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Using the full system, farmers could reduce costs by 40% and chemical usage by up to 95%.


Small Robot Company (SRC), a British agritech startup for sustainable farming, has developed AI-enabled robots – named Tom, Dick and Harry – that identify and kill individual weeds with electricity. These agricultural robots could reduce the use of harmful chemicals and heavy machinery, paving the way for a new approach to sustainable crop farming.

The startup has been working on automated weed killers since 2017, and this April officially launched Tom, the first commercial robot currently operating on three UK farms. Dick is still in the prototype phase, and Harry is still in development.

Small Robot company says the robot Tom is capable of scanning around 20 Hectares per day, collecting about six terabytes of data in an 8-hour shift to identify the crops, spots undesirable weeds – using “Wilma,” an artificial intelligence operating system. This data can then be sent to Dick – the world’s first non-chemical robotic weeding system that zaps individual weeds with electrical ‘lightning strikes.’ And finally, Harry plants seeds in the weed-free soil.

It is called the “city brain”, an artificial intelligence system that is now being used across China – only megacities could afford them before – for everything from pandemic contact tracing to monitoring illegal public assemblies and river pollution.


Authorities at all levels are now using AI for everything from pandemic control to monitoring illegal public assemblies.

A research team from the University of Massachusetts Amherst has created an electronic microsystem that can intelligently respond to information inputs without any external energy input, much like a self-autonomous living organism. The microsystem is constructed from a novel type of electronics that can process ultralow electronic signals and incorporates a device that can generate electricity “out of thin air” from the ambient environment.

The groundbreaking research was published June 7 in the journal Nature Communications.

Jun Yao, an assistant professor in the electrical and computer engineering (ECE) and an adjunct professor in biomedical engineering, led the research with his longtime collaborator, Derek R. Lovley, a Distinguished Professor in microbiology.

Chipmaker Nvidia is acquiring DeepMap, the high-definition mapping startup announced. The company said its mapping IP will help Nvidia’s autonomous vehicle technology sector, Nvidia Drive.

“The acquisition is an endorsement of DeepMap’s unique vision, technology and people,” said Ali Kani, vice president and general manager of Automotive at Nvidia, in a statement. “DeepMap is expected to extend our mapping products, help us scale worldwide map operations and expand our full self-driving expertise.”

One of the biggest challenges to achieving full autonomy in a passenger vehicle is achieving proper localization and updated mapping information that reflects current road conditions. By integrating DeepMap’s tech, Nvidia’s autonomous stack should have greater precision, giving the vehicle enhanced abilities to locate itself on the road.

Do you want to work for Tesla remotely and test its latest Autopilot and Full Self-Driving features? You may be in luck as we learn that the automaker is now looking to hire self-driving car test drivers around the world.

You don’t even need a college education.

When it comes to Autopilot and Full Self-Driving package features, people often say that Tesla’s own paying customers are the testers and that’s mostly true, but the automaker also does plenty of internal testing.

With launch just five years away, the Gateway Exploration Robotics System — better known as Canadarm3 — has arrived at a critical point where its artificial intelligence system must be properly calibrated to meet the rigorous autonomous demands the Lunar Gateway project will impose upon it.

The AI solutions sought for Canadarm3’s vision by MDA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) largely relate to obstacle avoidance to prevent the arm from bumping into other structures on the lunar outpost and how to work with issues like prolonged communications blackouts and less-than-optimal lighting conditions — both of which must be overcome for the Gateway.

Speaking at a recent industry day event, Chris Langley, AI Lead at MDA for Canadarm3, related some of the challenges posed to the project by the Gateway operations plan, including only one month per year of crewed occupation initially and as little as only 8 hours of communication each week.

The growing population of avatars that use AI smarts to interact with us is a major clue.


In the fictional worlds of film and TV, artificial intelligence has been depicted as so advanced that it is indistinguishable from humans. But what if we’re actually getting closer to a world where AI is capable of thinking and feeling?

Tech company UneeQ is embarking on that journey with its “digital humans.” These avatars act as visual interfaces for customer service chatbots, virtual assistants, and other applications. UneeQ’s digital humans appear lifelike not only in terms of language and tone of voice, but also because of facial movements: raised eyebrows, a tilt of the head, a smile, even a wink. They transform a transaction into an interaction: creepy yet astonishing, human, but not quite.

What lies beneath UneeQ’s digital humans? Their 3D faces are modeled on actual human features. Speech recognition enables the avatar to understand what a person is saying, and natural language processing is used to craft a response. Before the avatar utters a word, specific emotions and facial expressions are encoded within the response.

Summary: A new deep neural network can accurately predict a healthy person’s brain age based on EEG data collected from a sleep study.

Source: AASM

A study shows that a deep neural network model can accurately predict the brain age of healthy patients based on electroencephalogram data recorded during an overnight sleep study, and EEG-predicted brain age indices display unique characteristics within populations with different diseases.