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Apr 20, 2022

AI ethics for children: digital natives on how to protect future generations

Posted by in categories: ethics, robotics/AI

AI brings many benefits but as with any rapidly advancing technology it needs ethical frameworks that protect society, in particular children and young people.

Apr 20, 2022

“” Most people in the world are operating under the false impression that we’ve got too many people

Posted by in category: futurism

This is not true. Earth could maintain a population many times the current level. The birth rate has been dropping like crazy. — @elonmusk

Apr 20, 2022

Discovery of bacteria linked to prostate cancer hailed as potential breakthrough

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

And if bacteria causes one kind, whos to say it doesnt cause every other kind.


Genetic information on the microbes has already allowed the scientists to piece together how they may behave in the body, including what toxins and other substances they might release. This has led them to develop half a dozen hypotheses around how the bugs could cause prostate cancer.

“We currently have no way of reliably identifying aggressive prostate cancers, and this research could help make sure men get the right treatment for them,” Luxton added.

Continue reading “Discovery of bacteria linked to prostate cancer hailed as potential breakthrough” »

Apr 20, 2022

Elon Musk defended his billionaire status and said he doesn’t own a home, a yacht, or take vacations weeks after Grimes faced huge backlash for saying he lives “below the poverty line”

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, habitats

It would be very problematic if I was consuming billions of dollars a year in personal consumption, but that is not the case. In fact, I don’t even own a home right now. I’m literally staying at friends’ places.

Apr 19, 2022

How Wavelets Allow Researchers to Transform — and Understand — Data

Posted by in category: mathematics

Built upon the ubiquitous Fourier transform, the mathematical tools known as wavelets allow unprecedented analysis and understanding of continuous signals.

Apr 19, 2022

Robots reach for food processing

Posted by in categories: employment, food, robotics/AI

The processing of food at high volumes has traditionally posed many problems for robots and cobots, and has lagged behind other industries. Foods have a variety of shapes and sizes and can be delicate in nature. These variables can be challenging when a robot tries to grasp an item. The delicate often has strict requirements for quality, making them even harder to grasp (think: strawberries).

Non-automotive robot orders now represent 58% of the North American total. Unit sales to the food and consumer goods sector alone increased 29% in 2021 over 2020, according to Association for Advancing Automation (A3).

“More industries recognized that robotics could help reverse productivity declines and fill repetitive jobs human workers don’t want. It is no longer a choice whether to deploy robots and automation,” says Jeff Burnstein, president of A3. “It’s now an absolute imperative. As we’ve long believed—and users continue to confirm—robots help companies compete, ultimately creating more jobs to handle their growth.”

Apr 19, 2022

California suggests taking aim at AI-powered hiring software

Posted by in category: law

Automated HR in the cross-hairs over discrimination law.

Apr 19, 2022

Netflix Tumbles as 200,000 Users Exit for First Drop in Decade

Posted by in category: futurism

After a decade of meteoric growth that shook Hollywood to its core, Netflix Inc. has run into a wall.


Losing customers for the first time in a decade, Netflix Inc. is throwing out all of its old rules.

Apr 19, 2022

Soft robotic origami crawlers

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, robotics/AI

Materials scientists aim to develop biomimetic soft robotic crawlers including earthworm-like and inchworm-like crawlers to realize locomotion via in-plane and out-of-plane contractions for a variety of engineering applications. While such devices can show effective motion in confined spaces, it is challenging to miniaturize the concept due to complex and limited actuation. In a new report now published in Science Advances, Qiji Ze and a team of scientists in mechanical engineering and aerospace engineering at Stanford University and the Ohio State University, U.S., described a magnetically actuated, small-scale origami crawler exhibiting in-plane contraction. The team achieved contraction mechanisms via a four-unit Kresling origami assembly to facilitate the motion of an untethered robot with crawling or steering capacity. The crawler overcame large resistances in severely confined spaces due to its magnetically tunable structural stiffness and anisotropy. The setup provided a contraption for drug storage and release with potential to serve as a minimally invasive device in biomedicine.

Navigating complicated terrains

Bioinspired crawling motion shows adaptation to complicated terrains due to its soft deformable dimensions. Researchers aim to engineer crawling for a variety of applications in limited or confined environments, including extraterrestrial exploration, tube inspection, and gastrointestinal endoscopy. Origami provides an appropriate method to generate contraction relative to structural folding, which can be adapted to engineer robotic crawlers. The team described Kresling patterns; a specific type of bioinspired, origami pattern used to generate axial contraction under torque or compressive force, coupled with a twist from the relative rotation of the device units. Ze et al illustrated a magnetically actuated small-scale origami crawler to induce effective in-plane crawling motions. The scientists developed a four-unit Kresling assembly and verified torque distribution on the crawler using finite element analysis to induce motion.

Apr 19, 2022

New method allows robot vision to identify occluded objects

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

When artificial intelligence systems encounter scenes where objects are not fully visible, they have to make estimations based only on the visible parts of the objects. This partial information leads to detection errors, and large training data is required to correctly recognize such scenes. Now, researchers at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology have developed a framework that allows robot vision to detect such objects successfully in the same way that we perceive them.

Robotic vision has come a long way, reaching a level of sophistication with applications in complex and demanding tasks, such as autonomous driving and object manipulation. However, it still struggles to identify individual objects in cluttered scenes where some objects are partially or completely hidden behind others. Typically, when dealing with such scenes, systems are trained to identify the occluded object based only on its visible parts. But such training requires large datasets of objects and can be pretty tedious.

Associate Professor Kyoobin Lee and Ph.D. student Seunghyeok Back from the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) in Korea found themselves facing this problem when they were developing an artificial intelligence system to identify and sort objects in cluttered scenes. “We expect a robot to recognize and manipulate objects they have not encountered before or been trained to recognize. In reality, however, we need to manually collect and label data one by one as the generalizability of deep neural networks depends highly on the quality and quantity of the training dataset,” says Mr. Back.