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Archive for the ‘robotics/AI’ category: Page 1755

Dec 16, 2018

China has never had a real chip industry. Making AI chips could change that

Posted by in categories: information science, robotics/AI

This is happening in the city of Tianjin, about an hour’s drive south of Beijing, within a gleaming office building that belongs to iFlytek, one of China’s rapidly rising artificial-intelligence companies. Beyond guarded gates, inside a glitzy showroom, the US president is on a large TV screen heaping praise on the Chinese company. It’s Trump’s voice and face, but the recording is, of course, fake—a cheeky demonstration of the cutting-edge AI technology iFlytek is developing.

Jiang Tao chuckles and leads the way to some other examples of iFlytek’s technology. Throughout the tour, Tao, one of the company’s cofounders, uses another remarkable innovation: a hand-held device that converts his words from Mandarin into English almost instantly. At one point he speaks into the machine, and then grins as it translates: “I find that my device solves the communication problem.”

IFlytek’s translator shows off AI capabilities that rival those found anywhere in the world. But it also highlights a big hole in China’s plan, unveiled in 2017, to be the world leader in AI by 2030. The algorithms inside were developed by iFlytek, but the hardware—the microchips that bring those algorithms to life—was designed and made elsewhere. While China manufactures most of the world’s electronic gadgets, it has failed, time and again, to master the production of these tiny, impossibly intricate silicon structures. Its dependence on foreign integrated circuits could potentially cripple its AI ambitions.

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Dec 16, 2018

DARPA head on AI dangers: ‘It’s not one of those things that keeps me up at night’

Posted by in categories: military, robotics/AI

“At least in the Defense Department today, we don’t see machines doing anything by themselves,” he said, noting that agency researchers are intensely focused on building “human-machine” partnerships. “I think we’re a long way off from a generalized AI, even in the third wave in what we’re pursuing.”


Artificial intelligence does not yet pose a serious threat to humans, according to the head of the Defense Advanced Research Agency. Though the military is rushing to improve its AI capabilities, DARPA Director Dr. Steven H. Walker said AI remains “a very fragile capability.”

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Dec 15, 2018

Author Vernor Vinge: Proposing a singular view of technology’s future

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, singularity

When the Technological Singularity arrives, you can’t even imagine what the future will hold afterwards. Just ask author Vernor Vinge.

A five-time Hugo Award-winning author (among various other awards and accolades), Vernor Vinge has been writing and speculating about AI and intelligence amplification for over half a century. As part of his storied career, an interesting anecdote concerns a rejection letter he received from legendary science fiction editor and publisher John W. Campbell, Jr.

Early in his career, Vinge had proposed a story about a human being with amplified intelligence and (as Vinge relates in his short story collection) Campbell wrote him back with the comment, “Sorry — you can’t write this story. Neither can anyone else.” Jump forward a few decades, and Vinge delivered a paper to NASA entitled The Coming Technological Singularity in which he foresaw a moment when artificial intelligence will develop exponentially until it reached a point that surpasses humanity’s ability to comprehend. It is intelligence so far superior that we can’t even imagine what it would be like. And then what?

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Dec 15, 2018

Sci-Fi Promised Us Home Robots. So Where Are They?

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

Science fiction has promised us a whole lot of technology that it’s rudely failed to deliver—jetpacks, flying cars, teleportation. The most useful one might be the robot companion, à la Rosie from The Jetsons, a machine that watches over the home.

It seemed like 2018 was going to be the year when robots made a big leap in that direction. Two machines in particular surfaced to much fanfare: Kuri, an adorable R2D2 analog that can follow you around and take pictures of your dinner parties, and Jibo, a desktop robot with a screen for a face that works a bit like Alexa, only it can dance.

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Dec 15, 2018

Technology will kill the 9-to-5 work week, says Richard Branson

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

With the rise of A.I., and studies that repeatedly suggest that workers’ productivity actually increases during shorter work days, the work week is poised to undergo a major transformation in the coming years.


The billionaire entrepreneur predicts the rise of technology will soon force society to rethink the modern work week.

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Dec 14, 2018

AI for Scholarship: How Machine Learning can Transform the Humanities

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Will AI transform — or replace — the Humanities?


Artificial Intelligence has the potential to revolutionize the Humanities by transforming how we analyze texts.

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Dec 14, 2018

The Amazing Ways How Unilever Uses Artificial Intelligence To Recruit & Train Thousands Of Employees

Posted by in categories: information science, robotics/AI, transportation

Unilever, the multinational consumer goods manufacturer, uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help with recruiting and onboarding of new employees. The algorithms help to sift through CVs and even conduct and analyze video interviews.

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Dec 14, 2018

NASA’s Insight Lander on Mars Spotted from Space!

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, space

NASA’s newly arrived Mars lander has been spotted by one its orbiting cousins.

The space agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter used its supersharp High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera (HiRISE) to photograph the InSight lander, as well as the hardware that helped the stationary robot ace its Nov. 26 touchdown on the equatorial plain known as Elysium Planitia.

“It looks like the heat shield (upper right) has its dark outside facing down, since it is so bright (saturated, probably a specular reflection),” HiRISE principal investigator Alfred McEwen, of the University of Arizona, wrote in an image description today (Dec. 13). [Mars InSight in Photos: NASA’s Mission to Probe Core of the Red Planet].

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Dec 13, 2018

Researchers Develop Nanodiscs That Can Wipe Out Tumors

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, nanotechnology, robotics/AI

Cancer research is an area of medical science that, rightfully, gets considerable attention. There are nearly 14.5 million Americans with a history of cancer and with more than 13 million estimated new cancer cases each year. It’s no wonder even artificial intelligence (AI) has gotten into the field. Researchers from the University of Michigan are not getting left behind, with a groundbreaking method that has the potential to eliminate tumors.

This new technology uses nano-sized discs, about 10 nm to be exact, to teach the body to kill cancer cells. “We are basically educating the immune system with these nanodiscs so that immune cells can attack cancer cells in a personalized manner,” said James Moon from the University of Michigan.

Each of these ‘nanodiscs’ is full of neoantigens (tumor-specific mutations) that teach the immune system’s T-cells to recognize each neoantigen and kill them. These work hand-in-hand with immune checkpoint inhibitors that boost the responses of T-cells — forming an anti-cancer system in the body that wipes out tumors and potentially keeps them from reemerging.

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Dec 13, 2018

The end of GEO Satellites as we know today

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, business, robotics/AI, satellites

GEO Satellites business globally make roughly 80% of the overall Space market business with $270B revenues claimed in 2017. How a Space Industry of such kind level of business can disappear is not an argument for many years to come but how a transformation of the Satellite configuration can impact the Space Industry this represents a real topic.

I already discussed in my previous article of how the advancement of A.I. bringing to autonomous missions for satellites, 3D printing permitting on-orbit Manufacturing and Robotic Assembly are not far away technologies, with the mature advancements achieved in on-Ground applications, to be applied to Space Satellites. Already today recently born Startups are working on Satellites on-board software/hardware permitting more autonomous tasks with decision making capability without being piloted from remote on-Ground Stations, significantly reducing operative costs.

Arriving to build fully autonomous Satellites is just a matter of time, with remotely controlled operations to be applied only for safety contingencies. The foreseen growth in the number of small satellites by order of magnitudes push the market this way.

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