Robotics/AI – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Jan 11
2019

In 1983, Isaac Asimov predicted the world of 2019. Here’s what he got right

Isaac Asimov was one the world’s most celebrated and prolific science fiction writers, having written or edited more than 500 books over his four-decade career. The Russian-born writer was famous for penning hard science fiction in his books, such as that in I, Robot, Foundation and Nightfall. Naturally, his work contained many predictions about the future of society and technology.

We’re not living in space, but the Russian science-fiction author foresaw the rise of intelligent machines and the disruption of the digital age.

Jan 10
2019

Machine learning leads mathematicians to unsolvable problem

AI researchers connect machine learning to Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem via a finding of unLearnability.

Simple artificial-intelligence problem puts researchers up against a logical paradox discovered by famed mathematician Kurt Gödel.

Jan 10
2019

Making Superhumans Through Radical Inclusion and Cognitive Ergonomics

These dated interfaces are not equipped to handle today’s exponential rise in data, which has been ushered in by the rapid dematerialization of many physical products into computers and software.

Breakthroughs in perceptual and cognitive computing, especially machine learning algorithms, are enabling technology to process vast volumes of data, and in doing so, they are dramatically amplifying our brain’s abilities. Yet even with these powerful technologies that at times make us feel superhuman, the interfaces are still crippled with poor ergonomics.

Many interfaces are still designed around the concept that human interaction with technology is secondary, not instantaneous. This means that any time someone uses technology, they are inevitably multitasking, because they must simultaneously perform a task and operate the technology.

Jan 10
2019

This AI food truck could bring fresh produce directly to you

Check out the SPACe_C eMart, the ice cream truck-style food delivery service of the future that offers fresh food and educates consumers on farm-to-table eating.

Jan 10
2019

Steam-Powered Asteroid Hoppers Developed through UCF Collaboration

Using steam to propel a spacecraft from asteroid to asteroid is now possible, thanks to a collaboration between a private space company and the University of Central Florida.

UCF planetary research scientist Phil Metzger worked with Honeybee Robotics of Pasadena, California, which developed the World Is Not Enough spacecraft prototype that extracts water from asteroids or other planetary bodies to generate steam and propel itself to its next mining target.

UCF provided the simulated asteroid material and Metzger did the computer modeling and simulation necessary before Honeybee created the prototype and tried out the idea in its facility Dec. 31. The team also partnered with Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, to develop initial prototypes of steam-based rocket thrusters.

Jan 9
2019

The Clever Clumsiness of a Robot Teaching Itself to Walk

Researchers make robots teach themselves how to walk through trial and error, like babies, to navigate the real world.

Jan 9
2019

If an AI became sentient, would it gain human (or equivalent) rights?

I find this subject very fascinating.

AI can fake their emotions but whether they can feel those emotions is another matter.

Jan 9
2019

‘ANYmal’ robot stalks dark sewers to test its navigation

Researchers are testing a four-legged robot’s ability to find its way through the sewers under Zurich.

Jan 9
2019

A system to generate new song lyrics that match the style of specific artists

Researchers at the University of Waterloo, Canada, have recently developed a system for generating song lyrics that match the style of particular music artists. Their approach, outlined in a paper pre-published on arXiv, uses a variational autoencoder (VAE) with artist embeddings and a CNN classifier trained to predict artists from MEL spectrograms of their song clips.

“The motivation for this project came from my personal interest,” Olga Vechtomova, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “Music is a passion of mine, and I was curious about whether a machine can generate lines that sound like the lyrics of my favourite music artists. While working on text generative models, my research group found that neural networks can generate some impressive lines of text. The natural next step for us was to explore whether a machine could learn the ‘essence’ of a specific music artist’s lyrical style, including choice of words, themes and sentence structure, to generate novel lyrics lines that sound like the artist in question.”

The system developed by Vechtomova and her colleagues is based on a neural network model called variational autoencoder (VAE), which can learn by reconstructing original lines of text. In their study, the researchers trained their model to generate any number of new, diverse and coherent lyric lines.

Jan 9
2019

Robots of the future: more R2D2 than C3PO

Researchers from Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, have offered a bold glimpse into what the robots of the future could look like. And it’s nothing like C3PO, or a T-800 Terminator.

In a paper just published in Nature Machine Intelligence, CSIRO’s Active Integrated Matter Future Science Platform (AIM FSP) says robots could soon be taking their engineering cues from evolution, creating truly startling and effective designs.

This concept, known as Multi-Level Evolution (MLE), argues that current robots struggle in unstructured, complex environments because they aren’t specialised enough, and should emulate the incredibly diverse adaptation animals have undergone to survive in their environment.