Human-robot collaboration requires the establishment of methods to guarantee the safety of participating operators. A necessary part of this process is ensuring reliable human pose estimation. Established vision-based modalities encounter problems when under conditions of occlusion. This article describes the combination of two perception modalities for pose estimation in environments containing such transient occlusion. We first introduce a vision-based pose estimation method, based on a deep Predictive Coding (PC) model featuring robustness to partial occlusion. Next, capacitive sensing hardware capable of detecting various objects is introduced. The sensor is compact enough to be mounted on the exterior of any given robotic system. The technology is particularly well-suited to detection of capacitive material, such as living tissue. Pose estimation from the two individual sensing modalities is combined using a modified Luenberger observer model. We demonstrate that the results offer better performance than either sensor alone. The efficacy of the system is demonstrated on an environment containing a robot arm and a human, showing the ability to estimate the pose of a human forearm under varying levels of occlusion.

Heritage Foundation researcher Emma Waters joins'Fox & Friends Weekend' to discuss a recent report that a global birth decline is good for the planet. More than 60 heads of state and government and hundreds of business leaders are coming to Switzerland to discuss the biggest global challenges during the World Economic Forum's annual gathering next week, ranging from Israeli President Isaac Herzog to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The likes of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Chinese Premier Li Qiang, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, French President Emmanuel Macron, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and many others will descend on the Alpine ski resort town of Davos on Jan. 15-19, organizers said Tuesday. Attendees have their work cut out for them with two major wars -- the Israel-Hamas conflict and Russia's invasion of Ukraine -- plus problems like climate change, major disruptions to trade in the Red Sea, a weak global economy and misinformation powered by rapidly advancing artificial intelligence in a major election year. Trust has eroded on peace and security, with global cooperation down since 2016 and plummeting since 2020, forum President Borge Brende said at a briefing.

As we've talked about in the past, the focus on data – how much is being generated, where it's being created, the tools needed to take advantage of it, the shortage of skilled talent to manage it, and so on – is rapidly changing the way enterprises are operating both in the datacenter and in the cloud and dictating many of the product roadmaps being developed by tech vendors. Automation, analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, and the ability to easily move applications and data between on-premises and cloud environments are the focus of much of what OEMs and other tech players are doing. And all of this is being accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which is speeding up enterprise movement to the cloud and forcing them to adapt to a suddenly widely distributed workforce, trends that won't be changing any time soon as the coronavirus outbreak tightens its grip, particularly in the United States. OEMs over the past several months have been particularly aggressive in expanding their offerings in the storage sector, which is playing a central role in help enterprises bridge the space between the datacenter, the cloud and the network edge and to deal with the vast amounts of structured and – in particular – unstructured data being created. That can be seen in announcements that some of the larger vendors have made over the past few months.

IBM Thursday introduced new storage hardware and software aimed at placing its storage at the center of large-scale data requirements for artificial intelligence and analytics workloads. The new offerings are aimed at helping to build the kind of information architecture needed to get the most out of businesses' fast-changing data, said Eric Herzog, IBM's chief marketing officer and vice president of worldwide storage channels. "The new stuff is all about storage solutions for AI, big data and business analytics," Herzog told CRN. "IBM thinks customers need an information architecture to build AI before they can collect and analyze their data and feed it into their AI systems." IBM storage technology has always been an important part of customers' high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and machine-learning infrastructures, said John Zawistowski, global systems solutions executive at Sycomp, a Foster City, Calif.-based solution provider and IBM channel partner. "Why IBM? It's the way they integrated the AI software platform and storage," Zawistowski told CRN. "And the way IBM understands the importance of doing that. And the way IBM technology performs."

IBM Corp. is all-in on artificial intelligence and machine learning. The company provides a broad range of cognitive products for businesses of all sizes. However, it is also using its other product lines, such as its storage business, to assist customers in developing products around Internet of Things and machine learning. "We provide the storage platform with our flash technology to SparkCognition, a professional software company. They are a hot startup [with] a number of different use cases, including cybersecurity, real-time IoT and predictive analytics," said Eric Herzog (pictured, left), vice president of product marketing and management, storage, and software-defined infrastructure, at IBM. Herzog and Mark Godard (pictured, right), manager of customer success and partnerships at SparkCognition Inc., spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's mobile live streaming studio, during IBM Interconnect 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

For the first time ever, NASA has been relying on private companies like Elon Musk's SpaceX for re-supply missions; only that's just the beginning. This QuickTake examines the future of space tourism using private space taxis. FILE - In this Tuesday, July 26, 2016, file photo, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors Inc., left, discusses the company's new Gigafactory in Sparks, Nev. On Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2016, Tesla reports financial results. SAN FRANCISCO - Elon Musk is gleefully pushing the technological envelope in the arenas of rocketry, transportation and solar energy.

The entire scope of the digital age – from the birth of the internet, to artificial intelligence, to catastrophist predictions of the end of days – is crammed into 96 idiosyncratic minutes in this latest documentary by Werner Herzog. And while Herzog's defiantly esoteric line of commentary works with some subjects – suicidal penguins, for example, in Encounters at the End of the World – he does seem out of his depth at times while navigating this vast and complex subject. Herzog's USP here is that, as a luddite who doesn't even carry a mobile phone, he is essentially a technological tourist, an outsider looking into the digital world. It's a sporadically fascinating film that dips its toe into many different themes where perhaps it should have chosen to immerse itself in just one or two.

Werner Herzog's films have a common theme: they're about visionaries and dreamers. Sometimes his dreamers accomplish the impossible: he's made two films, for example--"Little Dieter Needs to Fly" and "Rescue Dawn"--about the American pilot Dieter Dengler, who escaped from a Laotian P.O.W. camp and, for twenty-three days, hiked barefoot through the jungle until he reached freedom. But Herzog is also fascinated by delusional dreamers. At the end of his 1972 film "Aguirre, the Wrath of God," the conquistador Aguirre stands on a raft in the Amazon. He's been searching, fruitlessly, for El Dorado; now all his men are dead, and he's speaking only to their corpses and some monkeys.

Elon Musk has not been shy about his trepidations regarding the onset of artificial intelligence. The billionaire co-founder of PayPal pypl and CEO of Tesla tsla and SpaceX has often aired his misgivings about the technological advancement. He's even backed a non-profit research organization, Open AI, that aims to ensure the tech is developed ethically and safely. Now, in a video teaser shared exclusively with Fortune, Musk clarifies what he deems is the "biggest risk" that AI poses to humanity. The clip is a short segment from Lo and Behold, the latest film by German filmmaker Werner Herzog, due out this week. In it, Musk conjures a dystopian future usurped by profit-seeking AI warmongers.

To make a documentary about the Internet requires nerve. To do so when you can hardly be bothered with a cell phone, however, takes both innocence and bravado, plus a pinch of madness. All of which means that Werner Herzog, now aged seventy-three, is right for the job, and the result is "Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World." The movie is divided into ten parts, none of which could be mistaken for a commandment; Herzog's documentaries have always been fired more by marvelling, and by an explorer's ache to learn, than by any pedagogic urge to tell. If he were struck color-blind tomorrow, he would instantly embark on a film about Matisse.