LinkedIn’s job-matching AI was biased. The company’s solution? More AI. CareerBuilder, LinkedIn—most of the world’s biggest job search sites use AI to match people with job openings. But the algorithms don’t always play fair. Read more …
Hacking is as old as humanity. We are creative problem solvers. We exploit loopholes, manipulate systems, and strive for more influence, power, and wealth. To date, hacking has exclusively been a human activity. Not for long. Read more …
There are now businesses that sell fake people. On the website Generated.Photos, you can buy a “unique, worry-free” fake person for $2.99, or 1,000 people for $1,000. If you just need a couple of fake people — for characters in a video game, or to make your company website appear more diverse you can get their photos for free on ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com. Read more …
The news: US startup Agility Robotics has just made its two-legged robot Digit available to buy for the first time. The first customer is car giant Ford, which has been testing the robot for vehicle-to-door delivery since May 2019.
Digit’s digits: It’s similar in size to a small adult, able to carry items weighing up to 40 pounds (18 kilograms), and can navigate semi-autonomously, using cameras and lidar sensors. The robot is able to pick boxes up and put them down without guidance, but tasks like avoiding obstacles still require help from humans via a teleoperation system. You can see a video of Digit in action here. Agility’s CEO, Damion Shelton, didn’t specify how much each one will cost but told The Verge it is in “the low-mid six figures.” Pricey, in other words.
The news: DeepMind and Google Health have developed a new AI system to help doctors detect breast cancer early. The researchers trained an algorithm on mammogram images from female patients in the US and UK, and it performed better than human radiologists. The results were published in Nature on Wednesday.
A tragedy of errors: Breast cancer is the most common cancer for women globally, and their second leading cause of death. Though early detection and treatment can improve a patient’s prognosis, screening tests have high rates of error. About 1 in 5 screenings fail to find breast cancer even when it’s present, also known as a false negative; 50% of women who receive annual mammograms also get at least one false alarm over a 10-year period, known as a false positive.
The results: In tests, the AI system decreased both types of error. For US patients, it reduced false negatives and positives by 9.4% and 5.7%, respectively; for UK patients it reduced them by 2.7% and 1.2%. In a separate experiment, the researchers tested the system’s ability to generalize: they trained the model using only mammograms from UK patients, and then evaluated its performance on US patients. The system still outperformed human radiologists, reducing false negatives and positives by 8.1% and 3.5%.
You don’t have to think about it: when you speak, your brain sends signals to your lips, tongue, jaw, and larynx, which work together to produce the intended sounds.
Now scientists in San Francisco say they’ve tapped these brain signals to create a device capable of spitting out complete phrases, like “Don’t do Charlie’s dirty dishes” and “Critical equipment needs proper maintenance.”
The last time you had your blood pressure checked, it was probably at a doctor’s office with a bulky cuff wrapped around your arm. One day soon, perhaps, you will just need a simple stick-on patch on your neck, no bigger than a postage stamp. Read more …
Weed-killing robots are threatening giant chemical companies’ business models.
AI-powered weed hunters could soon reduce the need for herbicides and genetically modified crops.
The ability to send thoughts directly to another person’s brain is the stuff of science fiction. At least, it used to be.
In recent years, physicists and neuroscientists have developed an armory of tools that can sense certain kinds of thoughts and transmit information about them into other brains. That has made brain-to-brain communication a reality.
These tools include electroencephalograms (EEGs) that record electrical activity in the brain and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which can transmit information into the brain.
Car sharing with autonomous vehicles could improve cities in many ways. Singapore is taking a pioneering role, working with ETH researchers to explore the potential of personalised, electrified and automated public transport. Read more …
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-12-algorithms-wheel.html#jCp
For Amazon’s latest hardware trick, the company has apparently been working on a home robot under the codename, “Vesta.” That nugget comes via Bloomberg sources, who report that the online retail giant expects to start trialing the device in employee homes this year, with plans to launch it to consumers as early as 2019. Read more …
Controlling your gadgets by talking to them is so 2018. In the future, you won’t even have to move your lips. A prototype device called AlterEgo, created by MIT Media Lab graduate student Arnav Kapur, is already making this possible. With Kapur’s device—a 3-D-printed plastic doodad that looks kind of like a skinny white banana attached to the side of his head—he can flip through TV channels, change the colors of lightbulbs, make expert chess moves, solve complicated arithmetic problems, and, as he recently showed a 60 Minutes crew, order a pizza, all without saying a word or lifting a finger. It can be used to let people communicate silently and unobtrusively with each other, too. Read more …
Apple announced a new health effort as part of iOS 11.3. The new Health Records section in the Health app lets you gather and view all your medical records. The company is partnering with hospitals and clinics. Read more …
Tech Insider talked to Sophia, the first-ever robot citizen that once said it would ‘destroy humans’. Steve Kovach interviews Sophia, the AI robot. Despite its impressive feats, the machine still has a few hiccups to correct. Read more …
While Europe still discusses the downsides of self-driving technologies, Singapore will be putting public commuters on self-driving electric buses. The test will start end of 2017. Driverless vehicles, which have so far been limited to small-scale deployments within business parks and tourist spots for example, could become a reality at scale for intra-town travel in Singapore from late 2020. Read more …
Meet Nadine in Singapore, the humanoid robot which talks with you in English, French and German. Nadine is a realistic female humanoid robot that was modelled by Professor Thalmann. The robot is well designed and its artificial skin and hair makes her look very human. Nadine is a socially intelligent robot who is friendly, greets you back, makes eye contact, and remembers all the conversations you had with her. Read more …
Anemia, which is the result of malnutrition or infection, is unfortunately very common in poorer countries. The University of Washington presented a simple way of tracking anemia with your smartphone through a light source technology. Read more …
Here is the ultimate wearable. The State University of Illinois has developed a biostamp with sensors build into a silicon patch at the size of a fingernail. It is powered wirelessly and transmits the body data to your smartphone. It could measure all possible body functionalities soon and become a challenge for your local doctor. Read more …
Two recent digital developments – drones and brain reading technologies – have been successfully connected by a research group of the University of Florida in 2015. Controlling any kind of connected devices with your mind could be the future. The students used a brain reading helmet to analyze electrical brain signals. The device allows you to control the drone with your thoughts. Watch this video …
Over the past decades, one of the biggest challenges in robotic computing was to make robots walk. The famous fall of Hondas ASIMO during the 2006 Robotic Show in Tokyo is still in our minds. But here is an astonishing video which proves the opposite. Watch video …
Paralyzed from the waist down after a BMX accident, Steven Sanchez rolled into SuitX’s Berkeley, California, office in a wheelchair. A half-hour later he was standing and walking thanks to the Phoenix—a robotic exoskeleton now available for around $40,000. The suit returns movement to wearers’ hips and knees with small motors attached to standard orthotics. Wearers can control the movement of each leg and walk at up to 1.1 miles per hour by pushing buttons integrated into a pair of crutches. Read more …
Just listen to Jürgen Schmidhuber, Director of of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA in Lugano and Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Lugano. He speaks about how Artificial Intelligence is going to take over Human Intelligence during this century. Watch the video …
Elon Musk has been vocal about his anxiety over the future of artificial intelligence, and he’s put his money where his mouth is in the past, but now he’s going even bigger with the announcement of Open A.I., a non-profit artificial intelligence research company launching with $1 billion in donation from Silicon Valley luminaries and Musk as co-chair. More …
Believe it or not: Robots can also drive motorcycles. Yamaha just released it’s MOTOBOT. Pictures and videos show the humanoid robot riding Yamaha’s most sporting motorcycle, the 1000cc R1M. The aim of MOTOBOT is to develop rider-support systems similar to those in cars to make driving safer. Yamaha’s self-driving robot will be able to autonomously drive as fast as 200 km per hour. Read more …
Brain connectivity enters a new chapter: a paralyzed man’s arm received brain signals at a university case in Ohio. Doctors bridge his spinal injury with electronics, so that the paralyzed man can control his arm with his thoughts. Scientists at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio say they’ve used electronics to get around a paralyzed man’s spinal injury, permitting him to use an implant in his brain to move his arm and hand. Read more …
While other brilliant minds like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have warned against the rise of artificial intelligence, Ray Kurzweil, famed inventor and futurist, and currently also Google’s director of engineering, is taking a vastly different approach to technological innovations on the AI front. In fact, according to Kurzweil, humans will be artificially intelligent by 2030, making us half-homo sapien, half-computer. On June 3 at the Exponential Finance conference, Kurzweil predicted, “Our thinking then will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking. We’re going to gradually merge and enhance ourselves. In my view, that’s the nature of being human – we transcend our limitations.” In just 15 years, Kurzweil believes, the human brain will become a hybrid of biology and technology, and we will “put gateways to the cloud in our brains.” And as the cloud becomes more and more advanced and is able to store increasing amounts of information, so too will our brains. By the late 2030’s or early 2040’s, Kurzweil said, the majority of brain function, at least in terms of information processing and thought processes, will be non-biological. Watch video …
Robotics and brain computer interfaces hold the promise of making patients with paralysis walk again. Scientists and engineers are currently developing exoskeletons that respond to the patient’s brain orders and help them move their limbs. In the future, these technologies could dramatically help people with paralysis after spinal cord injuries and patients with parkinson. This is how it’s done. Read more …
Remember Pepper, the intelligent robot that SoftBank unveiled last year? Pepper goes on sale in Japan this coming weekend, but in advance of that launch SoftBank has revealed that Alibaba and manufacturer Foxconn have invested $118 million each in its robotics division. That deal will give Alibaba and Foxconn 20 percent shares in SoftBank Robotics Holdings (known as SBRH), with SoftBank retaining a dominant 60 percent stake. “SoftBank, Alibaba and Foxconn will build a structure to bring Pepper and other robotics businesses to global markets, and cooperate with the aim of spreading and developing the robotics industry on a worldwide scale,” SoftBank said in its announcement. Read more…
Any new technology involves a certain amount of uncertainty and business risk. In the case of the Internet of Things, however, many of the risks have been exaggerated or misrepresented. While the IoT vision will take years to mature fully, the building blocks to begin this process are already in place. Key hardware and software are either available today or under development; stakeholders need to address security and privacy concerns, and collaborate to implement the open standards that will make the IoT safe, secure, reliable and interoperable, and allow the delivery of secured services as seamlessly as possible (Push Technology). Read more…
There are remote control cars and then there are Remote Control Cars. This is the latter of the two. Range Rover UK developed a prototype system that allows a Range Rover Sport to be controlled remotely through a smartphone app. And not just the door locks. The vehicle can be driven from the app. Read more…
The final frontier of the digital technology is integrating into your own brain. DARPA wants to go there. Scientists want to go there. Entrepreneurs want to go there. And increasingly, it looks like it’s possible. You’ve probably read bits and pieces about brain implants and prosthesis. Let me give you the big picture. Neural implants could accomplish things no external interface could: Virtual and augmented reality with all five senses; augmentation of human memory, attention, and learning speed; even multi-sense telepathy – sharing what we see, hear, touch, and even perhaps what we think and feel with others. Sound crazy? It is… and it’s not. Read more…
Google has been testing self-driving cars for years. Six years in fact, with a fleet of 20+ self-driving cars, which have self-driven almost a million miles over that period — and are now averaging around 10,000 self-driven miles per week. So how many accidents have Google’s autonomous rides got into over that period? Eleven “minor accidents”, according to Google’s Chris Urmson, writing in a blog post on Medium yesterday. However Urmson lays the blame for all 11 fender-benders at the feet of the otherhuman drivers — rather than the self-driving machines. Read more…
The robotic chef is the brainchild of Moley Robotics and will be ready for market in 2017 after it finishes training under MasterChef champion Tim Anderson. The robotic sous-chef will have 2,000 recipes programmed by then and you will be able to select what you’d like through an accompanying app. Read more…
Many companies in traditional business make a product, sell it on shelves and, hopefully, make a profit. Whether it is Philips’ Hue or Parrot’s Flower Power, one can understand why technology companies are choosing the same retail approach used by food, drink and clothes manufacturers. After all, for many digital companies, Internet Of Things devices represent the first physical embodiment in the real world, following a generation in which online, intangible development reigned supreme. But connected devices are not cans of beans or sweaters, and device makers do not need to limit their products to a single, one-time purchase event more commonly associated by perishable items. Internet-connected hardware is always-on, updateable and extendable, offering far more opportunity. To multiply their revenue potential, IoT startups should aim instead for long-term value creation. Rather than selling customers a single, self-contained product and letting theirrelationship end, this means offering them the chance to engage through multiple touch points throughout an ongoing engagement. Read more…
Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk has gone on record before proclaiming the potential risks of artificial intelligence, and now he’s putting his money where his mouth is. The intrepid inventor and entrepreneur announced a donation of $10 million to help fund research to “keep AI beneficial” to humanity today. The funds go to the Future of Life Institute (FLI), an organization run by volunteers dedicated to research aimed at “mitigate[ing] existential risks facing humanity,” and specifically those related to our ongoing progress towards AI that can approach human capabilities. Read more…
When Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk all agree on something, it’s worth paying attention. All three have warned of the potential dangers that artificial intelligence or AI can bring. The world’s foremost physicist, Hawking said that the full development of AI could “spell the end of the human race.” Musk, the tech entrepreneur who brought us PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX described artificial intelligence as our “biggest existential threat” and said that playing around with AI was like “summoning the demon.” Gates, who knows a thing or two about tech, puts himself in the “concerned” camp when it comes to machines becoming too intelligent for us humans to control. Read more …
For all the innovation that has come out of startups, few have addressed one of the hardest tasks in the world: caring for a newborn infant. Whether it is providing milk at 3 a.m. or ensuring that the baby is exposed to the right shapes and sounds appropriate for its age, parents are faced with a near-constant barrage of challenges, often under incredible pressure and stress. Taking advantage of the convergence of mobile, Internet of Things, and cloud computing, Rest Devices, a Boston-based startup founded by a group of MIT alums and dropouts, hopes to change all that with the development of a smart baby nursery. Their first product is called the Mimo, a onesie for babies that includes sensors for monitoring a baby’s respiration, pressure, moisture and temperature. Read more …
Locking a new running technique can be tough though, so enter the Sensoria Smart Sock Fitness Tracker, which wants to track your steps and advise on running style, by doing real-time gait analysis thanks to its sensor-stuffed socks. Sensoria’s wearable device consists of a pair of socks, containing its “e-textile technology” (which basically boils down to pressure sensors, so it can figure out which bits of your foot are taking the weight as you run), plus a clip-on Bluetooth 4.0 device that also contains an accelerometer and altimeter, and attaches to the ankle of the sock via magnets (it’s detachable so the sock can be washed). This wirelessly connects to your computer or smartphone to upload your running data. Read more…
Remember ATLAS? That massive walking robot that DARPA is building with (the now Google-owned) Boston Dynamics? Last time we saw it, it had two major flaws that made it ever-so-slightly less intimidating: it was loud as hell, and it needed a big, thick support cable to keep it powered and upright. Both of those issues have been fixed. DARPA released a video today demonstrating the latest version of ATLAS, and it’s a doozy. DARPA says about 75% of the bot has been redesigned, with only the stuff below the knees staying the same. Read more …
Google-owned Boston Dynamics has been making incredible robots long before it was purchased by Google. Today it showed off its latest amazing robot, Spot – a smaller, more agile version of its WildCat robot. Then, a BD team member decided to kick it, therefore dooming us all when robots become sentient. Read more …
Please do watch this breathtaking video! Hugh Herr is building the next generation of bionic limbs, robotic prosthetics inspired by nature’s own designs. Herr lost both legs in a climbing accident 30 years ago; now, as the head of the MIT Media Lab’s Biomechatronics group, he shows his incredible technology in a talk that’s both technical and deeply personal — with the help of ballroom dancer Adrianne Haslet-Davis, who lost her left leg in the 2013 Boston Marathon.
Chris Hawker, the creator of the Powersquid, and some of his buddies at Trident Design have created a new flying drone, the Carbon Flyer. The Flyer is an ultralight airplane that flies under its own power and controlled via Bluetooth. A tiny camera streams the flight to your phone. Read more…