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Category: robotics/AI – Page 524

Farm robot autonomously navigates, harvests among raised beds

Strawberry fields forever will exist for the in-demand fruit, but the laborers who do the backbreaking work of harvesting them might continue to dwindle. While raised, high-bed cultivation somewhat eases the manual labor, the need for robots to help harvest strawberries, tomatoes, and other such produce is apparent.

As a first step, Osaka Metropolitan University Assistant Professor Takuya Fujinaga has developed an algorithm for robots to autonomously drive in two modes: moving to a pre-designated destination and moving alongside raised cultivation beds. The Graduate School of Engineering researcher experimented with an agricultural robot that utilizes lidar point cloud data to map the environment.

Official website for Osaka Metropolitan University. Established in 2022 through the merger of Osaka City University and Osaka Prefecture University.

Serotonin system’s hidden complexity may reshape understanding of day-to-day decision making

Our lives are filled with binary decisions—choices between one of two alternatives. But what’s really happening inside our brains when we engage in this kind of decision making?

A University of Ottawa Faculty of Medicine-led study published in Nature Neuroscience sheds new light on these big questions, illuminating a general principle of neural processing in a mysterious region of the midbrain that is the very origin of our central serotonin (5-HT) system, a key part of the nervous system involved in a remarkable range of cognitive and behavioral functions.

“The current dominating model is that individual 5-HT neurons are acting independently from one another. While it had previously been suggested that 5-HT neurons may rather be connected with one another, it had not been directly demonstrated. That is what we did here. We also identify an intriguing processing role—or a computation—that is supported by this particular type of connectivity between 5-HT neurons,” says Dr. Jean-Claude Béïque, full professor in the Faculty’s Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and co-director of the uOttawa Brain and Mind Research Institute’s Centre for Neural Dynamics and Artificial Intelligence.

The Ontology of War and Machine Consciousness in Philip K. Dick’s Second Variety

“Second Variety” is a science fiction novelette by American writer Philip K. Dick, first published in Space Science Fiction magazine, in May 1953. Set in a world where war between the Soviet Union and United Nations has reduced most of the world to a barren wasteland, the story concerns the discovery, by the few remaining soldiers left, that self-replicating robots originally built to assassinate Soviet agents have gained sentience and are now plotting against both sides. It is one of many stories by Dick to examine the implications of nuclear war, particularly after it has destroyed much or all of the planet. The story was adapted into the movie Screamers in 1995. 00:00 Intro 01:03 Peek into the plot 03:33 Self-Replication and Technological Autonomy 06:51 Current Autonomous Warfare Capabilities 10:30 Space Warfare and the Projection of Terrestrial Conflict 13:14 Current State of Space Warfare 15:22 Wrapping Up =============== 🎬 Loitering munitions system WARMATE • Loitering munitions system WARMATE 📙 🇺🇸 Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies https://bookshop.org/a/98861/97801987… The Human Terrain Project — PENTAGON’S attempt to understand The Enemy | ENDEVR Documentary • The Human Terrain Project — PENTAGON’… 📙 🇺🇸 War in the Age of Intelligent Machines https://monoskop.org/images/c/c0/DeLa… =============== Buy the book featured in this video: 📙 🇺🇸 Buy the book Second Variety https://bookshop.org/a/98861/97988883… 🎧 Free Audiobook • Post-Apocalyptic Story “Second Variet… =============== You can find my take on things summarised in the books I wrote. 📙🇺🇸Chronicles of the Machine — Simulated conversations with Philip K. Dick https://buchshop.bod.ch/chronicles-of… 📙🇺🇸Zero Person: Reframing Autistic Cognition Beyond the Self https://buchshop.bod.ch/zero-person-e… 📙🇩🇪Zero Person: Autistische Kognition jenseits des Selbst https://buchshop.bod.ch/zero-person-e… 📙🇺🇸Book order: The end of the I https://www.bod.ch/buchshop/the-end-o… 📙🇩🇪Book order: Das Ende des Ichs https://www.bod.ch/buchshop/das-ende–… 📙🇺🇸 #actuallyautistic — Living with Autism – A Poetic Exploration of the Spectrum https://buchshop.bod.ch/actuallyautis… =============== Image credits: Freepik.

AI helps unravel a cause of Alzheimer’s disease and identify a therapeutic candidate

A new study found that a gene recently recognized as a biomarker for Alzheimer’s disease is actually a cause of it, due to its previously unknown secondary function. Researchers at the University of California San Diego used artificial intelligence to help both unravel this mystery of Alzheimer’s disease and discover a potential treatment that obstructs the gene’s moonlighting role.

The research team published their results on April 23 in the journal Cell.

About one in nine people aged 65 and older has Alzheimer’s disease, the most common cause of dementia. While some particular , when mutated, can lead to Alzheimer’s, that connection only accounts for a small percentage of all Alzheimer’s patients. The vast majority of patients do not have a mutation in a known disease-causing gene; instead, they have “spontaneous” Alzheimer’s, and the causes for that are unclear.

A shortcut to AI computation: In-memory computing overcomes data transfer bottlenecks

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, researchers at POSTECH (Pohang University of Science and Technology) have identified a breakthrough that could make AI technologies faster and more efficient.

Professor Seyoung Kim and Dr. Hyunjeong Kwak from the Departments of Materials Science & Engineering and Semiconductor Engineering at POSTECH, in collaboration with Dr. Oki Gunawan from the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, have become the first to uncover the hidden operating mechanisms of Electrochemical Random-Access Memory (ECRAM), a promising next-generation technology for AI. Their study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

As AI technologies advance, data processing demands have exponentially increased. Current computing systems, however, separate data storage (memory) from data processing (processors), resulting in significant time and due to data transfers between these units. To address this issue, researchers developed the concept of in-memory computing.

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