Oceania
Startup adds eye-tracking technology to virtual reality
San Francisco-based startup Fove has developed eye-tracking for virtual reality -- that kernel of technology many feel is key for the illusion of becoming immersed in a setting. Or use a death stare to shoot down virtual spaceships. Watch a movie of a forest or a room and be able to look around wherever you want. "It allows you to go inside the world that's behind the display," said Yuka Kojima, Fove's co-founder and a rare female chief executive in male-dominated Japan Inc. Fove, which comes from "fovea," the part of the eye with the sharpest vision, from "field of view," and the word's similarity with "love," has devised a way to use tiny infrared sensors inside headset goggles to monitor the movements of a wearer's pupils. It's a small company, founded in 2014, with offices in Tokyo, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and employing just 17 people.
Shared Space Bots on display at Brisbane's World Science festival - video
The World Science Festival Brisbane's'Shared Space Bots' performance demonstrations at Queensland University of Technology used pint-sized, futuristic floor robots to reveal research into the technologies that will allow humans to communicate with driverless cars, and allowed audience members a chance to'test drive' the systems safely. Shared Space Bots were demonstrated by internationally acclaimed technologist Christopher Lindinger from Austrian R&D company Ars Electronica Futurelab. They have been developed as part of the ongoing research cooperation between Mercedes-Benz and Ars Electronica Futurelab on the topic of future mobility.
AI technology: Is the genie (or genius) out of the bottle?
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'Facial scans that can calculate risk': new tools that will transform your finances - Telegraph
Lawrence Wintermeyer, CEO of Innovate Finance, expects to see more innovators trying to tap into the unbanked and unrepresented consumer market. He said: "The firm Pockit, for example, gives customers an account and card that they can use to manage their money and make payments. Users can deposit money into their account at thousands of locations across the UK or have their salaries or benefits paid into their account. Pockit users also get cash back deals on the high street and online." So-called "challenger banks" are popping up and Monese is the latest to make waves.
Why humor is the frontier of artificial intelligence
This week my audience greatly appreciated the Motherboard post "Joke-Telling Robots Are the Final Frontier of Artificial Intelligence", so I decided to spend a few words on humor and artificial intelligence. Why allowing an artificial intelligence to joke is important? I like the honest way Bloomberg asks for the same question in a post which is now 4 years old, but is still a good read: Can a computer be taught to be funny? It doesn't seem nearly as important an endeavor as getting computers to identify malignant tumors or prevent airplanes from crashing, but being able to model humor is a key problem in attempting to model human thought. As Motherboard explains "Some specialists even see humor as the final frontier for artificial intelligence, because it requires mastery of sophisticated functions like self-awareness, empathy, spontaneity, and linguistic subtlety."
Domino's has a robot delivering pizzas in Australia
Domino's latest "deliveryman" stands three feet tall and doesn't need to be tipped. It has ferried pizzas in Brisbane at a top speed of 12 mph, and the company's Australian master franchise said it's excited for what could come next. "We have a relentless passion to push the boundaries of what's possible with pizza delivery," said Michael Gillespie, chief digital officer for Domino's in Australia. "As we get further, it's not hard to believe that we might have a store with a couple of [robots] that are doing deliveries." Domino's has started using a robotic cart named DRU, which stands for Domino's Robotic Unit, to deliver its offerings.
Human eyes assist drones, teach machines to see
Drone images accumulate much faster than they can be analyzed. Researchers have developed a new approach that combines crowdsourcing and machine learning to speed up the process. Who would win in a real-life game of "Where's Waldo," humans or computers? A recent study suggests that when speed and accuracy are critical, an approach combing both human and machine intelligence would take the prize. With drones being used to monitor everything natural disaster sites, pollution, or wildlife populations, analyzing drone images in real-time has become a critically important big data challenge. Publishing in the journal Big Data, researchers, including Stรฉphane Joost from EPFL, present a new approach to rapidly interpret aerial images taken by camera drones that combines human crowdsourcing and machine learning.
Is artificial intelligence ready to rule the world?
This week humankind was delivered a body blow by an artificial intelligence (AI) called AlphaGo that beat Go's world champion, Lee Sedol, so is it now time for humans to let the machines rule the world? Not just yet--while this adds to a growing list of machines that have beaten the best humans at chess, checkers and backgammon, Lee Sedol won a game back against AlphaGo, so there is still hope for us. The ancient Chinese strategy game Go has substantially more moves to consider each turn than chess. With the two players having to look several moves ahead with more possible outcomes than there are atoms in the universe before deciding what move to make. For each move in a game such as Go, the AI uses a tree search that plays out scenarios, notes which lead to the most victories, and then works back to find out the next move that will lead to the best scenario.
Xbox apologises for go-go dancer party
The head of Microsoft's Xbox has apologised after the company hosted a party for computer games developers that featured podium performances by female go-go dancers. The evening event in San Francisco was held on the same day as a Microsoft-sponsored "women in games" lunch. The dancers were dressed in short skirts and crop tops. Phil Spencer said it was "unequivocally wrong", after attendees took to social media to complain. The event took place during a week-long conference for developers creating games for Xbox.
Rise of the machines?
But it could be a real threat, warn researchers at the recent World Economic Forum. Unlike today's drones, which are still controlled by human operators, autonomous weapons could potentially be programmed to select and engage targets on their own. "It was one of the concerns that we itemized last year," Toby Walsh, professor of artificial intelligence (AI) at the school of computer science and engineering at the University of New South Wales, told FoxNews.com. "Most of us believe that we don't have the ability to build ethical robots," he added. "What is especially worrying is that the various militaries around the world will be fielding robots in just a few years, and we don't think anyone will be building ethical robots."