In the News
AI May Not Kill Your Job—Just Change It
A new paper from MIT and IBM’s Watson AI Lab shows that for most of us, the automation revolution probably won’t mean physical robots replacing human workers. The recent listings also included more “soft skills” requirements like creativity, common sense, and judgment.
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Research
RoboTurk: A crowdsourcing platform for imitation learning in robotics
Despite encouraging results, imitation learning studies have so far been limited to modest-sized datasets due to difficulties in collecting large quantities of task demonstrations using existing methods.
GPT-2: 1.5B Release
As the final model release of GPT-2’s staged release, we’re releasing the largest version (1.5B parameters) of GPT-2 along with code and model weights to facilitate detection of outputs of GPT-2 models.
Applied use cases
'Crosses a moral boundary': Chief Scientist warns against risks of artificial intelligence
The nation's chief scientist has urged software developers on the cusp of artificial intelligence breakthroughs not to lose their "moral compass" amid fears humans will be treated as data points by our largest companies.
The Body Instrumental
It’s difficult to know all of the places where it’s currently deployed, but it’s a common feature of general facial recognition systems: anywhere you see facial recognition, AGR might well be present.
Market News
How to train artificial intelligence that won’t destroy the environment
The study found that training just one AI model produces as much carbon dioxide equivalent as nearly the lifetime emission of five average American cars.
Robot bees can crash into walls without taking damage
Tiny robotic fliers aren't exactly durable at present, but they may be tough critters before long. Harvard researchers have developed a RoboBee that uses soft, artificial muscles (really, actuators) to fly without taking damage.
Pushing state-of-the-art in 3D content understanding
While most traditional systems for this task depend on 2D image signals, ours is based purely on 3D point clouds, which achieves higher precision than prior work.
Ethics
Science fiction or fact? Rights of robots to be debated in Limerick
It's been 40 years since Gary Numan sang about having robot friends in his hit single Are Friends Electric? Professor David J Gunkel of Northern Illinois University will be interviewed by Dr Martin Mullins, an expert in the area of risk and ethics at Lero, a world-leading Science Foundation Ireland...
Rights for robots: why we need better AI regulation
With rapidly evolving technologies, is it time our legal system considered a similar status for artificial intelligence (AI) and robots?
Robotics
A robot puppet can learn to walk if it’s hooked up to human legs
That’s the premise of a study by researchers from the University of Illinois and MIT published in Science Robotics today. The data captured from the torso and legs is then mapped onto a two-legged robot (specifically, a smaller version of the Hermes robot developed by MIT).
Top 10 robotics stories of October 2019
Whether it was Anki’s patent portfolio going on sale, Teradyne adding to its robotics portfolio or the new Sawyer Black Edition cobot from Rethink Robotics GmbH, there was no shortage of robotics stories to cover in October 2019.
History’s message about regulating AI
At the forefront of history’s lessons for today’s technology challenges is the imperative to avoid substituting fear in place of solution-oriented thinking that asks questions, identifies issues, and seeks solutions.