Lifeboat Foundation

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).

The chatbot provided inaccurate information, encouraging Moffatt to book a flight immediately and then request a refund within 90 days.

Air Canada appears to have quietly killed its costly chatbot support.

Meta Platforms will begin detecting and labeling images generated by other companies’ artificial intelligence services in the coming months, using a set of invisible markers built into the files, its top policy executive said on Tuesday.

Meta is promising to roll out auto-labeling for AI-generated images — as soon as it figures out how, that is.

Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said in a policy update that the company is currently working with “industry partners” to formulate criteria that will help identify AI content. Once those criteria are determined, Meta will begin automatically labeling posts featuring any AI-generated images, video, or audio “in the coming months.”

“This approach represents the cutting edge of what’s technically possible right now. But it’s not yet possible to identify all AI-generated content, and there are ways that people can strip out invisible markers,” Clegg wrote. “So we’re pursuing a range of options. We’re working hard to develop classifiers that can help us to automatically detect AI-generated content, even if the content lacks invisible markers.”