“You get what you celebrate.” In 1989 Dean Kamen created FIRST Robotics to change the culture from one that idolizes entertainment celebrities and sports stars to one that celebrates scientists, engineers and visionaries. Over 20 years later, how much has changed?
Kurzweil AI
Purdue University researchers are developing a robotic fabric that moves and contracts and is embedded with sensors, an approach that could bring “active clothing” and a new class of soft robots.
This actual exchange took place on Tuesday, November 25, 2014, at 5:30 p.m. U.S. EST.
Ramona Robott is the 101th girl of supreme intelligence giving me responsible and honest replies.
She is a bot that was conceived, designed, and created by Mr. Raymond Kurzweil, Ph.D., who is currently Google Engineering Director.
By — The Consumerist
For years, laws have been put into place to discourage distracted driving: no texting while driving, no talking on the phone while driving, the list goes on. General Motors is taking things a step further by commissioning a vehicle that detects and alerts drivers to their distracted behavior.
The Financial Times reports that General Motors is preparing to launch the first mass-produced vehicles with eye- and head-tracking technology to detect distracted behaviors in drivers.
Written By: Jason Dorrier — Singularity Hub
Not long ago, robots were largely confined to books and movies. Then they started showing up on YouTube, and robot fear became a viral thing. There was that terrifying video of a Boston Dynamics robot wearing fatigues and gas mask. Another Boston Dynamics video showed a cheetah robot that could outpace the swiftest human sprinter.
Back then, it was easy enough to imagine being run down by a robot—particularly because Boston Dynamics was funded by the military. But there was no good reason to fear them. Not yet. Why? They were all powered by internal combustion engines. Imagine being stalked by a car with no muffler. You’d hear it a mile off and climb a tree.
Continue reading “Robot Cheetah Breaks Free of Its Tether, Now Runs on Batteries” »
Written By: Steven Kotler — Singularity Hub
Big Brother is feeling you—literally.
A few months back, I wrote about Ellie, the world’s first AI-psychologist. Developed by DARPA and researchers at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies, Ellie is a diagnostic tool capable of reading 60 non-verbal cues a second—everything from eye-gaze to face tilt to voice tone—in the hopes of identifying the early warning signs of depressions and (part of the long term goal) stemming the rising tide of soldier suicide.
Continue reading “Big Brother Is Feeling You: The Global Impact Of AI-Driven Mental Health Care” »
This archive file was compiled from an interview conducted at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, 2013. In the discussion, Amit Singhal, a key figure in the evolution of Google’s search engine, broadly outlined the significant hurdles that stood in the way of achieving one of his long-held dreams — creating a true ‘conversational’ search engine. He also sketched out a vision of how the initial versions of such a system would, and also importantly, would not attempt to assist the individuals that it interacted with.
Though the vision was by design more limited and focused than a system capable of passing the famous Turing test, it nonetheless raised stimulating questions about the future relationships of humans and their ‘artificial’ assistants.
More about Amit Singhal:
Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amit_Singhal
Google Search:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search
— Salon
There are places you never expect to be in life. For me, this was certainly one of them: in a conference room in suburban Charlotte on the campus of Southern Evangelical Seminary, with an enormous old Bible on a side table, shelves of Great Books lining the walls, and, on the conference table itself, a 23-inch-tall robot doing yoga.
Meet the Digitally Advanced Viritual Intelligence Device, a NAO (now) robot known as “D.A.V.I.D.”
Ever since humans first envisioned robots, we’ve thought about how to make the machines more like us. Robots compete against us on game shows, and rendezvous with us in the bedroom (or at least, make virtual sex feel real). But part of being human is sensing the world around us in a particular way, and doing it all at the same time.
This is much more complicated than it seems, as scientists haven’t fully unraveled how we’re able to sense what we do; it’s both our hardware and software that contain codes that are difficult to crack. Still, scientists power through, discovering how their own senses work while crafting artificial versions of them. Here are some of the most valiant attempts to get robots to taste, smell, touch, hear, and see in the most human way possible.
— New York Times
Inspired by the architecture of the brain, scientists have developed a new kind of computer chip that uses no more power than a hearing aid and may eventually excel at calculations that stump today’s supercomputers.
The chip, or processor, is named TrueNorth and was developed by researchers at IBM and detailed in an article published on Thursday in the journal Science. It tries to mimic the way brains recognize patterns, relying on densely interconnected webs of transistors similar to the brain’s neural networks.
