AI & Robotics News and Discussions

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

[Tadasuke]

Energy efficiency of AI accelerators:



from https://spj.science.org/doi/epdf/10.341 ... uting.0006

[caltrek]

Sea Cucumbers Inspire Liquid Robots
by Kendra Leon
January 25, 2023

Introduction:

(Courthouse News) — To create what an international team of engineers calls "liquid" robots, they had to overcome the limitations of both traditional and so-called "soft" robots."

In their study published Wednesday in Matter, the team describes traditional robots as hard-bodied and stiff while “soft” robots are flexible but weak and their movements difficult to control. To find a compromise between the two models, Carnegie Mellon University Professor Carmel Majidi — a mechanical engineer and the senior author of the study — said the team looked to the sea cucumber — an animal that can alter the stiffness of its tissue to improve load capacity and prevent physical damage from the environment.

“The ability to change stiffness is especially important in making soft robots where in one state you want it to be highly deformable, compliant, and adaptive to its surroundings, while in another state you want it to lock in place so that it can withstand load and exert force or perform mechanical work on its environment,” Majidi said via email.

According to the study, the team embedded magnetic particles in gallium, a metal with a very low melting point of 85.6 degrees Fahrenheit, to create a new phase-shifting material. Chengfeng Pan, an engineer from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and leader of the study, said that allows robots to switch between liquid and solid states and “endows them with more functionality.”

This new phase-shifting material has an extremely fluid liquid phase that has "very low viscosity when it’s in its liquid state, meaning that it has virtually no mechanical resistance to deformation," Majidi said.

Read more here: https://www.courthousenews.com/sea-cuc ... d-robots/

[caltrek]

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. Launches Robotics Reports — A New Open Access Journal
January 2023

Introduction:

(Robotics Reports) Introducing Robotics Reports – a multidisciplinary open access journal launching in 2023. Broad in scope, Robotics Reports is dedicated to providing an open and accessible academic resource to researchers and stakeholders around the world.

The influence of robots and robotics research is exponentially expanding. To support this growth of influence, Robotics Reports will provide every author and reader the opportunity to easily access the latest technological advances in robotics research, artificial intelligence, androids, autonomous machines, developments in robotics and advanced materials, large-scale systems, micro/nano robots, bio-inspired designs, robotics in deep-sea and space exploration, transportation, medical devices, surgical advancements, clinical applications and more.

Expansive in scope and mission, Robotics Reports commits to offering every opportunity to researchers in the field by considering a variety of academic contributions from research and review papers to commentaries, short reports, meta-analyses, null-hypothesis papers, protocols, methods, and Letters to the Editor.

The journal is dedicated to serving the community as an easily accessible, open, and efficient scientific resource that supports the academic work taking place in this dynamic field.

We warmly welcome the entire robotics research and commercial community — established researchers and young investigators alike — to consider publishing their work in Robotics Reports as we strive to transform the future of open science and open robotics for the greatest good to science and humanity.

Read more here: https://home.liebertpub.com/publicatio ... /overview

[caltrek]

Vietnam to Send 20 Teams to VEX Robotics World Championship 2023
January 30, 2023

Introduction:

(Vietnam+) Hanoi – Vietnam is allowed to send 20 teams to the VEX Robotics World Championship 2023 (VEX Worlds), scheduled to be held in May this year in Dallas city in the US state of Texas, according to the Robotics Education and Competition Foundation which involves in the organisation of robotics competitions.

Held annually, the VEX Robotics World Championship, the largest robotics competition in the world, attracts more than 3,000 teams from over 60 countries.

To select the best teams representing Vietnam to compete at the championship, STEAM for Vietnam, in coordination with the American Centre and Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST), organised the National VEX IQ Robotics Championship 2023.

The tournament will take place on February 26 at HUST. It brings together 145 teams and 684 students from 152 elementary and junior high schools in 27 provinces and cities.

The tournament is expected to help students across the country have hands-on experiences in science, technology, engineering, and math. It also enables the students to develop necessary soft skills for the future, such as computational thinking, problem-solving, and teamwork skills.

Read more here: https://en.vietnamplus.vn/vietnam-to-s ... 47574.vnp

[wjfox]

Will Machine Learning Help Us Find Extraterrestrial Life?

Jan 30, 2023

When pondering the probability of discovering technologically advanced extraterrestrial life, the question that often arises is, "if they're out there, why haven't we found them yet?" And often, the response is that we have only searched a tiny portion of the galaxy. Further, algorithms developed decades ago for the earliest digital computers can be outdated and inefficient when applied to modern petabyte-scale datasets. Now, research published in Nature Astronomy and led by an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, Peter Ma, along with researchers from the SETI Institute, Breakthrough Listen and scientific research institutions around the world, has applied a deep learning technique to a previously studied dataset of nearby stars and uncovered eight previously unidentified signals of interest.

“In total, we had searched through 150 TB of data of 820 nearby stars, on a dataset that had previously been searched through in 2017 by classical techniques but labeled as devoid of interesting signals," said Peter Ma, lead author. “We're scaling this search effort to 1 million stars today with the MeerKAT telescope and beyond. We believe that work like this will help accelerate the rate we’re able to make discoveries in our grand effort to answer the question ‘are we alone in the universe?’”

https://www.seti.org/press-release/will ... trial-life

[caltrek]

Incredible 'Fairy' Robot Sails on The Breeze Like a Floating Dandelion
by David Nield
February 1, 2023

Introduction:

(Science Alert) Weighing in at just 1.2 milligrams, a new robot called FAIRY – that's short for Flying Aero-robots based on Light Responsive Materials Assembly – is the first flying bot we've seen based on soft materials that respond to light.

The robot was inspired by dandelion seeds, and ultimately it could be used in the same way: its creators are hoping that it might be deployed to help mitigate the loss of pollinators (such as bees) that we're currently seeing in the wild.

Light can be used to get the FAIRY up into the air, and to control the spread of its bristles. After that, the ultra-light bot travels on the wind, and could potentially be dispersed across large distances, just like the seeds that it's based on.

"The FAIRY can be powered and controlled by a light source, such as a laser beam or LED," says micro roboticist Hao Zeng from Tampere University in Finland.

"It sounds like science fiction, but the proof-of-concept experiments included in our research show that the robot we have developed provides an important step towards realistic applications suitable for artificial pollination."

Read more of the Science Alert Article here: https://www.sciencealert.com/incredibl ... dandelion

For published research results: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10. ... .202206752

[agi]

deleted

[weatheriscool]

A model that could improve robots' ability to grasp objects
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-02-rob ... grasp.html
by Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore

When completing missions and tasks in the real-world, robots should ideally be able to effectively grasp objects of various shapes and compositions. So far, however, most robots can only grasp specific types of objects.

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Peking University have recently developed a new machine learning model that could help to enhance the grasping abilities of robots. This model, presented in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, is specifically designed to predict grasps for objects in a robot's surroundings, so that they can devise optimal strategies for grasping these objects.

"In real-world applications, such as intelligent manufacturing, human-machine interaction and domestic services, robotic grasping is becoming more and more essential," Junzhi Yu, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. "Grasp detection, a critical step of robotic grasping, entails finding the best grasp for a target object. Mainstream encoder-decoder grasp detection solutions are attractive in terms of accuracy and efficiency, yet they are still limited, due to the checkerboard artifacts from uneven overlap of convolution results in the decoder. Moreover, feature representation is often insufficient."

[wjfox]

[raklian]

This is a gamechanger. Depending on how it's used, going to see a doctor may no longer be necessary in some cases. At the same time, doctors will get more effective in diagnosing and providing treatment if they consult with it on a regular basis. This will probably have some cumulative effect in reducing overall cost and the strain on the healthcare system.

[wjfox]

[Yuli Ban]

[Ozzie guy]

ChatGPT being akin to the first change from "Less Narrow AI" and Bing escalating this with web search integration a few months later feels like something approximating the soft takeoff.

As in actual change from an AI with some degree of generality however small, then bigger change and the knowledge change from AI with generality will keep growing exponentially.

[spryfusion]

[Ozzie guy]

A "center left" Australian state level politician gave a speech to parliament partially written by ChatGPT warning about AI and he wants an inquiry into the risks and benefits of AI.

He also talked about the singularity (intelligence explosion & radical change) and AGI!!!

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-n ... by-chatgpt

[weatheriscool]

ChatGPT can (almost) pass the US Medical Licensing Exam
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-02- ... -exam.html
by Public Library of Science

ChatGPT can score at or around the approximately 60% passing threshold for the United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE), with responses that make coherent, internal sense and contain frequent insights, according to a study published February 9, 2023, in the open-access journal PLOS Digital Health by Tiffany Kung, Victor Tseng, and colleagues at AnsibleHealth.

ChatGPT is a new artificial intelligence (AI) system, known as a large language model (LLM), designed to generate human-like writing by predicting upcoming word sequences. Unlike most chatbots, ChatGPT cannot search the internet. Instead, it generates text using word relationships predicted by its internal processes.

Kung and colleagues tested ChatGPT's performance on the USMLE, a highly standardized and regulated series of three exams (Steps 1, 2CK, and 3) required for medical licensure in the United States. Taken by medical students and physicians-in-training, the USMLE assesses knowledge spanning most medical disciplines, ranging from biochemistry, to diagnostic reasoning, to bioethics.

[weatheriscool]

Quantum tunneling to boost memory consolidation in AI
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-02-qua ... ry-ai.html
by Beth Miller, Washington University in St. Louis

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have made tremendous progress in the past few years including the recent launch of ChatGPT and art generators, but one thing that is still outstanding is an energy-efficient way to generate and store long- and short-term memories at a form factor that is comparable to a human brain. A team of researchers in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis has developed an energy-efficient way to consolidate long-term memories on a tiny chip.

Shantanu Chakrabartty, the Clifford W. Murphy Professor in the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering, and members of his lab developed a relatively simple device that mimics the dynamics of the brain's synapses, connections between neurons that allows signals to pass information. The artificial synapses used in many modern AI systems are relatively simple, whereas biological synapses can potentially store complex memories due to an exquisite interplay between different chemical pathways.

[weatheriscool]

North American companies notch another record year for robot orders
By Timothy Aeppel
Six-axis robot arm picks up sorting containers at the Amazon fulfillment center in Baltimore

Feb 10 (Reuters) - North American companies struggling to hire workers in the tightest labor market in decades brought on more robots last year than ever before, with many earmarked for new electric vehicle and battery factories under construction.

Demand for robots appears to have slackened near the end of the year, though, raising questions about how strong 2023 will be in the face of shifting household consumption patterns and the rising interest rates engineered by central bankers to bring high inflation under control.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/nort ... 023-02-10/