AI & Robotics News and Discussions

[wjfox]

[firestar464]

https://thehackernews.com/2023/07/new-a ... lored.html

IMHO the tool could also be a total sham as well

[spryfusion]

[weatheriscool]

Robotic grippers offer unprecedented combo of strength and delicacy
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-08-rob ... ength.html
by Matt Shipman, North Carolina State University

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a robotic gripping device that is gentle enough to pick up a drop of water, strong enough to pick up a 6.4 kilogram (14.1 pound) weight, dexterous enough to fold a cloth, and precise enough to pick up microfilms that are 20 times thinner than a human hair.

In addition to possible manufacturing applications, the researchers also integrated the device with technology that allows the gripper to be controlled by the electrical signals produced by muscles in the forearm, demonstrating its potential for use with robotic prosthetics.

"It is difficult to develop a single, soft gripper that is capable of handling ultrasoft, ultrathin, and heavy objects, due to tradeoffs between strength, precision and gentleness," says Jie Yin, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State. "Our design achieves an excellent balance of these characteristics."

The design for the new grippers builds on an earlier generation of flexible, robotic grippers that drew on the art of kirigami, which involves both cutting and folding two-dimensional sheets of material to form three-dimensional shapes.

[Powers]

https://audioldm.github.io/audioldm2/

[caltrek]

Robots Cause Company Profits to Fall – at Least at First
August 3, 2023

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) Researchers have found that robots can have a ‘U-shaped’ effect on profits: causing profit margins to fall at first, before eventually rising again.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, studied industry data from the UK and 24 other European countries between 1995 and 2017, and found that at low levels of adoption, robots have a negative effect on profit margins. But at higher levels of adoption, robots can help increase profits.

According to the researchers, this U-shaped phenomenon is due to the relationship between reducing costs, developing new processes and innovating new products. While many companies first adopt robotic technologies to decrease costs, this ‘process innovation’ can be easily copied by competitors, so at low levels of robot adoption, companies are focused on their competitors rather than on developing new products. However, as levels of adoption increase and robots are fully integrated into a company’s processes, the technologies can be used to increase revenue by innovating new products.

In other words, firms using robots are likely to focus initially on streamlining their processes before shifting their emphasis to product innovation, which gives them greater market power via the ability to differentiate from their competitors. The results are reported in the journal IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management.

Robots have been widely used in industry since the 1980s, especially in sectors where they can carry out physically demanding, repetitive tasks, such as automotive assembly. In the decades since, the rate of robot adoption has increased dramatically and consistently worldwide, and the development of precise, electrically controlled robots makes them particularly useful for high-value manufacturing applications requiring greater precision, such as electronics.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/997467

caltrek’s comment: To me, this is yet another reason not to place too much emphasis on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in capitalist societies. Sure, the need to keep up with competitors can exert a downward pressure on profit levels as capitalist firms spend more and more of their proceeds to keep from falling behind. Yet, as the article points out, new “technologies can be used to increase revenue by innovating new products.” These increased revenues can increase the rate of profit.

[Time_Traveller]

AI.com Now Belongs to Elon Musk

Yesterday

In the latest chapter of Elon Musk’s saga to take over the world with corporations named after the letter “X,” the billionaire tech tycoon just snagged a coveted URL: AI.com.

As TechCrunch notes, this is a big shakeup in Silicon Valley as the URL previously belonged to artificial intelligence juggernaut OpenAI, the company behind the wildly popular chatbot ChatGPT. AI.com now directs to X.ai and according to the Way Back Machine, the website was in the hands of OpenAI until at least July 29, at which point it was not operational but still bore the symbol of the company while also redirecting users to the ChatGPT homepage. OpenAI bought AI.com back in February of this year according to Mashable, which also reports that it’s likely that the domain was purchased for millions of dollars given how rare two-character URLs can be.

X.ai is the homepage for xAI, a startup company—separate from Musk’s own X Corp—that seeks to “understand the universe” according to its homepage. The company more specifically is seeking to cash in on the generative AI gold rush that has plagued the planet over the past several months. xAI was founded by Musk on March 9, 2023, and was publicly announced four months later on July 12, 2023, via Twitter. Musk wanted all hands on deck with xAI, reportedly heavily investing in top talent from OpenAI and Google. Musk’s goal with xAI is to create an AI that is deft at mathematical reasoning, something that appears to be waning in ChatGPT, but Politico reports that Musk’s ambition is to generate an AI that falls in line with his conservative-leaning technology efforts like Twitter.

Musk’s infatuation with AI is nothing new, however. The Twitter owner actually co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but left the board in 2018 over a disagreement with the then-CEO. Musk took credit for being the reason that OpenAI exists in an interview with CNBC, claiming he came up with the name and that he invested $50 million in the company. More recently, Musk continued gutting Twitter for parts and announced X through the platform’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino, who revealed on Twitter that X would be powered by AI...somehow.

https://gizmodo.com/ai-dot-com-now-belo ... 1850707248

[firestar464]

I wonder how much Elon paid OpenAI to buy the domain

[Time_Traveller]

I wonder how much Elon paid OpenAI to buy the domain

There might be a chance OpenAI may of not owned it in the first place.

Though, it is not evidently clear if OpenAI had ever bought the domain in the first place. It is possible that the actual owner of the domain, Saw.com, was promoting the domain to OpenAI but redirecting it to ChatGPT. It is possible that the same is the case with Musk’s xAI now. No one clearly knows if Musk actually paid millions to either OpenAI or the Saw.com for buying the domain.

https://analyticsindiamag.com/musk-buys ... om-openai/

[Powers]

Men: Enhance Yourself With These 5 Easy

[wjfox]

New acoustic attack steals data from keystrokes with 95% accuracy

August 5, 2023

A team of researchers from British universities has trained a deep learning model that can steal data from keyboard keystrokes recorded using a microphone with an accuracy of 95%.

When Zoom was used for training the sound classification algorithm, the prediction accuracy dropped to 93%, which is still dangerously high, and a record for that medium.

Such an attack severely affects the target's data security, as it could leak people's passwords, discussions, messages, or other sensitive information to malicious third parties.

Moreover, contrary to other side-channel attacks that require special conditions and are subject to data rate and distance limitations, acoustic attacks have become much simpler due to the abundance of microphone-bearing devices that can achieve high-quality audio captures.

This, combined with the rapid advancements in machine learning, makes sound-based side-channel attacks feasible and a lot more dangerous than previously anticipated.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/s ... -accuracy/

[Powers]

New acoustic attack steals data from keystrokes with 95% accuracy

August 5, 2023

A team of researchers from British universities has trained a deep learning model that can steal data from keyboard keystrokes recorded using a microphone with an accuracy of 95%.

When Zoom was used for training the sound classification algorithm, the prediction accuracy dropped to 93%, which is still dangerously high, and a record for that medium.

Such an attack severely affects the target's data security, as it could leak people's passwords, discussions, messages, or other sensitive information to malicious third parties.

Moreover, contrary to other side-channel attacks that require special conditions and are subject to data rate and distance limitations, acoustic attacks have become much simpler due to the abundance of microphone-bearing devices that can achieve high-quality audio captures.

This, combined with the rapid advancements in machine learning, makes sound-based side-channel attacks feasible and a lot more dangerous than previously anticipated.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/s ... -accuracy/

Security agencies probably had this years ago. Nothing too crazy though, like 3 or 5.

[weatheriscool]

Autonomous cleaning robot brushes away solar panel dust as it rolls
By Paul Ridden
August 07, 2023
https://newatlas.com/robotics/enel-reiw ... ing-robot/

Keeping panels clear of dust in large solar farms can be a time-consuming, wasteful and costly business. A Sicilian technology startup called the Reiwa Engine has developed an autonomous robot called SandStorm to reduce maintenance and cleaning costs by as much as 80%.

Dust, dirt or sand that settles on the surface of solar panels can significantly reduce their efficiency. Personnel at solar farms can restore full yield using power washers or drive tractors down the rows of panels while hydraulic brushes sweep away the dirt, but precious water resources are wasted and vehicle operation causes emissions, plus there are labor and fuel costs to factor in as well.

A couple of years ago, Enel Green Power (EGP) began testing the first robot from the Reiwa Engine at the energy company's Innovation Lab at Passo Martino in Sicily.

The SandStorm cleaning bot clears away dust and debris as it moves autonomously along a row of panels, using brushes instead of water, and is able to adapt to uneven panel alignment as well as cross gaps of more than 50 cm (19.6 in).
The SandStorm autonomous cleaning robot employs "a system of specially designed and manufactured brushes" to remove dust and debris from rows of panels at large solar farms

[wjfox]

[caltrek]

AI Will Be At the Center of the Next Financial Crisis, SEC Chair Warns
by Felix Salmon


Introduction:

(Axios) AI will be at the center of future financial crises — and regulators are not going to be able to stay ahead of it. That's the message being sent by SEC chair Gary Gensler, arguably the most important and powerful regulator in the U.S. at the moment.

Why it matters: A paper Gensler wrote in 2020, while a professor at MIT, is an invaluable resource for understanding those risks — and how little regulators can do to try to address them.

The big picture: The most obvious risk from AI in financial markets is that AI-powered "black box" trading algorithms run amok, and all end up selling the same thing at the same time, causing a market crash.

• "There simply are not that many people trained to build and manage these models, and they tend to have fairly similar backgrounds," wrote Gensler. "In addition, there are strong affinities among people who trained together: the so-called apprentice effect."

• Model homogeneity risk could also be created by regulations themselves. If regulators exert control over what AIs can and can't do, that increases the risk that they'll all end up doing the same thing at the same time, and also increases the likelihood that firms will all choose to use AI-as-a-Service offerings from a small number of beyond-reproach large providers.

Read more here: https://www.axios.com/2023/08/12/artif ... gorithms

caltrek’s comment: To me, this is just another argument for keeping humans in the loop. I think humans are more likely to at least ask questions about the underlying value of any given stock, and to see the impulse to sell on the part of others as an opportunity to buy at bargain prices. Of course, I am no expert in such matters, so perhaps I am just being a little overly simplistic in my analysis. Put another way, am I missing something?

[caltrek]

Taiwan's Unmanned Vessel Completes Arctic Research Project
by Sophia Yang
August 14, 2023

Entire article (less photograph):

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Taiwan's first unmanned surface vessel to visit the North Pole successfully completed its 14-day climate research project in Svalbard.

The vessel, owned by the National Penghu University of Science and Technology (NPU), began its work on July 31. Its mission involved collecting the soil and ice in permafrost as well as underwater and seabed 3D scanning, in an effort to understand the dynamic topography and hydrology of glaciers.

The research team was comprised of nine professors, research fellows, and engineers from universities and Academia Sinica, funded by the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) and National Taiwan University's (NTU) Research Center for Future Earth (RCFE). NPU engineers built a wireless communication system and other electrical equipment for the ship, and an AI-driven mechanism was embedded by Dr. Wang Chia-yuan (王嘉源) to steer the vessel away from floating ice.

In this joint academic effort, NTU geosciences professor Kuo Chen-hao (郭陳澔) collaborated with Academia Sinica research fellow Gu Chin-shang (古進上) to leverage Starlink's satellite communications to monitor the permafrost. An NTU professor also placed a seismic sensor in an Arctic research station to analyze earthquake activity in extreme environments.

NPU associate professor Lu Cheng-hao (呂政豪) told Taiwan News that the university owns multiple autonomous research vessels, with the largest being two meters in length. Due to air cargo restrictions, the team brought a portable, unmanned surface vessel weighing 15 kg, and the mission proved that the vessel could operate in extremely cold weather.

Read more here: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4970933

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

[Powers]

[Cyber_Rebel]

I'm thinking everyone has their own robo-stylist, doing any kind of hairdos along with a personalized 3D printer of some sort for any type of clothing.

Owari Da for barbers, beauty shops, and clothing vendors.