Jul 15
Computers are good at a lot of things. Thinking like a grown-up human being is not one of them. Not yet, at least.
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Jul 11
We poke fun at Siri and pretend to get scared by Humanoid robots and make our neck hair stand up straight by watching quadrocopters do amazing things but the truth is, artificial intelligence is still pretty dumb. But that’s going to change! The rise of artificial intelligence is happening and they’re learning a lot more about us because we’re learning more about them. Sort of.
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Jul 02
"What if" is sort of a loaded phrase in the Marvel Universe. Writers have always been able to ramble off a What If… Wolverine had hot dogs for claws!? and then you’d see "WHAT IF: HOT DOG WOLVERINE" on a spinner rack. But sometimes, just from the nature of comics being batshit insane, we get thought experiments played out long form. And so after Age of Ultron ended with a huge influx of artificial intelligence beings in the Marvel universe, we now have Avengers AI, an Avengers team captained by the Vision. An entire team of gadget Avengers, basically.
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Jun 15
Anki Drive isn’t just a car racing game, it’s an iOS-based robotics platform
Posted in: Today's Chili
When Anki Drive was demoed live on stage during Apple’s WWDC, we saw a modern take on classic slot cars using iOS devices and Bluetooth-equipped toy vehicles — basically a racing video game rendered with real world objects. But there’s actually a lot more to it than that. Earlier this week, we talked briefly with Boris Sofman — Anki’s CEO and cofounder — about the product and the startup’s history and ambitions. While playing the game and taking pictures was off limits, we got the opportunity to examine the cars up close. Read on after the break.
Gallery: WWDC 2013: Anki Drive App
Jun 10
Apple is just starting its WWDC keynote this morning, but it’s already announcing something quite interesting: a new company called Anki and its inaugural iOS app called Anki Drive, which centers around artificial intelligence and robotics. The name, which is Japanese for “memorize,” features smart cars that are capable of driving themselves (although you can certainly take over at any time) and communicate with your iPhone using Bluetooth LE. These intelligent vehicles, when placed upon a printed race track, can sense the track up to 500 times a second. The iOS-exclusive game is available as a beta in the App Store today, which you’ll need to sign up for — the full release won’t be coming until this fall — and it’s billed as a “video game in the real world.” According to the developers, “the real fun is when you take control of these cars yourselves,” which we can definitely attest to — the WWDC demo cars had weapons, after all.
Gallery: WWDC 2013: Anki Drive App
Follow our liveblog for all of the latest news from WWDC 2013.
Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Software, Mobile, Apple
Source: Anki
May 20
Ionut Budisteanu of Romania certainly does seem to have a pretty bright future ahead of him, especially after he picked up the top prize at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, which so happens to be the largest high school science research competition in the world. This would mean that Ionut Budisteanu managed to earn the Gordon E. Moore Award, in addition to a $75,000 prize that was named in honor of the Intel co-founder and fellow scientist. According to the organizers of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, “Their research demonstrates the value of hard work and creative thinking. All the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair finalists here this week show great promise in harnessing the power of science and innovation to solve problems and create opportunity for our global community.” Just what made Ionut’s work so valuable? Well, he manages to address a major global issue by potentially reducing the cost of a self-driving car dramatically, so much so that it could make such technology affordable to the mainstream folks.
Thanks to an array of 3-D radar and mounted cameras, Ionut has successfully created a feasible design for an autonomously controlled car which is smart enough to detect traffic lanes and curbs, in addition to keeping track of the real-time position of the car. The best part of the news is? The entire shebang would cost a mere $4,000, which is a whole lot more affordable that what Google is currently using in their self driving car project.
Ionut decided that processing webcam imagery using artificial intelligence technology to check out items like curbs, lane markers, and who knows, soccer balls which so happen to go out of the field of play and roll onto the road, would be able to eliminate the need for a high end 3D radar, resulting in the use of a low-resolution 3-D radar to get the job done when it comes to recognizing large objects such as other vehicles, houses, and obstacles like trees. Ionut ran 50 simulations with his system, where in 47 of them, no accidents were recorded. Three of the simulations that failed involved the non-recognition of people who were 65 to 100 feet (20 to 30 meters) away, and a slightly higher-resolution 3-D radar should get the job done down the road.
Press Release
[ Romanian teenager advances self-driving car idea copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]
May 16
Google and NASA team up for D-Wave-powered Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab
Posted in: Today's Chili
Google. NASA. Quantum computers. Seriously, everything about the new Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Ames Research Center is exciting. The joint effort between Mountain View and America’s space agency will put a 512 qubit machine from D-Wave at the disposal of researchers from around the globe, with the USRA (Universities Space Research Association) inviting teams of scientists and engineers to share time on the unique super computer. The goal is to study how quantum computing might be leveraged to advance machine learning, a branch of AI that has proven crucial to Google’s success. The internet giant has already done some work with quantum computing before, now the goal is to see if its experimentation can translate into real world results. The idea, for Google at least, is to combine the extreme (but highly-specialized) power of the quantum bit with its oceans of traditional data centers to build more accurate models for everything from speech recognition to web search. And maybe, just maybe, with the help of quantum computers your phone will finally realize you didn’t mean to say “duck.”
Filed under: Misc, Alt, Google
Via: New York Times
Source: Google Research Blog
Mar 19
Hoping to be holding the personal assistant of the future, researchers at the University of Cambridge have unveiled what’s supposedly the most realistically esxpressive controllable avatar ever. Move aside, Siri—this is what you get for mouthing off. More »
Mar 09
Remember SmarterChild? That AIM bot that would answer all/most of your questions and get huffy and stop talking to you when you inevitably started swearing at it? Unfortunately SmarterChild is still dead and gone, but it’s got a Twitter descendant: @DearAssistant. More »
Feb 28
Watson ponders careers in cooking, drug research as IBM makes it earn its keep
Posted in: Today's Chili 
While mad game show skills are nice and all, IBM has started to nudge Watson toward the door to begin paying its own freight. After a recent foray into finance, the publicity-loving supercomputer has now brought its number-crunching prowess to the pharmaceutical and pastry industries, according to the New York Times. If the latter sounds like a stretch for a hunk of silicon, it actually isn’t: researchers trained Watson with food chemistry data, flavor popularity studies and 20,000 recipes — all of which will culminate in a tasting of the bot’s freshly devised “Spanish Crescent” recipe. Watson was also put to work at GlaxoSmithKline, where it came up with 15 potential compounds as possible anti-malarial drugs after being fed all known literature and data on the disease. So far, Watson projects haven’t made Big Blue much cash, but the company hopes that similar AI ventures might see its prodigal child finally pay back all those years of training.
Filed under: Science
Source: New York Times
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