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Category: robotics/AI

Engineered for the Future

Buildings account for 30–40 percent of global energy expenditure and more than half of global electricity consumption. But the most advanced smart buildings—those with full automation, AI controls, and on-site generation—can achieve energy reductions of 50–70 percent. Scaled across the built environment, that translates to 60–110 exajoules of energy saved per year—that’s more than the entire current energy consumption of the United States, or the total output of all the world’s nuclear power plants combined.

Transforming the buildings we already live and work in to become a part of the system itself that generates, stores, and manages energy efficiently could be the blueprint for the future of energy use, creation, and management.

Finding the best ways for humans and robots to work together requires ‘swarm’ thinking

If the future of warehouse work belongs to humans and robots working side by side, a key question remains: What is the most effective way for them to collaborate?

Research published in Transportation Science suggests that the answer may be more flexible than many warehouse operators expect. The study, “Picking the Best Bot: Collaboration Strategies for Humans and Bots in Order Pick Systems with Traveling Salesman Problem Routing,” found that under many real-world conditions, warehouse workers achieve higher productivity when they dynamically switch among multiple autonomous mobile robots rather than work exclusively with a single robot.

The findings challenge a common assumption that fixed human–robot pairings are the most efficient approach.

Artificial General Intelligence: So Close Yet So Far?

Despite its rapid development and widespread adoption, AI is a nascent technology with vast potential for enormous growth in the coming years.

Decades of science fiction make it easy to imagine a future in which AI evolves beyond task-focused point applications to offer broad, human-like intelligence. Although artificial general intelligence (AGI) is theoretical, the road to real AGI is fraught with serious technological and societal challenges. AGI developers face the daunting hurdles of making AGI work effectively, accurately, reliably — and, most of all, safely.

Chip-scale ‘acoustic atom’ controls sound waves to imitate atomic energy levels and advance computing

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. What goes up must come down. Physical laws like these govern all of the natural world—except for the tiny internal components of today’s microprocessors, which operate according to the unique and complicated rules of quantum physics.

As the microprocessors that power computers, medical equipment, sensors, and more continue to shrink in size, engineers face challenges controlling quantum-scale systems. But in a step forward for the technology, researchers at Virginia Tech have developed an “acoustic atom”—a chip-scale device that traps and controls sound waves in ways that mimic the behavior of real atoms. Long term, these advances could influence technologies connected to quantum artificial intelligence (AI), telecommunication, medical imaging, GPS, and more.

The research is published in Physical Review Letters by Linbo Shao, assistant professor in Virginia Tech’s Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, along with colleagues at the university’s Center for Power Electronic Systems, Department of Physics, and Center for Quantum Information Science and Engineering and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

New ‘HTTP/2 Bomb’ DoS attack crashes web servers in under a minute

A new denial-of-service (DoS) attack dubbed HTTP/2 Bomb can be launched from a single machine to take down web servers within seconds.

The technique works on default HTTP/2 configurations of major web servers, including NGINX, Apache HTTP Server, Microsoft IIS, Envoy, and Cloudflare Pingora.

Discovered by OpenAI’s Codex software agent under the guidance of researchers at offensive security firm Calif, HTTP/2 Bomb combines two previously known HTTP/2 DoS methods: the HPACK compression amplification and Slowloris-style resource retention via HTTP/2 flow-control stalling.

Google adds Android protection against AI deepfake scam calls

Google is introducing a new Android security feature that will detect and flag phone calls in which scammers use artificial intelligence to impersonate a user’s personal contacts.

Called “fake call detection,” the feature is rolling out globally this month to Android 12 and later devices, starting with Pixel devices, and will be enabled by default.

Once activated, it works automatically when both a caller and recipient are using Phone by Google: when a contact places a call, their device sends a silent, encrypted confirmation signal to the recipient’s device in real time.

Scientists identify a cell type in the brain that was previously ignored and it may explain why human memory has no known upper limit

The human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons. That number appears in almost every popular account of memory and intelligence, and it tends to carry an implicit argument: that the scale of human cognition follows from the scale of this cell count. What is less often mentioned is that the brain contains a roughly comparable number of a different cell type entirely, one that researchers have treated, for most of the history of neuroscience, as little more than biological scaffolding.

A paper published on 23 May in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences puts forward a new hypothesis about what those cells, called astrocytes, might actually be doing. The work comes from a team at MIT: lead author Leo Kozachkov, Jean-Jacques Slotine, a professor of mechanical engineering and brain and cognitive sciences, and Dmitry Krotov of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, who is the paper’s senior author. Their claim is not that astrocytes have been misunderstood in any dramatic sense; it is the more careful suggestion that they may be doing computational work that neurons, on their own, cannot account for.

This is a hypothesis supported by a mathematical model. The experimental work needed to test it has not yet been done.

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