The company's previous demo had involved marching a human out in a robot-like body suit, so when Optimus walked slowly around the stage, it was met with delight from the cheering crowd. Despite the show's futuristic framing, robotics experts were mostly underwhelmed by the reveal. Optimus' clunky attempts at something like a dance seemed less advanced than other humanoid robots, such as Honda's Asimo, which played soccer with former President Barack Obama back in 2014. Tesla engineers boasted that Optimus' hand had as many as 11 degrees of freedom (that's to say, all the ways in which robotic parts can bend). In comparison, a robotic hand designed by a Japanese engineer back in 1963 had 27. What is it about Optimus that makes us feel threatened?

In this #4 post of the Symposium "Hitchhikers Guide to Law & Tech", Nathalie Smuha and Anna Morandini continue asking fundamental questions on the interaction between regulation and technology. Can the European AI Act mitigate the ethical and legal concerns raised by this hyped technology? Which trail is the EU blazing to secure "Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence" in Europe, as distinct from the laissez-faire approach in the US and the state-centric approach in China? In this post, both authors unpack the proposed AI regulation and evaluate its merits and pitfalls. After explaining the build-up towards the proposal, they set out the scope of the Act and its four categories of risks as part of a "risk-based approach" to regulate AI.

Across the AI ethics and global policy landscape, there is consensus that there should be human accountability for AI technologies1. These machines are used for high-stakes decision-making in complex domains -- for example, in healthcare, criminal justice and transport -- where they can cause or occasion serious harm. Some use deep machine learning models, which can make their outputs difficult to understand or contest. At the same time, when the datasets on which these models are trained reflect bias against specific demographic groups, the bias becomes encoded and causes disparate impacts2,3,4. Meanwhile, an increasing number of machines that embody AI, and specifically machine learning, such as highly automated vehicles, can execute decision-making functions and take actions independently of direct, real-time human control, in unpredictable conditions that call for adaptive performance.

Thank you for joining us on "The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity." Turrka Kuusisto, CEO of Posti, talks about how the group reinvented and transformed from a traditional postal company to a next-generation and efficient delivery and fulfillment company using the cloud.

A pair of researchers have found a more efficient way to multiply grids of numbers, beating a record set just a week ago by the artificial intelligence firm DeepMind. The company revealed on 5 October that its AI software had beaten a record that had stood for more than 50 years for the matrix multiplication problem – a common operation in all sorts of software where grids of numbers are multiplied by each other. DeepMind's paper revealed a new method for multiplying two …

Branded "the world's first ultrarealistic humanoid robot artist," Ai-Da is widely known for creating portraits and poems, using a robotic arm, cameras in her eyes and AI algorithms. She told the house -- undoubtedly to her creator's pride -- that the unique features allow her to create "visually appealing images."

It may not be unusual for burgeoning areas of science, especially those related to rapid technological changes in society, to take off quickly, but even by these standards the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has been impressive. Together with robotics, AI is representing an increasingly significant portion of research volume at various levels, as these charts show. The number of AI and robotics papers published in the 82 high-quality science journals in the Nature Index (Count) has been rising year-on-year -- so rapidly that it resembles an exponential growth curve. A similar increase is also happening more generally in journals and proceedings not included in the Nature Index, as is shown by data from the Dimensions database of research publications. Five countries -- the United States, China, the United Kingdom, Germany and France -- had the highest AI and robotics Share in the Nature Index from 2015 to 2021, with the United States leading the pack.

Yejin Choi, a University of Washington computer science professor and senior research manager at Seattle's Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), won a $800,000 "genius grant" given annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Choi, one of 25 MacArthur Fellows for 2022 revealed Wednesday, is an expert in natural language processing. Her work aims to improve the ability of computers and artificial intelligence systems to perform commonsense reasoning and understand implied meaning in human language. "This is such a great honor because there have been only two other researchers in the natural language processing field who have received this award," Choi told UW News. Choi spoke to GeekWire earlier this year about the debate over a robot's ability to have human-like feelings.

An exoskeleton boot that lets you walk faster while using less energy could help older people or those with disabilities move around.Existing exoskeletons have failed to make the step into the real world because they need to be fine-tuned to a person's gait over long periods. Without such personalisation, the hardware may provide only a minimal boost or even make walking harder. "Despite all the things you see in the comic books and superhero movies, exoskeletons are really, really tricky," says Steve Collins at Stanford University in California. Collins and his colleagues have previously found tailoring an exoskeleton to an individual to be a lengthy task. The wearer had to visit the lab for five consecutive days and walk on a treadmill for 2 hours each day while wearing an uncomfortable respirator and sensors so that the content of the air they breathed in and out, and therefore their metabolic effort, could be measured. Now, the researchers have come up with a computer model that absorbs the data from 3600 of their previous laboratory tests to learn how to approximate the metabolic effort based on physical data from the exoskeleton's sensors alone.

A humanoid answered pre-submitted questions in the House of Lords about technology and art in London.