Oregon-based robotics company Agility Robotics announced Thursday that its humanoid robot Digit has moved more than 100,000 totes at a GXO Logistics facility in Flowery Branch, Georgia.
This milestone marks a significant step for the company in proving the practical value of humanoid robots in real-world logistics. Instead of polished demo clips, this result proves the robot can handle real warehouse tasks every day.
Using simulation-based techniques, scientists can ask how their ideas, actions, and designs will interact with the physical world. Yet this power is not without costs. Cutting edge simulations can often take months of supercomputer time. Surrogate models and machine learning are promising alternatives for accelerating these workflows, but the data hunger of machine learning has limited their impact to data-rich domains. Over the last few years, researchers have sought to side-step this data dependence through the use of foundation models— large models pretrained on large amounts of data which can accelerate the learning process by transferring knowledge from similar inputs, but this is not without its own challenges.
Biologist Michael Levin—creator of the world’s first living robots—reveals a radical, evidence-based view of evolution driven by a fundamental mind, where agency emerges in unexpected places and what this means for humanity’s co-evolution with AI and AGI.
▶️ Read the article on Forbes.com \.
If “Batman” appears on the scene, we immediately become more altruistic: in fact, research conducted by psychologists from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, shows that the sudden appearance of something unexpected—Batman—disrupts the predictability of everyday life and forces people to be present, breaking free from autopilot.
The study was published in the journal npj Mental Health Research, and was led by Francesco Pagnini, Full Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Faculty of Psychology, Università Cattolica.
Prosocial behavior, or the act of helping others, is essential to social life, yet the spontaneous environmental factors that trigger such behavior remain little explored. This study tested the ability of an unexpected event, such as the presence of a person dressed as Batman, to increase prosocial behavior by interrupting routines and increasing people’s attention to the present moment.
New York City’s thousands of traffic cameras capture endless hours of footage each day, but analyzing that video to identify safety problems and implement improvements typically requires resources that most transportation agencies don’t have.
Now, researchers at NYU Tandon School of Engineering have developed an artificial intelligence system that can automatically identify collisions and near-misses in existing traffic video by combining language reasoning and visual intelligence, potentially transforming how cities improve road safety without major new investments.
Published in the journal Accident Analysis & Prevention, the research won New York City’s Vision Zero Research Award, an annual recognition of work that aligns with the city’s road safety priorities and offers actionable insights. Professor Kaan Ozbay, the paper’s senior author, presented the study at the eighth annual Research on the Road symposium.
But what if we’re in a “rational bubble” that, unlike other big speculative manias in history, takes our economy to a fundamentally better place?
I’m borrowing the phrase “rational bubble” from conversations with a Nobel laureate in economics, my friend A. Michael Spence. Bubbles seem by definition irrational. They grow as investors — often hostage to exuberant, herd-like behavior — push valuations well beyond anything warranted by the fundamentals on the ground.
However, the A.I. excitement, as seen in the blowout Nvidia earnings on Wednesday, rightly reflects the potential transformation of the entire economy. It is economically rational to risk losing everything on several bets if just a few can deliver a thousandfold return, which some A.I. investments almost certainly will.
EGGROLL is a novel optimization algorithm that utilizes low-rank perturbations to significantly enhance the scalability and efficiency of Evolution Strategies for training large neural networks, achieving up to a hundredfold improvement in training throughput while maintaining competitive performance.
Unlike most alien planetary invasion methods in the Dark Forest universe, Pluribus acts as a cosmic Trojan Horse, an interstellar gift engineered to disarm an entire civilization the moment it’s opened. Sent to Earth by an alien beacon from a relatively nearby star system, Pluribus hides behind the appearance of progress. Even if the extraterrestrial senders turn out to be benevolent, their initiative still aligns with the Dark Forest Hypothesis.
Chapters:
00:00 Pluribus Signal as a Weapon.
03:01 Galactic Disarmament.
04:10 Humanity’s Defense.
06:03 The Dark Forest Hypothesis.
Footage:
Produced in part with SpaceEngine PRO © Cosmographic Software LLC.
Some elements in this video are also made with the help of artificial intelligence.
Music:
Atlantis by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.… to Find Stellardrone’s Music: https://stellardrone.bandcamp.com Feedback or inquiries: boetezzport@gmail.com.