Showing posts with label a.i.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label a.i.. Show all posts

Monday, April 12, 2021

Friendly Helper or BattleBot?

That lovable scamp from Boston Dynamics, the robotic dog Spo, was one of several robots tested by the French army during training sessions at a military school in the northwest of France. This is according to a French source.

It’s not clear what role Spot was playing (neither Shark Robotics nor the École de Saint-Cyr had replied to requests for comment at the time of writing), but Ouest-France suggests it was being used for reconnaissance. The 70lb Spot (31kg) is equipped with cameras and can be remote controlled, with its four legs allowing it to navigate terrain that would challenge wheeled or treaded robots. To date, it’s been used to remotely survey a number of environments, from construction sites to factories and underground mines.




Read more over at Engadget...

Monday, December 28, 2020

Goes Both Ways - Fast! Robotaxi purpose-built from the tarmac up...

 The Zoox Robotaxi Is a Bi-Directional autonomous vehicle, built specifically to be a robot car.  



We learn over at Yanko that the Amazon-owned Zoox...

... is a conventional cube-shaped with a unique bi-directional ride sans any steering wheel – having the capability to smoothly navigate tight spaces without much fuzz since it comes with a 4 wheel independent suspension system. The fact that it can move in any direction (independent turning wheels) and does not need to reverse (remember it is bi-directional) gives it an advantage on urban roads as it measures just 3.63 meters. 

The interior of the autonomous ride has charging ports and a small display is quite minimalistic with emphasis on passenger safety as there are next-generation airbags enveloping the passengers, providing five-star safety standards by Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. 

To further enhance the safety of the riders, the vehicle is decked in six LIDAR pucks, multiple sensors, and cameras for a 270-degree field of view – covering the blind spots and having the ability to see objects 150 meters away en route for a safe ride. And it can achieve a top speed of 70 miles per hour, so you can rest assured of arriving at your destination on time.



Wednesday, October 21, 2020

Think Creatively How to Incorporate AI into You Strategy

Over at the Financial Times, a panel discussed the realities of AI — what it can and cannot do, and what it may mean for the future. AI was defined as “any machine that does things a brain can do.” Intelligent machines under that definition still have many limitations; we are a long way from the kill-bot cyborgs from the Terminator.

Machine intelligence is not likely to replace humans in the near future -- but it will continue to evolve as a valuable tool. Because of developments in neural technology and data collection, as well as increased computing power, we can use a.i. to augment many human activities. And streamline repetitive manufacturing processes. Such machine intelligence will continue to increase capability to perform routine tasks involving language and pattern recognition, as well as assist in medical diagnoses and treatment. Used properly, intelligent machines can improve outcomes for products and services.

"...professional services, law firms have applied language recognition to assess contracts, streamline redaction and sift materials for review in litigation cases, as well as to analyse judgments. The London firm Clifford Chance notes, however, that the facilitation of processes does not yet “transform the legal approach”.

Prof Susskind says: “I am in no doubt that much of the work of today’s lawyers will be taken on by tomorrow’s machines.” This could have major implications for how lawyers are trained and recruited.

It should be obvious that organizations should be thinking creatively about how to incorporate a.i. into their strategies.



Read more at the FT...

Monday, August 31, 2020

Skynet is on its way - AI wins against human fighter pilot in DARPA dogfight

As we read over at some military news site,

DARPA's AlphaDogfight trials have officially come to a close with Heron Systems' incredible artificial intelligence pilot system defeating not only its industry competitors, but going on to secure 5 straight victories against a highly trained U.S. Air Force F-16 pilot, without the human pilot scoring a single hit.

This should not be confused with the Intelligent Flight Control System (IFCS), a next-generation flight control system designed to provide increased safety for the crew and passengers of aircraft as well as to optimize the aircraft performance under normal conditions. What is most valuable to 99% of the rest of the world -- outside of military applications -- is regarding passenger planes which fly autonomously. Software would have to be capable of handling emergency situations. At present, modern airliners do a good job of flying automatically until something unexpected happens. At that point, a pilot takes control and typically resolves the problem. Very rarely, though, a pilot must act to save the aircraft from catastrophe. 

There's more details about autonomous flight over at the I-triple-E, Application of AI Methods to Aircraft Guidance and Control.



 

Friday, May 22, 2020

People Would Be More Accepting of Jonny-Cab Once They Try Them Out

Autonomous vehicles seem to have s public perception problem, according to new survey data collected by an industry group. Partners for Automated Vehicle Education surveyed 1,200 Americans earlier this year and found that 48 percent of Americans say they would "never get in a taxi or ride-share vehicle that was being driven autonomously." And slightly more Americans -- 20 percent versus 18 percent -- think autonomous vehicles will never be safe compared to those who say they'd put their names down on a waiting list to get a ride in an autonomous vehicle.

According to the survey data, getting a ride in a robotaxi might change some of those minds. Three in five said that they'd have more trust in autonomous vehicles if they had a better understanding of how those vehicles worked, and 58 percent said that firsthand experience -- i.e. going for a ride in a self-driving car -- would make them trust the technology more.
"Of the 1,200 survey respondents, 678 reported owning an [advanced driver assistance system] ADAS-equipped vehicle, and three-quarters of them said they 'will feel safer on the road when I know that most other vehicles have enhanced safety features,' with the same number saying they are eager to see what new safety features will be on their next vehicle," the report adds.

As describer at Slashdot, "Interestingly, drivers who own cars with forward collision warning (FCW), blind spot monitoring (BSM), lane departure warning (LDW), and automatic emergency braking (AEB) were also more likely to believe that safe autonomous vehicles would be available within the next 10 years compared to those without those features."

Monday, March 9, 2020

Robots Taking Jobs... Again

The robot future started years ago...

The adoption of industrial robots in France makes manufacturing businesses more productive and profitable but at the expense of jobs, according to a recent paper presented by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private, non-profit, non-partisan research organization in America. 
In a paper titled "Competing with Robots: Firm-Level Evidence from France," economics professors Daron Acemoglu (MIT), Claire LeLarge (University of Paris Saclay), and Pascual Restrepo (Boston University) analyzed 55,390 French manufacturing firms to study the economic impact of robot adoption.

Monday, March 2, 2020

What is Europe's Strategy for Data?

The European Commission presented its long-awaited EU data strategy in Brussels on February 29, 2020. In response to evolving economic and social concerns brought about through digital transformation, European lawmakers debuted a discussion paper addressing a vision for Europe as a leader in the global data economy. The paper was presented together with the Commission’s Communication, Shaping Europe’s Digital Future and other papers, such as on Artificial Intelligence.


Friday, November 22, 2019

US Patent and Trademark Office Wants to Know if A.I. Can Own Its Own Creations

Can an artificial intelligence (A.I.) own what it creates? The USPTO wants the public's opinion:

The US office responsible for patents and trademarks is trying to figure out how AI might call for changes to copyright law, and it’s asking the public for opinions on the topic. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published a notice in the Federal Register last month saying it’s seeking comments...
The office is gathering information about the impact of artificial intelligence on copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property rights. It outlines thirteen specific questions, ranging from what happens if an AI creates a copyright-infringing work to if it’s legal to feed an AI copyrighted material.

Read more here...

Monday, August 12, 2019

Is LIDAR going away for A.I. vision? Elon Musk says yes, others disagree

Cornell researchers published a research paper that is somewhat critical of about lidar. Using nothing but stereo cameras, the computer scientists achieved breakthrough results on KITTI, a popular image recognition benchmark for self-driving systems. Their new technique produced results far superior to previously published camera-only results—and not far behind results that combined camera and lidar data. LiDAR sensors use lasers to create 3D point maps of their surroundings, measuring objects’ distance via the speed of light. Stereo cameras, which rely on two perspectives to establish depth, as human eyes do, seemed promising. But their accuracy in object detection has been woefully low, and the conventional wisdom was that they were too imprecise.

Radar sensors deliver images similar to optical sensors. LiDAR delivers points which measure the distance between the instrument and the target. Cameras plus lidar performed better than cameras alone had nothing to do with the superior accuracy of lidar's distance measurements. Rather, it was because the "native" data format from lidar is easier for machine-learning algorithms to work with.


Tuesday, April 23, 2019

Knowledge Worker Productivity Improvements with Machine Learning


Leveraging machine learning to enhance capabilities that can recognize context, concepts, and meaning means there are interesting new opportunities for collaboration between knowledge workers and computational power. For example, Bluedog’s experts can now provide more of their own input for training, quality control, and fine-tuning of algorithm-based outcomes. We use the computational power of our servers to augment the expertise of human collaborators — this helps to create new areas for our experts to leverage.

For example, at Bluedog, we utilize several algorithm-based tools to help us quickly assess opportunities for our clients. We extract information from Word Documents locally for multiple uses. With one tool, we take advantage of each Word document’s XML metadata. From there, we use a regex library to find each targeted word or phrase in the document, then adding them to a list. Our toll then performs for-loops to scan for relevant patterns in the XML to extract data.

Knowledge workers — the staff or consultants who reason, create, decide, and apply insight into non-routine cognitive processes — can contribute to redesigning work process roles and team member roles. Consider financial auditing, where AI is likely to become pervasive. Often, when AI offers a finding, the algorithm’s reasoning isn’t obvious to the accountant, who ultimately must offer an explanation to a client — characteristic of the “black box” problem. To improve this outcome, Bluedog recommends providing an interface so experts to enter concepts they deem important into the system and be provided with a means to test their own hypotheses. In this way, we recommend making models accessible to common sense. 

As cybersecurity concerns mount, organizations have increased the use of instruments to collect data at various points in their network to analyze threats — and to address “Internet-of-Things” (IoT) devices. However, many of these data-driven systems do not integrate data from multiple sources. Nor do they incorporate the common-sense knowledge of cybersecurity experts, who know the range and diverse motives of attackers, understand typical internal and external threats, and appreciate the degree of risk to an organization. 


Bluedog’s experts specify the use of Bayesian models — which employ probabilistic analysis to capture complex interdependence among risk factors —  combined with expert systems judgment. In cybersecurity for enterprise networks, complex factors may include large numbers and types of devices on the network. It is crucial to access the knowledge of the organization’s security experts about attackers and risk profile to better intercept cybercriminals.

Monday, April 15, 2019

Automation from Robots -- What Jobs are at Risk?

Twelve jobs have a 99 percent chance of being automated, according to a study by Oxford:

  • Data Entry Keyers
  • Library Technicians
  • New Accounts Clerks
  • Photographic Process Workers and Processing Machine Operators
  • Tax Preparers
  • Cargo and Freight Agents
  • Watch Repairers
  • Insurance Underwriters
  • Mathematical Technicians
  • Hand Sewers
  • Title Examiners, Abstractors, and Searchers
  • Telemarketers

Whenever a job has a pattern of repetitive activities, they are most likely to be replicated with machine learning algorithms. Most studies on automation stop short of saying that jobs will be completely eliminated by automation. Rather, workers will be redeployed.

Automation is coming to the most common jobs...


Graphic courtesy of titlemax.com

Friday, November 16, 2018

Create Diverse Workplaces Using Artificial Intelligence Ethically

Companies should be aware of and recognize that artificial intelligence algorithms are created by humans with biases and beliefs -- and make every effort to eliminate those biases.


A.I. takes input data and races off to make inference and decision making about the world at lightening pace,” --Dipayan Ghosh, a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School




Read more...

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

How to cope with the coming robot revolution? More education, universal basic income, and other strategies could help.

... Bill Gates recently suggested yet another ethical red flag: that robots themselves may have to be taxed to make up for lost levies on income from employees. Others have suggested as robots take on more tasks, there could be a growing case for universal basic income, where everyone receives state benefits.

In addition, recent studies have suggested artificial intelligence can develop sexist and racist tendencies. Researchers developed a word-embedding factual association test to determine how strongly words are associated with other words, and then compare the strength of those associations to facts in the real world. "For example, if a computer searching rĂ©sumĂ©s for computer programmers associates “programmer” with men, mens’ rĂ©sumĂ©s will pop to the top... Instead of debiasing embeddings, essentially throwing away information, she prefers adding an extra layer of human or computer judgment to decide how or whether to act on such biases. In the case of hiring programmers, you might decide to set gender quotas...."

Read more hear...

Monday, August 14, 2017

Hidden Messages in Signs... for Robots Only

The company 3M is helping autonomous cars by encoding hidden messages in road signs.

3M is using its expertise with signs to assist with autonomous car development. The company, which now boasts 90,000 employees, is tucking invisible messages into traffic signs to help self-driving cars figure out where they are.

Read more here...

Saturday, August 5, 2017

UBI vs the Robots

With advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, many people's jobs will be up for grabs. And we are entirely unprepared as exponential advances, most notably in form of artificial intelligence, will eat away employment as humans' primary source of income. There may be an answer, in the form of a direct payment to each of us.

Universal basic income (UBI) is gaining momentum worldwide. Switzerland held a referendum on the introduction of a nationwide UBI (which it rejected) in 2016,1 Finland is currently testing it for some people, and India is considering replacing its welfare state with a UBI.2 The UBI is an unconditional cash payment that flows monthly from the state budget to everybody. It is transferred from public to private accounts throughout an entire lifetime, from birth to death, without any application or preconditions to be fulfilled by the beneficiary. It is supposed to cover the socio-cultural subsistence minimum. However, the determination of this minimum level of subsistence is a political and not an economic decision.

Some suggest work can be divided into a few categories: routine and nonroutine, cognitive and manual. Routine work is the same stuff day in and day out, while nonroutine work varies. Within these two varieties, is the work that requires mostly our brains (cognitive) and the work that requires mostly our bodies (manual). Routine work started to stagnate at the end of the last millennium because some of that work is easily handled by machines.

One approach to machine intelligence is with neural networks, a tool of artificial intelligence. This provides a means for machine learning that can leverage big data -- the data sets being created and standardized. Everything we do is generating data, and lots of data is exactly what machines need in order to learn to learn.When computer code is wrong, it is self-corrected, further improving error detection and expanding the capabilities of the particular a.i. Bigger data sets speed such learning, and lower the error rates. No, this isn't SkyNet: think of robots as technologies, such as machine learning algorithms running on purpose-built computer platforms, that have been trained to perform discrete tasks that currently require humans to perform.

As others have written, "During the Obama administration, a report of the president was published (no longer available at whitehouse.gov) that included a very dire prediction: "There is an 83% chance that workers who earn $20 an hour or less could have their jobs replaced by robots in the next five years. Those in the $40 an hour pay range face a 31% chance of having their jobs taken over by the machines." Clearly, the robots are coming."

Read more here... and here...

Wednesday, January 4, 2017

More Robots Coming.... To a Sidewalk Near You!

Not just aerial unmanned vehicles, but terrestrial, as well, are making their way to us...

Designers of futuristic cityscapes envision airborne drones dropping off your packages and driverless cars taking you to work. But the robotic-delivery invasion already has begun — in the form of machines that look like wheeled beer coolers scooting along the sidewalks.

...But Missy Cummings, director of the Humans and Autonomy Lab at Duke University, worries that new technologies such as drones and sidewalk robots are being developed without enough attention paid to how they will interact with people or to how people will react.

“It’s a huge problem in robotics, which are developed by engineers” who know little about human interaction, she said. “Look at Google Glass,” she said. The eyeglasses had tiny screens that allowed Internet access, and wearers could take photos and videos using voice commands.

Read more at the WaPo...

Monday, November 28, 2016

Robot Trucks take to Ohio Highways

From SlashDot--

"A vehicle from self-driving truck maker Otto will travel a 35-mile stretch of U.S. Route 33 on Monday in central Ohio..." reports the Associated Press. The truck "will travel in regular traffic, and a driver in the truck will be positioned to intervene should anything go awry, Department of Transportation spokesman Matt Bruning said Friday, adding that 'safety is obviously No. 1.'" Ohio sees this route as "a corridor where new technologies can be safely tested in real-life traffic, aided by a fiber-optic cable network and sensor systems slated for installation next year" -- although next week the truck will also start driving on the Ohio Turnpike.
Read more here...

Monday, November 7, 2016

Elon Musk: Basic Income, Because -- Robots

Space entrepreneur Elon Musk believes we’ll eventually need a basic universal income because of “automation.”

“People will have time to do other things, more complex things, more interesting things... Certainly more leisure time. And then we gotta figure how we integrate with a world and future with a vast AI.”

For example, in the future, semi-trailer trucks will be able to drive themselves. And though that won't become the status quo for a while, it will mean that there won't be a need for quite as many truck drivers, says Musk. Some drivers will transition to fleet operators, responsible for monitoring the status of a fleet of trucks, not any one individual truck. If a truck appears to be having issues, then the fleet operator would come in remotely and solve the problem.

"Actually, it's probably a more interesting job than just driving one [truck]," says Musk. It's likely those truck drivers who no longer have a job might see the situation differently. But the optimistic Musk sees increased automation as an overall benefit to society, even an opportunity.

Even the President thinks we should consider radical alternatives.

Read (and watch the video) here...

Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Who Will Protect the Robots?

BBC has a good article -- without someone to watch passengers, how will robot taxis ensure their fares don't become unruly?

Read more...

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Can You Tell I Can't Wait to Not Drive!

Another company -- emerging from stealth mode -- announced a retrofit kit to make fleet vehicles, from delivery trucks to car services, self-driving. The kit includes a sensor array, computer and an LED sign to communicate with pedestrians and other drivers.

The company, Drive.ai, is past the dev phase, as it holds a license to test self-driving cars in California, and has already been deploying its systems on open roads.

Read more at CNet