Toggle light / dark theme

NOIR: Neural Signal Operated Intelligent Robots for Everyday Activities

We present Neural Signal Operated Intelligent Robots (NOIR), a general-purpose, intelligent brain-robot interface system that enables humans to command robots to perform everyday activities through brain signals. Through this interface, humans communicate their intended objects of interest and actions to the robots using electroencephalography (EEG). Our novel system demonstrates success in an expansive array of 20 challenging, everyday household activities, including cooking, cleaning, personal care, and entertainment. The effectiveness of the system is improved by its synergistic integration of robot learning algorithms, allowing for NOIR to adapt to individual users and predict their intentions. Our work enhances the way humans interact with robots, replacing traditional channels of interaction with direct, neural communication.

OpenAI blames DDoS attack for ongoing ChatGPT outage

OpenAI has confirmed that a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is behind “periodic outages” affecting ChatGPT and its developer tools.

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, has been experiencing sporadic outages for the past 24 hours. Users who attempted to access the service have been greeted with a message stating that “ChatGPT is at capacity right now,” and others, including TechCrunch, have been unable to log into the service.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman initially blamed the issue on interest in the platform’s new features, unveiled at the company’s first developer conference on Monday, “far outpacing our expectations.” OpenAI said the issue was fixed at approximately 1 p.m. PST on November 8.

Noise-canceling headphones could let you pick and choose the sounds you want to hear

The technology that makes it possible, called semantic hearing, could pave the way for smarter hearing aids and earphones, allowing the wearer to filter out some sounds while boosting others.

The system, which is still in prototype, works by connecting off-the-shelf noise-canceling headphones to a smartphone app. The microphones embedded in these headphones, which are used to cancel out noise, are repurposed to also detect the sounds in the world around the wearer. These sounds are then played back to a neural network, which is running on the smartphone; then certain sounds are boosted or suppressed in real time, depending on the user’s preferences. It was developed by researchers from the University of Washington, who presented the research at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) last week.

The team trained the network on thousands of audio samples from online data sets and sounds collected from various noisy environments. Then they taught it to recognize 20 everyday sounds, such as a thunderstorm, a toilet flushing, or glass breaking.

Amazon to unleash ‘Olympus’ against ChatGPT with double AI power

Amazon is reportedly investing millions in training Olympus.


Stockcam/iStock.

The Information reported that Olympus will be Amazon’s answer to the AI leaps made by OpenAI and Microsoft in selling similar software to corporate customers. Another report by Reuters said that the company is investing millions in training Olympus, according to the two people familiar with the matter.

Android Studio gets a built-in coding bot

Android Studio, like so much of Google’s product portfolio, is getting its infusion of AI today at the company’s annual I/O developer conference. Android Studio Hedgehog, the upcoming version of Android Studio currently in the canary release channel, will be the first to add support for the new conversational experience in Android Studio meant to help developers write code and fix bugs and answer more general coding questions.

Built on top of Codey, Google’s new PaLM 2-based foundation model specifically trained for coding, the Studio Bot will roll out to developers in the U.S. first, with a wider rollout expected over time.

High-speed photonic neuromorphic computing using recurrent optical spectrum slicing neural networks

face_with_colon_three year 2022.


Sozos and co-workers present and numerically evaluate photonic neuromorphic hardware using recurrent optical spectrum slicing for use in ultra-fast optical applications. The approach extends optical signal transmission reach to more than four-fold that of two state-of-the-art digital equalizers and reduces power consumption tenfold.

China Unveils Plan To Mass Produce Human-like Robots, Calling It ‘New Engine’ For Growth

More than 10 Chinese companies this year have revealed innovations related to humanoid robots, he noted, adding that China already has some supporting facilities from developing industrial robots.

Beijing has set aside about 10 billion yuan (about $1.4 billion) to fund the robotic development. On Nov. 6, China opened the first provincial-level innovation center on humanoid robots in the country’s capital to work on solving pressing “key common problems,” including an operation control system, open source software, and robot prototypes.

At least one Chinese company, Jiangsu Miracle Logistics System Engineering Co., has promised to introduce its first humanoid robot by the end of the year. Chinese securities brokerage firm Zheshang Securities estimates that the humanoid robot market will have a demand for 1.77 million machines by 2030.

New Tool Lets Artists “Poison” Their Work to Mess Up AI Trained on It

In particular, many have griped over their original work being used to train these AI models — a use they never opted into, and for which they’re not compensated.

But what if artists could “poison” their work with a tool that alters it so subtly that the human eye can’t tell, while wreaking havoc on AI systems that try to digest it?

That’s the idea behind a new tool called “Nightshade,” which its creators say does exactly that. As laid out in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper spotted by MIT Technology Review, a team of researchers led by University of Chicago professor Ben Zhao built the system to generate prompt-specific “poison samples” that scramble the digital brains of image generators like Stable Diffusion, screwing up their outputs.

Honeybee behavior as a model for decision-making in a kilobot swarm

Researchers at the University of Barcelona have made a sweet discovery: Honeybees make great subjects when studying the dynamic of group behavior and decision-making.

In a recently released study, Professor M. Carmen Miguel, who has previously studied leadership activity among schooling fish and social interactions among flocks of birds, said a group of mini robots were trained to reach a consensus on tasks by mimicking processes displayed by .

The intricate behavior of bees has long been a subject of great interest among researchers. There are more than 4,000 species of the insect, and they have been around for more than 100 million years.

/* */