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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,589

‘Every aspect of our lives will be transformed’ — exploring the future of AI

A new centre has opened to study the positive and negative implications of AI and ethical quandaries it poses.

“The rise of powerful AI will be either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity,” Professor Stephen Hawking said in Cambridge, at the launch of the Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI).

The CFI is seeking to investigate the implications of AI for humanity, building an interdisciplinary community of researchers, bringing together philosophers, psychologists, lawyers and computer scientists. But, with strong links to technologists and policymakers, it has clear practical goals.

Artificial intelligence will change the ‘course of our species’: Top Goldman tech banker

Artificial intelligence is a “momentous development,” said George Lee, co-chairman of the global technology, media and telecom group at Goldman Sachs.

“As awesome as the internet has been, it will be best remembered as really the predicate for machine learning,” said Lee, who’s also chief information officer of Goldman’s investment banking division. He appeared on CNBC’s “Squawk Alley” on Wednesday from Goldman’s Builders + Innovators Summit in Santa Barbara, California.

The internet enabled computing scale in a network and serves as a way to “collect data that’s used to train all these algorithms,” Lee said, predicting machine learning will “change our world … and even the course of our species in ways that are hard to predict today.”

Give a 3D printer artificial intelligence, and this is what you’ll get

A London-based startup has combined some of today’s most disruptive technologies in a bid to change the way we’ll build the future. By retrofitting industrial robots with 3D printing guns and artificial intelligence algorithms, Ai Build has constructed machines that can see, create, and even learn from their mistakes.

When CEO and founder Daghan Cam was studying architecture, he noticed a disconnect between small-scale manufacturing and large-scale construction. “On one side we have a fully automated production pipeline,” Cam explained at a recent conference in London. “On the other side we’re completely dependent on human labor.” With the emergence of more efficient printing technologies, he thought there must be a better way.

“We wanted to push the boundaries of how intricate we could design things through computation and how we could create them through 3D printing,” Cam said.

Roving robots may roam your clothes

If you don’t like the thought of bugs crawling all over you, then you might not like one possible direction in which the field of wearable electronics is heading. Researchers from MIT and Stanford University recently showcased their new Rovables robots, which are tiny devices that roam up and down a person’s clothing – and yes, that’s as the clothing is being worn.

The centimeter-sized robots hang on by pinching the fabric between their wheels, with the physically-unconnected wheel on the underside of the material held against the others simply by magnetic attraction.

Each Rovable contains a battery, microcontroller, and a wireless communications module that lets it track the movements and locations of its fellow little robots. It also has an inertial measurement unit (IMU), which includes a gyroscope and accelerometer. By using that IMU and by counting its wheel revolutions, the robot is able to keep track of its own location, allowing for limited autonomous navigation on the wearer’s body.

Microsoft reaches ‘human parity’ with new speech recognition system

Researchers at Microsoft have published details of new speech recognition technology that they say transcribes conversational speech as well as a human does. “We’ve reached human parity,” says Microsoft’s chief speech scientist Xuedong Huang in a statement. “This is an historic achievement.”

The system’s word error rate is reported to be 5.9 percent, which Microsoft says is “about equal” to professional transcriptionists asked to work on speech taken from the same Switchboard corpus of conversations. It uses neural language models that group similar words together, allowing for efficient generalization. Microsoft plans to use the technology in Cortana, its personal voice assistant for Windows and the Xbox One, as well as speech-to-text transcription software.

Although the results are impressive, it’s far from an endgame for speech recognition. Microsoft still needs to tune the technology to work as well with conversations in a wider range of more challenging real-life situations and with a broader selection of voices. And for use cases such as Cortana, much of the difficulty comes from teaching the artificial intelligence to understand the meaning of words and act on them, not just accurately hear them.

SRI Demonstrates Abacus, the First New Rotary Transmission Design in 50 Years

I know, it doesn’t seem like there’s any possible way that a transmission system could be interesting enough that we’d dedicate an entire article (and video!) to it. But here we are: As soon as SRI explained how their new Abacus transmission worked, we were absolutely sure that it was cool enough to share. In a nutshell, here’s why: It’s the first new rotary transmission design since Harmonic Drive introduced its revolutionary gear system in the 1960s*, and it might give harmonic gears a literal run for their money.

The physics of most electric motors generally dictates that the motors are happiest when they’re spinning very fast. Unless you want to use them to simply spin a thing very fast, you’ll need to add a rotary transmission that can convert low torque, high speed rotation into higher torque, lower speed rotation. If you’ve got the budget, the way to do this is with a high-performance harmonic gear like the ones offered by Harmonic Drive. Roboticists like harmonic gears because they are compact, have high gear ratios, and, perhaps most important, don’t have backlash, which is essentially the amount of wiggle room that you get with conventional gear-based transmissions. In robotic applications, wiggling means that you don’t know exactly where everything is all the time, making precision tasks something between irritating and impossible.

Harmonic gears are great, but they’re also superduper expensive, because they require all kinds of precision machining. Alexander Kernbaum, a senior research engineer at SRI International, has come up with an entirely new rotary transmission called the Abacus drive, and it’s a beautiful piece of clever engineering that offers all kinds of substantial advantages:

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