|
Preparing for the robot takeover 101
Toronto Star – AP FILE PHOTO This would include kudos from Bill Gates, who dubbed him "the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence. New unconventional school to study ways to harness technology's power Singular fantasies |
 Calgary Herald |
Albert Einstein Robot: The True Test of The Theory of Relativity
DigitalJournal.com – by M Dee Dubroff. If Elvis lives and perform wedding ceremonies, can’t others whom we admire do the same? Albert Einstein, although dead for more than 50 years, now smiles, looks around and makes eye contact with passersby. Einstein Brought Back To Life In Robot Form Einstein robot smiles when you do |
The Small Robotics Building project utilizing smart infrastructure technology and robotics, the companies are creating an automated living environment that can handle such duties as reception, deliveries, cleaning, and security, without the need for human intervention
coondoggie writes “Ok, maybe this is getting a little too close to bringing Terminator-like robots to life. For starters, eco-friendly engine builder Cyclone Power this week inked a contract from Robotic Technologies, Inc. (RTI) to develop what it calls a beta biomass engine system that will be the heart of RTI’s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR). The purpose of EATR is to develop and demonstrate an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling — in other words it needs to ‘eat.’ According to researchers, the EATR system gets its energy by foraging, or what the firms describe as ‘engaging in biologically-inspired, organism-like, energy-harvesting behavior which is the equivalent of eating. It can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable.'” We can only hope they don’t team up with the Multi-Robot Pursuit System project to “search for and detect a non-cooperative human.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
CWmike writes to tell us that artificial intelligence and robotics have made another wobbly step forward with the most recent robot from Stanford. “Stair” is one of a new breed of robot that is trying to integrate learning, vision, navigation, manipulation, planning, reasoning, speech, and natural language processing. “It also marks a transition of AI from narrow, carefully defined domains to real-world situations in which systems learn to deal with complex data and adapt to uncertainty. AI has more or less followed the ‘hype cycle’ popularized by Gartner Inc.: Technologies perk along in the shadows for a few years, then burst on the scene in a blaze of hype. Then they fall into disrepute when they fail to deliver on extravagant promises, until they eventually rise to a level of solid accomplishment and acceptance.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
csn writes “On Wednesday, January 28th at 6:00 PM PST and 9:00 PM EST, the stars of the cult television hit ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’ will reunite to do what they do best — heckle bad movies. Join Mike Nelson, Kevin “Tom Servo” Murphy and Bill “Crow T. Robot” Corbett as they make fun of the 1950 short film, ‘Overcoming Fear,’ live over the internet.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Philip Hingston writes “Computers can’t play like people — yet. An unusual kind of computer game bot-programming contest has just been held in Perth, Australia, as part of the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games. The contest was not about programming the bot that plays the best. The aim was to see if a bot could convince another player that it was actually a human player. Game Development Studio 2K Australia (creator of BioShock) provided ,000 cash plus a trip to their studio in Canberra for anyone who could create a bot to pass this ‘Turing Test for Bots.’ People like to play against opponents who are like themselves — opponents with personality, who can surprise, who sometimes make mistakes, yet don’t robotically make the same mistakes over and over. Computers are superbly fast and accurate at playing games, but can they be programmed to be more fun to play — to play like you and me?” Read on for the rest of Philip’s thoughts.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
somanyrobots writes with this excerpt from the Dallas News: “In a major defeat for social conservatives, a sharply divided State Board of Education voted Thursday to abandon a longtime state requirement that high school science teachers cover what some critics consider to be ‘weaknesses’ in the theory of evolution. Under the science curriculum standards recommended by a panel of science educators and tentatively adopted by the board, biology teachers and biology textbooks would no longer have to cover the ‘strengths and weaknesses’ of Charles Darwin’s theory that man evolved from lower forms of life. Texas is particularly influential to textbook publishers because of the size of its market, so this could have a ripple effect on textbooks used in other states as well.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
By studying the way beetle larvae wiggle to move across water, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have employed biomimicry techniques to develop a low-energy and low-maintenance system for moving small robots and boats in water.
The Eye-in-the-Sea camera will allow marine biologists Erika Raymond and Edith Widder, pictured, to unobtrusively observe organisms in the deep ocean. In this gallery, you can watch as the system is flawlessly installed in the bay, and within a week, you’ll be able to use their camera to peer into the deep.
