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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,756

Will Uber’s Fleet of Self-Driving Cars Save Lives?

Researchers estimate that driverless cars could, by midcentury, reduce traffic fatalities by up to 90 percent. Which means that, using the number of fatalities in 2013 as a baseline, self-driving cars could save 29,447 lives a year. In the United States alone, that’s nearly 300,000 fatalities prevented over the course of a decade, and 1.5 million lives saved in a half-century. For context: Anti-smoking efforts saved 8 million lives in the United States over a 50-year period.

The life-saving estimates for driverless cars are on par with the efficacy of modern vaccines, which save 42,000 lives for each U.S. birth cohort, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Globally, there are about 1.2 million traffic fatalities annually, according to the World Health Organization. Which means driverless cars are poised to save 10 million lives per decade—and 50 million lives around the world in half a century.

Neuromorphic computing mimics important brain feature

(Phys.org)—When you hear a sound, only some of the neurons in the auditory cortex of your brain are activated. This is because every auditory neuron is tuned to a certain range of sound, so that each neuron is more sensitive to particular types and levels of sound than others. In a new study, researchers have designed a neuromorphic (“brain-inspired”) computing system that mimics this neural selectivity by using artificial level-tuned neurons that preferentially respond to specific types of stimuli.

In the future, level-tuned neurons may help enable systems to perform tasks that traditional computers cannot, such as learning from their environment, pattern recognition, and knowledge extraction from big data sources.

The researchers, Angeliki Pantazi et al., at IBM Research-Zurich and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, both in Switzerland, have published a paper on the new neuromorphic architecture in a recent issue of Nanotechnology.

Hezbollah Drone Is a Warning to the U.S

I hate saying “I told you so”; however, it has happened. Whenever, technology is easily acquired means the bad people also has the same access via many sources.

As early as November 2004, Hezbollah sent Iranian-supplied Mirsad drones into Israeli airspace on spy missions, catching Israeli air defenses off guard. Shortly thereafter, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah proclaimed that the Mirsad could penetrate “anywhere, deep, deep” into Israel while carrying more than 200 pounds of explosives.

It was a bold claim for the time. The United States was the first country to deploy a modern, armed drone—the Predator—in 2001. For several years, America possessed a virtual monopoly on weaponized flying robots.

Nasrallah was perhaps exaggerating, but he wasn’t bluffing. In August 2006 during Israel’s brief, bloody war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, the militant group launched three explosives-laden Ababil drones toward Israeli territory. Israeli jet fighters shot down all three robots.

Space Robotics Challenge Prepares Robots for the Journey to Mars

NASA, in partnership with Space Center Houston, the Official Visitor Center of NASA Johnson Space Center, and NineSigma, a global innovation consultant organization, has opened registration for a new competition — the Space Robotics Challenge. This event seeks to develop the capabilities of humanoid robots to help astronauts on the journey to Mars.

The Space Robotics Challenge is a $1 million prize competition designed to push the boundaries of robotic dexterity. Teams must program a virtual robot, modeled after NASA’s Robonaut 5 (R5) robot, to complete a series of tasks in a simulation that includes periods of latency to represent communications delay from Earth to Mars.

Though some dexterity has been developed for Earth-based robotics systems using hydraulics, such robots cannot be used in space because of the below-freezing temperatures and the harsh environment of planetary surfaces. The R5 uses elastics technology instead of hydraulics – an innovative way of addressing the problems of operating in space. This technology could also benefit humankind on Earth, as they could operate under dangerous or extreme environments on our home planet.

How Today’s Jungle of Artificial Intelligence Will Spawn Sentience

From time to time, the Singularity Hub editorial team unearths a gem from the archives and wants to share it all over again. It’s usually a piece that was popular back then and we think is still relevant now. This is one of those articles. It was originally published August 10, 2010. We hope you enjoy it!

You don’t have a flying car, jetpack, or ray gun, but this is still the future. How do I know? Because we’re all surrounded by artificial intelligence. I love when friends ask me when we’ll develop smart computers…because they’re usually holding one in their hands. Your phone calls are routed with artificial intelligence.

Every time you use a search engine you’re taking advantage of data collected by ‘smart’ algorithms. When you call the bank and talk to an automated voice you are probably talking to an AI…just a very annoying one. Our world is full of these limited AI programs which we classify as “weak” or “narrow” or “applied.”

Automatic Colorizing Bot Tries to Colorize a Black and White Video

Classic tv will never be the same.

Remember that amazing automatic colorizing algorithm we told you about back in March? It was just put to an interesting test. As a fun “what if?” hobbyist Amir Avni tried the neural network-powered colorizer on a B&W video.

It should be obvious that this isn’t a simple transition. To go from colorizing a still image by learning from thousands of other images online is one thing, to do it 24 times per second, smoothly, is entirely another.

“As a bonus, I took the bot’s algorithm and started testing it on some video-clips,” writes Avni. “Of course the results aren’t perfect since it was trained on photos and not on a batch of photos, but the results are still interesting.”

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