Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI

Humans are innately able to adapt their behavior and actions according to the movements of other humans in their surroundings. For instance, human drivers may suddenly stop, slow down, steer or start their car based on the actions of other drivers, pedestrians or cyclists, as they have a sense of which maneuvers are risky in specific scenarios.

However, developing robots and autonomous vehicles that can similarly predict movements and assess the risk of performing different actions in a given scenario has so far proved highly challenging. This has resulted in a number of accidents, including the tragic death of a pedestrian who was struck by a self-driving Uber vehicle in March 2018.

Researchers at Stanford University and Toyota Research Institute (TRI) have recently developed a framework that could prevent these accidents in the future, increasing the safety of autonomous vehicles and other robotic systems operating in crowded environments. This framework, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, combines two tools, a and a technique to achieve risk-sensitive control.

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I am for Ethical Robots what about you?

Every time we talk to Alexa, Siri, Google, or Cortana, we are building the brains of the robot. Human machine relationships increase and robot ethics are needed for the coming age of automation, they are simply not adequate for the nuanced capabilities and behaviors we are beginning to see in today’s devices.

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The world’s small-scale farmers now can see a path to solving global hunger over the next decade, with solutions—such as adopting climate-resilient crops through improving extension services—all culled rapidly via artificial intelligence from more than 500,000 scientific research articles.

The results are synthesized in 10 new research papers—authored by 77 scientists, researchers and librarians in 23 countries—as part of Ceres2030: Sustainable Solutions to End Hunger. The project is headquartered at Cornell University, with partners from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).

The papers were published concurrently on Oct. 12 in four journals— Nature Plants, Nature Sustainability, Nature Machine Intelligence and Nature Food —and assembled in a comprehensive package online: Sustainable Solutions to End Hunger.

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Over the past decade or so, the performance of batteries has skyrocketed and their cost has plummeted. Given that many experts see the electrification of everything as key to decarbonizing our energy systems, this is good news. But for researchers like Chueh, the pace of battery innovation isn’t happening fast enough. The reason is simple: batteries are extremely complex. To build a better battery means ruthlessly optimizing at every step in the production process. It’s all about using less expensive raw materials, better chemistry, more efficient manufacturing techniques. But there are a lot of parameters that can be optimized. And often an improvement in one area—say, energy density—will come at a cost of making gains in another area, like charge rate.

Improving batteries has always been hampered by slow experimentation and discovery processes. Machine learning is speeding it up by orders of magnitude.

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Caltech’s OrbNet deep learning tool outperforms state-of-the-art solutions.

Artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning is being applied to help accelerate the complex science of quantum mechanics—the branch of physics that studies matter and light on the subatomic scale. Recently a team of scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) published a breakthrough study in The Journal of Chemical Physics that unveils a new machine learning tool called OrbNet that can perform quantum chemistry computations 1,000 times faster than existing state-of-the-art solutions.

“We demonstrate the performance of the new method for the prediction of molecular properties, including the total and relative conformer energies for molecules in range of datasets of organic and drug-like molecules,” wrote the researchers.

Quantum chemistry is the scientific study that combines chemistry and physics. Also known as molecular quantum dynamics, quantum chemistry is a subset of chemistry that studies the properties and behavior of molecules at the subatomic level through the lens of quantum mechanics.

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Tesla is updating the interior of the Model 3 to let owners lock their Sentry Mode/TeslaCam storage device in the glovebox.

Sentry Mode is Tesla’s integrated surveillance system inside its vehicles using the Autopilot cameras around the car to record potential vandalism or other incidents.

Tesla owners have to plug a storage device in one of the USB ports in the center console and footage recorded by Sentry Mode and TeslaCam, the automaker’s dashcam feature, will be stored on it.

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Scientists at the University of Hawaii’s Mānoa Institute for Astronomy (IfA) have used AI to produce the world’s largest 3D catalog of stars, galaxies, and quasars.

The team developed the map using an optical survey of three-quarters of the sky produced by the Pan-STARRS observatory on Haleakalā, Maui.

They trained an algorithm to identify celestial objects in the survey by feeding it spectroscopic measurements that provide definitive object classifications and distances.

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