Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI

Enhancing astronomers’ ability to peer ever more deeply into the cosmos may hinge on developing larger space-based telescopes. A new concept in space telescope design makes use of a modular structure and an assembly robot to build an extremely large telescope in space, performing tasks in which astronaut fatigue would be a problem.

The robotically assembled modular space telescope (RAMST) design is described by Nicolas Lee and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in an article published this week by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, in the Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems (JATIS).

Ground-based telescopes are limited by atmospheric effects and by their fixed location on the Earth.

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PARC is a Xerox company that has received funds from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) through its Inbound, Controlled, Air-Releasable, Unrecoverable Systems (ICARUS) program.

The ICARUS program aims at creating a prototype air vehicle that has the potential to deliver small payloads in an autonomous manner to targeted locations and then disappears after the task it completed. PARC in cooperation with AeroVironment Inc. plans to produce particular materials and the air delivery system that can be made to disappear through a project within ICARUS that is referred to as On-Target Delivery and Disintegration Upon Stress-release Trigger (ONLY-DUST).

The project focuses on producing complex structures that are majorly firm during flight and storage, and at the same time permits reliable on-demand transience. It is possible to potentially scale up the DoD applications of the demonstration system because of its association with AeroVironment Inc., a leading company in unmanned, small aerial vehicles.

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There are three buckets.

There are three buckets of jobs right now, and each one will be affected by artificial intelligence. So says Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social and a director with Starbucks, during a conversation on Tuesday at Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Colorado.

The first bucket, Shih says, are the jobs that almost certainly will disappear as AI and machine learning technologies continue to evolve and become more prevalent. This includes things like drivers (thanks to autonomous vehicles), lower-skilled manufacturing jobs (humans out, robots in), and certain research functions (paralegals, etc.).

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Nice chime on QC.

Manoj Saxena is the executive chairman of CognitiveScale and a founding managing director of The Entrepreneurs’ Fund IV (TEF), a $100m seed fund focused exclusively on the cognitive computing space.

Saxena is also the chairman of Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, San Antonio branch and Chairman, SparkCognition an Austin based cognitive security and safety analytics company.

Prior to joining TEF, Saxena was general manager, IBM Watson, where his team built the world’s first cognitive systems in healthcare, financial services, and retail. Earlier he founded, built and sold two Austin based software startups.

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Using pneumatic pistons and servos to power robots makes them fast and strong, but also bulky and extremely heavy. No one is going to mistake ATLAS for a real human being. To eventually create humanoid-looking robots like the Terminator we need to mechanically replicate every part of the human anatomy—starting with the muscles.

Researchers at the Suzumori Endo Robotics Laboratory at the Tokyo Institute of Technology started with an artificial human skeleton that was then covered in bundles of multifilament artificial muscles. Like real human muscles, the multifilament bundles contract and expand when an electrical current is applied, and by controlling different groups of these muscles at different times, the skeleton’s arms, legs, and head can all be made to move similar to how a real human can.

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