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Category: robotics/AI – Page 792

The machine generates nearly identical works of art with small discrepancies that make them unique.

Robots or automated systems that are built and programmed to generate different types of artistic creations are referred to as art robots. These robots, which come in a variety of shapes and have different capacities, create artwork using a combination of hardware and software.

Among these machines are certain art robots that are engineered expressly to produce visual art, including drawings and paintings. These robots have the ability to use ink or paint to create an image on a canvas, applying the substances with such tools as pens and paint brushes.

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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.

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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 to make split-second decisions.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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“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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