Outgoing Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx on our robotic future.
Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,687
This Remarkable Robot Hand Is Worthy of Luke Skywalker
Most of today’s robot hands can perform easy tasks. They’re uber-practical grippers, simple and useful. But is it really so much to ask for robotic masterworks as dextrous as Luke Skywalker’s bionic hand in Star Wars? In short, yes, yes it is. It might have been a long time ago in a galaxy far far away—but most Star Wars tech is beyond us.
Still, it’s hard not to get in a Star Wars state of mind watching this beautiful robot hand engineered by Yale postdoc Joseph (Zhe) Xu and the University of Washington’s Emanuel Todorov.
Greek scientists create artificial neuron with quantum-dot lasers
Syn. Neurons via Q-Dot Laser. Nice.
Greek researchers working at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (EKPA) optical communication photonic technology laboratory have developed an artificial “neuron” that simulates fundamental functions of the human brain, at speeds that are many orders of magnitude higher.
A paper on the new breakthrough made by the Greek team, led by Prof. Dimitris Syvridis with Dr. Charis Mesaritakis as main researcher and with Alexandros Kapsalis and Adonis Bogris listed as authors, was published in the “Scientific Reports” section of the science journal “Nature” on December 19.
Simulating the action of biological neurons is the “Holy Grail” of computing; the proposal developed by Mesaritakis and his team uses an integrated all-optical neuron based on an InAs/InGaAs semiconductor quantum-dot passively mode-locked laser.
New active filaments mimic biology to transport nano-cargo
Very interesting read. The researchers created a completely artificial microscopic transport system mimicking the human body. With this technology we’re going to be able to address many areas of healthcare as well as some areas of AI.
Inspired by micro-scale motions of nature, a group of researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, in Chennai, India, has developed a new design for transporting colloidal particles, tiny cargo suspended in substances such as fluids or gels, more rapidly than is currently possible by diffusion.
Fluid friction determines micro-scale inertia in fluid. This means, for instance, blood cells swimming within blood encounter roughly the same amount of drag that a human would experience attempting to swim through molasses.
As the group reports in The Journal of Chemical Physics, from AIP Publishing, they applied and then extended a model of active filaments that includes these frictional hydrodynamic interactions, specifically as they relate to the speed and efficiency analysis of transporting colloidal particles.
Building a Google for the dark web
I can honestly state there is already one that folks are using; I would suggest DARPA should assess it and maybe acquire it. As it would give them a jump start and they can enhance it for their own needs.
In today’s data-rich world, companies, governments and individuals want to analyze anything and everything they can get their hands on – and the World Wide Web has loads of information. At present, the most easily indexed material from the web is text. But as much as 89 to 96 percent of the content on the internet is actually something else – images, video, audio, in all thousands of different kinds of nontextual data types.
Further, the vast majority of online content isn’t available in a form that’s easily indexed by electronic archiving systems like Google’s. Rather, it requires a user to log in, or it is provided dynamically by a program running when a user visits the page. If we’re going to catalog online human knowledge, we need to be sure we can get to and recognize all of it, and that we can do so automatically.
How can we teach computers to recognize, index and search all the different types of material that’s available online? Thanks to federal efforts in the global fight against human trafficking and weapons dealing, my research forms the basis for a new tool that can help with this effort.