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Category: robotics/AI – Page 96

Charging forward at top speed, a garden snail slimes up 1 millimeter of pavement per second. By this logic, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology researchers’ new 3D printing process speeds past existing methods—at a snail’s pace.

Researchers in Beckman’s Autonomous Materials Systems Group created “growth printing,” which mimics tree trunks’ outward expansion to print polymer parts quickly and efficiently without the molds and expensive equipment typically associated with 3D printing. Their work appears in the journal Advanced Materials.

“Humans are incredibly talented at making things. Completely new manufacturing processes are hard to find. Growth printing is entirely new, which is thrilling,” said Sameh Tawfick, a professor of mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and project lead.

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Empa researchers are working on producing artificial muscles that can keep up with the real thing. They have now developed a method of producing the soft and elastic yet powerful structures using 3D printing.

One day, these could be used in medicine or robotics—and anywhere else where things need to move at the touch of a button. The work is published in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies.

Artificial muscles don’t just get robots moving: One day, they could support people at work or when walking, or replace injured muscle tissue. However, developing artificial muscles that can compare to the real thing is a major technical challenge.

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This Deep Dive AI podcast discusses The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology by Alex M. Vikoulov, Book I of The Science and Philosophy of Information eBook/audiobook series. This book serves as both an accessible introduction and a standalone work, exploring some of the most profound questions in science and philosophy.

In this epic work, Vikoulov delves into the origins of life, consciousness, and intelligence, examining topics such as abiogenesis, noogenesis, and the rise of Homo sapiens. The book also presents The Omega Point Cosmology, which envisions a teleological progression of intelligence toward a cosmic destiny. It blends scientific exploration with digital physics, complexity theory, and transcendental metaphysics, offering a novel perspective on the interconnectedness of information, mind, and reality.

*The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and the Omega Point Cosmology by Alex M. Vikoulov is available as a Kindle eBook and Audible audiobook:

#OriginsOfUs #EvolutionaryEmergence #OmegaPointCosmology #SyntellectHypothesis #DigitalPhysics #HomoSapiens #ScienceOfInformation #PhilosophyOfInformation #AlphaPoint #OmegaPoint #abiogenesis #noogenesis #evolution #consciousness

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Billions of people may be continuously running AI inference for their waking hours in the near future. Satisfying this demand requires relentless focus on efficiency to reduce the required quantities of two key inputs: energy and capital. The constraints on these inputs in conjunction with the slowing and/or stagnation of both Moore’s Law and Dennard Scaling has left hardware architects no choice but to pursue Domain Specific Architectures (DSAs) — architectures tailored to the task at hand.

The current dominance of GPUs in modern deep learning is largely accidental — it was pure serendipity that the computational workload of graphics and deep learning were similar. Remnants of their graphical heritage still persist in GPU architectures today. What would AI inference hardware look like if it was redesigned carte blanche? By working backwards from the AI inference workload, we can determine some optimal properties these DSAs should have. Furthermore, we will attempt to predict the direction the inference paradigm will shift over time — a crucial exercise for hardware architects and engineers alike to ensure return on investment.

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Crewless tanks.

As the newest generation platform within the RIPSAW family of vehicles, the M3 inherits the proven functionality and reliability of its predecessor in a more modular, mission-capable system, enhancing both soldier safety and mission success, according to the company.

The vehicle incorporates the familiar large, open deck area from the RIPSAW M5 robotic vehicle, and 10kW of offload power provides the flexibility to support multiple lethality, RSTA, combat engineering, and logistics payloads. With a powerful hybrid electric drivetrain and novel suspension, the RIPSAW M3 provides unmatched mobility with over 180 miles of range.

The company has completed over 2,500 miles of pre-delivery durability testing and refinement to ensure a rugged, reliable platform.

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ServiceNow, which provides businesses with outsourced IT and customer service support as well as other digital services, said it was buying the business process automation company Moveworks for $2.85 billion in cash and stock. The Santa Clara, California-based ServiceNow framed the acquisition around the burgeoning market for AI agents that can perform digital tasks for people, often involving the use of other software.

The company is among a clutch of competing software giants, including Salesforce, Microsoft, and Alphabet’s Google, that are building platforms that enable companies to automate work with AI agents. ServiceNow said the purchase would allow it to combine its own agentic AI and automation capabilities with Moveworks’ AI assistant, as well as Movework’s prowess in providing AI-based search tools that allow organizations to find information within their own large data pools.

Gina Mastantuono, ServiceNow’s president and chief financial officer, told Fortune that while ServiceNow’s AI agents primarily automate specific back-end tasks, Moveworks had built an elegant front-end AI assistant that can perform a wide range of different tasks.

The same interface works for both people requesting a task to be fulfilled and for the people who are normally responsible for fulfilling those requests. More than 90% of the customers that use Moveworks’ AI assistant have rolled it out to their entire workforce—a reach into the employee base that Mastantuono said was attractive to ServiceNow.

The combined companies would be able to build what ServiceNow said would be a powerful universal AI assistant, along with more perceptive AI-based enterprise search to find answers to requests, automate and complete everyday tasks, and increase productivity.

(https://open.substack.com/pub/remunerationlabs/p/servicenow-…hare=true)

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How will artificial intelligence affect the distribution of income and wealth this century? After falling through much of the 20th century, income inequality, measured as the fraction of income going to the richest 1% of residents, has been rising since the 1980s. The fraction has doubled in both China and the United States during that time, increased by 50% in Europe and one-third worldwide.

Industrialization dominated the economy before then, but starting in the ’70s and ’80s, capital took over as globalization increased, tax changes reduced progressivity and game-changing technologies were introduced rapidly.

The computer and personal computer revolution came first, followed by the Internet and the World Wide Web. Now (AI) is beginning to make its mark in the world as a next-generation general-purpose technology.

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Understanding how ecosystems respond to ubiquitous microplastic (MP) pollution is crucial for ensuring global food security. Here, we conduct a multiecosystem meta-analysis of 3,286 data points and reveal that MP exposure leads to a global reduction in photosynthesis of 7.05 to 12.12% in terrestrial plants, marine algae, and freshwater algae. These reductions align with those estimated by a constructed machine learning model using current MP pollution levels, showing that MP exposure reduces the chlorophyll content of photoautotrophs by 10.96 to 12.84%. Model estimates based on the identified MP-photosynthesis nexus indicate annual global losses of 4.11 to 13.52% (109.73 to 360.87 MT·y−1) for main crops and 0.31 to 7.24% (147.52 to 3415.11 MT C·y−1) for global aquatic net primary productivity induced by MPs. Under scenarios of efficient plastic mitigation, e.g.

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It’s about my paper.

Dissolving polymers with organic solvents is the essential process in the research and development of polymeric materials, including polymer synthesis, refining, painting, and coating. Now more than ever recycling plastic waste is a particularly imperative part of reducing carbon produced by the materials development processes.

Polymers, in this instance, refer to plastics and plastic-like materials that require certain solvents to be able to effectively dissolve and therefore become recyclable, though it’s not as easy as it sounds. Utilizing Mitsubishi Chemical Group’s (MCG) databank of quantum chemistry calculations, scientists developed a novel machine learning system for determining the miscibility of any given polymer with its solvent candidates, referred to as χ (chi) parameters.

This system has enabled scientists to overcome the limitations arising from a limited amount of experimental data on the polymer-solvent miscibility by integrating produced from the computer experiments using high-throughput quantum chemistry calculations.

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US tech giant OpenAI on Monday unveiled a ChatGPT tool called “deep research” that can produce detailed reports, as China’s DeepSeek chatbot heats up competition in the artificial intelligence field.

The company made the announcement in Tokyo, where OpenAI chief Sam Altman also trumpeted a new joint venture with tech investor SoftBank Group to offer advanced artificial intelligence services to businesses.

AI newcomer DeepSeek has sent Silicon Valley into a frenzy, with some calling its high performance and supposed low cost a wake-up call for US developers.

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