Lifeboat Foundation

Now retrofitted for civilian use, the Community Chlorine Maker makes enough chlorine to treat water for a whole village. We just need to get it to them.

What might life be like once autonomous vehicles populate the roads? With the help of colleague Timothy Bonds, RAND’s Nidhi Kalra described what may occur when autonomous vehicles “democratize transportation.” Read our recap from #PoliticsAside: r.rand.org/326y

When you see a photo of a dog bounding across the lawn, it’s pretty easy for us humans to imagine how the following moments played out. Well, scientists at MIT have just trained machines to do the same thing, with artificial intelligence software that can take a single image and use it to to create a short video of the seconds that followed. The technology is still bare-bones, but could one day make for smarter self-driving cars that are better prepared for the unexpected, among other applications.

The software uses a deep-learning algorithm that was trained on two million unlabeled videos amounting to a year’s worth of screen time. It actually consists of two separate neural networks that compete with one another. The first has been taught to separate the foreground and the background and to identify the object in the image, which allows the model to then determine what is moving and what isn’t.

Continue reading “MIT’s deep-learning software produces videos of the future” »

Since the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) needs to be in tip-top shape to discover new particles, it has two inspectors making sure everything’s in working order. The two of them are called TIM, short not for Timothy, but for Train Inspection Monorail. These mini autonomous monorails that keep an eye on the world’s largest particle collider follow a pre-defined route and get around using tracks suspended from the ceiling. According to CERN’s post introducing the machines, the tracks are remnants from the time the tunnel housed the Large Electron Positron instead of the LHC. The LEP’s monorail was bigger, but not quite as high-tech: it was mainly used to transport materials and workers.

As for what the machines can do, the answer is “quite a few.” They can monitor the tunnel’s structure, oxygen percentage, temperature and communication bandwidth in real time. Both TIMs can also take visual and infrared images, as well as pull small wagons behind them if needed. You can watch them in action below — as you can see, they’re not much to look at with their boxy silver appearance. But without them, it’ll be tough monitoring a massive circular tunnel with a 17-mile circumference.

Continue reading “CERN introduces Large Hadron Collider’s robotic inspectors” »

We took the technology out of the studio and into a car – making Holoportation truly mobile. To accomplish this, we reduced the bandwidth requirements by 97%, while still maintaining quality. This new mobile Holoportation system greatly increases the potential applications of real-time 3D capture and transmission.

Nice update and glad the author mentioned Airbus, Gooch and Housego as I often see these 2 contributors missed in QC roadmap and companies engaged on QC activities. Airbus has been heavily involved with QC research and development for a few years now.

Physicsworld.com — news, views and information for the global physics community from Institute of Physics Publishing.

A lot has happened since we first heard about the AirMule, a prototype VTOL (Vertical Takeoff and Landing) aircraft that features internal rotor blades – these work along with the horizontal-thrust ducted fans visible at the rear. First, it made some tethered autonomous test flights. Then, it flew untethered for a short distance. Now, known as the Cormorant UAV, it’s made its first full untethered autonomous flight … although there were a couple of hiccups.

Designed by Israeli firm Tactical Robotics, the Cormorant is designed to deliver troops, civilian passengers or other cargo within tight quarters where helicopters with exposed rotor blades just can’t go. With the UAV in its name standing for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, the idea is that it will perform these tasks either autonomously or by remote control.

Continue reading “Cormorant/AirMule UAV completes first autonomous flight” »

NRG-X is the world’s first fully automatic charging solution, which provides efficient, high power energy transfer, has a great range of parking tolerance and can be simply retrofitted to almost every electric vehicle. Therefore, NRG-X is the ideal solution for convenient every day charging of your electric vehicle primarily at home. The system comprises two basic components:

The categories of AI.

Click here to learn more about author James Kobielus.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage these days. However, people often overlook the fact that it’s a truly ancient vogue. I can’t think of another current high-tech mania whose hype curve got going during the days when Ike was in the White House, “I Love Lucy” was on the small screen, and programming in assembly language was state of the art.

Continue reading “Coming to Grips with Artificial Intelligence’s Many Manifestations” »