TEHRAN – A team of researchers at Tehran's Amir Kabir University of Technology have designed and manufactured a robotic arm for removing pollutants from the surfaces of the double umbrella type porcelain insulators, Mehr reported on Saturday. Cleaning the polluted insulators of the overhead high voltage power lines has been one of the problems for the power transmission network during recent years, Amir Kabir University faculty member Amir Abolfazl Souratgar told Mehr. He pointed to power failure in southwestern Khuzestan province and a number of western provinces due to sand and dust storm in January 2015 due to polluted insulators. The robotic arm is able to clean insulators at higher speed and precision in comparison with other methods, he said, adding that it can work at high temperatures of up to about 60 centigrade and at low temperatures of around minus 40 centigrade as well as during high humidity and other bad climate conditions. Live-line cleaning of insulators using robot technology is an alternative and novel approach to removing the contaminants on the surfaces of the insulator.

ICLI is an interdisciplinary conference focusing on the role of interfaces in all artistic performance activities. We encourage critical and reflective approaches to key themes in the design and use of live interfaces. A wide range of theoretical and practice-based approaches are welcomed by people from all possible research, art and other practice backgrounds. The fifth International Conference on Live Interfaces will take place at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, NTNU, 9-11 March 2020. This biennial conference will bring together people working with live interfaces in the performing arts, including music, the visual arts, theatre, dance, puppetry, robotics or games.

An Australian-based technology firm that uses artificial intelligence to catch distracted drivers made a pitch to an Edmonton conference on Friday. Acusensus presented its automatic camera enforcement technology at the International Conference on Urban Traffic Safety. Founded in early 2018, the company made international headlines with a pilot program in Australia earlier this year. The Acusensus camera system is mounted on the side or above the road, like photo radar. But unlike photo radar, the system takes high-resolution pictures of every passing car.

Robotics teams from all over the country compete in Pennsylvania in the Subterranean Challenge to see whose robot performs best in a simulated mine disaster scenario.

LINCOLN -- Through a $2.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, a University of Nebraska–Lincoln research team is developing ways to maximize …

The evening starts with a pre-meetup, hands-on workshop from 5-6:45 PM. This is perfect if you're new to KNIME Analytics Platform. After a short introduction to the tool, you'll build your first workflow, which reads and pre-processes some customer data before training a machine learning model. At the end of the workshop, we'll show you different options to deploy the trained machine learning model using KNIME Server. After the workshop, we invite you to refuel on some snacks and drinks before the talks start at 7:15 PM.

Machine learning gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. It encompasses a broad range of approaches to data analysis with applicability across the biological sciences. Lectures will introduce commonly used algorithms and provide insight into their theoretical underpinnings. In the practicals students will apply these algorithms to real biological data-sets using the R language and environment. Please be aware that the course syllabus is currently being updated following feedback from the last event; therefore the agenda below will be subjected to changes. The training room is located on the first floor and there is currently no wheelchair or level access available to this level.

Not so long ago, stories about cyberwar started with scary hypotheticals: What if state-sponsored hackers were to launch widespread attacks that blacked out entire cities? Crippled banks and froze ATMs across a country? Today, these scenarios are no longer hypotheticals: Every one of those events has now actually occurred. Incident by catastrophic incident, cyberwar has left the pages of overblown science fiction and the tabletops of Pentagon war games to become a reality. More than ever before, it's become clear that the threat of hacking goes beyond nuisance vandalism, criminal profiteering, and even espionage to include the sort of physical-world disruption that was once possible to accomplish only with military attacks and terroristic sabotage. So far, there's no clearly documented case of a cyberwar attack directly causing loss of life. But a single cyberwar attack has already caused as much as $10 billion dollars in economic damage.

And to demonstrate exactly how absurd the problem is, a new AI called Grover, developed by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the University of Washington (and spotted by AI Weirdness), allows you to enter a headline, and it will generate hundreds of words of convincing, fake text that looks like it belongs in the New York Times or on CNN. Luckily for you, the researchers put Grover's fake news generator online for anyone to try. And let me say, from personal experience, that it can create some doozies. For a test, I wrote the headline: "Why Donald Trump Eats 100 Cheeseburgers a Day." This is an article that even I, a journalist, don't know how I'd go about writing.

Priya Lakhani is an entrepreneurial adrenaline junkie. She has founded two successful companies, won numerous business awards, and acted as an advisor to the Department of Business, Innovation, and Skills. Her life's aim is to change the world for the better, and to that end she has funded meals in India, vaccinations in Africa, and her current project improves education for thousands of UK children. Remarkably, she has achieved all this despite a constant barrage of people telling her to "quit and go home". In this podcast Priya takes us through her astonishing career, from unloading boxes of sauce outside Victoria Street Station, to writing a book for preschoolers.