Petting zoos are fun, but they can also be kind of sketchy. Is that rabbit being attacked by too many five-year-olds? Is that goat depressed? It’s awkward. But if the tactile experience were coming from robots and AI you might really be able to enjoy yourself.
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[CEATEC 2013] We took a gander at Asukanet’s Aerial Imaging (AI) plate last year, where the premise of this particular setup was extremely simple – it will project an image that looks as though a “hologram” is being projected ala Star Wars. The projection itself will be placed at a 45-degree angle from the display, where your peripheral vision would be able to “capture” this “hologram” within a radius of 40-degrees. It does seem as though the image quality has improved, and there are several new applications that were demonstrated on the showfloor.
Aerial Imaging (AI) Plate Gets New Applications original content from Ubergizmo. 
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What the hell is Evernote doing selling backpacks and socks? That’s a question asked by many yesterday, when Evernote revealed a plan to expand its business well beyond productivity software by opening up Evernote Market. The Market, revealed at the third annual Evernote conference in San Francisco, debuted selling a selection of high-end bags from Côte&Ciel, notebooks from Moleskine, a scanner from Fujitsu, a stylus from Adonit, plus a smattering of T-shirts, posters and the aforementioned socks. The stylus packs the smallest tip on the market and is designed to work with note-taking apps like Penultimate. And the scanner integrates tightly with Evernote software, too — it can scan a pile of varied documents (business cards, receipts, invoices, etc.), then sort and deposit the results an appropriate notebook automagically.
At first blush, selling physical goods seems odd for such a company. To hear CEO Phil Libin tell it, however, the move into retail is a logical one, should you be willing to make a bit of a cognitive leap. The key to this strategy was revealed during his day two keynote, when Libin said that his company is in the business of AI. However, those letters stand for augmented, not artificial intelligence.
Facebook’s current News Feed ranking isn’t all that clever — it’s good at surfacing popular updates, but it can miss lower-profile updates that are personally relevant. The company may soon raise the News Feed’s IQ, however, as it recently launched an artificial intelligence research group. The new team hopes to use deep learning AI, which simulates a neural network, to determine which posts are genuinely important. The technology could also sort a user’s photos, and it might even select the best shots. While the AI work has only just begun, the company tells MIT Technology Review that it should release some findings to the public; those breakthroughs in social networking could help society as a whole.
Filed under: Internet, Facebook
Source: MIT Technology Review
Getting out of bed is the worst. And anyone who says they don’t mind waking up can just leave now. Some of us are employing desperate measures to get going every morning, and a manipulative/verbally abusive alarm clock sounds like just the thing. The makers of the CARROT To-Do
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AI had its narrative problems, sure. But it didn’t have a problem with the awesomeness of its practical effects, specifically the awesomeness of this fully kinetic, crippled android puppet. It’s so good that the robo-carnage is almost disturbing.
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When people talk about artificial intelligence, it’s tempting to think that it means computers can think (a little) like humans. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that’s not quite the case.
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A new Kickstarter project seems like the wish fulfillment of a child of the late 80s or early 90s: the Supertoy Teddy is a stuffed bear you can talk to, just like Teddy Ruxpin, but this one intelligently talks back, rather than just operating via an embedded cassette deck with a fixed number and order of recorded statements. Supertoy Teddy is a robot, with AI-like conversational powers, built by a robotics company in Wales.
The Supertoy’s pedigree is a good one, as Supertoy Robotics’ co-creators Ashley Conlan and Karsten Flügge previously made Jeannie Rabbot, a Siri-like virtual assistant powered in part by Nuance tech that’s available for iPhone, Mac, Android and more. The Teddy inherits Jeannie’s bubbly personality, offering human emotion approximations and totally autonomous speech generation.
Supertoy Teddy uses a smartphone and remote server to do the heavy lifting of processing requests and formulating answers, using a free Android or iOS app to do so. The stuffed bear itself has a zipped compartment to hold the phone and connect it to its internal processing bits. The company says they’ve already built three prototypes, with the last being production-ready, which is why they’re targeting a December rollout for the first backer shipments if the campaign is successful.
Teddy has a mouth that moves, and later on will get more robotic movement in his limbs and other areas, too. The toy can also learn a person’s preferences and change its attitude accordingly, meaning an adult with one could end up with a Ted-like companion, while a kid would get the sweetest bear around. The Teddy can also be a practical help, offering up weather, setting alarms, reading bed time stories, playing music, doing phone calls, sending texts or emails and more.
Out of the box Supertoy Teddy can manage 30 different languages, with planned support in the future for different voices specially tailored to each. The tone of its voice already adapts to different emotions, to make it more lifelike. Backers can get one starting at £42 (around $62 U.S.).
Teddy Ruxpin was the toy we all imagined would actually come alive and talk to us, but Supertoy Teddy looks to be the real fulfillment of that childhood dream. Plus, since it’s designed for kids of all ages, anyone who still remembers Ruxpin fondly can get one, too, and use the Supertoy to help do their taxes or whatever else comes to mind.
It’ll take a long time before we see a J.A.R.V.I.S. in real life — University of Illinois at Chicago researchers put MIT’s ConceptNet 4 AI through the verbal portions of a children’s IQ test, and rated its apparent relative intelligence as that of a 4-year-old. Despite an excellent vocabulary and ability to recognize similarities, the lack of basic life experience leaves one of the best AI systems unable to answer even easy “why” questions. Those sound simple, but not even the famed Watson supercomputer is capable of human-like comprehension, and research lead Robert Sloan believes we’re far from developing one that is. We hope scientists get cracking and conjure up an AI worthy of our sci-fi dreams… so long as it doesn’t pull a Skynet on humanity.
[Image credit: Kenny Louie]
Via: Extremetech
Source: University of Illinois Chicago
A growing number of “smart” apps are using artificial intelligence algorithms in order to give you a more efficient and more personalized mobile experience.
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