Developed by a spinoff from ETH Zurich, the Ascento Guard is the newest kid on the block for autonomous security robots. It also happens to be very cute.
A Swiss startup called Ascento has recently unveiled its novel and adorable new security robot called the Ascento Guard. An autonomous outdoor security robot’s standout features are its wheeled “legs” and cartoon-esque, almost anthropomorphic “face.”
ETH Zurich/ YouTube.
Cute autonomous security.
An autonomous vehicle must rapidly and accurately recognize objects that it encounters, from an idling delivery truck parked at the corner to a cyclist whizzing toward an approaching intersection.
To do this, the vehicle might use a powerful computer vision model to categorize every pixel in a high-resolution image of this scene, so it doesn’t lose sight of objects that might be obscured in a lower-quality image. But this task, known as semantic segmentation, is complex and requires a huge amount of computation when the image has high resolution.
Researchers from MIT, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and elsewhere have developed a more efficient computer vision model that vastly reduces the computational complexity of this task. Their model can perform semantic segmentation accurately in real-time on a device with limited hardware resources, such as the on-board computers that enable an autonomous vehicle to make split-second decisions.
An insect-sized robot powered by tiny explosions can crawl, leap and carry a load many times its own weight.
The robot, developed by materials engineer Robert Shepherd at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, his PhD student Cameron Aubin and their colleagues, is powered by tiny actuators. “The actuator kind of looks like a drum. It’s a hollow cylinder with an elastomeric silicone rubber on the top,” says Aubin.
The researchers used four actuators to drive the robot’s feet. To make the robot jump or crawl, a stream of methane and oxygen is fed into each foot and sparked with electricity from a battery. The resulting reaction between the gases to form water and carbon dioxide releases energy as a small explosion, causing the rubber layer to deform. “That acts sort of like a piston,” Aubin says.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates, transportation accounts for 27 percent of global carbon emissions. Powered by fossil fuels, road-based transportation contributes 80 percent of these emissions and therefore countries are aggressively pushing for the electrification of vehicles. While major advances have been made for passenger cars and air transport, water transport is still lagging. Yara’s new cargo ship might just lead the way.
When Elon Musk announced the team behind his new artificial intelligence company xAI last month, whose mission is reportedly to “understand the true nature of the universe,” it underscored the criticality of answering existential concerns about AI’s promise and peril.
Whether the newly formed company can actually align its behavior to reduce the potential risks of the technology, or whether it’s solely aiming to gain an edge over OpenAI, its formation does elevate important questions about how companies should actually respond to concerns about AI. Specifically:
A group of authors led by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon has filed suit against Meta and OpenAI in federal court in San Francisco. Another, you might rightfully ask.
The allegations are the same as in the pending lawsuits: direct and vicarious copyright infringement, removal of copyright information, unfair competition, and negligence.
The authors allege that their copyrighted works have been included in the training material of the respective AI systems without authorization, specifically in the so-called book datasets.
“Lightning” system connects photons to the electronic components of computers using a novel abstraction, creating the first photonic computing prototype to serve real-time machine-learning inference requests.
Computing is at an inflection point. Moore’s Law, which predicts that the number of transistors on an electronic chip will double each year, is slowing down due to the physical limits of fitting more transistors on affordable microchips. These increases in computer power are slowing down as the demand grows for high-performance computers that can support increasingly complex artificial intelligence models. This inconvenience has led engineers to explore new methods for expanding the computational capabilities of their machines, but a solution remains unclear.
Potential of Photonic Computing.
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China Mobile on Saturday launched the largest quantum cloud computing platform in China along with China Electronics Technology Group Corp (CETGC), vowing to take quantum computing to a new level of practical use.
As the country’s most recent computing platform, it achieved hybrid computing of both quantum and general computing power for the first time in the industry, China Mobile said in a statement.
The platform was unveiled at the 2023 China Computational Conference in Yinchuan, Northwest China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.
With CETGC’s ability to self-design and build 20-qubit quantum computing chips, the platform is linked with advanced 20-qubit quantum computers, giving its users an open quantum fusion computing power testing environment.
