Issue #156: How a Real Dog Taught a Robot Dog to Walk

In the News

How a Real Dog Taught a Robot Dog to Walk

The researchers then translate the digital version of the real dog into a digital version of their four-legged robot—Laikago, which has a rectangular body and skinny legs. But thanks to this translation work, Laikago has learned to move like a real-life canine.

In The News

After coronavirus, AI could be central to our new normal

Whatever the new normal becomes in the aftermath of the current crisis, it’s apparent that AI will be an even larger part of the technology landscape going forward — and not only for healthcare.

Computers Already Learn From Us. But Can They Teach Themselves?

“There’s self-supervised and other related ideas, like reconstructing the input after forcing the model to a compact representation, predicting the future of a video or masking part of the input and trying to reconstruct it,” said Samy Bengio, Yoshua’s brother and a research scientist at Google.

Towards understanding glasses with graph neural networks

Our interest in this field was also motivated by the fact that glasses are also an excellent testbed for applying modern machine learning methods to physical problems: they’re easy to simulate, and easy to input to particle-based machine learning models.

Applied use cases

Comprehensive Guide To Hiring AI And Machine Learning Engineers

If you hope to use your experience in recruiting for traditional software development roles when hiring for AI & ML positions, you may go the wrong way.

Scale AI Machine Learning Digest - Q1 2020

Authors: Jonathan Frankle, Michael Carbin Presenter: Hongbo Tian Pruned neural network architectures created by removing unnecessary weights from trained dense neural networks can attain various benefits without sacrificing accuracy.

Ethics

AI Ethics

An accessible synthesis of ethical issues raised by artificial intelligence that moves beyond hype and nightmare scenarios to address concrete questions.

Scientists have created a new type of robot that is literally alive

Sitting in a petri dish in the laboratories of Tufts University and the University of Vermont are a new kind of life form — half living cells and half machine.

Robotics

Interacting with a Social Robot Affects Visual Perception of Space

Interacting with a Social Robot Affects Visual Perception of Space Carlo Mazzola, Alexander Mois Aroyo, Francesco Rea, Alessandra Sciutti HRI'20: ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction Session: Social Norms Abstract Human partners are very effective at coordinating in space and...

ONLINE: Neural Abstractions

with Tom White Artist and Researcher Victoria University of Wellington School of Design An Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium, co-sponsored by Autolab and CITRIS People and Robots (CPAR) in collaboration with Arts + Design Mondays at BAMPFA, and held in conjunction with the DH Faire.

Research

Swift: Google’s bet on differentiable programming

Two years ago, a small team at Google started working on making Swift the first mainstream language with first-class language-integrated differentiable programming capabilities.

Royal Dutch Shell reskills workers in artificial intelligence as part of huge energy transition

Since she began her online coursework, the seven-year Shell veteran has learned Python programming, supervised learning algorithms and data modeling, among other skills.

A conversation with Kevin Scott, author of “Reprogramming the American Dream”

In his new book, “Reprogramming the American Dream,” Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, looks at how he went from a childhood in rural Virginia to being a leader in the field of AI – and why he thinks there is ample opportunity for people from all walks of life to take advantage of...