Learn more about what comes next. Helm.ai, a startup creating software for autonomous vehicles, today announced that it raised $26 million in series B financing led by Amplo, JMPartners, Base Capital Funding, and Freeman Group with participation from ACVC, One Way Ventures, Binnacle Partners, and individual investors. According to CEO Vlad Voroninski, the funding will help Helm "better serve its customer base" while supporting product expansion. Self-driving technologies have captured the attention of investors during the pandemic, particularly as strains on the supply chain -- exacerbated by a driver shortage -- make apparent the usefulness of automated delivery trucks. For example, earlier this year, self-driving software startup Embark announced plans to go public in a deal that would value the company at more than $5 billion.

An AI tool can quickly suggest possible candidates for the chemical structures of psychoactive "designer drugs" from a simple analysis. The tool could fast-track the development of lab tests which screen the use of drugs that have similar effects to substances such as cocaine and heroin, but have been designed to evade detection. "Our method could cut down the time required to identify a new designer drug from weeks or months to just hours," says Michael Skinnider at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Skinnider and his colleagues created a machine learning tool called DarkNPS by training it with chemical structures of around 1700 known designer drugs, collected from forensic labs around the world. The training set included tandem mass spectrometry results for each drug, which is a common technique that provides information on the mass of a molecule and the elements it contains.

Orders in North America for robots are reaching record numbers as the U.S. economy continues to slog through a labor shortage fueled by the pandemic. According to data from the Association for Advancing Automation (A3) – a trade group representing organizations involved in robotics, AI and other tech – the total number or orders this year reached nearly 29,000, with a value of $1.48 billion. The orders are up 37% from a year ago, says the trade group. "With labor shortages throughout manufacturing, logistics and virtually every industry, companies of all sizes are increasingly turning to robotics and automation to stay productive and competitive," said Jeff Burnstein, president of A3, in a statement. Reinventing the (steering) wheel:Tesla's Elon Musk introduces new yoke-shaped wheel During the third quarter, North American companies order 9,928 robots valued at $513 million, the third highest quarter ever in orders and fifth highest ever for value, said A3.

The most interesting development of the week had nothing to do with Facebook or even Google losing its appeal against a €2.4bn fine from the European commission for abusing its monopoly of search to the detriment of competitors to its shopping service. The bigger deal was that DeepMind, a London-based offshoot of Google (or, to be precise, its holding company, Alphabet) was moving into the pharmaceutical business via a new company called Isomorphic Labs, the goal of which is grandly described as "reimagining the entire drug discovery process from first principles with an AI-first approach". Since they're interested in first principles, let us first clarify that reference to AI. What it means in this context is not anything that is artificially intelligent, but simply machine learning, a technology of which DeepMind is an acknowledged master. AI has become a classic example of Orwellian newspeak adopted by the tech industry to sanitise a data-gobbling, energy-intensive technology that, like most things digital, has both socially useful and dystopian applications.

The Benthic Rover II is the size of a compact car, although it rocks fat treads, making it more like a scientific tank. That, along with the two googly-eye-like flotation devices on its front, gives it a sort of WALL-E vibe. The robot's mission: To prowl the squishy terrain in search of clues as to how the deep ocean processes carbon. That mission begins with a wild ride, 180 miles off the coast of Southern California. Completely untethered, the robot free falls for two and a half hours, landing on the abyssal plains--great stretches of what you might generously call muck.

The European Union’s plan to regulate artificial intelligence is ill-equipped to protect people from flawed algorithms that deprive them of lifesaving benefits and discriminate against vulnerable populations, Human Rights Watch said in report on the regulation released today. The European Parliament should amend the regulation to better protect people’s rights to social security and an adequate standard of living.

AI systems being developed to diagnose skin cancer run the risk of being less accurate for people with dark skin, research suggests. The potential of AI has led to developments in healthcare, with some studies suggesting image recognition technology based on machine learning algorithms can classify skin cancers as successfully as human experts. NHS trusts have begun exploring AI to help dermatologists triage patients with skin lesions. But researchers say more needs to be done to ensure the technology benefits all patients, after finding that few freely available image databases that could be used to develop or "train" AI systems for skin cancer diagnosis contain information on ethnicity or skin type. Those that do have very few images of people with dark skin.

When a highly coherent light beam, such as that emitted by radars, is diffusely reflected on a surface with a rough structure (e.g., a piece of paper, white paint or a metallic surface), it produces a random granular effect known as the'speckle' pattern. This effect results in strong fluctuations that can reduce the quality and interpretability of images collected by synthetic aperture radar (SAR) techniques. SAR is an imaging method that can produce fine-resolution 2D or 3D images using a resolution-limited radar system. It is often employed to collect images of landscapes or object reconstructions, which can be used to create millimeter-to-centimeter scale models of the surface of Earth or other planets. To improve the quality and reliability of SAR data, researchers worldwide have been trying to develop techniques based on deep neural networks that could reduce the speckle effect. While some of these techniques have achieved promising results, their performance is still not optimal.

Scientists have found a way to make'soft robots' using balloons that change shape when inflated with air. This new technology has been used to create a robot with a gripping hand, a flapping fish tail, and a moving coil that can be used to retrieve a ball. In contrast to conventional rigid robots, these soft robots are "naturally geared to interact with the soft stuff, like humans or tomatoes", assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering at Pierre-Thomas Brun at Princeton says. This could make them significantly more useful for harvesting food, taking items off a conveyor belt, or providing health care – as part of wearable exosuits or under-the-skin devices that could help people with heart issues. The robots are built by injecting bubbles into a liquid polymer called elastomer which becomes rubbery when it solidifies, then inflating the device to make it bend and move.