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MIT researchers create AI system that could make robots better at handling objects

When most of us pick up an object, we don’t have to think about how to orient it in our hand. It’s something that comes naturally to us as we learn to navigate the world. That’s something that allows young children to be more deft with their hands than even the most advanced robots available today.

But that could quickly change. A team of scientists from MIT’s has developed a system that could one day give robots that same kind of dexterity. Using a AI algorithm, they created a simulated, anthropomorphic hand that could manipulate more than 2,000 objects. What’s more, the system didn’t need to know what it was about to pick up to find a way to move it around in its hand.

The system isn’t ready for real-world use just yet. To start, the team needs to transfer it to an actual robot. That might not be as much of a roadblock as you might think. At the start of the year, we saw researchers from Zhejiang University and the University of Edinburgh successfully transfer an AI reinforcement approach to their robot dog. The system allowed the robot to learn how to walk and recover from falls on its own.

Artificial Intelligence and Dreaming

Brent Oster is the President and CEO of ORBAI. He has 28 years experience in 3D computer graphics, animation, simulation, and AI with Bioware, Electronic Arts, Autodesk, and NVIDIA. He was the co-founder Bioware and Check Six, and he has completed the Stanford Continuing Studies curriculum of classes in entrepreneurial business, along with his degrees in Aerospace Engineering at University of Toronto and Scientific Computing at UC Santa Barbara.

As a Sr Solution Architect at NVIDIA, Brent helped Fortune 500 companies (and startups) looking to adopt ‘AI’, but consistently found that DL architectures tools fell far short of their expectations for ‘AI’. Brent started ORBAI to develop something better for them.

Progress Towards an Artificial General Intelligence

In 2,020 several powerful AI programs were developed which have the potential to alter many aspects of our everyday life. What are these programs, and who is behind them?

Discord link: https://discord.gg/bQrBVb6

Song source: Savfk — Music: Ultra by Savfk (copyright and royalty free sci-fi electronic cinematic epic soundtrack music) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A4Jak73Lao.

Image, song, video, thumbnail and information sources: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XstdBbyQBZh8NsSCW0su5yqiOnO…sp=sharing.

Shoutout to Max P for the audio editing and to saviors for the AI advice!

A robot could save farmers from being buried alive in grain

“It doesn’t sound like a lot when you look at the numbers, but those are completely preventable deaths,” Zane Zents, the lead software engineer for the Grain Weevil robot, told NTV News. “It’s something that in the 21st century I don’t think we should still be dealing with.”

The Grain Weevil: Zents’ fellow student Ben Johnson was studying electrical engineering at UNO when he received a special request from a farmer friend, Zach Hunnicutt.

“(He) said, ‘Hey, look, you guys build robots. Why don’t you build me a robot so I and my children never have to go into a grain bin again?’” Johnson told AgWeb in May.

The Weird Future of Digital Immortality — AI-Preservation

Biological immortality is not enough for an immerging community of Transhumanists. They’re hoping for a different take on Mind Uploading to offer them immortality. The Digital Immortality Definition depends on the person you ask, but one things is for certain the future is going to be weird when it comes to people longing for longevity and the goal of stopping aging completely. Living inside a computer by mind uploading to live forever may actually become a reality very soon in 2021.

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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 A new kind of Immortality.
02:05 Artificial Intelligence + Longevity =?
04:20 What are “Virtual Humans”?
06:40 The potential problem of consciousness.
08:53 Last Words.

#ai #longevity #immortality

$6 Million AI Changes Your Accent Mid-Conversation

Many job-seekers with valuable skills are disregarded by employers due to a fear of reduced intelligibility, removing the accent barrier could help.

In today’s multicultural societies, accents should not be a problem. But it turns out they still are due to a lack of coherence. Three Stanford students encountered this problem when one of their friends lost a customer support job due to his accent.

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Giving robots social skills

A new machine-learning system helps robots understand and perform certain social interactions. Robots can deliver food on a college campus and hit a hole-in-one on the golf course, but even the most sophisticated robot can’t perform basic social interactions that are critical to everyday human life. MIT researchers have now incorporated certain social interactions into a framework for robotics, enabling machines to understand what it means to help or hinder one another, and to learn to perform these social behaviors on their own. In a simulated environment, a robot watches its companion, guesses what task it wants to accomplish, and then helps or hinders this other robot based on its own goals. The researchers also showed that their model creates realistic and predictable social interactions. When they showed videos of these simulated robots interacting with one another to humans, the human viewers mostly agreed with the model about what type of social behavior was occurring. Full Story:

Streaming: the best films about artificial intelligence and robots

A century of sci-fi films that chart our changing attitudes to AI — from Fritz Lang to Finch.

“Old-fashioned” is generally not a term you want to hear applied to science fiction, a genre from which one tends to expect the futuristic and unfamiliar. But old-fashioned is very much how Finch (Apple TV+) feels, and not just because of the reassuring elder-statesman presence of Tom Hanks in the title role: a post-apocalyptic drama built from the scraps of a thousand others before it, it’s about as nostalgically cuddly as a vision of a barren, desolate future can be. Hanks is seemingly the last surviving human on the planet; an inventor, he assembles an AI robot (voiced by Caleb Landry Jones) to mind his adorable dog when he’s gone. Awww.

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Artificial intelligence is getting better at writing, and universities should worry about plagiarism

The dramatic rise of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has spotlit concerns about the role of technology in exam surveillance — and also in student cheating.

Some universities have reported more cheating during the pandemic, and such concerns are unfolding in a climate where technologies that allow for the automation of writing continue to improve.

Over the past two years, the ability of artificial intelligence to generate writing has leapt forward significantly, particularly with the development of what’s known as the language generator GPT-3. With this, companies such as Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA can now produce “human-like” text.

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