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Category: robotics/AI

AI-powered lab discovers brighter lead-free nanomaterials in 12 hours

A new autonomous laboratory recently navigated through billions of potential material synthesis recipes to identify brighter, lead-free light-emitting nanomaterials in just 12 hours. The work could accelerate development of safer light-emitting nanoplatelets for use in applications ranging from photodetectors to the production of fuel from solar energy. A paper describing this work appears in Nature Communications.

Nanoplatelets are sheet-like crystals only billionths of a meter thick; in this case, they belong to a family of lead-free “double perovskites,” materials whose atomic recipe can be tuned to control how they absorb and emit light.

“One of the big challenges in developing safer optical nanomaterials is the sheer size of the material universe,” says Milad Abolhasani, Alcoa Professor and University Faculty Scholar in the department of chemical and biomolecular engineering at North Carolina State University. Abolhasani is the corresponding author of the research.

Beyond borders: Metaverse manufacturing envisions AI-linked local production built on digital twins

Over the past decades, technological advances have fueled great innovation in a wide range of fields. Emerging and rapidly developing technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) systems, three-dimensional (3D) and four-dimensional (4D) printing, digital twins (i.e., virtual representations of physical objects, systems or processes) and advanced robots, are set to further transform many industries and sectors.

Researchers at London South Bank University explored the idea of metaverse manufacturing, an industrial ecosystem that would blend technology-enhanced physical production processes with immersive visual environments. In a paper published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, they tried to envision how this ecosystem could work and what technologies it would rely on, while also considering its possible advantages in terms of sustainability and productivity.

The study was conducted within the Mechanical Intelligence (MI) Research Group at London South Bank University, which focuses on bioinspired design and adaptive engineering systems.

After a 40-year wait, technology finally enables three-sided zipper design

In 1985, the Innovative Design Fund placed an ad in Scientific American offering up to $10,000 to support clever prototypes for clothing, home decor, and textiles. William Freeman Ph.D., then an electrical engineer at Polaroid and now an MIT professor, saw it and submitted a novel idea: a three-sided zipper. Instead of fastening pants, it’d be like a switch that seamlessly flipped chairs, tents, and purses between soft and rigid states, making them easier to pack and put together.

Freeman’s blueprint was much like a regular zipper, except triangular. On each side, he nailed a belt to connect narrow wooden “teeth” together. A slider wrapping around the device could be moved up to fasten the three strips into place, straightening them into a triangular tube. His proposal was rejected, but Freeman patented his prototype and stored it in his garage in the hopes it might come in handy one day.

Nearly 40 years later, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers wanted to revive the project to create items with “tunable stiffness.” Prior attempts to adjust that weren’t easily reversible or required manual assembly, so CSAIL built an automated design tool and adaptable fastener called the “Y-zipper.” The scientists’ software program helps users customize three-sided zippers, which it then builds on its own in a 3D printer using plastics. These devices can be attached or embedded into camping equipment, medical gear, robots, and art installations for more convenient assembly.

DNA-reading AI reconstructs ancestry in minutes, matching top statistical methods

Researchers at the University of Oregon have developed an artificial intelligence tool that can read genetic code the way large language models like ChatGPT read text. Scanning the genome for biological mutation patterns, the computer model traces pairs of genes back in time to their last common ancestor.

It’s the first language model designed for population genetics, said Andrew Kern, a computational biologist in the UO College of Arts and Sciences. As described in a paper published April 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the AI tool offers scientists a fast and flexible alternative to classical methods for reconstructing evolutionary history.

In practice, it can help researchers like Kern understand when disease-resistance genes emerged in a population, for example, or when species evolved key traits.

AI fails to make inroads with cybercriminals, study finds

Cybercriminals have been struggling to adopt AI in their work, reports the first-of-its-kind study that analyzed a dataset of 100 million posts from underground cybercrime communities. The study is published on the arXiv preprint server.

In reality, most cybercriminals—often referred to as hackers—lack the skills or resources to support real innovation within their criminal activities, experts say.

No digital content is safe from generative AI, researchers say

A research team led by Virginia Tech cybersecurity expert Bimal Viswanath has found a critical blind spot in today’s image protection techniques designed to prevent bad actors from stealing online content for unauthorized artificial intelligence training, style mimicry, and deepfake manipulations. The study is published on the arXiv preprint server.

The research team found that attackers can defeat existing security using off-the-shelf artificial intelligence (AI) models and simple commands. Furthermore, “There is currently no foolproof, mathematically guaranteed way for users to protect publicly posted images against an adversary using off-the-shelf GenAI models,” Viswanath said.

The work was presented at the fourth IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning, in Munich, Germany. The authors include Viswanath, doctoral students Xavier Pleimling and Sifat Muhammad Abdullah, Assistant Professor Peng Gao, Murtuza Jadliwala of the University of Texas at San Antonio, and Gunjan Balde and Mainack Mondal of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

Backdoored PyTorch Lightning package drops credential stealer

A malicious version of the PyTorch Lightning package published on the Python Package Index (PyPI) delivers a credential-stealing payload targeting browsers, environment files, and cloud services.

The developer disclosed the supply-chain attack on April 30, saying that version 2.6.3 of the package included a hidden execution chain that downloads and executes a JavaScript payload.

PyTorch Lightning is a deep learning framework used for pretraining and fine-tuning AI models. It is a popular package, amassing more than 11 million downloads last month.

2024 World Computer Chess Championships: The 50th Anniversary

Hosted by the european conference on artificial intelligence.

Sponsored by Google DeepMind.

In August 1970, six chess-playing programs and their developers gathered in New York to compete in the 1st United States Computer Chess Championship. This important event in the history of AI research began a series of annual competitions that continues to this day, longer than any other experiment in computer science history.

OS Orchestration: Stepping Into a Frictionless Future of AI Sparks and Endless Abundance

There’s a very specific reason the tech giants are suddenly racing to get AI running locally on your phone, watch, and smart glasses.

The traditional Operating System (OS) is quietly being retired. Soon, the OS as you know it will be replaced entirely by an omnipresent AI hub.

But if the OS becomes an AI, what happens to that grid of static apps we rely on every day? And when the friction of swiping and searching disappears, how does the underlying economy of the Internet shift?

In my latest piece, I explore what happens next: the death of the app, the rise of dynamic AI “Sparks,” and a hidden token economy where your device doesn’t just cost you money—it generates it.

Want a glimpse at what your digital life looks like when you stop swiping and start orchestrating?

I have been on a breathtaking journey, for decades I have been watching how we connect with the world and each other. If you’ve been around tech long enough, you remember the humble hum of single twisted-pair copper wires, and the sheer, brick-like weight of early cell phones. Fast forward to today, and we are streaming the entirety of human knowledge over millimeter-wave antennas onto super-thin slabs of glass in our pockets.

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