Baymax!, the Disney sequel to 2014's Big Hero 6, will debut on June 29th. Disney shared the release date on Friday, alongside a new trailer showing the loveable healthcare robot from the film attempting to help the citizens of San Fransokyo. "In each of our six episodes, Baymax just wants to help someone--and a lot of times they don't want to be helped," said creator Don Hall. "He sets out to fix a physical issue that he's identified, and in the process, gets to a deeper, more emotional place and can be almost transformative in that role." Baymax! is the second Big Hero 6 sequel following Big Hero 6: The Series, a 2D animated show that ran for three seasons on the Disney Channel.

Domestic robots are quickly becoming a practical reality, and Hollywood is keen to explore the implications... with a dash of slapstick comedy thrown in. Entertainment Weekly reports that 20th Century Studios and Locksmith Animation have released the first trailer for Ron's Gone Wrong, the CG-animated tale of Barney (Luca's Jack Dylan Grazer), a boy who gets a home robot (Zach Galifianakis) meant to be his "best friend out of the box." The movie's star-loaded cast also includes Olivia Colman, Ed Helms and Rob Delaney. It should reach theaters on October 22nd. There are no mentions of streaming plans so far, although we'd expect it to reach Disney at some point.

Something that I have been wanting to play around with is generating text to describe images. When posed in this way two pathways come to mind. First would be to use a combination of CNNs for feature extraction and feed those extracted features to an LSTM and let it generate descriptions by iterating repeatedly. The second way would be to build a multi-label classification model and have the output nodes represent specific tags. The first model is good in the case you wanted to generate captions for images that have a grammatical structure to them.

The charming robot at the heart of Disney's Big Hero 6, Baymax, isn't exactly realistic, but its puffy bod is an (admittedly aspirational) example of the growing field of soft robotics. And now Disney itself has produced a soft robot arm that seems like it could be a prototype from the movie. Created by Disney Research roboticists, the arm seems clearly inspired by Baymax, from the overstuffed style and delicate sausage fingers to the internal projector that can show status or information to nearby people. "Where physical human-robot interaction is expected, robots should be compliant and reactive to avoid human injury and hardware damage," the researchers write in the paper describing the system. "Our goal is the realization of a robot arm and hand system which can physically interact with humans and gently manipulate objects."

When Disney released the film "Big Hero 6" in 2014, audiences immediately fell in love with Baymax, the "personal healthcare companion." Designed for no other purpose than to improve healthcare, Baymax not only appeared as non-threatening and approachable as possible (he's described as a "giant marshmallow"), but was also programmed to respond to sounds of human distress and provide care for that distress, whether it be a recommendation for more sleep, a bandage, or something more advanced. While the plot of "Big Hero 6" took Baymax to superhero levels by giving him a rocket fist and the ability to fly, the idea of artificial intelligence (and even robots) making their way into healthcare isn't quite as farfetched. In fact, in many ways, Disney and Baymax provided a glimpse into the future of healthcare, one where artificial intelligence may actually be an important part of any healthcare plan. For many people, the idea of artificial intelligence is something limited to Hollywood movies and science fiction novels, but the fact is, most of us use AI every day.