Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: robotics/AI – Page 772

Imagine an iPad that’s more than just an iPad—with a surface that can morph and deform, allowing you to draw 3D designs, create haiku that jump out from the screen and even hold your partner’s hand from an ocean away.

That’s the vision of a team of engineers from the University of Colorado Boulder. In a new study, they’ve created a one-of-a-kind shape-shifting display that fits on a card table. The device is made from a 10-by-10 grid of soft robotic “muscles” that can sense outside pressure and pop up to create patterns. It’s precise enough to generate scrolling text and fast enough to shake a chemistry beaker filled with fluid.

It may also deliver something even rarer: the sense of touch in a digital age.

Read more | >

In a high-tech laboratory, somewhere in San Francisco, sits a comma-shaped piece of metal that aims to change how the world sees the weather. The structure dominates the room. The horizontal part softly curves upwards until it’s taller than a person, with ridges that stretch from top to bottom. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a piece of modern art.

In fact, it is art, but it’s also much more than that. It’s an AI-powered, data-processing powerhouse from a startup called Atmo, and it could democratize weather forecasting, putting every country on a level meteorological playing field for the first time.

Read more | >

Imagine returning home from your evening walk or gym to the aroma of freshly cooked kadhai paneer or chicken curry, which instantly reminds you of home. Now, what if you were to know that it was no human that lovingly prepared this piping hot and delicious meal, but rather, a machine?

From booking cabs to ordering food right at your doorstep, technology makes human lives easy. So it’s about time it saves humans from having to cook after a long tiring day at work, or at times when you’re just not in the mood to enter the kitchen.

The NOSH device, developed by the Euphotic Labs, was conceived by Yatin Varachhia, co-founder of the Bengaluru-based startup. The 34-year-old says the inspiration to build a device stemmed from his struggle of having good food.

Read more | >

Researchers from the Tokyo University of Science recently published a study in the journal Artificial Life and Robotics where they explored how machine learning can help detect deception.

Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) that involves the use of algorithms and statistical models to enable computers to learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed. In other words, it is a method of teaching computers to perform specific tasks by learning from data, patterns, and examples, rather than relying on pre-defined rules.

Detecting deception can be important in various situations, like questioning crime victims or suspects and interviewing patients with mental health issues. Sometimes, human interviewers might struggle to ask the right questions or spot deception accurately.

Read more | >

Just a few years ago, Berkeley engineers showed us how they could easily turn images into a 3D navigable scene using a technology called Neural Radiance Fields, or NeRF. Now, another team of Berkeley researchers has created a development framework to help speed up NeRF projects and make this technology more accessible to others.

Led by Angjoo Kanazawa, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, the researchers have developed Nerfstudio, a Python framework that provides plug-and-play components for implementing NeRF-based methods, making it easier to collaborate and incorporate NeRF into projects. Kanazawa and her team will present their paper on Nerfstudio at SIGGRAPH 2023, and have published it as part of the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference Conference Proceedings.

“Advancements in NeRF have contributed to its growing popularity and use in applications such as computer vision, robotics, and gaming. But support for development has been lagging,” said Kanazawa. “The Nerfstudio framework is intended to simplify the development of custom NeRF methods, the processing of real-world data and interacting with reconstructions.”

Read more | >