Lifeboat Foundation

It might sound like Science Fiction, but robots are helping a local hospital fight infections.

Given robotics history, I can understand Canada’s viewpoint. However, as technologies such as Quantum is applied to AI; we then will see real improvements in robotics. Until Quantum is AI’s platform; we will see robotics still fall short in many areas and will continue to see limited use and adoption.

Nowhere is the world’s robotic future more controversial than in Canada.

In a new global poll from travel site Travelzoo, Canadians were the least likely to agree that robots will make people’s lives better.

Continue reading “Poll On Attitudes Towards Robots Finds Canadians As Pessimistic As It Gets” »

Jeff Goodell is a braver person than me. Goodell reports that the driverless car “still drives like a teenager” Personally, I would worry more about the ability to hack these cars in the middle of a major US highway going 60 to 70 mph and hackers abruptly shutting off the engine.

Self-driving cars, war outsourced to robots, surgery by autonomous machines – this is only the beginning.

A group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have found a way to speed up the Web without actually increasing the connection throughput or making fundamental code changes.

It created Polaris, a framework that determines how to overlap the objects being downloaded by a page and minimize the amounts of time a site fetches individual resources. The framework creates a dependency graph of the page, then uses that to determine when each object should be loaded.

Don’t miss our biggest TNW Conference yet! Join us May 26 & 27 in Amsterdam.

Continue reading “MIT researchers found a way to load websites 34% faster on the same connection” »

A huge milestone has just been reached in the field of artificial intelligence: AlphaGo, a program developed by Google’s DeepMind unit, has defeated legendary Go player Lee Se-dol in the first of five historic matches being held in Seoul, South Korea. Lee resigned after about three and a half hours, with 28 minutes and 28 seconds remaining on his clock. The series is the first time a professional 9-dan Go player has taken on a computer, and Lee is competing for a $1 million prize.

“I was very surprised,” said Lee after the match. “I didn’t expect to lose. [But] I didn’t think AlphaGo would play the game in such a perfect manner.” DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis expressed “huge respect for Lee Se-dol and his amazing skills,” calling the game “hugely exciting” and “very tense.” Team lead David Silver said it was an “amazing game of Go that really pushed AlphaGo to its limits.”

Watch DeepMind’s program AlphaGo take on the legendary Lee Sedol (9-dan pro), the top Go player of the past decade, in a $1M 5-game challenge match in Seoul. This is the livestream for Match 1 to be played on: 9th March 13:00 KST (local), 04:00 GMT; note for US viewers this is the day before on: 8th March 20:00 PT, 23:00 ET.

In October 2015, AlphaGo became the first computer program ever to beat a professional Go player by winning 5–0 against the reigning 3-times European Champion Fan Hui (2-dan pro). That work was featured in a front cover article in the science journal Nature in January 2016.

Continue reading “Match 1 — Google DeepMind Challenge Match: Lee Sedol vs AlphaGo” »

Still can she walk and run without stumbling or jerking?

Toshiba’s humanoid robot ‘ChihiraKanae’ was displayed for the first time in Europe at a press preview of the International Travel Trade Show in Berlin, Tuesday. The humanoid resembles a young woman, and is able to talk, move and act according to the specifications.

Big news for Carnegie-Mellon’s Robotics department.

Robotics researchers gearing up for busy, productive year.

Continue reading “Carnegie Mellon robotics selected for research projects totaling more than $11 million” »

US Government’s cool $100 mil in brain research. As we have been highlighting over the past couple of months that the US Government’s IARPA and DARPA program’s have and intends to step up their own efforts in BMIs and robotics for the military; I am certain that this research will help their own efforts and progress.

Intelligence project aims to reverse-engineer the brain to find algorithms that allow computers to think more like humans.

By Jordana Cepelewicz on March 8, 2016.

Continue reading “The U.S. Government Launches a $100-Million ‘Apollo Project of the Brain’” »