Islamabad, Pakistan – On Wednesday evening, as Pakistan grappled with the aftermath of a wave of missile strikes from India that hit at least six cities, killing 31 people, the country's military spokesperson took to a microphone with a chilling warning. "When Pakistan strikes India, it will come at a time and place of its own choosing," Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry said in a media briefing. "The whole world will come to know, and its reverberation will be heard everywhere." Two days later, India and Pakistan have moved even closer to the brink of war. On Thursday, May 8, Pakistan accused India of flooding its airspace with kamikaze drones that were brought down over major cities, including Lahore and Karachi.

Recent progress in legged locomotion research has produced robots that can perform agile blind-walking with robustness comparable to a blindfolded human. However, this walking approach has not yet been integrated with planners for high-level activities. In this paper, we take a step towards high-level task planning for these robots by studying a planar simulated biped that captures their essential dynamics. We investigate variants of Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for selecting an appropriate blind-walking controller at each decision cycle. In particular, we consider UCT with an intelligently selected rollout policy, which is shown to be capable of guiding the biped through treacherous terrain. In addition, we develop a new MCTS variant, called Monte-Carlo Discrepancy Search (MCDS), which is shown to make more effective use of limited planning time than UCT for this domain. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these planners in both deterministic and stochastic environments across a range of algorithm parameters. In addition, we present results for using these planners to control a full-order 3D simulation of Cassie, an agile bipedal robot, through complex terrain.

Google has unleashed a tidal wave of product and feature updates through the ongoing Google I/O developers' conference, and it's no surprise that the intersection of artificial intelligence and healthcare was a recurring spotlight among them. Through keynote speeches and simultaneously released online blog posts, the company highlighted a handful of tech-driven healthcare efforts that seem to be bearing fruit. "Last year at Google I/O we announced Google AI, a collection of our teams and efforts to bring the benefits of AI to everyone," Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during the event's keynote. "… Healthcare is one of the most important fields AI is going to transform." Pichai made his case by recapping the company's work on interpreting retina images to detect diabetic retinopathy.