Lifeboat Foundation

Recent attempts to move beyond narrow AI applications in industry have struggled to gain traction. ReThink Robotics, a leading startup founded by AI founding MIT researcher Dr. Rodney Brooks to create adaptive collaborative robots for industrial robotics, closed its doors in October 2018 and has since had its IP acquired by HAHN Group. In a retrospective published by The Robot Report, several contributing factors led to the shutdown. ReThink’s reliance on series elastic actuators compromised the precision and repeatability found in typical actuators in favor of safety, which likely led to efforts to compensate on hardware through software.

While the company utilized innovative machine control and machine vision technologies in iterating on their robots, the combination of mechanical motion of firmware at the heart of their products led to a narrow range of issues at varying quality. This made Baxter and Sawyer, ReThink’s flagship industrial robots, ill-suited for adaptive industrial use.

Other companies attempting to build adaptive robots, including Jibo, have met similar troubles. Touted as an interactive social robot with a personality, Jibo launched their eponymous robot in November 2017 with an emphasis on naturalistic human-computer interaction, but entered the market with more limited functionality than cheaper smart assistant speakers. The company has since closed down and transferred ownership of their IP to SQN Venture Partners in November 2018.

Continue reading “The Expectations And Possibility Of Adaptive AI Hardware” »

Video games have increasingly demonstrated a great deal of audiovisual realism, in par with the massive performance improvement of computer systems. At the.

IBM’s biologically motivated machine learning accelerates brain research.

The AI taught itself the skill through a technique called reinforcement learning — essentially, it picked up the rules of the game over thousands of matches in randomly generated environments.

A paper on their research was published today in Science.

“How you define teamwork is not something I want to tackle,” Max Jaderberg, a DeepMind researcher who worked on the project told The New York Times. “But one agent will sit in the opponent’s base camp, waiting for the flag to appear, and that is only possible if it is relying on its teammates.”

Continue reading “DeepMind’s Gamer AI is Better At Co-op Mode Than Human Players” »

Researchers have programmed a robot to crack an egg. It’s more important than it sounds. Mark Bruer reports.

A Mad Scientist conference in Austin, Texas, recently addressed robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomy, the future of space, planetary habitability, and the legal and ethical dilemmas surrounding disruptive technologies.

This post by Prof. Kevin Warwick originally appeared at OpenMind.

Article from the book There’s a Future: Visions for a Better World

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Excited about the impending delivery robot revolution? If so, you need to know about Starship Technologies, the company which kickstarted the whole thing. Founded by two of the original creators of Skype, Starship is poised to change the world of deliveries. Here’s what you need to know.

A growing number of devices are now connected to the internet and are capable of collecting, sending and receiving data. This interconnection between devices, referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT), poses serious security threats, as cyberattackers can now target computers and smartphones, but also a vast array of other devices, such as tablets, smart watches, smart home systems, transportation systems and so on.

For the time being, examples of large-scale IoT implementations (e.g. connected infrastructure, cities, etc.) are somewhat limited, yet they could soon become widespread, posing significant risks for businesses and public services that heavily rely on the internet in their daily operations. To mitigate these risks, researchers have been trying to develop security measures to protect devices connected to the internet from wireless network attacks.

To this end, two researchers at Baoji University of Arts and Sciences, in China, have recently developed a new method to defend devices in an IOT environment from wireless network attacks. Their approach, presented in a paper published in Springer’s International Journal of Wireless Information Networks, combines a deep neural network with a model based on game theory, a branch of mathematics that proposes strategies for dealing with situations that entail competition between different parties.

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