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Category: robotics/AI

Robot enthusiasts were sending up cheers this month to the team advancing Atlas into an even more human-like walker through obstacles including a bunch of cinder blocks and a balance beam. They have turned Atlas into the very credible hulk, who wins the spotlight with its display of walking, which was recorded May 1.

The video is “IHMC Atlas Autonomous Path Planning Across Narrow Terrain.” Don’t miss the key word “narrow.” This is why the walk is being eyed as a big deal.

Narrow terrain is difficult due to the need to do tricky cross-over steps, tricky, in that there is limited range of motion in the hip joint, said the video notes. There was “a small polygon of support when one foot is directly in front of the other.”

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Computer scientists the University of Melbourne in Australia and the University of Toronto in Canada have developed an algorithm that is capable of writing poetry following the rules of rhyme and metre.

With the use of poetries rules and taking the metre into account, this AI algorithm creates weaves of words and grouped them together to produce meaningful sentences.

This AI is trained extensively on the rules it needed to follow to craft an acceptable poem and the dataset researcher used to train the AI has over 2,600 real sonnets.

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Will technology displace millions of workers, or will it create more powerful tools to change the world?
A new VICE Special Report: The Future of Work premieres April 19 on HBO.

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A technology that functions like a brain? In these times of artificial intelligence, this no longer seems so far-fetched — for example, when a mobile phone can recognise faces or languages. With more complex applications, however, computers still quickly come up against their own limitations.

One of the reasons for this is that a computer traditionally has separate memory and processor units — the consequence of which is that all data have to be sent back and forth between the two. In this respect, the human brain is way ahead of even the most modern computers because it processes and stores information in the same place — in the synapses, or connections between neurons, of which there are a million-billion in the brain.

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The technology is proliferating amid concerns that it is prone to errors and allows the government to expand surveillance without much oversight.

Police are increasingly using facial recognition to solve low-level crimes and to quickly identify people they see as suspicious. Claire Merchlinsky / for NBC News.

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One of the most controversial narratives of our time will be discussion around identity and intention, that is who is it actually doing or thinking whatever it is you may be witnessing and why. This disruptive shift will be about discerning between human intelligence, artificial intelligence, hybrids-of-sorts and the types of parameters with which to best frame each category.

Get ready for one of the most controversial tech developments of our era.

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Robotics ground controllers in NASA’s Mission Control Center at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston successfully replaced a failed Main Bus Switching Unit (MBSU) on the International Space Station with a spare using robotic operations on Thursday, May 2. The operation to replace the failed unit was conducted using the station’s Canadarm2 and Dextre, both part of Canada’s contribution to the International Space Station.

Using complex robotic work to perform critical maintenance allows astronauts to spend more time working on scientific experiments and helps develop better technologies and procedures for future human and robotic exploration beyond low-Earth orbit.

“Developing new robotic systems is extremely important to get our astronauts back to the Moon by 2024,” Robotics Operations Systems Officer Mike Ferullo said. “The techniques and methods that we are developing with Dextre and Canadarm2 are directly applicable to future missions, and the construction and repair of any Moon-based mission will be done with robotics wherever possible. It’s an extremely exciting time to be involved in space robotics.

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Numbers figure pretty high up on the list of what a computer can do well. While humans often struggle to split a restaurant bill, a modern computer can make millions of calculations in a mere second. Humans, however, have an innate and intuitive number sense that helped us, among other things, to build computers in the first place.

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