Robotics/AI – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Feb 3
2021

Dr. Mihaela Chita-Tegmark — Human Robot Interaction Lab, Tufts U — Co-Founder, Future of Life Inst

Is a postdoctoral scholar at Tufts University, where she conducts research in their Human Robot Interaction Lab (https://hrilab.tufts.edu/).

With a background in psychology and the social sciences, Dr. Chita-Tegmark is interested in topics at the intersection of technology and psychology, such as using artificial social agents in healthcare and the impact of such emerging technologies on human social interactions and well-being.

Dr. Chita-Tegmark has her Ph.D from Boston University in Psychology and Developmental Sciences, and she is an alumna of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she spent time studying role of social information in children’s lives, how social information influences the way children cooperate and engage in strategic decision-making, as well as on projects related to the development of social attention and language skills in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

Dr. Chita-Tegmark is also a Co-Founder of the Future of Life Institute (https://futureoflife.org/), a non-profit research institute and outreach organization that works to mitigate existential risks facing humanity, including those from advanced artificial intelligence (AI), to bio-engineering, to autonomous weapons, and to help promote positive uses of technology.

Feb 3
2021

Experimental AI framework Vx2Text generates video captions using inferences from audio and text

Researchers at Facebook have developed a framework, Vx2Text, that can generate captions by inferring from videos, audio, and text.

Feb 3
2021

Case studies of successful AI startups

Unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence is a small part — albeit an important one — of a successful product management strategy.

Feb 2
2021

Japan Sends Robot Into the Nuclear Hell of the Fukushima Reactor

The robots are sparing us the pains of tomorrow.

Picking up and examining pebbles of fuel is just the first step.

Feb 2
2021

DeepMind’s AlphaFold Is Close to Solving One of Biology’s Greatest Challenges

OEC promoting STEM education in Africa.

If we know a protein’s structure, we can make educated guesses about its function. And by mapping thousands of protein structures, we can begin to decipher the biology of life.

Feb 2
2021

A new bio-inspired joint model to design robotic exoskeletons

Recent advances in the field of robotics have enabled the fabrication of increasingly sophisticated robotic limbs and exoskeletons. Robotic exoskeletons are essentially wearable ‘shells’ made of different robotic parts. Exoskeletons can improve the strength, capabilities and stability of users, helping them to tackle heavy physical tasks with less effort or aiding their rehabilitation after accidents.

Feb 2
2021

Artificial Intelligence Will Define Google’s Future. For Now, It’s a Management Challenge

It is the OEC biggest challenge.

Google’s parent, Alphabet, has waded through one controversy after another involving its top researchers and executives in the field over the past 18 months.

Feb 1
2021

Elder care, wireless AI, and the Internet of Medical Things

Senior citizens are accustomed to constant probes by doctors, but wireless AI tech is enabling massive-scale, nonintrusive data monitoring.

Feb 1
2021

Here’s a Way to Learn if Facial Recognition Systems Used Your Photos

An online tool targets only a small slice of what’s out there, but may open some eyes to how widely artificial intelligence research fed on personal images.

Jan 31
2021

Robots got their name 100 years ago today

Exactly one hundred years ago, a play premiered that introduced a significant new word to the world – robot. When the first production of Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. opened on January 251921, at the National Theater in what is now the Czech Republic, it not only gave a name to the cybernetic machines that were just beginning to emerge, it also shaped people’s perceptions of what a robot is and the potential dangers they pose.

R.U.R., which stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots, came along at the perfect moment. The period between 1880 and 1930 saw the fastest rate of change in human history, with more fundamental advances in half a century than in the previous 2000 years.

It was the age of the machine, which had intruded so thoroughly into modern society that artists had to come up with whole new forms of expression to include it and portray it. It was also the age of Henry Ford, with his assembly line churning out thousands of uniform black motor cars by the thousands at a price that the average worker could afford. The telephone, wireless telegraphy, radio, the first televisions, radium, airplanes, plastic … the world was awash with new technology.