Tag Archives: engineering

#436526 Not Bot, Not Beast: Scientists Create ...

Posted on January 22, 2020 by Android

A remarkable combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and biology has produced the world’s first “living robots.”

This week, a research team of roboticists and scientists published their recipe for making a new lifeform called xenobots from stem cells. The term “xeno” comes from the frog cells (Xenopus laevis) used to make them.

One of the researchers described the creation as “neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal,” but a “new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism.”

Xenobots are less than 1 millimeter long and made of 500-1,000 living cells. They have various simple shapes, including some with squat “legs.” They can propel themselves in linear or circular directions, join together to act collectively, and move small objects. Using their own cellular energy, they can live up to 10 days.

While these “reconfigurable biomachines” could vastly improve human, animal, and environmental health, they raise legal and ethical concerns.

Strange New ‘Creature’
To make xenobots, the research team used a supercomputer to test thousands of random designs of simple living things that could perform certain tasks.

The computer was programmed with an AI “evolutionary algorithm” to predict which organisms would likely display useful tasks, such as moving towards a target.

After the selection of the most promising designs, the scientists attempted to replicate the virtual models with frog skin or heart cells, which were manually joined using microsurgery tools. The heart cells in these bespoke assemblies contract and relax, giving the organisms motion.

The creation of xenobots is groundbreaking. Despite being described as “programmable living robots,” they are actually completely organic and made of living tissue. The term “robot” has been used because xenobots can be configured into different forms and shapes, and “programmed” to target certain objects, which they then unwittingly seek. They can also repair themselves after being damaged.

Possible Applications
Xenobots may have great value. Some speculate they could be used to clean our polluted oceans by collecting microplastics. Similarly, they may be used to enter confined or dangerous areas to scavenge toxins or radioactive materials. Xenobots designed with carefully shaped “pouches” might be able to carry drugs into human bodies.

Future versions may be built from a patient’s own cells to repair tissue or target cancers. Being biodegradable, xenobots would have an edge on technologies made of plastic or metal.

Further development of biological “robots” could accelerate our understanding of living and robotic systems. Life is incredibly complex, so manipulating living things could reveal some of life’s mysteries—and improve our use of AI.

Legal and Ethical Questions
Conversely, xenobots raise legal and ethical concerns. In the same way they could help target cancers, they could also be used to hijack life functions for malevolent purposes.

Some argue artificially making living things is unnatural, hubristic, or involves “playing God.” A more compelling concern is that of unintended or malicious use, as we have seen with technologies in fields including nuclear physics, chemistry, biology and AI. For instance, xenobots might be used for hostile biological purposes prohibited under international law.

More advanced future xenobots, especially ones that live longer and reproduce, could potentially “malfunction” and go rogue, and out-compete other species.

For complex tasks, xenobots may need sensory and nervous systems, possibly resulting in their sentience. A sentient programmed organism would raise additional ethical questions. Last year, the revival of a disembodied pig brain elicited concerns about different species’ suffering.

Managing Risks
The xenobot’s creators have rightly acknowledged the need for discussion around the ethics of their creation. The 2018 scandal over using CRISPR (which allows the introduction of genes into an organism) may provide an instructive lesson here. While the experiment’s goal was to reduce the susceptibility of twin baby girls to HIV-AIDS, associated risks caused ethical dismay. The scientist in question is in prison.

When CRISPR became widely available, some experts called for a moratorium on heritable genome editing. Others argued the benefits outweighed the risks.

While each new technology should be considered impartially and based on its merits, giving life to xenobots raises certain significant questions:

Should xenobots have biological kill-switches in case they go rogue?
Who should decide who can access and control them?
What if “homemade” xenobots become possible? Should there be a moratorium until regulatory frameworks are established? How much regulation is required?

Lessons learned in the past from advances in other areas of science could help manage future risks, while reaping the possible benefits.

Long Road Here, Long Road Ahead
The creation of xenobots had various biological and robotic precedents. Genetic engineering has created genetically modified mice that become fluorescent in UV light.

Designer microbes can produce drugs and food ingredients that may eventually replace animal agriculture. In 2012, scientists created an artificial jellyfish called a “medusoid” from rat cells.

Robotics is also flourishing. Nanobots can monitor people’s blood sugar levels and may eventually be able to clear clogged arteries. Robots can incorporate living matter, which we witnessed when engineers and biologists created a sting-ray robot powered by light-activated cells.

In the coming years, we are sure to see more creations like xenobots that evoke both wonder and due concern. And when we do, it is important we remain both open-minded and critical.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: Photo by Joel Filipe on Unsplash Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#436488 Tech’s Biggest Leaps From the Last 10 ...

Posted on January 3, 2020 by Android

As we enter our third decade in the 21st century, it seems appropriate to reflect on the ways technology developed and note the breakthroughs that were achieved in the last 10 years.

The 2010s saw IBM’s Watson win a game of Jeopardy, ushering in mainstream awareness of machine learning, along with DeepMind’s AlphaGO becoming the world’s Go champion. It was the decade that industrial tools like drones, 3D printers, genetic sequencing, and virtual reality (VR) all became consumer products. And it was a decade in which some alarming trends related to surveillance, targeted misinformation, and deepfakes came online.

For better or worse, the past decade was a breathtaking era in human history in which the idea of exponential growth in information technologies powered by computation became a mainstream concept.

As I did last year for 2018 only, I’ve asked a collection of experts across the Singularity University faculty to help frame the biggest breakthroughs and moments that gave shape to the past 10 years. I asked them what, in their opinion, was the most important breakthrough in their respective fields over the past decade.

My own answer to this question, focused in the space of augmented and virtual reality, would be the stunning announcement in March of 2014 that Facebook acquired Oculus VR for $2 billion. Although VR technology had been around for a while, it was at this precise moment that VR arrived as a consumer technology platform. Facebook, largely fueled by the singular interest of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has funded the development of this industry, keeping alive the hope that consumer VR can become a sustainable business. In the meantime, VR has continued to grow in sophistication and usefulness, though it has yet to truly take off as a mainstream concept. That will hopefully be a development for the 2020s.

Below is a decade in review across the technology areas that are giving shape to our modern world, as described by the SU community of experts.

Digital Biology
Dr. Tiffany Vora | Faculty Director and Vice Chair, Digital Biology and Medicine, Singularity University

In my mind, this decade of astounding breakthroughs in the life sciences and medicine rests on the achievement of the $1,000 human genome in 2016. More-than-exponentially falling costs of DNA sequencing have driven advances in medicine, agriculture, ecology, genome editing, synthetic biology, the battle against climate change, and our fundamental understanding of life and its breathtaking connections. The “digital” revolution in DNA constituted an important model for harnessing other types of biological information, from personalized bio data to massive datasets spanning populations and species.

Crucially, by aggressively driving down the cost of such analyses, researchers and entrepreneurs democratized access to the source code of life—with attendant financial, cultural, and ethical consequences. Exciting, but take heed: Veritas Genetics spearheaded a $600 genome in 2019, only to have to shutter USA operations due to a money trail tangled with the trade war with China. Stay tuned through the early 2020s to see the pricing of DNA sequencing fall even further … and to experience the many ways that cheaper, faster harvesting of biological data will enrich your daily life.

Cryptocurrency
Alex Gladstein | Chief Strategy Officer, Human Rights Foundation

The past decade has seen Bitcoin go from just an idea on an obscure online message board to a global financial network carrying more than 100 billion dollars in value. And we’re just getting started. One recent defining moment in the cryptocurrency space has been a stunning trend underway in Venezuela, where today, the daily dollar-denominated value of Bitcoin traded now far exceeds the daily dollar-denominated value traded on the Caracas Stock Exchange. It’s just one country, but it’s a significant country, and a paradigm shift.

Governments and corporations are following Bitcoin’s success too, and are looking to launch their own digital currencies. China will launch its “DC/EP” project in the coming months, and Facebook is trying to kickstart its Libra project. There are technical and regulatory uncertainties for both, but one thing is for certain: the era of digital currency has arrived.

Business Strategy and Entrepreneurship
Pascal Finnette | Chair, Entrepreneurship and Open Innovation, Singularity University

For me, without a doubt, the most interesting and quite possibly ground-shifting development in the fields of entrepreneurship and corporate innovation in the last ten years is the rapid maturing of customer-driven product development frameworks such as Lean Startup, and its subsequent adoption by corporates for their own innovation purposes.

Tools and frameworks like the Business Model Canvas, agile (software) development and the aforementioned Lean Startup methodology fundamentally shifted the way we think and go about building products, services, and companies, with many of these tools bursting onto the startup scene in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

As these tools matured they found mass adoption not only in startups around the world, but incumbent companies who eagerly adopted them to increase their own innovation velocity and success.

Energy
Ramez Naam | Co-Chair, Energy and Environment, Singularity University

The 2010s were the decade that saw clean electricity, energy storage, and electric vehicles break through price and performance barriers around the world. Solar, wind, batteries, and EVs started this decade as technologies that had to be subsidized. That was the first phase of their existence. Now they’re entering their third, most disruptive phase, where shifting to clean energy and mobility is cheaper than continuing to use existing coal, gas, or oil infrastructure.

Consider that at the start of 2010, there was no place on earth where building new solar or wind was cheaper than building new coal or gas power generation. By 2015, in some of the sunniest and windiest places on earth, solar and wind had entered their second phase, where they were cost-competitive for new power. And then, in 2018 and 2019, we started to see the edge of the third phase, as building new solar and wind, in some parts of the world, was cheaper than operating existing coal or gas power plants.

Food Technology
Liz Specht, Ph. D | Associate Director of Science & Technology, The Good Food Institute

The arrival of mainstream plant-based meat is easily the food tech advance of the decade. Meat analogs have, of course, been around forever. But only in the last decade have companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods decided to cut animals out of the process and build no-compromise meat directly from plants.

Plant-based meat is already transforming the fast-food industry. For example, the introduction of the Impossible Whopper led Burger King to their most profitable quarter in many years. But the global food industry as a whole is shifting as well. Tyson, JBS, Nestle, Cargill, and many others are all embracing plant-based meat.

Augmented and Virtual Reality
Jody Medich | CEO, Superhuman-x

The breakthrough moment for augmented and virtual reality came in 2013 when Palmer Lucky took apart an Android smartphone and added optic lenses to make the first version of the Oculus Rift. Prior to that moment, we struggled with miniaturizing the components needed to develop low-latency head-worn devices. But thanks to the smartphone race started in 2006 with the iPhone, we finally had a suite of sensors, chips, displays, and computing power small enough to put on the head.

What will the next 10 years bring? Look for AR/VR to explode in a big way. We are right on the cusp of that tipping point when the tech is finally “good enough” for our linear expectations. Given all it can do today, we can’t even picture what’s possible. Just as today we can’t function without our phones, by 2029 we’ll feel lost without some AR/VR product. It will be the way we interact with computing, smart objects, and AI. Tim Cook, Apple CEO, predicts it will replace all of today’s computing devices. I can’t wait.

Philosophy of Technology
Alix Rübsaam | Faculty Fellow, Singularity University, Philosophy of Technology/Ethics of AI

The last decade has seen a significant shift in our general attitude towards the algorithms that we now know dictate much of our surroundings. Looking back at the beginning of the decade, it seems we were blissfully unaware of how the data we freely and willingly surrendered would feed the algorithms that would come to shape every aspect of our daily lives: the news we consume, the products we purchase, the opinions we hold, etc.

If I were to isolate a single publication that contributed greatly to the shift in public discourse on algorithms, it would have to be Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction from 2016. It remains a comprehensive, readable, and highly informative insight into how algorithms dictate our finances, our jobs, where we go to school, or if we can get health insurance. Its publication represents a pivotal moment when the general public started to question whether we should be OK with outsourcing decision making to these opaque systems.

The ubiquity of ethical guidelines for AI and algorithms published just in the last year (perhaps most comprehensively by the AI Now Institute) fully demonstrates the shift in public opinion of this decade.

Data Science
Ola Kowalewski | Faculty Fellow, Singularity University, Data Innovation

In the last decade we entered the era of internet and smartphone ubiquity. The number of internet users doubled, with nearly 60 percent of the global population connected online and now over 35 percent of the globe owns a smartphone. With billions of people in a state of constant connectedness and therefore in a state of constant surveillance, the companies that have built the tech infrastructure and information pipelines have dominated the global economy. This shift from tech companies being the underdogs to arguably the world’s major powers sets the landscape we enter for the next decade.

Global Grand Challenges
Darlene Damm | Vice Chair, Faculty, Global Grand Challenges, Singularity University

The biggest breakthrough over the last decade in social impact and technology is that the social impact sector switched from seeing technology as something problematic to avoid, to one of the most effective ways to create social change. We now see people using exponential technologies to solve all sorts of social challenges in areas ranging from disaster response to hunger to shelter.

The world’s leading social organizations, such as UNICEF and the World Food Programme, have launched their own venture funds and accelerators, and the United Nations recently declared that digitization is revolutionizing global development.

Digital Biology
Raymond McCauley | Chair, Digital Biology, Singularity University, Co-Founder & Chief Architect, BioCurious; Principal, Exponential Biosciences

CRISPR is bringing about a revolution in genetic engineering. It’s obvious, and it’s huge. What may not be so obvious is the widespread adoption of genetic testing. And this may have an even longer-lasting effect. It’s used to test new babies, to solve medical mysteries, and to catch serial killers. Thanks to holiday ads from 23andMe and Ancestry.com, it’s everywhere. Testing your DNA is now a common over-the-counter product. People are using it to set their diet, to pick drugs, and even for dating (or at least picking healthy mates).

And we’re just in the early stages. Further down the line, doing large-scale studies on more people, with more data, will lead to the use of polygenic risk scores to help us rank our genetic potential for everything from getting cancer to being a genius. Can you imagine what it would be like for parents to pick new babies, GATTACA-style, to get the smartest kids? You don’t have to; it’s already happening.

Artificial Intelligence
Neil Jacobstein | Chair, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Singularity University

The convergence of exponentially improved computing power, the deep learning algorithm, and access to massive data resulted in a series of AI breakthroughs over the past decade. These included: vastly improved accuracy in identifying images, making self driving cars practical, beating several world champions in Go, and identifying gender, smoking status, and age from retinal fundus photographs.

Combined, these breakthroughs convinced researchers and investors that after 50+ years of research and development, AI was ready for prime-time applications. Now, virtually every field of human endeavor is being revolutionized by machine learning. We still have a long way to go to achieve human-level intelligence and beyond, but the pace of worldwide improvement is blistering.

Hod Lipson | Professor of Engineering and Data Science, Columbia University

The biggest moment in AI in the past decade (and in its entire history, in my humble opinion) was midnight, Pacific time, September 30, 2012: the moment when machines finally opened their eyes. It was the moment when deep learning took off, breaking stagnant decades of machine blindness, when AI couldn’t reliably tell apart even a cat from a dog. That seemingly trivial accomplishment—a task any one-year-old child can do—has had a ripple effect on AI applications from driverless cars to health diagnostics. And this is just the beginning of what is sure to be a Cambrian explosion of AI.

Neuroscience
Divya Chander | Chair, Neuroscience, Singularity University

If the 2000s were the decade of brain mapping, then the 2010s were the decade of brain writing. Optogenetics, a technique for precisely mapping and controlling neurons and neural circuits using genetically-directed light, saw incredible growth in the 2010s.

Also in the last 10 years, neuromodulation, or the ability to rewire the brain using both invasive and non-invasive interfaces and energy, has exploded in use and form. For instance, the Braingate consortium showed us how electrode arrays implanted into the motor cortex could be used by paralyzed people to use their thoughts to direct a robotic arm. These technologies, alone or in combination with robotics, exoskeletons, and flexible, implantable, electronics also make possible a future of human augmentation.

Image Credit: Image by Jorge Guillen from Pixabay Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#436261 AI and the future of work: The prospects ...

Posted on December 3, 2019 by Android

AI experts gathered at MIT last week, with the aim of predicting the role artificial intelligence will play in the future of work. Will it be the enemy of the human worker? Will it prove to be a savior? Or will it be just another innovation—like electricity or the internet?

As IEEE Spectrum previously reported, this conference (“AI and the Future of Work Congress”), held at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium, offered sometimes pessimistic outlooks on the job- and industry-destroying path that AI and automation seems to be taking: Self-driving technology will put truck drivers out of work; smart law clerk algorithms will put paralegals out of work; robots will (continue to) put factory and warehouse workers out of work.

Andrew McAfee, co-director of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, said even just in the past couple years, he’s noticed a shift in the public’s perception of AI. “I remember from previous versions of this conference, it felt like we had to make the case that we’re living in a period of accelerating change and that AI’s going to have a big impact,” he said. “Nobody had to make that case today.”

Elisabeth Reynolds, executive director of MIT’s Task Force on the Work of the Future, noted that following the path of least resistance is not a viable way forward. “If we do nothing, we’re in trouble,” she said. “The future will not take care of itself. We have to do something about it.”

Panelists and speakers spoke about championing productive uses of AI in the workplace, which ultimately benefit both employees and customers.

As one example, Zeynep Ton, professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, highlighted retailer Sam’s Club’s recent rollout of a program called Sam’s Garage. Previously customers shopping for tires for their car spent somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes with a Sam’s Club associate paging through manuals and looking up specs on websites.

But with an AI algorithm, they were able to cut that spec hunting time down to 2.2 minutes. “Now instead of wasting their time trying to figure out the different tires, they can field the different options and talk about which one would work best [for the customer],” she said. “This is a great example of solving a real problem, including [enhancing] the experience of the associate as well as the customer.”

“We think of it as an AI-first world that’s coming,” said Scott Prevost, VP of engineering at Adobe. Prevost said AI agents in Adobe’s software will behave something like a creative assistant or intern who will take care of more mundane tasks for you.

“We need a mindset change. That it is not just about minimizing costs or maximizing tax benefits, but really worrying about what kind of society we’re creating and what kind of environment we’re creating if we keep on just automating and [eliminating] good jobs.”
—Daron Acemoglu, MIT Institute Professor of Economics

Prevost cited an internal survey of Adobe customers that found 74 percent of respondents’ time was spent doing repetitive work—the kind that might be automated by an AI script or smart agent.

“It used to be you’d have the resources to work on three ideas [for a creative pitch or presentation],” Prevost said. “But if the AI can do a lot of the production work, then you can have 10 or 100. Which means you can actually explore some of the further out ideas. It’s also lowering the bar for everyday people to create really compelling output.”

In addition to changing the nature of work, noted a number of speakers at the event, AI is also directly transforming the workforce.

Jacob Hsu, CEO of the recruitment company Catalyte spoke about using AI as a job placement tool. The company seeks to fill myriad positions including auto mechanics, baristas, and office workers—with its sights on candidates including young people and mid-career job changers. To find them, it advertises on Craigslist, social media, and traditional media.

The prospects who sign up with Catalyte take a battery of tests. The company’s AI algorithms then match each prospect’s skills with the field best suited for their talents.

“We want to be like the Harry Potter Sorting Hat,” Hsu said.

Guillermo Miranda, IBM’s global head of corporate social responsibility, said IBM has increasingly been hiring based not on credentials but on skills. For instance, he said, as much as 50 per cent of the company’s new hires in some divisions do not have a traditional four-year college degree. “As a company, we need to be much more clear about hiring by skills,” he said. “It takes discipline. It takes conviction. It takes a little bit of enforcing with H.R. by the business leaders. But if you hire by skills, it works.”

Ardine Williams, Amazon’s VP of workforce development, said the e-commerce giant has been experimenting with developing skills of the employees at its warehouses (a.k.a. fulfillment centers) with an eye toward putting them in a position to get higher-paying work with other companies.

She described an agreement Amazon had made in its Dallas fulfillment center with aircraft maker Sikorsky, which had been experiencing a shortage of skilled workers for its nearby factory. So Amazon offered to its employees a free certification training to seek higher-paying work at Sikorsky.

“I do that because now I have an attraction mechanism—like a G.I. Bill,” Williams said. The program is also only available for employees who have worked at least a year with Amazon. So their program offers medium-term job retention, while ultimately moving workers up the wage ladder.

Radha Basu, CEO of AI data company iMerit, said her firm aggressively hires from the pool of women and under-resourced minority communities in the U.S. and India. The company specializes in turning unstructured data (e.g. video or audio feeds) into tagged and annotated data for machine learning, natural language processing, or computer vision applications.

“There is a motivation with these young people to learn these things,” she said. “It comes with no baggage.”

Alastair Fitzpayne, executive director of The Aspen Institute’s Future of Work Initiative, said the future of work ultimately means, in bottom-line terms, the future of human capital. “We have an R&D tax credit,” he said. “We’ve had it for decades. It provides credit for companies that make new investment in research and development. But we have nothing on the human capital side that’s analogous.”

So a company that’s making a big investment in worker training does it on their own dime, without any of the tax benefits that they might accrue if they, say, spent it on new equipment or new technology. Fitzpayne said a simple tweak to the R&D tax credit could make a big difference by incentivizing new investment programs in worker training. Which still means Amazon’s pre-existing worker training programs—for a company that already famously pays no taxes—would not count.

“We need a different way of developing new technologies,” said Daron Acemoglu, MIT Institute Professor of Economics. He pointed to the clean energy sector as an example. First a consensus around the problem needs to emerge. Then a broadly agreed-upon set of goals and measurements needs to be developed (e.g., that AI and automation would, for instance, create at least X new jobs for every Y jobs that it eliminates).

Then it just needs to be implemented.

“We need to build a consensus that, along the path we’re following at the moment, there are going to be increasing problems for labor,” Acemoglu said. “We need a mindset change. That it is not just about minimizing costs or maximizing tax benefits, but really worrying about what kind of society we’re creating and what kind of environment we’re creating if we keep on just automating and [eliminating] good jobs.” Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#436209 Video Friday: Robotic Endoscope Travels ...

Posted on November 23, 2019 by Android

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!):

DARPA SubT Urban Circuit – February 18-27, 2020 – Olympia, WA, USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

Kuka has just announced the results of its annual Innovation Award. From an initial batch of 30 applicants, five teams reached the finals (we were part of the judging committee). The five finalists worked for nearly a year on their applications, which they demonstrated this week at the Medica trade show in Düsseldorf, Germany. And the winner of the €20,000 prize is…Team RoboFORCE, led by the STORM Lab in the U.K., which developed a “robotic magnetic flexible endoscope for painless colorectal cancer screening, surveillance, and intervention.”

The system could improve colonoscopy procedures by reducing pain and discomfort as well as other risks such as bleeding and perforation, according to the STORM Lab researchers. It uses a magnetic field to control the endoscope, pulling rather than pushing it through the colon.

The other four finalists also presented some really interesting applications—you can see their videos below.

“Because we were so please with the high quality of the submissions, we will have next year’s finals again at the Medica fair, and the challenge will be named ‘Medical Robotics’,” says Rainer Bischoff, vice president for corporate research at Kuka. He adds that the selected teams will again use Kuka’s LBR Med robot arm, which is “already certified for integration into medical products and makes it particularly easy for startups to use a robot as the main component for a particular solution.”

Applications are now open for Kuka’s Innovation Award 2020. You can find more information on how to enter here. The deadline is 5 January 2020.

[ Kuka ]

Oh good, Aibo needs to be fed now.

You know what comes next, right?

[ Aibo ]

Your cat needs this robot.

It's about $200 on Kickstarter.

[ Kickstarter ]

Enjoy this tour of the Skydio offices courtesy Skydio 2, which runs into not even one single thing.

If any Skydio employees had important piles of papers on their desks, well, they don’t anymore.

[ Skydio ]

Artificial intelligence is everywhere nowadays, but what exactly does it mean? We asked a group MIT computer science grad students and post-docs how they personally define AI.

“When most people say AI, they actually mean machine learning, which is just pattern recognition.” Yup.

[ MIT ]

Using event-based cameras, this drone control system can track attitude at 1600 degrees per second (!).

[ UZH ]

Introduced at CES 2018, Walker is an intelligent humanoid service robot from UBTECH Robotics. Below are the latest features and technologies used during our latest round of development to make Walker even better.

[ Ubtech ]

Introducing the Alpha Prime by #VelodyneLidar, the most advanced lidar sensor on the market! Alpha Prime delivers an unrivaled combination of field-of-view, range, high-resolution, clarity and operational performance.

Performance looks good, but don’t expect it to be cheap.

[ Velodyne ]

Ghost Robotics’ Spirit 40 will start shipping to researchers in January of next year.

[ Ghost Robotics ]

Unitree is about to ship the first batch of their AlienGo quadrupeds as well:

[ Unitree ]

Mechanical engineering’s Sarah Bergbreiter discusses her work on micro robotics, how they draw inspiration from insects and animals, and how tiny robots can help humans in a variety of fields.

[ CMU ]

Learning contact-rich, robotic manipulation skills is a challenging problem due to the high-dimensionality of the state and action space as well as uncertainty from noisy sensors and inaccurate motor control. To combat these factors and achieve more robust manipulation, humans actively exploit contact constraints in the environment. By adopting a similar strategy, robots can also achieve more robust manipulation. In this paper, we enable a robot to autonomously modify its environment and thereby discover how to ease manipulation skill learning. Specifically, we provide the robot with fixtures that it can freely place within the environment. These fixtures provide hard constraints that limit the outcome of robot actions. Thereby, they funnel uncertainty from perception and motor control and scaffold manipulation skill learning.

[ Stanford ]

Since 2016, Verity's drones have completed more than 200,000 flights around the world. Completely autonomous, client-operated and designed for live events, Verity is making the magic real by turning drones into flying lights, characters, and props.

[ Verity ]

To monitor and stop the spread of wildfires, University of Michigan engineers developed UAVs that could find, map and report fires. One day UAVs like this could work with disaster response units, firefighters and other emergency teams to provide real-time accurate information to reduce damage and save lives. For their research, the University of Michigan graduate students won first place at a competition for using a swarm of UAVs to successfully map and report simulated wildfires.

[ University of Michigan ]

Here’s an important issue that I haven’t heard talked about all that much: How first responders should interact with self-driving cars.

“To put the car in manual mode, you must call Waymo.” Huh.

[ Waymo ]

Here’s what Gitai has been up to recently, from a Humanoids 2019 workshop talk.

[ Gitai ]

The latest CMU RI seminar comes from Girish Chowdhary at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on “Autonomous and Intelligent Robots in Unstructured Field Environments.”

What if a team of collaborative autonomous robots grew your food for you? In this talk, I will discuss some key advances in robotics, machine learning, and autonomy that will one day enable teams of small robots to grow food for you in your backyard in a fundamentally more sustainable way than modern mega-farms! Teams of small aerial and ground robots could be a potential solution to many of the serious problems that modern agriculture is facing. However, fully autonomous robots that operate without supervision for weeks, months, or entire growing season are not yet practical. I will discuss my group’s theoretical and practical work towards the underlying challenging problems in robotic systems, autonomy, sensing, and learning. I will begin with our lightweight, compact, and autonomous field robot TerraSentia and the recent successes of this type of undercanopy robots for high-throughput phenotyping with deep learning-based machine vision. I will also discuss how to make a team of autonomous robots learn to coordinate to weed large agricultural farms under partial observability. These direct applications will help me make the case for the type of reinforcement learning and adaptive control that are necessary to usher in the next generation of autonomous field robots that learn to solve complex problems in harsh, changing, and dynamic environments. I will then end with an overview of our new MURI, in which we are working towards developing AI and control that leverages neurodynamics inspired by the Octopus brain.

[ CMU RI ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#436188 The Blogger Behind “AI ...

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Android

Sure, artificial intelligence is transforming the world’s societies and economies—but can an AI come up with plausible ideas for a Halloween costume?

Janelle Shane has been asking such probing questions since she started her AI Weirdness blog in 2016. She specializes in training neural networks (which underpin most of today’s machine learning techniques) on quirky data sets such as compilations of knitting instructions, ice cream flavors, and names of paint colors. Then she asks the neural net to generate its own contributions to these categories—and hilarity ensues. AI is not likely to disrupt the paint industry with names like “Ronching Blue,” “Dorkwood,” and “Turdly.”

Shane’s antics have a serious purpose. She aims to illustrate the serious limitations of today’s AI, and to counteract the prevailing narrative that describes AI as well on its way to superintelligence and complete human domination. “The danger of AI is not that it’s too smart,” Shane writes in her new book, “but that it’s not smart enough.”

The book, which came out on Tuesday, is called You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. It takes its odd title from a list of AI-generated pick-up lines, all of which would at least get a person’s attention if shouted, preferably by a robot, in a crowded bar. Shane’s book is shot through with her trademark absurdist humor, but it also contains real explanations of machine learning concepts and techniques. It’s a painless way to take AI 101.

She spoke with IEEE Spectrum about the perils of placing too much trust in AI systems, the strange AI phenomenon of “giraffing,” and her next potential Halloween costume.

Janelle Shane on . . .

The un-delicious origin of her blog
“The narrower the problem, the smarter the AI will seem”
Why overestimating AI is dangerous
Giraffing!
Machine and human creativity

The un-delicious origin of her blog IEEE Spectrum: You studied electrical engineering as an undergrad, then got a master’s degree in physics. How did that lead to you becoming the comedian of AI?
Janelle Shane: I’ve been interested in machine learning since freshman year of college. During orientation at Michigan State, a professor who worked on evolutionary algorithms gave a talk about his work. It was full of the most interesting anecdotes–some of which I’ve used in my book. He told an anecdote about people setting up a machine learning algorithm to do lens design, and the algorithm did end up designing an optical system that works… except one of the lenses was 50 feet thick, because they didn’t specify that it couldn’t do that.
I started working in his lab on optics, doing ultra-short laser pulse work. I ended up doing a lot more optics than machine learning, but I always found it interesting. One day I came across a list of recipes that someone had generated using a neural net, and I thought it was hilarious and remembered why I thought machine learning was so cool. That was in 2016, ages ago in machine learning land.
Spectrum: So you decided to “establish weirdness as your goal” for your blog. What was the first weird experiment that you blogged about?
Shane: It was generating cookbook recipes. The neural net came up with ingredients like: “Take ¼ pounds of bones or fresh bread.” That recipe started out: “Brown the salmon in oil, add creamed meat to the mixture.” It was making mistakes that showed the thing had no memory at all.
Spectrum: You say in the book that you can learn a lot about AI by giving it a task and watching it flail. What do you learn?
Shane: One thing you learn is how much it relies on surface appearances rather than deep understanding. With the recipes, for example: It got the structure of title, category, ingredients, instructions, yield at the end. But when you look more closely, it has instructions like “Fold the water and roll it into cubes.” So clearly this thing does not understand water, let alone the other things. It’s recognizing certain phrases that tend to occur, but it doesn’t have a concept that these recipes are describing something real. You start to realize how very narrow the algorithms in this world are. They only know exactly what we tell them in our data set.
BACK TO TOP↑ “The narrower the problem, the smarter the AI will seem” Spectrum: That makes me think of DeepMind’s AlphaGo, which was universally hailed as a triumph for AI. It can play the game of Go better than any human, but it doesn’t know what Go is. It doesn’t know that it’s playing a game.
Shane: It doesn’t know what a human is, or if it’s playing against a human or another program. That’s also a nice illustration of how well these algorithms do when they have a really narrow and well-defined problem.
The narrower the problem, the smarter the AI will seem. If it’s not just doing something repeatedly but instead has to understand something, coherence goes down. For example, take an algorithm that can generate images of objects. If the algorithm is restricted to birds, it could do a recognizable bird. If this same algorithm is asked to generate images of any animal, if its task is that broad, the bird it generates becomes an unrecognizable brown feathered smear against a green background.
Spectrum: That sounds… disturbing.
Shane: It’s disturbing in a weird amusing way. What’s really disturbing is the humans it generates. It hasn’t seen them enough times to have a good representation, so you end up with an amorphous, usually pale-faced thing with way too many orifices. If you asked it to generate an image of a person eating pizza, you’ll have blocks of pizza texture floating around. But if you give that image to an image-recognition algorithm that was trained on that same data set, it will say, “Oh yes, that’s a person eating pizza.”
BACK TO TOP↑ Why overestimating AI is dangerous Spectrum: Do you see it as your role to puncture the AI hype?
Shane: I do see it that way. Not a lot of people are bringing out this side of AI. When I first started posting my results, I’d get people saying, “I don’t understand, this is AI, shouldn’t it be better than this? Why doesn't it understand?” Many of the impressive examples of AI have a really narrow task, or they’ve been set up to hide how little understanding it has. There’s a motivation, especially among people selling products based on AI, to represent the AI as more competent and understanding than it actually is.
Spectrum: If people overestimate the abilities of AI, what risk does that pose?
Shane: I worry when I see people trusting AI with decisions it can’t handle, like hiring decisions or decisions about moderating content. These are really tough tasks for AI to do well on. There are going to be a lot of glitches. I see people saying, “The computer decided this so it must be unbiased, it must be objective.”

“If the algorithm’s task is to replicate human hiring decisions, it’s going to glom onto gender bias and race bias.”
—Janelle Shane, AI Weirdness blogger
That’s another thing I find myself highlighting in the work I’m doing. If the data includes bias, the algorithm will copy that bias. You can’t tell it not to be biased, because it doesn’t understand what bias is. I think that message is an important one for people to understand.
If there’s bias to be found, the algorithm is going to go after it. It’s like, “Thank goodness, finally a signal that’s reliable.” But for a tough problem like: Look at these resumes and decide who’s best for the job. If its task is to replicate human hiring decisions, it’s going to glom onto gender bias and race bias. There’s an example in the book of a hiring algorithm that Amazon was developing that discriminated against women, because the historical data it was trained on had that gender bias.
Spectrum: What are the other downsides of using AI systems that don’t really understand their tasks?
Shane: There is a risk in putting too much trust in AI and not examining its decisions. Another issue is that it can solve the wrong problems, without anyone realizing it. There have been a couple of cases in medicine. For example, there was an algorithm that was trained to recognize things like skin cancer. But instead of recognizing the actual skin condition, it latched onto signals like the markings a surgeon makes on the skin, or a ruler placed there for scale. It was treating those things as a sign of skin cancer. It’s another indication that these algorithms don’t understand what they’re looking at and what the goal really is.
BACK TO TOP↑ Giraffing Spectrum: In your blog, you often have neural nets generate names for things—such as ice cream flavors, paint colors, cats, mushrooms, and types of apples. How do you decide on topics?
Shane: Quite often it’s because someone has written in with an idea or a data set. They’ll say something like, “I’m the MIT librarian and I have a whole list of MIT thesis titles.” That one was delightful. Or they’ll say, “We are a high school robotics team, and we know where there’s a list of robotics team names.” It’s fun to peek into a different world. I have to be careful that I’m not making fun of the naming conventions in the field. But there’s a lot of humor simply in the neural net’s complete failure to understand. Puns in particular—it really struggles with puns.
Spectrum: Your blog is quite absurd, but it strikes me that machine learning is often absurd in itself. Can you explain the concept of giraffing?
Shane: This concept was originally introduced by [internet security expert] Melissa Elliott. She proposed this phrase as a way to describe the algorithms’ tendency to see giraffes way more often than would be likely in the real world. She posted a whole bunch of examples, like a photo of an empty field in which an image-recognition algorithm has confidently reported that there are giraffes. Why does it think giraffes are present so often when they’re actually really rare? Because they’re trained on data sets from online. People tend to say, “Hey look, a giraffe!” And then take a photo and share it. They don’t do that so often when they see an empty field with rocks.
There’s also a chatbot that has a delightful quirk. If you show it some photo and ask it how many giraffes are in the picture, it will always answer with some non zero number. This quirk comes from the way the training data was generated: These were questions asked and answered by humans online. People tended not to ask the question “How many giraffes are there?” when the answer was zero. So you can show it a picture of someone holding a Wii remote. If you ask it how many giraffes are in the picture, it will say two.
BACK TO TOP↑ Machine and human creativity Spectrum: AI can be absurd, and maybe also creative. But you make the point that AI art projects are really human-AI collaborations: Collecting the data set, training the algorithm, and curating the output are all artistic acts on the part of the human. Do you see your work as a human-AI art project?
Shane: Yes, I think there is artistic intent in my work; you could call it literary or visual. It’s not so interesting to just take a pre-trained algorithm that’s been trained on utilitarian data, and tell it to generate a bunch of stuff. Even if the algorithm isn’t one that I’ve trained myself, I think about, what is it doing that’s interesting, what kind of story can I tell around it, and what do I want to show people.

The Halloween costume algorithm “was able to draw on its knowledge of which words are related to suggest things like sexy barnacle.”
—Janelle Shane, AI Weirdness blogger
Spectrum: For the past three years you’ve been getting neural nets to generate ideas for Halloween costumes. As language models have gotten dramatically better over the past three years, are the costume suggestions getting less absurd?
Shane: Yes. Before I would get a lot more nonsense words. This time I got phrases that were related to real things in the data set. I don’t believe the training data had the words Flying Dutchman or barnacle. But it was able to draw on its knowledge of which words are related to suggest things like sexy barnacle and sexy Flying Dutchman.
Spectrum: This year, I saw on Twitter that someone made the gothy giraffe costume happen. Would you ever dress up for Halloween in a costume that the neural net suggested?
Shane: I think that would be fun. But there would be some challenges. I would love to go as the sexy Flying Dutchman. But my ambition may constrict me to do something more like a list of leg parts.
BACK TO TOP↑ Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots