Robotics/AI – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Nov 23
2014

General Motors Reportedly Launching Cars That Detect Distracted Driving

By Ashlee Kieler — The Consumerist

For years, laws have been put into place to discourage distracted driving: no texting while driving, no talking on the phone while driving, the list goes on. General Motors is taking things a step further by commissioning a vehicle that detects and alerts drivers to their distracted behavior.

The Financial Times reports that General Motors is preparing to launch the first mass-produced vehicles with eye- and head-tracking technology to detect distracted behaviors in drivers.

Nov 9
2014

Robot Cheetah Breaks Free of Its Tether, Now Runs on Batteries

Written By: Jason Dorrier — Singularity Hub

MIT-Cheetah-robot1

Not long ago, robots were largely confined to books and movies. Then they started showing up on YouTube, and robot fear became a viral thing. There was that terrifying video of a Boston Dynamics robot wearing fatigues and gas mask. Another Boston Dynamics video showed a cheetah robot that could outpace the swiftest human sprinter.

Back then, it was easy enough to imagine being run down by a robot—particularly because Boston Dynamics was funded by the military. But there was no good reason to fear them. Not yet. Why? They were all powered by internal combustion engines. Imagine being stalked by a car with no muffler. You’d hear it a mile off and climb a tree.

Well, all you robot fearing folk, the era of insanely noisy robots may be nearing an end—MIT’s stealthy electric robot cheetah is here to prowl your nightmares. (Sure, it looks friendly and playful, gamboling care-free on the quad—but don’t be fooled.)

Nov 6
2014

Big Brother Is Feeling You: The Global Impact Of AI-Driven Mental Health Care

Written By: Steven Kotler — Singularity Hub

happiness ai

Big Brother is feeling you—literally.

A few months back, I wrote about Ellie, the world’s first AI-psychologist. Developed by DARPA and researchers at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies, Ellie is a diagnostic tool capable of reading 60 non-verbal cues a second—everything from eye-gaze to face tilt to voice tone—in the hopes of identifying the early warning signs of depressions and (part of the long term goal) stemming the rising tide of soldier suicide.

And early reports indicate that Ellie is both good at her job and that soldiers like talking to an AI-psychologist more than they like talking to a human psychologist (AI’s don’t judge).

Oct 30
2014

Amit Singhal (at Google): Will your computer plan change your life?

This archive file was compiled from an interview conducted at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, 2013. In the discussion, Amit Singhal, a key figure in the evolution of Google’s search engine, broadly outlined the significant hurdles that stood in the way of achieving one of his long-held dreams — creating a true ‘conversational’ search engine. He also sketched out a vision of how the initial versions of such a system would, and also importantly, would not attempt to assist the individuals that it interacted with.

Though the vision was by design more limited and focused than a system capable of passing the famous Turing test, it nonetheless raised stimulating questions about the future relationships of humans and their ‘artificial’ assistants.

More about Amit Singhal:

Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amit_Singhal

Google Search:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search

Oct 30
2014

Why artificial intelligence is the future of religion

Michael Schulson, Religion Dispatches — Salon

There are places you never expect to be in life. For me, this was certainly one of them: in a conference room in suburban Charlotte on the campus of Southern Evangelical Seminary, with an enormous old Bible on a side table, shelves of Great Books lining the walls, and, on the conference table itself, a 23-inch-tall robot doing yoga.

Meet the Digitally Advanced Viritual Intelligence Device, a NAO (now) robot known as “D.A.V.I.D.”

Oct 29
2014

The Most Valiant Attempts to Program Our Five Senses Into Robots

Alexandra Ossola — MotherBoard

Ever since humans first envisioned robots, we’ve thought about how to make the machines more like us. Robots compete against us on game shows, and rendezvous with us in the bedroom (or at least, make virtual sex feel real). But part of being human is sensing the world around us in a particular way, and doing it all at the same time.

This is much more complicated than it seems, as scientists haven’t fully unraveled how we’re able to sense what we do; it’s both our hardware and software that contain codes that are difficult to crack. Still, scientists power through, discovering how their own senses work while crafting artificial versions of them. Here are some of the most valiant attempts to get robots to taste, smell, touch, hear, and see in the most human way possible.

Oct 9
2014

IBM Develops a New Chip That Functions Like a Brain

By JOHN MARKOFF — New York Times

Inspired by the architecture of the brain, scientists have developed a new kind of computer chip that uses no more power than a hearing aid and may eventually excel at calculations that stump today’s supercomputers.

The chip, or processor, is named TrueNorth and was developed by researchers at IBM and detailed in an article published on Thursday in the journal Science. It tries to mimic the way brains recognize patterns, relying on densely interconnected webs of transistors similar to the brain’s neural networks.

Sep 26
2014

Hundreds of floating robots could soon surveil the oceans

by Daniel Terdiman — C/Net

Boeing and Liquid Robotics today announced a partnership to make water-borne robots that can handle a variety of surveillance jobs, ranging from hunts for submarines to the detection of drug traffickers.

Silicon Valley’s Liquid Robotics is the manufacturer of the Wave Glider SV3, a $300,000 self-powered, seafaring data center that offers customers — until now, mostly researchers and marine industry companies — tools for investigating the open seas for months at a time. SV3s have a hybrid propulsion system that can drive the robot with either solar or wave power. Boeing is the world’s second-largest defense contractor.

Sep 25
2014

‘Person of Interest’ Season 4 Will Tackle Big Questions About Artificial Intelligence

By Sandra Gonzalez — Mashable

For three seasons, CBS’s Person of Interest has tried to raise questions about who’s watching us. But starting Tuesday, the show will shine a light on a subject producers think no one is keeping an eye on quite enough: artificial intelligence.

“Since the show initially premiered [in 2011], we used to get a lot of questions about [surveillance] and whether it was a real thing or not, and I think what initially seemed like a science fiction concept became factual and something people know is pervasive,” said executive producer Greg Plageman, referring largely to the 2013 Edward Snowden leaks.

Sep 20
2014

Empire Robotics shows its hands … and they’re fingerless

Nidhi Subbaraman — BetaBoston

The candidate for best robotic hand looks like a beanbag and claims to grip anything.

A Boston builder of robot hands, Empire Robotics, is showing its first commercial grippers today: the enchanting and entirely fingerless VersaBall. Interestingly, this first demonstration is in partnership with Universal Robots, who happens to be local bot maker Rethink Robotics’ competitor.

Robotics companies and researchers have already found ways to move robots around, not just in factories, but around your house too. But as robots begin to do more, they’re still trying to solve the problem of dexterity—how do you build a robotic hand that can hold and move objects of entirely different shapes, sizes, and textures?