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On Saturday, Chinese scholars unveiled a preliminary proposal draft in Beijing that could potentially shape the nation’s forthcoming artificial intelligence (AI) law.

The proposal draft pays attention to the development issues of industrial practice in the three areas of data, computing power and algorithms, Zhao Jingwu, an associate professor from BeiHang University Law School, told the Global Times.

Zhao said that the proposal also introduces the AI insurance system that encourages the intervention of the insurance market through policy incentives, exploring insurance products suitable for the AI industry. In addition, it proposes the enhancement of citizens’ digital literacy, aiming to prevent and control the security risks of the technology from the user end.

India will lower import taxes on certain electric vehicles for companies committing to invest at least $500 million and setting up a local manufacturing facility within three years, a policy shift that could potentially bolster Tesla’s plans to enter the South Asian market.

Companies must invest a minimum of $500 million in the country and will have three years to establish local manufacturing for EVs with at least 25% of components sourced domestically, according to a government press release on Friday. Firms meeting these requirements will be allowed to import 8,000 EVs a year at a reduced import duty of 15% on cars costing $35,000 and above. India currently levies a tax of 70% to 100% on imported cars depending on their value.

The policy change is likely going to pave the way for Tesla to enter India, as the Elon Musk-led company has been in talks with the government to lower import duties on its electric cars for years. The move also aligns with India’s goal to boost the adoption of EVs and reduce its dependence on oil imports, with the country setting a target of achieving 30% electric car sales by 2030.

Amazon is listing products in which even the title was generated using OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Can the internet survive?

As it stands, the draft policy would undermine the long-standing Bayh-Dole Act, with unintended consequences for innovation.

On socially compliant navigation: Researchers show how real-world RL-based finetuning can enable mobile robots to adapt on the fly to the behavior of humans, to obstacles, and other challenges associated with real-world navigation:

Abstract.

Continue reading “SELFI: Autonomous Self-improvement with Reinforcement Learning for Social Navigation” »

Saint Louis University associate professor of health management and policy in the College for Public Health and Social Justice, SangNam Ahn, Ph.D., recently published a paper in Journal of Clinical Psychology that examines the relationship between childhood adversity, and psychiatric decline as well as adult adversity and psychiatric and cognitive decline.

His team discovered that just one instance of adversity in childhood can increase cases of mental illness later in life, and adverse events in adults can lead to a greater chance of both mental illness and cognitive decline later in life.

“Life is very complicated, very dynamic,” Ahn said. “I really wanted to highlight the importance of looking into the lasting health effect of adversity, not only childhood but also adulthood adversity on health outcomes, especially physical health and psychiatric and cognitive health. There have been other studies before, but this is one of the first that looks into these issues comprehensively.”

For one, it reached over a million users in five days of its release, a mark unmatched by even the most historically popular apps like Facebook and Spotify. Additionally, ChatGPT has seen near-immediate adoption in business contexts, as organizations seek to gain efficiencies in content creation, code generation, and other functional tasks.

But as businesses rush to take advantage of AI, so too do attackers. One notable way in which they do so is through unethical or malicious LLM apps.

Unfortunately, a recent spate of these malicious apps has introduced risk into an organization’s AI journey. And, the associated risk is not easily addressed with a single policy or solution. To unlock the value of AI without opening doors to data loss, security leaders need to rethink how they approach broader visibility and control of corporate applications.

In a groundbreaking study published on the arXiv server, a team of Swiss researchers introduces Pedipulate, an innovative controller enabling quadruped robots to perform complex manipulation tasks using their legs. This development marks a significant leap forward in robotics, showcasing the potential for legged robots in maintenance, home support, and exploration activities beyond traditional inspection roles.

The study, titled “Pedipulate: Quadruped Robot Manipulation Using Legs,” challenges the conventional design of legged robots that often rely on additional robotic arms for manipulation, leading to increased power consumption and mechanical complexity. By observing quadrupedal animals, the researchers hypothesized that employing the robot’s legs for locomotion and manipulation could significantly simplify and reduce the cost of robotic systems, particularly in applications where size and efficiency are crucial, such as in space exploration.

Pedipulate is trained through deep reinforcement learning, employing a neural network policy that tracks foot position targets. This policy minimizes the distance between the robot’s foot and the target point while penalizing undesirable movements such as jerky motions or collisions. The controller was tested on the ANYmal D robot, which features 12 torque-controlled joints and force-torque sensors on each foot, proving the feasibility of leg-based manipulation in real-world scenarios.

To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more profiles here.

Irene Solaiman began her career in AI as a researcher and public policy manager at OpenAI, where she led a new approach to the release of GPT-2, a predecessor to ChatGPT. After serving as an AI policy manager at Zillow for nearly a year, she joined Hugging Face as the head of global policy. Her responsibilities there range from building and leading company AI policy globally to conducting socio-technical research.

Solaiman also advises the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the professional association for electronics engineering, on AI issues, and is a recognized AI expert at the intergovernmental Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).