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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2379

I love contract season with the US Government because you get to see all of the cool projects being awarded.

CAMBRIDGE, MA — The U.S. military’s unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) depend on stealth as they conduct surveillance and reconnaissance and other missions in the deep oceans. With Global Positioning System (GPS) signals unable to penetrate the ocean’s surface, these UUVs can rely on inertial sensors to provide acceptable positioning information during short missions. On longer missions, however, inertial sensors accumulate error, forcing the vehicles to risk exposing themselves to enemies as they periodically surface to obtain a GPS fix.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is addressing this issue by funding the development of a small number of acoustic transmitters that can be anchored to fixed locations around ocean basins to serve as an undersea navigation constellation, according to a May 10 release by the Cambridge-based nonprofit company Draper.

By measuring its range to multiple signals emanating from known coordinates, an undersea vehicle can operate continuously with accurate navigation information without needing to surface for GPS fixes or to use high cost inertial systems that are typical of current UUVs. DARPA awarded a contract on March 15 to a Draper-led team to begin development of a solution for the Positioning System for Deep Ocean Navigation (POSYDON).

Continue reading “Draper Gets DARPA Contract to Improve Stealth Capabilities for Undersea Vehicles” | >

DARPA was tied to this; and when you click on the article the page states content was removed. I will keep trying to track down because it is a great report; so not sure if someone has intervene.

Forget telltale finger grease prints: researchers have come up with a robot that mimics the swipe touch gestures we use to get into our phones.

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My new article on how some technologies will inevitably make the government smaller:

However, there’s reason to believe that in the near future, government might dramatically shrink—not because of demands by fiscally astute Americans, but because of radical technology.

Indubitably, millions of government jobs will soon be replaced by robots. Even the US President could one day be replaced, which—strangely enough—might bring sanity to our election process.

But it’s not just robots, it’s software programs and weird new tech that will do the replacing. Consider the over 1 million firefighters, a staple part of American government that also represents the ideal of service and career to one’s country. Companies around the world are now building fireproof everything, including couches, furniture, and building materials that simply don’t burn well. And intelligent robots—which I think will be in 50 percent of American households within five years time—will all have fire and carbon monoxide detectors.

Continue reading “Technology Will Replace the Need for Big Government” | >

One of many lessons around AI?

A class of students at the Georgia Institute of Technology recently learned that Jill Watson, the teacher’s assistant they’d been interacting with all semester, was actually a robot.

Jill, powered by IBM’s Watson analytics system, helped graduate students in an online artificial intelligence course, according to The Wall Street Journal.

“It seemed very much like a normal conversation with a human being,” one student said. “I was flabbergasted,” confessed another.

Continue reading “AI2 CEO calls for ‘full disclosure’ in artificial intelligence after students learn their TA is really a bot” | >

I wonder if this would qualify as a turing test.

Lalith Polepeddi, a (human) teaching assistant and researcher on the Jill Watson project at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Photo:
Lalith Polepeddi.

“I have been accused of being a computer,” says TA Lalith Polepeddi, a computer-science master’s student who was needled for responding to messages with lightning speed. “I don’t take it personally.”

Continue reading “Imagine Discovering That Your Teaching Assistant Really Is a Robot” | >

The troubling piece of this article is that the article leaves out how the underlying technology will need to change in order for AI to truly intertwine with humans. AI in the existing infrastructure and digital technology with no support of BMI, microbots, etc. will not evolve us to Singularity by itself and without changes to the existing digital landscape.

As artificial intelligence continuously evolves, the future of AI is also becoming more significantly challenging to perceive and comprehend for humans.

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At TechCrunch’s Disrupt NY, Siri creator Dag Kittlaus performed the first public demo of Siri’s new cousin, Viv. Kittlaus described the brains of Viv as, “software that’s writing itself,” which is a pretty bold statement with some implications that call to mind the dreariest of Skynet dystopias. But what exactly makes it any better than Siri?

The fact is we don’t yet know how good this new voice assistant will be, but we can reflect a little bit on what we see during the controlled demo in the video below. For starters, Viv is designed to integrate seamlessly with third party apps, which is a major deficit on Siri’s part. The new AI was able to send money via Venmo, book a room through Hotels.com, and hail a cab from Uber. And it did so quickly and with no apparent hassle. Kittlaus later in the presentation described Viv as a “marketplace” that he saw as an improvement upon app stores.

Where Viv really shines is in its ability to parse complex questions. In one sample query, Kittlaus asked his robot, “will it be warmer than 70-degrees near the Golden gate bridge after 5pm the day after tomorrow?” which Viv was able to answer. We will update this post to reflect how wrong Viv was if it’s over 70 in San Fransisco later this week.

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