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Category: robotics/AI

Japan is constructing an 18-meter-tall, 25-ton Gundam robot powered by a combination of electric and hydraulic actuators.

Japan has had a robust robot culture for decades, thanks (at least in part) to the success of the Gundam series, which are bipedal humanoid robots controlled by a human who rides inside of them. I would tell you how many different TV series and video games and manga there are about Gundam, but I’m certain I can’t count that high—there’s like seriously a lot of Gundam stuff out there. One of the most visible bits of Gundam stuff is a real life full-scale Gundam statue in Tokyo, but who really wants a statue, right? C’mon, Japan! Bring us the real thing!

Gundam Factory Yokohama, which is a Gundam Factory in Yokohama, is constructing an 18-meter-tall, 25-ton Gundam robot. The plan is for the robot to be fully actuated using a combination of electric and hydraulic actuators, achieving “Gundam-like movement” with its 24 degrees of freedom. This will include the ability to walk, which has already been simulated by the University of Tokyo JSK Lab:

As we all know, simulation is pretty much just as good as reality, which is good because so far simulation is all we have of this robot, including these 1/30 scale models of the robot and the docking and maintenance facility that will be built for it:

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A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in China and one in Korea has developed a micro-robot system that regenerated knee cartilage in rabbits. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes their system and how well it worked.

In many developed countries, the population is growing older, which means aging-related health conditions are on the rise. One such ailment common in older people is degeneration of the in the knees and hips. When this happens, a common treatment is replacing the knee or hip joint with an artificial device. In this new effort, the researchers have found a better way to handle the problem—regrowing the cartilage.

Prior research has shown that found in and fat can be coaxed into growing into cartilage cells. And researchers have also found that stem cells can be used to repair damaged cartilage. The challenge is placing the cells in the body where they are needed and keeping them in place until they attach to the surrounding tissue. In this new effort, the researchers have created a system that was able to overcome these hurdles—at least in rabbits.

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San Francisco startup RealityEngines. AI has turned off stealth mode and today launched its completely autonomous cloud AI service. It’s all very tedious to the common reader IMO — enterprise-level business stuff — but the technology itself and how it could shape our future in both data and perceived reality should be at least mildly considered.

Here’s how RealityEngines. AI works: using a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) technique called BANANAS, when a user points their data (through an API) to RealityEngines. AI and selects a use case (churn predictions, fraud detection, sales lead forecasting, security threat detection, cloud spend optimization, et al.), the data is attacked by the NAS to create cutting-edge models then refined by a generative adversarial network (GAN) in order to augment sparse or noisy data with synthetic data to further enhance the data modeling. Now that, is bananas.

It’s a democratization of AI that will not only create a service that allows anyone to create AI models without having to hire a team of developers, but it makes that service accessible to any business that feels it needs it and might not even have enough data. The synthetic data technology can help companies create AI models with a moderate amount of data.

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Circa 2016 could cure viruses in no time.

When you get right down to it, developing vaccines is about data and luck. Scientists start with a set of variables—what drugs a virus responds to, how effectively, and for whom—and then it’s a whole lot of trial and error until they stumble upon a cure.

One of the most exciting possibilities in medical research right now is how technology like machine learning could help researchers rapidly process those enormous sets of data, more quickly leading to cures. This is already starting to happen: In a study published Wednesday in the journal Macromolecules, researchers from IBM and Singapore’s Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology reveal a breakthrough that could help prevent deadly virus infections. With the help of IBM super computer Watson, they hope their finding will soon make its way into vaccines.

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Not everything is knowable. In a world where it seems like artificial intelligence and machine learning can figure out just about anything, that might seem like heresy – but it’s true.

At least, that’s the case according to a new international study by a team of mathematicians and AI researchers, who discovered that despite the seemingly boundless potential of machine learning, even the cleverest algorithms are nonetheless bound by the constraints of mathematics.

“The advantages of mathematics, however, sometimes come with a cost… in a nutshell… not everything is provable,” the researchers, led by first author and computer scientist Shai Ben-David from the University of Waterloo, write in their paper.

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Getting robots to just pick things up has always been a big challenge for engineers, but artificial intelligence is helping teach these machines new tricks. Startup Covariant, formerly known as Embodied Intelligence, says its bots are ready for full-time operation, and are being installed in warehouses around the world.

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