Lifeboat Foundation

Need an extra chair? No problem: These robots will turn into one for you.

One day, people could monitor their own health conditions by simply picking up a pencil and drawing a bioelectronic device on their skin. In a new study, University of Missouri engineers demonstrated that the simple combination of pencils and paper could be used to create devices that might be used to monitor personal health.

Their findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Zheng Yan, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering, said many existing commercial on-skin biomedical devices often contain two major components—a biomedical tracking component and a surrounding flexible material, such as plastic, to provide a supportive structure for the component to maintain an on-skin connection with a person’s body.

Panasonic has begun testing robotic mobility devices at the newly constructed Takanawa Gateway train station in Tokyo.

The effort is art of a plan to bring a series of automated services to the airport and surrounding facilities that are part of a massive redevelopment project in the surrounding Shinagawa business district.

Three mobility devices, essentially intelligent electric wheelchairs, will be used as a single group in the trial. The experiment will focus on ensuring the safety of passengers with mobility issues as they are transported throughout the huge facilities.

Over the past few years, researchers have been trying to apply quantum physics theory to a variety of fields, including robotics, biology and cognitive science. Computational techniques that draw inspiration from quantum systems, also known as quantum-like (QL) models, could potentially achieve better performance and more sophisticated capabilities than more conventional approaches.

Researchers at University of Genoa, in Italy, have recently investigated the feasibility of using a QL approach to enhance a robot’s sensing capabilities. In their paper, pre-published on arXiv, they present the results of a case study where they tested a QL perception model on a robot with limited sensing capabilities within a simulated environment.

“The idea for this study came to me after reading an article written in 1993 by Anton Amann, (‘The Gestalt problem in quantum theory’) in which he compared the problem of Gestalt perception with the attribution of molecular shape in quantum physics,” Davide Lanza, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “I was amazed by this parallel between cognition and quantum phenomena, and I discovered then the flourishing field of quantum cognition studies.”

Let’s go behind the scenes. 🎬

Starting on July 15, a new video miniseries explores the intricate world of Hubble Space Telescope operations. What does it take to keep such a complex machine working for more than 30 years? In three episodes, “Hubble – Eye in the Sky” takes a never-before-seen look at how this groundbreaking space telescope operates.

#NASA #Hubble #EyeintheSky #video #documentary #new #astronomy #space #science #trailer

Google today announced that it has signed up Verizon as the newest customer of its Google Cloud Contact Center AI service, which aims to bring natural language recognition to the often inscrutable phone menus that many companies still use today (disclaimer: TechCrunch is part of the Verizon Media Group). For Google, that’s a major win, but it’s also a chance for the Google Cloud team to highlight some of the work it has done in this area. It’s also worth noting that the Contact Center AI product is a good example of Google Cloud’s strategy of packaging up many of its disparate technologies into products that solve specific problems.

“A big part of our approach is that machine learning has enormous power but it’s hard for people,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told me in an interview ahead of today’s announcement. “Instead of telling people, ‘well, here’s our natural language processing tools, here is speech recognition, here is text-to-speech and speech-to-text — and why don’t you just write a big neural network of your own to process all that?’ Very few companies can do that well. We thought that we can take the collection of these things and bring that as a solution to people to solve a business problem. And it’s much easier for them when we do that and […] that it’s a big part of our strategy to take our expertise in machine intelligence and artificial intelligence and build domain-specific solutions for a number of customers.”

The company first announced Contact Center AI at its Cloud Next conference two years ago and it became generally available last November. The promise here is that it will allow businesses to build smarter contact center solutions that rely on speech recognition to provide customers with personalized support while it also allows human agents to focus on more complex issues. A lot of this is driven by Google Cloud’s Dialogflow tool for building conversational experiences across multiple channels.

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed a robotic gripper with the dexterity to handle thin objects like ropes and cables, the university announced. The technology could one day be used by robots to perform household tasks such as folding clothes, or for more technical purposes like wire shaping.

Humans can find it challenging to manipulate thin flexible objects, and doing so can be “nearly impossible” for robots, MIT spokeswoman Rachel Gordon said in an email. The standard approach had been for robots to use “a series of slow and incremental deformations,” plus mechanical fixtures, to handle these objects.

SpaceX has test-fired a Falcon 9 rocket for South Korea’s first military satellite launch on July 14.

As cells develop, changes in how our genes interact determines their fate. Differences in these genetic interactions can make our cells robust to infection from viruses or make it possible for our immune cells to kill cancerous ones.

Understanding how these gene associations work across the development of human tissue and organs is important for the creation of medical treatments for complex diseases as broad as cancer, developmental disorders, or heart disease.

A new technology called single-cell RNA-sequencing has made it possible to study the behavior of genes in human and mammal cells at an unprecedented resolution and promises to accelerate scientific and medical discoveries.