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Video Friday: DARPA's LUKE Arm, Human Support Robot, and Starting a Robotics Company
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Dean Kamen's DEKA R&D firm, with support from DARPA's Revolutionizing Prosthetics Program, designed the advanced prosthetic LUKE Arm to give amputees "dexterous arm and hand movement through a simple, intuitive control system." The LUKE Arm, which stands for Life Under Kinetic Evolution but is also a reference to Luke Skywalker's bionic hand, "allows users to control multiple joints simultaneously and provides a variety of grips and grip forces by means of wireless signals generated by sensors worn on the feet or via other easy-to-use controllers."
How Wimbledon is using IBM Watson's AI to power highlights, analytics and enriched fan experiences - Watson
Key Points: โ We're helping Wimbledon deliver new levels of engagement for ticket holders and 70 million online fans โ Watson-powered real time match reports are expected to rival global outlets in breaking news and uncovering player insights โ Watson Discovery Service is using 22 years of unstructured data to analyze an estimated 53,713,514 tennis data points โ A voice-activated, watson-powered digital assistant "Fred," helps attendees find their way around the venue At the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC), more than a half-million fans gather for the Wimbledon Championships every year. For two weeks in July, enthusiastic fans descend on the SW19 venue, with thousands of fans swarming onto the iconic Henman Hill to watch the tournament unfold. That's not including the more than 70 millions fans who watch the tournament online and on their televisions. All the fanfare isn't complete without the ongoing effort of the AELTC to enrich fan experiences through cutting-edge technology in new ways. For the 2017 Championships, IBM Watson is working with AELTC to deliver ticket holders and 70 million online fans with new levels of engagement and user assistance.
Google gives journalists money to use artificial intelligence in reporting
Google is giving British journalists over โฌ700,000 to help them incorporate artificial intelligence into their work. Google awarded the grant to The Press Association (PA), the national news agency for the UK and Ireland, and Urbs Media, a data driven news startup. It's one of the largest handed out by Google's โฌ150 million Digital News Initiative (DNI) Innovation Fund. Peter Clifton, editor-in-chief of PA, explained that humans would still be involved in producing AI-assisted stories. "Skilled human journalists will still be vital in the process, but RADAR allows us to harness artificial intelligence to scale up to a volume of local stories that would be impossible to provide manually," Clifton said in a statement.
Bill Gates made these 15 predictions in 1999 -- and it's scary how accurate he was
In 1999, Bill Gates wrote a book titled "Business @ the Speed of Thought." In it, Gates made 15 bold predictions that at the time might have sounded outrageous. But as Markus Kirjonen, a business student, said on his blog, Gates' forecasts turned out to be eerily prescient. Here are the 15 predictions Gates made nearly 20 years ago -- and how close they've come to being true. Gates' prediction: "Automated price comparison services will be developed, allowing people to see prices across multiple websites, making it effortless to find the cheapest product for all industries."
Neural network poetry is so bad we think it's written by humans
Can a machine incapable of experiencing emotion write poetry that stirs the soul? A neural network trained on thousands of lines of poetry has tried its hand at penning its own rhymes that mimic certain forms of verse. The poetic bot is fully tunable, says Jack Hopkins, who developed the system while he was a researcher at the University of Cambridge. It can be programmed to write in a particular rhythm or pen poems on specific themes. Set the theme to "desolation", for example, and the angst-ridden AI comes up with the following snippet of verse: The AI can be endlessly tweaked to produce different flavours of poetry.
Flipboard on Flipboard
Whether customers feel good or bad about their experiences is ultimately underpinned by their emotions. This doesn't matter what context they are in -- every interaction is emotional. As consumers, our shopping experiences mean quite a lot to us. If we stand in ridiculously big queues or receive terrible customer service, we are most likely to stay far away from or never return to that store. On the other hand, however, if we are delighted with the store's customer service, the product range or even the floor layout, we are most likely to continuously purchase and build a relationship with the brand.
Nintendo Switch Online: Free app to launch alongside Splatoon 2
The Nintendo Switch Online smartphone app will launch later this month. It will be available to download for free for both iOS and Android users from 21 July. The company recently confirmed that the Switch Online store will officially launch next year, and has stressed that the smartphone app with have a "limited" feature set. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.
Instagram accounts are being mysteriously shut down by a bug
Instagram users are complaining that their accounts appear to have been deleted for no apparent reason. The photo-sharing app's Twitter and Facebook pages are being bombarded with messages from users who have lost access to their accounts and are unable to log in to them. The affected users' Instagram accounts look as if they've been deleted, with the message "Sorry, this page isn't available" appearing on them. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.
Where Machine Learning meets rule-based verification
This whole topic โ where (and how) should ML and rule-based verification meet โ has been on my mind for a while, but I still don't have good answers. I do think it deserves significant attention from researchers and practitioners. The next three chapters will discuss why I expect ML to keep growing in dynamic verification, why there will always be an unavoidable, irreducible non-ML part, and some ideas about connecting the two. Finally, the last chapter will talk about rules in ML-based systems, explainable AI and all that. If you are not into verification, just go directly there. Please take a quick look at my Dynamic verification in one picture post.
Selecting investments using artificial intelligence - Globes English
Most fintech companies offer better interfaces for handling money (bank accounts, loans, payments, etc.), but quite a few startups are also offering a solution for a much older need than how to make money. Israel company I Know First, managed by CEO Yaron Golgher, is one of these. The company's main product is an algorithm that provides a forecast for three thousand different investment instruments, including shares, commodities, interest rates, foreign currency, exchange traded funds (ETFs), and global indices. "The algorithm rates all the investment instruments, and singles out investment opportunities in the capital market on a daily basis, according to the pricing anomaly it finds," Golgher says in a "Globes" interview. "Globes": What information do you use?