Future Timeline

(IFL Science) Come with us into the uncanny valley and say hello to Ameca, one of the "world’s most advanced human-shaped robot" designed to mimic a range of human expressions from gleeful to shocked, all of which are equal parts impressive and creepy.

Ameca is the brainchild of Engineered Arts, a UK-based company that makes humanoid robots for entertainment, information, education, and research.
The latest version you see here is the second generation of the model and features over 12 more motors in its face, meaning more facial expressions, than its predecessor. It can now scrunch its nose, wink, and purse its lips.

The humanoid robot now features 27 motors in the face and additional an five in the neck. This includes 12 in the lips, two in the jaw, four in the eyeballs, four in the eyelids, four in the eyebrows, and one in the nose.

There are also dozens of motors in its body, arms, wrists, and fingers, allowing it to move its upper limbs. You may be pleased to hear that Ameca is stationary and not able to walk, for now.

An artificial-intelligence (AI) model built at Mass Eye and Ear was shown to be significantly more accurate than doctors at diagnosing pediatric ear infections in the first head-to-head evaluation of its kind, a research team working to develop the model for clinical use reported.

According to a new study published August 16 in Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery, the model, called OtoDX, was more than 95 percent accurate in diagnosing an ear infection in a set of 22 test images compared to 65 percent accuracy among a group of clinicians consisting of ENTs, pediatricians and primary care doctors, who reviewed the same images.

When tested in a dataset of more than 600 inner ear images, the AI model had a diagnostic accuracy of more than 80 percent, representing a significant leap over the average accuracy of clinicians reported in medical literature.

The model utilizes a type of AI called deep learning and was built from hundreds of photographs collected from children prior to undergoing surgery at Mass Eye and Ear for recurrent ear infections or fluid in the ears. The results signify a major step towards the development of a diagnostic tool that can one day be deployed to clinics to assist doctors during patient evaluations, according to the authors. An AI-based diagnostic tool can give providers, like pediatricians and urgent care clinics, an additional test to better inform their clinical decision-making.

Human languages are notoriously complex, and linguists have long thought it would be impossible to teach a machine how to analyze speech sounds and word structures in the way human investigators do.

But researchers at MIT, Cornell University, and McGill University have taken a step in this direction. They have demonstrated an artificial intelligence system that can learn the rules and patterns of human languages on its own.

When given words and examples of how those words change to express different grammatical functions (like tense, case, or gender) in one language, this machine-learning model comes up with rules that explain why the forms of those words change. For instance, it might learn that the letter "a" must be added to end of a word to make the masculine form feminine in Serbo-Croatian.

This model can also automatically learn higher-level language patterns that can apply to many languages, enabling it to achieve better results.

The researchers trained and tested the model using problems from linguistics textbooks that featured 58 different languages. Each problem had a set of words and corresponding word-form changes. The model was able to come up with a correct set of rules to describe those word-form changes for 60% of the problems.

weatheriscool wrote: ↑Wed Aug 31, 2022 5:24 pm AI that can learn the patterns of human language
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-08-ai- ... guage.html

I think it's safe to say at this point that Google doesn't use any AI for its Google Translate, because...blech. To be fair, it's more accurate than it used to be, but sometimes only just.

raklian wrote: ↑Thu Sep 01, 2022 5:54 pm

Since at least the time of inquiring minds like Plato, philosophers and scientists have puzzled over the question "What's so funny?" The Greeks attributed the source of humor to feeling superior at the expense of others. German psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud believed humor was a way to release pent-up energy. U.S. comedian Robin Williams tapped his anger at the absurd to make people laugh.

It seems no one can really agree on the question of "What's so funny?" So imagine trying to teach a robot how to laugh. But that's exactly what a team of researchers at Kyoto University in Japan are trying to do by designing an AI that takes its cues through a shared laughter system. The scientists describe their innovative approach to building a funny bone for the Japanese android "Erica" in the latest issue of the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI.

It's not as if robots can't detect laughter or even emit a chuckle at a bad dad joke. Rather, the challenge is to create the human nuances of humor for an AI system to improve natural conversations between robots and people.

Over the past two years, machine learning has revolutionized protein structure prediction. Now, three papers in Science describe a similar revolution in protein design.

In the new papers, biologists at the University of Washington School of Medicine show that machine learning can be used to create protein molecules much more accurately and quickly than previously possible. The scientists hope this advance will lead to many new vaccines, treatments, tools for carbon capture, and sustainable biomaterials.

"Proteins are fundamental across biology, but we know that all the proteins found in every plant, animal, and microbe make up far less than one percent of what is possible. With these new software tools, researchers should be able to find solutions to long-standing challenges in medicine, energy, and technology," said senior author David Baker, professor of biochemistry at the University of Washington School of Medicine and recipient of a 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.

Proteins are often referred to as the "building blocks of life" because they are essential for the structure and function of all living things. They are involved in virtually every process that takes place inside cells, including growth, division, and repair. Proteins are made up of long chains of chemicals called amino acids. The sequence of amino acids in a protein determines its three-dimensional shape. This intricate shape is crucial for the protein to function.