Lifeboat Foundation

It may seem like dancing, but these charming automatons actually show off a sophisticated ability to navigate in closer quarters than has previously been achieved (even by bigger bots).

Awesome.

Competitors prepare for a contest involving electronic arms and robotic exoskeletons.

#Estonian delivery startup Starship Technologies and Mercedes-Benz team up to develop ‘Robovans’: http://bit.ly/2c4AMAD

For vessels operating at sea, avoiding collisions is a basic operational requirement. When those vessels are operated by humans, collision avoidance is part of basic operator training. And when those vessels become highly autonomous, collision avoidance must be incorporated into complex autonomy algorithms that must be thoroughly tested before the vessels enter the water.

MIT has used machine learning to create video from still images, and the results are pretty impressive. As you can see from the above image, there’s a lot of natural form to the movement in the videos.

The system “learns” types of videos (beach, baby, golf swing…) and, starting from still images, replicates the movements that are most commonly seen in those videos. So the beach video looks like it has crashing waves, for instance.

But like other machine-generated images, these have limitations. The first is size: what you see above is the extent to which the program can render its video. Length is also an issue: only about a second of video gets produced.

Continue reading “Machine-Learning Algorithm Generates Videos From Stills” »

Whether you believe the buzz about artificial intelligence is merely hype or that the technology represents the future, something undeniable is happening. Researchers are more easily solving decades-long problems like teaching computers to recognize images and understanding speech at a rapid space, and companies like Google goog and Facebook fb are pouring millions of dollars into their own related projects.

What could possibly go wrong?

For one thing, advances in artificial intelligence could eventually lead to unforeseen consequences. University of California at Berkeley professor Stuart Russell is concerned that powerful computers powered by artificial intelligence, or AI, could unintentionally create problems that humans cannot predict.

Continue reading “Why Artificial Intelligence Needs Some Sort of Moral Code” »

Nobody understands why deep neural networks are so good at solving complex problems. Now physicists say the secret is buried in the laws of physics.

DeepMind’s use of neural networks to synthesize speech could finally make computers sound more human.

Google has announced WaveNet, a speech synthesis program that uses AI and deep learning techniques to generate speech samples better than current technologies. By analyzing samples 16,000 a second, it can generate human-like speech and even its own music compositions.

If you’ve ever been lost in the maze of Youtube videos you may have stumbled on clips of computers reading news articles. You’d recognize that staccato, robotic nature of the voice. We’ve come a long way from “Danger! Will Robinson!,” but it there is yet to be a computer that can seamlessly mimic a human voice.

Now, there’s a new contender, brought to you by the brilliant minds behind DeepMind. Google has announced a new voice synthesis program in WaveNet, powered by deep neural AI.

Continue reading “At Last, Google’s DeepMind AI Can Make Machines Sound Like Humans” »