Lifeboat Foundation

With ChatGPT all over the news and more companies turning to various forms of automation to make their operations run more smoothly, it’s understandable that those who fear their jobs could be replaced by robots are feeling some anxiety lately.

Naturally, the companies fastest to embrace this technology are those that can afford it. Amazon announced the introduction of fully autonomous robots into its warehouses in June 2022. But the company has been using robotics since 2012, when it acquired order fulfillment company Kiva Systems for $775 million.

A broad, flexible AI will be used to analyze Earth science images to help scientists identify weather and natural disasters.

Microsoft has unveiled an advanced version of its search engine Bing — complete with ChatGPT-like technology that can answer complex questions and help users make decisions.

“We are basically taking the next generation of the model — that today powers ChatGPT — and building it in right into Bing,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told “CBS Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil before Tuesday’s announcement.

Microsoft has been pouring billions into artificial intelligence. Last month, the company announced it is making a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment” in OpenAI, the AI research company behind ChatGPT — positioning Microsoft to sharpen its competition with Google in commercializing new AI breakthroughs.

Google is launching new updates for Maps that are part of its plan to make the navigation app more immersive and intuitive for users, the company announced today at its event in Paris.

Most notably, the company announced that Immersive View is rolling out starting today in London, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Tokyo. Immersive View, which Google first announced at I/O in May 2022, is designed to help you plan ahead and get a deeper understanding of a city before you visit it. The company plans to launch Immersive View in more cities, including Amsterdam, Dublin, Florence and Venice in the coming months.

The feature fuses billions of Street View and aerial images to create a digital model of the world. It also layers information on top of the digital model, such as details about the weather, traffic and how busy a location may be. For instance, say you’re planning to visit the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and want to get an idea of it before you go. You can use Immersive View to virtually soar over the building to get a better idea of what it looks like and where the entrances are located. You can also see what the area looks like at different times of the day and what the weather will be like. Immersive View can also show you nearby restaurants, and allows you look inside them to see if they would be an ideal spot for you.

Continue reading “Google Maps challenges Apple’s 3D mode with a new ‘immersive view’ for cities” »

Researchers have crafted an artificial intelligence (AI) system capable of deciphering fragments of ancient Babylonian texts. Dubbed the “Fragmentarium,” the algorithm holds the potential to piece together some of the oldest stories ever written by humans, including the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The work comes from a team at Ludwig Maximilian University in Germany who have been attempting to digitize every surviving Babylonian cuneiform tablet since 2018.

The problem with understanding Babylonian texts is that the narratives are written on clay tablets, which today exist only in countless fragments. The fragments are stored at facilities that are continents away from each other, such as the British Museum in London and the Iraq Museum in Baghdad.

Robotic systems have become increasingly sophisticated over the past decades, improving both in terms of precision and capabilities. This is gradually facilitating the partial automation of some surgical and medical procedures.

Researchers at Tsinghua University have recently developed a soft robotic tentacle that could potentially be used to improve the efficiency of some standard medical procedures. This tentacle, introduced in IEEE Transactions on Robotics, is controlled through their novel control algorithm, together with the so-called active cooling for shape memory alloy, the actuating candidate for the robot.

Continue reading “A soft robotic tentacle controlled via active cooling” »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7qJQ2i47ZY

This video shows the humble beginnings and the 40 years of development journey of Boston dynamics’ robot ATLAS. We start with the first model developed in 1983 in the leg lab in MIT, all the way to the current version of Atlas shown in 2023 in the Boston dynamics youtube channel.

Atlas is an incredibly advanced humanoid robot that has been developed by the robotics company Boston Dynamics. It is a bipedal robot that stands at 6 feet tall and weighs 180 pounds. It is capable of performing a variety of tasks, including walking, running, jumping, and even performing backflips.

Continue reading “Boston Dynamics : 40 years of development (1983” »

Morgan Stanley says investors’ latest obsession is here to stay. “The AI hype is worth considering seriously.”

Scientists are deploying robots on the campus of University of Texas at Austin to see how they interact with the community.