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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,837

Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft come together to create historic Partnership on AI

The world’s largest technology companies hold the keys to some of the largest databases on our planet. Much like goods and coins before it, data is becoming an important currency for the modern world. The data’s value is rooted in its applications to artificial intelligence. Whichever company owns the data, effectively owns AI. Right now that means companies like Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, IBM and Microsoft have a ton of power.

In an act of self-governance, these five companies came together today to announce the launch the new Partnership on AI. The group is tasked with conducting research and promoting best practices. Practically, this means that the group of tech companies will come together frequently to discuss advancements in artificial intelligence. The group also opens up a formal structure for communication across company lines. It’s important to remember that on a day-to-day basis, these teams are in constant competition with each other to develop the best products and services powered by machine intelligence.

Financial support will be coming from the initial tech companies that are members of the group, but in the future, membership and involvement is expected to increase. User activists, nonprofits, ethicists and other stakeholders will be joining the discussion in the coming weeks.

We went to China’s Silicon Valley to see the front lines of the robot wars

The lights dimmed inside the Shenzhen Bay Sports Stadium as the countdown to the match began. “Wu, si, san, er, yi!” A chime sounded and two teams of robots sprang into action across an intricately constructed battlefield. In the stands, thousands of fans cheered, and groups of small children beat red and blue balloons together, producing a percussive roar.

Each team had four rovers, nimble infantry units that quickly spread over the terrain. The rovers were shaped like small cars, but could also slide side to side, strafing like water bugs over the surface of a lake. They fired small plastic marbles from cannons mounted on top of their frames. Lumbering alongside the nimble rovers was each team’s hero, a larger tank-like robot that could fire the small plastic marbles as well as more powerful golf balls.

The heavy favorite in this matchup of RoboMasters, an annual competition held each summer, was team 1.5S, returning champions hailing from China’s University of Electronic Science and Technology in the Sichuan province. They were taking on StarPro, from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan.

[AI Lab] Pepper robot learning “ball in a cup”

This video realized by the AI Lab of SoftBank Robotics shows how Pepper robot learns to play the ball-in-a-cup game (“bilboquet” in French). The movement is first demonstrated to the robot by guiding its arm.

From there, Pepper has to improve its performance through trial-and-error learning. Even though the initial demonstration does not land the ball in the cup, Pepper can still learn to play the game successfully.

The movement is represented as a so-called dynamic movement primitive and optimized using an evolutionary algorithm. Our implementation uses the freely available software library dmpbbo: https://github.com/stulp/dmpbbo.

After 100 trials, Pepper has successfully optimized its behavior and is able to repeatedly land the ball in the cup.

Komatsu’s robotic mining truck completely dumps the driver

Komatsu’s latest autonomous truck fully embraces the notion of unmanned operation by ditching the cabin and adopting a design that optimizes load distribution and doesn’t distinguish between forwards and backwards.

Komatsu began trials of its Autonomous Haulage Systems (AHS) in a partnership with mining company Rio Tinto in 2008, and since then the technology has hauled hundreds of millions of tonnes of material in Chile and Australia’s Pilbara region.

The autonomous haul trucks like the 930E model used by Rio Tinto incorporate controls, wireless networking and obstacle detection to enable unmanned operation, but they still look like conventional mining trucks complete with driver cabins.

Scientists put a new twist on artificial muscles

In a perspective article published Sept. 26 online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of scientists at UT Dallas’ Alan G. MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute describes the path to developing a new class of artificial muscles made from highly twisted fibers of various materials, ranging from exotic carbon nanotubes to ordinary nylon thread and polymer fishing line.

Because the artificial muscles can be made in different sizes and configurations, potential applications range from robotics and prosthetics to consumer products such as smart textiles that change porosity and shape in response to temperature.

“We call these actuating fibers ‘artificial muscles’ because they mimic the fiber-like form-factor of natural muscles,” said Dr. Carter Haines, associate research professor in the NanoTech Institute and co-lead author of the PNAS article, with research associate Dr. Na Li. “While the name evokes the idea of humanoid robots, we are very excited about their potential use for other practical applications, such as in next-generation intelligent textiles.” Science Based on Ancient Art.

Lawrence Krauss Versus Freeman Dyson on Gravitons

Yesterday, in the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson analyzed a trio of recent books on humanity’s future in the larger cosmos. They were How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Space Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight; Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets; and All These Worlds Are Yours: The Scientific Search for Alien Life.

Dyson is “a brilliant physicist and contrarian,” as the theoretical astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss recently told Nautilus. So I was waiting, as I read his review, to come across his profound and provocative pronouncement about these books, and it came soon enough: “None of them looks at space as a transforming force in the destiny of our species,” he writes. The books are limited in scope by looking at the future of space as a problem of engineering. Dyson has a grander vision. Future humans can seed remote environments with genetic instructions for countless new species. “The purpose is no longer to explore space with unmanned or manned missions, but to expand the domain of life from one small planet to the universe.”

Dyson can be just as final in his opinions on the destiny of scientific investigation. According to Krauss, Dyson once told him, “There’s no way we’re ever going to measure gravitons”—the supposed quantum particles underlying gravitational forces—“because there’s no terrestrial experiment that could ever measure a single graviton.” Dyson told Krauss that, in order to measure one, “you’d have to make the experiment so massive that it would actually collapse to form a black hole before you could make the measurement.” So, Dyson concluded, “There’s no way that we’ll know whether gravity is a quantum theory.”

Ghosts in the Machine: Female Computers in Science Fiction and History

When the computer is addressed in many science fiction shows, it often replies in a female-coded voice. From Majel Roddenberry’s Federation computer voice in the Star Trek series to the sentient ship AIs in Andromeda, Killjoys, Dark Matter, Outlaw Star, and Mass Effect, artificial intelligence has been a science fiction regular since at least the 1960’s. There are male-coded AIs as well—J.A.R.V.I.S., Hal, that weird Haley Joel Osment-bot from A.I.—but women have been part of humanity’s relationship with electric computers since the very beginning.

Jennifer S. Light’s article “When Computers Were Women” discusses the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) project during World War II, and how the people doing the actual computational tasks were a group of civilian and military women. The women were actually the “computers,” and were creating a machine that would someday replace them. The concept of the women as the actual computers made me think about how many artificial intelligences, whether in android form or integrated into actual ships, are coded female.

Light’s article also pointed out that history buried these early female computers. Their work was made light of, devalued, and all credit was given to the male inventors of ENIAC, reducing them practically to “ghost in the machine” status. This is where my mind made the connection. So many computer and AI characters are coded female because even layers of sexism and inequality still can’t erase the connection between the first “computers” being women and the task of computing. You can take the woman out of the workplace, but you can’t take the woman out of the machine she helped create.

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