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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,664

#24 AVATAR TECHNOLOGY DIGEST / Get a Virtual-Reality Punch

Welcome to #24 Avatar Technology Digest! We provide you with the latest news on Technology, Medical Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence the best way we can. Here are the top stories of the last week!

1) Did you know that Disney does more than shoot box office hits and sell toys to your kids? They also have a very active Research Department that specializes in a variety of applications that can be used throughout the Disney empire. And now another interesting innovation has come out of the Research Department, as they have developed a method for generating those 3D printable robots without the need for time and energy-consuming work at all.

2) Being able to identify problems with a person’s body without subjecting them to invasive procedures is the fantasy of all Star Trek doctors. There’s even a prize offering a fortune to anyone who can effectively recreate the tricorder technology out in the real world. Now, Stanford scientists think that they’ve developed a system that, in time, could be used to spot cancerous tumors from a foot away.

3) Technology is all around us, but what happened to the robots we dreamed of as kids? The ones who could be our friends and members of our family. The robots who were as smart as our smart phone, but could walk and talk and learn and engage with us, in a way no smart phone ever could. We think the Human-like household robot Alpha 2 by Ubtech Robotics could finally be that robot, and with your support, we can make Alpha 2 a reality.

4) Imagine playing a virtual-reality boxing game, complete with a menacing opponent aiming a haymaker at your head. You get your gloves up in time to block the punch, but you feel no impact when it hits, breaking the otherwise immersive experience.
Researchers in Germany have developed Visual reality technology for an armband that lets you feel impact from virtual interactions.

TV Anchor: Olesya Yermakova @olesyayermakova
Video: Vladimir Shlykov www.GetYourMedia.ru
Hair&Make-up: Nataliya Starovoytova

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Self-driving cars may become a mass reality faster than you think

“Just a few years ago, automated parking was a revolutionary new technology — now it comes as a standard option in some production models. This is how I believe driverless vehicles will come to be accepted in the future,” says Wei-Bin Zhang, IEEE fellow and a researcher engineer at the California PATH program, Institute of Transportation Studies of University of California at Berkeley.

That’s right — we may be on the brink of an all-out self-driving car revolution.

We’ve already seen cars that can stay in their lanes and apply the breaks by themselves, so to many, an autonomous car is just the next step in the natural progression. And the automotive industry is taking this very seriously. According to a study by Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), the self-driving market is estimated to grow to $33.89 billion in the next five years.

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Google’s RankBrain Outranks the Best Brains in the Industry

Bloomberg recently broke the news that Google is “turning its lucrative Web search over to AI machines.” Google revealed to the reporter that for the past few months, a very large fraction of the millions of search queries Google responds to every second have been “interpreted by an artificial intelligence system, nicknamed RankBrain.”

The company that has tried hard to automate its mission to organize the world’s information was happy to report that its machines have again triumphed over humans. When Google search engineers “were asked to eyeball some pages and guess which they thought Google’s search engine technology would rank on top,” RankBrain had an 80% success rate compared to “the humans [who] guessed correctly 70 percent of the time.”

There you have it. Google’s AI machine RankBrain, after only a few months on the job, already outranks the best brains in the industry, the elite engineers that Google typically hires.

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Researchers suggest that the universe could be a computer simulation: Is it possible?

It‘s older, but interesting!

The year is 2050 and super-intelligent robots have emerged as the masters of Earth. Unfortunately, you have no idea of that fact because we are immersed in a computer simulation set decades ago. Everything you see and touch has now been created and programmed by machines that use mankind for their own benefit. This radical theory, demonstrated in numerous books and science fiction films, has been, and is currently regarded by science as possible; Moreover, scientists are taking this theory to a cosmic level and even believe that if only one extraterrestrial civilization in the universe go the technological level to “emulate” an entire “multiverse,” then even our probes and space telescopes, which are out there exploring the universe, belong to that “creepy simulation.”

Robert Lawrence Kuhn, author and host of the Closer to Truth program, recently explored this theory in an episode where he interviewed several scholars, including Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, who argues that the scenario presented in the movie The Matrix might be true, but “instead of brains connected to a virtual simulator, own brains would also be part of the multiverse simulation.”

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Reports of Robots Stealing 50% of Jobs in the US and UK Are Totally Alarmist

It’s being reported that a Bank of England official forecasts that in the next 10 to 20 years, smart robots will steal 80 million jobs from Americans and 15 million jobs from Britons—over half the workforce of each nation. I smell BS.

In a speech delivered yesterday by Bank economist Andy Haldane at the Trades Union Congress in London, he predicted that robots could quickly “hollow out” the middle class, shrinking the need for human-only skills, especially in clerical, production, and administrative jobs.

It’s true—I think robots will appear more in those sectors. But for every “robot overload” doom-and-gloom claim, there is a calming rebuttal of reason.

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Disney Research-CMU design tool helps novices design 3D-printable robotic creatures

Digital designs for robotic creatures are shown on the left and the physical prototypes produced via 3-D printing are on the right (credit: Disney Research, Carnegie Melon University)

Now you can design and build your own customized walking robot using a 3-D printer and off-the-shelf servo motors, with the help of a new DYI design tool developed by Disney Research and Carnegie Mellon University.

You can specify the shape, size, and number of legs for your robotic creature, using intuitive editing tools to interactively explore design alternatives. The system takes over much of the non-intuitive and tedious task of planning the motion of the robot, and ensures that your design is capable of moving the way you want and not fall down. Or you can alter your creature’s gait as desired.

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