Cosmic Log
In the wake of March 10’s fatal Boeing 737 MAX airplane crash in Ethiopia, President Donald Trump took computer scientists to task today for making airplanes “too complex to fly.” And the computer scientists struck back.
It all took place on Twitter, of course.
Boston Dynamics’ scary-smart robots make use of sophisticated computer vision, but MIT is following a different strategy with its Cheetah 3 robot.
The vision-free version of MIT’s 80-pound, Labrador-sized Cheetah 3 can find its way across a pitch-black room and up an obstacle-littered stairway without the use of cameras or environmental sensors. Instead, it relies on what engineers call “blind locomotion” — that is, the feedback from its robotic legs and its algorithm-based sense of balance as it scrambles through the dark.
“There are many unexpected behaviors the robot should be able to handle without relying too much on vision,” designer Sangbae Kim, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, said today in a news release.
“Vision can be noisy, slightly inaccurate, and sometimes not available, and if you rely too much on vision, your robot has to be very accurate in position and eventually will be slow,” Kim said. “So we want the robot to rely more on tactile information. That way, it can handle unexpected obstacles while moving fast.”
The strategy is well-suited for getting around disaster zones or other risky environments.
We have heard the voice of our future AI overlord — and it’s making hair appointments for us.
Last week, Google wowed the world by demonstrating a voice assistant called Duplex that sounds eerily human on the telephone, right down the um’s and mm-hmm’s that it uses during its chat with a scheduler at a hair salon.
Some are now questioning how true-to-life the demo actually was. But even if some liberties were taken, Google Duplex was an eye-opener for experts who gathered at Seattle University on Wednesday night for an AI-centric event presented by MIT Enterprise Forum Northwest.
“Seeing that happen so quickly, I think, was a real shock for some people,” said Kat Holmes, a Microsoft veteran who’s the founder of the design company Kata and the author of “Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design.”
A new entrant in the race to commercialize fusion energy, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, aims to capitalize on superconductor technology from MIT and $50 million from the Italian energy company Eni.
The collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Commonwealth Fusion, an MIT spinout based in Cambridge, Mass., came to light today after years of work behind the scenes.
“This is an important historical moment: Advances in superconducting magnets have put fusion energy potentially within reach, offering the prospect of a safe, carbon-free energy future,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif said in a news release.
IBM is making a 10-year, $240 million investment in artificial intelligence research through a new lab it’s creating in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The investment will support research by IBM and MIT scientists at the newly created MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab in Cambridge, Mass., the two partners announced today.
“Through this collaboration, we will target innovations that will move us beyond specialized tasks to more general approaches to solving more complex problems, with the added capability of robust, continuous learning,” Dario Gil, IBM Research’s vice president of AI and IBM Q, said in a blog post.