used the malicious Telegram bot.

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Would you buy a $16,000 Unitree G1 for your home assistant? Share your thoughts in the comments.

The pressure is on for Elon Musk to accelerate the mass production of Tesla’s Optimus robot as Unitree Robotics announced that its $16,000 G1 humanoid robot is ready for mass production. Initially focused on four-legged robots, Unitree shifted to humanoid designs and quickly developed the G1, which now boasts impressive capabilities like leaping, climbing stairs, and adjusting its gait in real time. Standing at 1.32 meters tall and weighing 35 kg, the G1 features 3D LiDAR, a RealSense depth camera, and a 9,000-mAh battery for two hours of use. While it’s ready for production, Unitree hasn’t confirmed if mass production has begun.

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🌍🔬🦠

In a recent study published in the journal Cell, researchers developed a deep learning model, “LucaProt,” a transformer-based AI model to detect highly divergent ribonucleic acid (RNA)-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRP) sequences in meta-transcriptomes from diverse ecosystems. They identified 180 RNA virus supergroups and 161,979 putative RNA virus species, showing that RNA viruses are widespread and present even in extreme environments.

Background

RNA viruses are widespread and infect a variety of species, yet their role in global ecosystems has only recently been recognized due to large-scale virus discovery efforts. These studies, primarily using RdRP sequences, have expanded the known virosphere by identifying thousands of new virus species. However, current tools often miss highly divergent RNA viruses, prompting the need for improved identification strategies.

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