For the first time, MIT researchers have enabled a soft robotic arm to understand its configuration in 3D space, by leveraging only motion and position data from its own "sensorized" skin. Soft robots constructed from highly compliant materials, similar to those found in living organisms, are being championed as safer, and more adaptable, resilient, and bioinspired alternatives to traditional rigid robots. But giving autonomous control to these deformable robots is a monumental task because they can move in a virtually infinite number of directions at any given moment. That makes it difficult to train planning and control models that drive automation. Traditional methods to achieve autonomous control use large systems of multiple motion-capture cameras that provide the robots feedback about 3D movement and positions.

Human-machine cooperation and developing trust among robots, soldiers and civilians – these are the subjects of two, high-tech Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects from York U's Lassonde School of Engineering. They were, collectively, funded $5 million. Two York University projects led by Lassonde School of Engineering Professors Michael Jenkin (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) and Jinjun Shan (Earth and Space Science and Engineering) were awarded funding from the Department of National Defence's Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security (IDEaS) program under Innovation Networks in October 2019. York's securing two of the six contributions from the IDEaS Program speaks to the University's leadership in this area. Each contribution is worth close to $1.5 million. Adding the support of other funders, these two projects are, collectively, worth $5 million.

NEW DELHI: The government will soon come up with a national policy to reskill and upskill millions of youth in the country to create a workforce capable of handling emerging trends such as artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT) and machine learning. The idea is to strengthen the government's Skill India mission through dedicated policy measures. "Reskilling and upskilling is big on the incoming government's agenda," a senior government official told ET. "There will be renewed focus on reskilling." The idea is to create a workforce that can access new opportunities and to insulate it from technological shocks. "We would like to ensure that individuals have access to economic opportunities by remaining competitive in the new world of work and that businesses have access to the talent they need for the jobs of the future," the official added.

Last Tuesday, 14th January 2020, was a big day for the Norwegian IT sector as the government's national strategy for artificial intelligence was presented at a breakfast meeting at MESH, central Oslo. Over 160 people from business, academia and the public sector participated in the launch, as well as many who followed the event online. The presented strategy claims to serve as a framework for both public and private sectors that aim to develop and use artificial intelligence, especially in areas where Norway already is greatly positioned and has strong foundations, such as in health, oil and gas, energy, and marine industry. Regarding the current digital development, we see many countries have high ambitions where one worth mentioning is the UK. Their AI strategy was initiated in 2017, which has by 2019 opened 16 New Centres for Doctoral Training in AI at universities across the country, industry funding for new Masters positions and numerous governmental funded scholar-ships.

GlobalData research has found the top artificial intelligence influencers based on their performance and engagement online. Using research from GlobalData's Influencer platform, Verdict has named ten of the most influential people in artificial intelligence on Twitter during Q4 2019. Ronald van Loon is a recognised thought leader and one of the leading influencers of technologies including AI, IoT, big data, and data science. As director of Advertisement, now acquired by Digital Power, the influencer provides insights and secures analytics data quality, among other responsibilities. The influencer states that enhanced AI capabilities will allow drones to be controlled with the mind, along with robots eventually overtaking humans.

Artificial intelligence is one of the most common and preferred tools China like to mobilize for controlling the flow of its people. A large number of sensors and body scanners have been installed in metros and bus stations in major cities. The South China Morning Post reported that Chinese technology leader, Baidu, has developed an innovative tool that is able to detect at-risk individuals. Its system is using AI to direct infrared sensors at the foreheads of moving passengers. Invisible to the naked eye, this beam can detect the body heat of users and report any anomaly to the authorities.

MONTREAL, Quebec, Feb. 12, 2020 -- Element AI, a global developer of artificial intelligence-powered (AI) services and software that helps enterprises'operationalize AI', today announced Element AI Orkestrator, the latest addition to the company's portfolio of AI-powered software solutions. Designed for AI practitioners and the IT teams that support them, Element AI Orkestrator is a workload scheduling tool built as a result of the company's need to optimize its own computing resources. A software-as-a-service (SaaS) version is available now, with an on-premises version expected for Spring 2020. Element AI Orkestrator helps customers future-proof their IT infrastructures through optimized utilization of GPU clusters, allowing AI practitioners to build quality models and remove most of the engineering heavy lifting required to efficiently use GPUs. By maximizing these specialized and in-demand resources, Orkestrator will play a pivotal role in supporting the structural backbone of organizations deploying AI solutions for increased overall productivity.

Overhyped or not, AI (artificial intelligence) poses some serious cross-industry potential. Elements of it are already in use in our daily lives, from voice-powered personal assistants, suggestive searches and, soon at least, autonomous vehicle technology -- although, much of what generally put under the AI umbrella is, in fact, machine learning. The technology's power is in its ability to paw through the massive and increasing volumes of data in our grips, inferring past patterns and outcomes, and ultimately learning and improving from past'experiences' without being programmed. It has vast potential to enhance products, services, and operations, from recommending a show that you'll like on Netflix to facial recognition systems. The race is on to reap those advantages, not just between competing organizations, but between countries as well that are aware of just how these advances will boost their overall economic productivity in the years to come.

AI-powered visual inspection pioneer Neurala today announced that its vision AI platform, Brain Builder, has been optimized to enable edge learning for manufacturing and other visual inspection use cases. The latest Brain Builder SDK will debut as a hackathon partner of Bosch ConnectedExperience (BCX), Europe's largest IoT hackathon, in Berlin, Germany from February 17-19. Brain Builder is the only edge learning-enabled AI tool that allows users to build, deploy and analyze custom vision AI solutions with instant feedback on performance and continuous learning in deployment. "Traditional approaches to training deep neural networks (DNN) often fall short in deployment when the network encounters a new situation at the edge that it was not trained to classify," said Massimiliano Versace, CEO and co-founder of Neurala. "This issue is compounded by the fact that oftentimes, DNNs are trained on a server, and then deployed on a smaller, less powerful compute edge that is incapable of learning new information."

None of those are proven cures for the coronavirus, but this kind of misinformation has been spreading online, in some places seemingly faster than the disease itself. Internet giants like Facebook, Google, Twitter and TikTok have all pledged to promote fact-based information on the epidemic. And the World Health Organization has pledged to partner with technology firms to push out authoritative data. It won't be easy, experts say. If you were online when the virus broke, you may have seen that … bat video.