Issue #149: A Growing Presence on the Farm: Robots

In the News

A Growing Presence on the Farm: Robots

A blossoming of bots “The idea is that robots can automate the phenotyping process and make these measurements more reliable,” Dr. Chowdhary said. EcoRobotix, based in Switzerland, makes a solar-powered robot that rapidly identifies crops and weeds

In The News

From models of galaxies to atoms, simple AI shortcuts speed up simulations by billions of times

Emulators, based on a form of AI called machine learning, skip the laborious reproduction of nature. But creating training data for them requires running the full simulation many times—the very thing the emulator is meant to avoid.

The messy, secretive reality behind OpenAI’s bid to save the world

A team called “Foresight” runs experiments to test how far they can push AI capabilities forward by training existing algorithms with increasingly large amounts of data and computing power.

Green AI

AI models are typically evaluated by measuring their accuracy level (e.g., from a set of, say, 1,000 unseen English sentences, how many sentences did the model translate correctly to French?).

Applied use cases

The Next Leap in Self-Driving: Prediction

AlexNet serves as perhaps the most influential paper in computer vision, after achieving state-of-the-art accuracy on ImageNet in 2012.

fastai—A Layered API for Deep Learning

fastai includes: A new type dispatch system for Python along with a semantic type hierarchy for tensors A GPU-optimized computer vision library which can be extended in pure Python An optimizer which refactors out the common functionality of modern optimizers into two basic pieces, allowing...

Inside X, Google's top-secret moonshot factory

To that end, besides the self-driving cars (now a standalone company, Waymo) and internet balloons (Loon), X has built delivery drones (Wing), contact lenses that measure glucose in the tears of diabetics (Verily) and technology to store electricity using molten salt (Malta).

Ethics

Pentagon to Adopt Detailed Principles for Using AI

“While it’s great that the DIB principles affirm the import of international law, there are a number of areas where it is still unclear what international law requires for AI systems or weapon systems with increasingly autonomous capabilities,” she said.

The future of minds and machines: how artificial intelligence can enhance collective intelligence

In The Future of Minds and Machines we introduce an emerging framework for thinking about how groups of people interface with AI and map out the different ways that AI can add value to collective human intelligence and vice versa.

EU’s new AI rules will focus on ethics and transparency

The European Union is set to release new regulations for artificial intelligence that are expected to focus on transparency and oversight as the region seeks to differentiate its approach from those of the United States and China.

Robotics

What's New In Robotics? 14.02.2020

In this week's news mix: igus releases new cobot cable management kit, Nissan invests in cobots and 2019 North American robot sales increased by 1.8 per cent.

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through February 15)

Boston Dynamics’ Spot Robot Is Surprisingly Good at Pulling a Rickshaw Jon Porter | The Verge “The project came about after [Adam] Savage was loaned a Boston Dynamics robot for a year back in January.

Research

A First Look at JAX

Autograd is a library for efficient computation of gradients over numpy and native python code.

Deep Neural Network AI Reconstructs Mysterious Image Hidden in Picasso Painting

Using a computer vision technique known as neural style transfer (NST), the researchers were able to reconstitute the ghostly image of a woman hidden underneath, which was later painted over by Picasso to create The Old Guitarist (reusing canvases being one way that impoverished artists could save...

Teaching

It draws upon diverse themes in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, machine learning and artificial intelligence research.