Media
Japanese entrepreneur plans to open 'Dino-A-Live' animatronic theme park
It's been more than a decade since Jurassic Park hit theaters, but fans of the film have not yet given up hope that such a park could one day exist. Now, a Japanese firm is one step closer to making this a reality with an animatronic dinosaur park called Dino-A-Live where visitors see realistic replicas first hand. The theme park would contain full-sized dinosaur robots, and the firm set some of them lose in a Tokyo hotel to announce the park - to the horror of those in attendance. A Japanese firm announced an animatronic dinosaur park called Dino-A-Live where visitors see realistic replicas first hand. This fictitious Jurassic Park is the brainchild of Kazuya Kanemaru, who is the CEO of ON-ART Corp. Kanemaru and his team unveiled fully-painted man-operated robotic models of raptors, an allosaurus and a tyrannosaurus rex, in a performance at a hotel hall in Tokyo.
Little boy loses his sh*t over a Transformers toy
This little boy opens up a Devastator Transformers toy on his birthday - and apparently, it was everything he's ever wanted. He transformed a joyous present opening into a battle cry the alien robots would have rallied behind. Watch him absolutely lose his mind in the video above. We hope someone nails our gift this hard this holiday season. Seth Meyers takes'A Closer Look' at Trump's tumultuous transition
Video Friday: Self-Racing Cars, Robot Grumpy Cat, and Where's Keepon?
On a Friday morning nine (!) years ago, I published a post with just one video and one line of text on BotJunkie.com, That was the beginning of Video Friday. As more and more robot video content started showing up over the years, Video Friday turned into a way to keep you updated on everything that happened all week in one efficient (and hopefully entertaining) post. At one point Video Friday grew to include something like 30 videos (if we've crashed your browser, we're very sorry!). We've now toned it down to around 20 videos by being slightly more selective.
When her best friend died, she used artificial intelligence to keep talking to him
When the engineers had at last finished their work, Eugenia Kuyda opened a console on her laptop and began to type. "This is your digital monument." It had been three months since Roman Mazurenko, Kuyda's closest friend, had died. Kuyda had spent that time gathering up his old text messages, setting aside the ones that felt too personal, and feeding the rest into a neural network built by developers at her artificial intelligence startup. She had struggled with whether she was doing the right thing by bringing him back this way. At times it had even given her nightmares. But ever since Mazurenko's death, Kuyda had wanted one more chance to speak with him. A message blinked onto the screen. "You have one of the most interesting puzzles in the world in your hands," it said. Born in Belarus in 1981, Roman Mazurenko was the only child of Sergei, an engineer, and Victoria, a landscape architect. They remember him as an unusually serious child; when he was 8 he wrote a letter to his descendents declaring his most cherished values: wisdom and justice. In family photos, Mazurenko roller-skates, sails a boat, and climbs trees. Average in height, with a mop of chestnut hair, he is almost always smiling.
iPhones are less reliable than Android devices, study finds
Apple's iPhones and iPads are losing the battle against Android devices. That's according to a new study by mobile diagnostics firms Blancco Technology Group (BTG), which claims that Apple's devices are less reliable and experienced a bigger failure rate than their Android counterpart, driven by bugs in the iOS 10 update. For the purposes of the report the word "failure" refers to any number of problem including instances of apps crashing, connection difficulties and overheating. About 62 per cent of iOS devices suffered performance failures in the third quarter of 2016 compared with 47 per cent of Android devices, the report found. The iPhone 6 was the main culprit with the highest failure rate of 13 per cent.
The Algorithmic Democracy
The day before the election, as millions of Americans were feeling confident that the vast majority of the country shared their opinions, a pair of researchers at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute published a paper that looked closely at something many of us ignored: the provenance of political tweets. Where do they come from? How many are, in reality, made by humans? And if not, who is designing these crude straw-bots? Analyzing Twitter during three televised debates, they discovered that 20% of all political tweets were made by bots.
Amazon's drone-delivery testing site is top secret as locals stopped from roaming
The Cambridgeshire farm used to test Amazon's new delivery drones has become a heavily guarded site that's shrouded in paranoia and secrecy. A group of photographers visiting the testing ground has filmed the moment they were turned away from by security guards, who they say were equipped with ear pieces, binoculars and radios. One of the photographers described the confrontation as'hostile' and said that it was like'some kind of cult'. In the footage capturing the exchange last Thursday, one security guard, who was wearing a pair of binoculars around his neck, asked the photographers to leave while standing next to a private property sign. He refused to confirm or deny whether he was security or answer any questions.
Cool for kids
It used to be that a simple doll or action figure would be a welcome surprise when we tore open our Christmas presents. But now that today's kids grow up in a world saturated with technology, do they expect their toys to be a bit cleverer too? Famous toy retailer Hamleys certainly thinks so, predicting a bumper Christmas for interactive tech toys. So what can we expect? Reyne Rice, chief executive of ToyTrends, actually thinks it's the simpler, educational tech toys that will be the real winners this Christmas.
Photolemur uses AI and machine learning to automatically enhance your photos
Artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage in photo editing these days. While some in-development tools promise a future of near-magical image generation, Photolemur takes a more realistic approach. The MacOS app, currently in beta, uses AI to apply a number of automatic image enhancements based on the content of an image. It's a one-click, no-nonsense solution for people who want to spice up their images without putting in hours of work. According to its website, Photolemur is powered by an algorithm that took years to develop.