When you arrive at Bank of America’s new-employee boot camp at the New York Hilton Midtown, you’ll find a VR headset waiting for you. Slide it on, and you’ll be confronted with an angry customer, frustrated over a mix-up with their account. Your task: talk them down and make them feel heard. Or you can practice keeping your cool while responding to a robbery, and then unwind by relaxing on a virtual island or by sitting on a unicorn.
In a first-of-its-kind clinical trial, bioelectronic medicine researchers, engineers and surgeons at Northwell Health’s The Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research have successfully implanted microchips into the brain of a man living with paralysis, and have developed artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to re-link his brain to his body and spinal cord.
This double neural bypass forms an electronic bridge that allows information to flow once again between the man’s paralyzed body and brain to restore movement and sensations in his hand with lasting gains in his arm and wrist outside of the laboratory. The research team unveiled the trial participant’s groundbreaking progress four months after a 15-hour open-brain surgery that took place on March 9 at North Shore University Hospital (NSUH).
“This is the first time the brain, body and spinal cord have been linked together electronically in a paralyzed human to restore lasting movement and sensation,” said Chad Bouton, professor in the Institute of Bioelectronic Medicine at the Feinstein Institutes, vice president of advanced engineering at Northwell Health, developer of the technology and principal investigator of the clinical trial.
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McKinsey and Company is no stranger to generative artificial intelligence (gen AI): around half of the global consulting giant’s employees were said to be using the technology as of earlier this summer.
But it’s not the only org to see a rapid uptake of gen AI. Indeed, a new annual report by McKinsey’s AI arm QuantumBlack finds that “use of gen AI is already widespread.”
Elon Musk says he’s unsure how his own kids — and the rest of their generation — will navigate a future world dominated by AI. Here’s his top advice for them.
Recent advances in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) have opened exciting new avenues for teleoperation, the remote control of robots to complete tasks in a distant location. This could, for instance, allow users to visit museums from afar, complete maintenance or technical tasks in spaces that are difficult to access or attend events remotely in more interactive ways.
Most existing teleoperation systems are designed to be deployed in specific settings and using a specific robot. This makes them difficult to apply in different real-world environments, greatly limiting their potential.
Researchers at NVIDIA and UC San Diego recently created AnyTeleop, a computer vision–based teleoperation system that could be applied to a wider range of scenarios. AnyTeleop, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, enables the remote operation of various robotic arms and hands to tackle different manual tasks.
Year 2017 😗😁
The brain is really little more than a collection of electrical signals. If we can learn to catalogue those then, in theory, you could upload someone’s mind into a computer, allowing them to live forever as a digital form of consciousness, just like in the Johnny Depp film Transcendence.
But it’s not just science fiction. Sure, scientists aren’t anywhere near close to achieving such a feat with humans (and even if they could, the ethics would be pretty fraught), but there’s few better examples than the time an international team of researchers managed to do just that with the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans.
C. elegans is a little nematodes that have been extensively studied by scientists — we know all their genes and their nervous system has been analysed many times.
Let’s look at some examples of this software-defined momentum at the edge. In manufacturing, AI enables weld quality detection in real time on factory floors, improving production yields. In agriculture, farmers can use AI-driven systems to move from focusing on entire crops to looking at individual plants in a field to determine where to fertilize, irrigate or weed. Healthcare is transforming at every level—from the granularity of tracking nerve structures for anesthesia during surgery to the scale and scope of securing patient privacy and data across healthcare networks. An intelligent, software-defined edge aids in delivering resilience for evolving business needs.
AI tools and platforms are now widely available, allowing businesses to harness their power to build solutions faster and gain a competitive edge. This accessibility is crucial for scaling their usefulness, as it shifts solutions from being built solely by data scientists and software engineers to being used by domain experts with less coding experience. With simplified AI model toolkits and an open development platform, these users can stitch together their own solutions and deploy them anywhere.
Let’s take the example of a quick service restaurant (QSR). QSRs could improve their operations by monitoring orders and ingredient levels, then dynamically resupplying their inventories. Lowering barriers to AI means businesses like a QSR can tap into automation and intelligent software solutions on any device, such as a point-of-service system, laptop or mobile device. Customers are happier, food waste is reduced and process efficiencies help QSRs maintain operations even in our current labor shortage.
There are an estimated 30,000 instances of arc flash each year in the United States alone, and one to two fatalities occur daily in North America. Ontario Power Generation (OPG) has five Boston Dynamics’ Spot robots deployed throughout their Enterprise Innovation division. In 2022, the team sought to see if Spot’s dexterous arm could be used to assist in tripping and racking out a 600 volt breaker—an activity that is high risk for arc flash. Now, Boston Dynamics engineers have taken this application to the next level by fully automating the procedure. Spot can perform the entire operation autonomously, with a human issuing high level commands safely out of harm’s way.
#PowerGeneration #bostondynamics #Robotics #spot
So why not break the AI apart?
In a new study published in PNAS, the team took a page from cognitive neuroscience and built a modular AI agent.
The idea is seemingly simple. Rather than a monolithic AI—a single network that encompasses the entire “self”—the team constructed a modular agent, each part with its own “motivation” and goals but commanding a single “body.” Like a democratic society, the AI system argues within itself to decide on the best response, where the action most likely to yield the largest winning outcome guides its next step.