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Archive for the ‘robotics/AI’ category: Page 2355

Feb 27, 2015

How to Keep a Piece of the Pie After the Robots Take Our Jobs

Posted by in categories: automation, business, economics, robotics/AI

Written by Victoria Turk — Motherboard

In 2013, researchers Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of the Oxford Martin School dropped the bombshell that 47 percent of U​S jobs were at risk of computerisation. Since then, they’ve made similar predicti​ons for the UK, where they say 35 percent of jobs are at high risk.

So what will our future economy look like?

“My predictions have enormously high variance,” Osborne told me when I asked if he was optimistic. “I can imagine completely plausible, incredibly positive scenarios, but they’re only about as probable as actually quite dystopian futures that I can imagine.”
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Feb 26, 2015

What happens when computers, not teachers, pick what students learn?

Posted by in categories: education, robotics/AI

By — Slate
Students in teacher Cynthia McClellan's eighth grade social science and history class at the Blake Middle School use their iPads during class.

NEW YORK—Teacher John Garuccio wrote a multiplication problem on a digital whiteboard in a corner of an unusually large classroom at David A. Boody Intermediate School in Brooklyn.

About 150 sixth-graders are in this math class—yes, 150—but Garuccio’s task was to help just 20 of them, with a lesson tailored to their needs. He asked, “Where does the decimal point go in the product?” After several minutes of false starts, a boy offered the correct answer. Garuccio praised him, but did not stop there.

“Come on, you know the answer, tell me why,” Garuccio said. “It’s good to have the right answer, but you need to know why.”
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Feb 24, 2015

Meet The Robots That Are Taking Over Japan

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Adele Peters — Fast Company


In another Tokyo suburb, a cartoonesque robot named Pepper, the first robot designed to respond to human emotions, is joking with customers at a store selling mobile phones.

While Japan has been a robot-friendly place for a long time, the number of robots is now booming, even as its human population is not. In the next five years, the country hopes to build 20 times more of them. One industry leader suggests that the country should invest in 30 million robots—nearly the same population as greater Tokyo—as part of a plan to regain a spot as the world leader in manufacturing.

“What you’re seeing in Japan is a much more aggressive approach to purchasing robots,” says Mike Zinser, a partner at Boston Consulting Group, and co-author of a new study about how robotics will transform manufacturing. “They’ve got a real potential to see significant cost savings, and also an improvement in competitiveness relative to other countries over the next decade.“
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Feb 24, 2015

AI: Artificial Imagination?

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Margaret Boden — IA News
Margaret Boden
Most of us are fascinated by creativity. New ideas in science and art are often hugely exciting – and, paradoxically, sometimes seemingly “obvious” once they’ve arrived. But how can that be? Many people, perhaps most of us, think there’s no hope of an answer. Creativity is deeply mysterious, indeed almost magical. Any suggestion that there might be a scientific theory of creativity strikes such people as absurd. And as for computer models of creativity, those are felt to be utterly impossible.

But they aren’t. Scientific psychology has identified three different ways in which new, surprising, and valuable ideas – that is, creative ideas – can arise in people’s minds. These involve combinational, exploratory, and transformational creativity. The information processes involved can be understood in terms of concepts drawn from Artificial Intelligence (AI). They can even be modelled by computers using AI techniques.
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Feb 19, 2015

Meet Poppy, the printable robot

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, robotics/AI

Prague Post
All the parts for making Poppy. Photo: European Commission

An the open-source, 3D-printed robot is set to inspire innovation in classrooms

Meet Poppy, the first completely open-source, 3D printed, humanoid robot (@poppy_project). Poppy is a robot that anybody can build and program. That means it’s not just a tool for scientists and engineers: the team of developers aims to make it part of vocational training in schools, giving students the opportunity to experiment.

Poppy was developed in France by Inria’s Flowers team, which creates computer and robotic models as tools for understanding developmental processes in humans. Dr Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, who holds an ERC Starting Grant in Computer Science and Informatics, explains: “Very little has been done to explore the benefits of 3D printing and its interaction with computer science in classrooms. With our Poppy platform, we are now offering schools and teachers a way to cultivate the creativity of students studying in areas such as mechanics, computer science, electronics and 3D printing.”

Feb 16, 2015

“Spot” Is a Smaller (More Kickable) Version of Boston Dynamic’s Big Dog

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Andrew Liszewski — Gizmodo

We haven’t seen much of Boston Dynamic’s four-legged self-balancing Big Dog robot since it was last spotted hurling cinder blocks in a lab. And that’s maybe because the company’s robotic geniuses have been hard at work building a smaller more agile version called Spot that weighs just 160 pounds so it can safely operate both indoors and out.

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Feb 15, 2015

World’s first robot-staffed hotel to open in Japan

Posted by in categories: business, robotics/AI

By: Press Trust of India — The Indian Express
Robots, japan robots, Human like robots, Huis Ten Bosch, Japan, japan news, world news, world trending now, indian express
A robot-staffed hotel, said to be the world’s first, is set to open in Japan in July where guests checking into the futuristic facility will be greeted and served by remarkably human-like robots.

Huis Ten Bosch, a theme park in typical Dutch style in terms of its architecture in Nagasaki Prefecture has unveiled plans to open the modern hotel with robot staff and other advanced technologies to significantly reduce operating costs.
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Feb 11, 2015

I’ll Be Back: The Return of Artificial Intelligence

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Feb 10, 2015

The robot trade is booming in China

Posted by in categories: business, robotics/AI

Georgina Prodhan, Reuters — Business Insiders
china robot
China will have more robots operating in its production plants by 2017 than any other country as it cranks up automation of its car and electronics factories, the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) said on Thursday.

Already the biggest market in the $9.5 billion (6 billion pound) global robot trade — or $29 billion including associated software, peripherals and systems engineering — China lags far behind its more industrialized peers in terms of robot density.

China has just 30 robots per 10,000 workers employed in manufacturing industries, compared with 437 in South Korea, 323 in Japan, 282 in Germany and 152 in the United States.

But a race by carmakers to build plants in China along with wage inflation that has eroded the competitiveness of Chinese labor will push the operational stock of industrial robots to more than double to 428,000 by 2017, the IFR estimates. Read more

Feb 10, 2015

A better ‘Siri’

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Kurzweil AI
https://lifeboat.com/blog.images/a-better-siri.jpg
At the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) this month, MIT computer scientists will present smart algorithms that function as “a better Siri,” optimizing planning for lower risk, such as scheduling flights or bus routes.

They offer this example:

Imagine that you could tell your phone that you want to drive from your house in Boston to a hotel in upstate New York, that you want to stop for lunch at an Applebee’s at about 12:30, and that you don’t want the trip to take more than four hours.

Then imagine that your phone tells you that you have only a 66 percent chance of meeting those criteria — but that if you can wait until 1:00 for lunch, or if you’re willing to eat at TGI Friday’s instead, it can get that probability up to 99 percent.
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