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Today's commercial aircraft are typically manufactured in sections, often in different locations -- wings at one factory, fuselage sections at another, tail components somewhere else -- and then flown to a central plant in huge cargo planes for final assembly. But what if the final assembly was the only assembly, with the whole plane built out of a large array of tiny identical pieces, all put together by an army of tiny robots? That's the vision that graduate student Benjamin Jenett, working with Professor Neil Gershenfeld in MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), has been pursuing as his doctoral thesis work. It's now reached the point that prototype versions of such robots can assemble small structures and even work together as a team to build up a larger assemblies. The new work appears in the October issue of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, in a paper by Jenett, Gershenfeld, fellow graduate student Amira Abdel-Rahman, and CBA alumnus Kenneth Cheung SM '07, PhD '12, who is now at NASA's Ames Research Center, where he leads the ARMADAS project to design a lunar base that could be built with robotic assembly.

LOS ANGELES, CA, Oct. 20, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE – iPR Software, the leader in Online Newsrooms, Digital Publishing, Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions, and customized integrated solutions, announced its largest technology rollout to date at Public Relations Society of America's International Conference in San Diego, California. With the launch of "Metatron," iPR Software's new application empowers Artificial Intelligence (AI) cloud capabilities as well as integrating the power of machine learning into DAM and customized software platforms to increase productivity and corporate asset sharing across multiple customer ecosystems. This latest software release further advances the company's vision for clients to publish their news and information to Traditional and Social media channels and better engage their B2B & B2C audiences while increasing traffic to their branded media and corporate assets. Leading organization's today are utilizing cloud applications to access the latest technology with encryption algorithms they can securely manage, publish, and share rich branded media content. Metatron introduces core, cloud-based software features that enable customers to securely publish and share key digital media and corporate assets, target practical enterprise use cases, increase workflow efficiencies, and automate mundane tasks to reduce data and storage errors.

Alphabet (Google) subsidiary Wing has become the first company in the United States to deliver packages by drone. In Christiansburg, the small Virginia town chosen as Wing's test location, the 22,000 residents can order products normally shipped by FedEx, medicine from Walgreens and a selection of candy from a local business -- all of which will arrive via drone. Wing, which already operates in two Australian cities as well as Helsinki, announced in a statement that the first drone-powered deliveries had taken place Friday afternoon in Christiansburg, "paving the way for the most advanced drone delivery service in the nation". One family used the Wing app to order Tylenol, cough drops, Vitamin C tablets, bottled water and tissues, the statement said. An older resident ordered a birthday present for his wife.

Have you ever been running late for work, your hand extended into your shower, cursing its name as the water slowly warms to a temperature that would allow you to enter? Well, you may be being unsympathetic to your hot water heater, because it's likely running all day and all night to keep between 40-80 gallons of water heated, so it can be ready at your command. As you ponder the inefficiency of such a system, imagine the hot water needs of a hotel or a high-rise apartment building, with hundreds of rooms and thousands of inhabitants. The founder in this week's Silicon Valley Insider, Sridhar Deivasigamani, estimates that at any point in time in the US, there could be as much as 6 billion gallons of water being kept hot for our consumption, one-sixth the size of Lake Tahoe. Intellihot, the Galesburg, IL company founded in 2009, designs and manufactures tankless water heaters, as well as monitoring devices and apps, for residential, commercial and industrial applications.

Tank warfare isn't traditionally easy to predict. In July 1943, for instance, German military planners believed that their advance on the Russian city of Kursk would be over in ten days. In fact, that attempt lasted nearly two months and ultimately failed. Even the 2003 Battle of Baghdad, in which U.S. forces had air superiority, took a week. The U.S. Army has launched a new effort, dubbed Project Quarterback, to accelerate tank warfare by synchronizing battlefield data with the aid of artificial Intelligence.

Armed violence is on the rise and we don't know how to stop it1. Since 2011, conflicts worldwide have killed up to 100,000 people a year, three-quarters of whom were in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The rate of major wars has decreased over the past few decades. But the number of civil conflicts has doubled since the 1960s, and terrorist attacks have become more frequent in the past ten years. The nature of conflict is changing.

As artificial intelligence is being used to solve problems in healthcare, agriculture, weather prediction and more, scientists and engineers are investigating how AI could be used to fight climate change. AI algorithms could indeed be used to build better climate models and determine more efficient methods of reducing CO2 emissions, but AI itself often requires substantial computing power and therefore consumes a lot of energy. Is it possible to reduce the amount of energy consumed by AI and improve its effectiveness when it comes to fighting climate change? Virginia Dignum, an ethical artificial intelligence professor at the Umeå University in Sweden, was recently interviewed by Horizon Magazine. Dignum explained that AI can have a large environmental footprint that can go unexamined.

About a year ago, top deepfake artist Hao Li came to a disturbing realization: Deepfakes, i.e. the technique of human-image synthesis based on artificial intelligence (AI) to create fake content, is rapidly evolving. In fact, Li believes that in as soon as six months, deepfake videos will be completely undetectable. And that's spurring security and privacy concerns as the AI behind the technology becomes commercialized – and gets in the hands of malicious actors. Li, for his part, has seen the positives of the technology as a pioneering computer graphics and vision researcher, particularly for entertainment. He has worked his magic on various high-profile deepfake applications – from leading the charge in putting Paul Walker into Furious 7 after the actor died before the film finished production, to creating the facial-animation technology that Apple now uses in its Animoji feature in the iPhone X.

Investing in emerging technologies can be extremely risky. It can also be extremely rewarding – and not just for your bank account. Technologies like artificial intelligence have the potential to change the world in many different ways. One of the industries where AI is already making real advances is healthcare, such as the ability to design and validate drug candidates to treat disease in less than two months. That has attracted the attention of plenty of deep-pocketed investors into AI healthcare startups, which have made more deals than any other AI industry since 2014, according to research firm CB Insights, with more than 80 AI diagnostics and medical imaging companies leading the way across 150 deals and counting.

Google's Pixel phones are the company's preferred way of showcasing its AI chops to consumers. Pixel phones consistently set the phone camera bar thanks to Google's AI prowess. But many of the AI features have nothing to do with the camera. The Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL unveiled this week at the Made by Google hardware event in New York City continue this tradition. Camera improvements aside, the Pixel 4 makes a play for a new arena that Google clearly wants to rule: offline natural language processing.