We present an optimization-based framework for rearranging indoor furniture to accommodate human-robot co-activities better. The rearrangement aims to afford sufficient accessible space for robot activities without compromising everyday human activities. To retain human activities, our algorithm preserves the functional relations among furniture by integrating spatial and semantic co-occurrence extracted from SUNCG and ConceptNet, respectively. By defining the robot's accessible space by the amount of open space it can traverse and the number of objects it can reach, we formulate the rearrangement for human-robot co-activity as an optimization problem, solved by adaptive simulated annealing (ASA) and covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES). Our experiments on the SUNCG dataset quantitatively show that rearranged scenes provide an average of 14% more accessible space and 30% more objects to interact with. The quality of the rearranged scenes is qualitatively validated by a human study, indicating the efficacy of the proposed strategy.

That message: Under EU law, A.I. threatens EU citizens' fundamental rights … They also recommended banning A.I. systems that use biometrics to …

European Union data protection regulators have called for a general ban on using artificial intelligence for facial recognition and other "biometric and behavioral signals" in public spaces. In their joint opinion, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) and the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) also said using AI for social scoring should be outlawed. The EDPB and EDPS urged the bloc to prohibit AI "recognition of faces, gait, fingerprints, DNA, voice, keystrokes and other biometric or behavioral signals, in any context" in publicly accessible areas. They said it should be illegal for AI systems to use biometrics to categorize people "into clusters based on ethnicity, gender, political or sexual orientation," or other types of classification under which they could be discriminated against. On top of that, the EDPB and EDPS argued that there should be a ban on using AI to "infer emotions of a natural person." It would be allowed in specific situations, such as on certain medical grounds.